Small Changes

So I was rummaging around in the trash at the Strand on my way home from dinner a few nights ago, and I came upon another find: Small Changes, by Marge Piercy. The Strand, despite its venerated image as a bastion of the cosmopolitan (but fashionably cheap) literati, throws away scores of books every night—perfectly readable books, with perhaps a bit too much wear and tear, or a missing dust jacket. This book, along with the dual Italian-English translated script of Madame Butterfly, found its way into my bag.

Small Changes is a novel set and published in the early 1970s about three women struggling to remake themselves in the image they hold in their heads of the ‘perfect woman’. Fundamentally, it’s a novel concerning the beginning of second-wave feminism. While overt sexism seems to have been conquered, the book offers insight into scenarios that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end just so slightly. Beth, a protagonist introduced in “The Book of Beth”, does more of the photocopying and data entry than usual in her office job at MIT. So do, seemingly, the female office workers where I work in the Parsons administrative office. Recently I’ve noticed that the good ol’ hierarchy is still in place, at least in ‘my’ office. The lower-paid office workers are exclusively working-class and female. The Dean of the school is—you’ve guessed it---a comfortably situated man.

Have we come so far, after all?