SOURCE: Wheelwright, Julie. “The New Avengers.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 196 (3 April 1992): 44-5.

In the following review, Wheelwright compares The War against Women with Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women.

To university students across North America, Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room was the feminist bible for the 1970s. French's portrait of a housewife who trades a claustrophobic marriage for graduate school was confirmation that our mothers were suffering from a similar malaise. The mad/angry wife, the tortured female intellectual stuck with “shit and string beans” and the parade of selfish males became symbols of what women were fighting against. The personal had, with a vengeance, become political.

Since its publication in 1977, French's novel has sold more than a million copies, and her reputation as a feminist scholar rests largely on this success. Ironically, in the same week that French hits the hustings to promote...