Library Loot ~ February 5-11

The Housemaid's Daughter ~ by Barbara Mutch, 2012, fiction (South Africa)

Barbara Mutch's stunning first novel tells a story of love and duty colliding on the arid plains of Apartheid-era South Africa.  When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she does not love the man she is to marry there — her fiance Edward, whom she has not seen for five years.  Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter, Ada.  When Ada is born, Cathleen recognizes in her someone she can love and respond to in a way that she cannot with her own family.  Under Cathleen’s tutelage, Ada grows into an accomplished pianist and a reader who cannot resist turning the pages of the diary, discovering the secrets Cathleen sought to hide.  As they grow closer, Ada sees new possibilities in front of her — a new horizon.  But in one night, everything changes, and Cathleen comes home from a trip to find that Ada has disappeared, scorned by her own community.  Cathleen must make a choice:  Should she conform to society, or search for the girl who has become closer to her than her own daughter?

The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace ~ by Lynn Povich, 2012, memoir (USA)

It was the 1960s — a time of economic boom and social strife.  Young women poured into the workplace, but the “Help Wanted” ads were segregated by gender and office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination.  Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the “Swinging Sixties.”  Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well.  It was a top-notch job — for a girl — at an exciting place.  But it was a dead end.  Women researchers sometimes became reporters, rarely writers, and never editors.  Any aspiring female journalist was told, “If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else.”  On March 16, 1970, the day Newsweek published a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement entitled “Women in Revolt,” forty-six Newsweek women charged the magazine with discrimination in hiring and promotion.   It was the first female class action lawsuit — the first by women journalists — and it inspired other women in the media to quickly follow suit. Lynn Povich was one of the ringleaders.  With warmth, humor, and perspective, she shows how personal experiences and cultural shifts led a group of well-mannered, largely apolitical women, raised in the 1940s and 1950s, to challenge their bosses — and what happened after they did.  For many, filing the suit was a radicalizing act that empowered them to “find themselves” and fight back.  Others lost their way amid opportunities, pressures, discouragements, and hostilities they weren’t prepared to navigate.  The book also explores why changes in the law didn’t solve everything.  Through the lives of young female journalists at Newsweek today, Lynn Povich shows what has — and hasn’t — changed in the workplace.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Linda @ Silly Little Mischief that encourages us to name the books we checked out of the library.  Click here to see what others got this week.