There's nothing worse than forced femininity and how it limits a woman's life.This book gets you beyond all the gender bias non-sense and leads you to understand how we got in this mess in the first place and how to change,because humans ARE capable of change and do not have to stay in boundaries which bind their talents,aspirations and individual make up.

Within all humans,there are different degrees of femininity and masculinity and the masculine based way that men are raised,has allowed them not only greater freedom in the world but also greater freedom within,to think strong and be strong,whilst women have been given a limited recipe for life which binds them to a femininity which may not be part of a particular woman's physical or emotional make up..I get the message that women are taught to play a role of false femininity which suffocates their true natures as individuals.

though i first read this book for a class, i have since turned to it many times. ms. bartky has a clear grasp on the dynamics of relations between men and women not only on the basic level of how we treat eachother, but on the intimate level of how we treat ourselves. this is a must read not only for feminists, but for anyone who has ever wondered why men and women are treated differently in our society... why we ARE different, and how we can change or overcome our seeming differences. it may be a bit thick at times on philosophical and sociological language, but the messages come through loud and clear enough so that you don't need to be schooled in either discipline to enjoy it.

Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky take French feminism--as it was introduced to the Anglo-American world by the work of Elaine Marks' and Isabelle de Courtivron's New French Feminism (1980)--and reconsider it today, in the context of developing postmodern thought/feminisms. Inaugurating third wave feminisms, the writings of Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Christine Delphy, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig bear both a deconstructive-psychoanalytical strand of thought--holding an upper hand today in the English-speaking academia, as expressed in the Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva triad--and a materialist subversive, countercultural instance. Focusing on issues of "identity, difference and femininity" (5), Fraser and Bartky rejoin French feminisms with Anglo-American feminists of a difference understood as a battle field between essentialist and non-substantialist significations. The presence of the American positive "gynocentric feminism" (Iris Young, Nancy Chodorow, and Carol Gilligan) vs. the universally emancipated subject is renegotiated today. Identity and difference are again problematized into "identities" and "differences" (6) within Derridean meaning indeterminacy and dislocated subjectivities. The question then returns to a full circle: do feminist postmodern identities of difference reaffirm an essentialist project? This is a useful collection of articles on challenging Franco-American representations of the feminine in Western philosophy, psychoanalysis, and French theories of discourse.