Did Susan Sontag like women? I’m not so sure she did, which made the arrival of feminism in the early 1970s a complicated prospect. Should she get on board or scuttle the ship? I’m not talking about the private realm, of course. She liked, loved, lusted after and admired plenty of individual women. Although she declined to identify publicly as a lesbian, most of her sexual relationships were with women. But was membership of the second sex useful to the public project of Being Sontag? Judging from the evidence here, it was an ambivalent passport, sometimes flashed at the border and sometimes disparaged.
The essays that make up On Women are from the early 1970s, just as the second wave of feminism was breaking on the shores of New York. They weren’t originally published as a book, in the manner of Against Interpretation, the collection that established her reputation as a young avant-gardiste and intellectual force in 1966. Instead, they are wayside pronouncements from a jobbing writer whose high-low trajectory ran from the New York Review of Books to Vogue. Their appearance now is a posthumous creation that, the jacket reports, brings together Sontag’s “most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves”.
