A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Correspondent Jeanne McDowell found Sex Researcher Shere Hite settled serenely on a satiny love seat in Hite's rococo Manhattan apartment. Instead of the antimale polemicist that McDowell had been warned about, she discovered a soft-spoken woman with a passion for classical music and antique clothes. "Walk into her house, and you feel as if you have entered another, gentler era," says McDowell. "And yet there she is, at the center of a storm about some of the most contentious issues of our time."

Women and Love, Hite's latest salvo in the battle of the sexes -- and the subject of this week's cover story -- sparked some skirmishes in the corridors of TIME. Many staff members who worked on the story were moved to conduct personal surveys on the state of male-female relationships. "It felt more like a national group-therapy session than a workweek," says Chicago Correspondent Elizabeth Taylor. Hite's basic conclusion, that women are profoundly dissatisfied in their dealings with men, was hotly debated. "Some people say her questions are rigged," notes Reporter-Researcher Jeannie Park. "But you can't deny the impact that her books have had." Though some staff members took issue with Hite's methodology and analysis, they sympathized with the women she quoted. "The voices in the book are telling us something," says McDowell. "Two decades after the women's movement began, communication between the sexes remains an issue."

Not for everyone, perhaps. Associate Editor Claudia Wallis, whose husband Hugh Osborn cared for their year-old son while Wallis spent long nights at the office writing the story, was unconvinced by Hite's book. "I don't believe the world is as bleak for women as she says," Wallis observes. Associate Editor Martha Smilgis agrees. "I am surprised at how fast some men are changing to meet the new demands of working women." That sentiment was echoed by New York Correspondent Wayne Svoboda, who found the male experts he interviewed virtually (and, cynics might say, predictably) unanimous in their objection to Hite's indictment of masculine behavior. "The book makes men sound like smugly apathetic brutes who don't care about depriving women of emotional sustenance," he says. All of which confirms what Hite learned long ago: if you make people angry, they will listen. And, of course, read.