Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
Penelope, 14, writes in her diary about how boring her parents’ lives are, unlike her own, which she believes will be full of exciting opportunities. Her father Edwin grew up in York. His life is dictated by his strict routine and the most exciting thing about him is the porn Penelope found stashed away inside his toolbox, a place he never expected a woman to look. Her mother, Margaret, is equally boring despite her “exotic” background. She was born in the Union of South Africa, where her parents moved to escape their failing farm and take advantage of the Natives Land Act of 1913. Her mother explains the act gave 80 percent of South African land to white people, the “only people capable of looking after it.”
Penelope yearns to escape the confines of her home. Her parents shape her worldview in important and lasting ways. Her father teaches her traditional gender norms, and her mother teaches her racism. Her mother’s racism was developed in an extremely hostile period of South African history, so Shirley is exposed to deeply problematic ways of thinking about race. Her mother is an unabashed white supremacist. Although Penelope dislikes her parents, she will internalize pieces of these beliefs, nonetheless. Penelope’s childhood highlights how racism and white supremacy are passed on and perpetuated from one generation to the next.
Themes
After the forced transfer, native South African people were desperate for work, and landowners like Margaret’s father would hire them for cheap. The farm isn’t successful, and he blames it on the “idleness” and “resentment” of his workers. Other farmers tell him to tie the worst of the workers to a tree and beat them to scare the rest of the workers into submission. Margaret’s father takes this advice and his workers seem quelled until one day a group of them attack him with his own whip. Margaret’s father was psychologically scarred forever, and they returned to England where he never worked again.
Margaret grew up in a society where horrific violence against Black people was normalized. Her father’s farm resembles a plantation from the era of slavery. Margaret’s vitriolic racism is further intensified after her father faces the consequences of his own deplorable actions. In this way, her father passed racism and white supremacy down to her, so she could later perpetuate it by teaching it to her own child, Penelope.
Themes
Margaret was happy to return to “civilized” England to get away from South Africa, which was no “place for a white girl to grow into womanhood” because of how the “hateful” native men looked at her. Margaret enjoyed her adolescence in England. She snuck out, wore short skirts, and smoked cigarettes, something only “sapphics” could get away with in those days. She met Edwin shortly after her father died in an asylum, and he quickly became a source of comfort and support during that difficult time. Edwin was a sensible choice for a husband, so they married even though that meant Margaret had to give up on her dream of being an elementary school teacher. Married women couldn’t work.
Margaret perpetuates enduring and false stereotypes that position Black men as a threat against white women. False claims of sexual assault by white women have been used to justify horrific lynchings of Black men throughout history. Margaret has a white, heterosexual feminist identity. Her feminism doesn’t just exclude women of color and queer women, but openly derides them. She passes this problematic version of feminism down to Penelope, who wields it in similar ways later in life. Margaret comes of age in the decades before the second wave feminist movement normalized working outside of the home for white, middle-class women like herself. She gives up her dream of working as a teacher to settle down with Edwin, who provides her with a safe home after she loses her father. She goes from daughter to wife, never having the chance to live on her own terms without being tied to a man.
Themes
Edwin took Margaret out but didn’t let her do things he found unbecoming of a woman, like swimming, dancing, or drinking. While caught up in her domestic duties, Margaret tells Penelope how much she misses dancing, but Penelope can’t imagine her mother doing anything lively or rebellious. She feels bad that her mother had to choose between marriage and a career. Penelope can’t wait to go to college and pursue a career, escaping both her mother’s fate and the dullness and routine of their home.
Penelope can’t imagine her mother as anything other than the domestic shell she’s become under the hand of her husband. Penelope is determined to avoid the same fate. She envisions a different type of home and family for her future self, where she’ll have self-determination and freedom of choice as a woman. Penelope’s feminist identity is born from the sadness and anger she feels for her mother.
Themes
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Everything changes when Penelope’s parents tell her that she was adopted. She no longer feels bad for Margaret, only resentful for the way they revealed this information to her. Over dinner one night they tell her that she was left on the steps of a church with no information, and that they’d adopted her from an orphanage after years of being unable to get pregnant. Shocked by this information, Penelope is desperate for them to tell her they love her, which is something they’ve never done. Instead, they carry on as normal, ignoring her tears as they finish their meals.
The revelation that she’s adopted shatters the already shaky semblance of home Penelope shared with Margaret and Edwin. Both Margaret and Edwin are emotionally unavailable after they drop this life-changing news. They can’t or won’t express their love for Penelope, and that leaves her feeling unwanted and unloved, both by her adoptive and birth parents.
Themes
Penelope is depressed for months but hides her sadness from the two people who “used to be” her mother and father. She hides this new information from her friends, too, because she’s ashamed to admit that she is an unwanted, rejected child. She wonders how her biological parents could’ve given her up, and feels like she’ll never know herself if she doesn’t know them. The adoption explains why Penelope feels so different from her dull parents. The more she looks in the mirror, the more she sees how much she doesn’t look like Margaret and Edwin. Edwin and Margaret have light eyes and pallid skin, while Penelope has hazel eyes, curly hair, freckles, and skin that tans easily.
Penelope’s revelation leaves her identity hanging in the balance. For Penelope, knowing who she descends from is critical to fully knowing and understanding herself. She’s lost the home she’d always known with Margaret and Edwin, and the home and community she was born into will remain a mystery. She’s different from Margaret and Edwin not only in terms of personality, but physically in significant ways that suggest they may come from different ethnic or racial backgrounds.
Themes
Penelope feels unloved and unwanted, like a nobody, and decides to become a teacher, get married to an adoring man, and have children to fill the void left by her adoption. She meets Giles shortly after the news of her adoption destroys her, and he puts her pieces back together. He is older and all the girls want him, but Penelope edges out all the other girls and wins him over. They get engaged when she is 18, which makes her the “golden girl” among her peers who are still single and worry they will be forever.
Penelope’s unknowable origin is a gaping void in her life story and identity. She rushes into marriage and family to fill that void and build the family she lacks. She looks to a man to heal and complete her, not stopping to question or consider if he is the right man for her. The fact that Giles desires her is enough after being rejected by both sets of parents in her life. The envy she garners from other girls her age soothes her deeply wounded self-esteem.
Themes
Penelope and Giles get married after she earns her teaching degree. Giles is loving and affectionate, and their life together feels perfect. Her career is delayed by their first child, Adam, and then Sarah comes only a year later. Penelope is overwhelmed with love for her children and is happy to stay home and care for them, but after three years of being a stay-at-home mom, her kids start to feel like little vampires sucking all the life out of her. She’s desperate to finally begin her teaching career. Penelope feels especially left out because countercultural movements, including the feminist movement, are shaking up the world outside her home. Giles doesn’t help her with the children. One night she tells him she wants to start working and he earnestly replies that it’s “impractical to have two masters: a boss at work and a husband.”
Like many women of her generation, Penelope’s career is sidelined by the duties of home and family. In her rush to repair the emotional fallout of her realization she was adopted, Penelope rushed headlong into the same life that her mother once led, that she was so fiercely determined to avoid. She’s gone from daughter to wife to mother. She’s never lived life on her own terms, but only in service of others. She wants to live out her mother’s dream of becoming a teacher, but her husband stops her just as Edwin stopped Margaret. Giles is grossly misogynistic, positioning himself as Penelope’s ruler rather than a partner.
Themes
Penelope finds a friend in the local librarian, Gloria, who’d ordered six copies of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique that she was recommending to local young mothers seemingly burdened by motherhood like Penelope. Penelope loves the book, which she hides in the closet where she keeps her cleaning supplies, a place Giles never enters. The book reveals that her misery isn’t hers alone but is shared by thousands of women who are going crazy trapped in their boring domestic lives. The book empowers her to fight against Giles’s old-fashioned beliefs.
The Feminist Mystique is a fundamental text of the second-wave feminist movement; however, it speaks almost exclusively to white women. Its thesis that women should be allowed to work outside the home may have been radical for white, upper-class women like Penelope whose husbands wouldn’t let them work and who were bored with motherhood, but this idea wasn’t radical for women of color who were already working outside of the home out of financial necessity while at the same time caring for their kids. Symbolically, she hides the book in a closet that she knows Giles will never open because he never contributes around the house. This mirrors the move her father made in her childhood when he hid his porn in the shed, thinking it’d be the last place a girl would ever want to go. The Feminist Mystique connects Penelope to a greater community of women who are oppressed in the same way that she is, and, like many other women of this time, she has a radical feminist awakening.
Themes
Penelope resents working class English women and the “Third World” women who get to work and be mothers. Giles laughs at her, but undeterred, Penelope follows him around day and night on her “freedom crusade,” determined to change his mind. One day he snaps, punches through the window on the front door, and tells her she’s lucky he didn’t punch her face instead. They divorce, and she keeps the house and the kids. She hires a babysitter and starts working at the Peckham School for Boys and Girls.
Penelope’s feminism doesn’t extend beyond upper-middle-class white women like herself. Rather than see how working-class white women and women of color are her natural allies, even if their oppression plays out differently from her own, instead she’s resentful of what she perceives as their freedom. She doesn’t understand that working, immigrant mothers work for low wages in order to survive, not because they want to pursue an intellectual calling like teaching. She also doesn’t understand that they work hard on top of managing the majority of housework and childcare. Giles responds to Penelope violently when she tries to advocate for herself, and this is Penelope’s final straw. Leaving him allows her to launch her career, but it also leaves her a single mom.
Themes
Penelope is charmed by Phillip, when she meets him only six weeks after her divorce is finalized. With him, the regret, sadness, anger, and loneliness left by her divorce fade almost immediately. He’s a “Clitoris Man,” unlike her clueless ex-husband, and so their sex is unlike anything she’s ever experienced. They have a courthouse wedding and Phillip moves into her house. She’s delighted that he works from home as a psychologist while she gets to leave the house to teach. Her children grow attached to him because he’s affectionate and playful with them, while Giles never was.
Like she did with Giles, Penelope rushes into her relationship with Phillip in the wake of an emotionally traumatic event and in order to fill a gaping void in her life. She is still searching for that perfect home and family that she’s lacked her whole life. Penelope and Phillip’s sexually fulfilling relationship leaves Penelope feeling more clued in to the sexually liberated second-generation feminist movement. Penelope relishes the role reversal in their relationship, happy to have Phillip home bonding with the kids while she’s at work. Phillip is a different, seemingly more open-minded type of man than Giles. He’s willing to be a stay at home dad, while many other men would be embarrassed or emasculated by this role. He’s also loving and affectionate with the children, taking on some of the childrearing duties.
Themes
She loves that Phillip wants to know who she is as a person, not just as a woman and mother. He doesn’t try to impose sexist gender roles on her either. In her diary she describes him as a “New Man,” “in touch with modernity.” Everything was going well until his interest in getting to know her transformed into psychological interrogations. When she spoke her mind he’d suggest they “find out what’s prompting this negative behavior.” She feels “psychologically raped” when he goes into therapist mode, probing into her childhood and subconscious.
Phillip is the first man in Penelope’s life who wants to know who she is as a person, not just in the role of daughter, wife, or mother. Penelope has hardly had much time on her own to explore and invent herself outside those societally imposed roles. Phillip is seemingly a perfect, supportive, feminist husband, until he starts to control her in his own way through his psychological probing.
Themes
Phillip criticizes everything she does, and Penelope starts to question their marriage after he accuses her of drinking too much. She’s incensed and insists a bottle of wine per night isn’t too much. She realizes that she’d married Phillip too soon when her love for him was fresh and blotted out reality. Their once fantastic sex-life has dwindled to the “unimaginative missionary pumping” that she and Giles resorted to once he’d no longer found her attractive after childbirth. She’s unhappy but staying is preferable to enduring public humiliation and ostracization for a second divorce.
Phillip’s criticism becomes too much, and Penelope wants to end her second marriage, realizing too late that she rushed into the relationship. It’s no longer liberating or freeing. Instead, Penelope is trapped by the unhappiness that has led to her nightly drinking that she doesn’t recognize as a problem. Despite her staunchly feminist identity, she’d rather suffer through an unhappy marriage than face the shame and judgement that society passes on divorced women, let alone twice-divorced women. Leaving him would also mean having to survive alone as a single mom for the first time, an incredibly difficult reality she’s never had to face and one that her version of feminism doesn’t account for.
Themes
By the time Adam and Sarah leave home, Penelope and Phillip are living completely separate lives in the same home. Eventually, Penelope finds used condoms in the trash, evidence of his affair with the 19-year-old version of herself. She corners him in the kitchen with a pot of boiling water in hand, most angry that he’d been sleeping with a woman younger than her daughter in their shared home. Penelope misses Giles, who seems appealing now in comparison. Giles is living in Hong Kong with his second wife, an Indian woman, and their sons. Penelope’s kids love their half-siblings, who they’d met once they started spending holidays with their dad. Whenever Penelope criticizes Giles’s new family, her kids call her racist. She thinks Adam and Sarah are examples of “political correctness gone mad.” After she and Phillip divorce she’s left to live alone in her house.
Penelope and Phillip’s marriage ends with another moment of violence, mirroring the end of her and Giles’s marriage. Penelope is betrayed in a way many women are, by a man who wants a younger, “more beautiful” woman. This type of betrayal is rooted in a misogynistic culture of unrealistic beauty standards, ageism, and sexual double standards. A man is never too old to be desired, but women lose their desirability after reaching a certain age that’s deemed “too old” to be beautiful. Penelope’s children recognize and call out her racism that underlies her judgement of Giles’s new family, but she accuses them of being too politically correct. Phillip’s infidelity is the final straw and Penelope gets divorced from him regardless of her shame. She’s on her own for the first time in her life, removed from her restrictive roles of daughter, wife, or mother. Once again she’s left without that home she’s been searching for, leaving another broken family in her wake.
Themes
Penelope hires a maid named “Boomi” and rents the upstairs rooms to Japanese students. She doesn’t like being middle-aged and single because she doesn’t know how to attract men; she attracted them effortlessly when she was younger. She fleetingly wishes she was a lesbian because an article said older and younger women often fall for middle-aged women, while men of all ages go for younger. Penelope tries to be happy alone and heed the advice of her women’s magazines that say women shouldn’t be defined by a male partner. She wants to love herself and her body, so she gets rid of her full-length mirrors.
Penelope is okay with letting people of color into her life so long as they serve her in some capacity, whether by cleaning or paying her rent. She doesn’t bother to correctly learn Bummi’s name, revealing the subtle ways she undermines her humanity. Penelope struggles with her sexuality in her middle age. Although she still professes strong feminist beliefs, she struggles now that she’s free of the gendered roles that she once wanted to escape. She’s still so much like her mother whose boring and limited life she never wanted for herself. She’s deeply internalized society’s judgement and disgust for women’s aging bodies, and gets rid of her mirrors in an effort to learn to love herself—a step that reveals just how deeply her self-loathing permeates.
Themes
Penelope should be happy at work, which she’d given her first marriage up for, but starts to hate it when it shifts from a school made up of “her own kind,” the “English children of the working classes,” to “a multicultural zoo of kids.” The disrespectful students and male teachers leave her perpetually angry and she laments that feminism is going out of style to make room for the “multi-culti brigade.” She stands up to the male teachers now, after years of feeling silenced and left out.
Penelope still holds fast to her feminist beliefs, standing up to the male teachers at the school. However, her version of feminism continues to lack intersectional awareness, so much so that she begins to hate the job she fought so hard to have and that was her feminist achievement. She continues to undermine the humanity of people of color, by comparing the children to zoo animals. She hates that society is evolving, that discussions of diversity and acknowledgement of racism is slowly pushing society towards equality. Penelope represents an old England, one built on white supremacy and concerned with preserving a homogenous population and culture, but that England, and the people like Penelope who believe in it, are fading into irrelevance.
Themes
Penelope remembers when “Saint Shirley the Puritanical of the Caribbean” confronted her in the staff meeting when she was still a brand new teacher. She was angry that Shirley attacked her rather than the “male chauvinist pigs” who objectified the female staff and even had affairs with students. Shirley, meanwhile, thought she should be respected by female teachers like Shirley because she’d petitioned for the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts that were both made law. She eventually forgave Shirley and they became work friends.
Penelope views herself as a reformer as much as Shirley views herself as one. Penelope believes her feminism has benefitted every woman on the school’s faculty, and thinks she deserves thanks and respect for those contributions. While it is true that she has made the school better through her pushing back against the male teachers, and through her petitioning for the Discrimination Acts, the good she achieved is overshadowed and undermined by her own racism at odds with a truly inclusive and intersectional feminism. Equality of the sexes will never be achieved without equality of the races, too, because white-supremacist, patriarchal society thrives and depends on both forms of oppression to maintain the status quo. Penelope and Shirley will be stronger if they unite around their causes together, but by the time they do unite it’s over their mutual burnout and disdain. They’ve both lost their political passions, and instead collectively perpetuate society’s harmful status quo.
Themes
Penelope comes home from work every day to her Golden Retriever, Humperdinck, who cuddles and listens to her for hours. She reaches out to her “Sisterhood” of college friends that she’d ignored when she was married, explaining that she’d “lost the me of myself and was subsumed within the we of marriage.” She’s quietly happy when one of her friends gets divorced, too. They become close and do everything together. Sarah supports her after her divorce from Phillip. Penelope phones her drunk to tell her she’s her best friend, and Sarah never hangs up, worried that her mother is suicidal, which Penelope insists she’s never been.
Penelope’s mental health suffers as she’s left mostly alone and still without the home and family she’s yearned for her entire life. She’s never managed to fully rebuild the friendships she lost when she lost her independence to marriage and the all-consuming and isolating roles of wife and mother. Penelope demands significant emotional labor from Sarah, reversing the roles of mother and child.
Themes
Sarah still hasn’t found love, but tells Penelope that when she becomes a mother she’ll quit working. Long having given up on her feminist politics, she’s happy for Sarah, wanting her only to be self-fulfilled. Giles is the kids’ favorite parent because he supports them financially, which makes Shirley sad since she’s the one that raised them. With Adam off in the U.S., Sarah lives with Asian roommates who Shirley describes as “well-educated and well-spoken so hardly Asian at all.” She comes over for lunch every other Saturday, and Penelope cooks her favorite foods. Sarah works as a celebrity agent and tells Penelope her life is hardly messed up compared to celebrities, before quickly trying to walk back on the statement.
Penelope’s feminism hasn’t earned her the exciting life that she once dreamed of. She turned out very much like her mother Margaret, who she both loathed and pitied. Now Penelope directs those feelings towards herself. She’s happy that Sarah is pursuing the path that she’d scorned, hopeful that it will lead her to the self-fulfillment that still eludes her. Giles, who has more financial power in a patriarchal society that privileges men, buys his way into the position as the children’s favorite parent, while Penelope’s hard, though imperfect, work as a mother goes both unpaid and unacknowledged. This points to the way that society undervalues the labor women invest in their children and families. Penelope’s racism continues to define her view of the world. She constantly views the people of color around her through stereotypical and discriminatory lenses. Sarah accidentally reveals her true feelings about her mother’s life. It’s clear she pities her, much as Penelope pitied her own mother years ago. She’s come full circle and is living the life she’d wanted to avoid.
Themes
A few years later Sarah has a family and her especially rowdy children bother Penelope when they visit. Sarah’s husband insists on letting the kids roam free and when Penelope says they need to be slapped, he tells her that’s child abuse. She hates visiting their apartment because the walls are covered in the kids’ drawings and everything is dirty. After Penelope gets the kids to sleep during one of their visits, Sarah tells her they are moving to Australia, where her husband is from and has been offered a job. Penelope immediately breaks down. When she retreats to her room Sarah sends the kids in to comfort her. As they jump all over her and tell her not to be sad, Penelope realizes how sad she’ll be to miss their growing up.
Penelope’s problematic and old-fashioned views on childrearing are another point of division between her and Sarah, just like her racist views. She longs to be closer to her children and their children, but pushes everyone around her away with her negative attitude. It’s not until Sarah and her grandchildren leave that Penelope realizes that she’s lost the last chance at a home and family that she had.
Themes
