In addition to voicing her concern with the hierarchical structures in society, within her novel Winterson encourages readers to think about sex dichotomies as a thing of the past. With her main characters of Dog Woman and Jordan she achieves a contrasting of the sexes that has been taken into consideration multiple times by scholarly articles such as Roessner's.
Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry has been argued to be an important historiographical novel for women; this novel considers women's role, prominence, or lack of prominence in society within historical fiction. Jeffrey Roessner argues: "The focus of feminist historiographers has steadily shifted from recovering the neglected past experience of women to historicizing the patriarchal values that helped produce such experience."