The Gender Knot:
Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy
Temple University Press, 1997
Sociologist Allan Johnson’s The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy (Temple University Press: 1997) is an eloquent, occasionally poetic, always accessible study of contemporary culture that offers practical suggestions about how both men and women can work for gender justice. Without playing blame games (naming, blaming, and shaming) Johnson argues that society is stuck in a debilitating "gender knot" because it takes an individualistic rather than a systems approach towards sexism.

While The Gender Knot is sociological, it is also profoundly personal — for Johnson shares his experiences as a husband, father, son, colleague and teacher. The Gender Knot derives its power from the elegant interweaving of Johnson’s sociological analysis and candid accounts of his struggles as a man in patriarchal society.

" The human capacity to choose how to participate in the world empowers all of us to pass along something different than what’s been passed to us. With each strand of the patriarchal gender knot that we help to unravel, we don’t act simply for ourselves. We join a process of creative resistance to oppression that’s been unfolding for thousands of years. We become part of the long traditions of people who have dared to make a difference — to look at things as they are, to imagine something better, and to plant seeds of change in themselves, in others, and in the world." - Allan Johnson