Book Review: In Her Day

With all that's been happening regarding my Mom, the economy, the cat and everything else, I've still managed to find the time to finish a book or two. In fact, I even managed to read one about...wait for it...lesbians. (I still have no idea why I get such a strange reaction from other gay men when I tell them I'm reading a lesbian novel. A book is a book is a book, and if it happens to be written by a female member of the gay community, so what?)

Carole Hanratty teaches art history at a State University in New York in the early days of the women's movement of the 1970s. Her close friends wonder if someone who keeps holing onto the belief that brains and intelligence win out over lust in relationship will ever find someone. Then, she runs into -- literally -- a young woman at a feminist restaurant called Mother Courage. Ilse Jones is almost 20 years her junior, feisty and very plugged into the revolutionary aspects of the women's movement. But something about the older Carole takes hold, and she finds that she can't stop thinking about her.

The same goes for Carole, and the two find themselves throwing caution to the wind and flinging themselves head on into a volatile relationship. Much of that volatility is due to their differences concerning the women's movement. Ilse believes that change can only come with action, thinking about what the future will hold, while Carole steadfastly tries to teach Ilse that you can't ignore the past, that the same arguments Ilse and her young group are fighting for are the same ideals from 50, 100 200 years ago. Carole and Ilse continue to butt heads over the movement, finally bringing them to a difficult decision.

Rita Mae Brown's In Her Day is a good book when it comes to dealing with the relationship of Carole and Ilse in terms of the age discrepancy. The two handle any disparaging attitudes very easily, though not many appear in the novel. And they do have great sex. My only issue stems from their arguments about the women's movement which don't come across as arguments but rather as long expository statements without much feeling behind them. I felt that even as characters in a novel, they were simply regurgitating from a script so I never felt that their arguments were as bad as they were meant to appear. But they do offer quite a bit of information on the differing views regarding the treatment of women in the early 1970s.

Image from Fantastic Fiction.