Seth Kaller, Inc.

This presentation copy of novelist Erica Jong’s collection of essays is inscribed to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Jong’s volume is entitled What Do Women Want?, a reference to a famous statement by Sigmund Freud to Marie Bonaparte: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”

Jong’s essays discuss women, the women’s movement, literature, contemporary culture, and travel, and received mixed reviews. Critics found the volume “embarrassingly unsophisticated”; “Jong at her best and worst, alternately flailing wildly and landing squarely on the mark”; “sometimes a lot of fun to read. The ‘sometimes’ is the problem with this random collection of essays”; and one suggested that “Jong should stick to fiction writing.” Other reviewers found that “Jong lays it on the line in these potent essays about women’s lives, writing with acuity, gutsiness, and humor” and found her essays “vigorous, bright, and forthright.”

[RUTH BADER GINSBURG]. Erica Jong, What Do Women Want? Bread Roses Sex Power. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. First edition, hardcover, no dust jacket. Inscribed to Justice Ginsburg: “For Ruth & Marty Ginsberg [sic] / Warmly / E J / 23 Sept 98.” 224 pp., 6½ x 10 in.

Inventory #27863       Price: $7,500

Jong’s first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), became a classic text of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. The book’s protagonist, Isadora Wing, narrates the novel and speaks frankly about her sexual desires and feelings. It resonated strongly with women stuck in unfulfilling marriages and ultimately sold more than 27 million copies worldwide. Jong went on to become something of a feminist spokesperson, but in 2015 complained that many people called her a “bad feminist” in the 1970s “because I liked to wear lipstick and I liked to wear high heels and I thought men were cool and I liked to wear fancy underwear.”

In 2013, Jong said of Justice Ginsburg: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a wonderful woman, who I taught with one summer at the Salzburg Global Seminar, and is a great teacher. She came out and said men don't understand women’s lives. And they certainly don’t understand women’s health issues. And, I was so glad she said that.”

When Ginsburg died, Jong’s daughter Molly Jong-Fast wrote, “My mother, feminist Erica Jong, thought of RBG as a GOD. She was a feminist before feminism was a thing. Her life’s work was to stop discrimination ‘on the basis of sex.’”

Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) was born in Brooklyn into a Jewish family and graduated in 1954 from Cornell University, where she met Martin D. Ginsburg. They married a month after her graduation, and they moved to Oklahoma, where he was stationed in the U.S. Army Reserve. Ruth Bader Ginsburg enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1956 but transferred to Columbia Law School in New York after two years and graduated in 1959. She held a clerkship for a federal judge and then worked at Columbia Law School on international law. She was a professor at Rutgers Law School from 1963 to 1972 and at Columbia Law School from 1972 to 1980. In 1972, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union to combat gender discrimination. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. She served as a liberal voice on the Supreme Court and authored many important opinions. Ginsburg died of complications from pancreatic cancer and was replaced on the court by Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Erica Jong (b. 1942) was born Erica Mann in New York to descendants of Polish and Russian Jewish immigrants. She graduated from Barnard College in 1963 and earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University in 1965. She is best known for her first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), which became scandalous for treating women’s sexual desires frankly and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Over the next forty years, she wrote ten more novels and eight volumes of poetry. She also wrote several works of non-fiction, including What Do Women Want? and edited the 2011 anthology, Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write about Real Sex.