All Men And Both Sexes

All Men and Both Sexes explores the use of such universal terms as &"people,&" &"man,&" or &"human&" in early modern England, from the civil war through the Enlightenment. Such language falsely implies inclusion of both men and women when actually it excludes women. Recent scholarship has focused on the Rights of Man doctrine from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as explanation for women&’s exclusion from citizenship. According to Hilda Smith we need to go back further, to the English Revolution and the more grounded (but equally restricted) values tied to the &"free born Englishman.&" Citing educational treatises, advice literature to young people, guild records, popular periodicals, and parliamentary debates, she demonstrates how the &"male maturation process&" came to define the qualities attached to citizenship and responsible adulthood, which in turn became the basis for modern individualism and liberalism. By the eighteenth century a new discourse of sensibility was describing women as dependent beings outside the state, in a separate sphere and in need of protection. This excluded women from reform debates, forcing them to seek not an extension of a democratic franchise but a specific women&’s suffrage focused on gender difference.

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives—to see that feminism is for everybody.

Essential reading for our times, as women are pulling together to demand their rights— A landmark portrait of women, men, and power in a transformed world. “Anchored by data and aromatized by anecdotes, [Rosin] concludes that women are gaining the upper hand." –The Washington Post Men have been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But Hanna Rosin was the first to notice that this long-held truth is, astonishingly, no longer true. Today, by almost every measure, women are no longer gaining on men: They have pulled decisively ahead. And “the end of men”—the title of Rosin’s Atlantic cover story on the subject—has entered the lexicon as dramatically as Betty Friedan’s “feminine mystique,” Simone de Beauvoir’s “second sex,” Susan Faludi’s “backlash,” and Naomi Wolf’s “beauty myth” once did. In this landmark book, Rosin reveals how our current state of affairs is radically shifting the power dynamics between men and women at every level of society, with profound implications for marriage, sex, children, work, and more. With wide-ranging curiosity and insight unhampered by assumptions or ideology, Rosin shows how the radically different ways men and women today earn, learn, spend, couple up—even kill—has turned the big picture upside down. And in The End of Men she helps us see how, regardless of gender, we can adapt to the new reality and channel it for a better future.

“If you want to know why more people are asking ‘what’s your pronoun?’ then you (singular or plural) should read this book.” —Joe Moran, New York Times Book Review Heralded as “required reading” (Geoff Nunberg) and “the book” (Anne Fadiman) for anyone interested in the conversation swirling around gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, What’s Your Pronoun? is a classic in the making. Providing much-needed historical context and analysis to the debate around what we call ourselves, Dennis Baron brings new insight to a centuries-old topic and illuminates how—and why—these pronouns are sparking confusion and prompting new policies in schools, workplaces, and even statehouses. Enlightening and affirming, What’s Your Pronoun? introduces a new way of thinking about language, gender, and how they intersect.

Loving Men, Respecting Women (The book in a nutshell) The overarching principle that pervades and unifies every element of this book can be expressed in a single word: Balance. The book's "radical" premise is this: in the benefits enjoyed and in the liabilities suffered, in the power and in the victimization, in the freedoms and in the constraints, it all balances out between Man and Woman-and it always has. By helping to promote a general understanding and perception of this balance throughout the culture at large, this book's ambition is to affect a fundamental gender paradigm shift. As it stands now, common wisdom perceives imbalance-an imbalance of power enjoyed by men and an imbalance of victimization suffered by women. Society has long recognized a world of male power/female victimization, yet that has never been more than half of the full story. The missing half can be found. It's contained within a shelf full of excellent but as yet rather obscure books. What might be thought of as the female power/male victimization half of the story remains obscure because neither sex wants to hear it. Nevertheless, for every female complaint, there is an equal and opposite male complaint. For every one CEO there have been many POWs. Hard/hazardous labor, battlefields, prisons, mines, the streets, the sewers-men have always occupied both extremes, the most and the least enviable positions on earth-the latter in far greater numbers than the former. Imagine, if you will, a gigantic scale where there is love on one end of the balance beam and respect on the other: This love/respect dynamic upon which gender balance pivots can be described in two brief statements: Throughout history, both sexes have respected men more than they've respected women. Throughout history, both sexes have loved women more than they've loved men. Feminism has made women's lesser status along the respect axis abundantly clear. Both sexes have listened and both sexes have worked together to change the cultural environment in ways that promote respect for women. That men are less loved, however, may ring true from the outset yet be met with cynicism just the same. Both sexes receive the female side with empathy and the male side without empathy exactly because both sexes love women more and men less. Hostility toward women is given the pejorative label of "misogyny" because hostility toward women is forbidden. Ours is more a misandrist ("male bashing") culture. But few know this word misandry-a word that would, if it existed in common parlance, condemn hostility toward men the way the word misogyny condemns hostility toward women. Apparently, in our lack of love toward men, we don't concern ourselves with the current cultural outpouring of derision toward men even to the extent of giving it a truly pejorative label. Balance is revealed in the following four key statements: One: At birth, members of both sexes are assigned roles, conditioning, and socialization that facilitate and ensure a world in which men are more respected/less loved and women are more loved/less respected. Two: Historically, men have been no more empowered to escape their biology, role, socialization, conditioning, and concurrent fate than women have. Three: The two sexes, equally powerless and equally powerful, have plied an equal overall force of influence upon the world and upon each other, engaged in equal complicity and partnership in the sculpting of our world, and are thus equally responsible for outcomes both good and bad. Four: Throughout history the enormous consequences and vast repercussions suffered by women for being less respected have been matched in full by the enormous consequences and vast repercussions suffered by men for being less loved. These four statements are key, because taken together they lead inexorably to the one key truth: It All Balances Out!

This is the guidebook for the newly emerging paradigm of masculinity. One that includes and celebrates both the primal and divine aspects of men.

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.