Paola Tabet is an Italian anthropologist. She was professor of anthropology at the University of Siena and at the University of Calabria. Life Paola Tabet was born into a family of communist intellectuals, some of whom emigrated to the United States. She spent her childhood in Manhattan and returned to Italy with her family after World War II. From adolescence she took part in the organization of young communists. However, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and a six-month stay in Russia ended her Communist sympathy. This subsequently led her to avoid any political organization. Trained as a philologist, she initially took an interest in everything including folklore , such as tales, songs and popular writings. She did field research, particularly on kinship in Calabria. She left the university at the turn of the 1970s, divorced and left for Tunisia. She met a hippie group from the American West Coast whose anti-authoritarian model and collective life outside family and marital stability encouraged her to raise her twin sons, with whom he lived for some years in other hippie communities in Italy. Here she was confronted with more traditional gender relations and homophobia, which prompted her to work on gender inequalities and to return to university to study anthropology, influenced by of work by Lévi-Strauss . She received a scholarship and then a research position at the University of Pisa where she founded a university feminist think tank, and undertook the study of the sexual division of labor and tools. Around 1978, she discovered the journal Questions féministes at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Here she met Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, and Monique Wittig. They became her principal research collaborators. In 1979, she wrote her first article entitled La main, les tooles, les armes, where she analyzes the importance of the sexual division of labor, which for her is the foundation of the domination of men over women. She notes that in several of the societies studied, sophisticated weapons and tools are reserved for men, while women have to make do with rudimentary tools or their bare hands, which forces them to work long hours because they are inefficient, monotonous and repetitive. This prevents them, from having free time for political, religious or artistic activities. She argues that "this expropriation of women's time is a fundamental aspect of their exploitation", which persists in today's societies with more