What's Wrong With "A Short History of Women," the Novel

The New York Times Book Review assigned a cover review [2] in June to a book called A Short History of Women [3]. Woohoo! Except that the book is actually A Short History of Women ... A Novel, by fiction writer Kate Walbert. What happens when a history of women gets presented as a novel? Well, it finally gets such a history onto the cover of the Times Book Review. But, I would argue, something is lost. Presenting history as fiction immunizes it from just the kind of analysis and criticism women’s history desperately requires.

Walbert is explicitly writing a version of feminist history. Her book begins with a self-sacrificing suffragette circa 1914 and ends five generations later with a Yale coed, class of ’11, carrying her well-loved copy of Kate Chopin’s lesbian coming of age story The Awakening [4]. The story thus precisely parallels the Western feminist movement. Walbert acknowledges outright her debt to the great feminist cultural analysts Carolyn Heilbrun [5] and Viola Klein [6]. To tell a story of five generations of women, from the hunger striking vote-seeker to the bisexual Yale freshman, is to stand next to historians of the social and political movement we call feminism, unmodified.

It is a fraught stance. Plato [7] set forth the perils of political fiction. Although his argument can be effectively disputed, at this point in feminist history, two of Plato’s criticisms of fictional political stories are particularly convincing. First, when a history is told as fiction, the writer is in complete control of the events and their meaning. Since only she knows the story she wants to tell, her version is immunized from criticism. Second, fiction operates through emotion, and such emotional appeals have a powerful effect on the reader. Consumers of fiction weep and laugh and are taken out of themselves as they encounter the imagined world. This, too, pushes rational argument to the margins. With the obvious formal inequalities behind it (legal marital rape, sex-segregated want ads), and with access to resources and some social legitimacy, feminism faces many crucial decisions about what direction to take next. A history distanced and protected from criticism and rational argument is the last thing the feminist movement needs.

A Short History opens with the matriarch, Dorothy Trevor Townsend, starving herself to death for suffrage, the ultimate political act. Walbert presents Townsend’s act from the viewpoint of her daughter, about to become an orphan. Despite her personal peril, the daughter says calmly, “Grandmother claim[ed] it was just like Mum to take a cause too far.” With the very next line, and in exactly the same affect-free tone, the narrator gives us the other side: “Mother said she had no choice.”

There were real historical martyrs [8] for suffrage a hundred years ago—Mary Clarke is generally thought to have died of a broken blood vessel from force-feeding during a hunger strike, and suffragette Emily Davison killed herself by running in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby. Historians have studied and debated their acts ever since.

Do readers benefit from digesting this history from a fiction writer with no training in politics and in a form that cannot be evaluated on the basis of rational argument? As a novelist playing historian, Walbert suggests that extreme political behavior is simply a matter of personal choice. Like the suicidal suffragette, the rest of Walbert’s characters march through the predictable feminist narrative with almost no discussion of the political or social meaning of their stories. And, no matter which feminist path they try, the women are all unhappy, each in her own particular way.

In Walbert’s world, all choices, even the choices of life or death, have the same heft and outcome. She preaches the politics of no politics, which is of course itself a political position. Both in form and in content, this neutered, novelized history of women teaches that political feminism is passé. No choice has meaning, and no choice makes life better. It takes a very good writer to produce a value-free novel—think Camus’ The Stranger [9]. Walbert is not even close. Some of A Short History is so hackneyed that, were it not for the earnest acknowledgements, you might think Walbert was writing a parody of the history of women, sort of a feminist Colbert Report. The suicidal suffragette gives way to the orphan, starving and freezing under her thin blanket at the wicked girls’ school, the bluestocking who gives up all hope of family for her professorship, the country club doyenne at the consciousness-raising group, the first Yale coed and the randy old professor, and the mommy getting drunk at a play date. The two-dimensional, stereotyped characters mechanically act out the banal and hopeless script she has set for them.

There are, of course, numerous examples of successful political fiction about women, including Chopin’s The Awakening, as well as books to which Walbert is obviously indebted like Jane Eyre [10] and Memoirs of an Ex Prom Queen [11]. (She takes her school for orphans from Charlotte Bronte’s classic and the discontented ’50s housewife from Alix Kates Shulman’s 1972 best-selling “break-through book,” as the Saturday Review called it. These works exemplify the best critique of Plato’s argument: that deeper learning and change can occur when readers recognize their own political truth in a fictional creation. They also point to the useful role of fiction in enabling readers to identify with and thus experience empathy for people very different from themselves. It may be that stories of a single woman’s life, like Jane Eyre, do a better job of edifying the choices in a reader’s individual life than a fictional history does of illuminating a whole movement. Or it may be that fiction is a necessary cover when the writer is prophesying an awakening from a culture that is still oppressive, but works less well to tell the tale of an established movement. Or maybe these earlier works succeed where A Short History does not because they are just better fiction.

Circa 2000, when feminists were writing their history instead of fictionalizing it, a real historian, Ruth Rosen of the University of California-Berkeley, noted [12] the coming novelization of women’s history and generally bemoaned the appearance of “therapeutic feminism,” which turns the political back into the personal. Rosen might well argue with Walbert’s implied lesson that political feminism was a failure, or that all choices have equal weight. But how can she? The novel’s form deftly deflects such arguments; it’s only a story, after all.

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