SOURCE: Scheer, Robert. “Revolution Betrayed.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (19 December 1993): 1, 8.

In the following excerpt, Scheer offers an unfavorable assessment of Fire with Fire, describing it as “a breathless, noisy and contradictory tract that substitutes overblown rhetoric for analysis.”

Are women a class with broad common interests? Does a welfare mother in Watts share a common oppression with a female executive in Beverly Hills that can be addressed by the women's movement? The unexamined assumption of both of these books [Naomi Wolf's Fire with Fire and Barbara Boxer's Strangers in the Senate] is that they do.

On the level of civil rights, both books are obviously correct: It is not difficult to postulate a common stake in equal protection of the law and freedom of opportunity. But now that the women's movement is progressing beyond an agenda centered on comparable pay, an end to harassment and busting glass...