The Women’s Room was published by Summit Books in 1977, selling twenty million copies worldwide and becoming one of the most commercially successful literary novels of the decade. Its famous opening line — “Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room” — announces both its subject (women’s confined spaces) and its tone (wry observation of constraint).
Mira Ward’s story begins in the 1950s: marriage to a medical student, children, suburban domesticity, the gradual realization that the life she was promised (security, fulfillment through family) is actually a form of imprisonment. Her husband is not cruel — merely oblivious, entitled, and uninterested in her inner life. The suburbs are not hostile — merely deadening, reducing intelligent women to competitive housekeeping and pharmaceutical dependency.
After divorce (prompted by her husband’s affair), Mira enters Harvard as a graduate student in literature and discovers the women’s movement: consciousness-raising groups, feminist theory, female friendship of a depth and honesty she has never experienced. The novel’s Harvard sections are its most alive — the intellectual excitement, the sexual experimentation, the sense of women discovering that their individual problems are political conditions.
French’s most controversial decision is the novel’s ending: Mira ends up alone, teaching at a community college, her feminist consciousness intact but her personal life a wasteland. French refuses the consolation of a happy ending — and her critics (who were legion) argued that this bleakness was not realism but ideology, a predetermined conclusion that no amount of experience could alter.
Collecting The Women’s Room
First edition (Summit Books, New York, 1977): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- UK first (André Deutsch, 1978): $15–$40
- Without jacket: $5–$10