“The Chesapeake Bay is like a beautiful woman. There’s no humiliation from which she cannot recover.”

James Mitchener in Chesapeake the novel.

These lines written, with utmost sincerity, only 55 years ago now sound completely anachronistic. Mitchener is writing about the amazing ability of the bay to recover from man made and natural environmental disasters and he uses an analogy to a beautiful woman. Today we wouldn’t do that. First it implies that women are emotionally different than men. Second it implies that beautiful women are different than ordinary women. It probably suggests other thing that I am too insensitive to understand.