Challenges the current orthodoxy in feminist criticism and pedagogy that "books change lives" by reexamining key feminist texts that attempted to be instruments for both personal and social change in the lives of their readers. The book uses reception studies of writers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Marilyn French to show that feminists' faith in the power of written or filmic texts as principal means to social change has been misplaced. It emphasizes important "second wave" works of popular feminism in order to argue that the cultural moment for belief in consciousness-raising texts has now passed, critiques feminist criticism's continued dependence on this model of oppositional possibility.