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PARTISA REVIEW
those who knew him. Anzia Yezierska was for John Dewey not just a box
labelled "the immigrant" but a fervent and attractive woman, nor was she
aroused by him only because he was born in America.
Norma Rosen knows that fiction has a core of truth even if it never
happened. She sees her improbable lovers as individuals from different
worlds who could not, becau e of character or background or obligation, re–
solve the problems raised by their affair. But more likely than not it was
temperament that drove them apart. When the real Anzia Yezierska, long
after the affair had ended, wrote a review of one of Dewey's books on
education, she impeached him for lacking "the power to reach the masses of
people who think with the heart rather than with the head." But wa she
thinking of "masses," or was she talking about herself? And what would John
Dewey have said?
PEARL K. BELL
WOMEN AS PROLETARIANS
SOVIET WOMEN. WALKING THE TIGHTROPE.
By
Francine Du Plessix
Gray. Doubleday. $19.95.
Marx didn't have a whole lot to say about women. One passage
from his essay, "Private Property and Communism," acquired a totemistic
status among Marxist feminists. Marx argued rather murkily that the nature
of a society'S relationships between males and females demonstrates the
"extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which
nature to him has become the human e sence of man. From this relationship
one can therefore judge man's whole level of development." That can take
you as far as you want to go, mostly in all sorts of utopian directions along
the lines of creating a social world in which human essences have become
natural and sex differences are dissolved into some generic humanness.
Engels took up the challenge of women and, he claimed, stated what
Marx himself would have said had he gotten around to saying it. His text,
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,
became the rallying
focus of subsequent Marxi t feminisms. An apt subtitle for Engel's effort
would have been, "Why Can't a Woman be More Like a Proletarian?" He
decided she could be; indeed, already was, by drawing an analogy between
reproduction and production and finding in the relations between the sexes
the ur-class relation. In order to be truly liberated, women must first become
