A Feel-Good Beach Read to Spark the Revolution https://ift.tt/aoQp3IK
Stories have long offered reprieve from and encouragement for arduous times, and Marie Bostwick’s latest novel, The Book Club for Troublesome Women, comes at a time when escape is needed without detaching from reality.
Uplifting in Bostwick’s signature way, it’s a historical fiction story in the women’s lit vein about women who want more and decide to pursue it. It’s about the way friendship and identity form as the world chafes against one pursuing her dreams.
After entering an essay contest, mom and housewife Margaret Ryan lands a columnist position for A Woman’s Place magazine. Because it’s March of 1963, she has to write what her male editor directs, her husband is furious she has less time to tend to his needs, and her paycheck factors out to less than minimum wage. The job offer comes during the first meeting of what becomes the Betty Friedan Book Club — “the Bettys,” as the group tightens — conceived during Margaret’s desperate attempt to befriend the newest neighbor, Charlotte, who’d intrigued her when they first crossed paths in the drugstore just after Christmas.
That December, Charlotte wore an out-of-place fur coat and filled a prescription for “Miltown,” a popular tranquilizer of the time. Her male psychiatrist prescribed it to treat the “neurosis” he said was evidenced by Charlotte’s maladjustment to her new role in the fictional D.C. suburb of Concordia. It’s slower than her previous New York life, where she had a housekeeper and a cook and was networking to launch her art career.
Her marriage is a strained one, and Charlotte’s discomfort with her circumstances is evident when Margaret knocks on her door with a plate of cookies and an invitation to join a book club. Charlotte says she might be interested — if the group was willing to read “something important.” She suggests Betty Friedan’s newly released The Feminine Mystique. Desperate for friendship, Margaret obliges.
Along with Viv, Margaret’s best friend and next door neighbor, and 20-something newlywed Bitsy, the Bettys bond over vodka stingers and Friedan’s words. They discuss the frustrations of their lives — the disrespect from Margaret’s husband when she didn’t have a hot meal prepared for him that evening; how Viv, already mother of six, is pregnant again because her physician wouldn’t give her birth control without her husband’s permission; how Bitsy and her much-older husband are struggling to conceive, but he’s forcing her to see a fertility specialist, convinced she is the problem.
Bostwick infuses humor into the novel, such as Charlotte likening Bitsy’s situation to the wives of Henry VIII.
“After six wives, wouldn’t you think it crossed his mind that he was the problem? But no. It had to be the women. Off with their heads!”
The chuckles dampen the infuriation evoked by this look into the rearview mirror. There’s the historical accuracies of Margaret needing her husband’s signature to deposit her paychecks (women couldn’t open their own bank account until 1974) and Viv’s birth control predicament (married couples didn’t have a constitutional right to it until 1965, and male consent was required until 1972). Then, there are the anecdotal illustrations of the attitude of that time, with Bitsy’s husband denigrating her for being a college dropout, when he’d made her do so, and Charlotte’s forced marriage to a man with girlfriends in multiple states. Ending the marriage was impossible without proof and, even then, it was a matter of appearances. Her parents told her plainly that a divorce would mean she was cut off.
Not only does the outside world chafe them in these ways, but the women become sandpaper for each other as they navigate some of the most controversial literature of their day, including Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915), Dearly Beloved (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1962), A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf, 1929) and The Group (Mary McCarthy, 1963). These books further the plot, awakening the women to their desires, the barriers keeping those desires out of reach, and the complex emotions that arise in that conflict.
A retrospective like this begs examination of the course taken to win equality, how efforts become exhausting doing “what men do,” and how progress was pressed primarily for white women. Bostwick puts these attitudes on display in various ways, from Viv’s ignorance of the ways Black women were barred from serving in World War II when she encounters a fellow Army nurse, to the subtle ways Margaret reflects on the pathways to equality, even though they were inequitable.
When denied a bank account, Margaret reflects on the words of her mother, who’d marched with the suffragettes: “Had we waited for men to give us the vote, it never would have happened. We had to demand it for ourselves and do the work to see it through.” However, in Margaret’s day, forty years after that movement earned “women” the vote, Black women were subjected to poll taxes and literacy tests in addition to both real and threatened violence (Black men, too). The energy and movement that could have shaped change for all women limited its efforts to those who fell into the majority of the minority, instead of what would benefit all women.
Much of the advocacy the Bettys witnessed in 1963 was enshrined into law the following year with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which in 2025 has been all but abolished at the federal level and is under fire at state and Supreme Court levels in terms of voting rights, reproductive healthcare restrictions, and LGTBQ+ rights, leaving many with rights and freedoms that predate the Bettys.
As a result, Boswick’s The Book Club for Troublesome Women is the anchovy and cream cheese canapés Margaret considers making for the first book club meeting: a feel-good beach read with substance, a sweet, tangy, and smooth complement to the strong, briny elements that spark a revolution. My hope is that it will inspire readers to get into some trouble of their own.
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