“To those of us who remained committed mainly to the exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities, the feminist analysis seemed a particularly narrow and cracked determinism. .... That many women are victims of condescencion and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.” You don’t have to look too closely to know from the essays collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) that Didion was NOT a feminist. This blistering 1972 New York Times review essay about women’s liberation confirms that. “To make an omelette,” Didion began drily, “you need not only those broken eggs but someone `oppressed’ to break them.” While she honored the origins of radical feminism in Marxist theory, within five years, the movement had descended, Didion wrote, into “superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, and self-loathing.” Didion joined other female movement critics—Midge Decter, Diana Trilling—in distancing herself from “a certain dolorous phantasm, an imagined Everywoman,” oppressed by everyone from her gynecologist to her children’s school. Feminism, as it had become a mass movement, was a collection of “half-truths” that “authenticated themselves,” Didion wrote, “bitter fancies” that “assumed their own logic.”