Backwards, in heels, with a highball in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

I found a review of the David Laskin book that I mentioned last week, the one about Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, and the rest of the Partisan Review crowd. The woman who wrote the review seems to belong to the tiny set of people with whom I agree on feminism:

. . . in this respect [Laskin] makes what feels like one very wrong turn. Repeatedly he is frustrated that these smart, independent, pioneering women couldn't see the point of feminism. It is not enough for him that they did it all backward, in heels and with highball in hand. Why the compulsion to marry, and to marry so recklessly? Why the deference to husbands of whom they were the intellectual equals? He dearly wants them to have embraced the women's movement, to which they would have lent considerable force but which they resisted, often with all their might.

. . . Laskin wonders why it never struck these intellectuals to arrange things differently, yet the ''differently'' is something for which—a revolution later—we are still searching today. And while it may seem remarkable that a husband's work should come first, none of these women appear to have minded having been married to hugely talented, often very visible, men. Most of all, it's impossible to say—of McCarthy, Stafford, Hardwick—that ''they managed to get published and to become famous, formidable intellectuals without challenging or offending the males who published them,'' given the toll on their personal lives. Hasn't Laskin seen ''Annie Get Your Gun''? These women wrote their way out of, and around, their marriages. They funneled their frustrations, their failures, their feelings about Boston society into their work. It cannot be said that anyone suffered in silence. They fought all the way, but the battle was a private one. Blinded by their own success, they had no time for liberty on the barricades.

RTWT. The first two paragraphs are very well-written.