The year my wife and I moved in together, for Christmas I bought her a pistol. It was her Beretta 92 EL, which we’ve dubbed “Beauty” for obvious reasons.Â
In subsequent years, I bought her jewelry. It didn’t take long for her to make it clear that anything so personal as jewelry needed to be selected by her, not by me. And really, the same should have applied to the gun, because the standard Beretta double-column grip is just a little too big for her to execute a smooth double-action first shot without shifting her grip for the follow-up shots.
Well, I had a solution for that problem: the single-stack Compact version of the Beretta 92, the “Type M.” A single column of 9mm is pretty darn slim, and makes for a much smaller grip. (Click to embiggen — if you look close, you can see Lincoln in the memorial!)
 
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For someone with smaller hands, this pistol is great! And yes, I know there are .45s out there that are almost as thin, but 9’s fine with us. The gun fits her hands much more comfortably, and she doesn’t have to shift her grip whether firing double-action or single-action. And as you can see, it’s not a whole lot bigger than my 9mm J-frame snubby.
  
All in all, it’s one of the best gun purchases I’ve ever made. They’re hard to find; if you run across one, check it out — you might like it a lot!
The perfect 9mm for a small hand is the Kel-Tec P-11. It does have a double-stack maggy, but is still so slim a grip that I have not found a woman who can’t grip it properly. It holds 10 rounds in the mag (CA-legal), is the simplest pistol to take down you will ever own, and is quite accurate well beyond pistol distance. I can hit a “duck” silhouette at 25 yards with almost every shot, and the “hog” silhouette at 50 most of the time.
I shoot NATO ammo in mine, as the only knock on the Kel-Tec is that it doesn’t like HP with a wide opening (Federal Classic works fine, though).
A decent example can be found on the net for under $250, and they are only $300 or so new.
That’s not bad — the Beretta Type M was about $450 for me out the door. I really like the Kel-Tec .223 rifle, and everybody seems to sing the praises of their little .380.
…aaand of course, after checking the California DOJ Roster of Handguns Which May Lawfully Be Sold In Kali, there are NO handguns by Kel-Tec on the list! Seems that they don’t have the little key lock that our Legislature has deemed necessary in order for a handgun to be “safe” — and of course the only handguns that may be sold here are “safe” guns. Aaaaargh!!!