Review: Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

There is a grating tendency among anti-capitalist academic books that this effort manages to avoid, which is viewing the duty of the writer to be that of detachedly observing the system. Táíwò is present in his own narrative, using his perspective as a Black man raised in a Nigerian diaspora community to show some of the pitfalls and limitations of “deference politics”; deference to those who managed to make it to the “room where it happens” takes for granted that such rooms should exist rather than addressing the needs of all those who didn’t make it to the room. Táíwò also emphasizes the need for action over mere description of the world. Although Marx may have said “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,” many Marxist academics remain focused on interpretation. To be clear, I am grading Táíwò on a curve here; his passionate polemic on the need for constructive politics (over deference politics) is vague in implementation. But he does at least view the world as changeable, and addresses an audience that hopes to change the world—another distinguisher from many academic books, which seem aimed at other academics.

It’s perhaps a poor indicator that I opened this review with “Well, it’s a bit better than a lot of academic books.” There isn’t all that much to this book; it is short, but despite its brevity it is a padded version of his 2020 essay. The extra pages lightly touch on works by other writers and organizers (Jo Freeman’s essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Amilcar Cabral and Paulo Freire on liberation and self-government, Nick Estes on indigeneity and trauma, etc.) but his treatment of these other topics neither bolsters his own argument nor sheds insight into these other works. During the process of publishing the book, someone made the decision to change the title from the at least descriptive one the essay took ("Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference") to one that suggests a thorough historic analysis that the book doesn’t deliver on (“Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics”). Still, it’s an approachable book that brings up a number of important political questions, and could be a good springboard for a chatty book club.

Review: Left of Karl Marx by Carole Boyce Davies

Sometimes I wonder what compels someone to write a book. This one seemed like it was written out of a genuine and deep admiration for Claudia Jones, and a desire to impart that joy with other academics. 

For all the author’s high regard for Claudia Jones, the author does not seem to be writing for the next Claudia Jones (there is an interesting aside in the Introduction where the author justifies her use of non-academic (communist!) sources, such as Jones herself). The book is missing a sense of urgency (Jones certainly considered her writing to be of pressing importance) and of scale — it is nearly claustrophobically focused on Jones, failing to ground her writing in the thinking of her time or to much extent explore her influence on the writers and political movements that came after her. 

I’m not convinced that the author really even understands Jones in her context. For example, in Jones’ famous 1950 International Women’s Day speech, Jones affirms solidarity with people facing all types of oppression, linking their struggles with the socialist movement. This, the author claims, is something “more radical than communism”, despite it aligning fully with Lenin’s 1902 work, What Is to Be Done?, a work Jones, as a self-identified Leninist, would have read but that the author seems unaware of. (Relatedly, the title of the book is an allusion to the location of Jones’ gravestone relative to that of Marx, and not a political statement the author argues effectively.) When we come to Jones’ well-documented beliefs with which the author particularly disagrees—Jones’ alignment with the CPUSA’s positions in the 1950s, for example—the author insists this smart, well-read, well-traveled woman has been naively deceived. 

Yet for all the minute focus on Jones, it isn’t even an exhaustive one-stop-shop for understanding her experience as a Black socialist woman. Her exclusion from the CPGB due to racial prejudices is briefly mentioned and the reader is pointed towards a work where some other scholar has elaborated it. Academic convention prevents you from stepping on other people’s toes, I suppose. Someone with fewer constraints should write a book on this very deserving thinker.

As a stand-alone chapter to see if you will enjoy the book’s approach to Jones’s writing, I suggest Chapter 4 (“Deportation: The Other Politics of Diaspora”).

Review: Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

Marketing did Natalie Haynes’ delightful Medusa retelling dirty. From the reviews, it appears readers went in expecting Madeline Miller’s magnificent Circe except with snakes for hair. I get it: the subtitle “Medusa’s Story” hints towards an intensely intimate perspective of a woman grappling with being the sole mortal among her gorgon sisters or working through the trauma of her violation in Athene’s temple. It’s not that book. It’s a different book. It’s good at what it sets out to do, and, unsurprisingly, fails at accomplishing what it doesn’t aim to do.

So what does it set out to do? Well, here my empathy for the misled readers ends because it is laid out fully from the very first page:

I see you. I see all those who men call monsters.

And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course.

I only see them for an instant. Then they’re gone.

But it’s enough. Enough to know that the hero isn’t the one who’s kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – he is monstrous.

And the monster? Who is she? She is what happens when someone cannot be saved.

This particular monster is assaulted, abused and vilified. And yet, as the story is always told, she is the one you should fear. She is the monster.

We’ll see about that.

Stone Tears is a story about what makes someone a monster. It is about Medusa, yes, but it is also about the “men who call [her] that” and who “call themselves heroes”. It is about “all those who men call monsters.” The second page takes us soaring above the world we are about to explore, a literal birds-eye view of a world structured around patriarchal dominance: gods over mortals, kings over subjects, men over women. Each of these power relations, we will see, creates monsters. The next chapter zooms into one such relationship: Zeus, king of the gods, hunts down and rapes the minor goddess Metis and then swallows her whole. It’s an intense chapter, the monstrosity of it is vivid. 

Readers waiting for “Medusa’s story” will have to wait until the 10% mark to hear through her eyes for the first time. Medusa is raised by her Gorgon sisters. It is a tiny isolated community: the three women live alone, lovingly tending a humble flock of sheep. The egalitarianism of it contrasts the scheming, power-hungry gods and monarchs of the surrounding chapters.

Medusa’s principle foil is, of course, Perseus, re-imagined as a Brock Turner or Brett Kavanaugh type: immensely privileged by birth, given help at every step of the way, whining as he fails upwards, and almost unbelievably cruel. Narratively, Perseus’s story is structured as a classic Hero's Journey—because of course it is in the classic retelling. Haynes deftly plays on our expectations with this trope, showing Perseus follow the expected steps of embarking on a quest and seeking wisdom and playing roguish tricks on a trio of three wise women, then taunting the reader for sympathizing with someone so carelessly cruel, so monstrous.

So perhaps when you’ve finished congratulating Perseus for his quick tricks, you might spare a moment to think about how the Graiai lived after he was gone. 

Blind and hungry.

With Medusa’s deadly head retrieved, Perseus wanders through the world killing indiscriminately and remorselessly, leaving the narrative for the last time laughing after turning his bride’s extended family to stone, musing how he will let others clean up his mess. 

But it is not just Perseus who is a monster. We see monstrous behavior in the gods’ egotistical violence: Zues’s rape and consumption of Metis, Poseidon’s rape of Medusa, his collective punishment of the Ethiopians for the vanity of their queen, Athene—powerless to take aim at her true target, Poseidon—cursing Medusa. We see other humans acting monstrously: a father who locked up his daughters out of fears of prophecies, a king forcing his brother’s life partner to marry him. Over and over, the true monster is patriarchy and its agents.

The horror of these figures of Greek mythology, varyingly beautiful or at least not portrayed as physically monstrous, is contrasted with the warm, caring sisterhood of the Gorgon sisters. Sthenno and Euryale’s loving reflections on the surprising delights and unsettling fears of motherhood are so human you forget they have tusks, wings and talons.

The hero/monster reversal is a very fun angle for a Greek mythology retelling. It’s satisfying terrain to explore here in the West as we reconsider Western myths from the colonization of the New World to which of the Allied forces was chiefly responsible for the defeat of the Nazis in World War II. Haynes is at times didactic in her calling out to readers the monstrosity of her characters—I don’t begrudge her for it, the monsters of history and popular books attract far too many fans. Haynes tells the story from a creative array of characters: Medusa, Perseus, Athene all get their say, but so too the individual snakes that make up Medusa’s hair, and Medusa’s decapitated head. Perspective influences your definition of a monster, after all. 

Those looking for a more serpentine Circe should look elsewhere. Those with some tolerance for somewhat Marvel-y dialogue interested in a feminist retelling of a half dozen interwoven episodes from Greek mythology will enjoy Stone Blind.

Review: They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

Women have always been smart, able to make decisions for ourselves, creative and enterprising, and both interested in and capable of shaping the world around us to our own benefit — to the same extent as our male counterparts. Some social configurations limited the sorts of actions available to us, and we may not have received the same education and resources as our brothers did, but we were never simply passive members of society. Many of these decisions and actions we took, the ways we shaped the world, are not obvious from a more superficial reading of historical sources. This is true for the important roles women played in science and art and politics, and also for the less savory parts of human history, like the ownership and exploitation of enslaved people.

In this work, Jones-Rogers exhaustively documents white women’s autonomy and shrewdness in their roles as slave owners in the United States. She draws from sources as diverse as advertisements, women’s magazine advice columns, sales records and lawsuits to show over and over again how involved white women were in the institution of slavery. They made decisions to purchase or sell their human property, determined how to discipline them, how to get the most value out of their property, and other aspects of ownership. Jones-Rogers shows how important slave ownership was to the culture of this class: enslaved people were often parts of dowries, wills, coming-of-age-gifts and other markers of life. She discusses several instances of “power couple” slave owners, with husband and wife taking wildly different tactics to the care and discipline of their slaves. 

All this at a time when a woman’s property was considered to be her husband’s! In practice, women had say over their own property, and their property rights were enforced in court orders. Women would often sue their husbands for mismanagement of their (human) property, or sign premarital agreements governing the ownership and management of their (human) property. Other historical sources often overlook the role women played in slave ownership, and Jones-Rogers documents a number of factors that led to this under-count. For example, female slave owners were more likely to own female slaves, and female slaves were not recruited for Civil War efforts as male slaves were. When these slave-owners lined up for compensation for slaves taken from them during the war, women slave owners were therefore underrepresented. Women slave owners also used slave traders to a relatively greater extent than slave markets, compared to their male counterparts. They also often used (male) go-betweens to execute their wishes. Buyers and sellers may also be listed only with a first initial, complicating assessment of the individual’s gender. A superficial examination of limited sources might conclude that this practice was mostly a male affair.

The most interesting and unique chapter of the book was the chapter on wet nursing. This practice involves biology and culture, and exploits inequalities and prejudices about race and gender and class. It was a life-giving practice for many people, disgusting in its particular form of oppression, yet rarely features in history books. In my opinion, it works well as a stand-alone chapter, highlighting many of the other themes Roberts pulls at throughout her work.

The rest of the book is very detailed, and though it really brings to life the period and all its ugliness, it’s not a casual read but a scholarly work. I recommend it for those with an interest in the topic, but for the reader casually interested in race and gender in American history, I suggest Angela Davis' Race, Women, Class.

Review: Love & Capital by Mary Gabriel

By her own accounts, Mary Gabriel set out to tell the story of Marx and Engels, not with the goal of examining their philosophical developments – which had already been dissected from all political angles – but with a focus on understanding their family. Gabriel discovers – chiefly through combing through decades of correspondence between the Marx and Engels households and their friends – a tightly knit, loving family of “brilliant, combative, exasperating, funny, passionate, and ultimately tragic figures.” But there are many brilliant, exasperating, passionate people in the world, and not all of them have biographies that could be pitched as “a story of one of the most influential thinkers in history, but this time, with a feminist angle.” What does Gabriel’s angle tell us about Marx?

Gabriel reflects, “as rich as the Marx family story is, I found it also shed light on the development of Marx’s ideas.” I don’t fully disagree: the grueling poverty Marx and his family lived through, the tumultuousness of the politics of the mid-19th century, these are all things I was broadly aware of but reading it in minute detail through their letters, all laid out carefully in chronological order, certainly helped me better understand the emotion and hope behind Marx and Engels’ writing. But it feels, nevertheless, like a partial portrait. The story of their intellectual development is told briefly, perfunctorily, and I was left with many questions. Who were they reading? How did it shape them? Did they exchange silly quotes from Adam Smith and Malthus or were Marx’s searing critiques of these philosophers put on paper only in Capital? Hegel is barely mentioned. I would have gladly read several pages on their reaction to Darwin. Instead, we get pages of salaciously delivered, poorly sourced gossip about mistresses and other soap opera dramas. Perhaps it is unfair of me to judge this biography on this account: Gabriel explicitly set out not to examine philosophical developments and wound up only including more of Marx’s theory because it seemed timely in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, I cast judgment based on its goal: these are figures we know because of their philosophy, to attempt to tell their stories without really engaging with their contributions feels empty.

But to be charitable, what if I look at this biography of Marx based on the goal Gabriel sets for herself: an emphasis on the women in Marx’s life? These women played a more important role than I previously appreciated: his wife and daughters handled some of his correspondence, translated his works, and acted as his research assistants. This isn’t unusual for writers of the time: Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia Tolstoy, played similar roles for their husbands (although Gabriel does not provide this context). Marx’s daughter, Eleanor (unnecessarily called “Tussy” throughout Gabriel’s oeuvre while family nicknames are inconsistently applied to the other figures) played an active role in the labour movement in the 1870s-1890s, and to a lesser extent, her sisters did too.

Despite the extra screen time these women received compared to a more ‘traditional’ biography of Marx, I felt like there was a complete absence of effort to understand who these women were. This tendency was most egregious for Marx’s wife Jenny von Westphalen, who is presented as gentle woman who loves simple luxuries, and who is deprived of her birthright to a comfortable living because of a lousy husband who won’t get a real job but thoughtlessly involves himself in political movements that go nowhere. This portrait is painted without specific evidence penned by Jenny herself, and Gabriel does not seriously engage with the counterfactual: that Jenny loved Marx, believed in the socialist cause, and that her trust in Marx’s contributions to socialism arose from her capacity for rational thought bestowed unto her by her aristocratic and bookish upbringing. All this despite Gabriel highlighting over and over again the tireless work Jenny did to support Marx, such as sending messages to their acquaintances requesting financial support and running a household that overflowed with visiting socialist organizers. Instead of respecting Jenny’s choices and intellect, Gabriel accuses Jenny of "parroting" Marx’s ideas. It reads profoundly unfeminist despite its emphasis on the women of the story.

I found myself instead wondering about the emotional pain the author brought from herself to the story. Who is this woman who had so many tears to shed about an 18th century woman pawning her jewelry and clothes, but so few tears for the poor living in London slums (who Gabriel likened to rats)? My google searches turned up sparse details about her life, but her outsized indignation at Marx's life choices had me trying to fill in the blanks. When she suggests Marx's economic work and organizing efforts were selfish choices with "so devastating an impact" on his children, is she thinking about an absent parent, too busy with committee meetings and conferences to provide her with the attention she deserved? Does she see in her own career a certain virtuousness in having done her dues for two decades as an editor at Reuters before taking time off to write books — if only Marx had put off writing Capital a little longer, Jenny might have been able to keep her von Westphalen family silverware! When she fails to consider the relationship between Jenny and Marx as one of partnership of two well-studied individuals both intent on bringing about socialism, is it because of a shallowness in her own romantic relationships? Has she never loved someone and the cause they believed in?

Still, the work Gabriel clearly did in reading the correspondence assembled in the Marx and Engels Collected Works and other archives shines through the gossipy muck. The book is peppered with fun anecdotes that make the characters and the period feel very alive. Combined with the historical and political context woven throughout the narrative, this book is an informative if infuriating read.

Review: A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

A Doll’s House is a tightly plotted play about the limited agency and opportunities for fulfillment that women had during marriage. It must have been explosive, cathartic, to see performed when it first came out in 1879. But even reading it in 2023, I was pleasantly caught off-guard by the bold confrontation between vivacious Nora and her superficially doting husband. Building to the climax, I grimaced continuously at how he kept calling her his little bird, his little dove, his little squirrel, his flattery of her looks, his opinions on how embroidery was a much more attractive hobby than knitting, his pressing himself on her despite her protestations, his calling her childlike. “It was the nineteenth century, maybe it was normal” I told myself. To have Nora come to the recognition that his infantilizing, objectifying attitude was the problem in their marriage, that he cared not for her as a person but for her as a decoration in his home, oh it felt so satisfying.

Review: Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes

Pandora’s Jar examines some of the women of Greek mythology – from Pandora to Penelope, highlighting the agency (or lack thereof) women have in the narrative, how they are objectified by the narrative voice, or how their failures or successes are rewarded or punished by the narrative compared to that of similar male characters. This kind of critique is the mainstay of feminist media critique, and Pandora’s Jar does it compellingly and with humour. 

This kind of critique of older media sometimes elicits angry retorts (always from men) about how it was a different time, and we cannot apply the standards of our present to the great works of masterful (male) writers from back then. Where I think Pandora’s Jar is particularly interesting is that the author points out over and over again how contemporary versions of these mythological women were often far more egalitarian in their depictions than some of the more modern versions we have come to know. As an example, ancient Greek depictions of Pandora emphasized not the “unleashing of evil/chaos” that we know her for now, but instead portray her role as the first woman, showered with gifts from the gods — an Eve without the apple scene. The play that underpins most of our conceptions of Oedipus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, gives barely 150 lines to Jocasta and very little space to her emotional journey, despite being by all accounts an innocent victim in a tragic story. Just a few years after this play’s first performance, Euripides gives us The Phoenician Women, where Oedipus barely features while Jocasta flexes her political muscles brokering a peace between her warring sons and braves a battlefield. Euripedes is hardly an outlier; the poets Stesichorus and Statius also produced works that centered Jocasta more. 

Why is it that these more feminist angles didn’t survive the millennia to occupy the same role in our pop culture? Haynes offers a few suggestions, emphasizing mostly taste or cultural currents: “As we change, so these characters have also changed as if to match us.” For example, Greek plays were often performed at nightclubs, where men might bring their mistresses, and these same men might not have been too fond of versions of Clytemnestra’s story that paint her murdering her cheating (and filicidal) husband as anything too sympathetic. During the twentieth century, changes in religious attitudes may have been why Anouilh’s 1944 adaptation of Oedipus switched the birth order of two siblings: what was first “appropriate if excessive religious fervor in an older sibling” became the “behavior of a rebellious younger sibling.” Under-emphasized is the explanation highlighted by Parenti in The Assassination of Julius Caesar: classic history is mostly written and interpreted by wealthy white men. I would have liked to see Haynes engage with this lens more.

The bias in these stories — and all stories we pass on — matters. The first versions we encounter become what is seen as “standard”, even when they’ve been toned down or distorted from some “authentic” version. Other versions we encounter become “re-tellings”, and their deviations from the expected script can take on a political, status quo-questioning quality.

But because we read them as children, we don’t always consider them critically: we tend to see them as a neutral, authoritative version from which other versions deviate. And – like all books – they reflect the values of their time. So while I don’t want to dissuade you from reading these stories to children, I would urge you to counterbalance the quiet prejudice which lurks within them.

Anna Karenina and The Woman Question

Why does Tolstoy kill Anna Karenina?

The easy answer is that Anna’s suicide is the just punishment for her adultery and lack of maternal virtues. The clearest evidence of this hypothesis is the comparison with Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, the female half of the other major romantic relationship of the book. 

We meet Kitty in the midst of a girlish infatuation with Vronsky, expressing all the excitement with dancing one would expect of Kitty Bennet. Heartbroken that Vronsky chooses Anna over her, she falls into a depression, but eventually develops a strong love for Levin. Throughout the rest of the book, her love for Levin is never shaken, not when he confesses he isn't a virgin, nor when he confesses his lack of belief in God, nor when he tries to send her away as his brother is dying, nor when he develops an interest in Anna. Instead, Kitty is described as a considerate nurse, an adoring wife, a doting mother. She enjoys her pregnancy and the tasks of housekeeping. Our last scenes with her are ones of familial bliss: her delighting with her husband over their baby recognizing familiar faces. Kitty embodies the Victorian ideal of a woman, and ends the book in happiness and financial security.

Anna is contrasted with Kitty in nearly every sense. She is uninterested in housekeeping, repulsed by her husband, and unable to bond with the daughter she births. She carries out a scandalously public affair with Vronsky, then chooses to be with him rather than mother her son, then refuses to bear Vronsky more than one child. In our last scenes with Anna, we see her unable to find security in her love for Vronsky nor joy in her life, shunned by society, turning to suicide. She transgresses against social expectations of women and because she cannot deserve a happy ending, Tolstoy sentences her to death by train, a symbol of technology’s destabilizing effect on social hierarchies and gender roles.

I find this answer unsatisfying. For starters, Stepan Arkadyevitch carries out multiple hedonistic affairs with far less remorse than his sister Anna (“one does so little harm to anyone, and gives oneself so much pleasure”) with narrative impunity. Second, Anna is written to evoke empathy. After her “fall,” we discover extenuating circumstances – she was practically forced into a marriage with a much older man as a young girl by a manipulative aunt, her marriage was cold and loveless – it really feels like the reader is being asked “you were quick to judge her, but can you blame her?” Indeed within the narrative, Dolly, a woman who works hard to maintain her marriage and who loves and cares for her children, expresses understanding of Anna’s choice: “How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same.” But moreover, Anna Karenina explores the oppression of women to an extent that still feels a little radical today, suggesting a different answer to the question.
 

Does Anna die because the oppression of women in her society left her no alternative for happiness and fulfillment?

Having left a loveless marriage, Anna – uniquely Anna, and not her male lover – is shunned from society and snubbed by her former friends. Her life is genteel, lonely, and interminably boring. Attempting to fill her days with anything other than changing her gown, she turns to reading voraciously, tutoring children, and writing children’s stories. Her efforts are largely trivialized as “unnatural” “affectations”, or curious pastimes rather than truly impressive philanthropy like running entire schools. Anna’s dissatisfaction in employment is suggested to be generalizable to all women. At a dinner party, the education and employment of women is discussed:

“Woman desires to have rights, to be independent, educated. She is oppressed, humiliated by the consciousness of her disabilities.”

Anna feels precarious, relying on her lover Vronsky for support. She believes he will only love her if she remains beautiful, but confides to her sister-in-law Dolly her certainty that Vronsky will not love her while she is pregnant, despite his repeatedly stated desire for more children. Anna’s fears are justified: during her pregnancy, Vronsky remarks that “she was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. She had broadened out all over.” Dolly is shocked to learn (after seven pregnancies) that she may have a choice over whether to become pregnant – control over her own childbearing was “the very thing she had been dreaming of” – and acknowledges Anna’s wisdom in refusing to bear more children, but that even remaining beautiful is no guarantee of Vronsky’s continued support:

“I,” she thought, “did not keep my attraction for Stiva; he left me for others, and the first woman for whom he betrayed me did not keep him by being always pretty and lively. He deserted her and took another.”

Pregnancy is repeatedly associated with “hideousness” and described as “intolerable,” while motherhood is described as unrewarding, futile, imprisonment. Dolly remarks:

Why, even if we suppose the greatest good luck, that the children don’t die, and I bring them up somehow. At the very best they’ll simply be decent people. That’s all I can hope for. And to gain simply that—what agonies, what toil!... One’s whole life ruined!

Dolly asks a “handsome” young peasant woman if she has any children. The woman responds,
 

“I had a girl baby, but God set me free; I buried her last Lent.”
“Well, did you grieve very much for her?” asked Darya Alexandrovna.
“Why grieve? The old man has grandchildren enough as it is. It was only a trouble.”

Anna decries her lack of legal and economic independence, her social standing and her reproductive choices: “what wife, what slave can be so utterly a slave as I, in my position?"

The flaw in this interpretation – that Anna’s options in life are so miserable, so akin to slavery that her suicide is seen in some way as understandable – however, is again the veneration of Kitty’s patient maternalism that I remarked on earlier. Further, Anna’s suicidal impulses are foiled against those of Levin, the other primary protagonist of the novel. Rather than Kitty expressing anything but delight in her new motherhood, it is Levin who has an identity crisis upon the birth of their child. In his search to understand the meaning of life, he tries to rationalize his purpose, poring over philosophy texts. He finally discovers that life cannot be understood through reason, but that meaning can only be derived through faith in God. He finds peace and happiness in his life.

So is this then the answer? That Anna dies because she has no faith in God? This theory also feels lackluster: Anna doesn’t dwell on faith, and never rejects God.

Is there perhaps no answer to the question? Tolstoy (rather smugly) writes in a letter to Nikolai Strakhov:

If I were to try say in words everything that I intended to express in [Anna Karenina], I would have to write the same novel I wrote from the beginning.

Clearly, Tolstoy intended to convey some meaning. Perhaps the answer is a muddled combination of all the above: Anna, as a woman in a decaying socioeconomic class, suffers from oppression but makes choices that are understandable – not alienly evil. If a woman can simply find happiness in her husband, in motherhood, in faith, she could have an enjoyable, rewarding life, Tolstoy seems to suggest.

Indeed this status quo-affirming tangle of an answer to the Woman Question is mirrored in Tolstoy’s examination of class. A landowner, Levin is displeased that he must exploit his workers to maximize his own profit, and tries to invent a sort of profit-sharing scheme in which he may incentivize peasants to work hard while he maintains his nobility: “living in good style – that’s the proper thing for noblemen.” His communist brother points out the flaws in Levin’s scheme, that rather than truly trying to address capital’s oppression of the labourer, he is attempting something out of an egotistical desire to be original. Even Levin’s philandering brother-in-law calls Levin’s attempt to define some ethical sort of capitalism “sophistry”, and suggests that Levin give away his estate if he considers his earning a hundred times that of his peasants "unfair." After a dozen chapters devoted to the ethics of capitalism and the oppression of the peasants, Levin’s ultimate solution to the challenges at hand is to be an ethical capitalist so that he may pass on his estate to his son.

He knew he must hire laborers as cheaply as possible; but to hire men under bond, paying them in advance at less than the current rate of wages, was what he must not do, even though it was very profitable. (...) Felling timber must be punished as severely as possible, but he could not exact forfeits for cattle being driven onto his fields; and though it annoyed the keeper and made the peasants not afraid to graze their cattle on his land, he could not keep their cattle as a punishment. To Pyotr, who was paying a money-lender ten per cent. a month, he must lend a sum of money to set him free. But he could not let off peasants who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall into arrears.

Tolstoy has, I think, a sharp sense for the many problems in his society, which was rapidly undergoing change as the serf system was abolished and Russia began to industrialize. But he seems unable to look beyond his patriarchal, aristocratic perspective. The conclusion of all these fantastically written dialogues and beautiful inner workings of the characters' minds thus feels rather empty, the questions raised going unanswered.

Review: Midwives of the Revolution by Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar

I picked up Midwives of the Revolution thinking that a feminist avenue into learning more about the February Revolution and the October Revolution might be up my alley; I’ve read a lot about contemporary feminist movements, but felt like my Russian history was a little shaky. This book unfortunately serves the exact opposite goal: it could be a reasonable introduction into common goals and struggles for 19th/20th century feminist movements for someone very familiar with Russian history between 1860-1917. It spends pages and pages reiterating fairly common issues affecting women in most contemporary industrializing societies (e.g., wage discrimination, exclusion from educational institutions, difficulties combining motherhood and work, the rising importance of women workers as men were called to fight wars). In contrast, key historical developments, like the grain shortages in 1917 that played a massive role in inciting the February Revolution, are discussed assuming the reader already understands their impetus and general timelines.

I learned a lot while reading this book, but I can’t really credit the book itself. I regularly found myself seeking additional sources to fill in some of the blanks. Some of the more interesting parts of this work were the Who’s Who of female Bolsheviks and the unique factors impacting women workers and peasants in Russia in the early twentieth century. For a better and briefer discussion of both of these topics, I refer the reader to “Women Fighters in the Days of the Great October Revolution” and “The Woman Worker and Peasant in Soviet Russia”, both by Alexandra Kollontai. (I'd love to point the reader to works by her peers too, but their translations appear to be few and far between. MotR's bibliography is unfortunately not very helpful in this regard; many citations lead to works that are seemingly available only in Russian and, as far as I could tell, aren't available online.)

There were a few other good tidbits here and there. Chapter Three had some interesting discussion of how Western late-twentieth century examination of Russian history was clouded by sexism. I also was surprised to learn the February Revolution happened on International Women’s Day – somehow this never makes it into modern celebrations of the day! I also learned just how influential Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? was on revolutionaries across parties and genders. Lenin read the novel five times in a single summer and named his famous polemic after it, and it was read in political education reading groups for decades!

Puzzlingly, the book repeatedly describes the Bolsheviks as dismissive of the importance of women in the revolutionary movement, but support for this claim is largely limited to the memoirs of a handful of Bolshevik men (e.g., Shliapnikov, Kaiurov). Where the Bolsheviks did reach out to women workers to bring them into their movement, the authors minimize these actions (“To an extent, the Bolsheviks recognized that there was some potential for agitation and organization [among women workers].”), or portray them as individual actions of various Bolshevik women (Agadzhanova, Armand, Vydrina, etc). I would have liked to see support of this position sourced from party debates, or more extensively sourced from a wider array of party leaders (the few mentions of Lenin’s position on the role of women in the revolution describe him as very supportive of Kollontai’s advocacy for involving women). I wonder if this emphasis is a sign of the times. Perhaps with the dissolution of the USSR further in the rear-view mirror and with the rising interest in socialism, there’s room for a new book on the role of women in the 1917 revolutions.

In conclusion, you can probably skip this book, but read the two essays by Kollontai.

Review: Take Back The Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age by Nora Loreto

I got three things out of this book.

First, I learned for the first time, the history of feminism in country of my birth and my citizenship. It's embarrassingly easy to accidentally form ones understanding of politics and history based only on events in the US. This is harmful in three ways: first it becomes too easy to look at failures south of the border and pat oneself on the back and conclude nothing needs to be done because "at least we are better than them." Second, it masks very real, very uniquely Canadian issues. Third, it makes Canadian would-be activists ill-equipped to advocate for their causes: what worked successfully, what didn't, what examples can we draw from? I though Loreto did a fantastic job laying out the story of the NAC and its eventual demise.

Second, I liked her analysis of #MeToo, Slut Walks and other 21st century feminist movements -- what lasting change did they have, and why didn't they have a larger impact? Although I'd lived through them, for many of them I didn't have the political consciousness to really examine at the time. It was fun to revisit, particularly through the lens of identifying what is required for sustained political movements and change.

Third, I enjoyed her argument for the value of debate. Debate within an organization prepares an organization for attacks from outsiders. Debate brings newcomers into the fold. Debate trains the next generation of leaders to think and speak. I was not fully swayed by Loreto that some of this couldn't happen in online spaces -- discord servers, smaller Zoom groups, etc... I think some of her critique of the hazards of diffuse organizational structures was better said by feminist Jo Freeman in her 1972 (!) essay on The Tyranny of Structurelessness. But I do agree there's value in real world physical togetherness.

I felt there was a gap in terms of assessing economic and political structure. Examples of positive change were almost entirely instances of bills being passed. Can we eradicate white supremacy, state violence, and misogyny through the passage of new laws one by one, maintaining the fundamental structure of Canada intact throughout? Or what major systems need to be removed or reinvented from the bottom up? What is the role of feminism versus a movement rooted in class analysis and anti-capitalism?

Overall, it was an easy, compelling read, if not necessarily succinct. I'm glad I read it, and would recommend it to Canadian feminists looking for an introductory to moderately advanced read.

Review: The Power by Naomi Alderman

It's the mid 2010s, and suddenly, women everywhere discover they can produce and control electricity. This power has a seismic effect on societies across the globe (the parallels with COVID-19 are stark and in some ways prophetic) as people react to the balance of power between men and women is thrown topsy-turvy. The inversion of gender stereotypes is intentionally overt. If the idea of exploring this thought experiment holds no charm for you, it will be a charmless read. 

The story telling is allegorical, both textually and meta-textually. The framing story is one of a (male) writer 5000 years into the future, presenting his well-researched but unorthodox theory for how his contemporary matriarchal society may have arisen. He notes to his (female) colleague that the characters are just instruments he uses to describe what he thinks could have happened. But of course, the characters also play the same role for Alderman in her exploration of gender and power structures.

Being allegorical, the message of the story is more important than the nuances of the character arcs or the world-building. One possible interpretation of its message is that if women were more powerful than men, it would be a matter of just years before the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation. It wouldn't be a technically incorrect interpretation of the plot of the novel, just an obtuse one.

Another interpretation of the message is that there is no possibility of overcoming ingrained sexual or class disparities except through a Pyrrhic victory - only a cataclysmic event in which society must redevelop from the stone age could bring women to the same place of power as men.

The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.

And then we'll be in the the Stone Age.

Er. Yeah.

And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instill fear?

Yeah?

And then the women will win.

But I do think Alderman is a little more optimistic than that. Change without a cataclysm seems possible for her heretical historian:

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent... But we don't have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we've based our ideas on.

Through Mother Eve's voice, this change requires collective action:

It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold. 

 

And this change requires recognizing that men and women are equally prone to violence and vengeance and other destructive tendencies, that it is the centuries or millennia of systemic power differences that produces the behaviours we see now.

I particularly loved the framing story. The little microaggressions from the female reviewer to the male author (including the final line of the book: "Neil, I know this might be very distasteful to you, but have you considered publishing this book under a woman's name?") were amusing, as were her arguments against his theory:

Have you thought about the evolutionary psychology of it? Men have evolved to be strong worker homestead-keepers, while women - with babies to protect from harm - have had to become aggressive and violent. The few partial patriarchies that have ever existed in human society have been very peaceful places.

I think it did a fantastic job at showing how our current cultural lens shapes our understanding of history.

This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.

However, I think I enjoy this book more in the rear view mirror. While reading it, I felt like it was overly long, with a rather long, odd and unnecessary "beware of fascism" detour. It could have been a fantastic novella, but it was an okay novel.

Review: Girl One by Sara Flannery Murphy

Wow—what a premise. A disgraced scientist discovers a way for women to give birth to clones of themselves (through parthenogenesis), and convinces nine women to bring nine daughters into the world and live together in a remote commune. Angry men, claiming God is on their side, burn down the community and the women and their daughters scatter across the country. Twenty years later, Mother One goes missing and Girl One has to find her.

I had so many questions and I couldn't wait for the author to explore them. What would motivate women to undergo something so very experimental for such an important and private part of your life? Were they particularly interested in creating miniatures of themselves, or was it the ability to becomes mothers without the involvement of men that appealed to them? Why live together in a commune? Was it a recognition that it takes a village to raise a child? Was it polyamoury? In what ways is the mother-daughter bond different when you share 100% of your genetic materials but experience very different childhoods?

Flannery Murphy found more to explore in the younger generation, however. That's not entirely unjustified—what is it like to not have a genetic father, to grow up famous for being a scientific miracle? But I found the answer to these questions a little unsatisfying. Respectively: you idolize a creepy scientist as a father figure; you sometimes give a bad media interview here and there and kids are a little mean about it but it isn't anything you can't shrug off.

What's most frustrating about this difference in emphasis is that the Mother generation becomes all the more fascinating as the mysteries of Dr Bellanger's role in the "scientific miracle" and who started the fire are revealed. We learn that the Mothers were women who came together as a group out of a desire to re-discover parthenogenesis—placing themselves in the footsteps from women from witchy folkloric tales who seem to have been able to give birth to daughters without fathers, although not recognized as such at the time. With their research coming to dead ends, they sought out a scientist to help them achieve this goal, and eventually discovered the ability to become pregnant on their own without his interference. Feeling threatened by these women no longer needing him at all, Dr Bellanger manipulated and abused the women. Eventually, he burned down the house, faking his death and the death of Girl Nine, who showed telekinetic abilities. These were some delightful, unexpected, and unique twists!

In contrast, the Daughter generation discovering and coming to terms with their latent magical powers felt like well-trodden ground for anyone that lived through our present era of unending Marvel blockbusters. It was a bit of a waste of such a neat premise.

I think there is space to have told the story that Flannery Murphy ultimately told, without keeping the Mother generation at arm's length. The "found media" of newspaper clipping and letters that she already used would have been a perfect device to explore the relationship between Mother One and Trish, or how the Mothers all found one another.

Character study failings aside, I thought the social commentary was explored well. As in our world, in the world of Girl One, men respond to the loss of power over women with violence and misogyny (I get the sense that Sarah Flannery Murphy would enjoy Down Girl by Kate Manne). Men, like Dr Bellanger, insert themselves into the birthing process in positions of power and authority without respect for the autonomy of women, from abortion policies to obstetric practices. Dr Bellanger does as too many men have done before him, and steals the spotlight from women and minimizes their contributions. Through Dr Bellanger's fear and jealousy at Lilliane conceiving a second child all on her own, we see a science fiction version of the uncertainty of paternity compared to the certainty of a woman always knowing the mother of the child within her. 

I got the sense that the author was familiar with the feminist movements of the 1970s and the 1990s, the decades in which the bulk of the story was set. The characters felt like 1970s feminists and 1990s feminists, not post-slut walk or post-#MeToo feminists transported through time into the 1970s and the 1990s. I mean this in a good way; the debate was kept fresh by the unusual premise.

The blurb of the book compared the story to Margaret Atwood's work, and I think this expectation worked to Girl One's detriment. I found the prose uninteresting and the dialogue and scene structure a little pulpy. I pushed myself through the first quarter out of sheer stubbornness to learn whether the boring-as-oatmeal main character's worship of the creepy Dr Bellanger was a brilliant portrayal of an unreliable narrator or astounding lack of insight on behalf of the author. (This is not the first time I've read a book for that reason!) Fortunately, it turned out to be the former, and once I adjusted my expectations that the book was going to be a medium-smart thriller with a penchant for giving implausible excuses for why the Most Dramatic Decision must always be made it was a fun enough ride.

Ignore the book's tagline and any other media that compares this book to The Handmaid's Tale. The last bit of the book blurb, "Girl One combines the provocative imagination of Naomi Alderman’s The Power with the propulsive, cinematic storytelling of a Marvel movie", is far more accurate.

 

Review: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I'm not really sure why this book was written. In the afterward, Atwood says it was in part a response to the many questions she'd received in the 30 years since The Handmaid's Tale about how Gilead fell. But the Gilead state was not, to me at least, the interesting part of the novel, as I've written before. Instead, I loved the exploration of how Offred, Moira, the Commander, and others reacted to the changing society; how they survived, how they rationalized their choices. It was very human; these dynamics exist in us now, in non-Gilead states. That is, to me at least, what 'good' science fiction and fantasy should be.

The book instead reads like fan fiction: some fan desperate to know what became of Offred's daughter and her suspected pregnancy writes a well-paced if somewhat predictable and plothole-riddled [1 (spoiler)] account of the two half-siblings reuniting and bringing down the dystopian State.

I said above that I'm not really sure why this book was written, but I have a theory that Atwood used it to explore her own feelings in response to changing cultures as someone in a position of relative power. Atwood is included on many lists of prominent Canadians and on many lists as standout authors of twentieth century literature. With this clout, she has come under fire for protecting the status quo, and complaining about the mobs on twitter.

It's hard to read parts of Aunt Lydia's autobiography and not see in them Atwood defending her own actions (or lack thereof), warning of the terror of cancel culture, and pondering her own legacy:

How will I end? I wondered. Will I live to a gently neglected old age, ossifying by degrees? Will I become my own honoured statue? Or will the regime and I both topple and my stone replica along with me, to be dragged away and sold off as a curiosity, a lawn ornament, a chunk of gruesome kitsch? Or will I be put on trial as a monster, then executed by firing squad and dangled from a lamppost for public viewing? Will I be torn apart by a mob and have my head stuck on a pole and paraded through the streets to merriment and jeers?

and

I meant well too, I sometimes mumble silently. I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing. Still, think how much worse it could have been if not for me.

She also perhaps still has some things to say about #MeToo that she wasn't able to include in her OpEd:

Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men, as I am sure you have noticed, my reader. Listeners are inclined to believe neither.

She seems aware, also, that some may read into this book the way I have:

You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits as you go, developing the fascinated but also bored hatred biographers so often come to feel for their subjects. How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

There was an intriguing bit of revisionism I noticed. In The Handmaid's Tale, the birth crisis was blamed on AIDS and nuclear power. In The Testaments, it is blamed on nuclear power, no mention of AIDS. (Is this cancel culture at work?)

I found the prose in this book much less vivid and enthralling than in the first. The first had these beautiful/horrific passages weaving together imagery of flowers and sex and food and death. These were not entirely absent in The Testaments, but they were sparser. The emotions of the narrator in The Handmaid's Tale were dynamic, switching from boredom, to hate and anger, to thoughtful critique of the patriarchal system, to a self-aware desire to be cared for by the system. Agnes, Lydia and Daisy were somewhat stock characters with limited emotional range. I did, however, enjoy how through Agnes' eyes, we explored how patriarchy and oppressive social norms are instilled in girls. Agnes's feelings of shame and fear surrounding men and her own sexuality before she even understood the mechanics of sex were, I thought, portrayed well.

The tone of the book was quite different from its predecessor. Where The Handmaid's Tale was meditative and focused on the narrator's internal journey, this novel read much more 'screenplay-ready', plot-driven with heists (the first also had a woman smuggled in a car, but the focus of the writing was Offred's dettached reflection of the Commander's boot, the only thing she could see during her smuggling, rather than a tense narrative of if she would be allowed through or not). Perhaps that's why this book was written? As additional fodder for the television show based on the first book?

There were a few Easter eggs and references I enjoyed picking up on, such as the Schlafly cafe being the site of Aunt wheeling and dealings. It was neat to see little bits of french language and quebecois culture alluded to, such as Ada's use of the phrase "toot sweet" (toute suite) and Daisy's reading list at school. It was also neat to follow the characters across Canadian land - which isn't portrayed often in fiction - from Etobicoke to New Brunswick.

In sum, this book didn't need to be written, and it certainly doesn't need to be read.

 1. Why did Lydia need to smuggle her report via Nicole at all? Does Canada not also have a problem with birth defects and declining fertility?

Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

It's been on my to-read list for a while, and I'm glad I picked it up finally. It wasn't what I expected. I was expecting a sort of Woman Versus The Dystopian State tale, something along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World but with more women. And instead, it was a much more internal look at the how one responds to changing systems and to oppression - the lies we tell ourselves to survive and the lies we tell ourselves to forgive ourselves for perpetuating oppression.

The prose was beautiful; vivid. I think if there were more women in the metal scene, there would probably be a Handmaid's Tale concept album. A lot of very metal motifs: like contrasting flowers/life with rot, Offred's thoughtful reflections about her surroundings giving way to unbridled hatred about her situation, the ghost of the former Handmaid in Offred's room, mistrust, surveillance.....

The dynamic between the Commander and the Handmaid was well woven and reminiscent of much of the #MeToo kind of stories (despite Atwood's somewhat poor take on the movement). The commander trying to lead Offred into saying everything is better now than it was before; the way he exerted power over her to make her attend him and visit the brothel with him; the way he deludes himself into thinking she was there because she wanted to be....

I wasn't such a fan of the epilogue. The details of the world were not particularly interesting to me, and the issues Atwood takes aim at (AIDS, nuclear power plants) did not age all that well. The epilogue critiques how little we are able to empathize with the pain/humanity of people from centuries ago - but the tonal shift wasn't quite what I wanted to read at that point.

I read this during the Summer of 2020, Shelter In Place orders intact, the week after George Floyd's was murdered by the police, with curfews lasting days in cities across the country. I saw somewhere a criticism that the world reflected in The Handmaid's Tale is too unrealistic; society doesn't change so quickly. That criticism rings so hollow right now - it is very easy to see how society could change so significantly over the course of a few years. I hope it does - but in a very different direction.

Review: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

It's impressive that a book written fifty years ago (1969) still seems to have fresh ideas to examine about gender identity and gender dynamics. Gender and sexuality was a key theme of a lot of media I grew up on: Friends (1994-2004), Sex and the City (1998-2004), How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014). These shows are hard to watch now; it is cringe-inducing how many jokes in Friends have the punchline of "a man did something stereotypically feminine." Even in more recent media that discuss gender identity, such as Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), the conversation starts premised on the idea that the social construct of gender exists and will always exist.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, we explore a world where the very concept of gender is literally alien. In Gethen, the humans are ambisexual, sometimes taking the male role in reproduction and sometimes taking the female role. Genly Ai, the alien envoy to Gethen from the rest of the human race, is a man who grew up steeped in the sometimes toxic social constructs of gender dynamics, and isn't able to recognize the bias he brings to his ambassadorial attempts. The people of Gethen call him a 'pervert' because he is always fertile and always in a male form, but even this term doesn't have quite the same amount of negativity as it would in our world. They're suspicious of him from a political view, but overall quite accepting of his physical differences. The people of Gethen make social mistakes too — but they are in assuming that he has the same concept of honor and shame as their own.

I loved this exploration of a gender-free society, and the implications this has for social organization. If anything, I wish we saw a little more of it. Fewer political dinners, more Genly hanging out with the common folk, particularly with Gethenians in stereotypically womenly positions. I found the choice to use male pronouns for all the Gethenians to be a little odd; it isn't simply Genly imposing male identities, Estraven uses these too. (Although, I suppose, it is Genly translating Estraven's diary; perhaps there is a reasonable in-world explanation for this.)

Woven in with the commentary on gender, there are also meditations on nationalism and loyalty, and on "first contact" and how to approach it thoughtfully. For example, a single envoy is sent, which Genly realizes is not just because a single person is nonthreatening, but because if an envoy is sent with colleagues, there is always an "us" and a "them." When a person is sent alone, they must to some sense integrate into the social organization of the new world, and allow it to change them along the way.

I was lukewarm on the story itself until Estraven and Genly began their trek across the wild from the labour camp to Karhide. The story of the two people, both exiles and aliens in a sense, learning about each other and forming a friendship was beautifully told. Their intimate conversations in the tent about their experience of gender reminded me of similar conversations I've had with guy friends. I was a little heartbroken at Estraven's death. I was surprised that at the end Genly hadn't fully shed his own notions of gender norms. For example, he sees a young child that hes describes as looking feminine but remarks that no girl would be so untalkative. Perhaps the commentary here is that your social training is hard, if not impossible, to unlearn.

This is not to say the book aged perfectly. There was a line about how sex drive is necessary to be human (although it was the flawed Genly who posited this, I think). The use of male pronouns also seems a bit dated or odd. But overall, I thought it was an excellent read.

Review: Ain't I A Woman by bell hooks

 Rating: 5/5 stars

In my review of Blackshirts and Reds, I wrote "There are things that I have spent so much time thinking about, that I can speak or write of them in an impassioned and organized way whenever prompted. This book read like that to me." Ain't I A Woman reads with the same cadence. Hooks has identified a very real problem, and presents it clearly, and passionately.

I've commented before that it can be tricky to review foundational books. Ain't I A Woman is forty years old. I've read a lot of feminist theory, and a lot of intersectional feminist theory. The core thesis of the book was not new to me. But I never felt that I was wasting my time revisiting the same old thing.  The focus of this book was, I felt, very much on the internal rationalizations of every-day people, rather than the public speeches of the movers and shakers of a particular time. For this reason, although there was a considerable amount of overlap with Race, Women and Class by Angela Davis, which indeed hooks cites, I view them more as good companion novels, rather than one being a replacement for the other. 

Nor did I feel like society has really changed so much in the intervening four decades that hooks' observations no longer ring true. The following passage, if it were written in 2021, would be just as searingly true as it was when first written:

When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong—and that is simply not the case. Usually, when people talk about the “strength” of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.

Still, I found myself wishing for a follow-up essay - where have we come since?

I wish I'd read this book earlier - perhaps as a chaser to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I really struggled with Malcolm X's misogynist depictions of women (even women he claimed he admired and respected), and hooks' analysis of his position towards women, and the role of women more broadly in the Black Power movement, gave me a sense of closure and healing.

My most recent non-fiction, non-autobiography read was Stamped From The Beginning,  and Ain't I A Woman was a much-appreciated follow-up to that. Ain't I A Woman made it all the more starkly clear the limitations of focusing solely on the writings of academics and politicians and other people of power when trying to understand the experience of those oppressed by colonialism and patriarchy. Stamped From The Beginning also falls victim to its chronological organization gimmick. hooks is far better able to trace the history of racist thinking by following one idea from its roots in slavery to modern reincarnations of the concept, then move on to another idea.

There was one line that made me laugh out loud - "No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women’s movement." I thought immediately of Kate Manne's Down Girl and its questionable use of the murder of Michael Brown to discuss victim blaming of rape survivors.

I liked that hooks did not remove herself from her writing. Academic writing encourages this practice - and I think it is a shame! Research is not carried out in a vacuum from which all subjectivity can be removed. Nor are academics just brains on sticks. When women and/or people of color encounter philosophy that erases them or minimizes their experiences, it hurts. I appreciated hooks relating her reaction to reading and researching these topics.

The writing was approachable, and ideas were presented in intuitive ways. The thesis of intersectionality should be obvious to everyone, but frustratingly (often intentionally, as hooks demonstrates) isn't. Go read it.

 

Review: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

 Rating: 4/5 stars

The Old Drift is a sweeping epic, tracing three family lines through three generations, exploring inter-generational inheritance of the effects of trauma, capitalism and colonialism. Woven into these stories is the history of Zambia, a nation similarly struggling with these wounds. Reading The Old Drift, I get the sense the Namwali Serpell feels both loving pride and intense despair about the state of her country, and has poured so much of herself into her first novel. She has a lot to say - about politics, motherhood, sociology, racism, sexuality, science, disappointment, identity, capitalism, global warming, love..... It's a tall order to successfully conduct such a symphony of ideas, and although I think at times the individual melodies get overpowered or off-tempo, it's still a very impressive book.

The three grandmothers each have some supernatural feature. One woman grows hair all over her face and body at a magically rapid pace. Leaving behind a sheltered childhood in post-World War Italy, raised by a brokenhearted mother who was worried her daughter would be stoned as a monster, she starts a new life in Zambia with her lover. Another grandmother's promising tennis career is interrupted with inexplicable blindness. She, too, makes her way to Zambia with her lover, but her immigration is instead an escape from her parent's disapprobation of her interracial relationship. The third grandmother is Zambian born and raised, and her brilliance and sense of adventure bring her to join Mukuka Nkoloso's team of revolutionaries [The Old Drift is impeccably well-researched - some of this research into Nkoloso went into a great New Yorker article]. She falls in love, becomes pregnant, and is abandoned by all her friends and family. This despair causes her to weep endlessly for decades, the skin under her eyes scarring.

The members of the mother generation escape magical distinction, but struggle to set their roots and thrive in the soil they are planted in by their mothers. They grapple with issues like being treated as a commodity by an unloving and ambitious aunt, sex work and homelessness, forming a sense of identity as an idly rich white woman in the expat enclave, an unfaithful spouse, miscarriage, AIDS, and loneliness. Their stories touch every now and then, but it isn't until the grandchildren's generation that the three storylines really merge.

The stories of the grandchildren stretch from the 2010s into the 2020s, and revolve around several fictional technological advances and how these inventions impact a developing country: smartphone successors surgical embedded into the palms of the user (exploited by the government for spying on and controlling its citizens), vaccines against AIDS (tested on brown, poor bodies without their consent), tiny drone swarms (exploited by the government for warfare, spying, controlling its citizens, and used by anti-government revolutionary forces).

The story concludes with intentionally loose ends - the final chapter literally ends halfway through a sentence. I suppose this conveys that history is never over; the offspring of the grandchildren will still be fighting the aftermath of colonialism. Still, I found that I hadn't quite had time to get invested in the final story arch, in which the grandchildren, in a move of rebellion against the government, attempt to take down the dam built by one of their grandfathers. And so the abruptness of the book ending where it did didn't quite have the impact it could have. Nor did I feel fully satisfied by the last sightings of all the mothers and grandmothers.

Parts of the book are incredibly depressing. Every relationship, no matter how strong they started, fizzled or rotted. It's a bleak look at love in general, and particularly one in which the central conceit is that each main character must have a child to narrate the next chapter. I found myself dreading the pages where the characters started to fall in love or found out they were pregnant. Beyond that, some characters - Matha and Sylvia in particular - have so much horribleness thrown their way that I found myself wondering what the point of showing so much misery was. 

Still, beyond these issues, I loved the writing. There were some lyrically beautiful passages:

Can mosquitoes and humans live peacefully together, can we forge an uneasy truce? Hover around each other enough and symbiosis sets in. Over moons, you’ll grow immune, and our flus will move through you – a mild fever and maybe a snooze. This balance can even come to your rescue, defend you against rank intruders. As Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe once said, the lowliest creature, the tiny udzudzu, is what kept the imperialists at bay! Thus when the whites first swooned to the tropics, they saw that the blacks never fell: the raging calenture that gripped the bazungu passed over the huts of the bantu. This place was The White Man’s Grave. But it wasn’t bad lands that caused their downfall – it happened on the seas as well. They say La Amistad’s crew caught a fever, while the black mutineers were spared it. Was it African skin or sweat? It was neither. It was us, and a matter of time. Reckon the wars, how a battleground festers: the British armies in the American South, the Japanese in the Pacific. Even the fall of the Roman Empire was due in part to our diseases. In every case, the nature of grace is that one side is simply more used to us. Call it invasion or world exploration: either way, it upsets this balance. Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to befalls on either side of this blade. The social contract or individual free will; the walls of a commune must keep us close or capital must run rampant. That’s how you froze your long Cold War, with this endless, mindless divide.

Other passages were just perfect little needles:

She was mainly struck by how small she looked in her reflection. She didn’t feel that small from the inside.

What sort of preparation, what sort of entertainment does a dying man want? Last things? Joseph had no idea what those would be – he was still obsessed with first things.

All she wanted was to be at home in bed, curled in a ball, alone and quietly bleeding.

During his time at university, Ronald had learned that ‘history’ was the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure. History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground.

But Sibilla’s marriage had long felt like a handbag that she had neglected to empty out, that she still carried around even though she kept her money, handkerchief and comb elsewhere on her person. 

The baby started to cry again. Matha had never considered that being female would thwart her so, that it would be a hurdle she had to jump every time she wanted to learn something: to read a book, to shout the answers, to make a bomb, to love a man, to fight for freedom. She had never thought Ba Nkoloso, Godfrey and Nkuka would each abandon her in turn to poverty and lone motherhood. Matha bounced her baby in vain. Go to sleep, baby, she whimpered. Shut up, baby. She had never imagined that to be a woman was always, somehow, to be a banishable witch. Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly – weeping was just what she did now, who she was – Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied

Each character had a distinct voice - not an easy task for a novel with nine main characters. 

Many of the dialogues were fairly in-depth discussions of big concepts. Capitalism versus Marxism. Racism. Free tuition. The right way to effect societal change. These Socratic dialogues feel like characters naturally exploring a topic shaping their lives, rather than the author attempting to argue her own views. (Indeed, at times, I wish the author came down a little harder on what she believes.)

‘The protests,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy right now. End-times shit.’ She laughed so hard that it rocked her onto her back. ‘Are you joking?’ she asked the sky. ‘That’s why I wanted to go! They’re frikkin trying to do something! Fight the power and that!’ ‘How about fight the power cuts?’ He was surprised to hear himself echoing his grandfather. ‘Why make free education a priority when people still don’t have food or electricity or running water?’ ‘They did it in Chile!’ she exclaimed, sitting up again and crossing her legs. ‘They made it completely free. Uni for everyone, paid for by those corporate oil companies and shit.’ ‘Are you sure you want to use Chile as the example of democratic progress?’ ‘Who said anything about democracy, men? Democracy’s bankrupt. People from the West shout “democracy” but they’re vampires, sucking our resources. Bloody capitalist stooges.’ ‘Stooges?’ he chuckled. ‘You really are Zambian. So what, you give all your money away?’ ‘I’m Marxist,’ she said with disgust. ‘I’m not stupid.’

 I opened the book knowing almost nothing about Zambia, and I closed it having been inspired to read up on its history, its traditional clothing, its cuisine, its language. Serpell did a fantastic job at painting the country and its people. The books hold on me didn't end upon putting it down; various parts of the book have rattled around in my mind since I read it. And I think that is the mark of a successful book.

Review: Persuasion by Jane Austen

 Rating: 4/5 stars

 Although I read and loved Pride and Prejudice in high school, I hadn't read Persuasion until now, and it is an interesting book to read at the age of thirty. Where Pride and Prejudice revolves around younger people blundering their way through new relationships, the cast of Persuasion are a little more experienced. Anne Ellis, having declined a proposal due to being too young, is still single some 8 or 9 years later. Other characters are widowed, looking for the second love of their life. Some have been married for a long time - a few very happily, the rest rather miserably. Through these characters, Austen explores how people change during their twenties. What acts can be forgiven? Can old relationships be rekindled? If I've presented Persuasion as being dry and academic, that is on me entirely - the characters are colorful and the prose is dripping with snark.

Somehow, Jane Austen's work became associated with romance for women, when her writing is closer to that of Dan Carlin than of Nora Roberts. I suppose it's because her incisive, acerbic commentary is centered around interpersonal relationships and the day-to-day concerns of the over-privileged and under-employed, rather than more "serious" topics like politics, war, or media. But in Persuasion, although there is the usual "will-they-won't-they" plot, Austen comments quite extensively on political matters.

One of the key themes is the decline of the aristocracy class, or the rise of the "self-made" men wealthy men. The skincare-obsessed and spendthrift Sir Walter perhaps personifies this critique of the useless navel-gazing of the gentry most starkly. He is foiled against Admiral Croft, who earned his wealth (albeit, as an instrument of brutal imperialism...) and is an upstanding gentleman with an enviably adorable relationship, and who finally did something about the draft in Sir Walter's estate's cupboards. "Productive" members of the gentry fare a little better than their more idle counterparts; Mrs Smith atones for her profligate past by industriously selling items she knits. One imagines that Austen sees herself in this class of privileged but productive aristocrats.

Feminism, or rather, questioning the existence of native differences between men and women, was thoughtfully presented. Mary Ellis decries that no one would judge a father for going to a dinner party while his child is sick, but that a mother is expected to stay home due to some presumed inborn ability to care for children that Mary doesn't recognize in herself. The resolution of the love story is spurred by Anne discussing with Captain Harville whether men and women are equally 'constant' in their love. If men and women love differently, is it due to social expectations, or due to biology, or due to (aristocratic) women having little other occupation? Austen also slyly suggests that the nature of women cannot be understood at all from books, because overwhelmingly books are written by men. I see you, Jane, and I appreciate you.

Review: Race, Women & Class by Angela Y. Davis

 Rating: 5/5 stars

I am so glad I read this book. Women, Race & Class does exactly what the title suggests it would: thoroughly investigates the interplay between race, gender and class at key moments in American history, from slavery and the abolition movement, through the women's suffrage movements, to modern issues like birth control. Davis identifies structural and systemic issues, and pulls no punches in pointing out the failures of the labor movements and the feminist movements and how these stumbles harmed people at the intersections of race, gender and class.

Davis' Marxist-Leninist angle adds so much to the examination of race and gender. It was exactly the gap I wanted filled after being disappointed in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, a yearning that was mollified somewhat with the delightfully data-driven yet philosophically-limited Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. I've often found myself frustrated at the presentation of "women's issues", where women are assumed to be white middle- or upper-class women, with little more than an acknowledging nod towards women of colour. It was such a relief to find this book, and to read about how this rich-white-women-first philosophy has impeded social progress historically.

It's a 40-year-old book now, and I imagine it has shaped the views of many writers whose work I have read elsewhere. There were no new earth shattering revelations here, nor blazing hot takes. Still, Davis does a fantastic job at boiling issues down to their essence. In the intervening 40 years, we have progressed despairingly slowly on issues of race, sex and class, and I think this book is still very much worth the read.

It is organized into 13 chapters, which can be read as 13 separate essays. My favourites were: 

• Chapter 1. The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood
• Chapter 2. The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's Rights
• Chapter 3. Class and Race in the Early Women's Rights Campaign
• Chapter 4. Racism in the Women's Suffrage Movements
• Chapter 10. Communist Women
• Chapter 12. Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights

Review: Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

 Rating: 4/5 stars

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men  is a great overview of systemic biases that harm women. It's a little like a cultural version of the more biological Delusions of Gender; it's a well-organized, well-referenced, approachable/conversational synthesis of a broad range of sexist beliefs/sexist structures. Criado Perez did a fantastic job in tracing how small biases or assumptions, power imbalances in who makes decisions, individual choices, etc, translate into much broader social injustices. I also appreciated that she would highlight positive efforts and the benefits they've already brought; it's easy to criticize something, and harder to fix it.

This book was not without it's own biases. European languages were the emphasis of studies like how language shapes perception of gender. Western countries, or charities/NGOs based in western countries, made up nearly all the examples of pro-women initiatives; many of the examples of injustices in western countries were very much "white collar" sexism, while examples of sexism in developing countries were very much centered around sanitation issues. Despite being the home for one seventh of the world's women, China was virtually ignored. Despite housing another seventh of the world's women, discussion of women's issues in India was largely limited to the availability of public toilets - certainly a very, very, very crucial issue... but in contrast, the life of a woman in the UK was sliced and diced in pretty much every way imaginable.

The chapter on politics was, I thought, a little disappointing. The author advocates for women taking up a broader proportion of parliamentary bodies, citing, as far as I can tell, as single study that found that governments with more women pass legislation that promotes education and healthcare. Her summary of this study doesn't describe whether these women are from progressive/left wing parties, but later the author indeed describes how in many countries, the conservative/right wing parties have poorer representation of women. One might imagine that it is not the balance of women, but the overall political persuasion of the government that is the causal factor in both a pro-education/pro-healthcare policy as well as a more gender-balanced governing body. The author translates this into a shakily-founded critique of Bernie Sanders/ advocacy for Hillary Clinton (c. 2016 democratic primary). According to the author, Clinton would, by virtue of her gender, be a better leader for women - with no investigation of the two leaders' policies, nor even a glance at the gender make-up of their aides, assistants and advisors (the people who typically write the legislation proposed by the leaders and interpret the legislation voted on by the leaders). I'm a little bit exhausted of reading liberal feminists working through their 2016 Democratic Primaries grief, but at least this section wasn't as bad as Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Still, this type of bias makes me question the author's interpretation of some of the fields she discusses that I am less familiar with - and that's a shame!

Despite these flaws, I think it is a book worth recommending and worth reading, and even those familiar with literature on how medicine, technology, law, etc propagate injustice against women will probably come away with something new.

I read the audiobook, which was narrated by the author, and her reading was enjoyable.