SOURCE: “Eight New Feminist Books,” in American Scholar, Vol. 42, No. 4, Autumn, 1973, pp. 676–84.

In the following excerpt, Howe offers a positive assessment of Unlearning the Lie.

If Frazier and Sadker's tone is too sanguine [in Sexism in School and Society] a useful antidote and complementary account is Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's Unlearning the Lie. Harrison, a writer and the parent of two children who attend the Woodward School in Brooklyn, makes palpable both her own reluctant conversion to feminism and the school's two-year process of beginning change. Indeed, it took two years of parental pressure on a “free,” private elementary (kindergarten through eighth grade) school to gain the cooperation of the staff, if not the agreement of all the parents. In this process, a few teachers and most significantly the director—strong women who had “made it” and who were not easily convinced of the need for change—played key...