In those days of poverty before the first light of civilization, where mankind wandered in the plains, the differences between men and women were of great significance, as men are bolder, braver, stronger, and more suited to the killing of prey and to the defense against monsters; and the first unsteady steps of civilization only magnified this difference, as men, being stronger, are also more suited to the work of clearing, sowing, and harvesting a field; and for this reason civilizations in their infancy accord men the pride of place, and many insist that women are an inferior class, and do not bother in raising female children.

But in Azlant, where magic tilled the fields, this was not so, for it had become clear that the great work of civilization is the work of managing labor and planning projects, and it is work to which both men and women contribute their strengths with no sex particularly advantaged. A successful civilization is one that can put the strengths of women to as productive use as the strengths of men, and values them accordingly. Often a civilization will cling to the habits of conduct for the sexes that were suitable when it was primitive when it is primitive no longer; in this it weakens itself.