The success of our species was, and still is, carried in the bellies of women, writes Cat Bohannon. The author invites you on a journey through 200 million years of evolutionary history.
How did humanity manage to survive? According to Bohannon, the most important inventions of our ancestors were not stone tools, fire, agriculture, the wheel or penicillin – but gynecology. By this, the author means the medical knowledge that allows mother and child to survive. We use it in every single contemporary culture. And documents and finds such as an ancient iron speculum prove that we also practiced gynecology in earlier cultures.
The book is about us as girls, women, mothers, people. The reader learns a lot about her own body. It is not surprising that a lot of it revolves around sex, pregnancy and birth. But Bohannon emphasizes: “Motherhood is by no means the fulfillment of femininity.” The book is therefore not only interesting for (expectant) mothers, but for science enthusiasts of all genders. It combines medicine, biology and paleontology. The author writes about current developments in gender-specific medicine and sheds light on how a sexist society shapes the development of the brain.
Bohannon explains physical processes in detail and clearly, even at the molecular level. She doesn’t make it easy, but differentiates where necessary. In doing so, she dispels the myth of the weaker sex. With a critical eye on study results, she examines prejudices such as the one about athleticism: Yes, men have more muscle mass. But when it comes to endurance, the female body wins. And clichés such as the one about the sense of orientation: Yes, there are slight differences in spatial orientation between adult women and men. But the differences do not lie fundamentally in ability, but in the type of spatial thinking. Bohannon is not interested in defining a superior sex, but simply in recognizing the wonder of the female body.
The author’s explanations are partly humorous and consistently technically sound: around a quarter of the book’s volume is made up of notes, bibliography and index. Salome Berblinger
Cat Bohannon
Eve
C. Bertelsmann, 768 pages, € 30,–
ISBN 978-3-570-10209-1