A Short History of Women: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Kate Walbert (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 2009

NOMINATED FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZEA profoundly moving portrait of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, A Short History of Women chronicles five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first. Beginning in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause, the novel traces the echoes of her choice in the stories of her descendants—a brilliant daughter who tries to escape the burden of her mother’s infamy; a granddaughter who chooses a conventional path, only to find herself disillusioned; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety of post-9/11 Manhattan. In a kaleidoscope of characters and with a richness of imagery, emotion, and wit, A Short History of Women is a thought-provoking and vividly original narrative that crisscrosses a century—a book for "any woman who has ever struggled to find her own voice; to make sense of being a mother, wife, daughter, and lover" (Associated Press)

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Walbert—2004 National Book Award nominee for Our Kind—offers a beautiful and kaleidoscopic view of the 20th century through the eyes of several generations of women in the Townsend family. The story begins with Dorothy Townsend, a turn-of-the-century British suffragist who dies in a hunger strike. From Dorothy's death, Walbert travels back and forth across time and continents to chronicle other acts of self-assertion by Dorothy's female descendants. Dorothy's daughter, Evelyn, travels to America after WWI to make her name in the world of science—and escape from her mother's infamy. Decades later, her niece, also named Dorothy, has a late-life crisis and gets arrested in 2003 for taking photos of an off-limits military base in Delaware. Dorothy's daughters, meanwhile, struggle to find meaning in their modern bourgeois urban existences. The novel takes in historical events from the social upheaval of pre-WWI Britain to VJ day in New York City, a feminist conscious-raising in the '70s and the Internet age. The lives of these women reveal that although oppression of women has grown more subtle, Dorothy's self-sacrifice reverberates through generations. Walbert's look at the 20th century and the Townsend family is perfectly calibrated, intricately structured and gripping from page one. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

What are the fundamental rights and responsibilities of a woman? In this newest endeavor, Walbert strives to answer what Victorians commonly called "The Woman Question." Critics praised this work as an intelligent, emotional, and illuminating family account and feminist study. However, despite the elegant writing, they also relayed concerns regarding overall style and structure. Several predicted that the author's use of one name for multiple characters and a crisscrossing, rather than chronological, narrative, would lead readers to throw up their hands in frustration and confusion. In short, reviewers acknowledged A Short History of Women as a thoughtful and complex undertaking, but questioned its broad appeal.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 2nd edition (June 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416594981
• ISBN-13: 978-1416594987
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #466,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kate Walbert is the author of Where She Went, a New York Times Notable Book of 1998; The Gardens of Kyoto, winner of the Connecticut Book Award for fiction in 2002; and Our Kind, finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and numerous other publications. She lives in New York City and Connecticut with her family.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Demands our Full Attention, May 28, 2009

By 

Jessica Hazlewood (Northern California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Short History of Women: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

There are some books that I like because they are satisfying in all ways. They are neat, tidy, and don't miss a trick. There are other books that I love because they are unsatisfying, even unsettling. This is such a book. It has left me wanting more. More from the author (I will be looking into her other books for my summer reading), but also wishing the book went on longer, giving me more and more about these characters she has crafted. I want more not because they aren't fully developed (because they are), but because I want to follow these characters even longer.

I have to say that this is one of my favorite reads in a while. I loved the sliding around through history (from 1898 through 2007), living with different generations of the same family, sensing the way women's lives and issues have changed (and not changed). Because of the sliding and shifting that does occur, this is a book that demands your attention--full attention--and I loved this sense of the book making sure I was involved, that I was really listening to it and its characters.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for an intelligent, interesting read, especially if you are interested in women's lives through the twentieth century.

160 of 192 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Short History: Not Short Enough, May 30, 2009

By 

Daniel Murphy "Dan Murphy" (Redmond, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Short History of Women: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Okay. I'll be straight with you. I'm a guy. But I'm a feminist father of a lesbian activist daughter, my personal motto was written by Virginia Woolf, and I'm an ardent believer that the sooner women achieve full equality in this world, the better off we'll all be. But this book was truly a struggle to get through.

I'm perfectly capable of working through, and thoroughly enjoying, a complex book that details the experience of women in the world. Be it The Hours (Michael Cunningham) or Virginia Woolf's own works, I love the challenge, and I love the reward. This book failed on two major counts, and annoyed me on a third.

First failure: the novel that spans generations has been done a hundred times, and done well. It is not a new plot device, and if it is to be done yet again, I'd like to see a hint of originality in the approach. Instead, I found wearying murkiness to the forward and backward literary catapulting, having to make frequent references to the chart in front of the book to relocate the plot line. Tiresome.

Second failure: The book starts off with the death by hunger strike of a woman who explains "There was nothing else I could do". Truly? Nothing else one could do, when so many amazing women of that era DID find something else they could do, and did win incremental battles in a war that is not yet over. I read Gloria Steinem, and I think "Damn! What a mind! What a human!" I attend The Vagina Monologues, and I'm thrilled by the gutsiness and brilliance of the characters. I read about the five woman in this book and I'm left with a sense of "Oh, give it a rest". Somehow women shrink in this book, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The tragedy of misogyny and gender prejudice is at its starkest when external limits shackle women of strength and ability. In this book, the women seemed uncomfortably close to shackling themselves.

My third point of contention is that the book reflects a frequently noted phenomenon that has blossomed with text messaging, Facebook, Twitter: a type of narcissism that assumes that we really want to know about it when someone does a load of laundry, has a pimple, or had a bad day with the kids/spouse/car/hair. Though Walbert throws us an occasional tasty nugget (e.g. a supposed women's advocate giving a lecture about how women evolved to make men more comfortable), way too often it's kibble. Women seem trivialized and powerless in this novel, more by their own personalities than by the world of men that they live in.

Choose this one for your book club or your personal pleasure at your own risk: this chunk of carbon is no diamond in the rough, it's a lump of coal that fails to ignite.

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Difficult Read, May 23, 2009

By 

P. Bigelow (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Short History of Women: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

A Short History of Women is Kate Walbert's third novel. Her previous novel, Our Kind was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004.

This outing opens with the death of dedicated suffragist Dorothy Townsend in 1914 from self-imposed starvation for the cause. The rest of the book deals with the consequences of her action on her progeny - from her daughter Evelyn to her great-granddaughter Liz.

I so much wanted to like this book because of Dorothy Townsend and her decisions, because of the historical eras in which the book is set, and because of the reviews being published. Unfortunately, I found this book hard to like. I was never drawn into the characters enough to actually like or dislike them. It's almost as if Walbert was more interested in, for instance, ensuring that Townsend's thoughts and speech patterns were authentic rather than creating characters her readers could relate to. Walbert's goal may have been to write a "literary" novel, but in doing so, she may have lost the main-stream reader. And more's the pity because many if most people are unaware of the sacrifices the early suffragettes made.