K. argues (i) that Dubois and Crouch's (1975: 'The question of tag questions in women's speechs') criticism of R. Lakoff (1973: 'Language and woman's place') is misguided and (ii) that Lakoff's analysis of English tags such as 'The war in Vietnam is terrible, isn't it?' is a useful frame of reference in terms of which the source of femininity commonly associated with the Japanese sentence particle 'wa' may be explicated in a principled way.