The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XXI, No. 9 June 2004 74035 $4.00

I In This Issue

I There was more to cooking in the 1950s than tuna casserole and jello mold (red, with celery, cran- berries, and walnuts, anyone?). Jan Zita Grover explores kitchen realities in her review of two books about women and food, Something from the Oven and A Thousand Years over a Hot Stove. Cover story D

I In Emotional Trials, sociologist Cynthia Siemsen discovers why “How could you defend that guy?” is exactly the wrong question to ask a feminist criminal defense attorney. p. 5.

I Irish women have been among the country’s political rebels since the 18th century, but they still have In 1970, as a result of one of the most successful boycotts in American history, several large grape growers signed a long way to go before they United Farm Worker contracts offering better pay and achieve real power, says reviewer conditions. From A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. Lauren Byrne. p. 8.

I Glamorous, sophisticated, and beautiful, the B movie star Anna Home cooking May Wong was judged “too by Jan Zita Grover Chinese to play a Chinese.” Instead, in the Hollywood of the A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through 1920s and 1930s, white actors Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Laura Schenone. New York: wearing “yellow-face” and taped W. W. Norton, 2003, 412 pp., $35.00 hardcover. eyelids played Asian parts. Two Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro. biographies and a filmography doc- New York: The Viking Press, 2004, 306 pp., $24.95 hardcover. ument Wong’s unique career. p. 18. I s Laura Shapiro wisely notes in the Century (1986), has again focused on the acknowledgments to Something from influences of America’s food industry on I and more... A the Oven, “everybody has a ’50s, even home cooking. In her earlier book, Shapiro those who experienced the decade only traced the rationalization of cooking 06> through their parents.” True to this obser- through the rise of cooking schools, labora- vation, the ’50s that Shapiro constructs are tory nutrition studies, academic home eco- different from those in Laura Schenone’s nomics/domestic science, and standard A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. They’re measurements for ingredients—the many different from mine. ways in which food production became 0374470 74035 Shapiro, author of the admirable Perfection more consistent and scientific: “What gave PRINTED IN THE USA Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the continued on page 3 The Women’s Review Contents of Books Center for Research on Women Wellesley College 1 Jan Zita Grover I A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told 106 Central Street Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Laura Schenone; Something from the Oven: Wellesley, MA 02481 Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview 4 Debra Spark I Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories Volume XXI, No. 9 June 2004 edited by Sandra Bark

EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman 5 Nancy Caplan I Emotional Trials: The Moral Dilemmas of Criminal Defense Attorneys [email protected] by Cynthia Siemsen PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash 7 Erica DaCosta I Simone Weil: As We Knew Her by Joseph Marie Perrin, Gustave Thibon, [email protected]

and J. P. Little POETRY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Robin Becker 8 Lauren Byrne I Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation by Janet Todd; No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the ADVERTISING MANAGER: Anita D. McClellan Revolutionary Years 1900-1923 by Sinéad McCoole [email protected]

10 Martha Saxton I Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Life at Forty OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler Acres (1747-1817) by Elizabeth Pendergast Carlisle [email protected]

11 Judith Vollmer I Two poems STUDENT WORKERS: Nissa Hiatt, Martha Ortiz, Bethany Towne 12 Florence Howe I Threshold by Shirley Kaufman; The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems by Minnie Bruce Pratt EDITORIAL MISSION: To give writ- ing by and about women the serious crit- Bernestine Singley I Underground Codes: Race, Crime and Related Fires by Katheryn Russell-Brown ical attention it deserves. We seek to rep- 13 resent the widest possible range of fem- I inist perspectives both in the books we 14 Kathy Davis Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation choose to review and in the content of by Julia Kirk Blackwelder; Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About the reviews themselves. Women’s Lives by Rose Weitz ADVERTISING IN THE WOMEN’S 16 Nancy Mairs I Gendering Disability edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison REVIEW: Visit www.wellesley.edu/ WomensReview to book an ad online; 17 Ellie Hernandez I Chicana Without Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies by Edén Torres preview the current issue and classified ads; and download a media kit including 18 Eithne Johnson I Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905-1961) display, classified, and line rates, sizes and shapes, policies, and deadlines. by Anthony B. Chan; Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russell Gao Hodges; Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN Radio and Television Work by Philip Liebfried and Chei Mi Lane #0738-1433) is published monthly except August by The Women’s Review, 19 The Bookshelf Inc. Annual subscriptions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for institu- tions. Overseas postage fees are an additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 sur- face mail to all countries outside the US. Back issues are available for $4.00 Contributors per copy. Please allow 6-8 weeks for all subscription transactions. LAUREN BYRNE is a freelance writer and editor who frequently EITHNE JOHNSON has an MA in communication and a PhD in Periodicals class postage paid at writes for the Irish Voice and Irish America magazine. radio-television-film studies. She has taught film and media courses, Boston, MA and additional mailing most recently at Wellesley College. offices. NANCY CAPLAN has been working in the poverty law arena, in POSTMASTER: send address correc- New York City and Massachusetts, since 1975. For the past 21 years NANCY MAIRS, a research associate with the Southwest Institute tions to The Women’s Review of Books, she has been a public defender in Massachusetts. She lives in Boston. for Research on Women, is a poet and essayist who lives in Tucson, Center for Research on Women, Arizona. Her books include Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the ERICA DA COSTA is a writer and editor in New York. Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Nondisabled and A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories. Wellesley, MA 02481. KATHY DAVIS teaches at the graduate school for women’s stud- ies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She has published MARTHA SAXTON teaches in the history and women’s and gen- The Women’s Review of Books is a project several books on women’s bodies and feminist body/politics, der studies departments at Amherst College. She has written a biog- of the Wellesley Centers for Women. including Dubious Equalties and Embodied Differences. She is current- raphy of Louisa May Alcott and, most recently, Being Good, a study of The Women’s Review is distributed by ly working on a transnational history of the feminist classic Our women’s moral values in early America. Total Circulation, New York City, NY, Bodies, Ourselves. BERNESTINE SINGLEY, a lawyer, is editor of the award-win- and Ingram, Nashville, TN. All other distribution is handled directly by The JAN ZITA GROVER teaches cooking classes, tends her cookbook ning, critically acclaimed When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Women’s Review. collection, and writes about food from Duluth, Minnesota. Writers Confront Their Personal Histories (2002). She invites you to visit her at www.BernestineSingley.com. The contents of The Women’s Review of ELLIE HERNANDEZ is an assistant professor of women’s stud- Books are copyright © 2004. All rights ies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she teach- DEBRA SPARK is the author of the novels The Ghost of Bridgetown reserved; reprint by permission only. es feminist theory, transnational border studies, and LGBTQ studies. and Coconuts for the Saint. Her book of essays on writing, Curious A graduate of the English department at UC-Berkeley, her research Attractions, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. focuses on the comparative sexualities of the Americas and gender JUDITH VOLLMER’s newest book of poetry, Reactor, was pub- and social relations in US Latina studies. lished in April by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her other FLORENCE HOWE is emerita professor of English at the books include The Door Open to the Fire and Level Green. Vollmer has Graduate Center, the City University of New York and emerita pub- received the Brittingham, Cleveland State, and Center for Book Arts lisher of the Feminist Press at CUNY. She is the editor of No More prizes, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth Century American Women Poets. Since Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She directs the 1994, she has codirected Women Writing Africa, a multi-volume Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and publishing project. She is writing a memoir. co-edits the poetry magazine 5 AM. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 Home cooking considerable inroads via the home continued from p.1 kitchen, and it is to it that Shapiro mostly turns. (I say mostly because she has uncov- scientific cookery its staying power,” ered some cracking good stories about Shapiro explains in her new book, “was food celebrities of the 1950s-1960s, and its partnership with the food industry, she lays down her main story of home which was becoming an ambitious new cooks almost too readily to recount player in the American kitchen.” Something theirs.) “That moment when the burgeon- from the Oven picks up Shapiro’s narrative ing food industry confronted millions of in the post-World War II era, which, American women and tried to refashion despite her book’s title, Shapiro does not them in its own image is the one I explore confine to the decade 1950-1960 but in this book,” she writes. rather expands toward that portentous The efforts of Kraft, Hormel, landmark, the 1963 publication of Betty Swanson’s, and other big food manufac- Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. turers to remake Americans’ home cook- In the immediate postwar period, ing in their own image have already been Shapiro writes, America’s food industry capably described by Harvey Levenstein. faced its greatest challenge yet: to convert Shapiro is after more elusive prey. She its immense wartime capacity for produc- wants to understand how the industrial tion to domestic use. This would be done siege was met by those under attack: by creating “a peacetime market for American homemakers. This is not so wartime foods.... factories were ready to easy to find out as it might seem; how keep right on canning, freezing, and dehy- should a historian go about determining drating food as if the nation’s life still the ways that home cooks prepared depended on it.” Baldly put, “What the meals for their families 50 years ago? Few industry had to do was persuade millions wrote about it. The magazines that many of Americans to develop a lasting taste for of them picked up in grocery stories— meals that were a lot like field rations.” the famous Seven Sisters (Family Circle, Spam and Treat (fatty canned pork Good Housekeeping, Women’s Day, Better that had been used in C rations), frozen Homes & Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, vegetables and fruit (not part of domes- McCall’s, and Women’s Home Companion)— tic rationing during the war), instant reflected their advertisers’ priorities, not mashed potatoes, frozen (“TV”) dinners, their readers’. Other magazines, like and foods subjected to vacuum process- Gourmet, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Town and ing (“originally developed to make peni- Country, emphasized more fashionable cillin and blood plasma”) were war prod- cooking, yet their recipes’ and columns’ ucts that made their way onto post-war relationship to what readers actually grocery shelves and into newly installed cooked is unclear. Grinding corn for tortillas, circa 1920. From A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. grocery-store freezers. That, however, was only half the manufacturers’ battle: hapiro’s approach to finding home Similarly, a 1960 Parents Magazine reader story Shapiro promises in her introduc- How were they to persuade home cooks cooks’ voices is threefold: she survey found that “more than half of the tion—it explains little about “the ques- to use these foods? S turns to newspaper food columns, subscribers...still baked pies, cakes, and tion that drove my research... Food historian Harvey Levenstein, in like The Boston Globe’s “Confidential cookies from scratch every week.” how...women began to renegotiate the his Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Chat,” a long-running recipe-and-advice Eventually, however, according to terms of domestic life in the context of Eating in Modern America (1992), noted swap among readers; community cook- Shapiro, industrial food won its battle [paid] work.” Unless readers are to another battlefront that Shapiro does not books; and “hardworking classics [like] with American home cooks. Something assume that the writing careers of mention: what a February 2, 1956, New Joy of Cooking or the Betty Crocker cook- from the Oven doesn’t have a lot to say Cannon, Bracken, et al. are object lessons York Times story termed the problem of books.” She also makes use of food about this purported victory, perhaps in in this renegotiation, the unfolding of “the fixed stomach.” “Americans could industry, government, and advertising part because much of the book is given their paid work says little about how not be persuaded to eat more food,” market research, which provides some of over to Shapiro’s discussion of high pro- “middle-class women” (Shapiro does not wrote Levenstein. As we now know, the the book’s most interesting data: For file women cookbook writers, real and define this term) cooked before, during, fixed stomach has expanded considerably example, as late as 1960, a US imaginary: Betty Crocker (Betty Crocker’s and after the postwar era. Poppy since 1956, but that’s another story—one Department of Agriculture study found Picture Cook Book [1950]), Poppy Cannon Cannon’s and Julia Child’s grasp of the recounted acerbically by Marion Nestle in that “popular convenience foods— (The Can-Opener Cookbook [1952]), Peg women they wrote for presented the Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences everything from canned spaghetti and Bracken (The I Hate to Cook Book [1960]), same conceptual problems that Shapiro Nutrition and Health (2002). On the way to frozen orange juice to devil’s food and Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French faces in her research. supersizing fast food and thaw-and-serve cake...accounted for no more than 14 Cooking [1961]). Interesting as this materi- Oddly enough, if anyone seemed to restaurant meals, the food industry made cents of every dollar spent on food.” al is, it constitutes a diversion from the have a grounded, lively, and informed Women with intent Post-Soviet Women A Vision for Girls Encountering Gender, Education, and the Bryn Mawr School Transition Andrea Hamilton “To educate American girls and women in ways beyond the Nation Building, Economic Survival, traditional has been a dangerous experiment that has and Civic Activism challenged basic notions of female nature and has seemed to edited by Kathleen Kuehnast threaten the social order . . . One such bold venture in and Carol Nechemias female education—the Bryn Mawr School of Baltimore, Women in the former Soviet Union, Against Obscenity Maryland—is the subject of Andrea Hamilton’s lively and The Big Vote despite a legacy of high levels of Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, well-researched book.”—from the Foreword by education and labor force 1873–1935 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of participation, face a host of new Leigh Ann Wheeler $39.95 hardcover Exclusion, 1890s–1920s problems. The contributors Liette Gidlow examine women’s role in nation- “Rather than portraying early twentieth-century Speaking for Nature building, rural household debates over obscenity as a part of a continu- “Solidly researched and elegantly written, this ous battle between the forces of ‘repression’ Women and Ecologies of Early Modern book is an important contribution to the economies, and democratization England and civic activism. and ‘enlightenment,’ Leigh Ann Wheeler literature on the fascinating political decade of identifies key moments in these early Sylvia Bowerbank the 1920s. 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Available at bookstores • The Johns Hopkins University Press • 1-800-537-5487 • www.press.jhu.edu

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 3 No more shayne maideles by Debra Spark

Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories edited by Sandra Bark. New York: Warner Books, 2003, 336 pp., $14.95 paper. I

f a gender can own a language, by women, six by men—about women then women own Yiddish. Or who (in the words of editor Sandra I they once did. “Before modern Bark) “reach beyond the limits Yiddish culture and literature began to imposed on them by their families, flourish in the later nineteenth centu- societies, and religion, yet feel bound Brownie Wise, inventor of the Tupperware party, demonstrating ry,” writes Sandra Bark in the preface to their communities.” a product. From A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. to her anthology Beautiful as the Moon, Since the stories largely portray Radiant as the Stars, “Yiddish was the women in the late 19th and early 20th sense of who America’s home cooks write them down, either: they exude voice of grandmothers, aunts, and centuries, there were plenty of limits to were, it was that serene specter, Betty them. Many are country women or daughters. While men conducted their overcome. The one that looms largest in Crocker. Like God, Betty Crocker women from American subcultures that religious and literary affairs in the holy the pages of Bark’s anthology is the pro- seemed omniscient. And with good rea- retain traditional foodways, at least for Hebrew, women lived their lives in scription against education. “A girl only son: General Mills’ popular Betty Crocker’s ceremonial occasions: Nez Perce, Yiddish, raising their children, run- needs to learn how to read her prayers Picture Cook Book was based on extensive Navajo, Creole, Low Country, Japanese, ning their businesses, and bargaining and sign her name,” says the grandmoth- correspondence, interviews, and field Ashkenazic Jewish, Italian. with God in that language.” Though er in Rachel Korn’s memoir, “The Sack observations among home cooks and One of A Thousand Years’ finest the gender divide was never all that with Pink Stripes.” Certain prayers are members of General Mills’ staff of achievements is its selection of illustra- neat—many men, including rabbis, forbidden for girls, as the narrator of home economists. tions, about which I wish Schenone had spoke Yiddish; a few women, like the Dvora Baron’s “Kaddish” discovers. She By the close of Something from the Oven, written. These range from photographs rebbitsin (rabbi’s wife) or the zogerin is not a boy and thus cannot learn the the rout of home cooking seems assured, in the Library of Congress’ WPA collec- (woman prayer leader), knew prayer that should be said over the dead. writ by Betty Friedan: Après moi, le tion to ones from small historical soci- Hebrew—the basic gender associa- She can’t learn it even though her dying Hamburger Helper. Shapiro doesn’t hint eties to engravings and woodcuts from tions were in place until the end of the grandfather has no male heir who can much at the nationwide shift back toward old cookbooks to reproductions of holo- 19th century, when Yiddish had a sex say the prayer in her place. (And this is a more natural foods and immigrant graphic recipes. change. Or, if that’s too much to tragedy, for who then will speed his soul cuisines, but this is by no means the Like Shapiro, Schenone addresses the claim, when the language was (in the along its way in the afterlife?) As for sec- inevitable result of her research. gains and losses in American kitchens of words of the scholar Irena Klepfisz) ular education, the mother in the mem- Shapiro’s view of the US seems similar to the 1950s and 1960s. Because she paints “de-feminized.” The reasons for the oir “The Four Ruble War” declares, “A the view cartoonist Saul Steinberg sati- with a far broader brush—her book “de-feminization” were complex, young girl should not study too much. rized in his well-known March 29, 1976, attempts to touch on women’s cooking related to radical socialism and the The more she learns, the less she is New Yorker cover, “View of the World from the close of the last North Jewish enlightenment, as well as the worth. And the more likely she will from 9th Avenue.” Shapiro ignores the American ice age to the present— lingering influence of the 18th-centu- become a gray-braided old maid.” population shift toward the West that Schenone offers only generalizations ry Chasidic movement, which empha- The proscription against education began occurring in the 1930s and that by about the post-war period, along with her sized an individual’s direct relationship points directly to the problem of being 1960 made California almost as populous mother’s recipe for—a dessert? a salad? with God and ecstatic spirituality. Not born a girl in a culture that valued as New York State. California’s foodways maybe both?—Blueberry Cream Salad surprisingly, “de-feminization” meant women primarily as keepers of the barely figure in Something from the Oven. (lemon gelatin, blueberry pie filling, sour “legitimization.” In the wake of the home. And yet the pieces in Bark’s Had Shapiro looked at what was occur- cream, sugar, lemon juice). re-valuation of the language, Yiddish anthology—some fiction, some nonfic- ring in home cooking in the West during I’m struck by how little either writer literature began to flourish—first, tion, which can make for confusion at the postwar years, she would have found, has to say about the recipes she men- during what is called the “classical times—don’t read as complaints. for example, that Sunset Magazine—begun tions or reproduces. In Stand Facing the period,” when Mendele Mokher Despite everything, the girls and women early in the 20th century by the Southern Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholom of this collection are resourceful. Pacific Railroad, then sold to the Lane America The Joy of Cooking (1996), Aleichem wrote (Aleichem is the cre- brothers, who turned it into a visionary Anne Mendelson provided an admirable ator of Tevye of Fiddler on the Roof); his is most obvious in Isaac testament to western food and garden- demonstration of the social and cultural and second, in the post-classical peri- Bashevis Singer’s well-known ing—greatly exceeded Gourmet’s circula- history that can be teased out of atten- od, when writers like Isaac Bashevis T story “Yentl,” in which a young tion, promoted the use of a vast number tive recipe reading. Applying her Singer, his brother I. J. Singer, and woman disguises herself as a boy, hiding of fruits and vegetables unused else- method to, say, Betty Crocker’s Picture David Bergelson were at work. her identity even from the woman she where in the US, and emphasized cook- Cook Book and the other familiar cook- And what of women? There were eventually marries. As Francine Prose ing that was simple (lots of grilling, lots books Shapiro cites reveals a great deal Yiddish women writers—and they writes in her introduction to Beautiful as of salad) and based on the freshest ingre- about the perceived competencies of published in the same publications as the Moon, dients. As far back as the 1933 Sunset All- their audiences. A close reading of Peg their male counterparts—but they’ve Western Cook Book, the magazine’s food Bracken’s The I Hate to Cook Book could largely been overlooked in literary his- Read in the context of this writers had touted regional specialties, have saved Schenone from quoting tories, and little has found its way into anthology, ‘Yentl the Yeshiva farmers’ market fruits and vegetables, Bracken’s book as if it were an anti- English translation. Ten years ago, a Boy’ seems even more delightful and recipes for the Mexican, Chinese, cookbook. Bracken, as Shapiro’s careful study group in Toronto began to cor- and meaningful than we may Italian, and Japanese foods popular in the reading of her recipes and advice rect this imbalance by publishing Found have remembered. For the sense West. If the culinary 1950s and 1960s reveals, was clearly an accomplished Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women of these women’s lives that look bleak to Shapiro, in part that’s cook adopting the conventions of what Writers (1994). That collection—with Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the because she does not look much farther Shapiro shrewdly terms “the literature its comprehensive feminist introduc- Stars provides makes us realize west than 9th Avenue. of domestic chaos.” tion to Yiddish literature by Irena that Yentl would have had very The view from 9th Avenue is a partial Klepfisz and its detailed biographical cogent, very strong reasons— aura Schenone’s first book, A one. Besides leaving out the West and and bibliographical material—was a apart from her more inchoate Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, the kind of cooking that Easterners first important step in restoring and irrational psychosexual urges L also uses recent studies in social would get around to terming California Yiddish women to their place in liter- and promptings—for wanting to and cultural history, recipes, and cooking only in the 1980s—better late ary history. Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant lead the life of a man instead of excerpts from popular magazines and than never, I guess—it delves insuffi- as the Stars is an additional step, offer- the much more limited, restricted cookbooks to tell its story. Along with ciently into the effects of postwar subur- ing up, as it does, portraits of women destiny of a woman. (p. xix) her considerable library research, ban housing and suburban supermarket- in Yiddish literature. Or perhaps that’s Schenone apparently spent a great deal ing on domestic cooking: It wasn’t only not entirely accurate, for if the book Other girls make less radical changes of time visiting home cooks in every food manufacturers who reshaped how showed Jewish women in Yiddish liter- to get what they want. When her father corner of America and cooking along- American women shopped and cooked. ature, it would have to be more com- won’t give her money for her education, side them. Most of her informants seem But as Laura Shapiro writes, everyone prehensive, including stereotypical the narrator of Helen Lodonyski’s “The to cook outside the pale of advertising- has her ’50s. If yours was suburban, views of women as scolds, helpmeets, Four Ruble War” manages to scrounge it driven women’s magazines; they don’t southern, or western, I hope to read and chatterers. There’s little of that herself. The narrator of “Kaddish” measure their ingredients, and they don’t about it one day. I here. Instead, there are 22 stories—18 learns the kaddish prayer on the sly.

4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 Being denied an education is part and In David Bergelson’s “Spring,” a young parcel of other denials. When one can’t woman studying for her examination in educate oneself, one’s purpose in life is the Faculty of Medicine is sidetracked circumscribed, as is one’s access to vari- by a trip to see her younger sister’s lover. Lawyers with consciences ous pleasures. This is all the more true in Later in the collection, there are stories a time when marriages are arranged. about middle-aged women feeling lone- by Nancy Caplan Perhaps for this reason, many of the ly and disconnected in the United young women in this collection dream States. Finally, there are stories of old Emotional Trials: The Moral Dilemmas of Criminal Defense not only of education but of romance. women, the most striking of which is Invariably, these stories tell of conflicts Dvora Baron’s magical story of “Bubbe Attorneys by Cynthia Siemsen. Boston: Northeastern University between a parent who wants an arranged Henya,” a miracle worker who helps her marriage and a child who wants a mar- community avert tragedy. The antholo- Press, 2004, 240 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper. riage of the heart. What’s surprising— gy’s stories also loosely follow the life of and what perhaps distinguishes this an Eastern European woman in anoth- I anthology from Found Treasures—is that er way. The stories start in the shtetl and the women of Beautiful as the Moon some- take a detour into Eastern European n Emotional Trials, sociologist Cynthia than other cases? times win; they sometimes convince cities before migrating to the United Siemsen digs deep into the thoughts PH: No. (p. 5) their elders of their needs. This is most States and/or Israel. I and experiences of women criminal striking in Ester Singer Kreitman’s “A In the book’s preface, Bark writes, “I defense attorneys. Through extensive This exchange vividly illustrates how Satin Coat,” in which a daughter pre- hope you will read this book as both an interviews with 14 women criminal Siemsen quickly found that her version vents a contracted marriage from taking engaging piece of literature and an excit- defense attorneys at various stages of of the question, “How can you defend place. Her mother, Rochel, similarly ing piece of culture.” Read purely on liter- their careers, she looks at ways in which those people?” would get her nowhere ignores convention by starting “her own ary terms, the anthology is largely strong, emotion and ideology intersect in the with her subjects. She learned that they dairy as an outlet for her energies.” though there are some stories—like Yente working lives of these women. In partic- “hated [the] question,” not because it Rochel’s work empowers her. It also Serdatzky’s “Two Heads” and Blume ular, she tries to determine whether the probed a difficult and sensitive area, but gives her the physical pleasures that are Lempel’s “Scenes on a Bare Canvas”— nature of criminal defense work, espe- because it was tantamount to an attack in such short supply in many of the that seem a bit maudlin (in the case of the cially cases in which men are accused of on their work. “How can you” immedi- other stories in Beautiful as the Moon. former) or poorly constructed (in the case committing violent crimes against ately implied that they were engaged in Kreitman writes, “The cows would of the latter). With literature in translation, women, creates emotional and/or ideo- an activity that is fundamentally wrong. express their thanks by licking her hands however, it’s always unclear whether it’s logical dilemmas for women criminal The question also assumed that their with their wet tongues. The warm milk the story or the translation that is to blame defense attorneys. She explores the ques- clients were guilty and that “those peo- in the buckets and the smell of manure for a passage that might strike contempo- tion of whether the women defense ple,” were less than human. in the stable awakened all of Rochel’s rary readers as weak. A few of these sto- attorneys who think of themselves as Having learned that her initial ques- powers. At such times, she felt she could ries are, in moments, overwrought. But on feminists feel particularly conflicted. And tion was pejorative and alienating to the bend iron with her bare hands.” balance the writing in the volume is tight, she discovers how these attorneys man- women defenders whom she hoped to and the anthology is most certainly a valu- age the conflicts and stresses that arise understand, Siemsen began to ask the hen the girls in these stories able culture experience—and not just from the work they do. women defenders how they responded to have an opportunity for because it gives us insight to the lives of One of the most interesting aspects of people who questioned their work by W pleasure—a chance to bathe our foremothers. If Yiddish literature Emotional Trials is how Siemsen figured asking, “How can you defend that guy?” by a mill, or eat juicy forbidden berries, flourished in the classical and post-classi- out what questions to ask. Early in the The women opened up. Ultimately, hav- or pursue an erotic experience—they do cal period, it died during the Holocaust. book, Siemsen tells about the reactions ing refined her approach, Siemsen was so with intense delight. And with fear, For a people who didn’t have a geograph- she got when, in the course of her initial able to get at some of the information for so often their desires and duties ical homeland, Yiddish was, for years, a interviews with Pat Hardy, she posed the she had sought initially. She discovered conflict. In “The Four Ruble War,” the place to be. And then it was destroyed. question, “How can a woman attorney what kinds of cases, clients, and situa- narrator acknowledges, “I walk on new Few people speak Yiddish anymore. defend a man who has raped another tions were difficult and stressful for the roads toward the future—even though Beautiful as the Moon doesn’t just give voice woman, especially if the attorney has women defenders and how they coped my heart is in pain because my parents’ to unheard women—and it should be feminist sensibilities?” (Siemsen refers to with these challenges. (Interestingly, blessings will never accompany me.” noted that some of the volume’s pieces all of her subjects with pseudonyms): Siemsen found that some people who The pain of such a conflict is clearest in have never been published before in followed her project were attached to her stories that attempt to articulate a char- English—it exhibits a culture and a liter- Cynthia Siemsen: How about the original line of inquiry, no matter how acter’s inchoate longings. In “At the ary sensibility that was destroyed. Among crime? [Have you ever struggled vigorously she told them it had changed. Mill,” as Ruchtsi approaches a noisy mill the strengths of the collection are the defending] a particular crime Similarly, she found that some feminist with water running under it, “she felt a endnotes that accompany each story, pro- because you’re a woman? scholars objected to her work because slight tug at her heart, as if someone viding a bit of information about the Pat Hardy: No. they felt she was giving voice to women were leaving for some unknown place, author. And what does one learn? That CS: Okay, do you consider your- “whose work by its very nature may put the kind of tug—who knows what it David Bergelson was killed, with many self a feminist? them in the public position of [seeming wants from you.” others, in the 1952 Stalinist purge of PH: Yes…. to be] ‘betraying’ their gender.”) The arc of Beautiful as the Moon loose- Yiddish writers. That Dvora Baron spent CS: Okay. Tell me about a case Siemsen divides her subjects, who ly follows the arc of a woman’s life. It the end of her life as a shut-in. That no where there’s been an act of male have been practicing for between six and starts with stories about young girls one knows what happened to Fradel violence against a woman. What 35 years, into three groups: early career, then moves to consider women just Schtok; she may have died in a psychiatric kind of stress does it add to your midcareer, and seasoned defenders. The starting an independent life. In Sholom institution. Even if Beautiful as the Moon life? Is it any different? women in the study are an interesting Aleichem’s “Hodel,” a daughter eludes weren’t the interesting read that it is, one PH: I don’t think so. No. mix. Siemsen frankly expresses regrets the marriage broker, chooses her own would admire it nonetheless for honoring CS: And so you aren’t more anx- that she was unable to achieve the level of husband, and joins him in political exile. and valuing the lost. I ious when those cases go to trial racial and ethnic diversity that she had

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 5 sought; all but three of her subjects were particularly poor people of color. She encompasses both feminism and criminal are just poor people who do drugs or white. Otherwise, however, the group of found this profoundly offensive and came defense. Olivia George, a Native- alcohol. The percentage of violent, women ranging in age from 33 to 61, to specialize in “searches and seizure and American criminal defense attorney, went beyond-redemption folks that I repre- reflects a mix of young and old, gay and the lying cops.” She commented, “The so far as to say that she believed that sented is somewhere around 2 or 3 per- straight, parents and women without chil- thing that makes me happiest in the world some feminists lose sight of the “bigger cent.” Kaufman spoke about represent- dren, single parents and coupled parents. is to get to take on a lying cop, especially if picture of inequality.” George added that ing a 65-year-old pedophile who had All of the women started their careers as I’ve got some evidence…so that I can that in sexual assault cases, she knows been out of trouble for 20 years. She told public defenders. Three had later gone prove to the judge that he’s lying.” Holly that she will treat the complaining wit- Siemsen about the mitigating circum- into private practice and two had become Porter, an African-American defender, ness humanely in the course of trial. stances she presented in court in her law professors. The remaining women spoke about getting together with friends Other defenders echoed this sentiment, attempts to keep him out of prison and continued to work as public defenders. and family in her community and hearing and noted that “beating up on” a sympa- commented about her representation of “story after story” of social injustice. She thetic alleged victim is rarely an effective this man, whom society sees one-dimen- iemsen found that all of these “thought that law was the one vehicle defense strategy. Effective or not, none sionally as a child molester: “It’s not so women shared a philosophy of where you had a say. Where you did have of the women defenders expressed a simple. It’s not black and white.” Kay S defending their clients, not the some…power to make a difference.” fondness for such practices. They felt Owens described many of the defen- crime with which they had been charged. Beliefs in social justice, concerns about they had an advantage as women criminal dants in criminal cases: “[They are] the Trudy Kaufman, one of Siemsen’s sub- racial and economic inequalities, and a defense attorneys. Fran Jones spoke of hapless, helpless, poor, sick, wounded, jects, explains: “I’m not defending the desire to keep the forces of government in her ability to “go in front of a jury…and [and] uneducated who can’t make it.” act; I’m not saying it’s good to tear some- check were reflected in the narratives of make arguments that are based on pas- Sally Tan, who was a public defender for one from limb to limb, or to put out their almost all of Siemsen’s women defenders. sion and compassion and win those 16 years, said about her indigent clients, eye, or rape them. I’m defending the Only two of Siemsen’s 14 subjects felt [cases]…a man could never do it.” “[They are] really at the bottom of every human being’s right to a fair proceeding, that doing criminal defense work conflict- list—economically and socially—they a human being who is alleged to have ed with their feminist beliefs. One of he other side of the “compas- really need help, and they appreciate it.” committed the act.” these two, Emily Locatelli, felt that she sion” coin was the heavy burden The notion that the clients who cause Siemsen does a particularly wonderful had failed to give a client charged with T Siemsen’s subjects felt when the women defenders the most difficulty job discovering and revealing the different statutory rape the zealous defense he defending clients who faced lengthy are the ones charged with the ugliest beliefs and experiences that drive the deserved, because she had such a “bad prison terms. They cared about their crimes proves to be a myth. Sally Tan women defenders in their work. Some stomach” about defending him. Her ideol- clients and suffered when the outcome of spoke about the worst kinds of clients: grew up without socioeconomic advan- ogy—“that everybody deserves a a case was bad. In California, where all of “[those who] whine about everything and tage and saw the ways in which people defense”—told her that this was wrong. Siemsen’s subjects practiced, this prob- won’t face the facts.” The narratives of without resources and status get short Ultimately, she could not reconcile her lem was exacerbated by California’s the women defenders make it clear, how- shrift from the government; they were “defender” side with her “feminist” side, “three strikes” law, which can cause an ever, that even when they are represent- motivated by a desire to fight hard for and she became a law professor after prac- individual convicted of minor offenses to ing the “beyond redemption 2 or 3 per- people who have little if any power. The ticing as a public defender for eight years. receive a prison sentence of 25 years to cent” or the “unrealistic whiners,” they more middle-class background of other Most of Siemsen’s defenders found life. As the stakes go up for the clients, are driven by their overriding principles women defenders motivated them to fight that their commitment to fighting for the stress goes up for the defenders. and beliefs. Several defenders comment- for people who did not enjoy the privilege fairness, upholding the Constitution, and Many of the women defenders describe ed that those who cannot take such that had cloaked their lives. For middle- defending their underdog clients coexist- what is, for them, the ultimate in stress: “heat” should “get out of the kitchen.” class Meg Lowe, it was a revelation to dis- ed with their feminist beliefs: They see the jury trial. Sleep deprivation, digestive cover that many police officers, whom she fairness—for women, for poor people, problems, and loss of appetite are typical. ong-time defender Vivian Gold had grown up believing were the “good for minorities, for immigrants, and for One defender, Becky McBride, described reflected on her work: “I believe guys,” routinely lied to justify their actions individuals charged by powerful govern- a fantasy she had while on her way to L that I’ve chosen the most honor- in the searches or arrests of poor people, ments with crimes—as a principle that court to try a particularly difficult case: able of professions….We deal every day that she would get into a car wreck that with the very fabric of life—with sex, would put her in the hospital for a with greed, with fear, with weakness, with month! Many of the women defenders regret. We are teachers. We teach toler- spoke about literally weeping when a ance, openness, variety in thought. We’re United Nations client was convicted or sentenced to always in the minority. We’re always in the prison. Kay Owens’ story about her role of the opposition. This keeps our for a united world defense of a mentally ill woman was par- minds alert. This keeps us tough.” For ticularly poignant. Her client, who suf- me, a long-time public defender as well, fered from bipolar disorder, was convict- and for the women colleagues with whom Women, Peace and Security at a Glance ed of an attempted purse snatching and I have shared this book, these words res- This study identifies the gender received a seven-year prison term. Owens onate, as do the words and narratives of perspectives in peace and security issues. It said that her client “never comprehended Siemsen’s 13 other subjects. In a world covers the impact of armed conflict on what she had done wrong and why she where we are surrounded by myths about women and girls, the international legal was going to prison.” Siemsen asked the criminal justice system that distort and framework, peace processes, peacekeeping Owens about her emotional reaction to cheapen the work that we do, this book is operations, reconstruction and the outcome in the case. Owens said, “I a rare breath of truth. More broadly, demobilization. wept. At the time she was convicted, I Emotional Trials reveals aspects of the E.DPI/2315 9211009308 24pp. $5.00 wept. I walked out into the hall and I was criminal justice system that are misrepre- crying in front of the jury…And one of sented in a popular media that demonizes Putting Gender Mainstream into Practice the jurors was trying to be kind to me and persons charged with crimes. Recent sto- Gender mainstreaming was established as said, ‘It’s all right.’ And I said, ‘No, it isn’t ries of wrongfully convicted and impris- a global strategy for the promotion of all right…This woman is going to prison oned persons exonerated by DNA evi- gender equality at the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995. This and she doesn’t belong there.’” dence are beginning to chip away at pop- publication contains the proceedings of the How did Siemsen’s women defender ular notions of the infallibility of police, first regional symposium on gender subjects cope with these stresses? Only prosecutors, and the criminal justice sys- streamlining, organized by the Economic two left trial work altogether (both tem as a whole. Emotional Trials con- and Social Commission for Asia and the became law professors), one because of tributes to a more nuanced understanding Pacific. family responsibilities. Several curtailed of the system, the human beings who are E.03.II.F.30 9211201691 216pp. $40.00 their workloads somewhat, changes that processed through it, and the women who were mostly necessitated by the conflict- defend them. The Gender Dimension of Economic ing demands of work and motherhood. Cynthia Siemsen is a sociologist and, Globalization: An Annotated Nonetheless, most remained actively while she states that she does not expect Bibliography engaged in criminal defense litigation. most of her readers to be sociologists, This bibliography presents a They dealt with the emotional demands elements of Emotional Trials—such as comprehensive compilation and of their work through their “strong ide- where Siemsen describes and applies her categorization of resources on gender and ological conviction of the value of “foundational theories”—may not economic globalization. It provides an [their] work.” appeal to readers who are not social sci- overview of literature and identifies main Any surprise that readers might feel at entists. Outside of the fairly dense research and advocacy institutions. The bibliography highlights literature on Latin the women defenders’ concern for their description of these theories in the American and Caribbean women. “criminal” clients is addressed by the way “Opening Remarks” chapter, however, E.03.II.G.131 9211214173 108pp. $10.00 the defenders describe the people they Siemsen’s analyses of her subjects’ nar- represent. Trudy Kaufman says it well: ratives are accessible and engaging. The United Nations Publications, Department of Public Information “There is a perception in our society that strength of Emotional Trials lies in the Sales and Marketing Section, Room DC2-0853, Dept.A503, New York, N.Y. 10017 criminal defense attorneys represent real- fine work Siemsen has done in mining Tel. 212-963-8302; Fax. 212-963-3489 - E-Mail: [email protected]; Internet: http://www.un.org/publications ly evil people and that our prisons are and revealing the stories of her women VISA, MC and AMEX accepted. SHIPPING & HANDLING: Domestic: add 5%, US$5.00 minimum, except HI, AK PR and VI. Orders for HI, AK, PR, VI and Overseas: US$5.00 per title plus US$5.00 handling charge. filled with really evil people. That is just defender subjects—stories that deserve wrong. The vast majority of [our] clients to be told. I

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 The four Simone Weils “[An] eclectic assortment by Erica DaCosta of the daring, the devastating, Simone Weil: As We Knew Her by Joseph Marie Perrin, Gustave Thibon, and J. P. Little; translated by and the derelict.” Emma Crauford. New York: Routlege, —The New Yorker 2004, 208 pp., $19.95 hardcover. I

he deceased did kill and slay her- Roots, was her attempt to guide her country self,” wrote Simone Weil’s doctor— out of what she perceived as the moral, T with unwarranted certainty—after spiritual, and political decay into which it she died in London in 1943. At age 34, in had fallen. exile from her beloved France, Simone Weil Simone-Weil-the-educator has been died of uprootedness. Her unique charac- underexamined. Thibon tells us that ter and prismatic thought continue to be influential today. Biographical writings have her gifts as a teacher were tremen- always been popular, as her life and death dous: if she was inclined to over- were dramatic, and she suffered an “excess estimate the possibilities of culture of temperament,” but during her lifetime, in all men, she knew how to place her developing philosophy and political herself on the level of no matter activism garnered equal attention. Since her what pupil in order to teach no mat- death, however, her mystical thought has ter what subject. I can imagine her taken center stage, and her work as an edu- carrying out the duties of an ele- cator and educational theorist has largely mentary school teacher just as well been eclipsed. I believe there are four as those of a university profes- Simone Weils that deserve equal weight: the sor….she brought to the task…that theorist, the political scientist/activist, the quality of extreme attention which, educator, and the mystic. in her doctrine, is closely associated J. P. Little, in a new introduction to with prayer. (p. 117) Simone Weil: As We Knew Her, a joint remi- niscence originally published in 1952, tells Weil taught after she graduated from the us that “when Paris was occupied by the Ecole Normale Superieure, and in addition Nazis in 1941, Simone Weil, accompanied to her pedagogical talents, she developed a

by her parents, fled south, arriving eventual- fertile body of ideas on the subject of edu- ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ly in Marseilles.” As a French Jew, she had cation. She asserted that “the first duty of a ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ been recently excluded from the teaching school is to develop the power of attention profession and was seeking work on a in children … [T]hey must learn to be farm—she often sought out manual labor attentive in order to be able, later on, to be jobs, since she found unpalatable the fact just” (from Weil’s Ecrit Londres as quoted by that those who made decisions in society Richard Bell in Simone Weil: The Way of had no experience of such work. She was Justice, the Way of Compassion [1998]). As introduced to Joseph Marie Perrin, a Thibon noted, her doctrine of attention is “Barnet persuasively and delightfully presents these women Catholic priest, who put her in touch with at the root of all her modes of thought. Gustave Thibon, a farmer, Catholic, and For Weil, justice flows from attention. A as the first generation of feminists, the women who ‘blasted autodidact. In return for her help on his judge, for example, “should first be taught the door open to the rest of the country, leaving it to us to farm, she gave him lessons in classical to see the suffering in the vagrant that imagine future lives as stunningly original as theirs.’” Greek (he was clearly no ordinary farmer). stands before her.” Weil elegantly equates She spent many months in the company of care and justice when she offers this sce- —The Boston Globe Thibon and Perrin, and when she left for nario, and she identifies the primary defi- the US with her parents in May 1942, she ciency in both judge and vagrant as lack of “Her flair for storytelling and enthusiasm for this endlessly entrusted Thibon and Perrin with her note- education. “Nothing…is more frightful fascinating subject makes each juicy chapter go down books and papers. The two men came than to see some poor wretch in the police as deliciously as an E! True Hollywood Story.” together to produce this reminiscence and court stammering before a magistrate who editions of her work. keeps up an elegant flow of witticisms,” —Bust magazine Simone-Weil-the-theorist described her- she says in her Selected Essays. This is the “Barnet’s treatment of this scintillating era is as self as a Bolshevik before she was 15 years same kind of attention to which Sara lively and of age, but by the time she graduated from Ruddick refers in her book Maternal appealing as the women she’s writing about.” the Ecole Normale Superieure, she had Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (1990). —Publishers Weekly become “a stern critic of both Right and Citing Weil, Ruddick expands upon the Left,” T. S. Eliot said of her in his introduc- idea: “Attentive love…represents a kind of “Regardless of your degree of knowledge about this tion to Weil’s The Need for Roots. She saw knowing that takes truthfulness as its aim remarkable era, you’ll find something—and someone— clearly that the Soviet Union would become but makes truth serve lovingly the person a system for destroying initiative, culture, known.” It is the attention of genuine to celebrate in this comprehensive, consistently and thought, while she also despised the interest and generous vision, acting freely entertaining volume.” —Elle wastefulness and dehumanizing effects of outside the prisons of ideological systems capitalism. She believed that in order to or personal defenses. “Barnet’s beautifully detailed portraits of these pioneering abolish what Marx described as “the women are delicately shaded, filled with resonating emotional degrading division of labor into intellectual eil’s doctrine of attention bears and manual work,” workers must increase striking resemblance to contem- nuance, and surrounded by such stellar supporting characters. . . . their control of language. This led her to W porary feminist psychologist All-Night Party is sure to arouse great interest.” become Simone-Weil-the-political-activist, Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care. Gilligan —Booklist who organized and taught evening classes notices a general divergence in women’s and for laborers. She worked as a trade unionist, men’s senses of justice, with women more hosted Trotsky in Paris (and debated vigor- likely to start from a point of care than ALL-NIGHT PARTY: The Women of Bohemian ously with him), fought in the Spanish Civil from a notion of impartiality. Though Weil Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913–1930 War, and wrote extensively against France’s would likely have disowned the division ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ colonial oppression around the world. Gilligan makes between men and women, ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ by Andrea Barnet (Little has also edited and translated a col- both Gilligan and Weil point to the lection of Weil’s writings on the subject, inescapable yet grossly obscured fact of Wherever Books Are Sold Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the human interdependency. However, to align Other [2003].) Her final work, The Need for Gilligan and Weil is as awkward as it is pro- ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL • www.algonquin.com

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 7 ductive. Weil was far removed from her Everywhere…I see as you do, the own femaleness and from sexuality alto- pharisaism, the conventionality, the gether. She never managed to achieve a full false virtues and false glories, all understanding of herself as an embodied that deception which is inherent in Irish women rebels creature, much less as a woman. However social things…This armour of con- this should not obscure her view of all ventions and lies risks stifling the by Lauren Byrne beings as “thickly situated” in a time, a divine germ, and at the same time it place, and a web of human relationships. protects it. It is no easier to dissoci- Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters Simone-Weil-the-mystic often over- ate them than to separate the wheat shadows the others, in spite of the fact from the tares before the harvest. and the Making of a Modern Nation by Janet Todd. that Weil published not one piece of reli- …Here on earth they are indissol- gious writing during her lifetime and ubly joined to each other. This is a New York: Ballantine Books, 2003, shared her religious life with startlingly few scandal for the weak or for the besides. The emphasis on her religion unintelligent….but it is a necessi- 346 pp., $25.95 hardcover. developed because of the crucial, penulti- ty… It is unavoidable that this tran- No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists in the mate period she spent with Thibon and sitory world, where we have the Perrin. Thus, Weil-as-mystic is revived two-fold duty of accepting life as Revolutionary Years 1900-1923 by Sinéad McCoole. with the re-publication of these reminis- long as it lasts and consenting to cences, perhaps at the expense of her death when it comes, should be Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, identities as teacher, theorist, and political compounded of good and evil. For, activist. Yet, what we are offered in this if it were only evil, how could we 2003, 288 pp., $29.95 hardcover. memoir is unique and exquisite—a witness consent to live? And if it were only I to a life. The love and reverence these two good, how could we resign our- intellectually formidable men display in selves to dying? (p. 152) rish history isn’t all popery and expected to reflect glory on her brothers their writing are moving, and they stand as potato famine. The aristocracy have by a suitable marriage and to breed annu- a monument to Weil’s power as both Whether viewed through a secular or reli- I their tales too. Ireland’s landed class ally for several years to protect her hus- thinker and being. This is not to suggest gious lens, this treatment of evil is, if not was made up almost entirely of English band’s property rights (the Duchess of that Perrin and Thibon have produced a entirely novel, extraordinary. Protestants after 1652, when Oliver Leinster had 22 children). It’s remarkable, hagiography. In fact, they wrote this piece Cromwell confiscated the best lands says Todd, that aristocrats, “raised by ser- in protest against the hagiography they here is also the personal Simone from the Norman-Irish and old Gaelic vants to consider their own desires para- had noticed emerging in the years previ- Weil, the one who, after the families and shunted them to the arid mount and their own persons effortlessly ous, which they felt misrepresented and T German invasion, accidentally west of the country. In the 19th century, significant, ever managed to live togeth- dehumanized her. dropped a suitcase filled with French the whimsical tales of writing partners er.” The marriage of the 15-year-old Weil drew liberally from the world’s resistance papers on a city sidewalk and (and cousins) Edith Somerville and heiress Caroline Fitzgerald to her 16- major wisdom traditions—especially scrambled frantically to gather them up. Violet Martin (who wrote under the year-old cousin, Robert King, Lord Buddhism and Taoism—but was most The one who declared that the room name of Martin Ross), authors of Some Kingsborough, in 1769, was fairly typical. drawn to Christianity. Thibon and Perrin, Thibon offered her was “too comfort- Experiences of an Irish R.M. [royal magis- Its purpose was to reunite vast King steeped in philosophic Christianity, able,” putting him to a great deal of trou- trate] and other books, helped shape the holdings in Cork and Roscommon. The offered Weil—all four Weils—the most ble to arrange a small residence for her on popular image of the Anglo-Irish after fractious Caroline dutifully produced rigorous and fruitful kind of dialogue: It another part of his property, and who land reform had robbed them of much several children (including the two who fed her for the rest of her life. Although smoked prodigiously. The one whose of their gilded status. In the late 20th are the subjects of Todd’s book) before she considered baptism, she ultimately mother made Gustave Thibon promise century, Molly Keane’s comic novels taking off for London and the joys of resisted it. Thibon says: “[H]er constant that he would look after Simone’s safety portrayed the deeply eccentric lives of court gossip. At home, Robert took mis- refusal of baptism and the judgments she and the one whose brother, Andre Weil, the Anglo-Irish who stayed on after tresses and abused his tenants. passed on the Church are sufficient proof was one of the greatest mathematicians of independence, islanded by snobbery and Caroline’s daughters, Margaret, born that her conscious doctrinal thought was the 20th century. Unfortunately, the poverty behind the crumbling walls of around 1771, and Mary, born shortly not Catholic.” He goes on to describe her Simone who refused to take food suffi- their demesnes. Even in their heyday, thereafter arrived in an era that prized cient to sustain her is the one too often the Anglo-Irish suffered the peculiar emotion over reason, so it’s not surpris- radical distrust of the Church as a brought to the fore. Weil biographer woes of colonialists. Though loyal to ing that they were less compliant than social organization and authori- Francine Du Plessix Gray makes it central. the crown, they resented the authority their mother. However, Mary ty….modelled on imperial Rome, However, Hilary Mantel in her recent arti- of the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the Wollstonecraft, their governess for a year, and confiscating for its own advan- cle, “Some Girls Want Out,” in the March crown’s representative who governed gets most of the blame for their willful- tage the liberty of man and the gifts 2004 London Review of Books, says: the country from Dublin Castle. ness. When she accepted the position, of God. Her conscience rebelled Although they were as well heeled as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of against a spiritual power which pro- [N]oting that anorexic girls have their counterparts across the Irish Sea, Women and scandalous love affairs were claimed that there was no salvation contempt for their own flesh, we they were victims of English snobbery. still in the future, but her ideas about a outside the Church. (p. 148) hospitalise them and force-feed Born into the last quarter of the 18th woman’s right to self-determination were them, taking away their liberties as if century, the Kingsborough sisters repre- not, and these she imparted to her This is why we must contend with Weil- they were criminals or infants…. sented the cream of the Irish charges. Given the dearth of information the-mystic rather than Weil-the-Christian. But we don’t extend the same con- Ascendancy (the name their relation about the girls’ younger days and Todd’s Though her capacity for mystical experi- tempt to pub brawlers or career sol- George Ogle coined for their class). It extensive knowledge of Wollstonecraft ence and thought was enormous, it is her diers. Men own their bodies, but was a period that saw the Anglo-Irish at (she’s written a biography of her), it can very mysticism that is, for many, problem- women’s bodies are owned by the their most spirited. Enjoying more parlia- feel at times as if Todd is exaggerating atic, if not incomprehensible. This unfor- wider society. mentary control in Ireland than they the influence of the girls’ governess tunately fosters disengagement with the would ever have again, their capital city, almost as much as the gossipy bishop other three Simone Weils. Moreover, the Enough has been said about this manifes- Dublin, was awash with cultural enter- who claimed that Wollstonecraft’s theo- fact that Weil spent virtually no time tation of Weil’s personality, especially since tainments that rivaled London’s any day. ries were leading young girls “to the developing a systematic philosophy, or her neuroses certainly did not limit them- Architect James Gandon’s many success- vestibule of the Corinthian temple of even polishing the fragments that piled up selves to the intake of food. ful commissions (including the Custom Seduction and Adultery.” in her notebooks, was compounded by Despite the enormous strength of her House and the Four Courts) were giving the language she used, which, as Thibon will and the force of her opinions, Weil that city the distinctive Georgian look airstyles may also have con- notes, “so often leads to confusion perceived personal ambition as a human that would be its saving grace even after tributed to Margaret’s taste for between the ontological and mystical grotesquery—an idol that must be it and its privileged class had declined H rebellion. Tall and angular, she planes.” Mystical writings necessarily have destroyed because it denied both the mys- into more squalid times. did not find the towering hairstyles of a kind of topsy-turvy Zen about them, tery of iniquity and the possibility of Lacking the volumes of extant corre- the 1780s flattering, and she often since their purpose is to jolt our thought relief for the afflicted. She earnestly spondence that made Stella Tillyard’s dressed as a boy. Wollstonecraft’s prefer- out of typical patterns. Thibon under- desired to efface all trace of a separate account of the Lennox sisters in ence for plain dress and her scorn of stands better than most that Weil wrote self in order to achieve union with the Aristocrats (1994) and Amanda Foreman’s aristocratic entertainments must have on both the classically philosophical and good, the true, and her special concep- best-selling Diana, Duchess of Devonshire been balm to Margaret’s soul. Though the mystical planes without confusing the tion of God. When Thibon recounts (1998) such riveting reading, Todd’s sub- she later claimed Wollstonecraft as the two. Thibon and Perrin serve as admirable their last meeting before she sailed to the jects do not come as vividly to life. Mary, greatest influence on her life, Margaret navigators through both the complica- US, not long before her death, we feel his the younger of the two sisters is seen never actively espoused her governess’s tions and the voids. rich, attentive love for her. The painful only in outline (presumably no portrait feminist cause. And while Wollstonecraft Whatever one’s theoretical orientation, void of disunion that Weil often experi- exists of her either). But in place of commented, “As a nation I do not admire it is hard not to be dazzled by the rele- enced had, at least momentarily, vanished. Tillyard’s sweeping psychological asser- the Irish,” it was to the not-too-well- vance and vitality of the exchange among Thibon observes, “I will only say that I tions, Todd brings the birdcage exis- defined notion of Irish independence these three people. When, for example, had the impression of being in the pres- tences of aristocratic women sharply into that Margaret directed her energies. Thibon tries to address Weil’s disgust with ence of an absolutely transparent soul focus. Political and social pawns to be Revolution was in the air. In 1791, the corruption of the church, he essential- which was ready to be reabsorbed into sold on the marriage market as early as inspired by activities in America and ly addresses the problem of evil: original light.” I age 13, the aristocratic female was France, members of Ireland’s middle

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 class, restless for their own political nobility to the city and promised to debated. Tired of waiting, the Irish tions of which are still being ironed out reforms, founded the United Irishmen. keep its military occupied with crowd Republican Brotherhood took the today. In the civil war that followed, Initially, Dublin Castle paid little attention control. Thus, the United Irishmen unpopular step of using England’s women weren’t treated with the defer- to them and even less to the “teapot soci- decided it would be a perfect day to involvement in the war to stage a ris- ence they’d once been shown, and the eties” of well-to-do women sporting start a revolution. But the usual mix of ing. On Easter Monday, 1916, to the jails of the new Irish government were green ribbons and resurrecting tales of treachery and half-heartedness that deep annoyance of Dubliners, the soon packed with anti-treaty women. Ireland’s old Gaelic chieftains. But war doomed every Irish rebellion came into rebels took over the General Post None was executed, but the women with France in 1793 made England fear- play. The rising was postponed, and its Office and other strategic landmarks in were frequently threatened with it. They ful of attack from her Irish side, and the key figure, Edward Fitzgerald, was cap- the city and declared a provisional in turn made effective, if reckless, use of Castle’s overzealous response to the crisis tured and died shortly afterward. Some republic. They held out for a week hunger strikes to gain concessions. The radicalized even hardcore members of months later the United Irishmen suc- before surrender became inevitable. women prisoners cheered themselves up the Ascendancy. Plans for revolution ceeded in taking Wexford, a small town The biggest problem for the women with fancy dress parties and concerts began to harden in earnest. The literate south of Dublin, but the English quick- who supported the rebels was being and even regular wrestling matches. Margaret, now married to the Earl of ly reclaimed it. The “modern nation” taken seriously. When the captured John Only Albinia Brodrick’s comments in a Mount Cashel and the mother of several was still a long way off. Deprived of a MacBride encountered a group of prison newspaper she published allude children in whom she hadn’t much inter- cause, Margaret turned—with not women being marched to Kilmainham to the less cheery “difficulties and temp- est, wrote political pamphlets. She proba- much more success—to love for some jail, he told them, “You’ll be all right, tations…of prison life…the love of self, bly also hid subversives in her large hous- return on her passionate nature. In you’ll be out tomorrow.” When Rose showing in petty disputes, petty jeal- es and dressed as a man to move about Italy, in later years, she befriended her McNamara asked how the men were ousies, petty growls and grumbles.” more freely. She certainly spent time in old governess’s daughter, Mary Shelley. likely to fare, he replied with equal con- When the civil war ended in 1923, ran- the company of Edward Fitzgerald, Mary King was packed off with an viction, “Ah no, we won’t be out, we’ll be corous divisions had to be buried in order favorite son of the Duchess of Leinster, obscure marriage to a commoner—and shot.” MacBride was the estranged hus- to move forward. This, McCoole sug- and his glamorous French wife Pamela, may have been the happier for it. band of Maud Gonne MacBride, the gests, is one of the reasons the names of the poster couple for Anglo-Irish involve- upper-class English beauty who, in 1900, the people involved in the wars were for- ment in the coming revolution. ike Margaret King, the women had founded Inghinidhe na hEireann gotten. For some families, too, she says, Mary King’s form of rebellion was who played a role in the 1916 ris- (Daughters of Ireland), a group describ- the idea of their women in prison was a more personal but no less public. At age L ing and the war years that fol- ing itself as “a mixture of guns and chif- source of deep embarrassment and best 16 she was taken to Windsor, where lowed occupied the peripheral roles of fon.” In 1915 Countess Constance forgotten. In the 1990s, when McCoole Caroline hoped proximity to the royal nurses and emissaries. But they were a Markievicz advised, “leave your jewels… began her research, enough time had court might counteract what she thought more egalitarian mix, involving every in the bank, and buy a revolver.” She was elapsed to allow the period to be viewed of as her daughter’s undisciplined Irish class, from shop girls to countesses, as the only woman to serve a sentence for with more dispassion, but by then only a habits. Instead, Mary began an affair with Sinéad McCoole’s No Ordinary Women her part in the rising. Earlier, Helena sprinkling of the original women were a married cousin twice her age. Pregnant, attests. (They included American women Molony had made use of the political still alive. Mostly she relied for informa- she pretended suicide, then recanted, and too. Molly Osgood from Beacon Hill momentum among women to unite tion on the daughters of women rebels was led back to Ireland a captive. The bur- helped smuggle arms into the country women workers, helping to found the and their younger family members. geoning newspaper industry had a field aboard her husband’s yacht.) And while Irish Women Workers’ Union in 1911. The Irish Constitution, drawn up in day with the story. Aristocratic culture Margaret and her peers espoused a kind 1937, also played its part in tidying might countenance inconsequential adul- of vague republicanism that the failure s women in America and Britain women away when it defined the role of tery but not a flagrant affair that threat- of the rebellion saved them from having were also finding out, war could women in the new Ireland: “[B]y her life ened the status quo. Redress was essential. to define in actual terms, these women A be liberating. The war of inde- within the home, Woman gives to the After an inconclusive duel, Robert King were united in their aim to “combat in pendence (1917-1921) enabled Irish State a support without which common shot his daughter’s lover as he lay in bed. every way English influence.” In a kind women to put their elaborate clothing to good cannot be achieved.” Ireland’s cur- Todd’s nominal subjects frequently of coffee-table account of revolution, practical use. They concealed dispatches rent president, Mary McAleese, may be have to take a back seat while she shifts richly illustrated with women’s parapher- in their hair and hid guns in their long the second woman to hold the position her focus to the subject indicated in her nalia and glorious period sepia portraits, skirts. A crowd of women meeting (a titular one without powers), but as subtitle—“the making of a modern McCoole names the many women together didn’t arouse suspicion the way Derry politician Mary Nelis, a member nation.” The rising of 1798, small and whose participation in these events has, a gathering of men did. The combina- of the currently inoperable Northern ultimately unsuccessful, was pivotal all for more than just the obvious reason, tion of not being taken seriously and Assembly, has remarked, “Patriarchy the same, as every Irish schoolchild been largely anonymous. wanting to prove themselves increased allows female figureheads as long as the knows. Todd does a marvelous job of The Act of Union in 1800, which their daring. Some concealed ammuni- dominant inequality is sustained.” The showing how the personal drama of united Ireland and England under one tion in the folds of their babies’ blan- facts bear this out: The Oireachtas (Irish the Kingsborough family intersected government, was the direct outcome kets; others distributed propaganda con- parliament) has one of the lowest rates with the public events of rebellion, of the 1798 rebellion. It was not until cealed in baby prams. of female representation among revealing the combination of happen- 1886 that the question of home rule In 1921, Michael Collins, sent to European national parliaments. Like the stance and cross purposes that go into for Ireland (proposed by Liberal London to represent the provisional Kingsborough sisters in the 18th centu- the making of history before hindsight leader William Gladstone) was given Irish government, signed a treaty guar- ry and the 20th-century female activists, and political bias tidy it up. any serious consideration again. anteeing one government for the 26 Irish women in the 21st century are Robert King’s murder trial by a jury World War I scuttled a third Home counties and a separate government for both decorative and useful but still of his peers in Dublin drew Ireland’s Rule Bill proposed in 1912 but never the remaining six counties, the ramifica- largely powerless. I

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 9 of affection, humor, and anxiety. once as a deputy to the Massachusetts Throughout her life, when Elizabeth General Court. He was one of the town’s communicated with a trusted correspon- largest taxpayers. Hadley indentured at River gods—and goddesses dent, she ventured beyond dutifulness. least one poor transient to Charles, giving Carlisle enables us to see how each voice him the benefit of three months’ free by Martha Saxton expressed and served Elizabeth. labor in exchange for supervising a In 1770, with almost no warning from “vagrant.” Elizabeth routinely helped at Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Life her diary or her correspondence, the births of local women. She also Elizabeth Porter, the heiress of Forty assisted in the Sunderland church trial at Forty Acres (1747-1817) by Elizabeth Pendergast Carlisle. Acres, married Charles Phelps, its care- and dismissal of a minister for doctrinal taker. Elizabeth’s mother had hired errors and sexual transgressions with a New York: Scribner, 2004, 368 pp., $26.00 hardcover. Phelps to manage the farm, but not, pre- female parishioner. And she found it sumably, to marry her daughter. hard to resist taking in and caring for I Elizabeth persevered despite her family’s stray girls, black and white. doubts and her own. Just before her The Phelpses owned a number of arthbound and Heavenbent is the and economic development of her coun- wedding, Elizabeth wrote to her best slaves, including Ceasar, who served in readable biography of a pious try. She was the only child of the ambi- friend, “Why did you not wish me happy Washington’s Continental Army. He may E woman born into the family of tious Moses Porter and his wealthy, frail single life that’s the life for me.” If have been the official substitute for one of the “River Gods” who prospered wife, Elizabeth Pitkin. When Elizabeth Elizabeth was a worried bride, she was Charles, who could afford not to fight. on the fertile banks of the Connecticut Porter was eight, her father died fighting for many years a contented wife, fre- (While Charles supported but did not River in the 18th century. This volume with the colonists alongside their quently referring with tenderness and fight in the Revolution, Elizabeth experi- belongs to a category of women’s biogra- Iroquois allies in Britain’s Seven Years’ love to her husband. enced it with more anguish as a “Civil phy that builds a narrative of the subject’s War against the French. Elizabeth’s In later years, Carlisle speculates, war.”) Later, Charles actively supported life and times around a diary, journal, or mother, who suffered from poor health, Charles may have had an affair. Certainly the state’s repression of Shays’ Rebellion, collection of letters. (See, for example, seems already to have been on her way to Elizabeth, in highly uncharacteristic diary an uprising of indebted farmers fighting Joy and Richard Buell, The Way of Duty opium dependence before her husband’s entries, described overwhelming unhap- for relief from creditors like him. Again, [1984] on Mary Fish; and Laurel death. His demise aggravated her depres- piness and emotional upheaval. “Good Elizabeth experienced the violent protest Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale [1990] sion and, no doubt, her susceptibility to God help me compose my spirit, teach with more ambivalence than her husband on Martha Ballard.) Women’s documents addiction. In keeping with the 18th-cen- me what I ought to do, for Jesus In the years of peace following from the period are rare. Like this one, tury ethos, when public and private life sake…what a week of wonder and Shays’ Rebellion, Elizabeth lavished they usually come from elite families and were not nearly so delineated as they amazement—such feelings—Lord help care and attention on her children and are constrained by self-effacement. At would become in the mid-19th century, me. Surely now I can truly say I am at thy wards. Charles and Elizabeth sent the the core of this biography is Elizabeth Carlisle’s story shifts quickly and easily feet in anguish of spirit.” Later, on her seven-year-old Porter to Northampton Porter Phelps’ diary, which covers many from detailed close-ups to wide-angle 47th birthday, she added a uniquely to school, then to Westfield, and later to decades but is frustratingly spare on views. She provides glimpses of the inter- Puritan perspective on this crisis. Hatfield in search of the best prepara- detail and emotional texture. It requires a national conflict as well as the medical “[W]hen I view the occurrences of the tion for Harvard, where he matriculated resourceful researcher like Elizabeth context for laudanum availability. past year how am I filled with amaze- at 15 in 1787. Elizabeth taught her two Carlisle to reclaim a coherent life story We do not know young Elizabeth’s ment, the wormwood and the gall, my daughters to read and write, and the from the ravages of traditional female thoughts on growing up with a drugged, soul hath them still in remembrance & is girls boarded out while going to school modesty and sexist evaluations of histor- sometimes delusional mother and no humbled in me. I think it is for my real in Amherst. The girls could use the ical evidence. Carlisle had the good for- father. But Carlisle’s discussion of good that I have such peculiar trials.” family’s large library, and through for- tune also to have had access to some let- Puritanism, and particularly of Elizabeth’s faith gave her a way to under- mal training and Elizabeth’s encourage- ters that provide intermittent but fasci- Elizabeth’s son’s later reflections on the stand and incorporate her agony into her ment, they became notably fluent writ- nating context to the circumstances and intensity of his mother’s old-style own journey toward sanctification. ers and readers. Although Charles and events of Phelps’ 70 years in Hadley, Calvinism, points toward a connection Elizabeth seem to have treated the girls Massachusetts. This volume supplies a between the Puritan belief in the utter oth history and married life placed equally, it was their natural daughter, valuable and complex female perspective corruption and worthlessness of the new demands on Elizabeth. In the Betsey, who became Elizabeth’s most on the Revolutionary and Early National unsaved self and the emotional sense that B politically tense years before the intimate companion. era, on women’s contribution to the concept might have made to an isolated Revolution, she bore a son, Porter, whose Porter, whose arch and self-conscious growing prosperity of the elite, and on child whose mother could offer her little health often concerned her. During the letters as a young man seem to reflect a the special utility for women of both nurturance. Carlisle also points out the Revolution, she lost another son but diet of romantic reading, excelled in col- Puritanism and literacy. unusually heavy weight of responsibility soon thereafter adopted an orphaned lege, but less so in life. He and his wealthy As the title implies, one of Carlisle’s for others that the unmothered Elizabeth baby girl, one of twins. The Phelpses wife preferred Boston and trade to farm- central themes is Phelps’ relatively unre- spontaneously assumed throughout her named the infant Thankful. Two years ing in western Massachusetts. But finan- constructed Puritanism, which suspend- life. In caring for others and in reading later, in 1779, after the British army had cial failures and the death in a duel of his ed her halfway between weighty responsi- and writing, especially letters, she beat moved south to try to subdue the business partner eventually forced him to bilities at her home, Forty Acres, and a back her legacy of loneliness. colonists there, Elizabeth gave birth to return to Forty Acres. Thankful married spiritual life that demanded that she give Elizabeth began her compressed diary Betsey, her last child. She also agreed to Enos Hitchcock, another man who failed her many worldly cares second place to entries at 16. They noted, mostly without take in her 17-year-old sister-in-law and at business. He may also have been an her relationship with God. Like Mary affect, the traffic of life through her to look after Charles’ mad brother, alcoholic, although Carlisle cannot identi- Fish and Martha Ballard, Elizabeth home and incidents in the community, as Solomon, who was often chained up to fy the precise reason that Thankful’s mar- Porter Phelps brought an 18th-century well as the weekly texts and sermons that keep him from doing violence to himself. riage was not happy. Betsey married the religious sensibility into a period of polit- interpreted and gave meaning to both. In Charles and Elizabeth seem to have Rev. Daniel Huntington and proceeded ical turmoil, accelerating economic Carlisle’s view, Elizabeth probably shared equally an unspoken but deep to have 11 children. She and her mother change, and increasing religious diversity. thought her journal would be read by commitment to the productivity and were devoted correspondents for the And, like them, she found in Puritanism strangers as a historical record of her vil- improvement of Forty Acres. Elizabeth’s remainder of Elizabeth’s life. This a source of considerable steel for her lage, which may add to its ritualistic qual- capable and industrious management exchange of letters, in the author’s words, spirit when times were difficult. ity. Meanwhile, like many other prosper- replaced her distracted mother’s delega- was for both, “a form of reflection, an The Chinese think it is a misfortune to ous adolescent girls, Elizabeth eagerly tion of authority. In the last decades accounting of oneself, sometimes the be born in interesting times. Elizabeth read novels, the new literary form. Their before industrialization began to outstrip only possibility for that necessary pursuit was fated to be born in such a period and, dramatic vocabulary made its way into home production, Elizabeth directed and of intentional living.” For both it seemed perhaps equally bad, into a family of Elizabeth’s letters, but not her diary. Her participated in producing soap, candles, to soothe a shared loneliness and longing interesting people. From childhood, her letters supplement her subdued diary- clothing, bedding, and cheese, not to for each other that abated with activity fortunes were closely tied to the political voice and allow us to hear her lively tones mention butchering pigs, preserving but that grew acutely painful for fruits and vegetables, and preparing Elizabeth in her later, quiet years. meals. Like the young George Wash- As the title suggests, an important ington, Charles Phelps accumulated land character in the narrative, and one with MOVING? throughout his life, first in Hadley, whom we become quite familiar, is Forty Don’t miss an issue! expanding Forty Acres, and later as far Acres. While the improvements to the afield as Vermont and New York. house are interesting and the emotional We get an intimate picture of the hold it had on its occupants undoubted- Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. material success of the Phelps family and ly powerful, the historian in me was We need your OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as its meaning for them and the township. uncomfortable with the author’s fanciful well as your NEW one. Send the information to: Address Change, Their household’s wealth and their con- evocations of an imagined symbiosis nections to their many neighbors through between Elizabeth and her house. But The Women’s Review of Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA exchanges of goods, labor, and good this is a minor quibble about an other- 02481, or phone toll-free 888-283-8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email turns, conferred both privileges and wise valuable study. Carlisle has pro- responsibilities. Travelers felt free to stop duced a well-drawn account of Elizabeth [email protected]. at Forty Acres as if it were an inn. Phelps’ life, rewarding to specialists and Charles served as selectman 20 times and nonspecialists alike. I

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 Poetry by Judith Vollmer

Note to the Mist

—at H.D.’s grave Vollmer© Robert

I belong to you, O nonhuman mind, scarf knotted at the throat, my mind’s a sax, brass gone smoky. I could call you spider web blown in from Palermo, but we’re in a different town. Good to lunch on bread & sharp yellow cheese a few blocks from Bethlehem Steel, very good to read one more page of Baudelaire to her, Greek flower All flowers are roses, even you, mist, unfold your pearlescent lips from the black trees. Your shreds & veils are blocking my peripheral vision but I see through you, I’m writing on you, my blue ink’s running blue. The December pines are still waiting for snow or bending for something fluctuating & changing colors. I brought thick paper for a grave rubbing, but Bruche, in Her Summer Kitchen your wet kiss floats me up a hillside, you’re making the mountains bigger, closer. Which jade cloud I’ve never prayed to saints. opened up a thousand miles north? Sometimes to my dead parents. Which far waterfall Once to a waterfall when they took us out West. sent your organza veils? Bake a pie from scratch, that’s a prayer. You know, the house, the temple. When London fell around her, Soon as I started seeing the fox down in the park when the rails were ripped out of their tracks I saw it almost every evening last summer. and melted down for guns My first friend was Louise Williams. she thought about running away, She lived up by the Singer Mansion and gave me on wealth, or love’s vapor. my first cup of oolong tea. And that 4-foot cactus I still have. She taught me to graft roses Astronomer’s daughter, single mother, untranslatable seer, senser of vibrations on the windscreens and she canned five shelves full of yard fruit that move our lives, every year. She took care of us all behind a slightly open door the year I had the twins then lost my mother. When your father dies, it’s a knife, she is sitting and practicing the hard but when you lose your mother facts of her vocation. the moon goes away. My mother would never Good when the gatekeeper imagine I have two kitchens, one just for waved me in to the serpentine summer, the heat goes right out these big screens. and casually pointed the exact pathway to her. Imagine, in the middle of town: Some of the men (& later women too) dead train tracks, broken buildings, hated “the American Virginia Woolf” & a springfed creek you washed your car in. for the hush of servants, the child If you haven’t seen what happens ushered away from mother’s study. We all could get our work done to a small American city that dies— if we had that kind of money. Enough. or changes—where everybody in town I belong to you, knows all and has always known all— O nonhuman mind, you’ve seen nothing. You know how lonely I’m dissolving & oxidizing when you start remembering: all the lost people in the intelligence of your strange movements out on porches. that come and go in this mild air. When I got out of the car I was walking around in a daze through the chalkwhite paths and matte greenways toward

this white stone her words on it and blood dampening my jeans, no kidding, my assumed last & final menses replicated. This morning I dreamed I was walking along a balustrade, Pittsburgh falling all around me and no place for me to go so I sat down at my desk and worked. Who can hold onto the safehouse of quiet work? Where is she gone to, mist, little house of silver pencils, little Grappa bench I sit on, gray day like a porch sandpapered down to woodgrain, to skin, to the fire inside me?

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 11 anxiety dominated many of her earlier My friend says she’d like to poems about life in Jerusalem, in cut off her head and let all Threshold, Kaufman’s eighth volume, the the Jewish history run out. (p. 115) Poets of witness tone is more pessimistic, and the domi- nant trope of division suggests that we In “Sanctum,” the volume’s final by Florence Howe are on the edge not of life but of death. poem, which quotes bleak lines from In the first half of the volume, Shelley’s “Ozmandias” and Thoreau’s Threshold by Shirley Kaufman. Port Townsend, WA: Kaufman’s words fly out in a broken for- Walden, Kaufman attempts to hold off mat rare for her: the pain of past and present: Copper Canyon, 2003, 96 pp., $12.00 paper. I collect these words To live in Jerusalem is to feel The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems by Minnie Bruce Pratt. like coins the weight of stones. Stone walls in the bowls of beggars around the City… Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2003, they add up to just enough to At the end she is seated, and although she 127 pp., $12.95 paper. keep going (p. 63) does not use the word “threshold,” that is the image that persists: I Even punctuation and some capitaliza- tion are absent. You and I on the stone ledge. oets’ lives drive their poetry—we of longing for wholeness and an end to The division in Kaufman’s own life all know that. But few poets’ lives separation. Now, both of these poets has taken second or third place to the The immensity of space watching P curve in the manner of either have moved on: Their new volumes sig- split in the world that she characterizes as Shirley Kaufman’s or Minnie Bruce nal, if not turning points in their lives, between the biblical “Sarah and Hagar”: Let’s sit here together on the throne Pratt’s. Each has made central to her then shifts in their poetic sensibilities. as if suspended over our own deaths. poetry a strong shock to her life in the In 1973 Shirley Kaufman married an two halves Let’s lean back—easy—against the 1970s: for Kaufman, the bifurcation she Israeli and moved to Jerusalem. “Roots in of an ancient slippage supporting stone, experienced when she moved from the the Air,” the title poem of her 1996 ret- and trust it to bear our weight US to Israel; for Pratt, the legal loss of rospective, opened with two images: a split a little longer. (pp. 132-133) her children because of her lesbianism. ficus tree that survives by “licking/ the on the fault line (p. 9) Still, they are very different people and ashes from the air,” presumably from n a recent interview in the literary write very different poetry. They are a bombings; and a dove who “built a nest Poetry fails to comfort. In “Rachel’s chil- magazine The Drunken Boat, Shirley generation apart—Kaufman is 81 and in the pot of geraniums”: dren are playing,” she writes, “[W]e are I Kaufman says she has been writing Pratt, 58; one is straight, one lesbian; one going to read poems to each other.” But “poems of witness” in Israel since she Jewish, the other Christian. One lives in and yesterday they hatched, the poems become “like seed/ scattered arrived in the early 1970s. I find that Jerusalem and the other in Washington, little homemade bombs. at the end of winter,” phrase apt for Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poet- DC; one grew up in the Northwest and They are not Jews or Arabs. ry as well, especially her 1999 volume, the other in the South. Kaufman has (p. 129) poems Walking Back Up Depot Street, in which she three daughters; Pratt, two sons. They with their earnest overreaching, writes poems from the perspective of an seem to have nothing in common. “Roots in the air” describes Kaufman’s we crack them invented woman named Beatrice. One Yet, both made their children, present own life-wrenching attempt to feel con- between our teeth strong poem from that volume supplies and absent, chief subjects of their previ- nected to her daughters and their families like they do the title of the current collection. In ous poetry. For each, the loss and separa- in the US and her experience of daily life at the movies “Eating Clay,” metaphors of sex mingle tion from her children energized poems in increasingly war-torn Jerusalem. While and spit the shells with sculptured bowls, food, and the on the floor (p. 69) question of one woman to another: “What made you the way you are?” In “On clear nights I watch holes,” the Check It While Making Time tone grows even darker: She’d say straight-faced it was Lillian Moller Gilbreth— the dirt she ate. (p. 105) I Wreck It weightless specks Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop A Life Beyond “Cheaper New Titles From Northeastern by the Dozen” of discredited prayers The Dirt She Ate reminds readers of Culture, and the Public Sphere Pratt’s strengths: her lyric directness, Jane Lancaster Gwendolyn D. Pough Nothing forgives us in Jerusalem humor, and narrative drive—and especially This first biography of Lillian This provocative study ex- of the sheer brilliance and energy of her Gilbreth recounts how the plores the complex relation- woman best known as the We speak of well-known third volume, Crime Against ship between black women, nurturing mom in Cheaper by opening the mind Nature (1990), the high point of her career hip-hop, and feminism. the Dozen met with challenges as if a door were closed thus far. Pratt says she has revised many of $50.00 cloth • $20.00 paper of combining marriage and and we could unlock it these poems. While most changes are cos- motherhood with a high metic, almost unnoticeable, the cutting of profile career. Listening to Olivia do you know what I’m saying single stanzas strengthens several poems. Violence, Poverty, $35.00 cloth More to the point, she has shifted the order and Prostitution God almost touches Adam of the poems so that the narrative of her Jody Raphael Emotional Trials but their fingers loss of her sons when they were six and “Jody Raphael weaves Olivia’s Moral Dilemmas of Women Criminal Defense Attorneys seven is now even sharper, more poignant, story with research findings to stone walls and more painful than in the original. The provide a compelling, brutally Cynthia Siemsen honest, and thoroughly grounded ditches barbed-wire fences suffering of Pratt and her sons becomes This groundbreaking work portrait of the entrapment of im- part of a larger narrative of the struggle of explores how women attor- poverished women in prostitution unbridgeable (p. 74) lesbians for the right to motherhood. For neys manage moral conflicts and the violence that is integral to of “betraying” their gender those who missed the earlier volume, this its maintenance.” by representing men accused The poem concludes with an image of one is essential reading. —Jody Miller, University of of violent crimes against Missouri–St. Louis Blue Pencils and longing that reminds us of ourselves as Pratt’s poems speak both of loneliness women. young children learning to walk. We “fell,” and self-sufficiency. “The Sound of One $50.00 cloth • $20.00 paper Hidden Hands $50.00 cloth • $20.00 paper Fork,” the title poem of her 1981 vol- Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 and got up ume, published when she was 37, cele- hammered brates a 60-year-old “woman next door” Edited by Sharon M. Harris the air with our small fists who “is eating supper/ alone,” having Foreword by Ellen Gruber Garvey cooked her own home-grown vegetables: and stumbled again This collection of original critical essays explores how our arms spread wide Her younger neighbors think that women periodical editors she is lonely. redefined women’s identi- over the But I know what sufficiency she ties and roles. threshold (p. 75) may possess. (p. 12) $45.00 cloth In the second half of the book, One may read this 60-year-old woman as Kaufman attempts to find solace in a model and comfort for the poet of familiar poetic forms and themes: the “The Segregated Heart” who has “no past, nature, art, survival, endurance. But home except what I make for myself,” NORTHEASTERN despair leaks out of these poems, as in and who writes movingly of a kind of University Press • Boston the image of Job’s wife, who, at the end, homelessness of the heart: “What I left I “stares/ at the unrelenting sky.” In the will not return to; yet I live in it every In bookstores, or call 1-800-666-2211 • www.nupress.neu.edu very next poem, Kaufman writes, day.” Finally, there is a vision prescient

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 not only for anyone needing to heal life’s Two-thirds of the arrestees in the US wounds, but for Pratt’s future as a poet: are white. Most criminals in the US are white. Most drug users are white. There are …the whole mends only when the The old wink-and-nod twice as many white women crack users as fragments are held… black women. Most Americans should fear I mend the separation in my heart. by Bernestine Singley the person who looks most like them, I hold the heart’s sorrow because 84 percent of violent crimes are and it blooms red, the courage to Underground Codes: Race, Crime and Related Fires same-race offenses. The exception is speak across distances, Native Americans: An estimated 60 per- the courage to act, like spiderlilies by Katheryn Russell-Brown. New York: New York cent of the people who violently assault rising unexpected Native people are white. every fall, in a deserted garden, University Press, 2004, 288 pp., $18.00 paperback. There is a reason we believe what we do along old foundations. (pp. 16-17) despite the facts. Conventional wisdom, the I wink-and-nod that paints crime with a Pratt’s career flows from these lines, as black face, is constantly reinforced by the though she had been directing herself y two best friends from college I was being harassed for traveling while way research projects are designed, the unconsciously in her earliest work. have joined me in northern New black long before the September 11, 2001, ter- choice of data collected, and how the In the selections from Crime Against M Mexico for our once-a-decade rorist attacks on the World Trade Center and results are interpreted and publicized. Nature, Pratt offers an unflinching look at reunion. Lounging in our hotel suite, we the Pentagon. While other black women and Fortunately, Russell-Brown is not confused. herself. Forced to choose between her trade verbal snapshots, punctuated with rau- I were being targeted, men who escaped And now that she has cracked the codes for lesbian lover and her sons, she mourns cous spikes of laughter, just as we did more detection got away with murder. If security us, we don’t have to be either. her deprivation and theirs. She remem- than 30 years ago. When it is my turn, I’m forces had been paying less attention to us, What is underground is invisible; coded bers her childhood terror that her tor- still smarting from my flight from Dallas- might they have detected the real threat messages suggest one thing, but mean mented mother would leave her, and Forth Worth International, where airport instead of the one they simply imagined? something else entirely. Together, Russell recalls her choice in “Motionless on the security has newly chafed me raw. Almost Brown argues, “underground codes” over- Dark Side of the Light”: immediately, I nosedive into a rant about here are nearly seven million look, misinterpret, or falsely link critical relentless, humiliating airport surveillance. Americans under the supervision of information about race and crime. Black Her mother has come to ask why My friends become a pair of puzzled faces. T the criminal justice system. Of women prisoners, “gangsta rap,” and crimi- she is crying. “You don’t even know what I’m talking those, African Americans and other people nal justice data collection illustrate how Her mother says she will stay, about, do you?” It is more an accusation of color are arrested, convicted, and buried messages and code-talking work. promises to live. (p. 72) than a question. Their silent nods stoke my imprisoned in numbers shamefully dispro- Statistically speaking, when it comes to fury. So, I break it down for them: 100 per- portionate to their presence in the popula- research on the criminal justice system, all But life is never simple, for Pratt must cent of the time I fly out of DFW, a secu- tion. For decades, social science the blacks are men, all the women are white, ask a more difficult question: How could rity agent pulls me aside, removes my carry- researchers, criminal justice workers, politi- and black women don’t count. This is so her mother now see her as “evil”? on bags, searches them and me, then hooks cal pundits, and opportunists of every ilk despite the current reality, in which black up my bags to a monitor and chemically have tripped over—and tripped up—each women are coming under the control of No explanation except: the one analyzes them to ensure I don’t board the other in their rush to explain why that is. the justice system at an astronomical rate: who tells the tale plane with illegal drugs or bombs. This is all Too often, the dominant discourse has fall- one that is six times greater than for white gets to name the monster. In my done in full public view. en back on a tired refrain: There are more women; that increased 78 percent in five version, I walk Nothing I do changes the pattern: not blacks in prison because more blacks are years; and that is growing faster than for to where I want to live. (p. 92) my poker face nor my basic black designer criminals. The coded message? Blacks and any other race and gender group. dress, tasteful jewelry, hosiery and pumps; crime are inextricably and justifiably linked. Russell-Brown sounds the alarm. Ignoring n the 13 new poems that conclude The not my hair pulled back off my face instead But the facts prove something different. black female criminality and victimization, Dirt She Ate, Pratt is observer/reporter, of spiraling freely in a nappy halo around I sometimes witnessing, sometimes par- my head the way I wear it otherwise. ticipating in scenes of work, some of “Why always me?” I ask the security which are dispiriting, even humiliating. agents. “Random search,” they mutter. MISSING MEN Pratt seems to be measuring her life against “One hundred percent defies probabili- A Memoir those of beauticians, manicurists, cashiers, ty,” I shoot back. Joyce Johnson construction workers, gamblers, the job- I am lawyer, writer, and business owner. “Johnson’s story is irresistible—her lucid, intelligent voice communi- less, even the handless. In “Chopping A wife of nearly 20 years; a suburb dweller cates a heartfelt sense of her painful coming of age, while participat- Peppers,” her concluding poem, Pratt tells past age 50. ing in major cultural changes in America at mid-century and beyond.” us what she is trying to do: “What threat profile do I fit?” I ask my —Ann Charters. Viking 288 pp. 0-670-03310-3 $24.95 two friends, who look slightly stricken, I was no metaphor when I fed a almost as though they might be responsi- machine eight hours a day. ble for those plastic-gloved people who IT WAS FOOD VS. ME . . . AND I WON I was what came before words, my plow through my bags. They have no How I Learned to Face My Feelings, Feed My Cravings, hands the spring, answer, but here, three years later, Make New Choices, and Live a Life Beyond Food setting metal jaws to shut, the Katheryn Russell-Brown does and she Nancy Goodman same synapses to snap shares it in Underground Codes. “Tells the real truth behind food issues of all kinds....with great together every second all day again As for the threat profile I fit? I am trav- humor, honesty, and style.”—Christiane Northrup, M.D. and again eling while black. Viking 240 pp. 0-670-03312-X $21.95 until what is being done can be My two college friends are white, which named. (p. 124) explains why they were clueless. Apparently, SEX, TIME, AND POWER though, I was not alone. Prompted by How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution Not surprisingly, since she is a poet, numerous harassment claims by black Leonard Shlain she wants to make palpable, even new, female travelers passing through customs, in “A coherent, convincing, and captivating narrative...[that] will affect the dailiness of life. She says here and in March 2000, says Russell-Brown, the forever your notions about sex.”—San Francisco Chronicle. her opening poem, “Learning to Write,” General Accounting Office (GAO) Penguin 448 pp. 0-14-200467-7 $16.00 that she has two tools: “a stick, a fat fin- “released a study outlining the race and gen- ger, six fingers instead of five”—in other der practices of the U.S. Customs Service.” SHE WINS, YOU WIN words, her pencil—and “Time divided Ninety-five percent of the passengers The Most Important Strategies into days, and my life into years.” It’s a who were stopped were frisked; four per- for Making Women More Powerful humble poem, suggesting that this poet cent were strip-searched; and one percent Gail Evans is also on a “threshold.” was subjected to an x-ray screening. “Black “Why isn’t there an ‘Old Girls’ Network? Gail Evans tells us why I find both poets humble and thankful women were more likely than any other —and shows us how to create one.”—Rachel Simmons, author of for the time they may still have in which group—including black men—to be pro- Odd Girl Out. to write. In “Islands,” Shirley Kaufman filed as drug couriers and searched,” says Gotham 192 pp. 1-592-40059-0 $14.00 celebrates a couple over 80: “astonished Russell-Brown. Black women unfortunate lovers whispering/ what happens next?” enough to be US citizens were treated even VIRGINS OF VENICE And the younger Minnie Bruce Pratt, worse: Despite being less than half as like- Broken Vows and Cloistered hopeful about the future, sees ly to be carrying contraband as white Lives in the Renaissance Convent women, black women were nine times Mary Laven The book of pages waiting to be more likely than white women to be x-rayed “A triumphant combination of scholarship and storytelling.” turned, following a frisk. —Ross King, author of Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. an airplane propeller, an album of Back when I was being harassed for Penguin 320 pp. 0-14-200401-4 $15.00 old photographs, being a black American traveler, I had never an empty field, unplowed ground, heard of a black woman who had hijacked a PENGUIN GROUP (USA) waiting for my hand. (p. 1) plane, made or exploded bombs, or smug- Academic Marketing Department, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 www.penguin.com/academic I gled tons of drugs into the US. I still haven’t. The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 13 she says, sends a message that it is acceptable bailiffs, judges, clerks, jurors. To see how race for information about African-American influences decisions at each step, observe the women to remain buried, thereby keeping interactions of all of these actors with each them invisible. There are legal, political, other as well as with victims and offenders. Good hair days social, and moral consequences to the deluge Anything less, contends Russell-Brown, of black female prisoners. Many incarcerated makes it impossible to discern the full by Kathy Davis women were sandwiched between children impact of race, thereby erroneously rein- and elders as sole caregivers and providers. forcing the belief that racial bias is not Styling Jim Crow. African American Beauty Training During Yet just try finding research on that. present. This is especially true for the jus- Perhaps researchers are stymied tice system’s back regions—the invisible Segregation by Julia Kirk Blackwelder. College Station, TX: because many don’t believe the criminal “petit apartheid” substrata where racist justice system is biased: “Mainstream” stereotypes dominate and minor func- Texas A&M University Press, 2003, researchers claim the evidence is inconclu- tionaries reign with total discretion. This is sive while “alternative” researchers— the “informal” part mainstream researchers 183 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Russell-Brown among them—contend it is minimize, choosing to overlook what is clear. They disagree with “mainstream” arguably a mother lode of racial bias. Rapunzel’s Daughters. What Women’s Hair Tells Us About researchers about what data should be col- The professor is talking research revolu- lected to track bias, when measuring tion. The quiet but explosive power of her Women’s Lives by Rose Weitz. New York: Farrar, Straus should start, and when it should end. approach emerges clearly in her dissection and Giroux, 2004, 266 pp., $24.00 hardcover. “Standard” measures of bias are typical- of the research on “gangsta rap.” ly limited to “formal” stages of the criminal I justice system: arrest, prosecutor’s charge, emember all those studies and high bail setting, jury selection, conviction, and profile criminal cases that proved lis- everal years ago, a white teacher in African-American hairstyling techniques, sentencing. Russell-Brown argues that this R tening to “gangsta rap” led to criminal a predominantly black public beginning with methods of hair wrapping kind of data collection begins too late, ends behavior? If so, you remember wrong. They S school in Brooklyn assigned the and braiding that traveled west on slave too soon, and ignores critical phases of did no such thing. Instead, what began as “a children’s book Nappy Hair (1997) by vessels and were then passed on from criminal processing by labeling them legitimate question about the ethical value of African-American author Carolivia mothers to daughters. Throughout the “informal.” It shuts out all but a fraction of gangsta rap” quickly morphed into an explic- Herron to her third-grade class. This antebellum years, African-American the inputs for racial bias. it statement purporting to prove something it well-intentioned attempt to encourage women experimented with recipes for hair Instead, Russell-Brown advocates for “a did not. Research on rap and criminality is so self-esteem among young black girls by care, looking for ways to stimulate hair fully realized typology.” Her approach is so sparse that Russell-Brown is able to method- celebrating “natural” hair backfired when growth, cure scalp ailments, or tame curly logical that it is difficult to fathom why it is ically and efficiently unearth the facts, study a parent complained that the images of hair. While hair care began as something not already the prevailing research methodol- by study, in only ten pages. Then, this lawyer, kinky hair in the book were derogatory women did among themselves, it gradually ogy. To get a more accurate view, she professor, and criminologist corrects the and offensive and did not make her developed into a home industry that oper- instructs, widen the lens. Begin data collec- record: “The research simply does not sup- daughter feel good about herself. A heat- ated outside the white-dominated beauty tion prior to arrest, including a person’s first port a direct link between listening to gangs- ed discussion ensued among parents and industry. Pioneers like Annie Turnbo contact with an agent of the criminal justice ta rap music and involvement in crime.” teachers, with some arguing that the Malone and Sarah Breedlove Walker system (a traffic stop, for instance), and con- What it does show, however, is insidious. assignment was empowering (in the spir- (Madame C. J. Walker) manufactured their tinue it through to final contact, such as A 1996 study used 200 randomly select- it of “black is beautiful”) while others felt own hair care products and built pyramid parole. Along the way, examine the behavior, ed whites to explore whether it is rap music it was patronizing and racist (why is a sales organizations in which representa- language, and racial identities not only of vic- lyrics that cause a negative reaction or white teacher teaching black children tives were trained to sell products door to tims and offenders, but also of witnesses, whether it is the artists’ race that explains about self-love anyway?). The incident door within the black community. These police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, people’s negative perceptions of the music. eventually reached the pages of The New organizations expanded, unencumbered For the first part of the study, partici- York Times, where columnist Clyde by licensing standards or external controls. pants were given song lyrics about a young Haberman denounced the debate as “an By the 1920s, the black beauty industry (;2'86(;,/( man who searches for and kills a police offi- ignorant cry of racism (that) makes all had entered its “golden age” as a leading cer. One group was told the song lyrics were knees jerk.” Dismayed at the angry reac- sector of African-American business. (;48,6,7( rap, another that it was a country song, and tions from parents, the teacher asked to Beauty salons sprung up in black commu- a third group that it was folk music. Then be reassigned to another school. nities and institutions for educating beauti- they were asked to evaluate the lyrics for In the college classes I teach, I have cians who could meet the hair-grooming their degree of offensiveness, danger to used the furor around Nappy Hair as an needs of women of color emerged. In the society, and likelihood of causing a riot. example of body politics. It illustrates era of racial segregation, says Blackwelder, They were also asked whether such lyrics why appearance is never simply an hair styling provided one of the only occu- should be regulated. “Those who were told that innocuous vehicle for each individual to pations for African-American women out- the lyrics were for a rap song were significantly more express her or his identity. Hair is ideally side “field, factory, and kitchen.” likely to report a negative response on all measures suited to exploring the constraints of than were those who were told that the lyrics were for femininity, since it often represents lackwelder’s history of the a country or folk music song.” (My italics.) power hierarchies among women based African-American beauty industry For the second part of the study, in on class, race, and ethnicity. As Patricia B centers around two stories. The addition to lyrics, participants were shown a Hill Collins pointed out in Black Feminist first is that of Marjorie Stewart Joyner, picture of the artist. One group was shown Thought (1990), blue-eyed, blonde, thin, one of the first sales representatives for &DUWRJUDSKLHV a black man and the other a white man, white women can’t be considered beauti- the Madame C. J. Walker Company, both of them with short hair and dressed in ful without the Other—black women whose advertising strategies are the sub- 0HGLWDWLRQVRQ7UDYHO a sport coat over a T-shirt. with classical African features, dark skin, ject of Noliwe Rooks’ delightful 1996 0DUMRULH$JRVtQ 3UHOXGHE\,VDEHO$OOHQGH “The same lyrical passage…acceptable as a and kinky hair. Given that two-thirds of book, Hair Raising. In true rags-to-riches KDUGFRYHU country song or when associated with a white artist, African-American women today straight- fashion, Joyner worked her way up [became] a dangerous, offensive song [needing] gov- en their hair, any book celebrating nappy through the ranks, promoting hair care h7ITHLYRICALPROSEANDDEEPPASSION WRITERANDPOET!GOS¤NMAPSOUT ernmental regulation when it [was] a rap song or hair is bound to cause a stir. The slogan products and demonstrating techniques HERPASTANDTHEPLACESTHATHAVE associated with a Black artist,” concluded the “black is beautiful” may have gained gen- in hair straightening and styling through- GIVENHERLIFEMEANING!LTHOUGH study’s author. (My italics.) eral acceptance across the color line, but out the US. She later became one of the THE(OLOCAUSTLOOMSLARGE !GOS¤NS We might be a nation of illiterates where the historical legacy of slavery and racism primary recruiters for students for the PALPABLELOVEOFHUMANITYANDUNIQUE race and crime are concerned, but this continues to make hair a source of con- Walker School of Beauty and helped set PROSESTYLEKEEPTHISWORKUPLIFTINGv ˆ0UBLISHERS7EEKLY doesn’t have to be our permanent condi- tention, with different meanings for up the first national organization for cos- tion. For the uninitiated, Underground Codes white people than for people of color. metology teachers. Well-traveled and $/62$9$,/$%/( offers 20 “Race Facts,” an eight-page It was against this backdrop that I with seemingly boundless energy, she primer to help boost the racial IQ. For read these two new books about hair. became a respected civic leader both 7KH researchers, criminologists, and academi- Styling Jim Crow is by a historian and doc- within and outside the African-American &RUUHVSRQGHQFH cians, it outlines the specific theoretical and uments the development of an African- community, using her position in the RI6DUDK0RUJDQ empirical foundations informed conversa- American beauty culture. Rapunzel’s beauty culture as well as her friendships DQG)UDQFLV tions about race and crime require. Daughters is by a sociologist and concerns with Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor :DUULQJWRQ One-hundred-and-fifty years after slaves the importance of hair to all women Roosevelt to advance the welfare of 'DZVRQ followed Harriet Tubman’s Underground regardless of their class, racial or ethnic African-American women. Railroad to freedom, Russell-Brown pro- background, or sexual orientation. The The second story is that of the ZLWK6HOHFWHG(GLWRULDOV:ULWWHQE\ 6DUDK0RUJDQIRUWKH&KDUOHVWRQ1HZV poses freedom of a different kind: a mind- first book shows how US women’s hair Jemison family, who built the enormous- DQG&RXULHU set shaken loose from the shackles binding and hairstyling practices were strictly seg- ly successful Franklin Beauty School in (GLWHGE\*LVHOOH5REHUWV race to crime. Accessible in style and com- regated along racial lines; the second Houston, Texas. Thanks to the sound KDUGFRYHU prehensive in scope, Underground Codes maps argues that preoccupation with hair is business instincts of James Jemison, the a well-signed route to the places where truth something all women share. school thrived in one of the most segre- _ZZZXJDSUHVVRUJ lives, where it never existed, and where In Styling Jim Crow, Julia Kirk gated cities in the US, attracting hundreds 7KH8QLYHUVLW\RI*HRUJLD3UHVV much more is still desperately needed. I Blackwelder traces the evolution of of poor young women from rural towns,

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 many of whom had never gotten beyond more generally, how their hair has the 7th grade and had few prospects. shaped their sense of self. Jemision, together with his wife and Weitz situates these “hair histories” extended family, taught them a profes- in a historical sketch that begins with sion that earned them the respect of their Greek philosophy and ends with ’60s community as well as a secure future. counterculture. In a dizzying series of At times, these two case studies were a short leaps, she moves from Jewish bit heavy on historical detail for my taste: veiling practices to the elaborate wigs Blackwelder includes endless lists of hair of 17th-century French aristocrats to preparations as well as course plans and the flappers of the 1920s with their letters from family members full of bobbed hair. Although she asserts that everyday minutiae like “Anita is fine” and “ideas about women’s hair were divid- “Jim J. is in a mood.” But there were also ed along racial lines,” in the final many interesting tidbits that I wouldn’t analysis, she believes that women’s have wanted to miss. I loved the letters preoccupation with hair is about the that parents wrote to the Jemisons thank- “the constant struggle to attain an ing them for taking such good care of ideal body,” which she calls the “cen- their daughters and those from students tral project” in the lives of most describing their struggles to finish the American girls and women. training program and their plans and Weitz believes hair is central to every hopes for the future. woman’s identity, regardless of class, eth- Blackwelder demonstrates that segre- nicity or race, sexual orientation, or age. gation, paradoxically, provided space for From the woman who cuts her hair after the black beauty culture to grow. Racial a divorce (in the fashion of “I’m gonna discrimination defined the organization wash that man right outta my hair”) to of the beauty industry, barring African- the lesbian with an attitude who shaves Class photograph, 1937. From Styling Jim Crow. American women from white-owned her head, women are obsessed with their beauty schools, which did not teach the hair and go to great lengths to tame, curl, black mothers expect their daughters to means to different women in different con- styling of black hair. However, it also dye, style, or remove it. Changing a hair- suffer for straightened hair, white mothers texts. Although I sometimes wished that enabled the development of a particular style is a way to mark a life transition or to sometimes expect their daughters to suffer Blackwelder had been a little less the histo- market sector for African-American make a statement about wanting to for curly hair” erases the historical context rian and elaborated on some of the contra- women, who developed their own tech- change. As one of Weitz’s informants put of racism and a racialized beauty ideal, dictions within black beauty culture, I would niques and products. The black beauty it: “There were things in my life I couldn’t which gives hair-straightening for black have liked to see Weitz be more the sociolo- industry continued to thrive even during change… and for some reason it was real women a different meaning and political gist. When Weitz concludes her book with a the Depression. It wasn’t until the 1960s important for me to change something... valence from permanents for white reference to Nappy Hair, praising it as an that it hit upon hard times, as integration So I got my hair cut.” women. She asserts that salons catering to alternative way to think about appearance brought about more stringent licensing Weitz is at her best when she gives white women specialize in personalized that will “teach young black girls to take laws, the range of professional options space to women’s stories: the undergrad- interaction between hairdressers and their pride in their natural hair,” I couldn’t help for women of color expanded, and, last uate who describes in minute detail how clients, while community-style black salons remembering its contested reception in but not least, a shift in racialized beauty she has perfected the “hair flip” in order “feel like a family space…and less like a Brooklyn. A sociological analysis could have norms brought about an appreciation for to “catch a guy’s eye”; the migrant woman’s space,” but she doesn’t elaborate. helped us understand why—at least in the “natural” hair styles. woman who gets up early every morning Such differences, however, make all the US—a concern for hair does not just unite More problematic is Blackwelder’s so that she can fix her daughters’ hair difference in understanding what hair us; it also divides us. I reluctance to examine some of the before going into the fields; the business assumptions behind the mission of woman who manipulates her hair to meet “racial uplift.” Practitioners in the beauty the demands of her career (“not too cute, industry promoted their services and hair too sexy, too young, too severe, too care products as a way to “glorify the dated, or too disheveled”); the woman womanhood of our Race.” Blackwelder with alopecia (an autoimmune condition adopts without question the idea that resulting in baldness) who laments her “carefully groomed hair and immaculate “constant paranoia” that her wig might dress armed women against the arrows of blow off or be on crooked (“You feel like 0-06-00 ISBN racial insults,” embodying black women’s you’re living with some dark secret”); and sense of identity and what they could many more. Weitz provides myriad accomplish in their lives. While she instances of how women can laugh at acknowledges that techniques like hair their “hair problems” and their everyday 9064-2 straightening also reflect racialized beau- struggles to make the best of a bad hair

ty norms and the historical white devalu- day. While she provides examples of • ation of African women, she is some- women who use hair as part of their hardcover what cavalier about their negative effects. rebellion against the traditional norms of Nevertheless, her book remains an heterosexual femininity, she indicates that important contribution to understanding they do so at their own peril, saying they $24.95 ($38.95 Can.) how African-American women (and men), will be forced to “leave behind not only often with great resourcefulness and stam- social approval from men, employers, ina, negotiated the constraints imposed by families, and others, but also the many Jim Crow and built lives for themselves. personal pleasures of hair.” She also demonstrates convincingly why This seems like a high price to pay, but • no account of beauty culture in the US what are those “many personal pleasures pages 304 can be complete unless it confronts the of hair”? Weitz is noticeably silent on this history of racism and racial segregation. subject with the exception of a wonderful chapter entitled “At the Salon.” Here she nlike her earlier scholarly works describes in detail the sensual pleasures of on women’s bodies and health, in having one’s hair washed, the comforts of U Rapunzel’s Daughters, Rose Weitz a women-only space, the intimacy of con- addresses a broad audience on the subject versations, and even the occasional flirta- of women’s hair. Beginning with her own tions with a hairdresser. Beauty salons How did the Queen become the desire as a child to possess blonde ringlets are—at least for the client—a space most powerful piece in chess? (“like Shirley Temple”) and ending with where women are cared for. her dilemma of whether or not to dye her While I found many of the hair histo- Marilyn Yalom, a senior scholar at Stanford’s Institute for graying hair, she makes it clear that this ries in Rapunzel’s Daughters familiar, amus- Women and Gender, links the Chess Queen’s emergence in book is a personal story. But every woman ing, or touching, I was also irritated by Europe during the Middle Ages to the changing role of women has a hair history that “reflects internal Weitz’s constant use of “we,” which in society and politics, the ascent of female sovereigns to power, struggles and external pressures.” Weitz’s seemed preachy (“who are you to tell me the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the cult of romantic love. book combines her own experiences and what I think/feel/should do!”) and left me informal conversations with interviews wondering who exactly “we” is. Although “Intriguing, insightful, and very learned.” —Norman Cantor with 74 women of different ages, sexual she frequently acknowledges that women’s orientations, ethnicities, and class back- hair experiences are shaped by differences grounds. The result is an engaging account in class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orienta- HarperCollinsPublishers of how women feel about their hair, how tion, she does this in a way that effaces www.harperacademic.com their feelings have changed over time, and these differences. A statement like, “While

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 15 book provides a helpful introduction and, thanks to the lengthy bibliographies follow- ing most of the pieces, ample suggestions Disability/gender bifocals for exploring a topic in fuller detail. The papers, now chapters, are scholarly by Nancy Mairs but not dauntingly so. For this reason, I can envision the book being taught fruitfully as Gendering Disability edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison. a text in upper division undergraduate and graduate courses in either women’s studies Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 320 pp., $24.95 paper. or disability studies programs. It might also be used as a resource by teachers of those I courses who haven’t yet given much thought to the influence of gender and dis- irst off, a disclaimer: Because I have in 2001—have occurred; and more general ability on each other. Like most collections, belonged to the disability community conferences routinely include presentations it doesn’t lend itself to being read cover to F for more than 30 years, I’m acquaint- by and about people with disabilities. cover (and like most books under review, An 1885 physiognometric drawing of a ed with several of the contributors to One day, we may hope, the perspectives that’s exactly how it was read!), but every supposedly pathologically “love Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison’s col- of these people will be so thoroughly inte- essay deserves at least one reading. deficient” woman. From lection Gendering Disability. I also know some grated into the general curriculum that no Perhaps because the book is not an Gendering Disability. of the authors of the works they cite, which students will need a separate course in order anthology for which an overarching editori- include my own. And I wrote the preface to to recognize and understand them, although al sensibility drew from a wide range of ability not only for people with disabilities, a memoir published by Smith and scholars will continue developing the disci- works to suit a plan, but rather a collection but for everyone.” Hutchison’s publisher, Rutgers University pline. Gendering Disability represents a step limited to the papers delivered at a single A number of the presentations use spe- Press, a couple of years ago. In a discipline toward that distant day. The articles and conference, I didn’t find it notably coherent. cific disabilities to examine the ways in as small as disability studies has historically excerpts included, drawn from a variety of Although it is divided into four sections, which gender inflects the realities they been, such path-crossings seem inevitable. disciplines, illustrate some of the ways in “Positions,” “Desire and Identity,” “Arts impose. Two essays, Daniel J. Wilson’s Fortunately, thanks to the publication of which issues of gender and issues of dis- and Embodiment,” and “Citizens and “Fighting Polio Like a Man” and “Disabled works like Gendering Disability, the field has ability inform and enlarge one another. Consumers,” I couldn’t always decide why a Masculinity” by Russell P. Shuttleworth, begun to grow and flourish. The Society for The term “disability” is almost too chapter was placed in one section and not address the issues peculiar to men with Disability Studies was founded in 1982. broad to have useful meaning. The realities another. In order to gain focus, the reader impaired mobility in a culture that conflates Both academic journals like Disability Studies of my life as a quadriplegic with advanced might begin with the final essay, “The Sexist masculinity with physical prowess. The Quarterly and popular magazines like New multiple sclerosis bear little resemblance to Inheritance of the Disability Movement,” in most inventive piece, “Helen Keller’s Love Mobility devote themselves to the subject, those of my 91-year-old mother-in-law, still which Corbett Joan O’Toole briefly and ably Life,” by the gifted writer Georgina Kleege, and articles appear in more diverse publica- physically robust but increasingly confused, lays out the thesis underlying the whole comes from a series, Writing Helen Keller, tions as well. Over the years, both universi- or my 33-year-old niece who has no eyes, project of Gendering Disability: Disability that reflects on blindness through the lens ty presses and trade publishers have and none of the three of us has much in studies faces the triple challenge of “bring- of Keller’s and Kleege’s experiences. (If brought out academic studies and memoirs common with the African-American man ing the disability rights model into the acad- you think that was a bad pun, you’re right.) in increasing numbers. Programs in disabil- mumbling and shambling down the street emy, bringing an academic lens to disability, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, who is Deaf (the ity studies exist at colleges and universities in front of my house. The fields that would and providing useful information by, about, capital letter indicating that she belongs to throughout North America and abroad. A be enriched by a “disability” perspective, and for the disability community.” Although the Deaf community, as opposed to a per- number of conferences like the one that whatever that is taken to mean, are similar- a couple of chapters seem utilitarian, such as son who simply has hearing loss but is not generated this book—“Gender and ly diverse. A general collection like Gendering those that raise questions of race, gender, culturally Deaf), also draws on personal Disability Studies,” held at the Institute for Disability can represent the complexities of and income inequalities in sociological and experience in “Interpreting Women.” The Research on Women at Rutgers University its subject only cursorily, therefore. The medical terms, more direct themselves to essay invites the reader to reflect upon the the first two of O’Toole’s challenges. control of meaning in any relationship in which one party possesses access to infor- fundamental tenet of the disability mation that the other does not. At 15, Sandra Scofield rights movement is that “disability” This use of personal detail in academic launched a false adulthood Ais a social construction rather than a discourse, unusual but welcome, enlivens that set her adrift in erotic medical condition. This is not to deny the for readers observations about a world to chaos, when she was, most realities, some of them medical, that an which they may not have direct access. truly, a motherless child. It individual may face, but to emphasize that Kristin Lindgren, in “Bodies in Trouble,” took her 40 years to find the such realities are not intrinsically disabling; examines autobiographical works of an courage to look back. they become so only when society is con- assortment of disabled writers, concluding structed, whether deliberately or heedlessly, that “[s]ustained attention to the lived expe- “A tale filled with longing and so that it fails to take into account the full rience and representation of illness and dis- loss as well as a powerful sense range of human capabilities. For example, ability can ground theories of embodiment of what it means to be holy and although the population examined by Carol in the widely varied experience of actual what it is like to sin.” — Mary Kaufman-Scarborough in “Integrating bodies, contribute to rethinking the relation- Morris, author of Acts of God Consumer Disabilities into Models of ship between body and self, and foster the Information Processing” is a small one, development of models of identity that “…shines with authentici- women with color-vision deficiencies, their incorporate difference.” ty…luminous language, experiences suggest the marketplace diffi- Several chapters demonstrate the pro- together with years of reflec- culties that may be encountered by people ductive value of reading a variety of sub- with disabilities in general. jects through the bifocals of gender and tion that have obviously led Because many scholars know little disability. They offer insight into relation- to real retrospective wisdom, make …Occasions of Sin both grace- about the disability rights movement, ships as diverse as that between amputees ful and enlightening.” — The Women’s Review of Books Smith and Hutchison wisely open with and those who fetishize them and that Adrienne Asch’s symposium paper between a blind 18th-century Parisian drap- “Occasions of Sin, in its groping sense of honesty and its plain-spoken, “Critical Race Theory,” which delineates a er and his sighted and savvy wife. They understated pain, has the attributes of a classic.” — Chicago Tribune number of ways in which disability studies explore the impact of disability on the parallel or diverge from both ethnic and works of disabled artists (Audre Lorde, “This searing memoir represents a daughter’s attempt to piece together feminist studies, which are more likely to Frida Kahlo) and on those for whom dis- the mystery of a mother lost before her child was old enough to under- be familiar. Not every reader will agree ability serves more metaphorically stand her, and before either one had learned her own worth as a with her concluding sentence, “The goal (Tennessee Williams). woman.” — Boston Globe is to create a society where it is irrelevant Have you ever had a friend try to to be blind or Black.” Some, sharing con- describe to you an incident you didn’t wit- “Scofield investigates the insistence of desire, the inability to transcend tributor Sumi Colligan’s concern about ness, only to break off helplessly: “Oh, the body and the indissoluble bond between mother and daughter...a “the real and ongoing threat of physical you hadda be there”? I feel a little like that narrative of survival...” — San Francisco Chronicle erasure,” may find in this view a form of about this book. I wish I’d been at Rutgers cultural erasure. three years ago when this remarkable Sandra Scofield’s novels have garnered much praise, including a Nevertheless, all will recognize how the group assembled; I wish I’d basked in their National Book Award nomination for Plain Seeing and a fic- interpolation of a disability perspective energy and enthusiasm for the ground- tion prize from the Texas Institute of Literary Arts. can enrich current academic discourse. breaking work they were doing. I’d have Similarly, in “Integrating Disability,” liked to ask them questions and to eaves- ISBN 0-393-05735-6 /W.W. Norton /6” x 8” /288 pages /CL$24.95 /Memoir Rosemarie Garland Thompson makes a drop on their informal encounters thorough case for studying disability “in a between presentations. Well, I missed my http://www.sandrascofield.com feminist context to direct our highly honed chance. But despite its somewhat scatter- critical skills toward the dual scholarly shot character, Gendering Disability turns tasks of unmasking and reimagining dis- out to be no mean substitute. I

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 Making the world better From object to subject by Ellie Hernandez

Chicana Without Apology: The New Chicana Cultural Studies THE STORY OF V by Edén Torres. New York: Routledge, 2003, 222 pp., $22.95 paper. A Natural History of Female Sexuality I Catherine Blackledge “The Story of revealsV the ancient and newfound powers of the v n Chicana Without Apology, Edén My favorite chapter is “Rich in It is full of mystery and secrets and truth. If we only knew what Torres weaves together historical Culture, Low on Capital.” Torres argues under our skirts! Learn the story—read this book.”—Eve Ensler, of The Vagina Monologues analysis, popular culture, political that under the American capitalist sys- I 336PAGES • 61B &W ILLUSTRATIONS economy, theory, and anecdote, combin- tem, having “culture,” as Chicanas do, is CLOTH $24.95 • 0-8135-3455-0 ing personal reflection with scholarly supposed to make up for economic writing. With this cultural studies imbalances. She suggests that approach, Torres creates a unique intel- Chicana/os hold onto Mexican culture in lectual mestizaje, or hybrid, composed of order to resist assimilation, arguing, along FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT feminist analysis, healing practice, exis- with cultural studies scholars like Paul The Unexpected Life of the AuthorThe of Secret Garden tential philosophy, and Latin American Gilroy and José Saldivar, that culture is Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina socialism. Torres opens her book with a naturally resistant to capitalist excess. But “A striking biography: moving, thorough and intelligent. A rare blend of poignant retelling of her father’s internal- she warns that under capitalism, a scholarship and compelling narrative.”—Toni Morrison ized colonization: group’s identity may be exposed to par- ticular types of exploitation—just look at 400PAGES • 40B &W PHOTOGRAPHS CLOTH $29.95 • 0-8135-3382-1 For most of my childhood, my the Taco Bell Chihuahua. It is represen- father was a ghost. I loved and tation but of the worst kind. “Rich in BEING RITA HAYWORTH feared him for many reasons, and Culture and Low on Capital” draws our never knew when he would appear attention to the effect of global Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom or disappear. Nor could I predict economies on Latina/o cultures, in par- Adrienne L. McLean whether his brief presence would ticular, to the consequences of cheap and “This is a superior piece of scholarship and an outstanding contr be kind or cruel. I have come to expendable labor. Shifting focus to labor to star studies.”—Ina Rae Hark, University of South Carolina

believe that he has always hated in Mexico, Torres notes that the predom- 256PAGES • 40B &W PHOTOGRAPHS the Mexican in him. (p. 11) inantly female maquiladora assembly PAPER $23.95 • 0-8135-3389-9 lines created by NAFTA and other inter- Torres goes on to explain that objectivity, national trade agreements have displaced the scientific search for evidence, and male workers while increasing the level of sociological cause and effect cannot even exploitation for woman. begin to measure the level of racial, gen- Torres addresses the rift between aca- New in Paperback der, and economic trauma that people demic institutions and social change GENDER AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT experience in American society. She activists: Edited by Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith claims that a “shame” versus “pride” dichotomy splits Chicana/o conscious- I believe an important and radical “This book breaks new ground by moving beyond a discussion of the ness, causing self-defeating acts of dis- political vision once existed in the contributions of individual women and men and covers the gendered basis of internal civil rights politics.”—Steven Lawson,Civil author Rights of placed anger and self-destruction. newly created Chicano studies and Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle Marginalized Chicana/os thus reenact women’s studies departments. I 288PAGES the pain of economic and social disen- also believe this vision has grown PAPER $21.95 • 0-8135-3438-0 franchisement in everyday circumstances. cloudy and diffuse, not just Trauma and dysfunction haunt because our thinking has become Chicana/o communities, communities of more complex, nor because of the color, and women through the experi- necessary critiques of masculinist GENDERING DISABILITY ences of domestic violence, drug and nationalism and mainstream, liber- Edited by Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison alcohol addiction, and sexual and what al feminism, but because the uni- “A pioneering study of the ‘borderlands’ of the body.”—Susan B Torres calls epistemic violence, which fying themes have been continu- author ofSigns of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1 have been handed down across genera- ously attacked and trivialized in World War II tions. Epistemic violence, or the distor- some very insidious ways. (p. 49) 320PAGES • 16B &W ILLUS. tion of knowledge, has been central to PAPER $24.95 • 0-8135-3373-2 perpetuating the cycle of violence that She cites professionalization and the makes sexism, racism, and homophobia “lure of high theory” for academics and normal facets of American life. As dismissal of intellectual projects by Torres explains, “The inability to experi- activists as some of the reasons for the POBLADORAS, INDÍGENAS, ence intimacy, to feel or give love uncon- rift. AND THE STATE ditionally can spread as it is expressed as Conflicts Over Women’s Rights in Chile n “The Virtues of Conflict: violence towards others—(re) creating Patricia Richards trauma for all those involved.” This per- Challenging Dominant Culture and vasive trauma keeps marginalized groups I White Feminist Theory” Torres aims “No other book on Latin American women’s movements addresses the in their subordinate role because the to examine theoretical language and its important topic of race/ethnic and class differences with such clarity and group is unable to achieve a sense of effect on women’s studies departments. sensitivity.”—Norma Chinchilla, California State University at Long Beach wholeness. However, the chapter takes an odd turn Moving away from the problem-solv- when it delves into the personal and insti- 256PAGES PAPER $22.95 • 0-8135-3423-2 ing approach that many academics take tutional politics of her home institution, to Chicana/o culture, Torres makes it the University of Minnesota. While HEARTS OF DARKNESS plain that colonization and conquest Torres’ personal commentary works well White Women Write Race myths create a never-ending cycle that in most chapters, here she seems unable binds people to stories of subordination. to use her experience to illuminate her Jane Marcus Because of this tie to a history of colo- discussion of Anglo-American feminism “In brilliantly provocative and brave readings of Virginia Woolf a Barnes and a daring rescue of the importance of Nancy Cunard nization, Chicana/os have not forgiven in the academy. One problem Torres Marcus uncovers the ubiquity of presumptions about race and i or moved beyond the Spanish Conquest. identifies is that Anglo-American femi- ism in their texts— and thereby transforms our understanding o Torres’ anti-romantic characterization of nist theory remains dominant even in this modernism.”—Nancy F. Cott, authorPublic of Vows: A History of Chicana/o culture is poetic yet without area of study that is supposed to be Marriage and the Nation the self-deprecating mire of 1980s liberal inclusive. Her experiences serve as a 224PAGES • 15B &W ILLUS. fantasies of inclusion. Torres’ cultural reminder that the politics of teaching PAPER $22.00 • 0-8135-2963-8 studies approach mixes identity-based women’s studies are still not thoroughly criticisms that were fashionable in the resolved. There is a body of feminist lit- 1980s with an examination of identity erature, such as “The Impossibility of RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS from various perspectives—not just the Women’s Studies” by Wendy Brown, that Saving minds from boring reading since 1936 point of injury. addresses this issue astutely, but unfortu- To order, call 800-446-9323 or visit rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 17 nately, Torres does not refer to it, and her In addition to film notes and plot syn- message gets lost. opses, Liebfried and Lane include sample In other chapters, Torres uses close reviews to give the reader a sense of how readings of John Sayles’ film Lone Star “Too Chinese to play the critics of the day assessed her per- and Maria Novorro’s El Jardin de Edén to formances. Concerned not to repeat the discuss representations of the US- “derogatory terminology” used in the Mexico border, and examines education a Chinese” press when referring to Asian actors, and its current state of inertia. Liebfried and Lane censored the reviews, Education may be liberating for some, by Eithne Johnson reproducing mostly positive or elided but Chicanas, like many women of color, comments. Unfortunately, this editorial are still more often objects of study than Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905-1961) decision distorts the evidence. In full, the subjects who analyze. Torres’ final chap- reviews might have shed more light on ter, “Donde Hay Amor Hay Dolor” (Where by Anthony B. Chan. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press/Rowman her acting abilities and on the variety of There is Love, There is Pain) sums up her opinions about them. The original premise: & Littlefield, 2003, 312 pp., $45.00 hardcover. reviews would also have provided evi- Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood dence of racism, and they would have The ability to make connections is shown the kind of language that was used often difficult, but we must Legend by Graham Russell Gao Hodges. New York: to represent or characterize other races. behave as if we know it is absolutely possible and necessary. Palgrave, 2004, 284 pp., $27.95 hardcover. han’s and Hodges’ biographies We have to do it despite the hard- also recount many of the diffi- ship and real dangers involved. Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio C culties racism posed for Wong, as Such a commitment increases our well as her attempts to resist or speak out capacity to perpetually incorporate and Television Work by Philip Liebfried and Chei Mi Lane. against prejudice and ignorance. Chan new voices, to critically think Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004, 179 pp., $45.00 hardcover. argues that by identifying Wong consis- about and acknowledge questions tently as “little,” critics and industry types and challenges as they arise, and I were keeping her in her place, since at to refocus on a larger vision. 5'7" she was as tall or taller than many of (p. 186) movie star’s age 14, she launched her costars, including Douglas Fairbanks. life leaves herself on a path He also quotes from reviews of Piccadilly For Chicanas, education involves both Aa wake of that was uncon- (1929) in which she was referred to as a love and pain: love, because of educa- film performanc- ventional not only “chink” and said to have “reposeful body tion’s liberating potential; pain because it es, publicity ma- in her Chinese- movements that are certainly her Oriental has been used as tool to serve the inter- terials, fashion pho- American family heritage.” As if that’s not bad enough, ests of the dominant group over margin- tos, and juicy gos- but also for most these biographies remind us that white alized Chicanas and lesbians. Without a sip. For biogra- Americans, since actors were chosen to play lead Asian middle-class base or a viable class cri- phers, this makes movie work was a roles in “yellowface,” with their eyes tique, Chicana feminists will continue to movie stars tempt- new and contro- taped back, while Asian actors were rele- have difficulty translating the promise of ing subjects. How- versial type of gated to minor parts. Wong was painfully success into real social change. ever, when there’s labor, especially aware of her position in the film industry. More than any academic book I have so much evidence for women. Hodges quotes from a letter she wrote to read in the past 20 years, this one is about a life, the As an Asian a lifelong friend explaining that she had thoughtful and meditative. It leads one to biographer has to character actress, heard that MGM considered her “too Still from Shanghai Express: Wong’s hands ponder and reexamine the educational sift through an were considered the most beautiful of she had to work Chinese to play a Chinese,” turning her apparatus. Its landscape is the narrative enormous amount all Hollywood actresses’. From harder for less down for a lead role she very much want- of conquest and colonialism superim- of material. Anna Anna May Wong (Hodges). than white actors. ed in the 1932 film, The Son-Daughter. posed upon urban alienation and inter- May Wong appeared Irony of ironies, Helen Hayes was cast instead, turning in nalized racial and gender disharmony. It in over 60 films and performed onstage this Chinese-American woman had to what critic Leonard Maltin calls “one of deals with the paradoxes of our so-called all over the world, so tracking the evi- watch while her white peers imprinted her most embarrassing performances.” millennial times in a way that challenges dence of her life requires travel and their hands on the sidewalk outside Both Chan and Hodges devote much academics, feminists, and feminist schol- translation. As Philip Liebfried and Chei Grauman’s “Chinese Theater” at its attention to what they identify as Wong’s ars of color. I Mi Lane discovered, many of the B opening ceremony. However, as Hodges “erotic” screen appeal. Chan says that she movies in which she appeared no longer notes, “If her handprints were not in the had the “capacity to exude a feverish sex- exist, deemed unworthy of preservation. cement sidewalk in front of Grauman’s, uality,” at the same time that he claims she Thus, these authors relied on other sorts her face was everywhere. Quality photog- of archival data to support their Wong raphers lined up to shoot her portrait.” Viennese poster for Piccadilly. Now on the projects: movie reviews, plot synopses, Wong’s charisma captivated each of From Anna May Wong (Hodges). film studio records, publicity materials, these biographers. A professor of Women’s Review and personal correspondence. Graham African-American history, Hodges was Russell Gao Hodges even enlisted a unfamiliar with Wong until he glimpsed a of Books website Chinese palm reader to help him under- photo of her in an English bookstore and stand Anna May Wong. was mesmerized by “the mystique of Why go to the trouble for a minor Wong.” Communications professor Subscribe by VISA character actress from the silent-film era Anthony B. Chan repeatedly refers to her who died in 1961? According to Hodges, as “hip” and “cool,” as if inviting his stu- or Mastercard on Wong was, in her time, “one of the most dents to join a Wong fan club. He grew up sophisticated women in the world.” By in one himself, since his Chinese- our secure server. bringing Wong back from the margins of Canadian parents adored her film work. the Hollywood star system, these books And in their “complete guide” to Wong’s add to the scholarship that has emerged performances, Liebfried and Lane gush Find out the around minority actors who were cast in over her. Their work is a labor of love, stereotypical roles that reflected the racist providing plot synopses of all the produc- answers to some majority perspectives of the time. tions—film, radio, stage, and television— Frequently Asked Perhaps the most compelling evidence in which she is known to have appeared.

.edu/womensreview of a person’s existence is the image of Wong appeared in several critically Questions her face. These books reprint many pho- acclaimed films: The Thief of Bagdad with tos of Wong: in family portraits, wearing Douglas Fairbanks (1924); Daughter of traditional Chinese dress; in glamorous the Dragon with Warner Oland, best Search our useful headshots; in film and publicity stills as known for playing Charlie Chan (1931); her characters. These photos seem to tell and Shanghai Express with Marlene index of back an American success story: Through luck Dietrich (1932). Describing her per- and pluck, she rose from “laundryman’s formance in Shanghai Express, Liebfried issues daughter” to international movie star. and Lane remark that if “the Best

.wellesley Growing up in the film industry’s boom- Supporting Actress Award existed then town, she played hooky to attend mati- (it began in 1936), many feel that Anna Win a free subscrip- nees and to watch movies being made. May Wong would certainly have had a She once told an interviewer that she was nomination.” Their book will be helpful tion—what a deal! so familiar around movie sets that she to fans and scholars interested in the www was dubbed the “curious Chinese child.” breadth of her acting career and in the After landing her first role as an extra at details of each production.

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 9 / June 2004 was made to play the Perhaps as a consequence of erotic-exotic “Orien- his positive role-model agen- tal” for an implicitly da, he repeatedly fails to The Bookshelf white audience. As an examine the provocative Asian woman, Wong questions about race, cul- was frequently cast as a ture, and environment that The Bookshelf provides a sampling of books of interest by and about women that “nautch dancer,” a he raises. Supporting his the- we’ve received in our office recently. For a more extensive listing, please visit our term that refers to a sis causes him to veer away website, www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview. dance style drawn from from the task of the biogra- Asian traditions that pher—to write a life story. Kass Fleisher, The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History, Albany, NY: The was meant to titillate Instead, Wong becomes a State University of New York Press, 2004, 348 pp., paperback. Fleisher, a nov- westerners. Hodges’ construct in his argument: elist, did not intend to become a historian, but she became drawn into the story of book illustrates this She appears as a naturally the 1863 Bear River massacre of nearly 300 Shoshoni Indians in Idaho by Union point with a photo of a superior actor who favored troops. After the massacre, the troops raped the surviving women. Fleisher begins Viennese poster for positive roles on screen and with the prehistory of the Cache Valley and examines the history and culture of the Piccadilly that features lived a model life offscreen Shoshoni people up to the current controversy over a National Park Service propos- a drawing of a topless in accordance with Chinese- al to commemorate the massacre—but not the rape, which is also denied by some Anna May Wong. It American values. Contradic- Shoshoni elders. may have increased tions abound, especially Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman, eds., Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict ticket sales, but it was when Chan tries to position Zones, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, 361 pp., paperback. false advertising, since A still from The Thief of Bagdad.From Wong within Confucian and “[W]ar is increasingly waged on the bodies of unarmed civilians,” who suffer most she retains her top in Anna May Wong (Hodges). Daoist philosophies: Practi- of the casualties, explain Giles and Hyndman in their introduction to this antholo- the movie. Like many cally putting ancient quotes gy of essays by feminist researchers about contemporary conflicts around the young women eager for screen time in the in her mouth, he claims she valued educa- world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and Sri Lanka. 1920s, Wong learned to perform in a spec- tion, family, and traditional Chinese culture. In such conflicts, the distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, tacularly theatrical way and wore revealing Yet she dropped out of high school, moved and state and domestic security are being erased, and women, children, and racial costumes that pushed the boundaries of away from family, and, as Chan himself and ethnic minorities suffer new forms of violence. acceptability. Moreover, she was routinely states, “liberated herself from ethnicity, Nancy M. Grace and Ronna C. Johnson, Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and cast in roles—prostitute and dancer— nationality, and race.” Reading Women Beat Writers, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004, 295 pp., paperback. When asked what prompted her to write her memoir designed to bring a touch of scandal and sex What does it mean to say that Wong “lib- How I Became Hettie Jones, the poet and one time wife of Amiri Baraka (Leroy Jones) to the screen. Referring to The Devil Dancer erated” herself from her race? Some said that she wanted people to know that even before the women’s movement of (1927), Hodges notes that the “dancing...of Chinese-American and Chinese critics fault- the ’70s, she and other women had “removed themselves from general cultural Anna May and the other nautch girls, was ed Wong for “degrading” portrayals of expectations . . .we were here and we had made changes in women’s lives.” enough to make New York State’s censorship Asians, and they appeared to hold her, not Paradoxically, despite the male Beats’ well-known patriarchal attitudes, many of the board require heavy cuts of close-ups of the the film industry, responsible for the limited women in this collection of interviews found this movement liberating. A general half-clad women.” (In 1934, the industry’s roles she landed. Despite the enormous introduction to the book provides background on the Beats, and introductions to Production Code set standards for films in an efforts she made for the China Relief effort each Q&A interview provide biographical information about each writer and a dis- attempt to keep state censors from cutting up in the US, she was snubbed by members of cussion of her work. prints.) Given Wong’s ambition—she the Chinese-American elite as well as by dis- Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich, New York: dropped out of high school to act in pic- tinguished Chinese visitors such as Madame Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 499 pp., paper. Guenther examines the failure of the tures—she probably recognized an angle as a Chiang Kai-Shek, who reportedly looked Nazi attempt to create fashions that would promote official gender policies and performer and tried to work it as long as she down on her as both American and of make Germany a European fashion capital. The chaos and contradictions of Nazi could. For typed characters like prostitutes Cantonese peasant stock. Wong lived most- philosophy manifested themselves in the realm of fashion as everywhere else, as and dancers, the final reel usually meant exile ly alone or near her youngest brother, dirndl skirts were promoted to proper Aryan women while the wives of high-rank- or death. Later, Wong found it difficult to get Richard. In leaving her ethnic community ing Nazis wore French couture. Meanwhile, in the midst of war, shortages of cast for parts that were not of these types. for an international career, she became mar- shoes and clothing were rampant, especially for concentration camp inmates. This still happens to genre and character ginal to it, removed from the interests and Linda M. Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, and Nancy Curtis, eds., Crazy Woman actors. But as Hodges and Chan observe, the concerns of its people. Creek: Women Rewrite the American West, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, fate of Wong’s characters may also have been While Chan wants Wong to appear noble 336 pp., paperback. The editors’ third collection of essays, stories, and poems determined by the impossibility of a happy and chaste offscreen, Hodges explains that solicited from women in the western US provides a revisionist, non-romantic pic- ending for an interracial relationship in west- Wong’s life was full of parties, love affairs, ture of the region. The topics of the pieces, by urban, rural, and suburban women, ern cinema at that time. She was never shown and drinking (which contributed to her early young, middle-aged, and elderly (they seem less diverse in terms of race and eth- nicity), range from bingo games to a rape crisis center to the AIDS memorial quilt kissing her white male co-stars on screen. death). According to Hodges, Wong usually to health food. “Crazy Woman Creek,” one of the editors reads the sign on a Studying Wong’s acting, dancing, ges- became involved with older, married white bridge during a road trip. Why, she wonders, it is never “Wonderful Woman tures, make-up, hair styles, clothing choices, men such as directors Tod Browning and Creek,” or “First Woman Doctor Creek”? and personal correspondence, Hodges Richard Eichberg and radio producer Eric Jody Raphael, Listening to Olivia: Violence, Poverty, and Prostitution, Boston, MA: argues that Wong deliberately created a Maschwitz. She never married, and Hodges Northeastern University Press, 2004, 308 pp., paperback. Olivia ran away “Chinese persona.” That persona also implies that she was a tragic figure, much like from a difficult home life at age 16 to become a stripper. This oral history appealed to non-Chinese audiences’ fasci- the ill-fated women she played on screen, recounts her journey from prostitution, hardship, and abuse to recovery. “I am nated notions of the “Orient”: “English who died over forbidden interracial love. one of the few women who have survived this lifestyle,” she tells Raphael when girls tinted their faces ivory with ochre color But perhaps this is too operatic a conclu- they meet. “I am telling my story to give hope, so other people understand the to the ‘Wong complexion.’ They cut their sion for a complex life, even for someone dynamics of prostitution and do not judge so much.” Expanding the story hair with bangs in the front to achieve the who performed “Madame Butterfly” roles. beyond Olivia’s individual experience, Raphael places it in the context of sociolog- ‘Wong haircut.’” In the US, Paramount even As both biographers acknowledge, Wong was ical data on poverty and prostitution. advised theaters to “use publicity stunts to ambivalent about marriage, especially to an Maureen Sabine, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study of make Euro-American girls look Chinese.” Asian American: If she married, she feared The Woman Warrior and China Men, Honolulu, HA: University of Hawai’i Early in Wong’s career, she reportedly she would be bound by the expectation that Press, 2004, 229 pp., hardcover. Maxine Hong Kingston has said that she origi- switched from styling herself as a flapper, a a wife would give up her career and inde- nally conceived of The Woman Warrior and China Men as a single, huge book and in style that made her film peers Clara Bow pendence. Of course, marrying a non-Asian fact wrote them at the same time, separating them only later as the work became and Louise Brooks famous, to making her- would also have been a problem, because unwieldy. Sabine believes that feminist critics have concentrated excessively on The self appear more Chinese. In interviews, she there were laws against miscegenation until Woman Warrior, ignoring its companion work, and in The Broken Book of Life consid- said she was proud to be Chinese and deeply 1967. Questions left unexplained are why she ers both together, as they comment on and add depth to one another. influenced by her family’s Cantonese tradi- chose older married men, and what her Jane B. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War American, Chapel tions. By downplaying her American identi- alleged affair with Marlene Dietrich meant to Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, 376 pp., hardcover. Over 20,000 women from different regions, races, and classes worked as nurses, ty, she may also have sought to capitalize on her. Chan argues that Wong’s lifestyle “pre- cooks, and laundresses in Union and Confederate hospitals, says Schultz, in this the ways in which she was already perceived dated the idea of the independent European account of the role of women relief workers in the war as well as of the experi- as Other in the western world. American woman of the late 1950s.” ences of individual women. She goes on to examine the war’s aftereffects, such as However, both biographers miss a more the 1892 Nurses Pension Act, which restricted pensions to those who had served as rom the start, Chan distinguishes his specific context for understanding Wong’s Union army nurses only, excluding women who had held other kinds of positions. book as the only one “written from a personal life: She lived like other screen Sally Webster, Eve’s Daughter/Modern Woman: A Mural by Mary Cassatt, Urbana F uniquely Asian-American perspec- actresses. Brooks was promiscuous. Dietrich and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004, 155 pp., hardcover. tive.” He certainly is the most qualified to was bisexual. Greta Garbo was a recluse. Webster tells the story of the mural that the American Impressionist painter Mary explain many aspects of Chinese and Katharine Hepburn carried on a long, open Cassatt created for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Chinese-American history, areas in which he affair with the married Spencer Tracy, yet Exposition in Chicago. Modern Woman was one of two large murals installed in the has expertise. More problematically, he por- remained on her own. Wong’s biographers building’s Hall of Honor. Now lost, it is known through written descriptions and trays Wong as a positive role model. Indeed, fail to consider that she was like other inde- reproductions. Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science, the mural’s he dedicates his book to potential future pendent-minded women of her generation, central panel, says Webster, was “a transgressive interpretation of the Genesis leg- readers—“all those Chinese girls adopted by who grew up in the heady modern times of end,” in which “attainment of knowledge is not a sin but an essential step in non-Chinese families”—on the assumption the early 20th century but did not fit com- woman’s move toward equality.” that they will learn from her example. fortably into the norm. I —Amy Hoffman

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