Seemed to go unnoticed here. Cant imagine why.
Do you remember reading The Women's Room? Or did you just see the movie one night late cause thats when they run these kinds of movies that are important to women.
I read it as a junior in college. I remember it very clearly. Remember the "click". That feeling when it all comes together and you realize just exactly whats going on.
I had to stop reading it half way thru. It was way too close to home. Not enough qualludes in the freezer for me to make it all the way thru in one shot.
Remember when she is having sex and the moron on top of her calls her "mommy"?
That was one of those "click" moments for me.
Every time that happens to me I want to give the guy a spanking and collect $200.
The Women's Room was the first book to introduce me to the idea that sex with men is always rape, an idea I always found ridiculous, even after my own rape, even after Dworkin hijacked the feminist movement for a while.
The Women's Room really dovetailed perfectly with my reading of Surplus Powerlessness (Rabbi Michael Lerner thank you so much). This is where it all comes together for me. How a Dworkin is created. How a Mira is born. How a Val is lost. How The Women's Room comes to be written at all.
To me The Women's Room was a tiny seed. Like Silent Spring was to the environmental movement. Not the seminal work. Not the end of the story. So much more was to come. I think about The Women's Room a lot when I see the continuing battle that is going on between the dykes and the FTMs about identity and pride and male priveledge. When I see feminist identified women denounce anal bleaching, pussy shaving, BDSM, women enjoying and even making their own porn. When I saw the pie fights. When some ninny calls me "mommy" in the middle of fucking my brains out.
So long Marilyn. And thanks for making me think.
Feminist Writer Marilyn French Dies at 79
By VERENA DOBNIK
AP
NEW YORK (May 5) - Marilyn French, the writer and feminist whose novel "The Women's Room" sold more than 20 million copies and transformed her into a leading figure in the women's movement, has died at 79.
French died of heart failure Saturday at a Manhattan hospital, said Carol Jenkins, a friend and president of New York's Women's Media Center.
Her 1977 first novel, "The Women's Room," transformed the college teacher into a feminist leader whose aim was "to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world," she once said.
The landmark novel, which was translated into 20 languages, details the journey to independence of a 1950s housewife who gets divorced and goes to graduate school. The book mirrored aspects of French's own life experiences, including the rape of her daughter.
She was called anti-male after a character in the novel says: "All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes."
"Those words came from a character, and she was not a man-hater, and never said that in her personal life," Jenkins said. "But she wanted men to accept their part in the domination of women."
Still, the novel "connected with millions of women who had no way before of claiming their anger and discontent," Jenkins said.
The male subjugation of women is the main theme of French's novels, essays, literary criticism and her four-volume, nonfictional "From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women."
More here
http://www.nytimes.com/...
In particular;
Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man" had had on racial equality 25 years earlier.
"It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives," Ms. Steinem said in an interview Sunday. "It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy."