The book contains eleven chapters, the majority named after a
metaphor for gender (Lerner 10). Each chapter traces a different aspect of "the development of the leading ideas, symbols, and metaphors by which patriarchal gender relations were incorporated into Western civilization (Lerner 10). • "Introduction" • "Origins" argues that the formation of
private property and class society occurred after the
appropriation of women's sexual and reproductive capacities. • "A Working Hypothesis" claims that
archaic states had a great interest in maintaining a
patriarchal family structure because they were organized from it. • "The Stand-in Wife and the Pawn" states that men learned to subjugate other groups from practicing dominance over women, and that this was expressed through slavery, beginning with the
enslavement of women from conquered groups. • "The Woman Slave" asserts that according to many different
ancient legal codes, states enforced women's sexual subordination through
force, economic dependency,
class privileges, and the artificial division between "respectable" and "non-respectable" women. • "The Wife and the
Concubine" argues that class differences exist for men based on their relation to the
means of production while for women they are based on their sexual ties to men who grant them material resources. This chapter also claims that laws defined "respectable" women as attached to one man and "non respectable" women as those unattached to a single or any men, and that these laws were institutionalized through the
veiling of women. • "Veiling the Woman" explains that long after women had become subordinated to men in most aspects of their lives,
metaphysical female power, especially
birthing, was still worshiped by women and men in the form of powerful
goddesses and that women played respected roles as mediators between humans and gods. This chapter also describes the historical procession from first, the invention of Near East
kingship; to second, the replacement of goddesses with a dominant male god figure; to third, the understanding of
fertility control as being conceptualized as a goddess' undertaking to the "symbolic of actual mating of the
male god or
God-King with the Goddess or her
priestess" (Lerner 9); to fourth, the split between
eroticism/
sexuality and
pro-creativity as expressed by the creation of desperate goddesses for both functions; to finally, the transformation of the
Mother-Goddess into "the
wife/consort of the chief male God" (Lerner 9). • "The Goddess" claims that early
Hebrew monotheism was expressed as an attack on different cults of
various fertility goddesses. It asserts that the
Book of Genesis and its writing ascribes
creativity and pro-creativity to an all-powerful
God with titles of "
Lord" and "
King", establishing him as
male. It also discusses the foundations of the association of
female sexuality dissociated from procreation with
sin and
evil. • "The Patriarchs" explains the establishment of a
covenant community that both symbolizes and actually contracts an assumed, inherent subordination of women in the relationship between the monotheistic god and
humanity. It argues that through this, women are excluded from the
metaphysical covenant and the earthly covenant community, leading them to solely access God and the holy community as
mothers. • "The Covenant" argues that this symbolic devaluation of women in relation to the divine becomes one of the metaphors that founds Western society, along with the assumption that women are incomplete and damaged human beings of a different and lower order than men, as described by
Aristotle. • "Symbols" • "The Creation of Patriarchy" ==Reception==