negative Hesiodic description of woman's origin and woman's role and, even more significantly, for "the fact that the Hesiodic texts become canonical in Greek thought."
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 | | The particularities too of Hesiod's extreme negativity towards woman, while open to compromise and mitigation in other texts and other spheres of interest, still remain the touchstone of an underlying attitude concerning this intrusive and ambivalent "other" who is brought into another man's household and forever remains under suspicion as introducing a dangerous mixture into the desired purity and univocity of male identity, whether in sexual relations or in the production of children.
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| | (Zeitlin 1990)
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For our purposes here, the most significant point of contrast that she draws between the Hesiodic and biblical formations is the extreme ambivalence toward reproduction which was seemingly endemic to "the economy of scarcity, parsimony, and anxious surveillance over what man has patiently accumulated by himself and for himself" in Greece in contrast to the unqualified enthusiasm typical of the "economy of abundance, proliferation, and expansiveness" of Hebrew culture.
33
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Zeitlin's argument is an important corrective to a tendency to elide the fact that while all known ancient Mediterranean societies were thoroughly androcentric, there was nevertheless a wide range of gender ideologies in them. These different ideologies do not
necessarily
indicate differences in other categories of social practice, however. I am not going to make any claim for essential differences in social practice between the represented cultures "in the background of" particular literary works, still less between entire social formations. Thus, to claim that one or the other culture's canonical texts construct woman as evil, scary, weak, gentle, nurturing, etc., while those of the other do not, teaches us very little about how women lived in the cultures. As the late John Winkler wisely remarked, such representations may be only "male palaver." Caroline Bynum has also made the point that we cannot take what texts say about women's position in society at face value (Bynum 1986, 258). Nevertheless, what the canonical texts themselves say is an important social practice in its
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| | 33. It is not completely clear from Zeitlin's text whether she considers this superstructure on an actual difference in the economic base or whether the economic terms are functioning for her as metaphors for cultural/ideological phenomena.
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