The Birth House, Ami McKay

Ami McKay opens her website with quotes like "Arrange whatever pieces come your way" from Virginia Wolf. For that reason alone you should treat yourself with a visit to her blog/website/musings, so I wasn't at all surprised by the tone of the reviews of her first book.

Her highly acclaimed book The Birth House is a fictional account of a woman McKay really wanted to know more about - but couldn't find any real information. McKay and her partner had bought the house of the local midwife from 50 years previously. The woman, childless until she adopted her daughter, had opened this house to local women who needed a place to give birth, and it all spoken to Ami. She became enthralled with the history of the area and the subject. Ami's attempts to find out more about her muse revealed little, so she created this historical fiction story to breathe life back into a story that was waiting to be found.

The Quill and Quire biography of the author Ami McKay describes someone who could be your best friend. Just your everyday gal from Indiana, who moves to New Brunswick Canada. When she hears the voice of the long dead owner of the house, Ami sets out to research the lives and careers of midwives, and then recreates a life story of the woman in whose house she is living.

Illana Stranger Ross calls this book "midwitchery" - "A midwife's magic which once would have been called witchcraft."

Amazon readers seemed to find the book an easy read, recommended it, and were looking forward to her next books. They commented that the book did a good job of depicting small town New Brunswick life and revealing the trade of midwifery. Lots of readers had also read "The Midwives Tale" and felt The Birth House was easier to read, but still emotional. The biggest complaint was the lack of depth of the characters, but most said the novel was a good first book, and described the author as possessing lots of potential.

Interestingly, after reading several blogs about this novel, I am quite struck at the number of book blogs that seemed to have picked up Ami McKay and run with it. As opposed to many of the other books in this bookclub, where I found many "official" reviews (NY Times, etc.) this book seemed to really flourish outside the usual publishing networks and within the grassroots movement. Here is an example "Amelia's Passion" wrote about McKay's book:

With The Birth House, Ami McKay has invited us into a place where the tides of change are slowly rolling in, inevitably altering long-held traditions to new methods of living by those who felt that modern vs. traditional birthing methods would be better.

Click here for Book Club potential questions - (provided by Ami McKay's website)

The Body Project

This book will be discussed by the local group on April 30th at 7:00 p.m. at Joseph Beth Booksellers.

According to the official website for The Body Project this book provides a detailed pictoral history of adolescent girls' development over the last 100 years. According to critics, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has captured the essential issues of body image and maturation and the external and internal pressures that girls encounter and have encountered over the ages.

Janell Lynn Mensinger wrote:

(Brumberg's) goal is "to initiate a multigenerational dialogue that speaks to the reality of earlier maturation, the need for sexual expression, and the nature of contemporary culture" (p. 209). More specifically, her wish is that The Body Project will generate discussions leading to the eventual creation of a new sexual ethics in hopes to eradicate our culture's condoning of the rapacious treatment of women's bodies.

Salon critic, Michelle Goldberg was not as overwhelmingly positive though she felt the book was a welcome addition to the debate about teenage sexuality and development. Goldberg thought Brumberg idealized mother-daughter relationships in the Victorian era, and was a bit too nostalgic for the good old "repressive" Victorian days...

Brumberg has such a romantic notion of the mother-daughter bond of previous decades that she seems totally oblivious to the hatreds and resentments that can make those relationships so stifling. Just because complaints about parents didn't surface in many Victorian diaries doesn't mean that everything was cozy.

Random House Books posts author Brumberg's synopsis of the book:

Girls today grow up believing that "good looks"--rather than "good works"--are the highest form of female perfection...creating a degree of self-consciousness and dissatisfaction that is pervasive and dangerous, leading to the social and emotional problems identified by Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher, and Peggy Orenstein.

Among her many scholarly works, Brumberg has also written Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa. The Body Project website also has an extensive list of resources for and about adolescent girl development.

Book club member Lisa submitted this video link as more information on this topic:
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=206&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html and asked in her comment - "have we really come a long way, baby?"

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath, under the pen name Victoria Lucas, published this, her only novel in 1963 and a few years later, a despondent and broken woman, Sylvia Plath killed herself in her London apartment by asphyxiation. The story and the tragedy speaks to my heart for the many women who suffer from a major depressive disorder and can't find a lifeline to save themselves from utter despair.

Wikipedia provided this description of the overlap between reality and fiction:

"The book contains many references to real people and events in Plath's life. Plath's real-life magazine scholarship was at Mademoiselle magazine beginning in 1953.[1] Furthermore, Philomena Guinea is based on Plath's own patron, Olive Higgins Prouty, author of Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager, who funded Plath's scholarship to study at Smith College. Plath was rejected from a Harvard course taught by Frank O'Connor.[2] Dr. Nolan is thought to be based on Plath's own therapist, Ruth Beuscher, whom she continued seeing into adulthood. A good portion of this part of the novel closely resembles the experiences chronicled by Mary Jane Ward in her autobiographical novel The Snake Pit; Plath later stated that she'd seen reviews of The Snake Pit and believed the public wanted to see "mental health stuff," so she deliberately based details of Esther's hospitalization on the procedures and methods outlined in Ward's book. Plath was actually a patient at McLean Hospital, an upscale facility which resembled the "snake pit" much less than certain wards in Metropolitan State Hospital, which may have been where Mary Jane Ward was actually incarcerated."

In searching for "blog material" I found an interesting NY Times Book Review of Sylvia Plath's husband's work, Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. This work, reportedly a collection of poetry written about their relationship, and over a long period of time, provoked a rather skeptical review from Katha Pollitt. She does not see Britian's poet laureate and accomplished author as the doting lover that he espouses, as she reviews his book of poetry about his perception of his relationship with Sylvia Plath she muses he might be trying to correct history. Pollitt suggests Hughes didn't really deliver the rose garden that he promised to Plath and that Birthday Letters might be as far from a work of reality as The Bell Jar is a work of fiction.

And, as a footnote, Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Plath and Ted Hughes is herself an accomplished writer, painter and after years of trying to avoid it, a poet.

Discussion group questions are suggested at: ReadingGroupGuides.com

The Girls Who Went Away - Questions

Suggested DISCUSSION QUESTIONS from Penguin Reading Group:

A couple of women the author interviewed explain the difference in grieving for a child that was taken and grieving for a child that died. Explore and discuss the two scenarios. How are they different? How are they similar?

What recollections do you have of girls who became pregnant before marriage, whether or not they were sent away?

Several of the interviewees recall maternity home staff using mind-control techniques (assigning pseudonyms, isolating “clients,” etc.). What are some other examples of how psychology and coercion were used with these young girls?

Are teenage girls today more likely to stand up and make decisions for themselves? If so, what is the source of this empowerment?

Discuss how public schools in the ’50s and ’60s handled sex education. How has this changed today? In your opinion, is there too much, or not enough, of a focus on sex education in schools? How has the Internet affected access to information about sex and sexuality?

Was there a particular interviewee with whom you felt closest (similar education background, socioeconomic status, family makeup, etc.)? What was it about her story that you most identified with?

Discuss how reliable paternity testing has changed how we look at premarital pregnancies. Is there still a sense of “boys will be boys”?

What are the pros and cons of unsealing adoption and birth records? Is it in an adopted child’s best interest to meet his or her birth mother? Is it in the best interest of the birth mother to connect with her child later in life? Why?

The Girls Who Went Away

February Book Club Selection - Meets Feb. 26th upstairs in Joseph Beth, Rookwood Plaza.

After the first incredible book (Snowflower and the Secret Fan), I couldn't wait to see what PPSWO had planned for us next. After reading several reviews and the intro to The Girls Who Went Away, I have the sense this book too will be provocative, challenging to our perception of girls, women, motherhood and the definition of family for each of those stages of life as well as evocative as we find their courage, strength and frailty all too human.

The Girls Who Went Away by Anne Fessler.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Ann Fessler brings to light American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.
In 2002, Fessler, uncovered a story of three decades of women who were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Caught in the middle of a great social upheaval, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy.
The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.

From the Reviewers
New York Times Book Reviewer, Kathryn Harrison

"The Girls Who Went Away" is a remarkably well-researched and accomplished book, especially considering that its author is not a sociologist but a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. She does, of course, have her vested interest in the topic. Fessler was adopted during the 50's, and she explores the era's glorification of the conventional nuclear family, along with the power of a cultural institution like Life magazine to create and disseminate comforting myths, as it did in its Feb. 19, 1951, cover story. Beginning with its title, "The Adoption of Linda Joy" infuses a sense of serendipity into an experience that virtually all birth mothers seem to have found irreparably damaging. Such discussions provide the background necessary for readers to fully appreciate the many profoundly sad and disturbing oral histories in "The Girls Who Went Away."

For discussion questions, author Ann Fessler directed us to Penguin Pages and thanked us for including her book in this club's selections. I will post those questions a week before the book club meets again - which is February 26th.

Jan. 29th First Book Club Meeting

Hello to everyone reading Snow Flower and the Secret Garden. Jan. 29 is the official meeting date for the Cincinnati PPSWO group for this book, so I am posting the questions that might be raised at the meeting for you to consider commenting on. These questions (though slightly modified) came from the author, Lisa See and might be listed in the back of your book, and some came from me (Jenny).

If you haven't finished the book yet, don't worry, I don't think these questions will reveal too much to you.

If you want to comment -- sign in to your Gmail account, find the comment button, at the end of this entry or the other entries, and fill in your comments. If you don't have a Gmail account you will have to create one in order to sign in (I think), but you can create one after you have clicked the comment button, just scroll down and look for the instructions. If you have problems let me know via email and I will try to help you.

Lisa See's questions - modified and added to:

• As the narrator, is Lily portrayed as the heroine or the villain? What are her flaws or strengths? Did you identify strongly with one character in the story? How did you feel about that?
• Do "old sames" still exist today? Do you have an "old same"?
• If men knew that nu shu existed, why do you think they ignored it or allowed it to continue? What purpose did it serve in the household/community?
• How would this story differ if it were told from Snow Flower's perspective? Would she have felt the need to clarify/resolve anything with Lily?
• Do you think the author was describing a sexual relationship either ongoing or not, in the story or that it was in fact sexual in nature? Was it important to the storyline? Why do you think the author included that in the story?
• If the traditions and ramifications of not footbinding still existed do you think you would participate in foot binding? Would your daughter with or without your support? Do we have any similar traditions that bind us?
• The word for mother was described as meaning pain and love. Do you as a daughter or mother see that as still being very true? How so?
• This was a story of pain and regret, but was it also a story of atonement?
• The narrator talks about the Chinese women as weak and powerless, do you agree with that conclusion? Why or why not?
• When you think about the communication vehicle that nu shu provided - what do you in text messages and email that might actually have some of the same potential for misinterpretation/ambiguity?
• Madame Wang was a foot bound woman, but she also did business directly with men. What was her status/role in the community and do you think she was respected, feared, trusted, or considered merely a "necessary evil."

Feminist Conversations: Women, Trauma and Empowerment in Post-Transitional Societies

For those of you can't get enough...Cincinnati Women's Political Caucus just announced two book related events:

March 9, 2009: Women, Trauma Empowerment in Post-Transitional Societies

The authors/editors of Feminist Conversations: Women, Trauma and Empowerment in Post-Transitional Societies, will be in Cincinnati to discuss their seminal work and its global implications. The program will take place at 7 P.M. at the First Unitarian Church , 536 Linton Street .

Drs. Dovile Budryte, Lisa Vaughn, and Natalya Riegg will discuss their recent book, Feminist Conversations: Women, Trauma and Empowerment in Post-Transitional Societies. This book is about the ways in which social and political transitions affect women’s lives. The essays in the book, collected from women in post-transitional societies, address traumatic and empowering aspects of structural changes and challenges faced by women in these societies, including violence against women.

Women's issues are treated in the book as a subset of larger democratization projects, with all the complexity and controversy of the latter. Feminist Conversations is designed as a forum of cross-cultural communication among women from different parts of the world, as well as from different life paths.

REVIEWS:
Mary Brydon-Miller, Ph.D.Director, Action Research CenterAssociate Professor, CECH-Educational Studies & Leadership University of Cincinnati , USA

The oppression of women happens in all parts of the world and takes many forms—from domestic abuse to economic disenfranchisement and the use of violence against women as a weapon of war. But responses to trauma and women’s empowerment also take diverse forms, as this important and engaging volume illustrates. Drawing on different countries and speaking from the experiences of
women themselves, the contributors explore the diverse ways in which women understand and respond to experiences of trauma and violence.

Feminist Conversations is a book full of fresh thought and hopeful strategies on how to improve the prospects for women’s rights in post-transitional societies.
The stories the editors included as a background to their deliberations also speak most eloquently about how far away we are from eradicating violence against women in much of the world. One sees clearly that in most post-transitional societies there are only the beginnings of women’s rights,overshadowed relentlessly by patriarchy. But in presenting this insightful book,the editors have at best taken bold and creative steps toward providing the one indispensable element in the struggle for women’s rights—international awareness.

Reflecting the conversational structure of their book, this presentation will be structured as a conversation among the editors about the basic themes throughout the book. The presentation will include readings from several of the chapters and commentaries.

March 12, 2009: Woman’s City Club 16th Annual National Speaker Forum

GAIL COLLINS: Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics
On Thursday, March 12, 2009 beginning at 7:30 pm at the Millennium Hotel, 6th and Elm downtown. TICKET PRICE: $25 each

Beyond her work as a journalist, Collins, a Cincinnati native, has published several books including her 1998 book, Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity. Also, she wrote American Politics, America's Woman: 400 years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines and The Millennium Book with her husband Dan Collins.