The role of women in different civilizations is always considered to be significant and rather influential. In fact, the treatment of women may serve as a kind of standard according to which many civilizations can be judged and evaluated. It is also possible to analyze what civilization and why may be influenced by some other factors and what the outcomes of these impacts will be. Kevin Reilly in his book The West and the World touches upon numerous aspects which help to define the peculiarities of different civilizations and tell a lot about Greek, Roman, Japanese, Indian, and Medieval European civilizations. In each of the above-mentioned civilization, women were treated in different ways that help to realize that each nation is unique and worthy of recognition. It was hard for a woman to get the same rights as men did. This is why to prove their rights and abilities to be treated on a proper level, women of all civilizations had to pass a long way and be able to get everything from this world as men did it for a long period of time. Greek, Indian, and other civilizations demonstrate different treatments of women; the status of women has been changed considerably with time but still some grounds allow to evaluate the peculiarity of each nation and to define its strong and weak sides from such perspectives like hunting, agriculture, love and sex, and love and devotion. Discussion It is useless to deny the fact that we all live in a man’s world. It is a usual affair to observe men in politics, economy, business, and many other vital spheres of life. When a woman tries to take some important position, she has to be ready to constant judgments, suggestions, and improvements from male side. Is it true that women are always under male power? Or are there any periods of time when women had more powers and rights and the civilizations where women’s role was appreciated on the necessary level? To find a proper answer to these questions, it is necessary to analyze different civilizations and clear up what kinds of achievements were defined then. Women and men: general overview . For a long period of time, it was stated that women had fewer rights in comparison to those which men did. However, to gain better understanding of what role women played in their societies, more attention should be paid to their actions, duties, and roles and rely to not only on some written records. For example, during the ancient times, in many civilizations like Medieval Europe, women were treated as gods. Thinkers define “the first human society …a ‘matriarchy’ (literally, a world of female power, or ‘mother-power’)” (Reilly, Men and Women: Hunters and Gatherers , 15). This way of treatment of women proves that Medieval European civilizations paid much attention to gods and their power over ordinary people. However, it was not the only one civilization that was devoted to gods. The representatives and Rome and Greece also demonstrated their interests in gods’ power but still they relied more on male gods and treated to female gods as good wives of gods who provided the necessary support. The representatives of the Indian civilization prefer to identify women’s power as something that is assumed that established. Men were always responsible for women; they had the right to work, hunt, and bring foo