SOURCE: “The New Avengers,” in New Statesman and Society, April 3, 1992, pp. 44-5.

In the following excerpted review-essay, Wheelwright commends Faludi's effort to put feminism back in the media spotlight, but finds shortcomings in her monolithic portrayal of feminism in Backlash.

To university students across North America, Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room was the feminist bible for the 1970s. French’s portrait of a housewife who trades a claustrophobic marriage for graduate school was confirmation that our mothers were suffering from a similar malaise. The mad/angry wife, the tortured female intellectual stuck with “shit and string beans” and the parade of selfish males became symbols of what women were fighting against. The personal had, with a vengeance, become political.

Since its publication in 1977, French’s novel has sold more than a million copies, and her reputation as a feminist scholar rests largely on this success...