A passion for friends : toward a philosophy of female affection /

The theme of Raymond's book is that a woman must work and live within a framework of female friendship if she is to progress and help improve the world for other women. Within this context, the author illustrates how ``hetero-relation'' women, that is, those who have been socialized and assimilated into the male-run world, are prohibited from advancing the cause of women's equality. Various impediments to the growth of true female friendship are described in detail. These include women's acceptance of powerlessness in politics; dependence on various forms of therapy or self-evaluation; strong desires to assimilate into the male-defined world; avoidance of other women so as to be more ``accessible'' to men, and self-deprecation. Women who do not live in separatist female environments may be faced with serious doubts about the ideas presented here. Those, however, who have ever experienced a close community of women may find this to be a groundbreaking philosophic treatise on female friendship. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-H. Alonso, Mercy College

If Raymond is correct, all of women's behavioreven friendships with other femalesis informed by their self-images as passive, secondary creatures in a male-dominated world. But despite this burden, she maintains, some women in various times and places have developed their innate capacity for intense same-sex friendships, with or without homoerotic components. Raymond looks at the lives of medieval nuns who formed spiritual and emotional ties in convents that gave them independence from a man's world. She examines the 19th century Chinese phenomenon of ``marriage resisters'': rural women who banded together after leaving their husbands or refusing to marry at all. Her radical feminist critique is, unfortunately, vague on how women's friendships might transform patriarchal social structures and bind women's lives together. The study is a mixture of impassioned rhetoric, jargon and tough-minded analysis. February 1 (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved