Ties that Bind: Essays on Mothering and Patriarchy (University of Chicago Press, $14.95 (pb), $29.95 (hb), 306 pp., 1990) is a collection of essays that originally appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. It is edited by Jean F. O'Barr, Director of the Duke University Women's Studies Program and Editor of Signs, Deborah Pope, Associate Professor of English at Duke University and an Associate Editor of Signs, and Mary Wyer, Managing Editor of Signs.Women and Madness. The incarceration of Women in Nineteenth Century France, by YannicK Ripa, is published by Polity Press, Cambridge (£29.50, 175 pp., 1990). Dr Ripa teaches history at the University of Paris, Jussieu.