One minute Virginia Desmarais is preparing for Christmas with her family, the next her husband, Professor Oliver Desmarais is dead on the ground from a brain hemorrhage. It’s the 1970s and Virginia has given up much of herself for marriage and family, having never finished her dissertation and has little to no job skills. Emotionally adrift, she soon finds all the areas where she’d previously been able to count on financially have dried up, save for a small pension to cover her mortgage. While Virginia has always taken her husband’s side when it comes to women in teaching roles, the Vietnam war and other controversial subjects, she begins to learn that maybe her blanket following of her husband was not always the right step. Four women she previously panned at Clarendon College due to Oliver’s opinion, begin to reach out to her with friendship. These women have been nicknamed The Gang of Four; none have been married, and all are outspoken, making them a target for the mostly male faculty of Clarendon. While she’s never seen herself as a feminist, Virginia finds herself trying to decide whether to support her new friends in the fight and possibly risk her quiet life and family, or hide from a cause she isn’t sure she belongs in.
The Wrong Kind of Woman is set in the 1970s against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of Counterculture, and the movement of Second Wave Feminism onto college campuses. The sense of change, confusion, and exploration is something that modern readers in 2020 will feel a kinship with, especially with recent large protest movements to fight for Black Lives and Women’s Rights. For those who have long experienced the benefits of feminism, you may find your stomach dropping every time Virginia reflects on her previous opinions or something Oliver has said. Her initially hanging up on the Four when they call to offer support is cringeworthy, but once they finally get her out to talk and share an appetizer or to, the text breaks up from what feels like an ice flow into individual pieces. The Wrong Kind of Woman follows the modern technique of frequently jumping between perspectives, which can be frustrating. I personally am not a fan of this technique and feel like frequent perspective changes can weaken the power of the story telling. Where the book shines is enforcing the situations that women in the United States during the 1970s would have experienced. Many women lost everything when their husbands died or if they were left for another person.
The Wrong Kind of Woman by Sarah McCraw Crow is now available from Harlequin Trade.
