(FORTUNE Magazine) – It's always silly to make sweeping generalizations about 2 1/2 billion people who may not have much in common beyond their anatomical features. Yet where women are concerned, authors and publishers keep trying. Market research shows that 70% of all books sold in the U.S. are read (or at least bought) by women, and that makes for a steady stream of advice, polemics, and prognostications on how women are doing, how they ought to be doing, and how they can get from here to there. Some of these books are actually worth reading, even if they're not quite what they purport to be.

Take Patricia Ireland's What Women Want (Dutton, $23.95), timed to coincide with the 30th birthday of the National Organization for Women (of which Ireland is the current president). Anybody hoping for an answer to Freud's question won't find it here; perhaps her memoir should have been titled What Pat Ireland Wants. Whether you agree with Ireland's politics or not, she is hard to dislike, especially when she recounts how she became a feminist. As a young stewardess with Pan Am in the 1960s, she discovered that male employees' families were covered by health benefits, but female employees' weren't. This was a matter of pressing concern, as her penniless student husband was in agony from impacted wisdom teeth at the time.

Politicized, Ireland led a group of fellow "stews" who forced Pan Am to change its ways. She went on to law school in 1972, when, she reminds us, the schools turned away plenty of qualified applicants simply because they were women. Moreover, she notes, day care was still seen as a communist plot back then. In vetoing a child care bill, Richard Nixon, in a message written by Pat Buchanan, called it "the Sovietization of American children.'"

Ireland writes compellingly of the years since, with inside accounts of Capitol Hill struggles, including NOW's push to get the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and the Medical Leave Act of 1993 through Congress. Contrary to the view of feminists as humorless scolds, she is funny. "Democrats and Republicans alike seem in need of basic sex education," she cracks. "They seem to think that babies come from welfare checks."

Despite enormous gains since Ireland's coffee-tea-or-me days, one new entry in the how-to-succeed category makes plain that women still have a long way to go. Women Breaking Through: Overcoming the Final 10 Obstacles at Work (Peterson's/Pacesetter Books, $22.95) is based on a survey by consultant and author Deborah J. Swiss of 300 executive women. The results are dispiriting. Why? Because the "final ten obstacles" are really just the same old hurdles. A partial list: the intractability of old boys' networks (what Swiss calls "the sanctum of the locker room"), double standards that pay and promote women differently (read less) from their male peers, and a widespread tendency not to notice women's contributions or to take them seriously.

The news isn't all bad. Almost 60% of the executives polled said that at one time or another being female had been an advantage in their careers. Says Carole St. Marks, CEO of Pitney Bowes Business Services: "You're noticed, and if you do things well, you get a lot of publicity." Ultimately, Women Breaking Through is refreshing because the author and her subjects take a gimlet-eyed view of formal affirmative-action programs. They suggest instead that women, individually and in coalitions, push harder to get what's coming to them. The question, of course, is whether many are by now too tuckered out (or fed up) to do so.

Have any daughters? Ever wonder what the world will be like when they grow up? Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey were trained at the Global Business Network, the think tank in Emeryville, California, that predicted both the 1970s oil crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union. They applied scenario planning to the question of women's fate and came up with a spellbinding book called The Futures of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century (Addison-Wesley, $24). The only certainty, the authors say, is that "the official future will not take place." In other words, a peaceable march toward full equality is, given a number of global trends today, not very likely.

Rather, the authors invite you to think in terms of a scenario they call "Backlash." Whacked by a complicated (but eerily believable) confluence of setbacks, American women lose ground to skilled immigrant men. "American engineering schools are the first stop off the jumbo jet for every Third World guy who doesn't want to drive a taxi," say the authors. But as with any scenario, what kind of future we get depends on what women do about it now.