Ways Of The World: Spartan Women

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Recommended: The lives of spartan women

Based on Robert W. Strayer’s second edition of Ways of The World, Sparta offers the best life for women, whether it is with regard to her personal finances, physical fitness, or domestic role, Spartan women enjoyed more liberty than their contemporaries did in China, India, Athens, and Rome.
Whereas domestic Chinese women served as the kinder, gentler Yang to the husband’s strong, rigid Yin, Spartan women exercised “more authority in the household (pp. 234, 245-6, 239). The culture of “implicit obedience” and the “womanly qualifications” that the women must exhibit precludes China from being the best civilization to live in as a woman (p. 236). A Spartan woman’s life also contrasted to an Indian woman’s, where bikkhunis wrote psalms to

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