The War Against Women

Description

This stunning work of research by Marilyn French, both a best-selling novelist and a leading feminist philosopher and theorist, constructs a powerful and convincing argument that there is, indeed, a war against women. Here, Marilyn French shows that negative attitudes toward women are not simply a current media trend but are part of a consistent and systemic global phenomenon that dates back over millennia. Shocking, convincing, and sure to be controversial, The War Against Women combines exhaustive research with an accessible style to document the economic, political, and physical suppression and abuse of women and children everywhere in the world. Building an inescapable web of facts, The War Against Women argues that the attack on women is an intrinsic part of our culture, values, and ideology. And here, Marilyn French documents the universal oppression of women through current economic policies in both industrial and developing countries, through international political systems, and through the nearly universal religious war to control women’s bodies–from the regulation of women’s appearance and habits to legislated reproduction. Marilyn French reminds us, for example, that although women do between 65 and 75 percent of the world’s work and produce 45 percent of the world’s food, they hold only 10 percent of the world’s income and 1 percent of the world’s property. But the economic disadvantages of women pale in comparison to the statistics on physical assaults on women’s bodies. In many countries, men still hold the legal right to beat, torture, imprison, or kill the women they “own.” In the United States, a man beats a woman every twelve seconds; four women die every day as aresult of beating by a man; and the United States has one of the highest, if not the highest, rates of rape in the world. In the industrialized nations, assaults on wives and female lovers and male incest with female children are treated as individual acts. Yet Marilyn French demons