Women Unbound | Fizzy Thoughts

Possibly the longest post ever

7 March 2010

This is going to be a long post today. I’m sorry, but I’ve got a variety of things to chat about.

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We Have a Winner

First of all, I need to announce the winner of This Book Is Overdue. After consulting with my advisor (random.org), I’ve been told that Jenners from Find Your Next Book Here is the new owner of this delightful book.

Woo-hoo!! Congratulations, and please email me with your address.

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So How’re You Doing With Those Reading Challenges, Softdrink?

Thanks for asking. I decided it was time to sit down and pretend like I’m being organized about reading challenges. Let’s start with a look at the current challenges:

South Asian Authors: I just finished my first of three books for this challenge, One Amazing Thing. The review will post sometime this week. I’ve also started my second book, The Space Between Us, so I’m in good shape with this challenge. I’m also reading books that were already on my bookshelf, making this an especially successful challenge.

Women Unbound: I committed to the Suffragette level (8 books, at least 3 non-fiction). I think I’ve more than completed this challenge…the thing is, I keep finding more books I want to read! So don’t be surprised if I pretend I’m still participating. Here’s what I’ve read:

O.A.T.E.S.: The idea here is to read books by Oates, Atwood, Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway and Steinbeck. I signed up for Rolled Oates, or two books, and I’ve finished. Yippee! I actually read 2 books by Atwood, The Penelopiad and The Year of the Flood, and one Steinbeck, East of Eden, so I’ve fulfilled my pledge to read two books.

The NY Challenge: My own challenge, and I haven’t even started the one book set in NY I need to read. This is why I set the requirement at one book.

I’ve been trying to resist, but there have been a few new developments that I just can’t resist:

Lu at Regular Rumination will be Exploring American Authors this year, and I’m going to join in. I’m going to try to read one book a month by an American author not from Canada or the US. Which isn’t to say I don’t love Canadian authors, ‘cause I do. It’s just that I already read Canadian authors. It’s the Mexican, Brazilian, Chilean, Honduran, Peruvian, (you get the idea) authors that I tend to ignore. This isn’t really a challenge, more like an informal read-along, which is just perfect for me.

Carrie at Books and Movies is hosting the Ireland Challenge. Since I’m Irish waaaaaay back in the family tree, and my dad was born on Saint Patrick’s Day, I just can’t say no (and in my mind those are perfectly logical reasons for joining a challenge). Some possibilities for this challenge are Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show, The Irish Country Doctor and How to Paint a Dead Man, all of which are currently residing inside of my house. How convenient. Oh, and I’m going with the Shamrock level, which is 2 books.

Also,Trish of Trish’s Reading Nook is hosting the Non-Fiction Five Challenge. I’m sure I can squeeze this one in. I’m going to use it to try and finish some of the non-fiction books I’ve started but have yet to finish. Please don’t make me name them…just know that there are plenty sitting around the house.

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Because the World Needs More Challenges

Okay, not really, although I’m sure there are some junkies out there looking to score. So just for them, I have a few things of my own in the works. Inspired by Ti at Book Chatter’s Moby Dick Monday (at which I totally failed), I’ll be doing a Wuthering Heights Wednesday read-along sometime soon. It’s tentatively planned for April, I just have to figure out how it’ll work. I’m also planning a quirky year-long international literature challenge, but that won’t kick off for a few more months. But if I put it down here, then it’s gotta happen, right? So stay tuned.

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Books! For You! (maybe)

Are you still with me? I also have a few books in need of new homes. These are all previously read, but I promise they’re in good shape. If you’re interested in a book, let me know in the comments. First come, first served, and one per customer, please.

Vanishing America
The Age of Orphans
Fault Lines (complete with creepy eye)
A Taste of Caviar
Wife of the North (this is an ARC. And I’ve tried to read it, but it just wasn’t working for me.)

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The End

Whew. I think that’s it.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

6 March 2010

temple of heaven

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven
Susan Jane Gilman
2009
304 pages

Last year when this book was first published I saw all sorts of reviews and thought… “Meh. China. Not interested.” Because China is one place I have no interest in traveling to. Call me eurocentric, but when I think about places I want to travel, I think of Ireland, and England, and Croatia, and Czechoslovakia, and Canada, and lots of places in the US, and if I’m really feeling adventurous, Mexico (because Hamburger thinks the cheaper the better, and if I ever travel to Mexico again I just know I’ll be sharing a room with a cockroach, and that’s so not my idea of a good time…and there’re a few cockroach scenes in this book that support this).

But then I read Dawn’s review and she included a few quotes from the book and I thought, “Hey. I like the way Gilman thinks. Maybe I should read this one after all.” And so I did. And it was totally worth it.

After college graduation, Susan and Claire, two casual college friends, decide to backpack around the world. They start their trip in China, which in 1986 had just started to allow tourists, and then the plan was to work their way west. Unfortunately, after a few weeks in China, Susan started to notice Claire was acting a bit paranoid. At first she explained away her observations with excuses like Claire just needed some alone time. However, it soon becomes very apparent that Claire was experiencing some sort of mental breakdown.

Since I’ve done the student backpacking trip (7 weeks through France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, (staring at the Yugoslavian countryside from the train because we had no Visa for Yugoslavia, and I just dated myself), Hungary, Austria and Germany (whew) I must say I spent most of the book feeling very grateful for the sanity of my college roommate, who was an awesome traveling partner, and with whom I’m still on speaking terms (although infrequently, as we now live in different states). My 40 year old self was appalled by some of the decisions that were made, although if I think back to my 21 year old self, she wouldn’t have been quite so shocked.

Anyways, I seem to be digressing more than usual in this review. Besides the fact that Claire’s increasing paranoia makes for an interesting story, and if you’ve ever done the student travel bit parts seem distressingly and comfortably familiar, and the people they meet are fascinating, Gilman has some fantastic observations about travel. Here are a few:

For perhaps the first time in my life, it became viscerally clear to me just how little I mattered, just how much I was not the center of the universe. It was like a swift kick to the gut. p. 13

…travel is a bit like the Internet – there’s a protective anonymity to it. Cast into a situation with people you never have to see again and shielded from repercussions, you turn brazenly candid. p. 41

Being a tourist, I was beginning to see, meant being infantilized much of the time. All power is contextual. Take a brain surgeon in Uzbekistan and stick him in Manhattan; take the toughest homeboy from Compton and leave him in Tuscany. Drop any of us, anywhere, in an alien environment, and you’ll see our IQ plummet. “IS THIS THE BUS STOP?” we holler at strangers, while dementedly pointing to the bus stop. To buy a sandwich, we’ll pantomime chewing. This is why, I suspect, so many otherwise decent people back home behave like assholes abroad: There’s nothing quite like feeling helpless to turn you into a world-class control freak, to make you forget your manners and throw a tantrum if your room isn’t ready and there’s no ice in your drink. In a strange environment you feel like a baby, and you’re often treated like a baby, and so you act like one. pp. 59-60

Soon we were all vying to establish our backpackers’ street cred, to prove how intrepidly we’d been traveling, how much discomfort we’d incurred at how little expense. The irony of this was wholly lost on us. We were too young and myopic to recognize the perversity of a logic that equates voluntary deprivation with authentic experience. We thought that by wearing burlap pajamas, contracting intestinal parasites, and opting to ride in third class with ‘the people,’ we were somehow being less Western and more Asian. pp. 147-148

If you like travel memoirs, I’d highly recommend this one. It would most definitely go on my list of bestest travel books, if I had such a list.

unbound2smaller Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

It’s also a great book for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. Two young women backpacking in China? It doesn’t get much more unbound than that! For a variety of reasons, their trip took an amazing amount of guts and fortitude. And rumor has it, one of Gilman’s other books, Poufy White Tiara, would also make an excellent book for the challenge. I see that one in my future, too.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

5 March 2010

henrietta lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
February 2010
384 pages

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FTC: This one came from the bookstore, so nothing to confess here, move along.

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If you read one non-fiction book this year, make it this book.

Seriously.

At first, I was a little leery of this book, but only because of the science. I pretty much consider science to be Boring. But this book doesn’t read like a science book. It hardly reads like non-fiction. Skloot focuses on the people, and in doing so, she tells the story of Henrietta Lacks AND her cells.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was 31 years old, mother to 5 children, and wife to David Lacks. The Lacks family was descended from both slaves and slave owners. The extended family grew up together, working in the tobacco fields. Henrietta and David were first cousins, both raised by their grandfather in an old slave cabin. In the 1940s David left for Baltimore, to find work in the shipyards, and after a few years, Henrietta and the children were able to join him.

However, by the late 1940s, Henrietta knew something wasn’t right. She felt a knot on her womb, and eventually went to Johns Hopkins. This was a huge step for Henrietta, as Johns Hopkins had a shady reputation among the poor black population of Baltimore. People believed that the hospital would snatch children off the street for use in medical experiments. However, it was the only option available to Henrietta.

Diagnosed with cervical cancer, Henrietta underwent treatment (radium tubes sewn into her vagina, followed by radiation treatments that scorched her skin). Initially, the doctors thought that the treatments were successful, but the tumors soon spread and Henrietta eventually died a very painful death from uremic poisoning (due to the tumors, she couldn’t pee, meaning the toxins built up in her body).

During the ‘40’s and ‘50’s, cell research was taking off. Henrietta’s doctor took a sample of her cancer cells. These cells became the first cells to be kept successfully alive in a laboratory. What’s more, they reproduced. The HeLa cell line, as it became known, is still used in medical research today. Henrietta’s cells have travelled the globe (and into space), and were used for research when developing the polio vaccine, in cancer research, and in cloning.

However. And this is a huge however. Neither Henrietta nor her family ever knew that her cells had been “harvested” for research purposes. When her grown children finally heard that their mother’s cells were immortal, they were outraged. And it reinforced the idea that Johns Hopkins was the enemy.

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot tells Henrietta’s story through her children’s search for understanding. Skloot had long been fascinated by Henrietta Lacks, ever since she had heard a brief mention of her in a community college class taken as a high schooler. Skloot spent years researching Henrietta Lacks, and convincing her children that she meant no harm in digging into their mother’s past.

While the book focuses on the people (the Lacks family, as well as the doctors and researchers involved), it raises excellent questions about medical ethics. Besides Henrietta’s story, it touches on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and other individuals who have been unwitting victims of scientific research. It also ventures into the murky area of who owns cells.

This is a fascinating book, as it provides a look into how the scientific study of cells brought about both good (scientific advances) and bad (the trauma and misunderstanding brought upon a family who knew nothing about what happened to Henrietta’s cells).

unbound2smaller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

While Henrietta certainly didn’t intend to become a medical pioneer, that’s what ended up happening with her cells. Her contribution to science and history is enormous, and she definitely deserves her spot in the Women Unbound Reading Challenge.

When Everything Changed

5 January 2010

When Everything Changed

When Everything Changed
Gail Collins
2009
471 pages

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Oh FTC, you’re gonna love this one: I bought this book (in hardback, no less) because it looked so awesome. And then I won a copy as part of BBAW. But I gave my extra copy to a friend. Whattaya gonna do about that, huh?

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Synopsis (from Barnes and Noble):
Picking up where her previous successful and highly lauded book, America’s Women, left off, Gail Collins recounts the sea change women have experienced since 1960. A comprehensive mix of oral history and Collins’s keen research, this is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for. The interviews with women who have lived through these transformative years include an advertising executive in the 60s who was not allowed to attend board meetings that took place in the all-male dining room; and an airline stewardess who remembered being required to bend over to light her passengers’ cigars on the men-only ‘Executive Flight’ from New York to Chicago.

We, too, may have forgotten the enormous strides made by women since 1960–and the rare setbacks. “Hell yes, we have a quota [7%]” said a medical school dean in 1961. “We do keep women out, when we can.” At a pre-graduation party at Barnard College, “they handed corsages to the girls who were engaged and lemons to those who weren’t.” In 1960, two-thirds of women 18-60 surveyed by Gallup didn’t approve of the idea of a female president. Until 1972, no woman ran in the Boston Marathon, the year when Title IX passed, requiring parity for boys and girls in school athletic programs (and also the year after Nixon vetoed the childcare legislation passed by congress). What happened during the past fifty years–a period that led to the first woman’s winning a Presidential Primary–and why? The cataclysmic change in the lives of American women is a story Gail Collins seems to have been born to tell.

Months ago I started listening to the audio book of The Feminine Mystique. While initially interesting, after what seemed like eons later (but was really only 5 hours of listening) I realized that it felt like I was hearing the same stories over and over (Friedan includes a lot of commentary from women that she interviewed). And Parker Posey’s (the narrator) voice was Extremely Irritating. Also, the term preaching to the choir is applicable here. So the thought of listening to 10 more hours of Parker reciting even more anecdotes was just more than I could bear. Even though this a feminist classic that I felt like I should read.

But then I saw When Everything Changed in the bookstore and I thought it would be the perfect alternative. And it was. Although it is a bit similar in style (it is filled with first hand accounts), which had the unfortunate consequence of me hearing Parker Posey’s voice as I was reading. Aaaaaggghhh!! I swear I was probably 1/3 of the way through the book before I could shake her. However, the big difference was this book has variety. And it’s current, as it looks at the past 50 years of women’s history. In contrast, Friedan’s book, although revolutionary in the 1960s, was a reaction to women’s lives in the ’50 and ‘60s, and is therefore somewhat dated. When Everything Changed, on the other hand, is not a reaction. It is history, but an interesting history comprised of first hand accounts that provide a powerful illustration of how much has changed.

There is a TON of information in this book, making it somewhat difficult to review (and also, occasionally, just a wee bit clunky to read…but only occasionally!). However, I highly, highly recommend it, especially if you’re participating in the Women Unbound Reading Challenge.

unbound2smaller When Everything Changed

The Woman Warrior

3 January 2010

the woman warrior

The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston
1975
209 pages

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FTC: I also bought this one. You should give me an award for stimulating the economy.

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I’m pretty much speechless. So I’m going to steal the description from Wikipedia:

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston, published by Vintage Books in 1975. Although there are many scholarly debates surrounding the official genre classification of the book, it can best be described as a work of creative non-fiction.

Throughout the five chapters of The Woman Warrior, Kingston blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales. What results is a complex portrayal of the 20th Century experiences of Chinese-Americans living in the U.S in the shadow of the Chinese Revolution.

The Woman Warrior has been reported by the Modern Language Association as the most commonly taught text in modern university education. It has been used in disciplines as far reaching as American literature, anthropology, Asian studies, composition, education, psychology, sociology, and women’s studies. In addition, it has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and has been named one of Time Magazine’s top nonfiction books of the 1970s.

Back to me being speechless. Unfortunately, I don’t mean that in a good way. This book baffles me, totally and completely. Not so much the interweaving of the folktales (although it was a little confusing at first), but the style. I found her writing choppy and disjointed. One minute we’re in the folktale, then whammo, there’s a random observation, then Kingston relates an episode from her childhood. Except it doesn’t flow…it’s as if the random observations are non sequiturs, and by the end I was totally frustrated.

unbound2smaller The Woman Warrior

However, despite my frustrations with this one, it does work for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. There is plenty of information contrasting the roles of women in traditional Chinese society with Kingston’s determination to break free of her mother’s traditional expectations. Then there is her mother, who despite her Chinese medical degree conforms to traditional beliefs about daughters being less worthy than sons. Finally, Kingston’s interpretation of Chinese folktales can be pretty kick-ass.

Eleanor Roosevelt

27 December 2009

Eleanor Roosevelt, 1884-1933
Blanche Wiesen Cook
1992
608 pages

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FTC disclosure: I bought. I read. I conquered.

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If you’ve ever been curious about Eleanor Roosevelt (hereafter known as ER), read this book. Seriously. It’s probably the best biography that I’ve ever read (not that I’ve read a lot). In fact, in places it’s a real page turner. I know, hard to believe.

My only quibble is the book is a little disjointed after the marriage of FDR and ER. There are times where information is repeated, and other times when the chronological order totally falls apart, making things a little confusing. However, I can easily forgive, given all of the wonderful info the book contains.

This book is perfect for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. ER is an awesome example of a political wife who refused to let politics, or society, or her husband dictate how she wanted to live her life (okay, it took awhile for her to get to this point, but she did get there). After giving birth to six children, submitting to a domineering mother-in-law, and then discovering her husband’s affair, ER finally took control of her own life. She pursued her own interests, made her own friends and eventually crafted a life almost completely independent from her family. And while she would never win any mother-of-the-year awards (for complicated reasons explained in the book), and her politics won’t appeal to everyone (although they do to me), she definitely stands as an example of a (largely self-) educated woman who unapologetically lived her own life. Go Eleanor.

unbound2smaller Eleanor Roosevelt

Now that I’ve got you all excited, I should mention this is Volume 1. It ends in 1933, which means there’s a lotta ER’s life left to go. I’ve checked out Volume 2 from the library…I’m on to the presidential years.

A London Child of the 1870s

22 December 2009

A London Child of the 1870s
Molly Hughes
200 pages
First published 1934

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For the FTC, because you’re so special: I bought this book from Persephone Books…you should check them out, as they are Very Cool.

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The Persephone blurb:
‘We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people.’ Thus Molly Hughes in one of the great classics of autobiography, A London Child of the 1870s (1934) in which she describes her everyday life in a semidetached house in Islington as the youngest of a large, characterful family. On first reading, writes Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, A London Child seemed ‘the most perfect and moving record of ordinary life in English’ and when he re-read it twenty years later ‘Molly’s book seems to me more painful now than it did when I first read it, but still finer as writing. Here is an ordinary life rendered truly, and joyfully, with a voice at once so self-abnegating yet so gay and funny and precise that we are reminded, in the end, of the one truth worth remembering, that there are no ordinary lives.’ As Adam Gopnik says, it is Molly’s pictures of everyday life that most stick in the mind: traveling by bus to the West End, making toffee in the afternoon, walking to St Paul’s on Christmas Day…

This book provides a glimpse into a young girl’s life in the 1870s, a life in many ways vastly different from our own. While Molly’s older brothers all went to school, she stayed home. Yet, Molly has no regrets…she describes her childhood as full of joy, filled with imagination and amusements. It’s interesting to read how Molly and her mom just accepted her father’s dictates about what was and wasn’t proper for Molly. Despite her mother’s untraditional upbringing, she was still fairly traditional when it came to her own daughter.

The introduction by Adam Gopnik is also fascinating, as he writes about his own history with this book and gives some insight into what happened to Molly after the book ended.

While this autobiography doesn’t tell of a famous person’s famous escapades (the reason I usually avoid autobiographies), it does give the reader a glimpse into middle class life in the 1870s. If you’re at all interested in history, this is good stuff. And since this is an autobiography, and it’s historical, and it’s set in London, I am counting it towards Eva’s World Citizen Challenge (for which I really need to figure out where I stand). I’m also counting it towards the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. There may not be a whole lot of unbound-edness happening, but it does offer some contrasting experiences.

unbound2smaller A London Child of the 1870s

The Widow Clicquot

12 December 2009

widow clicquot

I had to leave the picture nice and big, so you could see the bubbles coming out of the bottle…is it not the perfect book for my blog?!

The Widow Clicquot
Tilar Mazzeo
2008
191 pages

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To cover my ass with the FTC I feel obliged to tell you all I bought this one.

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I saw this book reviewed by Swapna and thought it sounded like the best kind of history book….the story of an individual set against the backdrop of a larger historical event. (The Devil in the White City is another book that does this very well.)

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin grew the business that is still produces her famous champagne, Veuve Clicquot (Widow Clicquot). While this might not sound that unusual in today’s world, in 19th-century France this was a pretty amazing thing. And not only did Barbe-Nicole succeed in a male-dominated, tumultuous business, she did it against the backdrop of the French Revolution.

Barbe-Nicole’s distinction is to have been the first celebrity business-woman among them. Some say, in fact, that she is the first woman in history to run an international commercial empire at all. Certainly, she was the first woman – and to this day, one of only a few – to lead one of the world’s great champagne houses. Entering the commercial world just as the first rumblings of the Industrial Revolution were reshaping life in nineteenth-century France, she brought the values of the family business woman to the age of manufacturing. Barbe-Nicole was not just an extraordinary woman, she was an extraordinary entrepreneur. (p. 190-191)

After the death of her husband, Barbe-Nicole continued the fledgling champagne business that he had started. Despite many initial setbacks (war and weather, to name a few), she refused to give up and by the time of her death (many, many years later) she was extremely wealthy, and her champagne was extremely popular.

Besides building her own business, Barbe-Nicole is known for three notable contributions to the champagne industry: internationalizing the champagne market (Veuve Clicquot was very popular in Russia), establishing brand identification, and developing the process of remuage (which allowed for faster champagne making (there’s a more technical term, but I don’t have the brain to describe it)). In fact, the only things I knew about champagne before reading this book were 1) it tastes good and 2) it has to be made in the Champagne region of France to rightly wear the name champagne.

Because Barbe-Nicole was a kick-ass business woman, and because she stepped out of the prescribed existence for French middle-class women in the 19th-century to make her own future, this book is the perfect read for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. It’s also pretty interesting, and not at all a dry, stuffy history book!

Do you think this might be something you’d like to read? First person to holler that they want it, gets it! Unless you’re the FTC, in which case, you’re not getting squat.

Somebody Else’s Daughter

9 December 2009

Somebody Else’s Daughter

Elizabeth Brundage

July 2008

352 pages

Hey FTC: me + my money + Borders = how I got this book

Somebody Else’s Daughter ended up being a compelling read, even if nothing much happened until the last 100 pages or so of the book. At first, it did seem like the author was bombarding me with characters and issues (feminism, adoption, AIDS and pornography, to name a few), but they do all pretty much tie together at the end.

This is a great example of a character driven novel. Although the back cover may lead you to believe this is the story of Nate and Cat and the daughter they gave up for adoption 17 years ago, it is really the stories of many different people living in one small, affluent community in the Berkshires. And everyone seems to have secrets. There’s Nate, now a teacher. And his biological daughter Willa. And Willa’s parents, Joe and Candace Golding. And Jack Heath, the headmaster of a private school. And his family. And Claire, who is a sculptor and single mom. And her son. And Pearl, the local prostitute. And a few others.

Despite the fact that not much happens for a very long time, this is still an engaging read, mostly because the characters are interesting…and I wanted to know what happens to them. The more I read the more layers I discovered there were to people. Brundage throws in a few twists, although I will say I thought the end was pretty predictable.

The one thing that did disappoint me was the stereotypical development of the student characters. The kids all go to a private school and it seemed like most of the clichéd student issues were thrown in. Not that I’m saying these things don’t happen, and that kids don’t experiment, but was it really necessary to include smoking, drinking, pot, Ecstasy, meth, bulimia, midnight cemetery jaunts, teenage angst, tattoos and dyslexia? After awhile I was wondering what else the poor kids were going to be subjected to.

However, despite the flaws of too many people and issues, it was still entertaining. And Claire’s feminist stance (and arguments with Joe) make this a candidate for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. Not a strong candidate, but I’m still counting it.

unbound2smaller Somebody Elses Daughter

True Pleasures

27 November 2009

True Pleasures

Lucinda Holdforth

2005

221 pages

After quitting her job, Holdforth travels to Paris and spends three weeks seeking out the haunts and houses of some of its most famous women. And Holdforth doesn’t restrict herself to French women. She starts with Nancy Mitford, who left England (and her husband) for Paris.

Throughout the book, Holdforth focuses on women who sought their own pleasure, whether pleasure of the mind or flesh or spirit. She discusses famous courtesans, such as Madame de Pompadour (mistress of Louis XV) and Pamela Harriman (US ambassador to France, although Holdforth argues that she was also a courtesan). There is a chapter devoted to salonnieres, such as Gertrude Stein, Madame du Deffand and Germaine deStael, whose salons expected both men and women to discuss art, literature and politics with “wit and intelligence.” Other women who make an appearance in the book include Coco Chanel, Josephine Bonaparte, Colette, George Sand and Edith Wharton.

Holdforth obviously holds these women in high esteem for acting on their desires. She argues that French women have always been powerful, and very adult. The older French women become, the more they are respected. In fact, she is quite dismissive of American women, whom she calls childlike. While I wasn’t quite sold on some of her arguments (occasionally, it seems as if sexual power is being equated with feminism, although that might just be me), the book is fascinating as it features women who (for the most part) led their lives as they wanted to. Also, these women were smart and accomplished. It was certainly fascinating to read about their accomplishments. Therefore, I’m counting this one towards the Women Unbound Reading Challenge.

I saw this book on Book Bath’s blog, so I owe her a thank you for the introduction!

And if there are any FTC spies out there, I bought the book with my very own money.