The Secret Life of Kittens Book

When I was in college, one of the exhibits in the on-campus museum was called Global Feminisms: the exhibit curators had gone to various countries around the world and chosen pieces that they believed represented feminism.

Mull on that for a moment: pieces that they believed represented feminism.

There were some truly cool pieces -- Tracey Moffatt's Love comes to mind, or Ingrid Mwangi's Static Drift -- but I couldn't shake the suspicion that not all of the artists would have considered their work feminist, that the exhibit had been constructed (and was being viewed) through a distinctly North American lens.

And that's where this book loses me a little. On the one hand, it's great to see the women in Material World: A Global Family Portrait given more of a voice. On the other hand, the questions are so leading in places, and some of the women seem so uncomfortable, that it's hard to tell how accurate a picture we're getting. Only one woman, I think, openly expresses dissatisfaction with her life. Maybe all of the other women are truly happy (how would I know otherwise?), but I wonder whether it would have been a more varied collection -- or whether particular themes would have arisen -- if the questions had been less pointed.

I actually wish they'd selected different women for this book, using the same criteria as for Material World: statistical averages. Is a statistically average woman in the same position as a woman in a statistically average family? I suspect that they returned to these families for the sake of ease -- because, in many cases, it was easier to get the okay from husbands or boyfriends who were familiar with Material World -- but in places it felt like a retread of what was covered in the previous book.

Still an interesting read, though, and another one of those books where it would be particularly interesting to see how things have changed between the book's publication and now.