Purchase a copy for yourself here!
The Female Persuasion is Meg Wolitzer’s eleventh novel, and feels in many ways like a response to the #MeToo movement and the reemergence of feminism in the cultural conversation. The novel focuses on women of different generations coming to terms with the ways that the world works, offering and accepting support to and from one another along the way.
The novel begins with Greer, a bookish and intelligent student who was accepted to Yale, but forced to attend the far less prestigious Ryland University because her stoner parents failed to submit the correct financial aid package. Greer’s boyfriend, Cory, is a similarly promising individual who goes off to Princeton University to pursue a life of wealth that would separate him from his Portuguese immigrant parents. The two maintain their relationship throughout college, where Cory seems to have an easier time finding a place for himself. At Ryland, Greer meets Zee, a queer activist for a variety of causes, who encourages Greer to find her voice despite Greer’s protestations. Zee encourages Greer to speak out against the boy who sexually harassed her at a frat party, and then invites Greer to a lecture by a prominent older feminist, Faith Frank. At this lecture, Greer is totally transfixed by Faith’s image and message, and after a chance encounter with her in the bathroom, finds herself in possession of her new hero’s business card.
While Zee is the one who brought Greer to the lecture, Greer seems to more centrally capture the attention of Faith Frank, and applies for a job with her at her feminist magazine, Bloomers. The magazine has become slightly out of date in the era of radical feminist blogs, and shutters its doors before Greer’s job interview, but Faith later brings in Greer to work with her at Loci, a VC-funded company that hosts summits and events with feminist messaging. Greer is at first enamored with Loci and Faith Frank, who embodies everything that Greer aspires to be, but she eventually becomes disenchanted with the whitewashed nature of the company, which seems to devote most of its energy toward fundraising from wealthy white women. Wolitzer’s depiction of Loci and the feminist-lite events that they host feels very of our digital age, when feminism has become commoditized by ad agencies and brands alike.
While Greer struggles to find meaning in this landscape, Zee escapes her wealthy district court judge parents in Scarsdale, New York, to join a Teach-for-America type of organization in Chicago, and eventually becoming a crisis counselor in Chicago’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. After graduating from Princeton, Cory’s lucrative consulting career is completely derailed when he learns of the accidental death of his younger brother, which forces him to move back home to care for his despondent mother. Both Zee and Cory are crucial resources for Greer in her early self discovery, but both fall to the wayside as Greer becomes increasingly ensnared by Faith Frank’s magnetic power. These two characters are important foils for Greer, who offer unique perspectives on the challenges of young adulthood, and the fleeting nature of the future.
The novel is in many ways about the ways that significant life events spur characters in different directions. For Greer, attending Faith’s lecture and their chance meeting afterward completely shaped her career path, and for Cory, the death of his brother completely derailed his career. In addition, Faith Frank cites the dangerous back alley abortion that her friend was forced to undergo in Vegas during their youth as one of her first recognizable moments of feminist outrage. While the friend who received that abortion turned out to become a prominent Republican Senator in Indiana, and a fierce opponent of reproductive rights for women, further emphasizing how people can be galvanized in totally different ways by their own personal experience of an event.
The novel’s main theme, however, seems to be power. Wolitzer examines who is able to exert power and influence, and in what way. She looks at the differences between masculine and feminine power, and the disparate ways society views them. The novel closes with the election of Donald Trump, referred to as, “the big terribleness,” a polarizing event that galvanized feminists across the country to examine how power is given or taken away from individuals. It feels like this conclusion ought to have engaged with the figure who at the center of this discussion of female power, and more specifically what it means to be a feminist now vs. 50 years ago, Hillary Clinton. Many of the criticisms levied against Faith Frank in the novel were ones that hounded Secretary Clinton during her presidential campaign, and it feels like Wolitzer would benefit from connecting the themes of her novel with Clinton. The lack of connection is almost jarring, as the novel constantly seems to be brushing up against discussions inextricable from our first female presidential candidate, but never makes that final step. Overall, the novel is in its best moments an engaging and thoughtful coming-of-age story for characters who are coming into their own at ages eighteen to seventy years old. Wolitzer seems to theorize that we are never finished growing into ourselves, and that being conscious of and open to self discovery is the secret to joy and meaning in this life.