FIDELTY, a Belt Revivals series story by forgotten feminist Susan Glaspell

FIDELTY
SUSAN GLASPELL (intro. Sarah Blackwood)
Belt Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic feminist novel originally published in 1915, and set in Iowa in the early years of the 20th century, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is a surprising, suspenseful work about the strictures that confine women, the risks those who want to flee them take, and the opportunities that await them if they do.

Ruth Holland, bored in her conventional small town, falls in love with a married man and runs off with him, shocking the community. A decade later she returns to cold shoulders and the disapproval of the town: she is seen as "a human being who selfishly—basely—took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it ... One who defies it ... must be shut out from it."

What Ruth decides to do next will upend most readers' expectations, as will the cryptic scenes that take place in the doctor's office after Ruth becomes involved with her married lover. Ruth Holland deserves to be placed alongside other heroines such as Emma Bovary and Lily Bart, women who wanted "an enlarged experience" and were "zestful for new things from life." Fidelity will shock and fascinate readers today as its heroine did in her day.

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My Review: It will most certainly shock readers today, will this read; not for the same reasons and not to the same degree as the readers of 1915 were shocked. Nowadays we're watching, or y'all're watching because I sure as shootin' ain't, The Real Housewives of {Flyover Country} to get the equivalent shock value. (I sometimes long for the Hays Code when I read about the antics of these surgically altered weirdos that keep so many so entertained.) I too was shocked by Fidelity: How has Susan Glaspell disappeared from the awareness of 2026's readers?

Born on a rural Iowa homestead (this means something important, y'all follow the link) in 1876, by 1894 she was a paid journalist; she later became a college graduate (in philosophy!) at a time when the number of *men* who graduated college was a vanishingly small slice of the population; she was a staffer, full time and paid, at the Des Moines newspaper; then gave it all up...to become a bestselling novelist and short-story writer.

AFTER that, she fell in love with a married guy. He divorced whoever he was married to in order to put a ring on Susan's finger (and who can blame him?), and their union produced...more bestselling novels, as well as the Provincetown Players, Eugene O'Neill's career, several still-produced plays of her own...y'know, all the usual things a woman can expect to have happen to her when she's born into a nineteenth-century farming family. Her life as a radical socialist free-love advocate would shock and startle many in the US today, let alone then.

So Fidelity is probably more faction, or even a roman à clef if one knew the good folk of Davenport, Iowa, circa 1910 which I do not and, if this story is any guide, am delighted not to have done. I'm no small-town fancier in general, but the beady-eyed, small-minded and judgmental folk of the place evoked in this story made me panther-screechingly furious on the regular.

Equally irksome to my twenty-first century self is the lackluster critical reception of the time, doubtless symptomatic of the era's cultural unreadiness to examine its prudishness and misogyny. (I'm appalled to not these same objectively wrongheaded notions are being trumpeted as in the ascendant again. Well-timed, Belt Publishing!) I suspect some of the resistance then also stemmed from the multiple narrators whose ideas about "fidelity," that inherently coercive concept applied far more to women than men in marriage as we constitute it in the West, being rather transparently intended to counterpoint each other and reinforce the validity of protagonist Ruth's choice to elope with a married man.

Pace University Professor Sarah Blackwood's introduction alone might repay the cost of procuring the book. So much of Author Glaspell's life is footnoted in relation to the Provincetown Players' enduring legacy, despite her 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Drama meriting more than a simple "oh, by the way" footnote. Professor Blackwood makes a good case for why we should look for, and at, Susan Glaspell as a visionary life-liver and writer.

I don't really think this story of "infidelity" and sexual liberation despite its consequences will ever go out of relevance and ability to illuminate and elucidate how willful and calricious a thing the human heart is. It's more out of fashion in twenty-first century storytelling when its focus is not on the guilt and the transgression angles of attack. It might feel less minatory because there's no emphasis on punishment for the behavior, but to my mind this story is more honest about reality than modern salacious takes on the topic. There are consequences to the choices we make. They aren't always easy to endure. If you knowingly transgress your community's norms be ready to find a new community.

I think a lot of people, married or not, can relate to, resonate with, find fellowship in, that message.

LYNDA DREWS' PAGE: Disposable Wives: Murder and Menace in Green Bay's Rural Belgian Settlement; The Maid and the Socialite: The Brave Women Behind Green Bay's Scandalous Minahan Trials

DISPOSABLE WIVES: Murder and Menace in Green Bay’s Rural Belgian Settlement
LYNDA DREWS
Little Creek Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, preorder for delivery on 12 May 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the quiet Belgian farming settlements near Green Bay, Wisconsin, whispers traveled faster than truth.

At the center of it all stood Jean Philippe Soquet—a man known by many names: the Bay Settlement Bruiser, the Belgian Archfiend… and, to some, a murderer. Over four decades, suspicion followed him, especially in the wake of multiple disturbing deaths and disappearances—including those of three of his wives.

What began as gossip soon hardened into something far more troubling.

Determined to uncover the truth, Pauline Villiesse—sister to Soquet’s third wife—refuses to let the past be buried. With the help of Xavier Martin, a respected translator navigating both language and loyalty within the Belgian immigrant community, she begins a relentless pursuit of justice.

Set in the decades following the Civil War, this riveting true story reveals a world shaped by faith, survival, and tightly bound traditions—where secrets are protected, reputations are everything, and justice is far from guaranteed.

Through courage, persistence, and an unyielding search for truth, Pauline and Xavier confront a chilling question:

How many lives can be lost before a community is willing to see what’s been there all along?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Male privilege is still unassailable, though that is steadily eroding. Hence the hysterical white-male rear guard action being waged by the reactionaries in this century. This is, they know, their final opportunity to avoid the reckoning for their multitudinous crimes against everyone not them.

As one who has benefitted from the privilege they've abused for millennia, i say bring the reckoning. Make it impossible for this hideous pattern of abuse to recur this generation. #ReleaseEpsteinFiles

The facts of Jean-Philippe Soquet's life are hard to stomach even at over 150 years' remove. The crimes he committed, and many we no doubt still don't know of, will call forth the horrified revolted rage that, in the twenty-first century, we're feeling as the Epstein Files slowly, inexorably, come to light. Apologists for Soquet's crimes pointed to his undeniable good works. That merely proves the ancient truism "bad people can do good things just like good people can do bad things" is never not accurate. It also follows that the actions don't change the essence of the person. Soquet's evil murdering heart did good too? Take that up with your god on Judgment Day.

I read this précis of a *mountain* of research done by the author. I came to the conclusion that Jean-Philippe Soquet was a sadistic, murdering scumbag, and no amount of good he did as well changes his status as an evil murdering bastard.

It's a tough read because it's so well sourced. It's stunning that male privilege has operated, and still operates, so well that even murder is...swept away, forgotten, ignored...because the remorse-free murderer does some objectively good things. How many women must die, lose their "one wild and precious life" in Mary Oliver's deathless formulation, before it matters more than someone's pallid do-gooding?

I've decided for myself: one.

Let justice be done at long last. It won't raise the dead. It might help heal the affected. That alone makes reading the case against a long-dead man for his crimes worth your time.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE MAID AND THE SOCIALITE: The Brave Women Behind Green Bay's Scandalous Minahan Trials
LYNDA DREWS
Little Creek Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the shadows of progress, two women's stories were erased. Until now.

What if a respected surgeon could destroy your life with just one diagnosis?

In early 20th century Green Bay, Wisconsin, this terrifying reality was all too true for two women. Mary, an illiterate maid, and Mollie, a college-educated socialite, fell victim to the physical violence and mental abuse of celebrated surgeon Dr. John R. Minahan. To silence them, he claimed they had the shameful and dreaded disease of syphilis. This is the first full account ever written about Dr. Minahan, whose wealth built a college stadium, science hall, and six-story office building—all named for him—while history lost, or perhaps erased, Mary’s and Mollie’s heroic stories.

Until now.

Eerily mirroring contemporary debates around gender equality, misinformation, and wealth disparity, this tale remains alarmingly relevant. It is a story of power, abuse, and the tireless pursuit of justice. Delve into this haunting yet inspiring historical tale to uncover the forgotten stories of Mary and Mollie, two courageous women who dared to stand up against a powerful adversary.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. CW: repeated violations of bodily autonomy

My Review: I have never been interested in Green Bay, Wisconsin; never thought much about it; never considered the idea that it, all hundred-ish thousand people in and around it, would have "socialites" because that suggests to my mind big-stage dramatics. Football, whether US or FIFA interpretations of it, bores me. So, no...not the instantly obvious reader of the book, me.

The publicist offered it to me, and because I've come to trust their take on the kind of stories I enjoy reading, I said yes. Thanks, Shaun! I owe you one.

John Minahan was a bounder, a cad, and a creep. I'd say he'd be diagnosable as a malignant narcissist in the twenty-first century (aren't all rapists, though? serious question). In his lifetime I suspect people thought of him, quietly and privately, as a thin-skinned bully. Feminists are likely to see in him a flattened caricature of "Manliness." The author, clearly a subject-matter expert more well-informed than the man himself on his pathologies, presents a vast body of details that support all these views of him. The gestalt of the (possibly too many) facts s wisely left to you to decide. She has an opinion but presents it as such, not as incontroverible fact.

The sheer volume of awfulness detailed by Mary and Mollie makes difficult reading. Obviously that is a vanishingly small concern compared to the living hell the perpetrator inflicted on his victims, and got away with doing so because they are women. When these two women stood up to him, and brough the receipts to show him up, he pulled out the V-card used against women since time immemorial: he accused them of having VD...syphilis...to show them as being un-Virtuous therefore deserving everything they said he did, but of course he didnt because un-Virtuous women lie to get back at men but even if he did they deserved it.

Does any of this, any part of this playbook, sound at all familiar?

Reading about the trial, the havoc that any legal proceeding wreaks on the lives and the mental health of the innocent and the guilty alike, makes me feel so hugely grateful to Virginia Giuffre for her astounding act of tenacious courage.

#OnlyRedactVictims

In this time of reckoning, it behooves all of us to learn the history of abuse suffered by our ancestors. Painful it is, necessary it must become.

WILD FOR AUSTEN: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane, excellent self-gifted read

WILD FOR AUSTEN: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane
DEVONEY LOOSER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wilder in her time than we’ve given her credit for, and Looser traces the fascinating and fantastical journey her legacy has taken over the past 250 years.

All six of Austen’s completed novels are examined here, and Looser uncovers striking new gems therein, as well as in Austen’s juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even essays and poetry. Looser also takes on entirely new scholarship, writing about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. In examining the legacy of Austen’s works, Looser reveals the film adaptations that might have changed Hollywood history had they come to fruition, and tells extraordinary stories of ghost-sightings, Austen novels used as evidence in courts of law, and the eclectic members of the Austen extended family whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth, humor, and remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Over eleven hundred endnotes.

One thousand one hundred plus end notes.

I was very very shocked to see this in its glory inside a non-academic book, albeit one by an academic who has spent her career toiling in Austen's vineyard. It's clear from reading this work that Author Looser thinks about Austen very much in a framework. An academic, analytical approach to what I can only describe as a wildly partisan, excitedly appreciative paean to Austen for her 250th birthday (tomorrow as I post this review).

I was very entertained by the discussion of Austen's work in "Wild Writings" because I'm not an Austenite. There are so many reasons for that...I'm male, and men come off very poorly indeed, is not one. Most come down to the absence of my chemistry response going ping the way it does with Eliot or Trollope or Anna Katharine Green. It's weird, but there it is, and reading Author Looser's warbles of rapture makes me feel vicariously the heights of appreciation my more muted pleasure won't reach.

In the second section, I switched on fully, thoroughly enjoying Austen's fascinating family relations. It's a section very aptly titled "Fierce Family Ties." Fierce is a good descriptor! Abolitionists, suffragists (not the later versions, but advocating for general male enfranchisement), progressives of all stripes...Jane Austen, lady novelist, also had lady novelist cousins...no matter where one looks, one finds her situated amid those who want to change the status quo for what looks to my twenty-first century eyes like the better.

Part three is Jane's afterlife, her posthumous career as an ikon. Here I felt uninvolved,uninspired...it took me two weeks to read this section because y'all superfans, well, when I don't share an obsession it's hard to work up enthusiasm for it. It was informative but not about something I care to learn about. That's the missing half-star explained.

I'd recommend this read to the holiday-weary Austenite because it really situates y'all in a cultural mainstream that's brought huge joy to the world. Could anything be more apt for a self-gifted read?

WINNING THE EARTHQUAKE How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress, recovering the life of a great American

WINNING THE EARTHQUAKE How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress
LORISSA RINEHART
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first major biography of Jeannette Rankin, a groundbreaking suffragist, activist, and the first American woman to hold federal office.

“Few members of Congress have ever stood more alone while being true to a higher honor and loyalty.” —President John F. Kennedy on Jeannette Rankin

Born on a Montana ranch in 1880, Jeannette Rankin knew how to drive a tractor, ride a horse, make a fire, and read the sky for weather. But most of all, she knew how to talk to people, how to convince them of her vision for America. It was this rare skill that led her, in 1916, to become the first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives.

As her first act, Rankin introduced the legislation that would become the 19th Amendment. Throughout her two terms in 1916 and 1940, she continued to introduce and pass legislation benefitting unions, protecting workers, and increasing aid for children in poverty. In 1941, she stood tall as the sole anti-war voice in Congress during WWII, advocating for pacifism in the face of tragedy and stating that you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

A suffragist, feminist, peace activist, workers' rights advocate, progressive, and Republican, Rankin remained ever true to her beliefs—no matter the price she had to pay personally. Yet, despite the momentous steps she made for women in politics, overcoming the boys club of capitalists and career politicians who never wanted to see a woman in Congress, Jeannette Rankin’s story has been largely forgotten. In Winning the Earthquake, Lorissa Rinehart deftly uncovers the compelling history behind this singular American hero, bringing her story back to life

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was aware of Rankin as the lone voice against declaring war in 1941. My 1970s public school education in Austin taught me that fact in seventh grade; nothing positive was ever added to it in any class I ever took on History, on sociology, or any other discipline at any later stage of my education. This book, published fifty years after that initial mention of Rankin's name, is the first comprehensive biography of a very very important voice in US politics in the first half of the twentieth century. This proves a point Author Rinehart makes:

"Nowhere in her education or prolific reading had she learned that in 1848, three hundred women gathered in Seneca Falls to declare their sovereign right to the ballot. Nor had she heard that since then, women in every state of the nation had been fighting for their right to vote. To her even greater amazement, they had won it in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, all before the turn of the twentieth century. She and all American women seemed to have been purposefully denied knowledge of their own struggle for liberation."

My one cavil with this statement is the modifying presence of "seemed" since there is no better way to stop people from making change than to stop them from knowing about the changes that have already happened. If authoritarians do not want any changes either made again or expanded on, they simply erase the history that shows their way is not the only way from public discourse. Then the few places the awareness of the changes survives can be marginalized and shouted down.

Book banning is step one; book burning step two; reducing literacy overall is the final nail in the coffin the high-control society uses.

I was drawn in by the title of the book. It seemed so off-kilter, so self-evidently contradictory, that I wanted to know where it came from hence my desire to read a book about someone I knew nothing substantive about. It's from one of pacifist Rankin's well-known in her time sayings: "you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Millennia of corroborative evidence has had no appreciable effect on war's prevalence.

I was impressed by the depth of Author Rinehart's scholarship. Her extensive notes and citations were all very enlightening and well-chosen from my layman's point of view. There are widely varying sources cited so this tells me how very much work it was to find all the factual crumbs she did. One major shock, though honestly it shouldn't've been, was that the representative from Montana was elected as a Republican. I'm so steeped in the post-LBJ empire of evil that is the modern GOP that I've lost sight of the entire progressive history of the Republicans. Go read about Robert La Follette and Teddy Roosevelt. Time was these were the progressive leaders, not the soulless evil bastards in the McConnell/Bush/Cheney ilk or the wild-eyed reactionary MAGAts.

How likely is the present base, let alone "leadership", of the party to embrace a pacifist follower of Gandhi, a campaigner for the abolition of the Electoral College, and vehement supporter of unions? Growing up in Montana in the 1880s (when their representatives were called "the gentlemen from Anaconda," the state's largest employer and main economic driver), Rankin recognized the evils of untrammeled capitalism. She emulated Jane Addams in her work for the betterment of ordinary folks. Rankin was, in short, the best kind of radical there is, a radical believer in people and their power to do good...when left to do it.

A role model for today who is finally getting her scholarly due, I hope the sudden awareness of Gen Z that things in the US do not have to be this way will lead some of them to discover this spirit-parent from our country's past.

WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars, solid history of how women have always contributed everything they have

WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars
HELEN FRY
Yale University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the twentieth century onwards, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, they ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women’s vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running.

In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform. From spies in the Belgian network ‘La Dame Blanche’, knitting coded messages into jumpers, to those who interpreted aerial images and even ran entire sections, Fry shows just how crucial women were in the intelligence mission. Filled with hitherto unknown stories, Women in Intelligence places new research on record for the first time and showcases the inspirational contributions of these remarkable women.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Every machine has cogs. No machine moreso than the War Machine, and perhaps the total wars fought between 1914 and 1945 did more cog-making than any others in human history.

As men were perceived as more suitable to the killing parts of war than women, and as modern war is hugely more industrial than at any prior time, who did the admin? Who answered the phones, staffed the production lines, translated the intelligence intercepted in all the newfangled ways?

Women. Not that the men who mostly documented the wars, then wrote about the wars, ever gave them much credit for their work. Comme d'habitude. It does mean that there are tantalizing holes in the records. I hope generations of future scholars will feel the itch to fill them in.

This 2023 book set out to restore the women who worked in the ever-more-important field of military intelligence to their place in the historical record. Author Helen Fry had her finger on the pulse, a pulse that current powers-that-be are doing their best to still in every way possible. The crisis of the World Wars caused old attitudes about women, and society more broadly, to shift. These advances are what make the men (mostly, still men at the top) in charge so uneasy and eager to turn the clock back.

For my part I oppose this. After reading this chronicle of just how central women doing the work that needed doing, doing it well, and maintaining the everyday functioning of the world for the fighting men, you might just agree with me.

Reading the book is not always a joy...Author Fry's narrative voice is well-honed but not always euphonious in my reader's ear...but it's really the sources that let the reader down. Many aren't available, remaining "classified" for some variety of reason. Some were just never there in official records, needing tracking down and interpreting implied or obfuscated truths from elsewhere.

A fan of spy fiction would do well to look into how it was really done by those whose need of answers was pressing. A reader of women's history will find rabbit hole after rabbit hole. The resister of regression will find a pile of reasons not to give up, nor give in, to the regressive pressures on us all.

I want, perhaps naïvely, to believe there are enough of us unwilling to lose what we have all as a society gained to make that our reality.

ENEMY FEMINISMS: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, challenging and emotionally difficult read...necessary, too

ENEMY FEMINISMS: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
SOPHIE LEWIS
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we’ll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.

In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.

Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.

At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh dear. Another excellent, necessary message to everyone in the US lost to a wide audience. I'm in the choir and I still felt hectored, lectured at, and blamed personally by the author's tone.

I did not enjoy the experience.

I can't fault Author Lewis's collection of facts or her citations. Capitalist feminism is indeed a huge existential threat to women's rights. I'd say, however, that the Cult of Mother needed a much, much more savage pounding than capitalism receives. Apparently not one of the author's targets, though, in spite of being so ready to condemn the woman-controlling bodily autonomy denial of abortion restriction.

I question how effective the chapter against "girl-boss" glamorization really is. It's gendered, but is this not a case where celebrating the still-rare sight of women in control of their economic future, and the economy in general, not worth it? I don't think this is the threat to female equality it's presented as, but it's certainly made me consider the issue in a new light. Which, come down to it, is the great strength of this book and books like it, as well as the reason I give it four stars.

So it's style, not substance, that I find unwelcoming and unpleasant. That does not mean I didn't take a lot of positive information, and a hefty amount of psychic homework, away from the read. I found her challenging the hidden enemy in us all bracing and grounds for a lot of self-reflection. Ironic given my whinging about her tone, I know, but in a review for readers I'm not aiming for critical standards of an essay but information, and I hope a shove to get it and read it, for the laity.

OH NO THEY DIDN'T! REMARKABLE WOMEN: Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Amazing Women!, a juvenile book about women with power

OH NO THEY DIDN'T! REMARKABLE WOMEN: Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Amazing Women!
ERIC HUANG (illus. Sam Caldwell)
words & pictures/Quarto Group (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this myth-busting guide to remarkable women past and present, everything you think you know will be proven wrong!

Remarkable women have been at the forefront of history. They’ve changed the world and are leading the way to our future. But how much do you really know about the remarkable women who’ve shaped our world? We all know that. . .

Frida Kahlo made her name as a painter

Jane Austen wrote simple romance novels

Men pioneered scientific breakthroughs in the past

AND that ancient people only worshipped strong male gods. . .

Or did they. . . ? Because. . . OH NO THEY DIDN'T!

Misconceptions about women from the past and present are everywhere, but none of them are true! In Oh No They Didn't: Remarkable Women myths are busted about over 50 remarkable women from politicians to legends, performers, activists, scientists, mathematicians, creatives, and more.

In this fresh and funny guide learn about inspiring women from all over the world as well as their influence on history and popular culture. Stylishly designed and humorously illustrated by Sam Caldwell, Oh No They Didn't: Remarkable Women makes learning fun with unexpected facts and a playful, upbeat approach to non-fiction.

Oh No They Didn't: Remarkable Women is the perfect inspiring guide for ALL young people to learn about the influential women who may have been left out of traditional history books and deserve to be celebrated.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My mother was my introduction to the waste of potential, and the weight of prejudice, that has plagued women since patriarchy took over the globe. Her (probably sexually, certainly emotionally) abusive father convinced her she was unable to understand math, science, or any other "male" stuff. He forbade her to accept a scholarship to study journalism, another to study acting, because she should get a husband and have babies.

Sadly for her she obeyed, hated her life, and "raised" children whom she neglected and abused...and she wasn't alone. May books like this one teach girls especially, and the boys they'll make lives with too (on current trends compulsory heterosexuality is on the way back, which this book quietly resists), that biology ≠ destiny.

Where we're going; with whom we're going; and even here, note that Motherhood Comes First.

The statement of purpose is quite lively, colorful, and well-judged, IMO.

Okay, they're the universal mother archetypes; but really...?


More to my taste, these are the women engaged in the USE of power...a message we can not afford to skimp on giving to the young.

Lest those darker impulses feel shamed, here are the role models for being angry, and still getting shit done.

That's what the good people of the Quarto Group allow me to share with you in the way of illustrations. I think this subject, empowering girls and normalizing them having and using power, is one we are woefully poor at passing on...it's telling that, when adding this book to my database of books read, not one library of the dozen or so I searched had this book in its collection.

It's up to us, grands and aunts and mothers. We're (surprise, surprise, surprise! in your best Gomer Pyle mental voice) gettin' no help or support for this message from The PTB. This book is part of the Oh No They Didn't! series, and the author penned the mythbusting entry in this series on US Presidents, as well as Pride: A Seek-and-Find Celebration: Adventure Through the History of the Queer Community, aimed at the same age group. You'll clutch your pearls, I'm sure, when I tell you these aren't in my searched library databases, either.

Resist being shoved back into being subservient to a straight white man, and model it for all the youth.

THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom, opening a conversation Society needs to have

THE GOOD MOTHER MYTH: Unlearning Our Bad Ideas About How to Be a Good Mom
NANCY REDDY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom.

When Nancy Reddy had her first child she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Reddy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood "right" feel so wrong?

For answers Reddy turned to the mid-20th century social scientists and psychologists whose work still forms the basis of so much of what we believe about parenting. It seems ludicrous to imagine modern moms taking advice from mid-century researchers, yet their bad ideas about so-called “good” motherhood have seeped pervasively into our cultural norms. In The Good Mother Myth, Reddy debunks the flawed lab studies, sloppy research, and straightforward misogyny of researchers from Harry Harlow, who claimed to have discovered love by observing monkeys in his lab, to the famous Dr. Spock, whose bestselling parenting guide included just one illustration of a father interacting with his child. Blending history of science, cultural criticism, and memoir, The Good Mother Myth pulls back the curtain on the flawed social science behind our contemporary understanding of what makes a good mom.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Misogyny begins at home. You drink it in with your mother's milk. She is, after all, "just your mother." That phrase resounds in my brain as one of the most invidious, viprously poisonous idiocies that passes unquestioned from many a mouth.

The myth of Motherhood is exalted...pedestalized...and thus an extremely effective weapon in misogyny's arsenal of control. A woman, a human female, is reduced to her biological capacity for reproduction. It is an important function but not, as the Cult of the Mother makes it, a predestination and (not incidentally) a life sentence.

The author's struggles with the reality of being a mother versus the snake-oil sold to her by The Cult of Mother led her into paths of research done during my, and my generation's, childhoods. It was done by men. It was deeply embedded in capitalist norms then being solidified, codified, and imposed to create a Cult of Mother to support a culture of mothers without agency since that belonged to husbands and experts. Never mind that the sample sizes were uneven and the methodology unreliable, uncintrolled often enough; never mind that a lot of the research designs adopted were unethical. Hear the Word of Your Lord And Master, woman: feel this or be forever lacking, wanting in human feeling, LESS THAN.

It's a vicious self-springing trap for someone in a deep emotional, existential, physical crisis often enough exacerbated by sudden and/or acute depression. Author Reddy takes us through the orthodoxies of our youth, hers too, and parallels them with her own struggles.

What this book sets out to offer the reader is a footing to view the mountain of garbage "science" and the reeking cesspits of "how YOU should feel" liberally sprayed with "...but it's NATURAL" as though Nature isn't the one and only source of all the ills and plagues of Humanity's time on Earth. Yes, it is. We too are part of Nature, not apart from, above it.

Our actions are natural, they can not be otherwise because we live within the laws of nature.

I offer four stars to the read, not docked too far for its lack of rigor...her models for that failing are the great and good of the subject's past...or for its tooth-gritting tendency to repeat itself...see previous parenthetical...but in recognition of its undeniable attack from within the fortress by a victim of The Cult of Mother, therewith to offer aid and comfort to others who experience what she has.

That deserves all five stars. I can't honestly warble my fool lungs out about the execution. It's above average and it makes its case clearly if anecdotally. It is a read that spoke my truth to me, so I resonate to its vibes.

Women: Do NOT settle for becoming what your biology hands you. Decide for yourself who and what you want to be.

Signed, A Pissed-off Man.

THE DRAPER TOUCH: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper, beautiful book and wonderful story of a groundbreaking lady

THE DRAPER TOUCH: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper
CARLETON VARNEY
Shannongrove Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$100.00 hardcover, available now

Vale Carleton Varney. Little did I know, he died the day my review appeared.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A must have for those fascinated with the history of the interior design business as well as the history of New York City, where Draper lived and designed some of her most famous projects such as the Carlyle Hotel–Features personal and archival photographs by fashion and society photographers Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton and André Kertész whose images were published in the 1920s in Vogue magazine–Insightful texts are based on interviews with Draper's family, former staff of the company and the author's personal memories of Dorothy Draper who was referred to as the 'Duchess of Decorating'–Extensive appendices that include never-before-seen Draper documents

Designer and interior decorator Dorothy Draper's color-filled life story is one of high society, money, gossip, and throughout it all, reinvention. Carleton Varney has owned and directed Dorothy Draper & Company, Inc., for almost 60 years. He worked with Mrs. Draper at the end of her illustrious career, and wrote the only biography of her life, The Draper Touch: The High Life and High Style of Dorothy Draper, in 1988. In the book, Varney sets the scene and defines the milieu that Draper was born into in 1889 and from which she escaped to become one of America's leaders in design—a true visionary entrepreneur.

Thirty-three years later, Shannongrove Press is releasing this deluxe edition of The Draper Touch. With a new foreword by Varney, newly found photographs, recently discovered historical documents from a private collection, and archival ephemera from Draper's family, this beautiful tome reveals Draper's fascinating journey and the real stories behind her ground-breaking work.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Carleton Varney's name is now more recognizable than Mrs. Draper's is. At an earlier time, Mrs. Draper was IT in the world of fashionable design.

What mostly matters in looking at this book isn't familiarity with Mrs. Draper but an openness to learning about the essential skills of design and, frankly, all of life: Decide what you want and go get it. So simple! Except when it comes to doing it. Mrs. Draper was born with every material advantage a person could have. Her doom, in the ancient Celtic sense, was to be a frivolous ornament to a man's life. That might be what Society had in mind, but Mrs. Draper begged to differ, and when circumstances forced her hand she strode forward (a very, very tall person for any era, over six feet!) to meet the world on her own terms.

The design of this book is, unsurprisingly, the reason it exists. It's lush and luxurious. Dorothy Draper lived in a time before color photography was common...she died in 1969 at almost 80...so most of what we see isn't twenty-first century Technicolor Architectural Digest stuff that we're so accustomed to. But to counterbalance that, look at that list of famous early-twentieth-century photographers! These are beautiful images...though there are not a lot of room portraits, so get that out of your expectations early. Instead we have something more intimate, more revealing than the lady's public aesthetic: Portraits, snapshots, items that truly reflect Mrs. Draper herself, not only her work but her world.

You might well have read something of Carleton Varney's work before, being as he's a columnist and an author of long standing. His style is breezily companionable and approachable. He doesn't pull his focus to show Mrs. Draper, or her clients, only in soft lights...but he soft-pedals that drama that no doubt occurred all too often, without ever ignoring it. Big personalities make big enemies, after all, so pretending she was universally loved...well. It's not like Author Varney isn't offering a bouquet of vintage cabbage roses and a box of pâtisserie from Fauchon, he simply does so without dishonest concealment.

I saw this book and was instantly transported to my past. Mama was a Draper devotee, and I read her books...Decorating is Fun! and Entertaining is Fun!, now republished by Shannongrove (non-affiliate Amazon links)...when a teenaged faggot. How much they influenced my mother was very clear, I only had to look around our house to see the myriad Draper touches. I never had a white wall in my home! Although there was entirely too much pink for my taste, thanks to Draper...a color I still abominate.

This read was a delight, a way to re-experience pleasant formative memories, and a very informative look at the life of a rare woman of business, boss of many men, in an era when they were uncommon entities indeed.