[Mira, the heroine of "The Women's Room,"] starts out submissive and repressed, anxious to live up to other people's expectations of her. She ends up liberated but lonely, painfully adjusting to a new kind of life. It's the period in between that make the book so interesting. (p. 7)

The details of suburban life accumulate: balky ice-cube trays and Cub Scout meetings interlace with adulteries, attempted suicides and enforced stays in mental institutions. It's the small events that make the large events ring true, that remove from them any hint of the soap opera. Some shattering dramas occur in this book, but they're nearly always believable; we're willing to accept them as part of normal life.

Mira feels herself to be a victim, and stories told by victims tend to be long and narrow, as if strung through a funnel of suffering. "The Women's Room" is, in fact, very long and very narrow. Everything that happens—marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, the most mixed and mingled of occasions—seems almost purely negative, viewed with the glassy eye of belated resentment. There is no "equal time" offered; the men are given no chance to tell their side of the story. Compared to the women—each separate and distinct, each rich in character—the men tend to blur together. They're all villains, and cardboard villains at that.

But this narrowness is, I believe (or hope), intentional. The bias of "The Women's Room" is a part of the novel. It's almost the whole point. When Mira, acting as narrator, fails to give us any clear description of the man she marries, we first suspect her of careless storytelling. But it proves later to have been deliberate—Marilyn French's own very careful way of telling us something important about Mira…. The problem, she feels, is that the white middle-class male is really hollow: a sort of walking uniform, making the expected jokes, maintaining the expected postures. No wonder it's hard to describe him.

In fact, what victimizes Mira is not men, but the chasm that she perceives between men and women—the mistrust, incomprehension and exploitation. Whether or not we agree that this chasm exists, it exists for her; it affects her whole life. With a narrator like Mira, a certain bias in the telling is not merely forgiveable; it serves a clear purpose.

We have more trouble accepting the polemics that creep in as the new Mira, divorced and liberated, begins to discuss with her friends the injustices done to women. Each character contributes her philosophy in great chunky paragraphs. We've stumbled into a seminar, it seems. But even these later, awkward sections serve as a kind of document—living witness, however discomfiting, to a stage that a multitude of women are certainly experiencing.

Think of it this way: Marilyn French has written a collective biography of a large group of American citizens. Expectant in the 40's, submissive in the 50's, enraged in the 60's, they have arrived in the 70's independent but somehow unstrung, not yet fully composed after all they've been through. Like those exhausting Russian novels in which quarrelsome and demanding families quarreled with us, made demands upon us, "The Women's Room" strains our patience, argues, wears us down. But it's proof of Marilyn French's abilities that we can finish this book feeling genuinely hopeful for some kind of happy ending, someday, for Mira. (pp. 7, 38)

Enthusiastic reviewers in the daily and weekly press have called Marilyn French's polemic the major novel of the women's liberation movement, and they have a point. The book does have an impact; this male reviewer found himself embarrassed for his sex. It is scarcely a surprise that women have suffered indignities for generations just because they are women, but it takes works like Ms. French's to make us realize just why that has got to stop. For those women who do not submit in a male-dominated society, life can be hellish, as Ms. French's heroines (she would reject the term) prove. Rape is not pretty, even when the act is committed with looks alone. (p. 68)

Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1978, by the Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 54, No. 2 (Spring, 1978).