Isn't there conflict and psychological warfare in any social justice movement or workplace?

I think it gets worse when it's women only. Men are happy in a middle-distance ground toward all others. They don't take anything too personally, and they don't have to get right into your face, into your business, into your life. Women need to do that. Women, the minute they meet another woman, it's: she's going to be my fairy godmother, my best friend, the mother I never had. And when that's not the case we say, ''well, she's the evil stepmother.''

We don't serve ourselves so well with our depth-charged levels of capacity for intimacy because then we can only be close to a small group. We can't command a nation-state.

Isn't that just an extension of arguments that have created glass-ceilings in workplaces?

No. I think the conclusion is not that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant and at home because they have no executive capacity. The conclusion is that there is something about the workplace that is deadly to all living things and men adapt more.

I do have a chapter that says if you have a situation that is male-dominated with a few token women, women will not like each other, they will be particularly vicious in how they compete and keep other women down and out. We can't say how women as a group would behave if overnight they had all the positions that men now have.

The cruelty you document ranges from mothers-in-law burning their daughters-in-law because of dowry disagreements to women stealing each other's boyfriends. Can it all really be lumped together?

It helps to understand that in these non-Western countries where you have mothers-in-law dousing daughters-in-law with kerosene for their dowries and we say ''how shocking,'' we have a version here. You have here mothers who think their daughters have to be thin, their daughters have to be pretty and their daughters need to have plastic surgery and their daughters have to focus mainly on the outward appearance and not on inner strength or inner self. It's not genital mutilation but it's ultimately a concern with outward appearance for the sake of marriageability.

Although you note that women don't have as much power as men, you view them as equally culpable for many of society's ills.