Events

  We are so pleased and honored that Kate Walbert was able to add an appearance into her busy schedule. Her new book has received glowing reviews from all the literary reviewers of note. A Short History of Women opens in England in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause. Her choice echoes in the stories of her descendants interwoven throughout the book: a brilliant daughter who tries to escape the burden of her mother's infamy by immigrating to America just after World War I to begin a career in science; a niece who chooses a conventional path—marriage, children, suburban domesticity—only to find herself disillusioned with her husband of fifty years and engaged in heartbreaking and futile anti-war protests; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety of the times while getting drunk on a children's playdate in post-9/11 Manhattan. In a kaleidoscope of voices and with a richness of imagery, A Short History of Women explores the ways in which successive generations of women have responded to what the Victorians called "The Woman Question."