Selected Product:
| The Creation of Patriarchy (Women & History)
Paperback
Author: Gerda Lerner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Release Date: 1987-10-22
ISBN-10: 0195051858
ISBN-13: 9780195051858
List Price: $19.95
Average Customer Rating:
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A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process.
Focusing on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of definition and interpretation, Lerner explores such fascinating questions as: What can account for women's exclusion from the historical process? What could explain the long delay--more than 3,500 years--in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position? She goes back to the cultures of the earliest known civilizations--those of the ancient Near East--to discover the origins of the major gender metaphors of Western civilization. Using historical, literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence, she then traces the development of these ideas, symbols, and metaphors and their incorporation into Western civilization as the basis of patriarchal gender relations.
The perfect gift
| Customer Rating: | This book is the perfect gift - for an historian studying the intellectual history of the ancient Near East from a Feminist point of view. The "boring" part of it is valid only when applied to people outside of the target audience. I was assigned this book in a history class, and read it with great delight cover to cover. I can understand where other people are coming form, but if you have a feminist Mesopotamian intellectual historian, this is THE book.
I give it five stars, but only within it's microniche. |
Fascinating introduction to feminist thought
| Customer Rating: | | While this book can be (and is) boring, and while the anger expressed within might be outdated, Lerner (who was writing in the 80s) does an excellent job of displaying some of the reasons WHY we continue to act as we do. Her discussion of the origins of marriage and female slavery were especially helpful. |
a hopelessly anacronistic misreading of the past
| Customer Rating: | | The just cause of feminism is done great harm by books like this that completely fail to read ancient material, contextualy. The "idea" that The Iliad was/is "sexist" would be laughable were it not pernicious because so few people who read Lerner will bother to read Homer, let alone the mountain of scholarly work on the meanings of "his" poems. Telemecus' sacrifice of 12 slave women has zero to do with "sexism" and everything to do with an ancient concept of divinity rooted in ritualized repetitions of "sacred" numbers. As in the credits for movies where the studio offers a disclaimer that,"no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture" someone needs to explain to Ms. Lerner that the "people" in the Iliad and the Odyssey were as real as "Christ's" transubstatiation. And before anyone suggests that the "symbolism" still represents a "sexist" culture, it should be pointed out that the 12 were a symbolic gift to the FEMININE spirit for whom Odysseus was laboring, and that, though it was, by our standards, TODAY, "barbaric" the culture of ancient Greece, viewed the Iliad and the Odyssey as epics in celebration of the power of the feminine, as they understood it. Let's try to remember, that "Odysseus" was part of a religious service, called the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that the WHOLE of the two books are in fact a description of a fertility cult dedicated to the ancient Greek belief in the power of the earth goddess, and that the entire war is a ritualized expression of worship for the earth goddesses symbol, "Helen", who, goes from Greece to Troy and back, as a symbol of the belief that the masculine (the warriors) must follow the feminine (Helen) and serve her so as to complete the cycle of birth, life, death, and eventualy rebirth in the form of the next, newer generation. Feminism deserves far more, and far better than this joke of a book. Anything else is an anacronistic "reading" that says more about Lerner's lack of erudition than it does about "Homer." END |
Eye opening
| Customer Rating: | | I thought this book was wonderful because it brings up many topics that get your brain thinking in totally different ways. I am currently doing a research paper on the possiblities of Mother Goddess worship in ancient times and this book has been very helpful. What makes this book different from a lot that I have read on the subject is that she shows many different sides to the topics she brings up. This is great because most of the subject is subjective anyway. The book is also very easy to read and follow. It's a great read! |
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