Idaho Commission for Libraries

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Theme Essay | Discussion Prompts

Books, Author Information, and Discussion Questions:

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

The Jailing of Cecelia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale

Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

Theme Essay

In the 1960s and '70s, many of our society's traditional beliefs and institutions were being questioned. Citizens criticized foreign policy, resisted U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and came to doubt the morality of governing agencies, especially after the Watergate scandal. People experimented with alternate lifestyles, like the "hippie subculture." The feminist movement also emerged during this time of questioning. Women's concerns took on a national importance they had not had since before the first World War. Women looked closely at the ways in which a male-centered society had influenced their ideas about themselves and their roles. In consciousness raising groups, they recounted their own stories and explained their feelings about their lives and their natures.

One central issue for women at that time was self-definition: what "women's nature" might be and what "women's place" in society should or could be. Traditionally, women's place had been in the home as housekeepers, wives, and mothers. Their work had been centered on providing for the daily necessities of living, and their emotional satisfaction was supposed to depend on romantic love and domestic ties. Women were expected to be selfless, setting aside their own needs to minister to the needs of others. Women's natures and roles had been determined by others their parents, lovers, spouses, and children. The women's movement in the `60s and `70s challenged all that. Women were encouraged to seek work outside the home, to find meaningful and satisfying careers, to discover and fulfill their own needs and desires. Women as well as men were to be independent and powerful individuals.

At the same time, women realized that certain values and attitudes traditionally considered female were valuable and should not be discarded or replaced by competition and aggression. Women in all sorts of different environments had created strong supportive communities among themselves; they had stressed cooperation and affectionate bonding. They also realized that not all women's experiences in our society are similar. Differences exist among us along lines of economic class, access to education, and racial or ethnic background. There is no single "women's experience" or "women's nature." All of these differences exert their own pressures upon us and help create our values and our sense of what possibilities exist for our lives.

So the process of developing women's consciousness has not been a simple success story in which women, like the heroes of Horatio Alger's nineteenth century novels, move from the rags of marginalization to the riches of self-confidence and full participation in their society. We have inherited contradiction, difference, and difficult choices as well as new possibilities. Women today write not only about making choices between homemaking and career or how difficult it is to balance the two together; they also consider the economic and emotional necessities of single parenthood, the struggle to find work (if possible meaningful work) and still provide care and love for children. They write about the choice to have children or not, the choice to marry, to take a lover, male or female, and also about what happens when choice is not available, about abuse, about how much personal responsibility women have, about victimhood. They ask questions: If we have been victims, must we remain so? How do we survive in the world as it is while achieving some space in which to grow and develop as caring, whole human beings? What part does our particular class, ethnic or racial heritage play in determining our identities? How much do we need to preserve and cherish that heritage, and how can we do this when its values and traditions differ from those of the dominant culture?

The five works in this discussion series deal with such questions. In them, women of many different backgrounds and personalities struggle to create and maintain that difficult balance among the pushes and pulls of society and self. And if there is no final answer offered by any of them, there is always, in each work, the possibility of achieving a satisfying, though perhaps temporary, balance day by day.

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Discussion Prompts

As you read these novels and short stories, you may want to consider the following questions. In exploring each author's answers or partial answers to them, you may also discover which of the questions are most significant to your life and how you would like to answer them.

1. What sorts of communities are presented? When are they supportive, fostering the needs and hopes of the women in them and when are they limiting and confining? How do the women in these novels and stories balance the values of community and individuality?
2. What sort of relationships exist between mothers and daughters? What is passed down from one generation to another? Many of the women in these works are both mothers and daughters; how do they balance these two roles? What do the mothers want to give to their daughters? What do they give without knowing it? What do the daughters choose to accept or reject?
3. What sorts of relationships exist between women and men? How do these women perceive the men in their lives? How important is heterosexual love to them? What kinds of relationships are strong and positive; what kinds destructive? How do these women balance their own needs and those of their lovers or husbands? If they do not choose such love, what do they choose instead?
4. What are the values these women live by? How do they develop a sense of their own value? What challenges that sense of being valuable? What reinforces it?
   

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Books for Further Reading

• Anzaldua, Glorie, ed. Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspecitves by Women of Color. New York: Women of Color Press, 1990.
• Aptheker, Bettina. Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience. Amherst: University of Massachusettes Press, 1989.
• Bruchac, Coral, Linda Hogan, and Judith McDaniel, eds. The Stories We Hold Secret: Tales of Women's Spiritual Development. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Reviews, 1986.
• Heilbrun, Carolyn S. Writing a Woman's Life. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
• Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton, 1976.
• Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

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"Balancing Acts" was developed in 1994 by Dr. Janne Goldbeck, professor of English at Idaho State University. Dr. Goldbeck teaches medieval literature, literature and gender, and writing. In 1994, she published her first volume of poetry, All the Ways Home.

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