SOURCE: A review of Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope, in Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 93–94.

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

Francine du Plessix Gray, an American novelist of partly Russian descent, investigates [in Soviet Women] a side of Soviet reality little known to most Western readers—the world of the “second sex.” Much of what she reports will come as revelation. How many Americans know, for example, that only five percent of Soviet women have access to birth-control pills or IUDs, or that the main form of birth control in the Soviet Union is abortion, or that the national average is 14 abortions per woman? In terms of sex education, one of Leningrad's few sexologists observed, “the Soviet Union is among the most backward countries in the world, somewhere on the level of Bhutan [or] Afghanistan.”

The quotidian complaints of...