The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, by Nadia Hashimi

452 pages, Kindle, paperback or hard cover,

Published 2014

A Review,  by Siobhan O’Hora

This book was recommended to me by my former boss.  She knows how passionate I am about women’s issues and she thought that I would appreciate the nature of this story.  Although this is fiction, it is not hard to imagine the many truths that unfold in the telling of this story.

Rahima and her sisters live in Afghanistan.  Their mother is condemned by her in-laws for only bearing female children and her father is an opium-addicted fighter for a wealthy man who is involved in both the drug trade and politics. Rahima and her sisters only sporadically attend school at the whim of her father and they are very limited in their freedoms because they were born girls.  At 9 years old, Rahima’s mother decides that they are going to invoke the ancient custom of bacha posh.  They cut Rahima’s hair short, dress her in male clothing, and start calling her Rahim.  In essence, making her a boy.  In this transformation, Rahim can then attend school, run and play football with the other boys in the village, freely leave the house to run errands for “his” mother, and even get a small job to help support the family.  In this custom, families with only girls can alter the looks of one of their daughters to be that of a male until they transform back into a girl when she is of marriageable age.

Rahim was not the first one in her family to go through the process of bacha posh.  Her aunt would visit her family and share bits and pieces of the story of their great, great grandmother Shakiba who had also been a girl-boy due to the circumstances of her young life.  Rahim(a) grows up listening to stories about her great great grandmother and over the course of time takes strength from Shakiba’s life story and struggles.

This is a story set in somewhat current Afghanistan as it shares the story of Rakima and how her life in some ways mirrors the life of Shakiba a century earlier.  It is the story of what the life of a girl in Afghanistan is like…the lack of freedom, the abuse, the poverty, the patriarchal rule, early childhood marriage and enslavement.  

As a member of Zonta I was immediately drawn to the plights of both Shakiba and Rahima.  Not only because of the injustices they and other women faced throughout the novel, but because I know that women living in Afghanistan are still living with these struggles to this day.  This is even more pronounced now that the Taliban is back in control of the country.  I felt this book helped me to understand some of the history and culture of this nation.  It touched on familial rules as well as what it was like to live in a male run village, a country under a Shah and how women’s roles have changed over time, yet have still remained somewhat the same.  

I highly recommend this book as a view into the country and culture of Afghanistan and how women are viewed and treated there.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive, by Stephanie Land

2020 - Paperback, Hardcover, and Audiobook   288 Pages

A Review, by guest contributor Jacqueline Wallace, member of the Zonta Club of Oswego.

Stephanie Land's 2020 New York Times best seller autobiography "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother's Will to Survive," provides a voice to many who are trying to find their way while struggling below the poverty line. 

The book showcases Land's first-hand experiences of working hard as a single mom in the service industry for little pay while navigating the system and surviving domestic violence. 

Many domestic violence agencies, such as Oswego's OCO inc. Sevices to Aid Families, have hosted discussions on Land's book as a way to shed light on domestic violence and services available for survivors and their families.

The book even caught the eye of former President Barack Obama, and appeared on his Summer Reading List.  He had this to say about it, "A single mother's personal, unflinching look at America's class divide, a description of the tightrope many families walk just to get by, and a reminder of the dignity of all work."

Netflix has even launched  seven-part series adapted from Stephanie Land's bestselling memoir.  While Maid is based on Land's experiences, it's reminiscent of many people's stories, which the series acknowledges with other characters Alex meets.  It’s no surprise that Land’s modest, straightforward book, with its nuts-and-bolts account of the housecleaning work she took on to support herself and her daughter, has been radically transformed in the Netflix series— only the broadest outlines of her story, along with the usual smattering of arresting or convenient details, have been retained. 

Members of the Zonta Club of Oswego hosted "Maid Book Club: Impact & Resources in our Local Community" with OCO Inc's Services to Aid Families on December 9 as part of Zonta's 16 Days of Activism. The event was facilitated by professionals from OCO, Inc.'s Services to Aid Families

Walk with me: a Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson

 2021, 322 pages, hardback, e-book.

Kate Clifford Larson explores the life of Mississippi sharecropper and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in this outstanding book that takes readers on the journey of a woman who was born into the grinding poverty and racism of the Mississippi Delta, and who rose to become the voice of the unheard and the conscience of a nation.

The 20th child of Mississippi sharecroppers, she had to quit school to work in the fields after sixth grade. When she tried to register to vote she was fired from her plantation job and kicked out of the house where she lived. Despite being arrested, brutally beaten, harassed by lawmen and the KKK, she persisted. Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice!

Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel―her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party―including itsstandard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson―tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary change.

She was not well educated or a polished orator like many of her fellow activists, but her ability to empathize with the poorest Black men and women, long denied the ability to vote in the South, resonated profoundly throughout the region and rendered her one of the most effective speakers of all.

Hamer's big moment came as she told her life story on national TV as part of the effort to challenge Mississippi's all-White delegation to participate in the Democratic National Convention in 1964.  Her testimony, given while wearing a borrowed dress, eloquently described the oppressive system that kept Mississippi Blacks powerless, and poverty stricken. The group won the right to seat Black delegates at the 1968 convention, and Hamer even ran for office herself.

This very moving book raises important questions about leadership of social movements—should it be top-down, led by ‘elites’, should it be grassroots bottom-up led by ‘the people’ or a combination. A significant question we have yet to answer.

Girl Waits with Gun, by Amy Stewart

"Girl Waits with Gun makes excellent use of history to put a fresh spin on classic cop-and-crook types. Amy Stewart s true-life protagonist is a rough and tumble version of the early twentieth century s New Woman. She is witty, sharply drawn, and suffers no fools! Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist"  Google Books

Girl Waits With Gun is the 1st book in the Kopp Sisters series by NYT best-selling American author, Amy Stewart.   Fiction - 2015, 448 pages, paperback, audiobook, and e-book.  

Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold. She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago. One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their family farm. When the sheriff enlists her help in convicting the men, Constance is forced to confront her past and defend her family — and she does it in a way that few women of 1914 would have dared. A fun book that touches on serious issues.

Gendered Citizenship. The Original Conflict over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920–1963, by Rebecca DeWolf

(350 Pages, published October 2021)

Want to understand the ERA better? 

By engaging deeply with American legal and political history as well as the increasingly rich material on gender history, Gendered Citizenship illuminates the ideological contours of the original struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) from 1920 to 1963. A comprehensive, full-length history of that struggle, this book grapples not only with the battle over women's constitutional status but also with the more than forty-year mission to articulate the boundaries of what it means to be an American citizen. DeWolf explores how this conflict around the ERA ultimately became the defining narrative for the changing nature of American citizenship in the era.

"This changes the game, in terms of what we have at our disposal now to talk about the forces that have historically supported or rejected not only the ERA but the ideological positions that coalesce to support or reject the ERA...the book is important because it is an original way of looking at a topic that many folks think has been fully covered, but DeWolf’s book proves has been missing major pieces. The attention paid to this particular historical time period, and the particular lens of looking at the topic from the vantage point of emancipationism and protectionism, is extremely valuable as a contribution to the field. It is meticulously historically researched, using relevant primary source archives, and appropriate secondary sources where needed."  LAURA D'AMORE

Rebecca DeWolf is a writer and a historian with a PhD in American history. Her research has won recognition through grants and fellowships, including the Dirksen Congressional Research Grant. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Frontiers, and New America Weekly.

read more about Rebecca DeWolf here:  https://www.rebeccadewolf.com/about-me

Three girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood, by Dawn Turner

Review submitted by Joanne Shawhan, Zonta Club of Albany 

 

Three girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner, 2021, 320 pages, hardback, e-book, and audiobook.

In this memoir, journalist and novelist, Dawn Turner delivers an immersive and often heartbreaking portrait of life in the historic Bronzeville section of Chicago.  It offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish…and others to falter.

 They were three Black girls:  Dawn, her sister, Kim, younger by three years, and her best friend, Debra who roamed together the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.  For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of “friends forever.” And then fate intervenes, first slowly and then dramatically, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There’s heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why? 

It’s at once a celebration of sisterhood and friendship, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.

Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother's Letter to Her Son Book, by Homeira Qaderi

Publisher Harper Collins, December 1, 2020  

A book review, by Irene Orton

An exquisite and inspiring memoir about one mother’s unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Time to share with everyone this great book that I just finished.  The title is:  Dancing in the Mosque by Homeira Qaden.  With all that is happening in Afghanistan I felt compelled to pick up this book in my local library.  I was not disappointed.

 

This 212 page book was compelling, as a courageous mother in Afghanistan she writes this memoir about the love she has for this child in a country that shuts women away from everything that we hold true and dear here in the United States.  I learned so much about society and the treatment of women in this country.  Homeira was no ordinary women, and she was constantly fighting for the rights of women in a very theocratic and patriarchal society.  At 13, she risked her freedom, and she defied the law to teach reading and writing to children.

 

This memoir is a letter to her son whom she was forced to leave behind.  This books serves as a wonderful invitation to reflect on the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival.  How far would we go to protect ourselves, our families and our dignity?

 

I could not put this book down!!!