SOURCE: "Defining the New Woman," in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XXIV, No. 39, September 25, 1994, p. 10.

In the following review of Reasonable Creatures, Corrigan, a literature instructor at Georgetown University, praises Pollitt's skillful definition of feminist issues and her sharp logic.

It seems an odd thing to say about a social critic so engaged with her historical moment, but Katha Pollitt is a woman seriously out of joint with her time. Pollitt is really a daughter of the Enlightenment, a fan of that 18th-century cant-buster, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Against our culture's predilection for feelgood thinking and lazy sentimentality masquerading as morality, Pollitt pits the neoclassical virtues of reason and wit. To read the 19 essays and reviews dating from 1985 to the present collected in Reasonable Creatures is to be bombarded, gloriously, by the force of Pollitt's contempt for intellectual sloppiness. For instance, in an essay entitled "Naming and Blaming: The...