Description
Book SynopsisIn Women in the Modern World, noted feminist and sociologist Mirra Komarovsky begins with a consideration of biology. Reflecting on these now-familiar arguments that the natural biological differences between women and men dictate different social roles, Komarovsky demolishes these arguments by carefully reviewing studies that find sex differences in cognitive abilities, achievement, and psychological predispositions. In successive chapters, Komarovsky explores how differential socialization produces the differences that we think we observe between women and men, and how gender inequality disfigures the lives of women, men, and the relationships between them. One chapter examines how it plays out among college students at Barnard in the first college generation after the Second World War. Many of these bright and ambitious women feel trapped between their talents and the constraints of feminine domesticity mapped out for them by social expectations. Successive chapters examine the cost
