Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.
After a party at which a man insisted on telling her about one of her own books, which he had not read, Solnit wrote: "Yes, people of both genders pop up at events and hold forth . . . but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they are talking about." She adds a qualifier: "Some men.' But this essay went viral because many women - many, many women - know exactly what Solnit is talking about.
Why are women such as Solnit being embraced after years of producing outstanding work? Perhaps it's because no one listens to them the first time they speak.
After a party at which a man insisted on telling her about one of her own books, which he had not read, Solnit wrote: "Yes, people of both genders pop up at events and hold forth . . . but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they are talking about." She adds a qualifier: "Some men.' But this essay went viral because many women - many, many women - know exactly what Solnit is talking about.
Why are women such as Solnit being embraced after years of producing outstanding work? Perhaps it's because no one listens to them the first time they speak.
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