Musings: America's Women

America's Women by Gail Collins is one of the most fascinating books I've read all year.  It is really good, people.  I got it when there was all that positive talk about the author's new book, When Everything Changed, which is a sort of sequel to this book.  But I am one of those readers who likes to start at the beginning, so I read this one first, but now I can't wait to get my hands on When Everything Changed because I am sure it is just as fabulous as this one.

This book is about the history of women in the United States (mostly the history of white women, though there's more on African-Americans than she led me to expect in the introduction, and sadly very little on Native Americans due to lack of documentation).  That makes it sound either very dryly academic or feminazi-like, but it is neither, I promise you.  It's a collection of information on what it as like to be a woman at various points in time, and also a lot of short, tantalizing biographies of women who were awesome.  Seriously, I had no idea American history was chock full of amazing females, none of whom get the attention they deserve.  If this book did nothing else, it seriously piqued my interest in reading at least a dozen biographies of all sorts of women who stood up for their rights.  Instead of gushing about all of them and this book, I'll just share with you some thoughts I had in reading through this book:

• Harriet Tubman.  WOW.  If there was an Official Coin of Bad*ss-ness, that coin would have Harriet Tubman's profile on it.  And she would be sleeping.  Did you know she suffered from narcolepsy?!  Randomly falling asleep at inappropriate times was apparently no biggie to this woman who helped so many slaves escape to freedom in the north.  She was cool as a cucumber in pretty much every situation that arose and a master of disguise, too.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony fought for equal rights alongside African-Americans until it appeared that African-American men would get the vote before white women.  At that point, Stanton pretty much turned on African-Americans and made a lot of appalling statements about uneducated men getting to vote before rich women.  This obviously created a huge breach, and women came out the losers as they didn't get to vote until 1920.
• Jane Addams was amazing and good and kind.  It is difficult to imagine someone who had so much empathy and so much will to help people.  But she had it and she used it, and the world is a better place for her having been in it.
• Eleanor Roosevelt.  I have heard so often that she was a hugely influential person, but I didn't realize how influential until reading this book.  I now fully appreciate her statue at the FDR memorial.  I think I've always had this vague idea of her as a "nice" person, but the woman was so strong-willed and amazing!  She did so much to advance civil rights.
• Rosa Parks.  People act as though she did one act of defiance in her life, completely out of the blue, but that woman was READY for her moment.  She grew up in a household that was heavily into fighting for civil rights, and she was already involved in the movement when she refused to give up her seat on a bus and set the civil rights snowball rolling.  According to her lawyer, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been virtually unknown if Rosa Parks hadn't put a face on civil rights.  And yet, when MLK and his supporters set up the march on DC to fight for equal rights, they didn't even consider asking Parks to speak and gave her almost no role in the proceedings at all.
• Women started campaigning heavily for the right to vote soon after the Civil War.  They didn't get it until 1920.  (Insane, right?!)  This was partially due to the liquor lobby, which didn't want women to vote for prohibition.  Whereas now, liquor companies embrace women so completely that they consistently portray them as scantily-clad supermodels that will be attracted to literally any man drinking a certain brand of beer.  How far we've come.
• Gail Collins is fascinated and frustrated by the complete lack of detail on how women historically dealt with their menstrual cycles.  There is literally no information on this.  Of course, now I want to know, too.

I mentioned some really famous women above, but what impressed me most about this book were the number of women mentioned who were not famous.  Or that were famous in their time but have sadly been lost to contemporary history because history in classes is full of Men, and never even hints at women's struggles for rights.  I loved learning more about people like the Grimke sisters, the early pioneer women (many of whom were disturbingly racist), the immigrant experience and the struggle America has had for so much of its history of wanting proper ladies on one hand but also desperately requiring as much labor as it could get.  Why America can be so forward-thinking in so many ways but so backwards sometimes, particularly in its treatment of women, is something that never ceases to amaze me.  I won't make this into a political post, but I just don't understand the movements and organizations that exist to take away a woman's right to determine her own life and path.

This post is getting WAY too long, I know, so I'll stop here.  But READ THIS BOOK.  It is so, so good and explains so much about women's struggles in the US.  I can't wait to find and enjoy the sequel; I'm sure it will be just as excellent.