Winner of the Dutch 2005 Eureka! prize for best non-fiction title The jury about the book: A revealing and at the same time extraordinarily funny book In cultures all over the globe, sex and gender issues have been expressed in proverbs, the world's smallest literary genre. This irresistible book provides revealing insights into the female condition across centuries and continents. Mineke Schipper discovered surprisingly more similarities than differences in thousands of proverbs about women, originating from hundreds of languages and more than 150 countries. Those vivid and earthy proverbs reflect women's phases of life: from girl to bride, to wife or cowife; from mother to mother-in-law, widow and randmother; the joys and sorrows of love, sex, and childbearing; women's work, their talents, and their power. This is an intriguing cross-cultural history of humanity, a history that has to do with all of us, in its bewildering views of men and women. Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet is a stunning and entertaining rough guide showing us how far both sexes have progressed on the road towards world citizenship where, in the words of a Tibetan proverb,'A hundred male and a hundred female qualities make a perfect human being.' New in paperback. First published in hardback by Yale University Press in 2004