Universal Difference

The author argues that rather than seeing liberalism as exclusionary of women's specificity, as many contemporary feminists do, we should look at variations in liberalism, and in particular at its democratisation in the nineteenth century, and at how feminists have used liberalism as a resource. Liberalism is analysed using a post-structuralist theory of hegemony: texts of liberal political philosophy are deconstructed to show how the term 'women' is used as an 'undecidable' in the Derridean sense to produce the opposition between feminine private and masculine public spheres; these texts are then linked to liberal-democratic social and political practices, including feminism as a social movement.

The Handbook of Sex Differences is a four-volume reference work written to assess sex differences, with a primary focus on the human species. Based on the authors’ highly influential 2008 book Sex Differences, these volumes highlight important new research findings from the last decade and a half alongside earlier findings. In this, the work’s fourth and last volume, two related questions are addressed: Are there universal sex differences (i.e., sex differences found in all societies)? And if the answer is yes, what are they and how can each one be theoretically explained? To answer the first of these two questions, this volume condenses much of the research findings amassed in the book’s first three volumes into summary tables. Then, to help identify likely universal sex differences, three versions of social role theory and two versions of evolutionary theory are examined relative to each possible universal sex difference. Consideration is even given to religious scriptures as a sixth type of explanation. In the concluding analyses, 308 likely universal sex differences are identified. No single theory was able to explain all these differences. Nevertheless, the two evolutionary theories were better in this regard than any of the three social role theories, including the recently proposed biosocial version of social role theory. The Handbook of Sex Differences is of importance for any researcher, student, or professional who requires a comprehensive resource on sex differences.