There are five main female characters in this book, and I identify with four of them. Why did I pick up this book again?

Okay, for reals, this was not an easy book for me to read. The plot has five intertwined plots, a single woman who wants a child, an overachieving teen, a wife/mother in a relationship that isn't working, an arctic explorer/scientist, and a hippie / herbalist / off-the-grid non-conformist. Four of them live in costal Oregon, the explorer is the subject of the single woman's biography.

I do not know how this book ended up on my reading list. I suspect because it is a reasonable Handmaid's Tale-like near-future dystopian where Roe vs. Wade is repealed, and an eight-celled blastocyst is considered a full person in the eyes of the law, making even miscarriages suspect under the law, and women are aware that this near-future dystopian is much, much closer than we want to believe.

As far as I'm concerned, abortion can be illegal when we get the equivalent for men, something where they have no control over their own bodies, are shamed by society, forced to live with the consequences of a strongly personal and highly private decision made public decided by someone else, have to risk their lives, and have their bodies destroyed for the rest of their lives. Which is to say, no, abortion should never be illegal because it isn't your decision, it is the carrying woman's and only the woman's decision. The cells are not a person until they can sustain themselves outside of the womb. This book hits nearly every trigger I can imagine when it comes to women being lesser than men.

Anyway.

This book.

The single woman teacher who wants a kid. Fuck.

The overachiving high school student with all the same arguments I make. Fuck.

The wife / mother in a relationship that isn't working. Fuck.

The arctic explorer who needs a male peer to publish her work under his name to get it published. Fuck.

The non-confirming weird herbalist character? Didn't particular identify with her. 80% isn't too bad for an author, I'd argue.

Anyway, yes, this book is worth reading. I started it, couldn't put it done, was done with is in a day. Four books in four days, time to read something that'll take me a bit to finish.

The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do.
Location 204

These kids, after all, have not been lost yet. Staring up at her, jaws rimmed with baby fat, they are perched on the brink of not giving a shit. They still give a shit, but not, most of them, for long.
Location 216

Waiting on the hard little plastic chair, under elevator music and fluorescent glare, the biographer takes out her notebook. Everything in this notebook must be in list form, and any list is eligible.
Location 241

A book of lists. This intrigues me, but not enough to convert my journal to the format.

On the first night, the mender asked what that noise was and learned it was the ocean.

“But when does it stop?”

“Never,” said her aunt. “It’s perpetual, though impermanent.”

And the mender’s mother said, “Pretentious much?”
Location 292

The hard-sunk eyes the wife once found beguiling are not eyes she would wish upon her daughter. Bex’s will have purplish circles before long.

But who cares what the girl looks like, if she is happy?

The world will care.
Location 412

She’s one of those people who think they will understand something if they hear its name, when really they will only hear its name.
Location 667

“Let’s spend the taxpayers’ money to criminalize vulnerable women, shall we?” said Ro/ Miss in class, and somebody said, “But if they’re breaking the law, they are criminals,” and Ro/ Miss said, “Laws aren’t natural phenomena. They have particular and often horrific histories. Ever heard of the Nuremberg Laws? Ever heard of Jim Crow?”
Location 1009

Civil disobedience.

The border control can detain any woman or girl they “reasonably” suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of residence, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination.
Location 1194

Or does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilized, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve.
Location 1241

Asking why she wants a kid.

Her eighth-grade social-studies class held a mock debate on abortion. The daughter prepared bullet points for the pro-choice team.

Her father proofread her work, as usual; but instead of his usual “This is top-notch!” he sat down beside her, rested a hand on her shoulder, and said he was concerned about the implications of her argument. “What if your bio mother had chosen to terminate?”

“Well, she didn’t, but other people should be able to.”

“Think of all the happy adopted families that wouldn’t exist.”

“But Dad, a lot of women would still give their babies up for adoption.”

“But what about the women who didn’t?”

“Why can’t everyone just decide for themselves?”

“When someone decides to murder a fellow human with a gun, we put them in jail, don’t we?”

“Not if they’re a cop.”

“Think of all the families waiting for a child. Think of me and your mom, how long we waited.”

“But—”

“An embryo is a living being.”

“So is a dandelion.”

“Well, I can’t imagine the world without you, pigeon, and neither can your mother.”
Location 1606

A hundred miles is too far for an unplanned pinch. She is thirty-seven years old and pines for her mother.
Location 1797

I understand this. Very much.

“Given your age, your FSH levels, and now this diagnosis, the chance of conception via IUI is little to none.”

“But if there’s a chance, at least—”

“By ‘little to none,’ I mean more like ‘none.’”

Taut pain at the back of her mouth. “Oh.”
Location 1940

I understand this. Very much.

This planet may be choking to death, bleeding from every hole, but still she would choose them, every time.
Location 2141

“Your shift now,” she says. “I’m going for a walk.”

“What about lunch?”

“I ate with the kids in town.”

“But I haven’t eaten.”

“So—eat.”

“I was waiting for you,” he says. “There’s nothing in the house.”

“Untrue.”

“What am I supposed to have, then?”

The wife starts for the kitchen, then stops. “Actually, it’s not my job to figure out what you’re having for lunch.”
Location 2153

I understand this. Very much.

The nurse has trouble, as usual, finding a vein. “They’re way buried.”

“The one closer to the elbow usually works better—?”

“First let’s see what we can get over here.”
Location 2235

F---ing hate this when it happens. Look, I know my body better than you do, if I say use this other place, use this other place.

... the biographer wrote emails to her representatives. Marched in protests in Salem and Portland. Donated to Planned Parenthood. But she wasn’t all that worried. It had to be political theater, she thought, a flexing of muscle by the conservative-controlled House ...
Location 2249

Because those in power don't listen to the people they represent.

A smart spinster. If the daughter were to say that word in front of Ro/ Miss, she’d get a sermon: What does the word “spinster” do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations? These are language acts, people!
Location 2292

She is too chickenshit to leave her marriage. She wants Didier to leave it first.
Location 2458

Why do some walruses in Washington, DC, who’ve never met the daughter care what she does with the clump? They don’t seem bothered that baby wolves are shot to death from helicopters. Those babies were already breathing on their own, running and sleeping and eating on their own, whereas the clump is not even a baby yet. Couldn’t survive two seconds outside the daughter.
Location 2469

“Tell me what’s going on, Mattie.”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve never gotten a B minus on a quiz before.”
Location 2482

Apparently my junior high school experience wasn't special, other smart girls had similar ones with grades slipping, too.

I first saw this book at the Getty Villa bookstore, when I didn't buy a bunch of physical books because I didn't want to carry them home, and was intrigued at the opening discussion about how Odysseus' wife Penelope's son told her to shut up when she voiced her opinion about her own future. Did I really read that opening correctly? Had I missed this when I was reading as a kid?

Yuuuuuuuuuup. I read it correctly. Yep, I missed it as a kid.

I picked up this book shortly thereafter from the library and read it quickly, it's a short book, essentially two essays from two lectures Mary Beard had given about women and, uh, power.

More specifically, the way women are seen in public discourse (not favorably) and in power (not favorably). Women have been dealing with being second class citizens for centuries, millennia even, of being told they are property or unfit or less.

Beard shows us the literature, gives us the quotes, demonstrates how over and over again power and the female gender do not go together historically. The concept isn't new, but it is finally, finally coming to the nation's, nay, the world's awareness.

My only gripe with the book is the subtitle, "A Manifesto." A manifesto is "a public declaration of policy and aims, especially one issued before an election by a political party or candidate." This book is a reflection, it gives no guidance or policy or direction from where we have been. I wanted the direction.

I recommend the book, yes, but read it as "this is how it is and was," not "here's a path to change."

Women, in other words, may in extreme circumstances publicly defend their own sectional interests, but not speak for men or the community as a whole.
Page 14

As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of maleness.
Page 17

In the words many of us learned at school, she seems positively to avow her own androgyny: I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too –an odd slogan to get young girls to learn. The truth is that she probably never said anything of the sort. There is no script from her hand or that of her speech-writer, no eye-witness account, and the canonical version comes from the letter of an unreliable commentator, with his own axe to grind, written almost forty years later.
Page 22

A notorious recent case was the silencing of Elizabeth Warren in the US Senate – and her exclusion from the debate – when she attempted to read out a letter by Coretta Scott King.

Few of us, I suspect, know enough about the rules of senatorial debate to know how justified this was, formally. But those rules did not stop Bernie Sanders and other senators (admittedly in her support) reading out exactly the same letter and not being excluded.
Page 26

Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say.
Page 30

It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority; or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it; they don’t hear muthos.
Page 30

More interesting is another cultural connection this reveals: that unpopular, controversial or just plain different views when voiced by a woman are taken as indications of her stupidity.

It is not that you disagree, it is that she is stupid: ‘Sorry, love, you just don’t understand.’ I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called ‘an ignorant moron’.
Page 32

And I've lost count of the number of times a guy has told a woman she should "read the paper," when she's the one who authored said paper.

How do I get my point heard? How do I get it noticed? How do I get to belong in the discussion? I am sure it is something some men feel too, but if there’s one thing that bonds women of all backgrounds, of all political colours, in all kinds of business and profession, it is the classic experience of the failed intervention; you’re at a meeting, you make a point, then a short silence follows, and after a few awkward seconds some man picks up where he had just left off: ‘What I was saying was …’ You might as well never have opened your mouth, and you end up blaming both yourself and the men whose exclusive club the discussion appears to be.
Page 38

Why, yes, yes this was my experience at Twitter, thanks to Arnaud, who would routinely tell me no, but yes to the guy who repeated my words immediately after.

The regulation trouser suits, or at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Angela Merkel to Hillary Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they are also a simple tactic –like lowering the timbre of the voice –to make the female appear more male, to fit the part of power.
Page 54

Ben Cody once commented to me that I dress very conservatively. I wondered about his comment, have looked at my standard outfit, and realized that, well, yeah, it is remarkably conservative: no hijab, but all of my body is covered with many layers, my clothes are unshaped, and nothing beyond my hands and head are exposed. I'm not sure when I drifted into my uniform, but I know it was a defensive response to cultural pressures I didn't want.

And it was that idea of the divorce between women and power that made Melissa McCarthy’s parodies of the one time White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live so effective. It was said that these annoyed President Trump more than most satires on his regime, because, according to one of the ‘sources close to him’, ‘he doesn’t like his people to appear weak.’ Decode that, and what it actually means is that he doesn’t like his men to be parodied by and as women. Weakness comes with a female gender.
Page 54

"Weakness comes with a female gender." We all know Trump is weak, so go McCarthy and her parody!

But Athenian drama in particular, and the Greek imagination more generally, has offered our imaginations a series of unforgettable women: Medea, Clytemnestra and Antigone among many others. They are not, however, role models –far from it. For the most part, they are portrayed as abusers rather than users of power. They take it illegitimately, in a way that leads to chaos, to the fracture of the state, to death and destruction. They are monstrous hybrids, who are not, in the Greek sense, women at all. And the unflinching logic of their stories is that they must be disempowered and put back in their place. In fact, it is the unquestionable mess that women make of power in Greek myth that justifies their exclusion from it in real life, and justifies the rule of men.
Page 59

Then she’s a virgin, when the raison d’être of the female sex was breeding new citizens.
Page 69

Athena, warrior god, was portrayed as a man. Gotcha.

We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured.
Page 83

But I do wonder if, in some places, the presence of large numbers of women in parliament means that parliament is where the power is not.
Page 85

Those reasons are much more basic: it is flagrantly unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we do so; and we simply cannot afford to do without women’s expertise, whether it is in technology, the economy or social care.
Page 86

But this is still treating power as something elite, coupled to public prestige, to the individual charisma of so-called ‘leadership’, and often, though not always, to a degree of celebrity. It is also treating power very narrowly, as an object of possession that only the few – mostly men – can own or wield (that’s exactly what’s summed up by the image of Perseus, brandishing his sword). On those terms, women as a gender – not as some individuals – are by definition excluded from it.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (‘ to power’), not as a possession.

What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don’t have –and that they want. Why the popular resonance of ‘mansplaining’ (despite the intense dislike of the term felt by many men)? It hits home for us because it points straight to what it feels like not to be taken seriously: a bit like when I get lectured on Roman history on Twitter.
Page 86

If I were starting this book again from scratch, I would find more space to defend women’s right to be wrong, at least occasionally.
Page 96

I bought this book on a whim while visiting a newly opened journal / papergoods / travel lifestyle shop in Los Angeles a couple weeks back. The book was small, with the blurb, "The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, no unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience." Yes, okay, I'm interested, keep going.

Turns out, the whole book was one big smack upside the head, complete with actionable items to do to help stem the tide of tyranny currently rising in our country. While reading the book, I wanted to highlight every passage, share all of the lessons with everyone, buy a million copies and send them out to everyone I come in contact with in all aspects of life. It is a fast read, 128 pages, so even people who don't read much or fall asleep while reading (read: many of my relatives) can finish it.

The book reminds us that we are not special. Democracy has fallen many times in the last century, and we have the advantage of historical perspective to see what happened. We aren't coming into this blind, we can see what is happening. We can stop it. Others have, we aren't too late.

So, yeah, I strongly recommend this book, it is incredibly worth reading. Let me buy you a copy, ebook or physical, I don't care which. I want you to read this book.

The twenty lessons:

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.

20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.
Page 73

Like Hitler, the president used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking, and presented journalism as a campaign against himself.
Page 73

We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.
Page 88

Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.
Page 89

In the twentieth century, all the major enemies of freedom were hostile to non-governmental organizations, charities, and the like.
Page 94

Today’s authoritarians (in India, Turkey, Russia) are also highly allergic to the idea of free associations and non-governmental organizations.
Page 94

To Ukrainians, Americans seemed comically slow to react to the obvious threats of cyberwar and fake news. When Russian propaganda made Ukraine a target in 2013, young Ukrainian journalists and others reacted immediately, decisively, and sometimes humorously with campaigns to expose disinformation.
Page 96

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.
Page 100

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.
Page 100

Similarly, it is none too difficult to imagine choices that increase both freedom and safety, like leaving an abusive relationship or emigrating from a fascist state. It is the government’s job to increase both freedom and security.
Page 101

When the American president and his national security adviser speak of fighting terrorism alongside Russia, what they are proposing to the American people is terror management: the exploitation of real, dubious, and simulated terror attacks to bring down democracy.
Page 109

Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.
Page 110

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves.
Page 114

A nationalist will say that “it can’t happen here,” which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that it could happen here, but that we will stop it.
Page 114

The acceptance of inevitability stilted the way we talked about politics in the twenty-first century. It stifled policy debate and tended to generate party systems where one political party defended the status quo, while the other proposed total negation. We
Page 119

Eerily, when judges said that a parliamentary vote was required for Brexit, a British tabloid called them “enemies of the people”—a Stalinist term from the show trials of the 1930s.
Page 122

In his 2016 campaign, the American president used the slogan “America First,” which is the name of a committee that sought to prevent the United States from opposing Nazi Germany.
Page 123

The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems.
Page 123

itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom.
Page 125

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something.
Page 125

One thing is certain: If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it.
Page 126