26. The Mother of All Questions | Rebecca Solnit
Absolutely all of Rebecca’s books are magnificent, here’s the list if you’d like to get to know her better.
Friends,
I bought this book in a London airport and although I’m generally not a fan of short stories, I absolutely love this one. (Note - I’m re-assessing my relationship with prior short story books 😊)
This is a collection of Rebecca’s published essays on feminism and each one deserves some quiet time to reflect once finished reading.
My favourite favourites:
The Mother Of All Questions (2015)
“As it happens, there are many reasons why I don’t have children: I am very good at birth control; although I love children and adore aunthood, I also love solitude; I was raised by unhappy, unkind people, and I wanted neither to replicate their form of parenting nor to create human beings who might feel about me the way that I sometimes felt about my begetters; the planet is unable to sustain more first-world people, and the future is very uncertain; and I really wanted to write books, which as I’ve done it is a fairly consuming vocation.
Some people want kids but don’t have them for various private reasons, medical, emotional, financial, professional; others don’t want kids, and that’s not anyone’s business either. Just because the question can be answered doesn’t mean that anyone is obliged to answer it, or that it might to be asked. The interviewer’s question to me was indecent, because it presumed that women would have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.”
A Short History Of Silence
“We make ourselves in part out of our stories about ourselves and our world, separately and together. The great feminist experiment of remaking the world by remaking our ideas of gender and challenging who has the right to break the silence has been wildly successful and remains extremely incomplete.
The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. it’s how we make the world.”
80 Books No Woman Should Read (2015)
“A few years ago, Esquire put together a list that keeps rising from the dead like a zombie to haunt the internet. ‘The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read’ is a reminder that the magazine is for men, and that if many young people now disavow the binaries of gender, they are revolting against much more established people building up gender like an Iron Curtain across humanity.
…
Ernest Hemingway is also in my no-read zone, because if you learnt a lot from Gertrude Stein you shouldn’t be a homophobic, anti-Semitic misogynist, and because shooting large animals should never be equated with masculinity. The gun-penis-death thing is so sad as well as ugly.
Also, the way Hemingway said shit about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s penis size was pathetic and kind of transparent, back when Fitzgerald was a far more successful writer. “
