Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science Is Redefining What Makes Us Female - Softcover

Hales, Dianne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 055337818X ISBN 13: 9780553378184

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2000

Synopsis

In recent years researchers in many scientific fields have actively focused on what being female really means. Their startling conclusion: Almost every assumption made about women--physical, medical, historical, psychological--turns out to be untested, unproven, or untrue.

Stereotypes about women are as old as time--and as current as still-too-prevalent beliefs based on male models. Acclaimed health writer Dianne Hales brings together the cutting-edge research in anthropology, physiology, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and medicine in a book that reveals the complex interconnections between all aspects of a woman's life from infancy to old age. Gender science is now clearly demonstrating that women are not the second sex but a separate sex, unique in body, mind, and spirit.

Just Like a Woman explains what it means to live in a woman's body, think with a woman's brain, drink in the world with a woman's senses, and react with a woman's sensibility to the stresses and elations of her multiple roles. Refreshingly free of ideology, this meticulously documented book offers a stunningly liberating message that expands our concept of human potential--and will forever change the way every woman views herself.

About this title

Review

The entry of more and more women into science, writes Dianne Hales, has started a quiet revolution, a reassessment of accepted notions of what it is to be a woman. "Women are not the second sex but a separate sex, female to the bone and to the very cells that make up those bones.... In affirming our femaleness, we are not diminishing or discrediting our mental ability or essential equality. Rather, we are recognizing a fundamental source of strength and sustenance."

This "equal but different" stance is crucial to modern gender studies--heretofore, Hales says, most if not all medical and psychological research was done on men, and the conclusions recklessly applied to women. Now, science is finding out that females have their own unique strengths that equip them both for the biological roles they may choose to embrace as well as the societal roles they have often been denied. Hales explodes stereotypical notions of physiology and psychology in this well-researched and liberating book. --Therese Littleton

About the Author

Dianne Hales is one of the country's most widely published and honored writers on health subjects, the author of twelve texts and lay books, and most recently the co-author, with Robert E.  Hales, M.D., of the award-winning compendium of mental health and mental disorders, Caring for the Mind.  She lives in Marin County, California, with her husband and daughter.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 055337818X
• ISBN 13: 9780553378184
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 416