BOOKS
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has come into bad odor, there may be some point in assimilating in–
equality to poverty. (The sheer awfulness of the Reagan administra–
tion is that it turns its back even on absolute deprivation; having
identified the "truly needy" it proceeds to impoverish them further.)
Sen's concern about the numerical measurement or aggrega–
tion of poverty is also more than abstract. The simplest and most
commonly .used numerical indicator of the extent of poverty is a
head count; one draws a "poverty line" somewhere and counts the
proportion of the population below it. As a measure, it is what it is .
But notice that it is completely insensitive to the extent of poverty, in
the sense that it would read the same whether everyone were a nickel
below the poverty line or far below it; it is completely insensitive to
the range of poverty, in the sense that taking a dollar from the
poorest of the poor and giving it to someone only two dollars below
the poverty line would not change the poverty count. The "poverty
gap," the total amount of income it would take to bring everyone up
to the poverty line, takes care of the first of these defects, but not the
second.
The connection of all this to Sen's main argument is that the in–
cidence of famine tends to be far from uniform, even among the
poor. Maybe the Lord giveth, and maybe the Lord taketh away. But
from whom, asks Professor Sen, and is it the Lord that decides?
ROBERT M. SOLOW
POLITICAL WOMAN
PUBLIC MAN, PRIVATE WOMAN:
WOMEN IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT.
By Jean Bethke Eishtain.
Princeton University Press. $25.00.
Until the "revolution" of the sixties, most political theorists
considered the role of women only as a side issue, and if they de–
voted more than a few pages to the topic of women, it was primarily
to define their role in relation to men. InJean Elshtain's opinion, the
principal result of their theorizing was to confine women exclusively
to the private aspects of existence. But rather than abolish the family
