BOOK REVIEW

ASCENT OF WOMAN, by Elisabeth Mann Borgese. 239 pp + index, George Braziller, New York, 1963. Hardcover,

$5.00.

To anyone interested in the nature of women (and who could possibly be more interested than a TV?), this book is a very special treat. Mrs. Borgese is one of the four or five very vocal ladies who are prying be- neath their own surfaces to discover their inner nature and she gives us the benefit of the others' work in an excellent 8-page bibliography. (Not that one should forego reading Florida Scott- Maxwell and Simone de Beauvoir in the original')

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The approach she takes is semi-scientific, and she has an unfortunate tendency to weaken her points by dragging to their support a mixture of dubious "data, gathered from folk-lore, language studies and literary works of fiction. However, the points are good enough to survive this treatment, and could stand on the antro- pological facts alone. The main ones are:

1. A feminine revolution is under way all over the world.

2.

3.

High population density favors feminine

ascendency.

Feminity and collectivism go hand-in- hand.

The bulk of the book is taken up with the develop- ment, proof, and projection into the near future of these points. From this base, Mrs. Borgese proceeds to a view of the far future which is, to say the least, unusual. Using the same methods as before, she makes a fourth point which is that the differentiation be- tween the sexes (more properly, genders) is growing less with the increasing crowding and mutual dependence of the world's population. This trend, she feels, is also a perfectly natural and inevitable reversal of the evo- lutionary trend which has led us from the non-sexual

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