The Goddess and Other Women is a collection comprising 25 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Vanguard Press in 1974.

[2][3] Literary critic Marian Engel in the New York Times compares Oates favorably to the European masters of short fiction: “One or two of these stories are as good as James's and Conrad's.

None of them is conventional or commercial, the 25 of them add up to a magnificent achievement.”[4] Literary critic John Alfred Avant, writing in the The New Republic,offers this a contrary assessment of the volume: Oates at her worst.

Kali is a cruel goddess, the necklace of skulls has to be considered as a symbol of her destructiveness, and she is often depicted as feeding on the entrails of her lovers.

[10] Yet Creighton emphasizes that this destructiveness must not be overestimated and that the female characters in The Goddess and Other Women have to be regarded as complex and rather ambiguous figures:But for all her terribleness, Kali is yet looked upon not as evil but as part of nature's totality: life feeds on life; destruction is an intrinsic part of nature's procreative process.