Dear Sisters

Katha,

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I'd better begin by laying my cards on the table: I loathed this book.

Like most boomers who lived through what the editors, Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, call "second-wave feminism," that great turbulent groundswell beginning in the late '60s, I did not emerge unchanged (or unscathed) as a result of its agitation. This was a genuine revolution. The movement addressed profound issues, issues of individual consciousness as well as public policy, and anyone who, in response, failed to re-examine his or her preconceptions probably had very little consciousness in the first place.

Nevertheless, the validity of the cause doesn't automatically bestow sanctity on its champions, and its ultimate triumph doesn't redeem sloppy thought or bad writing. One of the sources of wonderment about this book is how very bad most of the writing is. Surely an anthology of feminist writing assembled some 30 years after the fact could have presented us with more persuasive examples than these.

Back when the movement was in its heyday, anyone with a mimeo machine and a grievance could produce a broadside, and I suppose one could make the case that a characteristic assemblage of such screeds, regardless of their quality, might be of historical interest. But that isn't the case made by Ms. Baxandall and Ms. Gordon. Their introductory remarks, to the book as a whole and to its individual contributions, suggest they regard these pieces as intrinsically trenchant and compelling. It's astonishing to think that, having the entirety of feminist writings at their disposal, these are the items they culled.

The practice of politics, whether radical or conventional, seems to appeal to a certain type of personality. These pieces exemplify the phenomenon all too clearly. They are consistently humorless, abstract, categorical, totalitarian in tone. They substitute dogmatic assertion for analysis. They mistake anger for judgment, cant for argument. They deny the very contradictions they raise. They read like the product of a commissariat.

I didn't recognize my own growing disgust with the book until I reached an essay that, by virtue of its shockingly, refreshingly anomalous character, almost leapt off the page, etiolating all the others. God only knows by what oversight it made the cut. "Goodbye to All That" by Robin Morgan, movement personage and former child actress, is everything the other essays are not, and once one encounters its vivid, indignant, slightly crazed vitality, everything that came before seems, retrospectively, like the collected edicts of a newly installed revolutionary government bureaucracy.

Ms. Morgan, unlike her sisters, writes personally. She's really pissed, at specific events and specific people, within the movement and at large, and her name-names and take-no-prisoners style has a passion, a ferocity, a heat that cast a lifeless pallor over the rest of the book. I'm in no position to judge the fairness of her accusations, but damn it, the woman is there, you know what she's talking about (and she's talking a blue streak), you can agree or disagree, you can yell back at her--in fact it's hard not to. And paradoxically, even though she writes with more vehemence than anyone else between these covers, the experience of reading her isn't one of being hectored or bludgeoned. Probably because she isn't presenting an inchoate package of dissatisfactions, she's telling you exactly what she's experienced and what she's seen. The effect is bracing. She's provocative rather than provoking.

The other section I found very good, radically better than what preceded and followed it, was devoted to women's health issues. Again, the specificity of these pieces, and the specific issues they address, provided them with a focus that transcends mere grievance. They are gritty, factual, concrete. Once you read them, you share the rage and you join the celebration. Not because you've been told to, but because the substance of the pieces invites it.

There is, for example, an article reviewing Obstetrics and Gynecology, a textbook in use in many contemporary medical schools. Simply by quoting the book verbatim, the author, Kay Weiss, makes a far more damning case than any litany of doctrinal complaints could possibly do. That piece might turn any thinking person, male or female, into an impassioned feminist. Similarly, there are articles about abortion, breast-feeding, pelvic self-examination, and a number of other women's health issues, and all of them are cogent, persuasive, often downright inarguable.

I suppose if I had to state my reaction to this book in a paragraph, I'd put it this way: Feminism, at its best, is a voyage of discovery, a series of questions. What is the fundamental meaning of gender? Which aspects are mere social constructs, which are biological? How different are the sexes? How similar? What is the most productive way for us to appreciate and elicit the best in each other? We don't really know the answers, even if we do know that the answers handed down to us haven't served us well. But most of the pieces in this book give us answers, flatly and dogmatically. They remind me of something Norman Thomas once said of Henry Wallace: He said Wallace was a man "so firmly in possession of the truth that facts don't matter very much." This book is so firmly in possession of the truth, so confident about knowing the unknowable that it feels justified in telling us how to think.

Am I wrong in suspecting you see it differently?

Best,
Erik

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This week, our critics pore over Dear Sisters, a scrapbook of the women's liberation movement.

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