女性特质是什么？女性何以与男性相区别？不管是过去还是现在，女性永远都是被设计来取悦于男人，以突出男性的阳刚、力量和权力的。三寸金莲的纤纤细步，其精妙就在于反衬男性的健步如飞；用束腰带束起杨柳小腰，为的就是让女子看起来弱不禁风；冗长而累赘的圈环裙和窄底裙，还有拖地长裙，其设计的目的无非是把女人的双腿包裹起来，使之行走不便；各种增白霜使不同肤色的女性看上去成了“月光美人”，相形之下，男人看上去更阳刚……在这个世界里，强权的美是建立在对柔弱无力的赞美上！

谁是最早的女权主义者？女权主义思潮到底真正改变了多少女性的生活？这种思潮在当今不同的文化背景下有何差异？ 在这本《简史》中，玛格丽特•沃特斯着眼女权主义的发展历程，追根溯源，探究妇女选举权、20世纪60年代的妇女解放运动以及女权主义思想在今天是否依然有其价值等重大问题。她从欧洲讲到美国，再讲到第三世界，通过分析全球妇女的现状，向我们展示了女权主义研究的最新成果。

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team, husband and wife Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, take us on a journey through Africa and Asia to meet an extraordinary array of exceptional women struggling against terrible circumstances. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they are girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century combined. More girls are killed in this routine 'gendercide' in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth, it was totalitarianism. In the twenty-first, Kristof and WuDunn demonstrate, it will be the struggle for gender equality in the developing world. Fierce, moral, pragmatic, full of amazing stories of courage and inspiration, HALF THE SKY is essential reading for every global citizen.

Since its publication in 1990, Gender Trouble has become one of the key works of contemporary feminist theory, and an essential work for anyone interested in the study of gender, queer theory, or the politics of sexuality in culture. This is the text where Judith Butler began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices, and she writes in her preface to the 10th anniversary edition released in 1999 that one point of Gender Trouble was "not to prescribe a new gendered way of life [...] but to open up the field of possibility for gender [...]" Widely taught, and widely debated, Gender Trouble continues to offer a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.