Sex and Gender

This book shows how different a focus on gender is from one on sex, whether in scholarly thinking, professional activity or public policy-making. It indicates how incorrect contemporary renditions of the difference between them is, provides an explanation of this tension and difference based on the critical analysis of key institutions, and shows the serious consequences of this confusion for women in particular across a wide range of institutional processes and practices in North America and Western Europe.This confusion out of the failure to understand adequately the historical origins of sex as a civil designation in a political economy and in state taxation and census concerns, and the corollary determination of spokesmen for the emerging capitalist and industrial nation state to extirpate the last vestiges of gender, given its tie to a pre-industrial kinship system found in towns and local communities.This is a forcefully written study which integrates material from a vast range of disciplines and professional practices. It also seeks to integrate salient work in women's and feminist studies into a critique of key institutions and practices if advacned industrial societies. it uses critical theory and makes this available to students and practitioners, as well as scholars and academics.