Neither The Feminine Mystique nor The Second Sex sits on my bookshelf. I have never watched an episode of Xena the Warrior Princess. I am not a card holding member of NOW. Nor do I have a bumper sticker on my car that says "God is coming and she is pissed." I shave my armpits regularly and even watch pretty-boy football on occasion. Quite honestly, I delight in the company of men. So please do not take this as a bout of self-righteousness when I say that after reading "The Chrysanthemums" I have come to this conclusion: Steinbeck should not write women. He doesn't seem able to escape stereotypes and his own misogynist streak to see women as anything more than absolutes. Think about it. We have Ma Joad as the great Earth mother, the pillar of strength, the glue that holds her family together against poverty and social injustice. And Curly's wife weighs in as the bad seed, the juicy tart, the selfish beauty in red feather mules that brings destruction and ruin to the dreams of the men she meets-a sausage curled Medusa who turns herself and pathetic Lenny into stone. She is such a stereotype that she doesn't need a name of her own. Then there's the ambitious and unscrupulous Kate who beds brothers, produces and abandons sons, becomes a morphine addicted madam, and shatters her own son's delusions of fundamental decency when she is exposed to the light like a great arthritic spider. Now it's Elisa Allen; barren and frustrated, she wants to prove that she is just as strong, just as able as any man. Steinbeck makes her into another kind of prostitute: the married woman who uses (and refuses to use) her sexuality. His unsympathetic characterization of this sterile, self-centered woman repeats this pattern of over-simplicity. Women are not only grand matriarchs or manipulative bitches. But again, in "The Chrysanthemums," he has painted Elisa as that other kind of wo...