Kate Walbert's "A Short History of Women"

The title of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, uses the term "history", suggesting a fact-baseed, chronologically sequential overview of the public achievements of woman in the abstract. While focused on the idea this type of history, this story collection is a fiction that underlines the fictional aspects of history. It points to the uses, distortions, gaps and weaknesses of traditional history.

Walbert's use of history in her title evokes Dicken's and Fielding's use of the term in the subtitles of certain of their novels. Walbert's is a history of individuals, five generations of the women in a family. Their lives span from just a little before the start of the twentieth century to just past the advent of the twenty-first. The stories captures what history hasn't captured, what it can't capture: what goes on in homes, the days of maids, mothers and children, the emotional lives of individuals and the complex relationships they give rise to.

Walbert's elliptical and non-sequential story-telling here suggests connections between the little vignettes and memories that comprise the "stories." Conversely, the juxtaposition of women and periods draws attention to the disconnects between. In doing so, Walbert questions History's tendency to connect and relate events and personages through cause and effect; in contrast, her stories tell histories, present lives, marked by disconnection and miscommunication. For Walbert's characters, the past is always present and impacting on the present; ghosts appear in these tales. Yet, change is a constant and comes about, and most often thanks to disaster rather than any heroic, calculated action of the characters. The ghosts are figments of the present as much as figures from the past.

Walbert traces the matriarchal descent of the Townsend-Barret-Deel family across the Twentieth century. While the period is lauded as marking significant advances in the rights, roles and aspirations of women, the women in this book experience a more ambiguous progress.

Chronologically, the family history recounted here begins with Dorothy Townesend, a society lady and radical suffragette who undertakes a hunger strike on behalf of women's rights ostensibly. She succeeds and, without Walbert supplying much in the how why, enters into the history books of Walbert's fictional world albeit as a footnote. Somehow or other, she goes from being a much criticized figure whose protest is derided and ignored to the point where she ends up posthumously on a postage stamp. The last woman we encounter briefly, in a recreation of Dorothy's great-great-granddaughter's social networking page. Between these figures, we encounter Evelyn, Dorothy's daughter, who rises from the ruin that her mother's death immediately imposed on the family and goes off to study mathematics at Columbia. She's followed by her niece Dorothy Townesend Barret, an affluent, American suburban housewife in the fifties who late in her life, inspired by the figure of her grandmother Dorothy, takes off on a quixotic protest against the second Iraq war. Her daughters Caroline Deel and Elizabeth Barret, born in 1956 and 1963 respectively, follow; Both their tales suggest the greater opportunities afforded them come accompanied with old frustrations. Finally, the anonymity and sterile social networking page of Caroline's daughter, Dora Barret-Deel.

Regardless of their era, the women seem often isolated; all express a desire to relate to others more honestly; all sense they've been marginalized. They wish to "do something" with their lives, to make a mark in the world; explaining her arrest at Dover AFB, Dorothy Barret tells her daughter "I am just trying to Do Something." her histrionic cri-de-coeur gets little response from her daughter who is busy "looking for dinner inspiration, for anything other than pasta"(45). Dorothy Barret's daughter end up questioning whether the compulsion to do something isn't just another product of an essentialist notion of womanhood. They fear they've bought into the demands and expectation that a stereotype imposes on its victims and are forever locks blocked from their true selves, their personhood or self.

Regardless of "the something" they decide upon, all experience a regret and worry when looking back. Or as the late twentieth century Caroline corrects herself: "regret, perhaps, but not, it is bigger than that, more epic, somehow, padded and full and weirdly historical: this restlessness, this discontent. You've done it wrong, again, and you were going to do it perfectly"(222). "What is a woman to do?" is the central and unfair question that plagues Walbert's women. Although remembered as a "can-do" woman during "her time with the children," Dorothy Barret ends up afterward feels desperately compelled to "Do Something"(45).

One might say this is a matriarchal history; it is focused on the women as the family line descends. While not all the generations are connected via a mother-daughter connection, the issue of motherhood is central. Dorothy Barret asks: "Why couldn't she just be [a mother]?...It is apparently all that they ever need"(49). Yet, it fails to answer as a way of life for the women. For obvious reasons: children grow up and leave. Of course, the book presents a parade of men who would like the women in their life to simply mother them, but this is more a horrifying than a satisfying prospect.

A servant finds Dorothy Townsend outdoors weeping, "holding up the dead branch" and complaining that "'I didn't sign on for this....For you, for us. The children and you and me. We're a team, aren't we? A music hall show. It's all so bloody predictable'"(74). Yet, conscious of an obligation to her children, she's filled with self-loathing when she tries to reconcile her desire to starve herself to further the cause. She confesses, "it is brutal, unimaginable, to think of what she is doing, what she has already done to the children, to think of what the children may grow into, given her absence, given their father's absence." Yet, her guilt doesn't stop her. Ultimately, she rather cavalierly decides to "speak to Alexandra [her best friend] about it, propose explicit instruction on what should come next"(69). The family maid is left to break the news to her children, Dorothy dead and her mother indisposed by Dorothy's death.

Of course, motherhood in Dorothy Townsend's time and social place differs from the hyper, overly attentive and anxiety ridden versions we encounter when Dorothy's great-grandaughter takes her daughter on a play date to a posh apartment high-rise on the west side of Manhattan. While Dorothy Townsend clearly loves her children, she seems to spend a good deal less time with them than their maid and nurse do. Ironically, Dorothy's concern over the plight of women never seems to take in the plight of the serving women in her house.


While Dorothy loves her children in an abstract way, her yearning to make a mark on history eclipses any desire she has to be a mother. Yet, While clearly attached to her ideals and eager to affect change, Walbert's close rendering of Dorothy's interior life provides a glimpse into the tangle of motives driving her decision and casts shadows on any simple reading of Dorothy Townesend as a hero. While eager for change, she doesn't have a clear idea of what she's after. She's not a calculating sort. She recalls her decision being the product of "a magical intuition." Hearkening back to the origins of an action that will make her a historical figure, she questions the foundations of "her idea, her better idea-and isn't this the way of intuition? The hunch more formed than one fully understands? The outcome set? Something will happen, she thinks"(31).

Although read by later generations as an act of heroism, Walberts rendering of the months preceding it makes Dorothy's self-starvation seem as much an act of suicide as a brave political statement. Expected to fill a mother/wife role for which she feels ill-suited, Dorothy comes across as depressed and distracted rather than engaged and angry. Of course, a fine line lies between the political and the personal. The depression and boredom fueling Dorothy's decision has a political as well as personal aspect.

Dorothy's stab at change enters history rather silently. Dorothy's mother warns her: "'Nobody is paying a damn bit of attention'"(4). Yet, people are paying attention. She garners an obituary in The Times , "though her pursuit of dying has been kept-given an edict from the editors-between the lines....on the advice from certain persons familiar with the hysterical and copycat tendencies of the Women's Social and Political Union, and of the precedence of the war news above all else"(78-79). Between the lines, many of her contemporaries know what she's done. Evelyn's teacher Father Flanigan tells Evelyn he admired her mother; "he had read all about her in the papers-between the lines, he says, where the news is: a real hero she was"(12).

Regardless of whose featured in them, the stories are not ordered in strict chronological order. When it comes to establishing the truths of history, the ordering of voices is as important as the selection. Preceding her famous mother's reflections on her final days, Evelyn's account has little time for Dorothy as heroine. Early on, Evelyn strives to see her mother's willed death as a noble gesture on behalf of women, a gift of sorts, most especially to her as Dorothy's daughter. But, she's never given much of a chance to claim or name the act herself. Instead, she's silenced by her Godmother, Dorothy's best friend and fellow radical Alexandra. Evelyn recalls her mother telling her, "I'm dying for you." However, doubt is cast on this memory of Evelyn's by her godmother Alexandra who claims, "No, she would never have said such an thing and besides, she was delirious and spoke stuff and nonsense"(12).

Despite the readings of others, Evelyn's resentment and hurt ultimately preclude her from turning her mother into her hero. For Evelyn, Dorothy's not the history-maker but the mother who abandoned her. In a heavy-handed scene, Evelyn encounters her mother's ghost in the lobby of Barnard college. Her daughter sees her as "pale, beautiful, raven-haired, they would have called her, had she been a heroine though she was not, I could have told her; neither then nor now-not to me, not to anyone. No one will remember you, I want to say to her. No one. But I don't have the heart"(94).

While she can't say deny her mother face to face, Evelyn does break all connection to Dorothy, denying their relation when pacifists question her aboard a boat to America. She resolves, "I'll start from nothing...I am now no one's daughter"(90). She maintains the disconnection to the end. When her niece sends her queries as to Dorothy, she refuses to answer them.

Of course her desire to sever the connection can never be achieved. Her mother forged her, if by indirection. She granted Evelyn tremendous freedom while alive and with her death forced her to make her own way or sink. After her grandmother sends her to school and her godmother moves suddenly to Argentina, Evelyn's virtually free of family and the control it exerts over women of her time and place. Yet, as one might expect, this freedom, offered thoughtlessly and by indirection hardly constitutes care or inspires love. Evelyn expresses her resentment of the hurt her mother caused her by resolving to forget her mother.

Yet, like the family silver that bypasses generations, Dorothy's legend survives Evelyn's willful neglect. Decades later, her granddaughter, Dorothy Barret, discovers her. When her last child leaves for college and the "hours pooled at her feet like water," Dorothy Barret "researched her the history, her history, as best she could"(130).

While Father Flanigan can read between the lines of Dorothy's obituary, what lies beyond the facts that history records has faded considerably by the time Dorothy comes to it. Dorothy Barret is left with lines from newspapers, a stamp bearing "an engraving of a woman she had never met nor heard much of,"(130), and sundry paper records. With a handful of facts, the granddaughter has a hard time connecting to her grandmother in any particular fashion. From the stamp, grandmother Dorothy "looks like any of those turn-of-the-century types in profile, the hair piled high on her head in a pompadour, the collar, the eyebrows thick and arched, and the long nose and the slight downward curve of her mouth"(131). A fairly devoted and attentive mother herself, she puzzles out "the reason [her grandmother] chose to starve herself" and admits that grandmother Dorothy "remains a great mystery to me. She had two children she would leave as orphans." And, adds in what seems envy, Dorothy observes "[my grandmother] was, from all indications, engaged in a love affair. She was respected, brilliant."(133) From her discontented granddaughter's perspective, Dorothy the suffragette, living at a time when women's choices were much more circumscribed, appears to have lived a fuller life than her own.

While repeatedly citing her as an inspiration, Dorothy's picture of her grandmother is a less than whole one. It is clearly an image forged out of need and desire; the reader has the privilege of seeing how crucial parts are missing. Dorothy paints her picture of her grandmother from footnotes. She believes that footnotes are where women like her grandmother live. In a presentation on Florence Nightengale, she dedicates a portion to her grandmother, who she groups with "those other women whose names you wouldn't know, women who came and went" women such as "their antecedent Florence [Nightengale]"(130). In the end, Dorothy Barret will satisfy the gaps in what she knows of her grandmother by focusing on the much better documented life of Nightengale. And, with some warrant; in an earlier story, Dorothy Townsend and her friend Alexandra spend an evening with a "plate of sweets before them and a copy of Florence Nightingale's "Cassandra"; these days they might read it aloud just to hear her words in their voices"(63).

Unlike her illustrious grandmother, Dorothy Barret gained satisfaction and felt most authentic as a mother but seems unable or unwilling to accept her feeling and experience as legitimate and worthy. After her children grow up and leave the nest, she's left adrift and seeking meaning. In the words of her clingy husband, she becomes preoccupied by "the ever-constant Dorothy question...'What shall I do?' she wailed-the 'shall' alerting him to the fact that she had become... the on-the-stage Dorothy, the one who saw herself in epic terms"(120). Seeking to imitate her original Grandmother and her dramatic end, Dorothy Barret begins to protest the Iraq War by attempting to photographing the return of dead soldiers to Dover Air Force Base.

Dorothy Barret fails to ever become fully engaged in the protest she undertakes to photograph caskets returning from The Iraq War. "What I'm trying to do is to aim for something real" she explains to her daughter in recounting her eventual arrest. Her arrest proves an anti-climax, lacking in drama and emotion. It is not the original act of self-expression she hoped for. She admits, "Here the two of us...the all of us: the soldiers, the protestor, we're all from a scene already enacted"(44).

Dorothy only discontinues her protest when it begins to appear a derivative and shopworn act chosen in a desperate bid to do something "historic" and brave. She realizes that it's not the war itself but her unresolved and unspoken grief for her son James, who died from Leukemia some years before, thats been driving her, supplying her with whatever emotion she's brought to the act of protest. She acknowledges turning the soldiers at Dover into straw villains that she'd set up to complete the drama she'd set out on. She asks,"what had she planned, anyway? To whom would she have shown her pictures? Charles? Liz and Caroline?"(50).

Tossing aside her original intent, Dorothy ends up doing something much more original and true to herself and her grief: she comes to the guard tower at Dover with a desire to know the soldier she'd previously vilified. Dorothy decides, "She wants to know where he's from, what he studied in school. She's interested in his early artwork, she could tell him. Elementary. Preschool even. Did he begin with circles? Those circles!" She yearns to comfort him in a maternal fashion: "Don't despair, she could tell him. It happens to everyone"(51). Dorothy Barret's yearning fantasy to mother the soldiers may be an expression of power. Her emotion is a reverse mirror image of the resentment/revulsion her grandmother feels when confronted by the grown men in her life who wish to and manage to stay boys and who seek women to mother them.

Darwin and his theory of Evolution reoccur in the stories; much like History, Evolution seeks to answer how and why things came to be and change. Thinking through the expression of symbols and motifs, Walbert weaves her stories together through the recurring use of shapes, figures, scenes and gestures.

Walbert makes frequent reference to lines. Comically, Dorothy Townesend's great-grandson James tells his mother Dorothy Barrett, "'You're an original, Mom. I've meant to tell you,'" and she replies, "'From a long line darling'"(48). When it comes time to defend her trespassing at Dover Air Force Base to capture the return of U.S. service casualties, she defends herself to her daughter Caroline by invoking her Grandmother; "Caroline speaks of Responsibility and Reputation and Appropriate Behavior," Dorothy asks, "'And what of history?'....'Lineage?'"(41).

As she indicates in other stories, line morphs. Dorothy Trevor Townesend knows "the arc of [her former lover's] life from the papers." But what is the arc of a life? Walbert asks as much by having Dorothy afterward recall having once "watched as [William] pushed a child on the Hyde Park swings"(70).

For Walbert, lines seem a less than truthful figure of history; her history is marked by discontinuity. Repeatedly, we encounter breakdowns in these stories; between mothers and daughters, men and women, opportunity and realization. Most profoundly, the characters share a sort of isolation from each other, despite their desire and wish for connection.

Similarly, Walbert meditates on history as a circle through numerous allusions to circles throughout the stories. Dorothy Townsend at Oxford experiences a group of Anarchists, "a crowlike flock of young men sitting circled around a tall leader"(55). Dorothy chooses to find "a chair outside the circle"(55). Her sitting outside this circle of men may be an expression of well-founded fear. Throughout her life, Dorothy recalls a schoolgirl friend Hilde who is gang-raped; a group of boys come out of nowhere and "They gathered round. Hilde had something they wanted. They wanted that, they told her...Hilde disappears within the team of them, swallowed whole"(66).

Real and metaphoric Birds fly through Walbert's stories . Early on, after her mother's death, Evelyn's ambivalent feelings are captured in a scene where she releases the drawing-room canary from its cage. She "opened the little latch that so many times I had been tempted to open before...I let the door swing open, the canary with its seed eyes and thorn beak stunned by fresh air...the little door swings open on its tiny brass hinges but the bird does not move nor sing nor ungrip its maddeningly rigid claws from its swing, its hanging perch." She eventually reacts, "idiot bird, an idiot canary, a birdbrain, an imbecile....I must turn the cage upside down and shake the cage again and again...I pull it out, yank it out and it bites the skin of my thumb, the tight skin there, and that hurts so much I fling it off toward the tree"(15).

Walbert again uses birds to muse on issues of freedom at various points. Amusingly, looking for an Oxford gathering of spiritualists, Dorothy the elder wanders into a meeting of "the Anarchists-a crowlike flock of young men sitting circled around a tall leader"(55). While starving to death, Dorothy despairingly notes how outside church bells "are always ringing. And always the rooks rest in the rookery or wheel above the steeple. It might be the end of th war or the beginning. The battles have been won or lost but soon they will be starting again, so much still to be discussed with Mr. Darwin"(66).