"In my courses, the teachers told me about a world in which ostensibly one-half the human race is doing everything significant and the other half doesn’t exist."

"I asked myself how this checked against my own life experience. 'This is garbage; this is not the world in which I have lived.'"

ADDED: Here's a Gerda Lerner book that I read: "The Creation of Patriarchy."

Using admittedly sparse prehistorical evidence, Lerner offers a plausible multicausal theory to explain the development of the patriarchical system. She seeks to show that the subordination of women is a historical (i.e., changeable) phenomenon, not a natural one. Lerner posits that division of labor by sex occurred early but that the oppression of women began with the emergence of agriculture; the domination of women, she argues, preceded and served as the foundation for the origin of private property and the state and the institutionalization of slavery.