One Basket Book

This book was published in 1947 and the short stories in it were
written between 1913 and the 1940's. The author writes in a forward to the book that although some of the stories are older, they
do not seem dated. In 1947 they probably did not seem dated but today they do. That doesn't mean the stories are uninteresting. They remind
me of the stories I read in women's magazines in the 1950's .

Ms Ferber seems to be quite preoccupied with her character's weight. In almost every story someone is described as plump or
sometimes even fat. She mentions in the forward to the book that
after her first story, "The Homely Heroine", was published, none of
the "fat" girls in her home town would speak to her. That particular story was not in this anthology, but I guess she had this obsession
right from the start.

Ms Ferber is much more sympathetic to her male characters than
to the female ones. Middle class married women are almost always
portrayed as whiny, demanding, snobbish and non-productive. Husbands are shown as quiet, patient, and long suffering. Once in awhile a
husband will get fed up and stand up for himself. In one story, a
man gets fed up with his bossy fiancé and the night before the
wedding he announces that he is going to be the boss of the family and he slaps her. This is not portrayed as a horrible case of domestic
abuse, but something good. The fiancé goes all swoony and tells him
how much she loves him.

In the preface to one of her stories, the author says she was
denied entry to Mexico after it was published. In this story as
well as some others she describes Mexicans as dirty and lazy.

Some of the stories were quite good. If I hadn't read them all
in one fell swoop, I probably wouldn't have gotten so annoyed with
the repetitious themes.