The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How they are Changing the World - Softcover

Fisher, Helen

3.76

174 ratings by Goodreads

9780449912607: The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How they are Changing the World

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449912604 ISBN 13: 9780449912607

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2000

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"Tomorrow belongs to women," notes celebrated anthropologist Helen Fisher. In her explosive new book, The First Sex, she illustrates this enticing assertion. Drawing on original research, Fisher reveals how women and their natural talents are changing the world, making them ideal leaders and successful shapers of business and society--today and on into the twenty-first century.

Looking back to prehistoric times, Fisher shows how the special structure of the female brain enables women to do "web thinking" or "synthesis thinking," as compared to men's more linear or "step" thinking. With lively anecdotes and fascinating stories, Fisher reveals how women's special talents--superior verbal abilities, people savvy, acute senses, healing techniques, and more--are geared to success in today's worlds of medicine, education, communications, law, philanthropy, and government. Changes in society--the growth of the communications economy and new trends in family--are also giving women an advantage: women's unique talents are especially needed in our modern age.

This eye-opening book will change the way you see yourself, your family, and the world around you, including every man and woman you meet.

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Review:

Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher isn't afraid of immodest proposals. The woman who demystified four million years' worth of romance in Anatomy of Love now suggests in The First Sex that evolution favors women. Citing recent research in biology, sociology, sociobiology, and anthropology, Fisher makes a strong case for a near future in which the natural talents of women as thinkers, communicators, and healers, adapted to the age of information, create a new kind of global leadership in business, medicine, and education, skewing the power dynamics of sex and relationships towards the feminine. Women, she says, are contextual thinkers to a far greater degree than men; this "web thinking," as Fisher dubs it, is an asset in a global marketplace. Women are far more talented than men at achieving win-win outcomes in negotiations. On an organizational level, women are less interested in rank and more interested in relationships and networking, an essential attribute in a world without borders. In the arena of education, women have a natural talent for language and self-expression; as healers, they enjoy an emotional empathy with their charges that can and will redefine doctor-patient relationships. And, she predicts, in the next century women will reinvent love by asserting feminine sexuality and creating peer marriages, true partnerships. While Fisher's future may seem idealized, her science and her sociology make for a well-reasoned case that the people Simone de Beauvior once defined as "the second sex" are about to move to the head of the class. --Patrizia DiLucchio

From the Back Cover:

As the millennium begins, the world is changing in ways that favor women's special gifts -- their cooperative spirit, patience, intuitive intelligence, their gift for "web" thinking. And as millions of female baby boomers achieve the biological liberation of menopause, women will begin to wield unprecedented social and economic power.

Fisher pictures what life will be like when women fully express their gender differences and work with men to solve the problems of an epoch more complex than any that humanity has yet experienced. In business, women will control vast sums of money and sway political leaders. In civil society, women's compassionate thinking will help eliminate societal and environmental ills. In medicine, law, education, and communications, women's emphasis on the whole rather than the parts will radically alter strategies and goals. And in sexuality, love, and marriage, women will redefine family and romantic attachments, expressing themselves in a variety of bold, creative ways, from early adolescence to old age.

Whether you are a man or a woman, however well you think you know yourself, this visionary book will make you understand yourself better and see yourself as part of a revolution that, amazingly, has already begun.

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