Who Cooked the Last Supper?
I continue my recently renewed interest in non-fiction works with Rosalind Miles' Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World . I'd seen a few excerpts floating around the internet and, honestly, who can resist that title? This wasn't the greatest book I ever read. There's a lot of anger in these pages, and an uncomfortable amount of flipping some Freudian theories to accuse men of womb envy and natural inferiority to account for their oppression of women over the millenia. Additionally, while individual women are referenced a great deal, their struggles tend to be painted with a single brush. Intersections of gender with race or class are largely ignored and glossed over. There is a chapter about imperialism that touches on some of these issues, but Miles also misinterprets Sojourner Truth's famous "And Ain't I A Woman?" speech as being about the virgin/whore dichotomy rather than race relations. Despite that, ther...