Women aand the Common Life Love, Marriage, and Feminism W. W.
Norton, 196 pp., $ 23 The late Christopher Lasch was one of
those rare men who take women seriously. He did this by taking
their arguments seriously, an effort which in our time begins
with taking feminism seriously. In Women and the Common Life, a
collection of his last articles, Lasch considers the essential
feminist argument for "choice" -- a life of autonomy or perfect
freedom. Without ever attacking feminism, he finds that feminist
choice does not make sense and harms our democracy. A historian,
Lasch sees feminism in its historical context. He notes that
feminism defines its own context as a revolution against
patriarchy. Just as the French revolutionaries invented the term
ancien regime to describe everything before the revolution of
1789, so the feminists have set up " patriarchy" as a catch-all
category covering all history before the 1960s. They want it
made clear that only today's feminism can sustain women's self-
respect, so they measu