March Book Report: The Wife, book two of Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

I prefer happy stories.  Happy in this case is loosely defined to mean a book that is not filled with terror, unremitting anxiety, or endless misery.  It’s not relentlessly happy, of course, because life isn’t relentlessly happy.  But it does lean toward happy, a characteristic that I really prefer in a book.  I picked up a trio of books by Sigrid Undset.  Together, the three novels are called Kristin Lavransdatter; all three novels center on the life of Kristin, first as a girl, then a young married woman becoming a mother, and in the third novel as mature married woman and mother.  

Set in 15th century medieval Norway, the book is a collection of three novels about the life of Kristin, the beloved daughter of a prosperous Norwegian squire.  She grows up in the mountains near modern-day Lillehammer, and ultimately marries a man from further north in Trondheim.  I’ve read the first two novels in the series and this month’s review is about the second book, The Wife.

Undset wrote the novel in  the 1920s; it was a major factor in her receipt of the 1928 Nobel prize for Literature.  The book is a genuine masterpiece, with an epic sense of historical time in the life of one women, Kristin.  Kristin is neither singular nor distinct; though she does defy the social norm of the day to marry a man her father is not convinced will be a good husband.   Kristin is a rich and complex woman who is both a creature of her historical time and also admirable in modern terms.  Undset’s knowledge of precise details of Norwegian medieval life and history is vast and impressive and enriches the tale.  Much of the story in The Wife involves Kristin becoming a mother (of seven sons!) and coming to terms with a marriage she desperately desired but finds to be more difficult than she imagined.  The book is rich with Norwegian history and the role of the Christian religion in the lives of medieval Norwegians.  As Kristin sorts out the complexities of getting her heart’s desire, the reader sorts out the complexities of the history of women’s lives.

I’ve been reading a number of books about women’s lives in historical terms and this book fit nicely into that canon.  I’ve been struck over and over by the boundaries of a woman’s world, both in terms of history and in the modern context.  From the influence of marriage and motherhood on the lives of historical women to modern conversations about girls’ bodies and the clothing they wear, to my observations about the ways in which the women seeking the 2020 presidency must position themselves and are treated by the mainstream media, I am struck by the power of the boundaries of women’s lives.  The first two Kristin Lavransdatter books found me thinking about those boundaries, then and now, and I look forward to reading the third novel in this splendid collection.

September Book Report: Nella Last’s War

The British Mass Observation Archive was set up in 1937 as a project to encourage everyday English men and women to write down their thoughts and observations.   Nella Last, a 49 year old housewife with two grown sons in their 20s, joined the project in 1939, as World War II began.   The Mass Observation archive collected diaries from 500 ordinary English observers and by all accounts Nella Last’s were among the most compelling.

Nella Last lived with her husband in Barrow-in-Furness, an English ship-building town that was bombed repeatedly by the Germans during the war.   Over the course of the war, Nella worked as a volunteer in the local service member canteen, helped at the local hospital, and eventually she helped to manage a second-hand shop whose proceeds benefitted Red Cross packages for POWs.  In terms of war service, Nella’s talents seem to lie in her ability to keep up her spirits and the spirits of those around her.  She was a good manager of people and a good cook, using her talents to cleverly make-do with the food rations available and she was crafty, seeming to always be knitting sweaters and socks and making stuffed toys for children that sold well in the second-hand shop.

As she records her observations, it’s clear that Nella Last found that she very much enjoyed writing.  She participated in Mass Observation longer than most, writing from  1939 to 1965.  Her journals of the war years were eventually published in 1981.  During the war, Nella had all the concerns of a mother her age: anxiety about her sons, fear of the blitz, and the sadness of watching her friends and her community cope with the losses of the war.  She was also working outside her home for the first time in her life, as a volunteer, but increasingly aware of the power of her labor.  

The personal purpose Nella felt in her work seemed to re-inform her whole sense of the world and her place in it.  These reflections were powerful to me from an historical point of view.  I know that participation in war work in the 1940s fueled the feminist movement of the 1960s and in Nella’s writing was a practical example of how that work outside the home changed women.  In particular, Nella’s ability to use her cooking skills and clever ways in the face of scant resources is much-appreciated in the soldiers’ canteen.  Nella has cooked for her husband for all her married life and reflects that he rarely offered any appreciation of her ability and talents.  During the war, she finds that she likes to be appreciated.  She lets her husband know this.  

Nella’s thoughts on motherhood and her sons’ making their way in the world were also informative to me.  More than seventy years later than Nella, I too am living life without my child at home.  As I read of Nella’s worries about her sons as they fought in WWII, I experienced my first weeks with a child away at college.  Like Nella, I want my son to make his way in the world.  Like Nella, I am proud of how he has grown up.  Unlike Nella, who worried about her boys in a war, I had the comfort of a much-loved child being away but in the relative safety of college.  The perspective was a powerful reminder of my blessings and of the centuries of mothers before me who have had to endure the horror of sending their sons to war.

There was so much in this book to both enjoy and reflect upon.  Nella Last participated in the Mass Observation Project because she was an ordinary woman.  But in both her thoughtful writings about the world of war and her observations about the role of women and mothers within it, she is extraordinary and a reminder that there is so much to be found in the stories and history of  regular folks.

April Book Review: The Invention of Wings

I picked up this Sue Monk Kidd novel because the back-of-the-book description was so compelling.  The novel is the story of Sarah Grimke, a 19th century abolitionist and feminist.  I have long admired Sarah Grimke, who, with her younger sister Angelina, became famous for their public presence amongst the most active social reformers of the 1830s.  Contemporaries of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Weld, Lucretia Mott, and others, the Grimke sisters were important leaders in both abolition and feminism.  Moreover, they were intellectual forces to be reckoned with at a time when women were largely seen as ornaments, not intellects.  Thanks to her careful command of the real history of abolition and feminism, Kidd tells their story exceptionally well.

Sarah Grimke was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1792 and she grew up in a prosperous slave-owning household.   As a child, Sarah began to question the injustice of slavery.  An obviously bright child, her father permitted her to read the same books as her brothers.  However, as she approached adolescence, her parents made clear that her world must be the circumspect existence of a privileged Southern woman of the 1800s.  She could not receive the same education as her brothers; her aspirations to a career in law were laughed at dismissed.  

Kidd weaves the known story of Sarah Grimke with imagined conversations and an internal dialogue that adds layers to Sarah’s story and makes splendid work of it.  The story is powerful on its own; Kidd’s prose makes it exceptional.  The novel is structured as a story about Sarah and a Grimke family slave named Hetty, who lived alongside Sarah and whose experiences form the core of Sarah’s abolitionist beliefs.  

The novel is told in first person in alternate chapters by Hetty and Sarah.  Kidd’s prose is lovely and in the opening page of the novel, when Hetty says of her mother, Charlotte, “Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy,”  I knew that this book was special.  Not two paragraphs in to the story and I was hooked.  The rest of the book measured up to that first page and it was a terrific read.  Beyond that, it had me thinking about the lives of women in the 1800s.

As I read The Invention of Wings I also watched the Masterpiece Theater story about the Bronte sisters, “To Walk Invisible.” Charlotte, Emily, and Anne lived around the same historical time as Sarah and Angelina Grimke and though the women lived an ocean apart, their worlds were similarly circumspect.  All of them were brilliant and capable and all lived at a time when such women were largely excluded from the public eye.  They may not have been rare, but because opportunities for women were so limited, they seem rare.  That these amazing women wrote anyway (and Sarah also spoke out at public events), says much about the power of the ideas swirling in their minds.  As I read about all three of the Grimke women and watched the Bronte sisters, I felt again how much is lost when women’s contributions are undervalued or downright excluded.  Though they lived more than 100 years ago, in the aftermath of the Trump election, the Grimke women and the Bronte sisters seem more important than ever.  These women were warned and yet they persisted.  In 2017, we should embrace the lesson of that experience.

Outrage

Yesterday, I read a story about one woman's effort to terminate her pregnancy.  That the fetus was much desired but badly damaged is really superfluous information, though it's a powerful part of the tale Carolyn Jones tells.  What's more important are the many ways in which our state legislatures are systematically disregarding and ignoring the needs of more than one half of the population.  The female half.

Those of you who think that birth control is not a real issue, who feel that women's reproductive health is just a smokescreen, who don't understand the consequences of ignoring women's rights, I suspect you're in for a very tough election year.  I'm a woman and a mother; a voter and a citizen.  And I won't rest until my rights - human rights - are secure.  We deserve better.

Ladies, it's time to raise a little hell.  I urge you to support Planned Parenthood, Emily's List, and NARAL/Pro Choice America.  There is only one pro-choice, pro-woman presidential candidate and his name is Barack Obama. Women's rights are human rights.  Let's make sure our government understands this fact.

What's it to Me?

When it comes to birth control, I shouldn't have a dog in the fight.  In addition to the fact that I play for the all-girl team, I'm the mother of a son.  So I'm in no particular danger of being responsible for an unintended birth, let alone birth control.

But the current national discussion of women's access to birth control, one filled with loud claims by opponents of birth control for women (I'm talking to you, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney) sets me on edge.  Without a doubt, a woman's access to educational, economic, social, and political power in this nation is a direct function of her access to the ability to control when (and if!) she will become a mother.  In the less developed parts of the world today, access to education and birth control for women reduces the poverty of any society within 20 years.  The dangers and responsibilities of childbirth are real and significant and women who can control their reproduction have so many more opportunities for both themselves and the children they choose to mother.  In my mind, this is a human right.

I realize that men have a stake in reproduction and I'm not discounting that.  But for nearly all of human history, men have sought to control women's bodies.  Women in modern, developed 2012 may not always realize just how close they are to patriarchal management of their uterus.  But they are incredibly close, as close as the 1965 Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, a ruling that prevented states from making birth control illegal for women to obtain.  It's as close as the election of one of the chuckleheads who seems determined to ignore the very real health concerns of more than half of the population.

This morning, Mother Jones organized a chart to show the costs of birth control in this nation.  Check it out here.  There are both women and women's groups speaking out about birth control and the importance of making it widely and easily available.  Planned Parenthood is here.  The Guttmacher Institute is here.  These folks deserve our dollars and our very loud support as they fight the good fight for women and their children.

What He Said....

I was in the process of drafting my thoughts about the Catholic Church's objection over the Obama Administration's requirement that all employers provide women with birth control coverage when Kevin Drum summed it up nicely.  So pop on over to Mother Jones to read Drum's piece.  He's spot on and I hope that the Obama Administration will hold the line.

You Go, Girls

The 1992 elections were proclaimed the "year of the woman" and, for the first time in history, the number of women in the U.S. Senate began to creep upward.  Four women were elected in 1992; that brought the total of women in the U.S. Senate to six.

For years, the path of career advancement for women in the political world was to join the Democratic party.  Women tend to be more liberal than men and so this made sense; of course they would find an ideological home in the the more progressive of the two political parties.  At the same time, the Democratic party made a much greater effort to funnel talented women into the leadership pipeline, supporting their ambitions and advancing the issues which mattered to women.

There were exceptions, of course.  For example, in 1978 Kansas elected a Republican woman to the U.S. Senate in the form of Nancy Kassebaum.  Kassebaum came from a Republican political dynasty of sorts (her father was Alf Landon) and she was an exception.  Most women in American politics were Democrats.

Though their numbers were slim at the national level, many more women served in state legislatures, where party representation was more equal, though the Democrats still enjoyed an edge when it came to female candidates.  A number of political scientists identified this as the talent pipeline and they were confident that the number of women seeking (and winning election) to national office would continue to rise.

I've been thinking about all this because this year, 2010, may actually be the year of the woman.  There are plenty of Democratic women in races big and small and that's good.  But the main reason that 2010 is breaking ground in terms of gender is that there are a host of races with Republican women facing off against Democrats, a sign that both parties are now hospitable to female candidates.

Most of these Republican women are not candidates I find impressive, at least when it comes to the issues which matter to me.  But I am heartened to see so many women seeking office.  In terms of Senate candidates, the GOP has Sharron Angle in Nevada; Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, and Carly Fiorina in California (she's running against Democrat Barbara Boxer). The Democrats, long the leader when it comes to women candidates, are in the mix as well.  In North Carolina, Elaine Marshall is seeking to win a Senate seat.  Robin Carnahan of Missouri is looking to translate her state-wide popularity into a Senate victory.  Incumbent Democrats Patty Murray from Washington, Kirsten Gillibrand from New York, Barbara Boxer from California, and Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas are seeking to stay in Washington D.C.

The upshot is the 2010 election cycle might see the number of women in the U.S. Senate rise from sixteen to twenty-one.   For my personal politics, it will be no great victory should these GOP women win their races.  But from a demographic point of view, the prospect of one-fifth of the Senate finally being women is awfully exciting, especially for prospect of gender equality that it represents for today's boys and girls.