[In the following excerpt, Thomas praises the wealth of information presented in From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, Volume I: Origins but predicts that the series will be controversial among historians.]

Marilyn French is a well-known feminist scholar, teacher and novelist. A History of Women, her work-in-progress, is obviously designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative work, a bedrock standby for all enquiring women and especially for those who teach and take Women's Studies courses. Accordingly, this first volume, From Eve to Dawn, bears a heavy weight of expectation. The Foreword and Bibliography alone provide a solid foundation of scholarship, as French has worked for 10 years in conjunction with a troupe of numerous fellow-scholars and research assistants to produce this first volume. The book's argument, “thesis” if you like, is, as she points out, her own: “Although only I bear responsibility for the statements and points of view of this book, as well as the errors it must contain, I have not written it alone.”

From the beginning it is quite obvious that the book will become a battleground, not only for forces for and against Women's Studies students and scholars, but for various attitudes and loyalties within the ranks of feminists themselves. I consider myself both scholar and feminist of long standing, but from sentence three of Part I, “Parents”, I begin to react against the dogmatism of an unadorned statement such as this one: “At some point in the distant past, but probably not much further back than twelve or ten thousand years, men rose in rebellion against women.” No source, no footnote. The following few paragraphs of its brief introduction enlarge upon this one bald statement. If you can accept this beginning, you will be informed by the vast array of information that follows, by the “story” that French wrote, as she says, “to make sense of what I knew of the past and what I saw in the present.” If you balk at the dogmatism that marks the book throughout, you may as well avoid it all.

That considerable quibble expressed, I can recommend the book for its many qualities. Nowhere have I ever seen assembled such a quantity and diversity of material about women. Nowhere have I seen such material forged into a consistently readable, entertaining whole, unashamedly slanted in its sympathies towards women and definitely designed to instruct women of this and future generations. French is too practised a polemicist to indulge in crude and overt male bashing, but there is no doubt that from start to finish she is judge and jury and the outcome for the male is “found guilty.” She covers a remarkably broad range of material. Part I, “Parents” consists of two chapters, “The Mothers” and “The Fathers”. Part II, “The Rise of the State”, deals with Peru, Egypt, Sumeria, India, China and Mexico. Part III, “God, Glory, and Delusions of Grandeur”, considers Greece and Rome as well as the world's major religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All of this is simply and readably written, designed primarily, I would say, for undergraduates, the numerous subdivisions within chapters providing easy access. The endpapers are maps of the world, and there are also two informative maps within the text, showing the expansions of Rome and of Islam.

The simplicity of the text will be welcomed by students, though its confidently authoritarian tone is sure to stir negative reactions among French's own peers. From Eve to Dawn will provide a useful, though controversial, text for years to come. That, undoubtedly, is exactly what French intended.