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: Althouse

"My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world."

Marilyn French. RIP.

Did you read "The Women's Room"?

Her first and best-known novel, ?The Women?s Room,? released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife?s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages....

?It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,? [said Gloria Steinem.] ?It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.?...

Critics accused her work of being anti-male, frequently citing a female character in ?The Women?s Room? who declares, after her daughter has been raped: ?All men are rapists, and that?s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.?

I didn't read this book, though I read a lot of books in 1977 (the year before I went to law school). I never read novels that weren't considered literary, and I shunned the mixture of art and politics. Nor could I identify with the troubles of submissive housewives and journeys of self-discovery following divorces. I might have read some nonfiction on the subject, but I didn't need an easy-reading novel to get me inside the feeling of a situation that didn't apply to me anyway.

Full post as published by Althouse on May 04, 2009 (boomark / email).