Life After Life Women and Femininity

Women's suffrage is in full swing by the time Ursula is born in Life After Life, and she finds herself caught between two schools of thought: one that eschews the whole concept of school and thought, believing instead that a woman's place is as a wife and mother, and another that believes women should be educated, intellectual, and hold the same positions as men. It's quite a spectrum, and Ursula finds herself living different lives from one extreme to the other, and everything in between.

Questions About Women and Femininity

1. How do Sylvie's and Izzie's attitudes toward feminism differ? Are there ways in which they overlap? Why do you think this is?
2. How do Sylvie's traditional attitudes toward female gender roles affect her daughters, especially Ursula during her different lives?
3. Is Ursula a feminist? Is Pamela? Is Izzie? Why or why not?
4. How do women's roles change during the course of the novel, mainly as a result of war?

Chew on This

Sylvie and Izzie despise each other not because of their vastly different ideas on the roles of women, but because they seem to want to be each other—Sylvie wants to be free-loving like Izzie, and Izzie wants a family.

Despite being well-educated, Pamela ends up living a "traditional" lifestyle of being a wife and mother, perhaps because these were the values instilled in her by her mother.