In an age of global crisis and fear, grand narratives of human history have found a new appeal, popularized by books such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011). The Shrinking Goddess presents itself as a corrective to Harari’s eschewal of gender, instead seeking to re-centre women’s bodies, reproductive labour and symbolic power as the suppressed substrate of civilization. Its author, the Dutch novelist and academic Mineke Schipper, seeks to retell human history in a way that accounts for male domination – drawing on myth, religion, art, anthropology and popular history to craft a sweeping counter-story.
Schipper shares much of Harari’s style and posture. Her book is speculative, provocative and succinct, written to bring scholarly material to a popular audience through striking examples and narrative momentum. At its best, this makes for an engaging read. The archive is wide-ranging, the prose accessible and the book’s through-line forcefully sustained: that men across all cultures have feared, controlled and symbolically managed women’s reproductive power.
