Being a woman," said Joseph Conrad, "must be a terribly difficult trade, since it consists principally of dealing with men." And for men, women have forever been a mystery—less a separate gender than an alien species to be prudently admired or nervously ridiculed but almost never understood. Eternally misperceived, women have been systematically disadvantaged: undereducated or overprotected, denied employment or unequally remunerated, excluded from the professions then excoriated as inept, driven to the limits of reason then indicted as hysterical. They have been used as property, abused as servants, neglected as things, patronized as children, idealized as fictions and enshrined as myths. When they have not been belittled by vilification they have been maligned by idolatry.