Feminism in Cold Storage

I remember when this book first came out. I was a teenager and my father picked it up immediately and was so excited about it that he told me about half the book in an evening when he was done. I remember lots of stories from it but always felt like I was missing some. It was one of those books he had insisted on me reading one day and even gave me but that I didn't feel like I needed to read because I knew most of the stories (which did not turn out to be true).

Then I came across it again this month. It's been a week or so since I finished it, my reviews this month have been woefully behind. I had come across the audiobook version in my library when I was looking for a new book and it is on one of those few subjects that I knew my husband wouldn't mind listening to on our two day drive back home from visiting my parents. It turned into the easiest part of the drive.

I have always had a particular fondness for history surrounding boats and the sea, so this book was especially fascinating for me. I loved all the crazy stories about espionage and the way that became a big job for submarines to do. I don't remember all the names, unfortunately, but the man who used bets to factor intuition into calculations of where to look for things was amazing. That's an interesting concept all by itself.

It was crazy to get into the mindset of the Cold War while listening to this book. I don't remember much from that timeframe but I'm old enough to remember just a little. The fear and paranoia were strangely different from what terrorism has done in the last few decades. It's hard to explain but the book really brings you back there. I appreciated that the authors included that element, particularly since I'm reading it so long after both the period it covers and its publication.

I know herstories are normally my thing for the blog but I decided to include a review when I noticed that two out of the three authors were women. I enjoyed the narrator, Tony Roberts. He got a little monotone sometimes but kept the sense of suspense throughout the book.

Okay, I'll admit it, I got a little lost in the language. It took me longer than normal to get through To the Lighthouse. I had begun trying to let my Echo read it to me, which I have loved to do to get ahead on some reading while doing household chores but it let me down here. It was all the sentences that ran far too long with too many semicolons. It drove me a little crazy, so I had to change methods. I went back to reading it like a normal ebook. The magic of the book is in it's insight into normalcy. There's nothing unusual about any of its characters but To the Lighthouse looks deeper into the family and those who surround them than most books do these days. Each characters gets POV time and with each character you understand their alliances within the family, the reasons for their alliances, who they are allied against and why, their hopes and frustrations. One of the great things about reading it so far removed from the time and place when it was written is seeing the way the family of that time worked and how they depended on each other. It wasn't a fun book to read but it's a valuable book when looking at progress and the lives of women and the way that plays into the family life. While it shouldn't alone speak for the family dynamic of the time, it's very existence is proof that things were not perfect before women to work en masse in the second wave feminism. The roles of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay may have complimented each other functionally, I hesitate to believe that either was better off than a modern family. I'd love to have read this for a college class that dove deeper into what it all meant and the inner lives of each character. I feel a little like reading it for a reading challenge for a blog took a lot of the fun out of it but I don't know anyone else who has read it. Such is fate. This was my choice for Read Harder 2017 Task 7: Read a book published between 1900 and 1950 (first published 1927).

 This was a really weird story set in the near future. I liked it, but it was really weird. The protagonist, Meena, is a woman on the run and quite disturbed. It's told in the first person with time jumps between Meena and another woman who predates her, Miriama. The narrative seems confusing at first, but the women are still mentally working through some complex problems and they are running into people and situations that help them work it out.

What makes the story truly mesmerizing is the writing and the story building. The world has already come to terms with all the things that people complain now. Transgender is totally normal and we find that Meena's main love interest is trans. She's not only totally cool with it but specifically attracted to her spot on the gender scale. She also introduces the idea of transracial in one of her ramblings and how it had been normalized. I think my favorite bit of world building, though, is the shift in power from the US to Africa and the entire concept of the Trail leading there.

By the time I started to put together what was going on with the women, I was pretty far into the story and it enable the climax to unfold gloriously before me. I knew what was going to happen in a general way and all the details were so tangible and I almost couldn't move.

When reflecting on the plot itself, the story is a solid three star but needed to bumped up for the inclusive world-building, the mesmerizing writing style, Meena's liberating connection to her sexuality and all the ways in which the world was otherwise progressive beyond anything I'd seen before. It's a bit of a wild ride, really.

Given the extensive history of Gloria Steinem and feminism and how renowned her work is, you kinda have to go in knowing that it's going to be fantastic. Even if I had my doubts, they were assauged by my first foray into Steinem's work when I read Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions about two years ago. She mentions in the introduction to the book that she had originally intended for this book to be similar, simply publishing articles collected, rather than what it turned into. This is a collection of essays that go beyond what she had originally published for each of these subjects, though they do get into the original content as well. It's broken down into five parts that cover different concepts. Part 1: Phyllis Freud - this may be new favorite thing ever. I loved her reversal of Freud's writing. I always knew that his thoughts on the actions and thoughts of those of my gender were nuts, but I love how succinctly the gender bend works to show just how nuts he was. I especially appreciate the way she laid bare all the politics in his theories. Mostly, though, it was just a barrel of fun to read it all reversed and bent. Part 2: The Strongest Woman in the World - I knew that I had grown up a beneficiary of the work of women like Beverly Francis, but I had never known her name or really the beginning of the idea that women could be physically strong. We still suffer set backs all the time when some refuse to acknowledge this, but women like Bev Francis and things like Title IV keep working their magic and normalize women and strength. For the record though, anyone who thinks that it is somehow more physically demanding to life heavy things than to create and birth a child is either stupid or willfully ignorant. As women like this make obvious, women have always had the ability for physical strength, priming and a refusal to see it have kept us from realizing it for far too long. While I'm still only weights-curious, I have known a few women who lift and they are amazing to behold. Aside from the work of power-lifting and bodybuilding, Francis is also a good role model for dealing with the twists and turns of making something new acceptable for women. That she has become friends with fellow competitors just adds to it. Part 3: Sex, Lies, and Advertising - I have long hated magazines for many of these very reasons, even the ones I didn't know were a problem that magazine writers and editors had. I hated the  advertisements and the way they never seemed to talk about anything that wasn't products. I never did pick up Ms. Magazine, but I had long since given up on the whole thing well before I was old enough to understand what Ms. would be talking about anyway. This whole thing makes so much sense out of everything. It also helps that I read The Feminine Mystique and got the reference to Friedan's chapters on women's magazines. Any reader would understand the point without it, but it helped really drive it home. Part 4: The Masculinization of Wealth - yeah, I think there's a part of us all that know us but don't quite want to face it in print. I think we could all benefit from a de-masculinization of wealth though. If for no better reason than that these guys should have to earn what they have or lost it to someone more capable, whatever their gender. Part 5: Revaluing Economics - I've also come up against this thought process before too. The first time was when writing my first blog. You gotta put your money where your mouth is and that's much harder to do than you think it is when you start out. Still, it's a worthy endeavor. Part 6: Doing Sixty - I can't wait..... I mean, I totally can, but I'm looking forward to a time in my life when I feel like I can get a little more radical. I do feel it, though, getting easier every day. I'm only 35 now and I can't wait to see what I turn into by then. If Steinem is any indication, it's gonna be a fun decade. All together, it's an amazing work of non-fiction that needs to be read widely by all women, even if you don't think of yourself as a feminist. While I understand the allure of avoiding the word, I also think that being a housewife doesn't preclude you from supporting the endeavors of other women when their products are worthy of your cash. I know plenty of housewives who are feminists and breadwinning women who say they aren't, but as long as they support each other, I don't give a damn how they describe themselves. All the women I know could benefit from reading at least one of these parts. I know I certainly have.