Normal Women: From the Number One Bestselling Author Comes 900 Years of Women Making History

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With her financial dependence on her husband, she knows she’s failing the feminist cause – but she has a baby and a four-bedroom home to manage. A profound, strange, hilarious, dark, gross, compelling page turner that considers the ways in which women labor. I love sipping my tea and watching rich women scream at each other and talk crap about their husbands. That the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women?

Thirty-five-year-old Dani has given up condo life in the city to move back to her hometown Metcalf with her husband, Clark, and baby daughter, Lotte. Unlike motherthing which has a wild third act, normal women tried to cook up way too many ideas into one that concluded in a rushed and unbelievable ending. The relationship between Dani and Clark is 100% believable: they are both a little selfish, a little guarded, but make efforts to take care of one another (with both feeling resentful when those efforts aren’t recognised).You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In contrast to Anya, a “Normal Woman” who was “the portrait of self-care, a pursuit the mothers in the online mom forums held sacred, and another maternal obligation for all but the lucky few to fail at spectacularly,” the protagonist considers herself capable of something more than boozy backyard brunches and poop talk. It makes explicit the connection between women's paid and unpaid labor and is a hilarious send-up to gendered expectations surrounding appearance, motherhood, and societal value.

It is particularly interesting that I'm reading this at a time when we see hearing about the effect a lack of female input had in the COVID response.Clark does his best but he and Dani slip into gendered roles, inwardly berated by Dani who wages a silent war over their new espresso machine to which he seems oblivious. The complete sideline of women’s history as effected by the catholic and Anglican churches and by men who have been frightened of acknowledging that women have a voice that should be listened to to given that 52 percent of the population are women. Having finished the book I can see that Hogarth was trying to go for a conspiracy, mystery, inside-job sort of vibe but it was poorly done and really failed to capture my attention. It has a phenomenal girl math moment where the delulu girlies are going to get it right away: your husband‘s coworker has cancer, so you have to become a prostitute. It's not our world, but it's a fascinating one, rendered all the more interesting by the unreliability of Dani as narrator.