As a result of this litany of defeats, she has soured on nearly every ideal, but there is one that Barbara still fully embraces, and that embraces her back: her sense of what it means to be a man or a woman. She is a ruthless arbiter of gendered behaviors; at one point, while walking arm in arm with her husband, she admits to having “a kind of mania for gender itself.” Women, she believes, need to know certain things that men could never understand: “the stakes of looks,” for example, and how difficult it is “to give degradation the slip.” Gender, above all, determines how life is supposed to proceed, from cradle to grave; one of her longest digressions is an overview of the different ways that, to her mind, men and women are supposed to die. (“Every dead man is a felled tree. But women die ignominiously, like dried raisins stuck to the bottom of a Sun-Maid box.”) It’s no surprise, then, that of her many discouragements, the greatest seems to be J.