Kerri Maher: Author
Why Write about Remarkable Women?
by Kerri Maher
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique opens with an excavation of early twentieth century magazine stories for women and girls. Readers from 1963 when the feminist classic was published were no doubt as astonished as Friedan herself when she did her research and discovered that in the 1930s and 40’s, short fiction starring women and girls featured them in careers as varied as artists, copywriters, and saleswomen, “usually marching toward some goal or vision of their own,” and “the moral, in 1939, was that if she kept her commitment to herself, she did not lose the man, if he was the right man.” These stories were largely written by women writers who themselves made careers of working in magazines.
By 1949, these mass-produced and widely read stories had changed dramatically, with stories casting women into the role of housewife and mother. By the late 1950’s, “only one in a hundred heroines” of such stories “had a job; even the young unmarried heroines no longer worked except at snaring a husband.” To be sure, the idea of manhood had suffered in these years too, after the death and destruction men saw while fighting for freedom abroad. And, three-quarters of a century on, men and women alike are still suffering from the post-war vision of family that McCall’s summarized in 1954: “For the sake of every member of the family. The family need a head. This means Father, not Mother.”
The image of the pretty woman in heels wearing an apron tied around her tiny waist while making a pot roast for her hungry family “is not,” as Friedan puts it, “a harmless image.” It is profoundly misleading about the talents and ambitions of women everywhere, and its suggestion that homemaking is the apogee of the evolution of the females of humanity ignores the truth of history, which is that women have always done essential work outside the home as well as in it—equal work to men.
I became especially aware of this mid-20th century tension in my research on Grace Kelly for my second history novel, The Girl In White Gloves. In her film roles, Grace was the epitome of the 1950’s ideal—gorgeous, adoring of her romantic partner, and either already ensconced in, or aspiring to, the job of Wife. Her whole project in Rear Window is to convince her globetrotting photographer boyfriend, played by Jimmy Stewart, of the rewards of domestic life (while swanning around in nipped-at-the-waist couture, no less!). Despite the roles she played on screen, the truth of Kelly’s life from the late 1940s until her marriage in 1956, indicated that she’d been an avid reader of those earlier magazine stories Friedan wrote about. Kelly was an ambitious, career-oriented actress. Though her parents were wealthy, she put herself through the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan with modeling and television gigs, working hard to one day be a Broadway star. Then she gave all that up to marry His Serene Highness Prince Rainier of Monaco. Although her life as Princess was as busy and full of work as before, all of that was in the service of her husband, of “the mystique of feminine fulfillment.”
Her choice was much less surprising to me when I discovered that her mother, Margaret Majer Kelly, had been the first coach of female sports at the University of Pennsylvania’s College for Women in the 1920s, and had given that up to marry her Olympian husband, Jack Kelly. Sr.
We tend toward what we’ve been taught, toward what’s been modeled for us.
Which is why it’s been so important that in the last fifteen years, women writers of historical fiction have in some ways picked up the baton set down by the women copywriters of the 1930’s, and made it our mission to write about remarkable women in history who have been in the shadows of men for too long. For my generation of historical novelists, this publishing trend started in 2011 with Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife, which was about Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson. Before McLain’s blockbuster bestseller, if people knew about Hadley at all, they knew her as the mother of Hemingway’s son Bumby, and as the ditzy wife who lost her genius husband’s first manuscript on a bus in Paris. McLain rescued Hadley from the clutches of those male-focused narratives and let her tell her own story. And what a story it was.
Hundreds of books have followed, including novels imagining the lives of Alfred Einstein’s wife Mitza Maric, an accomplished physicist (The Other Einstein, Marie Benedict), Camille Claudelle, Rodin’s muse and an important sculptor in her own right (Rodin’s Lover, Heather Webb); a network of female spies in the first world war (The Alice Network, Kate Quinn); the Six Triple Eight, the only all-Black female battalion in WW2 (Sisters in Arms, Kaia Alderson); the story of Aiyi Shao, a woman nightclub owner in Shanghai during the second world war (The Last Rose of Shanghai, Weina Dai Randel). Since Madeline Miller’s 2019 Circe, there is even a burgeoning sub-genre of ancient world and mythology fiction that centers the lives of women, reminding us that even the Trojan War could not have been won without Athena and a host of other essential female characters. The list goes on and on, because the titles are as endless as the variety of women to be written about.
Readers are hungry for more.
No recent novel illustrates this so well as Bonnie Gamus’s 2022, Lessons In Chemistry, a novel so wildly popular it’s already spent 57 consecutive weeks on the New York Times hardback bestseller list and wasn’t just optioned for premium cable right away, it was actually made and will air on Apple TV+ just over a year after publication (instead of going stale in production like nearly every other novel that is optioned for film). Every woman I know has read this funny, wise, and sharply feminist novel about Elizabeth Zott, a woman chemist who becomes an unlikely television sensation in the early 1960s. If the market strength of woman-led historical fiction is any indication, literature at least is well on its way to undoing the damage that Freidan described in The Feminine Mystique.
And millennial book influencers on Instagram and Tik Tok show with their reels and reviews that these novels are indeed re-educating and inspiring a generation of young women readers.
More work needs to be done, and for more than just the women who read historical fiction. It’s a shame that in pretty much every study I could find, it’s shown that women read more than men, and that when men do read, they tend to read non-fiction, which means that they are not exposing themselves to the same books that are shaping the minds and hearts of women. More than ever before, men need to read—for instance—about the plight of a female chemist in 1960s American industry to understand why there aren’t enough women in science today, and glean clues as to how to help fix the problem. As Glennon Doyle told one well-meaning male caller to her podcast We Can Do Hard Things, who asked what he could do to help women: “Act like it’s happening to you” (I’m paraphrasing).
Reading fiction is one of the gentlest and most effective ways to pretend to be someone else, to educate oneself and cultivate empathy. It’s also why writers write—we want to know what it’s really like to walk in the shoes of others.
ABOUT KERRI MAHER:
Kerri Maher is the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller, The Girl in White Gloves, The Kennedy Debutante, and, under the name Kerri Majors, This Is Not a Writing Manual: Notes for the Young Writer in the Real World. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter and dog in a leafy suburb west of Boston, Massachusetts.
Kerri’s next novel is based the remarkable women of the Jane Collective, who ran an illegal women’s health clinic before Roe. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS CALL comes out September 19, and is available now for preorder now at all your favorite bookstores, in hardback, ebook, and audio formats: www.kerrimaher.com