If this book doesn’t make you furious, you’re probably not human.

I had expected the book to be a collection of biographies of normal women throughout history—not queens or the elite, but ordinary women, though little has come down to us about ordinary women in history. This book is not that. Philippa Gregory, the author of numerous historical novels about women, has written a master class in the history of misogyny, at least in England, though America or the United States is mentioned because it perpetuated much of its colonists’ culture in the New World. The book is painstakingly researched, in many cases using ancient records to bolster her points—the production of wool thread, for example, or the number of licenses issued to “femes soles” (in Medieval times, women who were working for themselves with no husband or other man involved in their businesses).

Prior to 1066, when William the Conqueror forayed into England and defeated the Anglo-Saxons, women in Anglo-Saxon society had a reasonable say in their own affairs, and could own their own land and monies. (This is not to say they were considered equal to men, just that they had more rights until William came along.) The Norman Conquest changed all that. Women became legal nonentities; they had no rights under the law separate from their husbands. Misogyny flourished in the succeeding centuries, fueled by religion, classism, racism, superstition, and the pronouncements in every age by learned men on what the true “nature of women” was.

Women, being intelligent and resourceful, strove in many different ways to overcome the obstacles set them. They became proficient and profitable at one trade or another—only to find that a law might be passed prohibiting women from engaging in that trade. Women who found themselves beating men at sports quickly found their participation in men’s sports prohibited. “Normal Women” documents this snatch-the-football trick over and over, up to the modern day.

Women did not feel a sense of sisterhood for much of this history largely because of classism: upper-class women were thought to be delicate and frigid—yet prone to extremes of emotion and irrationality. Working class women were thought to be sturdy, resilient, and sexually available. The classes didn’t mix, and they did not see that they had common cause until the mid-19th Century. White women did not initially see they had anything in common with women of other ethnicities. When women joined hands across class and ethnicity, progress began to be made, though not without many setbacks and failures.

Ms. Gregory is crystal-clear about why the progress of women’s rights has been so painfully slow: men. Men have a vested interest in the unpaid labor of women even today. And when women are able to out-compete men, that appears to trigger the need to shut them down. Why? “Normal Women” explains why, and it is infuriating because it is based on the musings of non-scientific Greek philosophers, an eight-thousand-year-old story created by goat herders about the fall of Adam and Eve (Eve thereby making all females everywhere suspect and inferior in the millennia since), Medieval fantasies about chivalry, completely unscientific “truths” about the female body and its workings, and similar nonsense. These attitudes persist today, as does widespread ignorance about the female body.

I told my husband about some of the anti-women measures mentioned in the book during Medieval times, and he immediately said, “Not all men were responsible for this.” Well, there were no women in Parliament writing the laws. There were no women sheriffs or bailiffs enforcing the laws. There were no women lawyers defending or prosecuting the laws. There were no women judges making decisions about the laws and their enforcement. And there were no men opposing the unjust laws against women, either. So yeah, all men, at least at that particular time. Thankfully, there has been some progress since, and today—not all men. Just a lot of them.

So I guess if you’re a man, “Normal Women” will infuriate you because “not all men.” If you are a woman, you will be infuriated because of the relentless and irrational war against women over the centuries. And if you aren’t infuriated—you are probably an alien.

Day 18 didn’t work out as planned, so we hung around the hotel, which was interesting in itself. When I woke up, I joined Tom on our balcony, overlooking a broad swath of jungle spilling down a steep slope to the ocean. Tom reported he had just seen a flock of scarlet macaws. As I sat and gazed, I saw a toucan flying below—its enormous yellow beak was unmistakable. That was my first toucan sighting, and as we leave day after tomorrow, it may be my last.

We spent some time in the adult pool and bar. I don’t know what the attraction is of swimming up to a bar for a drink but it’s undeniable.

On Day 19, we had a mangrove swamp tour scheduled for the afternoon. We discovered that the tour included a dinner, which was not what we had in mind. But we went with the flow.

Our guide was named Tomàs. I think he had doubts about us at first—I don’t know why, but he just seemed a bit standoffish at first. After a bit, when we listened attentively to his history talk as we drove, he began to warm up. His family was from Jamaica, and he grew up on a farm on the Caribbean side. He speaks English, Spanish, and French (yes, we chatted briefly in French), and he wants to learn Hebrew because he thinks it is the most beautiful language he has ever heard and he loves Israeli people. If he does learn Hebrew (and why not? He taught himself French), he will have a lock on the Israeli tourist market here. (My thought, not his.)

There were no other tourists booked for this tour. We started out in a bayou full of small, Fiberglas boats similar to the one we were on. This is the first time I have seen serious poverty here—the shacks lining the waterway reminded me of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride, only utterly without charm. I imagine that the swamp is not a popular location for housing, especially during the rainy season.

In the beginning of the tour, there were many mangroves. Many, many mangroves, if nothing else. Poor Tomás talked manfully about the differences between the mangrove species for a while, as there was nothing else to be seen. He pointed out that crocodiles didn’t live in this mangrove swamp because there were no sandbanks for them to haul out on—just tangled mangrove roots, impenetrable to crocs, providing no places to nest or lay their eggs. The channels seemed deeper than the ones in Tamarindo, and Tomás said there were lots of fish, some of them quite large.

We finally did begin to see birds—blue herons, which are a bright blue and smaller than great blue herons, white ibis, yellow-crested herons, great blue herons. As we approached the mouth of the estuary, we saw pelicans roosting in the trees. We approached quite closely as the pelicans stared down at us. They were clearly judging us, and not for the better. One of them made a disapproving gurgling sound as we passed by.

There are sandbanks and crocodiles here, but we didn’t see any (crocs, that is. There were plenty of sandbanks). We did see a chachalaca, but it was too far away to photograph. We also saw a HUGE iguana, lying on a branch and basking in the sun.

The exciting finds were a silky anteater, a ball of golden-brown fur in a mangrove tree, and a capuchin monkey, who went about his business quite close to us without seeming to care at all that we were there.

We were constantly astonished by the sharp eyes of the boat captain and Tomás, who could pick out a bird sitting like a statue within the tangled mangrove roots. There were times we didn’t see anything until it moved.

We headed back as the sun was setting and drive into Guero, a small town on a deep shipping harbor here. Tomás took us to a restaurant for some casado. I am a fan, but I wasn’t hungry. Tom did it justice, though. It was delicious, but my late lunch stuck with me. We had a gorgeous view of the sunset over the harbor.

Our first entire day in Costa Rica, at the hotel we were aiming for. We opted to spend the day resting. We had breakfast, made massage appointments at the spa, ate lunch by the pool, had massages, went to the pool bar in the hot pool for margaritas, and dinner is somewhere in the future. That’s about all we could handle today. Maybe tomorrow we will venture out and buy hats and make tour plans. Something daring and rascally like that.

Costa Rica, Day 5

Costa Rica does not remind me of Mexico at all. In Mexico, so much of the art, architecture, civic art, derives its themes from their indigenous people. You can see Aztec and Maya elements everywhere (among those from the numerous lesser-known civilizations of Mexico).

Pre-Columbian Costa Rican peoples did not create empires. There were several different tribes, which apparently lived fairly peaceably with each other, and were egalitarian in a way that Mexico’s indigenous tribes were not. And only 2% of Costa Ricans are indigenes today. This may be the reason I so far have not detected any cohesive style here. Our hotel, Royal Corin, could be in the US or Europe for all you can tell from its architecture and decor.

Today we decided to venture into La Fortuna in search of hats and other things. I bought a hat. It is not thing of beauty, but it fit, it’s packable, it has a chin strap, and it was relatively cheap. Most of the hats I looked at were heavy, not packable, had no chin straps, didn’t fit, or were too expensive. So I will wear my ugly hat with pride.

Unfortunately, my shoulder decided to be the problem today. It tends to get pissed off anyway, and it really did not like hauling luggage around for three days. My back feels fine, though, so I used my magic machine on my shoulder, took some acetaminophen and felt better.

We soaked in one of the thermal pools, then had cocktails at the pool bar. To the left were two youngish men from some cold state, to the right was somewhat older fellow from England, but originally from Venezuela. He emigrated to England, spent seven years obtaining his Ph.d., and is now a professor of supply chain management at Cardiff University. Impressive.

However, one of the younger men won me over by saying I didn’t look like I was 73 years old. I asked him to marry me.

We opted for the vegetarian menu for dinner. It is interesting that the food in this 5-star hotel is hit-and-miss. Some selections are delicious. Some are very uninteresting. Breakfast is almost universally boring, and I confine my attentions to fruit, scrambled eggs with sauce picante, and bacon. The vegetarian dishes that we ordered fell into the “meh” category, sadly.

I did see a green basilisk lizard near the pool, but he slithered off before Tom could see him. The lizard is almost the only wildlife I have seen so far except for a butterfly that had wandered into the hotel and was obviously confused by all the cold, hard tile. I scooped it gently off the floor and put it out a window.

Costa Rica, Day 6

We booked a chocolate plantation tour for today and had to be ready to go at 7:45 for transportation. Our group was tiny—just us and a family of four from Ohio. Our tour guide was Chapo (he goes by ChapoGuapo on the Internet. His main point appeared to be that the chocolate grown in Africa is produced via slave labor, and many of the slaves are children. He is right, and I never buy chocolate from companies that use slave labor, and that includes all the biggies—Mars, Nestlé, Cadbury, etc. it should be noted that the chocolate manufactured by these companies tends to be poor quality and crammed with sugar. So, Chapo and I were in complete agreement.

We walked through the chocolate trees as Chapo showed us the fruit and flowers and explained cultivation and processing. He also tried to point out a toucan he spotted ( I didn’t see it), and he tried to track down a red and blue arrow poison frog he heard peeping in the leaves near a huge tree. On his first try, he didn’t find it. We asked him if he ever saw Fer-de-lance snakes (extremely venomous and aggressive snakes). He said no, and he is terrified of snakes because he was bitten by a coral snake as a child.

Later, Chapo went back to the leaf pile and found his frog. The poor man also found a small hog-nosed viper, known locally as the “ox-killer.” He shooed everyone away, and I think the experience shook him deeply. Nevertheless, he rallied and we moved on to the fun part—tasting.

First, he broke open a cacao fruit, exposing the seeds encased in white goo. He gave everyone two gooey seeds with instructions to suck on them, but not chew (or diarrhea would follow). The white goo tasted sweet and citrusy. Then he gave us fermented seeds to smell (earthy), and then roasted seeds (chocolatey). Then we got spoonfuls of melted chocolate that Chapo doctored as we directed with various flavorings—cinnamon, chiles, marshmallows, coffee, salt, etc. I tried Chapo’s recommendations and had three spoonfuls, each a bit different and absolutely yummy!