Book description
'The break with the past, which has been described by others as the
transition to a capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the
transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex.' Ivan Illich
insists that we survey attitudes to male and female in both industrial
society and its antecedents in order to recover a lost 'art of living'.
'While under any reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any
economic regime they are only second sex... both genders are stripped,
and, neutered, the man ends up on top.' He argues that only a truly
radical scrutiny of scarcity, with special attention in this study to
the sexes and society, past and present, can prevent an intensification
of this grim predicament.
Ivan Illich was born in Vienna to a Croatian father and Sephardic-Jewish
mother, and had as native languages Italian, French and German. He later
learnt Serbo-Croatian, the language of his grand-fathers, then Ancient
Greek and Latin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. Thereafter,
he studied histology and crystallography at the University of Florence
(Italy), theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University
in the Vatican (1942-1946) and medieval history in Salzburg. He is the
author of Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment,
Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the
Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind,
Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and
Addresses 1978-1990. Illich lived much of his life in Mexico and the
United States, he died in 2002.
