Our Treacherous Hearts; Why Women Let Me

Women will remain exploited until they stop denying the bitter truth of their ``inferior'' positions and stop complying with their male exploiters, insists Coward, a British broadcaster, in this penetrating and wide-ranging analysis-cum-manifesto. She searches for the female feelings that, she believes, often go unacknowledged: the tendency to idealize men, to be manipulative, to play the victim, to enjoy the attention conferred by pregnancy and motherhood, and to collude in the notion that a woman is only as good as her own well-toned body. And though the people she interviews are British, Coward, clearly, is not speaking only about her country; in fact, she includes cogent opinions from feminist writers on both sides of the Atlantic. And her case that women are, in some respects, worse off now than before--languishing in guilt and servitude to children, doing double duty at home and work--is persuasive. Coward's points are, in general, well taken. (May)