Overview

In Women After All, anthropologist Melvin Konner traces the arc of evolution to explain the relationships between women and men. Drawing on colourful examples from the natural world—the octopus, the black widow spider and coral reef fish, which can switch from male to female in a single reproductive career—he sheds light on our biologically different human identities and the poignant exceptions that challenge the male/female divide. We meet hunter-gatherers in Botswana whose culture gave women a prominent place, inventing the working mother and respecting women's voices around the fire. History upset this balance as a dense world of war fostered extreme male dominance. But our species has been recovering over the past two centuries and an unstoppable move towards equality is afoot. It will not be the end of men but it will be the end of male supremacy and a better, wiser world for women and men alike.

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9780393352313

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Reviews

Engagingly written and persuasively argued, ... shows how an acknowledgment of human nature combined with a long view of history can advance the human condition. -- Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, & author of The Better Angels of Our Nature. A fluent, provocative, well-argued engagement with a lively mind. -- Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Astonishingly insightful... A richly informed, up-to-the-minute and sensible exploration of a highly charged topic. It is the best available examination of how and why men and women differ and how twenty-first-century humans can use this knowledge to forge a better world. -- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Sweeping, ambitious and eminently readable... A compelling and thought-provoking read for men and women alike. -- Lisa Sanders, M.D., Associate Professor, Yale School of Medicine Mines evolution and anthropology to probe gender identities in the light of biology, sexual conflict across species and more. -- Barbara Kiser - Nature Konner makes a powerful case for a provocative thesis ... he ranges from evolutionary biology through ethology, neurobiology, embryology, anthropology and history, with digressions into economics and politics. Not many people could pull this off-but Dr. Konner does. -- David Barash - Wall Street Journal

Author Information

Melvin Konner, M.D. is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. He is the author of Women After All, Becoming a Doctor and Medicine at the Crossroads, among other books.

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