Call me insular or even truculent. But I've had enough of photogenic young US feminists disinventing date rape and rediscovering the tyranny of body image. So it's a comfort to meet Katha Pollitt, who wasn't born yesterday, who's read her Mary Wollstonecraft and her Germaine Greer, who knows that class exists as well as gender.

These essays, written for the Nation, the New Yorker and the New York Times, are cheeringly argumentative and heart-eningly accessible. No jargon, no ghastly Germanic abstractions: just funny, questioning comment on topics that even a benighted British audience can recognise. Lorena Bobbitt makes an appearance, and there's a stout defence of Hillary Clinton. Pollitt takes a cause célèbre—like the William Kennedy Smith rape trial or the Baby M surrogate mother case—and unpacks the trunk of assumptions that comes with it. She is living proof that journalism needn't be glib and feminism needn't be dull.

Of course there are cultural chasms. America's obsession with abortion means that Pollitt expends a lot of energy fending off the pro-life movement: one of her least successful pieces records attempts to converse with a man picketing a clinic near her office. But other topics that might seem alien to us have the chill of imminence about them.

"Foetal rights, Women's Wrongs" tracks the growing tendency to hold a pregnant woman responsible for damaging her baby with drugs or drink. In New York, signs warn expectant mothers off alcohol, and strangers tell pregnant women: "Don't you know you're poisoning your baby?" Pollitt cites the case of Jennifer Johnson, a Florida woman arrested after her baby tested positive for cocaine, and then charged with delivering drugs to a minor.

To Pollitt, this "focus on maternal behaviour" is just another way of blaming women. "How," she asks, "have we come to see women as the major threat to their newborns, and the womb as the most dangerous place a child will ever inhabit?" Blaming mothers, she argues, lets society off the hook (Jennifer Johnson sought help at a drug treatment programme, but was turned away). And fetishising foetuses conceals a lack of concern for real live children. Not to mention—she's brave enough to say it—real live women.

Pollitt is equally suspicious of paid "surrogate" motherhood, which she regards as "reproductive Reaganomics", degrading to the woman whose body is rented and to the child whose life is sold. "Contract maternity is not a way for infertile women to get children," she argues. "It is a way for men to get children." Surely this is confusing the power of men with the power of money. The danger is not so much that men will exploit women, but rather, as Pollitt suggests in a later essay, that the rich childless couple will exploit the single mother on welfare?

In general, Pollitt resists the temptation to paint women as victims—or as angels. She attacks what she terms "difference feminism" (the idea that women are inherently nicer, more peaceful and cooperative than men) and traces it back to Victorian notions of "separate spheres", and the comfort of moral superiority as a substitute for practical power.

And where are the men in this collection? They're here all right, in the guise of murdering husbands, absent fathers, sexist columnists, and patriarchal judges. Not as good guys, not as sons or brothers, not as the father and grandfather to whom Pollitt dedicates her book. It's a bit worrying when such a commonsense, articulate feminist has nothing to say about improving diplomatic relations with the other half of the human race.