"How you do hate to admit that it's their turn. John! Haven't we had full swing--everything in our hands--for all historic time? They have only begun. Thirty years? Why, John, they have done so much in these thirty years that the world's heart is glad at last. You don't know----" I didn't know. But I did feel a distinct resentment at being treated like an extinct species. "They have simply stepped on to an eminence men have been all these years building," I said. "We have done all the hard work--are doing it yet, for all I see. We have made it possible for them to live at all! We have made the whole civilization of the world--they just profit by it. And now you speak as if, somehow, they had managed to achieve more than we have!" Owen considered a while thoughtfully. "What you say is true. We have done a good deal of the work; we did largely make and modify our civilization. But if you read some of the newer histories----" he stopped and looked at me as if I had just happened. "Why you don't know yet, do you? History has been rewritten." "You speak as if 'history' was a one act play." "I don't mean it's all done, of course--but we do have now a complete new treatment of the world's history. Each nation its own, some several of them, there's no dead level of agreement, I assure you. But our old androcentric version of life began to be questioned about 1910, I think--and new versions appeared, more and more of them. The big scholars took it up, there was new research work, and now we are not so glib in our assurance that we did it all." "You're getting pretty close to things I used to know something about," I remarked drily. "If you knew all that was known, then, you wouldn't know this, John. Don't you remember what Lester Ward calls 'the illusion of the near'--how the most familiar facts were precisely those we often failed to understand? In all our history, ancient and modern, we had the underlying assumption that men were the human race, the people who did things; and that women--were 'their women.'" "And precisely what have you lately discovered? That Horatio at the bridge was Horatio, after all? That the world was conquered by an Alexandra--and a Napoleona?" I laughed with some bitterness. "No," said Owen gently, "There is no question about the battles--men did the fighting, of course. But we have learned that 'the decisive battles of history' were not so decisive as we thought them. Man, as a destructive agent did modify history, unquestionably. What did make history, make civilization, was constructive industry. And for many ages women did most of that." "Did women build the Pyramids? the Acropolis? the Roads of Rome?"