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

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The New York Times Book Review assigned a cover review in June to a book called A Short History of Women. 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. The story thus precisely parallels the Western feminist movement. Walbert acknowledges outright her debt to the great feminist cultural analysts Carolyn Heilbrun and Viola Klein. 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 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 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.