Friday Book Review: Girldrive by Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein

With the rise of smart-girl blogs like Jezebel has come a whole new examination of the word feminist. In Girldrive, Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein embark on a cross-country road trip, stopping at points on the map where they’ve arranged to interview an assortment of women. The goal: Ask these women how they view womanhood and modern feminism.

It’s an interesting premise, and the authors come with all the right credentials. Degrees from prestigious liberal-arts schools? Check. Parents who are established feminist artists or academics? Check. Youthful energy, ambition and idealism? Check. Skilled in writing and photography? Check and check. Unfortunately, the resulting book leaves the reader aching for something better.

Despite logging thousands of miles, Aronowitz and Bernstein don’t venture very far outside their personal comfort zones when it comes to the women they talk to. For the most part, they’re connecting the dots from one middle-class, gender-conscious, college-educated 20-something woman to the next. Some of the more culturally established subjects are bound to be interesting — like Carla DeSantis, founder and editor of ROCKRGRL Magazine, or the women of the Big Star Burlesque troupe in Austin, Texas. Rarer are the spur-of-the-moment interviews with working-class women who haven’t spent years crafting sound bites.

There are a few, though. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the authors visit the Top Hat Lounge and sip $2.50 well drinks poured by their bartender, a 27-year-old single mother. When they ask, “What’s the number one thing on your mind lately?” she says that her problems are economic. She’s raising a 7-year-old on welfare, even though she’s a few credits shy of a master’s degree in anthropology. Is anthropology paying these days? “Fuck no,” she says. “I’d rather be a bartender making cash,” even if that sometimes means being, as she puts it, “a vagina behind the bar … not a real person to most people.” Aronowitz and Bernstein seem to have seen her as a vagina behind the bar, too, for the purposes of their project. If they asked her name, they don’t say so here.