"The human side of a man-hating feminist"

Famous misandrist Marilyn French is dead. Here is an amusing attempt to defend her in the Times of London. Excerpt:

'Yet she was human, and not unloving: her anger against patriarchy was mingled with a real pity for the “dumb, grey, mute” men equally trapped by stereotype and expectation. And so they are - or were, although the softening of the modern male ideal in Western society should please her: the gentle fathers, woman-friendly employers, emotionally open gay men. From interviews I have read I am not sure that, as her life drew to its end, she saw or accepted the rate of change in such men, even as a minority. But she was an intellectual and academic historian, and knew that centuries of culture do not evaporate overnight.

Her vision, skewed and rhetorically extreme though it is, still has its uses. The Women's Room is not a book I'd pick up again, but Beyond Power still has things to say to a generation about to plunge into a nasty recession in which the weakest (often the ones with the wombs) will be shoved to the wall.'