Before and After Gender Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life

Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Strathern's book was intended as an analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work, accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler. Strathern engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time, including Shulamith Firestone, Simone de Beauvoir, Ann Oakley, and Kate Millett. Building toward a conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society.