Down Among the Women

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The tension between mother and daughter is political as well as generational; the former is a tough pragmatist, worn hard by the work of the Second World War, with a bleak and cynical outlook of gender relations. the clinging helplessness of her father's new wife Susan, her junior, whose submissiveness is the kind that enslaves the man, not the wife.

Gradually the plot moves away from Scarlet and through these lives and others, spiralling outwards until certain parallels emerge between all these lives: the sense of male-female relationships as a series of inevitable and painful compromises, both romantic and financial, and the ever-present twin threats of violence and poverty which keep women in their place. Praxis (1978) is noted for the development of its heroine, who endures in the face of repeated disasters. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Follow Wanda, the tough 30s radical, her daughter Scarlet, unmarried, pregnant and frightened, and Scarlet's friends -- born victims, snobs, obsessive lovers -- in their absurd, nightmarish, often hilariously awful liaisons. The first people (women) we are introduced to are Wanda, aged sixty-four, and her daughter, Scarlet.In the meantime, just feed us, keep us, fetch the coal and say something nice while you’re about it. Hovering about are Scarlet's friends and protegÈes, all of whom exist only in relation to the men whose beds they grace, covet or leave. Eighteen-year-old unmarried mother Scarlet, a lost child recovering from her first abortion, looks at the world with her friends and begins to see the truth. All of them tried to follow some sort of feminine ideal and great unhappiness resulted from squelching their own desires.

I have little patience for self-consciously ‘quippy’ dialogue at the best of times, and this book is a great example of a text where I kept wishing the author would silence her characters now and again and put more of the onus on the narrator’s voice, which is both a stronger and more subtle instrument. Fogli ben conservati, saldi e privi di sgualciture da lettura, tonalità ossidate vintage, tagli bruniti dalla luce.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. If we look upward, it’s not toward the stars or the ineffable, it’s to dust the tops of the windows. Not being familiar with this author’s work, I had little idea of what to expect, and all through the opening pages I was expecting a kind of social comedy with a political edge.

It made my jaw drop with it's accuracy and wicked black humour, and I became utterly addicted to Fay Weldon's books. Once I started it, I was already halfway through the book; then, all of a sudden, I felt the need to slow down and absorb the events of the young female protagonists. This is one of those books which at first seems doubly dated: the story is set in the 1950s, but it was published in the early 1970s, and in many ways it wears openly more signs of those later times than it does the former.Jag hade förväntat mig mer humor, men istället är det en ganska sorglig historia om kvinnoöden som berättas. There’s Audrey, a working-class girl who changes her name and takes up a new life with a man dedicated to a middle-class parody of destitution on a bleak (but wholly organic) farm in the countryside. This book, or any of her books, may not be agreeable to the palate of younger women, but for my generation who slogged through feminism in the 60's and 70's with little progress in some areas (equal pay for equal work for example) and have seen much of what we fought for overturned these days: the frustration with the male species and their need to dominate will ring true. The part that was the most interesting to me was how cruel the women could be (especially to each other) when they were unhappy and bitter because of it.