The Importance of Women in Civil Life

In the very earliest sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly three thousand to 25 hundred b c, women are everywhere. Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this changes. The place of women in civic life erodes. Gradually a more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape. With its emphasis on chastity and premerital virginity. A weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women's role in government and the liberal professions. And the loss of women's independent legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands.