Connecting with "Mrs. Bridge"

The Fab 5 met tonight to discuss and dissect the life and times of Mrs. Bridge, the subject of the novel by the same name by Evan S. Connell published in 1959. This choice was my doing; I’ve been interested in reading the book for quite a while. Many years ago there was a Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward made-for-TV miniseries called Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (see photo to the right), based on this book and its companion, Mr. Bridge. I don’t remember being bowled over by it, other than I enjoyed seeing them act together, but I always wondered what the big deal was about the book. Since I’ve owned the book forever but haven’t taken time to read it, as I am wont to do I brought it to book club to inflict it on them so that I would read it too.

Mrs. Bridge is the wife of a wealthy lawyer and the mother of three children living the country club life in Kansas City just before World War II. Time is passing her by—her kids are getting older, the world is changing around her, but she stays just the same.

Tentative and polite to a fault, Mrs. Bridge (her real name is India, but she’s never felt it fits) has a complicated inner life, a life of quiet desperation, which rarely makes its way out of her brain. While she wishes to improve herself, she never can quite finish her projects--learning Spanish, doing charity work, improving her vocabulary.

World issues, politics, philosophy, art…all of these things interest her a bit, but she doesn’t feel qualified to offer opinions on any of them. She defers to her husband’s opinions, as well as his wishes on just about everything. She is uncomfortable with anything different, which includes people different from herself. Anyone of any noticeable ethnicity seems to be disturbing to her, in a ethnocentricity that goes beyond black/white race relations of the time.

She would’ve been a little concerned at the way we attacked the Mexican food we had for dinner. Far too ethnic, I think, and who knows what rules of good manners we were breaking, dipping our chips into take-out bowls of queso.

Mrs. Bridge is lonely and bored. She has everything she could ever want, including a maid to do all the domestic chores, but she has no one to feel really close to. Her husband works all hours to provide all the material goods they could want, but he offers no real companionship. Her children are rapidly outgrowing their desire to be anywhere near their old-fashioned and oddly unworldly mother. She has very limited ideas of everything, from manners to sexuality. When a friend commits suicide, she tells her grown children that the woman had eaten some tuna that had been left out overnight. When a cousin has a baby three months after her wedding, Mrs. Bridge mentions that first babies are so often premature. Since “appearances” are all that really matter to her, she never faces most of reality.

Sonya was so caught up in Mrs. Bridge that she immediately went out to buy Mr. Bridge and read it too. But of course we wouldn’t let her tell us about it, because we might read it too. Which made discussion rather difficult for poor Sonya tonight, because she couldn’t possibly discuss the book as if she were uninformed of Mr. Bridge’s side of the story.

We debated if Mrs. Bridge’s inability to do anything is because she is a product of her time or because her husband’s dismissive attitude made her to hesitant to make a move. In the end, though, it’s hard for a millennial woman to understand her. On the other hand, there are some very universal things, like the distance she feels from her children as they become independent adults. Or her fears about how the future is dark, that the world might just fall apart around her.

Connell’s writing is very unusual. Each chapter is a tiny scene in Mrs. Bridge’s life, and, especially in the beginning, it’s difficult to see where it might be going. But eventually all of these vignettes weave into a full portrait of a woman living half a life. He describes things so well. At one point, she has read a political book and decides she will vote differently this time around. She never gets around to talking to Mr. Bridge about the book, so she figures that for once they will each vote their own way. But on the way, she starts to feel doubtful about her choice. “And when the moment finally came she pulled the lever recording her wish for the world to remain as it was.”

While she is floundering in boredom and desperation, we wonder what her problem is. Why not take classes, or volunteer, or take over the baking, or whatever? A long time ago we read I Don’t Know How She Does It, which was the opposite—a woman who was killing herself “having it all”—children, husband, career. We’re looking for a happy medium—not too busy, not too leisurely. We can only hope our stories will end more happily!

The Lifeboat: Save It or Throw It Overboard?

Well, after an unintentional year-long sabbatical, thought it might be time to get back at it. I have no excuse to offer as to why I’ve stopped blogging; I haven’t stopped reading!

The Fab 5 Book Club has not stopped reading either. Tonight we tackled The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan. Before we get started, you need to understand that the Fab 5, while being a very chatty crowd, does not always stay on topic very well. Also you need to understand that we don’t all always come terribly prepared.

Tonight was a different story. Everyone had finished the book, even the one who started it last night at 5 and finished it around midnight (Hint: This was not me, at least not this time). It’s a fairly quick read, which is always helpful in last-minute cramming. And Nancy was very eager to get started, trying to come up with some less-than-obvious segues from the food we were noshing to the plot of the book, things like “I bet they wished they had cheese like this on the lifeboat.”

And finally we gave in and actually talked about the book. The Lifeboat is a story about just what it sounds like, a lifeboat. The Empress Alexandra, a fictional ocean liner crossing the Atlantic just 2 years after the Titanic disaster, sinks in open water, and passengers scramble to get onto lifeboats. Grace, a new bride, is pushed onto a lifeboat by her husband, and the story begins. Thirty-nine people set off in a lifeboat, only to be lost at sea for 21 grueling days.

At the start of the book, Grace has survived the lifeboat and now finds herself facing a new obstacle: she is standing trial. She writes a diary of her experiences for her lawyers.

Grace is an enigmatic character, presenting readers with lots of ethical and moral questions. But while this might seem to be a book based on the old ethics question of the lifeboat—a lifeboat has too many people, so you must find a rational way to decide who should go overboard—it really turns out to be something different. As Grace goes through the process of recollection, trying to bring to the surface moments that she cannot easily remember, readers find no easy understanding of her fellow passengers’ actions. Nor can we get a handle on Grace herself. So rather than asking what we would do in their situation, we spent a lot of time trying to understand who did what and why.

Interestingly, three of the four of us read this book with one or two other stories in the back of our minds, influencing what we read. Sonya had the movie Titanic in her head, which made her suspicious of Grace’s husband’s actions before the boat sank. Nancy couldn’t help but think of our recent read Gone Girl, in which a woman’s diary takes on a different significance as the book goes on. I had shadows of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, in which the main character has been accused of murder but you really have no idea if she is guilty or not, or what guilt even means. Also Life of Pi loomed large in the lifeboat imagination.

This may be the longest period of time we’ve ever spent talking about a book at book club, which is all the more surprising since each of us expressed some degree of disappointment with the book. There are many, many threads and clues—or red herrings, as the case may be—that lead us nowhere, and none of us were terribly satisfied with that. Grace says straight out that we can’t know everything, but that did nothing to quell our dissatisfaction. We spent a bit of time talking about whether a book (or other form of entertainment) should tie up most or all loose ends, or if that is also unsatisfying. It seems there is some middle ground, Chekhov’s gun notwithstanding.

It may be that my own dissatisfaction with the ending had less to do with the book itself and more to do with the fact that I was reading it electronically, and the end came even though there were still 30 more digital pages to go—acknowledgements, suggested reading, endorsements, reading group guide, etc. etc. And here I thought there was still more to the story.

Of course we did get a bit off topic, debating which people we might be okay with pushing overboard and discussing the fact that all of us would probably die within the first few days because we are, well, soft. Barbara mentioned the day that she had a paper cut on the tip of her finger, and her day was an anguish of alternating between typing with a band-aid on, which made for many typing errors, and typing without a band-aid, which “really hurt.” I scoffed at the idea of needing a trailer to go camping, then remembered that the threat of a rainstorm sends me from my tent to the nearest hotel. Don’t think any of us would do too well in boot camp, let alone any real human deprivation.

But no deprivation was happening here, as we passed around the dark chocolate sea salt caramels. Final judgment: The Lifeboat had some saving graces, but you don't really want to stay in it forever.

Learning "The Language of Flowers"

Victoria spent much of her life in foster care, until Elisabeth. Elisabeth was determined to make this volatile young woman her daughter. Then something happened that ended the relationship, but we don’t know what. Now Victoria is turning 18 and is aging out of the group home she’s been living in.
What do you do when you are alone in the world with nothing to your name, expected to somehow create a life for yourself? Victoria turns to the only thing she knows or cares about—flowers.

Elisabeth taught her the “language of flowers”—the meaning that Victorian lovers assigned to flowers as they used them in covert communication. Victoria uses her knowledge of flowers to find her first job, and she sends messages with flowers even though she knows that no one will get the message. But then someone does.

The Fab 5 read The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, and we couldn’t put it down. We really liked the characters, and the whole flower thing is pretty intriguing. The author has had foster children, and she has some idea of what it takes to love a child who has been hurt and traumatized. She also knows a great deal about the foster care system, something we don’t know enough about. There is some mystery about Victoria’s history, and as a reader I was drawn into the story.

But it did seem to us that perhaps she created a sort of composite character, combining the stories of lots of people, because it seemed difficult to believe that all of Victoria’s history could happen to one child. This did not stop us from appreciating and enjoying the novel.

There was one portion of the story that Nancy felt dragged a bit, regarding a new mother who suffers through a difficult period of nursing a baby. You can refer to my last post to remind yourself that some children truly are slow nursers, and it can feel like forever. So we were not all in agreement on that point.

We were all in agreement on one issue—the story wraps up a little too neatly and quickly. Yet we were all satisfied by it, even though we knew we probably shouldn’t be.

The Secret Lives in "Silver Sparrow"

I've gotten very far behind in posting the books I've been reading, so this week I'll be doing some marathan blogging to try to catch up a bit.

The Fab 5 Book Club met, oh, some time ago, to talk about Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. But first we ate some great Mexican food, from a restaurant that was closed by the health department shortly thereafter. We’re not sure whether we should be sad or grateful that we escaped with our lives.

We also talked a bit about pet-sitting. One upcoming vacation prompted the need for a rat-sitter. Then Nancy mentioned that she once did some cat-sitting for a friend, a friend who left a sticky note on every conceivable surface with instructions about the cat, the food, the way the toilet flushed, etc. Cat people may respond here in their own defense, but it seems there is something about anyone who owns multiple cats that puts them under the shadow of suspicion.

But about the book. Dana and Chaurisse are sisters, but only one of them knows it. They share a father, James Witherspoon, and Dana has spent her life as the product of his secret marriage. Chaurisse, on the other hand, is the daughter of his public wife and has lived a pampered, sheltered life. The book is written from Dana’s perspective in the first half, and the second half comes from Chaurisse.

All of us were caught by the story, wanting to know what happened. We spent some time wondering what it would be like to find out that your father has a whole different family. And what it would be like to grow up knowing that. Children look to their parents for their identity—to find out how much they are loved, to try to figure out where they fit in the list of parental priorities. Daughters look to their fathers for the male perspective on themselves, and they watch their parents’ interactions to find out what marriage might look like for themselves.

To grow up as part of a secret family, your needs always second to that of the public family, means that you are not first priority. But on the other hand, growing up in a secure family with no knowledge of the other family, makes your life and the love you’ve experienced a fraud. It’s a fascinating puzzle to consider.

Identity is a huge issue for everyone involved—a man who doesn’t want to work for anyone else, his brother who looks white but is not, and two women who may or may not be beloved wives. The book points out how much of our identity is shaped by our relationship to others and how we are perceived.

On top of that, Jones sets the story in 1980s Atlanta, which had us all think back on jelly shoes and Add-a-Bead necklaces. Okay, I’m the only one who knew about Add-a-Beads. Must have been a southern thing. There were some cracks in the 80s description—I can’t think of anyone who was fashionably sporting a tube top in the mid-80s—but still kind of fun.

The biggest downfall for us is that none of us could quite understand how the character of James Witherspoon warranted all this female attention in the first place. While it is still missing something to make it great, it is an interesting, well-written story.

Fab 5 Book Club: The Glass Castle

Tonight the Fab 5 had yet another intense, esoteric book discussion. I actually had to look up esoteric just now to make sure it meant what I wanted to say, which, once you read the definition is rather ironic. I’ll let you get your own dictionary if you need to.

Anyway. The Fab 5 tackled The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. This memoir recounts Walls’s childhood as part of a family that was one part comedy, one part lunacy and one part tragedy. Walls and her three siblings lived a nomadic life with their parents. Mom was an artist, a trained teacher, and always looking for the new bright horizon just waiting to be discovered. Dad was an alcoholic charmer, a highly intelligent man who was more comfortable hustling pool than working steadily at an actual job. He had big dreams, or delusions, depending on your perspective.

The children learned to read early and well, they learned about living frugally and simply, and they moved frequently in search of the next adventure. They lived all over the desert southwest, a vast playground and habitat study for the children, and they eventually moved to the town in West Virginia where their father grew up.  Dad was always on the verge of a new, spectacular invention. One of his plans was to built the Glass Castle, a scientifically designed house made of glass and tailored especially for their family.

 The kids were also often neglected severely, especially as alcohol claimed more and more prominence in their father’s life. Early on there were periods of time where food ran short, memorably a time when young Jeannette was hungry enough to eat the only thing left in the fridge—a stick of margarine. One move saw the children locked into the back of a U-Haul truck for what might be a 14 hour drive, with no way to communicate with their parents. As they got older, they went through periods of time where everyone in the family fended for themselves for food—scavenging the remains of classmates discarded lunch bags, finding ways to get invited to dinner at other people’s houses.

We wondered how these young people remained hopeful, kept their goals in sight, and seemed to feel loved, for the most part. This is an interesting point, after a Bible study discussion I took part in today. We talked about Job, and how he felt right before God, even though everything pointed to God's dismissal of him. We each thought a bit about how and when we have felt "approved of"--and how so often it feels to a child that their parents don't really approve. In this book, the children seem to feel their parents' approval as far as that goes, which serves them well as they push at the boundaries of their isolated lives.

Walls is a great writer, and she manages to tell incredibly sad stories with beauty and wit. That almost goes without saying, since this dark family tale turned out to be one of our favorite reads in a long time. Somehow she makes readers a tiny bit jealous at certain points that we didn’t grow up with such footloose and adventurous parents, even when it was obviously not something to be envied!

Eventually, though, we proved our incapacity for such an unplanned and uncertain lifestyle. Host Nancy produced two miniature boxes of chocolates—one Whitman sampler, and one Russell Stover. Neither box had a little chart telling us the filling of each candy. Rather than throwing caution to the wind and each claiming two unknown pieces of chocolate, Nancy carefully cut each chocolate in half so we could see what kind we were getting. No one got an unexpected coconut or maple filling, and everyone was happy. I kind of don’t think we would make it with the Walls family.

Jeannette Walls has also written a book called Half Broke Horses, about her tough-as-nails grandmother. Nancy and Sonya have both read it and recommend it. I’m hoping to read it soon!

Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow"

Last night the Fab 5 met to choose our books for the next six months, a meeting that is always filled with anticipation. And very difficult decision-making. Four people brought 36 books. Yikes. We pored over them, and in the end were rewarded with a list of 6 books we are very excited to read.

But now I go back to our last meeting, when we discussed Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. The reason I did not write about it at the time is that I had not finished it yet. So we had two discussions about it, last month and this month.

Jayber Crow is about an “ineligible bachelor barber” making his way through life. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber (born Jonah, hint hint) first considers ministry, then finds his way back to his birthplace to settle in and live his life alone, but not always lonely.

I’m probably one of the last to come to the Wendell Berry party. And I am knocked out by his characterization, his description, and his compassion for every character in the book. It took some patience and some deliberateness to make my way through it, but I was rewarded.

This book is about Jayber, first and foremost, a man you come to love. It is also about small towns, generational differences, the change in farming from small homesteads to big agriculture, and the beauty of nature that we both treasure and destroy.

It is also a novel layered with religious imagery, from floods to rainbows, from death to resurrection, from rebirth to sacrificial love, from hell to heaven. And you can’t help but draw the parallel between Jayber Crow and Jesus Christ.

[Spoiler alert]

Jayber, though by no means a perfect man, lives a solitary life, surrounded mostly by men, and is “reborn” to a cold, lonely earth when he flees his old life by pushing himself through a tiny bathroom window at a dance hall. He makes a personal commitment to a woman who has given herself to someone else, and vows to treasure her and love her in the way that he can, from a distance. In their later years, he walks with her, just enjoying her company, through a beautiful wooded area.

The final scene brings the two together as the wooded area is being logged. It brought to mind one of my favorite Over the Rhine songs, “The Trumpet Child.” “The trumpet child will lift a glass / his bride now leaning in at last / his final aim to fill with joy / the earth that man all but destroyed.” That image of joyful union amidst the ruins of sin has always given me goosebumps, and I loved seeing a new iteration of it in Jayber Crow.

Now, having said all that I just did, I should point out that Berry starts off the novel with a warning against finding subtexts, explanations and interpretations, stating that people who do what I have just done should be “exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.” Would that really be so bad???

"Dandelion Wine": What books remind you of summer?

In the dead of winter, what’s better than a taste of summer? You could have ice cold lemonade, but there’s that whole “cold” thing. Or you can put on your bathing suit, but that also has numerous drawbacks. Instead, how about a book that brings summer back to you?

Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine bottles up the summer of 1928 for all time.

The Fab 5 met to talk about it during a December snow drought. Our hostess lives a ways out, so we were glad about that. We told her we’d only drive to her house in the wintertime if she promised to decorate their mounted bear for Christmas. She obliged.

Dandelion Wine seems to be a novel that draws deeply on the author’s childhood in small-town Illinois. Most of Bradbury’s work is science fiction,, and we were surprised to find that this novel is often categorized as science fiction as well. I wouldn’t call it sci-fi, but sometimes it borders on magical realism.

Douglas Spaulding is twelve years old and has the entire summer spread out before him. He determines to pay attention, to notice things. His eyes are beginning to open to life, mortality, and the temporal nature of things. Through Bradbury’s descriptions, you can smell, feel, taste summer.

You’ll also be reminded of how different a young boy’s life is now. Douglas and Tom are watching things change before their eyes. The town’s trolley is being swapped out for buses. People are growing up, growing old, and dying. And the boys are observing their neighbors intently, finding surprises for the better and worse.

We were reminded of Olive Kitteridge in that this novel is actually a collection of stories all related by time, setting and recurring characters.

Sonya’s favorite story was about an elderly woman, Helen, and a young man named Bill who develop a close connection. They come to wonder if they are soulmates who have been meeting each other at the wrong time in their lives and that someday maybe they’ll be reborn as agemates as well, so that they can be together. It’s very sweet. Sort of reminds me of the Ben Folds song “The Luckiest.”

We were not sucked into the story right away. It took a while to catch our interest, several of us citing the story about 1/5 of the way in about another elderly woman who is visited by some little girls who refuse to believe she’d ever been young. It’s kind of sad; the woman decides that they are right—she is not the same person anymore, and there is no point to holding onto all of the mementos she has saved up, because they cannot make her that person. This was particularly hard for one of us to take, since she has a natural tendency to save up some mementos of her own!

The book grew on me as I read it, and I am happy I did. What books remind you of summer?

Cross Cultural Non-Communication

The latest Fab 5 meeting began with a trip report. One of us had gone to her hometown of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and she regaled us with tales of mysterious Wisconsin food staples such as cheese curds and visits to exotic places like Goesse’s, the Meat Market and Clem’s Wagon Wheel. She also got a tour of the Kohler factory, a tour guided by one Elmer VanderWeele, brother to the famous Calvin College English professor, Steve.

While this may seem like a strange way to start a book discussion, it was oddly fitting. This month’s book was The Thing around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie is a Nigerian author who now divides her time between the United States and Nigeria. The Thing Around Your Neck is a collection of short stories, and each one reveals some level of homesickness for what was and for what should be. Adichie does an excellent job of illuminating the tension of living somewhere between two cultures.

Sonya pointed out that, while Adichie is a good writer, the stories often end too abruptly. You’re left feeling as though the story isn’t finished, just ended. Also, she noted that the men in the stories do not come off well, particularly the Nigerian men. I agree, but it seems as though each story explores the way one person is silenced or repressed, someone who needs to speak (or face) the truth. Some of these characters are a woman in an arranged marriage, a young man who is beginning to see what corruption of justice leads to, and a girl who has played a hand in her brother's death. Some struggle with their sexuality. All of her narrators or main characters are women, and in Nigeria like many societies, men have power and so are the most likely candidates to oppress. So it is partly the themes of the book that lead to negative images of men.

Sonya did enjoy some of Adichie's insights, including a story where a Nigerian woman is a nanny for a young boy in America. She observes that "American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Amercians time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure." She also skewers the food culture of this country, when a young woman in a newly arrange marriage accompanies her husband to an American mall. "We ate the pizza sitting at a small round table in what he called a 'food court.' A sea of people sitting around circular tables, hunched over paper plates of greasy food...There was something humiliatingly public, something lacking in dignity, about this place, this open space of too many tables and too much food."

Made us wonder what she'd think of the former tradition at the denominational building where all of us work. Once a week, someone get a bunch of donuts and set them up in the breakroom for anyone who wanted to pay 50 cents. What a great idea. Extra calories for a bunch of us who already spend too much time sitting at desks , with the added bonus that when someone “forgot” to pay the denomination could foot the bill for the demise of the health that they pay to care for. Hmm. I think we know why that one fizzled out. But back to the book.

Adichie examines the strange brew that has come to be the culture of Nigeria—corruption, inequity, oppression—due to many factors such as colonialism, tribalism and religious differences. In my favorite story of the book, a Hausa Muslim woman and a young Igbo woman who'd been raised Catholic hide together in an abandoned storefront as a riot goes on in the market. The very human contact that these two women have as they wait for a safe exit belies the angry mob outside the door, and it gives a glimpse into the complicated nature of such disputes. All of these difficulties have formed a society where the only way to get what you need from the government, the police, the bank, or the merchant is to have some power. And power is abused wherever it is found, not just in Nigeria and not just in Africa.

The even stranger brew comes when you throw in Western society. Take a Nigerian woman and plant her in a home that her husband has prepared in the United States. She must somehow navigate her own culture shock, the man she married who may not be who she thought, the expectations of neighbors, and a bond with a home country that slowly becomes less her own. Where does she belong? Who does she belong with?

Beyond the societal issues, Adichie takes a close look at bonds between parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister. She is a keen observer of human nature and the way we relate to each other. It’s hard to imagine the matriarchal grandmother in the book who puts all of her hopes and dreams into one grandson, belittling the rest. Especially after hearing Barbara detail a day spent with her grandchild—watching out the window for trucks, playing with toys, watching the little one sleep in her bed. When does power enter a relationship, and when does it begin to change it? Barbara's obvious infatuation with her grandchild makes the tension that can come in a family seem impossible.

We topped off our meaty discussion with some meat pies, hummus and flatbread. I would have loved to make some Nigerian food like jollof rice or pounded yam with egusi soup, but that's a lot of work, and as much as I love these ladies, I don’t love them enough for that right now. So we settled for another food that I ate in Nigeria, since it is a country rife with excellent Lebanese food due to all the Lebanese expats there.

And if you want to hear me wax nostalgic for Nigeria, where I spent exactly one out of my 41 and 23/24 years, just ask me. One kind of character that shows up on much of what I've read of Adichie's work is the American or Brit who is overly fascinated with African culture, or who seems to claim it as their own, even after a short experience there. I try hard not to take that personally.

While the rest of my book club now thinks Nigeria doesn’t sound so great, reading these stories oddly makes me want to jump on the next plane. Readers had the same mixed reaction when the Neland Women read one of my favorite books, also by Adichie, called Purple Hibiscus. I’ve decided that Adichie can describe the smells and sounds so well that if you’ve been there, it brings back all of the good things, even though she doesn’t always tell about the good things.

And the good things are not always so easy to explain—even describing them might leave others thinking they don’t sound so good. When I worked for Christian Reformed World Missions, our communications director shared with me two and fast rules about video presentations. First, none should end with a shot of a sunset--cliche, cliche, cliche. Second, no missionary should title their video presentation "Land of Contrasts," because that can be said about any country. But you can understand the impulse. Whenever you visit a new country, you are struck by the contrasts you wouldn't notice in your own. And Adichie's book seems intent on introducing us to the contrasts within both Nigeria and America and between the two of them.

We've Come a Long Way, Baby

The Fab 5 tackled an unusually large book--both in size and topic--tonight. We discussed When Everything Changed by Gail Collins. With a subtitle like "The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present," readers should be prepared for a march through history.

In 1960, women were idealized as the June Cleavers of the world--well-groomed, stay-at-home mothers and wives with abundant homemaking, child-rearing and entertainment skills. They were also being arrested in some places for wearing pants in public and excluded from some male-only Executive Flights (unless they were the stewardesses, expected to bend over and light the passengers' cigars). Black women faced even stronger, higher barriers to career and acceptance.

This book works its way through the history of the fight for equal rights for women, including the way it became intertwined with the civil rights movement. So much of this is history that I've heard hints of, but never knew the whole story.

Growing up, we heard about the Equal Rights Amendment, and we knew the names of Friedan and Steinem, but generally the comments were negative, and the famous women's names were the punch lines to jokes. Most of the positive words for the ERA came from sitcoms and the Schoolhouse Rock segment. While none of us felt convinced that our mothers, for instance, were opposed to women being welcome as lawyers or doctors at equal pay to men, we think the negative response to the movement was due to the anti-housewife, anti-traditional-home feeling of the struggle.

All of us were fascinated by the stories and anecdotes. The first female U.S. Senator, Margaret Chase Smith, was barred from the Senate lounge, and when she was a member of the Naval Affairs Committee, "one of the staff members took her for a walk during long sessions so the men would have a break from the burden of a female presence." The stories of the black women who fought for civil rights, and at the same time, for the rights of women, are more amazing.

Sonya suggested that the book is a bit one-sided, ignoring the fact that many women at the time were happy to be stay-at-home mothers and wives, and Barbara noted that there wasn't, in the description of all the household labor, much mention of what "traditional" roles men took on at home--yardwork, heavy work, etc.

We had a bit of a discussion of what it means to have a career versus having a job. Only Barbara feels like she has a "career," and none of us feel that we are the ambitious types who want to move up and up. Barbara is also noted that being a stay-at-home mom encompassed some of the best years of her life.

As for homemaking, we all find different parts of it satisfying. For Nancy, it's cooking. For Barbara, canning is a fulfilling task. Sonya enjoys making the home a beautiful place to be. I can't say that I've found my niche in homemaking, though I do enjoy entertaining.

The revolutionaries seem disappointed by the later generations' decisions to drop out of the workforce to have children. They may have wished careers for us all, but we find that the real result for us is that we have that option, whether or not we choose to pursue it. That is something we are thankful for.

And pants. We're very thankful for pants. Though after spending a day at an amusement park last week, I think I see why the traditionalists were worried about the slippery slope of fashion. Yikes.

Fab 5 Part 2: Night Time

Last night the Fab 5 Book Club met in the new home of one of our members. It is a beautiful home, especially since they have painted almost every surface already in the 2 months they've owned it. Of course, we all had to take a moment to bemoan the state of our homes and their respective needs for repainting, refinishing, etc. Nancy mentioned that her basement is looking more finished now that they have hung the 8 or so hunting trophies on the wall. I have to note here, this is true love talking. When I met Nancy, she was single, and I could never have imagined a day would come when she would say "the basement looks more finished now that we have hung up all the deer heads."

This was a lighthearted beginning, but the discussion for the night was anything but lighthearted. This month we read Night by Elie Wiesel. I suspect that many of you had to read it in college. I know many of my classmates did, but it was never required for any of my classes. What a book. It is not very long, and it reads quickly. It also leaves no room for relief.

Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, went to Auschwitz at the age of 15. His narrative of this experience is horrifying and painful to read. He wrote this account 10 years after his liberation, as a young man, and he said "Never shall I forget those moments, which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust." And in reading the story, you have to wonder how he can even find the words to express it, how anyone can survive.

Yet Wiesel has been given the gift of grace. The version I read was a new translation from his original Yiddish text, and it included not only the original introduction, but also a preface written 45 years after the original publication, and the acceptance speech he made to the Nobel committee the year he won the prize for this book. He has somehow managed, not just to survive, but to find equilibrium with his God and to advocate for the oppressed everywhere.

We wonder what it means for modern generations to grow up knowing that people can do such things. We learn about the Nazi atrocities before we reach puberty. Though this in itself seems like an awful thing, it also helps young people understand the atrocities that continue in our world. Maybe if they can read such a narrative as teenagers they can have more empathy for those who suffer in far away countries, in a day when it is possible to turn the story off with one touch of a remote control.

Some of us in the group are cryers--it doesn't take much to set us off. So you can imagine what a book like this does to us. Barbara informed us that crying at night leads to red, puffy eyes in the morning (ditto for me), so she tries to get all her crying done on Friday nights. I can relate. My youngest child has begged me not to read in public places, because she is absolutely mortified if I cry there. She'll have to deal with it. I'm not likely to get control of the waterworks anytime soon, and I'm not giving up reading on airplanes or waiting rooms.

This book brings us to the end of our six months of planned reading. We have covered Little Bee by Chris Cleave, Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore, The Help by Kathryn Stockett, Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, The Hunger Games and Night. All but one of these deal with oppression in one way or another. We are getting to be very deep people, we think. When we don't get distracted by, well, anything.

Next month is our favorite time--book picking time. Normally we would have done this tonight, but we've decided to try giving ourselves a month to read whatever we want and report back. We'll also come with stacks of books to plan out the next six months, so if you have suggestions, we're takin' them. Nancy may be bringing back "The Alchemist," which is sort of the Susan Lucci of our book club. It's been up for election many times, but never quite makes it to the list. Anyone out there who thinks we should read it?