There’s nothing subtle about The Women’s Room. It’s a book I reread for the 1977 Club, and I was curious about whether it would affect me the way it did the first time, years ago.
It is the story of Mira and her awakening consciousness of the role of gender in our society. In its time, the novel was an important feminist work that profoundly affected the thinking of many women and perhaps some men. I remember vividly watching the movie on TV with a male coworker. He was astounded at the examples of sexism but even more astounded because I kept saying “That’s happened to me,” pretty much for every example.
French uses the vehicle of the novel to tell the stories of many women. First, it focuses on Mira’s suburbanite girlfriends when she is a young wife and mother in the 1950’s. Without fail, they are all treated poorly by their husbands. She prides herself on being the perfect wife and mother even though she finds life unfulfilling, but that doesn’t save her from a divorce when she is in her late 30’s.
The bulk of the novel focuses on the women she befriends as a graduate student at Harvard. These women are awakening to paternalism in our society. Still, they, too, are all betrayed in some way by their husbands or boyfriends.
I’m struggling now to express my many thoughts with some kind of coherency. One is about the crudeness of it all. First, I was struck by some of the things the men said to their wives in the early portions of the novel and by how the wives accepted this kind of stuff without being outraged. I’m talking about terrible name calling and reducing everything to sex. These women were more my mother’s age than mine, so I have no way of telling whether these scenes were exaggerated.
But overall, I feel that French makes a lot of generalizations and stereotypes men as badly as the men stereotype the women in her novel. I was always confused in the 70’s by some men who seemed to equate feminism with man-hating, but rereading this novel, I can see where that idea comes from.
Finally, it is just plain crude. I understand that women were taking pride in being able to discuss sex and use words that were only allowed to men before, but the language really grated on me. Moreover, there is free use of ethnic slurs. Maybe we’re supposed to know that they are used ironically, but there’s no overt indication that this is the case.
I think The Women’s Room is important as a historical document but not as literature. There are, for example, many places where the story is interrupted by little polemics by a narrator who is unnamed until the end of the novel (although it’s not too difficult to figure out who she is). I found these interruptions, where the narrator has to overtly draw conclusions about the events, irritating and unsubtle, as if French thinks her readers are too stupid to come to the right conclusions. Same with many of the discussions between her characters, although that’s a better way to handle the subjects.
Although my memory of my first reading of this book, when I was in my 20’s, was that I was struck by how much of it mirrored some of my experience, I do remember that French wrote another book, which I also read. And I remember thinking, oh, more of the same stuff, and putting it aside.
whatmeread 
I only first read this book in 2010. My feelings were mixed too. Some times it felt perhaps overly strident but at others spot on in its criticism.
I also remember thinking, to use that old ad tag line “You’ve come a long way baby” . However, I also recall thinking that in some situations there had hardly been any change at all in the intervening generations.
That’s very true. In some ways we haven’t come very far. I didn’t comment on it, but I also thought it wasn’t that well written. Of course, the little speeches didn’t help.
Very interesting review – I wanted to read this myself but my Middle Child has my copy…. I wonder what she will think of it as a young feminist. We probably were much more strident and less sophisticated about our feminism in those days, but then I think if it was the first time we were getting really angry about the issues that might have something to do with it.
Possibly. I was in college at the same time as those characters, and I don’t remember, for example, language like that or even the anger. I would be interested to see what you think about it. Maybe my memory is faulty.
I’ve just read two reviews of this, and they’re so different that I’m really intrigued to track it down!!
Oh, I’ll have to read the other one!
It almost sounds like she’s trying to use shock value – maybe to incite interest in her book, or to get people talking about it?
Maybe so.