Our Treacherous Hearts: Why Women Let Men Get Their Way

206 pp. 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.