This book brings to light dominant ideas about sex roles and the feminist critiques these generated in the years between World War II and the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s. While discussing the famous feminist scholars, Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, the book also hinges on the work of scholars who are lesser known, such as Mirra Komarovsky, Viola Klein, and Ruth Herschberger. By establishing the historical and theoretical connections between feminist eras, Tarrant shows how protofeminist ideas of the past served as the foundation for today's focus on the social construction of gender.