The Enlightenment promised humanity a bright future of emancipation which never
actuallymaterialized. Instead our social order is still based on gender inequality which
rests upon afalse conviction: that the individual can be conceived of as separate from
community that the more individualized a person is the less they need to establish links with
their community to feel safe and that the more they use reason to build a relationship with
the world the less they need emotions. Th is conviction which guides the ideals of our social
system is based on a fantasy: the fantasy of individuality. This volume is a step in fleshing
out the historical reasons for gender inequality from theorigins of humankind to present times
in the Western world. It is a theoretically-informedand up-to-date overview of the history of
gender inequality that takes as its starting pointthe mechanisms through which human beings
construct their self-identity.Starting from a peripheral interdisciplinary and heterodox
perspective this book intends toappraise the complexity of gender identity in all its richness
and diversity. It seeks to understand the persistence of relationality in supposedly fully
individualized male selves and the construction of new forms of individuality among women that
did not follow the masculine model. It is argued here that by balancing community and self
beyond the contradictions of hegemonic masculinity modern women are struggling to build a new
more empowering form of personhood. The author is an archaeologist who uses her discipline not
only to provide data theory anda long-term perspective but also in a metaphorical sense: to
construct a socio-historicalgenealogy of current gender systems through an examination of how
personhood and self- identity have been constructed in the Western world.
