In the intro she paints a view of radical feminism as a continuation and the fulfillment of socialism, as Marx and Engels failed to consider sex difference as the “tapeworm of exploitation,” more primordial than class struggle itself. But most of the book is more indebted to Freud than Marx and Engels; only the last chapter really fleshed out the vision of radical feminism she paints in the beginning.
I’m allergic to Freud being used to explain group psychology. The chapter on racism, where she analogizes Black psychology to the Oedipus complex and Electra complex, is particularly egregious in this. She uncomfortably veers into very bad stereotypes in the service of group psychologizing!
She also has very outre views about child sexuality. I understand that it is of a piece with her stance on family abolition, but it is very weird to read a radical feminist and not a libertarian talk positively about pedophilia. Her vision of transient “households” where the child can leave at any time (but, amusingly, the adults are bound to temporary contracts) just seems like something that’s not really well thought out. For someone who is very incisive about the way love, marriage, and family oppress women and children, it does not seem like she has thought at all how to avoid oppression with her utopian vision of what personal life would look like.
I liked her discussion of sexuality being unnaturally constrained to heterosexual intercourse. She advocates for a re-enchantment or an eroticization of the world by releasing society from this constraint, so that all relations will be suffused with sexuality. This is an interesting take but I wished she described it in more detail.