Beginning of Essay
Women have enjoyed significant improvements to their individual rights and their status in general, particularly during the current century. However, although the progress that has been achieved is relatively recent, the problem of women's proper place in society ....

Middle of Essay
.... Plato and Aristotle. Finally, the most radical theories on women, men, and patriarchy surfaced in the Enlightenment era, with the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft. During the influential account of man's downfall in the Judaic Bible, Eve, the woman is told by God, "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." The Bible was, and is still being used as a tool to justify women's traditionally inferior role in society. During biblical times a Jewish wife, often sharing her husband with many other wives, was virtually a slave to him. Confined to hard domestic labor, with little rest ....