No 'summary' can substitute for the experience of actually reading the book. What follows are paraphrases and exact quotes. I n the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature.
Sex is a subset to nature.
Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau. Pitting benign Romantic nature against corrupt society, Rousseau produced the progressivist strain in nineteenth century culture, for which social reform was the means to achieve paradise on earth. The bubble of these hopes was burst by the catastrophe of two world wars. But Rousseauism was reborn in the postwar generation of the Sixties, from which contemporary feminism developed. Sex is a far darker power that feminism has admitted.