Book Review: Reading Women

Title: Reading Women
Author: Stephanie Staal
Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Public Affairs
Pub Date: Feb 2011
Read: Mar 2011
Purchased: St. Mark’s Bookshop
Why: I can has feminism? No really, this seemed to bring together two of my great loves: feminism and reading. As soon as I heard about the book, I couldn’t pass it up.
Fulfills Mini-Challenge? Yes (2)
Notes: I have never actually taken a Feminism 101 course. I took several women’s studies classes in college, none of them foundational courses, so I’ve actually missed quite a lot of the major texts.

Review/Thoughts:
YES. I am finally getting to this review that I started months ago. Many apologies for the months-long delay. I don’t really know what happened. Thankfully I’m a lot more timely with my reviews now.

I have to say this book actually inspired me. I now have an itching desire to go back to school and study the great works of feminist literature in a classroom setting. As mentioned above, I never took a foundational course in Feminist Theory, so I’m a bit out of the loop with some of the major texts of feminism. This was a nice…primer, so to speak. I’ll probably just settle for reading the texts on my own.

Like Kim of Sophisticated Dorkiness, I doubt I was the target age group for this book, but I enjoyed it nonetheless, and I think it has a lot to offer in the way of analysis and introduction. Staal does a great job of incorporating her personal opinions about each text with classroom discussions and tying both back into her own life, then (as a 19 yr old college student at Barnard) and now (as a married mother, auditing classes at Barnard). She presents some of the challenges she’s faced as an adult that she wasn’t expecting when she was a college student, ready to take over the world, so to speak. That is certainly understandable, and never more obvious when Staal states,

Everyone asked my husband when he planned to go back to the office; only a few people asked me. Raising a child is vital work, but apparently it is still women’s work.

How does one balance one’s ideals and desire to work with raising a child? Staal is lucky in that there is another source of income (many households are single parent households), but I’m not unsympathetic toward her dilemma since I’ve seen the onslaught of complaints against those who choose to go back to work after having children — that complaint is never launched at men. The idea of a parent being there when the child comes home is all well and good except that the expectations always seems to fall on the mother. The more things change, the more things stay the same apparently, and Staal shows us some of that in her book.

The book isn’t perfect. It would be interesting to read a bit more about the intersection of feminism and ethnicity/race as it pertains to Staal’s own heritage (as far as I can tell Staal herself is at least part Asian American), but I can also understand that she might not have been able to tie her own heritage back to the actual works studied in her classes. Also, I haven’t read her other memoir about her parents’ breakup, so I don’t know much about her upbringing beyond what she talks about in this book, but it’s quite possible that her heritage did not dominate her upbringing in the same way that my own didn’t (what I mean is I’m Hispanic, Puerto Rican to be specific, but the reality is, I wasn’t brought up on a whole lot of Puerto Rican traditions, I know very little about the history, it wasn’t until I was older that I started to eat more Hispanic foods, I don’t listen to much Spanish music, I learned Spanish in a classroom not in my household (and I’ve lost most of it), etc. so sometimes I don’t feel “Hispanic enough” or even fully qualified to talk about Hispanic issues). So yes, back to Staal, while it would have been nice to include a bit about this, there might also be legitimate reasons why she chose not to, and I respect that. And I’d still recommend the book.

Final Verdict: