The lipstick proviso

by Karen Lehrman

Many women today prepare for a big meeting by reading a stack of folders and applying lipstick. They order their male colleagues around, then wait for those same men to help them on with their coats. They have higher-status jobs than some of the men they date, yet they never call men socially or ask them out. What's going on? Why such seemingly contradictory behaviors? Have women completely failed feminism - or has feminism failed them? In The Lipstick Proviso, Karen Lehrman - hailed by the New York Times as the "sharpest" of the new feminist thinkers - shows that women today are failing neither feminism nor themselves. Rather, they've entered a new stage of feminism, one in which the personal is not political, differences between the sexes need to be respected, and courtship, chivalry, and the nuclear family don't have to be jettisoned just because they existed before the sixties. As the first book to move beyond a critique or orthodox feminism, The Lipstick Proviso sets a radically n