One reason is that it's so ancient--the oppression and the acceptance of it. Because it was continuous, it meant there could be no real breakthrough . . . until there was one, thousands of years after the fact. Lerner talks about the fact that you couldn't get out of the blackout. A woman would write something down but there was no culture to preserve those ideas. The same woman would write the same thing down fifty years later. Nada. Disconnect. There was no continuity, hence no history. Just like the commercial, "like it never even happened." We're still living with it.