Invisible Women
Calling Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray (Fiction)
The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck (Historical Fiction)
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez (Non-Fiction 305.42 CRI)
If you had a superpower, what would it be?
As a woman of—ahem—a certain age, I have discovered that, in reality, I do have a tendency towards invisibility. It is no fun. In Calling Invisible Women, Jeanne Ray explores the almost undetectable line between being taken for granted and true invisibility. Clover, another woman of –ahem—a certain age, wakes up one morning to find herself literally invisible . . . and no one in her family notices. Soon, she discovers she is not alone. There are many invisible women, and they want to shake up the world. And it may just turn out that Clover is sort of a . . . Superhero???
Virginia Hall was a legend in the halls of the OSS during the second World War. A real-life superhero. In The Invisible Woman, Erika Robuck pulls no punches relating the story of the spy with the prosthetic leg. Nick-named “the limping lady” and most dangerous of spies, her face on wanted posters throughout France, Virginia must become invisible to the Nazis. How? She disguises herself as a much older woman (she was thirty-six.) Trying to fill in the blanks with what one imagines a spy thought and felt during her mission leading up to D-Day, both the horror and the hope, lands Robuck’s novel in Fiction, rather than Biography. However, Robuck’s historical sources include Virginia Hall’s family and the CIA museum.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, examines how data is collected, and how the skew towards studies designed around the human male affect women in the world at large. Perez calls the standard the “Default Male,” and proceeds to show how data studies effectively ignore the over 50% of the world population, (the female half,) with roots in language itself. Mankind. Warriors/Women Warriors. Doctor Who/Female Doctor Who. And the results of this inequity range from the irritation of “shivering in offices set to the male temperature norm,” to the snowballing effect of unpaid “women’s work” on wages and career advancement that result in feminized old-age poverty, to fatal medical misdiagnosis due to women’s symptoms not conforming to the male norm . . . like, say, heart attacks. In essence, Perez' well-researched work demonstrates that the female half of the world is simply invisible in the human equation and makes a compelling case for closing the gender data gap.
Xina Lowe, Librarian
#Women in Fiction, #Data on Women, #Historical Fiction, #WW II, #Booktalking
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