Interesting and I’m sure deliberate choice on Duncan’s part. I knew who Eve was, of course, but I did not think about several facts: that all people are supposed to be the daughters of Eve, that Eve was supposedly created to be “helpmate” to Adam, and finally, that Eve is most famous for deceiving Adam and “cursing” all of humankind. As an adolescent, I did NOT get the connotations of the group name. The novel is about a high-school sorority like service club called Daughters of Eve.

Sadly, there is still teenage pregnancy and spousal abuse. Women still earn a fraction of what men do, more men are in senior positions, including in schools, and there are probably still girls who are expected to help with household chores when their brothers are not. But even in 2019 I know of families who think it’s normal for the woman to do most of the housework, even if she works…and in a few cases, where the husband is the “stay at home parent”! So I guess this book is not “out of touch”, for then or now.Ĭertainly other issues are still relevant. Many of the moms in this novel married young, and an Epilogue reveals that many of the female teenagers in the novel were married around age 18.

First, I aged out of YA books in the early 80’s, and secondly, the attitudes presented in the novel seemed a bit outdated to me, even for the late 70’s. Daughters of Eve was published in 1979, but I really thought it was older. She started publishing short works as a teenager, and her first novel was published in 1959. Lois Duncan has been around for a long time.

Daughters of eve by lois duncan