man-hatress

Updated: June 19, 2025

A fascinating brilliant girl, who naturally adopts for her patroness the blue-stocking Minerva; a man-hatress, as clever girls so often are, and determined to pay the author of the Iliad out for his treatment of her sex by insisting on its superior moral, not to say intellectual, capacity, and on the self-sufficient imbecility of man unless he has a woman always at his elbow to keep him tolerably straight and in his proper place this, and not the musty fusty old bust we see in libraries, is the kind of person who I believe wrote the Odyssey.

Samuel Butler - The Humour of Homer and Other Essays