The Women's Room is the novel that summed up everything that second-wave feminism was all about. Desperate housewives going bonkers in the suburbs, sexist-pig husbands, women sacked for getting pregnant ... tick, tick, tick. The book is a 526-page manifesto for good old-fashioned women's lib. It is also a stonking read, which is why it sold by the cartload.

Our heroine, Mira Ward, drops out of Harvard to marry a young medical student called Norm. She is soon a domestic drudge; the verve and the thinking drain out of her. But she has her friends. They pop round and laugh and talk about their children - men are irrelevant. Later, though, the shine rubs off. Affairs begin and friendships whither. One woman ends up in an asylum; another has her heart demolished; another sinks below the breadline. Through all this, Mira cleans and polishes and frowns, and becomes a stranger to her sons.

Eventually Norm leaves Mira for another woman, and she is free. She returns to Harvard to finish her studies, and starts to become human again. A new group of women friends, the most vivid of them a woman called Val, help to unpress her, and she is soon having amazing sex with a man called Ben. You almost get to like Mira, especially when she tries to get close to her sons again.

At times, the book is entirely given over to pages of dialogue - Mira and her friends setting a misogynist world to rights - but it's still good reading. French writes as if it all happened; the churning awfulnesses of relationship break-ups are a speciality.

This is not a book of neat and happy endings. It turns out that Ben is not so different from Norm. It becomes clear that Mira may end up living the rest of her life alone. When Val's daughter, Chris, is raped, you end up at least sympathising with Val when she says: "Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relationships with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes."

Even read with a generous heart, the Women's Room can be a titchy bit silly at times. But if you're only ever going to read one classic feminist novel, then this wouldn't be such a bad one to pick.