This justified and helped start a pogrom against strong women that was to last over 200 years. Women were forced into accepting an inferior status to men - and it got worse. Men killed and tortured by the hundred the women they most feared. Behind all these theories were male sexual anxieties and insecurites. I sometimes forget quite how recent and how dramatic is the change of ideology in the West.
Women are today equal - in theory.
They have their own late night television shows in which they can openly tease men as sexual equals. The earlier 'scientific' theories for male supremacy are debunked as fraudulent. The witchery words of 'charm' and 'enchant' no longer entail the devil. Since this change, we have gone through a period of saying that it is solely conditioning that makes a woman mentally different from a male. We now know that our very brains are different, that we are differently talented but not definately not inferior.