From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume II
The Masculine Mystique from Feudalism to the French Revolution
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- €13.99
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- €13.99
Publisher Description
“Filled with fascinating detail . . . this second volume of French’s massive and valuable work is an example of scholarship and clear vision.” —Publishers Weekly
This volume of New York Times–bestselling author Marilyn French’s monumental history analyzes and evaluates the lives of women in societies around the world between feudal times and the French Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen years of collaboration with a team of researchers and prominent historians, the volume opens with fascinating chapters comparing medieval Europe and Japan, disparate cultures which nevertheless shared traditions of male dominated aggression and competitiveness.
French then shows how, in Europe, this tradition led to colonialism and imperialism, and the horrific subjugation of indigenous societies, just as women were subjugated in the conquerors’ home countries. As French makes clear in this impassioned women’s history, only with the French Revolution did the political force women exerted powerfully change the course of history.
“French gives us grand theory at its best, wading through copious amounts of scholarly data on the histories of civilizations and offering up, in readable prose, an important synthesis.” —Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This second of four volumes, moves quickly from feudalism to the French revolution. Firmly rooted in more modern history, novelist and scholar French (The Women's Room) writes less theoretically and more concretely than in volume 1. Beautifully sourced and referenced, the book shows, for instance, that in the 1400s Protestant and Catholic theologians transformed marriage from a private arrangement "into a complex public ceremony" that granted men more power. Women came to have less and less say in when and whom they would wed. Discussing the colonization of Africa, French illustrates how traditional, more egalitarian African gender roles were altered under European property-based, Christian social structures. French also begins to focus on how female sexuality was interpreted by a male-dominated culture. Marie Antoinette, for example, was convicted and executed not only for supporting her husband but for sexually corrupting the dauphin and thus "the body politic." Filled with fascinating detail and powerful arguments, this second volume of French's massive and valuable work is an example of scholarship and clear vision.
