Newborn Girls Were Regularly Left To Die
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In ancient Athens, it was very common for a couple to take a newborn baby girl out in the wilderness and leave it to die—an act they called “exposing” the baby.
“Everybody raises a son even if he is a poor,” one Greek writer wrote, “but he exposes a daughter even if he is rich.” In Rome, this was just as common, especially in poor families. We have records of a lower-class Roman writing to his wife de ella about her pregnancy de ella.
“A daughter is too burdensome, and we just don't have the money,” he told her. “If you should bear a girl, we'll have to kill her.” Even in Egypt, which gave women comparatively equal rights, the poor often left kids to die. “If you have the baby before I return,” one letter shows an Egyptian man writing his wife, “if it is a boy, let it live; “If it is a girl, expose it.”
Men Wouldn't Touch Menstruating Women
The Roman philosopher Pliny The Elder wrote, “On the approach of a woman in this state, milk will become sour.” He figured menstruating women could kill everything they looked at, even saying, “A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately.”
In Egypt, the women spent their menstrual cycles isolated in a special building men couldn't enter—and they weren't only ones to do it. The Israelites would not even touch a woman during her period—or, for that matter, anything she touched. “Everything on which she sits,” they wrote, “shall be unclean.”
And in Hawaii, men who entered the hut for menstruating women risked the death penalty. The natives of Papua New Guinea took it the farthest. If a man touched a menstruating women, they believed, it would “kill his blood so that it turns black, dull his wits, and lead to a slow death.”