History's Mistress - Paula Weideger

In 1885 an extraordinary book, (Das Weib), was published in Germany

Over two thousand pages long, it was a daring, even iconoclastic, historical, gynaecological and anthropological compendium devoted to the legends, rituals and beliefs that have shaped women's lives. Here was the female, literally, laid bare for inspection, in a manner never attempted since - from her moment of birth to her puberty, her childbearing years and her death.

A noted feminist writer, Paula Weideger has distilled what is most important from the original to reveal an astonishingly rich and immediate document: pointing out as she does so that, despite the original editors' disregard for prudery and convention, they could not conceal that they regarded women as mere sex objects.

History's Mistress is certainly a natural history, not only of the women it so intimately describes but also of the men who set out to discover them!