Reflections of a stormy petrel

Stupidity is everlasting, I suppose. And prejudice is, in my view, inevitable. I work, myself, in a fairly male-dominated field of research, for some reason; but I look further out and I see female Titans such as Marilyn Butler (English literary history), Ann Douglas (American ditto), Dorothea Wender (classics), Olga Davidson (Persian classics) - just a quick trawl through my files - then I really think that experience alone ought to silence this sort of nonsense. And literature as art has been open to women since literally the beginning of our civilization: Deborah's poem is the most ancient single item in the Bible, and Sappho belongs to the archaic period of Greek poetry. And then there is the possibility that the Odyssey may have been written by a woman...