This very short book, heralded as ‘likely to overshadow any other on the subject’, left me disappointed, as if presented dexterously with the contents of a nut-shell, a mere acorn rather than the promised oak. The author, a practising psychoanalyst and psychiatrist now at Boston University, sets out to explain the forces acting on ‘women, qua women’ irrespective of race, class or creed. She concludes that women's peculiar gifts, properly recognised and deployed, can strengthen the appropriate operation of power and bring about a fresh structuring of the environment. The task involves a true coming-to-terms with weakness, vulnerability and helplessness, qualities which in her view women are still encouraged to foster and men to deny. This is a laudable, even a noble objective, calling forth an opportunity for co-operation which many unhappy, isolated women have so far lacked. It recalls Mary Shelley: ‘If I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed,’ and is in line with