It's an unhappy fact of life and of prose that ideology tends to coarsen, and sometimes to fossilize, the moral imagination; it leaves little room for nuance or for play. In the writing of some (though by no means all) feminist theorists, insight becomes a bludgeoning rod instead of lightning flash; and the greatest danger for the ideologue who is also political activist is not that she will become corrupt, but that she will bore her readers into disaffection….

It is vexing to be told (as we are, again and again, in [On Lies, Secrets, and Silence]) that we must "frame our own questions on this as on every other issue." (What are "our own questions"?) It's particularly vexing in the context of abortion, when battle-trench mentality seems to suggest to Ms. Rich that all philosophical inquiry is inappropriate (or "male-defined") because all questions are "manmade."

It's interesting...