In the heady, revolutionary days of student sit-ins in Paris in the 1960s and 1970s, the message about gender was that all differences were socially constructed. The idea was that, with re-education and social change, these differences would melt away, opening the way for equality between the sexes. “Sociobiologists” were the enemy because they claimed that gender had something to do with genes and evolution. The battle lines between nature and nurture were drawn, with those on the political left firmly allied with nurture and those arguing for nature typecast as being on the extreme right.
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