By Tracy Sorensen
Marilyn French's well-loved novel The Women's Room was a physically big book, its chunky paperback format inclined to fan out badly after it had been passed around a few times. Its physical bulk was matched by its impact: "This book changes lives", the publishers proclaimed on covers of later editions.
Perhaps its special place in the feminist literature of the mid- '70s had to do with its attention to the "small" things so long trivialised in a sexist culture.
Like British author Fay Weldon, French was not afraid to go "down among the women", to the problems of keeping windows clean and husbands pleased. By tracing the intimate details of her heroine's route out of suburbia and into mature-age entry into university, she encouraged thousands of women to dare to do the same.
At 229 pages, The war against women (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, 1992) is a much smaller book, but its intentions are enormous. Its field of inquiry is anything and everything to do with the oppression of women since time began — an ambitious project, to say the least.
French starts with a look at the status of women in egalitarian prehistoric societies, dashes through an account of our Fall, ranges over genital mutilation, Chinese foot-binding, the battering of wives by husbands and the dehumanising language of nuclear militarists before skidding to a halt with a final section (just a few pages) on women fighting back.
If it's done well, or if you are among the first to do it, taking the really big view can be exhilarating and ground-breaking. Unfortunately, neither applies to French's book.
Most of what she says in The War Against Women has already been said more engagingly elsewhere. French's headlong race through everything that was ever terrible makes depressing reading, without the insight and eccentricities to be found in a writer like Germaine Greer.
Politically, French's analysis often falls into the same orbit as Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly, to whom she refers. It's the sort of politics which, despite exit-clauses insisting on the social construction of gender, seems too ready to blame the problems of the world on "men", at the expense of looking at what stands behind individual men, the systems moulding their behaviour.
In a passage about rape, for example, she uncritically quotes a writer who claimed: "No man ever died of an erection — though many women have". It's hard to see how an erection could kill anyone: clearly, the killing is done by something else — the use of physical violence. Inconsistently, French argues against sociobiological explanations for male behaviour earlier in the book.
As a "big" book, an impassioned and original case for feminism, which is how The War Against Women presents itself, French's latest project doesn't come up to scratch. Fans who buy it for old times' sake will be adding a rather average book to their shelves.