Description
Book SynopsisThis is a seminal three-volume work, that covers the history of women throughout the world, from earliest times to the present. Marilyn French, internationally bestselling author of The Women's Room, has spent over two decades with a team of researchers and historians examining women's roles and activities in various civilizations and societies throughout the ages. This volume investigates the role of women in society from feudal times up to the French Revolution. She begins with Europe and Japan, two countries vastly different in culture and tradition, yet similar in their male-dominated aggression and competitiveness. In all these different countries in all these different times, Marilyn French keeps asking the question: How did it happen that women had no power and no independence, that they suffered constant abuse and yet they nourished the family unit and preserved their culture and society? Along the way she provides vivid portraits of exceptional women such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana Ines le la Cruz, Mary Ingles, and Harriet Jacobs. In its breadth and its scope, this is a fascinating story peopled by remarkable women.
Trade Review"As a reference work it's invaluable: the bibliographies alone are worth the price. And as a warning about the appalling extremes of human behaviour and male weirdness, it's indispensable... Women who read this book will do so with horror and growing anger... whatever you think of French's conclusions, the issues she raises cannot be ignored. Women, it seems, are not a footnote after all: they are the necessary centre around which the wheel of power revolves; or, seen another way, they are the broad base of the triangle that sustains a few oligarchs at the top. No history you will read, post-French, will ever look the same again" Margaret Atwood, The Times, 21 August 2004
