Classics Corner: The Women's Room by Marilyn French; The Troubled Lives of Women in the Mid-20th Century

Classics Corner: The Women's Room by Marilyn French; The Troubled Lives of Women in the Mid 20th Century

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews


PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book published the month of your birthday (February, 1977)

Spoilers: Marilyn French's novel, The Women's Room, could best be summarized as Feminine Mystique: The Novel.

Betty Friedan's 1964 landmark book, The Feminine Mystique is considered the book that kick-started the second wave of Feminism. It laid out the problems that many women had when they married young, had children, and settled into lives as stay at home mothers. Friedan wrote about the "Problem That Has No Name," women who were bored, listless, and unfulfilled with their lives. They had education, but no idea what to do with it and were unable or unwilling to use it for a career or to find a life outside the home. Many of these women developed physical, psychological, and emotional disorders and used alcoholism, drug addiction, and sexual gratification as means to cope with that dissatisfaction. Friedan's book received criticism, but many women read, understood, and related to that situation. Enough to create a movement.

If The Feminine Mystique described the problem and offered potential solutions, then The Women's Room is the case study, albeit a fictional case study. However, French graphically illustrated what happened to these women as they moved from giggly schoolgirls and conformist housewives of the 1950's and early '60's to divorcees, single mothers, and feminist activists of the late '60's and '70's.

The Women's Room focuses on Mira Ward. When we first meet her, it is 1968 and she is hiding in the Ladies' restroom at the college where she is taking classes. However, it has gone through a change like everything and everybody around her. French tells us, "She called (the Ladies' room) that even though someone had scratched out the word 'ladies' in the sign on the door and written 'women's' underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she saw the cross-out on the door, had never thought about it. 'Ladies room' was a euphemism, she supposed, and she disliked euphemisms on principle."

This book is about women like Mira who argued and challenged being called "ladies" and all that the word implies ("young ladies", "proper ladies," sophisticated ladies who dress nicely, behave properly, and don't question society's standards) to being called "women." ("Wonder Woman,", "career women," women who fight for equal rights, careers, and the rights to being treated as equally to men.)

Mira is a product of a post-WWII upper-middle class upbringing, the type of upbringing that expected her to only have an advantageous marriage. All of her education and training, primarily from her mother, was made for that specific goal. However, Mira starts out life independent. She reads books by people like Nietzsche and Radclyffe Hall that are considered forbidden and asks important questions about sex, religion, and politics. At first, she tries to be independent. She doesn't want to be someone's secretary. She would rather have the adventures and be the boss. When she becomes involved with a boy, Lanny, she imagines herself scrubbing the kitchen floor with a baby crying in the background.

After she and Lanny break up, Mira begins dating Norm, a medical student. When she and Norm get married, Mira can feel her own life and independence slipping away. She suggests teaching and ultimately getting a Ph.D. in English Literature. Norm scoffs at the idea, thinking that she wouldn't have time what with taking care of the house, cooking meals, and raising the children. (It never occurs to him to share the household tasks. When she suggests this, it is clear that he thinks the very idea is repellant.) The picture of Mira's dependence becomes clearer and more haunting when after she gives birth to two children, Normie Jr. and Clark, Mira finds herself scrubbing the floor with crying children in the background, exactly like she feared.

Some of the hardest chapters to read are the ones that not only peer into Mira and Norm's troubled married life, but the troubled lives of all of the married couples that surround them. The Feminine Mystique doesn't just hit them, it hits everyone around them. Natalie is jealous when her husband, Hamp starts making eyes at the other women in their circle. Adele has a bad temper that constantly yells at her children and worries when she is pregnant with another. Bliss is engaged in an affair with her best friend's husband. Martha is taking night school courses and becomes involved with a French teacher. Sean and Oriane move to the Bahamas where Sean abandons her, leaving her broke and ill from cancer. Samantha and Simp end up financially stranded after Simp loses his job. The most troubling story is that of Lily, who is abused by her bullying husband and budding sociopathic son into a mental breakdown. Lily moves in and out of psychiatric care and constantly receives electroconvulsive therapy, shock treatments.

What of our main couple, Mira and Norm? Norm subjects his wife to verbal abuse and is judgemental towards his wife and her friends. He neglects his children. One night, he drops a bombshell on Mira when he tells her that he wants a divorce. (The reason is never specified, but is implied that Norm is leaving her for another woman, a woman whom he later marries.) During their separation, a devestated Mira attempts suicide by slashing her wrists only to be rescued by Martha.


This book illustrates the problems that women have with the institution of marriage. The female characters are more three dimensional than the males. They are flawed hurt characters who are desperate for happiness and are instead miserable. The men are flatter, more cardboard, and more interchangeable. It makes sense when the Reader realizes that the book is exclusively told from the female point of view, from a first person female narrator who isn't revealed until the end of the book. It presents the world how she sees it.

In her eyes, men are the dominant force unknowable and powerful. The women around her are the ones who are suffering. The Narrator makes no apologies for how she writes. She challenges the idea of marriage itself and how it transforms people into someone that they don't want to be.
She also mentions how when books are written by men, they make the female characters flatter and less interesting as mothers, children, or love interests. They can't write about women, because they can't get into their heads. (Though she cited that there were exceptions like Henry James.) In retaliation, the Narrator portrays the male characters from her outside perspective because she can't get into their heads.


After the divorce, Mira finds her life completely different. She finds the life that she once wanted. The first taste of freedom is felt when she gives Norm a bill, itemizing all of the work that she did for him all of those years. Even though Norm refuses to pay, she makes her point clear that she is becoming aware of her own mind and desires.

Mira has more freedom to further her education by taking English Literature courses in college. She becomes involved in a sexual relationship with Ben, another student, and meets some wild new friends that navigate her into the Women's Movement and living life on her own terms.


That's not to say that her and her friend's lives are problem free. Isolde, a lesbian, goes from one troubled relationship to another particularly with women who are afraid to take their romance with her to another level. Val, the leader of this group of feminists, wants to start her own women-only separatist community, but seeks vengeance when her beloved daughter, Chris, is raped.

But what differs between these women and the ones before is how they deal with their problems. The women that Mira knew during her marriage are more internal. They are unable to express their discomfort. Their only ways they can challenge their unhappiness is to act upon their frustrations and neuroses. They are so dependent on their husbands, that they can no longer become the agents of change. When that dependence is removed, the Marthas, the Samanthas, the Blisses, and the Lilies don't know what to do with themselves.

The Isoldes, the Vals, and the Chrises are the agents of change. Many of them are divorced or purposely unmarried, so they rely only on themselves. If something goes wrong in their lives, they seek to change it through action. They go through emotional break ups, sexual explorations, and class and work overload but are able act on their own. Part of independence is dealing with the positive and negative aspects of living your own life, becoming aware of your own emotions, and making your own decisions. It is an independence that is won because it is earned

Mira in particular, loves her new found and hard won independence. She enjoys it so much that she turns down Ben's marriage proposal knowing that she will end up with more of the same, another stifling crippling married life of dependence. In the end, Mira realizes that she has achieved the fulfillment that she long ago wanted by herself.

The Women's Room covers that dramatic moment when women challenged their right to be thought of as independent people who should receive equal rights and protection under the law and society. It showed that time when they stopped thinking of themselves as girls and ladies and started thinking of themselves as women.