National Book Award finalist Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women is a profoundly moving portrayal of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, chronicling five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first.
The novel opens in England in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause. Her choice echoes in the stories of her descendants interwoven throughout: a brilliant daughter who tries to escape the burden of her mother’s infamy by immigrating to America just after World War I to begin a career in science; a niece who chooses a conventional path — marriage, children, suburban domesticity — only to find herself disillusioned with her husband of fifty years and engaged in heartbreaking and futile antiwar protests; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety of the times while getting drunk on a children’s playdate in post-9/11 Manhattan.
In a kaleidoscope of voices and with a richness of imagery, emotion, and wit, Walbert portrays the ways in which successive generations of women have responded to what the Victorians called “The Woman Question.”
“A Short History of Women” consists of linked stories: in this case, 15 lean, concentrated chapters that hopscotch through time and alternate among the lives of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a British suffragist, and a handful of her descendants.
“A Short History of Women” ingeniously suggests the fallacy of the war/drawing room dichotomy. Its various settings include neither battlefield nor whaler, yet masculine power and influence pervade these pages, from Havelock Ellis, Charles Darwin and the “good men of Lloyd’s” in belle époque London to the young soldiers patrolling Dover Air Force Base in present-day Delaware. What’s remarkable is the way Walbert uses male preoccupations to illuminate the lives of her female characters — and there’s nothing “little” about them.
About Author:
Author of the acclaimed novel The Gardens of Kyoto, playwright and professor Kate Walbert turned her eye on the women of the 1950s for her 2004 National Book Award–nominated novel, Our Kind.
Related Books:
- A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) – By Howard Zinn
- The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World – By W. Cleon Skousen
