ACRL Women’s Studies Section Blog

Rebecca Donner reviews the novel, A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, at bookforum.com.

Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause.

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Elizabeth Lund reviews Poems from the Women’s Movement by Honor Moore for the Christian Science Monitor.

This “landmark collection” is powerful precisely because it is not a manifesto. Instead, the power of these poems comes from the fact that one writer after another – from the 1960s to the 1980s – dared to say what hadn’t been voiced before. In doing so, they helped other women – from scholars to housewives and mothers – find the courage to challenge the status quo as well.

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