BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Recognize Rage, Live Happily Ever After? : FEMALE RAGE <i> by Mary Valentis and Anne Devane</i> ; Crown $22, 262 pages

There is an Orthodox Jewish prayer in which a man thanks God for not having made him a woman, but I don’t think that’s the whole text. It’s not that men don’t want to be women--it’s that they’re grateful for all the time they don’t have to spend reading self-help books.

Perhaps that’s not the healthiest attitude, but it’s hard for those of us who dwell in the time warp of working motherhood to think about getting in touch with our rage. I feel myself a success if I get in touch with the guy who cuts my hair and with the front page of the newspaper in any given week, and I wonder: Are the women who read “Female Rage” the ones who don’t have much to be angry about in the first place?

Now I know, from the text, that rage is not the same thing as anger. I know that lots of women, many of whose stories are recounted in these pages, have every right to be off the Bobbitt meter at the hand they’ve been dealt.

But I don’t quite think that anecdote and mythology add up to a convincing argument--and a couple of times I tripped over the kind of reasoning that falls apart if you blow on it, which only made me more skeptical.

At one point the authors describe the physical ravages of repressed rage, as though someone had actually proven a physiological causal link between repression and the “worry crease” between the eyebrows. (I’ve sported one of those vertical lines for years, but I can tell you, it has nothing to do with rage. As a young woman in the Midwest, I got it into my head that sunglasses were an affectation, so I squinted for years to avoid becoming snow-blind.)

Then it’s a short hop to the point of the paragraph:

“Mary Jo Buttafuoco, who continued to support her husband, Joey, even after he was jailed for having sex with a minor, had her face disfigured for life by Amy Fisher, her husband’s teen-ager mistress.” Here comes the punch line: “Amy fixed on Mary Jo’s face the features of rage that she knew should be there.”

I’m sorry. First off, there’s the grammatical question, of whether she refers to Amy or Mary Jo. If it’s Amy, the authors are accusing her of being a fabulously accurate shot and a premeditated philosopher. If it’s Mary Jo, this is Twilight Zone analysis.

Either way, it’s a sloppy jump, one that skews the more modulated sections of the book.

I mean, all the stuff about Medusa is quite interesting; maybe she’s not all that hideous, but in fact a powerful, challenging creature who was done in by yet another posturing male. The authors work hard to make sure we have a new perspective on, and respect for, rage.

It’s kind of like finding out that Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters were in fact the souls of charity and goodness until they had a bad experience with either a) their dad, b) their stepdad, or c) the boy down the block.

I don’t mean to be facetious. OK, in part I do. Mary Valentis and Anne Devane are hard-working academics who clearly believe that they’ve unlocked some fundamental truths that will, in turn, liberate those women who are closeted in intolerable situations.

Perhaps for those women, rage is, in fact, the key, and perhaps popularizing a concept like this is our best hope for helping them find a way out.

But the snippet approach--bits and pieces of various women’s lives lined up to support sections of the authors’ thesis--is finally frustrating, and blaming. If women get in touch with their rage, they’ll be able, the authors say, to walk away from dysfunctional marriages and the like.

I can’t help but wonder: Where are the books, or the laws, or the helpful friends and relatives to get the people who are making these women’s lives such hell to start shaping up?