We have come a long way

It is sometimes easy to forget that we have come a long way in a few decades. I was pulled up short by the information that "as recently as 1974 there was correspondence in the Lancet about why flowers handled by a menstruating woman should wilt".

Odd how many florists are female then ...

(From Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, Anthony Fletcher, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995, p. 63)