… now I’ve got good cause:
“in 1776 James Boswell was still trying to persuade his father to disinherit all his female relatives, on the grounds that “our species is transmitted through males only, the females being all along no more than a Nidus, or nurse, as Mother Earth is to plants of every sort”. (p; 101)
(Williams, C.D. “Another self in the case”: gender, marriage and the individual in Augustan literature,” in Porter, R. (ed) Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, Routledge, London, 1997.)
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