Customer Reviews

In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice Against Women

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This book is a very important compilation of the history of prejudice against women from prominent writers in the nineteenth century. Why is it so important? Because it is still relevant today!

Thank you, Mr. Joshi, for putting together this masterpiece for us.

In my opinion, this book should be prominent in every home and used to open discussions with family members in an effort to get these prejudices out of our lives once and for all.

This book is NOT for women only. It is definitely a book that lends itself for use in book clubs everywhere.

Every page of this book is shocking. I consider this to be one of the best books I have read in a very long time.

Jean Teebken

IN HER PLACE: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF PREJUDICE AGAINST WOMEN follows the actual examples of such prejudice rather than providing the usual overview of history: as such, it culls records from books, articles and scholarly monographs to provide evidence in dozens of works which document scorn and disrespect for women over the past two centuries. Don't expect to find the familiar here, either: much of the material has never been reprinted since its original publication and offers thinking from major members of the intellectual and social circles of their times for some major eye-openers.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

The specious male propaganda collected in this volume all attest to their writers' inabilities to see beyond their own narrow cultural biases and a willingness to accept the status quo as not only normal, i.e. natural, but socially desirable--society, of course, being defined on their terms. While we may expect such historical prejudice from turn of the century religious bigots, pandering politicians, and fashionable intellectuals, the pervasiveness and reflexive acceptance of male dominance found its way into so-called "scientific" writings of physicians and researchers. That some of the most vociferous opponents of female equality were the very women suffering oppression speaks not only to the strength of this cultural prejudice, but also to its defining role of the culture itself, so much so that a threat to the established inequality was a threat to the very core of life as they knew it.

As people came to discredit religious and social justifications for female oppression, "science" supplied the necessary differences and therefore rationale for the continued oppression of half the population. While males of our species are on average larger and stronger, mostly due to the influence of testosterone, and these differences may very well have been responsible for the earliest cultural prejudices, might does not equal right, and in an enlightened society, arguments that mistake what is with what ought to be, the naturalistic fallacy, would have no sway over rational people with the empathy and magnanimity to imagine a more just society.

Though we may believe we have progressed beyond the chauvinistic attitudes displayed in "In Her Place", discrimination remains de rigueur in many occupations, schools, and social assumptions. For this reason it is instructive to recall the writings of chauvinists who were less restrained in their vitriol, because it is in those writings that we see most explicitly the prejudice which is today practiced more subtly, but nonetheless rooted in the same ignorance, fear, and hatred.