Different Girls
At the turn of the century, when a woman's worth was measured by the ring on her finger, these stories listened to the ones who stayed. Girls who tended sick mothers instead of dancing at balls. Girls who loved unwisely, or not at all, or in ways society had no name for. This collection gathers narratives of young women navigating love, family, and the crushing expectations of American society at a moment when everything was beginning to change. The opening story introduces Margaret, who watches her sisters marry one by one while she remains at her invalid mother's bedside. There's no melodrama here, only the quiet devastation of a life half-lived and the complicated, tender bond between a woman and the daughter who didn't leave. Other voices follow: young women making impossible choices, finding humor in absurd circumstances, discovering that duty and desire don't always occupy separate rooms. The prose has that particular late-Victorian restraint, which makes the moments of feeling all the more devastating. What endures is its refusal to let these lives be forgotten. These aren't heroines in the conventional sense, but their resilience speaks across the decades to anyone who has chosen obligation over ambition, or wondered what might have been.
Editions
X-Ray
“our society is unequal, and bodily difference is used to justify that inequality.””
— Unknown
“Agency refers to the individual – to the choices she makes. Structure refers to society – to the context that produced the individual, and in which she continues to act. Which of these factors most determines the person I am and the behaviours I perform?””
— Unknown
“Make-up shouldn't signify frivolity any more than a closely shaved chin or a well-trimmed beard. The problem is not skirts, stilettos or other symbols of femininity; rather, it's what the symbols of femininity mean in our sexist culture.””
— Unknown
“Even within our culture, there are times when breasts stop being read as bouncy sex balls: when women are breastfeeding, there's pretty wide acceptance of the fact that shouting 'phwoar' is bad form.””
— Unknown
“We are not born wanting fake breasts or a work-life based on unpaid domestic labour any more than we are born wanting a can of Coke or Nike runners. In significant ways, society creates our desires and expectations for ourselves.””
— Unknown
“A research team … found that lessons children were likely to learn about gender from watching cartoons include the idea that men are more important than women, the idea that men are aggressive and get into fights, and the idea that women are fearful or nurturing … A study from 2012 found … that watching TV decreased the confidence of all children of colour and female children, while it increased the self-esteem of white, male children.””
— Unknown
“There are, of course, still people out there who think that the reproductive functions of women's bodies should exclude them from the public sphere. The technical term for these people is 'gobshites'.””
— Unknown
“… And symbols are important - they dictate the ways that others read us, what they expect from us, and how they feel entitled to treat us.””
— Unknown
“Teen magazines advised me on how to attract men, while books, TV, films and other cultural products subtly reinforced a narrative of male superiority, which was confirmed by the gendered make-up of the world around me.””
— Unknown
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Unknown. Different Girls. Lex, lex-books.com/book/different-girls-2002b1bd-c809-4037-bc65-238fb3f11ef9.Unknown (n.d.). Different Girls. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/different-girls-2002b1bd-c809-4037-bc65-238fb3f11ef9Unknown. Different Girls. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/different-girls-2002b1bd-c809-4037-bc65-238fb3f11ef9.
