How Reading ‘Women Talking” Made Me an Angrier Old Woman

Yesterday I finished Miriam Toews bestseller, Women Talking, not my usual psychological/historical mystery. I found as I was reading it, my thoughts about men changed.

This book is about a group of women in a Mennonite colony trying to decide what to do after they’d been anesthetize and raped in their own bedrooms by a group of men from the colony. Reading it was difficult as I sat in a room with my husband. Every so often I would look up from the book and look at him, a good man but a man, none-the-less. My husband is a loving and caring man, but he’s still a man, raised in a time when men were the deciders and women were the homemakers…similar roles as in the book’s Mennonite colony. The only major male character in the book is the colony’s schoolteacher (a self-described “effeminate man” who is transcribing their discussion and who is in love with one of the women).

From Kavanaugh to Kraft to Epstein to Trump, men have not been treating women well and this book is a small example of that and the patriarchy in which women everywhere still find ourselves.

In the two days I spent reading this book, I had several incidents with men that angered me. Honestly, I may not have been so angry if the story was not in the forefront of my mind and heart.