...these essays make the case for placing one’s faith, and pouring one’s energy, into channels that can irrigate our culture under any regime: art, activism, and the telling of stories that animate both. The resulting collection provides, to borrow the author’s phrase, a bit of much-needed hope in the dark ... Solnit also grapples eloquently with a challenge that dogs all feminist writing: How does one write about the oppression women suffer at the hands of men without reinforcing the atavistic idea that woman and man are inelastic designations, with little in common and nothing in between? ... Solnit’s voice shows us what it means to refuse to be drowned out, and how doing so creates the hope that you, along with many others, can change the world.
The Mother of All Questions unites some of Solnit’s sharpest feminist polemics with her decades-long preoccupation with crafting narrative … The book is divided into two sections: ‘Silence is Broken’ and ‘Breaking the Story.’ The first offers up what Solnit sees as evidence of major social shifts regarding women’s place in the world, while the second points to specific cultural artifacts that exemplify either sexist or feminist sentiments … The Mother of All Questions is best understood as Hope in the Dark retooled for young feminists. Where Hope spoke to activists at their most defeated, Mother appears in the first months of Trump’s presidency, armed with purpose and reason.
In its content, The Mother of All Questions reinforces Solnit’s gift of hope; in the circumstances of its publication in this bleak year, it obliges readers to put it to use ... Solnit’s connective imagination often functions by boiling things down to essences, and in The Mother of All Questions, the key essence is silence, 'the universal condition of oppression' ... Solnit brings everyday aggressions into new focus, and outlines a cohesive phenomenon where we might have seen a series of isolated events. Notably absent, however, are the silences perpetrated by women against other women: the ways in which privileged women — often straight, white and cisgender — silence gay, bisexual and trans women and women of color, even and sometimes especially within the feminist movement.
The Mother of All Questions covers a wide range of topics, all of which will be familiar to anyone who has partaken in the feminist internet over the last few years ... At its best The Mother of All Questions can be read as a very recent history of feminism, one that can give readers, to borrow the title of a book Solnit published during the Bush administration, hope in the dark ... it's strange that Solnit doesn't acknowledge at all what has happened since 2014, the ways language has failed to prevent a forceful resurgence of old-school attacks on the freedoms of women, minorities, LGBT people, and the poor ... Also unacknowledged in Solnit's book, though, is what happens when these newly widespread principles—the importance of having your voice heard, of telling your story, of 'breaking silences'—are co-opted and used to fight against justice and equality.
The question at its very heart seems to be: How can we break through limiting narratives about gender and race and power — narratives that silence and harm us in so many ways — and create a more just, empathetic and joyful world? ... In one of her essays, Solnit argues for a way of being that is deft and supple and imaginative or maybe just fully awake in how we imagine and describe the world and our experiences of it,' for speech that 'conduct(s) the orchestra of words into something precise and maybe even beautiful.' How lucky we are that she gives us just that.
The first essay, the title of which is given to the book, addresses that exhausted, timeless question of motherhood. If that feels like a subject that’s been written about to death in the feminist blogosphere, don’t be fooled: Solnit’s brief essay is more thoughtful, probing, and powerful than the majority of content on the subject ... Solnit feels crucial in a way most other writers don’t. Feminism and the patriarchy are complex and mutating beasts, and it takes a steady hand and deep heart to get to the bottom of things. There are writers who struggle to express their bold ideas. Then there are writers whose ways with words aren’t matched by their storytelling. Solnit occupies the rare category of writer who presents her powerful, searing ideas in dazzlingly graceful language. The Mother Of All Questions is a joy of both form and function. It’s difficult to think of an equal.
Trenchant and hopeful, the book reveals that the ongoing work of righting the wrongs of patriarchy is only part of a much larger project of social justice for all people. As always, Solnit is eloquent and sharply insightful.
...short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch ... Chock-full of references to the work of women at the forefront of contemporary feminist thought, Solnit’s essays will stir minds and spark further investigation.
