When A Woman Teams Up With A

No One Sits On The Stoop When She's A Kid And Thinks, 'i Want To Be A Biographer When I Grow Up,'

It Has Always Been Preferable To Attribute A Woman's Success To Her Beauty Rather Than To Her Brains, To Reduce Her To The Sum Of Her Sex Life.

And In The Absence Of Facts, Myth Rushes In, The Kudzu Of History.

Power Has For So Long Been A Male Construct That It Distorted The Shape Of The First Women Who Tried It On, Only To Find Themselves In A Sort Of Straitjacket.

I Checked To See If There’d Been A Really Good Book Published In The Last Few Decades. Then I Started With What Cleopatra Would Have Read, Asking Myself, “what Can We Know About Her Education?” It Turns Out To Be A Very Great Deal, And Bizarrely, No One Had Written About That Before.