Leonard Sax M.D. Ph.D.: Why Gender Matters, What parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences.

Review: This book is basically a 250 page advertisement for gender segregated schools. I am convinced. Reading one book does not an expect make, still I do have a son. He truly is a different beast from my daughter. Occasionally I find myself looking at him and thinking - You. Are. An. Alien. (My husband too). It could be personality or birth order that makes raising him different, but really I suspect it's because he's a boy. I read this book to help me understand him better, so that I can help him succeed in his is life pursuits. Incidentally, this book has been more helpful for my relationship with my daughter. There are better tips in the girl sections. It has convinced me to be more gentle with her, and less indulgent with him. The book has taught me to be less afraid of the word feminine, to be able to define what it means to be a man or a woman without feeling guilty that they are not the same. I suspect when my children are older (in their 10's) I'll have to reread this book. It's a valuable resources.

What I want to Remember:

1. Boys are less risk adverse. Danger is thrilling. Instead of saying if you run in the road you might get hit by a car, just say don't run in the road.
2. Boys don't hear as well as girls. If he isn't following your instructions try talking louder. Try 'yelling'.
3. If he's having trouble sitting still in kindergarten he might not be developmentally ready to sit still. It might not be ADHD. Get lots of opinions. Don't be afraid to hold him back until he is ready for school. This is crucial to his feelings about school and his feelings about academic success.
4. Because girls and boys have different brains (they see and hear different, and solve problems with different parts of their brains) they need to be taught differently. If she says I suck at math, then try a different approach. If he says reading is boring, he might need reading material geared to his interests. [Review how male and female students learn math best]
5. In high school: Male teachers teaching science or math classes may inadvertently discourage their female students by talking too loud or seeming to be unsympathetic or by being unable to modify their lessons to suit female strengths. Female teachers teaching languages or humanities might alienate their male students by talking too quietly, by being too friendly, or by talking too much about feelings instead of facts.
6. Dating is important for boys. Because of the way boys make and keep friends it is important for their future emotional health that they learn how to be friends with girls. We need to teach our girls to set their personal value high so that boys can't take advantage of them*. That is if boys want sexual intimacy they must also offer emotional intimacy. NCMO victimizes girls now, and bankrupts boys later. (*ummm, is it really only up to a young girl to say "No"? Boys need to be taught some responsibility too. Also feelings of self worth are negatively impacted by social aggression among girls. Leonard Sax recommends sports where appearance doesn't matter to help build selfworth among girls)
7. Boys need a socially approriate outlet for their aggression, especially boys who are not naturually athletic. If your boy doesn't make the team, be sure to provide him with a physically rigourous activity.
8. Make sure your son has a positive male role model. More than one, or even a group of men would be great. And make sure he has 'man' time.
9. Make sure your daughter has a positive female role model. More than on, or even a group of women would be great. And make sure she has 'woman' time.

http://www.whygendermatters.com/

Meg Waite Clayton: The Wednesday Sisters

One Word Summary: I want to be an astronaut
More Words: I like what I learned about the female experience as a wife and mother in the '60s and'70s. The book is set in a fascinating era, and I feel like I appreciate the social culture of that time better, now that I've read this story. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the book. The story is about very four very different women who start their own writing circle, all told from the perspective of one lady. Every few chapters the perspective would change and the reader would get a paragraphs worth of insight into a different lady. It was informative, confusing, and a little boring. I wished there could have been more everyday details. For example, Kath becomes a single parent. I wanted to read more about her struggle to feed and bathe and care for children and find time/energy to realize her own dreams. I wanted to read a passage where she cries, fuly clothed in an empty bathtub. Although I can understand why the author didn't delve into the everyday heartaches of motherhood; she's in the business of writing books people will read not preaching to the choir. Besides a story like that would have to be on the scale of Middlemarch. As it is the book had a sort of Forrest Gump feel- the women just sort of show up where history is happening and say stuff like: and this is how it was for us. I guess that'll just have to be good enough.

Quote:

I know writers who have a talisman or a ritual to make writing easier:
bunny slippers they wear or a certain candle they always burn when they're
writing; putting pen to paper at sunrise, or noon, or 11:00 p.m.; sitting in a
certain chair in a favorite cafe or walking their dog on the beach first;
playing one song on their iPod on infinite repeat for one novel, then choosing
another song for the next. But that always strikes me as dicey. What if the cafe
table s taken? What if the dog you walk on the beach eats your bunny slippers?
What if your iPod dies? And the fact is, we were mothers and wives; if we waited
for the stars to align just so, we'd still be waiting.

Rate: 2 sidecars

Other Books:

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares

Books To Read

The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald

Love Story by Erich Segal

A.S. Byatt: The Children's Book

One Word Summary: Poor Tom
More Words: I didn't enjoy this book, although it has given me some ideas to chew on. Byatt could have written a brief-but-not-compelling-history-of-the-arts-and-crafts-movement-in-England-from-1895-to-1915. A huge problem, for a simple person like me, was the vast number of characters. Then Byatt killed off everyone that couldn't have a snappy happy ending. Thank goodness for WWI, right? I feel guilty for not being remotely interested in any of the women characters, because... well I am a woman. I'm still unsure about one idea. Byatt writes somewhere near the beginning that the children of arts and crafts generation experienced childhood differently from all other children past and present. How asinine, I thought, at first. Of course now I'm wondering if I missed the point. Maybe Byatt meant that the romanticized childhood was invented during this period-like Olive creating Todefright with Violet manage it smoothly. Whatever she meant, I still don't get it.

Knopf Books 2009

Quotes:

She was thinking much faster than usual, and reflected sardonically that
those hungry-minded women, those frustrated female thinkers, of whome Marian
Oakshott spoke, would always need her, Eslie, or someone like her , to carry
coals and chop meat and mend clothing and do laundry, or they wouldn't keep
alie. Someone in the scullery carrying out the ashes. And if one got out of the
scullery, like a disguised princess in a fairytale, there always hd to be
another, another scullery maid to take her place.

Nevertheless, she would like to get out.

{and that half speach by Saraphita after Benedict Fludd is dead}

Joyce Carol Oates: The Gravedigger's Daughter

One Word Summary: keeping going
More Words: I skimmed and skipped huge dull passages throughout this novel. It was dull and I didn't always 'get it', but the author skillfully created one mysterious gypsy with so many voices. I still want to know: Who is Hazel Jones?
Synopsis: The story of a girl a)struggling to hide from her past or b) to define herself or c) to conquer her weakness.

HaperCollins 2006

Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlut, a history of walking

One Word Summary: Space-Time
More Words: Wow! I relied heavily on my dictionary while reading this book. The reading went slow, and even slower during the chapters I didn't fancy. It took about six months to digest. Usually I'm too impatient to tackle longish projects, but this was a very good book. It's an education. Solnit is thorough, thoughtful, and witty. I'm not a poet or a philosopher or any type of mover and shaker but I am a walker. In the last six months I've felt more conscious of the space outdoors- appreciative, protective, and while I've been luxuriating in the freedom of my feet I've also been chaffing at their limitations. I wish people would park their cars. I wish it were easy to fetch groceries with two young children on foot. I wish communities were designed for pedestrians.

Viking (Penguin Group) 2000

Quotes: I've flagged so many passages. Here are three chosen at random.

They have castigated her cross-country walk across
the boundaries of decorum; she is mocking their garden propriety by suggesting
that they have become part of the garden's array of aesthetic objects, objects
that she can contemplate as impersonally as trees and water. That evening Miss
Bingley strolls about the narrower confines of the drawing wroom, where all the
Netherfields characters but Jane are gathered. "Her figure was elegant, and she
walked well," says Austen. The acuity of idle people about each other's conduct
extended to critiques of movent and posture, and a person's walk was
considered an important part of his or her appearance.

The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship - around participation in public life.

What exactly is the nature of the transformation in which machines now pump our water but we go to other machines to engage in the act of pumping, not for the sake of water but for the sake of our bodies, bodies theoretically liberated by machine technology?

Louisa May Alcott: Little Women

One Word Summary: girl power?
Summary: The story of happy family.
More Words: I felt guilty shirking my duties to read this book! I liked it very much- despite the nauseating sentimentality and the nonstop moralizing. There is so much good in this novel. I'm torn between a desire to take notes and a desire to take umbrage. Did Ms. Allcott intend to write a manual on how to be feminine? Well, as they say, the wicked take the truth to be hard. I appreciated the tongue in cheek humour. Allcotts little quips and zingers added so much voice and personality to the narrative. And now that I've read Little Women, I'm almost reconciled to Prof. Bhaer. Almost.

Quote:
I'd have a stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled with books, and I'd write from a magic inkstand

Jo got little comfort from them; so she went up to her refuge in the garret, and confided her troubles to the rats.

Action List:

1. Read Pilgrims Progress
2. Write a thank you letter to Noko for giving me a copy of Pilgrims Progress
3. Apologize to Noko for never reading Pilgrims Progress and for losing the copy she gave me
4. Re-watch the 1994 film version of Little Women, with Christian Bale
5. Write to PattiCake about how much I like Little Women
6. Apologize for doubting her literary tastes
7. Remember to tell her how much I enjoyed Meet The Robinsons by M. L'Engle

Penguin Classics

Margret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale

One Words Summary: Aiden Quinn
Storyline: In response to an apathetic population, unable to reproduce itself, a militant patriarchal group overthrows the U.S. government and establishes a theocracy which reduces everyone to a function. Suddenly women cannot own property, cannot work outside the home. Reading is against the law. Other minorities are silently removed. All infractions are punishable by death.

More Words: Now I feel guilty for enjoying my life as a stay at home wife and mother who bakes and is completely dependent on her man for food-shelter-clothing-affection. Gosh I don't even drive these days! However the real difference between my life and The Handmaid's Tale is choice. Still I can't help but wonder if I've been duped by The Man (or the troubadours).


Questions:

1. Why is Moira's lassitude so terrible?
2. The women in Gilead are segregated from the men, and they are isolated from other women by class, function, and suspicion. They seem to lack any form of companionship (even words). Which is more important romantic love or friendship?
3. What is the ancillary function of a Handmaid? Are the Commander's sterile?
4. Atwood uses pornography to manifest the level of 'social degradation', how is her barometric choice relevant to our society?
   The military coup is chilling especially in light of 9/11. Could something similar really happen?
5. THMT was published in 1985. When was America really becoming frightened by the AIDS epidemic?
6. Mme Defarge knit, Snow Flower had a fan, how would a woman in Gilead have 'written'?

Quotes:

I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy.
She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for
her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I
didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to
fight about that . I am not your justification for existence, I said to her
once. (p122)

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. (p 174)

No mother is ever completely a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. (p181)

I've tried to put some good things in as well. Flower's for instance, because where would we be without them. (p?)

Tracy Chevalier: Falling Angels

One Word Summary: Bad Mom

Reactionary Words: I wonder if you could sue the family of a woman who fails to watch your children at a public rally, and whose neglect causes the violent death of one of your children. I wonder what I would do to her if she didn't already die herself. Honestly this is another fantastic book that I hated. First of all I'll admit to being a selfish person but I've never reached the heights Kitty Coleman achieves- possibly because I'm not very intellectual and I'm not stuck in Victorian England. But people like her drive me crazy. She's sociopathic. I'm simultaneously disgusted with and sorry for her unsatisfaction.

Summary: The friendship of three children who meet in a graveyard and and bring with them the ideals of their very different families.