Will the US really elect Kamala its commander-in-chief?
So Kamala Harris has her Democratic Party’s nomination. She has the memes. And the vibes are good. With barely 70 days to the US election, excerpts from This Week, Those Books on a cultural history of America’s gender gap. And a novel about how it affects politics. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
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The Big Story:
Three women are making political waves in the Americas, both north and south, but right now, only one is assured success in the effort to serve as her country’s top leader.
In the US, there is perceptible “Kamala-mentum”1 in the presidential race…But a lot could change by election day November 5, as Harris seeks to become the first female president of the world’s most militarily and economically powerful nation.
In Venezuela, opposition leader María Corina Machado’s proxy candidate for president was denied a win by strongman Nicolás Maduro in the July 28 election. The situation remains volatile…
Claudia Sheinbaum will take office on October 1 as Mexico’s first female president…
This Week, Those Books:
A cultural history of American women’s struggle to break stereotypes – but not too much.
A female Silicon Valley success story tries for a political first.
The Backstory:
Five of South America’s 12 sovereign states have had elected female heads of state or government. The US is the only major country in North America never to have elected a woman head of state.
Eva Perón, first lady of Argentina, was the most powerful, if unelected leader in South America…
This Week’s Books:
America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines
By: Gail Collins
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
Year: 2003
My rating: Highly readable
A fascinating cultural history of women in America by New York Times columnist Gail Collins. The author is upfront on the lack of available information regarding women we should know about. She writes: “Native American women who had no written language left behind almost nothing of their voices”. Therefore, this book is heavy on the roughly 400 years since female colonists arrived in the New World.
The main theme is the contradictions that have shaped women’s roles in the US. “The center of our story is the tension between the yearning to create a home and the urge to get out of it,” Collins writes. She notes that “the history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than…
Choice quotes:
“…There was at most only one real chair in the average seventeenth-century American home, and it was reserved for the head of the household; hence, the word chairman”.
“…The average woman in New England married before her twentieth birthday and gave birth to about seven children…”
Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win
By: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2018
My rating: Entertaining
Charlotte Walsh sets off to become the first female US senator from her native Pennsylvania and runs smack into the patriarchy. The attitudes that govern women’s political trajectory are quite different, it turns out, to the standards applied to men. “Don’t be angry. No one likes an angry woman,” her campaign manager tells her. He also informs Walsh that as a woman…
Choice quotes:
“Goddammit. It’s 2017. There are plenty of women in Congress. A woman ran for president. It shouldn’t matter that I don’t have a penis”.
“You can be a strong female candidate, but not a feminist candidate. There’s a difference…And the hair…At least seventy-three percent of male voters prefer women with long hair…”
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
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Ready for another read? Women’s Day: How the other half lives
