This spectacular novel centers around four women who form a book club they call The Bettys after Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, the year this novel takes place which changes their lives. These women live in a planned subdivision called Concoria, just outside of D.C. It's like an early version of HOA hell where they tell you what color your house can be and what you can plant in your yard.
Bitsy, the youngest of the group, is twenty-three and married to a vet named King. King has been desperately wanting children because he is nineteen years older than her. Bitsy wanted to be a vet but couldn't get a referral from any of her professors for vet school. Bitsy's husband lets her work as a stablehand, and it's there that she meets Katherine Graham, the future owner of The Washington Post. King has his own negative ideas about Bitsy's ability to care for horses and is often mean-spirited. Viv is happily married to Tony and has six kids. When her doctor refuses to give her a prescription for the birth control pill without her husband signing his okay on it, she winds up pregnant at a time when her kids were all in school, and she was considering going back to nursing.
Catherine, a wealthy wife of a philandering husband, has four kids. She is manic-depressive at a time when that is rarely recognized in the medical field. Her new psychiatrist won't let her smoke during sessions and blames her for all the ills in her life. Margaret, a wife and mother of three, met her husband, Walt, in college and majored in English, hoping to write. When she enters a magazine contest, she doesn't win the contest but is instead offered a job as a columnist. The only problem is that they want a light, funny column to entertain the housewives, with some of the articles being product ads. On top of not exactly writing the column she wishes, her husband, jealous that she gets to do something she loves, calls it her jobette in a cruel way.
These strong women help each other to see what they can be and through difficult times. This book provides a pretty good reading list for women and examines how both men and women weren't given much of a choice in what they did for a living, with men being forced to take jobs they hate to support the family and women feeling unfulfilled and wanting more in their lives than just being a homemaker. Bostwick really taps into the zeitgeist of the early feminist movement and how these women bucked what society determined their life should be. This is a very thought-provoking novel that shows how far women have come and how much farther we have to go.
Quotes
Next-door neighbors were kind of a lottery; you get who you got.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p 45)
I've always been good with horses. In fact, sometimes I prefer them to people.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p 48)
Why settle for enough when you can have more than enough.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p 66)
Men love nothing as much as explaining stuff to women.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 70)
That's what fun is: putting yourself into a situation where everything could go horribly wrong, then somehow dodging the bullet.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 79)
The formula for good leadership was nine parts discipline--one part mercy--and that one part was equally as important as the nine.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 98)
Kids are like horses. They can smell fear. You've got to know how to hold the line.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 100)
Helen loathes Hemingway, found his themes repetitive--"No matter how terrible the male protagonist is, no matter how awful his choices, somehow it is always the woman's fault, always"--and his descriptions miserly--"Would it kill the man to use an adjective? Is he paying for them by the pound?"
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 107)
It's smart. It's what men do. Why do you think they join all those clubs--the Elks? The VFW? The Masons? Congress! she cried. To support one another, that's why. Why do you think they call them booster clubs? Because they're trying to boost each other over the wall or bend the rules in their favor to help the group. If women stuck up for one another the way men do, this would be a very different world.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 306)
A friend can give you a leg up to see what's on the other side of the wall, but you've got to pull yourself over the top.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 330)
Margaret thought back to the words she'd written months before, that there were a million good and right ways to be a woman, and only two wrong ways. First, to insist that your way was the only way. Secondly, to allow your square-peg soul to be deformed and mishappen, pounded in the round hole of someone else's ideal.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 341)
You can have it all, just not at the same time.
Betty Friedan
Denise was still an odd duck, but those were generally the ducks worth knowing.
Marie Bostwick (The Book Club for Troublesome Women, p. 351)
Link to Thriftbooks:https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-book-club-for-troublesome-women/53339844/?resultid=734e4177-0592-4704-b71b-2dcf01515a70#edition=71593743&idiq=65029475
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