Steinem’s career-spanning collection of essays—each one a book in itself—re-imagine everything from the masculinization of wealth to Freudian thought and aging

With cool humor and rich intellect, Gloria Steinem strips bare our social constructions of gender and race, explaining just how limiting these invented cultural identities can be.

In the first of six sections, Steinem imagines how our understanding of human psychology would be different in a witty reversal: What if Freud had been a woman who inflicted biological inferiority on men (think “womb envy”)? In other essays, the author presents positive examples of people who turn stereotypes on their heads, from a female bodybuilder to Mahatma Gandhi, whose followers absorbed his wisdom that change starts at the bottom. And in some of the most moving pieces, Steinem reveals something of her own complicated history as a writer, woman, and citizen of the world.