I was really disappointed in this book. It is a collection of academic papers which ordinary non-academic persons would never read. The first five papers are extremely repetitive. Again and again the author recounts what Locke, Rousseau and Mill wrote about women. People who have a professional interest in 17-19th century classics in political thought may be interested in this subject, but the implications for modern feminism are unclear because the author does not generalize. Chapter 7 is even more useless. The author critiques at great length a certain book called Civic Culture, but anyone who has not read the book will obviously not gain anything from this commentary.

The recurring problem with collections of academic papers is that they're written for a specialist audience, or even plural specialist audiences, so wrapping them together into one book makes little sense. A broader audience expecting to read a book-length feminist argument will be sorely disappointed when they only find eight different writings on minuscule academic topics without general relevance. To be fair, The ninth essay on "Feminism and Democracy" is a reasonably good synopsis of the arguments I was expecting to find throughout this book. Here the author actually proceeds beyond scrutinizing other people's writings, and what do you know, the text immediately becomes interesting!