Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet
Countless ideas about women have been recorded over 27 the centuries in the most concise of all literary genres, the proverb. Mineke Schipper’s impressive study examines more than 15,000 sayings about women, drawn from 150 countries and more than 240 languages. They appear on crockery, tiles and clothing as well as in books, but most are passed on by word of mouth. Schipper arranges them by theme: the female body, the phases of a woman’s life as a girl, bride and wife and later as a mother and grandmother, and the joys and sorrows of love, sex and childbearing.
Non-FictionPrint
Original title
Trouw nooit een vrouw met grote voeten
Author
Mineke Schipper
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Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet A fascinating analysis of more than 15,000 proverbs (…) an engrossing book to dip into.
Times Literary Supplement
A fine contribution to the cosmopolitan conversation that ought to come with globalisation.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton University
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Mineke Schipper
Mineke Schipper (b. 1938) was Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies at the University of Leiden. She has professorships in Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso and China. She received a Dutch knighthood for ‘building intercultural bridges nationally and internationally, inside and outside the academy’ and continues her scholarly work at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. She wrote 'Widows' as a recent widow herself.