Dear Editors,

Mary Sojourner's review of Phyllis Chesler's With Child is a lovely piece, and yet – oh dear! It's not just that Mary Sojourner knows so little about the realities of publishing (or seems to), the difference between fame and success and what female “really” means (some of this latter information can be found in Chesler and Goodman's Women, Money, and Power, Bantam, 1977); it's that her ignorance (?) is shared by so many, and is so American and so very female.

E.g. “Had this writing appeared in soft-cover, for a fair price, we might have admired her courage …” “We have … access to publication” “I resent paying $9.95 to male publishers” and “WOMEN are hot stuff right now.”

1. The real (media-created) “stars” of feminism must make their livings via commercial publishers because they are otherwise unemployable. Fame is absolutely distinct from (and often detrimental to) success. People magazine recently informed us that Germaine Greer was teaching permanently in Oklahoma at a relatively low-ranking and unknown university at $15,000 a year (the same salary a young woman in her middle twenties recently got here in Seattle for her first full-time job). Better then welfare? Sure, but what is Greer doing in Nowheresville at a salary not enough to put her financially into the middle class? (A male colleague of mine recently commented about his own $20,000 a year, “Well, it's O.K. if you're single.”) Eating, I suspect. For example:

2. Writer Star A, teaching for a year in order to save money to live on for the next one (at a salary like Greer's) found out simultaneously that she had a serious illness and no medical insurance (oddly enough) though medical insurance is standard in academic contracts.

3. Academic Star B, whose honors in the profession are dazzling, dislikes her tenured location but has never moved. Why? “Too radical,” I was told; “No one else will employ her.”

4. Writer Star C, having sold the paperback rights to a now published and well-known book on condition that there be a previous hardcover sale, spent three years trying to find a hardcover publisher. One after another refused the book, despite the large guaranteed income (half the paperback advance) such a sale would automatically bring in.