I was gifted this book by a friend for my last birthday, and I finally got around to cracking it open! The book is really interesting, the idea is that it is an overview of women who historically have been overlooked by history and whose legacies are mostly unknown. The entire thing is framed by Mosse researching one of her ancestors, Lily, a woman who wrote many books and articles in her lifetime but is unknown now to historians.
The result is a fascinating mix of the personal and the historical. Mosse talks about how frustrating it is to not find letters from Lily talking about how she felt and what she thought. Lily is anti-suffrage for women and Mosse talks about how she really wanted to agree with everything Lily thought. But despite it all, she thinks she would like Lily.
Because the sections on Lily are not that wrong and most of the other women get a paragraph or two it is a big book but a quick read. You get snapshots of the women, not biographies. But there are so many women that I had not heard of before in here, I actually flagged a few pages for when I am teaching later this semester.
The only comment I have is that Mosse has a pretty distinctive writing style where she likes to leave off paragraphs with something pithy, and trail off… It is fine a few times but starts to get a bit predictable after a while. You just want her to end the paragraph simply and move on! Transitions are probably the hardest thing to get right and I don’t blame her at all but still… (haha).
It is an informative read and a quick read, with the personal
touch really sucking you in. I’m pretty pleased with it as my birthday gift!
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