The Golden Notebook  

One of the most laudatory reviews of The Golden Notebook when it first appeared in 1963 was by this magazine’s founding editor, Irving Howe. Writing in the New Republic, Howe praised Lessing’s abilities as a novelist: “Precise and nuanced dialogue …











The Higher Immorality, 2000  

If a presidential election indicates the health of the body politic, America’s civic condition may be hovering just this side of the intensive-care ward. Even by the low standard we’ve come to expect from the quadrennial circus, the 2000 contest …



Ambassador to a Private World  

Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy by Frances Kiernan Norton, 2000, 845 pp., $35 Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals by David Laskin Simon & Schuster, 2000, 319 pp., $26 Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting …



Men Adrift  

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi William Morrow & Co., 1999, 662 pp., $27.50 Are American men in crisis, entrapped in a consumer culture without the opportunity to pursue meaningful work, and in psychic despair, searching …



The Longest Revolution  

American women entered the twentieth century without the right to vote and ended it with the right “to have it all” as long as they “do it all.” Progress? It depends on whom you ask. The nation’s citizens are deeply …



The Family: What Do We Really Want?  

How should democratic socialists think about the family and its role in modern society? The essential problem is to find alternatives to individualist and marketized conceptions of social life. Solutions to this problem are most commonly sought in the political …



Untold Stories  

Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism by Daniel Horowitz The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, 352 pp., $29.95 In 1967, when I first became immersed in the women’s …



Feminists, Puritans, and Statists  

Feminism’s ideological diversity makes fools of those who generalize grandly about the movement, but many critics are undeterred. A foolish view of feminists as a monolithic group of male bashers and prudes was eagerly adopted by impeachment pundits. Confusing feminism …