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A Different Woman
Fine in fine dust jacket. Hardcover first edition - New Dutton,, (1973). Hardcover first edition -. Fine in fine dust jacket.. First printing. Howard, a former Life staff writer, spent two years crossing the United States and talking to hundreds of women from rural matriachs to housewives at a Tupperware party to a high-powered big city attorney and the result is a book that "celebrates life, not ideology. It is at once a brilliant kaleidoscopic portrait of the American woman's coming of age from the 1950s to the 1970s and the tender, witty impassioned autobiography of a girl from the Midwest, now one of the nation's best journalists, coming to terms with her own womanhood." 413 pp.
- GenresNonfiction
413 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 4, 2014
My father introduced me to Jane Howard when I moved to NYC in 1964. She was working as a reporter, just about everywhere in the world it seemed, and was either at LIFE magazine then, or had just left. She was only 6 years older than I, but I felt like a toddler next to her. I am reading again her A DIFFERENT WOMAN, and finding so much to love about it, and that makes me rethink things about my life that she brings up in chapter after chapter. The book is ostensibly about the feminist movement, and she travelled everywhere in the country and met and talked to women. It could just as easily, at least at this distance in time, be an autobiography. I read it when it first came out in 1973, but I suppose that because of MS. magazine, and all the life-changing popular and social structure of the times, which affected me to some degree, I didn't realize how much fun and wisdom there is in it. After reading a chapter tonight, I thought I'd see if she were still alive (she'd only be 79), but found out she died at age 61, in 1996. I feel sad that I can't call her up and tell her how much I am loving the book the second time! (PS. I think the only other book I've read twice, or more, is The Poky Little Puppy, from about 1942.)
December 30, 2017
Published in 1973 and still fairly timely in 2017. Is it any wonder people are so frustrated by a lack of progress? We've been talking about it so long, maybe a different generation's methods will work? Or maybe in the US systemic sexism and racism are so foundational to our nation that change is unbearably slow or almost impossible?
Jane Howard doesn't go so far to make those kind of judgments, nor do the women she interviews around the country. The book is primarily Howard's interviews with women who "know" what's happening to US women during the time she's interviewing (late 1960s, early 1970s). Secondarily, it is a slight piece of memoir on her own development.
While admitting how little fundamental change has happened in regard to sexism during these 40 years is frustrating, reading these interviews is delightful. Howard covers a fair range of subjects, usually in their home environments. Some of the language and approach to race, sexuality, and gender-naming is dated.
Also, in the chapter "I'm in Love with a Handsome Mommy", Howard discussed a group of women working on a project to remove all of their menstrual blood at once in a "Mutual Aspiration Society". My dear childhood neighbor Regina and I dreamed and plotted of this, too. Alas, our idea for "vac-me" was not new, and didn't make it any further than the dreaming women before us.
******
Some of my favorite moments and quotes:
On small town Midwest (yes, my heart; she really captures some of what I feel as a Midwestern woman) - " The more I see of this sort of thing (franchises and chains), the luckier I feel that in my own past there figured a town so tiny and proud...."
"Still, she was indisputably midwestern, too, and with such a heritage I ought to be abler than I feel to define what distinguishes us from people who came of age in other regions. It pretty well goes without saying that we are not as charming, ... as those of the South, that we are not as breezy and effusive as westerners, nor as reticent as eastern Yankees. Maybe the essential thing we share, apart from the look and sound of us, is more subtly paradoxical: an attitude compounded of naivete and mobility. Landlocked, we were raised to wariness of things and people and ideas from afar. But we were also brought up equidistant form two oceans in as nomadic an age as the world has seen, and nothing really seems inaccessible to us, either."
"One aspect of charm is hospitality among kinfolk. Even now I feel a twinge of guilt if I plan a vacation that does not include homage to, and free board and room from, some relatives along the way. Nor is such largesse restricted to blood kin."
"Nobody ever told us in so many words to brush our troubles under the rug because if we did they would disappear, but that was the general idea. it was often implied that if we couldn't think of anything nice to say we had better keep still, that it didn't do to argue all the time, and that controversy was somehow in poor taste. Why my mother would ask us, did we always have to analyze everything? Why were we so critical? What idd we man, asking whether she liked .... those friends never, ever talked about, and nobody else did either."
"All roads, my mother used to observe, lead to the farm, a place where, as Ann has since recalled, our male relatives were miraculously able to give us ceremonial hugs upon arrival and farewell, with their hands still in their pockets. If they were a demonstrative lot by nature, they hid it well."
"Our choir was impressive .... it gave me an abiding fondness for hymns of all kinds ...."
"In the undemonstrative Midwest, where "not so bad" can mean "marvelous and wonderful", ice cream is a common metaphor for love. Maybe that is why a lot of us do not look as lean and rangy as we might like to."
On marriage, partnership - " The subjunctive mood grows wearisome; commitment sometimes beckons. It's not that I want someone to watch over me; I want continuity. It is sobering, of course, to note how disillusioning how many other people have found such things, but i still might have to try it, someday, for myself. I may be able to summon a spirit other than resignation in which to do it."
"Marriage brings sex and social approval: a lot of women only get married to have the stigma of old-maidiness removed. But who needs it, if it means playing games and stopping your growth and whining?"
".... by the time he's up and dressed, I've cleaned the house and made ten phone calls, and put everything in order, and gone off to work."
On road trips and travel - " Some of the best conversations of my life have been in cars on long trips like this one. There is something freeing about being encapsulated and uninterrupted, something conducive to the heights of humor and depths of gravity that separate good talk from blather about logistics."
On communicating with men - " Maybe it was true, as I once had heard someone else observe, that "men and women snipe at each other because they no longer need each other, which is why it's so appalling for the word 'ballsy' to be applied to women. All that word really means is that a woman's got presence."
On the movement - "What worries me is that what we're having now will turn out to be temporary liberation, like they had in Elizabethan England."
"Women don't often have such a sense of plunging into something adventurous. I knew no security. I knew I was taking a chance, but I was determined to make it work. I think that's why it did work. Not taking chances makes life narrow and uninteresting, but when you do take risks, the possibilities just expand. One radical step opens up all sorts of other doors - politically, sexually, economically."
"I'm just getting into the whole new area of intuition and loneliness and ethics and defensiveness and love, and I have such ambivalence about it. I don't know how it will turn out, but it feels like the right place to be."
"I'm thinking of naming them Chastity, Fidelity, Promiscuity - the central concepts of our time."
Jane Howard doesn't go so far to make those kind of judgments, nor do the women she interviews around the country. The book is primarily Howard's interviews with women who "know" what's happening to US women during the time she's interviewing (late 1960s, early 1970s). Secondarily, it is a slight piece of memoir on her own development.
While admitting how little fundamental change has happened in regard to sexism during these 40 years is frustrating, reading these interviews is delightful. Howard covers a fair range of subjects, usually in their home environments. Some of the language and approach to race, sexuality, and gender-naming is dated.
Also, in the chapter "I'm in Love with a Handsome Mommy", Howard discussed a group of women working on a project to remove all of their menstrual blood at once in a "Mutual Aspiration Society". My dear childhood neighbor Regina and I dreamed and plotted of this, too. Alas, our idea for "vac-me" was not new, and didn't make it any further than the dreaming women before us.
******
Some of my favorite moments and quotes:
On small town Midwest (yes, my heart; she really captures some of what I feel as a Midwestern woman) - " The more I see of this sort of thing (franchises and chains), the luckier I feel that in my own past there figured a town so tiny and proud...."
"Still, she was indisputably midwestern, too, and with such a heritage I ought to be abler than I feel to define what distinguishes us from people who came of age in other regions. It pretty well goes without saying that we are not as charming, ... as those of the South, that we are not as breezy and effusive as westerners, nor as reticent as eastern Yankees. Maybe the essential thing we share, apart from the look and sound of us, is more subtly paradoxical: an attitude compounded of naivete and mobility. Landlocked, we were raised to wariness of things and people and ideas from afar. But we were also brought up equidistant form two oceans in as nomadic an age as the world has seen, and nothing really seems inaccessible to us, either."
"One aspect of charm is hospitality among kinfolk. Even now I feel a twinge of guilt if I plan a vacation that does not include homage to, and free board and room from, some relatives along the way. Nor is such largesse restricted to blood kin."
"Nobody ever told us in so many words to brush our troubles under the rug because if we did they would disappear, but that was the general idea. it was often implied that if we couldn't think of anything nice to say we had better keep still, that it didn't do to argue all the time, and that controversy was somehow in poor taste. Why my mother would ask us, did we always have to analyze everything? Why were we so critical? What idd we man, asking whether she liked .... those friends never, ever talked about, and nobody else did either."
"All roads, my mother used to observe, lead to the farm, a place where, as Ann has since recalled, our male relatives were miraculously able to give us ceremonial hugs upon arrival and farewell, with their hands still in their pockets. If they were a demonstrative lot by nature, they hid it well."
"Our choir was impressive .... it gave me an abiding fondness for hymns of all kinds ...."
"In the undemonstrative Midwest, where "not so bad" can mean "marvelous and wonderful", ice cream is a common metaphor for love. Maybe that is why a lot of us do not look as lean and rangy as we might like to."
On marriage, partnership - " The subjunctive mood grows wearisome; commitment sometimes beckons. It's not that I want someone to watch over me; I want continuity. It is sobering, of course, to note how disillusioning how many other people have found such things, but i still might have to try it, someday, for myself. I may be able to summon a spirit other than resignation in which to do it."
"Marriage brings sex and social approval: a lot of women only get married to have the stigma of old-maidiness removed. But who needs it, if it means playing games and stopping your growth and whining?"
".... by the time he's up and dressed, I've cleaned the house and made ten phone calls, and put everything in order, and gone off to work."
On road trips and travel - " Some of the best conversations of my life have been in cars on long trips like this one. There is something freeing about being encapsulated and uninterrupted, something conducive to the heights of humor and depths of gravity that separate good talk from blather about logistics."
On communicating with men - " Maybe it was true, as I once had heard someone else observe, that "men and women snipe at each other because they no longer need each other, which is why it's so appalling for the word 'ballsy' to be applied to women. All that word really means is that a woman's got presence."
On the movement - "What worries me is that what we're having now will turn out to be temporary liberation, like they had in Elizabethan England."
"Women don't often have such a sense of plunging into something adventurous. I knew no security. I knew I was taking a chance, but I was determined to make it work. I think that's why it did work. Not taking chances makes life narrow and uninteresting, but when you do take risks, the possibilities just expand. One radical step opens up all sorts of other doors - politically, sexually, economically."
"I'm just getting into the whole new area of intuition and loneliness and ethics and defensiveness and love, and I have such ambivalence about it. I don't know how it will turn out, but it feels like the right place to be."
"I'm thinking of naming them Chastity, Fidelity, Promiscuity - the central concepts of our time."
October 7, 2023
I read this book with the hope of getting a better sense of the brave people behind second-wave feminism, but Jane Howard is (a) a terrible journalist and (b) too taken with first-person digressions that are banal and inconsequential. I wanted to hear more about one woman who had suffered significant economic hardship to fight for the cause, but Howard is just too frivolous and inside her middle-class bubble to ask the right questions. So this poor woman is ushered off-stage for the next bullshit Howard digression about being pulled over for a ticket or eating a salad. To get a sense for how bad Howard's "eye" for detail is, look no further than this vapid paragraph:
"Inside the corridors have jungle foilage wallpaper, and if records show you to have been a guest there before, you will find a basket of fruit when you first reach your room with a 'Welcome Back!' card from the manager. The desk is good about messages and whenever you pick up the phone in your room the switchboard operator greets you by name. The orange juice is expensive but obscenely delicious."
Well, thank you so much, Inspector Obvious, for painting such a distinct picture of being in a hotel that WE ALREADY FUCKING KNOW!
What a missed opportunity! The lives of women who lived during these times were important, but, in Howard's bungling hands, the effect is insulting tedium.
"Inside the corridors have jungle foilage wallpaper, and if records show you to have been a guest there before, you will find a basket of fruit when you first reach your room with a 'Welcome Back!' card from the manager. The desk is good about messages and whenever you pick up the phone in your room the switchboard operator greets you by name. The orange juice is expensive but obscenely delicious."
Well, thank you so much, Inspector Obvious, for painting such a distinct picture of being in a hotel that WE ALREADY FUCKING KNOW!
What a missed opportunity! The lives of women who lived during these times were important, but, in Howard's bungling hands, the effect is insulting tedium.
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May 18, 2019I read it many years ago and I’m looking forward to reading it again. I loved her writing as I recall.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews