There is a danger, when listening to polemical books, that the listener will emerge feeling a little battered. Not so with the late writer and activist Susan Sontag’s On Women, which comprises a series of her writing and interviews published in the 1970s, when feminism’s second wave was at its height in the US, and which is read with thoughtfulness and clarity by the voice actor Laurel Lefkow.
Sontag’s commitment to the feminist cause has been relentlessly questioned during her life and posthumously, so it is useful to have her thoughts on women and womanhood all in one place. She could undoubtedly be argumentative: “Like all capital truths, feminism can be simple-minded,” she wrote in an open letter to the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, published in the New York Review of Books. Rich, in return, said Sontag’s writings on women were “more of an intellectual exercise than the expression of a felt reality”.
