The Women's Room

When I was in high school, I tried to read Atlas Shrugged and couldn’t get through it. When I was an Army wife, I read it, and thought it wonderful. Then after university with a better education, I read it and recognized it for drivel.
Reading can be subjective depending on where we are in life.
When I first read The Women’s Room by Marilyn French in the late 1970s, I thought I was reading my biography. The stories of some marriages were the marriages of my mother’s friends (she never followed the traditional route).
Although the scenes in Cambridge were places I knew as intimately as the characters did, that was not what hit me. Unlike much fiction I read about male-female, this was the real story, a variation on the hundreds and hundreds of conversations I have had with women friends.
Last week I entered the Church where the American Library makes it home. At the entrance is a bookcase where books are placed for people to take. I picked up a copy of The Women’s Room, and decided to reread it.
Unlike Atlas Shrugged, I found the truths in the book were as valid today as they had been 30 years ago. The wars might have changed, but the power structure, if anything has gotten worse. If I look at my own personal relationships, I have refought the same battles, only maybe they were skirmishes rather than full-fledged battles. Maybe that is personal progress, but not much.