Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science is Redefining What Makes Us Female [Hardcover]

Dianne Hales (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 1999

Throw out the Stereotypes!

Just like a woman! The very phrase is a put-down, echoing the long-entrenched stereotypes of what it means to be female.  From earliest recorded history, women have been cast in terms of males: lesser versions that are frailer, smaller, dimmer, less competent, defective.  Never again.  This lively, meticulously documented book turns the dismissive old catchphrase inside out.

It is only in the past few years that researchers in many fields have actively focused on what being female really means.  Their startling conclusion: almost every assumption made about women--physical, medical, historical, psychological--turns out to be untested, unproven, or untrue.  Rather than classifying women only by their biology (as the medical establishment has), or denying they are biological creatures (as some feminists have), Just Like a Woman presents the cutting-edge findings in anthropology, physiology, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and medicine that are redefining what a woman is.

These findings reveal the complex interconnections between all aspects of a woman's life from infancy to old age.  Gender science is confirming that the female of the species is not the second sex but the separate sex.  She is as powerful as the male but with different strengths: intuitiveness, adaptability, durability, sensitivity, sensuality.  Her brain is smaller but more densely packed with neurons, her senses of smell and hearing more acute, her core body temperature higher.  She processes emotions and perceives pain differently; she sleeps more lightly; she is more vulnerable to certain mental disorders and more resistant to others; her body reacts differently from a man's to many medications; and the rhythms of her monthly cycles shape not only her fertility but her mood, her creativity, and her resilience.  These are only some of the special aspects spelled out in this book, and all of them are crucial to a woman's understanding of her body, her mind, her spirit, and her relationships with those she loves.  From conception on, she is female to the core.

This stereotype-shattering book lays out what it means to live in a woman's body, think with a woman's brain, drink in the world with a woman's senses, and react with a woman's sensibility to the stresses and elations of her multiple roles.  Refreshingly free of ideology, Just Like a Woman offers a stunningly liberating message that expands our concept of human potential and will forever change the way every woman views herself.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The entry of more and more women into science, writes Dianne Hales, has started a quiet revolution, a reassessment of accepted notions of what it is to be a woman. "Women are not the second sex but a separate sex, female to the bone and to the very cells that make up those bones.... In affirming our femaleness, we are not diminishing or discrediting our mental ability or essential equality. Rather, we are recognizing a fundamental source of strength and sustenance."

This "equal but different" stance is crucial to modern gender studies--heretofore, Hales says, most if not all medical and psychological research was done on men, and the conclusions recklessly applied to women. Now, science is finding out that females have their own unique strengths that equip them both for the biological roles they may choose to embrace as well as the societal roles they have often been denied. Hales explodes stereotypical notions of physiology and psychology in this well-researched and liberating book. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly

As Hales (Caring for the Mind) argues on the one hand against old stereotypes of women as inferior and, on the other hand, against those feminists who insist on no difference between men and women, she finds that fundamental differences between the sexes exist and are cause for celebration. In three sections, she gathers a vast amount of biological and physiological research on animal behavior, genetics, hormones, women's health; findings on the female life cycle from girlhood through menstruation, pregnancy, infertility and menopause; and investigations into the mind, from the brain to emotions, mental disorders, sexuality and spirituality. The first two sections offer a heavy-handed determinism: in the way female seals jockey for choice rock positions and entice male seals to fight each other, Hales sees the evolutionary roots of the differing competitive styles of corporate men and women. More interesting are the crucial medical discoveries she reveals, especially concerning heart disease: the traditional test for detecting heart disease in men is far less reliable for women, whose heart attacks often don't show the same symptoms as men's. While Hales claims to steer clear of ideology, her choice of facts reinforces the idea that the differences between men and women are what matters most about who we are; often she replaces a disparaging set of stereotypes with a valorizing one. Only in the chapters on the brain and emotions does she suggest that men and women may be as similar as they are different or that the differences may be caused by social rather than biological factors. As absorbing as it is contradictory, her book will be welcomed by readers who want to know why women are different from men but will be frustrating to those more interested in the significance of those differences.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; 1 edition (March 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553102281
• ISBN-13: 978-0553102284
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,931,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dianne Hales is a widely published, award-winning freelance journalist. She has served as a contributing editor for Parade, Ladies Home Journal, Working Mother and American Health and has written for many national publications, including Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, New York Times, Readers' Digest, Washington Post, Woman's Day, and World Book. In addition to more than a dozen trade books, she is the author of the best-selling college health textbook, An Invitation to Health, and coauthor of An Invitation to Personal Change.

Dianne never expected to fall madly, gladly, giddily in love with Italian, the world's most enchanting language. But fall she did, and her latest book, LA BELLA LINGUA, tells both the dramatic story of Italian and her adventures over more than twenty years of studying and speaking the language.

Dianne ilives in northern California with her husband Robert E. Hales, M.D., and daughter Julia--who were surprised and delighted to discover that their wife and mother was becoming Italian.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Made me proud to be a woman, January 21, 2000

By 

Cheryl Gatling (Syracuse, new York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science is Redefining What Makes Us Female (Hardcover)

I read this book because I read an excerpted article from it in Reader's Digest, an article on differences between the male and female brain. I enjoyed the book, with its broader scope, even more than the article. I read the whole thing in a few days. The foundation of Dianne Hales book, as it claims, is science. Extensive notes in the back give the sources for all the research studies she cites. But the book is hardly a cold recitation of facts. She interprets the results through her own experiences as a woman (daughter, wife, mother), and the experiences of people she knows. The book is very personal, very readable, and, in my opinion, entertaining. She covers a wide range of topics that influence a woman's experience. Her premise is that neither men nor women are superior, just different, and we need to understand those differences. Usually, however I get a sense from her pages that she thinks being female is something special. I found myself time and again feeling proud to be a member of this sisterhood of women.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Now this was a good book, August 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science is Redefining What Makes Us Female (Hardcover)

I enjoyed this book, much more than I did Natalie Angier's "Women:An Intimate Geography". It brought up many issues facing the new role science must play in caring for women as our society sheds many notions of what women are "really" like. As science learns more and more about women, she rightly takes the approach that men and women ARE different, and need to be cared for, and understood in different ways. This is neither good or bad, just different, and the way things are. The only problem I have with the book, and it is a small but very nagging one, is that Hales, like many other writters suppose that most research was done on/for men because women were considered less important. While the feeling may have been true throughout the history of humankind, much of the research we have has come from studies done from two very male dominated areas: prisons and the military. If all you have are pretty much all men to do research on, most of your research is going to be male orientated. I do agree though that it is surely time for science to get past that and realize that it needs to make more progress in helping women.