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This fine, seriously engaging, beautifully organized, well-written book has a hidden subtext, which Mari Jo Buhle has the scholarly integrity to reveal in the penultimate sentence of the acknowledgments, just before the Index: “I am so grateful to Paul Buhle,” she writes, “who a long time ago browbeat me out of becoming a psychologist” (p. 418). Intellectually drawn to psychoanalysis in her teens and to psychology as an undergraduate, Buhle succumbed to the lure of history, which permitted her to combine these interests as a graduate student in pursuit of the history of feminism. Buhle has the grace not to make an issue of the virulent academic and professional climate for women at that time, except to admit modestly that “[w] omen's history had not yet become a part of the curriculum…” (p. 417). Decades later, with this book as an impressive thus-far harvest of her distinguished record as a historian, Buhle charts both the desperate yearning and the inevitable clash between psychoanalysis and feminism in the peculiarly hospitable twin arenas of popular culture and academe.
I am drawing attention to the subtext because both the intrinsic attraction to psychoanalysis and the sense of a narrow escape figure in Buhle's treatment of her material. “This book is by and large a standard history of ideas, although it covers far-flung intellectual tendencies rarely seen in intimate relation to one another,” says she in her exemplary, bracing Introduction (p. 20). The richly detailed overview of the Introduction, in fact, makes it an incisive, useful summary of what will follow. The pivotal concept is Buhle's “definitional axis of feminism” which “swings between difference, meaning an emphasis on the qualities that distinguish ‘woman’ from ‘man’ and determine the distinctive roles, rights, and identities of each; and equality, meaning a claim to autonomy