This thorough revision of A World Full of Women will appeal to instructors and students in anthropology, or any discipline looking for a global approach to the study of women. “Reading this book is like sitting down for an intellectually stimulating, yet thoroughly comfortable, chat with this author,” according to a reviewer.

Written by an anthropologist who has taught undergraduates for 28 years and designed the first official women's studies course in Louisiana, this book has been fueled by the explosion of research on women since the 1970s.

One reviewer decribes the text as “especially strong in its anthropological grounding, in its appropriate theoretical orientation, its selected ethnographic detail, and in the way it invites participation on the part of its readers.” Another reviewer writes, “Ward has achieved a rare thing: an accessible, interesting, personable, opinioned text, combined with the comprehensiveness that makes texts valuable.”