Not just gender as topic, but how knowledge about gender is made, validated, and distorted. 

Ann Oakley moves through the social sciences not to summarise them, but to pull apart their methods—who asks the questions, how answers are shaped, and why certain kinds of experience are made legible while others are quietly excluded.

Written at the tail end of the twentieth century, it sits in that moment where feminist scholarship turns its attention back onto the disciplines themselves, exposing research as a set of social practices rather than neutral tools. What emerges isn’t just critique, but a persistent question: what would it mean to know differently?

2000 hardback edition (The New Press; originally Polity Press, UK). Very good condition: clean, tight binding with crisp pages and no markings observed. Covers show minimal shelf wear with slight surface rubbing; corners sharp. A well-kept copy of a foundational late-20th-century feminist methodology text.