This year will be the 100th anniversary of some women over the age of 30 getting the vote, and for the first time all men over the age of 21. One can confidently expect an avalanche of articles about increasing women’s power, with the usual sanctimonious finger-wagging at ancient Athenians, who empowered citizen males in the direct democracy they invented 2,500 years ago, but not females.
It is very difficult for people, even academics, to understand the power of culture — a society’s sense of the way things have ‘always’ been done, which is met with a blank incomprehension by other societies who do things differently. The Greek historian Herodotus illustrated the problem.
The Persian king Darius once asked some Greeks how much money it would take for them to eat the corpses of their fathers.
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