Former Congresswoman Katie Hill shares her experience with misogyny and double standards in politics to help women topple the longstanding power structures that prevent them from achieving equality.
Both thoughtful and thought-provoking, Hill unflinchingly takes responsibility for choices and actions that led to her political demise, while also offering sage advice for those fighting for women’s rights in this straightforward and candid memoir-cum-manifesto.
... [an] impassioned introduction to the gender inequities of 21st-century America ... Her whirlwind recap of past feminist movements can be reductive, and her liberal use of the first-person plural suggests a commonality of experience at odds with contemporary feminist thought. But if Hill’s intended audience is politically disaffected young women who could be nudged into action by a dismal cascade of data points, She Will Rise makes a decent primer. Hill heads off familiar lines of skepticism with frank explanations for why some women need abortions later in pregnancy, why rape survivors don’t always file police reports and why women often stay with perpetrators of domestic abuse. The last is a struggle Hill knows well; her personal revelations ground that chapter’s statistics in the urgency of real life ... Yet her self-reflection doesn’t extend to the scandal that prompted her book. Hill brushes off her relationship with the staffer as a 'gray area' that can’t be explained in the 'zero-tolerance' terms of the #MeToo movement, and insists that her husband constrained her social circles so completely that her campaign was her only outlet for intimacy. Her unwillingness to call her relationship with the staffer what it was — an unambiguous ethical violation — is all the more glaring in light of the book’s premise: that women in office conduct themselves better than the men who outnumber them.
... becomes a reasonably convincing, if personally unreflective, battle plan for getting more women elected ... [Hill's] book, despite many references to 'imperfections,' also makes it clear she thinks her conduct was not especially serious ... Hill's tone, light and Twitter-inflected, often jars ... Attempts to correct sexism by claiming women are in fact better than men are also neither flattering nor convincing. Nor do we need inane encouragement along the lines of 'women are awesome at being in charge, just like we are at everything else,' as Hill puts it ... But Hill's aim is to encourage more women to run for office, and the book does a fair job of laying out some of the barriers and obligations this involves. There is also a satisfyingly concrete list of legislative measures to address problems stemming from sexism, along with their status in Congress. These are nested, though, in confused platitudes about female empowerment ... Maybe this isn't surprising: Jessica Bennett, in a sympathetic New York Times profile of Hill, notes that the book was written in three weeks.
