The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

This book starts with "the problem that has no name"--the ennui, depression, and discontent of housewives in the 1960s--and traces that problem to larger questions of social structure. While parts of this book seem dated (thank goodness!), the questions of not only the social structures that lead to this problem, but also how we allowed it to happen (after women had already earned the legal right to vote) still seem relevant today. Friedan supports her case with both anecdotes and statistics. Worth reading for historic interest, at least.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

In this book Murakami weaves a complicated, beautiful love story in which the protagonists, having met briefly at the age of ten, are not reunited throughout most of the novel. The story teems with references to Proust, Orwell, Janacek, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, among others. In addition to the beautiful strands of magical realism (in which the moon is imbued with as much meaning as Proust's madeleines), the novel also reflects on estranged families--how children cope with being emotionally abandoned by their parents. There's also a fairly harrowing portrayal of the effects of domestic violence (although this interest is far more prevalent in the earlier sections of the book). While the book never fully explains the Sakigake cult, or the Little People who speak to them, or even how the two worlds (1984 and 1Q84) work together, I really enjoyed the story.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

This book tells the story of Kamila Sidiqi, a young woman whose studies to become a teacher were interrupted by the arrival of the Taliban in Kabul. Instead of rolling over and accepting their strictures, Kamila developed a dressmaking business to provide for her family. The story read like fiction (the prose was fairly smooth), but the drama was all in anticipation--it seemed like Kamila and her family basically were able to run their business without major setbacks. It's a very powerful story, but I'm not entirely convinced that the way it's told was the most effective or best choice.

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

In this book Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat travel to Genua, where Magrat has been sent by the witch who left Magrat her wand and her position as fairy godmother. With moments that spoof The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, and countless fairy tales (but most of all Cinderella), this story is hilarious. There's also a lot of travel humor. I can't get over how smart these books are in their parody. All of which is to say, this book is another one smashed out of the park for Pratchett.

The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins

This book tells the story of Gerty Flint, who overcomes a poor and deprived childhood to find happiness. The story is pretty good--of course there's a bit of gothicism in the family romance (missing family members) who reappear by the end, and a good measure of religious sentiment (but not so bad as The Wide, Wide World), and a fair amount of sentimentalism. There are a few points where Gerty seems almost modern--she wants to stand up for herself and earn her own way, at one point, and at another, she lets another girl be saved from the fire instead of herself, but she never quite breaks out in a fully satisfying way. Still, I'm interested in the intricate plot, and the character development (which at times seems a bit flat or uneven). Much more enjoyable than I thought it might be.

The Group by Mary McCarthy

While this book follows the coming of age of a group of Vassar graduates mostly in New York City during the end of the Great Depression and into World War Two, it's really in some ways the story of one woman's unfortunate marriage and how that match affects the lives of her college friends. I read Joanna Smith Rakoff's A Fortunate Age a while ago for the Barnes and Noble First Look program, and at the time heard that she had written an homage to The Group--now I can see she straight up lifted the plot and set it forward sixty years. I enjoyed this book, although I think it would have been more striking if I were a contemporary and if I hadn't read the knock-off version first. Despite the large number of characters, I think McCarthy does a nice job of managing them so that the various scenes illuminate and fill in the inevitable gaps in the history far better than a more full chronology might.

A New England Nun and Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

This collection of stories offers many pleasures. Freeman writes masterful short fiction, often demonstrating the triumph of the human spirit over circumstances that threaten to cause people to choose their worst instincts. The stories value the ability to live in honesty with oneself, while trying to treat others with as much love and charity as possible, above all else. I particularly liked "Dear Annie," The Jamesons, and "The Lost Ghost." I am definitely planning on reading more of this author in the future.

The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson

I thought that this memoir was quite funny and engaging at times, and that Ms. Dickinson managed to avoid one of her habits that most annoys me in her column (that is, scripting responses as a form of advice). I do think that there were moments when the author was trying to have it all. For example, in the prologue, as she described her ex-husband offering to help her mother before their marriage, she notes that the ex-husband (almost viciously denied a name in a book that names most of the other characters, including her current romantic interest) didn't get it, and complains about having to go outside, in the cold, with no warm clothes, to fix his shoddy job of cutting down a tree. I'm not sure why she had to go outside herself, and why she couldn't take a moment to find gloves and a coat. This ancedote sums up my complaints with the book. I did enjoy her style and I thought most of her stories were reasonably well selected.

Reconstructing Womanhood by Hazel Carby

In this work, Hazel Carby challenges the dominant narratives of African-American cultural history and its pattern of black women writers in order to include urban confrontations in fiction. Carby starts by laying the groundwork and acknowledging the black, feminist scholars and critics who have preceded her. Then she re-examines antebellum racial and gender relationships, especially questioning the ideal of womanhood. She reads both Northern and Southern antebellum texts, including Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before moving on to such authors as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Iola Leroy), Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Pauline Hopkins. Utimately Carby identifies a renaissance in African American literature during the turn of the twentieth century, and complicates the tradition of African American fiction to consider its previously neglected engagement with the struggles of the urban working class. I thought this book was very neatly assembled, and its readings of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (the part I was looking to read, and the one I am most qualified to assess) were quite sharp.

Resisting History by Barbara Ladd

I think I could have found this book more helpful than I did. In some senses, Ladd seems to be trying to recuperate the way Faulkner writes women in As I Lay Dying and Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse. Her concerns are gender, choice, agency, authorship, and the act of writing in As I Lay Dying, A Fable, The Golden Apples, and Tell My Horse. She contends that the presence of women and hybridities in these stories challenges the monolithic narrative of History and divides it into several different narratives. Her readings apply Walter Benjamin's Marxist analysis to these texts and attempts to include the study of space in addition to Benjamin's temporal approach. As this review may indicate, though, I had trouble following exactly what unified this study.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

It has been a long time since I first read this book. I remember enjoying Jane Eyre as a child, but I didn't remember much about the plot, beyond the first chapter at Gateshead, a scene that made a large impression on me. This time, I have read the book in conjunction with lots of criticism, especially of the Madwoman in the Attic type, so I am seeing a lot of Jane in both Bertha Mason and Helen Burns.

I was particularly disturbed by Mr. Rochester this time through; he was a bit more controlling than I had remembered. Neither did I particularly care for St. John Rivers, who forces Jane to learn Hindustani and wants to force her to marry him and sacrifice her to his missionary missions.

The racial ambiguities in this novel (especially as they center around Bertha (the creole), Mr. Rochester, Blanche Ingram, and Mrs. Reed taint both the colonized people and the colonists by association. Brontë seems to contrast the "fairy" and "elf-like" Jane with Bertha Rochester, who is figured as a witch and a vampire. Ultimately, though, Jane is tainted by the same colonial money that taints Rochester--and even from the same family as Uncle Eyre is an agent for the Masons. So while Jane's return to Rochester seems to be from a position of more independence (she has money of her own, and he can no longer subject her to his possessive gaze as he is now blind), that return is complicated by her accession into the colonialist part of the British Empire.

The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein

I found this play entertaining reading, but I'm not convinced that it completely works in the end. I like the art history lectures, and the idea of telling the story through vignettes of Heidi's life, but the politics of the play are fairly predictable and routine and Wasserstein strikes such a reasonable, middle-ground sort of point, that I'm not entirely convinced she's saying much of anything at all. Ultimately one of those works far more interesting for its flaws than its successes.

Clarissa's Ciphers by Terry Castle

This analysis of Clarissa struck me as very smart. Castle opens with the fragmentation of Clarissa and draws a striking parallel between Clarissa's body and Mrs. Sinclair's as each woman dies. The majority of the book dealt with letters, signs, and readers. The book builds well on itself.

The Sturdy Oak edited by Elizabeth Jordan

This composite novel, which like the parlor game, consists of a different author taking on each chapter, was written as part of the 1917 New York suffragist campaign. It follows the transformation which leads a young couple to embrace the cause of women's votes. While the story ends happily, with George, the husband coming around to support his wife and her interest in women's action, and with the marriage of the secondary couple, one might wonder about the effectiveness of the ending. George comes around very quickly, and the second marriage happens just as quickly--almost undermining the woman's prior decision to support herself (despite her large fortune) as a stenographer. The quest for quick and easy endings thus seems to undermine a truly radical position on women's rights.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Harriet Jacobs tells of her life as a slave in this narrative. She frames the story on either side with affirmations from people who have known her that her story is true and not exaggerated. She specifically seeks to engage the sympathy of the free women of the North; to that end she focuses on the experience of motherhood for a slave. Although she makes much of the fact that she missed the opportunity for formal education, she is able to deploy the style and grammar that white Americans would have used at the time. The book ends not with a marriage but with the freedom of Linda (the name Harriet uses in the book) and her two children; there's a nice development to that point on the ethics and practical concerns involved in buying the legal freedom of someone who considers herself free.

Communities of Women by Nina Auerbach

Nina Auerbach has quite a dazzling scope in this book. She looks at the development of communities of women in British and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She pairs Pride and Prejudice with Little Women, Cranford with Villette, and The Bostonians with The Odd Women, and then focuses her discussion on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in the last chapter. These communities, she contends, grow increasingly more encompassing as time goes on: while the Bennett sisters are waiting for husbands, and the March sisters must be married off to finish the book, Miss Brodie's fascist leanings incorporate a militancy and a sort of political self-sufficiency.