REVIEW: Portrait of a Feminist: A Memoir in Essays by Marianna Marlowe

Reviewed by Sandra Eliason

In her memoir in essays, Portrait of a Feminist, (She Writes Press; 2025) Marianne Marlowe walks us through stages of her life in vignettes that trace her forming and evolving feminist viewpoint of the world.

The memoir is in four parts: early influences that brought her to feminism, observations on her childhood years, formative experiences in adolescence, and later life reflections. What this memoir ultimately teaches is life’s frequent ironies, the ways in which our lives’ greatest desires manifest themselves or don’t.

Although Marlowe’s circumstances are unique, her experiences of being female in the world resonate.

Born in the United States to a Peruvian mother sent to the U.S. to find a husband, Marianne knows from an early age that her American father controls the purse strings, and her mother needs to fight for the money she thinks she needs. Raised in this situation, Marianne “feels feminism in [her] bones,” she says, “Because mine is a feminism that cannot bear injustice, it was my defining identity.” Her experiences, she says, feel like “A gauntlet run: veering from, sometimes colliding with, unhappy moments and flagrant unfairness.”

To Marianne’s mother, her future husband was “good on paper — tall, dark, and handsome, an engineer — and unfailingly polite.” He had grown up with a strict British mother, in a culture that clashed with her mother’s upbringing, where money and good looks ruled, and spending was not restricted. This clash of cultures continues throughout the book, as Marianne moves to Ecuador (for her father’s job) in grade school, back to California for most of her life, and spends multiple summers and vacations in Peru.

Marianne describes Ecuador’s “national pastime” as “the hounding and harassing of women on the streets,” where as a prepubescent girl she faced exhibitionists, men on the street pretending to kiss her, creating  the mens’ “sense of entitlement over another’s perception…the way she will feel and what she will think about and what she will fear…,” and the man who spent an afternoon photographing her younger sister, (finally asking that she be allowed to return to his home alone — she wasn’t). About that episode, Marianne reflects first, “A photographer can feel he has ownership not only over an individual subject but also over an entire experience,” and second how the experience made her feel she was not worthy of the camera, did not have the ideal looks a girl is supposed to have. She sits in front of the mirror, willing her face to become prettier.

Summers in Lima, Peru, are spent with her cousins and extended family. There she learns that men can have two families, and she is to pity the woman whose man strays; and that a woman’s goals are to marry a handsome, rich man, have children and a large house to manage. While Marianne dreams of education and a career, her female cousins dream of marriage and good looks.

Her Peruvian grandmother believes a woman without a husband is not complete, and Marianne sees the more patriarchal views in Peru in the 1980s as though they were a generation behind her thinking.

After four years in Ecuador, Marianne’s family moves back to California, on the “boring side” of the Golden Gate Bridge across from San Francisco. There, in her adolescence, she realizes the cost of being raised the kind of female who must please a man. Again, although her experiences are unique, the situations are universal.

When a boyfriend whom she had clearly told no to sex raped her, she didn’t report it and continued the relationship. She blamed herself for spending the night and getting into bed next to him naked. It must be her fault. When a group of men attempted to kidnap her friend after a night at a club, clearly intending to rape her, Marianne chased them with a camera, taking pictures until they scattered. Planning to use the photos as evidence when she went to the police, Marianne was upset when the friend destroyed the photos, saying exposing the incident would upset her father and make him cry.

I am older than Marianne Marlowe, and lived thousands of miles away, yet experiences in my life resonate with hers. Raised on the conservative Iron Range of Minnesota, I was taught women could never work in the local Iron ore mines, because they could not do “Men’s work;” that women stayed home and were wives and mothers; and that girls were to “do what I tell you because I said so;” not get too loud, and be “good girls” (read: do what society expects, and don’t stand out). The messages were, keep your legs together, learn to run and walk like a girl, and pretend boys are better than you at whatever you are good at. If I had evidence of someone trying to kidnap me, my father would have  blamed me, told me he was ashamed of me for getting myself into that situation, and exploded in anger. I would never have revealed an episode like this either.

Being raised by a Peruvian mother in California, with the standards of beauty of her Peruvian family, Marianne is shocked when she marries and moves with her husband to Seattle. One of her husband’s fellow medical residents looks her up and down and decides she looks “slutty.” When he, and his wife, try to apologize, Marianne submerges anger and outrage in order to make peace, as a woman is taught to do.

As Marlowe gets older and reflects back on her life, she sees how her cultures have shaped her and her Peruvian family, and reflects on the ironies in life. Her mother’s sister was always the beautiful one. Yet, living in what Marlowe describes as the epicenter of plastic surgery, she ages naturally, with no Botox or facelifts. Her mother, although good looking, was not the striking beauty. On a visit to Peru, her mother had a facelift, liposuction, and tummy tuck. Marlowe and her sister hardly recognized their mother at the airport. She reflects on the culture that asks women to loath the feminine when its not up to the patriarchal standards of the male gaze.

Marlowe always expected to raise girls, but having two boys, she begins to understand that it is not only women who are victims in a patriarchal society, but also men who can be at the mercy of “feminine wiles.” She says, “I never thought that I would care about the boys and men,” but she wants to protect her sons while raising them to have vulnerability.

A final irony is Marlowe’s own life decisions. Although she describes herself as a “raging feminist,” not sure at first whether she wants to get married and what name she will have if she does (she keeps her maiden name) then not sure whose name her future children will carry (it becomes hyphenated, hers and her husbands), she settles into domesticity. Her life goal had always been education and a career, yet she found handling marriage, domesticity, and motherhood too complicated, and became a full time mother.

In contrast, her female cousins’ goal was a husband, caring for a home and raising children (with cooks, chauffeurs and maids). Her grandmother’s favorite grandchild, raised to believe one was not complete without a husband, got pregnant, and the boyfriend refused to marry her. This cousin ended up living in Miami and working full time, while Marlowe became the one at home, managing the house.

Ultimately, while this book is the portrait of a particular feminist, raised in unique circumstances, the circumstances will be familiar to anyone raised in a patriarchal culture.