Books, Arts & Manners: Feminism and Its Illusions

“Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life”: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Doubleday, 275 pp., $23.95)

A COLLEAGUE recently told me he was a feminist. “That’s interesting,” I thought. “I’m not.” That wasn’t always the case. Like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, I came of age with feminism. Like her, I deviated from the movement, though for me the deviation has been total. I now regard “feminism” as I do Marxism: a dead ideology of no use in explaining how the world works. Thus, the title of this book strikes me as an epitaph not only for radical feminism but also for feminism as such. The eloquent Mrs. Fox-Genovese, author of the important Feminism without Illusions, prefers to see herself as a kind of feminist Luther: in a series of interviews with contemporary American women which measure the disparity between what radical feminists say about women’s lives and what ordinary women know about their own lives, this accessible work intends to expose the corruption that perverted “true” feminism.

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About the Author

Elizabeth Powers

Elizabeth Powers is a writer living in New York.

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“Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life”: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Doubleday, 275 pp., $23.95)

A COLLEAGUE recently told me he was a feminist. “That’s interesting,” I thought. “I’m not.” That wasn’t always the case. Like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, I came of age with feminism. Like her, I deviated from the movement, though for me the deviation has been total. I now regard “feminism” as I do Marxism: a dead ideology of no use in explaining how the world works. Thus, the title of this book strikes me as an epitaph not only for radical feminism but also for feminism as such. The eloquent Mrs. Fox-Genovese, author of the important Feminism without Illusions, prefers to see herself as a kind of feminist Luther: in a series of interviews with contemporary American women which measure the disparity between what radical feminists say about women’s lives and what ordinary women know about their own lives, this accessible work intends to expose the corruption that perverted “true” feminism.