A LITTLE GIVE

Rethinking feminism from the vantage point of middle age.

Editor, journalist, and memoirist Benjamin meditates on feminism, family, and women’s work in a series of linked essays that cohere into a thoughtful reflection on the trajectory of her life. Growing up in an Iraqi Jewish family, the author rebelled against cultural expectations: “I had seen how women in my family and its circle deferred to fathers, uncles, husbands; how they aspired to be model homemakers and mothers and then internalised the psychological cost, and I wanted no part of it.” Her intelligent, capable mother seemed oppressed by the need to please. Going to university, Benjamin decided, would be a path out, and she discovered feminism, which “gave my escape enough velocity to burst through my family’s cultural bubble, but only just.” If feminist ideas spurred her, now in middle age she finds herself lamenting more and more “what gets left out of the burnished picture that any public-facing feminist presents as she leans in and strides through the world.” Benjamin’s essays swirl around topics such as cleaning, feeding, caring, and safeguarding: women’s often thankless occupations. The success of housework, she asserts, “turns on its invisibility, on the quiet conspiracy of the women who do it and then hide the fact of its doing, denying the physicality of their own labour.” Some of that labor, though, gives her great satisfaction: Cooking, for example, offers “solace and a deep absorption,” as did working in a soup kitchen during the pandemic. But nurturing poses more of a challenge. To offer others “what they need without losing myself in the process, is an ongoing project.” Natalia Ginzburg, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and psychologist Alison Gopnik, among others, inform Benjamin’s musings. “Every day I struggle with how to be a woman,” she writes. “Frequently when I speak I am not heard. Frequently I am filled with rage.”

An intimate and powerfully written look at women’s lives.