For the several thousands of years before they became

In the profound and piercing words of Stacy Schiff, the chronicler of women erased and misunderstood, we hear the echo of millennia: “For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception.” These words cut deep, not in bitterness, but in truth — truth forged in the long shadows of history, where the brilliance of women was too often recast as danger, and their wisdom labeled as witchcraft. Schiff speaks not only of the past, but of the enduring illusion that power must belong to one side or none at all.

For countless centuries, women were myth before they were human. They were cast as sirens, luring men to ruin with beauty and voice; as enchantresses, whose knowledge of herbs or stars was seen as sorcery; as snares, whose intelligence was a threat disguised as charm. To the ancient mind, the woman’s mind was a labyrinth — feared, desired, but never trusted. In the temples of Greece, the oracle spoke with divine authority, yet her words were filtered through priests. In medieval courts, the wise woman healed the sick, yet was branded a witch for knowing what men could not explain. And so it was that the power of women was buried beneath the fictions of men, not because it was small, but because it was immense.

When Schiff writes that “female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise,” she unveils a truth as old as civilization itself — that many structures of inequality were not born of superiority, but of fear. The fear that, if women stood as equals, the fragile towers of pride might crumble. Thus, societies devised myths and laws to bind them — to call obedience “virtue” and silence “grace.” Yet beneath these illusions, history whispers of women who resisted the roles they were given. Cleopatra, whom Schiff herself has written of, was not a seductress of men, but a ruler of empires. Her intellect, her statecraft, her linguistic mastery — all were reduced to a story of beauty and manipulation. To diminish her was to preserve the illusion that power belonged only to one sex.

The pattern has endured through ages. When Hypatia of Alexandria, the philosopher and mathematician, illuminated the world with her mind, she was torn apart by mobs who saw in her wisdom a threat to the divine order of men. When Joan of Arc led armies with a conviction greater than kings, she was accused of witchcraft and burned by those who could not bear to see heaven’s fire in a woman’s heart. Their lives testify to Schiff’s insight: that for millennia, a woman’s intelligence was treated as a man’s deception — as if truth spoken in a woman’s voice could only be trickery, as if reason and grace could not share the same soul.

Yet the tide of time turns, as all falsehoods must. The sirens have become scientists, the enchantresses physicians, the snares scholars and leaders. The old myths fade before the reality of women who heal, build, teach, and lead — not as anomalies, but as inheritors of a strength long denied its name. Schiff’s words remind us that the liberation of women is not a battle between the sexes, but a restoration of balance, a recognition that intelligence, creativity, and courage are not bound by gender, but shared by all who dare to exceed the limits of fear.

And yet, her warning still resounds: the ghosts of the old order linger in subtle forms — in doubt, in dismissal, in the quiet reshaping of a woman’s achievement into something safer, smaller. To confront this, each generation must awaken anew to the truth: that power is not a finite resource, and that to lift another is not to fall, but to rise together. Where once the fear of women’s power bred myths of destruction, now the courage to embrace equality must breed acts of creation.

Therefore, O reader of this age, take this teaching to heart: see through the disguises of fear. When you encounter a woman’s strength, do not seek to explain it away; when you meet her wisdom, do not reduce it to charm; when you hear her dream, do not silence it with disbelief. Instead, let her light enlarge your own. For in honoring the intelligence once called deception, we redeem the wisdom of half the world — and at last, become whole.