It's been a long time since I was even close to being caught up with summarizing my reactions to books, a sort of goal for my blog. To make a concerted effort to do so would make for one-note content for a while. So, I'll continue my strategy for a while of writing many-books-in-one post summaries.
Lately, I've been reading a lot of "women's books." By quote marks I mean the books are not necessarily written by women, but are told about women. Many of these books have been set in the 1800s. One thing I noticed that, during that century, women had a wide range of career options, but very few socially acceptable ones. The other thing I noticed is that women have had it tough.
Let's start with the high-minded women. Sometime soon, I'll move on to the not so honorable. One of my blog readers/correspondents turned me on to Sarah Orne Jewett because he compared my writing to hers, specifically, The Country of the Pointed Firs. Before I bought it, though, I ran across her book, A Country Doctor:
It follows the growth and education of a young orphan girl raised in guardianship by the local village doctor in a inland New England town sometime in the late 1800s. The young girl decides early on that she wants to study medicine, despite resistance she gets from her family -- an elderly aunt she eventually visits -- and the temptations of romance and a married life. (At that time, being a career woman precluded marriage and family.) Young Nan is motivated primarily by her desire to better humankind and she does go on about it. Of all the books I read, Nan is by far the most selfless and idealistic.
Moving on .... A friend loaned me Gail Collin's book. Her son bought it for her for Christmas. She read it immediately and loaned it to me.
America's Women : Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines
After a couple years of noticing on my bookshelf and feeling guilty keeping a mother from her son's gift, I finally read it. Even though Collins starts her account of women with women's interaction with the first white men on the North American continent four hundred years ago, (like Pocahontas and hapless, obscure Pilgrim women), she lavishes most of her attention on women who lived in the 1800s. The job options for women were on the rise, then.
Collins mentioned in passing the first woman to graduate from medical school, one Elizabeth Blackwell, but she didn't share the interesting stories about how Blackwell's medical school colleagues initially thought her presence was a joke, but how they jeered her and refused to attend classes with her when they found she was serious. Blackwell never married. Collins certainly lingers on some stories and situations longer than others and despite some passages lifted almost verbatim from other sources, the book reads quite easily.
Quite without planning to, I read yet another book about a woman living in the middle of the 1800s, this time a story by the French master writer, Gustave Flaubert, about a woman trapped against her desire in the backwater towns of France. Madam Emma Bovary's method of dealing with boredom and life were neither as high-minded as Nan's nor as forbearing as the women sketched in Collin's portrayals.
Madame Bovary
Emma, the original "desperate housewife," dealt with her lack of career options by making her poor sap of a husband miserable and by having a single child. I confess that my reaction to the book was an appreciation for its sly humor. In fact, the following description of M. Bovary's reason for motherhood wins her inclusion into my "careers for women" list. She bore a son as revenge for being a woman. That will show those men!
"...this idea of having a male child was like an anticipated revenge for for the powerlessness of her past. A man, at least, is free; he can explore each passion and every kingdom, conquer obstacles, feast upon the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Both inert and yielding, against her are ranged the weakness of the flesh and the inequity of the law. Her will, like the veil strung to her bonnet, flutters in every breeze; always there is the desire urging, always the convention constraining."
What a brilliantly vivid metaphor! Her will is like veil, desire like a breeze and convention like a bonnet.
Wallace Stegner's book, Angle of Repose, by contrast, does not dazzle the mind like Flaubert can (even when translated). Instead, he writes a solidly detailed, linear fictional story based somewhat (or maybe a lot) on a very real woman artist named Mary Hallock Foote, who captured the western mining towns in etchings and prose for eager readers back East just as Susan Burling Ward did in Stegner's Pulitzer prize winning novel.
On the plus side of the book, I learned things about my region that I didn't realize. For instance, I did not know before reading the book that there was a mercury mine just south of San Jose in a town named New Almaden. In fact, I also learned what the word "cinnabar" means. It's a popular name in these parts for golf courses and housing developments and the like, but the substances itself isn't as tasty as cinnamon.
Susan Ward describes a building in New Almaden, the foreman's house as "trying to be something it's not" with it's wide veranda columns. Not only did the foreman's house exist in the time period depicted, it still does exist! These days, the building is so revered and valued, that American Express Bay Area Initiative Partners in Preservation granted the "Casa Grande" funds for restoration. One day, I'll go see it for myself and form my own opinion about how its pretention has held up.
The down side of the book was a certain dissonance between Susan's supposed upbringing and her outlook. Susan's pride and judgmentalism clashed with her background as a Quaker, a sect that would not even use the word "you" back in the days when English had a formal mode that the Quakers called each other "thee," even when it was grammatically incorrect. (I looked this up.) Stegner has Susan say things like:
"Will thee forgive me ... for wanting to make thee over? I'm a foolish woman, I'm too much in love with talk and talkers. Talk isn't that important. What's important is thee. Thee is dear to me."
I grew up in the shadow of the Mennonites who also supposedly shun worldly pride. Susan's tone struck me as false from start to finish. I admit, I don't know very many East Coast Quakers, but she never even nodded toward the humility young Quakers must have had inculcated into their psyches.
So, another option for a womanly career is pretentious pioneer woman artist. Great work if you can get it.
Moving on to the pinnacle of job options, I'll now talk about The Morrigan by Annette Maxberry.
My book reviews often turn into stories about how I "met" the books I read, and this one has a unique how-we-met story. A co-worker told us that a good friend of a good friend had just published a book. She suggested we could support a new writer by buying a copy.
Soon after that, I found myself unexpectedly in a big branch of a big chain book store, so I asked one of their sales people about the book. The trouble was, I had come unprepared without the author's name or the name of the book. All I could remember, I told her, was that it began with an "m" (something like "the mulligan") and that it had a picture of a crow and a woman on the front. Much to my amazement, she actually came up with the title. Apparently, the book had recently been featured in a new-release publication that goes to big chain book store employees and she was able to conjure up its memory and order it for me! (At that time, it wasn't yet available in stores.)
During my time off this summer (actually while I was on disability), I read it. Even though it was more violent than I expected, I enjoyed the story and resolution very much. The true situation of the central drama doesn't become clear until very near the end of the book, but I rather enjoyed how it unfolded. (A fine first novel, still, if there is a second edition, I'd like offer a few editing suggestions. A character says some contradictory things and there are a couple typos.)
The Morrigan even inspired me to read all about the Morrigan and the other Celtic dieties on Wikipedia. The book tracks several women through time. Career-wise, the title character is a farm girl, a riveter, and aspiring actor in turn, but -- I don't think this gives too much away -- also develops the motto "A goddess is a woman who remembers her power." Is that not the ultimate career for a woman? Goddess.
Next time, I'll discuss careers for women from fiction and history that operate south of the law.
