This is a long, desperately earnest book, part novel, part tract or sermon, and I do not see how it could be endured, let alone enjoyed by any man. Many women will find it insufferable, too, but it will also create in them "the shock of recognition". I was alternately bored, infuriated and gripped by it. I do not accept all of its premises, but I think I understand it, and some of the experiences from which it has sprung. (Though "sprung" is scarcely the word, suggesting as it does swiftness and ease: The Women's Room is altogether more tormented and ponderous.)
It is a feminist document, bathed in the blood, sweat, and tears of the suffering of women at the hands of men. It boils and spits with rage, oozes self-pity, and yet is curiously touching in its commitment, and a frantic desire to get to grips with everything - philosophy, history, society justice, art, politics, race, sex; so much effort and thought, so many words, cannot help but be disarming.
It is about Mira, whose early life is familiar in American fiction; her struggle to escape from claustrophobically respectable, narrow-minded parents; her unusual intelligence and precocious reading matters, the blunders with boys before capitulation to marriage with normal Norm medical student and, naturally, male chauvinist pig.
Motherhood follows, poverty and grinding hard work, before a move to the more affluent suburb among similarly placed young marrieds. Divorce leads into section two and Mira's career as a mature English student at Harvard, where she joins a group of founder-Women's Liberationists, a noisily articulate, opinionated clique, who cook French, drink wine, wear flowing ethnic garments and are smugly pleased with themselves.
The earlier section is presumably designed as fuel to stoke the later dialectic fire; it is also better written and far more interesting, presenting a deadly, minutely detailed picture of American suburban life - womanhood, wedlock, social mores, in the 1950s, and early Sixties. These women with whose lives Mira's is interwoven are admirable and credible, though they are also stupid, acquisitive, vain. They endure husbands universally crass, clumsy, insensitive, selfish, lazy and brutal and several of them go mad, alcoholic, suicidal.
When Mira reaches Harvard, the book's tone rises to a sustained wail of self-pity and fictional scenes are interspersed with pages of harangue or introspective analysis. I warmed to the housewives, who brought their miseries upon themselves, yet could never have avoided them, given the sexual imbalance of their society. The university women alienated me even as I recognized their strident, campus tones. And alas, one's quest for the risible is rewarded in direct proportion to the humourlessness of the book, until the glorious moment when Mira leaves a personal relationship problem to return "to the joyful abandon of the seventeenth century sermon".
The trouble is that there is truth here, and deep feeling, passionate conviction. You cannot win, Mira discovers, cannot combine love and self-respect, marriage, maternity and serious intellectual work, domestic chores and the study of literature, womanly grace and worldly success. But from her particular experience, the novel attempts to derive a universal law. It won't do.
.lcMany women regard Marilyn French's book as a brilliant description of male injustice and oppression. But the woman who wrote this review is clearly not one of them.
