Against Women: The Worldwide Resistance to Emancipation

How women in modern societies have freed themselves from traditional patriarchy but face new and stubborn resistance from ascendant religious and secular extremists.

Only in the last 50 to 100 years have women proven themselves capable of virtually anything—any profession, position, or role once solely the province of men. Why did it have to take this long? In Against Women Abram de Swaan presents a survey of the systematic terror and intimidation that kept women from realizing their full potential. Following a clear-eyed inventory of the violence patriarchy inflicts at every stage of a woman’s life, the book details the recent, awe-inspiring efforts by which women have emancipated themselves, their spectacular advancements in the last century, and the fierce resistance that progress has provoked, especially among right-wing extremists and fundamentalist believers, whatever their creed.

Against Women documents the hardening consensus among ultra-orthodox believers of all faiths and secular radicals on the extreme right—however intensely they oppose one another in every other respect—that women should remain homemakers, mothers, and wives, subordinate to male supremacist “morality.” But however formidable this countermovement, de Swaan’s book reminds us, the myth of female incompetence has been undone once and for all—and there is no going back.