The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XXI, No. 7 April 2004 74035 $4.00

In This Issue

Listen Here, an anthology of web.qx.net/sara and www.cricket-press.com stories, poems, and memoirs by Appalachian women, is like an old- fashioned general store—stocked with the basics as well as with incongruous, unexpected treasures. Cover story D

Media critic Jennifer Pozner talks with She’s Not There author Jennifer Finney Boylan—formerly James—about why reporters are asking the same questions of trans- sexuals now as they were 15 or even 20 years ago. Public awareness has changed, says Boylan. Why hasn’t Dateline’s? p. 5.

While debunking the idea that science and politics can ever be completely separated, Anne Fausto- Sterling provides a “recipe” for ana- Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia cover lyzing Bush administration fuzzy photo by Sara L. Turner © 2004. science. p. 7.

When the results of the Women’s Health Initiative study of so-called Hormone Replacement Longing for persimmons Therapy for menopause were by Trish Crapo released, women all over the coun- try quit Premarin cold turkey, fear- Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia edited by Sandra L. Ballard and ing breast cancer. In The Greatest Patricia L. Hudson. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, Experiment Ever Performed on 2003, 673 pp., $45.00 hardcover. Women, veteran health writer Barbara Seaman tells the story of the drug that was supposed to make urwood’s was a stuffed-full dry- were cats everywhere. I worked over there goods store in the mountains of at Durwood’s, selling his wife’s home- us “feminine forever.” p. 12. D North Carolina, the kind of place made fried pies, something you might not where dusty boxes of outdated Christmas expect to find in a hardware store... and more... ornaments were jumbled on the shelves Durwood’s was a place where people went with hammers, “which were mixed in with for more than what they could buy. You 04> screwdrivers, which were mixed in with can go down to Kmart for a box of nails drill bits, which were mixed in with exten- if that’s all you want.” sion cords.… If you were wanting nails,” Listen Here is a lot like Durwood’s. Ruth, the narrator of Catherine Landis’ Landis is only one of 105 women writers novel Some Days There’s Pie, says, “you had represented in this new anthology, in 74470 74035 03 to scoop them out of a wooden keg and which fiction is mixed in with poetry, PRINTED IN THE USA weigh them on a rusting scale, and there continued on page 3 The Women’s Review Contents of Books Center for Research on Women Wellesley College 1 Trish Crapo Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia edited by Sandra L. Ballard and 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA 02481 Patricia L. Hudson (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview 4 Letters Volume XXI, No. 7 April 2004 4 Jennifer L. Pozner She’s Not There: A Life In Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman 5 Jennifer L. Pozner GENDER IMMIGRANT: A conversation with Jennifer Finney Boylan [email protected] PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash 7 Anne Fausto-Sterling IS SCIENCE OBJECTIVE? The Bush administration has been criticized [email protected]

for mixing science and politics. But is this really the problem? CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Martha Nichols, Jan Zita Grover 9 Joy Connolly Olympia Morata: The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic edited and POETRY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: translated by Holt N. Parker Robin Becker Mary Cappello The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk ADVERTISING MANAGER: Anita D. McClellan 10 [email protected] 11 Ritu Menon The Sari by Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler [email protected]

12 Cynthia A. Pearson The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding STUDENT WORKERS: Nissa Hiatt, Martha the Estrogen Myth by Barbara Seaman Ortiz, Bethany Towne EDITORIAL BOARD: Margaret Andersen 14 Brooks Robards Jane Austen on Screen edited by Gina Macdonald and Andrew F. Macdonald Robin Becker Claudia M. Christie Marsha Darling Anne Fausto-Sterling 14 Jody Bolz Two poems Carol Gilligan Sandra Harding Nancy Hartsock Evelyn Fox Keller Jean Baker 15 Alison Townsend Livelihood by Phoebe MacAdams; Embellishments by Virginia Chase Sutton Miller Ruth Perry Peggy Phelan Helene Vivienne Wenzel 16 Anne Marie Todkill Am I Still A Woman? Hysterectomy and Gender Identity by Jean Elson EDITORIAL POLICY: 17 Karla Jay The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars edited by Whitney Chadwick The Women’s Review of Books is feminist but not restricted to any one conception of feminism; all and Tirza True Latimer writing that is neither sexist, racist, homophobic, nor otherwise discriminatory is welcome. We 18 Susanne Boitano The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns by Elizabeth Kuhns seek to represent the widest possible range of feminist perspectives both in the books 19 Barbara Sjoholm The World: Travels 1950-2000 by Jan Morris reviewed and in the content of the reviews. We believe that no one of us can speak for femi- 20 The Bookshelf nism, or women, as such; all of our thinking and writing takes place in a specific political, social, ethnic, and sexual context, and a respon- sible review periodical should reflect and fur- ther that diversity. The Women’s Review takes no editorial stance; all the views expressed in it rep- Contributors resent the opinion of the individual authors. ADVERTISING POLICY: SUSANNE BOITANO is a freelance writer living in Jamaica CYNTHIA PEARSON joined the women’s health movement Visit www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview to Plain, MA. While she thinks nuns might really be onto something, the night she saw cervical self-examination. Four years earlier, book an ad online; preview the current issue she can’t imagine missing out on the new spring fashions. Carol Downer first shared cervical self-examination with members and classified ads; and download a media kit of a Los Angeles abortion rights group after being inspired by the including display, classified, and line rates, JODY BOLZ, an editor of the journal Poet Lore, teaches at transformative potential of direct action when she heard a radio sizes and shapes, policies, and deadlines. George Washington University. Her poems have appeared recently account of Alice Wolfson’s disruption of the Senate pill hearings. in The American Scholar, Ploughshares, and River Styx, as well as in a Pearson began working at the National Women’s Health Network The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN #0738- number of anthologies. Her first book, A Lesson in Narrative Time, 1433) is published monthly except August by in 1987 and has been its executive director since 1996. will be published in October by Gihon Books. The Women’s Review, Inc., 828 Washington JENNIFER L. POZNER is a freelance writer and the founding Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. Annual subscrip- MARY CAPPELLO is a professor of English at the University director of Women In Media & News (WIMN), a media monitor- tions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for of Rhode Island. She is the author of the memoir, Night Bloom, ing, training, and outreach organization. She’s so fascinated by institutions. Overseas postage fees are an and most recently, “Moscow, 9/11,” in Raritan, an essay on what it media portrayals of gender that she conducts multimedia presenta- additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 surface mail was like to teach creative writing at the Gorky Literary Institute in to all countries outside the US. Back issues are tions on gender roles in “reality TV” on college campuses Moscow following the events of September 11th. She is compos- available for $4.00 per copy. Please allow 6-8 throughout the country. She can be reached at ing a book-length essay on “awkwardness.” weeks for all subscription transactions. [email protected]. Periodicals class postage paid at Boston, MA JOY CONNOLLY teaches classics and the history of political BROOKS ROBARDS is a poet, journalist, and professor emerita and additional mailing offices. POSTMAS- thought at Stanford University. This year she is writing a book on at Westfield State College, with an MA and AB in English litera- TER: send address corrections to The Women’s Ciceronian political theory and its modern reception at the Center ture and a PhD in communication studies. The author of 10 Review of Books, Wellesley College Center for for Human Values, Princeton University. Research on Women, Wellesley, MA 02481. books, including Arnold Schwarzenegger (1992), she writes about and TRISH CRAPO is a freelance writer and editor who lives in does radio commentary on film. The Women’s Review of Books is a project of Leyden, MA. Her poems have appeared in anthologies and jour- the Wellesley College Center for Research BARBARA SJOHOLM is the editor of Steady as She Goes: on Women. nals, most recently Southern Poetry Review. She is working on a novel. Women’s Adventures at Sea and the forthcoming travel book The The Women’s Review is distributed by Total ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING is professor of biology and gen- Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of Circulation, New York City, NY, and Ingram, der studies at Brown University. Her most recent book is Sexing the the Sea. Her essays have appeared in American Scholar, Brick, The Nashville, TN. All other distribution is han- Body: Gender and the Construction of Sexuality. New York Times, and Smithsonian. Under the name Barbara Wilson, dled directly by The Women’s Review. she is the author of Blue Windows and Gaudi Afternoon. KARLA JAY is distinguished professor of English and women’s The contents of The Women’s Review of Books and gender studies at Pace University in New York City. Her most ANNE MARIE TODKILL is senior deputy editor of the are copyright © 2004. All rights reserved; reprint by permission only. recent short story, “Swimming with Sharks,” appeared in Telling Canadian Medical Association Journal. Moments, edited by Lynda Hall. With Yvonne M. Klein, she is ALISON TOWNSEND is the author of two books of poetry, working on a new translation of the prose of Renée Vivien. The Blue Dress and What the Body Knows. Her poetry and essays have RITU MENON is co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s oldest appeared widely, in journals such as The North American Review, New feminist press, and of Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Letters, Fourth Genre, Margie, and The Southern Review, and anthologies Women. She has written and published widely on women, and is such Are You Experienced?: Baby Boom Poets at Mid-Life and Boomer co-author of Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition and of Girls. She is an associate professor of English, creative writing, and Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India. women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 Longing for persimmons authentic.…The whole ambience is There are plenty of familiar and well continued from p.1 American Primitive. And besides, it’s loved writers in Listen Here—childrens’ just for one year. One year for me to writers Rebecca Caudill and Cynthia New from which is mixed in with children’s litera- write my book about getting away from Rylant, novelists Gail Godwin and 2 ture, drama, memoir, and nonfiction. it all in a forgotten corner of Appalachia. Jayne Anne Phillips—but just as satis- Writers with one book appear along- I’m going to do for this place what Peter fying was stumbling upon work I didn’t side those who’ve published 20. The Mayle did for Provence.” already know. I learned of a movement account of an 1891 miners’ strike writ- The collective narrators, who watch of black women poets called the ten by Mary Harris (Mother Jones) is from the edge of the yard in the first Afrilachian poets. Betsy Sholl’s long followed by Jane Wilson Joyce’s plain- paragraph, seem at first to be children: poem “Appalachian Winter” carried me spoken, contemporary poems. The “The new people were wrong for us. through Hansel and Gretel’s forbidding diversity of genres and styles spanning We could tell by their smell…” but forest to a peaceful Appalachian front 170 years gives Listen Here a wide open turn out, rather gratifyingly, to be the porch. Sharyn McCrumb gave me a feel, and its editors have chosen brier bushes of the title. As the story glimpse into insider/outsider relations refreshingly generous criteria for progresses, they creep into and across at “The Cosmic Possum Hikers belonging. Writers who left Appalachia the yard, snagging the woman, clam- Hostel” on the Appalachian Trail. I (“Appa-LATCH-ah,” a character in one bering over the antique apple tree, and read old-timey rhyming poems thick story tells us) as kids and writers who finally entangling the writer as he hacks with dialect and poems in the speaking chose it as adults are included as gra- at them with a scythe. “Slash slash voices of contemporary women, meant ciously as those whose families have slash he went, his eyes hot and bright. to be performed live. been there for generations. It’s not how This was what he had come to the The sheer number of entries—and long you’ve lived in a place that mat- country for: to feel his blood pumping, their necessary brevity—made for a ters, editors Sandra Ballard and Patricia to feel alive.” sometimes slapdash format. Many Hudson assert through their choices, But though the writer has grown a excerpts were introduced as a “scene” “Converting Women is a sensi- it’s how well you paid attention. beard and learned to play a few twang- and were only a page to a few pages Piece after piece in Listen Here res- ing notes on a dulcimer, he has dan- long. At times, I felt as if really inter- tive and understanding analy- onates with details that are a joy to gerously missed the point. You can’t esting women were rushing past me, sis of the enabling function encounter. Florence Cope Bush, in adopt someone else’s authentic life as offering only scraps of their stories, as that both converting and being “Dorie: Woman of the Mountains,” your own. though they were shouting from a describes how the Cherokee of the train. I barely got situated on a front converted to Christianity in early 1900s made chestnut dumplings t the Key West Writers’ Seminar porch or in a mine shaft, barely figured India provided for women of with such precision that you could on The Spirit of Place in 2000, out what kind of person a narrator both India and the West. make them yourself if you could only A Dorothy Allison, whose novel might be—or in the case of “Briers,” find corn shucks. For dessert, you Bastard Out of Carolina is excerpted in what kind of plant—before the scene Kent’s particular gifts lie in her could roast wasp larvae on sticks over Listen Here, spoke bluntly about the was over. Near the end of the book, understanding of the extent to an open fire. Lily May Ledford, one of relationship poor people have to however, my washing machine broke, which India operated as an the founders of the Coon Creek Girls, “place.” “Place ain’t easy,” she said. causing me to read great chunks of it in America’s first all-woman string band, “That place I loved, I hated.” Her sister laundromats, which—as I read about epistemic and ontological site learns at the age of seven to play a had scoffed at the lofty sound of the women giving birth or hoeing gardens that helped to construct both “groundhog hide banjo”—one of seminar’s title, Allison told the audi- or stitching quilts—struck me as the- local Indian Christians and many phrases in Listen Here that made ence, and had urged her not to lie matically satisfying. The shortness of me wish for an accompanying CD. At about where they’d grown up. “The the pieces, which had bothered me European and American single 19, Ledford tells us in her memoir, she spirit of that place was nasty,” her sister before, turned out to be perfectly suit- women missionaries.” went to Nashville to make a record. A said. And Allison, commenting on how ed to a 50-cent dryer cycle. —Eugene Irschick, Department of fan, worried that she might be home- many times her family had to move to Editors Ballard and Hudson had History, University of California, Berkeley sick, sent “a live, crated possum” that make way for development, quipped, hard choices to make, and they chose “wouldn’t let itself be petted, nor “We lived in the future of Greenville, inclusiveness over depth. Their intro- $47.50 would it eat anything I brought to it. It South Carolina.” duction quotes West Virginia Poet just huddled up and grinned. How I The excerpt from Bastard in Listen Laureate Irene McKinney: “I’m a hill- longed for persimmons, favorite food Here tells of the derision a working billy, a woman, and a poet, and I under- of possums.” single woman encounters when she stood early on that nobody was going How I longed for persimmons, too! tries to have the court-stamped word to listen to anything I had to say any- Or blackberry jam or cherry pie or the “ILLEGITIMATE” removed from her way, so I might as well just say what I “great big cake covered all over with lit- daughter’s birth certificate. The novel want to.” The goal of Listen Here, tle white strings of coconut” that the as a whole is a magnificently written Ballard and Hudson state, “is to ensure famished characters in Lee Smith’s and frightening account of the effects that more people have the opportunity novel Saving Grace eat by the side of the of poverty on the lives of well-mean- to listen.” Given this goal, the broad road after their car blows up (“pow!”) ing people. sweep makes sense. While I might and catches fire. Who doesn’t long for a Similar struggles are depicted in quibble over some of the entries—a world in which a stranger would drive other excerpts. Rebecca Harding Davis’ few struck me as overly sentimental or up and bestow a cake on you just when 1861 novella, Life in the Iron Mills, por- as mainly of historic, not literary, inter- you needed it, or where people sit on trays the soul-crushing daily grind of est—I found them all to be well intro- the porch in the evening and talk about the mill workers’ lives. Irene duced and supplemented with lists of politics while “munching on fried fish” McKinney’s poems from her collection both primary and secondary sources, “Judith N. McArthur and Harold the way Nikki Giovanni’s grandmother Six O’Clock Mine Report tell of the stul- and connected to the whole by themat- does? As readers, we want more than a tifying environment of the coal mines: ic concerns of place, family, social jus- L. Smith have told the Minnie Kmart box of nails. tice, and love, to name just a few. I Fisher Cunningham saga with But this longing can easily mutate At Hardtack and Amity the grit admire Ballard’s and Hudson’s ambi- political sophistication and in into cheap romanticism or, worse, abrades the skin. The air is thick tion, and there’s a certain charm to the exploitation. In her poem “The above the black leaves, the open anthology’s breathlessness—as if the sufficient detail to illuminate a Vampire Ethnographer,” Amy Tipton mouth editors can’t wait to introduce you to century of political life in Cortner describes a “hillbilly vampire” of the shaft. A man with a the next writer. Even the last entry isn’t Texas and the country as a who “lived in a condo/called Mountain burning really the “end”—following it is a 12- Heritage Estates./He had many page list of “More Women Writing in whole . For this deeply degrees/and many publications in carbide lamp on his forehead Appalachia” to pore over. researched, generous, tough- small magazines.” At night, he could be swings a pick in a narrow In her excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker minded biography, we are found “prowling the bars and the back corridor Creek, Annie Dillard writes that she is roads/looking for fresh informa- beneath the earth. His eyes flare “telling some tales and describing indebted to Ms. McArthur and tion/whose heart-blood of mountain white like a horse’s, his teeth some of the sights of this rather Mr. Smith, who have resur- lore/had not yet been discovered/and glint. (p. 430) tamed valley, and exploring, in fear rected a woman of whom sucked dry/tape recorder fanged and and trembling, some of the unmapped to the ready.” There is plenty of joy to be found in dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to Texans can be inordinately In Elaine Fowler Palencia’s Listen Here as well. There are births and which those tales and sights so dizzy- proud.” “Briers,” one of the few short stories marriages and an old woman fending ingly lead.” Listen Here, too, leads us — The Dallas Morning News presented in its entirety, a similar char- off burglars by being smarter than they into this region, convincing us of its acter shows up in the form of a writer are. Annie Dillard gives us the joy of vast treasures. If readers find them- $38.00 who buys an old homestead in paying close attention to nature; selves, as I did, scribbling down the Kentucky. His wife grouses—“God, Barbara Kingsolver, the joy of her names of writers to track down later, where am I going to get arugula?”— fluid, right-on-key voice that poured Ballard and Hudson have accom- Visit us online at www.oup.com/us but the writer gushes, “This is so over me like a thick, literary balm. plished their goal.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 3 Letters Living her best life To the Editor: and a sexpot. Why must she choose? I read Meryl Altman’s musings on Sexuality and creativity are both the by Jennifer L. Pozner Sappho with interest and I very much provinces of women. They are inter- appreciate her praise for my novel, twined in the nerves and in the dream- She’s Not There: A Life In Two Genders Sappho’s Leap. Though I never respond life. The tragedy of women in patriar- to reviews anymore, I am tempted to chal society is the necessity to choose by Jennifer Finney Boylan. New York: respond to a thoughtful woman critic. one or the other—or else to be pillo- Would Aphrodite wish her ode ried and mocked by both women and Broadway Books, 2003, 320 pp., [“Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite”] to men. We are called “raunchy” at best spend eternity immortalized beside the and burned at the stake at worst. $24.95 hardcover, $14.95 paper. “zipless fuck”? Ms. Altman asks. Yes. Sexual women are never taken serious- Aphrodite was the goddess of desire. ly as artists. Anaïs Nin cautioned me All expressions of desire interested about this when I was in my 20s. “But her. Indeed she provoked them with Ms. Nin, we must change that!” I hen novelist James Boylan was transgender acceptance I’d ever seen in the help of her son Eros. It is appar- naively protested. Rejection of the a young boy, he played a game any mainstream media interview. ently so hard for contemporary erotic remains a problem even with W in which he pretended to be In She’s Not There as well as in her sub- Americans to deal with our puritanical sympathetic critics—as Ms. Altman’s an astronaut crashing onto a “Girl sequent media tour, Boylan presents a pic- conditioning that we sanitize even self-protective snideness toward my Planet” that turned anyone who ture vastly different from the images Aphrodite. The Ancient Greeks were work demonstrates. breathed its air into a girl—body, clothes, broadcast media love to portray of angry, far more accepting of the varieties of “As her Afterword explains, she and all. As a teenager he covertly tried on grieving wives and pathetic, selfish hus- sexuality than we. They had a sense of sees Sappho as a cross between Sylvia his mother’s and sister’s dresses, think- bands. For example, just recently Dateline humor about lust and the absurd Plath and Madonna,” she writes. Not ing, “Why am I doing this?... Because I NBC spent a year following a woman behavior we exhibit in the name of at all. Ms. Altman misses the irony of can’t not.” Yet no amount of play was named Joyce and her husband David, who lust. If Aphrodite and Hephaestus, her this comparison. What I say is that enough to calm his anxiety. “I was filled was in the process of becoming Victoria. lover, could be netted by Zeus and Sappho is so unique in being both with a yearning that could not be quelled Reporter Dawn Fratangelo repeatedly humiliated before all the Gods, the zip- poet and performer that we have no by rayon,” Boylan muses. badgered Joyce with variations on the less fuck would hardly shock them. modern equivalent for her. (The clos- It would be four decades before James question “Why go through all of this? This is one of the things Ancient est equivalent would be Joni Mitchell would find peace...as Jennifer. It is this Why stay?” When Joyce said their love Greece has to teach us. The Greeks or Judy Collins.) She sang her songs as struggle—and eventual triumph—that would prevail, Dateline was skeptical: “It understood far better than we that a troubadour and she probed the lies at the heart of She’s Not There, a mem- seemed too calm a response for some- desire was tricky, fickle, and absurd. depths of the psyche as a poet. By oir of one man’s heart-wrenching journey thing so drastic,” Fratangelo narrated. The They delighted in ascribing human fail- summoning the two disparate spirits to become the woman she always knew newsmagazine edited a year’s worth of ings to their goddesses and gods. of Plath and Madonna I was attempt- herself to be. I first became aware of She’s footage to highlight Joyce’s pain and loss “To judge by Jong, the feminine ing to shock the reader into seeing Not There when Jennifer Finney Boylan and to downplay the couple’s commit- seems to be in more of a mess than Sappho’s uniqueness. promoted it on two Oprah Winfrey Show ment to one another. The implication was ever: Is the representative Woman a “We don’t know much about episodes. As a man, Oprah’s audience that their marriage was bound to disinte- singer or a sexpot? Must she choose?” Sappho, but we’re pretty sure she was- learned, James Finney Boylan had had an grate, despite having survived “so far.” Altman asks. To which I answer: the n’t Jewish,” Altman writes. Is there intelligent, loving wife, Grace Finney, two representative woman is both a singer some occult anti-Semitism here or does spunky children, and four critically adly, that sort of framework is she mean that only a Jew would write: acclaimed novels—The Constellations, The more the rule than the exception “Plato, Schmato?” I doubt this. Planets, Getting In, and Remind Me To S when media take on transsexuali- Yiddishisms so infuse American Murder You Later. He chaired the English ty—which makes Jennifer Finney humor than even Episcopalians use department at Colby College, was consid- Boylan’s contribution to our political cli- Women’s lives them. My novel is, among other things, ered the one teacher whose class students mate particularly important. Since the in MISSISSIPPI a satire on utopianism. had to take before graduation, and played publication of She’s Not There, Boylan has I hope that someday I will in a rock band. It was a good life, a life made the media rounds, her savviness as encounter a reviewer who possesses Jim was proud of, a life he was desperate- an interviewee resulting in a relatively rare that apparently vestigial organ, the ly afraid of losing—yet he was plagued by phenomenon: coverage of transgender funnybone. Grateful as I am for any the knowledge that it was only “the sec- issues that educates rather than exploits. serious consideration, I wish my irony ond best life” he could lead. The knowl- The same week as Dateline sensationalized were not so often taken literally. edge “that I was in the wrong body, living Joyce and Victoria’s story, CBS’s 48 Hours Erica Jong the wrong life, was never out of my con- Investigates ran a sensitive, illuminating, and New York, NY scious mind,” she writes. empowering segment (at least by the stan- Boylan struggled every day to be a dards of broadcast news) on Boylan, Meryl Altman responds: man, hoping love would “cure” him of focusing not on Grace’s pain but on I appreciate Erica Jong’s response: his desire to be female. At age 42 he lost Boylan’s struggle from childhood until “Thoughtful” is the nicest thing any- the struggle. After what amounted to a the present, the acceptance she has been Wishing for Snow one has called me in weeks, and I too mental breakdown, Jim realized he could- shown by the Colby College community, A Memoir am in favor of sex, generally speaking. n’t take one more step in male shoes, lit- and the reality that she and thousands of MINROSE GWIN Tone is hard. I did think Sappho’s Leap erally or figuratively. Though he wished to James in Florence, Italy, In telling the story of her mentally was funny, and was hoping parts of my protect Grace from heartbreak, he finally 1999. From She’s Not There. ill poet mother, Gwin looks back- review were funny, too. had to reveal to her the reality he’d con- ward and forward at a southern cealed his entire life: He was transgen- family, linking personal and cultural dered, that wasn’t ever going to change, malaise while also attempting to The Women’s Review of Books and he had no choice but to face it. envision the person her mother And that, Boylan told Oprah’s view- longed to be, the woman Gwin welcomes letters to the editor. never knew. ers, is when James began the emotional- $24.95 ly, physically, and interpersonally chal- Mail your letters to Amy Hoffman, lenging process of becoming Jenny, the Life and Death in Editor in Chief, Women’s Review of articulate, attractive, and dignified Books, Center for Research on woman who sat before them in the stu- a Small Southern Women, Wellesley College, 106 dio. Boylan described the impact her Tow n Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481; transition had on her family, noting that Memories of Shubuta, Mississippi fax them to the attention of Amy their love has endured even if it has changed along with her gender—she and GAYLE GRAHAM YATES Hoffman at (781) 283-3645; e-mail Grace have stayed married and are rais- In this lyrical memoir and local them to ahoffman@ wellesley.edu; or ing their children together, though they history combined, Yates tells of her visit our website at www.welles- own moral journey from judgmen- now live more as sisters than lovers. tal young activist to middle-aged ley.edu/WomensReview and use the Defusing contentious questions from scholar who sees her home with handy form. Please make sure to the talk TV queen (such as Oprah’s accu- newfound compassion. include your mailing address and satory, pulse-of-the-audience query, $24.95 paper phone number in your letter. We “What do you think, ladies? Is it selfish to just up and turn yourself into a especially appreciate letters of 300 woman, or what?”) with humor, insight, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS words or less. (800) 861-3477 • www.lsu.edu/lsupress and grace, Boylan struck me as perhaps the most effective spokesperson for

4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 much of it was about wanting to fit in, how much about unconsciously adapting to female socialization, and how much, if any, was about trying © Bruce Strong Gender immigrant to get used to this new identity as by Jennifer L. Pozner Jenny, after struggling with the iden- tity of Jim for decades? A conversation with Jennifer Finney Boylan JFB: Early on I took voice lessons, and learning that feminine inflection was one of the primary things I was ight on political theory but full of sto- ed that to endure the indignity and awk- “instructed” to perform. But it annoyed ries about the ways gender politics wardness of changing genders. It’s pos- me, and in the end, I gave up most of L trickle into our daily lives, She’s Not sible in a strange, ironic way that the the so-called “feminine” inflections and There, which became a New York Times male life I lived gave me the courage to adopted a more androgynous voice, bestseller, is subversive, illuminating, surrender it. which feels natural to me. Jennifer Finney Boylan poignant, and funny. The book’s working title Being trangendered is not about mas- I think the feminine inflection of others who have had gender reassign- was “Gender Immigrant”: Boylan has traveled culinity and femininity, it’s about male- voice rising at the end of sentences is a ment surgery live full lives as well-adjust- from the culture of men to the culture of ness and femaleness. I’m female now, particularly adolescent inflection, and ed, responsible adults. “When people see women and lived to tell the tale. What follows which is to say I have a female body, but grown women are less likely to do it— me,” she says at the close of the segment, is an edited transcript of a conversation about I’m feminine in some ways and not in which makes sense, since adults are “they see a good parent. And when you the ways that gender is “done” in our society, others. I have the right to decide on any more confident than teenagers. I’ve also see our family, it doesn’t seem like an whether trading a plate of ribs for a salad is given day, just as all women do, where I occasionally heard it in the voices of unusual thing. You see four people who the result of nature or nurture, and the joys— fall along the femininity spectrum—with young men. But think about the way love each other.” and unexpected cultural baggage—that come Dolly Parton on one end and Janet Reno you’d ask, on the phone, “Is Mr. Smith with being female in America. on the other. there?” You’d ask it as a question, I’d n the hands of a less gifted writer, the wager. A man is more likely to state it. story of a woman forced to spend 40 Jennifer Pozner: The subtitle of your JP: When most of us talk about “Yes, is Mr. Smith there.” It’s an order, I years of her life trapped in a body that book is A Life in Two Genders. “finding our voice,” we mean it not a request. My guess is that there’s a did not match her spirit (Boylan calls it her Having lived most of your life as a metaphorically. You had to find a lit- whole lot of socially charged informa- “being alive problem”) would have provoked man, what were your expectations eral, physical voice appropriate for tion in that inflection. nothing as much in the reader as the desire about becoming female? your new body. You place an empha- We all want to fit in, and I wanted to to crawl into bed, play a maudlin CD, and sis in the book on the language of fit in, too. So I think both consciously bemoan life’s cruelty. Likewise, if told by a Jennifer Finney Boylan: It’s important gender—how men typically speak and unconsciously I found myself adopt- more self-aggrandizing and less self-criti- to understand that if you’re a transsexu- with authority yet women often ing certain social behaviors we associate cal author, Boylan’s memoir could have al, you’re not changing genders in order speak with a questioning lilt, as in with women. But isn’t that the difference come off simply as a feel-good motiva- to get a better deal. Having lived in this “Hello, my name is Michelle?” For between being an adult and being a tional tale, a roadmap for those seeking to culture and having been a professor for years, you told your female students teenager—finding the courage to be our- overcome unthinkable obstacles to claim many years, I had a pretty clear sense of to state their names because “Your selves, rather than bending under the the identity that would make them feel the realities of being female, but what I identity is not a question.” Yet, you pressure of our peers, or society? whole—but this would have offered only a most wanted was a sense of peace. And say that you found yourself introduc- one-dimensional look at a complicated, that is absolutely what I’ve found now ing yourself as “Jenny Boylan?” JP: There’s a way most people “do” emotionally tumultuous subject. Instead, that my gender and my spirit match. As What was behind that change: How gender—we mimic what we’re She’s Not There is fearlessly honest, some- I go through the course of my day there times sad, and often inspiring. are things that are aggravating about As professor James Finney Boylan, being a woman and many things that are Jennifer writes, “I used to stand at the wonderful—but I can wake up in the ✤ A R I Z O N A ✤ lectern in my coat and tie, waving my morning without having to wonder glasses around, urging students to find “what gender am I?” or worry about Blood and Voice the courage to become themselves. Then what to do about a struggle that to most Navajo Women Ceremonial Practitioners I’d go back to the office and lock the other people is incomprehensible. That MAUREEN TRUDELLE SCHWARZ door and put my head down on the is the particular dilemma for transsexu- Drawing on interviews with seventeen Navajo women practitioners desk.” She’s Not There brings readers als: The main thing that is required to and five apprentices, Schwarz explicates women’s role as ceremo- along with Boylan as she finds the understand the condition is imagination. nial singers and shows that it is more complex than has previously been thought. She details how women came to be practitioners and strength to take her own advice. reveals their experiences and the strategies they use to negotiate Throughout the book heartbreaking JP: During your transition, you being both woman and singer. anecdotes are tempered with the easy wit noticed yourself gaining food issues “It gets to the heart of Navajo ideals, especially the premium that of a comic novelist, as when Boylan and body image anxieties along with is paid on individuality.” —Trudy Griffin-Pierce describes the anguish she felt as a young your new breasts and hips. You say $24.95 paper, $50.00 cloth. Info at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1511.htm man trying to cope with an unbearable the culture had its hooks in you to Working Women in Mexico City difference between internal truth and the point where you felt like you Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879–1931 external reality. “I combed out my hair were oppressing yourself. A lot of SUSIE S. PORTER and looked in the mirror and saw a per- women can relate to that feeling— Focuses on women wage earners across the work force, from factory workers to street vendors. Drawing on a wealth of material, from fectly normal-looking young woman. but it must have been incredibly petitions of working women to government factory inspection This is so wrong? I asked myself in the confusing to be dealing with issues reports, Porter shows how a shifting cultural understanding of mirror. This is the cause of all the trou- at 42 that most girls started having working women informed labor relations, social legislation, and ble?” Dreaming of “just starting life over to cope with at 11. Or, did being ultimately the construction of female citizenship. as a woman” in a new town, she figured socialized with a male sense of con- “The story she tells continues to be relevant for our own times as global industrialization incorporates more Mexican women in the “I’d tell everyone I was Canadian. Then I fidence for four decades prepare you formal wage economy.” —Patrick J. McNamara lay on my back and sobbed. Nobody in any way to reject negative, exter- $50.00 cloth. Info at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1517.htm would ever believe I was Canadian.” nal judgments? She’s Not There balances Boylan’s buoy- New poetry— ant sense of joy in her new body with a JFB: Initially, I had to go through a The Shadow’s Horse frank description of the emotional fall- second adolescence, and it was a time DIANE GLANCY out her sex change has had on her wife of real awkwardness and narcissism for “Filled with stunning metaphors, engaging music, and imagery . . . Grace, as well as on her best friend, me. Most post-operative transsexuals Enjoy the many revelations within and among the poems in this book, with each turning, every re-reading, every new pattern of tough-guy author Richard Russo, whose eventually become rather unexceptional perception.” —Pattiann Rogers afterword, “Imagining Jenny,” explores men and women who go on with the $15.95 paper. Read samples at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1503.htm how a bond based in large part on male business of their lives unnoticed. camaraderie evolved into a unique People don’t look at them and say “Hey, Blood Mysteries DIXIE SALAZAR friendship tested—but ultimately wow, there’s one of those transsexuals “Dixie Salazar’s quirky, grief-stricken and ultimately redemptive enriched—by the interplay between men I’ve heard so much about.” We think, third collection was written, as she tells us in her opening salvo, for and women. It’s a tribute to Boylan’s “There’s a mother, an English teacher, a ‘all the shipwrecked saints and wretches among us.’ . . . These poems beautiful prose that readers empathize musician.” You asked whether 40 years are sensual, gritty, unflinching and wise.” —Ruth L. Schwartz with the losses Grace has endured and of maleness in any way prepared me for $15.95 paper. Read samples at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1505.htm the resistance Russo felt, yet applaud this. I was not socialized as a woman Boylan’s victory over nature, social stig- and didn’t suffer firsthand the slings ma, and personal fear. In the end, we and arrows that women have to experi- The University of Arizona Press understand that Boylan’s sex change was ence. Those 40 years did give me a cer- 355 S. Euclid Ave., #103 TTve., ucson AZ 85719 • 1-800-426-3797 • www.uapress.arizona.edu not so much a choice as a necessity. tain strength and patience, and I need-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 5 taught: shave our legs, apply eye- it’s funny is because it gets at deeply “cause” of homosexuality in order week and his first question was, “Can I shadow, flick the blush brush. Then held notions about nature versus to “cure” it. French kiss you?” Just like that! I there’s the way you had to do gen- nurture. From your unique experi- shrugged and said, “Well, no!” And my der: As a man, you started out wear- ence, how much of male/female JFB: From the research I’ve seen, the friends asked me, “Why didn’t you say ing your mother’s and girlfriends’ behavior do you believe is innate, biological components of transsexuality ‘Go screw yourself?’” You know, I clothing, and eventually underwent and how much is socialization? seem to be a lot clearer than those don’t have a long history with that. therapy and hormone treatment and involved in the genesis of homosexuali- There is nothing in a man’s experience surgery to become female. Now JFB: I’m nervous about declaring “The ty. But even if people could choose to that is like that. that you’re a woman, do you find Truth” about nature versus nurture even prevent transsexuality, I hope they that you spend more or less time from my own perspective. I am a story- would not. As difficult and painful as it JP: In one of the most powerful “doing” gender? teller, not a sociologist. was, in many ways I consider myself to scenes in your book you describe a Here’s what we know: There is a be very lucky. It is a great gift, this abili- guy in a bar who stared at you all JFB: You could argue that all gender is physical, neurological genesis for trans- ty to see into two worlds. night, followed you into the parking “done.” The question is, how con- sexuality. To get technical on you, the Nurture, nature—the short answer is lot, and tried to attack you. That sciously? That’s the definition of what bed nucleus of the stria terminalis of that a lot more is nature than any of us scenario would be familiar to far too we go through as adolescents, a time the hypothalamus is 40 percent larger in would like to think. We live in a patriar- many women. You fought him off, when, through trial and error, we’re women and in male-to-female transsex- chal culture that we have to resist. I got to your car, and escaped. You doing not only gender but our whole uals than it is in non-transgendered peo- agree with that. But, hormones and called it “immersion learning,” and character. Trying on our whole per- ple born male. It’s not caused by hor- genetics help to make us what we are. gave readers a glimpse into your sona, finding which songs, fashions, mone use, it doesn’t have anything to do This makes us uncomfortable because it mind after the encounter: “What and interests feel comfortable, what with being gay, lesbian, or straight. It’s seems to take away our free will. It does- did I do to him, why does he hate creates the effect we desire. We call there your whole life. That’s real. n’t do us much good to cover our eyes me so much?” ourselves adults when all that stuff Now that I’ve said all that, I’m going to facts, and one of the facts I know is becomes less conscious. I would say to contradict myself. People in the that hormones do matter. JFB: I was terrified. I hadn’t done any- that at some point most of our behav- “genderqueer” community are saying a But when I found myself worrying thing other than to be attractive to him ior is performative. very different thing. They say it is our about my weight and ordering salad— and then to say no, and suddenly I was I shave my legs now, and what’s duty or at least our prerogative to mess that had nothing to do with biology and an object of fury, lust, and loathing. I interesting is that back in the old days with accepted notions of gender, to everything to do with culture. So, I was on the receiving end of a hatred I’d when I was a guy, I felt that this was turn every assumption upside down. made damn sure to stop acting like an never imagined before. It’s no surprise something very powerful I was doing. They’re particularly suspicious of some idiot and eat the baby back ribs if I to me that such moments exist for I’d sit there thinking, “I am crossing a kind of hypothalamus litmus test to wanted them. In some ways, some women, but it had never happened to divide here, I’m being daring, femi- judge whether you’re “really” transgen- things have become more complicated me. I was never particularly physically nine, powerful.” And now I think of it dered or not. They say it’s wrong to than they used to be. I don’t have a con- intimidating as a man, but I wonder, if only as something tedious, annoying, imply that there’s just one thing that stant internal battle about gender any- I had not had those years of male and inevitable. makes us this way. more, but I do have to make a conscious assurance, when he came at me would I decision to have the ribs for lunch in a have shoved him away, would I have JP: You have this great joke in the JP: That sounds similar to the situation when people are going to fought? Or would I have already sur- book about the effects of estrogen debate in the gay community about notice and perhaps disapprove. rendered, just hoping to get through pills and testosterone suppressors: whether finding a “gay gene” the situation without being killed? “One pill makes you want to talk would help end discrimination by JP: You’ve said your students no Sometimes I think it was because I still about relationships and eat salad. showing people it’s not a “chosen longer see you as an authority figure had enough male history in me that my The other pill makes you dislike the lifestyle,” or whether it would give because you’re female. first instinct was self-preservation. Three Stooges.” Part of the reason fundamentalists a way to isolate the JFB: In class, I was apparently more of JP: Drawing distinctions between an authority figure as a man. Students sexual orientation and gender identi- would write down what I’d say. Now I ty, you write that the main thing gays Beyond the Reproductive Body find they often sit there with their books and lesbians have in common with The Politics of Women’s Health and closed, during the same lecture in which transsexuals is “that we get beaten Work in Early Victorian England they used to take notes. They are more up by the same people.” As a woman Marjorie Levine-Clark likely to challenge me now, to question and as a transgendered person, how “Levine-Clark convincingly shows both how ideas of women’s my knowledge. There are advantages to do you cope with being at risk in bodies in the early nineteenth century differed by class and how this, in that it’s easier to get a discussion public space? women understood their own bodies and experiences of illness at going, but it also irks me because I want the time. Beyond the Reproductive Body is innovative, original, and will have a major impact on the historiography of women’s work and to be an authority figure sometimes. I JFB: What do you do, both as a health.” —Anna Clark, University of Minnesota reject the cliché that women always have woman and as a visible transgendered $24.95 paper 0-8142-5122-6 $69.95 cloth 0-8142-0956-4 to be empathic and sensitive and spe- person, if you want to live your life? $9.95 CD 0-8142-9032-9 cialize in “talking about our feelings.” You swim against the tide until you get Handling the Sick I’m glad if students feel more comfort- tired, and then you swim with the tide The Women of St. Luke’s and the able with me now, but who knows? This until you get your courage back. I pass Nature of Nursing, 1892–1937 may only be because I’m more comfort- pretty well, so some of the violence Tom Olson and Eileen Walsh able with myself. that is reserved for people who are vis- ibly transgendered is not shown me. In “In this highly readable narrative, Olson and Walsh argue that nursing is a craft, rooted in the traditions of apprenticeship that JP: One thing that comes across in general people leave me alone. Rural valued practice over theory.” —Allison Hepler, University of Maine, your book is the sense of surprise Maine, where we live, is a wonderful Farmington you felt during your transition when place. Yankees generally respect each $49.95 cloth 0-8142-0959-9 $9.95 CD 0-8142-9036-1 bartenders started trying to offer other’s privacy. I have not been on the Jenny sports insights Jim already receiving end of much cruelty or stu- Any Friend of the Movement knew, car dealers tried to hustle you, pidity yet—most of the burden I’ve Networking for Birth Control, 1920–1940 and neighbors addressed you as had to shoulder is the result of being Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer “just” Jim’s sister. Was it really that female in this culture, not because I’m “In this important contribution to the burgeoning literature on the surprising to you? transgendered. history of birth control, Meyer brings to life the stories of women who established, ran, and used the Maternal Health Association of Cleveland in the interwar years.”—Andrea Tone, Georgia Institute JFB: When I went to New York for JP: As a media critic I remember of Technology the first time as Jenny, the level of watching you on Oprah’s show and $54.95 cloth 0-8142-0954-8 $9.95 CD 0-8142-9034-5 harassment just walking down the getting frustrated at how often you Roman Fever street was amazing. I’m a professor of and other transgendered guests Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth- culture studies, and I’ve been a guy, were asked to repeat the same fun- Century American Women’s Writing and I have two eyes. What was the big damentals ad nauseum—that being surprise? It was everything that I knew transgendered does not equal being Annamaria Formichella Elsden to be true, but it was happening to me, Roman Fever foregrounds how women writers counteracted dominant gay, does not mean you’re a drag stereotypes. Popular nineteenth-century portrayals of women abroad not someone else. Faced with that queen, is not about clothes. I was often fell into two categories: the overly assertive “feminist” and the aggressive attention, I felt scared, sin- struck by how viscerally angry the hyper-feminine lady. Texts about Italy by American women move gled out, vulnerable, and angry. But audience was when families were beyond these stereotypes. $21.95 paper 0-8142-5117-X $49.95 cloth 0-8142-0946-7 here’s the kicker—there was some part involved—they cheered when $9.95 CD 0-8142-9030-2 of me that thought, “Well, looking Oprah asked if it wouldn’t have good today, Jenny Boylan.” There’s been better for you to stay miser- The Ohio State University Press just enough adolescent in me to look able since now, your wife is miser- to men for validation. able. How did you feel about that www.ohiostatepress.org 800-621-2736 I’m in bars sometimes with my question, and about media cover- band. This guy came up to me last age in general?

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 JFB: There’s this assumption that peo- JP: You seem to have gone to great ple in so-called Middle America won’t lengths to make sure everyone understand. But if people in rural around you was okay with your Maine get this, people can get it any- transition, not only your close fam- Is science objective? where. When I came out almost every- ily and friends but also Colby cam- body knew what transsexuality was. I pus administrators, faculty, and by Anne Fausto-Sterling wasn’t the first transgendered person students, as well as any number of they knew of. Yet the media is stuck in current and former acquaintances. The Bush administration has been criticized for this idea of novelty. There’s been no And your book seemed to be writ- shortage of shows about transgendered ten with that same care. Why has mixing science and politics. But is people, but they tend to always be the taking care of other people’s same. I’ve done a lot of TV, and yet I adjustment to your transition been this really the problem? constantly seem to be echoing the same so important to you? interview I saw on TV with some other host, with some other transsexual, 15 or JFB: I wanted to bring as many people 20 years ago. along with me as possible. It’s sadly true October 2002: The so-called examples of which may be found on a Reporters want to print a story that most people, including liberal, Data Quality Act takes effect. The website sponsored by Senator Henry A. around the heartbreak caused to the compassionately minded people, don’t law, slipped unnoticed into a 2001 Waxman, www.scienceandpolitics.org)? family. That’s one of the reasons my understand transsexuality. They think spending bill, sounds innocuous. It Donald Kennedy, editor of Science, the wife, Grace, has not participated in any it’s some nutty lifestyle, or that it has says that government agencies must official organ of the American media stuff. When people see me in an something to do with being gay or les- meet standards for “quality, objectivity, Association for the Advancement of interview, they see a woman who found bian or wanting to be “feminine.” Alas, utility and integrity.” Under the law Science, calls these events “an epidemic the courage to become herself, but that many people think that male-to-female anyone can challenge a government of politics.” Kennedy acknowledges isn’t as interesting to media as stories transsexuals define themselves as agency, and one of the first challenges that such practices existed in the past, about depressing, broken families. Even women in terms of skirts and makeup comes from the agricultural industry. but complains that what matters this the title of Oprah’s show was “The and high heels and sponge cake. At issue: studies published in time is “how deep the practice cuts.” Husband Who Became a Woman.” Why was it so important to educate November 2002 suggesting that low He writes in Science that the criteria for From the outset they define me as a people? Because I wanted them to levels of the herbicide atrazine cause scientific advisory and peer review man who betrayed people and broke understand. Because I wanted people deformities in frog reproductive organs. committee appointees “should rest on everyone’s hearts. to recognize that in me, as a woman, December 2002: George Bush more objective criteria of training, abil- There’s an old saying in creative writ- they would find someone who is gen- appoints W. David Hager to an ity and performance,” noting also that ing: Show, don’t tell. There are so few erally familiar to them, that as a FDA Advisory Committee for the Federal Advisory Committee Act good examples of transsexual people woman my issues are pretty similar Reproductive Health Drugs. Hager, demands balanced committees that are living their lives with dignity, self- (although, admittedly not identical) to an OB-GYN, refuses to prescribe con- “not inappropriately influenced by the respect, and a sense of humor. All I the issues of women-born women. It’s traception to his unmarried patients, appointing authority.” really had to do on Oprah was sit there also fair to say that some people will believes in treating premenstrual syn- But Kennedy’s reasoning (and that in my Ellen Tracy suit and smile. That never get it. In which case, what can drome through Bible reading and of other commentators) is confusing. did more good in terms of making peo- you do? You move on. prayer, and opposes abortion rights. Should science always be free from ple understand than all the lectures I can Since taking office, Bush has also political influence? George Bush senior give. When people see me, they JP: You mentioned once that you replaced, wholesale, the membership of wrote that “Science…relies on free- encounter a well-adjusted, nice, funny, don’t want to be a “model transsex- the advisory committee to the Centers dom of inquiry; and one of the hall- middle-class English teacher. The funni- ual.” But your wit and your articu- for Disease Control (CDC) marks of that freedom is objectivity. est thing someone said was, “The weird- late style seem to have made you a National Center for Environmental Now more than ever, on issues ranging est thing about you, Jenny, is that you’re bit of a media phenom. Are you Health; the CDC’s Advisory from climate change to AIDS research so normal! You’re like somebody I actively involved with the transgen- Committees on Lead Poisoning and to genetic engineering to food addi- might actually know!” People tell me, “I der movement? Prevention; the National Human tives, government relies on the impar- didn’t understand before, but now I get Research Protections Advisory tial perspective of science for guid- it.” That’s a pretty good day’s work. JFB: I am not involved in the transgen- Committee; the Advisory Committee ance.” Yet, as Kennedy notes, politics One thing about transsexuality, it der “movement,” which is not a move- on Genetic Testing; and other scientif- almost always has some influence. takes a lot of explaining. It’s not a great ment but a series of different groups of ic advisory committees. Perhaps the common understanding, topic for short TV segments. At least on people doing different things. I’ve May 2003: Museum directors as expressed by Bush, of science as Oprah I got a whole hour to myself, and decided I can do the most good by con- relegate an exhibit of photographs of objective or “impartial” is wrong. then I was a panelist when she did a sec- centrating on what I do well, which is Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Perhaps policies are not necessarily ond show. That’s an eternity compared telling stories, and just going about my Refuge (ANWR) to the basement of based on “objective” research, and per- to the Today Show, where I had 6.5 min- life. It seems as if that has connected to the Smithsonian Institution. The haps even the researchers themselves utes. And one of the minutes is always people in some way, though, and maybe museum also removes commentaries by cannot be “objectively” evaluated. devoted to, “So, are you gay?” while that is its own revolution. photographer Subhankar Banerjee “Assessing training, ability and per- another is always, “How sad is this for I guess that for a little while I’m going such as,“The refuge has the most beau- formance” is complex. What counts your poor wife?” The thing I hate about to be a transgendered spokesmodel. tiful landscape I have ever seen and is depends in the end on policy objec- these short little shows is that they don’t There will be other people. I don’t see so remote and untamed that many tives, which are, in turn, political. For give me room to be funny. I don’t get to myself being defined by this for the rest peaks, valleys and lakes are still with- example, if it is policy to decrease lev- be myself. I feel like I’m doing a book of my life. I’ll write other books. I’ll go out names.” It substitutes bland new els of government regulation of indus- report: “How I Changed Genders on back to fiction. But I’m glad to be in the captions such as,“unnamed peak, try, a scientist who works for and My Summer Vacation.” It’s very hard to public eye for the time being, because Romanzoff Mountains.” Meanwhile, understands industry might be the best have an intelligent discussion in these we need more good role models. Interior Secretary Gale Norton qualified. But if it is policy to use regu- forums, because it’s always okay to make I’m tremendously proud of my describes ANWR’s complex ecosystem lations to decrease pollution, a scientist fun of transsexuals—we’re seen as book, because it did something I’ve as a “flat, white, nothingness.” trained in academia with no ties to pos- pathetic and freakish. always wanted to do in my writing, October 2003: The National sible polluters might be the better which is to stay in that zone between Institutes of Health (NIH) tele- choice. So, is science politics by other JP: Media must have a harder time the tragic and the comic. This book has phones between 150 and 180 of its means—or can scientifically produced plunking you into their pre-written connected with a lot of people, and grantees to warn them that their knowledge rise above the fray to offer “family heartbreak” stories, since surprisingly so—my publisher, Random names are on a “hit list” given to the impartial guidance? you and Grace have stayed together. House, certainly didn’t expect it. I like House Committee on Energy and What, in short, do we mean when to think that this book connects with Commerce (which oversees the NIH) we claim that science or scientists are JFB: That’s the thing people are most such a wide audience because the main by the Traditional Values Coalition. objective? Science and technology uncomfortable with—they’re telling question I’m asking is not, “How do The targeted studies address aspects of studies guru Bruno Latour offers a me, in effect, what people have told you have a sex change?” but “How do human sexuality, including HIV and helpful analysis in a short but stimulat- women for decades: I won’t be a “real you live an authentic life?” That’s a AIDS, other sexually transmitted dis- ing book entitled We Have Never Been woman” until I find a nice man and question all people ask themselves, or eases, and adolescent sexuality. NIH Modern. Latour suggests that before the marry him. Even people who have dealt should. The book isn’t long on obscure warns applicants to remove terms European Enlightenment there was no with my transition in a very sophisticat- gender theory or on gory details about including “transgendered,” “prosti- clear separation between the idea of ed way are uncomfortable with the fact the surgery. People don’t necessarily tute,” “gay,” and “sex-worker” from culture and the idea of nature. People that we are two women living together want to know about that. They want to the titles of their grants and from e- saw both as part of a universe that was and legally married. know about how they can be true to mail messages, lest they be tagged for put on earth by God. The serfs and the Somebody said to Grace, “Don’t you themselves, and what will the cost of site visits and nonscientific scrutiny. monarch each held a natural spot in the understand? You need to get a divorce that truth be to them and to the people world; God spoke at times through and move on with your life.” And they love. At the heart of the book are hat are we to make of this signs of nature; and social bodies used Grace—this is how phenomenal she very mainstream questions: How do I sampling of the second natural signs to guide their behavior. is—Grace said, “No, you don’t under- tell the truth? How do I live my life W President Bush’s foray into The Enlightenment ushered in a new stand—this is my life.” with honor? science and related policy (many more era of human attempts to understand

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 7 and control nature. God was relegated as performing replicable experiments, to the sidelines as human political and permit us to work toward “less false” Follow the Politics—A Recipe economic relationships were seen as views of how the world works. Among the means through which people would these rules are some of the ideas pio- take control of their own destinies. Step 1. Read carefully: neered by Boyle—but modified to This change required a commitment produce a more egalitarian scientific J The Tuesday Science section of The New York Times both to the domination of nature and practice. A contemporary modest wit- the emancipation of humans—and a J Nature Science Update at: www.nature.com/nsu/040308/ ness, for example, may well be a clear distinction between them. Nature woman, a member of the working could be dominated only if it was 040308-9.html class, a person of color, etc. something fully external to humans. So, J The news sections from Nature magazine (all but the current Furthermore, the disembodied context a new domain of purely human politics of the original witness rooms has and culture emerged, along with con- issue of this weekly available for free on line at: www.nature.com/ changed. Results and experiments are cepts of democracy and human rights. nature/archive/IssueYear2003.html public and meant to be scrutinized by Thus, separating nature from culture anyone who cares to do so. Scientific led to the development of both mod- solutions are valid only if local con- Step 2. Armed with key tidbits visit: ern science and of the Enlightenment text—social, political, geographic—is concepts of democracy and freedom. J Union of Concerned Scientists: www.ucsusa.org taken into account. In other words, The concept of objectivity subsequent- democratizing science to a degree that ly became one of the tools that main- J Representative Henry Waxman’s “Legislative Issues Page” at would surely horrify Boyle makes it tained this separation of politics and www.henrywaxman.house.gov/issues.htm work better. culture from science and nature. Life (and science) is messy. Science Latour maintains that, from the is not simply political; any old view of beginning, the claim that science and Step 3. Start writing letters to your representatives, phoning the the world does not count as scientifi- culture were separate was false. Forcing White House, talking to people and all those other good things cally acceptable. (I, for one, believe that them to appear to operate in separate scientific evidence produced according domains created “underground,” we do to stir things up. to conventional rules of scientific prac- hybrid structures in which nature and tice shows that animal and plant diver- culture were inextricably intertwined. sity has been shaped by the forces of He and others have looked historically evolution, not created by God as at these hybrids by examining experi- Boyle believed that “Knowledge was The air pump itself operated below described in Genesis.) We should not ments performed by Robert Boyle over constituted when all believed alike,” but ground, in the basement; working men be surprised by the mixture of science a number of years, beginning in the that observations only counted when kept it functioning with constant tin- and politics brought into such high 1660s, which he designed to demon- made by appropriate “modest witness- kering and repairs. Thus, women could relief by the current Bush administra- strate the existence of a vacuum. es”—gentlemen of a certain class and not be modest witnesses, and the labor- tion. And we cannot fight for the In the now classic (to science and standing. In one experiment, men ers were hidden in the basement. The points of view we believe in merely by technology studies devotees) Leviathan watched a bird in a glass enclosure die relationships among gender, class, declaring that science is (or should be) and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the as a pump sucked the air out of it. work, and instrument design were ren- above the political fray. Separating sci- Experimental Life, Steven Shapin and Women became upset at the sight and dered invisible. In fact, in order for the ence from politics produces political- Simon Schaffer explain that Boyle invit- disrupted the experiment. This event experiment to count as science, the scientific hybrids that we must address ed observers to view his vacuum exper- “proved” that women could not be the messiness involved in producing it had both politically and scientifically. iments on the main floor of a neutral dispassionate, modest witnesses needed to be invisible. The hybrid networks Sometimes the struggle is over data. setting, the British Royal Academy. to establish knowledge. linking nature and culture were forced (Does the herbicide atrazine in our literally underground. water produce abnormal frogs?) But In addition to distinguishing the evaluating data is also about scientific nonhuman, natural world from the authority (Who is the better expert? THE DARK SISTER human, cultural world, Enlightenment Who has chosen the better statistical WOMEN’S Rebecca Goldstein scholars distinguished those who stud- test, the EPA scientist or the one who With a new afterword “Clever, observant and nimble. ied human culture from those who works for the herbicide industry?) With VOICES . . . A wicked satire on feminist studied nonhuman nature. In order to the Bush II administration we are wit- fiction. . . . Simultaneously be a successful scientist, one had to nessing in the arena of science funding BLACK EYE re-examining one of her own favorite themes, first laid out in develop a way of viewing the world and science policy-making the same Escaping a Marriage, The Mind-Body Problem, namely, that made the hybrids connecting invasion of far-right politics seen in Writing a Life the relationship between reason nature and culture disappear. For a sci- federal court appointments, education Judith Strasser and passion, the intellect and entist, work was an out-of-body experi- policy, and foreign policy. The scientif- “Judith Strasser has written an the hungry soul.” unflinching, unsparing, un-put- —The New York Times ence. Indeed, this is how we now teach ic conclusions (e.g., abstinence works down-able diary of a woman’s Paper $17.95 both science and humanities. We make better than condoms) follow the poli- slow tumble to health, freedom, sure that there is nothing about nonhu- tics. So must we. and even joy, against terrifying LATE PSALM odds. Black Eye is the kind of man nature in our English courses and book we wish no one had to Betsy Sholl nothing about human culture in our write, but which we are “This is a beautiful, moving, essential book.”—David Jauss, science courses. compelled to read.” Boyle’s strategy of ignoring hybrids —Jacquelyn Mitchard, author author of You Are Not Here of The Deep End of the Ocean Cloth $24.95, Paper $14.95 and relying on modest witnesses works. For Further Reading: The University of Wisconsin Press Cloth $26.95 Poetry Series His approach has produced knowledge powerful enough to build computers, Harding, S. (1998). Is Science NOWHERE IN AFRICA REACTOR make vaccines, and split atoms. But the Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, An Autobiographical Novel Judith Vollmer better the nature/culture split works, Stefanie Zweig Feminisms, and Epistemologies. “Read Reactor and let Vollmer the more unacknowledged hybrids pro- Translated by Marlies Comjean refresh your geography in With a preface liferate. The more we dominate nature Bloomington, IN: Indiana Nowhere in Africa is the startling ways.”—Robin Becker extraordinary tale of a Jewish Cloth $24.95, Paper $14.95 (e.g., build massive factories), the more University Press. family who flees the Nazi The University of Wisconsin Press the results of our domination pour into Poetry Series regime in 1938 for a remote culture (e.g., air pollution becomes a Latour, B. (1993). We Have farm in Kenya. Abandoning social and medical problem). The their once-comfortable MAVERICK Never Been Modern. Cambridge, existence in Germany, Walter AUTOBIOGRAPHIES hybrids break out of their subterranean MA: Harvard University Press. Redlich, his wife Jettel, and Women Writers and the spaces and confront us regularly with a their five-year-old daughter, American West, 1900–1936 confusing science-politics mix. Regina, each deal with the Cathryn Halverson Potter, E. (2001). Gender and harsh realities of their new Cloth $45.00 life in different ways. eminist philosophers of science Boyle’s Law of Gases. have weighed in on this prob- Cloth $24.95 NAKED IN THE Bloomington, IN: Indiana lem. Sandra Harding argues that PROMISED LAND F GODDESSES AND in order to assess the validity of scien- University Press. MONSTERS A Memoir Lillian Faderman tific knowledge, we must understand Women, Myth, Power, and Paper $19.95 the context in which it was produced: Shapin, S. and S. Shaffer (1985). Popular Culture Named among the best books of 2003 by the What problems were people trying to Jane Caputi San Francisco Chronicle and the Advocate Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Named a 2004 Notable Book by the American solve? Who defined them? What mix Cloth $65.00, Paper $24.95 Hobbes, Boyle and the Library Association of people and knowledge sources con- tributed to answers? Harding suggests Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS that we never obtain correct or objec- Princeton University Press. Available at booksellers or visit www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress tive or final answers, but that basic rules of scientific investigation, such

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 A Renaissance woman Essential Reading by Joy Connolly

Olympia Morata: The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic edited and translated by Holt N. Parker. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003, 275 pp., $22.50 paper.

emember the old college applica- advise pursuing a more conventional life, tion essay question that asked you Morata concludes, “I have decided to R to identify your personal hero? consider them to be the ones who are Move over, Mom, Sojourner Truth, lost.” After her marriage, she tells Curio, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ruth Bader a family friend and teacher: “I think I Ginsburg: A new hero is on the block, have to give the answer to one question and her name is Olympia Morata. you asked me, whether I had given birth Born in Italy in 1526 or 1527, Morata to anything. The children I bore on the BLACK SEXUAL POLITICS Patricia Hill Collins emerged as something of a child prodi- very day and hour I received your letter, I gy, achieving early recognition for her am sending to you: the poems appended “Patricia Hill Collins’ brilliant and ground-breaking knowledge of classical literature. She here… I have borne no other children, analysis of the urgency of a more progressive Black sexual married for love, moved from Catholic and so far I have no expectation of bear- politics among African Americans is nothing short of a Italy to Germany the better to enjoy ing any.” And to her close friend Lavinia tour de force.” religious freedom, kept up a lively cor- della Rovere, she exults after joining her —Beverly Guy-Sheftall, co-author of Gender Talk respondence with a number of promi- husband in Germany: “Now I have com- $26.00 nent humanists and Protestant reform- plete leisure to get back to divine studies ers, and died of fever before she turned as often as possible, which I think you 29. If she sounds an unlikely hero, that ought to do, and I take more pleasure in is only because current popular knowl- them day by day.” edge of history, especially of European For all her dismissal of domestic duties women in the Middle Ages and the as the natural and primary sphere of Renaissance, suffers from a fixation on women and her steadfast emphasis on royalty and a narrow view of courtly life piety and spiritual study, Morata stymies and love. Hollywood and its European stereotypes of learned women: She is no counterparts have not helped matters bluestocking, no killjoy, no prim miss. by giving us the romanticized if enter- Parker notes that she disliked the dogmat- taining 16th-century spectacles of (for ic disputes that weakened the Protestant example) Helena Bonham-Carter’s Lady movement, and she was keenly sensitive to Jane Grey, Valentina Cervi’s Artemisia the potential for the doctrine of predesti- Gentileschi (in the infamously inaccu- nation to arouse despair in the faithful. rate 1997 film Artemisia), and the very She rejoices (as do her correspondents) in young Olivia Hussey, radiant in silks her happy marriage to a supportive STARTING IN OUR OWN BACKYARDS and slashed velvet against Franco German doctor. The marriage indeed How Working Families Can Build Community and Survive the New Economy Zeffirelli’s lush set for Romeo and Juliet seems to have been as much a relation of Ann Bookman (1968). Fiction and cinema normally equals as was conceivable at the time: “As Ann Bookman eloquently tells us, the struggle isn’t present Renaissance women as excep- Andreas Grünthler was a well-regarded just to accommodate our work and our families; it’s also tions of exceptions, heroes of a decid- scholar and artist who set Morata’s poetry to be active citizens in our communities. This is a deeply edly male-ordered and usually wealthy to music and wrote desolate letters thoughtful and perfectly timed addition to one of the most world: beautifully dressed, sexualized, mourning her early death. “You can’t important discussions of our time.” objectified, isolated, eternally remade believe how madly I love you,” Morata —-Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor into virgins or victims. tells him in one letter not long after their $26.00 None of these molds is a good fit for marriage. In times of great unrest, she Morata, whose surviving writings col- warns him not to protect her from bad lected here reveal an intent focus on news: “Don’t invent anything false to N EW IN P APERBACK! scholarly and religious study, warm comfort me. If, God forbid, there’s any friendships with women and men, and danger, I desire so much to share it with often precarious financial circumstances. you.” Her letters attest to her affectionate She began giving public performances in participation in personal exchanges of Latin and Greek in her early teens, and household service, foster care, and schol- her devout evangelical Christianity led arly materials. She writes to one male her (among other projects) to translate friend for help finding a cook, to another the Psalms into powerful Greek verse. for help finding a book; she sends Lavinia “God has sent from Olympus to mortals della Rovere short imaginary dialogues in the heavenly/ Morata as a paradigm to which the two women discuss their stud- the wise,” wrote one of her students, ies, religious faith, the nature of happiness, punning on her name. But that same stu- and the pull of the worldly life. dent also composed a poem that editor Holt Parker rightly says “makes one want ike most learned women of her to weep”: “Nature denied you nothing of time, Morata was first educated at all her gifts/ with one exception: that home, by her father, a teacher L REINVENTING EDEN you were a woman.” deeply influenced by Protestant theology. The Fate of Nature in Western Culture Morata rarely discusses her gender, He secured for her at the age of 12 a Carolyn Merchant but when the subject arises, she writes place in the court of Ferrara as the com- with sharp and animated authority. Here panion to the oldest daughter of the rul- “[Merchant] covers a wealth of information and she is at the age of 14, answering a letter ing d’Este family. Religion was a complex sheds light on the thinking of generations of sci- from her teacher Chilian Sinapius, who and often dangerous issue in any 16th- entists, philosophers and environmentalists.” seems to have suggested that her scholar- century European court, and Ferrara was —Publishers Weekly ly achievements would come to an end no exception. The French-born duchess, $18.95 with maturity and marriage: “Since letters Renée, had grown up surrounded by surpass all human affairs, what women’s Protestants, and though her own reli- spindles and needles (as you say) will be gious practices were erratic, she was able able to call me away from the gentle to use her position to aid Protestants Muses? I have closed my ears against fleeing persecution from Catholics in these women’s spells just as Ulysses did at France. To educate her daughter (and 1.800.634.7064 ■ WWW. ROUTLEDGE- NY. COM the Sirens’ rocks.” As for women who Morata) she engaged a German friend of

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 9 John Calvin’s and, briefly, Caelius Curio, seemed a delirium but which turns out to the family friend so curious, years later, be a beautiful lucidity. Fable-like poems are about Morata’s fertility. He was an Italian recited for a reporter’s cameraman; the Protestant, a minor noble who had The special camera lights go off; and suddenly, Nina, formerly escaped from the Inquisition by tricking Vassily’s guide, cannot see a thing. The his guard into putting chains on a fake by Mary Cappello story moves brilliantly between the alle- leg. It is to Curio’s diligence in seeking gorical and the mundane, between the out copies of Morata’s letters that we The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk. New York: Farrar, dreamlike and the real, between remem- owe this collection, which he published bering and forgetting, and between deeply after her death. The book likely found its Straus, and Giroux, 2003, 209 pp., $22.00 hardcover. private and deeply cultural realms. way to the library of Elizabeth I: Curio Taken together, the stories in The Red dedicated its second edition to the Passport offer a sense of some of contem- English queen in 1562, when she reached porary Russia’s pressing concerns—from the age at which Morata had died. ussia has figured mightily in the © Susan Miller the radioactive fallout of Chernobyl to the Holt Parker’s translations of Morata’s American imagination, but, per- war that continues to be waged in poetry, dialogues, and letters are smooth R haps consequently, it is still rarely Chechnya, from the diminished lives of and fluent, a pleasure to read, and they chosen as a place of real travel by disabled pensioners to the hope and dis- are introduced by a useful essay that Americans. Author Katherine Shonk has may of Russia’s youth. The range of the recounts Morata’s life and contacts not only visited Russia but has inhabited collection’s subjects produces the occa- against the political and religious back- the culture long and sensitively enough to sional story that seems like an experiment, ground of the time. Readers unfamiliar have woven a collection of stories in as if the author asked herself, what would with the intricacies of Reformation his- which contemporary Russians and happen if I wrote a story about “x”? Some tory may encounter some confusion in Americans meet. We expect snow in of these arrive at unconvincing endings Parker’s presentation of “evangelism,” a Russian-based stories, that infernal cold that seem either sentimental or driven by disputed but still common label for the that has presumably produced the Russian the narrative problem the writer set her- Protestantism adopted by Italian human- soul. But time and again in Shonk’s stories, self. An occasional unsatisfactory ending, ists like Morata and her friends. Very snow appears as a mistake: One character however, does not diminish the power of occasionally Parker drops names of mistakes the sweep of poplar seeds the collection as a whole, the ambitious nobles, battles, and theological disputes through the air for snow; another is made undertaking that the collection represents, with little or no explanation. But this is to see that it is snowing inside her house— Katherine Shonk or the vast affective terrain it charts. why they invented libraries and the the flakes, visible only through the lens of One might ask of such a collection that Internet. These are minor nuisances in a special camera, are radioactive fallout. Russian disillusion with American perki- its language take more risks, that the lan- an otherwise very approachable book. Like the snow transformed, these stories, ness, but it is rescued by the deft handling guage be willing to wander more or to Now it must be said that much of too, offer moments of unexpected lyri- of just this dynamic in a story about an break. And yet, I do not want to conclude Morata’s work does not appear here. But cism and illuminating shock. American who wants to introduce Russians that these are neat stories about messy this is not Parker’s fault—or even Curio’s. The Red Passport abounds with details that to group therapy, American style. In matters. The book reads as an interesting In her letters, Morata avoids naming her- are moored to place; without stereotyping “Kitchen Friends,” Leslie, an American and companion piece to Andrea Lee’s beautiful self “Lutheran,” “Calvinist,” or or attempting to “capture” Russia or near victim of terrorism in Russia, gathers Russian Journal (1981) and as an antidote to “Reformed.” She prefers the label Russians ethnographically, the author incor- together the Russians who also experi- condescending guidebooks like Victor “Christian,” but her allegiance to porates such particulars as Moscow’s quirky enced the attack for a healing session. Ripp’s Pizza in Pushkin Square: What Protestantism is unmistakable. This led to cat circus alongside the emergence of “Kitchen Friends” opens with a flat Russians Think About Americans and the her eventual alienation from the Ferrara Western-based franchises like McDonald’s description of an explosion in Moscow. American Way of Life (1990). Though it court and later, to her decision to leave and Baskin-Robbins, the reruns of Santa Well-drawn sentences offer up a clichéd could be argued that the female characters Italy for her husband’s hometown of Barbara that appear on Russian TV, and the Russophile: “Leslie established an identity in The Red Passport are too often mere foils Schweinfurt, where she would be able to habit of Russian police of stopping dark- as a true Russophile, known for her love of for masculinity-in-crisis, at bottom, this practice her religion and engage in her haired, dark-skinned men in the metro. Tolstoy, her painstaking dissections of glas- collection raises important questions “divine studies” in peace. Unfortunately, Shonk richly imagines, which is to say, nost and perestroika, and the dramatically about the forms that intimacy takes and she and her husband found themselves forges story, in the space between Russian patterned shawls she wore through even of what counts as intimacy in differ- caught up in the German wars of religion, and American drives and naiveté, between Milwaukee winters.” But the story develops ent cultures. and by 1554, after a 14-month siege, most their quibbles, their expectations, and their into a complex meditation that opens onto In “My Mother’s Garden,” a daughter of her written work was lost in the sack living conditions. In this sense, thankfully, larger, culturally significant questions: Have visits her mother in her home near and burning of Schweinfurt. Barely escap- these are never quite stories “about” Russia our own mechanisms of cure, by turning Chernobyl, even though she is putting her- ing with their lives—Morata tells the har- from an American point of view; rather shallow commodity, failed us? What self and her own family at risk by doing so. rowing tale in several of her letters—they they are tales of American interlocutors, resources do Russians have for survival, “It never ceases to shame me,” the daugh- settled in Heidelberg, but the fever Morata eavesdroppers, Slav-wannabes, and ances- witness, or “healing”? Or is healing simply ter reflects, “this fear I have of touching contracted during their flight never left trally deprived sojourners. not an end to which Russians devote their my mother, of carrying the poison in her her, and she died the following year. The meeting of Russian and American energies, is healing not part of a Russian skin and clothes to my daughter.” At one The power and appeal of this collec- in these tales is helped by Shonk’s eye for lexicon? Russians, one character explains, poignant moment, the mother presents tion rests in the glimpses it gives us of a drawing uncanny connections. Take, for don’t have the luxury of being preoccupied her daughter with a photo: “The photo woman’s life that is exceptional, but not example, the kitten that appears in “The with the past. Leslie wants her new Russian was painted on thick paper in tones of in the fashion of a Lucrezia Borgia or an Death of Olga Vasilievna,” “a kitten small- compeers to talk about their post-traumat- green, and the image was strewn with faint Elizabeth I. If Morata’s religiosity is not er than the rest but as still and black as the ic stress; they want only to find out if any white dots. ‘See the snow?’ she said, ‘The to all modern tastes, her passion for forged revolutionaries who crouched of them has been materially compensated American said it’s radiation. He said he has learning and endurance in the face of beneath the [metro] station’s wide arches.” for being harmed in the explosion. Finally a special camera that can see it.’” Shonk immense suffering makes her writing Such uncanniness never works only to Leslie’s motives for reaching out to Russian resists casting Russian realities through the worth remembering. poetic effect in Shonk’s stories but seems victims are exposed: She had hoped to lens of a “special” American camera that Toward the end of her life Morata rife with political significance. In this same amend the wrongs of her peasant-oppress- can see things about Russia that Russians wrote to a friend that she was searching story, Shonk exposes the incongruity, the ing ancestors. She wants to “reveal the cannot see for or about themselves. for commentaries on the letters of ideological disconnect, of what would shameful history of her real family to her Instead, she imagines scenarios in which Cicero in the bookstores and among her appear in an American context as an surrogate one.” The story ends on a star- American pragmatism meets layers of dis- friends, but so far had been unsuccessful, exchange of mere pleasantries. An tlingly macabre note as Leslie, abandoned belief or in which Russian and American for “there is a great lack of good authors American businessman asks the unem- by her therapy group, curtsies before a pile disillusion are met by forms of trust here.” We moderns are fortunate to have ployed husband of the Russian woman of flowers, placed in memoriam, wilting on invested in various manifestations of a large number of good authors easily who works for his wife what he “does for a a trolley track. friendship and of love. available; but women’s writing from the living.” “A living?” the Russian repeats. Toward the end of The Red Passport,a past remains thin on the ground, largely “You know, like where do you work?” the entral to The Red Passport is Shonk’s Russian man selling ice cream to an due to lack of good editors and presses American goes on. In a visit to the Russian masterful configuration of American child of Russian descent willing to publish the work. All the more couple’s apartment, the American wife, C Russian/American encounters, exclaims, “Russian, American, what’s the credit is due to Holt Parker for this edi- named Melissa, a woman who breast- and yet, in some ways, the most complex, difference?…We’re all friends now.” Of tion and translation. It will probably be pumps milk that is then delivered to her lyrical, and subtle tale in the collection is course, the difference remains huge, the most appreciated by scholars of the early baby’s nanny, blurts, “I love your place, you also the only story in which Americans sameness goes unacknowledged, and we modern period, of religion, and of two!” The Americans come off as bum- don’t appear. “The Young People of only pretend to be friends. Russian red women’s history. Still, he succeeds in bling yet “refined” creatures whose baby, in Moscow” treats an elderly married couple, passports and American blue passports making Morata’s letters—already read- the end, is bitten by their Russian hosts’ cat pensioners, reduced to selling books of continue to have a wildly different curren- able, engaging, even suspenseful—easily and whose relationship with the Russian the husband’s poetry in the metro corri- cy in the world. The image invoked by accessible to the nonprofessional reader. couple is strained by the questionably desir- dors in order, literally, to survive. The story Katherine Shonk’s title and richly atmos- As such the book is a perfect antidote to able life that the Americans, as conduits to is haunted by the couple’s loss of their pheric and finely crafted tales pushes us to the velveteen vision of Renaissance capitalism, can make available to them. child years before and by the sudden atten- consider what the red passport signifies, women that dominates the popular imag- The Red Passport might threaten to tion they receive when Vassily, the hus- and for whom? Who claims it, and where ination today. devolve into a too-easy juxtaposition of band, recites a children’s poem in what had can it take you?

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 \ Steadfast in sticking to custom herself, she deep water in paddy fields, or ride side- thought the prescription of white for wid- saddle on a camel—all without showing ows a bit anachronistic for the 20th cen- cleavage or allowing their pallus to slip. The No magic wand tury and encouraged her own daughters wonder is that this garment, this six yards and daughters-in-law to dispense with it. of fabric without hook, stitch, or pin, has by Ritu Menon I hope the authors will excuse the endured well into the 21st century. digression but it is this kind of detail, these The Sari by Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller. Oxford, U.K.: fragments of personal history, that they hat accounts for it? The authors highlight in their narrative. Not surprising, claim that the sari, more than Berg, 2003, 279 pp., $39.95 hardcover. then, that their story has a character, Mina, W any other dress, embodies who appears in the very first chapter and Indian womanhood, insinuates itself into tells her own sari story in the form of let- their personalities, and becomes more ters to them. She reappears in subsequent than something to wear; they suggest, in ix yards of fabric draped around you Acknowledging this, the authors of The chapters, and her letters cover almost all fact, that it can define their being. It is without hook, stitch, or pin—that’s Sari promise something different. Their the facets of the sari that the authors have also, as sociologist Rachel Dwyer says, S how the sari was described to us as endeavor, they say, is to: chosen to discuss: The Working Sari, the “heavily laden with cultural meanings of children. And the riddle of how it stayed in Marriage Sari, the Intimate Sari, the nostalgia, tradition, womanhood, nation- place—or, rather, how to make sure it did- enquire first into the most intimate Youthful Sari, the Sensual Sari, the Old alism and social status.” Another reason n’t unravel in a heap around your feet— aspects of a woman’s relationship to Age Sari; choosing saris, possessing them, could be that, modernization and west- kept us experimenting with it for hours. her clothes and then to explore, designing them, even discarding them in ernization notwithstanding, the majority One of the most enduring images of child- within the same volume, how these favor of the more practical and (now) of Indian women are traditional or con- hood continues to be that of little girls, tee- micro observations about individu- increasingly popular salwar-kameez (belted ventional or old-fashioned enough to stick tering on sandals or high heels too big for als might be related to macro harem pants, caught at the ankle, worn with the sari. Or perhaps they just know them, lips sucked in, brows furrowed in changes in the way populations with a loose, knee-length tunic). and enjoy its many attributes and perenni- concentration, winding those six yards relate to issues as profound as being Sprinkled though the book, in addition al pleasures. One shouldn’t overstate the around their tiny bodies. modern and being rational. A study to Mina, are well-known actresses, politi- case, however. Most women wear the sari Obviously, the mystique survives— of clothing should not be ‘cold’; it cians and public figures, who, the authors because they don’t really have a choice in enough to prompt Daniel Miller and has to be involved in the tactile, sen- suggest, used the sari to communicate the matter: Other forms of dress are con- Mukulika Banerjee to attempt a cultural sual, emotional, intimate world of erotic intent (the incomparable actress sidered unsuitable for adult women and anthropology of the sari. Over the years feelings. The task of an anthropo- Rekha being the star); or power and little else is available for the vast majority. there have been a number of books deal- logical account is firstly to convey authority (Indira Gandhi); or coquettish A “modern,” “rational” (I wish the ing with practically every aspect of this these feelings empathetically: that is, playfulness (legendary actresses like Nutan authors had put those loaded terms with- garment, from the rich variety of its to try to experience the sari from with her pallu [the free end of the sari, in quotes) person might actually prefer weaving and wearing to its color the point of view of the various tossed over the left shoulder to fall grace- cheaper, more practical, yet equally attrac- palette—brilliant hues in the desert women who wear them. (p. 253) fully up to the knees], Sharmila Tagore tive, options. But Miller’s and Banerjee’s regions bleaching to paler creams and with her “impossibly low hipline,” and romance with the sari leads them into whites in the more verdant Kerala, for Immediately, my memory flashed back Asha Parekh’s “tightly-draped folds”). But making some remarkable assertions. example; from tracing its evolution and to burying my face in my grandmother’s there are also the millions of ordinary The power principle, for instance. The regional adaptations to uncovering its fas- soft-as-down white sari, and it struck me women who have devised their own way authors quote working women, in posi- cinating history and sociology. The best that I’d never seen her wearing any other of tying a sari so that they can ride a bicy- tions both of subordination and authority, of these accounts are a storehouse of color. Ever. Married at 12, widowed in her cle or a motorbike, play tennis, read the in support of their claim that the way information and anecdote—invaluable 30s, by the time we knew her, she had news on television, carry headloads on a women carry their saris can demonstrate resources for the researcher. been in widow’s white for a while. construction site, transplant rice in knee- that they are “in more control of things

NEW FROM PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MISSING MARY SUBVERSIVE SOUTHERNER TRANSFORMING THE FAITH The Queen of Heaven and Her Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice OF OUR FATHERS Re-Emergence in the Modern Church in the Cold War South Women Who Changed American Religion Charlene Spretnak Catherine Fosl Edited by Ann Braude “As in the oldest ‘call and response’ songs, Spretnak has Foreword by Angela Davis “At last the religious voice of 20th century feminism can called on the Blessed Mother’s magnitude. And the Holy “Laying out the inescapable connections of civil rights and be heard. The stereotype of feminism as secular and One has responded with her immaculate love; this is civil liberties is Fosl’s most impressive achievement.” homogeneous crumbles in the face of these passionate, evident on every page. This book and its author are to be —New York Times Book Review diverse, and deeply moving stories. In gripping detail, we treasured as truly enacting the deepest spirit of ¡Viva la May 2004 / 464 pp. / 1-4039-6544-7 / $19.95 pb. learn that struggles for women’s rights have been part and Virgin!”—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., author of Women parcel of virtually every religious tradition. Pain and grief Who Run with the Wolves and The Faithful Gardener REVISED AND UPDATED! thread through many of the stories, yet together they 288 pp. / 1-4039-6398-3 / $24.95 cl. articulate a spiritual richness that is filled with hope, and SYLVIA PLATH many offer concrete stories of transformation on which A Literary Life future generations can build.”— Sara M. Evans, author of HEARTBREAKERS Linda Wagner-Martin Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End Women and Violence in Contemporary “Readers who are familiar with Plath’s writing and want June 2004 / 272 pp. / 1-4039-6460-2 / $27.95 cl. Culture and Literature to know more about its personal and professional Josephine Hendin contexts would do well to begin with this succinct, In her latest book, Jo Hendin looks at the figure of the commonsensical study.”—Library Journal GLOBAL PRESCRIPTIONS violent woman, arguing that she is a grenade pitched at Literary Lives 288 pp. / 1-4039-1653-5 / $19.95 pb. Gendering Health and Human Rights both conservative and liberal views of women. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky 320 pp. / 0-312-23700-6 / $29.95 cl. “Petchesky offers important new insights into the STICKING TO THE UNION complex political forces shaping struggles for reproductive ACTION CHICKS An Oral History of the Life and Times and sexual rights within the context of rapid social and New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture of Julia Ruuttila economic globalization. [This] is critical social analysis at Edited by Sandy Polishuk its very best.”—Richard Parker, Mailman School of Public Sherrie A. Inness Health, Columbia University “Action Chicks is insightful, provocative, and fun to read. Foreword by Amy Kesselman 320 pp. / 1-84277-004-7 / $75.00 cl. From action figures to video games, this book explains “Sandy Polishuk’s Sticking to the Union is the best kind of 1-84277-007-1 / $29.95 pb. who the chicks are and what they mean. Trenchant and oral history, bringing to life a person and an era quickly Zed Books compelling analysis.”—Robin Roberts, Professor of English passing out of reach.” and Women’s and Gender Studies, Louisiana State —Elinor Langer, author of A Hundred Little Hitlers University Palgrave Studies in Oral History TERROR, COUNTER-TERROR 304 pp. / 1-4039-6396-7 / $18.95 pb. 273 pp. / 1-4039-6239-1 / $75.00 cl. 1-4039-6403-3 / $59.95 cl. 1-4039-6240-5 / $22.95 pb. Women Speak Out Edited by Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma CHEERLEADER! Women across the world have spoken out against SOME WORE BOBBY SOX terrorism, militarism and violence of all kinds as an An American Icon The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, unacceptable strategy for resolving differences and Natalie Guice Adams and Pamela Jean Bettis 1920-1945 conflict. This anthology, ranging over the last decade, is a “This is an impressive and fascinating account of why Kelly Schrum powerful statement by them against all terrorism and any violent means used to deal with it. With contributions by: cheerleaders are both vilified and glorified: why “Some Wore Bobby Sox is a lively and insightful Susan Sontag, Anisa Darwish, Rohini Hensman, Barbara cheerleading enacts both wholesome and erotic facets exploration of the interplay between an emergent teenage Kingsolver, and many others. of American femininity. Adams and Bettis do a terrific job girls’ identity and the growth of a teenage girls’ market in 272 pp. / 1-84277-352-6 / $65.00 cl. of chronicling the new culture of cheerleading—cheering the decades before World War II. Kelly Schrum makes a that goes far beyond traditional stereotypes.” 1-84277-353-4 / $22.50 pb. significant contribution to our understanding of several Zed Books —Don E. Merten, Ball State University dynamic areas of research—studies of girls and girlhood, 208 pp. / 1-4039-6184-0 / $24.95 cl. American popular culture, and consumer culture.” —Kathy Peiss, author of Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture June 2004 / 224 pp. / 1-4039-6176-X / $29.95 cl.

Distributor of Berg Publishers, Hambledon and London, I.B.Tauris, Manchester University Press, and Zed Books (888) 330-8477 • Fax: (800) 672-2054 • www.palgrave-usa.com

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 11 than anyone else in this place”; that if a fullest expression in a section on what woman lawyer “carries her sari particular- the authors call the “elevated sari,” a gar- ly well and with ease then everybody is ment that the wearer feels she has to trying to figure out what this person is “live up to”: The end of HRT about”; and that, according to some women, “wearing the sari was far more This elevated sari has a vastly by Cynthia A. Pearson demanding, risky and vulnerable [than enhanced capacity for good and Western clothes], a high-wire act where for bad. Perhaps the single most The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: nervousness was transparent.” common comment we heard Can one really advance a proposition, about the sari was that it makes a Exploding the Estrogen Myth by Barbara Seaman. based on such multiple and individual woman the most beautiful she experiences, that is liable to be disputed could ever become… In a society New York: Hyperion, 2003, 277 pp., or refuted by just as many who claim the where power itself is generally opposite? One can accept that powerful thought of as having a female $24.95 hardcover. political personalities like Indira Gandhi aspect, in the form of shakti, the or Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa sari simultaneously augments, have invested the sari with something of combines and ‘totalises’ the possi- their own power—but that’s a far cry bilities of aesthetic beauty, female n July 2002, I spent day after day relevant information about drugs, med- from characterizing it as a “power” gar- mastery, sexuality and the cult of talking to reporters about the results ical procedures, and bodily functions, and ment. Similarly, although pollution and the maternal. As a symbol of I of the Women’s Health Initiative that menopause, childbirth, and puberty purity taboos still operate in many situa- Indian-ness itself, it represents not study of menopausal hormone therapy. are natural conditions that don’t always tions, especially with regard to food, men- a compact nationality so much as As the director of the National Women’s need medical management—relate strual blood, and cooking, they are far less an aspiration, what Khilnani has Health Network, I was called on to directly to one of the key issues of the present and oppressive today than in the called ‘the idea of India’, which respond to the study’s finding that taking modern women’s liberation movement: past, and I can’t help feeling that it would people struggle to live up to as hormones increased the risk of breast Who controls women’s bodies? have been more politic to highlight worthy inheritors of a great and cancer and didn’t prevent heart disease. Barbara Seaman tells the full story in change rather than continuity. Mina’s ancient culture, an India that tran- The drugs being studied, Premarin and her new book, The Greatest Experiment assertion below seems excessive, likely to scends regions and diversity to Prempro, are blockbusters bringing in Ever Performed on Women. She explains, in be regarded with some skepticism. reconstitute itself at a higher over a billion dollars each year to their vivid detail, the history of both plane. As a result, and as one fash- manufacturer, Wyeth. The news that the menopausal hormone therapy and oral I always change my sari when I get ion commentator perceptively put drugs used by so many women caused contraceptives. In both cases, she argues, home; my sister-in-law will throw it, to violate the integrity of the cancer was shocking to many, and the there exists a mythology of estrogen, one me out of the kitchen and the sari is akin to ‘burning the media treated this study as front-page that misleads, disempowers, and physical- house if I don’t change my sari American flag’. (p. 236) news. I was asked over and over again ly harms women. In the tradition of before starting my household jobs. what this meant for the millions of Gerda Lerner, whose The Creation of They also have this other curious Phew! The authors go on to say that women currently taking hormones and Patriarchy inspired feminists with the custom, I don’t know if other the sari is “being adopted by those… what they should do. But like many fem- knowledge that patriarchy is not an unal- Bengali families have this, but who wish to show their loyalty to inists, I found myself trying to give terable facet of human nature, Seaman every time you go to the toilet you India”—like Sonia Gandhi. As the answers to questions that weren’t being describes how the mythology of estrogen have to change all the clothes you Americans would say, give me a break. If, asked. I wanted to talk about the med- was created, so that women today can were wearing. (p. 103) in fact, the sari were able to “augment, icalization of menopause and women’s take it apart. In her words, she is combine and totalise the possibilities of right to know the real truth about their “exploding the estrogen myth.” By contrast, the authors’ comments aesthetic beauty, female mastery, sexuali- bodies and about the drugs and medical on the Uniform Sari are banal. Surely all ty and the cult of the maternal,” Indian procedures recommended to them. eaman, now a columnist for uniforms, not just the sari, are intended women wouldn’t be as disempowered as I had only limited success in 2002. A Hadassah magazine, has covered to erase or subdue individual differences, they are. The sari may have many uses few journalists made the connection S this beat for 40 years and has inter- to eliminate “the particularity of body and attributes, but the one thing it isn’t, is between Wyeth’s celebrity-studded adver- viewed most of the key figures and shape, skin colour or hair”? And to con- a magic wand! tising campaigns and women’s mistaken attended many of the key events. She vey an impression of neatness and effi- The best parts of the book are the belief that hormones prevented heart begins by sharing a personal story. ciency? All organizations have dress chapters on producers and designers, disease, Alzheimer’s, wrinkles, and sexual Seaman’s Aunt Sally died of endometrial codes, after all, and there’s no reason why where the writing is direct and the decline. The occasional writer credited cancer shortly before her 50th birthday. the sari should be an exception. information lightly given. In “The the National Women’s Health Network The young doctor taking care of her aunt Perhaps it’s a question of the authors’ Pleasure of What to Buy” one can or Dr. Susan Love with presciently warn- warned Seaman and Sally’s other female location, or of an intended readership almost feel oneself being enveloped in ing that what doctors were telling women relatives never to take Premarin. He was outside Asia, but it seems to me that they sumptuous silks or gossamer chiffons. about hormone therapy wasn’t necessari- certain, he said, that Premarin caused have “exoticized” the sari, despite their But in the end, one comes away feeling ly the full truth. Sally’s cancer. “It’s a special cancer. An desire to understand it as a “lived” gar- that the promise of a pleasantly differ- But the bigger story wasn’t really told, estrogen cancer,” he told Seaman. At the ment. Or perhaps their impulse to thus ent reading experience has been only and I believe it’s an important one. The time, in 1959, Seaman was 23 and just understand it leads them to read too partially—and altogether too self-con- assertions made by health feminists— starting out as a freelance writer on much into the ordinary. This finds its sciously—realized. that women have the right to know all women’s health and sexuality. She started a file on Premarin and cancer, but for the time being could do little about the warn- ing she’d received. Meanwhile, many other women who hadn’t received any warnings about estrogen causing cancer were being offered estrogen pills by their physicians. To women who turned to their doctors for help with disruptive hot flashes and night sweats, estrogen was effective medicine that they appreciated. But unbeknownst to these women, their doc- Special Offer tors were being encouraged to think of estrogen as far more than just a treat- to Book Group Members ment for hot flashes. Premarin was the most popular brand of estrogen from Send us the names and addresses of the people in your group and we will send the start and remains so to this day. “The each of them a free sample copy of The Women's Review of Books. Premarin ads were charming…. Designed to foster fantasies of a foun- tain of youth, they featured women of a OPRAH AND BEYOND certain age having fun, being admired, Send addresses to sometimes waltzing with impeccably Book Group Offer dressed handsome gentlemen who (you could tell) adored them.” Doctors Women's Review of Books responded by steadily increasing the Wellesley Center for Research on Women number of prescriptions they wrote for 106 Central Street Premarin and other estrogen drugs. Wellesley, MA 02481 But it took more than ads in medical journals to create a shared view of menopause as a medical problem that

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 always needed treatment. Seaman Joyce Brothers, the TV psychologist, she explains that this shift was accomplished says, “We were swamped with questions by marketing estrogen as a “replace- and comments on Enovid, the first oral ment” for hormones lost as women aged contraceptive.” Over the next few years, and their menstrual cycles came to an as Seaman checked out the science, she New KNOPF end. Messages aimed directly at women became convinced that women were not from started to percolate through popular cul- receiving accurate information about the ture in the 1960s, with Robert A. Wilson’s risks and side effects of birth control Her Dream of Dreams book Feminine Forever the best-known pills. As a result of her work, Senator The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker example. Wilson claimed that menopause Gaylord Nelson began hearings in by Beverly Lowry caused a precipitous decline in women’s January 1970 “to explore the question of “[A] beautifully written biography of Madam overall health, sexuality, and mental state, whether users of birth control pills are C.J. Walker—the African-American cosmetic and that estrogen was the only cure. His being adequately informed concerning millionaire from Louisiana. . . . With crystal-clear argument, says Seaman, was that “A the pill’s known health hazards.” By that prose, lively anecdotes and dutiful research woman is not ‘complete’ unless she takes time, the early, high dose pills had been Beverly Lowry tells how Walker, against all odds, hormone replacement pills. She will be removed from Great Britain’s Health became a pioneer businesswoman and civil rights ‘condemned to witness the death of her Service formulary and replaced with activist extraordinaire. Lowry should be saluted for giving Walker the kind of grand historical own womanhood.’ She cannot be ‘forev- safer, low dose pills, but they were still recognition she deserves.”—Douglas Brinkley er feminine’ unless she takes hormone- being marketed in the United States. Vintage | Paper | 496 pages | $15.00 replacement therapy.” Wilson’s descrip- Nelson’s plan for the hearings was to tions of menopausal women suffering take the drug companies to task for their from “living decay” and being in a disregard of women’s right to know and More Stories We Tell “vapid, cow-like state” certainly offended to publicize studies of the effects of the The Best Contemporary Short Stories by American Women some women, but many more absorbed pill. However, Alice Wolfson and other Edited by Wendy Martin the message that menopause must be women from DC Women’s Liberation In the second edition of this anthology, Wendy Martin offers us an treated. changed all that. assortment of stellar short stories written by North American women In the 30 years following the publica- over the past thirty years. It includes classics to the form like Alice tion of Feminine Forever, a series of med- Suddenly….there was a distur- Munro, Ann Beattie, and Joyce Carol Oates—and stories by exciting ical benefits were claimed for bance from some women in the new voices like Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, and Marisa Silver. These stories menopausal hormone therapy. Women audience. Someone asked, “Why attest to the enduring talent and dedication of American women writers. were told that estrogen prevented frac- are there no patients testifying at Pantheon | Paper | 384 pages | $15.00 tures, heart disease, and possibly even these hearings?”… When I turned Also available, We Are the Stories We Tell Alzheimer’s—but they weren’t told that to check out the disturbances, so Pantheon | Paper | 352 pages | $16.00 studies hadn’t definitively proven any of did the rest of the people at the these claims. There were always some press table…who quickly shifted The Fire This Time studies that doctors could cite to back up their attention…to the Wolfson Young Activists and the New Feminism their claims that hormones helped women committing civil disobedi- menopausal women age more healthful- ence right there in the Senate, pre- Edited by Vivien Labaton and ly. At one point over a dozen studies senting their spontaneous testimo- Dawn Lundy Martin seemed to show an association between ny based not on scientific research In The Fire This Time, Dawn Martin and Vivien using hormones and experiencing fewer but on their own life experiences. Labaton, of The Third Wave Foundation—a multi- heart attacks. But Seaman points out that (pp. 131-132) racial, multi-issue, and multi-cultural activist the right kinds of studies, those that organization—offer a cross-section of feminist voices that express new directions in activism, were able to sort out the influence of the Direct action inside a Senate hear- identity and thought. Ranging from media and hormones from the influence of the ing room was unheard of in 1970 and culture to politics and globalization, The Fire This health-conscious lifestyle of the women immediately made news. The protests Time is a call to new frontiers of activism, and using the hormones, weren’t even begun were reported on the nightly news and helps reinvent feminism for a new generation. until the 1990s, and even then only at the in major media around the world in Anchor | Paper | 384 pages | $14.95 insistence of skeptical activists. the weeks following. Seaman describes When the Women’s Health Initiative the result: Reading the Women of the Bible results were announced, they completely A New Interpretation of Their Stories undid the culturally accepted view of So successfully did DC Women’s menopausal hormone therapy. The news Liberation make its case that hear- by Tikva Frymer-Kensky media at the time focused on the fact that ings on medical topics that exclud- “Reading the Women of the Bible contains new insights and brilliant hormones didn’t prevent heart disease or ed testimony from patients would analyses, and a whole set of creative syntheses. This book has much to say Alzheimer’s and that they increased the soon become a thing of the past. about and to women of every era and age, but its spirit, scope, and breadth go beyond any generic limits: men—perhaps even more than women—can risk of breast cancer and blood clots. But the Boston Tea Party of the and should learn much from it, both about the Bible and the women in it.” What didn’t get as much attention was women’s health movement went far —David Noel Freedman, University of California, San Diego the finding that the women in the study beyond establishing a patient’s right Schocken | Paper | 480 pages | $15.00 experienced none of the quality of life to testify before Congress. It led to improvements that have been advertised the opening up of consumer access And If I Perish for over 60 years. They didn’t have more to information on all prescription energy, better sex, or improved mood. So drugs, to patient participation on Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II much for the happy, healthy older woman FDA committees, and it helped to by Evelyn Monahan and waltzing with her adoring partner! determine how to move forward Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee In The Greatest Experiment, Seaman with NIH and other government “This scrupulously researched book will please shows that what had been commonly clinical trials….Ultimately, the professional scholars and general readers with its “known”—that women need to replace group succeeded in shifting some lively narrative, telling detail, and first person the hormones lost through menopause power from entrenched interests to accounts. It is an important corrective to the current to be healthy and enjoy life—wasn’t ordinary people. (p. 134) historical record in which these brave women . . . knowledge at all, but spin. She acknowl- don’t rate a mention. It is also a worthy memorial to edges that some women do experience At this point in the book Seaman is those who died in action.”—Jill Ker Conway Knopf | Cloth | 528 pages | $30.00 problems with menopause, and rightly describing not only her beat as a journal- credits early estrogen researchers with ist, but her own involvement in founding good intentions. But she uses this story, a movement of which both she and I are Masquerade which she aptly describes as a decades- a part. The National Women’s Health The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier long experiment on women without their Network sprung from the work of by Alfred F. Young consent, to illustrate women’s need to Seaman, Alice Wolfson, and others, and “Meticulous detective work has enabled Alfred Young to separate fact learn as much as possible about the drugs continues in their spirit to this day. In from fiction and finally reveal the true story of Deborah Sampson, the and medical procedures being recom- The Greatest Experiment, Seaman recounts fabled female revolutionary war soldier. A remarkable tale, engagingly mended to them. the stories of menopausal hormone written, this is surely the definitive biography.”—Mary Beth Norton, therapy and oral contraceptives with the author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 oven throughout the history juicy details of an insider and the biting Knopf | Cloth | 432 pages | $26.95 of menopausal hormone ther- analysis of a feminist critic. By sharing For desk and examination copies: W apy, Seaman tells another these stories, Seaman tells us not only Visit: www.randomhouse.com/academic estrogen-related story, that of the devel- how women’s health has been poorly Email: [email protected] opment and introduction of oral contra- served by the mythology of estrogen, Write: Knopf Academic Marketing ceptives. The FDA approved the first but also how we can undo the harm 1745 Broadway, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10019 oral contraceptive in 1960. In the early done and create a better, healthier future 1960s, when Seaman was a writer for Dr. for all women. The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 13 misses Clueless as hardly a serious adapta- ics make entirely opposing judgments tion of Emma. He wanders through the about the same film. Hilary Schor begins semantics of “handsome” as applied to her essay in response to Anthony Lane’s The Janeite lens an “over-aged” Gwyneth Paltrow as review of Douglas McGrath’s Emma by Emma, complains about how filmmakers asking what the terms are by which we by Brooks Robards fill up the frame with bustling servants “read” adaptations of Emma. “What does and stampeding sheep, then decides it mean to be true to a text? What is the Jane Austen on Screen edited by Gina Macdonald and Andrew F. director Amy Heckerling’s application of Austen spirit? What is celebrity and what is “clueless” is intriguingly Austenian and its relation to narrative film? And, most Macdonald. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, allows that the movie Clueless has consid- significantly, what is a classic?” While she erable virtues after all. Mosier has the col- doesn’t presume to answer such big ques- 2003, 284 pp., $25.00 hardcover. lection’s final say: “No film has yet been tions, she puts them on the table as made worthy of Austen.” But he fails to reminders of how slippery they are. Then make any consistently coherent or she wisely narrows the analysis to manage- enlightening point about what makes Jane able size, concentrating on modes of nar- hat makes Jane Austen’s novels nal, yet a careful, imaginative treatment can Austen so popularly filmable. ration and giving fair play to their exercise so popular and so readily adapt- shed new light on the text and open up a in both novel and film. W able to film? Linda Troost’s and new readership that brings new perspec- ithin this unfortunate frame- She tells the reader, Sayre Greenfield’s anthology Jane Austen in tives and new responses to the source.” work come some interesting dis- Hollywood asked that question in 1998, and Fortunately, many of the authors ignore W cussions of what film versions What has made McGrath’s Emma apparently it still needs answering, because the literature battle cry. of Austen novels may do. Penny Gay seem classic to most viewers is not now we have Jane Austen on Screen. Both A structurally odd little section entitled introduces a too-often missing feminist anything on the screen at all, but collections rely predominantly on English “Short ‘Takes’ on Austen: summarizing perspective with a look at the foreground- something that surrounds it: its professors to explore Austen’s work in film the controversy between literary purists ing of sisterhood in Ang Lee’s Sense and complicated use of voice-over nar- or as pop culture phenomenon, although and film enthusiasts,” contains the first Sensibility. Jocelyn Harris weds classic liter- ration, both from the unseen female Jane Austen on Screen rounds itself out by three essays. Austen scholar Roger Gard ary analysis to more recent critical tech- narrator who opens the film and including a film director and a film special- gamely stumbles onto the battleground niques by considering the merits of trans- from Emma herself in ironic com- ist among its cast of experts. English pro- with a stunning series of gaffes that fail to lation versus imitation and intertextuality. mentary and epistolary confession, fessors might understandably think them- offer the reader the benefit of his literary Paulette Richards examines the use of and its equally strategic deployment selves best suited to delving into Jane on expertise but instead betray his ignorance Regency romance motifs in Roger of characters’ voices, both to bridge screen, but that does a disservice to the about film as a medium. “The camera has Michell’s Persuasion without falling prey to individual scenes and to interrupt labors of their colleagues in communica- no narrative voice,” he declares. Pictures Deborah Kaplan’s argument from Jane our easy progress from one per- tion and cultural and film studies, who are “can’t establish an ironic context.” They Austen in Hollywood that the movie version spective to another. (p. 145) usually better trained to explore the sub- cannot “manage time, or summarize.” “harlequinizes” Austen. tleties of cinema and popular culture. “Pictures can tell only of the surface of Ellen Belton starts on solid ground in She gives equal weight to narrative Jane Austen on Screen, a book designed things.” Finally, Gard disposes of every her comparison of the 1940 and 1995 film technique in the novel. From its first chap- for academics and Janeites rather than the one of the Austen-based movies in a sin- versions of Pride and Prejudice by focusing ters, Schor suggests, Emma “is playing a general public, suffers from the weakness- gle sentence: “[I]sn’t it unfortunately the on historical context. It’s useful to be complicated game, asking us at once to es inevitable in trying to do justice to film, case that none of them remains in the reminded that the 1940 version was identify with its heroine, and to believe a feminism, and literature all at the same mind as even a minor work of art?” released as War World II was unfolding voice floating somewhere above her, time. The point should not be which is Fortunately, New Zealand film director and that the relationship between Britain which knows more than she (or we) about better, book or film, but what we can learn Gaylene Preston helps level the playing and America helps explain the subtext in Emma’s ‘real’ situation.” The analysis from each. The bad news for Jane Austen on field with a tribute to Ang Lee’s film of the 1940 film of England as a “lost and deepens further when Schor points out, Screen is that the title is a misleading hook Sense and Sensibility, and Kate Bowles lovingly remembered world.” While her “‘The problem highlighted in this essay is that panders to the same kind of commer- ignores the whole either/or noncontrover- premise that the 1995 miniseries is a post- one of where, again almost literally, to cialization the novel-based films are often sy by discussing the vitality of Janeite feminist rewriting of the novel for an locate the site of female speech: the film, accused of. The good news is that the indi- Internet fandom. audience that “wants Elizabeth to have it like the novel, asks, where is that voice vidual essays often have more insight than The editors close their collection with all” is interesting, it might have been even coming from? whom is it safe to speak the undertaking as a whole. perhaps the most confusing essay of all. more rewarding to see her sustain her for? where can Emma ‘go’ as an inde- In their introduction, Macdonald and John Mosier displays an impressively broad sociopolitical perspective in her dis- pendent narrator?” Macdonald set up an awkward dichotomy broad array of European literary scholar- cussion of the later film version. Jan Thus, Schor’s analysis doesn’t deterio- by trying to square off the “purists,” for ship to argue, “the primary objective of a Fergus flounders somewhat in a compari- rate into the good/bad generalizations that whom any film version of the Austen nov- good adaptation, like that of any good son of “purist” and “postmodern” ver- plague the premise set up by the editors els will fail, against the “film enthusiasts,” interpretative reading of a text, is to make sions of Mansfield Park, because she con- and often mire the individual essayists. who argue that the films have their own viewers return to the text and reconsider fines herself to a narrow consideration of Had the other essayists felt free to follow validity. The battle seems weighted in favor it anew.” A fair enough statement. Then film as adaptation. Schor’s capable lead, Jane Austen on Screen of the novels. The editors compare the he meanders, sometimes entertainingly To be fair to the enterprise as a whole, might have accomplished the difficult task films to the translation of a poem: “[T]he but often bewilderingly. For example, at the authors do occasionally dispute one of juggling film, literature, and feminism words will never be the same as the origi- the beginning of his commentary, he dis- another, and it can be intriguing to see crit- with greater success.

Poetry by Jody Bolz

What You See Last Time You See What you see last time you see you’re startled to admit with which it arched your hand opening a last time you feel these days for everything beneath a lover’s mouth holding nothing ants shimmering on pavement or bent across

wherever you lie last time you lie slap of plastic flags the turned earth in your bed or some bed above a crummy car-lot of a garden-plot behind a numbered door hovels fences trainyards despite its open gestures

or out in broad daylight blossoming in rust its eyes frank with longing— Rescue fingers scrabbling the last time each ugliness disarming you moment when your body in dirt as you listen each injury each failure which seemed to you we’re digging a grave in the sky —Paul Celan to the last thing the botched heart inseparable lurch of wind in birch boughs that woke you up from will and joy and fury Reverse the tape sirens and shouting in terror is trash to burn or bury. and billowing ash takes shape suggests a wall—no, a tower— truck gears grinding all the years you fought and two dark figures on a nearby highway this last thing: (a man and a woman?) last phrase of the soundtrack moment when your body each with close-cropped hair on end who rocket skyward you’ve been hearing for a lifetime like every body hand in hand. song without lyrics becomes a slab of stuff no mention of the tenderness despite the trust —September 11, 2002

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 sense, beauty wrought from a world that town’s disaster alarm is both painful and lovely. Sutton’s subject rushed us to the street, loud pitch is the memory of a compelling and at pulsing against Teaching and learning times dangerous family and the story of the drape of heavy air. Today’s sky how the narrator rescues herself, learning is astonishing, by Alison Townsend to love even in unloving circumstances. Her work is a wonderful balance of expe- the quick slide of night to Livelihood by Phoebe MacAdams. Los Angeles: rience and reflection, as these first stanzas mid-day, a greater sweep from “Above the Beach” illustrate: of jade.... (“Twisters,” p.7) Cahuenga Press, 2003, 94 pp., $12.00 paper. Though it’s summer, we stand Though her imagery is striking, it’s Embellishments by Virginia Chase Sutton. Aptos, CA: above the beach never just for effect. Sutton is first and in stiff dresses, dead husks of foremost a poet of the body. Her work is Chatoyant, 2003, 71 pp., $12.00 paper. alewives visceral, forceful in its insistence on bod- near our patent leather shoes, in ily understanding. A compact, stolen the photo when she was a child, “gather[s] a slow hat is teaching anyway?” Now Frank is gone. (p. 34) pinch of skin.” Memory exists in a Phoebe MacAdams asks in the our home-permed hair frizzes “stitched shelter.” Someone’s face is “fist- W introduction to Livelihood, her “This is a hard season for my stu- over the snap of small waves ed shut.” Drinks with a lover are fourth poetry collection. A veteran public dents/ who grow anyway,” MacAdams creeping described as “fire and color, shot silk// high school teacher in Los Angeles, writes. “This is for them.” There are also close to our feet. We are moving the savory slur of desire.” This sensory MacAdams explores teaching in all its moments of joy. MacAdams writes out- to this new place, away from the apprehension of the world gives the joys, frustrations, and sorrows. She writes side with her students, turns them on to lost business, poems a precise authority, as in the first of students and classes, faculty meetings, Hamlet, gives witty instructions for section of “Night Terrors,” a prose poem and tragedies that occur in the course of reading Gertrude Stein (“writing is the lost house, lost jobs. In Chicago, that examines motherhood and daughter- the school year. She also writes movingly matter of the matter,/ the matter is Mother plans, things will be different. hood from multiple perspectives: of the conflicts that occasioned the 1989 what we write”). But what do we understand this Los Angeles Unified School District One of things I find most admirable afternoon It’s the light that wakes me each teachers’ strike, and in the final section of about MacAdams’ work is her ability to morning: a smooth triangle the book, captures a year in the classroom define the interrelatedness of her work as about promises or journeys? It’s widening over the bare floor as the in a poetry journal. MacAdams says that a teacher and the rest of her life. In lunch door quietly hinges and the book was inspired by “the Buddhist “Connectedness: My Students, My at Howard Johnson’s, Mother Mother’s big body eases all the idea of Right Livelihood...a profession Husband,” she writes: interviews way in, ribboning the light to that is honorable and which does not for a teaching job, Dad happy to shadows. Her flat white face bring harm to others.” Teaching has been I teach the roundness of things, be selling anything. glimmers along my bed’s MacAdams’ right livelihood, and while which They rent the cheapest house, a blanketed edge, amber fumes many writers teach, I don’t think I have starts with my wedding ring, the flat green suburb of bourbon sift through her ever seen the process revealed with as circle teeth. much intention and attention as it is in of teaching, of notebooks, of where we’ll hide gallon liquor jugs Listen, she says, I never wanted a this gritty and luminous collection. A writing in the trash daughter. Her breath burns teacher too, I found myself nodding my done in class, then next year and the next. Gin bottles my eyes. I know how you are: lazy and head in agreement over something in at home, glint selfish, sleep when I need nearly every poem. Here are the students the roundness of words, of work, against the moon behind the you. She can spin the words for with seemingly insoluble problems, the of the sky filled with stars, house. (p. 23) hours until her voice blurs into endless papers, the exhaustion. Here too the moon each night the sounds I never recognize as are the realities of inner-city schools— around morning, then evening, Upstairs in this house, the narrator my own tears. (p. 50) shootings, murders, pregnancies. and later your arms. and her sister hide, practicing holding MacAdams’ style is supple and varied. We are round like a bear. their breath, wondering, “Who will pass The mother’s accusation and the The poems in the first section of the The year is round, out, disappear into the rug’s white nap?” child’s perceptions work in concert book, which gathers work written between and all of us go round Looking at a photo, the narrator wonders toward the stanza’s unsettling conclusion. 1986-2002, are condensed and lyrical, dis- full of sky, like stars. (p. 30) about the sisters, “forced/ to hold hands This poem, which later moves forward in tinguished by an approach both meditative and pretend that their small faces/ time, charting the narrator’s experience as and incantatory. In “Again, Teaching,” In the second part of the book, haven’t been creased by the sun.” When a young mother and, finally, her thoughts MacAdams evokes “Hathor, goddess of MacAdams takes on larger subjects in she shows the picture to her sister, reve- as she keeps watch at her dying mother’s schools,” her “companion here at the lore poems titled “Bilingual Education,” “A lation comes: “the girls in this photo/ bedside, is an example of Sutton’s uncan- house/ in the complicated halls/ where Day in the Life of L.A. Unified,” and already recognize that the sun’s luminous ny ability to braid the past and present we often feel lost,” and exhorts her stu- “Teacher Strike: 1989.” Difficult to gleam/ won’t shield them. It’s what they together into a seamless whole. dents to “take words.../ and learn to make excerpt, these pieces are extended medi- cannot see.” In the brilliant “My Mother Spon- your life with them. Make your barge of tations, characterized by a longer line or, Making things visible, speaking out of taneously Combusts at Marshall Field’s words/ and make it strong.” In “Lesson in some instances, mixtures of lineated silence, and giving the ravaged body and Richard’s Swirl Shoppe,” Sutton Plan Prayer,” she reveals what all good and prose poetry. Quietly revolutionary words are all part of Sutton’s poetic task, weaves together the past and the present teachers know—that they are students in their insistence on the integrity of the which she performs in a variety of ways. that illuminates it even more tightly. In too—and requests individual, they should be required read- Some of her poems, like that above, this magically surreal poem, the narrator ing for school administrators. unfold in plain yet haunting diction. describes a fashionable mother, so self- Beauty be with me now, In the final section of the book, Others employ more lavish language. In centered she says, “When you lose the weight gods of the Jurassic, MacAdams returns to the short lyric, cap- “Perfume,” a delicious love poem, “Roses I’ll invest in pretty clothes./ Then it’s your turn. of the then and now, turing the daily round of teaching and still flower in the yard,/ their thick colors Now it’s mine.” Midway through the poem, stay with me as I plan school in a richly detailed poetry journal blurring in a coil of night air.” In the narrator notices “sequined smoke these lessons (which she says was inspired by Ed “Amphetamines,” a chilling poem about misting above// her curls.” Smoke and this life. (p. 21) Sanders’ 1968, a personal history in verse), enforced adolescent weight loss, the nar- fire are metaphors for the mother’s disso- where she attempts to answer some of her rator’s “rushing heart empties small lution, as Sutton alternates images of the MacAdams’ language is spare, questions about teaching. In her introduc- fires/ in a quick slap of blood.” In the mother shopping with those of her “tied unadorned, and piercingly direct, infused tion to the book, MacAdams says that haunting “Tia Maria and Blue Sugar to a chair in a slippery hallway, white with heart, intelligence, and human teaching “is a process, a journey I have Cubes,” the lovers’ voices are “a polished straps// centered over thin breasts,” or warmth. Mini-portraits of various stu- been on with my students. Teaching is curl in the sharp night air.” “snapped into a rayon housedress// with dents emerge. She grieves over one of her something we do together.” These taut, Sutton creates muscular, haunting slashed pockets, roomy cotton under- brightest students, who has been absent honest, and heartfelt poems provide an poems out of the spell of words them- pants/ tugged to her ribs.” At the end of for over three weeks, “trying to hold on to invaluable map of that journey. selves. Though her poems are narrative in the poem is this extraordinary image: her spinning life” in the face of family structure, they are lush, sensuous, and dysfunction, only to return pregnant. he title poem in Virginia Chase richly detailed. In many, the process of She reaches for another cigarette. She consoles a boy whose friend has Sutton’s exquisite first collection, remembering becomes a kind of spell, Bronzing lips steam into a been shot: T Embellishment, is about a tattoo, driven by an intense lyricism that seduces smile, “[t]he bite and stain forever/ on the skin,” the reader: dumplings boiling on the stove. “Frank took the bullet for me,” he a “slur” of colors, which when picked Wait awhile. Some fires said, head held high. away leaves ones that are “raw, sharper The sky is lovely: a sudden slur of smoulder before they explode. It “He was sitting by me in the car.” than a scar.” Like the poet’s skin, etched night dropping takes time, I remind I told him to make his life twice with “fine lines tallied before the gushing a furl of grey clouds that overlap myself, liking the operator’s curling as good glut// of color that filled each individual until real color iron as it teases for his best friend. petal/ and leaf,” the poems in this collec- gathering smoke into a nest of full He nodded. tion are embellishments in the finest is forgotten. Minutes ago, the flame. (p. 41)

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 15 One of the things I admire most “Anecdote” is typically assigned to about Sutton is her honesty. The poems the bottom rung of evidence in main- are strikingly undefended. In the devas- stream medical research (even by those tating “Blackout,” for example, she Me and my uterus who acknowledge that “evidence” is remembers being raped when drunk: “anecdote” in the aggregate). And yet, by Anne Marie Todkill there is no more powerful teaching tool ...That gin’s a dream than a story, despite the danger of snapping me upright in bed some Am I Still A Woman? Hysterectomy and Gender Identity “reading in” too much. Elson’s ethno- nights, graphic method involves constructing reminding me of the two of us by Jean Elson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, meaning simultaneously with gathering wrapped data. Each word that she identifies as 2004, 247 pp., $19.95 paper. significant primes the ear to hear the inside an ice-storm of blankets next instance more acutely. Does this and sheets. How you result in an interpretation as valid as it took what you needed. How you is sensitive? Elson’s readings are con- never asked me ysterectomy,” Jean Elson tells excesses or abuses in medical practice, vincing and only occasionally lapse into to open, but waited until the glass us, “is currently the second but to describe the psychosocial impact overinterpretation. A case in point is was empty H most commonly performed of hysterectomy: specifically, its impli- her response to phrases such as “they [major] surgical procedure in the United cations for women’s conception of took it all” or “they took everything” and I couldn’t speak. (p. 14) States. [The most common is cesarean themselves as women. To what extent, with respect to the removal of not only section.] Each year approximately Elson wanted to know, does the the uterus (hysterectomy per se) but also In other poems she recalls the child 600,000 American women undergo hys- removal of the womb—that symbolic of the ovaries and fallopian tubes (salp- who accidentally steps on a coal that terectomies, a rate that is among the and productive core of femaleness— ingo-oophorectomy). Elson takes these spills from a backyard grill, but knows world’s highest.” It is hard to believe “disrupt” a woman’s “gender identity”? phrases as a cri de coeur that means, she’s “...passing/ some test, of walking that the womb can be as troublesome as To answer this question, Elson “they took all of me.” I am not per- barefoot and sweaty/ over new coals, this; frightening to realize that it is so interviewed 44 women aged 24 to 97 suaded that the immediate context of keeping my careful silence,” and the girl disease-prone—or so easily patholo- who had undergone hysterectomy for the interviewee’s choice of words who “realized years/ ago: it was either gized—that “the uterus of at least one benign conditions. (Interviewing invites such a drastic reading. swallow or drown.” out of every three American women is women living with a diagnosis of can- Allowing for such differences in Sutton illuminates loss unflinchingly, eventually surgically removed.” cer, Elson felt, would add another level interpretation, Elson articulates the in shapes so deep and primary that they Most hysterectomies are “elective.” of complexity to their responses and many facets of potential meaning that seem etched on the reader’s conscious- That is, they are prompted by benign as make it more difficult to discern the women may derive from the loss of ness. Ultimately, her poems summon that opposed to cancerous or otherwise life- information she was seeking.) Most their womb and ovaries. She lays out a most important emotion, empathy. threatening conditions. Among the lived in a “medium sized urban area in map of possible responses, and does so Walking through an exhibit of portraits most common conditions for which New England” and were located against the background of earlier clini- by John Singer Sargent with her young hysterectomy is an irrevocable solution through word of mouth and local cal, sociological, and theoretical stud- daughter, the narrator thinks of her are fibroids, endometriosis, excessive advertising. As she assembled her study ies, which are helpfully referenced and mother, realizing how “...even she want- bleeding, and chronic pelvic pain. sample, Elson refined it, seeking annotated. Now that I have read these ed/ that split second of illumination, the Elson does not brood over the allega- women from specific socioeconomic accounts, and Elson’s lucid analysis of perfect scrap/ of trembling light.” tion by some researchers that “at least strata or who identified themselves as them, it may be too easy for me to say “What does the sea give back after one-third of all American hysterec- lesbian or bisexual. Elson’s interviews, that much of this map could have been water/ has slipped away and returned,” tomies are probably ‘medically unnec- conducted from 1997 to 1999, ranged sketched out intuitively. Although there she asks in “Beach Glass.” “Is it beauty essary’”—at least, not until the final in length from 90 to 180 minutes and is no such thing as a “typical” response, or mystery?” It is both, as these moving chapters of her book. The first objec- were loosely structured and “open- each one made sense within the com- and courageous poems attest. tive of her research was not to expose ended.” The hysterectomy experiences plex social framework of how woman- recounted to her had occurred at dif- hood is defined, constructed, lived, and ferent ages (from 24 to 69); at widely responded to in North America. Some different distances of time (from 9 interviewees felt that an essential and weeks to 69 years before Elson’s study); irreplaceable part of their female iden- and in vastly different ideological tity was removed along with their Calling All Poets moments (from 1938 to 1998.) womb; others felt this “disruption” of These details of Elson’s ethno- gender integrity less keenly. Some felt and Writers: graphic research methodology are relief after the procedure, which important to bear in mind. Her released them from painful symptoms; Our July 2004 issue focuses on “grounded theory approach”—which, some felt anger; others, grief or regret. new books of fiction and poetry. as she describes it, “discovers theory Some were surprised by their reaction, through the systematic collection, con- for the experience of hysterectomy had stant comparison, and analysis of inter- triggered an unsought-for reflection on view data” —has the advantage of their identity as women. The personal Has your book been advertised being able to capture the detail, com- meaning that each woman accorded to plexity, and nuance of lived experience. her surgery was, by and large, consis- yet in the Women’s Review? Its disadvantage (if this is one) lies in tent with the biographical details she the difficulty of extrapolating findings disclosed. The trouble is, of course, into generalizable conclusions. Elson’s that a patient’s experience of selfhood don’t get mad: study sample is small, at least for epi- and gender identity is not likely to be demiologic purposes; in medical parl- inquired into before surgery. Although buy your own ad! ance it would be called insufficiently much is made of the importance of “powered” (a term ripe for feminist counseling and informed consent discourse analysis). More problematic before treatment, the culture and con- for most readers is the fact that her Special deep discounts for small presses, straints of modern medical practice do study group is so disparate and her not leave much room for pre-op psy- small businesses, and authors when prepaid. presentation of their stories so discon- chological exploration. tinuous. There are many variables in Copywriting services at no charge; design these accounts, and largely because of ill a woman still feel like a and typesetting fees on request from Elson’s mode of reporting, it requires woman when her uterus is some effort either to hold these vari- removed? The blunt, almost [email protected]. Book your ad by June 1; W ables together as a synthetic whole or tabloid-style question posed by Elson’s to keep track of the details of a partic- title surprised me. Surely, I thought, Camera ready delivery by June 10; ular narrative. The pseudonymous prevailing notions of gender are not so On-ssale date July 1 - August 20, 2004. interviewees experienced hysterectomy reductive, so biologically based, as to for various reasons, in various circum- make this a question one could serious- stances, and with varying degrees of ly pose nowadays in North America. Click the “discounted ad consent, understanding, support, and And yet, the answer for many respon- rates” link on our homepage, empowerment. It is not feasible, there- dents was that the loss of the womb did fore, to draw strong correlations make them feel somehow less of a between personal and social factors woman—less whole, less attractive, less www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview and types of responses aside from the feminine, less normal. probably real but nonetheless highly Elson writes: “[N]one of the localized connections explored in indi- women I interviewed perceived them- vidual accounts. selves as members of an additional sex

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 or gender category. Instead, their nar- done the reader a favor by pointing out ratives endorse the cultural binary divi- that it is an inconsequential novel—and sions of sex and gender.” The designa- that’s putting it kindly. tion of “male” or “female” is made, Modernist and modern In addition to claiming avant-garde Elson argues, very early in life and does status for all lesbians, the contributors to not change, despite the insecurity that by Karla Jay this collection appear to ignore or to be one may feel with regard to meeting ignorant of any biographical fact that the “ideal” standards or expectations The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars undercuts their position about forward- of one’s gender. For most intervie- looking women. Though biography is wees, the physical reality of gynecolog- edited by Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer. beyond the scope of these essays, facts ic surgery caused some collateral dam- about lives are brought in only when age to their gender identity, but “near- New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, they are convenient and further an argu- ly all respondents still asserted that ment. Hall and Brooks may have been they still identify as women.” 2003, 259 pp. $65.00 hardcover, $29.00 paper. lesbians, but were they avant-garde? This is not to say that gender identi- Both leaned decidedly to the political fication is without nuance. For exam- Right. In Florence during World War II, ple, the loss of ovaries and their hor- Brooks and her partner, Barney, praised monal function was seen by many of n Nightwood, Djuna Barnes showed a case for expanding the canon. Joe Mussolini; Hall and her partner, Lady Elson’s interviewees as a greater loss to she knew a thing or two about mix- Lucchesi’s “‘Something Hidden, Secret Una Troubridge, cheered him from their femininity than the loss of the uterus. I ing high and low culture. The Paris and Eternal’: Romaine Brooks, balcony. Brooks and Barney were more Many missed having a physical and of her novel is a stew of nobility, circus Radclyffe Hall, and the Lesbian Image concerned about a sudden absence of emotional cycle. For some, the keenest freaks, transvestitic doctors, and preda- in The Forge” demonstrates how Hall’s filet mignon than about the displaced loss caused by early menopause was tory women of wealth. As Jane Marcus early novel, The Forge (1924) made refer- and exterminated millions. The people not the loss of fecundity but of per- noted in her brilliant essay “Laughing at ence to Brooks’ painting Weeping Venus created or painted by Brooks and Hall ceived youthfulness; in most cases, it Leviticus: Nightwood as Women’s Circus (1916-1917). After Susan, the protago- were white, even if the Paris around was not simply the event of hysterec- Epic,” Barnes’ 1937 novel foregrounded nist, views Venetia’s painting of the them was not. What does their decision tomy but its timing during the “child- the very groups—Jews, gypsies, and same title, “Susan leaves her husband not to include people of color mean? bearing years” that caused regret. homosexuals—who would be targeted and begins her life with the artist.” For None of the essayists here ask such Some grieved the loss of the potential to by the Nazis for extermination. Thus, to “women who found themselves in her question. As a result, the list of “class, bear children, even when they had not examine high and low culture and to situation,” Lucchesi writes, “the erotic race, sexual orientation, and social and intended to have any. For some, the “articulate the ways that ideas of moder- implications of Brooks’ nudes were political belief systems” in the introduc- surgery brought insecurity about sexu- nity intersect with class, race, sexual ori- obvious.” I am not quite so confident tion seems to be simply a politically cor- al attractiveness and pleasure; for oth- entation, and social and political belief that I know what the audience believed, rect litany without substance or commit- ers, no longer concerned about the systems at a specific historical moment and such speculations should be backed ment. Perhaps the concerns of the edi- possibility of pregnancy, it was disin- and geographical site,” as The Modern up with reactions from lesbians who tors were not adequately conveyed to hibiting. Despite the uncertain risks Woman Revisited intends to do, is not a were not close friends of Brooks. contributors. Or is it adequate to confine and benefits of estrogen replacement particularly novel idea, though new Neither The Forge nor the painting is discussions of “isms” to the two essays therapy, most interviewees embraced essays on Modernism or modernity are openly lesbian, and women did not dare on women of color? this technology as a means of “retain- always welcome in this fast-growing and paint male nudes at the time. How then In a second essay on the American ing or regaining [the] feminine gender popular area of endeavor. can Lucchesi suggest that “previously expatriate artist, “Deconsecrating identity” that had been taken from Barnes, along with Radclyffe Hall overlooked work by Hall and Brooks Modernism: Allegories of Regeneration them ahead of schedule. and Colette, forms the literary center of could open up a more thorough and in Brooks and Picasso,” Bridget Elliott Thus, despite the existence of theo- this collection. The other essays are nuanced understanding of strategies argues convincingly that both were ries, summarized by Elson in her intro- panoramic in content. Some focus on these artists used to formulate, regulate, influenced by Puvis de Chavannes’ ductory chapter, that construe gender visual artists such as Sonia Delaunay, and resist the boundaries of the newly 1871-1872 oil paintings, Hope. The sim- as a social or cultural “construction” or Augusta Savage, Tamara de Lempicka, emergent lesbian identities of postwar ilarities between the ruined architecture “performance,” Elson’s interviewees and Claude Cahun and her collaborator, Europe”? Is there anything in Brooks’ in the background of Chavannes’ 1872 were not prompted by a “disruption” Marcel Moore. There are also essays on Weeping Venus that speaks to “identity” version of Hope and Brooks’ famous in gender identity to radically question dance and fashion and even one on per se? Lucchesi implies that all work by 1923 self-portrait of herself in a top hat the category of “woman” in either Babette, a man who performed as a lesbians is homoerotic and therefore and long black coat are indeed striking. biological or sociological terms. As female acrobat. Though the inspiration modern/Modern. Brooks’ painting Nevertheless, it seems a feat of syllogis- Elson somewhat wryly puts it: for this work was an art show on might be labeled Modern, but Hall’s tic logic to conclude that “there might Romaine Brooks at the Berkeley Art novel is conventional. be more continuities between artists Although postmodern theorists Museum in the Bay Area in the year such as Picasso and Brooks than view- might object to the idea of sur- 2000, only three of the essays focus on ost of the essays suggest that ers have imagined” simply because they rendering identity to a con- Brooks, the American portraitist who those the contributors have were influenced by the same painting. structed category of gender, the left the United States first for Capri and M labeled “lesbian” are all The contrasts Elliot draws between individuals that I interviewed, then for Paris, where she was Natalie “transgressive” or revolutionary to Brooks and Picasso are equally falla- like most contemporary women, Clifford Barney’s love interest for many some degree. Yes and no. Social con- cious. “Picasso,” Elliott professes, are not postmodern. They years (though by no means Barney’s structionists argue that lesbianism as we “belonged to the experimental avant- placed great value on their abili- exclusive one). know it did not evolve until the mid- garde of the Left Bank and Brooks to ty to identify as women. All this talent resided in Paris 19th century. Certainly it was extraordi- the high society world of the Right (p. 177) between the wars. It is not clear, howev- nary to love women and create gyno- Bank.” In fact, between the wars, er, whether the collection is intended to centric work before World War II. As Brooks lived on the Quai Voltaire on At the same time, Elson’s inform- be about “the modern” or about the lit- the introduction to the book points the Left Bank and occasionally appeared ants were “not simply passive recipi- erary and artistic movement known as out, using a concept outlined in Shari at Left Bank salons. ents of cultural prescriptions; they “Modernism,” because the terms are Benstock’s groundbreaking Women of “Looking Like a Lesbian: Portraiture exercise[d] agency by stretching biolog- used interchangeably. Whitney the Left Bank (I also discussed the finan- and Sexual Identity in 1920s Paris,” by ical definitions of womanhood.” Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer’s cial and legal parameters of lesbian Tirza True Latimer, places Brooks and Elson’s book simultaneously sum- introduction critiques theories of and expatriation in The Amazon and the Page: Claude Cahun into the tradition of the marizes and opens up many lines of scholarship on Modernism from the Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien), dandy, saying it was “transgressive” for inquiry about women’s self-identifica- 1960s and 1970s as “centered around the sexual choices of Brooks, Hall, and women to assume the masculine style tion as women. It is worth reading for the role of formal innovation, the repro- others were made easier by the fact that and accouterments made famous by its examination of themes such as the duction of a vanguard culture, and the they had substantial inheritances and Oscar Wilde. The 1923 photograph of meaning of the onset of menarche, the distinction between so-called high art that they were foreigners in France. Cahun certainly seems to make a state- acceptance of life stages, cultural and and popular culture....” The clear impli- Djuna Barnes may have been, as ment about the dandy: Cahun’s hair is medical notions of the female repro- cation is that a re-evaluation of Carolyn Allen claims in her essay, the cropped short, her hand is on her hip, ductive organs as “unstable and funda- Modernism is to follow. Yet, most of the only member of the group who was a and she has chosen to wear a white mentally uncontrollable,” sources of essays focus on the “modern” woman, true New Woman, working because she handkerchief in the pocket over her grief after gynecological surgery, and who was not necessarily a “Modernist” had to and wanted to earn a living. (The heart. Her outfit also seems to include a the ambivalent relationship between or even avant-garde. financial circumstances of other les- masculine shirt and fancy white cravat, women and their gynecologists. One Take, for instance, the three essays bians in the collection—for instance, although the photo is not clear. In a hopes that the latter group will be on Romaine Brooks, which are, unfor- Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, were 1928 photograph of Cahun’s image among the main readers of this book. tunately, dispersed in different sections not entirely clear to me.) Their lesbian- reflected in a mirror, her hair is buzzed Alas, it is those physicians, both men of the anthology—thus restricting dia- ism was in fact a scandal in the United short but seems dyed in a feminine way. and women, who stand to learn the logue among the essays and forcing States and Britain: As the small print in She appears to be wearing lipstick. Her most about the psychological impact readers primarily interested in Brooks to many commercials warns us, “Don’t try checked blouse—which in another of hysterectomy who may be the least skip around. Brooks is not generally this at home.” Finally, although The photo is revealed to be a bathrobe— likely to give Elson’s study the atten- considered a Modernist, but I have no Forge creates a nice connection between seems more a reference to harlequinism tion it deserves. quarrel with anyone who wants to make Hall and Brooks, Lucchesi might have than to dandyism. It is possible that

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 17 Cabrini established 67 schools, hospitals, and orphanages. Victorians became per- versely fascinated with nuns; many 19th- Getting to be a habit century brothels kept habits and whips on hand for their customers. by Susanne Boitano In the 20th century, the church offi- cially recognized women’s religious com- The Habit: A History of the Clothing of Catholic Nuns munities as “true” and declared the orders’ right to exercise authority over by Elizabeth Kuhns. New York: Doubleday, 2003, dress and lifestyle. During the 1950s religious women ran schools, hospitals, 228 pp., $23.95 hardcover. and charitable missions, but it was also at this time that concerns over nuns’ obsolete garments began to surface. In 1962, the second Vatican Council urged or nuns, donning the distinct The act of shedding “dirty” secular nuns to adopt modern dress. Coming to ensemble is not just a 24/7 routine; clothes for a clean, holy set was seen as agreement on new clothing guidelines F it’s an act of daily devotion, despite parallel to the donning of white robes was difficult; hundreds of nun-hours absurd images of nuns that abound in after baptism to represent a new life in were spent on polling and altering, as Claude Cahun (and Marcel Moore), the popular media: Think of the chirpy Christ. Symbolic of poverty, chastity, and orders tried to tailor their images to a untitled, ca. 1928. Black and white novice in The Flying Nun or the irreverent obedience, early habits were modeled on world in ideological flux. Some nuns photograph. From The Modern musical Nunsense. The Habit peels back the clothing of the poor—constructed even consulted charm schools and Woman Revisited. stereotypes to expose real nuns, showing from coarse, undyed fibers and cut in a makeup experts in an effort to update that as the habit concealed the body, it sexually ambiguous fashion. For some their look. The Daughters of Charity Cahun was making a statement about revealed the soul. Kuhns reflects on the women, becoming a nun was a way to consulted haute couture designer gynandry, a trope that was extremely power of this enigmatic outfit: “Though escape brutal pagan practices and unjust Christian Dior, who constructed a box- popular among lesbians in Paris during my book focuses on a material aspect of societal restraints. Aristotle had seen pleat dress and kerchief-like veil for this period. their lives, I hope the readers will catch a women as “incomplete mutilated m[e]n,” them. New orders began wearing skirts, It’s difficult to make the same claim glimpse of the remarkable courage and Kuhns says, whereas early sisters were while older orders reworked their of dandyism about Brooks’ famous compassion that Catholic nuns have essential members of the Church. Up revered patterns. Without professional 1923 self-portrait. The unadorned black exhibited in every era of their history.” until the fourth century, taking the habit design help the results were often disas- top hat and the long black coat without Raised a Protestant, Kuhns converted to was a purely individual act that demon- trous: Habits that were merely short- a flower or handkerchief in its button- Catholicism, but hers is a history, not a strated one’s religious affiliation, conse- ened or amateurishly restyled ended up hole calls up the image of a Victorian memoir. She traces the foundation of the crating a life of hard labor, prayer, and looking dowdy and ill-conceived. gent on his way to a funeral—not the humble frock, from early Christian ascet- penitence. The Middle Ages witnessed flamboyant sartorial statement of an icism to 21st-century aesthetics, discover- the first official vows. Though the nuns Oscar Wilde or Alfred, Lord Douglas. ing hidden meaning, religious and secu- were now under the jurisdiction of the In Ladies Almanack, Djuna Barnes sati- lar, in its dark folds and pale pleats. male-dominated church, they did not rized Brooks’ lack of style when she Why the gnarly fabrics, the outsized always comply or seek approval where described her as looking “like a sleeves—and what about those wimples? dress was concerned. Ruling abbesses Coachman of the period of Pecksniff.” Kuhns starts by deconstructing the habit. often brought their own vision to the Fashion is one of the central preoc- Here’s where we learn coif from cincture, design; thus, the high-born Hildegard of cupations of this volume. (Despite the coronet from cap with the help of a glos- Bingen outfitted her flock in an aristo- homage in the acknowledgments to sary of church terms. Kuhns notes that cratic style, complete with red and purple Shari Benstock, the editors and contrib- the habit has chameleon tendencies, mir- veils and crown-like wimples. As a result utors have overlooked the invaluable roring the needs of secular and church of this focus on the habit, many nunner- anthology that Benstock edited with society. While some were inspired by ies were on the vanguard of textile tech- Suzanne Ferriss, On Fashion.) In addition heavenly visions, others were ripped off nology and manufacturing, as well as cen- to the idea of the female dandy, there is from peasant garb. The veil ceremony ters of scholarship, religious and secular. an intriguing essay by Mary Louise itself was once a carbon copy of a roman- Roberts on the boyish look of the tic wedding, complete with a bachelorette ith the start of the Protestant “femme garçon” during the 1920s. In night and a big cake. Clearly a dramatic revolution, persecution of “Samson and Deliah Revisited: The passage from one life to another—taking W Catholics grew: Cloisters were Politics of Fashion in 1920s Paris,” the veil made Christ your better half, and destroyed and nuns’ habits ripped from Roberts argues that “postwar observers vow breakers were considered adulterers. their bodies. Associated with the aristoc- Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity. interpreted the new fashion in two ways: Next, she addresses the work involved in racy or royalty, nuns were driven from Several new habit alternatives as a visual language for the war’s social fashioning and maintaining a traditional their convents and even beheaded. One appeared after 1967. upheaval and as a visual fantasy of habit. Keeping it from looking like hell victim cut her wimple rather than allow From The Habit. female liberation.” Whitney Chadwick was not easy, between hot and cold the executioner to touch it. However, sis- examines the presentation of Lee starching, laborious pin tucking and pleat- ters continued their work, and during the Kuhns encourages readers to consider Miller’s body in photography. Again, the ing, and constant patching. Church late-18th century their ranks began to the complex history of Catholic nuns’ essays that explore fashion and the pres- fathers decried the amount of time that increase rapidly. Religious women like devotion and service. From antiquity to entation of the body in photography are went into servicing the complicated attire, Mary Ward and her “galloping girls” and modernity, from the Middle East to dispersed throughout the book. but sisters themselves were notoriously orders such as the Daughters of Charity Manhattan, she lays out the origin and The problems in structure and con- reluctant to deviate a single stitch or pro- in France helped the needy and became various incarnations of the habit by tent may stem from the fact that almost cedure from the divine pattern. widely influential. In America, Mother examining orders throughout the ages all of the essays were originally papers and how each dealt with the dress as a presented at a two-day symposium, The group. What’s missing, though, are the Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Dominican Sisters, Queen of the Holy Rosary, 1961. The white monastic personal stories: What is it like to cut a Between the Wars, that was orchestrated habit varied little from that of the original order, founded in the 1200s. From The Habit. black and white figure in a polychromat- in conjunction with the art show on ic world? The question of why nuns feel Romaine Brooks. Perhaps the organiza- that dressing in habits serves their God is tion reflects the arrangement of the avoided, and Kuhns leaves a whole closet original panels. Many of the essays are of spiritual psychology locked. still conference-paper length and lack Perhaps the question is unanswer- adequate development. And sadly, the able, beyond the reach of research and book is rife with errors, including vari- interview, but rather an expression of ous spellings of Colette’s name and the soul. Providing wordless commen- women prancing around on “high tary are 23 black-and-white photo por- heals.” Even worse, an essay on Augusta traits of 19th- and 20th-century nuns. Savage refers to Dahomean women as These illustrations would have been “African Americans.” If university more instructive had they been culled presses want their books to be taken from a broader sample: Especially inter- seriously, they had better start springing esting would have been examples of lux- for copyeditors and proofreaders. And urious and self-indulgent habits and in an era when work on Modernism is a unsuccessfully retooled habits. In the plentiful and thriving area of scholar- end, while Kuhns’ book is one of a few ship, a volume of this nature needs that attempt to combine church, social, more depth and precision to be worthy and costume history, The Habit doesn’t of serious attention. fully disrobe.

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 Yet we can’t help noticing what’s leaver-out of things,” says he believes a missing from this account of “the travel writer should give information for world.” The enormous social upheavals the reader who wants to take the same The view from above that roiled the United States in the ’60s trip. Never one to make the logistics of and ’70s—the civil rights, anti-war, fem- travel part of the story, by the last two by Barbara Sjoholm inist, and gay liberation movements—all decades of the 20th century, Morris of which, one could argue, did more to becomes a complete “leaver-out.” I The World: Travels 1950-2000 by Jan Morris. change the established order than sometimes had the sense she’d arrived changes of government in Africa and by teleportation in one high-rise hotel New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, South America, have barely a reference after the next, sent by publishers to cap- in Morris’s essays. Neither Birmingham ture the feel of a place before departing 458 pp., $27.95 hardcover. nor Berkeley is on her list of stops, and again. This floating style of description her Manhattan doesn’t include has many merits, yet in a travel writer Christopher Street. such luxurious distance can lead to gen- Morris’ bird’s eye perspective, the eralities when we want specifics. Unlike an Morris, author of several dozen Photos / Magnum © David Hurn persona of omniscient narrator, contin- many literary travelers, V. S. Naipaul and books of travel and history and ued when she completed, as she’s writ- Jonathan Raban, for instance—whose J hundreds of articles about place ten, “what is vulgarly called a sex sometimes illuminating and sometimes and politics, is no casual traveler. change” in 1972. James Morris had an uncomfortable interactions with the Chance encounters, tedious hours in unmistakable voice on the page, and Jan people they meet are part and parcel of bus stations, hapless adventures with Morris has the same voice: large-heart- the story and help us to believe the local guides; hunger, exhaustion, disori- ed, lively, immensely erudite, never pon- writer is giving us the real texture of a entation, and fear—which often form derous or pontificating, invariably place, however biased—there can be the very stuff of travel books—crop up charming—a sensual voice, yet curious- something specious about Morris’s pro- rarely in her writing. From the begin- ly disembodied. If her shift from man nouncements. This is what she thinks ning of her journalism career, she went to woman weren’t so well-known, and if about Sydney; what about the people to places that mattered—not always to she herself didn’t include an excerpt who live there? She’s not above making her, but to history. The first reporter to from Conundrum, her 1974 book about sharp judgments and rude comments, break the story of the summit of becoming a woman, there would be lit- but she doesn’t do it face to face. Everest in 1953, she went on to become tle in this substantial collection to reveal For just as she’s often invisible, so are the Middle East correspondent for The the gender of the author except, per- the inhabitants of a place, except as Times. Later she joined the staff of The Jan Morris haps, a certain assurance and privilege local color. About St. John, New- Manchester Guardian, which eventually often associated with being a man. foundland, she writes: sent her to Africa, South America, Australia, and the United States. Often taking a bird’s eye view, from an As a city Casablanca is some- The moment you arrive they take Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, she con- airplane, a hill, a bridge, or a window, thing less than romantic, being you up Signal Hill, high above the tributed stories about Eichmann’s trial Morris grew increasingly adept at set- mostly modern, noisy and ugly harbour, where winds howl, in Jerusalem, the rise and fall of African ting a scene without appearing in it her- in a pompous French colonial superannuated artillery lies despots, and the bitter paranoia of the self. By the late ’60s and ’70s, when way. The experience I was to morose in its emplacements, and cold war. she’d left newspapers for magazines and have there, though, struck me far below the ships come and go Jan Morris was James Morris then, of the writing of books, she’d mastered then as it strikes me now as through the rock gap of the course, product of Oxford and the omniscience; her literary tone remained romantic to a degree. It really Narrows. Within an hour or two army. As a man she was a vigorous, confident and trenchant, even as she was like a visit to a wizard. I saw they are feeding you seal-flipper curious, and cool observer. The style allowed herself stronger opinions and a myself, as I walked that evening pie, roast caribou, partridge she forged as a foreign correspondent more impressionist, fanciful style of through those garish streets, as a berries or salt cod lubricated with was vivid and artful, yet impersonal. As description. Describing London in figure in a fairy tale, about to be pork fat. (p. 323) she writes in the introduction to The 1975, she indulges her pleasure in gor- transformed. Duck into swan? World, a sweepingly ambitious collection geous hyperbole: Scullion into bride? More magi- Marvelously vivid—but, who is of excerpts and articles that spans five cal than any such transforma- “they?” The lack of human contact, decades, “I was not often profoundly It is a gift of London, or a rather tion, I answered myself: man named or otherwise, eventually made involved in the matters this books a technique, that through the into woman. (p. 206) me curious. I found myself wondering describes. I am by nature an outsider, by dingy and the disagreeable, the whether Morris was deliberately remov- profession an onlooker, by inclination a fantastic habitually looms. er evocation of Casablanca is ing herself from situations in which she loner.” Yet few were (nor are) better at Illusion breaks in! Its principal the only serious reference in might be hurt or challenged. At no capturing the flavor of a place in a few agency is that monarchy, whose H the collection to Morris’ point after the sex change does she sentences and swiftly conveying the heraldic lions, unicorns, crowns, midlife change of gender. Like Virginia record anyone responding to her, much mood of a political situation. roses, thistles and Norman mot- Woolf’s Orlando, Morris seems to shrug less making a crude remark as she pass- Describing Cairo in the early ’50s, she tos are as inescapable in this city off a complex public change of role, es in the street. Perhaps that’s never places herself on a hill and first gives us as Leninist quotations in one that took enormous courage to con- happened or perhaps it doesn’t matter a long view of the pyramids, then the Moscow… The mystique of ceive of and carry out, as having little to to her if it does. Yet—and it’s noticeable city itself: London’s royal presence, the do with her writer self (“Orlando had in a book about encounters with other fetish feel, the mumbo jumbo, become a woman—there is no denying cultures—this distance gives a sense of A forest of incomparable colours the sensations of this it. But in every other respect, Orlando disengagement that no amount of talk minarets springs out of the crum- peculiar city, and often makes it remained precisely as he had been. The about Sydney’s “swank” or Manhattan’s bled hodge-podge of its streets: feel like a place of pilgrimage, a change of sex, though it altered their “fizz” can personalize. one with a spiral staircase, one Lourdes or a Jerusalem, or more future, did nothing whatever to alter Perhaps it’s no mistake that Morris’ with a bulbous top, some single, exactly, perhaps, like one of those their identity”). I admire Morris’s matter world shrinks slightly over time, and some double, some like pepper- shrines where a familiar miracle is of factness, yet, all the same and with that large, anonymous cities come to pots, some like hollyhocks, some regularly re-attested, the saintly respect, I have the sense in reading interest her most. Urban centers such as elegantly simple, some assertively blood is annually decongealed or through this collection that she lost an Sydney and Hong Kong seem to be ornate, some phallic, some the hawthorn blossoms each opportunity to describe the shift in per- where she’s most at ease. Yet Morris is demure, rising from the huddle of Christmas morning. (p. 211) spective—not only as human being, but also an ardent Welsh patriot. Her most houses around them like so many as traveler in the world—that must come personal book, in fact, is the lovely A variegated airshafts from an “I was twenty-four years old at the from such a radical physical transforma- Writer’s House in Wales, in which she underground chamber. (p. 20) start of the 1950s, seventy-four at the tion. Although Orlando took her awak- takes us all around her house in a Welsh end of the 1990s…” says Morris. The ening from male to female quite for valley and shows a feel for the natural It is a blazing place. It blazes with World is divided into decades, and granted, Virginia Woolf playfully and landscape not always apparent in her heat. It blazes with a confronta- Morris provides a brief gloss to each profoundly explores the ramifications descriptions of cities. It’s in Wales, in tion of opposites, the clash of span, a summary that reminds us how that attend her metamorphosis. It’s not her family house, surrounded by maps the modern and the traditional. much happened in that tumultuous half so much what Orlando feels inside (she and books, that we see her most inti- Above all it blazes with the glare century. As a witness to history, Morris feels she is as she has always been) but mately. The persona slips, the writer self of contemporary history. Pause takes us back with her to Baghdad and how she’s treated by others that gives is at home, and family members and on a bridge in Cairo, amid the Berlin in the ’50s, to South Africa as shape to Woolf’s exploration of gender neighbors are within reach, named and blare of the traffic and the shove apartheid’s tentacles grew, to Hiroshima in history. But others’ eyes on her are loved. Homesickness is the other side of of the citizenry, and you can post-bomb and Cuba post-revolution. something Morris doesn’t provide. travel, and especially after 9/11, home is almost hear the balance of the Her portraits of cities in Eastern Toward the end of The World, I grew where Morris longs to be. The World powers shifting about you, as the Europe at the height of the cold war a little impatient not only with the ends with a return to Wales on black, brown and yellow peoples conjure up the tensions of the ’60s, omniscient voice, but with Morris’ very September 10, 2001. “The very next day, come storming into their own. while her homage to Manhattan cap- style of travel. Paul Theroux, in an essay far away in dear old Manhattan, the next (p. 21) tures a city that doesn’t exist any longer. on Bruce Chatwin, “an inveterate zeitgeist declared itself.”

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 7 / April 2004 19 Sunny Greece! Small island house! Weekly, monthly. On isolated terraced The Bookshelf Classified mountain slope overlooking sea. Breathtaking sunsets, moonsets. Dramatic hikes. Marvelous peace. Moonrock: (614) 986-6945; The Bookshelf provides a sampling of books of interest by and about women that we’ve Book your classified ad at www.wellesley.edu/ WomensReview or e-mail [email protected] email: [email protected]. received in our office recently. For a more extensive listing, please visit our website, www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview. Publications Miscellaneous Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, ed., Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003, 241 pp., paper. Need materials on the contemporary femi- Essays and poetry on art, feminism, and activism by 18 writer-activists, predominantly nist movement? The monthly feminist news- Feminist editor. Ph.D. Prize-winning author. from Latin America and the Caribbean. In a “Declaration of Resistance” to the ruling paper off our backs has been reporting on the Twenty years’ experience editing every imagi- class, patriarchal domination, and globalization, the collection examines history and the movement since 1970. We have published nable kind of writing. References provided, politics of language and identity, and culminates in some strategies for resistance. detailed coverage of every NWSA confer- including many happy WRB readers. (510) Miriam Jacobs and Barbara Dinham, eds., Silent Invaders: Pesticides, Livelihoods and ence. Use off our backs in your classes. $25 524-7913; [email protected]. Women’s Health. London, UK: Zed Books, 2003, 342 pp., paper. Silent Invaders puts per year. $30 institutional rate. 2337B 18th a face on the human suffering associated with exposure to pesticides. Over 75 percent St., NW, Washington, DC 20009. Attn.: WRITING COACH AND EDITOR. of the world’s pesticide-applying workforce is made up of women. In addition, others WRB. (202) 234-8072; www.offourbacks.org. Get that article or book into print with work in the midst of these chemicals. The essays address the question of why pesti- coaching or editing from author praised by cide use continues unabated, pointing out that the voices of those with a financial Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Gloria Steinem stake in the industry outweigh those of specialists who issue substantiated warnings Job Opportunities and Maya Angelou. www.JoanLester.com/; as well as the women directly involved in farming. Ultimately, these chemicals elimi- (510) 548-1224. nate all but the most hardy of insects, resulting in the need for ever more powerful toxins to eradicate those that are left, a vicious cycle that simply speeds up the The National Women’s Studies Darwinian process. Association, based at the University of Maryland in College Park, seeks a full-time Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw, eds., Amy Lowell: American Modern. New Classified Advertising Executive Director. Please see the NWSA Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 208 pp., paper. Lowell, a literary web site for further information: critic and innovative, modernist poet, was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Let The Women’s Review of Books pro- www.nwsa.org. mote your service, sell your product, announce poetry in 1926. However, not long after that, her work fell into obscurity. Because a job, education, or travel opportunity, or pub- Lowell was for the most part self-educated and outside the elite circles of higher edu- licize your conference or workshop. cation, she had little interest in maintaining traditions of thought or form in her work. Call for Papers Instead, she sought to make poetry more accessible to anyone “with a spark of poetry Rates: in them.” Criticism published shortly after her death attacked her work and ideas, and $1.25 per word per insertion the generally acknowledged misogynist nature of later high modernism also had a neg- for 1-3 insertions ESSAY CONTEST. $200 and publication ative impact on the survival of her poetry in the modernist canon. $1.15 per word per insertion will go to the author of the best essay on the for 4-7 insertions Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth life and/or works of twentieth-century $1.05 per word per insertion Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, 276 pp., $24.95 hardcover. Using nine American writer Ruth Suckow. Deadline: for 8 or more insertions experiments by psychology’s most innovative thinkers as examples, Slater examines November 1st. For more information, see: societal views on free will, authoritarianism, conformity, and morality. B. F. Skinner’s www.ruthsuckow.org. All Classified ads must be prepaid by check legendary child raised in a box, Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies, the response of VISA or MasterCard. Telephone numbers cult members when their apocalypse fails to arrive, and the laying of the groundwork and e-mail addresses count as two words. Abbreviations count as one word each. for a medication to solve the memory problems of aging baby boomers are some of Travel/Rentals the subjects Slater covers. Copy must reach us by the 5th of the month prior to an issue cover date (e.g., May 5 for Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A the June issue); please type or write legibly. Carol Christ, She Who Changes, Re- Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy. New York: Oxford University Press, Imagining the Divine in the World (Palgrave- Advertising is accepted at the publisher’s 2003, 317 pp., hardcover. The story of the woman who led “the most productive espi- MacMillan, 2003), leads two programs in discretion. Services and products have not onage operation of the Civil War” under the nose of the Confederate government. Van been tested; listings do not imply endorse- Greece: Goddess Pilgrimage in Crete and Lew ran a spy ring to gather intelligence to help Union soldiers escape from Richmond ment by The Women’s Review of Books. Sacred Journey in Greece. Ariadne Institute, prisons. She is said to have used social and female stereotypes to mislead authorities. P.O. Box 303 Blue River, OR. 97413;(541) For more information or to place your ad, call Anita After the war she was appointed postmaster of Richmond by President Ulysses S. Grant. 822-3201; [email protected]; at 781-283-2560 or e-mail [email protected]. —Amanda Nash and Bethany Towne www.goddessariadne.org/.

Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe The Women’s Review of Books www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview publishing monthly since 1983 If you’ve enjoyed this issue, you won’t want to miss what’s in store for our regular readers: * Reviews of the latest books by and about women * Lively writing and authoritative commentary * * Special themed issues * Academic and other job postings * Poetry, interviews, and letters * $27.00 for one year / $48.00 for two years (Library/institutional subscriptions: $47 for one year / $89 for two years)

Name______Enclose payment and we’ll add a FREE issue onto your subscription! Address______P I enclose $_____ for 1 year/2 years (plus overseas postage*) Address______P Please bill me City______State_____ Zip______P Charge my P Mastercard P Visa Phone______E-mail______Card #______Exp.______P This is a gift subscription; please send a card from: Cardholder signature______

To order on our website, go to www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview. To order by fax, fax this form to 781-283-3645. To order by mail, mail this form to The Women’s Review of Books, Center for Research on Women, Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. For more information or to order by phone, call toll-free 888-283-8044. *Please add US $20.00 per year air mail or $5.00 per year surface mail postage anywhere outside the USA. All payments must be made in US dollars. 0404 Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe