Gender: A World History found its way to my ears (I went audiobook form for this one) due to a sale. For $2.99 this sounded like just the sort of thing I’d like to read. For the most part this book did fit my needs and meets the criteria of being as advertised: this was in fact a history that was serious about being global in scope and a historical survey of the topic of gender and how it has been understood through the ages.
Author Susan Kingsley Kent, a professor in the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder, spends 7 hours/190 pages breaking down how gender exists in almost every society as a way of organizing its people and how gender is used to assign certain responsibilities, obligations, and privileges to some, and to deny them to others.
What we have here is a good introduction to gender studies and the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity. I had personally hoped for a bit more in-depth information, but in trading breadth of locations and times covered Kent gave away room for deep dives. But although I was a bit disappointed this book does still manage to analyze how race, ethnicity, location, and social class intersect with what we generally understand as gender.
Best of all, Kent writes from the point of view that gender is not neutral. The chronological organization shows how understanding of gender changes over time, affecting historical events, ideologies, and people. The history of gender can also shed light on other types of relations, such as those between a government and its people, between different social classes, and between a colony and its colonizer. I just wish this book allowed itself to be a bit more as it generally shies away from gender identity.
Bingo Square: Question (This book aims to answer big questions surrounding our understanding of gender.)
