Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh
Heartland is a memoir at the intersection of Educated by Tara Westover and Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. For readers who actively seek out trying on someone else’s shoes, Smarsh’s memoir will amply deliver.
Heartland explores the experiences of four generations of women and men in a working-class class family in rural Kansas, delving into their experiences of love, marriage, work, and education. The book is sectioned into thematic chapters, rather than being strictly chronological, covering her family’s peripatetic travels across the state for work, romance, love — and all too often, sanctuary and safety. Readers should know the book discusses abuse and neglect in a multitude of ways; violence is woven in the fabric of these women’s lives, both a symptom and cause of their poverty.
The book includes a massive cast of individuals from both sides of Smarsh’s family. [A family tree map would have been a helpful addition, but this is a minor detraction.] Through this account and interpretation of her family’s history, Smarsh makes an argument for greater attention to the social, cultural, and gendered reasons for poverty in America. She challenges the popular and misguided myth of meritocracy, especially highlighting the multiple ways spousal and domestic violence play an enormous role in this societal problem.
Smarsh’s delivery of this message lacks — thankfully — pedantism or blame, focusing instead on the interconnected web of cultural expectations and histories which have resulted in these outcomes. Her writing also is smooth, journalistic, and easily accessible; in fact, evoking an emotional response from this reader on more than one occasion.
Heartland is a fantastic non-fiction read on poverty, especially among the white working class, in middle America.
Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother by Peggy O’Donnell Heffington
I read this over Mother’s Day, so it was particularly poignant for me as I reflected on the fluidity of my own womanhood and ideas concerning mothering. It’s a profound read; readers should be prepared to question their notions of womanhood and mothering.
As a mother, I found this history of mothering, motherhood, and childlessness to be an amazing read, and on multiple levels. First, in terms of its content, O’Donnell Heffington lays out a compelling history, arguing for a revision in the way mothering is perceived, valued, and recognized. This is a history for anyone and everyone, regardless of their position on child-bearing, motherhood, or womanhood at large. Each chapter addresses a form of mothering or motherhood, expectations around these roles as they have changed through time, and historical factors which have influenced our collective image of Mother today. Throughout Without Children there are stories of mothers — of diverse kinds — embedded, evidence of O’Donnell Heffington’s arguments and research. The result is an intimate narrative history, one which toggles seamlessly between micro-history, prosopography, and discussions of the larger contexts of religion, politics, and gender.
Second, Without Children impresses in terms of its prose and language; it flows at a comfortable, easy pace, delivering what is a deeply contentious issue in straightforward terms. O’Donnell Heffington clearly has an agenda; what writer and what non-fiction does not? — but the book, to its credit, lacks superciliousness, pedantry, and jargon. Given the controversial topic and the heated debates among many women and mothers regarding having children or not, Without Children performs a miracle of balance.
At the root of the debate and ultimately at the root of this book, is the question and discussion of the constituency of womanhood as it is understood in most Euro-American Western societies. What makes a woman? (Some would have us believe it is motherhood.) What constitutes a mother then? (Some challenge the notion of birth and biology.) In a moment of gender fluidity and revolution of gender identity, Without Children asks us to suspend our ingrained understandings of gender to consider other definitions of motherhood and womanhood.
This is a deeply intellectual tale, one woven out of ancient and Italian history, imagination, and philosophies of Womanhood and queerness. The fiction in these pages reads as a reimagined history of real women, whose lives were lost to us because of the threat they posed (just by being) to European and Italian patriarchy. The tale unfolds as a kind of immortal telling of several lives, connected to a single soul. It is multigenerational and historical. There are several “Sapphos”.
As a historian, I deeply appreciated the embedded histories here: legal, social, cultural. There is a historiographical element to the book, an unfolding of a trajectory of thought as the book follows “Sappho” in her various guises and incarnations through time.
This is not an easy read. There is a required pre-existing understanding of Italian and European literature necessary to grasp its nuances. But, that said, the undercurrent of desire, rage, and feminist ambition is hard to miss. For that reason, After Sappho is worth both an initial and several re-reads.
The description states this is a feminist tale, what happens when women are ostracized, “cast out” from their communities. It does not disappoint. The characters and their lives challenge typical narratives of women in this historical era. Despite being several decades past the so-called Women’s History turn in the discipline, popular depictions of European women in the 17th century remain stagnant as powerless, subjects in a patriarchal world, and largely passive. Of course, we have seen and heard of the warrior women (queens), daring women (aristocrats), extraordinary women (those who chose to challenge norms); what we often lack are narratives of truly ordinary women. They remain (largely) relegated to a passive role in society.
Not so in Elizabeth Lee’s Cunning Women.
In this tale women lead the way despite living under a patriarchal yoke. The characters here are not heroines, they do not dismantle patriarchy, they must live within in it (as we all do) but they resist. It is this reality that Lee folds the reader into. Mother and daughters, even the sons of the village are bound within a system not of their own making. What makes Cunning Women feminist is that some characters find ways to resist, even when knowing their reality cannot deliver on desire. They resist anyway. Other characters find ways to resist by scraping by, by working within the system and in these ways — by merely surviving — challenge the patriarchy which binds them. These characters, in their hanging onto life, raise a fist to “the Man” so to speak. Even the characters who bow to the patriarchy find themselves at odds with it when the women in this tale earn their vengeance.
Cunning Women is a complex tale, one which appears deceptively simple in its plot. It is for that reason (I believe) the story moves slowly. Lee allows the reader time to digest and mull over, to reflect as the main character does on the parameters of a woman’s life in an English village in the 17th century. The love story necessarily moves slowly; this is not a rush of lust but an intellectual and emotional growth of love. Note: this is not a romance. No, this is much more realistic than that. Cunning Women is an account of a realistic life with all its banality and uncertainties.
Medieval Royal Mistresses: Mischievous Women who Slept with Kings and Princes by Julia A. Hickey
This is a compendium of salacious scandals highlighting a handful of women who possessed power and agency in a world where their gender and sex were deemed inferior to men. For readers who enjoy the political maneuverings rife in European medieval history, this is a fantastic work to add to your collection.
Each chapter focuses on a specific woman, her immediate world, and a narrative charting of her political and public life as it was recorded in the historical archive. There are the usual mentions of the usual heavyweights of Medieval women’s history: Elizabeth Woodville (who became Edward IV of England’s queen), Katherine Swynford (who became the Duchess of Lancaster and the wife of John of Gaunt), Rosamund Clifford (the mistress of Henry II and the object of many romantic poems), and Saxon queens, like Emma or Ælfgifu of Northampton. But the book also brings to the forefront other, lesser known women who came to wield sexual and political power: Maud Peverel (the mistress of William the Conqueror), Herleva of Falaise (the mistress of a Duke of Normandy), Edith Forne Sigulfson, and numerous other unnamed women who bore royal children.
Many of the women in these pages were powerful in their own right as heiresses or bearers of royal blood, but invariably most were eventually cast aside or somehow lost their influence over the men who ruled this world and time. For all their power, Medieval Europe was a patriarchal world.
Medieval history is — to me at least — infinitely intriguing, but the archival evidence on women in this age and the internal lives of individuals is so sparse that monographs are often dry and lack the kind of micro- and prosopographical history I personally enjoy. There is a great deal of historical tennis volley of “Duke So-and-So met Earl Such-and-Such in battle” or “Lady Blah Blah was then wed to the second son, Henry (always a Henry somewhere), but died alone the way” and so on and so on, so on, so on, etcetera, etcetera. But to Hickey’s credit, the prose and style of this book make what might be a dry topic of political intrigue interesting.
Bravehearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West by Katie Hickman
“Gripping,” “Exhilarating!”, “Captivating!” These are descriptors I often flutter my eyes at, chalking these up to marketing histrionics that serve solely to assuage publisher’s fears about book sales and authors’ egos. But in Hickman’s case, I was hard pressed to find more authentic adjectives for Bravehearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West.
I was expecting no less, to be honest. I’ve read Hickman’s work before (Courtesans: Money, Sex and Fame in the Nineteenth Century (2003) and Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (1999) specifically) and enjoyed her scholarship for many reasons. Bravehearted, however, was the first time I’ve read Hickman’s scholarship since I began and finished graduate school, becoming in my own right, a historian. I can now say I appreciate Hickman even more than I did previously.
Bravehearted (like Hickman’s other works) is, from the perspective of a general reader, incredibly easy and smooth to read. The facts (that is, the history) are woven so artfully into her prose that the reader never feels like there’s a history lesson embedded in it. (There is, of course. More on that below.) Instead, the women, men, and children — indigenous, white settler, and immigrant alike — feel like full-fleshed characters in a story set in an epic, sweeping landscape. I could not help but feel the tragedy and simultaneous hopefulness of their journeys across the United States. At times, the harshness of the wind, the damp of the rain, the aridity of the desert air seemed to tragic, and simultaneously hopeful whip my hair, slick my skin, burn my nose. Hickman achieves what all historians — storytellers that we are — aspire to do: transport the past into the dimension of the present.
Each chapter of the book focused on a different region, a different woman, a different route settlers took toward the Western coast. The Pacific Northwest, the Californian region, and the Southwest were all covered in succession in Bravehearted. Embedded within these pages were not only those perspectives of white settlers, but indigenous voices too; though, the focus of this book was primarily on the European, East Coast, Midwest, and White settlers who encroached, entitled and arrogantly, into Indigenous lands. There are mentions of other people of color, Chinese immigrants and Black women, but again, these feature less prominently than white women and men. It is worth noting that there are few Mexican/indigenous women in Bravehearted; indeed, as I attempt to recall the book from memory, I find myself unable to remember one. Of course, it’s possible I am just forgetting, but that in itself is telling: There weren’t enough of them mentioned to mark a place in my memory. (The index is absent in the ARC so I could not look up where I might have read about them in it.) This is a well-researched, brilliantly written work of historical scholarship for any audience, but, it is not a work of decolonization; its intent is not specifically aimed at disrupting dominant narratives of white settler colonization or to bring to the forefront the voices of women of color.
This is — and this is not a detraction so much as it is a neutral statement — a history for those who are interested in women and the gendered component of history of the American West. The lesson is a simple one, but one which still requires learning: white women were as much part of the making of the West into the WhiteAmerican West as white cowboys, sharp shooting lawmen, and male miners (there were female miners too!) In other words, white women (and women of color in lesser numbers) were there tooand they shaped White America in equal measure to their masculine counterparts.
The content of Bravehearted is not entirely divorced from race or ethnicity, but certainly the focus here is gender more so than race or ethnicity. Hickman’s inclusion of men and women of color and the indigenous perspective is not minor or token in any way; it is well done, but academic readers who may be expecting a stronger connection between or a deeper discussion of gender and race might struggle to locate it within this particular work. This is — and again, this is not a detraction — a work for a general audience. What Bravehearted offers the reader is breadth, indeed, a wide lens of the landscape of the American West in terms of the gendered experience of traversing it in the 19th century.
If, by now, my final verdict is unclear, let me end with it: This is a fantastic telling of American history worth any and every reader’s time.
A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research: Exploring the Trailblazers of Stem by Dale Debakcsy
I loved reading this ARC (Advanced Reader’s Copy) so much I pre-ordered it! Eye-opening, superbly written, and well-researched. I cannot think of higher praise for a non-peer-reviewed non-fiction written for a general audience. I can’t wait for my copy to arrive so I can re-read it!
A History of Women in Medicine and Medical Research: Exploring the Trailblazers of Stem is broken down into several chapters, each one focusing on a specific woman, her personal background or life story, and her professional career in the sciences. The book progresses chronologically from the 16th century up to the near present, ending in the 1970s.
Each chapter ends with a section devoted to further reading and sources. While the book lacks citations and formal references, these inclusions are especially valuable. This kind of historiography is difficult to discover without a significant investment of time and effort making Debakcsy’s book all the more useful and appealing. I do not mind admitting this is a key reason why I have chosen to purchase my own copy.
These are not long or exhaustive studies of each individual; these historiographical sections allow the reader to explore further. That said, the brevity of each chapter is not a detraction. These are easily digestible chapters, perfect for classroom use or as readings for an undergraduate course. The chapters capture all they need to, leaving the reader satisfied but curious for more.
The women themselves are fascinating subjects, not only for their contributions to STEM, but also for their perseverance and resilience in the face of class, gender, and racial prejudices. Many of the women derive from the upper classes, but a significant number of them are working- or middle-class. Some were immigrants or enslaved (or lived just outside that category). Many had to break with their families to pursue their dreams. In many cases these women knew or knew of one another, interacted closely or within similar professional circles. A cohort of pioneering women in these fields is visible in the 19th century, particularly in the fields of medicine.
While the majority of women examined and brought to light in DeBakcsy’s book are white, European or American, there are also significant chapters focusing on women of color in the Western world. These are mostly (but not exclusively) black women who broke academic and professional ceilings.
This is a fantastic book for the classroom and any library (academic and home, alike). I cannot wait for my copy to arrive!
Originally published in 1976, The Easter Parade, justifies its classic status. The story, revolving around gendered concerns, the complications of family and love, imparting a sense of futility and time passing, remains wholly contemporary. Yates’ novel is one that entered on a timelessness human experience: life and living.
That said, for all its timelessness, the novel is grounded in its historical moment. It carries the reader through several decades, letting them be witness to shifts in American culture, especially as it pertains to gendered expectations and the function of love and sex in the lives of educated white women in mid-twentieth century America.
The plot follows the life of two sisters, though it is centrally focused on the younger, Emily Grimes. As children Sarah and Emily Grimes were part of a generation whose parents were divorced; their mother is a single mother, their father is an absent, yet present factor in their lives. The tale follows them through adolescence and then young adulthood, where their paths diverge. Sarah takes the more conventional path of marriage, child-bearing and raising, while Emily pursues academic life, single womanhood, love affairs — marriage too, but also divorce — and a career. The Easter Parade is built on their divergent, yet intertwined lives; Part three and four of the novel take the reader into the interiority of their familial and sibling bond. Despite their differences, the sisters remain, well, sisters.
In a sense, this is a novel about nothing and everything, the intangibility of our lives and the worth of living those lives. I have just finished reading it, feeling like I have traversed the twentieth century, like I have witnessed humanity being played out among other people, been given a privileged view into someone’s life.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 