Women: Let's Build our Own Table

This review originally appeared on rabble.ca.

No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It's Time to Stop Playing By the Rules by Lauren McKeon (House of Anansi + The Walrus Books, 2020, 22.95)

Resilience Is Futile: The Life and Death and Life of Julie S. Lalonde by Julie S. Lalonde (Between the Lines, 2020, 23.95)

From the time we're young, the world tells girls not to take up too much space. Be nice, we're told. Be small. Don't be too loud. Yet, there's another message women and girls of recent generations have been fed on repeat: You can be whatever you want to be. But the road to leadership and achievement is one lined by institutional and systemic barriers. According to No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It's Time to Stop Playing By the Rules, a new book by journalist Lauren McKeon, current power structures aren't built for women to succeed.

"Women and others who've been historically excluded from power are more likely to battle gargoyles, to traverse rickety bridges (if there is a bridge at all), to leap over rusty spikes in the road. And god help them if they don't do it all while smiling," writes McKeon, the award-winning writer, editor, and author of the previous book F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism. Often called "too nice" for leadership herself, McKeon has written a groundbreaking book that asks women to consider "that if all women are set up to fail, it stands to reason that Indigenous women, women of colour, women with disabilities, homeless and precariously housed women, and those who are LGBTQ+ are only set up to fail more and to fall harder."

To read this full review, visit rabble.ca.