It speaks to the divisions Marilyn French chronicled that her death, on May 2 at 79, left women of certain vintages bereft but seemed to go largely unnoticed by their male contemporaries. THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE: that was the pledge on the dust jacket of French's 1977 first novel, The Women's Room. It was decried by some critics as militant, man-hating propaganda, but its themes of female solidarity and empowerment didn't seem hugely radical to my blithe circle of undergraduate friends. French would later define feminism as "the belief that women matter as much as men do." My generation...
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