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    A Short History of Women: A Novel
    A Short History of Women: A Novel
    A Short History of Women: A Novel
    Ebook274 pages4 hours

    A Short History of Women: A Novel

    By Kate Walbert

    3.5/5

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    NOMINATED FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

    A 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).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJun 16, 2009
    ISBN9781439100547
    A Short History of Women: A Novel
    Author

    Kate Walbert

    Kate Walbert is the author of seven works of fiction: She Was Like That, longlisted for the Story Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; His Favorites, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year; The Sunken Cathedral; A Short History of Women, a New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a National Book Award finalist; The Gardens of Kyoto; and the story collection Where She Went. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize stories. She lives with her family in New York City.  

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    Reviews for A Short History of Women

    3.5/5

    173 ratings31 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Following a cast of characters throughout different time periods is an ambitious task, and I'm not entirely sure that Kate Walbert in her new novel, Short History of Women, entirely accomplishes all that she sets out to do. This book introduces four generations of women who seek to explore, what the Victorians called, "The Woman Question." (In other words, they are trying to figure out women's place in society.) Since I teach women's literature, I was really interested in this book; however, I found most of the character development too rushed -- the end result a cast of cardboard characters. Still, the history is interesting, and anyone who is likes women's history and feminism will find this an entertaining and light read.
    • 3/5
      Here's another book marketed as a novel that is actually a collection of linked stories or a novel in stories. The book addresses the struggles of women over the last century, and how conflicted and unsatisfied women are today despite the struggles of their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers. Although Walbert's writing is impressive and I enjoyed the stories each on their own, the way in which they were linked fell flat. The stories jump back and forth between characters, setting and time in a confusing way.
    • 5/5
      This is a superb piece of writing. A book to be savored. Contained within a mere 237 pages is a family saga that jumps back and forth through time like the work of Proust, with a style that recalls Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse". The family springs from Dorothy Trevor Townsend, who starves herself to death to call attention to women's suffrage in 1914. The story is told through her eyes, and through those of her descendants, restless, questing women all, up to the present day. The book raises a lot of questions regarding the place of women in society, using Florence Nightingale as a touchstone. These women seem to feel like outsiders in a society in which they comprise a slight majority. They rebel, as Nightingale did, against being "a continuation", but nevertheless continue in the rebellious path of their matriarch, Dorothy. I have to say though, that these restless, disconnected feelings aren't the province of women alone. Anyone who's lived the human condition should be able to relate.
    • 3/5
      Given the rave reviews I'd seen, I think I was expecting something other than I found. The figures are interesting, and I particularly liked the immersion in the London suffragette movement, but the characterization didn't really allow much engagement or emotional involvement on my part.
    • 3/5
      A complicated tapestry tracking generations of women, each trying to discover themselves and what each believes worth fighting for. I really enjoy the story, but having listened to the audiobook there were moments when the changing narrators were hard to follow. I'd recommend reading rather than listening.
    • 4/5
      THe complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, chronicling five generations of women from the close of the niniteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first.The novel opens in England in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsendm, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause. Her chosice echoes in the stories of her descendants interwoven throughout.
    • 4/5
      "A Short History of Women" goes back and forth in time between the stories of five generations of women. Each woman's individual story is shaped by the life of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist who starved herself to bring attention to her cause. The novel juxtaposes pieces of Dorothy's life with glimpses of her children's, their children's, etc. The result is a view of what it is to be a woman, from 1898 all the way through 2007.The first few chapters of the novel felt somewhat too intellectual and dense. However, after that, the novel became more and more compelling. It was particularly fascinating to learn about Dorothy's life in bits and pieces throughout the novel, and to see how her decision impacted generations of her family and the choices that they made. The characters were delightfully human, and the author's use of language is what makes the novel flow so beautifully. She is able to use words to elicit feelings of sadness as well as to achieve biting sarcasm. This is a book that will utterly absorb you until the final page; I was excited to see that the author has other books as I'd love to read more of her work.
    • 1/5
      This book is way to literary and intellectual for me. I only got a few pages in and I was lost.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written, a little slight, had much less interest in the more modern chapters. Still and all, lovely book
    • 3/5
      There's just something about this author that doesn't quite connect with me. This is the second book of hers I've read after hearing absolute raves from other readers that I trust. And this book especially covers a topic that I love (women's suffrage). But unfortunately doesn't actually talk about that much, other than one of the characters being involved in it. With such similar names between characters, I kept having to go back to the family tree and figure out who I was reading about, so that was really confusing for me. The writing is really beautiful and well done, and I felt like the author knew her characters really well. However, I just didn't feel that she lets the reader know the characters as well as she does. There's just some kind of disconnect for me, and it may be just as much my fault as the authors (or more!!).
    • 3/5
      Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women took me a long time to finish. I enjoyed the first chapter and hit a wall in the second, a recurring problem throughout the book. The characters and their stories seemed compelling and interesting, but the writing style and uneven, often terse chapters alienated and frustrated me as I struggled to understand and connect with the story. Despite the genealogy chart and chapter dates, I still found it difficult to distinguish which woman's story I was reading. There were several moments of beauty and truth that I enjoyed in this novel, but there were many more that made me consider giving up. The author's writing style, particularly when a character is talking, is filled with hyphens, fragments, starts, stops and questions, leaving this reader wishing for a translator or cliff notes. In short, this promising novel did not work for me.
    • 2/5
      Eh. I'd read some great reviews of this, but I just couldn't get into it. Too disjointed. It traces the paths of 3 or 4 different women along the same genealogical line, great-grandmother down to great-granddaughter. It keeps jumping back and forth, without substantially different voices for the different women, and in the end I just felt sort of disconnected and bored with the whole thing.

    • 3/5
      Oh, this is so bad of me. I received this through the Early Reviewer program. It sounded like something I would really like, but I've tried reading it three times and I guess I'm just not in the right mood or frame of mind for it right now. I feel bad for not finishing an Early Reviewer book. But I just couldn't get through it. Really no reflection on the book itself other than it didn't grasp me enough to pull me in. I'll give it some time and hopefully come back to it.
    • 3/5
      "A Short History of Women" looks at five generations of women, starting in the late 1800s and ending in almost present day. The complex narrative uses multiple voices to tell the story of suffragist Dorothy Townsend and her subsequent generations. It's a look not only at the unending affect that one women, or person, can have on future generations, but also at the role women play in society and how that role has evolved over the years. The idea is great, but I found it hard to connect with the women. The writing and the plot have good intentions, but a book is at its best when the reader is concerned about what happens to the characters they are reading about and, for me, this book never reached that final plain. Still an interesting read.
    • 3/5
      When I am engaged in a book, I come back to it whenever I can, whether I have an hour or ten minutes. This book became "take or leave." My main concern was that I would go for days and not even think of reading this book. When I read, I checked back to the family tree inside the front cover frequently. The characters seemed flat and gray, yet there were moments of lyric beauty in Walbert's writing. But the overall sporadic telling of the story and how five generations connected to the original suffragette remained unclear much of the time.
    • 3/5
      An interesting look into several generations of women within one family. It starts with a woman in the 1920’s who starves herself for women’s suffrage leaving behind 2 children in the process. It goes on to tell each generation’s story. I just didn’t feel much connection with any of the characters because she skipped from generation to generation. Overall it was an interesting look at each generation’s issues, but the characters themselves didn’t have enough depth.
    • 4/5
      I think I would have liked this book better is I'd known what the message was supposed to be. That successive generations are bound by an ancestor's acts, either to repeat it or react against it? Or the opposite, as seems to be what happens here: just because your mother/grandmother/great-grandmother/great-great-grandmother (as we move through the generations) starved herself in the name of suffrage, that has absolutely no bearing on your own tendency toward activism. As vignettes of the lives of 5 individual women, these stories are good, compellingly written, and all that. As a thesis, this book doesn't quite hold together.
    • 3/5
      A good book. Parts of this book I thought were extremely accurate, a really good, understated exploration of what it is to be a woman in the world.

      This book does have that problem that all books with multiples in characters have, which is that I always like one character's story more than others, so I hate to leave one chapter and start the next.

      Another personal irritation that should not put anyone off from reading this book: maybe it's because I just read "The All of It", but I can't help noticing that Walbert uses the phrase "the all of it" or "the all of [insert item here]" many many many times. At some point I felt she was overusing it.
    • 3/5
      When I requested A Short History of Women through LTER, it looked promising. Interesting subject, generational women’s story, changing voice, social history - all right up my alley. I had tried to read one of Kate Walbert’s earlier books, Our Kind, but couldn’t get through it but that could’ve been a fluke and maybe this book would lead me back there. Oh well. In looking through my notes, I’m not even sure what to say about it. Uneven comes to mind. The story begins in 1914 England with a suffragette starving herself for the cause and continues through subsequent generations of female family members. The story moves back and forth through time and characters, explaining actions and reactions. Truly, I liked it and I didn’t like it. There were chapters I loved and others I hated, where I just couldn’t seem to catch the rhythm. Three quarters of the way through, I began to lose patience and just wanted to finish it and move on. I hate to be so wishy-washy, but I may have enjoyed this more at a different time. Sadly, somewhere lost in this book was a story I really would have enjoyed reading had the author not been trying quite so hard. Perhaps I just don’t like her style. A more patient reader may find it to be more worthwhile.
    • 3/5
      Soon, they'll put Evelyn's mum on a postage stamp. Dorothy Trevor Townsend died for the cause. Suffrage. She wanted to Do Something.Always took things too far, said Grandmother. Grandmother is dead now, Thomas, Evelyn's brother is living with friends in America. Evelyn was sent off to school to be safe from the war. The war is over, and her friends have mostly scattered.Gone home. Safe at home once again. Evelyn isn't sure what is next for her... Women did get the vote, and that is Something. Women can now attend college and become whatever they want, even doctors or professors. Dorothy Townsend Barret, Daughter of Thomas who went to America.She has three grown children, Caroline, Liz and James. James died. Hehad wondered what comes next. His mother told him nothing, nothing comes next. He hoped she was wrong. Dorothy wanted to Do Something. She protests that some places are off limits to the public, and she blogs. Her Lawyer daughter Caroline is at wits end. She reads her mothers blog and fumes. Caroline's daughter Dora is at college and calls herself a revolutionary. She reads Sylvia Plath. She admires her grandmother, who died in order to Do Something.Liz Anne Barrett. She and her family, Suzanne and the twins live uptown, and Liz spins clay.She pumps her breasts, and uses formula, or the nanny does. Liz is very modern. She schedules play dates and keeps an anxiety journal, or means to. She remains alert. These are women who Do Something. What they find hard to do is to connect with each other. A broken family, the glue missing.
    • 4/5
      This book follows several generations of the women in one family beginning at the start of the twentieth century and tracking to modern day. Each woman serves to reflect both the major political and social events of her time and the more quiet issues of the day, and in a very interesting way illustrates both how much has changed in the world--particularly for women--in the last century and a bit, and also how many things have stayed the same. We protest different things in the twenty-first century, at least on the surface--but how different are they really? And in many cases it seems as if people are listening even less than they used to. This is a thought provoking novel, and my first instinct is to say that I enjoyed it very much, despite a few detracting factors--one of which how very one-sided the point of view was. These women are upper or upper-middle class, white, educated, etc. Even in the middle of a war, they find the means to get to university. They are a product of the Western world. So while I enjoyed their story, I have to say that the title feels insufficiently general and implies a much broader scope than is actually presented in the book. That aside, however, I suspect I will continue to think about the ideas that are presented for quite a while to come.
    • 3/5
      I confess I read it out of order so I wouldn't lose track of the character's lives, but enjoyed the interlinking of the women in this family. I've always thought it a shame that generations cannot relate with each other because of their differences in age.
    • 2/5
      A Short History of Women was one of the ten best books of the year, according to The New York Times. It’s easy to see how this story of five generations of women, all dealing with quintessential “women’s issues” through five generations of the same family, might impress with its postmodern techniques of jumping through time from 1914 to 2003 to 1898 back to 1914; changing viewpoint and even voice with each section; and reproducing blogs and Facebook pages. I, however, found the book cold and uninvolving, with characters about whom I cared not at all and no real plot. As a fictional treatise on the history of women, it has some merit, but as a novel I found it wanting.The book begins with the death of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, an Englishwoman who starves herself to promote the cause of women’s suffrage. She leaves behind two young children, a girl and a boy, who are split up between relatives and never see one another again. Why this first Dorothy – there are a few others as the years go by – takes it into her head to abandon her family is never adequately explored, though we are told that she gave her body because she had nothing else to give. But no one seems to pay much attention to her sacrifice, and there is no evidence that it had any effect on Parliament’s decision, finally, to grant women the right to vote.It certainly had an effect on her children, however – and her grandchildren, it seems, and down through the ages. Her daughter, Evelyn, is the only character who is in the least likeable, and that is probably because she tells her story in the first person, the only character in the book to do so. Evelyn lives a life different in almost every way from what was expected of women in her era, probably another reason she is at all appealing. But she is the type of woman who holds others at arm’s length, and her lack of close emotional attachments makes her life seem to pass too lightly. In fact, under the circumstances described in the book, she would have been a truly revolutionary figure, but we see little of that.The women in later generations are stereotypes of contemporary women of different ages. Dorothy Townsend Barrett is a member of the generation that gave rise to the Baby Boom, a woman who married just after the end of World War II and promptly had two children, just as she was supposed to according to the mores of the time. Somewhat later, a third child comes along unexpectedly, and Walbert writes of this woman in 2007 taking her daughter on a play date and winding up having a play date of her own with the other girl’s mother. Walbert presents a picture of modern women as anxious, helicopter parents who have little emotional attachment to their children, but are eager to see that those children get the proper type of everything, from the right schools to the proper toys.A Short History of Women appears intended to hold up a mirror to who we are and where we came from. But if modern women are really as emotionally bereft as the women in this book, we are missing out on a great deal of life. Ultimately, I found this book to be deadening in its portrayal of women supposedly attempting to find their own voices and to make sense of their lives; nothing at all seems to make sense to them, or fundamentally to matter to them. There is no emotion expressed in any way except obliquely, impliedly, no love of mother for child or woman for man. Walbert seems to be saying that women cannot know who they are unless they abjure all connections to anyone but themselves. It makes for a grim, cold and depressing reading experience.
    • 2/5
      I wanted to love this book and I was disappointed. The writing style is choppy. I had to keep going back to the family tree to figure out which character each chapter was about. I found none of these women very intriguing. I wish I were in a book group; I think a discussion might help me to appreciate this novel.
    • 4/5
      A really wonderful book, beautifully written, tells the story of family generations of women, beginning with a suffragette who starves herself for the cause. Less than 5 stars because it ended too soon.
    • 5/5
      This should be required reading for anyone with an interest in women’s history/studies/literature. A Short History of Women follows five generations of women, the descendants of a fictional suffragette, Dorothy Townsend who starved herself to death for her cause. The novel traces how her legacy echoes in the lives of the future generations of women in her family despite their wide range of personal choices and experiences. Walbert is a master of powerful restraint. She is simultaneously subtle and direct, wry and heartbreaking, brave and tender. This allows her to reflect on topics that people have been discussing for ages (i.e. “The Woman Question”, women’s rights, women’s voices, etc.) while avoiding the pitfalls of common clichés. I don’t necessarily see Walbert bringing new ideas to the table, but she has touchingly shown that while (most) women’s rights have been won and the women’s movement has withered, women are still asking themselves – and each other – the same questions. “They were always waiting, waiting to hear, respectfully listening. Who are we? they wanted to know. Tell us, who? And what should we do next?”I found one review by a man who read the book based on his wife’s recommendation. He said he simply couldn’t connect with the characters, didn’t understand their experiences, and his wife said he just couldn’t understand women’s experience in a male-dominated society. I think that’s a load of crap. Walbert expertly demonstrates that the collective experience of women that has transcended time and various realities is the search to fill some common void. These women are all trying to become this person they’ve never met and couldn’t possibly know, they have something to say but can’t find the words, they just want to do something, but what? “What we want is something to do, something to live for.” Who can’t relate to that?My favorite character was Dorothy’s niece, who in her mid-70’s rediscovers Florence Nightingale, creates a personal rebellion and starts searching for her own voice. And when she finds it, she speaks loudly: “Why Florence Nightingale? Because she was, first and foremost, BRAVE. She made a different life. She got blood on her hands. She did not accept what she could not abide. When she finally understood that her bonds were made of straw, she broke them, or bent them, or whatever you'd do to straw.” … “And we have such a road ahead! It is only at the brink of death that we are truly present for our life. And isn't that an outrage?”
    • 3/5
      This isn't an easy read. The voices jump from generation to generation, character to character, back and forth. I kept getting confused and had to flip back to the generational chart at the beginning of the book to keep things straight. It is, however, an intriguing read. It poses several questions that would make good book club discussions. Do we ever really know the story behind our family stories? Do we ever really know our parents and grandparents? Can an act five generations old still have implications down the generational line? Did winning the vote really change anything for us, as women? This is a good book to open the floor for many spirited discussions about family, about legacies, about history.
    • 1/5
      This book is just all over the place between characters and time periods. I don't like the style of writing which is all over the place as well. Couldn't keep up. Gave up.
    • 3/5
      A fictional "history" of women in one family, from the early British suffragist to the modern American college student. Although the issues the women grapple with through the generations ring true, because the "history" is short there is not space for depth or resolution. A fast read with interesting character sketches.
    • 3/5
      So far all I know is that a girl or boys "mum" is in the hospital. Him or her are also there they say in the book that the mom "mum" has starved herself half to death. So that is why she is in the hospital. The grandmother has stated that the mom "mum" is "To smart to be stupid". Yet I clearly don't get that statement. I understand where the grandmother is coming from saying you are to smart to be dumb,but I don't fully understand the statement maybe further into the book I will understand.

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    A Short History of Women - Kate Walbert

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