The book that saved 16 year old me
It's from the 1940s
What have I been reading lately?
Mermaid horror...dragon romantasy...position papers on abortion responsibility. You know, the usual. I rarely ever re-read anything, but this week I decided to pick up my absolute favorite book from high school. From the nineteen hundreds!
"West with the Night" by Beryl Markham wrecked and saved me at 16.
It's a memoir about Markham growing up on a horse farm in Kenya in the 1920s. She becomes an early African bush pilot, eventually solo piloting her way from the U.K. to Nova Scotia. She was the first person to make that particular east to west flight. Not the first woman, the first person.
At the time I read this book, I was a young horse woman who loved flying small aircraft with my own dad. I fell in love with Markham and her adventurous life she so eloquently chronicles in this memoir. Interestingly though, this little book would never have reached me without a specific endorsement by a male author. Ernest Hemingway. (Maybe you have heard of him?)
Hemingway said Markham could "write rings around those of us who consider ourselves as writers." Because of this review, "West with the Night" was republished in 1983 with great success.
When I think of the inequities between men and women, I am often frustrated by how much of women's brilliance gets buried simply because nobody with power bothered to dig it up. Markham wrote a book so good it changed the brain chemistry of a sixteen-year-old horse girl decades later. And it almost didn't matter, because the world doesn't hand out microphones evenly. It took Hemingway, a man whose opinion the world had already decided to trust, to say "hey, actually, listen to her" before anyone did.
That should piss you off a little. It pisses me off a little.
It could be so easy, fellas. Hemingway didn't write Markham's book for her. He didn't explain her own flying to her. He just used a platform he didn't earn alone (1940's male privilege at play) to point at something extraordinary and say "look."
That's the move. You just have to be willing to point. Recommend the book she wrote. Say her name in the room she isn't in. Give credit loudly, take it quietly.
(BTW, Hemingway was no saint. The guy had a well-documented ego and his own messy history with women, so let's not canonize him. People are nuanced, and you can learn something useful from someone without needing them to be a hero.)
Privilege isn't something to apologize for on a loop. It's something to spend. So this week, borrow the one good move from Ernie. Find the woman in your life already doing the damn thing, and point.
Here, I’ll go first…
Erica Smith is your favorite sex educator's favorite sex educator! I have followed and learned from Erica for years now and she just keeps getting better. Her book released earlier this year and is so helpful that we are reading it in Pleasure Club in Sept. Check it out here or wherever you buy your books!