She is clear about her position that women must speak up whenever criticism or politics or controversy is present. She does not suggest that the time had yet arrived in 2001, when her essay was published, when gender didn’t affect the effects of the written word. She’s a mite bitter about that.
Martha Brooks is a jazz vocalist. She writes about how she became more than a novelist and playwright through experiences that began with her deliberate attempts to connect "with the divine in nature." Her discussion is really more about a sort of spiritual search that she doesn’t claim as solely the province of women, though she implies that females have an edge over the other sex.
As a journalist and columnist, Anne Giardini points out that women’s struggles in society have never in the past been about power, which is the energizing principle for men. She wants to tell her daughter that "…unless she pens the book, she will never see her soul written out, that unless she barges into the room uninvited, she will never be a part of how decisions are made…"
It is mildly ironic to note how many of these voices tell of how they had been reared with the promise that they could do or be whatever they wanted. Some of the dropped threads might be those oft-repeated promises that the women who wrote about them feel cheated of to this day.
Reading their stories makes it impossible not to accept the politically incorrect facts that led them to their respective conclusions. Fortunately, there is much pathos and not a little humor among these essays that made reading them a real pleasure, even if at the end, you have to hope than in the last decade things may have improved, at least south of the border.
The best thing of all about this collection is that those threads dropped before they could be woven automatically into the growing women’s lives are actually some of the knowledge that has been arcane since the dawn of time. Some of the subjects written in regretful or challenging language are those that aren’t discussed much in polite conversation. Puberty, courtship, childbirth, menopause, bereavement. It’s not certain that these essays could benefit the very young. Some knowledge would be as wasted on youth as the seed cast on stones. For Senior Women, there are many chords that cannot fail to resonate.
DROPPED THREADS 2
Edited by Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson; © 2002
Vintage Canada paperback, 273 pp.
sequel to Dropped Threads, Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told, was a surprise because it comes from what appear to be different places. Another 35 women speak of their lives as they might to people who are already friends, or at least acquaintances. These stories are sometimes painfully personal. They deal with private demons like rape, like the missteps of misspent youth, like the moral terror of abortion, like the final acceptance of lesbianism.
The revelations in these essays make the writers even more sympathetic than those in the first collection. These aren’t generalized pieces; these are like letters from relatives or friends who have decided to open up. The dropped threads of these women are peculiar to their specific lives and situations in a way that makes the reader, willfully or not, engage in true exercises in induction. "There," you think, "I might have been," unless, of course, you actually were in those particular places if not in the same shoes.
The writings in Dropped Threads 2 were as stirring as TV docudramas. Brave, artistic, moving. Don’t read one of these books without the others. And be aware of the third, which may or may not be the final book in the series.
Dropped Threads 3: Beyond The Small Circle. by Marjorie Macdonald (Editor); Ann-Marie Anderson (Introduction). This reviewer hasn't had a chance to read this additional book in the series.
We would be inclined, however, to recommend it on the basis of the previous two.
©2011 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
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