Margaret Walters (1938–2020)

The nice thing about the VSI series is that the books are indeed very short and generally well-written. The expected not so good things are that that aren't very in-depth (duh, hardly a ding given the series name) and that they are usually written by someone on the inside, so to speak. A knowledgeable insider to be sure, but with the accompanying sympathies and biases.

Nonetheless, this one, like the few others I've read, gives you a decent history and background. Certainly enough to hang your hat on and put other feminist works etc. in context and give you a starting point for further exploration of the subject.… (meer)

Great little book. I feel really great after reading it. So often I feel like online feminism in microblogs and short articles just point out to me all the injustice in the world. It is great to read the amazing and wonderful steps that women and men over the years have taken towards making society more egalitarian. The amount of progress that has been made in just a few hundred years is incredible.

There were some quotes that really made me think about my own life and reassess my priorities. The Very Short Introduction books always get criticized for being too short and not going into enough detail, for living up to their names, basically. This book has given me a bunch of authors to read more of and a bunch of ideas to give my mind something to mull over.… (meer)

Maybe it's the format of Very Short Introductions, but I found myself not trusting the author in the least. It ruined the book for me. Walters presents the book in an academic, disinterested tone, but spends the entirety of it making value judgments. "So-and-so's writing is clear and poignant, and despite being written 500 years ago, still resonates strongly with women today." In fact, the whole book seems to read like a "how not to write on Wikipedia" article; it's chocked full of weasel words, and often makes references to "a recent scholar" who has "convincingly argued" something --- but doesn't tell us who that scholar was, or what their convincing argument looks like! And if you wanted footnotes to do any research for yourself, well, you're out of luck! None of this is to say that one mustn't make value judgments. If Walters had put herself into the book, saying that /she/ found so-and-so's writing clear and poignant, I'd be all for it.… (meer)