The rise of feminism over the last 15 years has been accompanied by a proliferation of feminist novels—frankly didactic Bildungsromans whose subject is the education of a heroine, and of the reader, too, into the painful realities of woman's place. Some of these novels are complex and inventive…. Others are as pat as pamphlets. All, however, share a moral urgency, a zest for the role of tutor, that seem more characteristic of the 19th century than our own….

Fifteen years is a long time, though—long enough, you'd think, for everyone not enrolled in a Total Woman seminar to have gotten the message. As I cracked open Marge Piercy's fat new novel ["Braided Lives"], which is about growing up female in the 50's, I must say I wondered if she could possibly have anything to say that has not already been said—and said and said—before. Does she? Well, yes and no.

If you remember—or fantasize—the 50's as an era of innocent pleasures and social harmony, think again. For Jill Stuart, our narrator, and her friends, the 50's mean McCarthyism, an intellectual climate of stodgy conservatism, sex without birth control, and a vicious, though covert, struggle for power between the sexes. Jill is impulsive, rebellious, smart, an outsider from the start, a half-Jewish tomboy who hangs out with the local toughs in her working-class Detroit neighborhood, writes poetry, and worries that her sex play with her girl friends means that she is "an L." A scholarship to college is her chance to escape the life of female drudgery that has already claimed her best friend, Callie, pregnant and married off to a garage mechanic by 16. Jill's parents think such a life is good enough for their daughter—the father out of indifference (he had wanted a son), the mother out of resentment at her own balked life that has come in middle age to border on lunacy.

At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Jill discovers literature, politics and the rich female life of the dormitory. Her closest friend is her blonde, beautiful, boy-crazy cousin Donna, but there are others: sarcastic Julie; sad, hard-drinking Theo; Alberta Mann, the long-haired folk singer whose parents are Communists. Jill and her friends are the campus bohemians—they read Sartre, drink Chianti and scorn the "pink, plastic" girls who won't sleep with their boyfriends. Their hunger for experience, however, leads them smack up against the repressive sexual mores—and reality—of the day. One moment they are declaiming the need for total honesty with men and vowing that they will never end up possessive and dependent like their mothers. The next, they are worrying that they will do something "castrating" to their boyfriends, in whom they wouldn't dream of confiding their frequent pregnancy scares.

"Free love!" sneers Jill's mother, who sees men as powerful but stupid deities to be placated and deceived. And she is on to something. Jill's pretentious Existentialist-poet boyfriend Mike does dump Jill when her parents try to force him to marry her, just as Mrs. Stuart said he would. (p. 7)

Jill will recover from Mike's traumatic desertion and continue to look for a love that does not entail her subjection—with rich sinister Peter, with her townie thief, with warm intelligent Howie. We know from page one that Jill's quest is eventually successful—she will become the well-known poet and feminist activist who lives happily on Cape Cod with her lover and writes these memoirs. Not everyone fares so well. One friend will die of an illegal abortion. Another will become a civilrights worker and be murdered by racists in the South. Julie will marry dopey Carl and subside into domesticity. Others, however, will blossom in the political ferment of the 60's: Alberta will become a feminist lawyer. The women's movement will rescue Theo from her madness. Stephanie will open a hippie boutique. As Jill says, "We were all a little crazy in the 50's, but we've been getting clearer and clearer ever since."

Hear, hear. It's always refreshing to have someone speak up for the 60's, and I'm sure I'm not the only veteran of those years who takes a certain pleasure in books that point out how bad the bad old days that preceded them really were. Much of Piercy's material will be familiar, even platitudinous, to readers of, say, "The Bell Jar," "The Women's Room" or even Ms. magazine. But the accent is placed in a new and bracing way.

Too many heroines of feminist novels are privileged, fragile innocents. A discouraging professor, a patronizing boyfriend, a pushy parent are enough to make them resign their ambitions and sleepwalk into obedient housekeeping for a husband the reader can see from the start is a creep. Piercy's women are fighters. Jill is as eager to explore sexuality as any young man; she listens to Mike and her professors disparage her poetry and keeps right on writing; she breaks laws. Donna also actively seeks sexual pleasure, and even when married persists, however furtively, in asserting her will. Even Jill's ignorant, witchy mother has her weapons, the old-fashioned female ones of hysteria and subterfuge.

Piercy burns with anger and conviction, and much of the time it's catching. We are as outraged as she by the doctors who refuse to fit Jill with a diaphragm because she is unmarried, by the abortions without anesthetic or follow-up care, by vital young women producing earnest, self-castigating Freudian analyses of their failure to "adjust."

I wish Piercy had been content to let a part stand for the whole. But as though afraid we will overlook some facet of female misery if she doesn't drum it into our heads, she methodically makes poor Jill & Company victims of every possible social cruelty and male treachery, usually more than once. Besides her two abortions and the rape, Donna is seduced as a teenager by her sister's husband, betrayed by a married man who tells her he's getting a divorce, addicted to tranquilizers by her psychiatrist and beaten by her husband, who also purposely makes the tiny hole in her diaphragm that results in the pregnancy that dooms her…. Even Jill, who is tougher than her friends, is sexually attacked by her boyfriend at age 14, forced to make love by Mike when she doesn't want to, sodomized against her will by Peter. And so on. All right, all right! I wanted to shout, I get the point!

Because Piercy is an intensely dramatic writer, none of this is, scene by scene, incredible. Cumulatively, though, it does wear one down. Were there no loving fathers in the 50's? No honorable boyfriends? No professors who encouraged their female students? There were times when I suspected that the author was unwilling to edit autobiographical material—"But Theo really was raped by her psychiatrist!"—and times when I thought she simply felt she owed it to women to recite the complete catalogue of female suffering. Whatever her reasons, they give "Braided Lives" a lurid predictability, like a kind of feminist National Enquirer, and a tone, too, of patronizing the reader.

While it never quite loses its energy and forward motion, "Braided Lives" is less compelling than Piercy's last novel, "Vida."… (pp. 7, 30)

That "Braided Lives" is as interesting as it is is a tribute to Piercy's strengths. She is blunt, she is heavy-handed—she's certainly no prose stylist—and yet by virtue of her sheer force of conviction, plus a flair for scene writing, she writes thought-provoking, persuasive novels, fiction that is both political and aimed at a popular audience but that is never just a polemic or just a potboiler. "Braided Lives" won't win any literary prizes, but it will make its readers pay more attention to the current attack on legal abortion, and make them more eager to defend the imperiled gains of the women's movement. For a novelist whose aim is didactic, that's no small compliment. (p. 31)