Review by Choice Review
The latest work by Chollet, a journalist and chief editor for Le Monde diplomatique, deals with the impact of European witchcraft trials and accusations against women today, a project weighed down by the author's apparent disinterest in European witchcraft trials and accusations. The book's research into witchcraft is largely based on a few scholars' writings from decades ago, along with speculative 19th-century polemics by Matilda Joslyn Gage and Jules Michelet quoted as fact. Recent scholarship has deepened modern knowledge of gender and witch trials, so that scholars today better understand the high rates of women accusing other women, how gender-based patterns of accusation differed by time and place, or how accused women shaped their responses and reasserted their agency. Chollet's work is strongest when she examines the multitudinous challenges women today face as a result of institutionalized misogyny. For example, she writes eloquently about women's fraught interactions in medical settings, which she unfortunately links to the now-discredited belief that witch hunters disproportionately targeted women in healing professions. Although many readers will find this book resonant and compelling, the promised historical framework is not rigorous enough for academic collections. Summing Up: Not recommended. --Daniel Harms, State University of New York College at Cortland
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Chollet's English-language debut is a smart feminist treatise reclaiming the witch and her radical way of life as a path forward for women, as opposed to the death sentence it once represented. She argues that the reasons why women were tortured and killed in witch hunts between the late fifteenth and eighteenth centuries are the very same reasons modern women continue to be persecuted today: remaining single or unmarried, remaining childfree or ending unwanted pregnancies, aging with an emphasis on going gray, and being smart, or more specifically, possessing more knowledge than men. Chollet refreshes these familiar issues by melding philosophy, history, personal experience, and a wide range of literature with current interest pieces such as when she couples activist Barbara MacDonald's texts with a recent press piece about Gloria Steinem titled "Granny Does Resistance" to emphasize the unparalleled ageism that women experience. She also spends time with less familiar ideas such as normalizing mothers who regret having children. Chollet's informed and passionate treatment will appeal to readers looking for more substance amid the witch trend that's otherwise been largely commodified and often scrubbed of its feminist origins.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this spirited yet uneven polemic, journalist Chollet traces misogynistic attitudes in Western society back to witch hunts that occurred in Europe and the U.S. from the 1300s to the 1700s. These periodic public tortures and executions of women "induced all women to be discreet, docile, and submissive," according to Chollet, and drove them into an acceptance of the "gendered division of labor required by capitalism." She forcefully argues that the marginalization of single women, women without children, older women, and female healers is a direct legacy of the witch hunt, though her calls for rethinking social behaviors and expectations often seem out-of-date. For example, her critique of the "standard birth position" of "lying on your back" doesn't acknowledge that women in the U.S. have been encouraged to sit or move during labor since the 1980s. Elsewhere, Chollet presumes that "a large number of parents have given in to societal pressure rather than to an impulse of their own" without providing firm evidence for such a conclusion. Though her iconoclastic wit shines, Chollet's provocations ultimately come across as more defensive than revolutionary. This call for change feels like old news. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Following A Thousand Ships, which was short-listed for Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction and a best seller in the United States, Haynes's Pandora's Jar belongs to a growing number of titles that put the female characters of Greek mythology front and center as less passive or secondary than they've been regarded (25,000-copy hardcover and 30,000-copy paperback first printing)
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