This volume consists of eight essays written by Iris Marion Young over the course of 25 years. The essays form a useful collection; neither overly repetitive nor disjointed, they approach the same subject—how it feels to live as a woman—by examining several different experiences typical of female life. Young offers "a trajectory of thinking of one idiosyncratic feminist theorist" over several decades—as not only her perspective on feminist theory but (one suspects) her experience of what it is to be a woman changes (4).

Young intends these essays to add to feminist critical theory by provoking reflection on what it is like to live as a woman—to have breasts, to be pregnant, to menstruate, and perhaps to be drawn to activities "traditionally associated with the feminine," such as dressing up and outfitting one's home. "Oddly," Young writes, "feminist scholars have thought systematically very little about these ordinary body experiences," though an exploration of them could help reinterpret certain female traits and functions in a positive light (6). Drawing her interest in lived experience from existential phenomenology, Young distinguishes her approach from other feminist writers, as well as from Foucault, by speaking "from the point of view of the constituted body's experience," rather than examining how the body is represented or talked about by others (8). According to Young, a typical feminist question about fashion would be: "whose imagination conjures up the pictures [of women in attractive clothes] and their meanings?" whereas her question will be: "How shall I describe a woman's pleasure in clothes?" (64-65).

This approach leads to some delightful suggestions about how to understand female experience. The greatest strength of this book is Young's insight into various experiences—how a pregnant woman senses a double center of subjectivity (in the head and in the belly); how women can feel that clothes 'love them back' because they relate to clothing with an acute sense of touch rather than primarily by sight; how the convention of pointing to one's chest when saying 'I' must give flat-chested men and breasted women very different experiences of identity. Men and women alike might come to glimpse for the first time, or to think more deeply about, ordinary experiences in a woman's life through the essays in this book. Young furthermore suggests that grasping the significance of certain female experiences can improve our understanding of what it means to be human. Pregnancy, she points out, should make us question the assumption that human beings are naturally and primarily individuals. The pregnant woman feels the fetus's movements as her own sensations; where the mother ends and the child begins is not entirely clear (49). Pregnancy can also lead one to question the clear distinction between a transcendent mind and a body rooted in immanence. While pregnant, the woman's body is not simply an obstacle to 'transcendence' but is in the process of transcending itself by creating another life; one feels not primarily the limits of the body but its capacity, its abundance (51).

Young's description of female body experience is certainly educational, but she also has a polemical and political purpose in mind. She seeks to reinterpret certain experiences as positive in order to counteract the devaluation of the female and the feminine she sees in present and past social practices. Young's reinterpretations in the later essays are sometimes also arguments against other feminists who have come to detest so deeply the social pressure to take part in certain "feminine" activities that they deny the value or pleasure of these activities at all. With time, Young seems to have been more and more impressed by the need to value such activities, and correspondingly increasingly cautious about condemning them out of an honest zeal to eradicate inequalities or injustices. In a 1997 essay, she counters an argument that private homes should be dissolved because they are based on "'an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance'" with a consideration of why private space is necessary for a flourishing life and a warning concerning the "dangers in turning our backs on home" (147-quoted from Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty,154).

Young opposes the radical feminists' disparagement of all 'feminine' activities, but she herself harbors an equally radical desire: to remake the social and political order to allow for the uninhibited enactment of the female body experiences she has uncovered. My deepest criticism of Young's book is that her in-depth explorations of certain aspects of female experience do not provide the basis for these far-reaching political recommendations. Without a fuller picture of female experience, she cannot give a balanced account of the way existing social structures and conventions both respond to and deny female desires. Without distinguishing what in contemporary practice is helpful and what is harmful to female interests, she risks suggesting changes that would free up the expression of certain experiences while unleashing other horrific consequences. "Celebrating breast-feeding as a sexual interaction for both the mother and infant," for example, may do justice to the connection between motherhood and sexuality, but in practice it also may make a mother's relations with the rest of her family more difficult-how does the father fit into this picture? (88-90). Collectivizing housekeeping and care of the elderly might make some women's burdens lighter, but the public maids are likely to be lower-class women, whose cleaning tasks will be multiplied. Moreover, fewer women will have the (perhaps mixed) pleasure of caring for their own houses and families. The piecemeal accounts of female body experience Young offers are well-suited to her purposes of expounding everyday experience, but do not help her build a coherent picture of the social and political conditions that might correspond to her insights about the possibilities of female body experience.

Of course, such a collection of essays is not intended to present the definitive account of female body experience, let alone of the political organization that would allow women maximum freedom (11). One topic that Young might take up more systematically is what female body experience means for relations among human beings. She does indeed offer some thoughts on the importance of female body experience to relationships among women, which makes her reluctance on the subject of female relations with men more striking. One must admit that, without male-female relations, it is difficult to even begin to imagine a future society. Whether as fathers, friends, boyfriends, coworkers, husbands, or fellow parents, men play a major role in the lives of most women, and much of female experience has to do with figuring out how to exist with men-in the house, at work, in the world. None of the essays collected here considers a positive relation between men and women; even in the essay on 'House and Home,' men appear as people who either help or do not help with the housework rather than people with talents or habits unique to the male body experience that might be a part of the shared attempt to create a home. It is not clear why Young has avoided this topic; perhaps she will take it up in the future. Her thoughts on this matter would constitute a crucial component of the attempt to articulate a vision of social and political organization that would allow women to live most freely and happily.

Jenna Silber Storey, The University of Chicago

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