The War Against Women

by Marilyn French

Overview

"Terrifying...Impressive...A challenging esay that justifies the feminist revival."
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Bestselling author and feminist scholar Marilyn French has written a shocking and fascinating analysis of the history of women's political, cultural, physical, and economic repression that is as controversial as it is utterly convincing. In this stunning work of resarch, Ms. French creates a devastating portrait of today's male-dominated global society, with its underlying aim of destroying, subjugating, or mutilating women. Here is a devastating indictment of our values and an important step toward an urgent public discussion of human morality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345382481
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/02/1993
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	409,474
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Marilyn French (1929–2009) received her doctorate from Harvard University in 1972. She was a literary critic, and her articles and stories appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies. French is the author of several books, including The War Against Women and the novel The Women's Room, which has sold more than 21 million copies since it was first published in 1977. She taught at Hofstra, Harvard, and the College of the Holy Cross, and received a Harvard Centennial Medal.

Editorial Reviews

Men's tendency to subjugate and abuse women operates on personal, institutional and cultural levels, notes novelist and feminist French ( Beyond Power ). Boys' desire to dominate girls is instilled in childhood, while grown men see women as mothers owing them caretaking services, she observes. In her sharp analysis a major goal of male-conceived religious movements like Christian fundamentalism and militant Islam is to keep women subservient. Other examples of institutional suppression of women explored by French are discrimination in the workplace, biased divorce judgments and widespread rape, wife beating and male incest, a systemic pattern tolerated by society. On the cultural front she examines male sadomasochism against women in the arts and advertising. A landmark in feminist analysis, this powerful indictment reveals the global extent of men's assault on women, drawing implicit connections between the drive to criminalize abortion, starvation wages paid to women by transnational corporations, genital mutilation in Africa, Third World brothel tours and sociobiology's characterization of male aggression as normal, female aggression as nonadaptive. Author tour. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

French (author of the groundbreaking novel The Women's Room , LJ 11/15/77) states what she is about in her title. This exhausting, horrifying, and deeply saddening compendium catalogs religious, sociological, institutional, and physical oppression of women throughout the world. While it is extensively footnoted, French's essays are focused toward raising readers' consciousness of legal and political strictures; statistics on rape, incest, female infanticide, and clitoridectomy; and male obsession with controlling female reproduction. Little of what is contained here will be news to any conscientious reader of Ms . magazine. One wonders who French perceives as her audience, as most feminists are probably aware of the global difficulites faced by women, and those who would not take on the feminist designation may simply dismiss her arguments. Although much shorter than Susan Faludi's extraordinary Backlash ( LJ 9/15/91; an LJ ``Best Book of 1991''), which took aim primarily at media manipulation, French's book is less accessible and more demanding of readers. For academic collections, and public libraries where interest warrants. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.-- GraceAnne A. DeCandido, ``School Library Journal''

Library Journal