Women's Terms

books that have been most important to me-as a feminist, as a leftist, as a believer in social and spiritual change-have been those that translate the reality we've been handed by generations of male minds into women's terms. Elizabeth Fisher's Woman's Creation does this, as does Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman -and though the books contradict each other in ways I find totally confusing, I love them both. I am enormously impressed by the work of two dear friends of mine, Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker: their book, Woman's Worth, looks at women in cultures around the world and shows that capitalist, communist, and socialist are words that describe men's lives, and that women's economic lives fall into different categories, systems in which we have minimal, token, or negotiating power. This exploration of women's culture, existing apart from the realities of the lives of the men who have lived with us, controlled us, and often literally owned us, is one of the aspects of feminism I find most crucial, and feminist historians are also addressing it. I am excited by the books that have followed in the wake of Carroll Smith Rosenberg's brilliant 1975 essay, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in

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