SOURCE: A review of Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope, in Maclean's, Vol. 103, No. 15, April 9, 1990, p. 71.

In the following review, Jackson offers a positive assessment of Soviet Women.

In her riveting portrait of Soviet women, Francine du Plessix Gray combines loving knowledge of her subject—she was raised in Paris by Russian women—with an American novelist's gleeful sense of irony. And the ironies abound in Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope, a candid depiction of post-glasnost females—superwomen of a sort never imagined by Western feminism. To begin with, feminism does not yet exist in the Soviet Union (although high fashion does). In its place is a strong matriarchal tradition expressed by the Russian proverb “Woman can do everything; men can do the rest.”

According to du Plessix Gray, since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, women have done everything: 92 per cent of women work at jobs while also logging 40 extra...