Women's Rights ~ by Janet Stevenson, 1972

This is a little book (90 pages), but look what I found.

"According to Sir William Blackstone, the most widely respected writer on the British Common Law, a woman stopped being a separate individual -- a human being -- at the moment of her marriage.  She suffered civil death" (p. 27).

That's interesting. When I planned to continue my college education, as my new husband had agreed before we were married, he said, "You're my wife now." He felt he had the right -- NOW -- to say what I could do, what he would allow.  And he saw no reason for a woman to attend college.  Not all men thought that way, according to this quote about Angelina Grimke's marriage to Theodore Weld:

"Since both the bride and groom agreed on the unfairness of the law that would condemn Angelina to civil death at the moment she became Mrs. Weld, they had decided to do without the usual rituals. ... they spoke to each other the vows that each had decided to make. Such a marriage was legal under Pennsylvania law, but unless one of the witnesses was a magistrate it could not be registered and was of little use in any lawsuit involving property. ... Love and honor were among the things they promised each other. Obedience was not" (p. 42).

I have never included "and obey" in any of the marriages I have performed. I explain to the bride and groom when we are planning the ceremony that I would only say "and obey" if both of them agree to obey the other. So far, they have always laughed -- and no one has taken me up on it yet.

Battle for the Ballot
The 1848 meeting of women at Seneca Falls was a landmark for women's rights.  Yet it wasn't until 1920 (72 years later) that women finally got the right to vote in the United States.

"One -- only one! -- of the women who signed the document ['Declaration of Principles'] on that summer day in 1848 would live to vote for the President of the United States the first time it was legal to do so. That was Charlotte Woodward. Neither Lucretia Mott nor Elizabeth Cady Stanton would see that victory. Nor would the two other 'generals' of the battle for the ballot: Lucy Stone and Susan Anthony" (p. 50).

Women got the right to vote, but other legislation pushed women further away from equal rights with men.

"The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, designed to end discrimination against black Americans, wrote discrimination against American women more strongly than ever into the statute books. The word 'male,' which had never before appeared in the Constitution, was used not once, but three times!" (p. 52).

Do you feel my frustration? I rate this little book 7 of 10.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon ~ by Grace Lin, 2009

Grace Lin wrote and illustrated this book, so I'm going to give you some of both.  First, a taste of Grace Lin's writing:

"Every night the stars filled the sky like snowflakes falling on black stone and then melted away as the sun mounted" (p. 256).

China becomes a magical place as we follow a girl named Minli on a journey to change her family's fortune.  The opening words of the book show us an unappealing place.

"Far away from here, following the Jade River, there was once a black mountain that cut into the sky like a jagged piece of rough metal.  The villagers called it Fruitless Mountain because nothing grew on it and birds and animals did not rest there.  Crowded in the corner of where Fruitless Mountain and the Jade River met was a village that was a shade of faded brown.  This was because the land around the village was hard and poor" (p. 1).

Minli and her family are introduced on the next page.

"One of the houses in his village was so small that its wood boards, held together by the roof, made one think of a bunch of matches tied with a piece of twine.  Inside, there was barely enough room for three people to sit around the table -- which was lucky because only three people lived there.  One of them was a young girl called Minli" (p. 2).

And now I'll share a taste of the visual art Grace Lin gives us.  I discovered this sequence of images -- seeing the place become the sketch and then, when painted, the final illustration of the imperial garden (p. 134) -- at the Paper Tiger Blog.  There you can read an interview with Grace Lin, who shared her artistic process.

Grace Lin included stories within the bigger story. These are not chapters, but stories being told by someone Minli meets:

The Story of Fruitless Mountain (p. 4)
The Story of the Old Man of the Moon (p. 18)
The Story of the Dragon (p. 51)
The Story of the Goldfish Man (p. 62)
The Story of the Paper of Happiness (p. 81)
The Story of the Dragon Gate (p. 92)
The Story of the Buffalo Boy's Friend (p. 105)
The Unknown Part of the Story of the Old Man of the Moon (p. 136)
A String of Destiny (p. 147)
The Story the Girl Told the Green Tiger (p. 169)
The Story of the Village of the Moon Rain (p. 184)
The Story of the Green Tiger and the Tea (p. 195)
The Story of Da-A-Fu's Ancestors (p. 210)

(Da-Fu and A-Fu are twins; together they are called Da-A-Fu, much as we might say "the twins.")

The Story of the Dragon's Pearl (p. 225)
The Story of Wu Kang (p. 239)
The Story That Ma Told (p. 252)

My favorite picture (found on p. 279) is shown below.  Isn't it beautiful? You'll have to read the book to know what it depicts. My rating of the book is 9 of 10.

The Gate to Women's Country ~ by Sheri S. Tepper, 1988

As I read The War Against Women by Marilyn French (click the link/title to read my review of that book earlier today), I kept thinking women ought to run things rather than men.  Sheri Tepper had the same idea and wrote it into a story where "civilization has evolved into a dual society where walls enclose the peaceful women and keep the warrior men out, and yet there is a gate between them for those who dream."  The novel takes place many years after a nuclear war.  To prevent another world war, women have segregated most of the men into garrisons outside walled cities full of women and girls and little boys under five -- plus a few men who, at the age of 15, willing choose NOT to be warriors and come back to live with the women.  That's the setting.  I kept trying to think of all the reasons this arrangement could not possibly work, but Tepper developed a humdinger of a story showing how these people made it work.

For starters, what about sex?  The women had that figured out.  A couple of times a year they would have "carnivals" where men and women partied and had sex.  Everything was all pre-arranged, right down to private rooms for them to get together.  Of course, the young people found a way to talk to each other during the rest of the year, through a hole in the wall.  That was a connection of sorts, but basically they were strictly segregated, with women inside the city walls and men in garrisons outside the walls, where they practiced their skills as warriors.  The men sometimes sneered at or about women, like the warrior Michael who said,

"Warriors don't have daughters.  They may beget an occasional girl, my friend, but we don't have daughters.  You ought to know that!  No, you've got to use girls for what they're good for.  Forget daughters.  Stavia's nothing to me.  Or Myra, either.  Barten's courted Myra until she's eating out of his hand.  He's done well, Barten" (p. 69).

Ah, you may pick up on his tone here that he, and other men, think they are still in control.  Men in the garrison learned one thing, and learned it well -- how to fight.  On the other hand, women learned all sorts of things, except during carnival times.

"Except for these semiannual holidays, school went on year after year, all year around.  No matter how old they were, almost all the women in the city were studying something.  'After the convulsions,' Morgot said, 'a lot of knowledge was lost because people didn't know anything outside their own narrow areas, and the books  were gone.  Even if you're seventy, you should be learning something more in case it's needed'." (p. 74)

Stavia says, "I kept thinking, that was how it used to be, wasn't it?  Before the convulsions.  Before Women's Country, that's how it used to be for women.  To be shorn like sheep, and bred whether they wanted to or not, and beaten if they didn't..."  And part of Morgot's reply was:

"Some did shave heads.  Some allowed beatings.  Other cultures were quite advanced, at least in principle.  And we have to remember that many women did not resent their treatment because they'd been reared to expect it.  Of course, it was even worse than that for individual women or in certain places. ... When a woman's husband beat her, sometimes to death, it was called 'domestic violence'." (pp. 291-292)

This is a book I have continued to think about ever since I read it.  The Gate to Women's Country makes the reader think.  Therefore, I give it a rating of 8 out of 10.

The War Against Women ~ by Marilyn French, 1992

Although I took 16 pages of notes while reading this book, I will refrain from sharing all of that with you and quote only three small parts.  I hope you take the time to think about each of them.

"To understand the discrimination in state policies regarding reproduction, imagine a government forcibly sterilizing men or allowing their mothers or wives or sisters to lock them up, beat them, or castrate them for sexual behavior" (pp. 117-118).

"Military work is counted as a valuable contribution to society; raising children is not. ... And while states glorify soldiers who fight the wars, most of those killed in them are women and children" (p. 37).

"As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not.  The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women.  Beyond that, it is not necessary to beat up a woman to beat her down.  A man can simply refuse to hire women in well-paid jobs, extract as much or more work from women than men but pay them less, or treat women disrespectfully at work or at home.  He can fail to support a child he has engendered, demand the woman he lives with wait on him like a servant.  He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love, he can rape women, whether mate, acquaintance, or stranger; he can rape or sexually molest his daughters, nieces, stepchildren, or the children of a woman he claims to love.  The vast majority of men in the world do one or more of the above" (p. 182).

I checked this book out of my library at the same time I got Susan Faludi's book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), but read French's book first simply because it had fewer pages.  Backlash, at 552 pages, is a thick book.

Reading this book made me angry.   It riled me.  It made me dream of a society where women were in charge, rather than men.  And I found that someone else had already "dreamed up" such a society and had written it into a well-known book.   I got that book from my library and read it immediately after The War Against Women.  It was sort of an antidote for my frustrations and will be the next book I review.  Oh, you want to know which book that is?  The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper.  I'll come back here and provide a link as soon as I review that book.  (Done!  The link is live.)

Marilyn French's The War Against Women is a very important book, and I give it a rating of 8 out of 10.

The Breadwinner Trilogy ~ by Deborah Ellis

The Breadwinner (2001) is the first book in Deborah Ellis's trilogy about Afghanistan, which also includes Parvana's Journey (2002) and Mud City (2003).  I've been looking for books that show girls doing brave and exciting things, and the little girls in these three books are amazing.  They must pretend to be boys in order to make a living for their families -- because girls and women were forbidden by the Taliban to be out of their homes without a man or a boy to chaperone them.

The Breadwinner was exciting to read because I had never thought about what a family would do if there were no men or boys in it.  Parvana's brother was out of the picture before the story begins, and her father was taken away when men came to their house.  Eleven-year-old Parvana had accompanied her father when he went out to sell items on the streets, and her sister is too old to pose as a boy.  It feels really strange to Parvana to have her hair cut short and to be wearing her brother's old clothes, but she finds she is able to spread out her wares on a blanket, make sales, and buy food for the family.

"A few days later, Parvana was sitting watching the tea boys run back and forth between the customers and the tea shop.  One of the boys almost collided with a donkey.  Parvana was laughing and looking the other way when a tea boy tripped on something near her and spilled a tray of empty tea cups all over her blanket.  The boy sprawled in the dust in front of Parvana.  She helped him gather the cups that had rolled away.  She handed him the tray and saw his face for the first time.  She let out a gasp and slapped a hand across her face.  The tea boy was a girl from her class" (p. 94).

So their family wasn't the only one in need of a "boy" to go out and work.

Parvana's Journey, the second in the trilogy, continues the story, with Parvana searching for her missing family.  Other children, injured and orphaned, join with her as they all try to find food and avoid land mines.  She, still posing as a boy, takes care of a baby and leads the other children.  And all the while she is trying to make sense of her world.

"Parvana had given up trying to understand why the Taliban hated women.  There were other things to think about" (p. 12).

I don't know why they hate women, either, but these books clearly show how miserable the Taliban made life for the Afghan people.  Especially the children.

Mud City, the third book, is seen through the eyes of Shauzia, rather than Parvana.  Shauzia was the "tea boy" Parvana knew from school, the one who tripped in that quote above.  Shauzia's dream is to somehow get out of Afghanistan and go to France.  She has a folded picture of France that seems to her like the most wonderful place in the world.  When I think of the life she led as she tried to survive in Afghanistan, I can certainly see why any other place would see better.  France even had green fields!  Nothing was easy for the children described in these YA (young adult) books, as shown in this example from pages 45-46).

The day after that, her sandals fell apart. ... "How much for a pair of sandals," she asked.

The pedlar named a price.  It was more than Shauzia had in her pocket.

"I don't have enough."  She felt like crying.  Her bare feet burned.  She had to hop from one foot to the other.

The pedlar watched her for a moment, then rummaged in the bottom of his cart.  Finally he handed her several sandals that did not match.

"Try these," he said.  Shauzia tried them on until she found a sandal to fit each foot.  One was brown, and one was green.

"Why do you have all these sandals that don't match?" she asked.

"People with one leg need sandals, too," he replied.

The trilogy came out in a single volume in September 2009. Synopsis:  "Deborah Ellis’ trilogy has been a phenomenal success, both critically and commercially. Now young readers can experience this entire epic story in one volume. The Breadwinner is set in Afghanistan, where 11-year-old Parvana lives with her family in a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul. When her father is arrested for the crime of having a foreign education, the family is left with no money or resources. Forbidden to earn money as a girl, Parvana must transform herself into a boy and become the breadwinner. In Parvana's Journey, her father has died and the family has scattered. Parvana, now 13 years old, is determined to find them. Again masquerading as a boy, she joins a group of wandering children, all refugees from war, who exist mainly on courage. In Mud City, the focus shifts to 14-year-old Shauzia, who lives in the Widows' Compound in Pakistan and dreams of escaping to a new life in France. Deborah Ellis uses simple, compelling language, memorable characters, and a wealth of imaginative detail in this wrenching look at the human cost of war that is also a surprisingly hopeful story of survival."

I highly recommend these books, though I enjoyed the first one the most, probably because the family had to figure out a way to get food, even with no man in their household. All get my best ratings, however: The Breadwinner, 10 of 10; Parvana's Journey, 9 of 10; and Mud City, 9 of 10.

Mongol Queens ~ a teaser

Today's teaser is from The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire ~ by Jack Weatherford, 2010 (pages 30-31):

As part of the wedding ceremony, a Mongol bride stood in front of her new ger [tent] and put on the boqta, the tall headgear of a queen. She also put on all her jewelry. Before entering the ger, she walked between two large fires that sanctified her so that she might enter her marriage in the purest possible state. The marriage happened without much ceremony, but for eight days afterward, people brought presents to the couple.  On the eighth day, the family would host a grand feast. ...

The husband had to have a place prepared for his new wife. In one episode in which a khan brought in a new queen for whom he had not yet prepared a home, he sought to bring her to the ger of his senior wife. Out of hospitality for the younger woman, the elder queen did not at first object and she went to sleep, apparently without suspecting that the couple might try to consummate the marriage at that time.

However, during the night the khan became amorous with his bride. The older queen, sleeping nearby, awoke. "How shall I watch you two enjoying each other in bed?" she angrily asked them.

Although it was night, the senior queen ordered them out. "Leave my ger!" Since there was no other ger in the vicinity, the khan and his younger wife had to spend the night outside in the open. The next day, the khan was able to make arrangements to move the young queen in with some of his relatives until he could prepare her a place of her own. In the ger, the wife ruled even if her husband happened to be a khan [king].

The Diaries of Eve and Adam

What if Adam had recorded his days in a diary?  What if Eve kept a diary, too?  What do you think they would have written?  What if Mark Twain got hold of the original manuscripts (or carved rocks?) and "translated" them for us?

I have just completed reading facsimile editions of Extracts from Adam's Diary (1904) and Eve's Diary (1906), each of which has the same subtitle:  "Translated from the original MS."  These are the funniest Mark Twain books I have ever read.  To begin with, Adam isn't too sure what he thinks of the "new" creature that we know as Eve.

Tuesday
"The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest.  And always that same pretext is offered -- it looks like the thing.  There is the dodo, for instance.  Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it 'looks like a dodo.'  It will have to keep that name, no doubt.  It wearies me to fret about it, and it does no good, anyway.  Dodo!  It looks no more like a dodo than I do" (p. 5).

Saturday
"She fell in the pond yesterday, when she was looking at herself in it, which she is always doing.  She nearly strangled, and said it was most uncomfortable.  This made her sorry for the creatures which live in there, which she calls fish, for she continues to fasten names on to things that don't need them and don't come when they are called by them, which is a matter of no consequence to her, as she is such a numskull anyway; so she got a lot of them out and brought them in last night and put them in my bed to keep warm, but I have noticed them now and then all day, and I don't see that they are any happier than they were before, only quieter" (p. 33).

After reading Adam's diary, I imagine this cartoonist has the right idea.  Adam, after all, says right there in his diary that fastening names on the animals is all about the animals coming when they are called by those names, right?  Then THIS makes perfect sense:

Here's Adam's idea of appropriate work for the woman and for himself:

Wednesday
"Another thing, she says it is ordered that we work for our living hereafter. She will be useful. I will superintend" (p. 49).

Adam was not around when their first child was born, so it's interesting to see him trying to figure out what "it" is:

Next Year
"We have named it Cain.  She caught it while I was up country trapping on the North Shore of the Erie; caught it in the timber a couple of miles from our dug-out -- or it might have been four, she isn't certain which.  It resembles us in some ways, and may be a relation.  That is what she thinks, but this is an error, in my judgment.  The difference in size warrants the conclusion that it is a different and new kind of animal -- a fish, perhaps, though when I put it in the water to see, it sank, and she plunged in and snatched it out before there was opportunity for the experiment to determine the matter.  I still think it is a fish, but she is indifferent about what it is, and will not let me have it to try" (p. 55).

Three Months Later
"The short front legs and long hind ones indicate that it is of the kangaroo family, but it is a marked variation of the species, since the true kangaroo hops, whereas this one never does" (p. 65).

Poor Adam.  Life was so confusing to him.  Decades ago I ran across a slogan that tickled my funny bone -- and seems entirely appropriate here:  "Adam was a rough draft."  Eve's diary shows us her curiousity and industriousness.  Here's a long quote that comes from pages 51, 53, 55, 57 -- every left page has drawings, and every right page has words.

"I laid a dry stick on the ground and tried to bore a hole in it with another one, in order to carry out a scheme that I had, and soon I got an awful fright.  A thin, transparent, bluish film rose out of the hole, and I dropped everything and ran!  I thought it was a spirit and I was so frightened!  But I looked back, and it was not coming; so I leaned against a rock and rested and panted, and let my limbs go on trembling until they got steady again; then I crept warily back, alert, watching, and ready to fly if there was occasion; and when I was come near, I parted the branches of a rose-bush and peeped through ... but the sprite was gone.  I went there, and there was a pinch of delicate pink dust in the hole.  I put my finger in, to feel it, and said ouch! and took it out again.  It was a cruel pain. ...

I was curious to know what the pink dust was.  Suddenly the name of it occurred to me, though I had never heard of it before.  It was fire!  I was as certain of it as a person could be of anything in the world.  So without hesitation I named it that -- fire.

I had created something that didn't exist before; I had added a new thing to the world's uncountable properties; I realized this, and was proud of my achievement, and was going to run and find him and tell him about it, thinking to raise myself in his esteem -- but I reflected, and did not do it.  No -- he would not care for it.  He would ask what it was good for, and what could I answer?  For if it was not good for something, but only beautiful, merely beautiful --

So I sighed, and did not go.  For it wasn't good for anything; it could not build a shack, it could not improve melons, it could not hurry a fruit crop; it was useless; it was a foolishness and a vanity; he would despise it and say cutting words.  But to me it was not despicable; I said, "Oh, you fire, I love you, you dainty pink creature, for you are beautiful -- and that is enough!" and was going to gather it to my breast.  But refrained."

Eve discovered fire?  Why not?

I rate both Extracts from Adam's Diary and Eve's Diary 8 of 10.