*Lineages of the Feminine*

That is the new book by Emmanuel Todd, subtitled An Outline of the History of Women and mostly on the feminization of society.  It does not cohere, and spends too much time wallowing in pseudo-anthropology, but it has a number of interesting bits.  Here is from the preface:

The feminist revolution is a great thing (I’m an ordinary Westerner on the point) but we are not yet able to see how much the emancipation of women has radically altered the whole of our social life.  Because we always see women as minors, as victims, we do not place them, for better or for worse (i.e., like men) at the centre of our history: they are the protagonists, for example, in the rejection of racism and homophobia, but they are also the unconscious protagonists of our neoliberalism, or deindustrialization and our inability to act collectively….we must accept that the inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women

The original pointer was from Arnold Kling’s review.