The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

Today, any advocate of womankind operates under the shadow of feminism. Some react against it, some seek to extend and refine it, and some seek to preserve it. Either way, they must respond to some claims, going back to Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and other early feminists, such as: -many of the behavioral differences between men and women are socially constructed, not biological -the path to sexual justice lies in the diminution of gender roles (i.e. "seperate spheres") in favor of free choice -most fundamentally, men and women are of equal moral worth. Moderata Fonte existed before the feminist movement as we know it. As a result, she did not think in the same terms as we would about sexual justice. For example, she never challenges the idea that differences between men and women are intrinsic, as far as I can tell. Similarly, she does not attack gender roles: rather, she asserts that the woman's proper gender role as homemaker, mother, and teacher is undervalued by patriarchal society, and the man's gender role as conqueror and ruler is overvalued. She does not claim men and women are moral equals: she claims women are superior. The book is written as a three way dialogue. Sometimes, the conversation drifts (realistically) to other topics, unrelated to Fonte's main point. This may be frustrating to readers expecting concision, but the diversions can also be interesting, offering insights into the culture of the time.

Really. This book was a lot of fun to read and, despite the claims of the "Kirkus" review, it really isn't heavy reading at all. It does require some minimal knowlege of the life during the Renaissance era, but ample footnotes are provided to explain the numerous classical references and anything else that the reader might find confusing.One thing to be aware of. While the title of the book is "The Worth of Women", the dialogue spends FAR more time talking about the lack of worth of men. (The author's basis thesis seems to be that women are virtually perfect, so the occassional "bad" woman is either an utter anomoly, or has been made "bad" due to the influence of men; while men are basically evil, and the even rarer "good" man is an anomaly.) I will confess that the constant harping on the evils of the male sex got a little tiresome after a while.If you don't want to read that men are incapable of love/kindness/caring/intelligence ... this isn't the book for you.