See Jane Win is a great, sometimes compelling, piece of journalism, but I occasionally felt that in the rush to get the book out to the masses, it suffered from not having been adequately edited. Sometimes, it feels like it was a series of longreads that got rewritten and mushed together to create a cohesive story. Good journalism still needs to be massaged into book form.
The book starts by looking at a handful of important campaigns: Abigail Spanerger, London Lamar, Anna Eskamani, and Catalina Cruz. These aren't the only campaigns she examines, and we do get a good peek at Amy McGrath, but Stacey Abrams and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pretty much have only cameo appearances in the book.
Through the perspective of these campaigns, we see candidate training efforts (fascinating), and we examine the difficult, complex issues: fundraising, media coverage (of which, more later), candidates of color, the public perception of campaigning and motherhood (including breastfeeding), and the very real troubles of trolls, attack ads, and the damnable lies.
Obviously, the first part of the book, with the candidate introductions, was necessary to set the stage for analyses of these important issues. Moscatello got into the nitty gritty on academic research as well as first-person research, and we were treated to statistics, and some framing notes like:
One analysis shortly before the 2018 election found that when a woman in office was described with feminine adjectives, men and women were more likely to question her competence. The flip side was that when female politicians were described with masculine language, they were perceived as more qualified. Word choice made a difference, even when the adjectives used reflected positive traits.
But the beginning of the book is slow and can be draggy; there were parts that were so repetitive that I wondered whether Moscatello's editor had been fired mid-job. I started reading before a two-week trip to the UK, and didn't think twice about jettisoning it to read Michelle Obama's Becoming when my library hold came in. Once we got passed the introductions and got into the election-related issues, the individual candidates became more three-dimensional and it was easier to appreciate the compelling personal tales and the trends that bubbled under the momentum of women candidacies in 2018.
By the time the final third of the book is presented, and we get to read about the victories (and what came next), the book has pulled the reader in. You want to hear more about these leaders, and what their wins (and others' losses) and the decisions they made (about campaigning, about parenting, about their hair and makeup, about their debate prep, and more) meant for them, and what they might mean for women going forward.
Understandably, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election and the #MeToo zeitgeist of 2018, the narrative focused mainly on Democratic candidates. If you can't fathom the appeal of left-of-center candidates (people who would be considered dead-center, or even right-of-center in most of the industrialized world), this book isn't you. If you're the kind of person who pays no attention to inequities between men and women, between white people and people of color, between the wealthy and those of lesser financial means, then this book probably won't captivate you. But if the 2018 election gave you hope that 2016 didn't guarantee a Handmaid's Tale future, if election night in 2018 felt like the first time you took a breath that didn't feel uneasy in two full years, and if you believe that women deserve power commensurate with their abilities, I think See Jane Win is worth your time.