Body and Soul.

• Author: Peters, Thomas J.

Our Wildest Dreams: Women Entrepreneurs Making Money, Having Fun, Doing Good. Joline Godfrey. HarperBusiness, $20. Body and Soul. Anita Roddick. Crown, $22. In Our Wildest Dreams, entrepreneur and champion of women entrepreneurs Joline Godfrey tells us that there are as many women-owned businesses in the United States as there are people in Norway. It's one of those statistically meaningless compansons that nonetheless startles. Or at least it startled me.

The facts: There are between 4.1 and 5.4 million women-owned businesses in the United States, depending on how you do your counting (the higher figure is the most plausible). They employ as many people as the entire Fortune 500 and ring up half a trillion dollars in annual revenue. Women's businesses surged from 5 percent of all businesses in the United States in 1972 to 30 percent by 1987. Women-owned businesses are as statistically prevalent in construction and agribusiness as men-owned enterprises.

The statistics are important, but Godfrey's treatise is anything but a dry recitation of economic facts. On the contrary, half the book is devoted to case studies of women entrepreneurs-owners of trucking, marketing, construction, and computer companies and even one "upscale, fresh-flower mail order business."

Godfrey, a 10-year veteran of Polaroid before starting her own firm in 1986 (at one point she thought she could make a difference in a big corporation; "I was an idiot," she now claims), offers Wildest Dreams as an unabashed celebration of women entrepreneurs. "Women owners are still invisible," she writes; and with this book she makes them visible. Godfrey tells us that she intended to write a "gender-neutral" book but couldn't. She lost her voice, she says, and decided to write for women, though she contends (and I agree) that the book is also a useful primer for men.

In the preface, Smith and Hawken founder and author Paul Hawken flatly declares that "women's businesses are pivotal to meaningful change" in a corporate America that he sees as gone awry. Godfrey agrees. "Like water on a rock," she says, "womenowned businesses are eroding timehardened beliefs about the way business is and must be done."

In the opening chapter, titled, "The (New) Right Stuff," Godfrey begins:

I am not six feet tall. I don't wear Brooks Brothers suits. I don't own an HP calculator (although my business partner does). I cry. I laugh, a lot. I touch people. I talk about how I feel. I remember birthdays...