Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-352) and index.

A leading zoologist takes a fierce and often humorous look at the females of the animal kingdom and subverts the prevailing opinion among evolutionary biologists who have insisted that males are more interesting.

Humans are locked in a battle over sex and gender: one side argues that evolutionary biology dictates how we should be, and the other that it's a patriarchal tool that shouldn't matter at all. Rewriting the science of evolution and sex, she shows how feminist biologists have uncovered nature's dizzying diversity of bodies, brains and behavior that evolution has created. With a new perspective on the female animal of a variety of species, Cooke reveals a new understanding of what being female can mean, and how evolution itself can work. -- adapted from jacket