The gendered society

As this book enters its fourth edition, it’s been adopted widely around the coun try and translated into several languages. It’s personally gratifying, of course, but more gratifying is the embrace of the book’s vision of a world in which gender inequal ity is but a distant anachronism, and a serious intellectual confrontation with gender […]

With each new edition of Thinking about Women, there is an opportunity to reflect on changes in the status of women and men in society. News headlines and popular books proclaim various changes—that “The End of Men” is near or that women need to “Lean In” to find success in hitherto men’s worlds. Various commentators […]

Influenced mainly by liberal and socialist feminists, several gendered approaches to development have emerged, in part, as critiques of the major theoretical approaches to development – modernisation theory, underdevelopment and dependency theory, and neo-liberalism – in the Third World countries since the 1950s. A major policy highlight of this has been the predominance of ‘efficiency […]

People often consider feminism to be a modern idea and assume that women of the past simply accepted the life carved out for them. In fact, women’s rights have been at the forefront of political and social debate for centuries. Written over 200 years ago, The Declaration of the Rights of Women by Olympe de Gouges started […]

The Declaration of Sentiments begins by asserting the equality of all men and women and reiterates that both genders are endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It argues that women are oppressed by the government and the patriarchal society of which they are a part

This book includes a diversity of women’s lived experiences and provides framing feminist concepts such as intersectionality. It strives to have students consider privilege, systems of oppression, and diversity of experience.

enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis …. indicates the […]

This book should be mandatory reading for all adults in the 21st century, as it sheds light on the severity of oppression by patriarchy and how it deprives women of agency. Beauvoir exposes the mechanisms of patriarchal oppression, breaking down the foundations of male dominance in societies.