[jraph]

Yes, sexism is not a new thing from today, and such sentences are witnesses of this. We might be interpreting stuff from the past with today's eyes, true, but that doesn't make the interpretation wrong. There are a lot of things we know now and didn't before. It's even totally possible we have reading keys that might have been unavailable back then.

We should not interpret stuff out of context though, but here I'm not sure taking the context in account would not make the point even stronger. I would be quite surprised about any context changing things for this particular phrase (but happy to be surprised...)