The Enlightenment promised humanity a bright future of emancipation which never actuallymaterialized. Instead, our social order is still based on gender inequality, which rests upon afalse conviction: that the individual can be conceived of as separate from community; that the more individualized a person is, the less they need to establish links with their community to feel safe; and that the more they use reason to build a relationship with the world, the less they need emotions.Th is conviction, which guides the ideals of our social system, is based on a fantasy: the fantasy of individuality.This volume is a step in fleshing out the historical reasons for gender inequality from theorigins of humankind to present times in the Western worldIt is a theoretically-informedand up-to-date overview of the history of gender inequality that takes as its starting pointthe mechanisms through which human beings construct their self-identity.Starting from a peripheral, interdisciplinary and heter