It’s not often that a non-fiction book makes me want to cry, especially not one about the 2008 elections, but this week I have been reading Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry. A professor of women’s history recommended it to me as a feminist examination of the fervor that had surrounded Barack Obama and the hate and disgust that had been Hillary’s portion in the last presidential election.
I cried because I recognized myself in the book.
Like Traister, I had been raised to believe that sexism no longer existed. Birth control and the vote had excised it from the American landscape. My epiphany came, however, not during the 2008 elections but a year later when I entered graduate school. Continue reading
