According to Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn of Harvard University, and Paola Giuliano of the University of California at Los Angeles, economists whom you cite with unguarded enthusiasm, deep-seated attitudes toward women have to do with agricultural technology (“The Plough and the Now,” July 23, 2011). In particular, keeping women down has to do with the use of the plough rather than the hoe. The plough was heavier and thus required more physical strength, which is not a women’s forte. Men’s work put women in their place, that is. This brilliant insight is credited to Fernand Braudel, a French historian of renown, who had studied the collapse of matriarchy in ancient Mesopotamia, which was an early victim of the wicked plough. But it takes not much knowledge of history to learn that the plough was well established in ancient Rome, and that both Germans and Slavs picked it up from the Romans on arrival to the sub-continent. Areas tilled with hoes in Roman times are the least developed in Europe, with the attendant attitudes toward women. And the ploughed Europe is precisely where feminism had sprung to life around the time of Braudel’s birth. It is wonderful to see economists dabbling in anthropology, but it is pitiful to see the results. By the way, untoward attitudes toward females go back to chimpanzees, our direct ancestors some six-million years ago. Since about a hundred-thousand years ago, these attitudes have to do with hunting and gathering, traditionally split along male-female lines. And so forth.