In a book entitled "The Social Fabric....1607-1877" in a chapter entitled "Husbands and Wives" the views of three of our ancestral great grandfathers who were Reverends are quoted. If you, like me, collect interesting tidbits about our ancestors I thought you might like their perspecitves on women. Nathaniel Ward found it hard to view women as anything other than "featherheaded" spendthrifts and "squirrel-brained" friskers after the latest fashions, ladies "fiter to be kickt....then either honour'd or hummour'd." He called "these nauseous shaped gentlewomen" no more than "gant-bar-geese, ill-shapen-shotten-shell-fish, Egyptian Hyeroglypics, or at the best...French flurts of the pastery." Thomas Hooker: "The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her at night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sets the table, walks with her when he travels and parlies with her in each place where he comes." Thomas Shepard admired in his mate "incomparable meekness of spirit toward myselfe especially." As all of these gentlemen are my great-something grandfather's I would rather claim Hooker who is willing to set a table than Ward who apparently has no use for women at all (except, of course, for bearing children!). The book is by Cary, Weinberg, Hartshorne and Wheeler and published by Harper Collins College Publishers 1995.