In Pursuit of Disobedient Women

In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, she decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, centre on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time. Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her, and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent. Life, for Searcey, as for most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalised and connected world. The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered.