Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature--one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.

"The authors follow the microwave's life trajectory from the design office to the factory and thence to the shops and household. Examining the different jobs women and men do, the different kinds of knowlege they contribute and the unequal importance they are ascribe in the evloution of the microwave, this book shows how technology relations continue to disadvantage women"--Back cover.

In this collection of new and previously published essays, Sherry Ortner draws on her more than two decades of work in feminist anthropology to offer a major reconsideration of culture and gender. Making Gender is rich in theoretical insights and ethnographic examples, offering a stimulating synthesis of the field by one of its founders and foremost theorists.

History of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns by describing the developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology.

The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.

Drawing on postmodernist scepticism about what we know and how we know it and on recent developments in the philosophy of science and feminist theory, this book offers a new perspective on the meaning of gender, one that is not determined by the traditional focus on male-female differences.

"Well-grounded in research, this accessible text presents psychology as it has been transformed and is being transformed by the inclusion of women in the discipline. It discusses the changes that a feminist vision of psychology has made in everything from the methods used to the topics being studied until ultimately, the students' views of psychology and themselves are transformed." --Publisher's description, www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Yoder-Women-and-Gender-Transforming-Psychology-2nd-Edition/PGM1520.html?tab=overview