Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-218).

"One of the world's most widely-read psychoanalysts, Erich Fromm was a groundbreaking thinker on gender and sex, issues which have come to have a profound impact on psychology in recent years. He believed that a state of war has existed between the sexes for some six thousand years - a "guerrilla war" which followed the triumph of men over women and reorganized society on the basis of male domination, turning women into the property of men. As long as we fail to acknowledge this state of war dating back to the dawn of history, Fromm said, we will never understand the psychology of men and women. Fromm began to evolve his radical views about the sexes when he first encountered the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen, the nineteenth-century anthropologist. Throughout his life Fromm wrote or lectured about gender, though he never collected these writings in one volume. In Love, Sexuality, and Matriarchy: About Gender his most significant contributions about the problematic relations between men and women, some never before available in English, are brought together for the first time. They reveal Fromm as a pioneer of many of today's most challenging ideas about gender. "There cannot be domination of one social class, nation, or sex over the other that does not lead to subliminal rebelliousness, rage, hatred, and desire for revenge in those who do the oppressing and exploiting," Fromm said. In his view, the way the sexes relate to each other is ruled both by matriarchal and patriarchal social structures and by the dominant social character at a given time. He explains why sex-specific problems are not caused by the difference between the sexes, but mostly by the way two people relate to each other as human beings." --,Dust Jacket.

Translated from the German.

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