Never mind that MacKinnon was in “gritty New Haven” as a student at the decidedly not-gritty Yale Law School — Hirshman, who has also practiced as a lawyer, has a case to make and scores to settle. The simple argument she insists on returning to — of the inexorable triumph of a noble feminism like hers and MacKinnon’s — doesn’t properly capture the knottier parts of her subject.

Image Linda Hirshman Credit... Nina Subin

Hirshman gestures at some of these complexities, including the trade-offs liberal women have had to confront, especially when it comes to the piggishness of certain male Democrats. What to do with Senator Edward Kennedy, notorious for his boozy, boorish womanizing but also known for his stalwart support of women’s rights? Or Clinton, for that matter, whose administration, Hirshman says, “produced considerable payoffs for feminists”?

But she doesn’t allow complications to linger. She takes what might best be described as an Old Testament view, suggesting that the election of the Republican president George W. Bush, and his subsequent rollback of reproductive rights, amounted to divine retribution for a devil’s bargain. She is breezily confident that, if it hadn’t been for the Lewinsky scandal — or if penitential Democrats had properly atoned by forcing Clinton to leave office — then Al Gore, the party’s candidate in the 2000 presidential election, would have been a “shoo-in.”

Elsewhere, she does better, setting aside the specious what-ifs for some actual history. The strongest parts of “Reckoning” are where Hirshman gives credit to the black women in addition to Hill who were central to the movement. Most of the lead plaintiffs in early sexual harassment lawsuits, like Mechelle Vinson and Paulette Barnes, were black women. The original Me Too movement was begun by the activist Tarana Burke, in 2006.

But the essential contributions of these women are quickly folded into Hirshman’s triumphal narrative arc. Black women have talked about how challenging it can be to manage intersecting identities and allegiances in a movement that hasn’t yet resolved its relationship to law enforcement and the carceral state; by contrast, Hirshman’s biggest complaint about law enforcement seems to be that there isn’t enough of it. She namechecks the former Black Panther and current prison abolitionist Angela Davis without actually engaging with her ideas. “Reckoning” glosses over an expansive definition of physical assault without peering too closely at its expansive law-and-order implications.

The word “reckoning,” of course, has a biblical meaning: a day when sinners will be judged for their deeds. But “to reckon” with something can also mean to take it fully into consideration, even — or especially — when certain elements are hard to assimilate. Hirshman has written a lively account of a social revolution that’s still in the making, but anyone seeking a deeper understanding of why the current moment has been such a long time coming may wish that she had done a little more reckoning of her own.