Despite centuries of campaigning, women still earn less and have less power than men. Equality remains a goal not yet reached. In this incisive account of why this is the case, Mary Evans argues that optimistic narratives of progress and emancipation have served to obscure long-term structural inequalities between women and men, structural inequalities which are not only about gender but also about general social inequality. In widening the lenses on the persistence of gender inequality, Evans shows how in contemporary debates about social inequality gender is often ignored, implicitly side-lining critical aspects of relations between women and men. This engaging short book attempts to join up some of the dots in the ways that we think about both social and gender inequality, and offers a new perspective on a problem that still demands society’s full attention.
Table des matières
Acknowledgements vii
Preface viii
1 What is Gender Inequality? 1
Making Inequality 5
What Has Changed? 10
Changing Conditions 12
2 Worlds of Inequality 23
Exploiting the Feminine 25
Problems at Work 30
Problems of Agency 35
Locations of Inequality 38
3 Problems of Subjectivity 47
Imagining the Female Body 48
Other Bodies 53
How the Body Matters 58
Questions of Order 61
4 Enter Feminism 76
Conditions for Feminism 76
A Secondary Sex 82
Changing Times 87
Unchanging Times 97
5 Making Gender Equality 120
The Rights of Women 122
The Limits of Liberalism 130
Notes 140
Bibliography 152
Index 166
A propos de l’auteur
Mary Evans is Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.