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Hutchison's American Heroines |
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By The Hill Staff
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Posted: 11/17/04 12:00 AM [ET] |
“Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others,” said the famous female aviator Amelia Earhart.
In her first book, American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) is out to prove that a core group of American women have done as Earhart suggested. These women have challenged the norms and excelled. In doing so, they have smoothed the path for the next generation.
Hutchison asserts that the “American heroines” have allowed young women today to encounter few barriers to success. If anything, she writes, their sex is an asset.
The book is a compilation of short biographies of significant American women, arranged thematically. These bios are followed by short Q&A’s with modern women who have been barrier-breakers in their own fields — Barbara Walters in journalism and Lynne Cheney in education, to name a few.
It’s a unique but awkward format, made more so simply because too many stories are being told. The number of biographies is overwhelming, and they lack consistency: Some profiles are painfully slow, while others make you wish Hutchison had written more.
She devotes several pages to many fascinating women. There’s Jacqueline Cochran — who pioneered the revolutionary idea during World War II that women were capable of serving their country as pilots — whom the senator whips through much too quickly. Similarly, there’s the artist Mary Cassatt, who is described as “selfish, utterly obnoxious” and as having an “acerbic edge,” while at the same time being dynamic enough to serve as a model for Louisa May Alcott’s unfinished novel Diana and Persis.
The meat of the book lies in the interviews — not too surprising given that the senator was a television news reporter before going into politics. She has a knack of asking interesting, if inadvertently self-promoting, questions.
“What do you consider the most important trait for success?” she asks Anne Legendre Armstrong, the first female keynote speaker at a GOP convention, in 1972.
Armstrong responds, “I’ve always gone for the best people. I’ve never been afraid of being overshadowed by people. One of the reasons I valued you [referring to Hutchison] as a staffer was that, even in your twenties, you would level with me and stand up to me when I was wrong.”
Overall, there is something starry-eyed and girlish about the whole production — could be something about the cover. There’s a bit of “Oh, how lovely. I got to interview important people, and they’re just like me!” It is a style that is both endearing and excessive — a book to enjoy in small doses and otherwise left to adorn Republican coffee tables.
Book reviewed:
American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country
By Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison
384 pages; $24.95
Harper Collins, 2004
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