3.5 stars, rounding down because when I think back on it (I finished it a few weeks ago), the things that bugged me stick out more than the things that didn’t. This might’ve been a four star book for me if I’d checked at all on what it actually was. I’d hoped it would be a deeper dive into the title concept, aka “mainsplaining” (although Solnit herself did not coin that term and is not a fan of it). The title essay was fantastic, so […]
I am a little vexed by this book
The Mother of all Questions by Rebecca Solnit
In which the question is “Why don’t you have kids?” I work in a pretty Democratic-voting but ultimately culturally conservative environment, so nothing about this book rings untrue in the slightest….for the most part. I also think that a lot of these essays, like in the previous book, are fairly good distillations of essential points. But the issue is, that Rebecca Solnit seems to say all the right things. Certainly, for a relatively limited subset of ideas and people who hold opinions on these ideas, […]
“Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear.”
I do not really do New Year’s resolutions, but my informal one this year was to read more about topics I should be more informed about, and specifically more feminist reads. As with most of the good things I read these days, Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit was already on my radar thanks to Cannonballers. I was familiar with the eponymous essay’s conceit: that Solnit was treated to an older gentleman explaining her book to her without realizing that she had written […]
Yes All Women
It’s been a long time since a book I’ve read doubled as a personal journal, but my copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me is about as marked up as my high school copy of Emerson/Thoreau’s Nature/Walking. The book, a collection of essays about the individual and shared experiences of womanhood and issues of gender, power, and feminism, takes its name from the lead essay in which Solnit narrates an infuriating experience of an older gentleman oldwhitemansplaining one of her own books to […]
It’s a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist.
Rebecca Solnit’s publisher was giving away free copies of “Hope in the Dark” in the days after the election, and I jumped all over it as fast as I could. I loved Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me” which, among other things, made it clear that she is an expert on many things besides misogyny and feminism. And boy, is she. “Hope in the Dark,” which is an examination of the history of civil disobendience and social change, was the salve, and the inspiration/kick-in-the-butt, and […]
A must-read for everyone.
Ever since someone told me about the word “mansplaining,” I felt an enormous sense of relief. So that’s what they call it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been interrupted, openly contradicted, shamed, or talked over in settings with men. It’s quite common in English graduate programs to be told that you’re wrong when you’re not, or that someone’s subjective opinion is passed off as incontrovertible fact. I won’t spoil the full review, which is replete with lots of caps, and a special […]