Women and Appletrees
"Tonight Mother bathes. It's a long time since Mother Sofi and Fredrika began their bathing... Two middle-aged women, both of them nearly fifty...who bathe every week. Nobody ever heard of anything like that in the parish... Hired men and maids, sons and daughters, once in the summer maybe, but married women? And year round?" Mother Sofi, the mother of fifteen children, and her friend Fredrika, childless, both married "up" - for money - from poor landless parents to farmers with land, but improvements to their lives were short-lived. When Sally, mother Sofi's "illegitimate" and abandoned first child, and Ellen, Fredrika's niece, find each other as adults, their friendship grows fast and strong. And, whether working in ill-lit, crowded, and dirty factories or attempting to plow over-used soil, so too are their lots in life hard. Written as part-autobiography from the industrial slums of Stockholm and nearby rural farming villages in the 1890s through the 1920s,Women and Appletreesportrays the life-sustaining importance of friendships among working-class Swedish women. Through their struggles with economic, social, and religious proscriptions, Moa Martinson tells a powerful story of endurance and intimacy between heterosexual women living women-centered lives.-- For great reviews of books for girls, check outLet's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. --From500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen