The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XXI, No. 1 October 2003 74035 $4.00

I In This Issue

I In Zelda Fitzgerald, biographer Sally Cline argues that it is as a visual artist in her own right that Zelda should be remembered—and cer- tainly not as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crazy wife. Cover story D

I What you’ve suspected all along is true, says essayist Laura Zimmerman—there really aren’t any feminist news commentators. p. 5

I “Was it really all ‘Resilience and Courage’?” asks reviewer Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild of Nehama Tec’s revealing new study of the role of gender during the Nazi Holocaust. But generalization is impossible. As survivor Dina Abramowicz told Tec, “It’s good that God did not test me. I don’t know what I would have done.” p. 9

I No One Will See Me Cry, Zelda (Sayre) Fitzgerald aged around 18 in dance costume in her mother's garden in Mont- Cristina Rivera-Garza’s haunting gomery. From Zelda Fitzgerald. novel set during the Mexican Revolution, focuses not on troop movements but on love, art, and madness, says reviewer Martha Gies. p. 11 Zelda comes into her own by Nancy Gray I Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Gender Talk is the Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise by Sally Cline. book of the year about gender and New York: Arcade, 2002, 492 pp., $27.95 hardcover. race in the African American com- I munity, says reviewer Michele Faith ne of the most enduring, and writers of her day, the flapper who jumped Wallace. p. 26 romanticized, images we have of into fountains and got her picture in the O early 20th-century art and culture is papers, the woman who had it all and then that of the Jazz Age. Consider the artists, went famously mad. Her story is paradig- I and more... writers, and dancers whose works we contin- matic of the era, or at least it has seemed so. ue to revere. Think of the stories and And it is here, in the tensions between what 10> exploits, the heady tales of living high and seems and what is, that biographer Sally dying young, the image of expatriates Cline has found her richest material. Her aim squeezing every last drop of experience out is to set the record straight, “to give Zelda a of the years between the two world wars. life of her own,” separate from as well as

0374470 74035 There in the midst of it all is Zelda intertwined with Scott Fitzgerald’s and their Fitzgerald, icon extraordinaire—a Southern “golden couple” image. The structuring PRINTED IN THE USA belle married to one of the most celebrated continued on page three The Women’s Review Contents of Books Wellesley College Center for Research on Women 1 Nancy Gray I Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise by Sally Cline Wellesley, MA 02481 (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 4 Letters www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview Volume XXI, No. 1 5 Laura Zimmerman I WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? The strange case of the missing feminists. October 2003 When was the last time you saw one on TV? EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman 6 Rebecca Steinitz I A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird; Letters to Henrietta [email protected] by Isabella Bird, edited by Kay Chubbuck; The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash by Isabelle Eberhardt, edited by Elizabeth Kershaw; Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley [email protected] I CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Martha Nichols, 8 Gretchen A. Case Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Jan Zita Grover Surgery by Kathy Davis POETRY EDITOR: Robin Becker

9 Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild I Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust by Nehama Tec ADVERTISING MANAGER: Anita D. McClellan [email protected] 11 Martha Gies I No One Will See Me Cry by Cristina Rivera-Garza, translated by Andrew Hurley OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler 12 Marilyn Richardson I Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag [email protected] EDITORIAL BOARD: Margaret Andersen I 13 Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts I Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy by Tricia Rose Robin Becker I Claudia M. Christie I Marsha Darling I Anne Fausto-Sterling I 14 Lori D. Ginzberg I The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America Carol Gilligan I Sandra Harding I Nancy by Amy Schrager Lang Hartsock I Carolyn Heilbrun I Evelyn Fox Keller I Jean Baker Miller I Ruth Perry I 15 Siobhan Senier I Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life by Kate Phillips Peggy Phelan I Helene Vivienne Wenzel 16 Lesley Hazleton I Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels EDITORIAL POLICY: The Women’s Review of Books is feminist but not 17 E. Frances White I Having It All? Black Women and Success by Veronica Chambers; Rock My Soul: restricted to any one conception of feminism; Black People and Self-Esteem by bell hooks all writing that is neither sexist, racist, homo- phobic, nor otherwise discriminatory is wel- Margaret Weigel I Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Loathing in Sunnydale come. We seek to represent the widest possi- 18 ble range of feminist perspectives both in the edited by James B. 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Overseas postage fees are an additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 surface mail Contributors to all countries outside the US. Back issues are available for $4.00 per copy. Please allow 6-8 CATHLEEN CALBERT is the author of two books of poetry: recipient of the George Washington Williams Fellowship from the weeks for all subscription transactions. Lessons in Space and Bad Judgment. Her work has appeared in a number of Independent Press Association. Periodicals class postage paid at Boston, MA publications, including The Best American Poetry 1995, Feminist Studies, Ms., MARILYN RICHARDSON, principal of African-Americana and additional mailing offices. POSTMAS- and The Nation. She is a professor of English at Rhode Island College. Consultants, is a writer and independent curator in Watertown, MA. TER: send address corrections to The Women’s Review of Books, Wellesley College Center for GRETCHEN A. CASE is a PhD candidate in performance studies at the ROCHELLE GOLDBERG RUTHCHILD is on the faculty of Research on Women, Wellesley, MA 02481. University of California, Berkeley. She studies the body in medical settings. Vermont College of The Union Institute and University, and an associ- ANNE CORAY lives at her birthplace on remote Qizhjeh Vena (Lake ate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. The Women’s Review of Books is a project of the Clark) in Southwestern Alaska. Her chapbook, Ivory, won the 2001 She dedicates this review to those Jews who survived the fight against Wellesley College Center for Research on Anabiosis Press Competition. the Nazis, especially Asya Vershubskaya Fedorova and Gdalya Toker, Women. As an autonomous publication it has MARTHA GIES teaches creative writing at Lewis and Clark College, who took her into the Belorussian forests and shared with her his its own editorial board and board of directors, in Portland, Oregon, and in Veracruz, Mexico. Her writing appears in incredible experiences with the Bielski partisan brigade. who set policy with regard to its editorial, many literary quarterlies and her book Up All Night, a portrait of the SIOBHAN SENIER teaches English and American studies at the financial and organizational character. city told through the stories of 23 people who work the graveyard University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Voices of American The Women’s Review is distributed by Total shift, is due from Oregon State University Press in 2004. Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, Circulation, New York City, NY; Ingram, LORI D. GINZBERG teaches history and women’s studies at Victoria Howard. Nashville, TN; and Armadillo Trading, Culver Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Women and the Work REBECCA STEINITZ is an associate professor of English at Ohio City, CA. All other distribution is handled of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United Wesleyan University, where she teaches Victorian literature and feminist directly by The Women’s Review. States, Women in Antebellum Reform, and numerous articles. theory. Reading travel writing makes her want to travel. The contents of The Women’s Review of Books NANCY GRAY is an associate professor of English and women’s BECKY TUCH’s fiction has appeared on Cleansheets.com and are copyright ©2003. All rights reserved; studies at The College of William and Mary. She is the author of Scarletletters.com. She reviews fiction for Ibbetson Street Press and The reprint by permission only. Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing by Women as well as various Erotica Readers Writers Association, and art exhibits for Artsmedia. She is articles and reviews dealing with women writers and feminist theory. at work on a collection of short stories. BARBARA HABER is the author of From Hardtack to Home Fries: An MICHELE FAITH WALLACE is professor of English at the City Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals, and is the former curator College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her book of books at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library. Dark Designs and Visual Culture is forthcoming from Duke University LESLEY HAZLETON’s new book Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography Press in 2004. of the Virgin Mother will be published next spring. MARGARET WEIGEL holds a SM in Comparative Media Studies ADRIAN OKTENBERG’s most recent collection is Swimming with from MIT and a MA in American Culture and Civilization from Dolphins (2002). Her previous book was The Bosnia Elegies (1997). She UMass/Boston. She writes on media, advertising, and culture for lives in Northampton, MA. numerous local and national publications. MELISSA MCFARLAND PENNELL is professor of English and E. FRANCES WHITE is the dean of the Gallatin School of coordinator of American studies at the University of Massachusetts Individualized Study at NYU. She is author of Dark Continent of Our Lowell. She has presented workshops and lectures on women’s work in Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. Lowell and on literary responses to the industrial revolution. Her most LAURA ZIMMERMAN is cofounder and codirector of the Center recent book is the Student Companion to Edith Wharton (2003). for New Words (formerly New Words Bookstore in Cambridge, MA), SHARIFA RHODES-PITTS is from Houston, TX. She is a recent a nonprofit organization promoting women’s voices and ideas. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 Zelda comes into her own Zelda’s lines.” She debunks Zelda’s sup- tector. Cline continued from p.1 posed acquiescence, reinforcing Zelda’s regards painting public quip that Scott “seems to believe as central to that plagiarism begins at home” with Zelda as a per- device Cline has chosen for this task is detailed examples of Zelda’s crossing son and as an that of voice: Each of the book’s six out of Scott’s name on story manu- artist, as well as parts is structured around the “voices” scripts and replacing it with her own, or the art most in that shaped Zelda’s life, culminating in inserting “No!” and “Me” where he need of reclaim- “her own voice.” By that Cline means used her words as his own. Cline duly ing on Zelda’s above all Zelda as artist, the aspect she revisits the well-known example of behalf. She spec- feels has been most neglected by other Scott’s insistence that Zelda remove ulates that early biographers in favor of the more myth- large passages from her novel Save Me the biographers paid ic Zelda. Waltz (written while he was struggling to scant attention Though the Fitzgeralds themselves complete Tender Is the Night) as they, in to it because so wrote repeatedly about the costly under- his view, usurped his literary right to much of it was side of maintaining their glamorously their shared experiences. Referring to lost or destroyed. troubled image, that image has persist- Zelda’s original manuscript and draft But Cline was ed—largely, according to Cline, because revisions as “mislaid,” Cline points out able to see more Fitzgerald biographers have insisted on that while there is no direct evidence of than two-thirds it. Cline’s book is quite another matter. what deletions Zelda actually made, of the paintings It’s possible to come away from it feel- Zelda firmly insisted in a letter to Scott themselves (held ing as if you know Zelda and Scott too that she would revise strictly “on an aes- mostly in private well. Her access to published and thetic basis.” Cline uses the incident to collections) and unpublished letters, journals, manu- demonstrate Zelda’s determination to be slides of the rest. scripts, institutional records, library an artist in her own right and to stand up Citing Zelda’s Zelda in white knickerbockers, her outrageous traveling out- archives, and people who knew or were to Scott in the process. visual art as “the fit for the Fitzgeralds' auto trip south to Mont- related to Zelda is extensive, frequently most successful- gomery, 1920. From Zelda Fitzgerald. going beyond that available to previous riting is only one of Zelda’s ly refined of her biographers. She digs carefully and “three arts”; the other two are three gifts,” she relentlessly into the details behind com- W dancing and painting. Zelda’s examines the work Zelda produced Cline looks at the characters Zelda peting or incomplete accounts, noting determination to train, at the late age of from 1925 until her death in 1948. She dressed in multiple and unexpected per- that even some of her interviewees who 27, to be a ballet dancer and her remark- interprets Zelda’s technique, influences, sonas as examples of her noncon- knew Zelda “found it hard to distinguish able if limited success, are already well recurrent themes, and productivity as formist sensibilities: “Though Zelda is between their memories and their read- known. Most of Cline’s material here proof of talent and as a rich source of partly making children’s art for Scottie,” ings of what has become an abundance will be familiar enough; but her interpre- clues about the artist behind the work. Cline says, “she is at the same time sub- of Fitzgerald material.” Cline manages tation of the effects of Zelda’s commit- For instance, she is able to counter verting the conventional childhood to make the distinctions sharp while rec- ment to her teacher, Madame Egorova, views of Zelda as an indifferent moth- approach by using dolls to transgress ognizing the connections, even the col- are worth noting. Both Zelda’s doctors er by examining the paper dolls Zelda male/female boundaries.” Cline argues lusion, between fiction and reality in and her husband blamed her first break- created to delight and instruct her that Zelda’s unconventional vision, Zelda’s life. What emerges is a scrupu- down on her “obsession” with dancing. daughter Scottie. The hours spent present in all aspects of her life, was lously researched account of a woman Dancing, however, was the least of it, painting and playing with the hundreds most fully realized in her visual arts. In who was always in the limelight yet was according to Cline. Zelda’s devotion to of fairy-tale scenes attest to Zelda’s her view, painting stands as Zelda’s ill-equipped either to deal with it or to Egorova was, in Scott’s view, “abnor- parental attentiveness. In addition, greatest claim to being an artist in her do without it, a complex mixture of mal,” and became the basis for his accu- Southern belle, Jazz Age wild child, wife, sations that she had lesbian relation- mother, and seriously ambitious artist. ships. While this may have been so while Cline gives us a Zelda of contradictions, Zelda was hospitalized, Cline believes a woman “both intensely private and that Zelda’s commitment to dancing had Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers publicly outrageous,” whose competing more to do with Zelda’s desire to THE GUERRILLA GIRLS’ ILLUSTRATED sensibilities overwhelmed her as much become independent of Scott and his GUIDE TO FEMALE STEREOTYPES as they fed her creativity. As Zelda’s life need to control her. Cline covers a good The Guerrilla Girls with Scott moves from high adventure deal of ground here, teasing out and In their latest assault on injustice toward women, the to bitterness, rivalry, jealousy, and illness, correcting suppositions about their subversive group tags the Top Types, examines sexual she seems undone by having no solid affairs; their attitudes toward sexuality slurs, explains the evolution of butches and femmes, foundation to hold onto. In the end, her (both of them more or less “bisexual” in and delves into the lives of real and fictional women story reads as tragedy, her death a need- manner and appearance, but he loudly who have become stereotypes. “The work of the less waste, leaving one wondering what homophobic, she speaking in terms of Guerrilla Girls elevates cage-bar rattling to a fine art.” she might have accomplished had things “desire”); their talk of divorce; Zelda’s —The New York Times Book Review. been otherwise. suicide attempts; and the varying states Penguin original 96 pp. 0-14-200101-5 $20.00 One of the more fascinating aspects of her mental health. Cline links Scott’s of Cline’s approach is her liberal use of frantic disapproval of Zelda’s dancing fiction as evidence for fact. Her reason and his obsessive control of her writing for doing so is persuasive: to Zelda’s increasingly frustrated and Fast Girls erratic behavior. She contends that TEENAGE TRIBES Zelda and Scott flourished as Zelda’s arts came most fully to the fore AND THE MYTH OF THE SLUT capricious, merciless self-histori- between 1929 and 1934, the period of Emily White ans, writing and rewriting their her first breakdowns and hospitaliza- “Groundbreaking.”—Los Angeles Times. “Emily White exploits. They used their stormy tions, and suggests that art was Zelda’s does for the American suburban high school what other partnership as a basis for fiction, lifeline in her struggle to hang onto a feminists have done for the Salem witch trials...This which subsequently became a sense of self and sanity as her life fell book will open minds and repair damaged hearts.” form of private communication apart. Wistfully evoking a mythical abili- —Donna Gaines, Ph.D., author of Teenage Wasteland. that allowed fiction to stand as a ty to live in fire, Zelda wrote, “I believed Berkley 224 pp. 0-425-19176-1 $14.00 method of discourse about their I was a Salamander, and it seems I am marriage. (pp. 1-2) nothing but an impediment.” But as an artist she was a self with vision and pas- For them, Cline says, “imagination sion of her own. Fear of Flying was always more powerful than fact.” Interestingly enough, while most of 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Nowhere is this issue more evident than Zelda’s doctors agreed with Scott that Erica Jong in Cline’s account of the debates over Zelda’s writing and dancing were signs New Afterword by the Author Zelda’s role in Scott’s writing. While for of her instability, they referred to her “Extraordinary...at once wildly funny and very wise.” the most part Cline takes an even-hand- painting as “therapeutic.” From Cline’s —Los Angeles Times. After 30 years, the iconic novel still ed view of these two difficult personali- descriptions of the paintings, as well as stands as a timeless tale of self-discovery, liberation, and ties, her focus on what Zelda lost along from the one reproduced on the book womanhood. This edition includes essays by John Updike the way is (perhaps inevitably) marked jacket (Ballerinas Dressing), it’s clear that and Henry Miller. by impatience, if not anger, with Scott’s Zelda was not at all interested in depict- NAL 480 pp. 0-451-20943-5 $14.00 part in it. She points out, for instance, ing typical feminine forms. Yet her that what Scott’s biographers refer to in painting may have been accepted his work as “inspired by” Zelda’s letters because it was seen as a less serious PENGUIN GROUP (USA) and remarks was in fact, “not a matter of threat than writing or dancing to Scott’s Academic Marketing Dept., 375 Hudson St., NY,NY 10014 www.penguin.com/academic ‘inspiration’ but a direct borrowing of work and his status as her husband-pro-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 3 for Zelda. Cline’s tone becomes one of itics continue to be elaborated, over years, increasing indignation as she traces as I penetrate, recover, and restore the lost Zelda’s experience with “madness” (the Letters intellectual, literary, and radical history of quotation marks are hers.) Criticizing my hometown—one of countless places Scott and the medical establishment for Dear Editor: left to deliquesce in the wake of capitalism’s doing as much harm as good, she details “At 70, knowing what I know, such anx- search for higher profits—Lynn, treatments aimed at “reinterpreting” ieties seem so pointless that I am able to Massachusetts, where I lived until I was Zelda’s behavior as “disappointed ambi- enjoy some of the freedoms I discovered close to 30. tion” inappropriate to a wife, and “reed- on that island smack in the middle of New The old labor city where the ucating” her “toward femininity, good York City. On impulse, last weekend I International Brotherhood of Electrical mothering and the revaluing of mar- spent an entire day strolling through the Workers was founded, where Emma riage and domesticity.” Cline makes the zoo without a hint of guilt” (Women’s Goldman and Frederick Douglas lived and case that Zelda’s illness was at least in Review, July 2003). thought and wrote, Lynn is a crystal into part a response to feeling invisible and I am saddened that Alix Kates Shulman which we may peer, beyond the deliberate trapped, and that her art constituted a enjoyed freedom without guilt while smears of “organized forgetting,” to find Zelda Sayre in June 1918 as she viable attempt to break free of the roles “strolling through the zoo.” an organic American radical consciousness looked when Scott first met in which she was cast. Too bad that the animals she strolled by that transcends sex (gender), race, ethnicity, Cline’s last chapter is devoted prima- are not able to enjoy their freedom. religion, national origin, and nation itself. her in Montgomery. From rily to countering the “overwhelmingly Virginia Eskridge That politics is one of class consciousness, Zelda Fitzgerald. powerful myth” of Zelda as a “left-over Pittsburgh, PA the most dangerous idea on this continent. widow” who, when not hospitalized, In my own spirit, it embraces all other ele- wandered the streets “lugging her Bible Alix Kates Shulman responds: ments of “identity” that I may collect into own right. And because Zelda contin- on a one-woman mission to convert the I'm not a vegetarian, I wear leather, and its single political blade. ued to develop this art so assiduously residents.” Instead she shows Zelda liv- I enjoy my friends’ pets (though wouldn't Linda McCarriston right to the end, Cline uses it, along ing quite competently on her own in have one myself), so I guess visiting zoos is Anchorage, AK with a careful study of hospital records, Asheville, North Carolina, checking her- in keeping with the rest of my behavior. to correct previous depictions of Zelda self in and out of Highland Hospital as Still, I do agree that locking up animals for Dear Editor: during the eight years after Scott’s needed and approaching life with a good show is pretty bad, though it never I did so appreciate your July issue death as hopelessly lost in madness. deal of “clarity, healthy activity, above all occurred to me to boycott zoos. Mea culpa. about old women. I am an old woman, Between 1930 and 1948, Zelda enormous creative output.” This is a and am interested in what other old resided for varying lengths of time in Zelda damaged by the events of her life Dear Editor: women are doing and how they look. I seven mental clinics on two continents. but, Cline suggests, coming finally into I’m delighted to have the political (read: know they are banished from TV, though She was diagnosed as schizophrenic— her idiosyncratic own. Yet even at the social) nature of my writing be noted in ugly old men abound on the screen. So though her last psychiatrist told Cline end she did not escape the mystery that recent issues of Women’s Review by Adrian you can imagine how I enjoyed the July that manic-depression was more likely had always followed her. Cline cites con- Oktenberg and Judith Harris. She especially issue with its thoughts of old women and the case—and subjected to a remarkable flicting accounts of the hospital fire in has leaned deep into the well of “quietist” even their pictures. array of debilitating treatments. Until which Zelda perished and provides no literary silences that persist in controlling or D. Marillia Hinds Scott died in 1940, he was intimately clear answers as to what really happened paving over radical discourse, whatever its Indianapolis, IN involved with Zelda’s treatment as well and why, only the conviction that Zelda sources. My own “political identity,” how- P.S. Once I canceled my subscription to as financially responsible for it. Cline died needlessly at the age of 48, still ever, is not primarily Irish, though I enjoy Vanity Fair because it had stories about sees his role as reflecting his need to see struggling to achieve all that she could. dual citizenship by virtue of being “first seven old men, some of whom were dead, himself as “a junior consultant almost Finally, then, the voice that Cline generation” American (of IRA Northern and all were ugly. There was a one-page arti- on a par with her doctors,” who knew restores to Zelda is “the voice of aspira- Irish stock, as well as half Canadian cle about a pretty young woman. The editor better than anyone else what was best tion.” It seems a fitting legacy. I Ojibway on my mother’s side). My real pol- wrote me a very sympathetic reply.

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4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 Where are the women? New from KNOPF by Laura Zimmerman Intertwined Lives The strange case of the missing feminists. When was Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle the last time you saw one on TV? by Lois W. Banner I “Banner has intertwined not only the lives of he neutral voice in America is the firmed that these conditions are still at an Mead and Benedict, but all the assumptions about white male,” The Nation columnist all-time low. “We’re being systematically women and sex in the first half of the Katha Pollitt recently told me overlooked,” she said. “I’m not talking twentieth century.”—Carolyn Heilbrun, author of T Writing a Woman’s Life when I asked her about political opinion- about fringe people. People who have making in the US since 9/11. “Everyone enjoyed access to the media are feeling Knopf | Cloth | 560 pages | $30.00 else is providing color commentary. A very much frozen out. In the best of woman’s opinion about Iraq or the budg- times women face a high barrier. Now The Good Women of China et is seen as a woman’s opinion. The same they may be less inclined to keep hurling Hidden Voices for a black person. And white men just themselves against the barricades.” by Xinran Xue don’t have the idea that they are affected Indeed, as Rivers mentions in her arti- An unprecedented, intimate account of the lives of modern Chinese women, by the fact that they are white men.” cle, even Pulitzer Prize winner and syndi- told by the women themselves—true stories of the political and personal For decades, this spurious claim to cated columnist Ellen Goodman “com- upheavals they have endured in their chaotic and repressive society. “neutrality” has justified a white male plained…about getting bumped too Anchor | Paper | 256 pages | $13.00 monopoly of the air waves and the print- often” at The Washington Post. Jill Nelson, ed page. In today’s media-driven culture, best-selling author and the first black Class Action these “experts” deliver the opinions that woman on The Washington Post Magazine’s The Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harassment Law shape our lives and the country’s political staff, says she lost $10,000 in freelance system. Frequently, it’s the op-ed pages, work after 9/11. “It was an immediate by Clara Bingham and Laura Leady Gansler elite opinion journals, and Sunday morn- post 9/11 paradigm shift,” Nelson said. “This always riveting, often horrific account of a landmark sexual ing news programs that explicate, pro- “If you weren’t on the government-spon- harassment case is an unsparing look at the real nature of judicial progress— mote, and even guide national decisions. sored white male reaction page, you were and the costs of even the most dramatic courtroom victories.” —Jeffrey Toobin When women are excluded from these not going to be heard.” Previously con- Anchor | Paper | 400 pages | $15.00 venues, we’re excised from the public pol- tacted for commentary by CNN or other icy-making loop. At the same time, our outlets every six weeks or so, Nelson went Against Love exclusion confirms our apparent lack of an entire year with only an occasional A Polemic authority to speak about critical political call—and those were to cover insignificant by Laura Kipnis issues. Consciously or not, audiences events such as OJ’s most recent arrest. become habituated to male voices and “Deeply subversive, tough-minded, clear-thinking, bylines and dependent on white male grav- t best, many editors are afflicted provocative and shrewd, Against Love has the nerve to wonder out loud if marriage has evolved into an itas to explain what’s happening in the with a “one-woman-only” mental- instrument of social control. . . . She is not so much world. As we witnessed at the time of A ity. Currently, for example, the op- against love as for honesty.”—James Atlas 9/11 and later during the wars in ed page of The New York Times carries Pantheon | Cloth | 224 pages | $24.00 Afghanistan and Iraq, national emergen- Maureen Dowd. Before her, it had Anna cies push women even further to the side- Quindlen and before that, Flora Lewis. lines. “To feel voiceless in a democracy in Before Lewis, it had no women colum- so difficult a time,” prize-winning journal- nists at all. “This is true in many newspa- Rereading Sex ist Geneva Overholser said on National pers and magazines,” said Pollitt. “There’s Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Public Radio in November 2001, “is very one star woman columnist. Editors don’t Nineteenth-Century America close to feeling disenfranchised.” have the 50/50 picture at all. They have by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz Many women have felt a renewed sense the picture: men plus one woman, or of second-class citizenry in the past two maybe two.” After an editor for a weekly Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for History years. By muting women’s voices, the or monthly magazine commissions one “Her definitive account moves us beyond the old binary of Victorian lights media has belittled our authority and lead- long piece by a woman, he or she has and shadows, of prudery versus passion, to show the interwoven complexity ership and removed us from the public done the affirmative action for that issue. of our first national conversation about sex.”—Patricia Cline Cohen, author of conversation. We have also been robbed This unacknowledged quota system caps The Murder of Helen Jewett of the platform to assert political opinions the number of accomplished women Vintage | Paper | 528 pages | $16.00 that specifically affect women. “News writers in major venues and all but elimi- agencies do not gather the facts about nates the up and coming. Additionally, The Country Under issues of concern to women,” Rita Henley male editors tend to look for someone to My Skin Jensen, editor in chief of Women’s eNews, father and mentor. Typically, it’s another an Internet news service for e-mail sub- man who closely resembles them. A Memoir of Love and War scribers and major media outlets, told me. And then there’s television. In by Gioconda Belli “They do not hear women’s voices, literal- December 2001, the White House Project, “Few writers have spoken so frankly about love, ly. And by not having access to the media, a national group advocating women’s polit- sex, childbearing and childrearing and the women’s organizations and advocates can- ical leadership, announced that the fre- intimate connection of these issues with the not build their communities of interest.” quency of women guests on Sunday morn- wider political arena of war, revolution and the Jensen has all-too-often witnessed male ing talk shows dropped in the month fol- search for power.”—Ana Cristina Rossi editors’ unlikely concepts of “women’s lowing 9/11 from only 10.7 percent of Anchor | Paper| 400 pages | $14.00 issues.” In the late 1990s, at a public talk guests to an even worse 9.4 percent. given by a top decision-maker at The Los Among repeat appearances—the true The Storyteller’s Daughter Angeles Times, Jensen asked how the paper measure of authoritative presence— by Saira Shah was reaching out to women readers. He women were a mere seven percent. The replied, “We have a brand-new lifestyle study showed that we were also afforded The vivid, often startling memoir of a young woman shaped by two dra- and home decorating section.” less airtime, placed in later segments, and matically disparate worlds: part sophisticated, sensitive Western liberal, In the months following 9/11, women underrepresented in every professional part fearless, passionate Afghan, falling in love with her ancestral myth. wrote only 8 percent of the op-ed articles category. Nightly newscasts were equally Knopf | Cloth | 272 pages | $24.00 in The Washington Post, The New York Times, imbalanced: A 2002 Fairness and Accuracy and USA Today. During the wars in in Reporting (FAIR) study showed that in The Birth of Pleasure Afghanistan and Iraq, biased editorial 2001, US sources interviewed on the three by Carol Gilligan choices persisted. “It hasn’t been this bad major networks were 92 percent white and for women scholars and journalists want- 85 percent male. Women constituted only “A revolutionary book that will transform our beliefs about love, pleasure, human possibility, and ourselves. Carol Gilligan is a thinker and prophet ing to influence the national public agen- 15 percent of all sources, and in the cate- of luminous grace, courage, and compassion.”—Catharine Stimpson da since the pre-women’s movement days gories of professional and political sources when women were completely invisible,” (think of all the qualified feminists you Vintage | Paper| 272 pages | $13.00 Caryl Rivers, author and journalism pro- know who could have filled those seats!) a fessor at Boston University, wrote in an mere nine percent. www.randomhouse.com/academic April 2003 commentary published by Television producers, like print editors, Women’s eNews. More recently, Rivers con- dislike risk-taking. As a rule, they seek

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 5 sources who have been used previously, women aren’t reading the papers,” said either on the air or in print—a perfect Overholser. “If you compare the percent- method to keep the circle of opinion- age of women who read the paper with the makers small and closed, making it an old- percent of letter-writers, the numbers are White ladies traveling boy’s network. Perhaps this stems as much very skewed.” Other journalists, mention- from lack of imagination as from deliber- ing that women also submit fewer unso- by Rebecca Steinitz ate exclusion. No doubt the motives are licited manuscripts to magazine slush piles, varied and complex. But the result is clear: speculated that we too quickly shy away A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. Television and print media suppress the from being told no, or dislike pestering views of women commentators on critical people in charge—or that our lives have Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003, 156 pp., $6.95 paper. subjects like the effect of war and peace become so overwhelmingly busy we don’t on women’s lives, sexual violence and traf- have time even to write a note. Perhaps Letters to Henrietta by Isabella Bird, edited by Kay Chubbuck. ficking of women, how globalization we’re not well-enough endowed with a trait affects women’s lives, or what low wage that Katha Pollitt calls undiscourageability. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003, earning women endure. Women commen- Men are definitely not better writers, Pollitt tators discussing subjects like these would says, and their perseverance does not nec- 356 pp., $18.95 paper. cast a critical eye on the news and shake essarily win friends. But undaunted by up the standard male-chosen topics. dozens of rejections, they do increase their The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt by Isabelle Media leaders perpetuate sameness, odds of getting published. Eberhardt, edited by Elizabeth Kershaw. Northampton, exclude outsiders, and enforce unspoken Then there’s the problem that even quotas. Add to these norms a corporate those few women who have successfully MA: Interlink, 2003, 208 pp., $12.95 paper. structure that all but eliminates women entered the arena of mainstream com- from the top of the decision-making mentary often conceal their feminist Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley. Mineola, NY: pyramid, and we’re looking at a structure leanings. “If a female journalist does that nearly guarantees exclusion of femi- begin to advocate for women or to pro- Dover, 2003, 743 pp., $34.95 paper. nist commentators. Especially in today’s mote a related story, she loses credibility hyper-masculine, conservative culture, in the newsroom,” said Jensen. “It’s the I when progressive voices in general have same experience that African Americans been marginalized, feminists are barred and Latinas have. No one asks white men hat are we to do with white lously regains her health once she begins from view. “I’m worried that elite journals to give up their interest in sports or the women who travel? Who see to enjoy her journey. Given the con- like The Atlantic are looking for women to military. But if a woman were to advocate W the world as their canvas, their straints placed on women by Victorian say provocative things,” said Rivers. “That running a story every day on the front inspiration, their oyster? What, especially, domesticity, it is easy to assume that Bird’s means you smash other women, dump on page of a major newspaper about are we to do with 19th-century women illnesses were psychosomatic—editor feminism, or say that the real victims are defunding rape crisis centers, she might travelers, those doyennes of empire, most Kay Chubbuck is quite sure of it—but men. And you can’t find a feminist with a likely be asked, ‘Do you have a hang-up frequently labeled intrepid, who climbed there is no question that she suffered and show of her own on cable television and about this?’ Her credibility would defi- mountains, forded rivers, collected that travel, the more adventurous the bet- very few on talk radio.” nitely be challenged.” As a result, with a insects, and commanded battalions of ter, alleviated her suffering. What you can find, of course, are right- few well-known exceptions, feminist native bearers, all while dressed in long Bird’s travels began in 1872 when, at wing commentators like Laura Ingraham spokespersons mostly publish or broad- skirts with umbrellas close at hand (or, the age of 40, she set out on an 18-month and Ann Coulter filling women’s allotted cast in independent media, such as alter- less physically if more historically impres- trip to Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, air time and print space. Chances are, they native websites, community radio, The sive, in trousers)? and Colorado. Written as a series of let- will be mocking Hillary Clinton, attacking Village Voice, The Progressive, and others. Their stay-at-home peers saw them as ters, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains feminist “misfits,” or asserting outrageous There was a time when US feminists admirable freaks; ’70s feminists reclaimed covers her Colorado sojourn. In Letter I, opinions, such as Coulter’s that viewed the media as too abstract and elit- them as gender-bending heroines; and ’90s written at Lake Tahoe, Bird describes her McCarthyism wasn’t so bad after all. ist to claim top priority. Pained and out- post-colonialists repudiated them as impe- escape from “the clang of San Recent articles in The New York Times raged by institutions that thwarted rial conspirators. Surely, though, each of Francisco”; a train trip through the Magazine and The Nation have analyzed the women’s lives—racism, domestic vio- these assessments reflects its cultural “thriving farms” of the Central Valley up conservative machine that grooms and lence, the law, medicine, theology, poli- moment as much as its object. Four new into the Sierras where “overhanging sponsors journalists (especially on college tics, academia—we directed our attention volumes of letters, diaries, and travel writ- ravines from 2000 to 3000 feet deep, the campuses), endows media think tanks, and to these. At the same time, we helped ing invite us to consider some of these monster train snaked its way upwards”; the operates a highly organized, long-term build an environmental movement, a gay women on their own terms. It may be frontier town of Truckee where the hous- campaign to control and manipulate the rights movement, and a human rights impossible to separate Isabella Bird, Mary es are “glaring with light and crowded media. “Our side has nothing like it,” movement. We were not slackers. We Kingsley, and Isabelle Eberhardt from the with men”; a “truly grotesque and humil- Pollitt said. “It doesn’t spend the money. simply had enough to do. intertwined histories of gender and empire iating” encounter with a bear who causes And when it does, it’s much mushier. But the days of letting the media off that shaped both their experiences and her horse to bolt and throw her; and her There’s a deficiency of sharkiness.” Jensen the hook are over. Increasingly, a vast their subsequent reputations, but it is still first glimpse of the lake: also spoke about the vast sums conserva- industry run by a handful of corporate worth asking what it is like to read their tives have poured into the media, adding executives saturates our public and per- writing today, in light of those histories. Then the river became broad and that women’s organizations have moved in sonal lives with narrow, biased ideas and Dover’s recent editions of Bird’s A still, and mirrored in its transpar- the opposite direction by diverting their opinions. And in times of crisis, like 9/11 Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) ent depths regal pines, straight as resources into direct service. The result, and the war in Iraq, it goes berserk with and Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897) an arrow, with rich yellow and Jensen believes, is the stifling of women’s the sound of its own voice and the sight are exact replicas of the original texts, green lichen clinging to their chances to affect the political workings of of its own face. even to the tiny print and century-old stems, and firs and balsam-pines the country. For decades, a number of prescient photographs and sketches. In contrast, filling up the spaces between them, feminists have been warning us that a Letters to Henrietta and The Nomad are con- the gorge opened, and this moun- y themselves, these cultural and state of emergency for women and peo- temporary efforts, edited collections of tain-girdled lake lay before me, political forces present huge hur- ple of color exists in the media industry. Bird’s letters and Eberhardt’s diaries, with its margins broken up into B dles to progressive women. Add “A serious effort to match the right’s respectively. This set of books thus also bays and promontories, most pic- to these the personal ones. Many women media assault with comparable vigor is gives us the opportunity to compare our turesquely clothed by huge sugar- distrust what is required of political com- crucial,” wrote Laura Flanders years approaches to 19th-century women’s pines. (p. 8) mentators. We are not inclined to be before most of us were thinking about travel writing with theirs, and I’m not sure thunderous and simplistic. In our eager- this problem, “if only to respond to we come out ahead. Letter I sets the stage for what follows: ness to be fair minded, we obsessively those newspaper editors and TV anchors Isabella Bird was one of the most mountains, nature, horses, and a glimpse research subjects and worry too much who claim they don’t hear from feminists famous Victorian women travelers. The into the domestic, social, and political his- about how we are received. Of course, as they do from their opponents.” nine books she published between 1856 tory of the American West. Bird was we can also be bombastic, smart-alecky, How to win access to both the main- and 1899 took readers with her to New remarkably observant, and she provides and combative. But that’s not our typical stream and alternative media, how to use England, Hawaii, Colorado, Japan, detailed accounts of everything from tone. “Commentary, punditry, op-ed it to advance equality, how to exert influ- Malaysia, Persia, Kurdistan, Tibet, Korea, panoramic mountain views to a pudding writing, and also the web lend themselves ence—these are the big questions. But and China, an impressive itinerary for any she concocts out of nearly nothing. Her to being brash and quick,” media activist, backing away from their magnitude traveler, let alone one who at home in gift for narrative draws you into the journalist, and broadcaster Laura would be a mistake. So would assuming Scotland seemed scarcely able to get out drama of her repeated attempts to reach Flanders told me. “Historically, women simple answers. Nothing should stop us of bed. Bird traveled for her health: In Estes Park and her nascent romance with have not been given to practice this. It’s from talking among ourselves, making a Letters to Henrietta, a collection of previ- the outlaw Big Jim Nugent. It’s hard not more acceptable for a man than a woman public clamor, or joining with media ously unpublished letters to her sister, she to be impressed by her ascent of Long’s to be outrageous—but this seems to be activists already in gear. “What’s holding complains at the beginning of a trip of Peak, the “American Matterhorn,” her changing on the right, not on the left.” us back is access,” Flanders writes in the “Neuralgia in my head pain in my bones solo ride across the prairie in a blizzard Even people who write letters to the concluding pages of her book. “But so pricking like pins and needles in my limbs that freezes her eyes shut, and her sojourn editor tend to be overwhelmingly male— what else is new?… The right to commu- excruciating nervousness exhaustion in a near-abandoned camp with two men, and women also make fewer contacts with nicate is like any right. And like any right, inflamed eyes sore throat swollen glands dwindling supplies, 700 head of cattle, media ombudspersons. “It’s not because it will not be given. It must be won.” I below each ear stupidity”; then miracu- and a lot of snow.

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 It’s also hard not to be disturbed by her harsh to criticize bad British rule, of ume is not an unabbreviated record”). increasingly addicted to alcohol and kef description of a group of Digger Indians which she encounters too many examples. During this time Eberhardt struggled [hashish],” why don’t we see either the acts as “perfect savages, without any aptitude financially and emotionally, moved or their effects in the diary? On the other for even aboriginal civilization.” She ike Bird, Mary Kingsley began trav- between France and Africa, met and mar- hand, pronouncements like “Her respons- makes the horrifying claim that “The eling in mid-life and rapidly became ried the ostensible love of her life, and es to her surroundings and the landscape Americans will never solve the Indian L well known for her travels. Unlike tried to develop a career as a writer. A year here mirror her perception of the mean- problem till the Indian is extinct,” but Bird, she was firmly associated with one after the diaries end, she died in a flash ing of her life and fluctuate as much as her goes on to distribute her disgust equally: location: West Africa, where she jour- flood at the age of 27. mood” are at best self-evident. Like Letters “They have treated them after a fashion neyed first in 1893 and again in 1895, her Though Eberhardt has been a bohemi- to Henrietta, The Nomad tries to present which has intensified their treachery and second trip serving as the basis for her an heroine for a century now, she comes Eberhardt’s diary as “the repository of her ‘devilry’ as enemies, and as friends best-selling Travels in West Africa. If Bird across here as profoundly adolescent. She authentic self,” but the intrusive notes sug- reduces them to a degraded pauperism, traveled for her health, Kingsley’s goal was calls her diary “an endless record of the gest the impossibility of that task. devoid of the first elements of civiliza- science or, as she put it, “raw fetish and unfathomable sadness there is at the bot- tion.” In short, like those of so many fresh-water fishes”: She brought back sev- tom of my life,” and announces that she o, what are we to do with these Victorians, her opinions fail to map onto eral new species of fish and snakes, as well “will only ever be drawn to people who books? Clearly the editors of Letters our conventional political alignments. as a rare lizard, and compiled a lengthy suffer from that special and fertile S to Henrietta and The Nomad want us While Bird does not often pontificate, she comparative ethnography of “fetish,” or anguish called self-doubt, or the thirst for to explore the psyches of their 19th-cen- makes her feelings known. She finds “the African form of thought.” the ideal, and desire for the soul’s mystical tury women travelers, but as guides to Americans excessively patriotic and Travels in West Africa is loosely organ- fire.” I hope it made her feel better to those psyches these books are less than unbearably materialistic (what else is ized around Kingsley’s progress down the write it, but do we really need to read it? satisfactory. Indeed, their editors might new?). She boldly goes where few women coast, up the Ogowé River, in search of Occasionally the book manages to have done well to listen to Kingsley who have gone before, yet believes firmly in the Rembwé River, and up Mount leave Eberhardt’s head. Its most interest- claimed that “As a psychological study the women’s domestic mission and herself Cameroon. Often the only white woman ing passages are the letters she wrote to a carefully kept journal of a white prefers the company of men. Bird thus within many miles, she cheerfully runs newspaper during the trial of a man who man…in…Africa…would be an exceed- shows once again that a pathbreaking river rapids, wades through swamps up to had stabbed her, a man she was deter- ingly interesting thing…but to the gener- woman can embrace gender norms, and her neck, wanders in the jungle at night, mined to defend despite his obvious guilt. al reader it would be hopelessly weari- that racist truisms and critiques of racist and builds fires in driving rainstorms, all Here she narrates the events surrounding some.” Still, I recommend Letters to policies and practices can emerge from the while shepherding a generally hapless the stabbing, writes articulately about her Henrietta for its non-psychological content the same mouth. crew of skeptical Africans, and judiciously conversion to Islam, and shows a thought- and its useful “Chronology” and “Notes If A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains keeping cannibals and trading rivals alike ful understanding of French-African poli- on People and Places,” definite benefits of gives us Bird’s adventures and opinions, from killing each other. It’s not surprising tics. These letters made me wish for a dif- a contemporary edition. however, it reveals little of her emotional that Kingsley is a favorite of anthologists: ferent book, one in which Eberhardt con- But if you want to view these women in world. In compiling Letters to Henrietta, She writes about numerous topics, and she centrated less on herself and more on all their problematic achievement, and see editor Chubbuck clearly sought that has a sardonic sense of humor that Africa. She might have been able to write 19th-century Denver, Hong Kong, and world, hoping to “reconstruct the ‘real’ appears most frequently at moments of a penetrating critique of French colonial- Sierra Leone to boot, you’ll want the origi- Isabella” and find her “‘genuine’ voice.” If peril. The passage where she falls into a ism, if she hadn’t been so wrapped up in nals. Put Travels in West Africa on your bed- the quotation marks show Chubbuck’s game trap filled with spikes and remarks her own colonial romances. side table so you can pick and choose the awareness of postmodern challenges to only that “It is at these times you realise Part of the problem with The Nomad is adventures and digressions that interest the idea of the authentic self, her intro- the blessing of a good thick skirt” appears its editing. The badly written, repetitive you, and take A Lady’s Life in the Rocky ductory speculations about psychosomat- in virtually every collection of travel, editorial interjections either make promis- Mountains on your next trip, whether it’s an ic roots of Bird’s illnesses, a suppressed women’s, and Victorian literature I know. es the text doesn’t keep or simply state the adventure vacation or a bus to work. Rather rivalry with her sister, and the possibility As she narrates her travels, Kingsley obvious. If, as Kershaw informs us, than simply celebrating or condemning that she traveled “in search of a spouse” veers repeatedly into anecdotes and dis- “Isabelle is chain-smoking, and becoming them, the best thing to do is read them. I reveal a determination to find the post- quisitions on politics, natural history, Freudian subjectivity behind the mask of geography, and ethnography, in classic the Victorian spinster (Chubbuck ascribes Victorian prose fashion. Some of these Bird’s brief marriage to John Bishop, her digressions are interesting: I found myself sister’s deathbed physician, to guilt over fascinated by ten pages on the appearance In Step-daughters of England, Jane Garrity Henrietta’s death). and evolution of a mangrove swamp, shows how four British women modernists; These letters, which served as sources while eight pages on the tragic results of for Bird’s published works, cover the trip the African fear of twins were creepily Dorothy Richardson, Sylvia Townsend that produced A Lady’s Life in the Rocky compelling. Others, however, left me less Warner, Mary Butts and Virginia Woolf used Mountains, as well as her next major jour- than engaged: After a while one tale of a ney, in 1878-1879, to Japan, China, and village rivalry or a steamboat ride sounds experimental literary techniques in order what is now Malaysia. But while the letters much like the next. to situate themselves as national subjects. provide an entry into Bird’s emotional Like Bird, Kingsley operates in the Reading literary texts through the lens of life, that life doesn’t propel Bird’s writ- framework of empire, accepting the idea ing—or compel her readers. In Australia that Africans are an “inferior” people in material culture, this interdisciplinary book she is miserable. In Hawaii she is happy. need of European guidance. At the same makes a major contribution to the new In Asia she is fascinated. Throughout she time, however, she breaks with much of misses her sister and friends. the conventional wisdom of her day, modernist studies by arguing that women’s Much more interesting, as Chubbuck roundly condemning the efforts of both imaginative work is inseparable from their herself admits, are the letters where missionaries and British government offi- “Isabella is on fire with her own descrip- cials, strongly supporting trade and ambivalent and complicated relation to tions.” In the immediate excitement of traders, and taking seriously both African Britain’s imperial history. new sights and experiences, Bird leaps the beliefs and Africans themselves (when boundaries of grammar, and her torrents she isn’t making fun of their clothes). of imagery make her physical world come Indeed, after the publication of Travels in By locating both canonical and non-canonical works of alive. On the volcanic mountain Mauna West Africa, she became one of the most female literary modernism within broader cultural Loa, for instance, “The new lava flow is in vocal advocates for Africa and Africans in waves streams coils twists tortuosities of the debates of her time over the British discourses, Garrity demonstrates the intersections every kind, the surface shining and presence in West Africa. The book reveals among nationalism, imperialism, gender and sexuality smooth with a bright metallic lustre and a the experience and awareness that gener- in the construction of English national culture. great deal of iridescence everywhere.” ated her advocacy, misguided as it might In Hawaii, Bird is both critical of sometimes seem to us. American policies and coolly dismissive AAAvvvailable nownowailable Jane GarrityGarrityJane of the “natives,” finding King Lunalilo he Nomad also takes us to Africa at 216x138mm 376pp Associate Professor of essentially pathetic. In Asia, her complex the turn of the 20th century, but to hb 0-7190-6163-6 £47.50/$74.95 English at the University affiliation with empire fully emerges, as T French-dominated North Africa. pb 0-7190-6164-4 £15.99/$27.95 of Colorado at Boulder she repeatedly addresses the implementa- This was my least favorite book, though tion and consequences of British sover- I’m not sure whether I more disliked the eignty. While she explicitly contrasts a nomad, Isabelle Eberhardt, or her book. A Published by Manchester University Press. Distributed in the USA by Palgrave horrendous prison in Canton to its “sim- Russian-German émigré raised in Geneva, Macmillan, available in the rest of the world from Manchester University Press ply splendid” counterpart in British-ruled Eberhardt made her way to North Africa Hong Kong, she also waxes indignant in 1897 at the age of 20. There she dressed Manchester University Press Palgrave Macmillan Oxford Road 175 Fifth Avenue over the effect on China of “the opium as a man, traveled alone in the desert, took Manchester M13 9NR New York tel: +44 (0)161 275 2310 NY 10010 USA which we forced upon them.” Essentially drugs, had sex, and converted to Islam. The fax: +44 (0)161 274 3346 tel: 800 221 7945 Ext. 270 a woman of her time, she takes empire Nomad contains selections from her diaries Email: [email protected] fax: 212 777 6359 for granted and believes that good British between 1900 and 1903 (typically, editor www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk www.palgrave-usa.com rule is a good thing, but she is quick and Elizabeth Kershaw says only that “this vol-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 7 pursued other cosmetic procedures. vinced that many women are seeking She made the argument, then contro- only an “ordinary” or “normal” appear- versial in feminist circles, that cosmetic ance through cosmetic surgery; the sur- Makeover politics surgery is inextricably tied to identity, gery becomes a way of reframing or and that women who choose it are revising a life’s narrative. by Gretchen A. Case empowered rather than manipulated. Dubious Inequalities and Embodied ne of my primary questions as Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Differences is not a sequel to Reshaping the I read was whether Davis Female Body. Rather than merely repeat- O overemphasizes the voices of Studies on Cosmetic Surgery by Kathy Davis. ing earlier arguments, Davis increases individual women, presenting their the stakes. In this book, she insists that explanations without sufficiently engag- Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, “while…cosmetic surgery is best seen ing the cultural pressures that formed as an intervention in identity for every- those words. This is precisely where 2003, 159 pp., $21.95 paper. one regardless of gender or ethnicity, Susan Bordo and other feminist scholars this does not mean that all cosmetic sur- of body theory find fault with Davis. To I geries have the same meaning.” Her her credit, she does not allow this book writing is elegant; she avoids jargon but to devolve into an academic brawl. She he thrill of before and after pho- cles that offers an intelligent, complicat- uses precise terms from philosophy and outlines the criticism and responds tos is hard to resist; just seeing ed look at some of the questions sur- medicine when necessary. All discus- calmly, clarifying her earlier work in T them is hard to avoid. From rounding cosmetic surgery. sions of concepts and terminology some cases. In her very smart introduc- news reports on botulism-as-beautifier In her 1995 work Reshaping the Female unfamiliar to a general reader are tory chapter, Davis reminds the reader to the tears of grateful rhinoplasty recip- Body, Davis, a women’s studies profes- accompanied by concise explanations. If that feminist theory, as well as body the- ients on the ABC reality series Extreme sor at Utrecht University, discussed the all academicians could present their ory, is constantly shifting, and with each Makeover, mainstream Western media impact of government-funded cosmet- research so lucidly and persuasively, stu- shift comes new problems: inundates its viewers with images of re- ic surgery on women in the dents the world over would rejoice, and made human bodies. Kathy Davis Netherlands. Davis conducted a series non-academics might take more kindly Postmodern body theory has responds to this media coverage in of pre- and post-surgery interviews to scholarly books. often been a cerebral, esoteric, Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences, with women seeking breast enhance- Her arguments are complex, howev- and—ironically—disembodied a collection of previously published arti- ment, as well as with those who had er, and require the reader’s full attention. activity, which distances us from This book is thorny, frustrating, and ripe individuals’ everyday embodied with possibilities for debate. Its chapters experiences and practices. There Open for Thought range from a fascinating account of a has been an unmistakable ambiva- 19th-century female surgeon in lence toward the material body “Cosmetic Surgery in a Different Voice” and a tendency to privilege the to discussions of more recent figures body as metaphor. (p. 9) such as performance artist Orlan in “My Body is My Art.” The book moves from Her advocacy of an embodied under- a brief history of cosmetic surgery as a standing of choices and experiences is medical specialty to its present and the strongest and most important future concerns. accomplishment of this book. To dis- In her introduction, Davis declares cuss the re-making of human bodies by that she never intended to write another considering only sociocultural trends book about cosmetic surgery. However, and not particular, individual bodies Women Don’t Ask she was constantly drawn back to the seems to me not only impossible but Negotiation and the Gender Divide topic. In a conversation with feminist also unconscionable. Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever colleagues, she notes, In turning her attention and the read- At the heart of Women Don’t Ask are two funda- er’s to individual bodies, Davis quite mental questions: Why aren’t women better Everyone agreed that cosmetic rightly explains that any cultural study negotiators? And how can they learn to get what surgery to meet the ideals of femi- of cosmetic surgery must include both they want? Based on extensive research, and nine beauty is oppressive. gender and race. She devotes a large featuring in-depth interviews, this is the first book Nevertheless, they conceded, an part of Dubious Inequalities and Embodied to identify a dramatic but unacknowledged differ- ence between men and women. Revelatory, dis- individual woman might benefit Differences to discussions of surgical turbing, and ultimately empowering, it encour- from having her body surgically choices made by people of both gen- ages women to ask for what they want and it altered and should, therefore, be ders who hope to erase physical features tells them how to get it. allowed that choice. (p. 87) attributed to a particular ethnicity. Four Cloth $24.95 ISBN 0-691-08940-X of her seven chapters include examples This is the crux of Davis’ ongoing of this phenomenon, which almost mission: to explore the contradictions always involves a non-white patient. In inherent in cosmetic surgery by consid- “Surgical Passing,” her most recogniza- Insult to Injury ering it an “intervention in identity” ble subject is Michael Jackson. Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse rather than a search for ideal beauty. In a Choosing to address the many reconfig- Linda G. Mills chapter titled “Surgical Stories: urations of Jackson’s body is under- Constructing the Body, Constructing the standable, but Davis spends only a short By arresting and jailing men who beat their female partners, are we actually helping bat- Self,” she revisits the story of Diana, an section on a man whose journey tered women? In this controversial and much- informant from the Dutch study who through cosmetic surgery could be a anticipated book, Linda Mills argues that we had suffered all her life with perceived book in itself. may be making the problem of domestic vio- ugliness. The pseudonymous Diana was More successful are the chapters on lence worse. Looking honestly at uncomfortable devastated by the taunts of the school- historical figures involved in making facts, she makes a powerful case for a new approach. children she taught each day who cosmetic surgery a modern science dur- Cloth $19.95 ISBN 0-691-09639-2 referred to her as “rabbit face” and ing the early 20th century. Suzanne worse. Diana opted for facial recon- Noël, a French surgeon who was one of struction so extensive that family and the first women to practice cosmetic co-workers did not recognize her after surgery, receives long-overdue credit for NEW IN PAPERBACK surgery. She underwent the multiple, pioneering surgical techniques like the painful procedures, Diana tells Davis, modern face-lift and for emphasizing Aftermath Twice upon a Time not to stand out as a beauty but to blend the concerns of her patients. In “Lonely Violence and the Remaking of a Self Women Writers and the History of the into her world more easily: “That’s the Heroes and Great White Gods,” Davis Susan J. Brison Fairy Tale main thing. I’ve got a nice face now. I’m recognizes Maxwell Maltz, author of the Elizabeth Wanning Harries just ordinary.” 1954 memoir Doctor Pygmalion, not only “By facing what follows from traumatic Davis details this story with great for his success as a cosmetic surgeon to abuse without blinking, by refusing to “In this elegant study … Harries forget that the world can never be as it suggests that fairy tales may be our compassion, emphasizing that Diana’s the rich and famous but also for his nar- was, Susan Brison’s shatteringly only universal point of reference, the was an empowered choice. Yet Davis cissistic accounts of the “miracles” he insightful Aftermath reconstructs philos- only cultural language we speak in resists the argument here and through- performed on his patients. Noël and ophy as she reinvents survival.” common.” out Dubious Inequalities and Embodied Maltz are neither lionized nor complete- —Catharine MacKinnon —Amanda Heller, Boston Globe Differences that women choosing cosmet- ly dismissed; both are presented as inte- Paper $15.95 ISBN 0-691-11570-2 Paper $18.95 ISBN 0-691-11567-2 ic surgery and other interventions are gral—if little-known—developers of simply responding to invented (and current theories and practices. The PRINCETON 800-777-4726 • READ EXCERPTS ONLINE impossible) standards of beauty, which delight Davis found in writing these two University Press WWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU they internalize and pursue, even to the chapters is palpable. She notes that she • detriment of their health. She is con- came across both figures through the 8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 sort of serendipitous turns all tion, and the harsh work conditions researchers crave, and her analysis of present in both labor and death camps. their writings becomes a strong founda- She also describes many examples of tion for later chapters. Gender and survival parent-child devotion, love, and deter- Davis admits that she has changed mination—which in the arbitrary and her earlier belief that men’s experiences by Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild violent world of the Nazi killing with cosmetic surgery were so rare as to machine sometimes led to all family be insignificant. In fact, she now chal- Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust members perishing in the “selections” lenges the belief that it is natural for and sometimes saved them from death. women to improve their bodies but far by Nehama Tec. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Men and women generally suffered dif- less acceptable for men to resort to plas- ferent kinds of horrors because of the tic surgery for any aesthetic reason. 2003, 438 pp., $35.00 hardcover. Nazis’ patriarchal ideology: Men expe- However, she and other feminist critics rienced more physical violence; women worry that inclusion of men in the dis- I more rape and forced prostitution. cussion might erase the real, embodied Women did better hiding on the Aryan differences of gender and race. This esilience and Courage is Nehama Bawnik, one of those Jewish women side. But as survivor Leah Silverstein debate, which is largely found in her Tec’s fifth book about the who rose to heroism in the extraordi- told Tec, every day was “like playing final chapter “A Dubious Equality” and R Holocaust, and it reflects her nary horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland, Russian roulette with your life.” Did intended to explain the book’s title, feels years of researching, thinking about, saved her blond, Aryan-looking daugh- women do better at bonding and sur- the most inconclusive. This may be and analyzing the reactions of ordinary ter, and others. The book opens with vival than men? Tec raises the questions, because of the constantly evolving ideas people to this genocidal 20th century the testimony of a survivor about notes the contradictory information in that Davis does not shy from but cannot slaughter. Aided by her knowledge of Bawnik’s courage. Tec then proceeds her own and others’ findings, and find- always fully elucidate. many of the key languages of through the early stages of the German ing no definitive data, can only call for The timeliness of Dubious Inequalities Holocaust survivors, Tec has produced occupation, from the arbitrary rules more investigation of this issue. and Embodied Differences was reinforced the best and most comprehensive gen- separating Jews and gentiles, the forma- Nazi policies wreaked havoc with by my recent viewing of several der analysis of Jewish Holocaust sur- tion of ghettos, the brutalization and traditional norms and forced women episodes of Extreme Makeover. One of vivors and resisters to date. A look at terror, the collaboration of the local into non-traditional roles. Ironically, the makeover recipients was a male offi- her acknowledgments gives a sense of populace in the first mass murders, and patriarchal sex roles held firmly in the cer in the National Guard seeking the the depth and breadth of her study and the establishment of the labor and organized resistance, where men stronger, younger profile he felt was the involvement of top Holocaust death camps. She shows that it was almost without exception were the necessary to advance his career. He scholars in aiding this endeavor. often women and young people of both leaders. Tec notes: “Only in the forest, underwent a series of cosmetic alter- Tec is careful to delineate key sexes who proved resilient in dealing where the highly patriarchal partisan ations—including a chin implant and methodological issues at the start. She with the ever-increasing Nazi strangle- groups placed a high value on physical extensive dental work—despite the inti- relied heavily on qualitative research; hold and who helped their families to strength and military skills, were mately documented pain, and, more quantitative data is generally unavailable, survive as all slowly realized the nature women hampered in their efforts to tellingly, the guaranteed derision from unreliable, or non-existent. Although of the genocidal threat facing them. assume new roles.” Partisan women his male soldiers. In an uncanny echo of her focus is the “killing fields” of east- Men of higher social standing and intel- were largely confined to traditional Davis’ observations, a friend of his ern Europe, she made a substantial lectuals, unable to adapt to their loss of female duties, cleaning, cooking, nurs- declared that cosmetic surgery for men effort to include the experiences both of status and resources, often became ing the wounded. To survive, they was “not natural.” Yet the guardsman eastern and western European Jews. She immobilized by depression. often had to submit sexually to a male was willing to risk an unmanly reputa- explores two main issues: “whether and Tec discusses camp life in detail, protector. As one female former parti- tion in order to look as masculine as how the temporarily different treatment emphasizing the continual brutalization san observed: “The boys had the guns, possible in a very male-dominated work of Jewish men and women led to and dehumanization, the food depriva- not the women.” sector. As Davis writes, diverse, gender-related responses; and how their prewar roles affected the cop- The primary problem with defin- ing strategies of Jewish men and ing cosmetic surgery exclusively women.” Tec’s focus on gender was not GRACEFUL EXITS in terms of beauty is that recipi- without difficulties within the Holocaust Catholic Women and the Art of Departure ents are easily cast as frivolous, studies field. She alludes in a footnote to Debra Campbell star struck, or ideologically “concerns about the study of gender” Stories about the complicated relationships of manipulated. In contrast, by expressed by leading Holocaust scholars. Catholic women to their church. treating cosmetic surgery as an And the back cover blurb by cloth $24.95 intervention in identity, it Christopher Browning, no doubt well- becomes easier to take their expe- meaning, addresses the “political cor- riences with their bodies serious- rectness” argument by asserting that COMMON WHORES, VERTUOUS WOMEN, ly, acknowledge the gravity of Tec’s “sensitive [my emphasis] investiga- AND LOVEING WIVES their suffering, and understand tion of gender issues does not lead to Free Will Christian Women in Colonial Maryland why—in the face of all its draw- trivialization and distortion in the serv- Debra A. Meyers backs—cosmetic surgery might ice of some presumed agenda”—as if A revisionist approach to the study of women seem like their best course of studies of traditional, i.e. male, history and religion in colonial Maryland. cloth $39.95 action under the circumstances. have no agenda. Most problematic were (p. 98) the reactions of survivors, who general- ly resisted a gender analysis as somehow INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Davis consistently recognizes the diminishing the significance of the mur- psychic pain of the women and men derous German policies against all Jews at bookstores • Order: 1-800-842-6796 • iupress.indiana.edu who choose cosmetic surgery and refus- and the overall horror of women’s and es to separate their choices from their men’s shared experiences. CHILDREN, ETHICS, AND MODERN MEDICINE embodied experiences. She makes their It is to Tec’s credit that she persisted, Richard B. Miller decision to undergo surgical interven- for, as scholars such as Marion Kaplan Develops a comprehensive set of ethics for the medical treatment of children. tion an extremely weighty one rather and Claudia Koonz have shown, Medical Ethics cloth $34.95 than a flighty whim of a suggestible women’s studies and the gender per- “cultural dope.” Her compassion does spective illuminate Nazi policies in sig- lead to a somewhat disturbing epilogue nificant ways. Tec notes, for example, NO PLACE LIKE HOME? on the use of plastic surgery to mini- that the exclusion of Jews from Feminist Ethics and Home Health Care mize the facial manifestations of German public life was preceded by the Jennifer A. Parks Down’s syndrome in children so that exclusion of all women from higher This provocative new book analyzes practices in the home health care they will be less visibly marked as dis- education, the civil service, free access industry and concludes that they are highly exploitative of both workers and patients. abled. She indicates that this sort of to the labor market, jury duty, and high- Medical Ethics normalization through surgery is a ranking political positions. Hitler held cloth $29.95 recent development and an important traditional gender stereotypes that subject for critical engagement. women “cannot think logically or rea- However, because Davis never really son objectively since they are ruled only introduces concepts of disability in ear- by emotion.” However this did not stop AT BERKELEY IN THE '60S lier sections, this late inclusion of the the vast majority of German women The Education of an Activist, 1961–1965 stories of children unable to give from enthusiastically supporting the Jo Freeman informed consent to surgery is trou- Nazis, and voting for them, as suffrage An insider's story of the growth of political activism at Berkeley bling. Perhaps this will become the topic was one civil right the Nazis retained for in the 1960s. cloth $49.95 paper $21.95 of her next book; in any case, I will be Aryan women. waiting to read anything that Kathy Herself a Holocaust survivor, Tec Davis writes. I was born in Poland. Her mother, Ester

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 9 Tec concludes her study with a discus- woods. The brigade had a hospital, land- adversely affected.” In the camps, men Was it all “courage and resilience”? sion of the Bielski brigade, a truly ing strip, and workshops in its forest lair. “looked worse than we did,” women The dead don’t talk: For the most part, remarkable Jewish partisan group whose The brigade’s location in Belorussia, with “could suffer more than a man,” men’s we have only the testimony of those sur- survival rate of 95 percent contrasts with its high rate of partisan activity and rela- “spirits were broken much more than vivors willing to share their experiences the extremely high death rate (up to 80 tively sympathetic local population, in a ours”—but men may have endured or the evidence collected by brave urban percent) of Jews in Soviet partisan units particularly dense forest area that the harsher treatment from the guards. In historians like the murdered Emmanuel and other family groups. The Bielski tac- Germans feared entering and that was general, those unused to privation could Ringelblum and Cecylia Slepak in tics, to Tec, testify to the significance of close to the rapidly advancing Soviet not adapt; this was true for Dutch and Warsaw. Polish and Soviet Jews in the traditionally gendered female traits in front were critical factors in their outwit- French Jews of both sexes who were sent path of the initial German invasions Holocaust survival: “In the ruin of tradi- ting the Nazis. to concentration camps. were generally unlucky. Women, without tional society, cooperation and mutual Women could be strong in ways that the telltale mark of circumcision, had an protection rather than combativeness uring the Holocaust, since every challenged gender and Jewish stereo- advantage. Those who did not “look and competition promote greater odds Jew was by definition marked for types; this happened in all types of sit- Jewish,” or who spoke without a Yiddish of survival.” But while it might be reas- D death by the Germans, the very uations. Tec recounts many heartbreak- accent, or who had more money could suring to take this essentialist lesson act of survival, of maintaining human ing stories of incredible bravery and sometimes save themselves. Some who from those who lived through the dignity, was defiance. Tec shows that gen- tenacity by women such as the partisan survived, like Tec’s mother, the Bielski Holocaust, the experience of the Bielski der played a role: Traditions of female Anda Luft, who after many months of partisans, the Warsaw ghetto fighters, brigade actually shows many things. The self-sacrifice are reflected in the many successfully outwitting German and and many who passed as Aryan, were group was led by brothers who brooked accounts of mothers who shared their Ukrainian pursuers, finally died fight- heroic. Some, such as those on no interference with their leadership, meager food rations with those less for- ing with her infant daughter strapped “Schindler’s list,” the pianist Wladislaw used violence to save themselves and tunate. To Tec, the observation of many to her back. Yet we know the Szpilman, the “Nazi officer’s wife,” or destroy the enemy but also to maintain female survivors that women outlived Holocaust’s denouement, and even those saved by Raoul Wallenberg in their power, and in the later stages of the men throughout the Holocaust horrors is though Steven Spielberg found a Budapest, were lucky. Some, like the war, were aided by the Soviet govern- especially significant. While both men’s Holocaust story with a “happy” end- Sonderkommando (the prisoners who dis- ment with arms and equipment, as well and women’s roles changed, “because ing, as Tec notes, “no matter how posed of those murdered in the Nazi gas as by the US government. My relative, these changes placed a higher value on resilient and courageous the Jewish chambers), or Jewish prostitutes, had lit- Bielski partisan Gdalya Toker, told of [women’s] traditional roles of caring for women and men were, most were over- tle choice. Some, like many Jewish police- repairing lend-lease Studebakers in the and helping others, they were not as come by the ruthless German power.” men, some members of Judenrats (Nazi- organized governing councils of the ghettos), and Jew-catchers like Stella Goldschlag, were venal. Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Lodz ghetto, did not survive, but his bit-by-bit appeasement of the Nazis stalled the final liquidation of that ghetto, although New fromHARVARD it did not prevent Rumkowski from sac- rificing many Lodz Jews in the process. That the percentage of survivors from the Lodz ghetto was much higher than from the Warsaw ghetto is another of those chilling Holocaust statistics that cast doubt on any generalizations about survival tactics. Tec acknowledges the complexity of the issue of Holocaust survival in dis- cussing those who did not act nobly, for example, the relatively few mothers who Why Do Men Barbecue? Competing Devotions NEW IN PAPERBACK abandoned their children to survive. Recipes for Cultural PsychologyCareer and Family Famous Women Perhaps the final words on Holocaust RICHARD A. SHWEDER among Women Executives behavior are those of Dina GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO MARY BLAIR-LOY Abramowicz, who jumped from a Why do American children sleep TRANSLATED BY deportation train and lived: “It’s good alone instead of with their parents? “[A] fascinating book with an VIRGINIA BROWN that God did not test me. I don’t know Why do middle-aged Western important message. Blair-Loy…is “In a pungent new translation by what I would have done.” women yearn for their youth, on to something really new when Virginia Brown, [Boccaccio’s] Given the problems of access, it is while young wives in India look she writes about not only the famous women hold up very understandable, although regrettable, that forward to being middle-aged? In Tec’s study did not include testimony interplay between cultural norms well indeed.” these provocative essays, one of from survivors who remained in the for- and individual actions (and —Ingrid D. Rowland, the most brilliant advocates of mer Soviet Union, including former institutional structures) but on the New York Times Book Rev cultural psychology reminds us cultural schemas that evoke deep members of the Bielski brigade. There is The I Tatti Renaissance Library no discussion of gay and lesbian sur- that cultural differences in emotional resonances. An New in paper vivors and how they fit and don’t fit into mental life lie at the heart of outstanding book.” gender paradigms, although this is a sub- any understanding of the —Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein, The Tangled Field ject recently made more visible by the human condition. author of Deceptive Distinctions publication of Gad Beck’s An New in cloth and paper New in cloth Barbara McClintock’s Se Underground Life and Aimee and Jaguar, the the Patterns of Genetic film, documentary, and book about the Making Manhood Embroidered with Gold, NATHANIEL C. COMFORT Berlin Jewish lesbian Felice “Lucid, engaging, and unafraid Schragenheim and her Aryan lover and Growing Up Male in Strung with Pearls protector Lily Wust. Tec cites survivors’ of controversy, Comfort… Colonial New England The Traditional Ballads observations that attractive women [portrays] a highly respected ANNE S. LOMBARD of Bosnian Women sometimes gained better treatment, and and dedicated professional she notes in passing that some boys in “A major, and wonderful, book, AIDA VIDAN adamant about maintaining her the camps, called pipels, who did extra Making Manhoodreinterprets Bosnian traditional ballads have personal and intellectual freedom, services and slept with kapos (male Jewish American masculinity through the intrigued many by their beauty and who possessed an astonishing guards), were favored with extra food. lens of early modern history and eloquence. These songs are now attunement to complexity and Overall, however, Tec deserves high reinterprets the American available to the English reader in a pattern and a protean ability praise for this comprehensive work, Revolution through the lens of bilingual edition offering a selection to rapidly solve intricate, which contributes greatly to women’s, masculinity. Readable and engag- of never before translated or multidimensional problems.” gender, and Holocaust studies, and does so in writing refreshingly free of aca- ing, this is a compelling view of published materials from Harvard —Donna Seaman, Booklist American manhod at its origins.” demic jargon. Her book is a must-read University’s Parry Collection. New in paper —E. Anthony Rotundo, for anyone seeking a greater understand- Publications of the Milman Parry Collection ing of the war against the Jews, gender, author of American Manhoodof Oral Literature • New in cloth New in cloth and genocide. No single book can answer the many questions about gender and survival in the Holocaust, but Tec’s careful research and thoughtful analysis HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 800.405.1619 www.hup.harvard.edu represent a significant achievement in moving the discussion forward. I

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 award, which went to Elena Garro in Clearly, she loves research, and in No 1996 and Silvia Molina in 1998. She has One Will See Me Cry, her characters share published a volume of poetry and four that joy. Joaquín, eager to learn every- Old Mexico other books of fiction, all untranslated, thing he can about Matilda, goes to the beginning with the short story collection National Library in order to read about by Martha Gies La guerra no importa (1991). Papantla, Veracruz, where she was raised, Now associate professor of Mexican and there, in the books, he feels “safe”: No One Will See Me Cry by Cristina Rivera-Garza, translated history at San Diego State University, Rivera-Garza spent hours investigating Among their pages there is a by Andrew Hurley. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, prison and asylum files in the course of cathedral of smells in which earning her doctorate in Latin everything has a name; there is a 2003, 229 pp., $15.95 paper. American history at the University of tunnel of voices where he can go Houston. to find clues, clouds. The organi- I In addition to her fiction, Rivera- zation of the stories orients him Garza has published in The Journal of the within the mysteries of the world. n one of Agustín Casasola’s haunting Twelve years ago Joaquín had been History of Medicine and has an article in When no one is watching, he photographs, eight ragtag camp fol- working on a series of portraits of The Confinement of the Insane: International caresses the covers, sticks his nose I lowers, soldaderas, spill from a train. women in bordellos. Looking through Perspectives 1800-1965, a new collection between the brittle pages, inhales One of them, in a dirty white flounced the eyepieces of the viewer, he is taken from Cambridge University Press. the oder of ink. If the city were a skirt, hangs off a step, gripping the back to “that day when Matilda removed It was during a search of public library, he would be a happy handrails, and looks angrily down the her clothes with no embarrassment health records that the author found the man....Joaquín has never been in track, her fury palpable. whatever and, reclining on the marble prototype for Matilda Burgos. As she Papantla, but he can move with This is the Mexican Revolution that table...asked him: ‘How does one come frequently reports in interview, she felt increasing ease among its complex many people recognize from Los de Abajo to be a photographer of whores?’” herself observed by the eyes of a network of narrow streets bor- (The Underdogs) , Mariano Azuela’s Within a few days (days filled with woman whose photograph she found dered by white houses, among the famous 1915 novel; or from los corridos, rain), Joaquín sells his photographs to a while examining patient files. It was “una pigs and chickens that trip up the popular ballads about martyrdoms collector, buys Matilda an engraved silver seducción a primera vista,” a “seduction at people walking. When he wearies and victories and the night raids of bracelet, and gives it to her with the hope first sight.” of this, he rests under the colonial Pancho Villa; or from the vast Casasola that she will explain to him how a collection of gelatin dry plates, which woman goes crazy. capture the sweat and drama of civil war. Working an exquisitely ornate plot, In Cristina Rivera-Garza’s novel, No adorned with the thumbnail stories of One Will See Me Cry, the main character families and lovers and other inmates at is a photographer. But unlike the histor- the asylum, Rivera-Garza teasingly unrav- ical Casasola (1874-1938), Joaquín els the personal histories that answer Buitrago spends the years between 1910 those two questions, along with the and 1920 oblivious of troop move- implied questions: Will Matilda recover ments. Instead, he suffers insomnia and leave the madhouse? Will Joaquín over a woman he loved and left in conquer his morphine dependency? Rome; and he declines a family fortune Throughout, the author continues to President in order to punish himself with memo- refuse the stereotypes: No, Matilda is not Rollins College ry and morphine. seduced by the rich uncle in whose household she works as a domestic. No, Rollins College, an independent, comprehensive liberal arts institution, invites In all that time, the photographer her love for another girl at the bordello applications and nominations for the position of President. The next presi- never went out searching for rev- does not solve, once and for all, the rid- dent will succeed Dr. Rita Bornstein, the College’s thirteenth president, who is olutionaries or their female camp dle of her sexuality. And, no, she is not retiring at the end of the 2003-2004 academic year after fourteen years of followers or massacre; instead, he rehabilitated from whore to matron by a devoted himself to taking photo- rich, adoring client. exemplary leadership. graphs of absences. A chair, the In the telling of this complex, popu- Florida’s oldest college, Rollins enrolls 3,835 students in diverse degree pro- wrinkled outline in the seat of lated tale, most things happen twice, if someone who just got up. A cup not three or four times. Two characters grams through the College of Arts and Sciences (1723 students), the traditional, of coffee with a dark lip-print on even have the same name. Of Matilda, residential undergraduate college; the Roy E. Crummer Graduate School of the rim. An empty swing seat still the author says, “Tautology is the queen Business (433 students) with its highly ranked MBA program; and the Hamilton moving. The half-open pages of of her heart.” Holt School (1679 students), offering evening undergraduate and graduate pro- a book. A lighted cigarette. Schizophrenia yanks Matilda through grams. There are 185 full-time faculty members. Rollins is a member of the (p. 192) manic-depressive mood swings, exhaust- Associated Colleges of the South and is consistently rated by U.S. News & World ing, finally, even her logorrhea. “There Report as one of “America’s Best Colleges.” Rollins’ endowment of $143 million As the character refuses the clichés, so are still many details, but there is no plot does the author: Here is an historical at all to guide them.” Silence descends. places it in the top 10 percent of the more than 3,600 universities and colleges novel set not in the ranchos, camp- She had, after all, long ago in America. Set in the residential community of Winter Park, Florida and just grounds, or cantinas of Chihuahua but in minutes from the city of Orlando, the campus is noted for its lakefront beauty Mexico City’s La Castañeda, a modern gathered up her memories and, and is often described as one of the most beautiful campuses in America. insane asylum, inaugurated in 1910, on one by one, put them away in a the site of a former hacienda. And secret place. Then she closed the In recent years, the College has significantly enhanced campus facilities, includ- instead of peasants with sticks and guns, door and turned the latch of ing renovating residential halls, and building the Cornell Campus Center and Rivera-Garza delivers a cast of urban silence. ‘No one will ever see me the Harold & Ted Alfond Sports Center; completed a comprehensive campaign misfits—mental patients and artists, cry. Ever.’ More than pain itself, which raised $160.2 million, far surpassing its $100-million goal; added fifteen upwardly mobile physicians and fallen Matilda feared other people’s pity newly-endowed chairs, bringing the total to twenty-four, including a chair of aristocrats, prostitutes and labor and compassion....[N]o doubt distinguished presidential leadership as part of a $10-million gift to endow the activists—dislocated not by war, but by without realizing it, she had decid- the devastations of idealism, ambition ed to live with all her losses alone. college presidency; approved a campus master plan; and renewed its strategic and, most drastically, romantic love. (p. 147) planning process. It is one of these inmates, Matilda Burgos, who sets the story in motion by Running through the book is the con- The ideal candidate will be a proven, outstanding leader with a commitment to asking Joaquín Buitrago, now reduced to stant hope that the characters may be continuing to build academic excellence and national visibility; appreciative of taking mug shots for the asylum’s files, healed if only someone will listen to the complexity of all three components of the College; a strategic, visionary “How does one come to be a photogra- them; but, finally, it is not enough: They thinker; an effective fundraiser; and a strong manager of resources. pher of crazy people?” are too wounded by events. The only mir- After a sleepless night, Joaquín acle is that of their interconnectedness. Applications and nominations may be submitted, in confidence and preferably remembers where he had seen this Rivera-Garza provides a believable and before October 20, 2003 to: Shelly Weiss Storbeck, Managing Director, A.T. woman before: satisfying ending, if not a happy one. Kearney Education Practice, 333 John Carlyle Street, Alexandria, VA 22314. 703-739-4613 (phone); 703-518-1782 (fax); [email protected] (email) [W]ith extreme care, he removed o One Will See Me Cry was origi- his most treasured possession: nally published four years ago in The search committee will begin reviewing materials immediately and continue the collection of stereoscopic Mexico, and in 2001 it won the N until the position is filled. For more information about Rollins College, please photographs, mounted on paste- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award, given consult its website at: www.rollins.edu. board, that he had taken just annually for the best book in Spanish by after his return from Italy. Each a woman writer. Born in Matamoros, Rollins College is an Equal Opportunity Employer card held the image of a naked Tamaulipas, in 1964, Rivera-Garza is the woman. (p. 5) third Mexican winner of this prestigious

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 11 edited and cropped according to our indi- vidual capacity to withstand the assault of recollection? Or perhaps she intends the Photographing horror pictures she invokes to coalesce inside eye- lids closed against remembered images of by Marilyn Richardson atrocity. We can evaluate Sontag’s take on those we know; we are asked to trust her Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag. analysis of those that are unfamiliar. The only image the reader actually sees New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, is the harrowing Tampoco from Goya’s early 19th-century series “The Disasters of 131 pp., $20.00 hardcover. War,” which is used as the dust jacket illus- tration. The picture’s immediacy is com- I promised by its service as the background for the book’s title and the author’s name, usan Sontag is concerned with the a story but to be able to call up a picture.” both in large type. Access to the scene is “innumerable opportunities a mod- She scaffolds this premise with a virtuoso further hindered by the jacket design, S ern life supplies for regarding—at a display of references. Observations on which wraps the picture around the spine distance, through the medium of photogra- people, places, events, and works of art and onto the back of the book. To see it phy—other people’s pain.” Do we, awash in careen back and forth over time and geog- whole, the reader must splay the volume, the incessant flood of such information raphy, ricocheting off one another with pushing the cover flat. The reward for this Cristina Rivera-Garza through our television sets, newspapers, and dizzying speed. World War I, the Kellogg- effort is a confrontation with a picture that computer screens, have a moral responsibil- Briand Pact, Japan, Freud, Einstein, the is a brilliant counterpart to the title and to ity to examine our response to what have Spanish Civil War, Kabul, Mostar, the burden of Sontag’s reflections on war, archway next to the church or sits become commonplace depictions of acts of Manhattan after September 11, 2001, empathy, and conscience. on the steps leading up to the utmost violence and cruelty? Have we General Franco, “Sbarro pizzeria in down- There dangles a hanged man, his gazebo in the center of the plaza. become inured and apathetic beyond the town Jerusalem,” Serbs and Croats, Al trousers—in a stroke of Goya’s deft distilla- (p. 59) recall of compassion in the face of atrocity? Jazeera, Morocco, Guernica, Simone Weil, tion of anguish and pity—fallen about his “Ever since cameras were invented in the refugee camp in Jenin, and the Iliad knees; and facing him, a soldier lounging in Rivera-Garza’s characters know 1839,” Sontag declares, “photography has show up between pages five and 12, and a relaxed posture, lost in contemplation of what the writer knows—the private kept company with death.” Photographs of that’s just within the discussion of the the dead man before him. Is that a look of and intense pleasure of solitary reading the Crimean War, the American Civil War, strengths and weaknesses of Woolf’s opin- bemusement on the soldier’s face? Even sat- and discovery. Here’s Pablo, an engi- the world wars, lynchings of blacks in the ions on war. In a book so crammed with isfaction? The silent indignity of death col- neer, after a day at the Mexican Society South, and the Nazi death camps offered ideas and information, historical events, lides with the energy of the gaze of the liv- for Geography and Statistics, analyzing an inexorable march of scenes of horror names, places, and assorted brief mentions ing figure. This demonstration, on the cover, an obscure mining report from San for the casual perusal of a relatively safe, all serve as shorthand for what entire gen- of the power of art to indict vividly signals Luís Potosí: relatively privileged public. With the refine- erations experienced or witnessed. Sontag’s provocative commentary within. ment of video—higher resolution, smaller, Among the photographers, painters, Although Three Guineas is the starting Diligently, in a firm hand, he more lightweight equipment—Vietnam, and images enlisted to explicate the inter- point for Sontag’s journey through the copied out the information, and Rwanda, Palestine and Israel, and New play of pictures and memory are German depiction and iconography of horror and when he was done he left the York City on September 11, 2001, mor- photographer Ernst Friedrich; Werner suffering, the charge that Woolf lacks a reading room to walk–aimlessly, phed into a constant background presence Bischof (Indian famine); W. Eugene Smith political analysis leads her in another direc- anywhere. He needed a drink to on ubiquitous monitors, public and private, (Minimata, Japan); the Laocoön; Judith and tion. Some readers will see Dante’s Inferno as put his thoughts in order and that we can tune in and out at will. Holofernes; Rosenthal (raising the flag on the template for Sontag’s attempt to jour- calm his excitement. (p. 173) Sontag opens this extended essay with a Iwo Jima); Yevgeny Khaldei (burning of ney through and stare down the visual evi- discussion of Virginia Woolf’s Three the Reichstag); Huynh Ut (naked dence of the human impulse to inflict pain, One of the many pleasures of this Guineas, published in 1938 in response to Vietnamese girl burned by napalm); Eddie terror, and carnage on our fellow beings. beautiful novel is its loving recreation the question, “How in your opinion are we Adams (Vietcong suspect shot in the head); Using this evidence she locates a potential of the Mexican capital at the turn of to prevent war?” posed to her by a London and scores of others including references nexus of politics, art, and conscience. the last century: the salons of the lawyer. Woolf’s pseudo-epistolary reply has to work that is unattributed. In her 21st-century journey, the Inferno Colonia Roma and grand houses along long been established as a landmark in the What’s surprising is the number of is all that survives of the three realms of the Paseo de la Reforma; the Fábregas literature of pacifism, feminism, and images that are part of our common visual Dante’s vision. But “to designate a hell,” Theater, where Matilda believes she human rights, a meditation on war, art, and currency. Sontag suggests that “The famil- Sontag says, “is not, of course, to tell us once worked; the San Carlos Academy, conscience. Woolf explores the ways class iarity of certain photographs builds our anything about how to extract people from where Joaquín went to art school; La and gender shape responses to images of sense of the present and immediate past.” that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames.” Parisina, where Pablo buys Matilda six war; specifically, to the newspaper photo- Her reference to “photographs that every- Among the pertinent questions she asks: yards of purple silk; and the Buen graphs she analyzes of civilian victims of one recognizes” is nonetheless a sweeping “Who believes today that war can be abol- Tono cigarette factory, where Cástulo the Spanish Civil War, which show mutilat- assumption. Surely recognition is limited by ished? No one, not even pacifists. We hope does his labor organizing. The Plaza ed bodies and dead children. Sontag and one’s age, among other things. How old only (so far in vain) to stop genocide and Mayor. Plaza Santo Domingo. La Casa Woolf agree on the power of photographs does one have to be to carry the first-hand bring to justice those who commit gross de los Azulejos. La Opera Bar, with its to demonstrate that, as Sontag says, “War experience of the pictures surrounding violations of the laws of war.” And, “What ornate ceiling and velvet drapes. El rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War President Kennedy’s assassination? How old does it mean to protest suffering, as dis- Café de Nadie, legendary in literature scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.” still to flinch at the memory of the explo- tinct from acknowledging it?”; “What to do and art. They part company, however, when Sontag sion of the Challenger spacecraft? In the with such knowledge as photographs bring Sadly, the trains by which her charac- declares that to respond with “a general same way that the mind’s eye perceives the of faraway suffering?”; “Is there an anti- ters are always arriving—from Veracruz, abhorrence of war” is to “dismiss politics.” receding foreground, middle ground, and dote to the perennial seductiveness of war? Teziutlan, Real de Catorce, San Luís Sontag’s “conversation” with Woolf, background of a painting or photograph, it And is this a question a woman is more Potosí—are a thing of the past. which surfaces at other points, is only one cannot assign equal clarity and emotional likely to pose than a man? (Probably, yes.)” Buenavista, Mexico City’s main station, such narrative exchange. There is the autho- resonance to scenes from Jacques Callot, While particularly outraged by the sins is now silent and dark: The last passen- rial conversation with the reader, which car- Mathew Brady, and CNN. Our access to of apathy, boredom, selfish privilege, and ger train departed in 2001. Since the pri- ries the spoken quality of segments of some images is through memory, to others willful innocence, Sontag moves cautiously vatization of Ferrocarriles Nacionales recent lectures folded into the text. Further, through something closer to study and to a toward a prescription with the warning that de Mexico, the Mexican National there is a sotto voce conversation running choice to be moved by what we see. “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It Railroad, under the former PRI govern- through the book in the form of paren- needs to be translated into action, or it ment, only freight is hauled over the thetical phrases (asides, elaborations, count- ike Sontag’s On Photography, published withers,” The first step toward action, she country’s rails. A potent symbol of the er-views; some brief, others a line or more 25 years ago—which she revisits says, is to wake ourselves from the hypnot- Mexican Revolution is gone. in length), almost one to a page. These cre- L briefly here with some second ic trance induced by the reductive quality of No One Will See Me Cry has won ate a kind of internal call and response that thoughts—this is a book about seeing that what we see on all those screens as we surf high praise from Carlos Fuentes, adds another layer to the discussion. has no illustrations. Nor are there, this time, through scenes of war and disaster and the Mexico’s dean of letters, now 75, who However, they eventually become a dis- a table of contents, chapter titles, chrono- tapes on every channel throughout 9/11 of wrote: “[This] is one of the most beau- tracting tic that reinforces the suspicion that logical structure, or index. Perhaps Sontag’s the planes hitting the towers over and over tiful and perturbing novels ever written Sontag’s sweeping compendium is actually omission of the usual maps is her deliberate and over again. Near the end of the book, in Mexico.” the draft of a longer, more expansive elab- attempt to tap into the anatomy of horror Sontag wonders if “[p]erhaps too much The novel is lovingly translated by oration on the scores of images and events as it resides in the eternal present of the value is assigned to memory, not enough to Andrew Hurley, who teaches at the that are only touched upon in this essay. post- traumatic unconscious. But one feels thinking.” That speculation suggests a tec- University of Puerto Rico and whose But what does Sontag believe these that pictures, in particular, are withheld. tonic shift in the way a viewer might many excellent translations from the images of war and suffering give us that is Sontag assumes her readers share her famil- respond to the daily surfeit of images of Spanish include the work of Jorge of lasting significance? They help us to iarity with the artists, photographers, and suffering; a shift from collective witness and Luís Borges, Ernesto Sábato, and remember—and to remember, according images she discusses. Does she assume a memory to the personal decision to bear Reinaldo Arenas. I to Sontag “is more and more, not to recall mental screen upon we project these images, witness. And that could lead to action. I

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 to inspire a whole new set of theories, to be a guide through this uncharted ter- and to revive our engagement with issues ritory. Where her voice does appear, it is that are fundamentally about the way life fleeting. In the introduction, prologue, First-person stories is lived, not the way it is taught or talked and short passages preceding each of about. The stories here are personal nar- three sections, Rose writes practically in by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts ratives of 19 black women diverse in eth- a whisper, far removed from the polemi- nicity, sexual orientation, age, religion, cal power she exhibited in Noise. She Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and geography, and class background. There communicates only the elemental, in is 22 year old Sarita, a former Muslim simple language. In an interview Rose Intimacy by Tricia Rose. New York: Farrar, Straus & who speaks of her love of black men and explained, “A lot of people who read the her own struggles as a biracial woman. manuscript wanted me to inject more Giroux, 2003, 398 pp., $25.00 hardcover. Soupi grew up in rural poverty and was analysis…I said, ‘Look, that’s another raped by her older brothers. Rhonda, a book. These women have never had a I 35-year-old law student, battled drug chance to speak ever in the history of abuse and speaks of her evolving identi- the published word.’” Her decision is s a rule, I don’t write reviews in © Jim MacKenzie ty as a “dyke” who is involved with S/M. also informed by the prevailing literature the first person. What was at first But to name only three flattens the pur- on the subject. Rose rejects what she sees A my obedient response to a publi- pose of this book, which champions the as the dominant modes of “sexual sto- cation’s house style rapidly evolved into a particularity of each woman’s experi- rytelling” where “the author-expert worldview, as I became fed up with the ences and refrains from holding up any frames bits and pieces of women’s sexu- personalized appreciations that comprise one as representative. Longing relies on al stories around a central thesis” or much contemporary criticism. Longing to cumulative effect. molds the subjects’ experiences into Tell requires, for several reasons, a change The interviews have been edited, with “‘story containers’—such as ‘rape vic- of mode. For one thing, the book is itself identifying characteristics altered for the tim,’ ‘incest survivor,’ ‘married woman,’ a collection of first-person narratives, sake of anonymity. Gone also are Rose’s ‘single mother,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘virgin,’ and boldly presented with little commentary comments and questions as an interlocu- ‘prostitute.’” She presents the first per- or analysis—a rare case of tongue-biting tor. At first, this seems to produce a dif- son narratives whole to avoid these dis- for an academic. For another, there is my ferent sort of silence, the author refusing embodying strategies. own relationship to the work, which I first encountered in 1996 as a college freshman attending a small colloquium as part of my research for a paper about black women’s sexuality. Tricia Rose IN SEARCH OF At the time I was not a critic, but a fan. I’d received Rose’s book Black Noise: Rose, I’d left hip-hop, and the impor- Rap Music and Black Culture in tance of black feminism to my everyday THE REAL Contemporary America as a gift. Noise life was such that prospective boyfriends established Rose as the most daring and were provided with a copy of Audre articulate critic of hip-hop culture amid Lorde’s essay on the use of the erotic, POCAHONTAS a flurry of books from the so-called rap and hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman was (naively) academy, and a personal hero for girls considered age-appropriate reading for like me, at once baby womanists and hip- the summer youth courses I taught. hop heads. Rose’s academic star was on But not long after that I also left the rise amid the cross country gun-clap- those foundational texts. Was it that the ping that ended in the deaths of Tupac discourse seemed dated? Perhaps, but Shakur and Biggie Smalls, terrible proof those years also corresponded with the of her thesis that hip-hop was both an simultaneous apex of cultural studies empowering and an alienating response and the recession of multiculturalism. If to urban life in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. the latter seemed to trap me in a web of But by the time Shakur and Smalls had reductive labels, the former was a tem- been murdered, Rose had announced porary way out. The question was no that she wasn’t going to write or talk longer “ain’t I a woman?” but “ain’t I so about hip-hop anymore. Politely exiting much more?” The mastery of complex the ghetto of hip-hop punditry, she was cultural theory held promise. For my already on to the next thing. paper on the black female nude, I To those listening closest, the next worked in a fury through Jacques Lacan, thing had been a signal clearly audible on Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha (all at the lower frequencies of Noise. While once). Looking back, wasn’t it just a some black feminist grappling amounted high-pitched complaint against the to “I-know-it’s-misogynistic-but-gosh-I- sexed-up images that so infuriated me in really-love-those-beats,” Rose went fur- “urban culture” magazines? Somewhere, ther. In her exploration of sexually the initial, personal impulse was lost. My explicit lyrics, imagery, and the role of peers and I rabidly applied our mutant women in the genre, Rose sought to black feminist cultural theory to every- address the silences around gender poli- thing that moved, but I think we’d tics in hip-hop. The very form of Longing stopped applying it to ourselves. was foretold as Rose excavated lyrics by ’80s female rap phenoms MC Lyte and he book that resulted from Rose’s Salt-N-Pepa, whose songs used boldly long-ago colloquium is now pub- narrated personal sexual experiences for T lished. Longing to Tell is—for a the purpose, Rose argued, of educating woman of my generation—a back-to- other women. As if in response, the next basics reminder of the issues that made few years had Foxy Brown growling us baby womanists to begin with. Its about her “ill na-na” and Li’l Kim invit- structure is intricate. Rose advances the ing an imaginary partner to “fuck me till tradition of black feminist thought at the I bleed” as slogans of sexual empower- same time that she suggests, via her P RAISE FOR D R . GUNN A LLEN: ment. Suddenly the silences were a deaf- refusal to present the subject matter in ening, disturbing roar. any way other than its (nearly) raw form, “Allen is a pathfinder. . . . Her emergence at this time in our This was the climate in which I trav- that this tradition is in need of extensive history, and our determination, renders her as significant as eled to the far edge of campus with my renovation. The bibliography name- any who have come before.” best friend, the one who’d introduced me checks most of the fundamental books —LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW to bell hooks and was my partner in a of the movement, but leaves plenty of high school mock rap collective. We gath- others out. Perhaps its brevity suggests “[Dr. Gunn Allen] helps us get past the merely ethnic to the ered around a table to hear about Rose’s that before we read anything, we must value of the stories as works of art.” latest project, which I remember as typi- read our own lives. —URSULA K. LEGUIN cal of the work in which I was immersed Indeed Rose begins by saying, “We FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW at the time, a complement to my steady compare our lives to the stories we diet of hooks, Michele Wallace, and Alice know”—not “we compare our lives to www.harpersf.com Walker, whose texts armored me to face the theories we know.” Her aim seems to A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers the world according to L’il Kim. Like be to provide a whole new set of stories, The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 13 While there is nothing new about the form of oral history, Rose’s use of oral narratives recalls—all at once—everything from the classic slave narratives to the The morality of class first-person confessionals heard on TV talk shows to the ventriloquist-like per- by Lori D. Ginzberg formances of Anna Deveare Smith. But the form, variously used and abused, is The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century made strange and new in Rose’s project. The narratives preserve the subjects’ ten- America by Amy Schrager Lang. Princeton, NJ: Princeton tative tone. Their stories are rambling, contradictory, and disjointed—in keeping University Press, 2003, 152 pp., $45.00 hardcover. with the somewhat tentative nature of the project itself, which even after publication I seems to be a thing in search of its final o 19th-century reformers in the Some of the works of fiction that Lang form. This in itself is a strategy, allowing United States, class did not have explores (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House the intimate stories to live within a greater T much to do with economics or the of Seven Gables, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, context, so at any moment a subject may distribution of wealth or, certainly, any and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s step back and qualify, or give further back- excesses on their own part. It was a moral Cabin) will be familiar to readers whose last ground, or make connections and/or con- condition, and therefore material relief or English class is a distant memory; others fessions that had hitherto gone unspoken. jobs or any restructuring of the economy will not. But to 19th-century readers of fic- Despite the subjects’ diversity, several were not viewed as solutions to poverty. To tion, most of them women, all were impor- themes emerge. Rose divides the book these reformers, many of them middle- tant and widely read books, and their char- into three parts. The first, “Through the class women, frequent moral pleadings, acters were familiar figures. Susan Warner’s Fire,” collects the stories of women who along with various reformatories and The Wide, Wide World was a best-seller; “share a sense that victory lies in how efforts to remove children from their Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick was enormous- they grow from the pain involved in com- homes, held more promise. Even as work- ly successful. Lang carefully considers each ing into one’s own.” Next is “Guarded ing-class activists like freethinker Fanny for its depictions of middle-class and Heart,” whose subjects are at “a highly Wright and New York’s striking women tai- impoverished homes; its views of work defensive moment in their lives in matters lors in the 1820s and 1830s offered sharply and self-sufficiency; and its exploration of of sexual intimacy…only too aware of contrasting analyses of the material realities the possibilities of cross-class interaction

new from the Center for American Placesnew the pain that may come from abandon, of the poor, many middle-class Americans Becoming Women between women or between men. Through from letting go.” Finally is “Always declared that class itself could be “tran- their characters, she makes a convincing Something Left to Love,” the stories of scended” through individual virtue. case that the very self-definition of the women who “keep their focus on what They learned these views in part from emerging middle class—its “fear of class pleasures and possibilities tomorrow the fiction they read. In her profound and conflict, its obsessive concern with self- might bring.” Actively evading the pitfalls complex The Syntax of Class,Amy control, and its devotion to ‘home’” — of sociological “story containers” these Schrager Lang looks at a number of shaped a literary tradition that upheld its classifications pioneer a new attention to works of fiction that purported to be authors’ own class standing, arrogance, and emotional themes—a move not immedi- reformist: “stories of people who are claim to a neutral narrative voice. When ately successful. The themes seem not—or are not yet, or are never to be— Ellen Montgomery’s mother in The Wide, imposed from without for the sake of themselves members of the middle class,” Wide World, for example, insists on the making the book, rather than organic to she writes. Novels like Elizabeth Stuart “appropriate expression of emotion, sub- the project—although if the section Phelps’s The Silent Partner or Maria mission to legitimate authority, and headings and capsule descriptions veer Cummings’s The Lamplighter “entail a Christian piety” she is teaching her daugh- Regarding Emma toward the sentimental, this may reveal a definitive encounter between members of ter not only to embody feminine virtue for tendency that does come from within: an different classes,” according to Lang, as its own sake; she is making sure, Lang Photographs of unexplored correspondence between the authors, characters, and readers struggled argues, that Ellen’s “prolonged and painful women’s testimonies and popular expres- to understand what poverty, industrializa- education” in self-mastery and domesticity American sions of black women’s sexuality as found tion, and the growing distance between will hold “class conflict at bay.” Women and Girls in R&B lyrics, romance novels, and the classes meant to their own standing and newly popular black erotica. future. She does not explore these books s a teacher of American studies, Melissa Ann Pinney Overall, though, the experiment is a tri- for their voyeuristic peerings into work- Lang is attentive to historical con- umph. Longing to Tell returns black feminist ing-class life but for the insights they offer text, carefully weaving real events For more than fifteen years, Melissa Ann A Pinney has been making photographs of girls thought to its primal scene, forcing a con- into the “deep unease that attended the and nonfictional texts into her literary and women, from infancy to old age, frontation with the experiences—plainly naming of class in the United States” dur- argument. By offering historical evidence to portray how feminine identity is told by everyday women—that ignited a ing this time period, as it still does today. of the class divisions that plagued constructed, taught, and communicated. Her movement. More than three decades after Lang argues convincingly that 19th- American society (such as those depicted work depicts not only the rites of American the particular plight of black women century American fiction writers obscured in Charles Loring Brace’s 1872 Dangerous womanhood—a prom, a wedding, a baby shower, a tea party—but the informal broadened the scope of feminism’s sec- the realities of class by talking about gen- Classes of New York), Lang is able to place passages of girlhood: combing a doll’s hair, ond wave, this collection provides a der or race instead. In these works in par- works like Louisa May Alcott’s Work and doing laundry with a mother, sneaking a primer for the next 30 years. If it seems to ticular, she finds that a “vocabulary of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick in their appro- cigarette at a state fair. With each view, we repeat things we already know, it’s because class yields to that of gender,” which, priate class and literary contexts. Lang rec- gain a greater understanding of the they need repeating. And yet, after the given prevalent beliefs about the differ- ognizes that she is not the first to offer connections between mother and daughter, and by extension the larger reiteration come the questions. How are ences between the sexes, served to make such insights and cites historians like world of family, friends, and society. we to understand and use these stories? those other societal divisions seem natural. Christine Stansell for showing how the How are we to talk about them? Although By displacing class differences onto gen- 19th-century language of gender identity “Melissa Ann Pinney is making powerful normally I snicker at the facile questions der in their depictions of character and was also a vocabulary of class. Her work art. In matters of light, color, and composition she is flawless. But these of publishers’ reading group guides, plot, authors ranging from Horatio Alger fits well with other scholarship that are not simply constructions of elements. Longing pleads for one. Rose carefully to Maria Cummins to Louisa May Alcott describes the idealized bourgeois house- These photographs bear witness to the omitted her research questions, but a book were able to define class as intrinsic, ahis- hold of the 19th century. Indeed, other speed at which the little girl becomes containing her answers is eagerly awaited. torical, and fundamentally unchangeable. authors, like Stansell and Jeanne the old woman, to the fleeting, I hope Longing to Tell is the first in a two- The material realities of industrializing Boydston, have argued that the ideology breathless beauty of childhood, to life itself, which leaves us stunned in its wake.” volume series. society in this literature were therefore no of domesticity itself obscured both the Ann Patchett, As I prepared to review this book I one’s fault—certainly not the fault of the very real work women did and the hard- from the Foreword was reading it on the subway home. The authors or their middle-class characters or ships working-class and poor women young woman next to me cried out. She’d readers who, after all, were seen merely to endured. Fictional accounts of the “Melissa Ann Pinney’s record of life with her daughter, Emma, adds a new been reading, over my shoulder, the story occupy the place that nature intended. For orphans, rag-pickers, millworkers, and ser- and touching chapter to our knowledge of Linda Rae, who was told that “babies Lang, middle-class readers, especially vant girls who populate these novels of the lives of women and girls.” came from the cabbage patch and your women, were urged to feel sympathy for served to enhance the middle-class view Adam Gopnik, ‘thing’ was nasty.” I’d turned the page characters from the “faded aristocracy of that “homes of the better sort” were the author of Paris to the Moon when she was in the middle of a sen- the house of seven gables to the orphan only basis for class harmony. 120 pages, 74 color plates Cloth $45.00 tence. “It was just like that for me,” she girls of domestic fiction, from the Lang also draws connections with the said, and we launched into a long conver- exploited factory operatives and domestic contemporary literary search for domestic sation about the silences that Rose is servants to the street ‘arabs’ and the belea- stability and bliss. Behind the 19th-centu- hoping to explode. Before I knew it I’d guered free blacks who take center stage ry literature and policies that obscured the Distributed by the missed my stop in Harlem, and we were in mid-century novels,” but their empathy nature of poverty were images of women University of Chicago Press barreling off to the Bronx. was supposed to be limited to those who that helped define respectability and indo- 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 www.press.uchicago.edu I had to get off the train, retracing our sought to “transcend” class by becoming lence, associating middle- and upper-class path in order to find my way home. I “like” themselves. women with unpaid housework and poor-

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 er women with the scanty rewards of paid available for renewed reading and labor. In spite of the many social and eco- research. More recently, historian Valerie nomic transformations that have occurred Sherer Mathes has republished the since these novels were written, our under- Lost and found impassioned letters Jackson wrote to standing of class, sexual behavior, and per- everybody from her own friends to the sonal virtue have remained remarkably by Siobhan Senier Secretary of the Interior on Indian constant. Gender remains deeply embed- issues, as well as her expose of US treaty ded in the story many writers and pundits Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life by Kate Phillips. abrogation, A Century of Dishonor, which still tell about poverty and its relief; expres- Jackson personally distributed to mem- sions of sympathy and concern for the Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, bers of Congress. “unfortunate” among us do not challenge Jackson’s activism and writing on class stereotypes or the complicity of many 2003, 370 pp., $34.95 hardcover. behalf of Native Americans are emi- of us, members of the professional class, in nently important and interesting, but maintaining the status quo. I there is a whole other side to her career. The Syntax of Class is not an easy book to For decades before she started raising read. Although Lang avoids the jargon of lit- hanks to the unflagging work of instant best-seller and went into numer- hell about the American government’s erary criticism, readers who are not literary feminist historians, we have an ous reprintings; its massive impact was treatment of indigenous people, Jackson scholars, like myself, may find parts of it T increasingly full and fair account- both political and popular. It attracted had been well-known—and well-paid— dense with references and overstuffed with ing of women writers before the 20th the interest and praise of policy-makers as a writer of many popular forms. (She quotes. The sense of being handed a long century. Not only were those writers and reformers in Native American once said that she wrote for love, but required reading list may be daunting. Still, more numerous than your high-school affairs, much obsessed at that time over printed for money.) She was actually one parts of this book are startling in their clari- English teacher and Miramax may have the question of how to “assimilate” of the most successful female poets of ty. Lang’s ability to move seamlessly between led you to believe; many were also Native people. Meanwhile, the book her day, supported and mentored by author and character, and her insistence on extremely prolific, critically respected, spurred a wave of tourism to its setting Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who the relevance of class to both, offer an and just as financially flush as their male in southern California, and further pop- more famously advised Jackson’s close entirely new window into 19th-century liter- counterparts, if not more so. ular writings about that place. General childhood friend, Emily Dickinson. ature. I had never quite understood why Considering the success enjoyed by such Custer’s widow Elizabeth, among others, Jackson’s verse was included and extolled Christie, for example, the heroine of Alcott’s 19th-century American writers as visited and wrote about the home of the by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his antholo- Work, made me squirm. Christie seeks her E.D.E.N. Southworth, Fanny Fern, and “real” Ramona. gy Parnassus. She published copious trav- independence from domesticity in a series of Susan Warner, only something close to a Southern California, at least, still el essays—sometimes several a month, working-class jobs, yet Lang’s explication of conspiracy in the academic and publish- remembers Helen Hunt Jackson: The covering locations all over the United how this character’s “native gentility, her per- ing establishments could have erased town of Hemet continues to stage the States and Europe—in such prestigious fect middle-classness…blocks the possibility them from public memory. annual Ramona pageant it began in magazines as Harper’s, The Atlantic, and of her proletarianization” helped me to see Helen Hunt Jackson belongs to that 1923. The romance plot has also resur- The Nation. And in the 1870s, as she both her and Alcott far more clearly. Now I group—perhaps not entirely forgotten, faced, usually in attenuated form, in at turned more and more to fiction, she want to delve into books that are new to me but now more or less relegated to the least three films and, just last year, in a entered a profitable contract with (Frank Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and categories of sentimental and regional telenovela on the Spanish-language chan- Roberts Brothers of Boston, which Their Friends will be the first), as well as those interest. In 1884 Jackson published nel Univision. Historians and literary printed some of her books in its popular I had read long ago (Phelps’s The Silent Ramona, a blockbuster romance in which critics remember Jackson too: In 1984 No Name series of anonymously Partner or Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the the eponymous American Indian the late Modoc scholar Michael Dorris authored novels. Iron Mills.) Because of The Syntax of Class, princess escapes her evil Spanish republished Ramona, making the case for The rich career of this 19th-century my reading of them will be entirely differ- guardian to elope with a handsome the book’s impact on Native American American woman—educated, esteemed, ent and richer. I Indian sheep-shearer. The book was an history while also making the novel savvy, published, geographically mobile,

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 15 have written it had she not already been practicing poetry throughout the 1850s, while married to Hunt. Sacred doubt ackson had some money of her own, left to her by her grandfather, by Lesley Hazleton J and after 1865, she began traveling widely, to Europe as well as around Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas New England, and publishing her descriptions of the places she visited. In by Elaine Pagels. New York: Random House, the 1870s, a financially independent and increasingly successful Helen Hunt 2003, 241 pp., $24.95 hardcover. moved to Colorado Springs, again for health reasons. There she married the I railroad executive William Sharpless Jackson, with whom she purportedly oubt has always seemed to me to gospel was then written to refute it. worked out a relationship based on both be central to the religious experi- Where Thomas offered an open, para- mutual fondness and financial inde- D ence—to the intuition and per- doxical path to the divine, steeped in pendence. With William, like her first haps even the apprehension of some- metaphor, John laid down the law—this husband, frequently away, Jackson had a thing grander than myself that I call, for way and no other. And in an ancient lit- Helen Hunt Jackson good deal of time for reading and writ- lack of any other word, the divine. erary-philosophical feud, he developed ing, and began producing short stories Like many others, I have experienced the image of “doubting Thomas” in and novels under the signatures “Saxe intimations of this divine, in both natu- order to ridicule not just the Thomas and financially independent—has been Holm” and “H. H.” The pseudonyms ral settings and “church” ones. But gospel, but everything it stood for. almost entirely overlooked—until, that were part bow to feminine propriety, despite a religious upbringing—in my It’s worth reading Thomas alongside is, the publication of Kate Phillips’s part self-protectiveness, and part sales case, a Jewish home and a Roman Beyond Belief, if only for its beauty (the timely and welcome new biography. gimmick. Indeed, Jackson very quickly Catholic school—I cannot bring myself “official” translation is in The Nag Whatever scholarly attention has been became a deft self-marketer and entre- to believe all I am apparently expected Hammadi Library in English, edited by turned to Jackson in the past two preneur, wittily playing ideals of femi- to believe. I value questioning and am James M. Robinson), though Pagels decades has addressed her activism and nine self-effacement against her enjoy- deeply suspicious of certainty, especial- quotes bountifully from it as she shows writings on Indian issues, so Phillips ment of financial gain: “I know I ly when I look at the self-righteous con- how the Thomas author “teaches that wisely confines her discussion of these should turn faint whenever I saw my viction that leads to the fanatical cruel- God’s light shone not only in Jesus but, to a small portion of this dense book. book, but $2000 or $3000 would buy so ties of fundamentalism and orthodoxy. potentially at least, in everyone [and] Instead, she expands our knowledge of much Cologne I could recover.” I call myself agnostic, then, even encourages the hearer not so much to those earlier parts of Jackson’s life that One of the most interesting things though I know this is not really so. believe in Jesus, as John requires, as to are much less discussed, but equally about Jackson (and she is not alone Elaine Pagels’ new book Beyond Belief’ seek to know God through one’s own, intriguing from the standpoint of among early women writers in this) is emerges from her doubts as to what divinely given capacity.” women’s history. This book restores that, even though she lived progressive- Christianity has traditionally demanded “The kingdom is within you and out- interest in a woman, monumental in her ly, she rarely wrote so. At the same time she believe. She did not write it in order side you,” Thomas has Jesus saying. own time, who may have come to seem that she was traveling extensively and to resolve these doubts, however. On “When you come to know yourselves, overly didactic or sometimes even retro- managing her own money and time, she the contrary, in a way she celebrates then you will be known, and you will see grade from today’s perspective. More was writing domestic advice manuals them, opening up the whole concept of that it is you who are the children of the than that, it tells a great story. for homemakers that, by her own what it is to be religious. Beyond Belief is living Father. But if you will not know Jackson’s parents were orthodox admission, were “cranky” and tradition- written very much in the spirit of the yourselves, you dwell in poverty; and it Calvinists; her father, Nathan Fiske, was alist. Even though she would finally first- and second-century gnostics— is you who are that poverty.” He directs a minister and professor in Amherst, produce a significant body of writing Christians who saw themselves not as the disciples to find the divine light Massachusetts. From his evangelical fer- expressing remarkable sensitivity to and believers but as seekers of the divine. within themselves. vor, Phillips suggests, Jackson may have solidarity with Native American people, Pagels, whose l979 book The Gnostic This is, to use the language of good absorbed some of the moral fire she she also wrote some travel pieces that Gospels introduced the gnostics and their old-time religion, anathema to the imparted to her own writings, even as exoticized and even vilified people of hauntingly beautiful texts to the general author of John, the only one of the she turned to a more relativistic color. And even though Jackson man- reader, clearly numbers herself among four New Testament gospel writers to Unitarianism in her adult life. Jackson’s aged to pursue her writing throughout the seekers. insist that Jesus is actually divine, rather mother, meanwhile, taught her the ideals two apparently happy marriages, her Nobody becomes a historian of reli- than the messenger, the child, or the of Christian submission and cheerful- own fictional heroines usually had to gion, of course, without a deep involve- servant of the divine. John’s Jesus ness in the face of adversity. Deborah choose either romantic or personal ful- ment with it. Pagels has the rare declares that he and only he is the light. Fiske, it turns out, covertly produced her fillment. Phillips offers convincing and courage, especially for an academic of “Whoever does not come to me walks own writing, publishing children’s fic- nuanced readings of the contradictions her stature (Harrington Spear Paine in darkness,” he says. “You are from tion unbeknownst even to her family. in Jackson’s life and work, carefully trac- Professor of Religion at Princeton), to below, I am from above... The one who Such contradictions set the stage for ing them to a broad array of equally provide some insight into her personal comes from above is above all.” Helen Hunt Jackson’s own life and art. contradictory forces: familial lessons, religious journey. She frames her new John tells Christians what to believe, Phillips reviews the impact on stubbornly entrenched ideas about race book with her return to church during insists they believe it, and threatens them Jackson of the tragic deaths of loved and gender in the culture at large, and the sickness and eventual death of her with exclusion if they refuse. Thomas, ones, of which there were many. When expectations of women writers in 19th- first child. There she finds commun- on the contrary, “does not tell us what to Jackson was only 13, she lost her century America, as well as Jackson’s ion/community, despite the fact that believe, but challenges us to discover mother to tuberculosis; her father died attempts to short-circuit those expecta- she cannot believe in her church’s what lies hidden within ourselves,” says three years later, of dysentery, in tions, and even her ability to grow and dogma. “What matters in religious Pagels. Where John insists that the Palestine. Jackson’s parents, indeed, change with experience and time. experience,” she realizes, “involves human and the divine are separate moved far, wide, and often, driven by Phillips, who is also a novelist, began much more than what we believe (or realms, and ne’er the twain shall meet, poor health. Always ill herself with a this biography as her dissertation in what we do not believe).” Thomas sees the one inside the other. In variety of respiratory problems, American studies at Harvard University. How did the matter of belief—of fact, another gnostic gospel, that of headaches, and emotional distress, She brings to it the best sensibilities of obedient and unquestioning adherence Philip, states the union of human and Jackson seems to have continued what both the scholar and the creative writer. to dogma such as the virgin birth or the divine explicitly: Whoever achieves gnosis, Phillips characterizes as a pattern of The book is dense, based on extensive resurrection—become so central to or true knowledge, becomes “no longer “relocation,” a strategy for both physi- (and original) primary and secondary Christianity? How did blind faith tri- a Christian, but Christ.” cal and mental wellness. research; Phillips ferreted out over 1300 umph over thought and experience? In this, the gnostics were part of a Jackson lost her first husband, of Jackson’s now scattered personal let- How did the four New Testament long mystical tradition. As early Jewish Lieutenant Edward Hunt of the Army ters, many of them not seen before. She gospels get selected as canon, and the gnostics had taught, and as the kabbal- Corps of Engineers, in a submarine- closely analyzes Jackson’s early fiction, gnostic gospels rejected? Who decided, ists would elaborate over a millennium testing accident in 1863. Her two sons essays, and poetry, which is also new. At and why? And what did that decision later, a spark of the divine exists within by Hunt also died, one of a brain tumor the same time, for all this groundbreak- mean for Christianity? every human being. Everyone is thus before he turned one, and the other of ing scholarly work, the book is also emi- Pagels explores these questions by potentially divine—a belief that posed a diptheria at age nine. The combination nently lucid and engaging, written for focusing on two gospels in particular: radical challenge to the developing insti- of these tragedies and her husband’s fre- readers unfamiliar with Jackson’s early the New Testament Gospel of John and tution of the church. If the divine lay quent absences seems to have jump- work, as indeed most readers will be. the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. The two inside each person, what reason then to started Jackson’s writing career. In 1865 This will easily be the definitive biogra- were probably written at about the same have intermediaries? What purpose she wrote an elegy to her son in the New phy of Helen Hunt Jackson for the fore- time—the end of the first century—but could be served by bishops, creeds, York Evening Post. The publication of seeable future. It will teach us volumes the more Pagels studied them and spoke canons, prescribed ritual? A power this first piece was surely driven by grief, both about a fascinating and influential with other scholars, the more she struggle was inevitable. but Phillips persuasively argues that it woman writer and about the times in became convinced that the Thomas On the one side were the founding would have been unlikely for Jackson to which she lived. I gospel came first and that the John fathers of the church, who for the sake

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 of unity in difficult times for the emerg- Indeed, some of her younger intervie- ing new religion demanded absolute wees think of themselves as women first belief in what would become the and black second, and they view sexism Nicene Creed, the Catholic profession The price of success as a more significant barrier to their suc- of faith that includes Jesus’ virgin birth cess than racism. While most black and resurrection in the flesh. Their by E. Frances White women of an older generation (including vision was hierarchical, authoritarian, me) would still see racism as at least as and exclusive (“No one comes to the Having It All? Black Women and Success by Veronica Chambers. significant in their lives as sexism, it was Father, except through me,” Jesus says refreshing to read about an often ignored in John) On the other, the gnostics—a New York: Doubleday, 2003, 240 pp., $23.95 hardcover. segment of the black population that term covering many different groups— fully embraces feminism. were far more inclusive, experiential, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem by bell hooks. and, above all, democratic, for if all n contrast, bell hooks’ Rock My Soul is were potentially divine, then differences New York: Atria Books, 2003, 226 pp., $23.00 hardcover. a confused mixture of black national- of class, gender, and so on were moot. I I ism, pop-psychology, empty moraliz- ing, and self-adulation. Poorly written t is refreshing and inspiring to learn n Having It All, Veronica Chambers many of her interviewees have thought and repetitive, the book seems more like how varied early Christian practice explores the impact of the civil deeply. Chambers explains that as she a first draft than a well-reasoned and fin- I was. Before the church fathers suc- I rights movement on the psychology was writing about relationship issues, ished product. Clearly the book needed ceeded in their polemical war against of black people, in particular, on the she found herself engaged to a white strong editing. “evil interpreters” and “heresy,” and in growing population of black women man, something that surprised her even Good editorial assistance could have favor of the “four-gospel canon,” with white-collar occupations. As a black though she spends most of her life in saved hooks from factual errors and mis- Christian writings reveal a poetic and middle-class woman in her 30s, integrated society. readings. Early in the book, she mistaken- imaginative reach, sometimes an almost Chambers is herself a member of this I was disappointed that Chambers, a ly identifies the renowned sociologist, E. joyous anarchy. group. She is a first-generation college young black feminist, did not imagine or Franklin Frazier, of the middle-20th cen- Some of the details in Pagels’ book graduate who has been an editor for explore issues that lesbians might have. tury, as John Hope Franklin, the distin- are stunning. The gnostic Gospel of Newsweek and the New York Times Her discussion of black lesbians is con- guished historian. Moreover, hooks con- Truth, for instance, suggests that Jesus Magazine. Like many of the women she fined to two paragraphs that appear as an flates Frasier’s theory of the black matri- nailed to the cross should be seen not as studied, upward mobility has been a afterthought in a section about women archy with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s mis- a sacrifice, but as the “fruit on the tree.” mixed blessing for her. She feels alienat- who might not want to “have it all” in the reading of that theory. This misreading Though this may at first be a chilling ed from her brother who has not fared as traditional sense nor be “waiting to allows her to dismiss Frasier as a “conser- analogy for any modern reader familiar well as she, and she has had to redefine exhale.” While I have no supporting sta- vative black male patriarch”—a character- with the song “Strange Fruit,” it what “having it all” means to her. tistical evidence, it is my sense from my ization that is at the least sloppy thinking. becomes clear that the Gospel of Truth Class and race are difficult to address own life as a middle-class black woman Beyond pointing out factual errors means the Tree of Knowledge in Eden. together. Yet, Chambers successfully that a significant proportion of success- and misreadings, editorial support might Where Adam and Eve were destroyed exposes many of the issues faced by ful black women are lesbians. I suspect have helped eliminate some of the sur- by eating the original fruit, this new fruit black middle- and upper-class women. In that freedom from looking for a male prising contradictions found throughout conveys genuine knowledge: gnosis. the process, she reveals a key contradic- mate in a predominately sexist culture has the text. In general, hooks uses the same Then there is the joyous mysticism of tion: On the one hand, since its advantages. Black lesbian experience history in contradictory ways to serve her the Round Dance of the Cross, which Reconstruction, black women have been clearly needs more analysis than shifting arguments about self-esteem. On has Jesus chanting with his disciples expected to “lift as they climb”—to uplift Chambers gave it. the one hand, for example, when hooks before the crucifixion and then inviting the race while and by striving for upward Throughout the book, Chambers is wants to demonstrate that black people them to join the cosmic dance, since mobility. Paradoxically, on the other unapologetic about being middle class. have regressed since the 1960s, she pres- “Whoever dances belongs to the whole.” hand, some black people consider suc- Indeed, she has no critique of bourgeois ents the era of segregation as a time of As the church became increasingly cess to be a sign of collaboration with a ideology. She asks: black self-esteem. Frequently, when she institutionalized, such beliefs and prac- racist white society. Striving for upward idealizes segregated life, she uses herself tices would become increasingly mar- mobility can expose black women to crit- My question is what is wrong with as an example. She tells her readers: ginalized, as would the vital roles icism and isolation. buying into the American dream? women played in early Christian groups Chambers interviewed black women It sure beats lying prone in a I survived and did well in those as preachers, prophets, priests and even in their mid-20s to their mid-50s, all of thatched hut waiting for the mas- [newly integrated] classrooms not bishops. By the fourth century, gnostic whom were apparently heterosexual. Her ter of the compound to swing by because racism was not present traditions were all but totally repressed. purpose was to examine an issue widely for a quickie. (p. 176) but because I knew that ultimately Until the 20th century, that is, when the discussed in the popular media: an a bell would ring and I would be large cache of ancient writings dubbed implicit critique of liberal feminism that While I would have been more critical free to enter a world of warmth “the gnostic gospels” was unearthed at suggests that in opening up opportunities of the so-called American dream, and care that was all black and Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian desert. for women to succeed in all parts of Chambers’ position becomes even more welcoming. (p. 15) The timing was apt. By the end of life—including career and family— problematic when she compares US the century, an enormous number of women’s liberation placed too heavy a society with others. I take that second Yet, on the other hand, contradicting people were experimenting with spiritu- burden on successful women. sentence in the above quote as an egre- her image of idyllic southern black com- al practices from yoga to sweat lodges, What is most interesting about this gious and uninformed attack on African munities, occasionally hooks admits that Sufi dancing to kabbalistic meditation. book, however, is not its exploration of cultures. It is dropped into her argu- segregated life was not “all black and wel- They were in search not of belief, but of this issue; rather, the book reveals the ment and remains in isolation without coming,” particularly for darker-skinned the experience of the divine. And now it rich texture of the lives of a group of any supporting material. blacks. Her grandmother, she notes, reg- was to be found in Christianity too— women who rarely surface in popular cul- According to Chambers, “the number ularly called hooks’ darkest sister not through Saint John of the Cross’ ture. Chambers is not completely pes- of black families earning $100,000 or “Blackie.” There is no question that black dark night of the soul, or through the simistic about the lives of her intervie- more almost doubled from 220,400 to people developed rich counter-discourses alarmingly explicit ecstasies of Saint wees, as some reviews of her book have 415,500 in 1998. Black women’s to protect themselves from the vicious Teresa of Avila, but through the gnostic suggested. In fact, she explores many increased earning power was the rocket dominant discourse on black inferiority. assertion that people can find the divine kinds of experiences. For example, she fuel for that stratospheric rise.” In the But given the power of racist ideology, by themselves, even within themselves, describes the exhilaration that some past ten years, black women have the extreme pressures that people faced in their own ways—in as many ways, women feel when they triumph over dif- increased their earning of bachelor’s living in segregated societies, and strug- perhaps, as there are people. ficult circumstances. She also portrays degrees by 75 percent, while the rate for gles for influence within and across black This is certainly a major reason why many women with strong senses of their black men has gone up only 47 percent. communities, these counter-narratives Beyond Belief leaped onto the best-seller own self-worth. The question of why so many women were also flawed. list the moment it was published in July. Yet, she movingly describes the isola- move into the middle class while many Hooks’ main focus is on life in inte- It opens the way to reclaiming tion and pressures that some successful men remain poor and working class is grated society. Using some idiosyncratic Christianity from the blinkered “true black women feel in integrated society. raised at several points but only superfi- and highly selective examples, she argues believers.” Elegantly, subtly, and with For some, upward mobility means never cially addressed. Chambers sheds little that endemic low self-esteem is the most immense erudition, Pagels counters the feeling at home among white or black new light on this vexing topic. Ironically, serious issue facing black people today. deadening forms of orthodoxy—literal- people. Others feel hyper-vigilant when she finds it easier to discuss conflicts She makes this argument as if she were ly, as she points out, “straight think- among one group or the other. In addi- between black men and women than the first black intellectual to seriously ing”—with the vitality of questing and tion, success can mean abandonment by among black women. This is one place focus on the topic. She ignores the legions questioning, intuition and experience. a black community that has little inter- where her class analysis falls short. of black intellectuals and artists who have Her welcome and eminently well-earned est in the issues that middle-class Refreshingly, however, she is worked to counter low self-esteem: from success demonstrates that there are far women face. unapologetic about her feminism. She Ralph Ellison to Gwendolyn Brooks; more people seeking and groping their Chambers devotes a good portion of argues that black women from her gen- from Nina Simone to John Coltrane; from way towards their own sense of what her book to the difficulty many success- eration are aware that they have been Carter G. Woodson to E. Franklin Frasier. religion might be than all the fathers of ful heterosexual women have building able to succeed because of the com- Facing issues of self-respect was central to all America’s churches and synagogues personal relationships with men. bined successes of the civil rights and the political activities of black feminists in and mosques can divine. I Clearly, this is a hot topic about which feminist movements. the early and mid-20th century.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 17 Hooks relies heavily on the pop-psy- ties), though, she must convince Buffy’s chology of Nathaniel Branden—a pecu- family and friends that she is in fact Buffy. liar choice for a radical black feminist. By inhabiting Buffy’s body and relation- Branden emerged in the 1960s as the The expanding Buffyverse ships, Faith begins to understand the central theorizer in the objectivist move- value of other people through identifica- ment. Founded by fierce anti- by Margaret Weigel tion and compassion. Faith “has seen Communist Ayn Rand, objectivists advo- people in need and come to their rescue. cated extreme individualism. Rand Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Why? It is a basic moral truth, missed by expelled Branden from the movement Nietzsche, that the other somehow makes when he broke off their decade-long Loathing in Sunnydale edited by James B. South. a claim on us. Somehow, the good of the affair for another woman in the move- other is the good for me.” ment. This break freed Branden to devel- Chicago: Open Court Press, 2003, 335 pp., After this experience, Faith realizes op his own cult-like following. He was that life as an army of one is a lonely and particularly popular in the early 1990s, $24.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper. empty existence and embarks on a path when his books on self-esteem were of personal rehabilitation. Schudt argues often found on The New York Times best- I that the viewer, in caring what happens to seller list. Given that hooks frequently Faith despite her history of terrible criticizes what she calls “liberal individu- t’s official: It is now safe for smart Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy is deeds, is exercising a similar brand of alism,” it is not surprising that she over- people to watch TV. For years, aca- the fourth in Popular Culture and compassion through association. looks the roots of his ideas. I demics eschewed the “boob tube” Philosophy, a series from Open Court Fans of the program may nod “aha!”, I suspect that Branden has identified a and its lowbrow programming both per- Press; earlier series selections addressed easily making the connection between major area of concern for many sonally and professionally. But televi- Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and The Matrix. This Faith and Nietzsche’s “new man,” and Americans. Struggles with self-esteem sion’s academic fortunes have soared book is both a smart take on pop culture, therein lies the rub. Those familiar with may be a condition of living in moderni- within the last 15 years. It’s difficult to and a pop culture take on philosophy. the Buffyverse will relish revisiting past ty. Most people face daily assaults on determine whether the academy’s inclu- Philosophers and those unfamiliar with the episodes, but everyone else will be lost. their self-confidence and sense of worth. sion of television and Internet studies as television series may come away wanting Most authors helpfully include minimal Having a healthy sense of self is an a component of cultural studies curricu- more, but educators and reflective Buffy descriptions of the action to inform the ongoing project for just about everyone. la preceded the rise of television as a fans of the world should be delighted. analysis, but while this allows non-Buffy Hooks seems particularly attracted to legitimate topic of analysis or vice versa, The book is organized into five “codex- readers to grasp the essentials, it is a pale Branden and other self-help psycholo- but the two phenomena reinforce each es,” or chapters, consisting of three to five substitute for the real thing. Remember gists’ views on the role of “victimology” other. So academics formerly ashamed to essays, each mapping a dimension of philo- the season three finale, when the mayor’s in fostering a sense of inadequacy and publicly acknowledge a critical “bad TV” sophical thought onto the Buffyverse. The ascension plans are foiled at Sunnydale powerlessness in people. But I believe habit can now declare, “Hi, I’m an overe- codexes are, in order of appearance, High’s graduation? Neal King in his essay that the appeal of this argument to many ducated Buffy the Vampire Slayer addict!” “Buffy, Faith and Feminism,” “Knowledge, “Brownskirts: Fascism, Christianity and in the late 20th and early 21st centuries without fear of being forcibly ejected Rationality and Science in the Buffyverse,” the Eternal Demon” does, and he uses it has much to do with the successes of the from the faculty lounge. “Buffy and Ethics,” “Religion and Politics as an example of community vigilantism civil rights movement. Black people suc- Indeed, the WB network’s Buffy the in the Buffyverse,” and “Watching Buffy.” versus fascist controls. Or how about cessfully exposed their victimization by Vampire Slayer is in the vanguard of aca- when, in season five’s final episode, Buffy racism to the world. Victims of sexism demic acceptability, a hot topic for textu- he codex/chapter that holds the doesn’t kill Ben? Here is King’s well-inten- and homophobia followed suit. al analysis. James B. South, the editor of most obvious promise for Women’s tioned clarification: Conservative elements opposed to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear T Review of Books readers is Codex the expansion of civil rights began to and Loathing in Sunnydale, describes how One, “Buffy, Faith and Feminism.” The Buffy is faced with the decision criticize political arguments based on his attitude toward the show, and popular most powerful essay in the collection is whether or not to kill Ben, a claiming rights denied the victims of culture in general, changed at the end of part of this codex, “Also Sprach Faith: the human whom Glory requires in racism, sexism, and/or homophobia. Buffy’s first season: “[A]fter watching Problem of the Happy Rogue Vampire order to manifest herself. Glory is These conservatives recognized that col- “Prophecy Girl” [the season finale], a tel- Slayer” by Karl Shudt. Faith, for the unini- a God planning to open up a por- lective action by identity groups that evision show became something differ- tiated, is a vampire slayer like Buffy, but tal that will collapse all worlds claimed victim status undermined the ent for me: no longer a form of enter- while Buffy is characterized by a great together, thereby destroying the status quo. Increasingly over the 1980s tainment or relaxation, but something wardrobe, zingy one-liners, and doing the earth and all of humanity. Buffy is and 1990s, conservative social commen- worth thinking about.” Judging by the right thing, Faith is overtly sexual and afforded the opportunity to kill tators complained that claims of “vic- online academic journal Slayage interested less in slaying than in fulfilling Ben, whose body is an occasional timhood” undermined individual initia- (www.slayage.tv) and the thousands of her own hunger for fun, men, and power. vessel for Glory, thereby effective- tive. Such arguments were used success- independent websites and articles, South In Shudt’s excellent essay, he proposes that ly killing Glory herself. Ben, fully in the attacks against the so-called is not alone. The publication of this col- Faith’s strength, lust, ruthlessness, and though, is innocent. (p. 236) welfare state. Branden is among those lection of essays exploring the complex rejection of traditional logic and morality who made such attacks on welfare pro- fabric which is the Buffyverse (the world makes her a premier example of philoso- So, all clear? grams. Problematic elements of this per- as developed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer pher Fredrich Nietzsche’s übermensch.He It is curious that this collection omits spective run throughout Rock My Soul. and its spinoff Angel) in relation to that also proposes compassion and drama as a codex devoted to sexuality, both male Many black nationalists also fear that hoary old discipline, philosophy, further an antidote for such unbridled power. The and female, which has been a rich subtext blacks’ self-respect is undermined by the codifies the dialogue between pop culture argument is well-supported through multi- running throughout the series. Faith’s belief that they are victims. Paradoxically, and academic analysis. ple references to Faith’s brash, impulsive, casual encounters and Buffy’s various however, both white conservatives and It’s difficult to identify a television and often cruel behaviors, and framed paramours are addressed in Codex One, black nationalists use victim status when program in recent memory that spins a against Buffy’s more sensitive and reflec- but more as a means of contrasting the it suits their interests. more empowered feminist reality than tive ones. In an early exchange, Faith asks two slayers. Obvious topics for investiga- The success of Clarence Thomas illus- Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy, a petite, Buffy if she has ever had sex with Xander, tion, such as Willow’s transformation trates this point and represents the com- well-dressed, demon-killing machine and when the reply is one of hesitation from meek high school virgin to power- ing together of these two strains of with an SAT combined score of 1700 is and doubt, tells Buffy, “‘You think too ful Wicca lesbian or the vampire Spike’s thought. Thomas stood with white con- assisted in her slaying duties by a kalei- much.’ Thinking and reflection are charac- thwarted masculinity, are oddly ignored. servatives against black claims for equality doscope of smart, sweet, and funny teristic of slave mentality, of those who Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy based on arguments that they were vic- women. From earth mom Joyce, little sis cling to false ideals such as ‘duty’ and has potential as a valuable pedagogical tims of racism; yet he also mobilized Dawn and best friend Willow to former ‘goodness,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’” tool, provided that the students are famil- black nationalist ideology to claim he was vengeance demon Anya, slayers Kendra Faith subsequently ignores her slayer iar with the television program. The a victim of black politicians, black and Faith, and Willow’s lover Tara, duties and becomes a murderer for hire. essays nicely elucidate the theories of women, and liberal whites. This was a there’s rarely a moment when there isn’t After waking from a coma early in season philosophers from Plato to Proust and match made in heaven: Black conserva- a delightful woman onscreen. Sure, the five, Faith trades bodies with Buffy thanks would almost certainly aid in the under- tives drew on the ideas of both conserva- men are helpful, but women unquestion- to a magical tool. Before her flight out of standing of sophisticated concepts. tive whites and reactionary black national- ingly run the show. Sunnydale (and away from the authori- As many of the essays refer to the ists to challenge mainstream black politics. same episodes and focus on similar Even as she continues to project her- themes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and self as a radical thinker, bell hooks has MOVING? Philosophy is not suitable for reading from bought into this line of thinking. She cover to cover. By all means read it, but says, “Black folks who see themselves as Don’t miss an issue! only in pieces, and only after watching the victims are sorely lacking in self-esteem television show; as is often the case, the which leads them to fall prey to thinking Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. We need television program is actually far superior that they lack any meaningful agency.” your OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as well as your NEW to the book version. It’s encouraging to Overall, she is hypercritical of contem- one. Send the information to: Address Change, The Women’s Review of see that the academy is starting to relax its porary black life. Virtually the only black prejudices against mediated forms of nar- people about whom she has consistently Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, or phone toll-free 888-283- rative entertainment. Just don’t hold your good things to say are Martin Luther 8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email [email protected]. breath waiting to hear, “Hi, I’m an overe- King, her mother, and herself. I ducated Walker, Texas Ranger fan!” I

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 Now Available From OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

s the global population continues to grow, family planning is fast becoming one of the most critical issues facing the planet. While many organizations—most prominently the United ANations—are trying to implement policies that will help curb the population explosion, the scholars in this book show that religious conservatives, including the Vatican, are on shaky ground when they say that religious doctrine prohibits the right to contraception and abortion.

In many of the world’s religions there is a restrictive and pro-natalist view on family planning, and this is one legitimate reading of those religious traditions. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, however, this is not the only legitimate or orthodox view. Seeking to counteract the simplistic idea that all religions are completely antagonistic toward family planning, the authors—all scholar-practitioners of the religions about which they write—present alternative interpretations of religions’ views about family planning.

Arguing for the existence of equally valid traditions that allow contraception and abortion, they seek to escape the confines of oversimplified either/or, pro-choice/pro-life arguments. Instead, they point the way toward a more open discussion of family planning. Just as the world’s religions sanction both pacifists and “just war” theorists, so those same religions support the no-choice and the “just abortion” view.

Dispelling the notion that the world’s religions are uniformly conservative on $19.95, paperback issues of family planning, the authors show that the parameters of orthodoxy are wider and gentler than that, and that the great religious traditions are wiser and more variegated than a simple repetition of the most conservative views would suggest. Ultimately, these authors argue that the right to an abortion is a religiously grounded civil right; the denial of it is a violation of religious freedom.

At bookstores everywhere 1 Visit us online at www.oup-usa.org The Afflicted Girls New blues, old photos

Some said it was Unnatural by Adrian Oktenberg Rebellion against God and Man, sprung from a Stubbornness Outlandish Blues by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Middletown, CT: of Mind or unmaidenly Pride, Wesleyan University Press, 2003, 50 pp., $12.95 paper. but this Affliction had no Natural Cause, hence no Earthly remedy, Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. St. Paul, MN: the fault that of the Father of Lies, who improved our tongues Graywolf Press, 2002, 48 pp., $14.00 paper. I to speak of things we knew not of, for we Christened the Minister “Damnable Rogue,” “Blackguard,” onorée Fanonne Jeffers takes in my belly, sore nipples and “Whoremasterly Hellhound.” Langston Hughes, “poet laureate way after the sucking is gone. H of the blues,” as her model in her Don’t thank me for my body.... We cast the Bible aside, crying, second book, Outlandish Blues. The model Don’t thank me for the back “Sir, these are goblin stories! has naturally been updated a bit to include that don’t break from Abram’s Why, the Prince of this World offers such contemporary phenomena as weight. more than sin and misery!” women’s shelters, gay-bashing, and Aretha, I know what you need—a baby’s but Jeffers has retained Hughes’ eloquence wail in the morning, After we collapsed into his hands, and elegance in her own voice, as well as smile on your man’s face.... we told our tale: how the Tempter his social and historical sense. You cannot I know what you need; of Souls had promised us yellow Canaries write the blues, lacking music, without an don’t give me your grief or ribbons if we dined with him, ear to die for and immense control in the to help this thing along. language; otherwise it just sounds boring I know how emptiness feels. that he enchanted the pudding, and repetitious on the page. Jeffers suc- Woman, I know how and we grew faint close to Falling, ceeds admirably on both counts and pro- to make my own tears. (p. 22) as he pressed us to add our marks duces a book that is lively, witty, sly, and to his Book, below the names passionate, like the blues itself. Abraham is the uncle of Lot, and so the The first section of the book begins story moves to Lot and his wife, who was of His Handmaidens, the fallen with “Fast Skirt Blues” and ends with turned to a pillar of salt. The four-poem women who called us in dreams “Think of James Brown Pleading,” so we “Wife of Lot” sequence, more original to come dance with the Black Man, are given the sexy, raw, desperate blues, still, explains just why she looked back— whom they said we must marry. the kind we think of right away, right “He didn’t warn me what the angels told away. This is part of “James Brown”: him”—and challenges an unjust God in Since we resisted these entreaties, feminist terms. This is from “The Wife of we were called upon to Testify, I think of James Brown pleading Lot After the Fire”: providing the Spectral Evidence to a closing door. So pretty of who let Demons into her body. in his do-rag tied on straight The angels only saved my girls to through the day and into the night bear their father’s sons. At the first Sentencing, one claimed, and right now, you are prettier No forgiveness, nothing in the “I have no skill in Witchery.” than James. The brothers in the hovering sky. Then she tried, “I will unwitch the girls, room What kind of God condemns girls just let me speak,” meaning Lie. wink and nod at your raw weeping.... to carry their father’s blood? This is the truth No mercy for me when I found We looked to the truth of her body, I need: your crying and holding out the truth. hunting for the hidden teat: fast to one woman at the same time. if pricked, she would feel nothing; What else is left if I can ignore your No forgiveness in God’s hovering it would be cold, the Devil’s own. tears or James, shoulders sky, draped with female screams and someone’s to blame for making Unwholesome Mother, she succored and royal purple, begging with all me look back. Night Creatures that suck blood the sweat he was capable of? If there was a chance for me and from lower lips and milk from ring fingers; (p. 15) so much mercy above, we envisioned her Familiars: why wasn’t I warned of the salt Jeffers can write sexy poems full of love, clinging to my skin? (p. 30) one like a bald Cat with bat wings, lust, violence, and compassion, viewing another after a manner of Monkey, relations between men and women now These poems encompass blues vernacular eyes in the back of its head gaping with a lustful, then with an unsentimental, and also reference literature much farther as it drank its secret Elixir. eye, but if that were all, the book might back, to the laments so common in seem to rest too much on one note. Jeffers ancient women’s poetry. Unable to unearth the hag’s pap, expands her vision in the second, central The third and final section of the we loosened our own clothing section of the book, and here we find a book at last brings us to the “outlandish” to reveal fever blisters from the Hell-Fire poet writing deep from the heart. blues, which Jeffers explains in a quota- this night-flier fed in us, Jeffers takes the stories of Sarah and tion from the scholar Michael A. Gomez: Abraham and their issue from the Bible “[N]ewly arrived Africans [in the slave writhing in a Strange Manner until and, in a series of dramatic monologues, trade] were classified in the North our Tormenter was made to claim takes a tale of patriarchy and patriarchy’s American lexicon as ‘outlandish’ in that the pain she had inflicted, her frozen God and turns it first into questioning, they were ‘strangers to the English lan- palms soothing our burned skin. then argument, then redemption on female guage’ and had yet to learn their new terms. It’s a most remarkable story in roles.” This section’s angry, pointed Scold, Troublemaker, Quarrelsome Shrew! Jeffers’ hands, and echoes, in some respects poems address slavery, lynching during They led her away, and she was hanged but from an entirely different perspective, Reconstruction and after, and contempo- at our word. Afterwards, they gave us brandy. Alicia Ostriker’s recent the volcano rary slights and injustices in language that We swore before God and Man sequence. This is the core of the book, this recalls June Jordan in her capacity as seer argument with God’s arrangements, and, and righteous truth-teller. that we would become Good Wives, while the subject matter is as old as time, not discontent with our condition, the voice in which it is expressed is new, Nod. and we would live Righteous Lives, original, important, and equal to the task. At the very least, write a letter. Some our thoughts turned up to Heaven. Here is the voice of Hagar, Sarah’s kinds of anger handmaid, who bears Abraham’s child need screaming. —Cathleen Calbert because Sarah is barren. The poem is (From “Confederate Pride Day at “Hagar to Sarai.” Bama [Tuscaloosa, 1994],” p. 48)

Don’t give me nothing in All of which shows that Honorée Fanonne exchange for a beating Jeffers’ is a voice to be reckoned with.

20 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 J. Bellocq’s Storyville portraits of I became both model and with objects—their intricate prostitutes, named after the red- apprentice— positions. E light district in New Orleans posing first, then going with I thrill to the magic of it—silver where the photographs were taken Bellocq crystals like constellations of stars around 1910-1912, were never intended arranging on film. In the negative for showing but are by now well known. to his other work—photographing the whole world reverses, my black It has fallen to Natasha Trethewey, in the shipyard.... dress turned Bellocq’s Ophelia, to use them as inspiration white, my skin blackened to pitch. and blueprint for a book of poems. This I see, Inside out, is a brilliant conception for a woman too, the way the camera can dissect I said, thinking of what I’ve tried writer from the South, and for the most to hide. part, it is brilliantly executed. The book the body, render it reflecting light I follow him now, watch him take takes the form of a series of letters home, or gathering darkness.... pictures. as well as diary entries, by the subjects of I look at what he can see through Bellocq’s portraits. Trethewey subverts I find myself drawn to what his lens the male gaze by not allowing Bellocq shines— and what he cannot—silverfish himself to speak—what we hear in this iridescent scales of fish on ice behind book are the voices of the women. the walls, the yellow tint of a faded Trethewey manages the transforma- Storyville Portrait, one of E. J. Bellocq’s at the market, gold letters on the bruise— tion from abused country girl alone in photographs of New Orleans window.... other things here, what the camera the big city to “fallen woman” with prostitutes, ca. 1912. From In them, the glittering hope of misses. (p. 43) admirable economy and calm—“I do Bellocq’s Ophelia. alchemy— now have plenty to eat,” the subject As in the poem above, Trethewey’s reports. We soon learn how she earns her like the camera’s way of capturing language throughout is calm, fluid, one keep: “I was auctioned as a newcomer / are. The women in the pictures are talk- the sparkle of plain dust floating line moving into the next as a fish to the house....” ing, drinking, playing with animals; some on air. (p. 27) moves through water, language borne in appear to be sharing a joke with the pho- its natural element. There is nothing And then, in my borrowed gown tographer. It is not merely that they have She begins to change, and as she does, easy about this, however—it was shaped I went upstairs with the highest nothing left to lose. They look like the book evolves into an extended medi- so that no word is extraneous, no tone bidder. women in full possession of themselves, tation on present, past, and future; being jars, and when our expectations are sub- He did not know to call me so unlike most portraits of women in this bound and unbound; secrets and disclo- verted, an explanation is given and Ophelia era. Wittily, Tretheway imagines how this sure; making and unmaking. This is the appears plausible. In all, the book is (From “Letters from transformation comes about by having best section of the book, called “Storyville finely crafted, elegantly played out—but Storyville,” p. 14) her Ophelia buy a camera. So equipped, Diary,” and it includes such fine poems as not finished! It ends rather suddenly, she literally begins to see for herself, to “Bellocq,” “Blue Book,” “Portrait #1 and with the portrait sitter “after the Trapped between bad memories of the shape her own world: #2,” “Disclosure,” “Spectrum,” and flash”—“stepping out / of the frame, work and abuse at home and her dread- “(Self)Portrait.” Here is “Photography”: wide-eyed, into her life.” Looking back, ful present, Ophelia is at first “as mute” September 1911 I see that the entire collection is only 29 as her namesake. Then, a transforma- — October 1911 poems, and that there are gaps in the tion begins. This past week I splurged, spent a Bellocq talks to me about light, stories where I would have liked to One of the things that is striking little shows me know more. But what better compli- about Bellocq’s pictures of women in of my savings on a Kodak, and at how to use shadow, how to fill the ment could be given a book than that their off hours is how relaxed the women once frame it’s too short? I

Medea’s Litigation as ✤ A R I Z O N A ✤ Daughters Lobbying Blood and Voice Forming and JULIANNA S. GONEN Reproductive Hazards Navajo Women Ceremonial Practitioners Performing the and Interest MAUREEN TRUDELLE SCHWARZ Woman Who Kills Aggregation Drawing on interviews with seventeen Navajo women practitioners and five apprentices, Schwarz explicates women’s role as ceremo- Jennifer Jones Julianna S. Gonen nial singers and shows that it is more complex than has previously been thought. She details how women came to be practitioners and reveals their experiences and the strategies they use to negotiate This intriguing book explores the legal, “Using the landmark Supreme Court decision being both woman and singer. cultural, and dramatic representations of UAW v. Johnson Controls as a case study of “It gets to the heart of Navajo ideals, especially the premium that six accused murderesses to look at how interest group litigation, Julianna S. Gonen is paid on individuality.” —Trudy Griffin-Pierce $24.95 paper, $50.00 cloth. Info at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1511.htm English-speaking society responded to and discusses the intersection of fetal protection controlled anxiety over female transgres- policies, workers’ rights, feminism, and judicial Working Women in Mexico City sions. Dramatic representations of policymaking. She argues that litigation allows Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879–1931 criminal women proliferate during times groups to achieve a number of policy goals, SUSIE S. PORTER Focuses on women wage earners across the work force, from factory of heightened feminist activity and with policies emerging from the litigation workers to street vendors. Drawing on a wealth of material, from theatrical narratives, as evidenced in plays, process, partially as a result of group interac- petitions of working women to government factory inspection television, and film, serve to contain tion. This book does a very good job of reports, Porter shows how a shifting cultural understanding of women and deflect attention away from integrating the literature of political science and working women informed labor relations, social legislation, and issues of women’s systematic repression. women’s studies literature.” —Susan Gluck ultimately the construction of female citizenship. “The story she tells continues to be relevant for our own times as $23.95 paper 0-8142-5114-5 Mezey, Loyola University global industrialization incorporates more Mexican women in the $48.95 cloth 0-8142-0936-X $44.95 cloth 0-8142-0942-4 formal wage economy.” —Patrick J. McNamara $9.95 CD 0-8142-9020-5 $9.95 CD 0-8142-9018-3 $50.00 cloth. Info at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1517.htm

New poetry— From Old Woman to The Shadow’s Horse DIANE GLANCY Older Women “Filled with stunning metaphors, engaging music, and imagery . . . Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives Enjoy the many revelations within and among the poems in this book, with each turning, every re-reading, every new pattern of Sally Chivers perception.” —Pattiann Rogers “Chivers proposes that new standards and strategies for understanding $15.95 paper. Read samples at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1503.htm late life in North America must be acquired, arguing that narrative fiction, both in film and on paper, is particularly well suited to help in Blood Mysteries this process. Exposing the clichéd and reductionist approaches to age DIXIE SALAZAR pervading our culture—whether it be in radio broadcasts, on TV, in “Dixie Salazar’s quirky, grief-stricken and ultimately redemptive medical textbooks, professional photography or even feminist third collection was written, as she tells us in her opening salvo, for theory—Chivers effectively shows the potential of the literary ‘all the shipwrecked saints and wretches among us.’ . . . These poems are sensual, gritty, unflinching and wise.” —Ruth L. Schwartz $36.95 cloth 0-8142-0935-1 constructs she discusses to resist such ageism.” —Sylvia Henneberg, $15.95 paper. Read samples at www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid1505.htm $9.95 CD 0-8142-9015-9 Morehead State University The hio State University Press The University of Arizona Press www.ohiostatepress.org 800-621-2 355 S. Euclid Ave., #103 TTve., ucson AZ 85719 • 1-800-426-3797 • www.uapress.arizona.edu

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 21 what William James would describe as a physical experience, are within her ser- “religious experience.” Never is she quite mons, several of which are included in able to lift up and out of herself. She says their entirety in the book. Her first ever, Ministerial and female for instance, addressed to a class of most- Epiphany—the idea that in one ly white, male, southern, conservative by Becky Tuch bright, shining instant everything Duke Divinity School students, was about becomes clear and life is trans- menstruation. In a brave reinterpretation, Grace: A Memoir by Mary Cartledgehayes. New York: formed from that day forward—is she inserts herself into the role of a an overrated theological concept. woman in Mark 5, a woman who had been Crown, 2003, 304 pp., $23.00 hardcover. My experience in the Chevette aside, “hemorrhaging” for 12 years. “If it embar- life’s most important events—birth, rasses you to hear about my period,” she I death, learning to read… don’t hap- says, “think what it was like to live it.” She pen in an instant. (p. 218) describes how lonely that woman was sim- efore becoming a minister, Mary Newton © Susan M. ply because of her body. “I wasn’t like any- Cartledgehayes was a docetist, Although she develops a progressively body else because I was unclean.” B someone who believes Jesus’ body profound relationship with God, the self- Surprisingly, she does not seek to show was different from that of other humans. conscious awareness of her gender that women are clean when they have their As such, she’d always thought Jesus would inhibits her from what might otherwise be periods. Rather her point seems to be that be a good dancer. So when she saw Martin a transcendental connection. As a minister, everyone is regarded—legitimately or Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ, she is belittled by fellow church staff, mis- not—as unclean at some time or another. Cartledgehayes was “irate” to see Jesus trusted or silently scorned by church- We are all inside our bodies in peculiar portrayed as a goof on the dance floor. goers. On some rare occasions she is ways. We have all experienced pain because She was shocked that “[h]is arms flailed so praised and admired, but not because she of our physical selves. And, like the woman wildly... his feet didn’t know where they is a great minister and also a woman. in Mark 5 who sought Jesus’ cloak, we all should go next, and he had no discernible Rather she is frequently regarded as a great have the capacity to heal and be healed. sense of rhythm.” minister, in spite of being a woman. Her As the book progresses, her sermons If she reacted strongly to Jesus’ appearing candid accounts are refreshing: only get better. Like the biography itself, awkward, it is because she herself suffers each sermon is marked by Cartledgehayes’ from that same sense of misshapen self. If Mary Cartledgehayes I am a woman and it’s not my fault tenuous balance between the earthly and she became disillusioned by Jesus being less God called me into the ministry. the spiritual. In one of her best, she states, than super-human and unable to transcend which highly spiritual people are attuned. When I entered the sanctuary on his own physical self, she is equally disap- “To see the holy,” she writes, “You have to Sunday mornings with my shoul- The disciples who departed pointed in her own body, its own confine- have the capacity to see the patterns sur- der-length hair, with my breasts no [from Jesus] wanted a god who is ment within social constructs. She writes, rounding you.” Up until her decision to preaching robe could hide, and not physical, a god free of the become ordained, she spends much of her with a shade of lipstick dark body, free of the pain that humans [T]here’s a gap between believing life wanting nothing to do with religion. enough that people who were hard endure, a god who can protect [that all humans are created in the This alienation from God is an uncom- of hearing could read my lips, I them from the pain of being image of God] and incorporating mon position for someone who is later to looked like no other preacher human, of having a body. [the doctrine.] Most women don’t. become a United Methodist Minister. But who’d preceded me. (p. 137) And instead Jesus told them he We have trouble believing that our like Jesus, Cartledgehayes doesn’t exactly is the son of God and a human physicality—these breasts, these seek God; God seeks her. Or as she Bluntness is part of Cartledgehayes’ being who feels pain. So some of menstrual cycles, these hormones— describes it, the “conversion experi- charm. As a minister, she is to-the-point, them went away. And Jesus looked has anything to do with God. Our ence…happened to me because I’m so honest and aggressive. As a writer, she at the ones who stayed and said, souls? Oh, sure. This body? Oh, thick-headed it was the only way God doesn’t play coy word-games or drift far “What are you still doing here?” come now. (p. 97) could get my attention.” She has her first into metaphor. One might even wonder Helpless, they looked back at religious experience in her car, when the whether she takes a private pleasure in her him, and they said, “Where else Throughout Grace, Cartledgehayes’ body roof becomes suddenly transparent and blunt style, a secret pride in her god-given would we go?”… is indeed a constant source of frustration, she is bathed in warm, dense rays of gold- right to be crass. “[H]ave you ever heard of I’ve been trying to think curiosity, and power. Her memoir tells the en sunlight. After that, several other small a clergyperson who says things like ‘god- through what’s really important, primal story of one human’s search for incidents occur, too powerful to ignore as damn it’ and ‘fuck it’?” she writes. what really matters. I’m making a God. But in Cartledgehayes’ story, the phys- they all involve “the devastating impact of “Preaching, ministry…obviously these list, and I’m surprised how many icality of bodies makes this search more the sacred.” were tasks suited for people holier than I.” things on it have to do with incar- complicated. She frequently considers these For a story that deals with metaphysical nation, with our existence as physi- questions: How do women, in particular, issues, Cartledgehayes is unusually down- t’s not that Cartledegehayes enjoys cal beings—the very thing Jesus search for God? How can women identify to-earth and human. She curses, she being controversial. She didn’t seek named to some of his followers, with the women of the Bible, when there smokes, and she loves sex. She drinks I out the ministry to make a statement the very reason some of them are so few positive examples to follow? when she’s distraught and pigs out when about the gender divide within the church. walked away. (pp. 183-184) How can Christian women relate to their she’s anxious. And she insightfully delin- But once in place, the debates seemed to own bodies, when the Bible says that bleed- eates that precarious boundary between form around her. “Because of my embod- What runs deep in Cartledgehayes’ story ing is dirty and physical discipline is a hus- God and the institutions of God. While iment,” she writes, “The ritualistic words is a search that is demanding but unyield- band’s responsibility? As one community Cartledgehayes quotes, “The Lord our and statements of faith I offered were ing. Becoming ordained does not convince member asks her, “If you value women’s God is an everlasting God [who] does not received differently.” her of the unequivocally holy nature of lives, how can you be part of the Church?” faint or grow weary,” she later writes, As a United Methodist minister, everything, just as, conversely, watching a Like Jesus on the dance floor, “Holy week sucks if you’re ordained.” Cartledgehayes performs baptisms, visits young man die of cancer does not cause Cartledgehayes lacks rhythm; she feels she Perhaps most interesting about the sick, prays for the dying, mourns the her to lose faith. The uncertainty of her is disconnected from the cosmic rhythm to Cartledgehayes’ story is the absence of dead, weds couples, organizes committee faith, her constant examination and reeval- meetings, and prepares inspiring sermons uation of it, has a leveling effect. Coupled for each Sunday morning. Beyond the with her friendly, genuine tone, one is church, she has an additional set of obliga- encouraged to feel a kinship with her. tions as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a Readers cannot help but consider our own THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE friend, and a sister. It is not only remarkable bodies and our own alienation from God. Faculty Positions for 2004-22005 that one woman finds time to do all these One is inspired to ponder whether there is things, but that doing them is what evokes spiritual meaning in everything, from our The Evergreen State College seeks broadly trained faculty interested in teach- her sense of holy connectedness. “Either it awkward humanness to the music, patterns, ing in a public, liberal arts institution emphasizing interdisciplinary study and is all holy, or none of it is holy,” she writes. and rhythms surrounding us. team-teaching. “Regular” appointments typically involve initial 3-year term Evidently, Cartledgehayes is never one While Grace might speak most to people contracts, rotation between specialized and general education courses, eligi- to beat around the bush. For this reason, who have been historically marginalized by bility for permanent appointment after 3-6 years of full-time Evergreen teach- her story is endearing and her character religious institutions—women, homosexu- ing. Review of completed applications will begin on the dates. comes alive as a woman who never relents. als, etc.—one does not need to be marginal- Philosophy of Science (October 13, 2003) She may question her faith from time to ized in order to identify with time but she never questions her womanli- Cartledgehayes’ struggle. One does not Organic Chemistry (October 13, 2003) ness. If she had to rank her loyalties, one need to have had a religious awakening or Political Economy of Racism (November 3, 2003) suspects that being a woman would take a even identify as Christian in order to read Business Management (November 10, 2003) higher priority than being a minister. But, as this story. One simply needs to ask ques- For complete position descriptions and application procedures, please visit she successfully conveys by the end of her tions. The ideal reader is someone who does www.evergreen.edu/facultyhiring, or contact Michael Kilpatrick, Faculty memoir, one cannot distinguish between not take religion for granted, who wrestles Hiring Assistant, at The Evergreen State College, L-2211, 2700 Evergreen the holy and the secular. The physical and with spirituality, God, physicality, and ideas Parkway Olympia, WA 98505, call (360) 867-6861, or email the spiritual are one and the same. about death—but who never stops asking. [email protected]. The finest examples of her commit- Like Cartledgehayes, one must be unafraid ment to the physical, particularly the female to explore the possibilities. I

22 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 Cooking with joy by Barbara Haber

Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 344 pp., $42.95 hardcover. Made from Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth by Jean Zimmerman. New York: The Free Press, 2003, 266 pp., $25.00 hardcover. I ntil recently, feminists disdained such broad subjects as immigration histo- women’s role in the kitchen, see- ry, the history of science and technology, U ing it as a symbol of subjugation and the impact upon culture and society because of the persistent and repetitious of specific foods. demands made on women throughout Women’s studies scholars are starting history to fill the waiting maws of hus- to interpret cookbooks—traditionally bands and children. While other domes- ignored by American scholars—as vital tic tasks had been studied—housework texts for understanding women’s lives. In and childrearing for instance—cooking 1997, Anne Bower edited Recipes for remained a distasteful reminder of Reading, a collection of essays that explore women’s enslavement to a hot stove. community cookbooks, those regional When food did attract the attention of recipe collections typically published by women’s studies scholars, the focus tend- groups of women in support of local A 1959 menu in The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook included canned spaghetti, ed to be on eating disorders, especially charities. In Eat My Words: Reading Women’s packaged rolls, frozen peas and carrots, and instant lemon pudding. anorexia nervosa, a disease that lent itself Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote, folk- From Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking. to feminist interpretation. Self-starving lorist Janet Theophano clarifies the value young women were understood to be tak- of cookbooks as a literary genre, and in Men were perceived as meat-lovers, while to the lady of the house. This was also a ing control of their own bodies as a so doing dignifies food and its impor- women were thought to prefer daintier time when advancing technology light- response to the overwhelming pressures tance not only to women’s but to human fare such as salads and sweets. Neuhaus is ened the work load by bringing refrigera- of parents and the demands of a culture history. Now, historian Jessamyn Neuhaus sensitive to the limitations of these texts, tion and electrical appliances into homes, where thinness has excessive value. mines American cookbooks and periodi- realizing, for instance, that their intended along with new lines of canned goods and The celebratory aspects of cooking cal literature about cooking written audience was white and middle-class, and other processed foods that simplified and food did not attract feminist scholar- between 1920 and 1963 for what these that they were prescriptive—setting stan- cooking. In the cookbooks of the 1920s ly interest until the late 90s. Because food have to say about gender. dards for what people ought to be doing and 30s, Neuhaus finds that women were is ubiquitous, essential for sustaining life, To this end, she examines a huge num- rather than gauging what they actually did. being encouraged to view routine cooking and because the kinds of foods eaten and ber of both well-known and obscure Nevertheless, by amassing so many as an art and to approach the task with the conventions of serving them vary cookbooks, as well as hard-to-find maga- sources that make the same points, she joy. She goes on to illustrate how cook- from one culture to another, feminist his- zine articles that gave women the message offers persuasive evidence about the cul- books published during World War II torians and others realized they could that cooking routine family meals was tural ideals of the period. encouraged women to advance the war analyze these qualities to discern issues of their obligation, while men were entitled The story she tells begins with post- effort by limiting their use of rationed race, class, and gender, the feminist to be served. These books and articles not World War I America, when cooks ingredients—watering down butter or mantra. At the same time, studying food only genderized domestic duties, but gave employed by families were finding better stretching meatloaf by incorporating allowed scholars to throw new light on certain foods sex-linked characteristics. jobs in factories and leaving the cooking bread crumbs. These economies would

“A Hand Half in Darkness” Away From the Dayshift’s Bullhorn and Dazzle from “A Winter Light” by John Haines At night, alone in our own rooms, we lie The year always begins for me in September quietly, no other to watch us listen when loss is fully apparent, as the dark talks solemnly to the moon deliquescent light sliding back or the wind steps lightly outside the window. into its house of bone. Winter retreat coming on. This is speech at its best, But also a coming to, relearning the landscape’s proper grammar a gray animal in the distance the edges of things: pitching its muted clarinet to the sky’s roof. water dipper’s curve, open mouth of cup as we drink our tea How did Li Ch’ing-chao, “most famous and accomplished and trace the smooth ceramic circle. of Chinese women poets” put it? Last night, among the deep snows of the village, Touch is what we lose in summer One blossom opened. when we are all sight, hunters of color; we know the rose but not Grace the imperceptible weight of petals. of the singular, polar star, anoint the quick and the coarse-throated. So I long for fall, our time Give us a measure’s hush, soft-light our mouths to bring in the birch, to lift allow us your gentle wash. the dense and wind-dried wood, return to a layering of fine paper. Note: The quote is by Robert Payne, editor of The White Pony, An Anthology of Chinese Poetry, (1960) which includes Li-Ch’ing-chao’s poem “Spring Now the sky delivers its black ink. Returns.” I have excerpted the two lines in italics from this piece. Now our candles mirror the stars, a wax and cling to the soul’s wick. O shape within, O reach, O incantation. —Anne Coray

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 23 allow greater amounts of scarce food to Another problem with the book is that cookbook geared to home cooking, since among young people but also among pro- be sent overseas to our fighting men. Neuhaus does not evaluate the recipes as that was thought to be a sissy preoccupa- fessionals, mostly women, who show up Postwar cookbooks reflected the broader recipes. While the commentary provided tion for men. He had to make fun of at board meetings with needles clicking. social goal of creating “normalcy” by by authors of cookbooks helps academics women first, before he could allow him- Quilt-making, too, has a growing follow- having women leave their jobs to return analyze the perceptions of these writers self to express his own interest and cre- ing. In earlier times, these activities to tending the home fires. Whether or not and the times in which they lived, cook- ativity in the kitchen. As more academic brought groups of women together for such a return to domesticity really took books are first and foremost about the writers turn to cookbooks and to food as convivial chatting and story-telling while place in the 50s, the prescriptive literature preparation of food, and should be instruments of social analysis, they will they produced needed garments and blan- of the 1960s and 70s illustrates the con- understood for what they are. For exam- have to remember that food has its own kets. These days, such crafts are hobbies flict between women’s domestic duties ple, Neuhaus ably describes how male history and that the techniques of cook- more likely to be accompanied by televi- and their desire to hold outside jobs. cookbook writers ridicule the abilities of ing are complex and full of sion-watching. The social and Many cookbooks of this period offered women who nevertheless are expected to messages for those who utilitarian function of crafts is short-cut recipes that made use of canned do the lion’s share of home cooking, know the language. lost. Zimmerman also points and frozen foods, products seen as a great while men perform outdoor barbecuing out that getting satisfaction boon to working women. At the same stunts or cook up the rare flapjack break- ean Zimmerman under- from cooking is more problem- time, however, books and articles contin- fast. What Neuhaus misses is that men’s stands that language, for in atic because of the demands on ued to hold women responsible for the books about home-cooking were often JMade from Scratch, she says, women to produce frequent routine preparation of family meals. excellent. Some exhibited a knowledge of “the capacity to share home- meals. Her advice is for women Neuhaus looks at cookbooks in each of how to prepare fresh vegetables when grown cooking knowledge is to take short-cuts by the judi- these decades for their underlying mes- average books resorted to canned ones. critical to our spirit, strength, cious use of processed sages, which she refers to as the “cooking One 1950s book even offered delicious and happiness as a foods, but to develop mystique,” as restrictive to women as the and economical recipes for such foods as society.” These are at least one specialty ideological messages described by Betty polenta or risotto, at a time when such not the typical utter- that they can take Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Neuhaus dishes were relatively unknown in ances of a feminist, pride in. She also sug- offers pages and pages of examples to America. The truth is that traditional sex but Zimmerman is con- gests sharing domestic support her argument, a repetitive tech- roles created limitations for men as well as vinced that revaluing tradi- tasks with one’s mate, a nique that weakens the effectiveness of for women. No red-blooded American tional women’s work, in the recommendation that has her book to a reader longing for narrative. male in this period could simply write a kitchen as well as at the quilt- historically been hard to ing table, is a feminist act. She implement. believes that the successes of It is hard to know who feminism now allow for a will benefit from this book. broadening of its scope to Feminists who like to cook include a renewed regard have never been dissuaded for the place of home- from doing so by nega- making in women’s tive ideological mes- history. sages, and those who FACULTY POSITIONS This is the theme hate to cook are of her book, which unlikely to change she illustrates in a their minds. As for The Duke University Faculty of Arts and Sciences announces the following open positions series of chapters Drawing from the the needle crafts, I, for which it solicits applications and nominations: that include the his- I Hate to Cook for one, will never tory of homemak- Book (Fawcett, be persuaded to take up quilt-mak- African and African American Studies – Mathematics – Professor David Morrison ing, the story of the 1960). From ing, even though that particular Professor Maurice Wallace (919-684-2830) (919-660-2800) home economics Manly Meals and home-based craft has received fem- Associate Professor: Pop Culture Assistant Research Professors: Area Open movement, the ten- Mom’s Home inist support right along. Nor will I Cooking. Asian and African Languages Music – Professor Scott Lindroth sions between ever go near a sewing machine, and Literature – Professor Miriam Cooke (919-660-3300) homemaking and feminism, the diminu- despite Zimmerman’s arguments (919-684-4309) Rank Open, non-tenure track: Jazz tion of cooking skills in America, the mod- about the satisfactions sewing holds for Assistant Professor: Chinese Literature Physics – Professor Harold Baranger ern loss of home cooking, and the not converts. For reasons having to do with Biological Anthropology and Anatomy – (919-660-2500) quite lost traditions of needle crafts. an apron I attempted in my seventh grade Professor Richard Kay (919-684-4124) Assistant Professor: Nanoscience Zimmerman frequently interjects anec- home economics class, I have had a life- Rank Open: Primate Anthropology dotes from her own life that dramatize the long terror of sewing machines. At the Political Science – gratification to be found in the domestic same time, I handle a Cuisinart or Professor Michael Munger (919-660-4300) Biology – Professor Philip Benfey arts. Aware of the objections to enforced KitchenAid mixer as though it were a (919-660-7372) Rank Open: International Relations Assistant Professor: Functional Genomics domesticity raised by second-wave femi- natural extension of my hand. Psychological and Brain Science – nists, Zimmerman never glorifies home- What matters most about Made from Chemistry – Professor John Simon Professor Christina Williams (919-660-5713) making, but exhibits a real understanding Scratch is that it persuasively dissociates (919-660-1500) Associate/Full Professor: Behavioral of the problems faced by women who the home arts from feminist dogma that Rank Open: Organic Chemistry Neuroscience choose to spend their time at it. caused women to be defensive about per- Computer Science – Psychology: Social and Health Throughout her book Zimmerman forming such tasks with any kind of joy. Professor Alan Biermann (919-660-6500) Sciences – Professor Timothy Strauman acknowledges that there is something This is no small thing. After all, giving Multiple Positions, Rank Open: (919-660-5720) gratifying about working with one’s women choice has always been the most Computational Biology and Associate Professor: Social Psychology hands, and that by taking up a time-hon- compelling argument offered by the Computer Systems Public Policy Studies – ored craft, people can literally add texture women’s movement, and the more inclu- Economics – Professor Thomas Nechyba Professor Bruce Jentleson (919-613-7401) to their lives. She points out that knitting sive that philosophy has grown, the bet- (919-660-1800) Assistant Professor: Social Policy with an is enjoying a new popularity, especially ter it has become. I Rank Open: Empirical Applied emphasis on Child Policy Microeconomics Religion – Professor Wesley Kort English – Professor Maureen Quilligan (919-660-3510) Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction Writing (919-684-2741) Multiple positions, Rank Open: American Hampshire College Assistant Professor: Asian American Religion/Early Antiquity Literature and Culture Women’s Studies – Hampshire College an independent, innovative liberal arts institution and member of History – Professor John Thompson Professor Robyn Wiegman (919-684-5683) the Five College consortium is accepting applications for a three-year renewable posi- (919-684-3014) Distinguished Professor: Area Open tion as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction Writing. Assistant Professor: Military History Teaching experience at the college level is required. Publication and a MFA or other relevant graduate degree are strongly preferred. A writing sample of no more than Interested candidates should contact the individual indicated as soon as possible for twenty pages of fiction will be crucial to the decision. The creative writing program is more detailed information. Each search has its own application deadline. In some cases, committed to familiarizing students with a diversity of voices, perspectives and cul- departmental web pages contain further information about these positions. tures. All Hampshire students are expected to respond to a Multi-Cultural require- ment at some point in their college studies.

We offer a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits program. Review of appli- cations begins September 30, 2003 and will continue until the position is filled. The position will begin in the fall of 2004. Applicants should submit a letter of inquiry, resume, three letters of reference and a brief representative writing sample to: Fiction Writing Search, Mail Code: “WP”, School for Interdisciplinary Arts, 893 West Street, Duke University Is An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002. hr.hampshire.edu

Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer

24 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights New England life Columbia University Fellowship 2004-2005 by Melissa McFarland Pennell The Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American invites applications from scholars, advocates, and activists conducting innovative interdisciplinary work on the intersecting themes of sexuality, gender, health and Millworker by Judith A. Ranta. Boston: Northeastern human rights in U.S. and international contexts. During their residencies, fel- lows will examine the challenges posed by integrating sexuality, gender, health University Press, 2003, 284 pp., $18.95 paper. and human rights in theory, research, and advocacy. Our focus is on examining I and expanding traditional definitions and boundaries, while acknowledging con- ditions of inequality, marginality, and postcoloniality. Applicants should have ho were the women who con- Chamberlain had begun working in tex- the Ph.D. or an equivalent level of professional achievement, experience, and tributed to the Lowell Offering, tile mills, moving between Newmarket, publication at time of application. Stipend, office, and other resources provided. W one of America’s first work- New Hampshire, and Lowell, See website for information and application forms — ers’ publications written by the female Massachusetts. Even tracing http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/gender operatives of the Lowell, Massachusetts, Chamberlain’s life in Lowell is difficult, Deadline: 01/15/04 textile mills? What happened to them however. In addition to moving between Fellowship Program, Columbia University when they left the mills, either to return Lowell and Newmarket, Chamberlain Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health to their rural homes or to move on to married Thomas Wright in Lowell in 722 West 168 St., Rm. 945, New York, NY 10032 USA new stages in their lives? With the excep- 1834. Under the name Mrs. Wright she Tel: 212 305 5656; Fax: 212 305 0315 tion of a few, such as poet Lucy Larcom may have been a Lowell boardinghouse [email protected] and women’s rights activist Harriet keeper. By the early 1840s she returned to Hanson Robinson, most of the approxi- the use of the surname Chamberlain and mately seventy contributors to the to mill work; no public record of divorce Offering faded into obscurity, their identi- or of Wright’s death has been discovered. ties hidden behind the various pseudo- From 1840 to 1843, Chamberlain regular- nyms under which they had published ly wrote for the Lowell Offering. In 1843, their work. In The Life and Writings of she married Charles Boutwell and moved Florida Atlantic University Betsey Chamberlain, Judith Ranta provides to Illinois, returning to Lowell in 1848, the recoverable details of Chamberlain’s where she worked until 1850, contribut- Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent life as well as 34 of the selections that ing pieces during this period to the New Scholar in the Humanities she contributed to the Lowell Offering England Offering before returning to her (1840-45) and its successor, the New husband’s farm in Illinois. England Offering (1847-50). Betsey Chamberlain’s writings are live- Florida Atlantic University (FAU) In her substantial “Biographical and ly and engaging, many filled with details invites applications and nominations Critical Introduction,” Ranta acknowl- of rural and village life in early 19th-cen- for the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent edges the challenges facing anyone who tury America. Her sympathies for the hopes to trace the life of an Offering con- condition and treatment of Native Scholar in the Humanities in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College tributor. She mentions Harriet Americans shape some pieces, while her of Arts & Letters. Robinson’s invaluable key to names and advocacy of women’s rights and argu- pseudonyms of contributors published ments for recognition of women’s contri- The successful candidate will be a distinguished humanist in 1902, which allowed Ranta to identify butions influence others. Many of her dedicated to working with the Dean and the faculty to the pieces Chamberlain had written over sketches and tales reflect the popular enhance the scholarly profile of the College, contribute to the years. She concedes, however, that tastes of her era, particularly the interest the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and further much about Chamberlain’s life must be in didactic writing, evident in develop the College’s role in the University and regional com- discerned from these writings, since the Chamberlain’s frequent use of a closing munities. S/he will have an earned doctorate or equivalent, information gleaned from public records moral or lesson, at times underscoring an presents only the bare facts of a life individual’s receiving “just desserts” for and an impressive record of university teaching, scholarship story and often raises as many questions either virtuous actions or vices. Ranta and/or creative activity that is broadly-based and addresses as it answers. Ranta explores the factors divides Chamberlain’s work into three topics and issues that reach across the humanities disci- that set Chamberlain apart from the typ- groups: “Native Tales and Dream plines. ical “mill girl” of the 1830s and 40s, Visions,” “‘The Unprivileged Sex’: focusing particularly on her Native Women’s Concerns,” and “‘Our Town’: FAU is a rapidly growing public university on seven campus- American heritage as well as her age and Village Sketches.” es, enrolling more than 24,000 students. For more detailed life experiences. The narratives in “Native Tales and information about Florida Atlantic University and the Born in 1797, Chamberlain grew up Dream Visions” depict interactions Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters, see our web- in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, the between Native and European site at http://www.fau.edu/divdept/schmidt. daughter of William and Comfort Americans and dream visions that Ranta Guppy. Her Native American ancestry links to “Algonkian cultural influences.” The Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities could be traced, according to genealogi- In “A Fire-Side Scene,” Chamberlain is funded by a generous endowment that includes ample cal records, to her paternal grandmother, reveals the brutality of the white treat- funding for a full program of professional activities. The gen- Sarah Loud Guppy, an Abenaki. Ranta ment of Native Americans through the suggests that Chamberlain’s mixed-race admissions of Uncle David, an old eral terms of this appointment are negotiable, and typically identity influenced Chamberlain’s self- Indian-fighter. He recounts the burning would include tenure at the rank of Professor. perception, evident not only in her sym- of a Miami village during the Battle of pathetic stance toward Native Americans Fallen Timbers (1794) in what later Applications will be reviewed until the position is filled. in her writings, but also in her descrip- became Ohio. To justify his actions, he Letters of application should respond to the position criteria tions of herself in various sketches that says, “I am glad the Indians were hea- and be accompanied by a current curriculum vitae and the distinguish her posture and features then—had they been Christian, I should names, addresses, email address, and phone numbers of from those of a typical Euro-American. dread meeting their souls in another five references. Her father’s often litigious relationships world.” This emphasis on difference with his family and neighbors affected based on religion as well as race also Applications and nominations should be sent to: Chamberlain’s sense of her place in vil- shapes the view of Ichabod in “The lage life as well, both because of the Indian Pledge,” who ends up learning “a Anthony Julian Tamburri, Associate Dean financial burdens and social marginaliza- lesson of Christianity from an untutored The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters tion his actions caused. savage.” Chamberlain’s intentional use Florida Atlantic University Following a course typical of rural of the term “savage” makes her point. 777 Glades Road women, Betsey Guppy married Josiah In this selection, the Native character, Boca Raton, Florida 33431-0991 Chamberlain in 1820, and the two began who remains unnamed, acts out of his Email: [email protected] farming in Brookfield, New Hampshire, commitment to charity and reciprocity, near Wolfeboro. She bore two children reinforced by his belief in the expecta- Confidential inquiries may be directed to search committee prior to her husband’s death in 1823. Like tions of the Native deity Cantantowwit, coordinator Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, at 561/297-3861. many widows of her day, Chamberlain thus calling into question Ichabod’s had to sell portions of her husband’s expressions of Christian superiority. Florida Atlantic University is an Equal Opportunity/Equal Access Institution. estate to settle debts and to support her- The dream visions focus on self and her children. By the early 1830s, Chamberlain’s experiences in Lowell,

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 25 her hopes for social reform, and her [old maids’] influence, you would be but desire to return to the rural countryside. dead letters, mere blanks in society.” As “A New Society” presents a vision of Ranta notes, the positive treatment of America in which women’s education, an older women in Chamberlain’s sketches, Black feminism 101 eight-hour work day, and the elevation of such as the benevolent Aunt Dear Soul, virtuous industry over wealth and titles along with the sympathetic presentation by Michele Faith Wallace govern the day. Chamberlain also treats of scenes from rural life, also anticipates the Lowell Offering itself as an agent of the work of later New England regional- Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African change in “A Vision of Truth,” in which ists, including Sarah Orne Jewett and the dreamer sees the words Lowell Mary Wilkins Freeman. American Communities by Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Offering emblazoned on leaves that come The remainder of Chamberlain’s from the tree “Mental Knowledge.” writings consists of sketches of Guy-Sheftall. New York: Ballantine Books, Chamberlain clearly believed that her “Salmagundi,” the name Chamberlain work and that of the other contributors gives to Wolfeboro and its surroundings. 2003, 304 pp., $24.95 hardcover. would have an influence beyond their In “Recollections of My Childhood,” immediate community. Chamberlain recalls a child’s freedom in I the natural world much the way Lucy he selections that appear in Larcom writes of her home in Beverly ohnnetta Cole and Beverly Guy- the sixties.” Or as Cole and Sheftall fur- “‘The Unprivileged Sex’” include in A New England Girlhood. In other Sheftall’s Gender Talk is the most ther explain, T cautionary tales that praise plain sketches Chamberlain recounts village J able and constructive black feminist virtue over physical beauty, stories that traditions such as huskings and sugar- book published thus far in terms of its We are concerned because we may have been aimed at Chamberlain’s making, as well as minor historic potential accessibility to a broad range believe that hip-hop is more younger coworkers. In “Fortune Telling: moments, some linked to her own of readers. Cole and Sheftall have gone misogynist and disrespectful of A Narrative of Salmagundi,” the lovely ancestry, such as the preparation of the the extra mile to construct the argu- Black girls and women than Harriet fails in virtue and falls in dis- first dish of tea in Portsmouth, New ments for gender dialogue in the black other popular music genres. The grace, while her friend Eleanor, who Hampshire, by Abigail Van Dame, community and to gather the kind of casual references to rape and rejects the suit of the intemperate Chamberlain’s great-great-grandmother. documentation that should be convinc- other forms of violence and the Joseph R., finds happiness when in her She tends to emphasize the virtues of ing to anyone, feminist sympathizer or soft-porn visuals and messages 30s she marries “a rich and very worthy rural life, particularly the ways in which not, who takes the time to read it. of many rap music videos are man.” The more interesting tales under kindly neighbors recall individuals to Drawing upon a vast array of personal seared into the consciousness of this heading are those that deal with “old temperance, but she also acknowledges testimony both from previously pub- young Black boys and girls at an maids” and elderly women. A single the dark side of country life. She con- lished autobiographies and from inter- early age. (p. 187) woman in her 30s and early 40s during demns the pauper auctions, a common views gathered specifically as part of much of her working life in Lowell, practice in New England villages in the the research for the book, Gender Talk The chapter on “Black, Lesbian, and Chamberlain enjoyed writing from the late 18th and early 19th century, during provides, as well, a cogent history of Gay: Speaking the Unspeakable” is par- perspective of an “old maid,” despite her which paupers were “struck off to him black feminist struggles and debates up ticularly moving, with testimony from own marriages. She praises spinsters’ who will keep them for the least pay— until now. All of this careful packaging such important cultural figures as the contributions to family life and calls an inhuman practice,” but one not fol- is crucial, because black audiences, late poets Audre Lorde and Joseph attention to the literary and reform activ- lowed in Salmagundi. She praises her male and female, have been so unwill- Beam; poet Cheryl Clarke; and novelist ities of single women. The three community for its morality and its dedi- ing to be persuaded by feminist argu- Samuel Delany. Cole and Guy-Sheftall “Recollections of an Old Maid” respond cation to the education of its children. ments on the grounds that our experi- explore the history of African and to issues of class, pressures upon women Upon leaving Lowell in 1850, Betsey ences as victims of racism absolve us African-American homosexuality, start- to marry, and the value of women’s edu- Chamberlain settled permanently in from willing participation in the sins of ing with anthropologist Ife cation. For example, in the first Illinois, her writing life apparently at an the patriarchy. Amadiume’s study, Male Daughters, “Recollection,” Chamberlain criticizes end. When she died in 1886, her obituary Cole and Guy-Sheftall have man- Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an the Widow A., who has raised her made no mention of her life in Lowell or aged to step right out of that box, African Society (1987). Amadiume daughter Ruthy to be a “lady,” incapable her contributions to the Offering. The Life effectively drawing black men and showed that heterosexual/homosexual of caring for herself. Because her and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain answers women into a discussion about how divisions in Africa were recognized “mother’s foolish indulgence had almost a number of questions about gender inequality affects all of us. only as recently the 18th century. beggared her,” Ruthy must marry; her Chamberlain’s life, resolving some of the Gender Talk lays out clearly and logical- Woman-to-woman marriages were not marriage to a hardworking farmer trans- mysteries that have surrounded the fate ly the process by which black commu- uncommon in some pre-colonial forms Ruthy into a woman who with of at least one of the women who lived nities arrived at our current situation, in African kinship systems. Cole and Guy- “utmost eagerness [performs] every duty and wrote in Lowell during the era of which 54 percent of black children live Sheftall go on to cite references in of her station.” In the last the Offering. The volume presents a body in single-parent, largely female-headed many African cultures to same-sex inti- “Recollection,” Chamberlain describes of writing that reflects Chamberlain’s and less prosperous households; 68 macy and cooperation as coterminous the conditions of a young woman eye for detail and talent with words, one percent of African-American children with heterosexuality. In America, sexu- named Sarah who sacrifices her career as that suggests her potential for a more are born to unmarried mothers; and 47 al relations between slaves in the 17th a teacher to care for her ailing mother: sustained literary career. It invites one to percent of the prison population and century in New York were more com- “Her education, though it made her no ask: Had Betsey Chamberlain’s life cir- 29 percent of those who are confined plex than previously imagined. New richer, increased her happiness and her cumstances been different, might to mental hospitals are black. Black evidence suggests that both consensual self-respect, and gained for her the America have enjoyed a larger body of men emerge from prisons HIV infected and forced sex took place between male esteem of others.” The closing remark work by an important female voice? Or and “on the down low” (having secre- slaves, as well as the rape of black boys of “Old Maids and Old Bachelors” eeri- had she never worked in Lowell, might tive sex with other men), passing the by white masters. ly presages Melville’s “Bartleby the Betsey Chamberlain have remained a disease on to unsuspecting black More recent complications include Scrivener,” as the narrator admonishes silent member of the various communi- women and black gay men. the phenomenon—covered in two the old bachelors, “were it not for their ties in which she lived? I The book is constructed of precisely recent Essence Magazine articles, “Men argued chapters on the ways some of Who Sleep with Men” and “Cover the more commercial forms of hip-hop Girls”—of black women who keep Women’s Studies culture participate in misogynist brain- secret from the world that they are mar- San Diego State University washing; the difficulties of living as a ried to black gay men, even when their gay man or lesbian in a largely intolerant husbands are responsible for infecting The Department of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University invites applications for a black context; the longstanding prob- them, and possibly their unborn chil- tenure-track position, at the rank of associate or full professor, beginning Fall 2004, pending lem of violence against women within dren, with HIV. Louis Farrakhan’s budgetary approval. black communities; the black church’s “hyperhomophobic” assertions, includ- We seek to strengthen our offerings in: Psychologies of Women/Lesbian Studies, including iden- role in supporting homophobia and the ing speeches in which he has gone so far tity formation, mental health, theories of psychotherapy, psychological aspects of sexuality —par- conspiracy of silence about intra-racial as to suggest that homosexuality is a ticularly lesbian sexuality, and body image. Applicants must have a Ph.D., a strong record of schol- sexism; and the black power move- crime deserving of the death penalty, arly publications, and experience teaching in Women’s Studies or a related field. Successful ment’s opposition to black feminist are also discussed. applicants will be committed to undergraduate teaching of a diverse student population, includ- movement. But the smartest and most The most personally disturbing ing courses such as Psychology of Women; Women, Madness and Sanity; and Lesbian Lives and persuasive weapon of all in Cole’s and material to me in the book concerns Cultures. They must also commit to strengthening a successful graduate degree program and con- Sheftall’s arsenal is their use of expert the extent of violence against women tributing to an emerging LGBT program. Also essential is dedication to departmental, university and community service. Salary is contingent upon experience and qualifications. testimony gathered from black witness- within black families and heterosexual es on both sides of the gender divide. black dating arrangements. Guy- Applications are due and the position will close on October 31, 2003. Send letter of application, The chapter on hip-hop draws cru- Sheftall, a professor of women’s stud- names of three references, sample syllabi, and curriculum vitae to: Search Committee, cial evidence from the writings of savvy ies and English, begins the book by Department of Women’s Studies, San Diego State University, San Diego CA 92182-8138. hip-hop chronicler Nelson George and sharing her own horrific experience of Further information is available at http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/wsweb/ cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson con- severing a short-term relationship with SDSU is a Title IX, equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against individuals on the basis cerning “a major war brewing (simmer- a professorial colleague at Spelman of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, marital status, age, disability or veteran sta- ing, erupting, back to simmering again) College, whereupon he proceeded to tus, including veterans of the Vietnam era. between black men and women since physically assault her, stalk her, steal

26 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 her car, set her car on fire, break into single mother who was divorced her home, and engage in other kinds when I was very young, and she of harassment, including writing her always worked. The expectation Classified name and telephone number on the was that I would always be able walls of public bathrooms through- to support myself. (pp. 33-34) Book your ad at www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview or e-mail [email protected] out Atlanta. Cole explores personal issues as well, recounting her experi- In contrast, writer Pearl Cleage Booksellers take graduate teaching and supervision. The suc- ence of a public betrayal by her for- describes her household when she cessful candidate will join the Programs in mer husband while she was president was growing up as “male reverential,” Religious Studies and in Classical Studies within of Spelman. and her father as a “big race man” the interdisciplinary Division of Humanities; who always talked about race but membership in the Centre for Jewish Studies is n the summer and fall of 1999, never talked about gender. In her fam- also possible. A letter of application, curriculum Cole and Sheftall conducted a ily, the women were expected to wait vitae, three confidential letters of recommenda- I series of four- to six-hour inter- on the men. tion and a sample of the applicant’s written work views with prominent black intellectu- The historian Manning Marable (no longer than 20 pages) should reach the Chair als and activists, asking them questions describes his grandmother, Fanny by 31st October 2003: Professor Doug Freake, about what they saw as the most press- Marable, who was born in 1898 in Publications Division of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, York ing issues of gender in the black com- Tuskeegee, Alabama, and who University, 4700 Keele Street, 207 Vanier College, munity. Among those participating became the mother of 13 children, as REVOLUTION, SHE WROTE. An unconven- Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada (email: were Manning Marable, director of a feminist role model. Emory tional take on feminism and politics. $17.95. dfreake@yorku,ca; phone: 416-736-5158; fax: the Institute for Research in African Professor Rudolph Byrd describes www.RedLetterPress.org 416-736-5460). York University is an Affirmative American Studies at Columbia how his father’s abuse of his mother Action Employer. The Affirmative Action University; Dorothy Height, chair of turned him against patriarchy and 5 AM. POETRY: Alicia Ostriker, Robin Program can be found on York’s website at the board of the National Council of turned him into the protector of his Becker, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Toi Derricotte, http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs Negro Women; Derrick Bell, profes- mother, alienating him from his father Virgil Suarez, Denise Duhamel, Bob Hicok, sor of law at New York University; when he was only ten. Crystal Williams, Dean Young. “Brilliantly edit- English: Nineteenth-Century British Joyce Ladner, senior fellow at the Elaine Brown describes the way ed”—Chiron Review. $15/4 issues: 5 AM, Box Literature. The tenure-track position offered is Brookings Institute; Calvin Butts, min- Black Panther men thought of female 205W, Spring Church, PA 15686. in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the ister of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist participants as “smart bitches” who Assistant Professor level. The successful candi- Church; Farai Chideya, journalist; needed to be silenced. “A woman in New, essays-only, original feminist writing: date will have particular expertise in the period Pearl Cleage, playwright and novelist; the Black Power movement was con- www.QuietMountainEssays.com between 1800 and 1860, will be at home working Rudolph Byrd, director of African sidered, at best irrelevant. A woman with both poetry and prose, and will have signif- American Studies at Emory asserting herself was a pariah. A Solving the Great Pronoun Problem: 14 icant university teaching experience. University; Elaine Brown, former woman attempting the role of leader- Ways to Avoid the Sexist Singular contains a Qualifications include a Ph.D. or equivalent in chair of the Black Panther Party; and ship was, to my proud Black brothers, 14-point guide, discussion, and illustrative exam- English Literature with specialization in nine- Barbara Smith, black lesbian writer making an alliance with the ‘counter- ples. Equal Writes reviews guidebooks about teenth-century British literature, and demonstra- and activist. They also conducted a revolutionary, man-hating, lesbian, unbiased communication, explains how to ble excellence in both teaching and research. It is weekend long “multilogue” at the feminist white bitches.’ It was a viola- choose one, and supplies a bibliography. To expected that the successful candidate will partic- Ford Foundation on November 19, tion of some Black Power principle order send $5 plus a long, stamped, self- ipate in our roster of large-lecture introductory 1999, with participants including that was left undefined.” And there are addressed envelope for each article to the courses, teach upper-year courses in her/his field Byllye Y. Avery, founder of the many more stories here. author: Marie Shear, 282 East 35 Street, #7N, of specialization, and, either immediately or very National Black Women’s Health If you want to give somebody one Brooklyn, NY 11203-3925. soon, contribute to the graduate program in Project; Kimberle Crenshaw, profes- book that summarizes the crises of English. A letter of application, curriculum vitae, sor of law at Columbia University; sexuality and gender in black commu- three confidential letters of recommendation and Dazon Dixon Diallo, president of nities, this is it. If you want to teach Job Opportunities a sample of the applicant’s written work (no Sister Love, Inc., the first and largest one book on race in your introduction longer than 25 pages) should reach the Chair by women’s AIDS organization in the to gender course, or one book on gen- The University of Iowa Department of 10 November 2003: Professor Kim Ian Southeast; James Early, writer and der in your introduction to African Women’s Studies announces a tenure-track Michasiw, Chair, Department of English, Faculty director of cultural heritage policy at American Studies course, or one book position in U.S. Minority Women’s Literature of Arts, York University, 4700 Keele Street, the Smithsonian; Jacquelyn Grant, on race and gender in your sexuality and Culture at the Assistant Professor Level,to Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada (email: professor of theology at the course, this is it. If you are teaching be jointly appointed in Women’s Studies and [email protected]; phone: 416 736-5166; fax: Interdenominational Theological any kind of course in which you need English OR American Studies. Ph.D. by August 416 736-5412). York University is an Affirmative Center; Evelyn Hammonds, professor a book that will quickly bring your 2004 in Women’s/Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Action Employer. The Affirmative Action of the history of science at Harvard; students (graduate, undergraduate, or English, American Studies or related interdiscipli- Program can be found on York’s website at Calvin Hernton, professor emeritus at high school) or your reading club up nary fields. Demonstrated commitment to excel- http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or a copy can be Oberlin College; bell hooks, author; to speed on the current flow of opin- lence in both teaching and scholarship. Substantial obtained by calling the affirmative action office at Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of histo- ions and dialectics among African training and experience in Women’s/Gender 416 736-5713. All qualified candidates are ry at New York University; and Haki Americans concerning issues of gen- Studies required. Must be able to teach core cours- encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens Madhubuti, founder and publisher of der and sexuality, this is it. It would es in Women’s Studies such as Introduction to and Permanent Residents will be given priority. Third World Press. help as well for sympathetic members Women’s Studies, Race, Class and Gender, and In particular, the chapter, “Having of other communities to use this Feminist Theory. Letter of application, C.V., three English: Professional Writing. The tenure-track Their Say: Conversations with Sisters book to better understand how sensi- letters of recommendation and writing sample to: position offered is in Professional Writing at the and Brothers,” draws heavily upon this tive issues of sexuality, gender, and Rosemarie Scullion, Chair, Search Committee, Assistant Professor level. The successful candidate material gathered directly from inter- health remain among black people, Department of Women’s Studies, 701 Jefferson will have particular expertise in periodical publica- viewees and multilogue participants, young and old. Building, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242. tion and print journalism. Additional expertise in producing a range of narratives It is not a perfect or an especially Screening of applications to begin on November one or more of visual design, ethics in profession- describing what it was like to grow up elegant book but it is simple, straight- 10. Minorities and women are encouraged to apply. al writing, and workplace writing is a considerable in a black family dependent upon the forward, clear, and brimming with The University of Iowa is an Affirmative asset. Professional experience in print journalism patriarchy. Many pay tribute to the integrity, positive energy, and hon- Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. or publishing is highly desirable. Qualifications ways in which their parents resisted esty. It is not likely to intimidate any- include a Ph.D. or equivalent in rhetoric, profes- sexist hegemony. For instance, Ruby one with its erudition, abstractions, The Division of Humanities, Faculty of sional writing, journalism, or communications and Sales, a former civil rights activist who or hipness. It is entirely successful in Arts, York University invites applications for a demonstrable excellence in both teaching and grew up in the South, describes her what I suspect is its intended goal, tenure-stream appointment at the Assistant research. The successful candidate will be a key father as “atypical” in that he would which is to make it easy for even a Professor level in the field of Christian Origins contributor in building our new program in “hang out clothes, wash, iron, cook, bona fide fool to comprehend the and New Testament Literature. The appoint- Professional Writing. The candidate will be expect- and on Saturday he would say to my urgency of the situation. At the same ment, to commence July 1, 2004, is subject to ed to step into a rotation for teaching a large sec- mother, ‘Mrs. Sales you’ll have break- time, the book is succinct and direct budgetary approval. All qualified candidates are ond-year lecture course, to offer upper-year cours- fast in bed today and I’ll do every- enough to make it a both a cogent encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens es in areas of particular expertise, and, either thing.’ My mother didn’t cook dinner review and an eye-opener for even and Permanent Residents will be given priority. immediately or very soon, to contribute to the for us; my dad was the cook in our the most knowledgeable and com- We seek a candidate with a completed Ph.D. at graduate program in English. A letter of applica- family so therefore all my brothers do mitted of black feminists. No matter the time of appointment, evidence of a vigorous tion, curriculum vitae, three confidential letters of the same thing. My father braided our how much you have come to know research agenda with scholarly interests in the recommendation and a sample of the applicant’s hair and my divorced brother braids about any subject, you must admire Jewish, Greek, and Roman contexts of early written work (no longer than 25 pages) should his daughter’s hair.” Aubra Love, somebody who has managed to pull Christianity, and promise of excellence in teach- reach the Chair by 10 November 2003: Professor director of the Atlanta-based Black off an utterly weightless and simple ing. Other requirements include the ability to Kim Ian Michasiw, Chair, Department of English, Church and Domestic Violence introduction to that subject. This is teach broad undergraduate courses in Christian Faculty of Arts, York University, 4700 Keele Institute, reports, what we have here, by all rights the studies from an interdisciplinary perspective in Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada (email: book of the year, except that would the first- and second-year Foundations program, [email protected]; phone: 416 736-5166; fax: I didn’t know the word feminist. make too much sense. And nothing as well ancient Greek language. The successful 416 736-5412). York University is an Affirmative But you know, I was raised by a makes sense these days. I candidate must also have the potential to under- continued on back cover

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 1 / October 2003 27 continued from page 27 already achieved a position of eminence in Department of Political Science, Box 1063, will not accept candidates’ materials via email. Canadian literary studies. The ideal candidate One Brookings Drive, Washington University, Please send by October 15, 2003, a letter of Action Employer. The Affirmative Action will combine an expertise in contemporary St. Louis, MO 63130-4899. Washington application including proposed course offer- Program can be found on York’s website at anglophone Canadian literature with great fluen- University is an AA/EO employer. Washington ings, vita, SAS postcard, one-page dissertation http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or a copy can be cy across the historical range of English University strongly encourages the applications abstract, and either a sample of writing from obtained by calling the affirmative action office at Canadian writing. Some capacity to engage with of women and minorities for these positions. your dissertation or relevant published articles 416 736-5713. All qualified candidates are francophone Canadian texts is a considerable and three letters of recommendation to: encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens asset. That candidate will have at least ten years The Program in Women’s Studies at the Professor Rosanna Hertz, Chair/Women’s and Permanent Residents will be given priority. of university teaching experience and will have University of California, Irvine, announces Studies/Wellesley College/Wellesley/MA. published extensively and influentially. an opening for a tenure-track, assistant profes- 02481. Wellesley College is an Equal English: Postcolonial Literature. The tenure- Candidates will also have an established capacity sor position in critical and cultural studies of Opportunity/Affirmative Action educational track position offered is in Postcolonial to contribute to discussions of Canadian litera- gender and religion. We seek candidates with institution; successful candidates must be able Literature with a specialization in Caribbean ture outside the university. It is expected that the strong theoretical interests in transnational to work effectively in a culturally diverse envi- Literatures in English at the Assistant successful candidate will contribute immediately feminist cultural studies, and grounding in the ronment. Applications from women, minori- Professor level. The successful candidate will both to undergraduate and graduate teaching in analysis of gender in its relations to sexuality, ties, veterans, and/or candidates with disabili- have demonstrable expertise in current her/his areas of expertise. Most years the Chair race, nationalism, and class. Interdisciplinary ties are encouraged. Caribbean literatures and significant university would teach one full-course equivalent at each training is preferred. Possible areas of expertise teaching experience. Some expertise in diasporic level. Salary will depend on qualifications and are cultural and expressive modes of religiosity, and minority literatures in Canada and in post- experience. The position to begin July 1, 2004, is secularity and spirituality, religious movements, Travel colonial theory and critical race theory is a con- subject to budgetary approval. A letter of appli- religious fundamentalisms and their politics. siderable asset. Qualifications include a Ph.D. or cation, curriculum vitae, three confidential letters Applicants must have a Ph.D. in hand by the Carol Christ leads two programs in Greece: equivalent in English Literature with specializa- of recommendation and a sample of the appli- time of the appointment. Deadline for applica- “Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete” and “Sacred tion in postcolonial/Caribbean and demonstra- cant’s written work (no longer than 25 pages) tions: November 1, 2003. Please send a letter of Journey in Greece.” Ariadne Institute, P.O. Box ble excellence in both teaching and research. It is should reach the Chair by 10 November 2003: application, current CV, three letters of recom- 8306, New Orleans, LA 70182-8306. Phone: expected that the successful candidate will Professor Kim Ian Michasiw, Chair, Department mendation and a sample of your research or (504) 288-9802; Email: institute@goddessari- undertake immediately large-lecture undergradu- of English, Faculty of Arts, York University, publications to: Chair, Search Committee, adne.org; www.goddessariadne.org. ate course in Caribbean literature, will participate 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Women’s Studies Program, 360 Krieger Hall, in the teaching rotation for a course in minority Canada (email: [email protected]; phone: 416 Irvine, CA 92697-2655. The University of Sunny Greece! Small island house! Weekly, literatures in Canada, and, either immediately or 736-5166; fax: 416 736-5412). York University is California has an active career partner program monthly. On isolated terraced mountain slope very soon, contribute to the graduate program. A an Affirmative Action Employer. The and is an Equal Opportunity Employer com- overlooking sea. Breathtaking sunsets, moon- letter of application, curriculum vitae, three con- Affirmative Action Program can be found on mitted to excellence through diversity. sets. Dramatic hikes. Marvelous peace. fidential letters of recommendation and a sample York’s website at http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs Moonrock: (614) 986-6945; email: WISE- of the applicant’s written work (no longer than or a copy can be obtained by calling the affirma- Wellesley College, Department of [email protected]. 25 pages) should reach the Chair by 10 tive action office at 416 736-5713. All qualified Women’s Studies, invites applicants to apply November 2003: Professor Kim Ian Michasiw, candidates are encouraged to apply; however, for a Luce Foundation Assistant Chair, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents will Professorship. This new position is a tenure- Miscellaneous York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, be given priority. track line for a comparative scholar with expert- Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada (email: ise and empirical research experience in South LIGHTBOX CO of NEW ENGLAND [email protected]; phone: 416 736-5166; fax: Washington University in St. Louis invites East Asia or Korea, with a research focus lightboxes for SAD, sleep problems, PMS, 416 736-5412). York University is an Affirmative applications for a tenure-track joint position on the relationship among work, gender all biological rhythm disorders: 800 853- Action Employer. The Affirmative Action with Women and Gender Studies and the and families. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in 6456; www.lightboxco.com; [email protected] Program can be found on York’s website at Political Science Department to begin Fall a social science discipline or Women’s Studies. vard.edu http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or a copy can be 2004. Consideration of applications will begin Wellesley College seeks individuals who are obtained by calling the affirmative action office October 1, 2003, and continue until the posi- excellent teacher-scholars. Our interdisciplinary WRITING COACH AND EDITOR.Get at 416 736-5713. All qualified candidates are tion is filled. The teaching commitment department is searching for an individual with that article or book into print with coaching or encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens involves both departments. The successful can- global interests who will contribute to the editing from author praised by Charlayne and Permanent Residents will be given priority. didate must have a strong commitment to department and other related initiatives on Hunter-Gault, Gloria Steinem and Maya Women and Gender Studies and willingness to campus, develop pedagogically innovative Angelou. www.JoanLester.com; (510) 548-1224. Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian participate actively in the program, which offers teaching, and conduct scholarly research. The Literature. Applications are invited for the Avie an undergraduate major and minor, and gradu- teaching load is two courses each semester. Feminist Editor. Ph.D. Prize-winning author. Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian Literature ate certificate. Please send vitae, writing sample, Salary is competitive with additional research Twenty years’ experience editing every imagina- in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and dossier including at least three letters of support and faculty benefits. Wellesley College ble kind of writing. References provided, at York University. The Chair is of open rank reference, TO: Prof. Jack Knight, Chair, is a small, private, highly selective liberal arts including many happy WRB readers. (510) 524- but is designed for a senior scholar who has Women and Politics Search Committee, college for women, located near Boston. We 7913; [email protected].

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