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Reviewed by Wendy Gamber | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 104.3 | The History Cooperative
104.3  
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September, 2008
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Mysteries of Sex
Tracing Women and Men through American History

By Mary P. Ryan
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 432. Notes, bibliography, index.
$37.50.)

Mysteries of Sex is a remarkable synthesis that covers vast chronological, geographical, and topical terrain. Mary P. Ryan's intriguing analysis ranges from the sixteenth century to the opening of the twenty-first, exploring subjects as varied as the European conquest of the Americas, the emergence of domesticity, slavery and race, citizenship, work, social and sexual revolutions, and immigration. Her bibliography alone, amounting to nearly fifty pages, is testament to the enormity of her accomplishment. 1
      Seeking to unravel the "process whereby the distinction between male and female is created, adapted and repeatedly recreated" (p. 3), Ryan conceives of her project as a series of "mysteries" for the historian-detective to solve. As chapter titles such as "Where Have the Corn Mothers Gone?" "What is the Sex of Citizenship?" and "Where in the World is the Border between Male and Female?" indicate, Ryan (like many of the scholars on whose work she draws) sees "mysteries of sex" as central, not tangential, to American political, social, and economic history. . . .
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