Gender [Paperback]

Ivan Illich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1990

The break with the past, which has been described by others as the transition to a capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex.' Ivan Illich insists that we survey attitudes to male and female in both industrial society and its antecedents in order to recover a lost 'art of living'. He argues that only a truly radical scrutiny of scarcity, with special attention in this study to the sexes and society, past and present, can prevent an intensification of this grim predicament.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ivan Illich is the author of Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Disabling Professions, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Heyday Books; 2 Revised edition (March 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930588401
• ISBN-13: 978-0930588403
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,199,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Historical Perspective, November 30, 2008

By 

methylethel - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gender (Paperback)

Gender is a short work (if you don't count the footnotes, which take up about half the book) that attempts to clarify modern sexual discrimination in the historical context of gender-- a subject that is difficult for first-world, post-industrial folks to grasp. Feminists, being a product of the first-world post-industrial age, are no exception, and Illich criticizes them heavily for their lack of historical understanding. Illich is too dense to cram into a good summary, but some of the main points are:

1. Feminists tend to attribute modern wage inequality and other sexual discrimination to vestigial patriarchal attitudes left over from our forbears' entrenched gender roles: i.e. sexism = patriarchalism.

2. Illich says this is comparing apples and tractors, because modern sexual discrimination is a product of industrialization and its concomitant destruction of traditional concepts of gender.

3.In traditional gendered society, men and women live and work in completely non-overlapping, completely interdependent spheres: complementary, like left hand and right hand, yin and yang. In the modern industrial workplace, men and women have been stripped of gender and are competing for the same jobs. Sexism as we know it isn't possible in a gendered (i.e. traditional) society, because it's only possible where men and women are playing on the same field, and competing for the same prizes: this simply didn't happen in the pre-industrial world.

4.Analyzing historical gender using a modern understanding of gender is like analyzing a football game using badminton rules.

Agree or disagree, it's an interesting analysis. Gender isn't the revolutionary work that Deschooling Society is, but it's worth reading and thinking about. Probably not much use to university feminists, but I found Illich's insight gave me a much clearer view of my reading of social histories, and it illuminated my personal experiences with gender in non-industrialized cultures.

6 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Should Illich have to bow to feminism, April 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Gender (Paperback)

The reviewer who criticized Illich for not making his views compatible with feminism either has an agenda or misses his point. Yes Illich has a deep suspicion of modernity--and feminism is the defining discourse of modernity )or post modernity or whatever). Illich rejects a society in which everyone is a player--a geographic isolate in favor of something John Crowe Ransom and the Agrarians would have admired. Read the Odyssey for example: it is among other things a rule book of civility and societal harmony (and its enemies). The greatest scandal of present day academia and its cousins in the medea is its historical amnesia. Maybe traditional society has something to offer us (and I am curious to know what the reviewer thinks will happen when bacteria become resistant to all antibiotics) It is after all globalism starting from WWI hich has brought us pandemics of flu, aids and diseases yet unknown. The 19199 flue pandemic killed as many people as the plague of 1348. Hey I don't see that we've come that far.

7 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Muddle, August 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Gender (Paperback)

Illich is faced with a problem. He deplores modern civilization as dehumanizing but recognizes only subsstence existence as an alternative. Unfortunately subsistence existence and other historically based cultures prensent strongly based sex roles. This flies in the face of feminism which denies the value of culurally defined sex roles and thus denies the values of Illich's ideal culture. Since feminism is a powerful political force, Illich must find a way to make his views compatible with it.

Illich overcomes this by defining modern sexual roles as sexist but historical cultural roles as gendered This is the book. He overcomes the challenge to his ideal by a linguistic definition. His history of social roles is spotty and biased to prove his point.

The book is a sophistic muddle. Mnay many better books that the social history of the home are available.