Women: The Longest Revolution, and: Dreams and Dilemmas, and: Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (review)

148 the minnesota review for this plurality of "scientific techniques" is the catastrophe model, which projects regions of undecidability with strictly local and provisional determinisms. So in the final analysis, Lyotard pits the aleatory nature of scientific discovery against the performativity of monopoly-capitalist administered society. The inventiveness and unpredictability he values in the avant-garde moment of postmodern aesthetics finds an echo in the agonistic and catastrophic process of development in postmodern science. We may suspect that Lyotard's pronouncement that performativity is scientifically unsound and even counter-productive will not greatly affect the technostructure and its pursuit of maximum systemic performance through the input/output calculus. But it is only fair to recall that knowledge was the commissioned topic of the essay—which may serve to explain the elevation of scientific research here to paradigm of all postmodern discursive practices. A precipitous, even despairing foreclosure of change and of the future seems to characterize both these theorists of the "postmodern." It is as if the great hopes inspired by the 60s in France were fated to be followed by an equally great pessimism in the 80s. But even if scientific progress and material wealth are not now employed in the cause of human emancipation and self-realization, this does not mean that they cannot be. Debray and Lyotard, however, have provided insightful analyses of the postmodern condition, rather than hope or guidance for improving it. EUGENE W. HOLLAND Women: The Longest Revolution by Juliet Mitchell. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 335 pp. $9.95 (paperback). Dreams and Dilemmas by Sheila Rowbotham. London: Virago Press, 1983. 379 pp. $8.95 (paperback). Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinern. New York: New American Library, 1983. 370 pp. $7.95 (paperback); $14.95 (hardcover). By now, the contemporary women's movement is old enough that some of its outstanding spokeswomen have begun to reflect on the course ofits development, and to measure its impact on their culture and their own lives. Each of these three collections of essays represents an attempt at such an accounting. In ways both witting and unwitting, they succeed in communicating the different voices of feminist writing. The sheer breadth of topics covered by the three books should convince any skeptic of the comprehensiveness of feminist philosophy. Read together, they also suggest that although the nuances of feminist philosophy and practice did not facilitate the development of an even and easy sisterhood, the depth of feminist commitment to making politics into something else imposed from within the movement an obligatory epistemological uncertainty about its researches and actions . Sheila Rowbotham captures this well with her warnings about the dangers of dogmatism among feminists: We, the feminists I mean, are not the pure embodiment of everything that is not tainted by the evil of masculinity. Nor in any case is all evil to be found in another biological grouping, or even in the concept of what is masculine. Nor is any particular man person simply the incarnation of a historical concept of masculinity. A fixed moral rectitude is incapable of negotiating with history. It knows no past, no present, cannot move into a future. Blown up with its own conceit, it heads for entrances and fills them with guilt as authority, (p. 352) The refusal to adopt a politically correct line that speaks through all of these essays remind us also that feminists are not dilettantes. That the personal is political has come to mean the reviews 149 search for a new concept of self that connects the individual in a web of relationships with others, but recognizes the need that each person has for a room of one's own. Of these books, Juliet Mitchell's provides the best view of the development of feminist theory. Beginning with a reprint of her early, and by now classic, essay of 1966, "Women: The Longest Revolution," Mitchell's writing wanders over a range of questions that she has pursued in greater depth in her longer works, Woman's Estate, and Psychoanalysis and Feminism. The nature of kinship structures and their role in the organization of the sexual division of labor; the meanings of sexual difference, seen through anthropological, literary...