Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves

New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Second Printing . Trade Paperback. Very Good. 5 1/4" x 8. 265 Pages Indexed. There is a red mark on the bottom page adges indicating a remainder book. The First Schocken Books edition was published in 1975. This is a second printing. A professor of the classics at Hunter College, Sarah Pomeroy has consulted archaeological data, documents, historical writing and, of course, the literature of the high civilization' of Greece and Rome with minute attention; her bibliography runs to nine closely-spaced pages, Her book is splendidly free of anachronistic speculation about what women must have felt, speculation projected back from our age onto a blank page of the past. Dr. Pomeroy's book leaves us in her debt. She does not draw large conclusions or form sweeping generalizations, but the details she has gathered here speak for themselves and do not readily leave the mind. A fascinating catalog of classical reverence and hostility towards women. It provides lively reading, too. The book is invaluable for its perspective and vast store of knowledge which, of course, is Pomeroy's knowledge. She has read the musty tomes for us; the least we can do is tentatively shelve our feminism and read her highly informative and wryly humorous book. A splendid textbook it is: not only courses on women's history and on classical antiquity but courses on Western civilization will be ill advised to ignore it.