Eve by Lucien Lėvy-Dhurmer, a painter in the symbolist tradition DeAgostini/Getty Images
Eve
Cat Bohannon (Penguin Books)
DID humans evolve to be sexist? Without contraception, suppressing women may have been an effective way of keeping birth rates under control. But any “benefits” of sexism (painful as that is to write) may have been overtaken by the knowledge that culminated in gynaecology, as humans learned to help each other through the process of big brains travelling through narrow pelvises. Perhaps our ancestors also used that knowledge to time births with harvests or help…