Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

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...