492
PARTISAN REVIEW
received by women's historians? In my view , they won't much like
the book either. As Mary Beth Norton recently pointed out in
The New York Times Book Review
("Is Clio a Feminist? The New
History," April 13, 1986), the field of women's studies has under–
gone an impressive evolution in the past twenty years . The first
writings in the field from the late sixties and early seventies were
based chiefly on a kind of victimization model. These works focused
almost exclusively on the social , legal , moral , and medical means
through which women have been subjugated by men . But , due to its
obvious intellectual limitations, this form of writing has by and large
disappeared from the scholarly literature , giving way to a more
sophisticated kind of commentary on the historical experience of
women. As Norton showed, such work has taken as its subject the
many remarkable and diversified ways in which women have actively
modelled their lives and their worlds, even within male-dominated
cultures and politics. Moreover, in recent years, "gender studies,"
devoted to the critical examination of the categories of femininity
and masculinity, has emerged as a fertile area of investigation . In
this new context, Masson's vision of an unqualified confrontation
between villainous doctors and female victims represents a reversion
to an old and unconstructive form of thinking.
There will, of course, remain a small and specialized group of
readers who will find Masson's message congenial. There are people
for whom the male oppression model is not so much an historical
hypothesis as a social and psychological world-view, who would
agree with MacKinnon writing in her preface: "Women should
study these medical articles ... to find out what men
really
think of
them." Readers of this persuasion will not be much bothered by the
basic logical and evidential shortcomings of Masson's work. They
will most likely be attracted, as they were with his last book , to the
strident tone and sensationalistic content. Those of us with a good
memory of Malcolm's articles may feel that Masson and members of
the feminist fringe make for strange bedfellows. (Masson, after all,
claimed several years ago to have slept with close to a thousand
women in his lifetime) . Both parties , it is clear, perceive a common
enemy in the contemporary psychiatric establishment . But the simi–
larity of interests is a delusion, and the followers of MacKinnon will
soon realize that Masson's motives are wholly different from their
own . The ideological marriage is surely destined to dissolve , but, in
the meantime, it appears that Masson has succeeded in seducing the
