Introduction

“In her entrancing debut, McCraw Crow traces the impact of second-wave feminism and the antiwar movement in the early 1970s on a New Hampshire college campus. . . . The choice to present the characters’ desperate actions in shades of gray makes for engrossing reading.” —Publishers Weekly

In late 1970, Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard while hanging Christmas lights. In the year that follows, his widow, Virginia, struggles to find her place on the campus of Clarendon College, the elite men’s college where Oliver was a professor. While Virginia had always shared her husband’s prejudices against the four outspoken, never-married women on the faculty—dubbed The Gang of Four by their male counterparts—she now finds herself depending on them, even joining their work to bring the women’s movement to Clarendon.

Meanwhile, Virginia’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Rebecca, is adrift in a world without her dad and hates the woman her mother is becoming. And junior Sam Waxman, reeling from the death of his favorite professor, falls in love with a magnetic activist bent on effecting change by any means necessary.

Soon, reports of violent protests across the country reach this sleepy New England town, stirring tensions between the fraternal establishment of Clarendon and those calling for change. As authorities attempt to tamp down “radical elements,” Virginia must decide whether she’s willing to put herself and her family at risk for a cause that had never felt like her own.

Told through alternating perspectives, The Wrong Kind of Woman is an engrossing story of grief and renewal, of shedding old identities and finding new ways to belong, beautifully woven against the backdrop of the rapid changes of the early Seventies.

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Excerpt

November 1970?Westfield, New Hampshire

Oliver died the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the air heavy with snow that hadn’t fallen yet. His last words to Virginia were “Tacks, Ginny? Do we have any tacks?”
That morning at breakfast, their daughter, Rebecca, had complained about her eggs—runny and gross, she said. Also, the whole neighborhood already had their Christmas lights up, and why didn’t they ever have outside lights? Vir- ginia tuned her out; at thirteen, Rebecca had reached the age of comparison, noticing where her classmates’ families went on vacation, what kinds of cars they drove. But Oliver agreed about the lights, and after eating his own breakfast and Rebecca’s rejected eggs, he drove off to the hardware store to buy heavy-duty Christmas lights. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1) Do you think that Virginia would have made the changes she did if she hadn’t lost Oliver?

2) What elements in The Wrong Kind of Woman feel similar to today? Does the unrest and division in the story’s background feel relevant to today?

3) Friendship is a theme of the novel—Virginia’s new friendship with the Gang of Four, Sam’s friendship with Jerry, and later on, Elodie, and Rebecca’s on-again, off-again friendship with Molly. Do you think the nature of friendships depends on your stage in life?

4) What role does Clarendon College—the campus, the students, the faculty—play in this novel?

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