Yes, clearly her work in the world outside the home was for some frivolous purchase. We needed a gallon of milk, but she needed more panty-hose. She needed new shoes, but couldn't afford them. I can remember my mother crying because she needed nice shoes, heels that killed her feet, so that she could look sufficiently feminine, if she wanted to be accepted at work, as a professional. But in Man-World, women like her worked because they didn't know their place, and used the money to buy gewgaws and shiny things and their 300th pair of shoes. Women like her needed to work, because they needed the money to pay electric and water bills, to buy school clothes, and groceries. It was such a common place theme that it became a motif in some movies like 9 to 5. Men, still wet behind the ear, always the bridesmaid, never the boss. She, my mother, was so brilliant that they used her to train her new managers. Never in my life, had I read an author who so completely captured my own mother's struggle between being an ambitious woman with a powerful intellect, trapped in the nightmare of 1970s workplace sexism. Her writing was a real turn on, she is not a slave to the soundbite. and really explore the tensions between generations, and genders, races, and religions, and make it all make sense. Here was an author who had the presence of mind, the ability to take a long view back into contemporary Feminist history in the U.S. Little did I know that there was something better.

The idea of recreating a new mythos was attractive to me, but sometimes, it seemed that notion was taken in some weird directions. And while some explorations of how we view history were well worth the read, some of it was clearly just re-imagined, even if it was packaged as something more. I felt like these later manifestations ignored motherhood and pregnancy. Oh some of it was alright, bit it seemed to miss some major points. Full of impractical ideas, and junk history. It seemed to be going through some supernaturally long, bad hair day. I had been turned off by the manifestations of feminism for a while.

Ruth rosen the world split open