It's an unhappy fact of life and of prose that ideology tends to coarsen, and sometimes to fossilize, the moral imagination; it leaves little room for nuance or for play. In the writing of some (though by no means all) feminist theorists, insight becomes a bludgeoning rod instead of lightning flash; and the greatest danger for the ideologue who is also political activist is not that she will become corrupt, but that she will bore her readers into disaffection….

It is vexing to be told (as we are, again and again, in [On Lies, Secrets, and Silence]) that we must "frame our own questions on this as on every other issue." (What are "our own questions"?) It's particularly vexing in the context of abortion, when battle-trench mentality seems to suggest to Ms. Rich that all philosophical inquiry is inappropriate (or "male-defined") because all questions are "manmade."

It's interesting, this about questions. In an introductory note to an essay about Anne Bradstreet, Rich says certain questions were "unavailable" to her when she wrote about the early American poet in 1966 "partly because of the silence surrounding the lives of women." Rich wishes she had asked, "What has been the woman poet's relationship to nature, in a land where both women and nature have, from the first, been raped and exploited?" I think we can agree that there was, in 1966, a silence surrounding the lives of women; and I suppose I could be persuaded that the question Ms. Rich raises in 1979 is a good one. But I don't know why she denigrates the questions she asked in 1966; the problems she then thought Bradstreet's life posed seem to me no less—and possibly more—compelling…. I like this essay. It is nice, precise. I'm rather glad, in fact, that Rich wrote it in 1966 and not in 1979, when her questions, I think, tend to become parochial….

Having charged men with attributing universal importance to their concerns, and only tangential importance to the concerns of women, feminists of Ms. Rich's ilk now contend that only women's concerns are of universal importance … assigning to themselves the right, of course, to define "women's concerns." This implied reactionary separatism leads inevitably to the conclusion that there are no truly universal concerns, in which case, pity us all! (p. 35)

I am bored to read again that "both middle-class marriage and factory work enslaved women"—bored because to say that is to tell only part of a complex truth, and part, also, of a terrible lie…. It is boring to read casual references to matriarchal societies, "gynocentric" or "gynocratic" societies, when there is little real evidence that such societies ever existed, claims for them appearing to rest more on desire than on scholarship….

Which brings me to that paper word patriarchy…. The word eradicates real differences and distinctions; it is the enemy of nuance…. What does one do with the fact that the same "patriarchists" who inveigh against abortion fight—as hard as Ms. Rich does—against pornography? My reading of Ms. Rich's book does not even tell me whether I may assume there is any qualitative differences between my son—poised on the brink of adulthood, scared, brave, kind, uncertain—and Idi Amin.

There are good things to be said about this book …: an acute, unmuddled, aphoristic essay on Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying; a long lovely passage about Emily Dickinson that evoked, as has nothing else I have ever read, the poet of the "intense inner event" working in her "white-curtained, high-ceilinged room." This essay reminded me that Ms. Rich was/is a poet—but, alas, Rich's eccentric reading of Dickinson's poems … reminded me that Rich is, unhappily, also a polemicist, her respect and love for the written word betrayed by her ideology. (p. 36)