The What Happened Book Club

This is the sixth installment of the What Happened Book Club, where we are doing a chapter a week.

That pace will hopefully allow people who need time to procure the book a better chance to catch up, and let us deal with the book in manageable pieces: I figured we will have a lot to talk about, and one thread for the entire book would quickly get overwhelming.

So! Let us continue our discussion with Chapter Six: On Being a Woman in Politics.

* * *

That this particular chapter fell on this particular day is almost too perfect. Here we are, a year after an election that was a referendum on how this nation values women, and it's abundantly clear, clearer than ever, that institutional misogyny is a national shame with which we must meaningfully reckon.

There is so, so much to talk about in this chapter, but this stood out as my absolute favorite passage:

I found that the decades of work I had done on women and families served me well in all those places, because it meant that I understood the intricacies of people's lives. I knew how governments could help or hurt families. I knew how to marshal resources and support to the people who needed them most. It turned out that my work on so-called women's and children's issues prepared me well for nearly everything else I've ever done.

I don't even know how to explain what that last sentence means to me, and how important I think it is. But if you've been reading here for more than a minute, I'm guessing you get it.