SOURCE: Benn, Melissa. “The Big Girls.” New Statesman & Society (26 November 1993): 39.

In the following review, Benn argues that Fire with Fire oversimplifies women's liberation and the complexities of social reality.

Absurdly over-hyped, Fire with Fire is the latest in a long line of high-energy, sweeping tomes by American feminists that everyone tells us overshadow our sour, small-minded, home-grown variety. But massive publicity of both book and author will ensure that they get out to millions of women looking hungrily (or lazily) for the text of their age. For that reason alone, it is important.

It is certainly the first feminist book of the Clinton era. Unashamedly, it welds the optimism of a new liberal consensus with what was learned from the dark 1980s: marketability, pragmatism and a fine-tuned sense of individual initiative, to be deployed on behalf of the unfortunate parts of the collective.

Women, says Wolf, are at...