Vagabonding: Feminist Thinking Cut Loose

Women, supposed experts in forgiveness and passivity, share complicity in men's crimes against the female sex and the earth, asserts Thurmer-Rohr. A women's studies professor in Berlin, she urges women to view ``great men in power'' as mental and moral cripples who have brought us to the brink of eco-suicide. She also counsels women to go beyond ``regressive self-dramatization,'' dependency on men and ``episodic consciousness restricted to the present.'' First published in Germany in 1987, this collection of essays includes an analysis of German females' alliance with male-defined goals under Nazism, a meditation on Chernobyl and women's repression of anger, and a debunking of New Age wishful thinking and eco-feminism. Despite their occasionally shrill tone and sometimes convoluted syntax, these provocative essays should have a liberating effect on women's (and men's) thoughts and feelings. (Aug.)