Reading Women

January 3, 2011
More than a decade after her graduation from Barnard College, journalist Staal (The Love They Lost) revisits feminist literature to conduct "a highly personal investigation" into the "balance between selfhood and womanhood." Her marriage is limping along, and motherhood and housework have intruded on her professional life. Contrasting her new responses to such feminist classics as Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and de Beauvoir's The Second Sex with those of her 19-year-old self and to those of today's students, Staal despairs over the "objectifying" of self she observes in young women today, but discovers that "absolutes that once dominated my thinking had been rubbed down by experience." Staal offers an interesting overview of feminist history and writings; however, her exploration of transformations in her life is superficial (her marriage was healed by "coming closer together through the thousands of tiny moments that make up a day"), and she learns the fairly trite lesson that "life is unpredictable, relationships are complex, and the mind cannot always rule the heart."

February 15, 2011
An immersion in feminist literature clarified Staals personal philosophies as an undergraduate at Barnard College in the 1990s and shaped her subsequent career as journalist and writer. Moreover, a reintroduction to these seminal works saved her from the postnuptial and postpartum ennui and isolation she encountered as a new wife and mother. Lacking a sense of identity beyond these traditional roles and hoping to reignite her youthful sense of purpose, Staal took the gutsy step of returning to Barnard to audit the feminist texts courses that once played such a pivotal role in her life. In reading and analyzing the influential works of such luminary feminist thinkers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Betty Friedan, Kate Chopin, Simone de Beauvoir, and Katie Roiphe, Staal examines what it means to be a woman in the twenty-first century and asks if and how these writers are still relevant today. Intimate in its reflections and keenly perceptive on a larger scale, Staals erudite literary memoir refreshingly embraces womens eternal quest for self-knowledge.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)