The War Against Women

How well I remember reading Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room. It had an enormous impact on my life in ways I'm still measuring, more than 30 years later. The one phrase in the book that has stayed with me all these years is "shit and string beans." Any woman who has read The Women's Room will know exactly what that means - and why it resonated then and continues to resonate today. Today girls are told that if they get the same education as men, they will earn the same money as men; that they are as good as men; that they can do anything a man can do, barring certain physical limitations. The fact remains that even with an identical four-year college degree, a woman earns 89 cents to a man's dollar. That's better than when I started college in 1975, when it was 74 cents to a dollar. But it's not equal. Why not? Ah, that's the rub. So - now I've got yet more to pile on to my list of books to read, for today I discovered that Marilyn French has written a series on the history (perhaps I should use herstory) of women. They sound absolutely fascinating. Here's the book review I came across at The New York Review of Books. Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009 The War Against Women By Hilary Mantel From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume I: Origins by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 352 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume II: The Masculine Mystique by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 477 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume III: Infernos and Paradises, the Triumph of Capitalism in the 19th Century by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 385 pp., $19.95 (paper) From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume IV: Revolutions and the Struggles for Justice in the 20th Century by Marilyn French, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood Feminist Press, 608 pp., $19.95 (paper)