When it was released The Women’s Room was not well received by men, but engrossed women totally. I can understand that; the content very much divides women and men, and I can’t say I haven’t felt that way myself, nor have I simply shrugged the feeling off after knowing some lovely men or learning more about nonbinary people blurring the gender lines. If you look at the Wikipedia page, you’ll see how many now-famous women felt changed by having read The Women’s Room, or noticing is ubiquity on the daily bus ride. Told from a omniscient narrator who seems to be in the cast of characters yet unknown to us, The Women’s Room opens in, literally, the women’s restroom. There, Mira stares at the sign on the door, which reads “Ladies Room.” What does that mean, to label “women” as “ladies”?
We’re swept back to her childhood in the 1940’s when Mira had a mind of her own that was shaped and tamped down by her parents. While Mira did go to college for a year, she was accused of being a whore for dancing with different men at a club. Her boyfriend is a free spirit who would never provide a stable home, so to avoid being saddled with a broke man and a baby (assuming she gives in to his desires for intimacy before the era of birth control), forced to scrub floors, she marries Norm, a man studying to be a doctor. Mira quits school and becomes pregnant. Norm seems surprised by her pregnancy, calling her a whore, and finally weeping that he’s just so stressed because medical school is hard and expensive. Mira ends up broke, scrubbing floors, married and with two babies.
Norm does become a doctor and his parents loan them money for a down payment on a house. Embracing the perfect wife role, Mira never outwardly complains. She dutifully has uninspired sex with Norm every ten days, plays maid and mommy to her two sons, and makes friends with the neighborhood wives, all living just like Mira. To spice things up, the neighbors take turns hosting parties at which the adults all dress like they’re not saddled with mortgages and children, flirting with each other, and dancing. Some take it too far, actually engaging in affairs:
“What dominated [Mira’s] account was shock at Natalie’s adultery. Norm listened impatiently, with a look of disgust on his face. He said Natalie was stupid and a drunken slut. She didn’t matter; she was not to be taken into consideration. Mira should just forget the whole thing; it was unimportant.”
Readers begin to see how Marilyn French is positioning her characters such that we can see how women’s lives are unimportant, while men’s lives are to control, maintain, rule. When one neighbor seems to have less consideration for her husband than wives are supposed to, Mira reflects on her wishes to not be a servant in her own family. She comes to the conclusion that, “She had a deep snarling contempt for people who confused an essentially economic situation with a moral one. And the relation between men and women was economic. Economic and political.”
French is described on Wikipedia as a “radical feminist,” though I don’t know what is radical about observations. When American women could not get jobs, have a credit card, or rent a place to live without a husband, brother, or father to co-sign, the system is rigged to keep women dependent. That seems factual to me. In what seems like a game, the husbands play along to pacify the little wifeys with small attempts of humor. Mira scoffs, “She was tired of joking about the ineffectuality or absence of the men, who were absent even when they were physically present. That was not funny either. She was sick to death of Bill’s obscene jokes, of Roger’s behavior, Norm’s naughty-child act.” Interestingly, what she describes is so well known to me. These games still happen, especially with older men I know, though I do not see it commonly with people my age and education level.
Eventually, and this is a small spoiler, though if you read the first chapters carefully it is not, Norm divorces Mira despite her perfect wife and mother routine. She is accepted to Harvard in the PhD lit program, and Norm moves his new wife into the house, the house Mira cleaned and polished daily. At Harvard, Mira meets free-thinking hippy types in her program. By this time, she’s in her late 30’s and they are about 15 years younger, giving Mira a more adult perspective, but also a reason to get stuck on new ideas that seem foreign to her. It is now the late 1960s. One change she is reluctant to embrace is her crush on Ben, whom she takes on as a lover. He is passionate and considerate in bed, and wants to know her sons. Is he different from Men with a capital M, or is he just playing the game differently?
So much of the 1960s chapters felt familiar because people were fighting for civil rights, arguing about the president, and accusing Black folks of getting into school for affirmative action sorts of reasons instead of merit when the average white man is struggling to pay for his own children’s tuition. One character is violently attacked and raped; she is humiliated in court and her perpetrator gets six months in jail. Not much has changed, right?
Consider how the students return home for the holidays. Mira is shocked that her parents’ family all complain about Jews, Black people, and liberals. She then has to have a conversation with her teenage sons about what they overheard at the gathering, asking what they think about minorities and how they’re treated. Mira’s friend uses another strategy:
“Last time I was home for Christmas two years ago and Daddy hit me because I said I didn’t like Lyndon Johnson, he just reached across and smacked me in the face real hard, it stung, you know, it brought tears to my eyes, so I picked up a fork that was lying on the counter, one of those long ones that you turn meat with, and I stabbed him in the stomach.”
Well then. Can you imagine? Consider that only 51% of Americans voted for Trump and what Christmas will be like for some families this year. The Women’s Room is a long novel, but it’s a classic listed as one of the top 50 books that changed the perspectives and lives of many of our current thinkers and writers. It should not be missed.
Grab the Lapels 
Great post Melanie. I really enjoyed your thoughts.
I read this novel when it came out. By 1977 we (young educated women anyhow) were aware of the issues French was raising but I still think she could be called a radical feminist. What she does here is more than observations I think. Through her writing she puts out there her perspective on how the patriarchy affected women’s lives and what options women did or didn’t have to get a fairer deal … personally, socially, legally. That’s a radical act because it confronted people – I think.
French was born the same year as my mum … she wasn’t a radical feminist in the sense that she didn’t put herself out there like French but she was feminist in the way she brought my sister and me up to feel we had equal rights and that she didn’t expect us to go down the wife and mother route she did. She brought us up to believe we had options and that she supported us in following our own goals. Oh, and in her mid 40s she did her matriculation and then went to university. By her 50s she had a career that was dear to her heart – a lexicographer.
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I see that I was thinking of French out of her context, so I see what you’re saying about her ideas and philosophy challenging people.
When you read the novel when it came out, what was your reaction to it? I’m also curious if your mom read it.
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Oh that’s a hard question. It was so long ago that I can only, I think, give a generalised answer, which is that it was exciting seeing more “literary” novels by women being published and that confronted societal norms and expectations concerning women, that shared women’s hopes, dreams, passions, desires – whether they were approved by the norms or not. It was just exciting, and it’s likely that I was less “critical” of how well they were doing it because I loved seeing people like me on the page. (Which is not to say I’m anything like Mira but that I could recognise her.)
I’m not sure whether Mum read it. I was living in Canberra by then, and while we always talked books we didn’t see each other as often – you know, young woman in the flush of early career and romance is not so focused on her Mum. Also, Mum was at university then and reading a lot for her English lit etc courses.
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Maybe I’m reading too hard into your comment, but do you mean that before The Women’s Room there were books that you would not call literary that had a feminist agenda?
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Oh yes I think you are taking an extra step. By the “and that” between “published” and “confronted”, I meant that there was more publishing of literary novels by women AND that more of them were addressing women’s lives from a feminist angle. Certainly that was the case in Australia (though it was in the 80s that it really picked up again.)
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I don’t know that I’ve even heard of this book but it sounds fascinating. She doesn’t sound that radical at all but lately I’ve also been noticing that there is a big shift in expectation for men between my own generation and the one before. No doubt this has a lot to do with the fact that women now have so many more options for stability than simply getting married.
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I keep reading about women choosing to be single rather than submit to a traditional marriage, and men who subscribe to that lifestyle are FURIOUS. I think there’s a connection to the rise of incel groups, and it’s all very gross. I also see women who agree to be the mom/chores person in the marriage is the husband is the provider, but then the husband gets mad because he can’t support a family on one income and wants her to work, too.
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Yeah, I see/hear these things too. Honestly, I struggle to understand why people (usually men) get so furious about women opting out of traditional marriage. If someone does not want to have children or get married, it affects me in no way and I do not care. I’ve chosen a fairly traditional path and I’ve done so happily, knowing I have had other options all along the way. I understand why women would choose something else. I agree it’s very gross in this connection with incels. This idea that men are owed women.
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I’ve never heard of this book, but I can see how it could be a game-changer when it came out. I sometimes can’t believe how limited women’s lives could be when my mother and father married (1974.) And I can’t believe how much some people seem to want to return to those days.
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The novel is definitely from a female perspective of the time and was criticized by male reviewers. Then again, when things are so restrictive, sometimes people need to carve out a space all their own. I know today we try to be as inclusive as possible, but there is something to be said of really connecting with like-minded people, too, especially in hardship.
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Oh Such a good book! I read it in the late 80s in a women’s lit class in college, and let me say it was still very eye opening then. Did you know Harvard didn’t begin admitting women as undergrads until 1977? French has also written a 3 (maybe 4) volume history of women. I have three of the volumes on my book shelf. Haven’t managed to read them yet though. French isn’t as radical as someone like Mary Daly, but writing a book like the Women’s Room is a lot more than mere observation. Many women at the time were unhappy but they couldn’t say why, they couldn’t say oh it’s the patriarchy like we can now. So authors like French who put words to what women were feeling and experiencing, were a big deal and definitely defined as radical for the time.
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I know that Notre Dame didn’t accept women until the 70s either, which, now that I think about it, is interesting because the second half of The Women’s Room is about women in the PhD program at Harvard. I wonder what the difference was for Harvard between grad and undergrad and accepting women.
I saw that she wrote nonfiction, but this is the first I heard about French, so I haven’t done a deep dive into her works. I can imagine this book was surprising in the way it explained great unhappiness to women who felt unfulfilled but maybe chalked it up to general dread, depression, or an existential crisis.
I would argue that Charlotte Perkins Gilman is more radical on the page than French. Her novels Herland and With Her in Ourland are breathtakingly original. The male protagonists kept introducing problems with a society of only women (and inside I agreed with them) only for a female character to explain why they guys were wrong (and me to think, “Holy shit, she’s right!”).
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With Harvard undergrad, they had the women only sister school of Radcliffe, that was how they kept women out as undergrads.
I agree Gilman was definitely radical, but I don’t think it serves to compare and say one was more radical than the other since they lived in different times and had different goals with their writing. Gilman had to separate her women from society in order for them to have independence, French has them working to change society. Both are radical but with different visions of what that means.
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It’s still shocking to me to hear that women couldn’t own a home on their own in the 1960s, and what’s happening now with limiting abortions, etc. is just abominable. It feels like we’re moving backwards, and as you pointed out, this book describes some conversations that were likely happening around the holidays even today.
I’ve never heard of this book before your review, but I don’t know if that’s because of my age, or because I’m Canadian, or I’m just not as familiar with this kind of book from that time period…
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There were many famous feminist books published in the US in the 70s, such as Fear of Flying (so good) and Looking for Me. Goodbar (also good). That being said, I had not heard of The Women’s Room when I spotted it at a Goodwill.
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[…] 2025. Some books that stuck with me were The Woman in Me by Britney Spears, Waiting by Ha Jin, and The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. Mom’s top three books from our book club were Charlie Savage by Roddy […]
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