Am I a Woman? A Skeptic's Guide to Gender

An accessible and provocative look at how we decide who is a woman - and why we find it important Let's face it: we live in a time that is highly ambivalent, if not downright schizophrenic, about what it means to be a woman. On the one hand, most women claim to be committed to sexual equality. On the other, feminism has become the new f-word, we venerate the impossible domestic vision of Martha Stewart, and the government invests our tax dollars in science aimed at discovering intrinsic biological differences between men and women. In this smart, intimate, and conversational book, Cynthia Eller asks what it is that really makes a woman a woman. Is a woman defined by her anatomy? Does she perceive the world differently from men? Is it her behavior that somehow marks her as inescapably female? Or is it a matter of how others evaluate her? Eller's answers demonstrate that the whole business of deciding who is a woman and who is not-and why-is far more complicated than it at first appears.