This book, first published in 1975 by Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923-1992), is more relevant and needed than it has ever been and it might have a good chance of being heeded this time around. A seminal book for me, it was on every women’s studies bibliography. The sub-title, “Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise”, must give you a hint of what we are now calling the MeToo problem that Dinnerstein addresses:

“It seems possible that now, for the first time in history, women in substantial numbers hate, fear and loathe men as profoundly as men have all along hated, feared and loathed women.”

She uses Freud and mythology, hard-wired into our psyches, to remind us of what has been going on for so long. She emphasizes, insists on, the need for basic change in gender arrangements, a change that goes deeper than the recent ragged displacement of male sexual bullies. The malignant aspect which women have just begun to have the courage to call out is not going to change fundamentally until, Dinnerstein writes, “female-dominated child care ceases to be the basic condition within which ‘normal’ personality develops”. The good news is that it’s starting to happen, and I have the promising proof of it in my own great grandchildren, or rather, in their other caregivers, the fathers.

“Man’s hand must be as firm on the cradle as woman’s.”

It’s going to happen, it’s happening, and the government, finally, is helping, with the dispersement of maternity and paternity leaves. I have been so aware of this as I recall my utter solitude and isolation with my babies compared to the group efforts focused on my gregarious geegees (great-grands).

My copy of the book is studded with post-it notes. They and my yellow highlights give me an entree into the author’s thoughts but they’re not enough. I’m going to have to re-read it again. (How many times now?)

Last week, or some time, I promised my takes on Transcription by Kate Atkinson and Warlight by Michael Ondaatje.

World War Two is still getting attention, but the focus has moved from the battlefield to backstairs - Intelligence. I guess the spotlight shifted with Enigma,the giant puzzle (how to break the Germans’ secret code) solved not only by Alan Turing but also by anonymous, dedicated women working as secretaries (secret secretaries) behind the behind the scenes and living on after the war never allowed to say what they had been doing.

Both of these new books play out behind the scenes with similar , elaborate safeguards against detection. Atkinson is sort of funny in her approach. Everyone seems sort of half-baked, unbelievable, unenthusiastic,casual and befuddled. No one seems to know what he or she is doing. And yet things happen, people are arrested, progress is made. Somehow we seem to have won the war.

Ondaatje’s protagonist is a young boy, taken over the years of and after the war. At first I wondered was it semi-autobiographical; it reminded me of John Lecarré’s relationship with his strange father. But “Viola” (her spy name) or Rose, is a dangerous, endangered, dedicated spy over the years, with no time for her neglected son and daughter. there are adventures in which the boy is caught up with cohorts of his mother - or are they his appointed guardians? One, The Darter (nicknames and pseudonyms foe everyone, it seems) takes Nathaniel with him on smuggfing excursions - importing greyhounds - bringing them in by boat on the canals off London. Ondaatje’s research is always fascinating (remember the winds he described in The English Paitent?), and exhaustive but the canals wore me down. However, when he got to rooftop surveillance, that’s when I got interested. In fact, I haver ordered one of his references (The Roof-Climber's Guide to Trinity: Omnibus Edition).

As confused as Nathaniel is about his past (and present and future) I was even more so. Ondaatje doesn’t fill in the gaps so much as he leaps from one time frame to another. My favourite book of his remains In the Skin of a Lion.