Summary
Contents
Subject index
What is Gender? explores these complex and important questions, helping readers to critically analyze how women's and men's lives are shaped by the society in which they live. The book offers a comprehensive account of trends in sociological thinking, from a material and economic focus on gender inequalities to the debates about meaning initiated by the linguistic or cultural turn.
How Different are Women and Men?
How Different are Women and Men?
It used to be thought that a woman is a woman because of her ovaries alone. As we shall see later, there are many individuals with ovaries who are not women in the strict sense of the word and many with testes who are really feminine in many other respects. (Bell cited in Oudshoorn, 1994: 37)
This quotation may come as a surprise if you have always thought about the biological differences between women and men as clear and beyond question. Bell wrote this in 1916 in a scientific study about what came to be known as sex hormones. The quotation shows the emerging scientific awareness that sex differences were less straightforward than conventionally imagined. ...
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