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No guy is going to read a chick book review with a title like this. So while the men are off reading other pages, we can talk. What we're supposed to be talking about is Women Designers in the USA, edited by Pat Kirkham, a professor at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, and published for Bard by Yale University Press to accompany the New York school's recent exhibition on women designers in the United States.

But first let's digress: when you women designers started your careers, you had a lot of girlish notions, right? First you thought you'd find a sage mentor who would respect your creative mind, or at least not try to date it, and show you the ropes. (You dated.) Next you believed that if you worked diligently--selflessly--your devotion would be rewarded and your talent discovered, by virtue of its pure and sparkling merit. (You remained obscure.) Then you decided that nurturing spouse, kids, and home would deepen your work. (You got more obscure.) When your work and womanhood finally became deep and confident, your children tall, you expected to reach that serene plateau called "fulfillment." And--whammo!--that's when your husband divorced you, your parents died, and/or your kids ran away from home, due to your workaholic neglect.

The point? There are always biological issues, regardless of your work history. The difference for women is that they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. Having a family hampers career; not having a family hampers life. And the advent of "having it all," so nice while it lasted, turned out to be an evil hoax, or at least an illusion. What is real, however, is choice. With more choices and fewer stigmas, women are free to design their own lives more creatively than ever before.

What about designing a book premise? Assembling a history of women in a man's profession--a whole century of them in a large nation--promised damnation from the start. There were tough choices to be made, with two possible approaches--one hot, the other cold. The hot approach would have put the topic right on the table and said: "Talented women have always been a whole helluva lot different than talented men, but here's how they managed to sleep (husband-and-wife collaborations, for example), schmooze, luck, buy, and labor their way onto a man's turf--the marketplace. This is how they designed their livelihoods--and their lives--in the days when they had no templates for success."

That editorial approach would have bared the love, lust, jealousy, fear, sex, and all the other issues involved when teachers, bosses, spouses, offspring, and clients fuel or crush the talents of women trying to reach that lofty, uppity goal: creative fulfillment (plus a living wage--and a life). What a drama. Alas, this book takes the opposite approach. Reading it feels like touring a pantheon, all marble and cold, lined with the busts of obscure heroes who did honorable things that no longer matter. With 462 pages of coated stock, the tome is too heavy to hold and too importantly comprehensive--in that relentless march-of-history style--to actually enjoy. Except for snippets of feminist wording, there is something very mannish about the result: encyclopedic, diligent, hyperprofessional, aimed for posterity--but also austere and impersonal.

The very first, steely sentence of the prologue, written by Eileen Boris, a professor of Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia, reads: "American women entered the twentieth century as unpaid family laborers constrained in their sexual expression and subject to legal and political disabilities." (What a downer--and with 426 pages to go.) Boris continues: "American women left the century with a vastly expanded public presence, but most still retained responsibility for home and children." Funny the way those pesky children keep hanging around their moms in this new, improved century. Can't those kids see their mothers are busy expanding their public presence?

If that is what this book is for--public-presence expansion--then it's a great success by virtue of heft alone. Even without luring readers inside, the tome works as a commemorative monument--standing tall in bookstores or lying supine in living rooms and offices--by announcing, with its title alone, that plenty of American women designers have existed over time (thank you very much). Enough of them to fill up a book--and hardcover, too! Or it can work as a talisman, a parental gift to a Parsons student upon her graduation.

But beyond its ceremonial value, it's hard to figure out how to interact with the book. Sometimes it feels like a receiving line filled with fleeting names one will never encounter again; other times it feels like a cocktail party where guests flit from one short bio to another (name, company, alma mater). Occasionally the text falls into college seminar jargon. Mostly the tone remains dutiful, with occasional lapses into the peppier prose of press releases. Not until the last chapter--where Ellen Lupton, the book's designer (along with Patrick Seymour), writes so engagingly about graphic designers--does the book warm up enough to explain how design mixes with culture, politics, and the longings of women.

From the start Women Designers in the USA begs the question: What exactly do we mean by "designers"? Thinkers or makers? Innovators or traditionalists? Artists or crafters? Professionals or amateurs? Whitebread or ethnic? The book's answer is everybody. You know...diversity. Another question left vague is context. Who were these designers working for? Big business, small business, home, church? And what was their motivation? Money, power, love, boredom? Once again the book's answer is all of the above. Why is all this friendly inclusiveness irritating? Including so many categories means there's no room to tell the reader what the different standards or the stakes were, or how women designers complied or resisted. If we are talking about the rigors of a real marketplace--with money and clients--then eliminate those Amish quilt-makers, or explain, please, how a very private domestic craft became a hot commodity and how commerce changed the rules.

The resulting book is an uneven collection of objects, described in small color plates, with something to annoy everyone. To err on the side of the academic, the book devotes a lot of space to double-whammy minorities, Native and African-American women. OK, fine. But if persecution is the criterion, let's hear less PC puff and more about the real cultural clashes and hardships of working outside two mainstreams. Otherwise, isn't it a tad patronizing?

The book includes chapters on fashion, jewelry, metalwork, Hollywood costumes and productions, industrial design, furniture making, ceramics, graphic design, interiors, and landscape. Architecture has no chapter of its own. Although women architects appear briefly in their capacity as interior designers, plenty are slighted. The monastic Julia Morgan, Hearst's Michelangelo, gets one sentence. Laurinda Spear, a gifted, 50-ish architect--product designer with a spousal partner, six kids, several global offices, and no grudges, gets name only. Liz Plater-Zyberk, the brilliant architect--town planner and antisprawl activist, gets nothing at all.

Quibbling aside, it's certainly better to have a big book called Women Designers out there than no book at all. But here's my beef: For a hundred years women designers have been trying very hard to think, act, and design like men. Isn't it time for women to redesign design? To advance past man's obsession with shaping objects and invent new ways of shaping life. Not gears, utensils, widgets, and tools, but patterns, rituals, perspectives, celebrations, and, yes, relationships. Women have some awesome traits, fueled by chemistry that science has just begun to discover. Designed for child-raising, women do very well with chaos, distraction, and simultaneity. And they show remarkable stamina and patience under duress. Women tend to ask questions that need complex answers. So instead of wondering how to do a kickier skyscraper, a woman might wonder how to conceive a better workplace. Instead of perfecting the undetectability of Stealth bombers, women might be more interested in inventing modes of diplomacy that avert warfare rather than wage it with style. Instead of having their work photographed without a living soul in sight, women might invite real people into the frame--because that's who the work is usually for. Certainly work and war need all sorts of tools, and women are perfectly qualified to conceive, draw, and produce them--but they're also supremely qualified to fulfill job descriptions that remain unwritten.

Notice how things have been moving faster lately, and how that speed demands that everyone move with more creative agility, more conceptual zip? The twenty-first century may look like chaos to a lot of guys out there, but it sure looks like a design opportunity from my seat. After all, women have been copying the steps, while dancing backwards in high heels, for a long time. Now it's time to choreograph the steps.