is not humility but rather passive acquiescence and self-effacement.
Both assertiveness and humility can be integrated into the same
personality. Gandhi, for example, combined in himself an unobtru-
sive lowliness with a persistent resistance to rulers who treated
some ethnic groups as morally superior to others. In South Africa
and in India, he displayed personal determination without arro-
gance.

In Western culture, assertiveness has been a personality trait
traditionally assigned to males. Whether human or animal, the male
"naturally" leads and the female is led. Edward Gibbon, the eminent
eighteenth century historian, expressed the prevailing male chau-
vinism of our civilization: "Female courage . . . can be only a faint
and imperfect imitation of the male valor that distinguishes the age
or country in which it may be found." ² In the nineteenth century,
Alfred Lord Tennyson summed up the prevailing assumption re-
garding innate traits:

Man with the head, and woman with the heart;
Man to command, and woman to obey;
All else confusion. ³

In our own time, Webster's Third International Dictionary defines
"manly" as "bold, resolute, and open in conduct." "Womanly" is
defined circularly in that standard dictionary as "marked by quali-
ties characteristic of a woman" and is illustrated by this quotation:
"Drawing was a waste of time, if not downright womanly, like
painting on China."

A generation ago, neo-feminism arrived with a wrecking ball to
use against the rigid gender stereotypes that had been erected
centuries earlier. The movement has been supported by social
scientists who have demonstrated that nurture more than nature
causes patterns of male dominance. ⁴ This contemporary milieu has
motivated historians to look for alternative patterns of socialization
in previous cultures. By piecing together mythological and archae-
ological data, some scholars have speculated that women had more
importance than men in certain cultures prior to the past three
millennia. ⁵ Some have also argued plausibly that women were

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