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From: toml@oliveb.UUCP (Tom Long)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: "The Women's Room"
Message-ID: <577@oliveb.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Aug-85 18:16:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: oliveb.577
Posted: Tue Aug 27 18:16:19 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Aug-85 10:50:15 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
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I just finished reading "The Women's Room" by Marilyn French.  I am over-
whelmed with negative impressions about the protagonist -- and since this
is an autobiographical novel, about the author.

1.  The protagonist is a failure in life, and for a good reason.  She is
too self-centered to maintain a real friendship, much less a marriage.

2.  In her bitterness, she uses her intelligence to lash out at everyone
around her.  In the 25 years covered by the book she goes from being a
lonely, maladjusted teenager to being a lonely, maladjusted professor --
without having gained a bit of wisdom along the way.

3.  She blames men for all her problems.  I have a male friend who suffers
from the same personality defects, and his life is as unsuccessful as hers.
But he doesn't suffer from the delusion that society is a conspiracy of
males out to keep him down.

4.  She supposes when a man goes to work, everything is easy for him.  This
is nonsense;  the individual man is no more responsible for society than
the individual woman is.

5.  Women do have one option not available to most men;  they can become
housewives.  Our protagonist was happy for a while being a housewife, but
since she didn't like her husband and she didn't like housework and her
best friend (!) told the neighbor women that our protagonist was having an
affair with the husband of one of them, her happiness was pretty fragile.
So she took out her frustrations by drinking and kind of ignoring her
children.

Do women really take the ideas in a book like this one seriously?  If I
wanted to find out about the world from reading a book, I would choose an
author or protagonist who had been successful in dealing with the world.
Do happy, normal women respond differently to "The Women's Room" than I do?

							Tom Long