The Type E woman.

• Author: Fields, Suzanne

The Type E Woman.

Harriet B. Braiker, Ph.D. Dodd, Mead, $16.95. Enough is Enough. Carol Orsborn. Putnam, $15.95. Harriet Braiker and Carol Orsborn are two feminists who have worn themselves out trying to make it in a man's world the man's way. Braiker, a social and clinical psychologist, analyzes the "Type E' woman who needs to learn how to stop being Everything to Everybody. Orsborn, founder of Super-women Anonymous, tells how being everything to everybody brought her to write what she says is the smart woman's theme song of the Eighties: Enough is Enough.

Braiker has a catchy idea, suggesting that the "Type E' woman runs risks similar to those of the "Type A' man. Such a comparison is clever but unsubstantiated. The "Type A' man emerged from a formal study of healthy men who revealed behavioral traits that showed them to be prone to heart disease. The "Type E' woman emerges from the author's informal research as she draws on her own personal experiences and those of other women she has interviewed.

The Type E Woman is pop psychology, but it rings distant bells of intuitive truth. Braiker draws a disturbing portrait of a woman who imitates the "Type A' male behavior, and who makes double trouble for herself when she adds to that agenda all the traditional female attitudes about what makes a good daughter, wife, and mother.

Braiker tells how the "Type E' woman, by taking on too much, becomes vulnerable to a constellation of mental and physical problems, as well as internalized, unresolvable emotional conflicts.

In her love life she is trapped by an inability to exhibit any kind of dependency on anyone else. She treats her boyfriend, lover, or husband like her job, and is especially vulnerable to the kind of man who will tell her "how "refreshing' it is to find a woman who can really take care of herself.' She feels expressing needs that smack even remotely of dependency will result in painful rejection or reproach. But there's a Catch-22 here: the man who finds her so "refreshing' is likely to leave her eventually for a less refreshing woman who needs him more.

"Type E' women are bombarded by stress, she says, and have begun to suffer from an increasing number of ailments that busy, successful...