BOOKISHGAL

I’ve had this book for about 18 years and still haven’t read it! Isn’t that awful??

What happened was this: Many of my readers know that I grew up a fundamentalist, so I wasn’t very empathetic to the women’s movement. (To put it rather mildly.) Then I went to Syracuse University and got my eyes opened to a ton of important things. Gay rights was one of them; and the equality of women and men was another.

I had a lot of feminist writings that served as textbooks in my “Feminist Theology” course:  Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father. Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence. And my very very favorite (and it still is), Dale Spender’s Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. And so on.

But I bought several more books after I finished the term and got home. I read them avidly for several months. Marilyn French. Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, whose book I wrote about several posts back. Janet Radcliffe Richards.

But there were some I missed, some more of the older ones. It was only a couple of years ago that I read the book that seemed to start it all in the early 1960s, The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan. And I’ve never yet read The Second Sexby Simone de Beauvoir, even though I had this book for so long. I guess I needed to come up for air after my intense reading just after Syracuse, and only sporadically plunged in again.

So this is another book I haven’t read, that makes me blush to admit it. But I am determined that I willstill read it. Partly because, with the extreme hyper-girly-fication that’s again being rammed down the throats of our young girls, I have a feeling all these books will soon be needed again, for another wave of working toward full human equality. And it’s important not just to know the early history (who now talks about Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or the Grimke sisters?), but to know the whole development, through all the waves.

And Simone de Beauvoir is a crucial piece of that extensive historical story.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS