Ms Saini's presentation despite being one of concise clarity manages to cover, and even more importantly, uncover much ground, providing for an exhilarating, informative read. In her introduction, she lights upon a point that on its own pierces centuries of fog by identifying the manner in which women are perceived. Their inferiority is whispered constantly and everywhere. Certainly this dismissive attitude can be loud and clear, even brutal at times; but to sustain such a direct disregard would be a taxing endeavour. Therefore the approach morphed into an omnipresent implicit bias.
The foggy pestilence is left to billow about because of the nonchalant attitude of well that's what science says even though that is not what science says. It obscures the truth from being seen, an inconvenient one of women being denied their birthright of equality. There's a cough there, a sneeze there, but the fog remains. Mingling with the miasma is yet another poisonous whispering, that there never was any intellectually vigorous analysis opposing the arbitrary proposition of women intrinsically having pared-down worth.
Challenging the notion of innate male superiority and corralling their righteous anger into brilliant and potent late-nineteenth-century rebuttals, women like Caroline Kennard* and Eliza Burt Gamble were ignored by science. Because women. Whisper, whisper. See how that fog seeps over everything a woman does? It stays put so well that an egalitarian society hasn't surfaced yet as women still are not spared from being sexually harassed/assaulted, still earn less pay for doing the same work as men, still not mentored as thoroughly as men hence making success into male-dominated fields beyond university graduation fraught with difficulties that has nothing to with their intellectual ability, and still not have complete control over their reproductive functions and of ones that they have, those human rights are under constant threat.
What makes a woman a woman? Data collected from varied, large samples shows that though men on average are taller and have greater upper body strength, woman are more robust. Less males survive birth and stay alive longer. Eliza Burt Gamble challenging the notion of the weaker sex in her book, The Evolution of Women: An Inquiry Into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man, had intimated as much when she wrote:
The systemic curtailing of women's potential can be traced to when agriculture became entrenched. Due to a historic windfall, that is, basically luck, men were able to build societies catering solely to their needs. And with even more luck, white men could shape the world to fit them like a tailored-made suit. With hoarded inter-generational wealth, especially land, certain white men could lord it over even other men to the present spectacle of white, male billionaires who have never known an emotion they are able to regulate weeping on televised broadcasts because they might be taxed more appropriately.
For most of history, that is, before humans switched to an agricultural focus, women were able to acquire power by networking with each other. When I was a young woman in the 1970s I was fond of saying that the only reason why women were making advances (my goodness there goes a woman firefighter! Wow, a woman police officer!) was that such changes improved men's lives. That is, men allowed such changes after all it is their world. With increasing inflation, the single male earner household went out the window. It became advantageous to the family's financial health if the woman made more than she traditionally did hence some fields begrudgingly accepted female candidates as long as their pay was less. Of course she simultaneously would do unpaid housework as usual.
My observing as time passed allowed adding to this earlier understanding that at present the male power structure has sufficiently supported men pushing technological advances, of the kind, that unwittingly permits women to network easily and rapidly with each other, such as the Web. Women finding and amplifying their voices have not gone by unnoticed as the ever present backlash to #metoo and #TimesUp shows and by my own recent experience of a 'reply guy' wedded to the whispering style plaguing discourses on women's equality unashamedly insisting during an online discussion that the words 'patriarchy' and 'feminism' be not used as if not naming what exists and why it does somehow will erase magically what is problematically and egregiously extant.
Ms Saini discusses the extensive research on brain dimorphism in humans and concludes there is no significant evidence male and female brains are much different, but rather they are intersex, with a bit of both, of which the proportion varies from person to person creating an individual mosaic in each and every one of us. Yet researchers insist on looking for a biological holy grail which would overtake numerous, substantial studies underlining the longstanding inequality between men and women is caused by cultural forces.
This page-turning book which I hardly put down since I wanted to keep on lessening my ignorance as quickly as possible is one I highly recommend. The content is riveting in its detailed elaboration regarding women's supposed inferiority. Dr. Jess Wade's crowd-sourced fund secured enough donations for a copy of Inferior to be sent to each UK state school. You can be a crowd-sourced fund of one and give a copy to a friend or relative because it is an essential tool in promoting equality.
*Caroline Kennard wrote two letters to Charles Darwin, the first asking in disbelief that since a distinguished scientist couldn't be so wrong in believing evolution only made men productive and intelligent that perhaps his views have been misinterpreted. He replied women were passive and less intelligent because evolution didn't push them in that direction since women were unable to hunt and make tools. Her reply not surprisedly was written in a less neat script than the first. Fast forward a bunch of decades and there's evidence women probably made the first tools, created out of fibre such as slings to carry babies and baskets with which to forage and they hunted smaller animals sometimes with the help of dogs which brought in a more consistent food supply than men did with their larger game.
À la prochaine!
OTHER BOOK REVIEWS
Book review / The Golden Thread : How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair
Book review / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner Townsend
Book Review / Against Empathy by Paul Bloom
Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord
Book Review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton
Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630
RELATED LINKS
Dr Jess Wade at Twitter
Angela Saini at Twitter
Inferior at Amazon
The foggy pestilence is left to billow about because of the nonchalant attitude of well that's what science says even though that is not what science says. It obscures the truth from being seen, an inconvenient one of women being denied their birthright of equality. There's a cough there, a sneeze there, but the fog remains. Mingling with the miasma is yet another poisonous whispering, that there never was any intellectually vigorous analysis opposing the arbitrary proposition of women intrinsically having pared-down worth.
Challenging the notion of innate male superiority and corralling their righteous anger into brilliant and potent late-nineteenth-century rebuttals, women like Caroline Kennard* and Eliza Burt Gamble were ignored by science. Because women. Whisper, whisper. See how that fog seeps over everything a woman does? It stays put so well that an egalitarian society hasn't surfaced yet as women still are not spared from being sexually harassed/assaulted, still earn less pay for doing the same work as men, still not mentored as thoroughly as men hence making success into male-dominated fields beyond university graduation fraught with difficulties that has nothing to with their intellectual ability, and still not have complete control over their reproductive functions and of ones that they have, those human rights are under constant threat.
 |
| Caroline Kennard |
 |
| Eliza Burt Gamble |
What makes a woman a woman? Data collected from varied, large samples shows that though men on average are taller and have greater upper body strength, woman are more robust. Less males survive birth and stay alive longer. Eliza Burt Gamble challenging the notion of the weaker sex in her book, The Evolution of Women: An Inquiry Into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man, had intimated as much when she wrote:
When a man and woman are put into competition, both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, more patience and a somewhat great degree of physical courage, while the other has superior powers of intuition, finer and more rapid perceptions and a greater degree of endurance . . . the chances of the latter for gaining the ascendancy will doubtless be equal to those of the former.Living longer may be a nifty evolutionary fitness edge, but nothing is free, especially in evolution. Women experience more pain because a physical price is paid when you are left standing while your male counterpart is resting quietly in a coffin. The female immune system is not necessarily stronger, but instead it is more flexible which is derived from being able to turn off the autoimmune response to the foreign body developing inside the womb.
The systemic curtailing of women's potential can be traced to when agriculture became entrenched. Due to a historic windfall, that is, basically luck, men were able to build societies catering solely to their needs. And with even more luck, white men could shape the world to fit them like a tailored-made suit. With hoarded inter-generational wealth, especially land, certain white men could lord it over even other men to the present spectacle of white, male billionaires who have never known an emotion they are able to regulate weeping on televised broadcasts because they might be taxed more appropriately.
For most of history, that is, before humans switched to an agricultural focus, women were able to acquire power by networking with each other. When I was a young woman in the 1970s I was fond of saying that the only reason why women were making advances (my goodness there goes a woman firefighter! Wow, a woman police officer!) was that such changes improved men's lives. That is, men allowed such changes after all it is their world. With increasing inflation, the single male earner household went out the window. It became advantageous to the family's financial health if the woman made more than she traditionally did hence some fields begrudgingly accepted female candidates as long as their pay was less. Of course she simultaneously would do unpaid housework as usual.
My observing as time passed allowed adding to this earlier understanding that at present the male power structure has sufficiently supported men pushing technological advances, of the kind, that unwittingly permits women to network easily and rapidly with each other, such as the Web. Women finding and amplifying their voices have not gone by unnoticed as the ever present backlash to #metoo and #TimesUp shows and by my own recent experience of a 'reply guy' wedded to the whispering style plaguing discourses on women's equality unashamedly insisting during an online discussion that the words 'patriarchy' and 'feminism' be not used as if not naming what exists and why it does somehow will erase magically what is problematically and egregiously extant.
Ms Saini discusses the extensive research on brain dimorphism in humans and concludes there is no significant evidence male and female brains are much different, but rather they are intersex, with a bit of both, of which the proportion varies from person to person creating an individual mosaic in each and every one of us. Yet researchers insist on looking for a biological holy grail which would overtake numerous, substantial studies underlining the longstanding inequality between men and women is caused by cultural forces.
This page-turning book which I hardly put down since I wanted to keep on lessening my ignorance as quickly as possible is one I highly recommend. The content is riveting in its detailed elaboration regarding women's supposed inferiority. Dr. Jess Wade's crowd-sourced fund secured enough donations for a copy of Inferior to be sent to each UK state school. You can be a crowd-sourced fund of one and give a copy to a friend or relative because it is an essential tool in promoting equality.
*Caroline Kennard wrote two letters to Charles Darwin, the first asking in disbelief that since a distinguished scientist couldn't be so wrong in believing evolution only made men productive and intelligent that perhaps his views have been misinterpreted. He replied women were passive and less intelligent because evolution didn't push them in that direction since women were unable to hunt and make tools. Her reply not surprisedly was written in a less neat script than the first. Fast forward a bunch of decades and there's evidence women probably made the first tools, created out of fibre such as slings to carry babies and baskets with which to forage and they hunted smaller animals sometimes with the help of dogs which brought in a more consistent food supply than men did with their larger game.
À la prochaine!
OTHER BOOK REVIEWS
Book review / The Golden Thread : How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair
Book review / Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Warner Townsend
Book Review / Against Empathy by Paul Bloom
Book Review / The Tulip by Anna Pavord
Book Review / The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt by Robert I. Sutton
Book Review / Florike Egmond's An Eye For Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630
Book Review / Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook: Artisanal
Baking From Around The World by Jessamyn Waldman
Rodriguez with Julia Turshen
Book Review/The Confidence Game: The Psychology Of The Con And Why We Fall For It Every Time By Maria Konnikova
Book Review / The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates
RELATED LINKS
Dr Jess Wade at Twitter
Angela Saini at Twitter
Inferior at Amazon