From Eve to Dawn, A History of Women in the World, Volume I: Origins: From Prehistory to the First Millennium
In her foreword to this first volume of a four-volume work, Atwood writes that women are not a footnote to history, but rather the necessary center around which the wheel of power revolves. That is the view that novelist and memoirist French (The Women's Room) satisfyingly supports. As in any survey, much of this volume reads schematically (For 99 percent of hominid and human existence, people lived in egalitarian matricentry), and like many historians, French has an agenda—but she backs up even her more controversial theories with an impressive accumulation of academically accepted historical, anthropological and sociological sources. French covers her material vividly as she discusses the formation of the gendered state in Peru, Egypt, Sumer and China and then surveys the differences between the formation of secular and religious states. The volume ends with a detailed analysis of the position of women in early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it's here that French's precise methodology really comes to life, though some will debate her interpretations. Written in concise, understated language, this is a significant addition to literature on women's studies and history.(May)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.