One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall. (1971) Not available in French.

I discovered One Minus One by Ruth Doan Macdougall via Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust and her rediscoveries. That’s how I also read The Girls From the Five Great Valleys by Elizabeth Savage and The Last Night at the Ritz also by Elizabeth Savage. (both recommended)

One Minus One is a novella told from the point of view of Emily, recently divorced from David. We’re in 1969 in New Hampshire. Emily and David were high school sweethearts, went to college together and got married very young. She’s now 32 and David left her for another woman, a fellow teacher at his school. Quite a banal story after all.

We follow Emily as she navigates her new life. She’s refused any kind of alimony from David and they have no children. They have no reason to see each other anymore. She was a stay-at-home wife, a would-be writer and she has now started her first year as an English teacher at a middle school. She doesn’t like it but it pays the bills.

Emily is lost and has a hard time living alone. She misses David very much and she has to face all kinds of material issues he used to take care of.

The novella has three parts, each corresponding to a step in her new life. She dates Warren for a while, moves in with Grace and KayKay, two other teachers from her school and later dates Cliff. While she befriends Grace and KayKay, Warren and Cliff are just buffers against crippling loneliness.

Each time she goes with the flow to avoid solitude. She’s grieving her marriage, her relationship with David, their good times and their complicity. She was blindsided by the divorce more because she put her head in the sand than anything else. The signs were there, she refused to see them. She’s still in love with David.

One Minus One equals zero. That’s how Emily feels now. She and David started dating when she was fifteen. She grew up with him, had all her firsts with him and she’s never been an adult without him. She was merged into him and she felt one with him. And now that he’s gone, she feels like a non-entity.

But she’s not helpless. After all, she has a job, she made new friends, she has an active social life and she goes out with other men. But she’s detached, as if all this was happening to someone else. Her soul seems bruised beyond repair, she’s the epitome of “emotionally unavailable”. She has possibilities to grow as a single woman but still feels a bit like a failure.

Emily is 32, we’re in 1969. She’s from the first generation of women who had access to oral contraception. A decade earlier and she’d have had children to take care of. She belongs to a transition generation, the one who moved from mandatory traditional roles to new possibilities, thanks to education and contraception. She is a bit torn between being a traditional wife and an independent woman. It’s also a time when couples settled down young, I chuckled when Cliff, 34, wonders if he’s not too old to be a dad now.

Macdougall wrote the beautiful portrait of a woman who needs to move on, to find out who she is, to stand on her own two feet without a male crutch and acknowledge that she’s stronger than she thinks she is. Emily’s sadness is so deep it oozes from the pages. I wanted her to get better.

This is an excellent novella, a good one to add to your TBR for the next blogging event about reading novellas. 😊I think it would appeal to readers who love Anne Tyler.

PS : ***spoiler alert*** After writing my billet, I read the discussion guide for this book (I kind of loathe them, tbh.) and I realized that readers are expected to feel less empathy than I did for Emily. I guess it’s because she refuses Cliff’s perfectly sound proposal and readers expect her to get back on the marriage wagon and learn to love Cliff since she likes him well enough. How is that fair to him? How will she not become a new “One” with Cliff instead of a “Two” in a well-adjusted partnership if she never becomes an adult of her own? It seems to me that she needs a room of her own for a while.

• Benigna Machiavelli by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1914) French title: Benigna Machiavelli. Translated by Pascale Voilley.
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) French title: Les hommes préfèrent les blondes. Audiobook narrated by Patrice O’Neill.
• The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (1972) French title: Les femmes de Stepford.

I’m virtually patting myself on the back for my mad multitasking skills to participate in as much blogging events as possible as November is rife with them. Novellas in November, Nonfiction November, Sci-Fi month, Margaret Atwood Reading Month, German Lit Month and I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of. Aren’t we busy bees?

I wonder why November is so loaded with blogging events. Is that because it’s autumn, almost past the bright colors of falling leaves and we’re way into a meteorological feast of rain, grey and early sunset that we want to burrow ourselves at home and read? Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.

Anyway, here I am with three novellas for NovNov hosted by Cathy and Rebecca, one of them for Sci-Fi month co-hosted by Annemieke and another published in 1925 which inserts into the A Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge hosted by Neeru.

These three novellas have female protagonists and are about feminism, relationships between men and women and explore these topics in very different ways.

Let’s start with Benigna Machiavelli by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It’s straightforward feminism, probably because it dates back to the Suffragettes era. Benigna McAvelly tells her story and how she quickly decided to be a good villain. And this is how she got to the conclusion that the world needed her brand of villainy.

I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairy stories have some point to them—the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: that the villains always went to work with their brains and accomplished something. To be sure they were “foiled” in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and heroines and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book—and they always tumbled! (…) And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it. “A good villain! That’s what we need!” said I to myself. “Why don’t they write about them ? Aren’t there any ?” I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one!

Benigna is bright, she has out-of-norm insight, she’s cunning and manipulating people for their own good.

She knows how to become popular because she’s industrious, helpful and friendly. She raises the good questions. She’s also meddlesome, doing these good deeds as experiments about human nature. There’s a sense of goodhearted shrewdness that warms the reader even if they know she’s manipulative.

As we follow her plans and actions, we see that Benigna actively works for the well-being of the women around her: a gift for her teacher, manipulating her father into moving out to save her mother from her husband’s harassment, opening her sister’s eyes about the scoundrel she plans on marrying, getting money from her grandfather to fund the boarding house business that will provide for the women of the family.

She thrives on taking action, she wants to be independent and free and she wants to protect a few women from toxic patriarchy. The tone of the book is light, witty, thoughtful and very attractive.

Highly recommended as it’s fun and thought-provoking. (PS: I have no clue how they came up with this cover for this book, really. It doesn’t make any sense to me.)

The second feminist character is Lorelei Lee from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. I decided to listen to the audiobook after seeing several reviews of it for the Club 1925.

Patrice O’Neill reads it with the voice of an ingenue. Her tone grated on my nerves until I got used to it, mostly because I have very little patience with false ingenues IRL too.

Lorelei Lee is the 1920s version of the Parisian cocotte of the 19thC century. Mr Eisman, the kind of the button, pays for her NYC apartment, comes to see her from Chicago as soon as he can and pays for her “educational” travels in Europe.

She goes on a tour with her friend Dorothy and they trick gentlemen into parties and shopping trips in London, Paris, Vienna.

Lorelei Lee is street smart. She makes appalling grammar mistakes when she speaks but she’s so lovely that men fall at her feet. She sounds pure, helpless and innocent when she’s as cunning as Benigna Machiavelli above. She’s just using her skills towards more futile goals like jewels, champagne, presents, and hotels suites. This quote is her, in all her glory:

“So when I got through telling Dorothy what I thought up. Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouraged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.”

She seems to think that if men are stupid enough to fall for her tricks hook, line and sinker, why shouldn’t she take advantage of them and live a glamorous life? She comes from Little Rock, Arkansas, from a poor family and had a rocky past; she doesn’t have anything to lose and behaves however she wants, never ashamed of anything.

With this novella, Anita Loos pokes fun at the men who fall for brainless beauty because it fuels their feeling of superiority. They fulfill a need to be protective and are condescending doing so. It’s the don’t-bother-your-pretty-head-with-serious-thinking drive. Well, more power to the Loreleis of this world until their marks stop objectifying women.

I did have a good laugh with her candid descriptions of London, where a Lady’s hat is so ugly it explains why her husband bought Lorelei a diamond tiara, of Paris, where she says there is obviously a Louis XVI in the furniture business, Vienna with all these people who only speak German, etc.

It was endearing, really! For a proper review, check out Jacqui’s here.

After this good fun, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin was horrifying. I knew of the derogatory “Stepford wife” tag and wanted to read the book to understand what it came from.

We’re in 1972, in Stepford, Connecticut. Joanna Eberhart has just moved to this suburban town with her husband Walter and their two children. It’s become the iconic setting: a commuting husband from NYC to CT (or NJ) with a stay-at-home mother with two kids and a station wagon.

At the beginning of the book, Walter and Joanna are all for equal sharing of domestic tasks in the household. She wants to develop her business as a photographer.

She looks for new friends in Stepford and only finds perfect decerebrated barbies who don’t have time for anything but kids, housework and looking good for their husbands. She eventually spots Bobbie and Charmaine who aren’t perfect hausfraus. Until they go to a romantic getaway with their husbands and come back as robotic versions of themselves.

It’s interesting that The Stepford Wives was written by a man, after the 1960s and the feminist movements. His statement is terrible: these husbands prefer to have robotic and docile wives with no other conversation than the merits of various cleaning supplies and the best way to make P&J sandwiches, domestic bimbos with big boobs devoted to serving their male masters. Poor wives and pathetic husbands, that’s what he seems to tell us.

In her review published in 2009, Lisa writes that these gender issues might still resonate in places like the Middle East and Afghanistan, but to those of us in the West it reads like a museum piece. How confident we were that our rights were set in stone. I’m not so sure about that in 2025. In the end, the Stepford’s men retaliation is SciFi in its means but not in its intent. Food for thoughts. Highly recommended too.

These three American books published in different times tackle with feminism in their own way and each resonates with the time it was published. It was interesting to read them within a few weeks and see how they resonate with our time now.