The Female Persuasion: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Faith emails Emmett Shrader to invite him to her apartment, and he knows from the terse nature of the note that something is wrong. When he arrives at her fancy apartment on Riverside Drive on a Sunday evening, she immediately informs him that she is furious with him. When he asks why, she urges him to try and figure it out for himself, but Emmett cannot think of anything. Finally, Frank says the name Lupe Izurieta and asks Emmett if it sounds familiar to him. Emmett does not know what Faith is talking about. When Faith mentions Ecuador, however, the pieces click into place, and Emmett remembers Lupe as someone he has “paid a lot of money to rescue.”

Faith asks Emmett if it’s true that the mentorship program doesn’t exist. Emmett carefully replies that it was “supposed to have existed,” and asks whether that counts for anything. Faith begs Emmett to tell her what happened. Emmett shamefully admits that though a lot of discussion around the mentorship program went on at ShraderCapital, he was never fully paying attention. Emmett’s attention span is notoriously terrible, and as he sits in Faith’s apartment trying to recall what transpired in the meetings about Ecuador, he has trouble remembering the specifics regarding what went wrong.

Emmett remembers that Faith asked him to do a special project concerning sex trafficking in Ecuador, but that he handed it over to two of his associates rather than get on it himself. They developed a plan to rescue the girls and then institute a mentorship program, and Emmett was pleased with the idea. During a meeting to finalize the details of it, however, Emmett’s attention dropped off. He recalls that the order of command changed, and a new woman was brought onto the project, but she proved to be poor with follow-through. She took ShraderCapital’s money but never hired any mentors.

Emmett recalls a meeting with his advisors in which they discussed what to do with the realization that they had essentially been swindled. Donations toward the program were still coming in, but because they were legally part of a restricted gift, the donations couldn’t be used for anything else immediately. One of Emmett’s advisors suggested letting the money sit tight and simply using it for Faith’s next special project, and then urged everyone in the room to keep quiet about what they had just discussed.

Emmett, with his “flealike” attention span, never followed up on what had transpired in that meeting and never told Faith what was going on. Now, Faith tells Emmett that Greer Kadetsky was contacted by a whistleblower who revealed the truth about the mentorship program, and though Emmett asks Faith to name the whistleblower, she does not. Emmett is wistful for the early days of Loci, which felt like “being young all over again”—he felt engaged with Faith and as excited by her as he had been so many years earlier.

Emmett reflects on his marriage, which had been the barrier between him and Faith back in the 1970s. His wife had always called the shots—it was her family’s money that allowed ShraderCapital to get off the ground. Though Emmett was often unfaithful to his wife, the two of them had an arrangement, and his infidelities were never of real concern to her—until Faith. His wife, realizing that this time had been different, ordered Emmett to cut off all contact with Faith, threatened by Emmett’s intellectual attraction to her. Then, to distract him, his wife placed a massive sum of money into an account in Emmett’s name and offered him the chance to start his own company.

After his wife’s phone call to Faith, Emmett did not speak to Faith for forty years. Though he had his share of affairs, he never met anyone like Faith again. Eventually, Emmett’s wife left him for another man, and Emmett conducted numerous liaisons with young women all over the country—and the world—as he traveled for business. One morning, when he saw a mention about Bloomer’s dissolution in the newspaper, he was motivated to call Faith Frank and make her a proposition. Faith and Emmett found themselves face-to-face for the first time in forty years after Emmett called Faith in to discuss the possibility of creating Loci. Although Faith was wary of going into business with Emmett, she agreed to come on board at Loci. ShraderCapital rehabilitated its image, and Emmett got to see Faith almost every single day, after missing her for so many years.

Now, in her apartment, Faith tells Emmett that she cannot believe that he steeped their organization in lies simply due to his short attention span. Emmett begs Faith not to ice him out. Faith tells him that she has decided what to do and warns him to listen carefully to her. She tells him that she is not going to make a “stink.” She does not want to put the foundation in danger, and she cannot afford to quit her job. She vows to pay closer attention to what is going on upstairs at ShraderCapital. She tells Emmett that she was put on Earth to work for women and will keep doing it no matter what—she is not going anywhere. 

Emmett is relieved. He asks Faith to confirm that no one knows anything about the mentorship program other than Greer Kadetsky and asks Faith to reassure him that Greer won’t say something. Faith laments having lost Greer as an employee, as Greer was someone she had taken under her wing. She urges Emmett to take some of his own employees under his and gestures to a pile of gifts at the foot of the sofa—things that her mentees have given her over the years. She is going through the gifts and thinning out her belongings. Emmett looks through the pile, reading notes from women who look up to her, and remarks that it must be burdensome “to be the most important person to people who aren’t all that important to you.” Faith, however, tells Emmett that her admirers and mentees “keep [her] in the world.”

Emmett suddenly remarks that he has done everything wrong—he should have left his wife for Faith when he had the chance all those years ago. He laments all that could have been between them and despairs that Faith now thinks of him as an “awful” person. As he puts Faith’s gifts and notes back into their pile, he wonders what he could possibly do to show her how he feels about her. He then realizes he has already given her something: a foundation.