Women's Sexual Experience: By Martha Kirkpatrick. New York: Plenum Press, 1982, 344 pp., $25.00.

This book is one volume in a series called Women in Context: Development and Stress. Previous volumes have been titled The Woman Patient, Becoming Female, and Women's Sexual Development. This latest volume explicitly sets out to raise questions about women's sexual experience rather than to give answers. While this is a laudable goal, the result is disappointing—a disjointed potpourri of ideas and opinions. Each chapter is written by a different author: journalists, legislative advocates, family service workers, founders of special interest groups, and law enforcement experts, psychologists, sociologists, obstetricians and gynecologists, internists, urologists, sex therapists, and psychiatrists.

The range of topics covered is very wide and the fifteen chapters are divided into two sections. The first five chapters deal with the general condition of women's sexual response and the second part with special circumstances. The topics covered under the general condition, for example, are: women's sexual response, the sexual experience of Afro-American women, sex and sexuality, and women at midlife. The chapters under special circumstances include: incest, female sexuality and pregnancy, voluntary childlessness, alternative sexual patterns, wife abuse, venereal disease, and prostitution. One of the better features of the book is that most of the chapters are