Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life.

Lately, so many writers are competing to put the last nail in feminism's coffin, the whole spectacle holds a kind of morbid fascination. Is feminism really as powerful as its attackers suggest? Is there no limit to the amount of media attention and grant money women authors who declare wa'r on the women's movement can attract?

Feminism Is No' the Story of My Life, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Doubleday), is another installment in the seemingly endless anti-feminist saga. And a very confusing story it is.

Fox-Genovese weaves together interviews with women whose lives and experiences are so numerous and varied they form a tangle of anecdotes and conflicting points of view. The author doesn't really attempt to sort it all out. Instead, she lets some characters pop up only briefly to declare their opposition to feminism, while she depicts others in ways that reveal more about the author than her subjects.

Take Gloria. whom Fox-Genovese proudly presents as her African-American friend: Gloria wonders whether she would call herself a feminist.... In fact, as she has repeatedly told me, most of the women she knows would never suspect that rich white women who do politics and write books even know they exist.... And on more than one occasion, she has asked me if she might take copies of essays I had written on African-American women, on abortion, and on women and families to her church group, because she felt I had gotten the issues right. I could not imagine, she told me, how much it would mean to her friends to know that some white women are listening and caring."

Unlike all those other, uncaring white women, Fox-Genovese illustrates that she can listen to black people in scenes like the following: "Two of the younger women who belong to [Gloria's] church saw my book on feminism on the backseat of her car. `Lord, Ms. Stanton,' they giggled, `what you coin' with that feminism stuff?"' From these women, Fox-Genovese gleans the wisdom that "feminism ain't for black folks. Feminism means you got to shave your legs and straighten your hair."

Maybe Fox-Genovese is right that there are a lot of stuffy academic feminists out there who don't have much to say to women who aren't white and upper-class. But she hardly presents a persuasive alternative.

She never addresses the basic question whether solidarity among women is possible. Instead, she sets up a straw figure of a feminist, to which she attributes various appalling ideas.

Here's one eyeball-grabber: According to Fox-Genovese, what most women don't know is that "official feminism" (whatever that means) "insists that a woman's right to choose means that it is wrong to save the life of a child who survives the abortion." Where is that written?

Fox-Genovese complains about "extremists" of both the feminist and the conservative variety. She positions herself, unconvincingly, on the side of downtrodden women everywhere.

In the end, her search for a reasonable middle ground comes to naught. On abortion, she starts off sounding pro-life, then retreats, after accusing the pro-choice side of being too tolerant: "Maximum tolerance of different views is healthy, and in some instances we do not have enough of it," she writes. "But, in the case of abortion, it is disastrously inappropriate. After all, we do not normally regard the taking of a human life as a mere matter of personal preference."

Instead of following through and suggesting some firm social policy, however, Fox-Genovese departs into a discussion of people's personal preferences when it comes to limiting the month of pregnancy at which abortion should be allowed: "My own preference would be for the third or fourth, although Pope John Paul II makes a compelling argument that, with respect to life, the drawing of lines is inherently difficult. Others may disagree. But at least this is a public discussion we could hold, for it acknowledges that we regard the legality of abortion as a moral concern."

Whatever. Fox-Genovese and the Pope can talk themselves blue in the face. In the end, Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life doesn't shed much light on the issues it takes up. Give me a radical feminist with attitude any day.

Ruth Conniff is the Managing Editor of The Progressive.