I’ve been recently reading several novels about WWII, not a good thing to be reading in today’s climate with the ICE raids, etc. So when my daughter suggested Marie Bostwick’s The Book Club for Troublesome Women, I was glad for the change. It was a good read, especially for this old woman, as it brought back lots of memories. Four young women, new to a planned housing development, decide to form a book club. Their first choice is Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The rest of the book explores how they are radicalized and all of the changes in their lives that ensue.
I also read The Feminine Mystique, but not in 1963. A friend alerted me to the book around 1965 or 66, but it had the same effect on me as it did for the characters in the story. I, too, found that being the model housewife was not entirely satisfying, and the book very validating. I loved my husband and kids, but I also felt like my brain was dying, and I longed for intellectual stimulation. When my husband and I did two years of voluntary service in Europe right after we got married, following college, {59-61}, that kept me mentally alert as we dealt with different languages, cultures, and experiences. So coming home to the US, having two babies in the next two years, and settling into the restrictive life of housewifery in the 1960s was a real let down.
Reading The Book Club for Troublesome Women triggered a lot of memories. We troublesome women fought hard for the rights that young women today take for granted. When I graduated from college, there were still only three jobs basically open to women: teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. Some even required us to stop working when we married. It was a man’s world and one of the big fights my husband and I had was how our names were listed in the telephone directory. Even into the late 70’s, the listings still read “Mr. and Mrs.” There was no mention of the wife’s name.
Having fought for my right to attend seminary, I quickly became one of those troublesome women. Thank goodness my dad applauded my yearnings, but my return to academia caused more than a few marital arguments. As a result, I started seeing a therapist, who, as in the book, insisted that I was denying my femininity and was sexually repressed. Eventually, I kicked a hole in his office wall while having a temper tantrum and quit therapy. Some years later, I discovered the 12-step program, which radically improved my life, for it permitted me to work on myself, rather than trying to caretake everyone around me. By working on myself, by learning to accept the things I couldn’t change and gaining the courage to change the things I could, I became part of a widespread movement in which troublesome women refused to shut up and sit down.
Looking back over the past 88 years, I realize I’ve lived through some amazing times and have benefited from the changes that shaped those years. For that, I am profoundly grateful. But we dare not stop being vigilant. Rights can be easily lost, as we are already seeing with some of the new policies being introduced in this administration. As the book so dramatically points out, the old strictures that guaranteed domination of rich white men also kept ordinary men from flourishing, just as it did women. So let’s all of us join the movement of troublesome men and women and see what we can accomplish in guaranteeing the rights of everyone, no matter what race, ethnicity, gender, educational level, etc. Writing these words, I am reminded of the Apostle Paul’s declaration that in Christ there is no male nor female, no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free. We are all important. But the struggle for equal rights has been won and lost myriad times, and we must remain vigilant. We all have an important role to play in the communities in which we find ourselves. So let’s claim our right to be troublesome men and women, for the fate of the world depends on us.