Sex differences in behavior are most interesting when they are the result of inherent differences in the operational rules motivating behavior and not merely a reflection of differing life history experiences. American men and women exhibit a few differences in testamentary patterns of property allocation that appear to be due to inherently different rules of allocation. Even when analyses control for resources and surviving kin configurations, women distribute their property among a greater number of individual beneficiaries than do men. The (...) most striking differences in property allocation between men and women occur within the nuclear family and reflect differences in reproductive life span and the resulting reproductive conflicts between spouses that can endure beyond death. (shrink)

Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret.

Drawing from religion and the human sciences, particularly psychology after Freud, the author attempts to demonstrate that the fear of death is man's central ...

lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying.Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally (...) Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors. (shrink)