Our online site is located at http://www.wmst.unt.edu/bluestockings04.htm

We meet once a month at the Barnes & Noble at Golden Triangle Mall on Thursday nights at 7 pm during the Fall and Spring semesters. We are open to anyone who would like to attend. We are a book club for people who want to read about women.

Here is the current reading agenda -

The Bluestockings Reading Agenda
September 2005-May 2006


September 15
Odd Girl Out
By Rachel Simmons

October 20
The Time-Traveler’s Wife
By Audrey Niffenegger

November 17
God’s Brothel: The Extortion of Sex for Salvation in Contemporary Morman and Christian Fundamentalist Polygamy and the Stories of 18 Women Who Escaped
By Andrea Moore-Emmett

December 15
The Secret Life of Bees
By Sue Monk Kidd

January 19
The Red Tent
By Anita Diamant

February 16
Woman With the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail
By Margaret Starbird

April 20
The House of Mirth
By Edith Wharton

May 18
Pride and Prejudice**
By Jane Austen

** This meeting will be held on the UNT campus instead of the usual meeting place at Barnes and Noble at Golden Triangle Mall. The meeting date and time will remain the same.


A Few Noteworthy Items

• All meetings except the May meeting will be at Barnes & Noble in Golden Triangle Mall

• Meeting time is 7 pm

• No meeting in March as attendance is always down with Spring Break

• Call Women’s Studies at (940) 565-2098 if you have any questions

We were also profiled on the Reading Group Guides website. Here is the link to the interview -
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/roundtable/interview_bluestockings_tx.asp

This message has been edited. Last edited by: JET,

The reading agenda for next year has been set.

The Bluestockings Reading Agenda
September 2006-May 2007


September 21, 2006
Maid in the U.S.A.
By Mary Romero
“[T]his classic text . . . continues to reaffirm the importance of questioning both the way our society organizes cleaning and caring work, and the relation of race, class, and gender on which domestic work relies.” – Pierrette Hondragneu-Sotelo

October 19, 2006
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
By Elizabeth Buchan
“Happy for 25 years, Rose watches aghast as both her career and marriage suddenly go down the drain. A best-seller in England that’s for the post-Bridget Jones crowd.” -- from Library Journal

November 16, 2006
Lucky: A Memoir
By Alice Sebold
“Addressing rape as a larger social issue, Sebold’s account reveals that there are clear emotional boundaries between those who have been victims of violence and those who have not . . . .” -- from Publishers Weekly

December 21, 2006
Beloved
By Toni Morrison
“A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book.” – The Baltimore Sun

January 18, 2007
The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity
By Kim Chernin
“Answers the need for help among five million American women who suffer from eating disorders.” -- Phyllis Chesler

February 15, 2007
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America
By David von Drehle
“The Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City became the deadliest workplace in American history when fire broke out on the premises on March 25, 1911. Within about 15 minutes the blaze killed 145 workers, most of them immigrant Jewish and Italian women in their teens and early 20s.” -- From Publishers Weekly

April 19, 2007
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
By Azar Nafisi
“In 1995, after resigning from her job, a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often reading photocopies pages of the illegal novels.” – From Amazon.com

May 17, 2007
Persuasion
By Jane Austen
“Anne Elliot, heroine of Austen’s last novel, did something we can all relate to: Long ago she let the love of her life get away.” -- From Amazon.com


The Bluestockings meet at 7:00 pm in Barnes and Noble at Golden Triangle Mall
Please feel free to join us in discussing these books that focus on women’s experiences.

Here is our latest reading agenda.

The Bluestockings Reading Agenda
June 2007—May 2008



June 21, 2007
Midwives
By Chris Bohjalian
Gripping story of a midwife who loses a patient and then goes on trial for manslaughter. The question becomes, as one reviewer on Amazon says, whether the practice of midwifery is not on trial as much as the midwife herself. This was an Oprah’s book club selection.

July 19, 2007
The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver
This long, gripping novel (almost 700 pages) chronicles the story of a missionary family sent to the Congo in the 1950s. If this has raised the hackles on your neck, it should.

August 23, 2007
The Hindi Bindi Club
By Monica Pradhan
This was a last minute addition to our reading roster. We were going to take the month off but we won a contest to have a phone call with the author. Monica was wonderful to speak with and we all greatly enjoyed the book.

September 20, 2007
Jane Eyre
By Charlotte Brontë
An abused child who makes good, a crazy wife who has access to too many matches, and a mysterious voice across the misty moors of Yorkshire – What’s not to love? It is, however, another rather longish novel, so don’t put off reading it until the week before we meet.

October 18, 2007
The Feminine Mistake
By Leslie Bennetts
Oh the flap this book is causing! Bennetts is alarmed about the financial future of stay-at-home moms. The author claims that many of these young mothers are “embracing a 21st-century version of the 1950s stay-at-home ideal that could imperil their economic future as well as their happiness.” This sounds a lot like The Price of Motherhood, which the Bluestockings read a few years ago, but it’s not!

November 15, 2007
Pink Think
By Lynn Peril
This book focuses on girls raised in the 1950s and 1960s and how media and culture trained them to be perfect women, wives, and mothers. The book also traces how remnants of this socialization are still in place for many women today.

January 17, 2008
Autobiography of a Face
By Lucy Grealy
How does a little girl deal with losing much of her face to a rare form of cancer? America’s obsession with looks plays a major factor in this child’s life as we read about her struggle for acceptance in a culture that places a high value on beauty. Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett, is a good book to read with this book, because Patchett and Grealy were college roomies. (Besides, it is short and cheap!)

February 21, 2008
Nineteen Minutes
By Jodi Picoult
This book was recommended before the Virginia Tech shootings, but it came highly recommended in any event. A girl witnesses a shooting at her high school and struggles to make sense of what she has experienced, just as her mother tries to understand what her daughter has experienced.

April 17, 2008
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
By Kim Edwards
This gripping novel is about the birth of twins: a boy and a girl with Down’s syndrome. Her husband who delivered the children tells the mother that her daughter has died at birth –. And . . . .

May 15, 2008
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
By Lisa See
Reminiscent of Pavilion of Women, the Pearl Buck novel we read a couple of years ago, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is set in China and is replete with foot-binding and the powerlessness of women in marriage there. It is touted as a poignant and suspenseful historical chronicle.

I forgot to post the new agenda for the academic year - here it is now.

The Bluestockings 2008-2009 Reading Agenda
Sponsored by the University of North Texas Women’s Studies Program
www.wmst.unt.edu


June 26, 2008 NOTE: Not our usual night!
An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas, Diane Wilson
The reviewer from Publisher’s Weekly says, “With her discovery that her ‘piddlin’ little county on the Gulf Coast’ let the nation in toxic emissions, shrimper Wilson, mother of five, found herself embarking on a voyage of discovery and activism that would strain her marriage and stretch her horizons.” Wilson ultimately became embroiled in a class David (Diane?) versus Goliath battle. According to Mollie Ivins, this book “is the rare, clear voice of a working-class woman goaded into action against the greatest massed forces in the world today: globalized corporate greed backed by government power.” Ivins attributed Wilson’s success to a trait Ivins said Wilson shares with many other women: “pure, cussed stubbornness.” AND – how many of you remember when Wilson herself was signing her books at Barnes & Noble one night when the Bluestockings met? (391 pgs.)

July 17, 2008
Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The memoir about a Muslim woman and her defense of women’s rights is one of the most gripping non-fiction books I have ever read. I bought the book having heard her speak at UNT, and it opened a whole new understanding about the struggle between Islam and the Western world to me. Hirsi Ali fled Somalia when she was forced into marriage by her father. She found asylum in the Netherlands, and her response to this new world is remarkable. To quote Publisher’s Weekly, “her attacks on Islamic culture as ‘brutal, bigoted and fixated on controlling women’ have generated much controversy.” That’s putting it mildly: there is a price on this woman’s head and she cannot return to the Netherlands, or probably anywhere in Europe. This should be a must-read for all American women. It is absolutely riveting. (384 pgs.)

September 18, 2008
The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
This novel is the one chosen for the One Book, One Community project at UNT which will begin in September. It is an intriguing read, with perhaps even more to discuss than we found in Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible. The novel brings up issues of immigration, how women form communities, and who decides what’s ethical and what’s not. Although this sounds like “heady stuff,” it’s really not – very down-to-earth. (336 pgs)

October 16, 2008
The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro
“A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s castle rock to look across the sea to America, sees a glimpse of his father’s dream.” I haven’t forgotten that we foreground women’s experience in the Bluestockings, but here’s a man’s dream, interpreted by his son – and related by a female descendant years later. This is the story of Scottish immigrants coming to Ontario, the adversities they faced and the hopes that helped them meet those adversities. Amazon praises Munro for her artful “compassionate understanding of ordinary lives.” (368 pgs.)


November 20, 2008
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
From Publisher’s Weekly: “After her husband’s fatal heart attack, which came at a time where their daughter Quintana was in intensive care after complications from pneumonia, Didion was labeled a ‘pretty cool customer’ by a social worker because she handled these shocks so calmly.” How do we get through the tough stuff? Do women and men cope differently when bad things happen? There are tons of books out there about death, but not many about grief; this is Didion’s personal journey through grief. (240 pgs.)

January 15, 2009
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
Every woman I know who has read this book has exclaimed, “How could this man write this story from a woman’s perspective and do it so well!” Quoting the San Francisco Chronicle,
Hosseini’s bewitching narrative captures the intimate details of life in a world where it’s a struggle to survive, skillfully inserting this human story into the larger backdrop of recent history.” I can promise you, it’s a story you won’t soon forget. (384 pgs.)

February 19, 2009
The Insufficiency of Maps, Nora Pierce
The SimonSays website describes this book thusly: “A young girl must discover the meaning of self and family as she struggles to find her place between two contrasting realities. On the reservation, Alice lives in a run-down trailer. Both her parents are alcoholics. She seldom has enough food and she rarely attends school, but she is free to follow her imagination…. Alice is removed from her home and placed with a white foster family in the suburbs. This new world is neat and tidy and wholesome, but it is also alien, and Alice is unmoored from everything she has ever known and everything that has defined her.” (224 pgs.)

April 16, 2009
Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindburgh
The 50th anniversary edition has recently been released of this timeless book. Amazon describes this book thusly: “Lindburgh’s musings on the shape of a woman’s life bring new understanding to both men and women. . . . Lindburgh casts an unsentimental eye on the trappings of modernity that threaten to overwhelm us: the time-saving gadgets that complicate rather than simplify, the multiple commitments that take us from our families.” (144 pgs.)

May 21, 2009
The Double Bind, Chris Bohjalian
This book was not only on our proposed list last year, when we elected to read this author’s book Midwives, but our own Nancy has been corresponding with the author. We’re hoping we can arrange a bookchat. Laurel Estabrook, young social worker and survivor of a near-rape, becomes intrigued when she finds photos of celebrities made years ago by one of her formerly-homeless clients. (416 pgs.)