The Book Club for Troublesome Women

by Marie Bostwick

“Homemade garland? Homemade eggnog? Tell me you baked a gingerbread house, and I’ll slash my wrists with a rusty frosting palette. How are the rest of us supposed to compete?” Margaret frowned and turned sideways, squeezing through the doorway. “It’s not a competition. I just want things to be nice. For the kids. And Walt.” “No, I get it. I feel the same way. But sometimes I wonder . . .” Viv tilted her head to the side. “Do you think anybody really notices?” * * * As it turned out, no one did.

The crack about “actually working” plucked the string of Margaret’s already taut nerves. She felt like reciting a list of all the thankless, boring, unremunerated tasks she undertook on a daily basis, everything from washing his underwear and ironing his dress shirts to waxing the floors and defrosting the freezer. But the petulance in his voice and his outrageous statement about a book she knew he’d never even read pulled her up short. Was he serious?

“The Group by Mary McCarthy.

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis,

didn’t apply,” she said. “Not anywhere.” “What?” Viv asked, looking confused. “Why not?” “Because my adviser, who was also the department head, refused to write me a letter of recommendation. Vet schools aren’t producing enough graduates to keep up with demand, and he said that even though I was a good student, writing a letter on my behalf would be a waste of time. No school would take a spot that could be filled by a man and give it to a woman who would end up leaving the program or the profession once she got married.”

read about how many women are denied the chance to pursue certain professions because it’s assumed they’ll quit after marriage, or how colleges alter the curriculum so women are only learning what they’ll need to know as wives and mothers, or that psychology classes are teaching girls that having ambitions beyond homemaking is a sign of neurosis—”

Lee Harvey Oswald got into a scuffle with three men while distributing flyers for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He was arrested in New Orleans but released the next day. Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm declared martial law, then ordered armed government forces to raid Buddhist pagodas and arrest fourteen hundred monks. Washington Post publisher Philip Graham took his life, making Katharine Graham a widow at forty-seven and the twentieth century’s first female publisher of a major newspaper. And on August 28, at least 250,000 people gathered to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and to hear the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Nearly every generation can point to an unanticipated event that divided time into before and after, a day after which the world would never be the same, when the markets crashed, or bombs dropped, or wars began, or towers fell.

For the generation cognizant in the early 1960s, the demarcation of the time before and after was a collective shock, a recollection indelibly etched, a shared trauma that would be retriggered by the question they would ask one another for the rest of their lives: “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” Margaret was at the market.

“You know what Eleanor Roosevelt used to say: ‘A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.’”