Feminist Author – …on the B.L.

Keep Marching

May 1, 2018 RaeAnna

Difficulty: II
Length: III
Quick Review: A look into the pitfalls, the successes, the struggles, the reality of being a woman in the United States today.

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner is a founder of MomsRising and works tirelessly to promote women’s rights through public speaking, campaigning, writing, and, yes, marching. Keep Marching is a look into the status of women in the United States. It’s incredibly well researched and accessible. I will refer to the author as KRF for the rest of the post because it is simpler.

I am always wary of feminist books, especially when written by white women. Feminism, historically, has left women-of-color out of the narrative, out of the statistics, and out of the picture. From the beginning of Keep Marching, KRF preaches inclusivity and intersectionality. Thankfully, she follows through.

I don’t want to give too much away. KRF discusses topics falling into three categories: Our Money, Our Bodies, Our Communities. Under these categories our right to choose, pay gap, motherhood, immigration, laws, and more are discussed at length.

Full of statistics, Keep Marching is both distressing and shows signs of hope for women and society. Motherhood is a recurring topic as it is a central component in many women’s lives, even those who are not mothers face obstacles based on reproduction. Women of color are often overlooked, and KRF includes statistics to show just how left behind they are. The stats are often given for women as a whole, but also given based on ethnic background, socioeconomic background, motherhood status, and more.

The book is separated into three parts discussing different topics in chapters. The reader is not bogged down solely in statistics. There are many anecdotes supporting her claims and statistics. The stories also show the struggles every day women face from all backgrounds. They ground her argument in reality. At the end of each chapter, there is a short section about taking action. In case the chapter sparks your interest or lights a fire under your butt, you now have a resource to help you know where to start.

As a cofounder of MomsRising, KRF has been a part of legal reform on state and federal levels. She often reiterates the phrase “we won” giving a sense of hope. An important theme to keep repeating. If we connect, support, fight, and raise our voices as a group, women can win. When women win, society wins. KRF gives many examples showing that when women win we all win. Investing in the future and success is an investment in society. She gives a lot of statistics on how society improves when women are involved at all levels because people need proof to take women seriously…. Or at least, that’s my experience.

It feels like Keep Marching is directed at white women. It is important to educate all women, but KRF makes it important to highlight the battles woc face. White feminists have left this group of women out of the discussion, and KRF is doing her best to include them. I was really impressed by the fact KRF focused so much on the different groups making up women. We are a group, but we are a diverse group, most of whom are consistently overlooked.

None of the information was new to me, but KRF does an excellent job laying out the information in an appealing and educational format without losing the reader.

Title: Keep Marching; How Every Woman Can Take Action and Change Our World
Author: Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner
Publisher: Hachette Books
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 9780316515566

Books

All the Single Ladies

January 26, 2018November 4, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 339
Quick Review: An in depth look at the transformation in status, perception, and participation American women have undergone in society through the centuries.

20180115_111033(0)-01.jpeg — All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister had me hooked when she stated, “I always hated it when my heroines got married” within the first few paragraphs. All the Single Ladies is a look at modern women and where we have come from.

All the Single Ladies is a fun yet in depth look at the history of women with a focus on American women. There are tons of statistics, but you won’t drown in them. The statistics serve a purpose to educate but are still interesting. Traister utilizes her own single life as well as friends, colleagues, and others’ experiences as single women. One thing Traister conveys more than anything else is that singledom is incredibly diverse looking different for everyone.

Traister is not anti-marriage, anti-male, anti-woman, or anti-single. When she began her journey writing this book, she was a single woman living in New York City. At some point in her life and book journey, she met a man. She is now a married woman with two daughters.

This has been on my reading list for awhile since I am a single lady. For as excited as I was, I was also a touch tentative. Rebecca Traister is a white woman. There is nothing wrong with this. When looking at a subject, there is the tendency to look at people similar to oneself. I was worried there would be a deficiency of inclusivity and diversity of perspective, socio-economic background, race, etc. I was pleasantly surprised. From the beginning, she states that she sites more white, New Yorker writers than most of us probably know. Throughout the book, she does a good job of talking about all women and not just those she identifies with. She spends a great deal of time discussing the disparity between white women and women of color, poor women and middle class/wealthy women, and more. She explores the fact women of color and poor women have enabled wealthier classes of women “freedoms.” How there is a dependency between the two discrepancies. How white women have lead change by co-opting opinions and actions of women of color.

Traister spends a lot of time emphasizing the complexities of women’s issues.

Nothing Traister wrote was groundbreaking. At least, it wasn’t ground breaking or remotely shocking to me. I spend a lot of my time listening to women’s stories and reading about the history and complexities of women’s status in society. If it’s not something you have spent a great deal of time lingering on, there will be lots of information packed into a fairly short book.

(I have fun finding mistakes, and she had one mistake on page 153: the date should be 1938 but reads 1838. Oops! Only off by 100 years.)

I highly suggest this book. It’s interesting and fun. Personally, it rejuvenated my love of being a single woman in America. I would love to hear Traister’s opinions about women’s status post the 2016 presidential election.

Buy on Amazon || Buy on Book Depository

Memorable Quotes
“…these single American women have already shown that they have the power to change America, in ways that make many people extremely uncomfortable.”
“Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely.”
“When people call single women selfish for the act of spending on themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.”
““It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish”” Amina Sow
“The state must play its role in supporting a population that no longer lives and dies within a family unit.”
“at the heart of independence lies money.”
“When it comes to female liberty and opportunity, history sets an extremely low bar.”
“women’s maternal status is often treated as the singularly interesting thing about them”

Title: All The Single Ladies; Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Author: Rebecca Traister
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781476716572

Books, Fiction

Children of the Jacaranda Tree

October 3, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 285
Quick Review The complexities of being a parent making choices forever impacting children, and children forever remembering and reeling from their parents’ choices.

Delijani begins Children of the Jacaranda Tree with a booming voice describing a mother’s love and desperate journey for survival. With moments of roman á clef, it is evident the topic of the novel is very near to Delijani’s heart.

The novel is about children growing up against the backdrop of Iran in the midst of the war with Iraq and struggle with the revolution during the 1980’s as well as the early 2000’s. The adults are revolutionaries in prison or raising the children of revolutionaries in prison. The children are grown up trying to piece together the meaning of their lives in relation to their parents and their home country.

The jacaranda tree is in the backyard of a grandmother. Every character goes in and out of this woman’s house. Some stay longer than others, but the tree plays a very small role in the book. Though it becomes a powerful symbol for each person; though, to each person it symbolizes something different.

Delijani is able to write with a palpable sense of fear as it permeates every main and supporting characters’ life in Iran as women, as men, as people, as revolutionaries. The adults fear for their lives and their freedom; they fear how to explain reality to their children. Though the children are too young to comprehend, they are able to sense fear. Every parent must explain the revolution and Evin prison to their children, but each struggles to explain it in a different way. As every parent must explain struggle and hardship, they do the best they can.

History repeats itself. Though decades separate the struggles of the parents and the children, they end up fighting the same battles with the same repercussions always with a sense of fear they will end up in Evin prison, where their parents once were imprisoned. The children repeat their parents’ hopes, actions, lives, and even mistakes. Some children know the details of their parents’ pasts, and some do not. The actions and pasts of their parents belong to the children in one way or another impacting their lives.

Every character in the story is trapped. Some are physically bound, and others are restrained psychologically. They are trapped by past, by grief, by tradition, by prison, by family, by responsibility, by secrets, and more.

Delijani writes a vibrant and emotionally charged novel about a subject so often forgotten, glanced over, or blatantly ignored. It is difficult to imagine this being the reality children had to grow up in less than thirty years ago. Delijani is able to bring that reality to life by telling the stories of so many children left behind.

Memorable Quotes
“It was important to her to know that she could choose those dresses, that this choice, although hidden from view, was still hers.”
“He was no longer anywhere.”
“The past is slippery, unreliable, like melting snow on marble stairs.”
“For secrets steal your childhood away from you.”

Title: Children of the Jacaranda Tree
Author: Sahar Delijani
Publisher: Atria Paperback (Simon & Schuster)
Copyright: 2014
ISBN: 9781476709109