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Rowena's Reviews
My true loves: Wilkie Collins, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anais Nin, George Eliot, James Joyce, James Baldwin, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, bell hooks, Chinua Achebe, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare... I'm falling for : Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Camus, Margaret Atwood, Somerset Maugham, Junot Diaz, A.S. Byatt... And the lists continue to grow! I will read almost anything, as long as it's well-written. I always love to expand my reading horizons.
I learned a lot from this book. The struggles that the female suffragettes went through were formidable, and it’s quite reminiscent of the current global climate where women are still fighting for their rights. Truly, I wonder why so many people are complacent about voting when it wasn’t so long ago that women and blacks weren’t even allowed to vote. With that being said, I was quite surprised by the number of women who displayed misogynistic tendencies themselves. I was also appalled by the anti-woman sentiments at that time. Rousseau (1762) shocked me with this line: "The woman is made specially to please the man.” A lot of people actually believed that learning in a woman was “unpleasing and unnecessary.” I would have laughed if it hadn’t been so tragic.
I did like the core message of the book which was “the only way to emancipate women was to end female dependency.”