A cogent sociological analysis.
A passionate call for societal support for mothers.
Melding reportage and memoir, journalist, novelist, and essayist Davis examines the “powerful and persistent myth and archetype” of a housewife: a “stay-at-home mom” living among suburban “tract houses and sodded lawns.” To the author, that image seemed inaccurate when she became a mother hoping to combine her writing career with caring for her child. How, she wondered, could those “seemingly opposing trajectories…peacefully coexist”? Her search for an answer proved both illuminating and troubling. The role of the housewife, she discovered, has evolved dramatically throughout history. In Paleolithic times, the model of “man-the-hunter, woman-the-gatherer” was caused less by biological difference than changing ecological conditions; gender roles were fluid, depending on a community’s needs. Davis underscores the importance of interdependence: From colonial America through the 19th century, women relegated to the domestic sphere were supported by grandmothers and aunts, friends, and neighbors. In the 1930s, many working-class housewives banded together in strikes and boycotts. The 1950s housewife, isolated from family and a supportive community, “was an anomaly, an aberration, constructed and crafted by multiple economic, political, ideological, and infrastructural forces: appliance manufacturers, mortgage subsidies, governmental agencies, and housing developers among them.” Davis addresses the concerns of Black mothers, single and married, as well as same-sex couples and trans women, to make a case for overarching needs. For the past 50 years, meeting those needs has been a continuing, controversial policy issue. As the only developed country without national paid parental leave, the U.S. shortchanges both women and men. Rather than insist that women “personally, individually solve problems that should rightly be addressed societally, structurally,” legislators must acknowledge the long history of interdependence that has served families and “to enact policies that both allow women to be housewives yet build a society in which no woman has to be one.”
A cogent sociological analysis.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781538722886
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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