A delightful and inspiring collection of essays and reviews about the image of women -- on stage, in fashion, in painting. Hollander thinks seriously about things everyone assumes to be thoughtless. She asks, "Why?", about subjects our mothers all told us were beyond questioning. Why is it easy to imagine Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet or Mary Martin as Peter Pan, but impossible to imagine a serious production in which Dustin Hoffman is cast as Cleopatra? Why do women look good in tuxedos? Where does fashion come from?