SOURCE: Gallagher, Maggie. “Party Girl.” National Review (29 November 1993): 66–67.

In the following review, Gallagher offers an unfavorable assessment of Fire with Fire.

Feminism has come to a peculiar pass: Feminist ideas are everywhere; feminists, however, are hard to find. How did this happen?

That is the question Naomi Wolf—whose first book, The Beauty Myth, was a national best-seller—takes up in Fire with Fire, a feminist's critique of feminism. This is what she has come up with: Why did feminism fail? Because it isn't any fun. Holding her first large royalty check in hand, Miss Wolf has had an epiphany: Money is good! Power is good! Success is good! Why doesn't feminism, she asks, drop its “trouble talk” and concentrate on the good stuff?

Miss Wolf offers one of the most cogent and penetrating descriptions of why movement feminism is so profoundly unattractive, including: “hangover habits of the...