The author takes a look at the way that gendered society creates difficulty for women moving into a position of equality. He compares different studies and hypotheses, mostly from the 20th century but does reference some earlier studies, and finds the common thread that ties all these together. He is good at pointing out how so much of what we believe are "just so" stories, but occasionally reports information uncritically that might be better questioned - such as the report of a tribe where men have 30 orgasms a night, every night. To his credit, he does not buy into the idea of a harmonious matriarchal society that was thrown down to create the patriarchy; there is little to no evidence for this. While at times he seems to promote the idea of the "noble savage", mostly he recognizes that this is also mostly mythical. I have just about come to the conclusion that there is no point in mentioning weak editing, strange use of punctuation, etc. It begins to appear that editors ceased such things somewhere around the mid 1980s. I may just have to get used to the difficulty imposed by stray commas or unwieldy punctuation and spelling that create a headache for the reader. ( )

The essays in this book (the required reading for my Gender Studies course this semester) were hit and miss. But many of my problems with the text ultimately stemmed from the make-up of the class. It's a very social-science centric book, and my humanities-based professor didn't enjoy teaching from it. We also moved very slowly and skipped around, which I feel left the students without a grounding from which to work. Several of our assigned readings sent me outside of the text to gather a better understanding, and I often read outside of the assigned readings within the book, so it was worthwhile in the end, though the class abandoned the text, and started choosing other essays. ( )