What is your first reaction when you think of feminism? What do you understand feminism to be from how you have heard of it or come into contact with it in your daily life? Has reading The Mother of All Questions changed your view of feminism?

As with other highly politicized topics, feminism and the struggle for women’s rights can be portrayed and conveyed to different audiences in very different ways. In order to begin to understand what a movement is really about, one needs to begin by parsing through the understanding that one has already received. Feminism is often presented in contemporary media as a shrill and senselessly aggressive group of radicals, but Solnit does her best in this book to speak to a broad audience without giving up her polemical edge.

Solnit writes in “80 Books No Woman Should Read” that literary canons tend to be dominated by men to the detriment of the imaginative experience offered to readers. Do you agree with this view? Given the way that Solnit engages with works of art and literature in her other essays, what sort of concrete effects do you think a canon that is wider in scope would, or would not, have?