Amy: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy! I’m Amy McPhie Allebest. Today we are going to discuss another of Gerda Lerner’s contributions to Women’s History. It’s a logical follow-up to her book The Creation of Patriarchy, which showed the way human beings instituted societal structures wherein men ruled women, from prehistory through the time of the Greeks. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness picks up right about where The Creation of Patriarchy leaves off, at the beginning of the common era, and it continues through the 19th Century. It’s also an exciting text because it documents women’s own writings as they began to wake up and become aware of their subordinate status and try to free themselves of their own internalized sense of inferiority.  But before we start, I’d like to introduce my reading partner, Janette Canare. Hi, Janette! Janette: Hi, Amy! Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here!  Amy: Can you tell us about yourself? Janette: Well, I currently live in California with my husband Jeff and our two kids, a daughter in high school and a son in college. I’ve lived in California for most of my life now, moving to Silicon Valley for a tech start up in the early 90s. Most people that I meet tend to assume that I grew up in California, but I was born and raised in Virginia. My parents were the first generation to immigrate from the Philippines, moving to Norfolk in the mid-1960s, where my dad was in the Navy. I grew up attending parochial school through high school, but since my 20s I’ve considered myself a lapsed Catholic. These days, I’m currently working towards a master’s degree in the humanities, as you know. Being back to school has kept me pretty busy, but I do enjoy being outdoors--whether hiking, gardening, or for photography. I also love art, theatre, and travelling and hope one day to be able to resume that. Amy: I hope so too - when you finally make it to Paris I am going to visit you there!! And then I also want to ask you what interested you in this project.  Janette: My interest in the topic of the patriarchy is two-fold. First, from an academic standpoint, my first year of graduate school was spent reading the foundational texts of the Western canon. In two quarters, we covered 2,000 years reading over 20 books, but of those 20, only two were written by women! I recall that it was a “collective lightbulb moment” shared between most of the women in my program...that in 2 millenia, only two books from women were represented. It was crushing to consider that for some reason, women had produced so few surviving works during the same period that gave us Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Descartes, and so on. Just saying these names, we think of their contributions to Western Civ. But where were the women? My second interest in this topic is more personal. Looking at the literature of women’s history is also motivated by my desire to better understand my own mother. She was born in the 1930s and whether due to World War II or other reasons, she herself grew up to be very motivated to pursue both her education and a career. From the stories she told me as I grew up, she was very proud of her career in the Philippines, and coming to this country, she continued to work in her field. Yet, growing up I was very aware of the fact that when it came to decision-making, my mom would always default to my father. I never really understood why until I started to understand more about the patriarchy. Suddenly, things started to click into place--patterns of behavior that I noticed in my mom and now sometimes notice in myself. So thank you for asking me to participate in this project! I’m excited to discuss Gerda Lerner’s book with you. Amy: I’m excited too! So to set the stage, I thought we could share some quotes by prominent men during the centuries that this book covers, the 1st through 18th Centuries, in the part of the world that this book covers, which is basically...