I thought this book was supposed to be a survey of women and their impact on history. It sorta, sorta is, but it's really more a polemical anthropology survey about how wrong a lot of descriptions about early societies are. Some of that was quite compelling and very interesting - that women gatherers raised 80% of the food to the men's 20% from hunting - or about how various unfamiliar cultures operated. But it was moving so fast and so sweepingly, that her quotes and examples felt cherry-picked, like one could easily tell the opposite story. The author comes across as though she's one of those people who reject religion in favor of some sort of female mysticism based on blood and the magical power of being able to give birth. She lumped most of the world's major religions together in ways that were unhelpful and rang false or over-simplified. She talked about them as unified in their theology when I know for a fact that Christian theology has tons of splits in it. She keeps talking about "female power of menstruation" in these glowing terms. That mysticism made it difficult to take her scholarship seriously. Also, the book was super depressing.