What makes the textual image of a woman with a penis so compelling,malleable, and persistent? The phallic woman can be a ribald joke, afantastical impossibility, a masculine usurper, an ultimatelyunthreatening sexual style, an interrogation into the I of the author,or an examination of female culpability. Every Inch a Woman takes noteof a proliferation of phallic feminine figures in disparate NorthAmerican and European texts from the end of the nineteenth centuryonward.
