The Feminist and the Cowboy
An Unlikely Love Story
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3.4 • 14 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The bestselling author of The Dirty Girls Social Club returns with an engrossing memoir about how falling in love with a sexy cowboy turned her feminist beliefs upside down.
Feminism was a religion in Alisa Valdes’s childhood home. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem took the place of Barbies and left Valdes impressed with a feminist ideology that guided a prolific writing career—at twenty-two Valdes was named one of the top feminist writers under thirty by the editor of Ms Magazine.
Yet despite her professional success, Valdes hit forty-two a single mom and a serial dater of inadequate men in tweed jackets—until she met the Cowboy. A conservative rancher, the Cowboy held the traditional views on gender roles that Valdes was raised to reject. Yet as she falls head-over-spurs for him and their relationship finds harmony, she finds the strength, peace, and happiness that comes from embracing her femininity.
From their first date the Cowboy makes her pulse race, and she discovers that “when men… act like men rather than like emasculated boys, you as a woman will find not only great pleasure in submitting to them but also great growth as a person.” Told with plenty of humor and candor, The Feminist and the Cowboy will delight the many readers who made The Pioneer Woman a bestseller—not to mention every woman who dreams of being swept away by a rugged cowboy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After going on endless online dates with liberal, modern men who seemed to be her ideal, Valdes (The Dirty Girls Social Club) does something totally out of character and e-mails a conservative cowboy, the story of their unlikely romance unfolding with wit and intelligence. Valdes came from a household of mixed messages, where the progressive, feminist ideals her parents preached were not practiced behind closed doors. She grew up angry and confused and believed the path to independence was to act like her father, who was controlling and domineering, a pattern she perpetuated into her 40s. Meeting the antimetrosexual, traditional throwback creates a new kind of confusion, as she finds herself more attracted to him than any other man ever. As she's feeling the first contentment she's known in years, he prompts her to question how she's been living her life and what she trusts to be her values. She struggles to reconcile her feminist brain with the more animal, instinctive reaction she's having to the cowboy, with the latter connecting with her more, and comes to an arguably incendiary realization: "The dirty little secret of feminism was that it could never go as far as it aimed to, because we were... fundamentally shackled to our own biology." Whether one agrees with her conclusions about relationships between the sexes, Valdes has written a thought-provoking exploration of her own missteps and the tremendous obstacles she has overcome to achieve happiness in the second half of her life.
