QUOTE : The Story of Yamada Waka: From Prostitute to Feminist Pioneer, and also Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed, the autobiography of Mrs. L. P. Ray (a former slave who ministered to the homeless in Seattle), it’s clear that there’s no definitive answer. But instead a rogue’s gallery of societal pressures that contributed in varying proportions to the difficulty of simply being born without a Y chromosome in the early twentieth century—abject poverty, lack of education, an appalling age of consent (as low as ten years old), religious condemnation, tribal shaming toward unmarried women who dared to (gasp) be sexually active, illegality of information pertaining to birth control, vicious wage gaps. Oh, and racism.