SOURCE: Review of Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals, by Marilyn French. Publishers Weekly 227, no. 18 (3 May 1985): 58.

In the following review, the critic praises French's central argument in Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals but notes that the book is “overlong” and presents “a great deal of repetition.”

In her bold, imaginative attempt to change the way we view our culture, the author of The Women's Room synthesizes an enormous amount of material from such diverse fields as anthropology, history, sociology, linguistics and science [in Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals]. The philosophical basis of all contemporary societies, French argues, is a patriarchal world view whose highest value is power: the domination of nature, which includes the subjection of women, nonwhites and the poorer classes as “inferior”; the belief in a permanent, unchanging, perfect order that somehow transcends the physical world. These values, she maintains, create...