Word: woman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...uterus that fluffs itself up every month in hopes of housing a baby, and a pair of spigots on the chest at which Baby eventually may dine. The surprising thing is that women are the more communistic sex, right down to the cellular level. Fetal cells derived from a woman's offspring may survive in her bloodstream decades after childbirth. What's more, the fabled liabilities of the female condition are sometimes revealed as strengths. Researchers have found that PMS--which has become a handy three-letter slur directed at the aggressive, or merely irritated, woman--is experienced by many...
...women embrace biology, which male-chauvinist diehards still equate with "destiny," won't they have to give up something else--like dignity and free will? The popularity of evolutionary theories featuring man-the-hunter from Mars and his Venusian sidekick, woman, has led many feminist scholars to assert that biology is a sexist "ideology," not a science, and Darwin just another dead white male with an ax to grind. In the mid-'80s, the influential French feminist theorist Christine Delphy advised thinking women to "ignore" biology, and in this country there were mutterings that research into sex differences should...
...infertile, and in most primates, the end of childbearing coincides with the end of life, so it was always hard to see why human females get to live for years, even decades, after their ovaries go into retirement. Hence the "grandma hypothesis": maybe the evolutionary "purpose" of the postmenopausal woman was to keep her grandchildren provided with berries and tubers and nuts, especially while Mom was preoccupied with a new baby. If Grandma were still bearing and nursing her own babies, she'd be too busy to baby-sit, so natural selection may have selected for a prolonged healthy...
Furthermore, as Mary Zeiss Stange points out in her 1997 book Woman the Hunter, there's no reason to rule out women's hunting with hard-edged weapons too, perhaps even of their own making. Among the Tiwi Aborigines of Australia, hunting is considered women's work, and until the introduction of steel implements, it was done with handmade stone axes the women fashioned for themselves. By putting women's work back into the record, the new female evolutionary scientists may have helped rewrite the biography of the human race. At least we should prepare to welcome our bold...
...lioness whose "mane smoked with fire [and whose] countenance glowed like the sun." Images of goddesses tell us nothing about the role of actual women, but they do suggest that about 3,000 years ago, at the dawn of human civilization, the idea of the fearsome huntress, the woman predator, generated no snickers among the pious...