A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

I had a difficult time following the story, and think for that reason it didn't impact me the way I thought it might. Here is the blurb from the back:

"A profoundly moving portrait of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters. A Short History of Women chronicles five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first. Beginning in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause, the novel traces the echoes of her choice in the stories of her descendants - a brilliant daughter who tries toe scape the burden of her mother's infamy; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety post-9/11 Manhattan. In a kaleidoscope of characters and with a richness of imagery, emotion and wit, A Short History of Women is a thought-provoking and vividly original narrative that crisscrosses a century - a book for "any woman who has ever struggled to find her own voice; to make sense of being a mother, wife, daughter and lover"(Associated Press)."