kcwellsch@watrose.UUCP (Kenneth C. Wellsch) (01/21/84)
I highly recommend that anyone, be you man or woman, who has not read the book, "The Women's Room" by Marilyn French should do so. It paints a very negative picture for women - too negative to consume all at once possibly, since it's a compendium of almost all that can go wrong for women. This book not only condemns men but also women. Women nowadays have a tremendous power but collectively at least are reluctant to use it. Maybe if enough women read books of this nature they will stand up for their rights as individuals and not let themselves be victimized so often. A friend suggested to me that this may take another two generations. A friend gave me some advice that had come from his five year old daughter, she said "What you do is what you are". If you treat women (and men) with the proper respect and preserve their dignity, others, certainly those that matter, will see this and your influence will not be lost. That advice came from someone much older than I and may sound noble, but why shouldn't people have noble aspirations? The book is copyright 1977 and should be available in the non-fiction section of most bookstores in hard-back as well as paperback. It is a depressing book, but well worth reading. Kenneth Wellsch
toml@oliveb.UUCP (Tom Long) (08/28/85)
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