In Je, Tu, Nous Luce Irigaray offers the clearest available introduction to her own work. This series of short essays on language, power, women, gender, and patriarchal mythologies lays out what for her has become the central problem for women in the modern world. Language, with its seemingly impartial rules of gender and grammar, is deeply rooted in phallocractic assumptions about the world. "Prehistory, " for example, is such only because it falls outside the scope of time organized by patriarchal systems. Genealogies, rules of exchange, symbolic economies, all operate in terms that disregard the difference between men and women. The recognition of that difference - that "I" does not equal "you, " that "man" and "woman" are not simple mirror equivalents but deeply, fundamentally different - is at the center of the changes Irigaray envisions in our culture and our world. In these brief and direct pieces, Irigaray considers women's experience of motherhood, age and the beauty system, the treatment of AIDS in society, cultural ideas of love, the ways social change depends upon linguistic change, why only mothers can educate daughters, and "how women need to find their own subjectivity. Only in that recovery will women create a female identity and discover the cultural means to live in accordance with their needs, their desires, their rights and obligations. Only when there is a separate, female "I" will any woman be able to join to another, different "you" to create a plural "we."