Rebecca Traister - Big Girls Don't Cry [96] Unabridged

Rebecca Traister - Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

96 kbps, Read by Kirsten Potter, Unabridged


http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/big-girls-dont-cry-rebecca-traister/1100630988?ean=9781439150283

Overview
REBECCA TRAISTER, whose coverage of the 2008 presidential election for Salon confirmed her to be a gifted cultural observer, offers a startling appraisal of what the campaign meant for all of us. Though the election didnΓÇÖt give us our first woman president or vice president, the exhilarating campaign was nonetheless transformative for American women and for the nation. In Big Girls DonΓÇÖt Cry, her electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining first book, Traister tells a terrific story and makes sense of a moment in American history that changed the countryΓÇÖs narrative in ways that no one anticipated.

It was all as unpredictable as it was riveting: Hillary ClintonΓÇÖs improbable rise, her fall and her insistence (to the consternation of her party and the media) on pushing forward straight through to her remarkable phoenix flight from the race; Sarah PalinΓÇÖs attempt not only to fill the void left by Clinton, but to alter the very definition of feminism and claim some version of it for conservatives; liberal rapture over Barack Obama and the historic election of our first African-American president; the media microscope trained on Michelle Obama, harsher even than the one Hillary had endured fifteen years earlier. Meanwhile, media women like Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow altered the course of the election, and comedians like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler helped make feminism funny.

What did all this mean to the millions of people who were glued to their TV sets, and for the country, its history and its future?

As Traister sees it, the 2008 election was good for women. The campaign for the presidency reopened some of the most fraught American conversationsΓÇöabout gender, race and generational difference, about sexism on the left and feminism on the rightΓÇödifficult discussions that had been left unfinished but that are crucial to further perfecting our union.

The election was also catalytic, shaping the perspectives of American women and men from different generations and backgrounds, altering the way that all of us will approach questions of women and power far into the future. When Clinton cried, when Palin reached for her newborn at the end of a vice presidential debate, when Couric asked a series of campaign-ending questions, the whole country was watching womenΓÇÖs historyΓÇöAmerican historyΓÇöbeing made.

Throughout, Traister weaves in her own experience as a thirtysomething feminist sorting through all the events and media coverageΓÇövacillating between Clinton and Obama and forced to face tough questions about her own feminism, the womenΓÇÖs movement, race and the different generational perspectives of women working toward political parity some ninety years after their sex was first enfranchised.
It was a time of enormous change, and there is no better guide through that explosive, infuriating, heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious year than Rebecca Traister. Big Girls DonΓÇÖt Cry offers an enduring portrait of dramatic cultural and political shifts brought about by this most historic of American contests.

Library Journal
Hillary Clinton concluded that her success in the 2008 primaries meant that children could grow up taking for granted that a woman can be U.S. President. When Sarah Palin then accepted her party's nomination for vice president, it revived the idea of a woman as President. Traister (Salon.com) here reflects on women's impact on the political process in 2008, the candidates, the media's sometimes sexist attention to Clinton and Palin, and voters' reactions to the candidates and campaigns. She looks at the complicated roles some candidates' spouses played and the media's challenge covering the possibility that we'd have an African American or a female President. Traister names several male correspondents who, in her view, displayed a significant level of sexist reporting and praises sound, professional coverage by numerous female correspondents. She quotes extensively from online media to support her views, thus providing broader perspective. VERDICT This will appeal to readers interested in the 2008 elections, women in politics, or media coverage of politics

Publishers Weekly
Who would have figured that the women who would benefit most from the 2008 presidential campaign would be the comediennes? Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton may have lost in their respective campaigns, but Amy Poehler and Tina Fey both gained in cultural stature for their biting imitations. According to Traister, staff writer at Salon.com, the rollercoaster ride of 2008 exposed an entrenched chauvinism in the media and a lesson for anyone who might assume that a female candidate would hold a monopoly on women's votes. The author bludgeons conventional political wisdom by trenchantly exposing Palin's strange triangulation of mainstream feminism, Clinton's need to appear vulnerable in order to appeal to women, and the precarious position of black women--some of whom were conflicted between supporting candidates who mirrored their gender or their race. Rising to the occasion, however, were women in the media, from Katie Couric, who--depending on your perspective--ruined or sainted Sarah Palin, to the sofa-bound political discourse of The View. Traister does a fine job in showing that progress does not proceed in straight lines, and, sometimes, it's the unlikeliest of individuals who initiate real change.