Starred review from February 1, 2024
How women have lived, loved, and survived through the ages. Hirsch makes an engaging book debut with a feminist chronicle of women's lives from prehistoric times to the present. Focusing on women in the Western Hemisphere, the author presents 101 artifacts, featured in full-page illustrations, about which she offers richly detailed but succinct essays, smoothly translated by Updegraff. All of the objects, Hirsch explains, "have a bearing on women--the body, sex, love, work, art, politics" and "bear witness to the movements women instigated, and to all the myths to which they've been forced to conform since time immemorial." The idiosyncratic compendium begins with a healed femur bone from 30,000 B.C., which has significant anthropological meaning; while other injured animals would die of starvation or be eaten by predators, human healing indicates caring--particularly, Hirsch argues, by grandmothers, who raised children while their daughters hunted with their sons and who "watched patiently over the injured until their bones had healed." The author profiles iconoclasts, including novelist George Sand, represented by a replica of her right arm; Sojourner Truth, represented by a coin bearing her famous speech "Ain't I a Woman"; mythological figures Isis and Athena, represented by a statuette owned by Freud; and other famous personalities, such as Greta Garbo, whose ballpoint pen represents "the influence not just of women who acted but also of women scriptwriters": In the 1930s and '40s, women on screen "were sassy, strong-willed, brave, sometimes even bad; they were incredibly quick-witted and didn't take anything lying down." Hirsch delves into popular culture (Aretha Franklin, Kim Kardashian), leadership (Golda Meir), philosophy (Hannah Arendt), fashion (perfumed gloves, metal corsets), and various women's protest movements: suffrage, abolition, labor, and politics, including the iconic pussyhat from 2017. Filled with illuminating anecdotes, the collection is as entertaining as it is informative.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
May 15, 2024
This highly subjective, addictive compendium has been compiled by German journalist Hirsch, and her insightful commentary is part instructive, as she provides background and context for each of the 101 objects presented, and part inspiring, as she makes sense of our modern world by drawing attention to touchstones that shape contemporary thinking and attitudes. Almost without exception, her choices represent objects drawn from Western civilization: classical Greece and Rome, Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and Europe, Great Britain, and to a lesser degree the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. She profiles items both humble (doll, pocket, hatpin) and momentous (the Bayeux Tapestry). Hirsch emphasizes how each of her choices improved women's lives by relieving workloads (washing paddle), opening up new possibilities (the safety bicycle), enhancing social and economic status (the typewriter), and giving women amplified voices (a Phrygian cap). The final object is a handful of hair, held aloft in defiance of misogynistic regimes. Hirsch creates a fascinating time line as she advocates for women's fundamental rights and freedom.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.