March Book Club

Note: March is book selection month. Please bring one book idea to share. The vote determines the next three books beginning in May.

Note: All the upcoming books and those that we didn’t select in the November vote are listed at the bottom of this section.

We the Men: How Forgetting Women's Struggles for Equality Perpetuates Inequality by Jill Elaine Hasday

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for "We the People," too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only We the Men. A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential voices have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism continues to warp constitutional law, political decision making, and everyday life, prominent Americans have spent more than a century proclaiming that the United States has already left sex discrimination behind.

Jill Elaine Hasday's We the Men is the first book to explore how forgetting women's struggles for equality-and forgetting the work America still has to do-perpetuates injustice, promotes complacency, and denies how generations of women have had to come together to fight for reform and against regression. Hasday argues that remembering women's stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality. These stories highlight the persistence of women's inequality and make clear that real progress has always required women to disrupt the status quo, demand change, and duel with determined opponents.

America needs more conflict over women's status rather than less. Conflict has the power to generate forward momentum. Patiently awaiting men's spontaneous enlightenment does not. Transforming America's dominant stories about itself can reorient our understanding of how women's progress takes place, focus our attention on the battles that are still unwon, and fortify our determination to push for a more equal future.

Steve will be moderating this month. Hope you can join us for some thoughtful discussion.

Upcoming books: (March is the next book selection month.)
April: Building a Life Worth Living: A Memoir by Marsha M. Linehan (Veronica)

Not selected this time:
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds by Paul Farmer
Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O'Connell's urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people by Tracy Kidder
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley
Life Is a Lazy Susan of Sh*t Sandwiches by Jennifer Welch