Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Lit List: Top Fifteen Non-Fiction Books For Women's History



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 clichĂ© 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 cafĂ©, 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 naĂŻve 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 fiancĂ© 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 fiancĂ©e 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,

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