Overall, the book aims to do two things: First, to offer a history that documents the ways in which gender inequality was built into the discourse of secularism; and second, to theorize the relationship between gender—the mutable attempt to establish a grid of intelligibility for the difference of sex—and politics—the institutionalization of power and its justifications. Gender and politics are inextricably interconnected, I argue, each looking to the other for its legitimation. I think the original contribution of the book is its theory about gender and politics. It develops and deepens arguments I have been making for a while about the ways in which psychoanalytic theory about the difference of sex enables us to historicize the question of gender. (Ironically, the charge against psychoanalysis by many historians is that it is unusable because it is ahistorical.)