Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. Elizabeth Fisher (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1980, 504pp., $4.95)

In her introduction Elizabeth Fisher writes of a “visionary” night in which she suddenly said to herself, “I've just rewritten Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State” (p. xiii), but her clever publisher knew better than to call the book Engels Supported by a Century of Other People's Scholarship and Rebutted by the Addition of Female Sexuality, a Subject With Which He Could Not Deal, Brilliant Victorian Though He Was, and No Wonder. Not only would such a title have taken up the space devoted instead to one of the most visually appalling cover designs I have ever seen, it also would have given prospective readers some idea of what the book was about, thus enraging female separatists (“She's agreeing with a MAN!”), the non-feminist Left (“She's a FEMINIST!”), the feminist Left (“We know THAT!”), and the ordinary public (“A COMMIE WOMEN's LIBBER, jeez!”). This way nobody is enraged because nobody is enlightened and most readers have so far dealt with the problem of another unpleasantly long, vaguely feminist tome by the serene expedient of not reading it.

When you think that the particular marsh you are stuck in is timeless (that is, ahistorical), you must look for timeless causes – or at least causes that have lasted as long as our existence as a species. This is exactly what Dorothy Dinnerstein does in The Mermaid and the Minotaur. Since her causes are so ingrained in “human nature” the only possible response is Dinnerstein's heroic despair: we're bound to lose but we'll go down fighting! An admirable position, but how much better (and what a relief) to be able to say with Fisher: Sexism, like a host of other evils, arose at a particular point in human history (that's the historical part) in response to the concrete, material ways in which people lived, that is, how they got their food, shelter, and so on (and that's the materialism), not out of some immutable biological essence imprinted on their genes or (this is Dinnerstein's version) pre-hominid social patterns necessarily transferred to a developing human species, with catastrophic results.