The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How they are Changing the World

This is an important look at many aspects of the natural talents of the female gender. Women have been marginalized throughout history. Time we reclaim all the wonderful things that make us who we are. The information in this book should be a part of every school curriculum!

Extraordinary book! Every woman should read it! It is a truly scientific approach of a state of affairs that cannot be denied any longer! I recommend!

I expected more from Helen Fisher. This book was poorly written, and is biased. I think it's fine to acknowledge the differences between men and women,in fact I'd like to see more discussion about this, especially the biological aspects. But why not show how both sexes have strengths and weaknesses, and how they compliment each other? Instead Fisher fills page after page claiming that women are superior at almost every task, and in most cases provides supporting arguments that are weak. Talents of males are mentioned as an afterthought. And of course in the 21st century the supposedly limited skill set of males will no longer be needed. I suppose many female readers will eat this up, but discrimination is discrimination, no matter where it's directed. The prose is quite choppy, kind of surprising, given the innately superior language abilities of women. She must have had a male editor.

Like

I got this book for my daughter but decided to read it myself first.I have read several other books by Helen Fisher and always found her to be a interesting and readable writer.She did not disappoints in this book.Women are superior to men in many ways; psychologically and emotionally to mention a few.They have had to adapt to male dominated societies throughout history.My daughter and I higly recommend it.

Good

I first tried to review this in the form of a satire, but satire is hard to do effectively without great misunderstandings and I am not good at it. So I will just rewrite the review simply as possible. I see no use in talking about which sex is first or best or more human or which one was a mistake of nature's or which is responsible for all the ills of the world. This books is stepped in this attitude. You got two setbacks in this kind of attitude.One is that your généralizations about what you imagine which human sex is first and best are going to have to be very narrowly confined to the human species and this attitude is going to be pretty steeped in your own psychology and not necessarily applicable to other personal and cultural outlooks and not very generalizable to other species without really stretching matters. In all species of seahorses the male gets pregnant and gives live birth. Are you still going to say male seahorses are the second sex? In many species of birds, such as penguins, the male does the incubating and much or even all of the food fetching for the babies. Does this just prove the infériorité of these male birds? You may choose just to say, Well, that's birds and fish, with mammals everything changed--or better, with the appearance of humans, everything changed, and that's when the males became the second, inferior sex.Or maybe you can throw the great apes into the inferiority box and say all the male great apes are the inferior, second sex and the females the first. But how did nature so foul up the evolution of great apes?Or if you say, Apes are all right, they're natural, it is with humans that everything became unnatural and the males became the second if somewhat ornery sex. What is it, then, about humans that suddenly made them different from the rest of nature? How did nature so foul up in evolving humans?You start to see that one can easily turn the tables around, and one can just as easily say one sex is the second and inferior as you can say the other is. Women have certainly faced the tables being turned against them for a long time. Maintaining this kind of attitude can only keep the opportunities opened for women to keep facing the tables turned against them. As a woman I am certainly sick of it.The second setback you have with this sort of first-sex attitude is that, while you may say, Well, saying one sex is the first sex may help women just like you, Erin, to feel empowered--but I don't need this attitude to feel empowered. Knowing I'm a full human being empowers me enough. I don't have to transform an entire half of the species to second-place species-membership to feel empowered. The setback here is that I worry about the sort of people that need this kind of attitude to feel good about themselves. And then if you say, Oh, it's only for a transition period, then I think about the old communist regimes and how they claimed the dictatorship of the proletariat was only to be temporary, until enough social justice had seeped into the empty tanks so everyone could be equal again.The book does not really clear up, much less hint, how readers are supposed to handle these two setbacks.It is earnest, and attempts some good scholarship, but it needs to step back and examine just what it is saying in this broader perspsective. As is, it is not very insightful into human beings.

I've not only read Helen Fisher's book, I've read many of the studies behind what she writes, and I read the same journals and attend the same conferences as ev psychs in the field, as I use data, not just speculation, in my newspaper column.She does have an "optimistic" tone about what's possible for women, and takes a positive look at some of the unique features in a woman's brain. That said, she doesn't distort data to do it.Contrary to the speculation of a layperson above, that it could be socialization at work, not biology -- take a look at some of the fMRI work by people like Julian Paul Keenan and you'll understand how wrong that is. Our genes work in response to the environment. They aren't just there to work in a vacuum.Furthermore, men's and women's brains ARE different, and it's not as a result of socialization. I say this as somebody who just read seven studies this morning, including Silverman and Eals' "Sex Differences In Spatial Abilities" from the collection of studies edited by Cosmides and Tooby, entitled "The Adapted Brain." Many, many studies show this -- but social scientists, many of whom aren't as rigorous about data as those in other disciplines (or who use little data at all) -- keep promoting a different view...a view based largely on speculation and wishful thinking. FYI, for all you anti-feminists out there -- the idea that it's society that's the culprit serves the victim-feminist cause.It's just as silly to demonize Helen Fisher for pointing out the results of the research as it is to demonize men for being highly visual and being interested in pornography when women aren't. Male sexuality isn't WRONG, it's just different. Furthermore, I'm not a feminist, and I don't know Helen Fisher personally, although I've heard her speak at Rutgers at the Human Behavior & Evolution Society conference, and exchanged e-mail with her about a criticism I posted about her on my blog. I would imagine, from my contact with her, and from reading her, that she, like me, is not a feminist, but a rational person looking at data.If you have an agenda against feminism -- and I do (or rather, what feminism has become, which is not an advocate for "equal treatment for all people, but special treatment for some) -- an Amazon book review is not the place to air it. Helen Fisher writes very good, well-sourced books, and I'm quick to criticize her and other researchers -- either on my site or in person at psychology, ethology, or evolutionary psych conferences -- when I feel they've erred.

Just perfect!