Lit List: Top Fifteen Non-Fiction Books For Women's History
By Julie Sara Porter,
Bookworm Reviews
This year Women's History Month's theme was "Nevertheless She Persisted." To celebrate the theme of women persisting against incredible odds, I have made a list of 15 non-fiction books that honor women in history.
Some are autobiographies about specific women and others are about women in general.
The authors run the gamut of mothers, teachers, political figures, pilots, writers, activists, journalists, philosophers, and leaders. Some are seniors looking back on their lives with pride, some regret, and hope for the future. Two of the authors are teenage girls who are ready to stand for a cause. One book is written by a married couple looking at the status of women around the world. One book celebrate young girls throughout history. Two are historic and literary analyses of the impact certain writers had on perspectives of women. Another explores the lives of women in developing countries and what has and can be done to help them. But all celebrate women in their strength, determination, resolve to change things, and yes in their persistence.
As always the reviews contain spoilers and has an honorable mention section on the bottom. If you know of any books that I missed, please include them here or on Facebook.
15. Girls: A History of Growing Up Female in America by Pam Colman
To learn about women's history we have to start from the beginning. We begin with girlhood and the circumstances that surrounded that girlhood. Penny Colman covers centuries of girls and their childhood from the pre-colonial days to the end of the 20th century as young girls prepared for the Millennium.
The book is written in a very basic easy-to-read format and is filled with black and white photos, sketches, portraits, and illustrations of girls from different eras playing, working, studying, and growing up. The book provides the reader with interesting visual and verbal information on the lives of these girls. It begins with the girls of the Lenape tribe who belonged to their mother's clan and describing the girls' clothing (or lack thereof during the summer time) and ends with a description of Elizabeth Murray, a young woman who conquered homelessness and applied to several Ivy League universities. It is an amazing journey to read about how a girl's role evolved from being trained to cook, clean, and tend children to the modern girls who know they could be anything they want even President of the United States (as one girl aspires towards).
The girls' roles evolved as the times did. The book describes how after the Revolutionary War wealthy white girls were encouraged to gain further education so they could educate their sons in pursuit of liberty. One was Eliza Southgate who wrote, "Here I may drink from the fountain of knowledge...writing, reading, and cyphering,...French and Dancing...Geometry..Geography" subjects that would have been forbidden in her mother's day.
The first person accounts are the highlights of the book as Colman uses primary sources such as journals, letters, and biographies to capture the girl's words. For example Mary Anderson was a slave when the Civil War ended and recalled "Marster (sic) and Missues come out on the porch and stood side by side. You could hear a pin drop...They were both crying. Then Marster said, 'Men, women and children, you are free. You are no longer my slaves.'
Colman's writing also comes alive when she writes about the hobbies of girls in the different eras. Young girls in the late 19th century read books like Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, rode bicycles and roller skated for the first time. Suffragist Frances Willard was so fond of riding her bicycle that she used to call it "Gladys" and Minnie Radcliffe Douglas performed in roller skating tournaments professionally earning $15.00 a show.
The young girls are also categorized by their responses to the popular culture and trends that surrounded them. Colman writes that the 1920's were the first generation in which girls were concerned about weight because they were inspired by the flappers, who were usually slender, long-limbed, small breasted women in A-line miniskirts and short bob hair cuts. One girl Yvonne "Eve" Blue wrote about her struggles in 1926 with dieting and eating disorders in a way that sounds very contemporary: "Three months in which to lose thirty pounds-but I'll do it-or die in the attempt....I was so weak I could hardly pull myself out of bed." Yvonne continued this dangerous diet until her Home Economics teacher intervened. Yvonne writes her teacher said, "If I kept it up I'd die. That I was not too heavy. That thin girls weren't pretty. That I was so foolish about this when generally was so 'honest' and 'sensible' heaven forbid. That I was really overweight, which she doubted, she'd help me reduce but consume 1800 calories a day."
Girls' reactions to gender roles are analyzed and recalled sometimes humorously such as the situation in which Nancy Kate and Jeanine Du Lombard recall opposite issues with their mothers. Nancy's mother wanted her to be a little girl in pink dresses and patent leathers but Nancy preferred to be a tomboy. "(Nancy's mother) went into my closet and removed my two pairs of dark corduroy pants saying 'I was a big girl now.' and that once they reached a certain age, girls didn't wear pants....Even at five, I know my mother was giving an opinion, but not necessarily telling the truth."
Jeanine however grew up in an opposite time period with a mother who worked as a teacher and a father who was a stay-at-home dad. She was free of the traditional gender roles but found just as much friction with a mother who went overboard in encouraging her daughter to play with trucks and wear pants. "I wanted to wear pouffy party dresses and Mary Janes every day of the week-she bought me corduroys and hiking boots....Even my literary heroes were wrong. I aspired to be just like clever and stylish Nancy Drew, whom my mother dismissed as prissy and dependent she thought Laura Ingalls..was a much better role model.....I understood for a boy to plead for a baby doll was daring and original while for a girl to do so would be old fashioned and unimaginative."
Girls is a wonderful book that captures girls' spirits, hopes, aspirations, and how they evolved over the centuries. It fulfills what one girl wrote on the Girl Power website: "Every girl is unique in her own way. It doesn't matter what color we are, our shape, size or the way we dress....Be proud you're a girl. Don't give up girl power."
14. Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
The slogan "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History" was a quote from Laurel Tatcher Ulrich in her book, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary 1785-1812. In her introduction to the book with the same name, Ulrich watched with wry bemusement as the quote appeared on t-shirts, websites, and other merchandise and items that refer to a sense of naughtiness, pushiness, and strength that is required to make one's voice heard. (In one account Ulrich objected to a group selling the quote and her photo without permission. When she confronted the proprietors of the site, they responded "I guess we aren't very well-behaved women.") Ulrich's book Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History explores some of history's least well-behaved but most fascinating women who made history.
Ulrich begins her book by describing three women who wrote books on the status of women in their eras (two of which will be reviewed on this list): Christine De Pizan's Medieval-era allegory, The Book of the City of Ladies, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's autobiography, 80 Years and More: Reminisces 1815-1897 and Virginia Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own. Each of the women reflected their own struggles and shaped their narratives as they saw fit. Ulrich describes The City of Ladies as "an elegant allegory" as the spirits of Justice, Reason, and Rectitude took the narrator through a history of women to counter the male stories which portrayed women as lecherous deliverers of sin. Stanton's autobiography is described as "a grandmotherly chat" as Stanton recalled her childhood encounters with her father's law practice and meeting a run away slave that led her to fight for abolition and women's rights. Woolf's essay is described as "more cerebral" than the other two as Woolf's narrator was denied admission to "a famous library" (said to be the British Museum) leading her to wonder "why is one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?"
Ulrich takes other examples from history and match them with Pizan, Stanton, and Woolf's writings. For example she writes of female warriors as: the Amazons from Greek mythology, Deborah Sampson who disguised as a man during the Revolutionary War, Fa Mulan the legendary Chinese warrior woman, and Jessica Lynch, a modern American soldier who was captured by Iraqi forces during the War on Terror. Telling the stories of these historic, mythological, and modern fighters capture the spirit of the Amazons in Pizan's City of Ladies and the desires of these women and Pizan to fight for women's recognition on the battlefield.
Another chapter focuses on Woolf's theory that a woman during Shakespeare's time would have been unable to produce such legendary works as he did. To show that, Woolf created an imaginary sister, Judith Shakespeare who is equally talented but beset by problems leading to her suicide and forgotten burial. However to counter Woolf's theory, Ulrich writes about three women who did achieve creative fame during the Renaissance: Amelia Lanyer, a poet, Elizabeth Cary, a playwright, and Artemisia Gentileschi, an artist. However, Ulrich revealed these women had advantages of coming from educated backgrounds with creative fathers who encouraged their talents, making them less a rule and more the exception in a male-dominated era. She also wrote that like Judith Shakespeare who was abandoned by a lover, the three women encountered unhappy love lives: Lanyer's husband squandered her family's money and she was seduced by an astrologer. Cary had an arranged marriage and eventually left her husband in Ireland. Gentileschi was raped by her father's pupil and had married, but ended up separated from her husband and raised her children on her own. Like their male counterparts, these women discovered sometimes the price of talent was to endure unhappiness. (Made even more so since they were outcasts because of their gender and found few people who could aid them or understand their creative and personal difficulties.)
Ulrich's chapter on Stanton, recalls an episode in which the young Stanton encountered an escaped slave, Harriet Powell, hiding in the attic of a family of abolitionists. Ulrich compares Powell's story with the stories of three other Harriets: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Tubman who wrote and spoke about the cruelty of slavery: Stowe wrote the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jacobs wrote her own autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Tubman freed slaves in the Underground Railroad and gave speeches against slavery. Ulrich's descriptions of the Harriets is fascinating as Stanton and the early suffragists were involved in slavery emancipation. (In fact Stanton and her mentor, Lucretia Mott first imagined a convention for women's rights when they were denied the chance to speak at an anti-slavery convention in London). While Stanton and Mott realized that compared to the hard life of the slaves, white women were often coddled and protected. However, they understood and related to the struggles to be recognized by a society that marginalized people based on their race or their gender.
Ulrich's final chapters describe medieval-era pictures which feature women taking part in different jobs like outdoor work, farming, brewing, and sculpting to reveal that women having outside work beyond the home was not a new idea. She also describes the struggles during the Second Wave of Feminism in the 1970's in which women like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Rita Mae Brown, and Kate Millet challenged societal standards of womanhood and how certain struggles (like equal pay) are still ongoing. It seems that as long as women refuse to be well-behaved then they will always make history.
13. How Great Women Lead: A Mother-Daughter Adventure Into The Lives of Women Shaping The World by Bonnie St. John and Darcy Dean
Modern Feminism shows that women can aspire to be anything
even top leadership positions. However, Bonnie St. John, former Paralympics
Skiing Medalist and current leadership trainer noticed a disturbing trend: far
too many women refuse to apply for top leadership positions. “Had the pendulum
swung back from the newly liberated, ambitious, trailblazing women leaders of
previous generations toward a more cautious view of leadership for the
daughters of Generations X, Y, and Z?” So St. John decided to interview various
women to learn what leadership means to them. But she wasn’t alone on her
quest. She brought her daughter, Darcy Deane, who was a teenager at the time
along for the ride. At first Deane was
not impressed by this assignment (“I couldn’t imagine a more boring subject to
talk about,” she admitted in her Cambria font writing.) but the future linguistics
anthropology major was excited by the promise of frequent travel and
experiencing different cultures. Together, St. John and Deane put together an
inspirational book to move 21st century girls and women to become
the great leaders of tomorrow.
St. John and Deane’s interview subjects are varied and
interesting in their different experiences. They job shadowed and questioned
women that ranged from Rashika Daryani, a high school junior who started a club
for teenagers to get involved in global awareness and social change and Cathy
Sarubbi, a homemaker and mother of five who volunteers at the Adaptive Sports
Foundation, to Hilary Rodham Clinton and Dr. Condoleezza Rice. The women’s answers are as diverse as their lives and occupations.
The mother-daughter writing team asked each of these women how they defined leadership. For example, Wendy Kopp CEO & Founder, Teach for
America said, “(Leaders) set a vision that’s very ambitious, that some people
think is a little crazy. Next, they get invested in working incredibly hard to
get there. Finally, they’re purposeful and strategic in terms of how they spend
their time, as well as completely relentless about overcoming whatever
obstacles get in their way.”
One way to be an effective leader is to learn how to relate
to the people around the leader, particularly colleagues and employees. So to
be a good leader, one must also be a good listener and that includes hearing
the truth no matter how inconvenient it is, said Sheryl Sandberg, Chief
Operations Officer of Facebook. “It’s hard to encourage people to tell you
things you don’t want to hear and it’s hard to believe that they can do so
without repercussions. One trick I’ve learned is to speak openly about what you
are bad at. This gives people permission to agree with you about your
weakness….Hearing the truth is better served by using clear simple language.”
Another important step in leadership is to solicit support
from people closest to us and that includes friends and family. One of the
common themes that spreads throughout the book is how much these leaders talk
about having supportive spouses, children, and other people in their lives. Lt.
Col. Nicole Malachowski talked about how her husband, Garrick supported her
through her US Air Force career to becoming the first female pilot of the
Thunderbirds stunt flying team. “(Garrick)’s proud of me. He’s never jealous or
intimidated like that. He’s such a complete, confident person that he’s able to
be married to someone like me and cheer me on….Marrying the right guy is the
best thing I ever did.”
Besides talking to women in news, business, society,
politics, entertainment, and society St. John and Deane had much closer
examples: within their inner circle of friends and family. They also job
shadowed St. John’s closest friend, Dr. Susan E. Rice, United States Ambassador
of the United Nations and St. John’s former mother-in-law and Deane’s paternal
grandmother, Dr. Fay Deane, the first woman Dairy Company Chairman in New
Zealand. Deane in particular reveals how much being a woman in the
male-dominated field of agriculture was a challenge and a success at the same time. She recalled how her attention to detail
helped her discover deficiencies in the volumes of milk received and inaccuracy
reports. Deane stood her ground despite the antagonisms from her male
stockholders. “One of these directors from the faction that opposed me stood in
the doorway and said, ‘Look why don’t you give up? Why don’t you just join the
winning side?’ “However, Deane’s standards of quality allowed her to stand against the directors and receive her appointment as Dairy Company Chair.
In the final chapter St. John and Deane reflected on their
interviews and what they both learned about leadership, that anyone can be an
effective leader whether they inspire, teach, perform, or write a book about
it. Maybe the Readers will become effective leaders too.
12. Half The Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity For Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn
Chinese ruler, Mao Tse Tung [popularized the Chinese proverb,
"Women hold up half the sky." Journalists, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn (the first married couple to receive the Pulitzer Prize for journalism) wrote of the conditions of women in developing countries to reveal that even in the 21st century some women still have trouble holding up their halves of the sky.
Kristof and Wu Dunn's writing is a bone-chilling call to activism as they discuss the problems that women face in some countries in Asia and Africa particularly sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender based violence including honor killings and mass rape, and maternal mortality. Kristof and Wu Dunn also held accountable the behavior of people in the wealthier countries like the United States: "If we are to lead the way, we must show greater resolution in cracking down on domestic violence and sex-trafficking in our own neighborhoods rather than just sputter about abuses from far away."
Many of the stories are unforgettable in their moving details of what these women have had to endure. There aren't many Readers who will forget the story of Meena Hasina, a Nepalese girl who was kidnapped and sold to a brothel in India. She said that if the girls had a stomachache, or other illness they would be soundly beaten. ("They turned the stereo loud to cover up the screams," Meena said dryly.) Meena gave birth to a daughter, who was taken into prostitution by the brothel owner. She was forced to leave her children behind as she ran away from the brothel and married.
Also heartbreaking are the stories of Srey Neth and Srey Momm, two young Cambodian girls,
who shortly after they were rescued from their brothels by the authors, poverty and drug addiction forced them back to prostitution "Rescuing the girls from brothels is complicated and uncertain. Indeed it's sometimes impossible and that's why it is most productive to focus efforts on prevention and putting brothels out of business," they wrote.
But after the girls finally left their prostitution lives behind them and settled into marriages, the authors also add, "Never give up. Helping people is difficult and unpredictable, and our interventions don't always work but successes are possible, and these victories are incredibly important....Even when a social problem is so vast as to be insoluble in its entirety, it's still worth mitigating."
Many of the chapters are violent and in some countries, women had very little choice but to resort to further violence such as the story of Usha Narayane, a woman who was considered part of the Dalit-Untouchable caste in India but received a degree in hotel management. Local mob boss, Akku Yadav raped and tortured various women in Usha's neighborhood. The local police refused to help most of the victims who were dark-skinned. "Often people went to the police to complain and the police arrested them," Usha said. When one woman reported a gang-rape by Akku, the police gang raped her themselves.
When Usha filed a police report for a friend, Akku threatened to rape her himself. Usha fought back with insults, vitriol, and threats to strike a match and burn the building down with both inside. People then began throwing stones-at Akku. Eventually a group of women stabbed Yadav to death.
When the police arrested Usha as the instigator-even though she had an alibi for Akku's stabbing, the neighborhood women stood up and said that they will have to be arrested as well. She was released after two weeks and is now the boss of the neighborhood. Kristof and Wu Donn say that Usha's story is "unsettling with no easy moral," They wrote. "After years of watching women quietly accept abuse, it is cathartic to see someone like Usha led a countercharge-even if we're uncomfortable with the bloody denounment and cannot condone murder."
Among the most graphic descriptions are those affecting women who have complications during childbirth. Prudence Lemokouno, a Cameroonian woman who died in front of the authors from loss of blood and because of medical indifference in which hospital personnel charged the grieving impoverished family $80.00 (paid by the authors and Kristof also donated blood).She died three days later when the doctor finally performed a surgery on her already ruptured abdomen.
Even when the woman live, they are still beset with problems. Ethiopian woman, Simeesh Segaye is an example. Even after she survived a difficult childbirth, in which the baby died, she developed incontinence issues which made her the source of ridicule among people and she was paralyzed from the waist down. Frequent depression caused her to recline in her own hut in a fetal position for almost two years. Her legs became permanently bent, which took extensive costly physical therapy to treat.
While the stories and statistics of these problems are grueling and heartbreaking, Kristof and Wu Dunn offer hope in the forms of many humanitarians who are fighting for these women and more like them. They range from Frank Grivalja, principal of the Overlake School in Redmond, Washington who organized funding to build an Overlake School in Cambodia. Zach Hunter, a high school student founded Loose Change to Loosen Chains, an organization to donate money to end human trafficking and sexual slavery. The authors also explored the efforts of Harper McConnell and Anne Cotton, an American and Welsh woman respectively who helped to provide better health care for women in Congo and Zimbabwe respectively. "The main factor that separates me from my friends here is the opportunities I was given as a first world citizen and I believe it is my responsibility to work so that these opportunities are available to all," McConnell said.
The responsibility isn't just given to outsiders to these countries. Kristof and Wu Dunn also provide examples of women who are educating and helping other women in their own countries in ways that are less graphic than the means of Usha Narayane and her friends. Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman received money from the sympathetic Pakistani president after reporting her rape to the police. She used the money to open village schools in her local area to educate girls in rural communities. Edna Adam, a Somali woman survived a genital mutilation to attend medical school, become a midwife/nurse, a UN Representative for the World Health Organization, and to open a qualified maternity hospital.
While these and other organization are often beset by financial problems and death threats from locals, these humanitarians are determined to help these women by providing health, protection, and most importantly education: a common theme in this book. "Education is the key for overcoming poverty, for overcoming war," said Sakena Yacoobi, an Afghan Muslim woman who runs an organization called the Afghan Institute of Learning, which provides schooling for girls and literacy courses. "If people are educated, then women will not be abused or tortured. They will also stand up and say, 'My child should not be married so young.'"
The last section of the book is a call to action for the Reader to get involved in educating themselves about these conditions and provide financial assistance towards non-profits that aid them. "The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings," Kristof and Wu Dunn wrote. "...Before long we will consider sex slavery, honor killings, and acid attacks as unfathomable as foot-binding. The question is how long will it take and how many girls will be kidnapped into brothels before it is complete-and whether each of us will be part of that historical movement, or a bystander." Truly Kristof, Wu Dunn, and these women are doing their best to uphold that half of the sky.
11. A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
The mother of Frankenstein author, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759-1797) was certainly a trailblazer in her day. Inspired by the French
Revolution, she wrote several short fiction and essays reflecting on the status
of women. Her watershed work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women was inspired
by her fellow philosophers’ views that women should only receive a domestic
education or education that makes them pleasing to men.
Wollstonecraft’s essay attacks that principle and became a
call for the education of women in all forms. She also warns what the life of
an uneducated woman would be like. She wrote, “My main argument is built on
this simple principle; that if (women) be not prepared by education to become
the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue, for
truth must be common to all.”
She also attacked the view of sensibility, a theory that
women were more emotional and prone to nervous disorders than men.
Wollstonecraft believed that the lack of education and stifling of women’s
maturity led them to this behavior making them childlike and prone to emotion. (It
is interesting that Wollstonecraft made the same argument that Betty Friedan
would make about 170 years later that a lack of education made women subservient
and girlish.)
Wollstonecraft also attacked authors and philosophers such
as Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose book Emile features women educated solely for
the pleasure of men. Wollstonecraft argued that these women were only concerned
with beauty and would never be true companions to men and be free to handle
their own finances and possibly choose their own careers, “Women might
certainly study the art of healing and be physicians as well as nurses. And
midwifery, decency seems allotted to them…they might also study politics…Business
of other kinds, they might likewise pursue.”
There is some debate whether A Vindication of the Rights of
Women could be considered a modern Feminist work. Many consider her arguments
elitist and focus solely on the differences between men and women. However what
can’t be denied is that Wollstonecraft’s work gave women the blueprint for
their later arguments and was one of the first works to get people’s attention
to what women truly wanted and needed.
10. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
To create art, a person needs time to themselves to
contribute to their work, to write, to paint, sculpt, compose, and time to fine
tune and edit it. This seems like a basic common need that many would take for
granted. But it took Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)’s essay, A Room of One’s Own to
make the need come to life.
This essay is based on a series of lectures Woolf gave at
women’s colleges Girton and Newnham College in 1929. In her essay, Woolf tells
of a fictionalized version of herself (called “Mary Beaton, Mary Seton or Mary
Carmichael or any name you please. It’s really not important.”) who searched
for works by and about women at a large library, said to be the British Museum and at “Oxbridge University” to
wonder “Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?” The Narrator resorted to her own personal
research since she was denied admission to much of the collections because of
her gender.
Because she found very few female artists during the time of
Shakespeare, the Narrator used her own imagination to create a fictional sister
of William Shakespeare’s, Judith. (Of course Laurel Thatcher Ulrich would later
find Renaissance era artists and writers, but they were often the exceptions
rather than the rule as we saw earlier in the review of Well Behaved Women
Seldom Make History)Judith Shakespeare shared her brother’s talent for writing
and languages but lacked the opportunities that William had. “She was
adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was
not sent to school,” Woolf wrote. Instead Judith was forced to do the mending
and the household chores, often burning her works as soon as she wrote them.
Judith then fled an arranged marriage to run away with an acting troupe. When
she reached London, she knocked on various actors’ doors but turned away. One
actor seduced and impregnated Judith leaving her to kill herself in despair.
She lies buried in an unmarked grave. Woolf’s description of the life of Judith
Shakespeare then her later acknowledgement that “we are all Judith Shakespeare”
reminds her listeners and Readers to acknowledge their artistic talents so the
later generations of Judith Shakespeares don’t go unacknowledged.
Even the women authors who did manage to publish were often
beset with difficulties, the Narrator discovered. Some like George Eliot and
The Bronte Sisters published under male names so they could be taken seriously.
Others like Jane Austen had to write around the noise and company of their
families. (Woolf wrote that Jane Austen would cover her work with blotting
paper so no one could see what she wrote.) Even when women did write, the public
did not take their writing particularly novelists seriously. Novels were considered lesser
works than poetry and non-fiction and were often held up for ridicule by the elitist
(often male) critics.
Women must have their own income and a room of one’s own if
she is to write fiction, Woolf wrote. In other words, women must have their own
physical and psychological independence and freedom from families and societal
roles if they are to create art. “They must have the liberty to travel and to
idle, to contemplate the future and the past of the world, to dream over books
and loiter at street corners and led the line of thought dip deep into the
stream,” she wrote. Virginia Woolf’s writing showed that the female artist
needs the time to create, explore, and to be that artist.
9. The Fun of It and The Last Flight by Amelia Earhart
All of the women on this list fit the theme of “Nonetheless
she persisted” but one that stands out in persistence, gutsiness, and sheer
gusto is Amelia Earhart (1897-1937?). The first female aviator to cross the
Atlantic Ocean, the first aviator to fly solo from Hawaii to California, and
disappeared with navigator, Fred Noonan attempting a round the world flight.
Earhart’s autobiographies, The Fun of It and The Last Flight capture those
thrilling flights and Eahart’s persistence in being a woman pilot as well as
the history of female aviators with the sheer bravado and common sense
reporting that she was known for.
Earhart’s childhood in Atchison, Kansas already solidified
her independence and early break from traditional gender roles. While Earhart
wrote that she was a big reader, which was encouraged, many of her other activities
were not. “I was fond of basketball, bicycling, tennis and I tried all
strenuous physical activities,” she said. “…With the intense pleasure exercise
gave me, I might have attained more skill and more grace than I did. As it was,
I just played exultingly and built up all kinds of wrong habits.”
Earhart became interested in flying in the winter of 1918
while working as a Red Cross volunteer at a Toronto hospital. She saw many
officers training flying at the various fields around the city. After deciding
to take a break in her University studies of medicine, she visited various air
circuses and asked about obtaining flying lessons. After taking her first flight
as a passenger, Earhart knew what she wanted to do. “As soon as I left the
ground, I knew I myself had to fly. Miles away I saw the ocean and the
Hollywood hills seemed to peep over the edge of the cockpit, as if they were
already friends,” she described her first flight as beautifully and with the
attention to detail that she gave to all the descriptions of her flights.
Much of The Fun of It described the mechanics of aviation
including requirements to be a pilot, the descriptions, measurements, and
speeds of various planes, and preparations that a pilot has to take before they
begin to fly. Earhart’s first major flight was in 1928 as the first female to
fly across the Atlantic as a passenger. While the pilots would be paid for the
exhibition, the sponsors told Earhart that she would not be. She agreed anyway.
Citing the book’s title and possibly a philosophy that she had about life she
said, “My own compensation which I had never really considered was, in addition
to the fun of the exploit itself, the opportunities in aviation, writing and
the like which the Atlantic crossing opened up for me.”
Earhart described her
first flight across the Atlantic with dry humor and wit. “Our Atlantic crossing
was literally a voyage in the clouds. Incidentally the saying about silver
linings is completely fiction. The internals of most clouds are anything but
silvery-they are clammy gray wetness as dismally forbidding as anyone can
imagine. However, some air travelers know that above them there is a different
world from any encountered elsewhere,” she wrote.
While Earhart recognized her placement in history as the
first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger, she acknowledged the men
who actually did the flying. She also wanted women to be recognized not as
female pilots, but as simply pilots. “I think in the future as women become
better able to pull their own weight in all kinds of expeditions, the fact of
their sex will loom less large when credit is given for accomplishment.”
Earhart decided to prove herself by making a solo flight
across the Atlantic in 1932. With the obstinacy
that she had been known for, Earhart saw her solo flight as a challenge. “It
was clear in my mind that I was undertaking the flight because I loved flying.
I chose to fly the Atlantic because I wanted to. It was in a measure a
self-justification-a proving to me and to anyone else, that a woman with adequate
experience could do it,” she said. She flew through icy wet weather from Newfoundland
to Ireland. As she made her historic landing in Londonderry, Earhart described
the welcome sight of land: “I succeeded in frightening all the cattle in the
country, I think as I came down low several times before finally landing in a
long, sloping meadow. I couldn’t have asked for better landing facilities as
far as that is concerned.”
Six chapters of The Fun of It are devoted to women in
aviation which Earhart only considered herself one of not the only one. She
wrote in one chapter the difficulties women have in becoming pilots such as
male flight instructors unwillingness to train them, that women didn’t (and
still in 2018 don’t) make as much money as men did (do) and couldn’t afford flying
lessons, and that women sometimes made unnecessary risks just to prove that
they could do it. She said that what really makes a good pilot who is the
enthusiasm for the occupation. She cited a flying couple where the wife said, “I would rather be poor and fly than have more
and do something else.”
Earhart profiled various women involved in aviation. She
cited various airport owners, flight instructors, clerical workers, and
mechanics, women who did the behind-the-scenes work of aeronautics when only the
pilots were acknowledged.
She also
profiled the women up front, t he pilots. Some were her contemporaries like Ruth Nichols,
who is “one of the most active record holders for many years,” Elinor Smith who
once held an altitude record of 27,418, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of
Charles Lindbergh and an accomplished pilot in her own right. She also referred
to women who flew before like Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to
receive a pilot’s license, Ruth Law, a barnstormer or stunt pilot, and
balloonists like Margaret Graham. Earhart admired their strength, nerve, and
abilities to challenge the idea many had that women were unable to fly and that
sometimes they had to resort to record breaks or stunt flying to prove
themselves. “Contrary to legal precedent, they (woman) are guilty of
incompetence until proved otherwise,” she said.
Earhart’s final book, The Last Flight covers mostly her
around-the-flight attempt in 1937, edited with a moving forward by her husband
publisher, George Putnam. He described her final book not as “a chronicle of
regret, but of high and happy adventure” and indeed it is.
Most of it consists
of beautiful descriptions of her journey such as her flight to Natal: “The weather
was unsettled all the way, a morning of vagrant clouds and rain-squalls which
chased each other across the sky,” she wrote. “It was interesting country we flew over. Ruffled dunes on the shore shone with bright
sand. We passed near a stately church on a high hill, supposed to be one of the
oldest in Brazil. We could see it plainly and even spot parishioners, tiny dark
dots trailing along the white ribbon of a road.”
She also described various
people she encountered such as natives and various dignitaries. In one
hilarious passage she describes an encounter with Dakar’s Governor General,
Marcel de Coppet. The meeting was somewhat mangled by Earhart’s difficulties
with the French language. “My French is rudimentary particularly the aviation
brand which is not taught in school,” she said. “Instead I remember questions
about my uncle’s health and my aunt’s umbrella about walking in the “jardin”
and shutting the “fenetre,” none of which helps appreciably.” However with sign
language and the fact that “aeronautics fundamentals are international,”
Earhart managed to make her point across.
Earhart’s flight is detailed to her final recorded moments
in which she and Noonan left Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island never to be
heard from again. However, her courage and tenacity is best described in one of
her final letters to Putnam: “I want to do it because I want to do it. Women
must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be
a challenge to others,” she said.
Amelia Earhart’s story is well-known but is the type that
every time the Reader comes to the end, they would hope that it ends
differently with Earhart succeeding in her around-the-world flight to
jubilation and continuing to fly to a happy courageous old age (perhaps getting
involved in future Women’s Rights movements like Equal Pay.) However, she
disappeared doing what she loved and that more than anything was the strongest
legacy that she could ever give.
8. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by The Taliban by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb
Certainly one of the most recognizable feminists of the 21st
century is Malala Yousafzai. The Pakistani young woman spoke online about
education for women and girls and was shot in the head by Taliban soldiers. She
survived her attack, continued to speak out about women’s education, and became
the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate all before she was 16 years old. Her
book, I am Malala explores Yousafzai’s upbringing in Swat Valley, northern
Pakistan by her idealistic father who ran a chain of schools, and her
traditional mother, as well as her activism towards education,
her shooting and recovery, and their move to Birmingham, England all with
realism, humility, and wisdom beyond Yousafzai’s years.
Yousafzai is far from just a symbol of women’s rights or
education. Her book took great strides to show Readers that she was just a
regular kid who liked watching Bollywood films, reading Twilight books, listening to
Justin Bieber, watching the TV show Ugly Betty, chatting with her best friend, Moniba, and fighting with her younger brother Khushal.
Yousafzai is living proof of the cliché of some people having “greatness thrust
upon them,” a normal person who’s life gets irrevocably changed by external
circumstances that make her speak out and become a hero. In answer to the gunman’s
question, “Who is Malala?” Yousafzai responded, “I am Malala and this is my
story.”
Yousafzai’s interest in education comes naturally from her
father, Ziauddin Yousafzai. Instead of behaving like many Pakistani fathers in
a male-dominated society, he was not disappointed that his first born was a
girl. Instead he named his daughter after Malali of Maiwand, an Afghanistan
woman who encouraged her people to fight the British. Ziauddin was also
committed to the ideal that every Pakistani deserved an education, boys and
girls. “(Ziauddin) believed that a lack of education was the root of all
Pakistan’s problems,” Yousafzai said. “Ignorance allowed politicians to fool
people and bad administrators to be elected. He believed that education should
be for all rich and poor, boys and girls. The school that my father dreamed of
would have desks and a library, computers, bright posters on the wall and more
important, washrooms.” So he opened the Khushal School in Mingora, Swat
Pakistan which welcomed boys and controversially girls.
Ziauddin’s desire to teach girls and boys made him the
target of controversy particularly the Taliban, whose regulations limited the
roles of women and girls. Yousafzai described the differences in the Islam
religion and that it did not begin as a sexist religion. (Muhammad’s first
wife, Khadijah helped him start the religion after all.) But that certain
factions were more fundamentalist than others and often they were the people
put in charge of the countries and interpretations of Muslim law. For example
people like Yousafzai’s family are Sunnis, while other factions like the Shias,
the Deobandi, and the Salafists are the fundamentalists who insisted upon the
restrictions towards women.
Yousafzai’s descriptions of the Muslim religion
help Western Readers understand the differences better and that not all Muslims
believe the same things and follow the same laws no more than all Christians
worship at the same altar or Jewish people follow the same dietary
restrictions. However many of the fundamentalist mufti, or scholars, challenged
Ziauddin’s teaching process saying that girls attending the same classrooms as
boys or female teachers leaving in rickshaws with male colleagues was wrong. Ziauddin continued to teach girls
and hire female teachers but thought of clever ways to get around the
restrictions like having girls enter from behind the school so they wouldn’t be
noticed by the Mufti.
Though these restrictions were nothing compared to when the
Taliban led by Maulana Fazlullah, conquered Swat Valley. Readers can feel
Yousafzai’s fear as she described a world that changed around her with men
dressed in camouflage gear and black armbands seen everywhere , hearing
Fazlullah’s voice on the radio denouncing various people for having electronics
in their house and announcing new restrictions such as “Women are meant to
fulfill their responsibilities in the home. Only in emergencies can they go
outside but then they must wear the veil.”
“Our men think earning money and
ordering others around is where power lies,” Yousafzai said. “They don’t think
power is in the hands of the women who takes care of everyone all day long and
gives birth to their children.”
The Taliban continued to keep a strangled hold on the Swat
Valley resorting to raids to free girls “from prostitution” was the official
claim but in actuality they attacked various girl’s schools and families. A ray
of hope came when Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan returned
from exile to lead her country once more and began a more Progressive government.
However her 2007 assassination filled many with anxiety including a certain schoolgirl in the
Swat Valley. “If (Bhutto) can die nobody was safe,” Yousafzai thought.
Increased violence after Bhutto’s death including school bombings inspired
Yousafzai to follow her father’s lead to speak out. She agreed to give
interviews when she saw how frightened many girls her age were. “The girls are
scared and even if they are not, their parents won’t allow it,” Yousafzai said.
“I have a father who isn’t scared and would stand by me.” She also knew that
she was speaking for the rights of all young girls in her country. “If I am
speaking for my rights, for the rights of all young girls, I am not doing
anything wrong.”
One of the things that Yousafzai did was write an online diary
for BBC Urdu to describe a girls’ life under the Taliban. She wrote under the
name of Gul Makai. Her entries spoke about school and the restrictions such as
wearing the burqa. “When you’re very young, you love the burqa because it’s
great for dressing up,” Yousafzai wrote. “But when you are made to, it’s a very
different story.” The Yousafzai Family became IDP (internally displaced
persons) leaving the Swat Valley after receiving death threats. They didn’t
return until they believed that the Taliban had been cleared out in 2009
(however they were still involved in the local government and were in hiding).
However despite the adversity in her home country and area, Yousafzai continued
to fight for girl’s education. She described seeing a young girl selling
oranges. “I took a photo of (the girl) and vowed I would do everything in my
power to educate girls just like her,” Yousafzai said. “That was the war I was
going to fight.”
The shooting is very evocative as Yousafzai described the
accounts of her friends watching her collapse on the bus and her family’s
sorrow as they waited for her to recover. Yousafzai was flown to Birmingham,
England to be operated upon and was followed by her family where they settled
to live away from Pakistan’s government. During her recovery and instant fame,
Yousafzai has met with admiration and criticism from the Pakistani government
who believe that she is either a teenager hungry for fame or represents the soldiers’’
tyranny (something they don’t like to discuss)". However, Yousfazai said that
there are still explosions and shootings such as many girls are being murdered.
The Yousafzai Family have yet to return to Pakistan to live
and Yousafzai has recently attended Oxford, studying Philosophy and Political
Science. “Some people say that I will never return home, but I believe firmly
in my heart that I will. To be torn from the country that you love is not
something that you wish on anyone.” Malala Yousafzai’s story is an inspiration
for many to find their greatness despite adversity and that no matter how old,
or how young someone is, they can still make great change in the world.
7. Forty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams
Jane Addams (1860-1935) was probably the most well-known of
the social activists, 19th century women who
worked to improve a city’s outlook by either ecological or humanitarian
improvements. Addams wanted to help the poor, so she founded Hull House, a
group home that was part homeless shelter, part day care, part adult education
and part community center. Her book,
Twenty Years at Hull House, tells of the early years of creating the house and
putting it together with the care and compassion that she gave her charges.
Addams had a social conscience even at an early age. She
recalled as a 7-year-old visiting the site of the mill her father owned. She
saw all of the poorer houses around and had “her first sight of poverty.” I
remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such
horrid little houses so close together, and that after receiving his
explanation I declared with such firmness when I grew up I should of course
have a large house, but it would not be built among the other large houses, but
would but right in the midst of horrid little houses like these,” she wrote.
Addams attended The Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia,
but an illness, possibly a nervous breakdown, ended her studies. She became
inspired by visiting London’s Toynbee Hall and the social experiments that
upper-middle class Englishmen and women did to help the poor. Addams decided to
rent a house in Chicago to help the poor immigrants. Addams often had to
solicit money from wealthy donors, government departments, and charitable
institutions to start Hull House and keep it running but it was everything to her.
In an essay titled, “The Necessity for Social Settlements,” Addams summarized
why people of wealthier backgrounds should help people from impoverished
backgrounds: “Nothing so deadens the sympathies and shrivels the power of
enjoyment as the helpfulness and the continual ignoring of the starvation
struggle which makes up half the race,” Addams wrote. “To shut one’s self away
from that half of the race life is to shut one’s self from the most vital part
of it.”
The book describes various people that Addams and Hull House
have helped. She described “permanently aged children” that poverty had stolen
their childhoods such as girls who were given to prostitution at fifteen and
sixteen years old. One girl Addams recalled was found in a brothel before the
police asked Addams and the Hull House Settlement to board her. “(The girl) was
clutching a battered doll which she had kept with her for the six months of her
‘evil life.’”
Hull House also provided a shelter for some of the oldest of
Chicago’s poor. Police tried to forcibly remove a German woman to the County
Infirmary. The woman resisted by clinging to a chest of drawers which held most
of her personal treasures so Addams offered to take her in, treasures and
all, so she would not feel unnecessary
and useless at the Infirmary. “To take away from an old woman whose life has
been spent in household cares all the foolish little belongings to which her
affections cling and to which her very fingers have become accustomed is to
take away her last incentive to activity, almost to her life itself,” Addams
said.
Addams was pleased with the work that many of the workers,
teachers, and volunteers contributed to Hull House but was also impressed with
the work that the poor did to help each other, a value she emphasized in Hull
House itself. “The woman who lives upstairs will willingly share her breakfast
with the family below because she knows they are ‘hard up’; the man who boarded
with them all last winter will give a month’s rent because he knows the father
of the family is out of work,” she said. Throughout the book there are various
chapters in which help not only comes from Addams but from the immigrants
towards each other.
The book is also filled with the many services that Hull
House provided for the city’s poor. Activities such as social clubs and art
exhibits provided safe alternatives to the sometimes mean streets of Chicago
and the trouble that the Settlement Residents, especially the younger Residents
could get into. One of those groups was a Labor Museum in which the residents,
mostly women revealed their work and abilities such as spinning, cooking,
gardening, arts, and crafts and shared them with others. “These women, and a few men, who come to the
museum to utilize their European skill in pottery, metal, and wood demonstrate
that immigrant colonies, might yield to our American life something very
valuable if their resources were intelligently studied and developed,” Addams
said.
Addams found that many of the residents who used to be
members of the Hull House clubs later led successful lives. “Having lived in
the Settlement twenty years , I see scores of young people who have
successfully established themselves in life, and in my travels in the city and
in the outside, I am constantly cheered by greetings from the rising young
lawyer, the scholarly rabbi, the successful teacher, the prosperous young
matron buying clothes for blooming children. ‘Don’t you remember me? I used to
belong to the Hull House club,’” she said. The Hull House clubs proved that
they provided more than just a hot meal and a bed, they provided a future for
the immigrants to study, learn, dream, and maybe grow into different people.
Addams’ commitment to the poor also shows in her acceptance
of people from all races, cultures, and ethnicities despite the objection from
others. When she first started the Settlement, some city elders objected to the
“no religious requirement at Hull House,” but Addams knew that many of the
residents would come from many religions: Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, some
with no religion at all. When she met Leo Tolstoy, the author wondered if her
puffed sleeves and fancy dresses were a barrier between her and the poor and
why she didn’t dress like the peasants. Addams tried to say that many of the working
class girls’ sleeves were also puffed and that “nothing would more effectively
separate (her) from the people than a cotton blouse following a simple form.”
She also added, “Even if I wished to imitate him and ‘dress as a peasant,’ I
would have to choose which peasant among thirty-six nationalities in the ward.”
Addams also received a lot of criticism during the Russian
Revolution and the American government’s conflicts with Anarchists and
Socialists. She defended many of her residents, some who had Anarchistic
beliefs. “I had felt at the time that the law itself extended to the most
unpopular citizen was the only reply to the anarchistic argument, to the effect
that this moment of panic revealed the truth of their government,” Addams
wrote. She was more interested in how and why these acts of violence occurred
and doing everything she could to prevent them rather than demonize the people
who did them.
This commitment to pacifism and ending violence proved to be an
important aspect in Addam’s life as she founded the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, spoke out against U.S. involvement in WWI,
and was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
For Jane Addams helping the poor was the most important
thing that she could do. Her book, Twenty Years at Hull House showed that
commitment and persistence that she made in doing so.
6. Living My Life by Emma Goldman
There was a time when Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was
considered the most hated woman in America. She was an advocate for Free Love,
Labor Unions, Women’s Rights (though was against anyone voting considering it
“an outdated and corrupt institution.”), and most importantly for Anarchism.
She was also considered by many the inspiration for, and some thought a
participant in, Leon Czolgosz’s assassination of U.S. President William
McKinley in 1901. She had been jailed many times including after McKinley’s
assassination and received a great deal of hate mail. (One of the less obscene
letters read, “I wish I could get at you. I would tear your heart out and feed
it to my dog.”) However, she lived her life as she chose and chose to speak out
for what she believed was right. Her autobiography Living My Life shows a woman
who described her colorful life with realism, wit, and honesty.
Goldman’s family emigrated from St. Petersburg to America
when she was twenty. Her early years were filled with abuse from her father, detachment
from her mother, an early unhappy marriage that ended in divorce, and a job at
a factory in which she was dismissed for asking for a raise. However it was the
Haymarket Affair, in which seven police officers and four civilians were killed
after a bomb was thrown during a worker’s protest in Chicago that started her interest in Worker's Rights.
Goldman met some
very interesting people because of her interest and outrage at the Haymarket
Affair. “In New Haven, I met a group of Russians, students mainly now working
at various trades. Most of them were anarchists and socialists. They often
organized meetings, generally inviting speakers ….Life was interesting and
colorful..” Goldman said.
Goldman made many friends in the Anarchist movement. One of
them was Johann Most, whom Goldman considered a mentor and the other was
Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, who later became her lover. They met at a café,
discussed their ideals, and made plans for recruiting others to join their
cause. Goldman was nervous about speaking at first, but when she made her first
public appearance, she hung a memorial wreath on the portrait of one of the
Haymarket participants, then she heard Most speak. “ I was caught in the storm
of (Most’s) eloquence, tossed about, my very soul contracting and expanding in
the rise and fall of her voice.” Goldman
said.
Goldman shortly after began her first lecture tour. Her
lectures were filled with support for the workers, but also humor and clever
one-liners that drew the crowd inside. When someone asked Goldman, an Atheist, if
she would speak in a church, Goldman replied. “In Hell if need be, provided the
Devil won’t pull at my skirts.”
Goldman proved to have very strong opinions that put her at
odds with her fellow comrades particularly her love of art, opera, and plays,
things that she enjoyed but refused to sacrifice for “the good of the cause.” She
recalled when as a child the only cure for her poverty stricken life were outings
to the opera or the sight of beautiful things like a garden of lilacs and
colorful silks and velvet. “The forest, the moon casting its silvery shimmer on
the fields, the green wreaths in our hair, the flowers we would pick-these made
me forget for a time the sordid home surroundings….Should I have to forgo all
that to be a good revolutionist (sic), I wondered. Should I have the strength?”
While she did not
actually say, “It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it” Goldman’s actual
quote, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to
beautiful, radiant things” describes her love of beauty and art even willing to
argue with her chosen comrades over the issue.
Goldman was an advocate for Free Love. The book tells of her
romantic involvements with various revolutionaries and comrades. Unfortunately
many of them she wrote wanted her more of as a woman. Some when they left the
Movement wanted her to join them and settle into marriage. Others were unstable
so she broke things off with them. “All true revolutionists had discarded
marriage and were living in freedom,” Goldman said. “That served to strengthen
their love and helped them in their common task.”
While Goldman had many lovers, her most frequent lover and
probably her, for lack of a better word, soul mate was Berkman. After their
first sexual encounter, Goldman sounded almost like a glowing teenager. “The
day ended in a glowing sunset. Joy was in my heart. All the way home I sang
German and Russian songs,” she said. “…Our lips met in a spontaneous embrace.”
Her love for Berkman showed that Goldman was not just a woman with a Cause, she
was a woman with feelings for others.
Berkman’s arrest in
1892 for the attempted murder of Carnegie Steel chair, Henry Clay Frick,
propelled Goldman to center stage in the Anarchist movement. She became chair
of organizing protests for Berkman’s imprisonment for 21 years. “My hatred of
conditions which compelled idealists to acts of violence made me cry out in passionate
strains the nobility of Sasha, his selflessness, his consecration to the
people,” Goldman wrote. Goldman had been arrested herself many times for “inciting
riots” and passing out literature on birth control, considered “obscene” at the
time.
These arrests increased her hatred for the American government
and the judicial system. Once the police suggested she act as a stool pigeon
and turn in other Anarchists for a lesser sentence. “You miserable cur,”
Goldman shot back. “Not enough that you act as a Judas, you even try to turn me
into one-you and your rotten chief! I’ll take prison for life, but you will
never buy me!” Even in prison, she stuck to her principles and refused to bully
more recent prisoners into submission.
After her release, Goldman continued to speak about Anarchism
and her other principles gaining a reputation as the “Queen of Anarchism” or “Red
Emma.” If she wasn’t controversial enough before, the McKinley Assassination
increased suspicion towards her. In her book, Goldman wrote about encountering
Czolgosz once when he used the name “Nieman” to ask for reading materials. She
did not recognize him among her circle of Anarchist friends and comrades. After
the Pan-American Exposition in which Czolgosz assassinated McKinley, the police
trailed Goldman as an accomplice.
She was arrested and given the third degree but she denied
any involvement. However, she expressed public sympathy for Czolgosz which put
her at odds not only with the general public but her own comrades who wanted to
distance themselves from the assassination. She told a reporter, “(Czolgosz) is
a creature at bay. Millions of people are ready to spring on him and tear him
limb from limb. He committed the act for no personal reasons or gain. He did it
for what is his ideal: the good for his people.” However she also expressed
sympathy for McKinley. “William McKinley is….merely a human being to me.”
Goldman founded the magazine, Mother Earth which told of her
views and those of other Anarchists.
After Berkman’s release the two continued to write and speak out about
their values (though his time in prison gave Berkman some PTSD and was not as
volatile as he used to be.) During WWI, Goldman and Berkman spoke and wrote
against conscription and organized the No-Conscription League of New York
encouraging people to resist the draft.
Goldman and Berkman were arrested, yet again , leaving
Goldman to wonder how a country claims to fight for democracy abroad and
withhold free speech at home, “We say that if America has entered the war to
make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in
America…Verily poor as we are in democracy, how can we give of it to the world?,”
she said. She and Berkman were arrested, imprisoned, and were released in 1918
only to have their citizenship revoked during the Red Scare of 1919-1920.
In 1920, they
departed for Russia hoping to be involved after the Russian Revolution and rise
of the Bolshevik government. On her arrival she wrote, “Soviet Russia! Sacred
ground, magic people! You have come to symbolize humanity’s hope, you alone are
destined to redeem mankind. I have come to serve you, beloved matushka (Mother
Country).” However these words prove to be very naïve and she would later eat
those words with a hearty helping of crow.
The chapter in Goldman’s
autobiography that deals with her time and eventual disillusionment with Soviet Russia is the longest but most thought-provoking because it showed her willingness to admit, "I was wrong."
Goldman first expressed concern writing to her niece, “I
could never in my life work within the confines of the State, Bolshevik or
otherwise.” Her worries were completely justified when she and Berkman toured
the Soviet Union and saw the repression, mismanagement, and corruption. Freedom
of speech was considered “bourgeois superstition,” and those who questioned the
government were arrested as counter-revolutionaries. Goldman expressed her
disillusionment in writing and she and Berkman supported strikers in Petrograd
in 1921. While Goldman hardly became a flag waving American patriot, it is
telling that she was able to say that she was wrong in her support for the
Bolsheviks. Not many people are willing to retract their earlier beliefs and see
corruption against the people in all forms. If anything her time in the Soviet
Union strengthened her resolve that “all forms of government are as bad and
corrupt as the other.”
Goldman left Russia in 1921 and traveled to England, Canada,
and France where she continued to speak and write in support of Anarchism
including expressing outrage over the arrest and execution of Niccolo Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti and met many admirers including authors Rebecca West, Jack
London, and journalist H.L. Mencken. She also supported the workers during the
Spanish Civil War and against involvement in WWII making her opinions known
until her death in 1940. Throughout her life, Emma Goldman was a woman who
stuck by her principles and lived a colorful vibrant life and her book showed
that life and commitment brilliantly. While many could argue against what she believed in, no one could deny that she lived her life according to her terms and made people aware of it.
5. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellion by Gloria Steinem
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem is considered the “Mother of Modern 20th
century Feminism” and with good reason. The founder and original
Editor-in-Chief/Publisher of Ms. Magazine, Steinem has been involved with
various causes such as ERA, against Pornography, for Reproductive Rights, and
most recently supported the Me Too/Time's Up movements, 2018 Women’s Rights Marches and
the March for Our Lives Rally. Her book Outrageous Acts and Everyday
Rebellions, first published in 1983, was the first of many that detailed her
life and views. This book is a collection of essays that chronicles her early
experiments with Feminism with wit, candor, and the strong will that she is
known for.
Her essay, “I Was a Playboy Bunny” is among her most famous.
Steinem went undercover in 1963 as a waitress at the notorious Playboy Club and
wrote frankly about the sexism and demeaning aspects that the female workers
endured from their managers and customers. (“You are holding the top job in the
country for a girl!,” The Playboy Club Bunny Manual states) Her descriptions of
the demeaning costume of a leotard and bunny ears and little else is memorable
as well as the interview which included a humiliating physical examination of
the potential Bunny’s um attributes. She also described the Bunnies’ encounters
with the clientele which were free to grope and ogle the Bunnies and VIP’s
(“Very Important Playboy’s”) that Steinem implied had the right to do more with
the Bunnies in private.
Steinem reported that she received much criticism and
derision for the article including her picture being used for Bunny recruitment
for years. (“The 1983 version insists in a caption that (Steinem)’s article
‘boosted Bunny recruitment.’”) However the article jump started Steinem’s
crusade against pornography and how she felt that it demeaned women and
degraded them as sex objects and playthings. One of the long term results that
she cited from the article is that “all women are Bunnies” (or could be
considered Bunnies by others). “Since feminism, I finally stopped regretting
that I wrote the article.”
Her essay “Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It),” is
a moving tribute to her late mother who suffered from mental illness and
probably what Betty Friedan would call The Feminine Mystique. Paraphrasing
Tolstoy’s famous opening she begins “Happy or unhappy, families are all
mysterious.” She said that while there was much speculation about her uncle’s
mental state after he left a prosperous job and a wealthy first marriage to
marry another woman and live at an airport hangar, no one speculated on her
mother’s strange behavior except for saying “that’s just her.”
“She was just a
fact of life when I was growing up; someone to be worried about and cared for;
an invalid who lay in beds with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional
response to voices only she could hear,” Steinem said.
Ruth Steinem had her first nervous breakdown before Gloria
was born and when her sister was five and as her daughters grew became addicted
to something she called “Doc Howard’s medicine” (but was actually solution of
chloral hydrate-knock out drops-which Steinem dryly said made her mother and
Doc Howard “the pioneers of modern tranquilizers.”). Most doctors just gave her
a vague diagnosis as a “nervous anxiety” but rarely gave her the attention that
Steinem felt she needed. Ruth had been
institutionalized many times particularly after her husband left and continued
to be so well into Steinem’s adulthood.
In her moving and
heartbreaking tribute to her mother, Steinem described a woman who was bookish,
intelligent and had a career that she loved and helplessly saw her devolve into
“someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang onto reality long
enough to hold down a job, and could rarely concentrate enough to read a book,”
she said. Steinem’s commitment to feminism was no doubt not just for the women of
the present and the future, but the women of the past who suffered without ever
knowing why they did or felt unfulfilled and regressed into depression, drug
addiction, and mental instability without the tools to understand their
behavior.
She also discusses working opportunities and the importance
of finding women who share common concerns. Steinem’s essay “Networking”
related how important it was for the Women’s Rights Movements to be accepting
to all races. Steinem described
networking as a way to discover “that we are not crazy-the system is.”
Steinem cited the various women’s groups that helped make
change for women in her day and how groups of women helped others make those
changes. She even saw differences in management with how women differentiate
power than with how men do. She saw men as more combative while women were more
collaborative. Many women were encouraged to adapt to men’s abilities to get
power, but she noted how few times men were encouraged to adapt to women’s.
“When to comes to content, women’s conviction that power has to be earned (and
especially by women) leads to an emphasis on individual excellence, knowledge,
and learning,” she said.
She referred to various examples of women networking with
other women to get their goals met and accomplished. These examples include:
one women encouraging her husband to raise his administrative assistant’s
salary, a United States government employee called various rape prevention
organizations to tell them where to get federal funding, Caucasian and
African-American feminists called male lobbyists of the opposite skin color so
they wouldn’t feel threatened by “their women” and a small women’s caucus of a big California political organization lobbied internally and stopped it from
endorsing candidates who were against reproductive freedom. “In patriarchy a
poor man’s house may be his castle, but even a rich woman’s body may not be her
own,” Steinem said. “That’s why groups run by and for women are so important to
us…It’s a need that crosses boundaries.”
In one section, she profiles five women-Marilyn Monroe, Pat
Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Linda Lovelace, and Alice Walker about what
their legacies meant to women at the time. Her essay, “The Real Linda Lovelace”
is an eye opening reveal of the life of the former porn queen and how she was
used and abused by the various men in her life. Lovelace, the star of the adult
film, Deep Throat (the name would later be used for Mark Felt, the secret
informer of Watergate fame), was managed by her former husband/trainer, Chuck
Traynor to play titillating sexual character meant to arouse the men watching
the screen. Steinem referred to the women taken to see the movie by their
husbands and boyfriends, or prostitutes with their pimps, to show what a woman
could do to a man “if she really wanted to.” Steinem said, “Of course if the
female viewer were really a spoilsport, she might identify with the woman on
the screen and sense her humiliation, danger, and pain-but the smiling happy
face of Linda Lovelace could cut off sympathy too.”
Lovelace’s “smiling happy face” did cover pain: her own. In
interviews she revealed that she had been a prostitute and tried to escape
three times and forced back into prostitution.
Traynor forced Lovelace at gun point to star in demeaning adult films
until she moved onto the bigger films like Deep Throat. (Though ironically the
success of Deep Throat gave Lovelace the financial security to break from and
eventually leave Traynor). Rather than expressing any remorse about Lovelace’s
situation, Traynor denied and boasted with pride, “When we first dated she was
so shy, it shocked her to be seen nude by a man…I created Linda Lovelace.”
He
also moved onto another adult film actress, Marilyn Chambers, who was so
intimidated that in a joint interview Chambers asked Traynor if she could use
the restroom. When the interviewer objected, Traynor snapped “I don’t tell you
how to write your column, don’t tell me how to run my broads.”
Steinem’s sympathies revealed Lovelace’s plight that she was
still attacked even after she wrote about her ordeal. Many derided her claims
saying she was only in it for money and when Lovelace tried to break into
actual film acting, the directors insisted that the films have nudity to
capitalize on her earlier fame. Steinem wondered, “Would a male political
prisoner or hostage telling a similar story be so disbelieved?.....(Lovelace’s
story) attacks the myth of female masochism that insists women enjoy sexual
domination and even pain, but prostitution and pornography are big businesses
that are still built on that myth.”
Her final section features more satirical essays but still
make important points. Her essay, “If Hitler Were Alive, Whose Side Would He Be
On?” brilliantly uses the very hyperbolic language that anti-abortion activists
used comparing abortion to the Holocaust. Her line, “Certainly, the groups that
use these and other inflammatory arguments don’t trust the major media” is
especially relevant in 2018 with people like President Trump who bellow “Fake
News” whenever they encounter something that criticizes or disagrees with their
various points.
Steinem was appalled at the inflammatory rhetoric said by
anti-abortion groups saying things like “Six million is the number generally
assigned not only to Jews who died under Hitler but to babies who have died
under the Supreme Court,” said by Patrick Riley of the National Catholic
Register in 1979. “The crucial questions of who decides and where the authority
lies are never discussed in these emotional comparisons between abortions and
death camps,” Steinem said. “Between a belief in reproductive choice as an
independent right against the dictates of the government and a Nazi
authoritarianism that opposed the very idea of individual rights.” She also
pointed out that Nazis were against many individual liberties such as
contraception, homosexuality, and abortion.
Steinem instead researched the actual values espoused by the
Nazi government and found that they were actually opposed to women’s rights,
particularly concerning reproductive rights. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote “The sacrifice
of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species.”
In fact his goal of returning women to the states of “Children, cooking, and
church” (Kinder, kuche, kurche) and his quotes were very similar to those
stated by conservative leaders in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Steinem found. While
many women did vote for National Socialism and were proud members of the groups
like the Jung Madel (Young Maiden’s ), Steinem found the majority of these
women were unaware of the politics of feminism or were taught to deride these
female leaders, something that she feared was still happening. “Hostility to
human rights for women and minorities hasn’t forced us out of responsible
jobs,” she said. “Yet there is an increase in subtle scapegoating for
everything from divorce and juvenile delinquency to crime and unemployment.”
While some may argue that Steinem’s essay is rather alarmist
and certainly many Readers will disagree with her pro-choice platform, no one
can deny the message of Steinem’s essay about doing careful research. That it
is important to look up information before appealing to emotion and discover
whether previous viewpoints ally or run contrary to current ones before history
is cited for current events.
Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions had a lot
to say about the status of women in her day. Unfortunately, there is still a
lot of relevance for women of this day.
4. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and 19th Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
Victorian literature is filled with stories of women going insane, dying young (usually after an unwise love affair), and often dealing with women who either talk about getting married or are in the throes of unhappy marriages or potential spinsterhood. Many of these themes are not a coincidence especially when the authors were female, wrote Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
In the definitive feminist literary criticism book, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and 19th Century Literary Imagination, Gilbert and Gubar write that the female author was often haunted by the Victorian ideal of the "angel in the house" or the "demon form"-women who rebelled from that form and were declared outcasts in society. To counter that image, Gilbert and Gubar reasoned that these women "had to kill the angel in the house," to quote Virginia Woolf. "In other words women must kill the aesthetic ideal through they themselves have been killed into art," Gilbert and Gubar wrote. And similarly all women must kill the angel's necessary opposite and double, the 'monster' in the house, Medusa-face also kills creativity."
They also write that these women suffered from what was called "The Anxiety of Authorship," the female authors' fear that they cannot be seen as legitimate authors so sometimes they hid behind male identities (George Eliot for example was Mary Anne Evans. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte wrote originally under the names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.) or used socially acceptable themes as covers for their real themes which were often more rebellious and subversive than many Readers and critics perceived.
One of the authors that supplied the best covers for her real intentions was Jane Austen, Gilbert and Gubar wrote. The critics analyzed Austen's novels in clever detail recalling the characters and plots which while usually ended with marriage were really about women's struggles with the institution of marriage. For example, they believe that Austen's parody of Gothic thrillers, Northanger Abbey is really about Catherine Moreland, a woman who is obsessed with reading Gothic novels because she is obsessed with finding her own story. Finding no story for herself she invents stories about the people around her. Another character who fits this cover of "searching for her own story" while conforming to a traditional marriage plot, is Emma Woodhouse. Emma is also an artist and author herself trying to turn her friends into her own romantic plots as Emma sets them up. Gilbert and Gubar take Austen and her characters to a new level to see them beyond frothy feather-headed romances which boy meets girl, boy loses girl in plot contrivances, boy-and-girl-reunite and they get married. End of story.
George Eliot's writing is also filled with women in search of their own stories or rather for significance in their lives. For example Gilbert and Gubar use Eliot's Middlemarch to show Dorothea Brooke's desire for a life of great wisdom and learning. An intellectual learned woman who designs houses for the poor, Dorothea does not want to settle into marriage but finds an intellectual ideal in Edward Casaubon, a professor who is trying to find a Key to All Mythologies. Instead she gets involved in a life of being stifled by Casaubon who Gilbert and Gubar compare to living death. Sometimes the right woman was born in the wrong time and their significance is marginalized no matter what they do. However, Eliot herself ran counter to that marginalization living a life under a male pseudonym, carrying on an over 20 year affair with one married man, and then married another man 15 years her junior.
Gilbert and Gubar also believe that these female authors often used their works to attack the Establishment of male writers especially the work of John Milton, whose personal life and writing held women up to a standard as spiritual beings or pushed them down as bearers of Original Sin. The works of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights counter Miltonian philosophies. Frankenstein takes the concept of Creation and Sin, but instead of creating a world that brings Sin, Frankenstein creates a monster from his own sin of pride. Gilbert and Gubar also believe Bronte's Wuthering Heights takes the Miltonian concept of Heaven and Hell and reverses it instead of a fall from Heaven into Hell, the characters fall instead from Hell (Heights) into Heaven (the Grange). Catherine and Heathcliff's most innocent times were when they were in the Hell of androgyny and innocence and were instead corrupted by the civilization of the Linton's. While previous reviews of mine show my feelings towards Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, Gilbert and Gubar's analyses of these works are fascinating and make the Reader look at their comparisons (both deal with romances that begin in early childhood between boys and girls who "are more than brother and sister.") and how their themes relate to each other and turn around their genres of horror and romance.
Gilbert and Gubar's section on Charlotte Bronte is among the most fascinating chapters. Her books, The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette take different selves of the author's to tell a story and often deal with the characters' doubles or other identities. Bronte's first novel, The Professor is a double for Bronte herself, the authors believe, because it is the only one of her books told by the point of view of a male character. The other books, particularly Jane Eyre separate the female characters into different selves reflecting their anxieties and concerns. Jane Eyre for example features passive small plain Jane Eyre and active large demonic Bertha Mason Rochester as doubles for each other. Gilbert and Gubar cite many of the eerie passages in the book where Bertha's attacks are often after Jane exhibits rage, nervousness, or anger at her situation. (suggesting that Bertha is Jane's double acting out her subconscious urges that she has kept hidden.) One scene reflects Jane's fears of her marriage to Rochester climaxing in Bertha grabbing Jane's veil and ripping it right in front of her. Gilbert and Gubar's writing show that Jane and Bertha are closer than Bronte believed.
The final section is devoted to poetry particularly Elizabeth Barrett Browning's narrative work, Aurora Leigh and Emily Dickinson's lyrical poetry. The writing also reflects the desires of women finding their voices through their writing. Aurora Leigh is about a woman who forgoes marriage for a life of a poet, a life that Barrett-Browning chose in her personal life and her marriage to fellow poet, Robert Browning. Dickinson's poems though brief also recounted various female author anxieties-such as stifling marriage, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and depression. However Gilbert and Gubar believe that Dickinson's choice to live an isolated life in her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts
was to sacrifice herself for her art. "Dickinson's posing was not an accident of but essential to her poetic self-achievement," they wrote.
In capturing feminist criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar make the Readers look at the works differently and recognize their authors as writers who recognized and understood the anxieties of their characters and Readers. These writers used their lives and works to challenge those anxieties.
3. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
Other books on this list talk about the importance of
educating women to help change their circumstances. Probably no one took that
message to heart more than Azar Nafisi. The former Western Literature professor
of the University of Tehran and the University of Allameh Tabatabi resigned
from her post in 1995 and decided to fulfill a dream: She gathered seven of her
best and committed students to meet at her house so she could continue to teach
about the literature that had been forbidden by the Ayatollah regime. The class
consisted of seven of her female students and on occasion one male student who
read the material and discussed the works with Nafisi. “To teach a mixed class
in the privacy of my home, was too risky even if we were discussing harmless
works of fiction,” Nafisi said.
This memoir is not only an eye-opening account of the status
of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran but is a wonderful tribute to the
transformative power of books and how they can change a person’s outlook and
make them move beyond the prescribed standards dictated by society.
The transformation that Nafisi did for her students is felt
early on when she described two photographs that she had taken of the women. The
first photo showed the students dressed in their traditional headscarves and
black robes. The second showed the woman with their scarves and robes removed
to reveal individual clothing styles. “Splashes of color separate one from the
next. Each has become distinct through the color and style of their clothes,
the color and lengths of their hair. Not even the two that are still wearing
head scarves still look the same.” These details about the two photographs show
how these classes changed the women to embrace their self-expression in ways
that the oppressive regime had forbidden.
The students are individualized as they are in their
photograph. They include: Mashid, who came from a traditional Islamic home that
had supported the Revolution and had worn the head scarf even before it was
required. Manna who is described as someone “who made poetry out of things
people cast aside.” (and whose husband, Nima, is the lone male member.),Yassi,
the group’s comedian who came from a more progressive family that thought the
Iranian government was a betrayal of Islam. Azin, an unhappily married woman discussed
clashes with her husband but was the most outspoken and obstreperous of
Nafisi’s students. Mitra was often in the background as the quietest calmest
member of the group but her dimpled smile showed more depth as Nafisi said,
“(Mitra) could and did use to manipulate people to her will.” Sanaz who was
dominated by “two very important men in her life”: her brother and her
childhood sweetheart. Finally, there’s Nassrin, Nafisi’s most frequent student who
appeared frequently in Nafisi’s academic life. She had been jailed and
publically interrogated as well as directly involved in the Iran-Iraq War. Nafisi
described Nassrin “The truth is I can’t describe her: she was her own person.
Nassrin was Nassrin.” Each one, whether they came from traditional religious or
secular progressive backgrounds needed something from the class and Nafisi’s
class provided them with those needs.
The books become symbols of the plight of these women as
they become themes that have carried over into her life. While Nafisi told her
students, “Do not under any circumstances belittle a work by turning it into a
carbon copy of real life. What we search for in fiction is not so much reality
but the epiphany of truth,” the students discover parallels between the books
they read and their own personal lives. The novels, particularly the most
prominent Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,
Henry James’ Daisy Miller, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice become
catalysts to help Nafisi and her students make the parallels in their lives and
finding their own “epiphanies of truth.”
For example Lolita goes
“against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives.” Nafisi and her students
shared a great deal of sympathy for Lolita’s plight of being shaped and
manipulated by forces outside herself, because they feel that they too had been
shaped and manipulated by forces outside themselves: In Lolita’s case it was by
Humbert Humbert and his obsession with
the twelve year old “nymphet.” With the group, it’s by their minimal status
from a government that wants to silence and isolate them.
Like Lolita, the women who read her story feel that they are
“without a past or story.” The students feel strongly for Lolita who they feel
has been kidnapped, raped, and deprived of her childhood. Each one opened about
how they felt dominated in their lives by powerful men. For example Nassrin
mentioned her mother who came from a wealthy liberal family but married her
father who came from a religious background. Her father dictated her every move
and she could not get along with her in-laws. “She’s very lonely my mother is,”
Nassrin said. “Sometimes I wish she would commit adultery or something.”
Through Dolores “Lolita” Haze, Nafisi and her students recount their own
unhappiness and oppression.
Nafisi herself was more than aware of the power literature
has over current events. In one chapter she recalled her early educational
career which climaxed in a mock-trial against Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We
also get some insights into Nafisi’s background: A jailed father, a family that
encouraged women’s education and revolutionary thoughts, an unhappy first
marriage and a move to Norman, Oklahoma where she experienced severe culture
shock and homesickness. She began teaching at the University of Tehran in the
‘70’s during the same time the Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Ayatollah
regime. Nafisi recalled the times of student unrest before the revolution that only
became worse afterwards.
Nafisi continued to teach at the university even though she
was constantly monitored by pro-Ayatollah faculty and students. The tension
mounted as Nafisi continued to educate literature as she saw it best but was full
aware that any sentence or opinion could have her imprisoned. Many of the
faculty considered the literature she taught as “blasphemous” and “filled with
Western values.” One of these was The Great Gatsby, which Nafisi chose to
taught “not because of the political climate but because it was a Great Novel,”
she said. She said many of her students were baffled by the story of an
idealistic man in love with a beautiful, rich, faithless woman: “(Gatsby) could
not be satisfying for those whom was defined by words such as masses,
revolution, and Islam. Passion and betrayal were for them political emotions
and for love far removed from the stirrings of Jay Gatsby and Mrs. Tom
Buchanan.”
Many of the department heads and faculty thought Gatsby
promoted “American materialism and adultery.” Furious, Nafisi wondered if they
had even read the novel, which openly criticized the idle rich not to mention
that the two most antagonistic characters were Tom and Daisy Buchanan, the
wealthiest careless people who destroyed people with their money and vast
carelessness. In one teachable moment Nafisi decided to put Gatsby on trial in
her class. One student spoke in prosecution against saying that not only Gatsby
should die but “the whole of American society deserved the same fate.” Another
student defended it saying that the characters in the book “are judged in terms
of their honesty. And the representatives of wealth turn out to be the most
dishonest. “ In this mock classroom trial, Nafisi proved that no matter if
Gatsby was banned from the university her life, her students could never
unlearn the lessons that it taught. Even the ones that were against it were
able to take what they read from it and use it for their lives.
Henry James’ Daisy Miller coincided with Nafisi’s later
academic career which was marred by the Iran-Iraq war. She recalled a time when
while reading the James novel, she was often startled by the sounds of air raid
sirens and the fear that because the shelters weren’t very good then it
wouldn’t matter if she remained where she was or sought shelter: she could
still die. It is an odd juxtaposition between the two but it became poignant
when Nafis underlined a specific phrase in the James novel. When Daisy Miller,
the American flirt, is judged by the object of her affection, Winterbourne she
says, “You needn’t be afraid. I am not afraid.”
You needn’t be afraid. Nafisi took that phrase with her in
her later academic career when she and other faculty members were required to
wear veils. Nafisi compared the James story of a flirtatious American woman
constantly observed and judged by other Americans with the standards that many
Iranian leaders, particularly men viewed the women in their country. During
that time Nafisi said, “I became irrelevant.” During the Cultural Revolution,
the university was closed but she was required to be present and offer projects
to Committees. During this time, Nafisi read, had private studies on Persian
literature (foreshadowing her later private study sessions with her students), and
taught a course or two at the Free Islamic University.
The former revolutionaries eventually were welcomed back by
a government that realized they needed their intellectuals to teach at the
University. That included Nafisi. However, there was a catch to this
return. The returning professors had to
conform to the current standards. One of them was that women were required to
wear the veil. Nafisi refused. When a friend reminded her that she wore the
veil to the grocery store, Nafisi pointed out “the university is not a grocery store.” Her friend’s reminder that
she could still teach what she wanted, left Nafisi with no choice but to
compromise her beliefs so she could do what she loved: teach.
Upon Nafisi’s return, she received a written accusation
stating “The adulterous Nafisi should be expelled.” She realized like Daisy
Miller with the other American expatriates she was being judged by others’
perception of her regardless of whether it was true or not. As in the James
work, Daisy was accused of having an affair with an Italian man as he took her
to see the ruins when she was simply sightseeing with him. She was innocent,
but she succumbed to malaria and died. Likewise, Nafisi was accused. Whether or
not it was true didn’t matter.
Others accused her based on their own views of morality.
Nafisi encouraged her students to write diary entries of how
they viewed literature. When some questioned the morality found in Daisy Miller
and accused Nafisi of teaching works from “the Great Satan.” (United States).
While Nafisi stood her ground and continued to teach, many of her more
sympathetic students remained silent. Later in her private classes, Mahshid and
Mitra regretted not getting involved by defending Daisy or Nafisi. “Mitra
confessed that she envied Daisy’s courage,” Nafisi said. “It was so strange and
poignant to hear them talk about Daisy as if they erred in regards to a real
person-friend or relative.” Another student, not one of her seven but one who
had originally been antagonistic towards Nafisi revealed that the class had
long term effects on her: She later gave birth to a daughter, who she gave the
secret name of Daisy.
The final section featured the impact that Pride and Prejudice
had on the lives of Nafisi and her seven students as their classes were coming
to a close and they decided to go their separate ways. From the beginning when her
students playfully paraphrase the famous opening lines of Prejudice saying
things like “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man,
regardless of fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old wife.” These jokes
revealed a lot about the students’ status and why they felt their time
accepting the Iranian’s dictates were coming to an end.
Nafisi compared the courtship between Elizabeth Bennett and
Mr. Darcy as a dance where one comes up to the other. The other steps away. They
continuously step forward and back, ultimately making a beautiful image as they
accept each other as their partners. While she teaches this, her students get
involved into their own dances as some settle into and out of marriages that
they think will help them. As Sanaz announces her engagement, Nafisi wonders if
she is really in love with her fiancé or maybe just trying to find a way out of
her stifled home with her abusive brother. Azin confesses that her husband
threatened with putting her away for a younger 18-year-old girl if she didn’t
leave the class. (Azin continued to go realizing how much the classes meant to
her.)
Nafis’s students rebelled covertly such as Azin polished her
nails, Yassi mocked the regime, and Sanaz
and Mitra wore their head scarves lower so their hair showed. As they did these
acts and gossiped about Sanaz’s engagement and Azin’s marriage, Nafisi wonders
what the future will hold for them and if they will be able to make their
voices heard as Austen’s characters do. “One of the most wonderful things about
Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies,” she said. “It seems
in almost every scene there is an ongoing dialogue between Elizabeth and
Darcy…..In Austen’s novels there are spaces for oppositions that do not need to
eliminate each other in order to exist…(Nafisi and her students) needed no
message and no outright call for plurality to prove our point. All we needed
was to read and appreciate the cacophony of voices to understand its democratic
imperative.”
The class lessons, particularly the dance between Elizabeth
Bennett and Darcy become the catalysts as the women seek their own ways of
receiving their independence. While Elizabeth Bennett wanted to get married,
she wanted to do so in her own terms. The women understood and related to that
need. In trying to change their lives, they became the women in the second
photograph, the ones who willingly dressed differently and looked forward to a
future without the Iranian regime.
Nafisi left Iraq with her children and her husband, Bijan
who at first was reluctant because “it was home.” However he knew that home had
changed too much for them to remain. The two settled in America where Nafisi
wrote for various newspapers and political magazines and eventually worked as
the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns
Hopkins University. Nassrin escaped to London to move in with her sister. Sanaz
ended her relationship with her fiancée but married someone else and enrolled
at a university. Azin divorced her husband, but lost custody of her daughter
but she eventually taught at the University of Allamaleh the exact same works
that she learned from Nafisi. She eventually remarried and moved to California
where she taught. Mitra and her husband sought residency in other countries,
eventually moving to Canada. Mahshid decided to remain unmarried but to continue
living in Iran and report about life from “behind the veil.” She became a
senior editor for a publishing company. Yassi taught her own version of
Nafisi’s class which involved not only reading but rock climbing and also moved
to Texas to study at Rice University. Still happily married, Nima and Manna
continued to explore their interests in literature where Nima taught class and
wrote essays on James, Nabokov, and his favorite Persian writers and Manna
wrote poetry.
Even though Nafisi and her students separated, they retained
what they learned and used it to make a better future. Lolita Haze, Jay Gatsby,
Daisy Miller, and Elizabeth Bennett may have led the way but Azar Nafisi and
her students moved forward to be better stronger people who changed their lives
by being themselves. Ultimately, that is the best gift literature can give.
2. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Like many important works in history, The Feminine Mystique gave voice to a problem and allowed people to articulate and organize. No one could formulate problems with the environment until Rachel Carson told us to imagine a Silent Spring. No one recognized the violations inside slaughterhouses until Upton Sinclair’s protagonists experienced them in The Jungle. And the problems that suburban housewives felt was not recognized until Betty Friedan brought it to life in her controversial, but thought-provoking and memorable book, The Feminine Mystique.
Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), interviewed several of her fellow graduates from Smith College and saw that many of them shared the symptoms of what Friedan called “The Problem That Has No Name”: listless expressions, boredom with their lives, and a desire to end the boredom by turning to drugs, alcohol or other means of self-gratification. Friedan writes, “The problem lay unburied unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night-she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-‘is that all?’’
Friedan called to task many that have contributed to the creation of the Feminine Mystique, including media representation. She cited the magazines that feature short stories and articles about women who have the ultimate goal of finding and keeping a husband and managing their children. (As compared to early articles and short stories from the 1930’s where while romance was a key factor to the stories, the most important plot points usually involved the female characters finding success in their careers as pilots, nurses, geologists, and copywriters among others.).
Friedan also cited the different portrayals from actresses when one generation sacrificed the gutsy career women popularized by Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Rosalind Russel, in favor of the dizzy kittenish innocents played by Marilyn Monroe, Lucille Ball, and Brigitte Bardot.
Advertisement also contributed to the Feminine Mystique because of the advertisers’ awareness that women were the main consumers in the home. “Why is it never said that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house,” Friedan writes.
Many of the ads displayed women using cleaning and baking products and gaining satisfaction with how they helped them in their housework. She also refers to ads like fur coats, perfume, and jewelry that were meant less to make the woman happy than to turn her into a sexual creature to arouse her husband.
Even the educated women who attended college to get degrees were not free from the Mystique, Friedan discovered. Many of the textbooks rigorously followed the beliefs of Dr. Spock, Sigmund Freud, and Margaret Mead who felt that women’s role was to function in the home.
Many of these women were only interested in attending college to find husbands. Others thought that their classes were boring, and slept through their studies considering their education “not worth it” if they weren’t going to pursue any further learning after graduation. Friedan listened to bull sessions between young female students that were hardly the sessions of Friedan’s college years where topics like “art for art’s sake,” America’s involvement in politics, censorship, and economics were discussed by women wanting to be part of the larger world around them.
Instead, these sessions featured students comparing engagement rings, discussing future intendeds, and what their home was going to look like. Unfortunately, Friedan would find that these same women would years later regret their lack of education and wish they had learned more for themselves rather than stifle their learning to raise a family.
Some of the most fascinating aspects of the book show what happens to the families when the women were trapped by the Mystique. Some turned to tranquilizers and alcohol to cope with their boredom. Others had affairs or dreamed of them to achieve some form of sexual satisfaction.
The more frightening accounts were from two women who had deep psychological problems: One woman would lie down and stomp her feet in a temper tantrum before she slashed her wrists in an attempted suicide and another woman performed her housewife duties such as arranging her daughter’s birthday party before she hung herself.
Since Friedan conducted her studies in the 1950’s around the same time as the rise of juvenile delinquency as seen in films like Rebel Without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle, Friedan found correlations between this rise and the mothers who were trapped, unfulfilled, and fallen into a stupor from “the problem that has no name.”
Besides identifying the problem, Friedan offered probable solutions such as encouraging women to work outside the home and for husbands and wives to divide the household labor, so no one feels slighted. Some of Friedan’s views are outdated (particularly her view of homosexuality which would later lead to division in NOW led by author, Rita Mae Brown). She also limited her research on middle-upperclass white women and did not focus as much time on lower class women or minorities.
However, the Feminine Mystique was a landmark book in American History because it kick started the feminist movement and showed what was behind the scenes of these suburban homes and revealed that all was not pleasant inside.
1. Eighty Years and More: Reminisces 1815-1897 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony In Her Own Words by Susan B. Anthony and Lynn Sherr
To paraphrase the old commercial jingle, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton ( 1820-1902)and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)were two great people that
were even greater together. The two long-time friends were considered the
“Mothers of the American Suffrage Movement,” founded the National Women’s
Suffrage Association, and fought for the right for women to vote. The two
completed each other in their separate ways to the Cause and their involvement
in women’s lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the better writer and her warm
engaging personality often won people over. Susan B. Anthony was the fiery
orator who made their points with her speeches and used her dry wit and
argumentative nature to speak out.
It only makes sense that Stanton and Anthony’s books should
be reviewed together and that’s why their books share the number one spot on
this list. The books reflect on the duo’s individual personalities and their
feelings towards women’s status, their causes particularly suffrage, and their
feelings towards enemies, friends, colleagues, family and naturally each other.
The writing styles even reflect their personalities. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
described it, Stanton’s autobiography is a warm grandmotherly chat which
Stanton leisurely told anecdotes and stories of her life. The Reader pictures
Stanton seating them inside a parlor while they share a cup of tea and Stanton
tells her life story.
Anthony’s book is mostly a collection of her best quotes and
the context in which they were said. Like Anthony herself, Lynn Sherr’s approach
to the Suffragist is to make her as direct, as eloquent, as determined, and
sometimes as stubborn and prickly as possible. The Reader may not feel the
close connection to Anthony that they would for Stanton, but they would never
forget what she said.
The two women’s
backgrounds foreshadowed their commitment to the suffrage movement. In Stanton’s
autobiography, she recounts the death of her only brother in which her father,
Judge Daniel Cady, said to her “I wish you were a boy.” Instead of feeling
hurt, Stanton vowed, “Then I will be all that my brother was.” She studied
subjects that were forbidden for a girl at the time like Greek and trained in
various farming responsibilities like caring and managing horses, hoping that
her father would say, “Well a girl is as good as boy after all.” Instead her
father shook his head and said, “If only you were a boy.”
As she matured, Stanton had a close approach of the
difficulties suffered by women as many of them came to her father for legal
advice against unscrupulous husbands, brothers, and sons. Stanton asked her father
why he couldn’t do more to help them instead of providing an ear and sending
them on their way. Cady took down various law books and showed his daughter law
after law which reduced women’s status and treated them as second class citizens;
laws which dictated that women belonged to their fathers before marriage,
husbands during, and sons after.
His law students also
got into the act including her future in-law, Henry Bayard by laughing and showing
her the worst laws. Upon seeing the young Stanton with jewelry received for Christmas, Bayard teased her by saying, “Now if in due time
you would be my wife, those ornaments would be mine; I could take them and lock
them up and you could never wear them except with my permission. I could even
exchange them for a box of cigars, and you would watch them evaporate in smoke.”
Stanton’s writing showed that while she
dearly loved her father, these misogynistic moments stuck with her and shaped
her resolve to fight for women’s rights.
While Stanton had a very conservative upbringing, Anthony’s
was a lot more liberal and progressive. Her father, Daniel a Quaker married her
mother, Betsy, a Baptist and Anthony witnessed relative freedom for women in
the Friends’ meetings where men and women were encouraged to speak out. “I had
all the freedom I wanted from the time I was a child,” Anthony said.
Anthony’s father was a guide for his daughter’s commitment
to social justice. He was an abolitionist who welcomed guests like Frederick
Douglass and was involved in the temperance movement. He also appeared to be
the type of parent who preferred to lead his children by letting them learn
from their mistakes as Anthony who supported her father’s temperance cause
after attending a disastrous military ball. Anthony said, “My fancy for
attending dances is fully satiated. I certainly shall not attend another unless
I can have a total abstinence man to accompany me, and not one whose highest
delight is to make a fool of himself.” Anthony’s words showed her as a woman
who even at a young age knew her own mind and was able to speak out about causes
that were important to her.
Both Stanton and Anthony’s activism began with their
involvement in temperance and abolition which played a large part in their
dedication to Women’s Rights. In 1840, Stanton was invited with several
American abolitionists like Lucretia Mott, Stanton’s mentor and Henry B.
Stanton, her husband to attend the International Anti-Slavery Convention in
London. The male abolitionists like Henry Stanton were encouraged to speak but they
refused to allow the women speak. Stanton was infuriated that half of the
speakers were forced to remain silent. “Women according to English prejudice at
that time, were excluded by Scriptural texts from sharing equal dignity and
authority with men in all reform associations.”
In 1848, Stanton, Mott, and other women formed the Seneca
Falls Women’s Rights Convention. The women at the convention composed and
signed a Declaration of Rights and Resolutions for Women. They slightly rewrote
the Declaration of Independence by opening with “We hold these truths to be
self-evident that all men AND WOMEN are created equal.”
While Anthony attended the Women’s Rights Convention, she
did not meet Stanton until 1852. In the meantime she taught school and obtained
her own reputation as an orator for women’s rights. When they met, Anthony, Stanton described her
future friend and partner, “There she stood with her earnest face and genial
smile, dressed in gray silk, hat and all the same color, relieved with blue
ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly.”
The two worked together for over fifty years. Stanton
described her friend as such, “It is often said that (Anthony) has been my good
angel, always pushing and goading me to work and that for her pertinacity I
should never have accomplished the little that I have. On the other hand it has
been said that I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them. Perhaps, all that
has been in a measure, true.”
While they were alike in their commitment to women’s rights,
they differed in many ways such as their personal lives. When she first met her husband, Stanton described
him as “a fine-looking affable young man.” “(Stanton had) conversational talent
and was ten years my senior, with the advantage that number of years
necessarily gives.” Stanton married Henry in 1840 and they had seven children.
Stanton was fortunate enough to marry a man who was not only committed to
abolition but was also supportive of his wife’s causes for women’s suffrage and
rights.
While Stanton managed to balance a family with her commitments,
Anthony decided that her commitment to the Cause was first, last, and most
important in her life. She never married inviting theories both then and now
about her sexual preferences and love life. Sherr however suggests that Anthony’s
decision not to marry was a conscious choice to remain committed to her ideals.
Sherr wrote “Today, we might be tempted to conclude that she was too smart, too
single-minded, too revolutionary to marry.”
Anthony often took digs at married suffragists such as
telling Antoinette Brown Blackwell, “No…not another baby is my preemptory
command.” (She also was very quick witted
about her single status. When a male
abolitionist asked how she could speak about the rights of married women when
she wasn’t married, Anthony snapped, “You are not a slave, suppose you quit
lecturing on slavery.”)
That wasn’t to say that Anthony hated men and children. Both
books speak about the many times when Stanton and Anthony would sit in Stanton’s
parlor while the two would write and discuss upcoming speeches and convention, one of Stanton’s children would sit on “Aunt Susan’s” lap.
While the vote was the single most important goal in the
suffrage movement, Stanton and Anthony also wrote and lectured on other rights
for women including the right to own property and the right to divorce their
husbands. Even though Stanton was happily married and Anthony unmarried, they had
seen what unhappy marriages did to wives, especially those who couldn’t get out
of them. They had been known to protect women who were being stalked or abused
by alcoholic husbands. “Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter resisting
most unequally among the sexes. By it man gains all; woman loses all…..Women
has never been consulted..,” Anthony said in a speech that Stanton wrote.
The commitment to Women’s Rights was so important to Stanton
and Anthony that it put them at odds with other suffragists. This was
particularly noticeable when the 15th Amendment was ratified giving
voting rights to black men only not women black, white, or otherwise. They
disregarded Horace Greeley’s suggestion that “This was the Negro’s Hour,” the
duo wrote various resolutions including “There can never be a true peace in the
republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African
descent and all women are practically established.”. The friction in which many
suffragists like Lucy Stone, founder of the American Women’s Suffrage
Association, were supportive of the 15th Amendment as it was.
Stanton and Anthony used the division founded the NWSA. (Which eventually merged with American Women's Suffrage Association)
While some may argue that Stanton and Anthony’s lack of
support for the Amendment is misguided maybe even racist by modern standards,
the books also show that their commitment to women’s rights was most important
in their lives and any other rights were secondary. Also that they felt that their
fellow suffragists’ support for a voting amendment that continued to deprive
women of their rights and even added the word “man” in the Constitution, was hypocritical.
The two contributed different things to the Cause of Women’s
Rights. Stanton wrote many of the speeches and was the more theological
philosophical of the pair. She edited and wrote works like The History of Women’s
Suffrage and an extremely controversial work in her day, The Woman’s Bible. The
Women’s Bible was written as a criticism and commentary towards male
theologians who used the Bible to justify women’s subservience to men. Stanton
and her co-authors cited stories and revealed Biblical verses and chapters that
were taken out of context by the mostly male clergy to justify their opinions.
Stanton wrote, “These dogmas are an insidious poison, sapping the vitality of
our civilization blighting women, and through her, paralyzing humanity.”
Anthony was a writer
as well as the founder, publisher, and editor of The Revolution, the NWSA’s
newsletters whose motto was “Men their rights, nothing more. Women their rights
nothing less.” She was also a mover and often did unusual stunts to get people’s
attention towards the cause of women’s suffrage. Her most infamous public
protest was in 1872 when she and three other women voted. Anthony and the
others were arrested and fined though she refused to pay the fine for the rest
of her life.At her trial she said, “My natural rights, my civil rights, my
political rights are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of
citizenship…..under this so-called Republican government.”
Like many good friends, Stanton and Anthony completed each
other and proved to be a great team. Anthony helped give Stanton the fire that
she needed to change things. Stanton gave Anthony the warmth and compassion to
be approachable to women in trouble. Women got the right to vote in Wyoming, Colorado, and other states in the duo's lifetime and finally got the national right to vote in 1920 after the ratification of the 19th Amendmen. Even though Stanton died in 1902 and Anthony in 1906, they were effective leaders in obtaining rights for women. They proved Anthony’s
final words, “With such women consecrating their lives, failure is impossible.”
onorable Mention: The City of Ladies by Christine De Pizan, "Remember the Ladies" by Abigail Adams, "And Aren't I a Woman" by Sojourner Truth, The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Our Bodies, Ourselves by The Women's Health Collective,
Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel, Wise Women: Over Two Thousand Years of Spiritual Writing by Women Edited by Susan Cahill, The Witchcraft Reader Edited by Darren Oldridge, When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone, Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, and Queens by Jane Dunn, Sovereign Ladies: Sex, Sacrifice, and Power-The Six Reigning Queens of England by Maureen Waller, The Witches, Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff, Women of the Four Winds: The Adventures of Four of the First American Women Explorers by Elizabeth Fagg Olds, Victorian Lady Travelers by Dorothy Middleton, Godiva's Ride by Dorothy Mermin, A Literature of One's Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing and A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt by Eleanor Roosevelt, From Pocahontas to Power Suits: Everything You Need to Know About Women's History by Kay Mills, Living History and What Went Wrong by Hilary Rodham Clinton, Look at What She Did by Chelsea Clinton,
