mercedes's Reviews (299)

This book has an incredibly interesting way of conveying three topics I'm deeply passionate about - being disabled, capitalism, and patriarchy. The main character, Keiko, strikingly resembles that of an autistic woman floundering in a misogynistic, capitalist dystopia... one not unlike the world we live in today. 

Keiko lives for work. Quite literally. After a childhood spent as an outcast, not understanding how to behave or what to say - getting a job at a convenience store where there's a manual telling her exactly what to do, and co-workers she can copy the speech patterns of, has brought some stability into her life. Nothing much matters outside of her job. She eats and sleeps solely to have enough energy to go to work the next day. 

This is no longer enough for the people in Keiko's life. To them, you can either have a part time job in a convenience store and be married, or be unmarried and have a 'real' job. Even Keiko's managers believe it's strange for her to be working there at 36, and that she needs to go out and find herself a man or a career. When Shiraha and Keiko manufacture a fake relationship, everyone is relieved for her. She's finally invited out to gatherings her co-workers left her out of before. Her friends and family refused to accept she had no interest in love or sex.

For such a short book, it has so many pertinent things to say about how capitalism disposes of disabled people - the only group they can't fully exploit. If they have no use of you, you have no use whatsoever. I think autistic people have a really complicated relationship with capitalism and that's what makes this book so interesting when you read it from the perspective of Keiko as an autistic woman. If she is 'cured', and finds a husband, people will allow her to continue wearing the 'convenience store worker mask' that she feels so safe in. Despite the fact that she is constantly masking, and adapting her speech patterns and facial expressions to fit in with the people around her—it's not enough. 

'The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.'

first read rating 4.5 / reread rating 3.0

Just absolutely delightful 

(I read this for my university assignment).

This is a hard one to rate because, while both stories are not typically enjoyable or interesting, it is absolutely fascinating to read early intersectional feminist thought. Wollstonecraft here not only links classism and misogyny together but also ableism, an acknowledgement still strikingly lacking in feminist circles today. 

Another really interesting aspect of both Mary: a Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman is just how autobiographical they are, especially Mary. A lot of it felt like an entire play by play of Wollstonecraft's own life. Her ability to weave her own experiences in her stories as well as religious quotes, whether quoted directly or used sarcastically to demonstrate oppression of women at the hands of religious beliefs and laws, is present throughout. 

“Men who are inferior to their fellow men, are always most anxious to establish their superiority over women.”

“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jacques—literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”