A Short History of Women

Dec 31, 2009 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book was handed me by my wife who had read a review in the NY Times. While it was well and very lyrically written, I could not really come to understand why the author had written it and what she had hoped we would gain through its reading. So I asked my wife and she said that she was not surprised I did not understand - I could not, she proposed, because I was not a woman and could not identify with a woman's life living in a male dominated society. Perhaps that is the case. I try to think...more

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Mar 16, 2009 Jackie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jackie by: Wendy at S&S

Shelves: work-review-related-reading

This new novel by renowned author Kate Walbert gives us glimpses into the lives of 5 related women over four generations. It begins in England in 1914 when Dorothy Townsend chooses to starve herself to death in the name of women's suffrage, leaving her two children orphaned. So begins the legacy of how this family's women deal with what was called in the 19th century "The Woman Question". Bouncing about in time to show various vignettes between the women and their families over the years, it's a...more

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Nov 14, 2011 Carolyn rated it 4 of 5 stars

This novel recounts vignettes in the lives of a British suffragette who starved to death for the cause and a handful of her female descendants. The timeline spans the late 1800s to the present time, but it is anything but chronological. It starts and ends with Evelyn, daughter of the suffragette Townsend, but the intervening chapters hopscotch in time, with central characters often being revisited at different points in their lives. Written in spare, compressed, but gorgeous prose, the novel bri...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Gretchen rated it 1 of 5 stars

While it isn't a bad book, I wasn't horribly impressed. The time line was confusing, since it was not told chronologically, and it involves 5 generations and includes 3 Dorothys. The women were those sorts you find in current literature whose characters seem to be round and unique, and yet they are of the same mold. I wouldn't rush to read it unless you need an injection of women's lib and you don't mind confusion. That said, it shouldn't be dismissed. It's unique and has some creative lines and...more

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Mar 02, 2011 Jan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Initially, when I finished reading this book, I had planned on giving it 3 stars. But since I wait to enter my books on Goodreads until the end of the month, a few weeks have passed since I finished it, and when I saw it on my list, I thought: "What book is THAT?"

I cannot in good conscience give 3 stars to a book that I can barely remember after 3 weeks.

Walbert's book tells the story of 4 generations of women from the same family, the progenitor of which is a woman who starved herself to death f...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Johnny rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: female-protagonist, historical, fiction

This is a seriously horrible book, just utterly boring and distracting. The pretentious central conceit, providing "a short history of women" through the fragmented stories of four generations of women all descended from the same woman, fails miserably in connecting with the audience in any significant or moving way. The narration jumps through a disjointed chronology spanning more than one hundred years and through the points of view of multiple characters with extremely similar names. The diso...more

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Jan 25, 2011 Mariellen rated it 3 of 5 stars

When this book was first suggested for our book club, I thought it was non-fiction. I didn't see the (A Novel) label at the bottom until after I started reading.
I enjoyed the book -- after I got past the first 33 pages. The writing style was annoying at first. It seemed cryptic and confusing. When the book got to the first chapter of Dorothy Townsend Barrett, the writing changed and it was a much more pleasant read. I did have to keep going back to the lineage chart to remember who was who - too...more

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Jan 05, 2011 Lucille rated it 3 of 5 stars

Every now and then, my library has displays based soley on a book's cover. Sometimes they have a large bookcase, where each shelf has covers of a specific colour to make the rainbow, starting at red and going all the way down to violet. On one day that I went in, the shelves alternated between red covers and white covers. Intrigued, I picked up the books with interesting titles and read the descriptions. This was one that stood out to me.
A Short History of Women chronicles the struggles of the...more

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Oct 31, 2010 Rachel rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

I've been interested in how the suffragettes managed to convince voters to give women the right to vote, partly because I hope some of their strategies might work to convince a tough audience to find just solutions of a number of social problems. Committing suicide for the cause, though, is not a strategy I would employ myself or recommend to others. For one of the main characters in this novel, her death by hunger strike doesn't seem to have much of an impact on the success of the movement alth...more

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Aug 02, 2010 Kathleen Hagen added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010-audio-books, 2010fiction

A Short History of Women, by Kate Walbert, Narrators: Nicola Barber, Ruth Moore, Kathleen McInerney, Eliza Foss, Paula Parker; produced by Highbridge Company, downloaded from audible.com.

A wonderful book spanning at least four generations of a family of women. Publisher’s note says it better than I can:
The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her
decision to starve herself for the cause info...more

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Mar 25, 2010 Barbara A rated it 5 of 5 stars

My faith in "best books" lists has been restored.

After being catatonically underwhelmed by "Let the Great World Spin", I have been deeply moved and deeply impressed by "A Short History of Women", . I have read Kate Walbert's two previous books, and this one, I believe, catapults her into the universe of excellence. I can understand why it was one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 as selected by the NYT.

Interleaving the lives of five generations of an English/American family, Walbert uses the fight...more

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Mar 08, 2010 Kerfe rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Kate Walbert's "A Short Hisotry of Women" is a meditation on the complications and conflicts of women's lives, no clearer or more easily resolved now than they were 150 years ago. More opportunity has not made lives or choices any less full of yearning, questioning, or regret.

Walbert's narrators include and descend from an early 20th century suffragette, who starves herself to death to call attention to "The Woman Question," and, seemingly, to justify her life. She leaves behind two children. He...more

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Jan 18, 2010 Nick rated it 4 of 5 stars

LIke others here I read this book because of the absolutely stellar review in the Times Book Review. The premise -- tracing five generations of women beginning with a British suffragist who starved herself to death for the cause -- definitely appealed to me. Fiction all about women, and feminist women at that! But also like others I wanted to like this more than I actually did. I wanted to love it.

Walbert's writing is beautiful, no doubt about it. I also think the greatest strength of this nove...more

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Jan 17, 2010 Holly Lee (Bellas Novella) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009, amazon-vine

Wow this book was a challenge to read. I had to be 100% focused the entire time to get through it. I found that it helped to take notes on how the characters connected with each other, small events that would help me remember their link. In the front there is a family tree that is helpful, but a few of the characters have the same names, as in common in families, which made it hard to keep everyone straight.

I love stories about families, and author Kate Walbert had a great concept. It follows t...more

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Sep 26, 2009 Karen Daubert rated it 2 of 5 stars

Motivated to read A Short History of Women by a glowing review in the New York Times, I wanted to love it. What a treasure it would be to have a book that provided through brilliant character portrayal a bridge from Virginia Woolf's London to the subsequent waves of feminist thought and experience in the U.S.A.

Reading, I felt unsatisfied, and by the end I wondered at the reviewer's taste. The book's clever structure dominates rather than supports the story. The writer's presence thus becomes unw

...more

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Aug 08, 2009 Mary rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-books

Initially, this book reminded me of every book I only read because it was assigned for school. Like medicine - good for you, but unpleasant. By the end, though, I liked it more and found a couple of characters sympathetic. It is a short book, but the history of women covers 5 generations, beginning with the original Dorothy, an educated - but not degreed - widowed, mother of a 13-year old daughter, Evelyn, and 10-year old son, James, who kills herself by hunger strike over the status (or lack th...more Initially, this book reminded me of every book I only read because it was assigned for school. Like medicine - good for you, but unpleasant. By the end, though, I liked it more and found a couple of characters sympathetic. It is a short book, but the history of women covers 5 generations, beginning with the original Dorothy, an educated - but not degreed - widowed, mother of a 13-year old daughter, Evelyn, and 10-year old son, James, who kills herself by hunger strike over the status (or lack thereof) of women. Or, perhaps she stops eating because she is depressed: unhappy with her own life, her son's clubfoot, life with her self-absorbed mother. Each of the subsequent generations of children are inescapably affected by Dorothy's decision to die, and equally unhappy with their lives. Evelyn and James, abandoned by their grandmother are separated: Evelyn sent north to a small boarding school during the war, and James sent to live with a family in California. Evelyn, one of the few fulfilled characters in the novel ultimately becomes a chemistry professor, living in Morningside Heights with a man who has lost his own wife and child. Since Evelyn never marries or has children, the generations continue through James's daughter, Dorothy, married to a survivor of a Pacific theater WWII POW camp, Charles. Dorothy and Charles have two daughters, Caroline and Liz, and have lost one son, James, to cancer. Caroline - a Yale educated lawyer - has no children, but Liz - an artist - has several including Suzanne, and a younger set of twins. The book is narrated in third person, but through the viewpoints of the characters, and in changing writing styles, so that the chapters about the more recent events even take the form of blog entries and a social networking page. I almost didn't get there though, because the initial chapters are so grammatically garbled and lacking in guiding punctuation (didn't the English use commas before WWI?), with no plot or compelling characterization, that they seem not worth the trouble of reading. This is a discussion-worthy book for those who stick with it and get to the end.(less)

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Jun 10, 2011 Caitlin Constantine added it

Shelves: gave-up

I give up. I'm halfway through and I just can't bring myself to care. I have to flip back and forth between the story and the family tree in the front of the book, which really disrupts my reading flow, and I am just really not caring all that much about any of the characters in the book, with the exception of maybe Charles (ironic considering the book's title and subject).

I'm really disappointed in this, because I liked the idea of a novel that tells the stories of several generations of women...more

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Nov 04, 2011 Lianne added it

A collective biography that chronicles five generations of women in one family. The story begins in 1914 with Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a suffragette who embarks a hunger strike for the cause of votes for women taking it to the death. This uncompromising choice is visited on subsequent generations of women in her family who either react against her feminist stance, or reinvent it within the context of each generation.Evelyn is her daughter, who, after her mother's death is sent to a boarding scho...more

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Jul 12, 2011 Jane Spencer rated it 4 of 5 stars

A Short history of Women by Kate Walbert is a novel portraying women's role as represented by five generations of women in one family.

We meet Dorothy on her deathbed, a suffragette on a hunger strike in 1914 England. Her daughter, Evelyn later moves to the U.S., never marries and becomes a successful scientist. Granddaughter Dorothy, marries, has children, then in middle-age becomes a blogging anti-war protester. Caroline and Liz are the baby-boomer great-granddaughters. Dorothy or "Dora" is Ca...more

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Feb 11, 2010 Pamela rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Everyone

Recommended to Pamela by: Book Club choice

A Short History of Women begins with: "Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far. Mum said she had no choice." This from the mouth of 13 year old Evelyn, daughter of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a fictional heroine in the cause for women's suffrage in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Dorothy's lack of choice, in Walbert's story, seems more personal than political. As dedicated as she was to the cause, it seems that the circumstances o...more A Short History of Women begins with: "Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far. Mum said she had no choice." This from the mouth of 13 year old Evelyn, daughter of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a fictional heroine in the cause for women's suffrage in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. Dorothy's lack of choice, in Walbert's story, seems more personal than political. As dedicated as she was to the cause, it seems that the circumstances of her life, and her emotional responses to them, drove her to nail down her own coffin. The "cause" was what she used to hang her personal troubles on. But her troubles were, in large part, a response to the social and political restrictions imposed on her.
Perhaps that is the slippery nub of the personal is political creed? No matter the political climate, now matter how far up the ladder of social, political, financial equality, women climb, there is, in the end, only our personal response to our environment. Perhaps this the nub of the problem that some feminist historians have with this novel?

It took me a while to take to this novel - which some people complain is really a collection of short stories. No matter, they weave a novel- like web. Walbert shows us several generations of Townsend women in vignettes that nail iconic moments in feminist and social history: The Suffragette Dorothy qualifying for a 1st class degree at Cambridge University but having to accept a mere "certificate" because as a woman she wasn't eligible to receive a degree: Her daughter Evelyn, emotionally scarred by her mother's suicide, succeeding first as a scholarship student then as a Professor at Barnard: Her granddaughter Dorothy attending self-conscious 1970s Consciousness Raising suburbanite rap sessions, then at age 70 leaving her husband to "find herself" via blogging: Her great-granddaughter, the play-date hunting Manhattan mother/artist: And finally the youngest descendant existing only as Facebook page.

Walbert's novel has upset some feminist historians - provoking one to suggest that this history could not/should not be presented in fictional form. Personally, I would not expect or require any one novel to live up to such an expectation. I think Walbert has done a fine job of presenting these specific women in these specific times and circumstances.

Did I say it is also well written?

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Jan 16, 2010 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-novels

All I learned from Walbert I already knew, that women are women and not much else can be generalized about them, but she writes so beautifully that I don't mind.

Notes:

These are nice hazy British memories of suffrage, gilded white starving lilies. Walbert has Pat Barker's sense of history, particularly minor, peripheral figures having social significance. These legacies are powe3rful and evident: perceptiveness, light seriousness, disregard for wealth, but not necessarily independence, not streng...more

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Dec 05, 2009 Grace rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, read-in-2009

Kate Walbert's 'A Short History of Women: A Novel' is proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. My journey through this short novel (topping out at under 250 pages) was a slow decline into the depths of hell.

The premise is simple - this is the story of five generations of women struggling to find out who they are and what their places are in the world. The story begins with the oldest, Dorothy Trevor Townsend, who starves herself to death for women's suffrage in 1914, leaving be...more Kate Walbert's 'A Short History of Women: A Novel' is proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. My journey through this short novel (topping out at under 250 pages) was a slow decline into the depths of hell.

The premise is simple - this is the story of five generations of women struggling to find out who they are and what their places are in the world. The story begins with the oldest, Dorothy Trevor Townsend, who starves herself to death for women's suffrage in 1914, leaving behind two children: Evelyn Charlotte Townsend and Thomas Francis Townsend. Second generation Evelyn does not marry or have children, so the third generation woman is Thomas' daughter, Dorothy Townsend Barrett. I understand the author's intentions in keeping Evelyn a single woman, teaching chemistry to women at Barnard, but I didn't like that the fact that the five generations of women were only possible because of the first Dorothy's son marrying and having a daughter. Dorothy Townsend Barrett goes on to have three children: James Francis Barrett (whose death in his late 40's is a constant source of pain for the family and eventually tears it apart), Caroline Townsend Barrett Deel and Elizabeth 'Liz' Anne Barrett. The fifth generation woman in the story is Caroline's college age daughter Dorothy 'Dora' Louise Barrett-Deel.

Is that enough to make your head spin? There are three women named Dorothy in five generations, which makes it incredibly hard to keep track of which one is which. Speaking from personal experience as the fourth Grace in as many generations, it is incredibly confusing and causes a lot of problems with insurance companies, doctors' offices, pharmacies, credit reporting agencies, boards of elections, etc. because there is no way to distinguish between mother and daughter with the same name as there is with fathers and sons.

The three Dorothy's were a big strike against the book for that very reason. Not only is it confusing in the real world, it's confusing when reading about three characters with the same first name especially when there is nothing remarkable or interesting about any of them because they all filled some stereotype. It was hard to keep track of which one was which. If it wasn't for the "Lineage" page at the beginning of the book with the family tree, I would have been completely lost.

My final complaint with the book is that it was shallow and fell flat. This had all the elements to be a modern classic: five generations of women - the first fighting for women's suffrage and the last reaping the benefits of the fight; five women growing up in incredibly different social and cultural times and learning to live in the new times and within their families; women's relationships with other women of different generations, oh the list could just go on and on. Instead, Kate Walbert decided to do a half assed job of telling the story, letting her incredibly interesting and compelling idea fall apart into this 237 page book of episodes from the five women's lives that are devoid of cultural relevance, raw emotion, or originality and make little sense when strung together.

Maybe this was the best Walbert could do. Maybe she didn't see the need to dig deeper. Or maybe she didn't think she had to because she underestimated the women who would read her book. Honestly, I expected more from an author selected for the New York State Writers' Institute line up this year. Oh well... besides, I should have known better for picking up a book about five generations of women that couldn't even hit 250 pages. (less)

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Apr 20, 2009 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars

A Short History of Women is an eloquent and lovely novel that begins at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself and, ultimately, dies to further her cause. Kate Walbert’s novel is not simply about the repercussions of Dorothy’s death, though, but rather about how her actions echo, reverberate, and resound through the lives of her descendents.

Walbert’s novel moves fluidly from the time of Florence Nightingale, who screamed into the void to be heard, to the age of the...more

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Feb 19, 2012 Sharon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: pacific-u-mfa

I love this book for its ambitious structure (the title says it all), but also for the compelling voice of the writing, so lovely and alluring we don’t realize we’re reading writing, even though the book is set up in such an unusual way, each chapter a different-generation woman in the same family, starting from England in 1914 and ending in American in 2007.
Listen to this: “Brigid told me the colors of my toe—the greens and blues of it—reminded her of Scotland and she took this to mean we woul...more

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Mar 31, 2011 Kathrina rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-fiction

This was hugely underwhelming; a nice writing style, but an utterly forgettable narrative.
"A Short History of..." is a trend in titles over the last few years, perhaps borrowing from the popularity of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a book that pays back its promise of a layman's ruminations of pop science unconcerned with order or specialization, just a little (not to say "short," that's Bryson's misnomer) book of raw wonder. But there is no wonder here.
Conversely, it is short,...more This was hugely underwhelming; a nice writing style, but an utterly forgettable narrative.
"A Short History of..." is a trend in titles over the last few years, perhaps borrowing from the popularity of Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a book that pays back its promise of a layman's ruminations of pop science unconcerned with order or specialization, just a little (not to say "short," that's Bryson's misnomer) book of raw wonder. But there is no wonder here.
Conversely, it is short, but it is not a history of women, nor even a history of one family of women, but rather the narrowing, dissipated memory of a woman through several generations, where the fact is remembered, but anything that made it relevant is forgotten or completely unexplored.
Alright, to justify that I'm going to have to reveal a spoiler, but it's something you learn in the first few chapters anyway, and, as the author explores it less than I will, I don't think it's going to spoil anything. In 1914 a woman, the mother of two young children and estranged from her husband, starves herself to death, apparently for the "woman's cause." She is defined as a Suffragette, but the evidence is meager. This, at first, is compelling. A reader will ask, why is she doing this? How does it benefit the cause? Who is paying attention? What will her children make of this? Unfortunately, even though we get some pov from her daughter, and also from her son's daughter, the only answer we get is basically, "it sucked that my mom died when I was young. I had to go to the US/to live with estranged relatives and live out a pretty unremarkable life that I will now describe in some detail..."
By the time we reach the present generation there is literally nothing left to say, so we have to read about modern-day New York City playdates and strung-out moms who drink too much wine. If there was ever any relevance to having a suffragette great-grandmother, it is totally ignored. If our understanding of a woman's role through generations is supposed to be expanded, I missed the thesis, unless I'm supposed to be convinced that a woman's role is pretty dull and/or ill-defined. If that's the case, I didn't need this novel to tell me so, and, if you're female, you didn't need this novel, either. Your evocation of a woman's role is better defined by your own biography than anything you'll find here. Is Walbert telling us how forgettable our own genealogical history is? If so, she's not telling us that it matters; you're still going to be a fucked-up adult with your own share of neuroses and regrets that has nothing to do with where you came from. It can't, since you have so little memory of where you came from. Maybe the "woman question" is asking something different than it did generations ago, but Walbert seems unwilling to answer it on any terms. This book flirts dangerously with irrelevance, both as a theme, and as a casualty of a weak narrative. (less)

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Feb 27, 2010 Felice rated it 4 of 5 stars

I recently purchased a copy of A Short History of Women at my library's winter book fair. Lucky me! What a stunning book. The author, Kate Walbert has written a masterpiece of powerful restraint. When I finished the book I had the Reader's Holy Grail Moment. I was deeply satisfied, wanted to talk to a fellow reader about it immediately and knew that in my house of books I had nothing else to read because what could compare? That is a lovely moment.

This is 5 generations of women's lives all star...more I recently purchased a copy of A Short History of Women at my library's winter book fair. Lucky me! What a stunning book. The author, Kate Walbert has written a masterpiece of powerful restraint. When I finished the book I had the Reader's Holy Grail Moment. I was deeply satisfied, wanted to talk to a fellow reader about it immediately and knew that in my house of books I had nothing else to read because what could compare? That is a lovely moment.

This is 5 generations of women's lives all starting with a British suffragette, Dorothy Trevor Townsend. Dorothy is starving herself to death as an act of civil disobedience in a WWI London hospital. The day to day routine of hospital is fascinating and a beautiful introduction to how well Walbert captures the quiet qualities of the lives of her characters in this novel. It is WW1 and most Dr's are serving overseas so with almost no males around her, Dorothy's dying days are spent in a world ruled by women. She has children she's not allowed to see, a public that is against her and time to reflect on her life and choices. Dorothy's hunger strike, the extreme embodiment of commitment, will color her children's choices for generations.

Dorothy's heirs: her daughter Evie, her son Thomas's daughter Dorothy and Dorthy's daughters Caroline and Liz all take up the suffragette/feminist mantle in some way in their lives whether they realize it or not though not in the public way their Grandmother did. The paths they choose science, the arts or as a contemporary housewife are all different but they all still chafe at what society has set out for them. Short History is no diatribe against what hasn't happened for women nor is it a celebration of girl power. There is an undercurrent of anger in these characters but also a striving to understand themselves, the complications of their relationships and what to do about it all.

Reading Short History was a pleasure. It's witty, dramatic and enlightening. Walbert's quietly authoritative writing is smart and disturbing. She moves effortlessly from the historical to the contemporary parts of the book. There are big questions here about life and the big events that change lives but they never overwhelm the storytelling. This is a brilliant, unforgettable novel.
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Sep 30, 2009 Susann rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Kate S. and Melissa P., maybe?

Recommended to Susann by: Time Out NY

What a smart, good book. Walbert has created five generations - a century+ - of women in one family. Starting with Dorothy, an English suffragist and mother of two, who starves herself to death, Walbert shows each woman, quietly or not-so-quietly, doing her best to figure things out while not quite connecting with her family.

The book's structure is a triumph. Walbert jumps through the decades, from character to character and then back to character, gradually showing the influence that each gener...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Mr. Woodnal rated it 1 of 5 stars

This is a seriously horrible book, just utterly boring and distracting. The pretentious central conceit, providing "a short history of women" through the fragmented stories of four generations of women all descended from the same woman, fails miserably in connecting with the audience in any significant or moving way. The narration jumps through a disjointed chronology spanning more than one hundred years and through the points of view of multiple characters with extremely similar names. The diso...more

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Apr 10, 2010 R. rated it 4 of 5 stars

A Short History of Women feels like a compilation of short stories and vignettes that manages to weave an overarching narrative around four generation of women beginning with Dorothy Townshed who died as a hunger striker fighting for female suffrage in England at the beginning of the 20th C. I normally am drawn to much longer books that focus on the development of a small group of characters and oftentimes find shorter books less fulfilling. Similar to Dara Horns "The World to Come" I was pleasa...more

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Feb 23, 2010 Anita rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: drama, female-authors, fiction

This book advertised itself as following a few generations of women. It really focused on one with glimmers into the other lives (I felt). Ok, maybe one and a half. I wanted to really like this book but felt the writing was disjointed and didn't flow at times. So, while I would say, go get it from the library, read it--see the changes in women's lives over generations. I'd also say, it won't be an easy read. However, there were some memorable parts and pieces. and I did like it enough to stay wi...more

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