The book interrogates the particular and generalisable qualities of the lived experience of gender in the twentieth century across three generations of a family. It penetrates the surface appearance of change to uncover the invisible layers beneath that perpetuate the transmission of gender for both women and men. Each sex is seen as enabled or disabled, often in binary ways, in reaching their full human potential.
Life stories offer a vehicle to explore not only the hidden depths of individual lives, but also the unexamined assumptions of the patriarchal system. The book argues that there are alternative forms of personal and collective power that challenge the crude, popular concept associated with patriarchy: a dynamic of domination and submission. It supports the re-conceptualisation of power as a cultural focus on the development of the full human potential—rational, physical and emotional—of the collective and the individual. It argues that the development of this type of power is the appropriate precedent for entry into the traditional conventions of private and public life that have acted for so long as proxies for the genuine maturation of both sexes, and societies more generally.
