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  • The Creation of Patriarchy

  • By: Gerda Lerner
  • Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
  • Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (5 ratings)

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The Creation of Patriarchy

By: Gerda Lerner
Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
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Publisher's Summary

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 BC 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.

©1986 Gerda Lerner (P)2021 Tantor

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this should be mandatory for everyone.

this should be mandatory reading. for everyone. life-changing. system smashing. an incredibly important feminist text

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Wish this was compulsory reading for all people

Want to know why things are the way they are, and why the whole world has gone to shit? this book explains it all perfectly. Sadly it was written in 1986 and not enough progress has been made since then. Its still just as relevant today.

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