Choice

Jo Kauffman, the novel's protagonist, wants to be a writer and share her life with a woman. She relinquishes both dreams when her college girlfriend's marriage shows her that not every woman has the strength to defy societal gender norms in her professional and personal life. When Jo marries a man to ensure she will have sociocultural influence and socioeconomic stability, her concession emphasizes that, though she has participated in the civil rights moment, advocating for equal rights for blacks, she has not been equally successful in advocating for her own sociopolitical empowerment as a woman. Eventually, Jo marries her love, Shelley Finklebein, but she does not participate in the marriage equality movement that leads the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize same sex marriages in 2015. Jo's personal, professional, and political autonomy increases as the autonomy of American women increases, but she never learns how to...