“ In every known human society the male’s needs for achievement can be recognized... In a great number of human societies men’s sureness of their sex role is tied up with their right, or ability, to practice some activity that women are not allowed to practice. Their maleness in fact has to be underwritten by preventing women from entering some field or performing some feat.” This is the conclusion of the anthropologist Margaret Mead about the way in which the roles of men and women in society should be distinguished. If talk and print are considered it would seem that the formal emancipation of women is far from complete. There is a flow of publications about the continuing domestic bondage of women and about the complicated system of defences which men have thrown up around their hitherto accepted advantages, taking sometimes the obvious form of exclusion from types of occupation and sociable groupings, and sometimes the more subtle form of automatic doubt of the seriousness of women’s pretensions to the level of intellect and resolution that men, it is supposed ,bring to the business of running the world. There are a good many objective pieces of evidence for the erosion of men ’ s status. In the first place, there is the widespread postwar phenomenon of the woman Prime Minister , in India, Sri Lanka and Israel. Secondly, there is the very large increase in the number of women who work, especially married women and mothers of children. More diffusely there are the increasingly numerous convergences between male and female behavior: the approximation to identical styles in dress and coiffure, the sharing of domestic tasks, and the admission of women to all sorts of hitherto exclusively male leisure-time activities. Everyone carries round with him a fairly definite idea of the primitive or natural conditions of human life. It is acquired more by the study of humorous cartoons than of archaeology, but that does not matter since it is not significant as theory but only as an expression of inwardly felt expectations of people’s sense of what is fundamentally proper in the differentiation between the roles of the two sexes. In this rudimentary natural society men go out to hunt and fish and to fight off the tribe next door while women keep the fire going. Amorous initiative is firmly re-served to the man, who sets about courtship with a club.