It is far too seldom in Australia that students, men or women, are provided with the resources to work on Australian materials in an Australian context in this way: and the cultural and gender cringe encour­aged and maintained by the institutionalised publishing, refereeing and promotion practices constructed by patriarchy usually mitigates against such open and successful use of Australian and women’s research as the intertextual resources for the production/writing/en-gendering of books.

This is the kind of book we should all make compulsory reading for fathers, sons, and husbands as well as the men we work with and amongst and the men with whom we have other kinds of relationships in our public, social and private lives·. It is devastatingly straightforward in its examples of the inconsistencies, irrationalities, contradictions and ideological biases of masculine world-making. Examples abound but one might quote the telling evidence of the analysis of the construction of PMT as a sickness, the manipulation of women in the war effort in Australia, the effect of the mythologies constructed by so­called Child Care experts on women’s construction of their own identities, and the profound implications of the case study analysis of reproductive technologies. This case study, which almost provides the conclusion for the book, refuses to leave hidden the collusion between the state, medicine and commerce which operates through such disparate social mechanisms as commercial institutions with a power base in women’s biology (drug houses and so on) and the media which represent/construct this violence and intrusion on and into women’s bodies by transforming it into nuclear family images of happy mothers and babies. These are specific examples, but the analysis of patriarchy and the forces and power relations, and social and private processes, which support and maintain it, is pursued systematically through its institu­tional bases in biology, science, the literary establishment, the structures of waged work and the family. The book concludes with.an introductory account of the complexities of the powerful powerless issue, raising the question of the silenced history of women’s resistance and the unspoken nature of women’s domestic power which has no voice, can have no voice; precisely because it is located in the private sphere which masculine knowledges and institu­tional structures marginalise and de-value.

There is a wealth of material in this book for introductory work in Women’s Studies. So many of the complex issues are raised, documented with useful examples, referenced for further work, and related to the whole contradictory fabric of the social system in, and through which men and women are constructed, that it could not fail to be a useful teaching text. At the same time, and paradoxically precisely because of its characteristics as a social science feminist text, and as, a subversive text in that social science genre, it raises some of the questions that currently pertain to feminism or feminisms and to Women’s Studies programs as they themselves begin to become institutionalised.

I am looking here to what Toril Moi located or identified in her work as a social science/Anglo-American feminism which unlike its sister French feminisms fears or evades (Toril Moi) or simply neglects, does not address, (me), theory: and theory here has to be read to mean specifically those kinds of feminist strategies that are based in psychoanalysis, semiotics and deconstruction of the Foucauldian – Derridean varieties. Insofar as this book belongs in the first category it has, for a reader like myself, who belongs in the second, some minor problems – but more importantly perhaps it raises the question of the relationship that can or does or might or should exist between these different feminisms and strategies in Women’s Studies programs.

What I am suggesting is that we need to specifically address these disjunctions, as women, so that we do not reproduce in our course structures the dichotomies between the social sciences and the humanities that currently characterise most Arts faculties in this and other Western countries and inhibit the useful transdisciplinary connections that could be made.

Let me return to the questions of genre and intertextuality with which I began and outline some of the problems I want to constructively indicate are problems for me in this text. They are problems I would actually be able to use this text to discuss and explore with students. First, the genre of the text is indicative of its intertextual history in social psychology and social theory. Second, its feminine/feminist authorship has the consequence of subverting that genre by excluding from its construction of its own history (the references which are the formal realisation of the relationships this text has with other texts, other writing subjects) the naming of the voices that spoke/speak the male knowledges which still inevitably contribute by intruding into, shaping and constructing this genre. This means that the text, while apparently espousing (the pun was unintentional but relevant) a Marxist view of ideology, a social constructivist position on subjectivity and identity, a psychology based tendency to regard ideology as consciousness, and a view of language as constructive of social realities and individuals, to name just a few of its theoretical positions, does not provide any theoretical account or acknowledgement of these positions. They are taken for granted, and, on the whole, adumbrated with considerable clarity. Taken for granted as well is the positioning of the writing subject, in the sense that within this genre she is the primary knower, who tells what is and provides the evidence to support her arguments. This writing position produces, even constrains perhaps, a tendency to make assertions, often repeatedly, which are generalisations that need some unpacking. I am thinking here of the repeated conflation of patriarchy with male, references to ‘male control of language’, and the assertion that in patriarchy some men have power over other men, but all men have power over women. The question of women’s compliance with patriarchy is dealt with at many levels in the book, but these repeated assertions tend in subtle ways to create an us/them situation which occludes the sheer complexity of the differences between sex and gender on the one hand, and the daily interactions between men and women in which both are involved in transmitting, constructing and transforming themselves, each other, and the social system on the other. These are the issues raised in the last chapter, but they need much more exploration.

I want to suggest that the genre of this text produces a tendency to speak from a monologic position in relation to these questions, and then to represent or construct reality from that position. It happens to be a position with which I am in general agreement, but this textual strategy has to be contrasted with the kinds of writing and texts produced by the ‘other’ theoretical frameworks I outlined above. There, instead of an unproblematic representation of the facts by a knowing subject, there is a self-conscious attempt to be explicit about one’s own positioning, and to construct oneself as writing subject, as a subject in process, and in the middle of the processes being explored. That is, there can be no ‘objective’ position from which to speak, and the monologic must always be a construction. To deal with these kinds of writing, and to practise them one probably needs to make at least some reference to the names of the fathers – Freud, Marx, Foucault, Barthes, Bakhtin, Derrida – and so on. At the very least we need to discuss the feminist strategy that is involved in not naming them.

To conclude then, on a very specific point, I think these questions, which are problems for me with the text, are all related to a social science/humanities (specifically philosophical/literary) difference, which is a difference between women, and a difference based on the importance and degree of analysis allowed to semiosis in the accounts being written of women’s oppression under patriarchy. By semiosis I mean all those processes, in any media, be they verbal, social, visual, environmental, by which and through which meanings, and thus social realities and selves, are made. To talk about these things adequately one has to deal with the complex interrelationships between semiosis, language and ideology in ways that are much more specific than the kind of taken­for-grantedness that is involved in classifying this problem as ‘male control myths’ set up by men. Only when we do this will it be possible for the instructions (‘women must’, ‘change needs to begin’ ...) on how to produce change actually to be followed.

The ‘real’ and the semiotic have to be put back together and then carefully deconstructed before change can begin ‘in the consciousness of women’, or before women can ‘un­learn the socialisation and the negative definitions of women with which they live within patriarchy’.

This is going to involve a great deal of concerted and careful analysis, and a commitment on the part of men and women to doing it, and to understanding the crucial role of representation and meaning-making in the construction and maintenance of patriarchy. This book is an excellent start and the very considerable success it achieves is in no way incompatible with the issues its own construction raises about these wider questions or the very pressing need to pursue them further. It must indeed have been a difficult book to write and those to come will be more difficult still. What matters is that women using these different strategies work together so that, in Robyn Rowland’s words, it becomes a real possibility that ‘women alone define and create woman herself’. That is the very specific problem this book so carefully and critically addresses.