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Originally Posted by livius drusus
I remember that whole "if women ran the world there would be no war" line. I believe it was supposed to be uterus related. It never made much sense to me as mothers have sent sons to war since there have been sons to send, so I don't see why women would be inherently less inclined to order large numbers of other mothers' sons into battle.
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Yeah, the whole "Come back
with your shield or
on it"
* attitude has been around since time immemorial. No less an observer than Margaret Mead has pointed out that women seem no less willing to send their sons into battle than are men. In fact, Mead argued just the opposite: she claimed that since women are less likely to know the horrors of battle firsthand, they're perhaps
more likely to send soldiers off to battle than are men. I don't know about
that, but I've never seen any evidence that women in power are more reluctant to send soldiers into combat than are men in power.
Cheers,
Michael
*Supposedly, back in the days of Ancient Greece, mothers would say this to their sons as they sent them off to battle. These soldiers carried large shields into battle -- if the soldier panicked and ran from the enemy, he'd throw away his cumberson shield. So, a soldier who came how without his shield was probably a coward. On the other hand, a soldier who died in combat would be carried home on his shield. So, when the mother told her son, "Come home with your shield or on it," she was saying, "I'd rather you were dead than a coward."