Is Kristin Hannah’s The Women A Feminist Novel?

That may sound like a silly question, but my sister posed it when she gifted me a copy for my birthday. The latest novel from Kristin Hannah is titled The Women. How could it not?

On the surface, it seems to be, from its title to its plot, the story of a girl who joins the army and becomes a doppelganger of a troubled Vietnam veteran. A woman making her way in a man’s world is the tired trope of feminist storytelling. However, this one is subversive to the point of being anti-feminist.

First, let’s be clear where feminism stands today. This social movement generally gets described in waves. First wave feminism was limited to isonomia (equality under the law), seeking suffrage and the right to own property. Each succeeding wave after that has been challenging gender norms itself. Moving us from Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique (1963) which found motherhood boring and unfulfilling to Hillary Clinton’s classic put-down when defending her conflict of interest as a lawyer in Arkansas when her husband was governor. Telling her 60 Minutes interviewer in 1992 “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.”

In The Women, Hannah surreptitiously turns this idea on its head. True to the 1960s, the main character Frankie McGrath doesn’t fight in the infantry. She’s a recent nursing major graduate who joins the Army Nurse Corps. Feminist fiction tends to avoid traditionally female jobs, writing female characters into action roles intended to transform stereotypes or would have her be a doctor rather than a nurse.

While that might be explained by good historical fiction writing, sticking to period-confirming probabilities, it’s another technique of historical fiction writing that foreshadows this novel’s message. Writers of historical fiction tend to weave period-specific books into the narrative, nonchalantly mentioning what a character is reading.

When Hannah does this, the books have a common theme: women unfulfilled because their plans for motherhood go wrong.

Graham Greene’s The Quiet American
Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion
Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby
Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls

And ultimately, The Women joins that theme. The book concludes with Frankie McGrath arriving at the good life by finding the right man. Far from Irina Dunn’s “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, the plot of this book is a series of attractions, rejections, and longings to be a wife and mother. McGrath’s service in Vietnam does what military service often does: it delays and interferes with the volunteer’s later civilian life. Her suffering as a Vietnam vet is depicted as a detour when contrasted with her friends who all got married right after school and live happier, more stable lives as wives.

The role of women in society remains possibly the most divisive cultural issue today. Like the appearance of this book, the real story is more complicated than the surface view. At first glance, the traditional roles of women as wives and mothers look like they have been permanently defeated by a cultural revolution. American women attend college at higher rates than men and regularly go on to be doctors, lawyers, and managers. However, it’s not misogynistic men successfully fighting back against the tide of social progress that keeps the role of women a salient issue. Instead, it’s the social cost borne by professional women fearing they are missing out, plagued by innate longings for the love of a stereotypically masculine man and an irrepressible craving for children’s love that holds total transformation back. Kristin Hannah’s The Women stealthily speaks to this tremendous tension all around us.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.