The discussion in this study of the relations between men and women is launcher from a crucial premise: that the struggle for equal rights for women reached a point where collaboration rather than confrontation between the sexes is necessary for continued progress.

In a new account of the relationship between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Christina Zwarg recreates a feminist conversation that has gone unheard. In Zwarg's view, the intimate, yet restrained, letters between the two writers are most significant in confronting the challenges posed by gender and desire. Focusing on their exploration of Charles Fourier's utopianism and particularly his concept of "passionate attraction," Zwarg offers the only detailed reading of Emerson's letters to Fuller.

In this eclectic collection of essays, distinguished scholars from different and specialized disciplines discuss aspects of sex, gender, and gender and society. In his contribution to this series of essays on Gender and Society, Peter Goodfellow states, 'sex, the biological separation intomale and female, is controlled by DNA and is determined by DNA. Gender, the arbitrary social division between masculine and feminine, is a social construct that involves interaction between an individual and society.' The definition of gender offered by Goodfellow is cogently developed by GermaineGreer in her essay on women as victims of rapeDSone of the newest and most controversial aspects of modern criminology. Susan Watkins suggests that the understanding of gender has influenced the analysis of population change, the efforts by activists to ensure reductions in fertility internationally,and the acceptance of birth control in local communities in Kenya. This analysis is complimented by Michele Le Doeuff in a discussion of the complex interplay between reduced fertility, increased literacy, and the function of work in the 'everyday life of every woman whatever her social class orlevel of education.' The question of how the sexes differ in their perception and processing of information about their external world is tackled by Lucia Jacobs within a biological and evolutionary context. She proposes that sexual selection should be given credit for the rapid evolution of ourunique abilities and complex culture concluding that 'it is the female that is the smaller, the "ecological" sex, best adapted to survive in the ecological niche of the species, and it is the male who carries the heavier burden or handicap of sexual selection, his fitness dependent on arbitrarytraits that reduce his competitive ability as a human being, although they are all too necessary for his competitive ability as a man.' The contribution of the sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy focussed on sexual selection, drawing on a wide range of research on the physiological and behavioural responsesof subhuman primates but, appropriately, drawing her inspiration from Spencer's own writings on physical beauty and its consequences for posterity. The chapters in this book were originally delivered as The Herbert Spencer Lectures in 1995 at Oxford University.

Presents cases where women have killed men in self-defense and analyzes society's reluctance to accept their actions as justifiable

Offers profiles of successful women science writers

Traces developments in neuroendrocrinology from the 1950s through the 1980s while examining sex differences in the brain

A Field of her Own

Presents portraits of three Black women who struggle against slavery and lynching and worked to foster civil rights and suffrage between 1826 and 1954