Product Review

Debora L. Spar spent most of her life avoiding feminism. Raised after the tumult of the 1960s, she presumed that the gender war was over. "We thought we could glide into the new era with babies, board seats, and husbands in tow," she writes. "We were wrong."
Spar should know. One of the first women professors at Harvard Business School, she went on to have three children and became the chair of her department. Now, she's the president of Barnard College, arguably the most important women's college in the country, and an institution firmly committed to feminism. "Wonder Women" is Spar's story, but it is also the culture's. Armed with reams of new research, she examines how women's lives have, and have not, changed over the past fifty years--and how it is that the struggle for power has become a quest for perfection. Wise, often funny, and always human, "Wonder Women" asks: How far have women really come? And what will it take to get true equality for good?