Class: a memoir of motherhood, hunger, and higher education by Stephanie Land
I absolutely LOVED Maid, so I was excited to see that Land had a follow up book about her time juggling college and single motherhood. After reading this book I just don't like her. She would probably say it's because of the stereotypes/preconceived ideas of poor people. But another review put it perfectly - I had to remind myself that she was 35, not 21. She wasn't a teen mom when she had her first daughter - she was 28/29. So, it's not like she missed out on all the fun party times of your 20's and was making up for it now. It's like she just never grew up and was perpetually 21 in her mind and actions. The main things I had issues with:
1) She left her daughter with ANYONE. I kept waiting to find out she had been molested or something. I can imagine it's overwhelming and hard to figure out childcare, but I was shocked by just how randomly she would find someone to watch Emilia.
2) She was hooking up with a LOT of dudes and never using birth control. WTF?! You know how this happened the first time, right? Plus, beyond unplanned pregnancies there are STDs, AIDS, etc. I lost a lot of respect for her when she was using the rhythm method of birth control and not in a serious relationship. That method has a 1 in 4 chance of pregnancy. Again she was 35 when she got pregnant the second time - not a dumb teenager.
3) College was SO important to her, yet while she's going she's constantly worrying about whether this degree will actually help her find paid work. She somehow was both flippant and overly invested in her degree.
4) Deciding to keep the second unplanned pregnancy in her mid-30's and then being shocked when other people weren't supportive or happy for her. Maid and this book continue to highlight just how hard being a single mother is and yet somehow she thought adding another child (with NO father in the picture, even for child support) would somehow make things better?
5) She also purposely chose to not find out who the father was (it was only possibly 2 guys) so that this child wouldn't have an abusive parent like her older daughter does. Here's an idea - stop sleeping with shitty guys! I mean if you're just really into "the bad boy" at least use some reliable birth control! These poor kids.
I did feel bad because it was painfully obvious to me that she sought romantic relationships because her parents were pretty terrible and basically cut her off. It also felt a lot like adding the second kid would make her even more of a victim, yet it would also reinforce the stereotype of the "welfare mom" having more kids to get more benefits. I feel bad for her kids. I'm sure now after the success of Maid and the Netflix series on top of that, she is fine financially. But what if it hadn't? What is there was no Maid and she had $50,000 in student loans, was still working shitty jobs and now had 2 kids to take care of?
The one good thing is that she is a good writer and kept me engaged with reading the book. But after reading this I just didn't like her as a person anymore. Anyone can make mistakes or bad choices, but we all know some things have bigger consequences. Land does a great job of showing how to make all the worst decisions and yet it's somehow not her fault.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Books & Banter and Evening Edition book clubs)
In an undisclosed year in a future, dystopian America, PACT - The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act shapes everyone's lives. Anyone viewed as "anti-American" and in particular anyone of Asian descent is immediately suspect. Bird is twelve years old and living with his father. Three years ago his mother, Margaret Miu, left them. A line from one of her poems became the rallying cry of anti-PACT protests. Bird quickly learned that everyone associated him with his mother even though he doesn't know where she is or why she left. One day he receives a postcard in the mail from her - no words, just a drawing. It triggers a memory that leads to him tracking her down and finding out what really happened when she left.
Celeste Ng is a very talented author. Each of her books is so different, yet all draw you into the character's world. The post-PACT world that she builds in Our Missing Hearts is terrifying because it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch from a possible reality. People lash out when they are afraid and want to find someone to pin their anger and fear on. COVID also highlighted just how far people are willing to go in the name of "the greater good." Historically children have been taken from parents as a means of control - and often it works for a long time until enough people are willing to stand up and stop things. We never learn from history either - atrocities against Indigenous people, slavery, the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps, McCarthyism, etc. What happens to the few who choose to stand up to what they see as injustice? Can one person make a difference in a society that seems happy to turn a blind eye? These are all issues that Ng explores brilliantly in Our Missing Hearts. I also LOVED that she made librarians the main part of the network of resistance in the book too.
Some quotes I liked:
"Did you know, their teacher explained the year before, that paper books are out of date the instant they're printed? The beginning of the year welcome talk. All of them sitting crisscross applesauce on the carpet at her feet. That's how fast the world changes. And our understanding of it, too. She snapped her fingers. We want to make sure you have the most current information. This way we can be sure nothing you use is outdated or inaccurate. You'll find everything you need right here online...So you banned all those books, Sadie said, and the teacher had blinked twice at her over her glasses. Oh no, sweetie, she said. People think that sometimes, but no. No one bans anything. Haven't you ever heard of the Bill of Rights?...Every school makes its own independent judgments, the teacher said. About which books are useful to their students and which books might expose them to dangerous ideas...It's our job as teachers, she said, her voice soft but firm...To decide what's worth keeping and what isn't." (p. 31-32)
"PACT, its proponents insisted, would strengthen and unify the nation. Left unsaid was that unity required a common enemy. One box in which to collect all their anger; one straw man to wear the hats of everything they feared." (p. 186)
"All over the country, a scattered network of librarians would note this information, collating it with the Rolodex in their minds, cross-referencing it with the re-placed children they might have learned about. Some kept a running written list, but most, wary, simply trusted to memory. An imperfect system, but the brain of a librarian was a capacious place...Librarians, of all people, understood the value of knowing, even if that information could not yet be used." (p. 236)
Exit Interview: the life and death of my ambitious career by Kristi Coulter
In 2006 at the age of thirty-five, Kristi Coulter left her comfortable yet boring job for a middle management job at Amazon. While Coulter was ambitious and wanted to be challenged in her job, she could have never foreseen just how challenging working at Amazon would be in a variety of ways. Coulter stayed at Amazon for 11 years and by the time she finally did quit, only 2% of employees had been there as long as she had. While we've all likely read horror stories about working at Amazon I think most of what I've read has to do with the warehouse workers and delivery drivers. But, we've all also likely read stories about how crazy working for huge corporations like Amazon/Facebook/Google/etc. can be too with tons of hours and cutthroat ethics. Coulter's experience is different in that when she started working at Amazon they were already well-known, not just starting out. But, they were also on the verge of the marketplace domination that they have now and she was a part of many of the new "non-book/media" things they were starting to sell. Her experience is also unique in that she is a woman in middle management who desperately wanted to advance and yet never seemed to meet the ever-changing requirements. She also quickly noticed that there were very few women on her level and even fewer above her. While she didn't experience the kind of bro/fraternity culture/sexual harassment many employees of silicon valley or other start-ups did, she did experience a serious glass ceiling and obvious (to her and other women) gender discrimination. She was once called "stupid" in a meeting with a peer-level manager and was also told by her superior at the time that in order to move up to the next level of management she would need to "change the world" - no other direction. But that also could give plausible explainability for never promoting her too.
While reading the book I wondered why she did stay as long as she did. I was also surprised by how little she seemed to tell her husband about the discrimination and craziness - I think she knew he would want her to quit. It's not worth fighting for recognition in an organization that doesn't see you a full person. When she finally does leave it's after a New York Times article is published that highlights just how poorly women are treated as Amazon employees and Jeff Bezo's reaction to the article, basically blowing it off. I'm sure nothing has changed at Amazon because Amazon's sole purpose is to make Jeff Bezos shit-tons of money. And for everyone who proclaims to hate Amazon, probably most of those people are still buying stuff from them because it's just so easy. I really like Coulter's memoir. While I personally can't relate to being so ambitious that I would put up with all the stuff she did, she did an excellent job of giving us an inside peek of what it was like to be a female manager at Amazon between 2006 and 2017.
Some quotes I liked:
"It's starting to bug me how much John downplays his career...Maybe I'm being sucked into power-couple fantasies, or maybe there's just something about his refusal to cop to being successful that makes me feel alone in this new life. Maybe it's the innate male confidence that eats at me. He doesn't need to puff himself up, because no one's invested in tearing him down." (p. 169-170)
"2013: At performance review time, I notice that a man who works for me and is one level down in the organization makes forty thousand dollars a year more than I do...I ask my HR rep if she knows what's up. 'There are just so many factors that go into compensation,' she says. 'It's hard to say.' She suggest I contact the comp team directly. 'This is a really busy time of year for them, though.' I wait until the review cycle wraps up and then I email them but I never get a response. The man is a poor fit for his job and impervious to my coaching and every time I see him I think about those forty thousand dollars." (p. 181-182)
"This is the moment it finally truly lands that I will never outrun my gender. Of course on some level I've known that for years, but never so starkly. I will never overcome the belief that the presence of women means a slower, softer, weaker Amazon. There is nothing I can do to make these men any smarter or less blind, because they're the norm and I'm a deviation." (p. 290)
Stained Glass Ceilings: how evangelicals do gender and practice power by Lisa Weaver Swartz
Stained Glass Ceilings is an academic study comparing and contrasting how gender is theologically taught and practiced at two prominent seminaries. Swartz interviews students and professors at both Southern Seminary (a Southern Baptist denomination based seminary) and Asbury Theological Seminary (a Wesleyan, non-denominational seminary). The whole book is only 4 chapters - how gender is theologically taught at both seminaries and then how gender plays out in practice at both seminaries. Her basic finding is pretty sad to me - Southern is a complementarian theology so they have VERY prescribed roles for both men and women particularly when it comes to ministry/church leadership. Asbury is an egalitarian theology so they are open to women being called to full time ministry and/or church leadership - yet it doesn't play out that way in real life. Asbury focuses on gender-blindness and seems to think that since they support women in ministry/church leadership that that is the end of the discussion/issue. When in reality women's experiences DO matter because if you never hear about the problems women have in ministry you can't help correct them. By seeing it as a non-issue you actually invalidate any issues that someone does have - this can obviously apply to other issues beyond gender as well. It was also shocking to me how many of the Asbury students were vehemently anti-feminist - that totally didn't make sense for an egalitarian focused seminary. It was just sad for me to see that the women's experience as Asbury wasn't better. Swartz actually says in her introduction that while writing this book she "...often recalled Mark Noll's words in the opening paragraph of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: 'This book is an epistle from a wounded lover' (1995). This book is, likewise, a work of both critical scholarship and Christian lament." (p. 15-16). While it was an interesting book, it was not an easy read and was very scholarly. Would I have still bought it if I knew this on the front end? Probably, but it was not a book you could easily pick up and read a few pages then put down. But, for women in the Church it's still an important read.
Some quotes I liked:
"Two decades after the Conservative Resurgence, gender egalitarianism remains a symbolic foe. It is also a conveniently tangible one. The conservative warriors of the resurgence battled over far more than gender, but an enemy as nebulous as 'liberalism' can be difficult to combat. It is much easier to attack the visible practice of allowing women in the pulpits." (p. 41)
[On the topic of Southern Seminary President Al Mohler speaking at Brigham Young University, a Mormon college] "Later, when I interviewed Mohler in his office, he explained the visit to me, reiterating, '[Mormons] are way beyond our confession. We do not recognize them as Christian, but on issues of family structure and many deep moral convictions there's commonality there.'...[then asked about commonality with egalitarian Christians] 'I think those relationships are going to be quite strained, more so than even in the past as we go into the future.' 'Why is that?' I pressed. 'Because,' he answered, 'I think the hermeneutic involved in egalitarianism is going to have a great deal of difficulty withstanding some of the other cultural pressures.' For Mohler, fears that an egalitarian reading of the Bible would lead to an interpretive slippery slope seem to have stymied alliance with egalitarian Christians, even other evangelicals." (p. 42) [Mind-blowing to me that a complementarian would choose to side with Mormons than other egalitarian Christians]
"Renee, one of the few single women enrolled in Southern's MDiv program, confessed to me that she had struggled with the complementarian framework for much of her life: 'I always thought that something was wrong with my personality, because I'm very talkative, very outgoing. I'm very opinionated and I have all these [ideas]...I want to lead things. So how do I do that in a biblical sense? I always felt like something was wrong with me, like God had created me right and I just messed it up.'" (p. 82)
"Dan did, however, acknowledge the context: 'I know traditionally it's been males who have dominated.' He nevertheless failed to engage the enduring legacy this tradition left in its wake. Instead, he worried about the possibility of what he called 'reverse domination' of women over men. Others agreed. Struggles to gain power have no place in a unified Church." (p. 103)
"Even the most enthusiastic boosters of genderblind equality, however, often recognized a problem. Some of the same administrators who insisted that Asbury was free from sexism also expressed bewilderment at how difficult it was to attract good women faculty members...They could not explain why men and women, equally called by God, might navigate uneven paths toward answering those calls." (p. 121)
"Clear policies and biblical teachings might support a woman's right to pursue church leadership, but she must also overcome cultural forces that normalize men's perspectives, leadership styles, and bodily mannerisms." (p. 136)
