The publishing business is an amoral industry. If it chances upon a "hot topic," it will grind out everything on that subject which it can find, regardless of scholarly or literary quality. When the hot topic cools off, publishers' doors are gently closed-often regardless of the merit of a particular book. Starting with the rebirth of the feminist movement in the 1960s, the book industry scrambled to keep up with this interesting new phenomenon. Women were newsworthy-women, a subject population which had been ignored by most scholars (including women themselves) and rejected by most publishers. The obvious exception, of course, was the field of marriage and the family, in which woman as mother, sex object, and wife made her male-defined appearance. But outside the kitchen and the bedroom, women did not exist. (Or so we were all led to believe.) The proper study of mankind was man, said man. The woman book industry changed all this. Not only can women now gain knowledge about themselves from some source other than the inside of their own heads, but after so many years of having to write mainly about the other sex (surely an exercise in self-estrangement), female scholars can now, if they choose, focus upon women. This cannot fail to be beneficial-and I do not mean this only in the sense of what it will do subjectively for the female intellectual. Just as for years the lack of published research and theory about blacks by blacks helped to perpetuate old myths (disguised as scientific fact) about what the Negro race was really like, so too has the absence of feminist scholarship maintained demeaning and inaccurate stereotypes of women. This silence too has been broken, and all of us will benefit. But because the publishing business is more interested in profit than it is in quality, the products of the woman book industry are extremely variable. As a feminist scholar, I would like to be able to say that, after several years of semi-indiscriminate production, the 1971-72 crop is all, or mostly all, of high quality. I would like to be able to say it, but I can't. A few of the 17 books to be reviewed here are outstanding; some are simply