Lauren Groff's short story "Annunciation" in the Feb 7, 2022 New Yorker is probably about as feminist as it gets, although not so much in terms of third wave "intersectionality." This is a woman-focused story in which men, to the extent they only vaguely appear, are disinterested, ineffectual, distant or in two cases, while no longer present, clearly malevolent. It's a story in which a woman can do a man's work and in which women rely on each other for support.
Before going further, I need to say that "a clanger" created a hurdle for me at the start. In her third sentence, Groff describes her unnamed heroine running in the hills above Palo Alto, California, as "the mist falls in starched sheets over the distant hills, the ones that press against the Bay." I'm very familiar with that region and there are no hills the protagonist can see that "press against the Bay." The south bay is surrounded by flat lands with big freeways running through them. The hills are well back from the water.
But most readers probably wouldn't be that familiar with the terrain and I suppose one can write this off to artistic license. "Annunciation" is a work of fiction after all.
Groff's story begins with a woman graduating from a college in New England. No one in her large family attends and as a result, with little money, she gets into an awkward old car given to her by a grandfather and heads west, ending up in a San Francisco youth hostel. Although the story ends late in the protagonists' life, that's almost the last readers hear of her original family. At one point, the protagonist's mother does tracks her down, but their reunion is very short-lived. Graff's heroine has no need for her mother.
After the brief stay in San Francisco, the protagonist finds a job down the Peninsula in Redwood City ("Climate best by Government Test," although that isn't mentioned in the story) and takes a low-wage clerical job in a government welfare agency. There she befriends a down-and out co-worker, a victim of domestic violence who lives with a young daughter in a Volkswagen Vanagon -- in one of the wealthiest areas of the U.S.
Groff's heroine has also found cheap housing close to her job in the compound of a strange, somewhat spooky woman who eventually dies of the law of unintended consequences, sending Groff's heroine on her way.
The two connections mentioned above -- they seem to fall short of real friendships or relationships -- are described in great detail by Groff, but in the end, neither one goes anywhere. This is not "sisterhood" feminism.
From here, readers are suddenly taken to a point significantly later in the life of Groff's heroine -- in Italy where readers are told she is now living a life of "grace," fundamentally a Christian concept, but in this case associated with such things as birds singing amid "beauty."
In the interim, readers learn that the woman in question created a family of her own and while it "has become my true north," it is one from which she apparently episodically flees. -- thinking good things about this behavior because she has so far always eventually returned. No mention of a husband, but she claims to be a mother who "sees her children fully." One wonders if they see it that way, but readers learn nothing of them.
One thing she likes about Italy is that she is surrounded by a thousand Madonnas, with a thousand different faces" (in churches), all unnamed, but wearing "the particular mortal face of a woman the artist loved." One supposes that's the way she would like to think of herself.
In the usual New Yorker interview, one learns Groff struggled with versions this story for a decade, apparently because she had no idea where it was supposed to go. Then she made a bet with another writer on who could first write a short story with a happy ending (a rarity readers are told) and voila!
Grace, wherever it came from and for whatever reason Groff's protagonist was worthy of it, is where it's at. And who needs men?
Amen, those of a feminist persuasion might say.
