The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. Dorothy Dinnerstein (Harper & Row, New York, 1976, 288pp., $3.95)

Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur is not a popular book. It has crept into public notice relatively without ballyhoo. This statement is partly an excuse for writing a review, in 1979, of a book originally published in 1976 and out in paperback a year later, partly a criticism of reviewers (why didn't they sing under my pillow, flag my car down on the highway?), and partly praise for the Old Girls' network that stubbornly insisted on plugging it anyway (“Haven't you read …?,” “Maude says …,” “I found this book …”). The vocabulary of critical praise has become so inflated nowadays that when I read Sara Blackburn's comment on the back cover of MM that the intellectual excitement of reading Dinnerstein is comparable to that of reading early Freud, I merely “humphed,” and yet Sara Blackburn is telling the truth. Dorothy Dinnerstein's argument is so brilliant, so ingenious, so wide, so novel, and so obvious that I can't trust myself to do it justice, especially in a few paragraphs. What she has done is to unify biology, history, and psychology in the interest of explaining not “the cause” of sexism but its profoundest motivations in both men and women. In this union of Darwin, Marx, and Freud (so to speak) none is reduced to the status of epiphenomenon or made a “reflection” of any of the others. Dinnerstein has taken one very obvious fact and much of the not-so-obvious thought of the past century-and-a-half and fused the lot in a rare intellectual triumph. To recognize that sexism is not all force and fraud seems to leave as an alternative only the craven surrender to “biology” – or rather, the kind of quasi-biology that asserts that either women are genetically inferior or men genetically horrid. Dinnerstein goes beyond such silly-simple notions to a conclusion which produced in me all the embarrassing hilarity of finally discovering the haystack after you've spent decades looking for the needle in it. The things this book explains! For example, the uneasy, unstable co-existence of feminism with protest against class privilege – and why the latter has always been so much more visible (when visible at all) than the former…