The Women's Room

Louise

Rating: really liked it
It had been a really shocking expreince for a girl of 16 in Tehran to read the story of a woman in the 60s who had almost the same situation the women today in Iran have.
I had read a room of one's own & so many other feminist (?) books by the time, but I can not say that they had that great effect on me... It was so awakening.

Rebecca

Rating: really liked it
Wow. I'm not sure how to encapsulate this important 500-page feminist novel in a review, so I'll keep my comments brief and just suggest strongly that anyone with an interest in feminist thought or feminist history must read this incredibly raw, honest and ominous novel.

It's one of those vital books that has fallen off of our radar. Apparently it was extremely popular when it came out in 1977, but I'm aghast that my generation has, for the most part, not even heard of it. Though a historic novel, its content is not outdated. French gives us a vivid look into second wave feminism and a group of women immersed in patriarchy.

If I have a reservation about this novel, it is that it is, perhaps, too raw for young feminists today, and we live in an era when patriarchy is far less overt and more difficult to identify. It would be easy to dismiss this book as outdated and irrelevant. But if we are honest with ourselves, I think we'll see a lot of truth in these characters who are flawed and broken, strong and visionary.

It is a sad novel, a hard one to read. But I'm telling you, it's vitally important.

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
HELPFUL HINTS

Room – an excellent movie from 2015 about a kidnapped woman

The Room – a 2003 contender for the worst film ever, a cult classic

The Room – a painfully horrible 1971 novel about an insane person by Hubert Selby Jr

A Room of One’s Own – a 1929 essay by Virginia Woolf arguing for the need for both fictional and literal space for women artists

A Room with a View – a 1908 novel by EM Forster. I haven’t read it yet

A Room with a View – a rather lovely song by Noel Coward – the intro contains the lines:

I've been cherishing through the perishing
winter nights and days a funny little phrase
That means so much to me that you've got to be
With me heart and soul- for on you the whole thing leans

You don’t get that kind of grammar in modern songs

Room at the Top – a vicious British social satire from 1957

The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White’s brilliant autobiographical novel from 1988

The Women’s Room – a devastating feminist novel from 1977 which maybe these days might come across as all obvious stuff I guess. I read it in the 1990s and I thought it was great. Hey, the 1990s – that’s a long time ago now. Time marches on and all, but I bet the stuff in this book has hardly changed a bit.

El

Rating: really liked it
Occasionally I hear a misinformed person who says something along the lines of "Feminism is no longer needed in our society" and a piece of me dies each time I hear it. I read quite a bit, and it's when I read things like French's 1977 novel The Women's Room that makes me realize just how important feminism and the Women's Movement has been in America. Because it's not so much that I can read this book and say "Wow, it's so good this shit doesn't happen anymore" - it's because I can read this book and say "Wow, it's still horribly relevant today."

I can pick up this book that was published a year before I was born and read this story that starts in the 1950s and I can still relate to the experiences the women experience - if not directly in a personal sense, then because I know people who match the experiences in the book. That's messed up, right? Because it's 2016 and people want to think things are so much better than they used to me. This isn't to say things haven't been improved, but when we're still discussing a political candidate's stance on women's reproductive rights, then shit hasn't changed nearly as much as we like to pretend it has.

The narrator is possibly French herself, though it's hard to say. The narrator has a sort of omniscient presence throughout the story - she talks about herself as part of the "we" (as in the group of women), and then also talks about instances in individual women's lives that she could not have been privy to, so it's understood then she is retelling what her friend told her. I found this an interesting narration technique because it requires the reader to look at the story through their own eyes. But I also found it frustrating because I wanted to know about the narrator herself - we learned so much about the main character, Mira, throughout the years, and about the other women in the group, but the narrator is sort of a mystery because she doesn't talk about herself as an individual outside of the group. Again, I feel this was probably French's way of allowing the reader to have a position in the story, so each reader brings their own experiences to the table, but I'm not entirely certain it was completely successful.

This is not a short book, and it feels longer as one reads because there is so much time and ground covered here. Beginning in the 50s and ending some time in the 70s, the narrator and Mira encounter so many different people and opportunities. There are not a lot of moments of brightness or hope here, and that can be tedious to read. But that was also French's point - there's a lot of darkness and despair in the world, and more so for those who are a minority as there's also a level of distrust involved. Mira struggles to find her tribe, so to speak, and she finds it, and in that sense it's where this story is particularly interesting to me.

Women are constantly labeled as being catty, or manipulative, or untrustworthy, especially towards one another. We are frequently tearing each other down when we should be building each other up. Mira experiences a little of all of this, participates accordingly on occasion, and grows and evolves, which is required of every woman, even today. Her first strong female relationships are in connection to their husbands and children, so the women have very few of their own personalities outside of their marriages. They have discussions that revolve around their husbands and children. They come to realize in their own ways on their own time how detrimental that is to their own growth, and they each react differently to this realization.

As time progresses, Mira grows and meets new people in each new stage in her life. They help her learn the problems with a patriarchal society, something she has probably always had within her, but never had the confidence to evaluate on her own. It's encouraging to see the different female relationships over time grow from something rather superficial to deeper, warmer experiences.

These relationships are still not perfect, but truthfully there is never any perfect relationship. But they are still strong women and their ties are strong, and that is something I found especially appealing.

There are quite a lot of points that I'd like to make about this book, but I failed to write this review at the time of finishing it, and a lot of my original points are now missing in the shit-hole that is my memory. It's a powerful book, and I'm glad to have read it. It's frustrating that the men-folk in this book were one-dimensional in comparison to the women, but I understand that was probably French's intention as well - here finally was a novel that showcased women in their habitat, and not just women the way men view them. After a long history of novels involving women and their relationships to men, it was refreshing to read a novel about women first and foremost.

It's a shame that so much of this novel is still relevant, and that many of the experiences these women have are experiences so many women still experience now in 2016. I would love to see a change. I feel French's novel was a large step in the right direction, but then... I'm not sure what happened. It doesn't seem that this book is popular amongst readers anymore, and I think that's a shame.

Dottie

Rating: really liked it
One of a circle of neighbors who for a period of months sometime in the seventies gathered nearly every afternoon to talk and have a drink before dispersing to prepare meals for families loaned me this book or recommended it - I think I went and bought my own copy to read. I began it about 4:30 one day and think there may have been pizza at my house for dinner that evening because I barely stopped reading from the moment I began to the moment I finished -- which was around 10:30 the next morning.

This was the first book in years which demanded that immedite attention and it has stayed strong since. Not only that, I have since read a great many of French's works -- and I can't recall any disappointments.

Alice

Rating: really liked it
What I learned from this book:

- I am about as privileged as is possible in terms of when and where I was born.
- This fact isn't going to shield me from the more insidious forms of subordination that still permeate most things.
- Generational patterns are really difficult to break, and if we think "everything's different now" we're overlooking some pretty big similarities.
- There's still a hell of a lot of work to do.
- I really don't want to get married.

Mandy

Rating: really liked it
Plus ça change....I didn't expect this key text of the feminist movement to have the same impact on me that it did all those decades ago, but in fact it had even more of an impact on me this time, because I've now had children and a lot of the book - the best part of it actually - is about being a mother, and the conflicts that arise from that. But what really struck me was how little things have changed in women's personal lives. In theory we now have equality, and in theory can aspire to anything we want. But in practice life can be just as difficult as it ever was, and old attitudes die hard. Many men still think that women are inferior. Many still think that the woman's place is in the home with the children. Many women think this too. Maybe it is?
"I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes," she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes."
So many of the issues raised in this book are as relevant and as pertinent as they were back in the 60s and 70s, especially childcare v career, attitudes to rape and so on, and it is well worth a re-read.
Because the sad truth is...plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Britta Böhler

Rating: really liked it
Re-reading this book for the first time after more than three decades, I found it less 'perfect' than thirty years ago, but still, the stories of these women are so powerful and heartbreaking and anger-inducing.

Megan Baxter

Rating: really liked it
In one of those odd synchronicities, I was midway through the first half of this book when my husband and I watched the second-to-last episode of From Earth to the Moon, The Original Wives' Club. What struck me about the women in the episode was that, although the show painted it as the extraordinary sacrifices these women made to support their astronaut husbands, most of what they showed was exactly mirrored in The Women's Room as the things that most suburban housewives did.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

Kogiopsis

Rating: really liked it
One of the things that I noticed in skimming other reviews of this book is that it seems to be extremely polarizing - either people love it and hold it up as a seminal feminist text, or they hate it (for much the same reason). Plainly speaking, your opinion on feminism will likely be your opinion on this book. It doesn't pretend to be apolitical in the least.

In that respect, as I write this review in 2015, I find myself wondering if this book is actually relevant anymore. It's definitely something that had value when it was published, but both the world and feminism have moved on: the focus of this book on middle-class white women is no longer as relevant when the forefront of activism is now intersectional. As a polemic, The Women's Room is much more narrow-focused than modern feminism; appropriate, given that it comes from a time when feminism was less developed and less visible.

Honestly, if you want to learn about the history of feminism - go for it and read this book; it's well-written and reflective. If you're interested in what it looks like now, though, you'll want to start with modern internet discourse.

Trevor Maloney

Rating: really liked it
"The Women's Room" is considered one of the most important novels of the feminist movement. If you are interested in the feminist movement, you might consider reading it just for that reason. However, in my view, there is good reason to read it beyond that. I would especially encourage men to read this book. Until I read "The Women's Room," I don't think I had ever read a novel that focuses so exclusively on the lives of women. This may say a lot about my reading habits, and/or my education, but I think it also says a lot about our culture; that a highly educated man with an at least somewhat refined cultural sensibility can still be a highly educated man with an at least somewhat refined cultural sensibility while not having read a novel that really digs into the lives and psyches of women until he's 36 years old.

From the author's 1993 introductory essay:

"Men can complacently continue to exalt rationality, power, possession, and hierarchy, and to justify domination as a necessary and natural principle, unhampered by the criticism of women or men who entertain a different value system. Men in power do not even hear radical criticism because they have pre-labeled it invalid, soft-headed, or insane. Because the dominant class controls the discourse, only the independently thoughtful even perceive the insanity of our present culture."

Megan Ammer-Barefield

Rating: really liked it
I chose to read this book because some website had labeled it "the most feminist book of past generations," and that description is so real that I can't believe modern feminists aren't talking about it more. The story focuses on a close knit group of graduate students, all women, who recall their pasts, enjoy the present, and calculate the future through personal experiences. Sort of a generic summary, but the notability of the story comes from the feminist history, thought, and theory that each character acknowledges, discusses and experiences. There's the typical 50s marriage with a dominant male head of house and his submissive wife, 60s liberation and 70s political action.The women vary in age but the sexism experienced is the same and the ideas discussed can easily apply to third wave feminism. The same issues are current as well, including objectification, rape/sexual harassment, and the dominant/submissive romantic relationship, along with other liberation like sexuality, masturbation, and academia. I dove right in, but took more than 30 days to finish, because the topics at hand are interesting, but the story is so full of details and people that it's sometimes a trudge through the print. But, at the heart there's exposure of the truth, which is also something often talked about in the novel, and the side of the story that is almost never told. The longevity of the story was also unexpected and preferred because the characters become familiar and the historical context helped placed their woes in the bigger issue. I've started collecting quotes from this novel and I just can't get enough. There is not enough praise for the novel for the fact that it took on such a strong group and enhanced their abilities and truths. For every modern day feminist, or those looking for some base, this is where your fire should come from.

Amy Conchie

Rating: really liked it
My mother gave me 'the Women's Room' with the caveat that when she first read it it made her so angry that she wouldn't speak to my father all weekend (the poor man did nothing!). It is this brand of feminism that, as a practical but vocal advocate of women's continual advancement, thoroughly riles me up. The worthless proselytizing characters are barely more than two-dimensional; the plot conveniently buckles in order to ensure they receive the most punishment at the hands of their oppressors. The book is filled to the brim with silly, ridiculous scenarios that cannot be taken seriously (I recall a woman having a panic attack over a dream about sanitary napkins... For goodness' sake!) and implausible relationships in which Gender and Sex overshadow every other natural instinct. It is ludicrous to think that anyone ever took this pile of tosh seriously. I wish for once that a female author would level the playing field by writing a bold, well-planned literary epic to rival Ulysses, Moby Dick, Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, 2666, etc., because the only way we will advance is by stepping up to the plate--not complaining that society wants us to wash it.

Beth

Rating: really liked it
An important book for me (and for more than a few women I know). The Women's Room is sort of Betty Friedan/The Feminine Mystique in novel form. The depictions of the middle-class lives of women and mothers in the 1950s and early 1960s are compelling. The stories of the women who moved in or into other realms in the later 1960s and through the 1970s show that sexism certainly didn't evaporate with feminism or with womens' moves out of an entirely domestic sphere.

KW

Rating: really liked it
In retrospect, I can say that, while "The Women's Room" wasn't always an enjoyable book, it was an important book, a narrative worthy of my time and attention in that it is a significant perspective of the life of the middle-class woman pre- and post- second wave feminism. It is often difficult for young adult women to appreciate our nearness, in terms of decades, to an American system which legalized and regulated the condemnation of the single woman. However, Marilyn French creates engaging snapshots of countless marriages defined by men, and particularly women, who are constrained emotionally, idealogically and rationally by gender roles. Emphasized is the helplessness of any women forced to divorce, and more than one character is described as mentally broken by the stressors of being thrust into poverty with children and limited job training. Leave well enough alone the outrage of being intellectually or physically belittled or quieted; it seems that the greatest facet of marriage in the 1940s and 50s was the element of discipline, namely a man's ability to keep his wife well-behaved and productive at any cost. "Punishments" for any behavior less than pleasing was divorce, isolation, emotional frigidity, physical harm and institutionalization. These are stories of women who, behind the facade of the upwardly-mobile white middle class, are kept for, literally, the fee of their life and well-being.

It is evident that French felt a duty to tell more than one story in this novel. For that reason, chapters are filled to capacity with scene after gory scene- suicide attempts, violent encounters, economic ruin, and episode after disgusting episode of Eisenhower-era masculine complacency. For that reason, the prose is often rushed and dense to the point of overcapacity. However, the storytelling is riveting enough to hit the point home- we could do worse than to remember that the sources of stories such as these are never far away, that this degree of marginalization is as current as today.