In The Force of Tendernes, Dorothy Avery sets out Williiam Blake's vision of the sexes, and then applies it as a template to Western theories of women and men from the beginning. She is concerned with matriarchy and patriarchy in our own earliest history and pre-history. In Homer's Odyssey and Aeschylus' Oresteia she examines how far the theories of Blake and of the anthropologists are realized there. Avery has no axe to grind in the gender wars, except the notion that the touch of tenderness opens heaven. This excellent text is a valuable, and frequently...