Feminism 101

Book: Reading Women: How the Greatest Books of Feminism Changed My Life


Author: Stephanie Staal


Published: 2011 (PublicAffairs)


Pages: 264


I finished this book about revisited feminism right before I unwrapped a new dress and pulled it on over tights to go over to my boyfriend's house. 

I spent the whole clothes time wondering who, exactly, was I wearing this for? Me? My boyfriend? Because I wanted him to think I looked cute? Because I wanted to look cute for myself? But what if looking cute for myself is subliminal code for looking cute in a way that he and society think look cute, so there's not actually any of me in this decision at all? ...How the hell am I ever supposed to know what's me and what's for him and what's Western societal pressure on the female bits of me?


Reading about feminism always makes me wonder that without giving me any answers. 


This book charts the experiences of a lady who revisits her Fem Text class at Bernard when her professional and family lives are doing that thing where they don't work together. Classic feminist dilemma that--say it with me now--she never thought would happen to her. 


And I loved reading about it. She writes in the perfect deft balance of understated confessional personal narrative and academic research. Her readings make her think about her real life and where she's at now in her real life makes her understand the readings in depths she couldn't get close to when she was a 20-year-old undergraduate immersed in an all-girl's college. And y'all, she's incredibly insightful about the vague, impractical, and hypocritical points of feminism while still being firmly in favor of the movement because, come on. Women are people too. 


She doesn't come to any more solid a conclusion than I ever do, though. She's glad she took the class during a whole new generation of thought, and she's glad it's made her appreciate how hard her life balance is and that it really might be worth it in the end, but she's not changing anything radical in her life because she read Vindication for the Rights of Woman again. I was sort of hoping there'd be an Awesome Gentlelady Who Doesn't Give a Fuck About Gender Roles No Seriously magic formula somewhere in there, but alas. 


Welp. I don't want to end on "alas" because I really liked this book, so I will tell you that after a good boyfriend visit I decided that I do dress for myself first but angle for outside appreciation. At least when I'm going out in public. 

Love triangle number infinity

Book: The Marriage Plot

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

Published: 2011 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Pages: 406

Internet rumblings + my university ID card still checking out books for me after I’ve made the leap from student to employee + Eugenides speaking here this coming spring + Middlesex = me finding and reading this book as fast as I could.

And the only reason I was disappointed was how can ordinary people in a college courtship postgrad marriage love triangle compete with hermaphrodites and a family of suicidal virgin sisters? Eugenides is brave for tackling such an ordinary subject in his unadorned prose, which brings weird things into the real world but keeps its real-world subjects small.

But he made me care about these people and wonder about the plausibility of happily ever after, and while he didn’t break the ground I think he meant to with the parallels of the Victorian novel marriage plot and its application to the late ‘80s/early ‘90s changing American dream, I wanted to know what happened to his fictional slice of it. And the ending was bittersweetly satisfying.

To the rumors!

“It’s Mary Sue-tastic!” I didn’t really get that. The female protagonist is a little empty, yeah, and mostly but not always described as pretty, but she’s in her early twenties and has no idea what she wants to do with her life. That totally happens all the time. And she has interests (Victorian novels!) and flaws (spoiled and indecisive and clingy!). I had more problems believing that her parents paid for her to wander, and get her apartment, and treat her boyfriend/husband’s mental illness, especially since they didn’t seem to like any of the choices she DOES make.

“It’s about David Foster Wallace’s bandanna and depression!” I mean maybe, in the troubled genius of the male antagonist. But I recognized the other guy in the love triangle a lot stronger. He was a lot like Walter from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom—a guy who works hard to make himself good and feels like he deserves something (the girl) for being able to repress his base urges so well.This guy makes better choices, though, which makes for a less brutal reading.

“It’s great!” “It’s terrible!” It’s good.