The Super Simple Cowl is a quick knit. A very quick knit--a wear it in two days kind of quick. The above photo shows my progress after a week. I need to finish this cowl by Friday, because the recipient is coming to visit me this weekend! Fortunately, I've only got a couple more triangles to go: one a day should do it.
Instead of knitting I've been writing--and I'm making good progress. : ) I wrote two whole chapters since Saturday (the majority of it done over the weekend). During the week, when I am busy schooling the kids, rotating the laundry, and doing everything else, I write just one page a day. It doesn't sound like much, but by the end of the week I've written half a chapter and because it was done slowly and thoughtfully, it's usually pretty good.
I'm now more than halfway through reading Bone River, by Megan Chance. Here's what I like about it: it's a truly feminist book. The female protagonist was groomed by her father to take over his work as an ethnologist--a male-dominated profession. Before he dies, he makes her promise to marry a man who is thirty years her senior and advises her that children would only interfere with the work. But, Leonie's heart's desire is to have a child. She buries this longing deep in her heart, telling herself that 'the work' is what matters most and that her father knew what was best for her. She suffers from bouts of depression because of this.
What makes me glad is that for once an author has gotten the feminist struggle right! (Which is usually depicted as a woman wanting to do male-dominated work.) Our struggle as women has nothing to do with gender roles and everything to do with personal sovereignty. In our time the pendulum has swung almost completely the other way for women, with society insisting that having a job outside the home is freedom and men insisting that their wives go to work. Women are still being told what to do; we are not trusted to know what is best for ourselves.
My favorite passage in the book so far was part of a dream that Leonie had:
...before my eyes my hands changed, growing wrinkled and gnarled and freckled, joints swollen, the hands of a crone, withering...My hands, saying I was an old woman with no strength and no passion and nothing done. And then, I heard a voice, hers, whispering, Who are you? What do you want from the world? Why haven't you taken it?(The voice belonged to the ancient Indian woman whose mummified remains Leonie discovered in the river bank.)
One of my pet-peeves in modern women's fiction is the depiction of kick-ass heroines as the feminist ideal. The true feminist ideal is any woman who pursues her life her way--period. Gentle, quiet heroines who possesses a strong heart and excel at the domestic arts should be equally valued role models for women.
My all-time favorite story about personal sovereignty is Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady.
What else? Oh! After several days of temperatures in the fifties and sixties, we woke up to snow this morning! Yay!
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