Book in Review: Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women, by Lori Jo Marso. New York: Routledge, 2006. 240 pp. $24.95 (paper), $95.00 (cloth)

• Published date: 01 October 2007
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591707304591
• Author: Diana Coole
• Date: 01 October 2007
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory
Books in Review
Volume 35 Number 5
October 2007 686-688
© 2007 Sage Publications
Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity:
http://ptx.sagepub.com
hosted at
The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women,
http://online.sagepub.com
by Lori Jo Marso. New York: Routledge,
2006. 240 pp. $24.95 (paper), $95.00 (cloth).
DOI: 10.1177/0090591707304591
Feminist scholars routinely scrutinize their predecessors’ work, finding
in their texts a rich resource for their own thinking. Lori Jo Marso maintains
that this sort of intellectual analysis is not however sufficient, especially if
the aim is one of raising political consciousness. In Feminist Thinkers and
the Demands of Femininity she argues for the importance of reading the the-
ories alongside the lives of the women who produced them. It is in the rela-
tionship between their intellectual work and their struggles to live as
intellectual women that she finds a source of inspiration that might help
contemporary feminists recognize their commonality. Marso’s principal
interlocutor here is Simone de Beauvoir: as author of the existentialist
approach to gender that Marso herself embraces, analyst of the tensions
befalling the independent woman, writer of novels and autobiographical
volumes that dramatize the challenges facing such women, and a feminist
who presented her own life as exemplary. Taking up the existentialist theme
that such lives have to be understood within a situation yet have lessons to
teach others, she also considers Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël,
and Emma Goldman.
Marso shows each of these women struggling to live according to the
feminist ideals their written work advocates while contending with prevail-
ing norms of femininity. In pushing at the boundaries of such constraints,
she argues, they engendered new models of womanhood, although at the
cost of considerable personal anguish as they strove to combine feminine
desire with feminist freedom and intimate relationships with political com-
mitment. It...