The Power of the Purse.

Remember the concept of ''sisterhood''? That quaint relic of an idea that women owed it to other women to crash through ceilings and navigate a male world? It just might be taking new root in a most unexpected place -- among women with money. There are more women controlling more wealth in the U.S. than ever before. (Of those in the wealthiest tier of the country -- defined by the I.R.S. as individuals with assets of at least $1.5 million -- 43 percent are women.) And unlike the women who preceded them -- old-school patrons who gave to the museum and the symphony and their dead husbands' alma maters -- these givers are more likely to use their wealth deliberately and systematically to aid women in need. To appreciate the magnitude of this change, go back 150 years or so to the women's suffrage movement. Back to when one of its leaders, Matilda Joslyn Gage, lamented: ''We have yet to hear of a woman of wealth who has left anything for the enfranchisement of her sex. Almost every daily paper heralds the fact of some large bequest to colleges, churches and charities by rich women, but it is proverbial that they never remember the woman suffrage movement that underlies in importance all others.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]