Women’s Work Men’s Property

“To some a book on the <i>origins</i> of sexual inequality is absurd. Male dominance seems to them a universal if not inevitable phenomenon that has been with us since the dawn of our species. The essays in this volume offer differing perspectives on the development of sex-role differentiation and sexual inequality but share a belief that these phenomena <i>did</i> have social origins origins that must be sought in sociohistorical events and processes.”In this way Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson introduce a book which fills a yawning gap in Marxist and feminist theory of recent years.<i>Women’s Work Men’s Property</i> brings together specialist historical and anthropological skills of a group of American and French feminists to examine the origins of the sexual division of labor the nature of pre-state kinship societies the position of women in slave-based societies and the specific forms taken by the oppression of women in archaic Greece.<i>Men’s Work Women’s Property</i> will be welcomed by teachers and students of women’s studies and anyone with an interest in the biological psychological and historical roots of sexual inequality.