I've had this in my TBR for nearly a year and I have to admit to not being too keen on it from the description. It really didn't sound like my kind of book - a feminist LGBTQ tract (with emphasis on the L) detailing the lives of assorted early campaigners.
However, it's always good to move out of your comfort zone - one of the reasons I decided to theme books this year, to deliberately force myself to read some I might not have read otherwise.
After the florid writing in the last two books, the return to short sentences and a simple vocabulary was a really welcome change of pace.
This is one of the most eye-opening books I've read in many many years. Told in short segments, rarely if ever more than one page long (very rarely more than three paragraphs), each segment headed with the relevant name/date/title, it gives us glimpses into the lives of dozens of real life campaigners for women's rights.
With this structure it does feel very bitty, and there's not much of a n obvious central story to hang your attention to. However this doesn't stop it from being an engrossing read throughout. The struggle for recognition is the central character/theme of the book.
Schwartz manages to celebrate the women in the history without blaming ALL men for the problems, just the men in charge. And those women she celebrates had to put up with far more than I ever imagined. The details of the law that meant a man could rape a teen girl and she would be forced to marry him were shocking. Along with this, Schwartz makes it clear how women weren't even citizens of turn of the 20th century Italy (and elsewhere).
The title comes from the unifying factor in the early segments that the women are inspired by the writings of Sappho, and extracts from Sappho's surviving works are scattered throughout. We read of their efforts to emancipate themselves (in some cases through sheer disregard of the rules society expects them to adhere to) from the systems holding them back and the eventual formation of the Bloomsbury Group.
I did have some minor annoyances with this book. The style gets a little grating after a while, and I'm sure I missed a lot of references that any feminist would see a mile away. The writer admits in the text late on that she has deliberately excised any men from the narrative -and even names a few of the allies to the cause that she has removed from the story. The segment that bemoaned the number of women who died in World War 1 was the most annoying part. Not a mention of the generation of young men dying in the fields.
I suppose male centered histories have erased women's contributions, but is it maybe a little bit petty to not only excise men from the story and then admit to doing it deliberately?
These are minor quibbles though. This book was so much more than I thought it would be, and has changed my way of thinking on several fronts. On that level, this is a definite success.
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