The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of great ferment in the feminist community. Many women had learned the ins and outs of political activism from the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement and it was widely believed that change was not only possible, but inevitable. Feminists like Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer were widely read and their pronouncements widely praised or condemned. Unprecedented numbers of feminist novels were also seeing print from such diverse writers as Eric Jong, Marge Piercy, Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and a few years later, Marilyn French, and many of these novels were very angry indeed. Walk to the End of the World is also an angry book and it would be easy to put Charnas down as a manhater, but if the novel is to be truly understood, it must...