This is a book that explains how women have been left out of science and cultural anthropology (both as practitioners and study subjects), but it takes the next step of contextualizing how this exclusion has caused a misunderstanding of women, motherhood, and women's role in society which has led to the discrimination and misogyny that reigns to this day. "Let the environment of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please." This was one of my favorite books of 2019 and I highly recommend it.

Saini also stresses those things that women are biologically good at. Women are better survivors than men, "at every age, women seem to survive better than men." While men tend to have more upper body strength, women have a strength of their own. It is fortunate that women have this survival advantage, as few health studies have included women throughout history. It is a recent discovery that a woman's immune system changes during her menstrual cycle, "[i]f a phenomenon affects women and only women, it's all too often misunderstood."

There is also a fascinating section on the gender brain studies which purport to show a difference in the brains of men and women. Saini argues that these differences exist because culture and experience physically change the brain. So when girls are given dolls and boys are given construction sets, culture influences biology, rather than vice versa. "With all these effects on the brain, in a world as gendered as ours, says Rippon, it's actually surprising that we don't see more sex differences in the brain than we do."

The chapter on the anthropological studies of motherhood was also fascinating, which refutes the idea that mothers are to raise their children alone. Human women are also among the only female species that outlive their fertility, perhaps because grandmothers were so instrumental in raising children. Anthropologists also tend to devalue motherhood as an intellectual pursuit. Children are "curious, energetic, but still dependent" making motherhood "difficult and demanding." Mothers throughout history have been responsible for teaching the next generation.

Anthropology has been sexist in other arenas too, with anthropologists focusing on the hunting aspect of hunter-gatherer societies. But gathering provided the majority of food for hunter-gatherer societies, in some cases, up to two-thirds of the food. So not only do women cook the food, set up the shelters, and have the children, they provide a majority of the food. Women even went on the hunts in some hunter-gatherer societies. "In none of the societies that have been studied do men bring home all the food. At worst, they bring in far less than half."

While women are producing most of the food, men spend a lot of energy attempting to keep women chaste. "She asked whether scientists had approached the question of women's sexuality entirely the wrong way. Could it be that women and their evolutionary ancestors weren't naturally passive and monogamous...? Might it instead be the case that for thousands of years women had been compelled by men to behave more modestly?....From the smallest laws to the most sweeping religious doctrines...cultures everywhere had tried to burn away every last scrap of female sexual freedom. This subjugation was the root of the moral double standard, the punishments, and the violent brutality that women continue to live with today."

This violence is possible due to the patriarchal nature of most societies. Women, in patriarchal societies, leave their families and comfort zones to join the family of her husband, thereby isolating her from her support system. "The common thread that unites species in which females are particularly vulnerable to male violence is females being alone."