Publisher's Weekly Review
In her foreword to this first volume of a four-volume work, Atwood writes that women "are not a footnote" to history, but rather "the necessary center around which the wheel of power revolves." That is the view that novelist and memoirist French (The Women's Room) satisfyingly supports. As in any survey, much of this volume reads schematically ("For 99 percent of hominid and human existence, people lived in egalitarian matricentry"), and like many historians, French has an agenda--but she backs up even her more controversial theories with an impressive accumulation of academically accepted historical, anthropological and sociological sources. French covers her material vividly as she discusses the formation of the gendered state in Peru, Egypt, Sumer and China and then surveys the differences between the formation of secular and religious states. The volume ends with a detailed analysis of the position of women in early Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and it's here that French's precise methodology really comes to life, though some will debate her interpretations. Written in concise, understated language, this is a significant addition to literature on women's studies and history. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* French's novel The Women's Room (1997) gave impetus to the second wave of the women's movement, and writing it awakened her curiosity about the roots of male dominance. How is that one gender has held power over the other for so long? French embarked on a 15-year inquiry that resulted in a four-volume series, From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World (1995-2008). The scope of this extraordinary endeavor is universal, its detail astonishing. French never fails to be lucid and accessible, and her findings are as fascinating as they are devastating as she draws on mythology, archaeological findings, anthropology, genetics, and overlooked historical sources to recover the fragmented and neglected story of women's role in civilization. In the first volume, Origins, which reaches from prehistory to the first millennium, she discusses matricentry, a form of society that centers around mothers. For nearly four million years, women had rights to the land and the responsibility for feeding the group. Children belonged to the mother, French explains, the only known parent, and were named for her. And then men figured out their role in procreation. Patriarchy, authoritarian rule by the fathers, was established, and its consequences are vast. French's analysis of the original battle between the sexes covers the fall of the goddess and the rise of the gods, the entrenchment of male power structures, the rise of the state, and biases against women in standards of justice. With eye-opening forays into the lives of women in ancient Egypt, China, India, Mexico, Greece, and Rome, and dissection of the status of women in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this is a resounding new look at the bedrock of today's societies.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
Library Journal Review
French's history of women, originally published in Canada in 2003, takes the reader on a tour of the global subordination of women from prehistory to the present. In the foreword, Margaret Atwood declares that reading this critical compendium will incite women to feel "horror and growing anger" as they begin to grasp the true nature and scope of their oppression by men. French (The Women's Room) endeavors to demonstrate how the origins of civilization, the state, and patriarchy are all one and the same. Though some may accuse her of offering an oversimplified account of what amounts to 10,000 years of human social evolution, this fundamental claim is one that no social scientist would deny, and it is further bolstered by French's use of primary sources whenever possible. She also draws on extensive academic research in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and history to argue that a matriarchal civilization has never really existed. She notes that wherever hierarchy and social stratification exist, with a few sourced exceptions, those with all the power and property have almost always been male. As in feminist historian Gerda Lerner's groundbreaking The Creation of Patriarchy, French sets out to account for what happened. While Lerner focused only on the ancient antecedents of Western civilization, French also looks at state formation in China, India, Mexico, and Peru as well as addressing the worldviews of the Greeks, Romans, and the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. The second volume follows with an analysis of the patriarchal social practices of Europe from the Dark Ages into the Enlightenment, including chapters on how the domination of women essentially set the stage for European imperialism and subsequent domination of native peoples in Africa and the Americas. French gives us grand theory at its best, wading through copious amounts of scholarly data on the histories of civilizations and offering up, in readable prose, an important synthesis of what an earlier generation of feminists called "herstory." Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.--Theresa Kintz, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
