Trashing Patriarchy

The appearance of Sexual Politics constitutes an event in publishing rather than in intellectual history. Much of its material and general drift is not only familiar, but even tired; it offers no new research, argument, or proposals, nor is it an imaginative essay like the famous ones of Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, nor a valuable investigation, like The Captive Wife by the late Hannah Gavron. What is only too clear in the year 1970 is the need felt by the publishing world for precisely this book on the women’s issue, a “radical,” “outspoken,” “fearless,” “uncompromising,” “forthright,” “militant” book, which “confronts” the facts of women’s “exploitation.” Other books are being issued, in hard-cover and paperback, even a children’s book about feminism! Miss Millett herself speaks of the “relatively uncharted, often even hypothetical territory” of her concern, of the “ambitious, often overwhelming” task. She does not say why she was compelled to undertake it, but she seems to believe the effort was unique and difficult. Other media have cooperated in the assessment to make...