From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume I
From Prehistory to the First Millennium
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The first volume of the New York Times–bestselling author’s monumental and unprecedented history: “Consistently thought-provoking” (The New York Review of Books).
The internationally celebrated author of The Women’s Room, Marilyn French spent over fifteen years with a team of researchers and prominent historians examining women’s lives and activities in civilizations and societies spanning the ages.
Beginning in prehistory, Origins moves on to examine women’s lives in ancient Egypt, China, India, Peru, Mexico, Greece, and Rome. In her reconstruction of wars, laws, and other activities affecting both women and men, French also traces the worldviews underpinning them. She also depicts how women’s relationship to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed for good and bad over the centuries.
“She backs up even her more controversial theories with an impressive accumulation of academically accepted historical, anthropological and sociological sources . . . Written in concise, understated language, this is a significant addition to literature on women’s studies and history.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her foreword to this first volume of a four-volume work, Atwood writes that women "are not a footnote" to history, but rather "the necessary center around which the wheel of power revolves." That is the view that novelist and memoirist French (The Women's Room) satisfyingly supports. As in any survey, much of this volume reads schematically ("For 99 percent of hominid and human existence, people lived in egalitarian matricentry"), and like many historians, French has an agenda but she backs up even her more controversial theories with an impressive accumulation of academically accepted historical, anthropological and sociological sources. French covers her material vividly as she discusses the formation of the gendered state in Peru, Egypt, Sumer and China and then surveys the differences between the formation of secular and religious states. The volume ends with a detailed analysis of the position of women in early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it's here that French's precise methodology really comes to life, though some will debate her interpretations. Written in concise, understated language, this is a significant addition to literature on women's studies and history.
