The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XXII, No. 3 December 2004 74035 $4.00

6 Our Final Issue...

I ...at least for now. As we explore the possibilities for additional sup- port for the Women’s Review, we con- tinue to hope that this will not be the last you hear from us. p. 3

I The awarding of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek set off a storm of controversy in her home country and a rush among feminists around the world to find out more about this little known author. Cover D

I Two books that explore the motivations and ideas of right-wing women, Evangelical Christian Women and Home-GGrown Hate have become more relevant than ever, now that George W. Bush has been elected for a second term. p. 6

I Ignored, for the most part, in the West, the people of the island of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea, Elfriede Jelinek forced a multinational mining compa- ny off their land in a ten-year strug- gle for autonomy. The women who played a crucial role tell their stories The challenging writings of in …as Mothers of the Land. p. 8 Elfriede Jelinek I In the Skeptical Feminism of by Bettina Brandt Carolyn Dever, reviewer Ann Snitow An Austrian feminist wins the Nobel prize in literature. finds an irresolvable, symbiotic I tension between theory and activism. his year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Writing in a powerful, imagistic, shocking p. 21 Elfriede Jelinek, is a highly controver- voice, Elfriede Jelinek is a polemicist in the Tsial author in her home country, style of compatriots like Karl Krauss and where she is condemned for her relentlessly Thomas Bernhard, and like the latter has critical stance toward Austria’s postwar poli- been called an anti-patriotic, pornographic I and more... tics and the mentality of its people. Praising writer. A member of the Austrian 12> the “extraordinary linguistic zeal,” of her Communist party from 1974 to 1991, prose that “reveals the absurdity of society’s Jelinek has tirelessly demonstrated how the clichés and their subjugating power,” the realms of economy, sexuality, and racism- Swedish Academy lauded the radical feminist form a brutal patriarchal whole. She voices who, in response, declared that the unexpect- her brand of politics not only in her novels, 74470 74035 03 ed literary honor should not be understood plays, and essays but also from her website, PRINTED IN THE USA as a “flower in Austria’s buttonhole.” continued on page 4 The Women’s Review Contents of Books Center for Research on Women 1 Bettina Brandt I THE CHALLENGING WRITINGS OF ELFRIEDE JELINEK: An Austrian feminist wins the Wellesley College Nobel prize in literature 106 Central Street Wellesley, MA 02481 3 Letters (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 4 Joycelyn K. Moody I Harriet Jacobs: A Life by Jean Fagan Yellin www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview 6 Esther Kaplan I Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles by Julie Ingersoll; Volume XXII, No. 3 Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism edited by Abby L. Ferber December 2004 7 Ruth Milkman I Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives by Mary Blair-Loy; EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality by Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson [email protected] 8 Kerryn Higgs I …as Mothers of the Land: the Birth of the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom edited by Josephine Tankunani Sirivi and Marilyn Taleo Havini PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash [email protected] 10 Rebecca Johnson I Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux; Conversations with Audre Lorde edited by Joan Wylie Hall POETRY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: 11 Peg Aloi I The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain Robin Becker by Alice Weaver Flaherty; An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain by Diane Ackerman ADVERTISING MANAGER: 12 Paula Bonnell, Jane Shore, Kathleen Aguero, Karen Head, Jessica R. Greenbaum, Susan Wicks, Carole Simmons Oles, Anita D. McClellan Kathleen Sheeder, and Robin Becker I Poetry [email protected]

18 Mandira Sen I Madras on Rainy Days by Samina Ali OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler 19 Valerie Miner I Gilead by Marilynne Robinson [email protected]

20 Judith Niemi I >PUBLISHING FOR THE LOVE OF IT: Small presses are changing the world, one page at a time STUDENT WORKERS: Nissa Hiatt, Bethany Towne 21 Ann Snitow I Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice by Carolyn Dever 22 Mary Titus I The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness edited by Susan Koppelman; Venus of Chalk by Susan Stinson EDITORIAL MISSION: To give writing by and about women the seri- 23 Meryl Altman I Cool Men and the Second Sex by Susan Fraiman ous critical attention it deserves. We 24 Karen Kahn I Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS by Anne-christine d’Adesky seek to represent the widest possible range of feminist perspectives both in 25 Julia Query I Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture by Bernice L. Hausman the books we choose to review and in 26 Alison Townsend I Because of the Light by Roseann Lloyd; Buddha’s Dogs by Susan Browne the content of the reviews themselves. 28 Silja J. A. Talvi I Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky 29 Irene Wanner I Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw by Ana Maria Spagna 30 Marie Shear I Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975 by Patricia Bradley The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN #0738-1433) is published monthly 31 Brooks Robards I Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom by Adrienne L. McLean except August by The Women’s Review, Inc. Back issues are available for $4.00 per copy. Please allow 6-8 Contributors weeks for all transactions. KATHLEEN AGUERO is the author of three volumes of poetry, has been contributing to the Women’s Review since its second issue. Periodicals class postage paid at Daughter Of, The Real Weather, and Thirsty Day. She is a professor of English JOYCELYN MOODY is the editor of African American Review and associ- at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA. ate professor of English at Saint Louis University. Boston, MA and additional mailing PEG ALOI is a freelance writer and teacher of creative writing, as well as JUDITH NIEMI is editor of Rivers Running Free: A Century of Adventurous offices. an award-winning poet. Women. She is a freelance wilderness guide, writer, and teacher in St. Paul, MERYL ALTMAN teaches at DePauw University in Indiana. She is MN. Contact her at www.judithniemi.com. spending this year in New York and Oxford, working on the American CAROLE SIMMONS OLES has published six books of poems, most POSTMASTER: send address cor- 1950s and Simone de Beauvoir. recently Sympathetic Systems. She teaches at California State University, Chico. rections to The Women’s Review of ROBIN BECKER’s books include The Horse Fair (2000); All-American Girl JULIA QUERY produced and co-directed the labor film Live Nude (1996); and Giacometti’s Dog (1990). Her honors include a Lambda Literary Girls UNITE! Books, Center for Research on Award and fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the National BROOKS ROBARDS is professor emerita of communication at Westfield Women, Wellesley College, 106 Endowment for the Arts. She teaches English and women’s studies at State College. Pennsylvania State University. MANDIRA SEN lives in Calcutta and is the publisher of two imprints: Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. PAULA BONNELL’s poetry has appeared in Southern Poetry Review, the Stree, which publishes women’s studies; and Samya, which publishes on Boston Herald, and other publications. Her first collection, Message, was pub- social change, dissent, and the construction of culture. The Women’s Review of Books is a proj- lished in 1999. MARIE SHEAR is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY. This is her 19th ect of the Wellesley Centers for BETTINA BRANDT is an assistant professor of German at Montclair contribution to the Women’s Review. State University in New Jersey. KATHLEEN SHEEDER is a former co-editor of the American Poetry Women. JESSICA GREENBAUM’s book of poems, Inventing Difficulty, won the Review. A teacher of English and creative writing, her work has most recent- Gerald Cable Award for a first manuscript. Her poems and essays have ly appeared in Margie: An American Journal of Poetry. The Women’s Review is distributed by appeared in numerous publications, including the Women’s Review, The New JANE SHORE is the author of four books of poems, including Music Ingram, Nashville, TN. All other dis- Yorker, and The Nation Minus One, a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award. KAREN HEAD is a Marion L. Brittain Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and others, she tribution is handled directly by The Technology, where she teaches writing. is a professor at George Washington University. Women’s Review. KERRYN HIGGS is the author of All That False Instruction, Australia’s first ANN SNITOW, co-editor of Powers of Desire and The Feminist Memoir lesbian novel. It was reissued by Spinifex Press in 2001. She is also a free- Project, teaches at New School University. She is a founder of the Network The contents of The Women’s Review of lance environmental writer. of East-West Women, an NGO dedicated to dialogue and mutual support REBECCA JOHNSON writes, organizes, and lives in Dorchester MA. among US feminists and feminist movements in East Central Europe and Books are copyright © 2004. All rights She is an out African American lesbian feminist, and feels like an increas- the former Soviet Union. reserved; reprint by permission only. ingly rare and endangered species. SILJA J. A. TALVI is a Seattle-based journalist and essayist currently work- KAREN KAHN is the communications director for the Paraprofessional ing on a book about women in prison. Healthcare Institute. In her spare time she struggles to find ways to address MARY TITUS teaches English, women’s studies, and American studies at global climate change. St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. ESTHER KAPLAN is a freelance journalist for The Nation, The Village ALISON TOWNSEND is the author of The Blue Dress and What the Body Voice, and other publications and the author of With God on Their Side: How Knows. She is an associate professor of English, creative writing, and Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Bush’s White House (2004). IRENE WANNER teaches fiction writing at the University of RUTH MILKMAN is professor of sociology and director of the Institute Washington Women’s Center in Seattle. Her story collection, Sailing to of Industrial Relations at UCLA. Her current research includes a study of Corinth, won the 1988 Western States Arts Federation award. California’s new paid family leave law, which took effect in July 2004. SUSAN WICKS’ fourth collection is Night Toad (2003). She has also pub- VALERIE MINER’s 12th book is Abundant Light: Short Fiction (2004). She lished two novels and a short memoir, Driving My Father. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 Review’s distinguished writers, dedicated tional labor that effectively excludes most that follows begins “However,” and later staff, and perceptive readers for the last women from scientific professions and in the paragraph we find “But this argu- Letter from the Editor year and a half. It hasn’t always been easy, simultaneously excludes all those values ment does not really work.” I don’t think but all have been my teachers. that have been traditionally regarded as I’ve overstated the extent of the very real Dear Friends, In sisterhood, ‘feminine’ from the practice of science.’” disagreement between them, though it’s As most of you know by now, this Amy Hoffman (Le Doeuff: 146). That sentence seems impossible to reproduce all its nuances issue of The Women’s Review of Books is Editor in Chief pretty unambiguous to me, and it is diffi- here; people will have to work through probably the last you will see in this cult to see how Altman could have read it LeDoeuff ’s argument point by point to form. Chronic budget shortfalls since as “repeating the exclusion of women decide which is right. the mid-1990s have forced us to sus- from science.” Furthermore, I would pend publication (for the details, please Letters have hoped that, by now, I had estab- Dear Editor, see last month’s issue or visit our web- Dear Women’s Review, lished my commitments both to science I am writing in response to the very site, www.wellesley.edu/womensreview). Like the rest of your readers, I mourn and to women in science – indeed, rather interesting article by Paula Caplan and But we will continue our search for an the suspension of the WRB and I want to than agreeing with claims that ‘science is Mary Ann Palko about the lack of additional institution, generous long- take the opportunity here, in this last male’, I have always presupposed my own women reviewers in the NY Times Book term funder, or publisher to join with us issue, to acknowledge the enormous successes as a scientist as something of Review. I had been noticing that often the and the Wellesley Centers for Women, service you, the editors, have performed an existence proof. cover page of the Los Angeles Times Book our “host” since our beginnings in these last 20 years. It is a sad day indeed. Evelyn Fox Keller Review, where the major articles were list- 1983, to re-envision and relaunch the I also want to express my sadness at Cambridge, MA ed with their authors, often included only Women’s Review, “like a phoenix from the the persistence of a discouragingly sim- one women, and always fewer women ashes,” as one of our hopeful writers plistic misreading of my work in the last, Meryl Altman responds: It’s tricky to than men. I started saving the covers, and put it. We’ll notify you of our progress the penultimate issue, of WRB. In her summarize complex scholarly arguments in February 2004 I sent an email with my on our website. review of Michele Le Doeuff ’s The Sex of briefly for a general audience. The “sexist own count of the numbers of male and Producing this last issue has been a Knowing, Meryl Altman does both of us a view that ‘science is male’” describes a female reviewers—which appears to be difficult and sometimes even demoraliz- disservice in attributing to Le Doueff the view held by Bacon, according to Fox- even worse than the NYTBR. I never ing task, especially in the aftermath of claim that I “slip from describing a sexist Keller’s account of Bacon as outlined by received any response. Although not the presidential election. Although view that ‘science is male’ to apparently LeDoeuff; LeDoeuff doesn’t attribute a quite the same study as Paula’s and Mary longer than most, this issue includes agreeing with that view, thus repeating simple view that science is (always and Ann’s since I did not count the numbers reviews of our usual variety of books, the exclusion of women from sci- only) male to Fox-Keller herself, and I of women’s books under review, nor do a from feminist theory and history to ence…”. Le Doeuff does indeed disagree didn’t mean to do that, either. I could complete count of all reviews, I believe poetry, social science to fiction, as well with aspects of my argument, and partic- undoubtedly have explained this better, my less rigorous study more than corrob- as essays and poems—a half-year’s selec- ularly takes issue with my reading of though maybe not in one sentence, and I orates their findings. tions bundled into a single issue (we Bacon, but she at least does me the cour- am sorry to have saddened someone from This is of course additionally distress- published the other half in November). tesy of recognizing the important distinc- whose work I have learned a great deal. ing due to the planned suspension of The In addition, you will find excerpts from tion between the argument I made for a Still, LeDoeuff ’s critique of Fox- Women’s Review of Books. Where will the many thoughtful and moving letters historical conjunction between masculin- Keller’s work, and of “feminist episte- women go who want to have their books we’ve received about the Women’s Review. ist and scientific ideologies and the crude mology” generally, is substantive and reviewed, or who want to write reviews For 21 years, it has been a great source and manifestly dubious claim that ‘sci- well-evidenced, and deserves to be read, for a popular audience, or who simply of inspiration, information, and new ence is male.’ Le Doeuff quotes me as not least because it vigorously challenges want to read intelligent reviews about ideas for feminists in this country and follows: “[Keller] affirms: “This conjunc- some US feminist orthodoxies. LeDoeuff interesting and important books by and around the world. tion between the scientific and masculine does indeed quote Fox-Keller on page about women?? For myself, I want to say it’s been a norms has been historically functional in 146, but she quotes the statement in Kathleen Sheldon great privilege to work with the Women’s guaranteeing a sexual division of emo- order to put it in question; the sentence Santa Monica, CA

(GXFDWLQJWKH3URSHU :RPDQ5HDGHU 9LFWRULDQ)DPLO\/LWHUDU\ 0DJD]LQHVDQGWKH&XOWXUDO Unbridled Books +HDOWKRIWKH1DWLRQ PROMISING THAT RAREST -HQQLIHU3KHJOH\ OF PLEASURES, A GOOD READ (GXFDWLQJWKH3URSHU:RPDQ5HDGHU www.unbridledbooks.com UHHYDOXDWHVSUHYDLOLQJDVVXPSWLRQVDERXW WKHYH[HGUHODWLRQVKLSEHWZHHQQLQHWHHQWK FHQWXU\ZRPHQUHDGHUVDQGOLWHUDU\FULWLFV 3KHJOH\DUJXHVWKDWIDPLO\OLWHUDU\PDJD]LQHV UHYROXWLRQL]HGWKHSRVLWLRQRIZRPHQDV FEAR ITSELF by Candida Lawrence FRQVXPHUVRISULQWE\FKDUDFWHUL]LQJWKHPDV Publication date: October 1, 2004, HGXFDWHGUHDGHUVDQGDEOHFULWLFVUHYLVHVRXU ISBN: 1-932961-01-1 $19.95 HC XQGHUVWDQGLQJRIQLQHWHHQWKFHQWXU\DWWLWXGHV 208 pages, Memoir / Women FORWK; WRZDUGZRPHQUHDGHUVDQGWDNHVDIUHVKORRN FG DWWKHWUDQVDWODQWLFFRQWH[WRIOLWHUDU\ A personal story of persistence and survival in a dangerous SURGXFWLRQ American age. Candida Lawrence fought for years to conceive, realizing her troubles were directly connected to exposure to 7KH,QWHUVHFWLQJ5HDOLWLHV low-level radiation while working for the government. DQG)LFWLRQVRI This heartfelt account is filled with smart, gentle anger, sweet sadness, and the most private sense of the vital. Like 9LUJLQLD:RROIDQG&ROHWWH Refuge from Terry Tempest Williams, Fear Itself addresses +HOHQ6RXWKZRUWK the impact of government secrecy with gentle outrage. ³7KLVLVDQLPSRUWDQWERRNRQHWKDWFKDUWV “Lawrence’s valuable story is frightening in its detailed WKHLQÀXHQFHVDQGFRQQHFWLRQVEHWZHHQZRP information about American lives lost to the secret keepers HQZULWHUVRIWKHHDUO\PRGHUQLVWSHULRGLQ of the national and corporate nuclear industries.” ZD\VWKDWRXWOLQHOLWHUDU\LQWHOOHFWXDOVH[XDO — GRACE PALEY DQGSROLWLFDOFRPSRQHQWVRIIHPLQLVWPRGHUQ “Powerful...The story is one we should all know if we are LVWV7KHUHVHDUFKLQWRWKHZRUNRI9LUJLQLD to chart a better future for those who come after us.” :RROIDQG&ROHWWHLVGHWDLOHGDQGVFUXSXORXV — SUSAN GRIFFIN, A CHORUS OF STONES, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF WAR SURYLGLQJEDFNJURXQGLQIRUPDWLRQLQOHWWHUV GLDULHVDQGRWKHUIRUPVRISULYDWHZULWLQJ PRAISE FOR CANDIDA LAWRENCE’S PREVIOUS MEMOIRS: WKDWVXSSRUWVWKHSHUVRQDOLQÀXHQFHVWKDW VKDSHWKHDUJXPHQWRIWKHERRN´ “Candida Lawrence is a contemporary American heroine.” SDSHU ±6KDUL%HQVWRFN8QLYHUVLW\RI0LDPL — ALISON LURIE FORWK DXWKRURI:RPHQRIWKH/HIW%DQN3DULV “Together,[Reeling & Writhing and Change of Circumstance] FG ± are a wow that will leave you moved, jubilant and incensed.” 7KH2KLR6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV — THE WOMEN’S REVIEW OF BOOKS ZZZRKLRVWDWHSUHVVRUJ

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 3 has focused on the fascist past and anti- Elfriede Jelinek in English Semitic present of Austria and Germany. The Piano Teacher. Translated from the Increasingly, she turns to the theater, German by Joachim Neugroschel. which she sees as politically more effec- Biography of an autobiographer New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, tive than the novel. Working in and 1988. (Translation of Die renewing the tradition of Bertoldt by Joycelyn K. Moody Klavierspielerin) Brecht’s epic theater, Jelinek avoids por- Wonderful, Wonderful Times. Translated traying “real” men and women. Instead, Harriet Jacobs: A Life by Jean Fagan Yellin. New York: from the German by Michael Hulse. she creates flat characters, stereotypes, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990 linguistic surfaces—“billboards,” as she BasicCivitas Books, 2004, 394 pp., $27.50 hardcover. (Translation of Die Ausgesperrten) once called them. Functioning only as amplifiers of words, they cease to exist I Lust. Translated from the German by when they stop talking. Jelinek creates Michael Hulse. London: Serpent’s Tail, and produces her plays in Germany, so ittingly, the Project on the History bondage via the single, personable, aris- 1992 (Translation of Lust) the Austrian public discovers them only of Black Writing marked its 20th tocratic Sawyer. Such romantic fantasy Women as Lovers. Translated from the after a considerable delay. F anniversary on October 1, 2004, was the stuff of Hollywood, but Jacobs German by Martin Chalmers. London: The novel Die Klaviespielerin (which with a lecture by Jean Fagan Yellin, had lived before there was a Hollywood, Serpent’s Tail, 1994 (Translation of came out in German in 1983) is perhaps author of Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Yellin mused. Painstaking research into Die Liebhaberinnen) Jelinek’s best-known and surely her most Throughout her lecture, “Tracking a Jacobs’ fantasy life revealed that her wild autobiographically inspired work. Slave,” Yellin was passionate and persua- hope had been based on the “conjugal” continued from page 1 Published in English as The Piano Teacher sive; everyone in the University of experiences of an enslaved concubine ourworld.compuserve.com/home- in 1988, it marks the author’s internation- Kansas (KU) auditorium was enraptured cum freed mother, Rose Cabarrus, anoth- pages/elfriede/, which is, unfortunately al breakthrough. This clever but disturb- as she described how she researched and er Edenton neighbor. Onto the gentle- for English speakers, in German only. On ing novel portrays the torturous relation- wrote her biography of Harriet Jacobs manly Sawyer, Jacobs pinned her hopes the site, which has had almost 250,000 ship between Erika, a piano teacher, and who, alone among the millions of of stopping Norcom’s ravages. Incidents hits, Jelinek has published widely on con- her overbearing, controlling mother. At enslaved black women, left a life-record divulges virtually nothing of her intimacy temporary issues in Austrian politics and the same time, the novel tells about the of her own making, penned before the with her intellectually lightweight lover— society, including articles on racist police ultimately unsuccessful sadomasochistic Civil War. Yellin’s 1987 edition of Jacobs’ only that her scheme failed. For Sawyer violence and diatribes against the ultra- relationship between Erika and one of incomparable antebellum autobiography, not only never freed their children, but in rightist politician Jörg Haider and his so- her male music students. The film ver- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by New York years later, he worked Louisa called Freedom Party. When Haider’s sion of the novel, directed by Michael Herself (1861), has been translated into Matilda, his adolescent daughter by party joined the government a couple of Haneke and starring Isabelle Huppert, many languages, including French, Harriet, as “nanny” to her half siblings years ago, she forbade performances of won three major prizes at the Cannes German, and Japanese. by his white wife. Eventually, Sawyer sold her plays in Austria in protest. Film Festival in 2001. Yellin first became fascinated with his “mulatto” offspring to Jacobs’ family. Though Jelinek had received numer- Lust is another infamous Jelinek novel. Jacobs while working on her doctoral dis- Jacobs’ virulent insistence that she was ous prestigious German and Austrian lit- Marketed as “women’s pornography” by sertation, published as The Intricate Knot: not saleable chattel—that no human erary awards in recent years, the German- the author and her German publisher, its Black Figures in American Literature, 1776- being is—proved bitterly insufficient to speaking literary establishment was publication was eagerly anticipated by 1863 (1972). Then in 1981, in a ground- secure her own freedom: She had shocked and caught by surprise to learn both feminist and traditional readers of breaking article in American Literature, escaped bondage in North Carolina via that such a controversial political writer pornography. It sold more than 150,000 Yellin cited a newly discovered cache of sailboat in 1842 only to be sold from slav- had been awarded the highest interna- copies and remained on German best- letters that Jacobs sent in 1852 and 1853 ery in New York in 1852. Cornelia G. tional literary prize. In Die Zeit, a high- seller lists for weeks, though in the end, to Amy Post, a white, Quaker anti-slavery Willis, her employer at the time, pur- brow German weekly with a largely aca- few probably read it. Despite the market- and suffrage activist with whom she chased Jacobs’ freedom to save her from demic intellectual audience, a journalist ing, Lust is not a text about women’s sex- briefly lived when she arrived in Rochester imminent threat of capture under the bemoaned what he characterized as the ual fantasies; rather it is an exasperating in the late 1840s. Yellin established that Fugitive Slave Act. moralistic high tone and hysterical finger- short novel that describes the voracious although the narrator of Incidents is called Whereas Part 1 explores Jacobs’ pointing in Jelinek’s work. He mockingly sexual drive of a company director and Linda Brent, Jacobs herself was a histori- “Private Dreams of Freedom and a labeled her “a grand regional writer” and equates his violent lust with capitalistic cal rather than a fictional figure, and Home” as the slave girl Hatty, in Part 2 equated the bestowing of this year’s greed. In an interview, Jelinek rejected all Incidents is not a novel by its famous editor, Yellin explores Jacobs’ “Public Dreams Nobel on the Austrian feminist writer to accusations of pornographic sadism, Lydia Maria Child—a “fact” that had been of Freedom and a Home,” as the anti- awarding “a hamster in a treadmill with arguing that sexuality, as it develops in robustly asserted by the influential US slavery activist “Linda [Brent],” who the most important prize for long-dis- the conventional frame of a heterosexual social historian John Blassingame. It is migrated to the Northern cities of New tance running.” Despite the fact that sev- marriage, with its unequal relations of Jacobs’ own autobiography. Yellin says York, Philadelphia, Boston, and eral of Jelinek’s works have been translat- ownership, is by definition an act of vio- that she had always doubted that Child Rochester. The third section of the book ed into more than two dozen languages, lence by the man against the woman. wrote Incidents: Child was too conscien- is narrated by the venerable, albeit never including Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Because she analyzes while at the same tious an abolitionist to risk the fate suf- married “Mrs. Jacobs.” Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, time reproduces violent pornographic fered by her friend John Greenleaf Hebrew, and, of course, English, the representations, Jelinek has posed a chal- Whittier, who created a scandal in 1838, t KU, Yellin confessed, “I don’t anglophone academic and literary worlds, lenge to German feminists in their when the details of a “slave narrative” he know a lot about biography. I went by and large, remain completely unfamil- debates over pornography. wrote were challenged by slavers as unver- A to conventions and workshops [for iar with her and her work. Hoping to set off a broad, overdue ifiable and thus inauthentic. Whittier’s biographers]…but I’d never written one, Born in a small southern Austrian vil- discussion about Austria’s participation in gaffe had hurt the abolitionist effort, and and I surely never will again.” Just what lage in 1946, but raised in Vienna, Jelinek is National Socialism, in 1984 Jelinek wrote Child would not have cast similar suspi- does enable biography? What does it take the daughter of a Czech Jewish father and Burgtheater, a play named after Vienna’s cion on the story of a formerly enslaved to learn another’s life in detail intricate a Catholic Austrian mother. Her back- most renowned theater venue. It traces woman she had come to admire. enough to reconstruct it? What impels ground underlines the multi-ethnicity of the history of two of the Burgtheater’s Harriet Jacobs is divided into three such intimacy and devotion? Yellin the vanished Hapsburg empire. Her father, rising stars of the 1930s, Paula Wessely parts, each bearing the particular moniker explained that she was “hooked” by the who survived the Third Reich working as a and Karl Hörbiger, who by the end of the by which Jacobs was known during that desire to move from editing Jacobs’ auto- chemist in a strategically important indus- decade became symbols of the Nazi cul- period of her life. As the pubescent biography to writing her biography when try, died in a mental institution in 1968. tural industry. Wessely, Jelinek claims on “Hatty” of Part 1, Jacobs served as she located the records of Jacobs’ exten- Her mother tried to make Jelinek into a her website, was the best-paid actress in nursemaid and domestic in two promi- sive work in the post-Emancipation free- musical wunderkind. While still in school, that system. Denouncing the political nent households in Edenton, North dom and relief movement. She pursued she took organ and piano lessons at the irresponsibility of the much admired Carolina—her birthplace and the site of questions about Jacobs’ sponsors and was Vienna Conservatory. In college she stud- Viennese couple, Jelinek also harshly crit- most of Incidents. In the first household enthralled by the information she found in ied art history and theater at the University icizes the Austrian theater-going public she outwits a lascivious owner, James letters, ledgers, and account books across of Vienna. Around that time, at age 21, that, before, during, and even after World Norcom Sr.—the Dr. Flint of Incidents— New England. She discovered dozens of Jelinek suffered a mental breakdown and War II, turned Wessely and Hörbiger into by seducing his neighbor, Samuel Sawyer. newspaper editorials and letters of protest started to write. Shifting her emphasis the darlings of the Burgtheater. After bearing two children by Sawyer, against the atrocious living conditions of from organ and piano playing to writing, With the rise of the extreme right in Jacobs further “escapes” Norcom by hid- freed refugee slaves that Jacobs wrote dur- Jelinek explains, meant turning away from the Austria of the 1990s, Jelinek became ing for nearly seven years in her grand- ing and after Reconstruction and signed her extremely restrictive mother. She cred- the subject of a widespread defamation mother’s household, under the eaves in a with the honorific “Mrs. Jacobs.” Yellin’s its her father, who loved to argue and campaign; enormous billboards that garret nine feet long, seven feet wide, and formidable investigations took her to the debate, for her fascination with the self- were distributed all over the country read three feet high. In this attic-tomb, Jacobs gold rushes of both California and conscious use of the manipulative power in large letters: “Do you love Jelinek or used a tiny gimlet to carve out a “loop- Australia, as she traced the lives of Jacobs’ of the spoken and written word. do you love Art and Culture?” Perhaps hole of retreat” within her hideout; from brother John and son Joseph. the Swedish Academy answered the this vantage point, she could sew, read, Readers who find redundant the biog- n her first novels, Jelinek criticized question. Jelinek is the first Austrian and most importantly, watch her son and raphy of an autobiographer should heed capitalism and consumer society. writer to be honored by the Swedish daughter at play in the yard. Henry Louis Gates’ 1989 Voice Literary IOver the next decade, she took on Academy and only the tenth woman to Yellin searched out the origins of Supplement review of Arnold Rampersad’s patriarchal society. More recently, Jelinek receive the Nobel prize. I Jacobs’ pipe dream of salvation from two-volume Life of Langston Hughes

4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 that she knew Jacobs deserved—and discursive authority by scrupulously nary woman to re-embody another rejoined to her colleague, “Yes, but it’s an avoiding personal and private rhetorics extraordinary woman’s life. amazing book!” after she wrote Incidents. Nonetheless, Harriet Jacobs includes a now familiar Autobiography differs from biography Yellin demonstrates that Jacobs main- photograph of Jacobs as well as a newly in that the former is necessarily an tained close professional bonds with a discovered one of her amid students at untrustworthy performance, fabricated constellation of 19th-century writers, the school she and her daughter operated by a storyteller who cannot be disinterest- including Child, of course, as well as for blacks at Alexandria, Virginia. ed. Biography analyzes story and story- Jacobs’ 40-year friend and confidante Additional rare photographs in the teller and transcends autobiography by Amy Post, Frederick Douglass, book’s 16-page visual appendix include completing its chronological, historical, Charlotte Forten Grimké, William C. those of family members (including per- and discursive gaps; thus, Harriet Jacobs Nell, and William Lloyd Garrison. After sons thought to be her children); the includes 100 pages of notes and a “select painful encounters with Harriet Beecher Norcoms; various anti-slavery leaders; bibliography” of over 150 citations. Stowe and Nathaniel Willis, Jacobs and the woman who ultimately bought Yellin adds to Jacobs’ story by chroni- deliberately avoided contact with writers her. Also reproduced in the appendix are cling her life after the time period cov- she judged spurious. examples of the vital, explicatory docu- ered in Incidents, from her manumission at At KU, Yellin said of her book, “This ments that Yellin discovered. age 39 to her death in 1897 at age 84. is really a woman’s story! Women are the Yellin concludes her book’s acknowl- Tellingly, Yellin’s biography does not actors throughout.” But she also names a edgments by thanking her children and document the friendships Jacobs enjoyed surprising number of men who helped grandchildren for indulging her devotion with other black women, freeborn or her in her research. In her introduction to to “Harriet.” She asks, “What will life be enslaved. Instead, it portrays a full-tilt Harriet Jacobs, she describes a poignant like without her?” I suspect she’ll never Harriet Jacobs in 1894. From Harriet Jacobs: A Life. activist gravely absorbed in struggles quo- incident in which she assumed she was find out. After all, she is professor emer- tidian and colossal for her own freedom being ignored by a librarian in Edenton itus at Pace University, where she directs and for the corporeal and psychosocial lib- because he was a racist who dreaded her the Harriet Jacobs Papers Project. (1986)—as well as Rampersad’s own Yale eration of other black people—first from efforts to uncover the truth about Jacobs, Undoubtedly, she will produce more Review essays on “Psychology and Afro- chattel slavery, then from the vicissitudes the writer and anti-slavery activist. Yellin Jacobs scholarship yet. I American Biography” (1983, 1986). and vagaries of sudden self-reliance. Still, decided he must fear as well Jacobs’ biog- These scholars call for the production of Jacobs’ intimacy with her daughter Louisa rapher, because she was impassioned, more biographies of black writers and of Matilda suggests a black womanly connec- Jewish, and female. She turned out to be To the Women’s Review: black people generally. At KU, Yellin tion that sustained her. The post- wrong, and this same librarian led Yellin Yours is a wonderful publication that has humbly attributed the inspiration for her Emancipation relief activism of Elizabeth to her crucial discovery that Jacobs’ been a teacher, an activist, an information own venture to another scholar of Keckley, “with whom Jacobs must have father was an enslaved carpenter named portal, and a companion to me for many African American autobiography, worked during the war,” inspired Jacobs, not Daniel but Elijah. Elijah was married years. As a lesbian and a feminist all my adult William L. Andrews, who argued that a Yellin suggests—but apparently across a to Harriet’s mother, then after her death life here in the Midwest (I’m 54), the biography solidifies an author’s canonical social divide. Keckley, a former slave who to a second woman who also bore him Women’s Review has literally helped me status in American belles lettres. Without had maintained her own sewing business children. This discovery highlights the know I am not alone in the world, not in my one, an author remains if not obscure both before and after serving as modiste way Jacobs constructed her autobiogra- values and concerns, not in my interests, not then at least “minor.” When a colleague in the Lincoln White House, belonged to phy, underscoring the exacting care with in my “lifestyle,” not in my politics. How reproved Yellin for expending so much Washington DC’s “colored society.” which she portrayed herself and her fam- great a loss it would be to me to have the professional energy on someone he dis- Jacobs, in contrast, was always a much ily. Jacobs’ account of her escape from Women’s Review cease to exist. missed as a “one-book author,” Yellin humbler social servant. bondage may be a woman’s story about Paula Meredith committed herself to carving out for Highly principled and hardworking, women, but Yellin’s journey includes Royal Oak, MI Jacobs the exceptional place in the canon “Mrs. Jacobs” brooked no threat to her numerous men who helped an extraordi-

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From the first, Christians for Biblical Equality sought Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles out endorsements from prominent male evangelists to validate their views, and the by Julie Ingersoll. New York: New York University Press, group took strong positions against homo- sexuality, abortion, and sex outside of mar- 2003, 181 pp., $18.00 paper. riage that alienated many of its own mem- bers. It’s clear from Ingersoll’s research that Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism edited by there are two tendencies within biblical Abby L. Ferber. New York: Routledge, 2004, feminism, which will be very familiar to anyone who has studied feminism in other 290 pp., $26.95 paper. realms: one strand is merely accommoda- tionist, seeking only to lift the glass ceiling; I the other has the potential to offer a pro- found challenge to the dualisms at the heart erry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other brought in to head up its seminary, where of conservative evangelical thought. The leaders of the evangelical Christian he introduced a series of new litmus tests Christian right now dominates the J right often characterize their attacks on into the job interview process. Once the Republican Party apparatus—playing a women’s equality as a return to “tradition- seminary’s faith tests centered on biblical decisive role on 44 state party commit- al values.” They see themselves as the inerrancy, but Mohler added a series of tees—and holds tremendous sway over the defenders of a biblically ordained social questions about the candidates’ views on current administration in Washington. order built around family (with, in its ideal abortion, homosexuality, and women’s Ingersoll makes a convincing case that this form, a bread-winning husband and a ordination. Even candidates who agreed movement’s commitment to gender child-rearing wife) and church (which, like on every point, but who accepted women’s inequality has become a first principle— the family, should be stewarded by a man). ordination, were blocked from being hired. one that underlies its stances against abor- But the submission of women is actually The seminary’s dean of the School of tion, gay marriage, contraception, and sex quite a recent development in American Social Work, despairing that her school education, which have gone far to shape evangelical culture. Throughout the 1800s, would lose accreditation because these national policy in recent years. The feminist and well into the 1920s, evangelical strictures would prevent her from hiring resistance she documents, if able to assert Christian women frequently served as pas- enough tenured faculty, went public with itself, could have profound consequences tors, missionaries, and traveling prosyletiz- her concerns and was forced out. The not only for evangelical women but for the ers. Women, like men, received calls from School of Social Work was soon shuttered. rest of us as well, by opening the door for God to serve, and their leadership within Mohler, who had at one time supported a detente in our current culture wars. evangelism fueled the moralistic drives for women’s ordination himself (he claims, temperance, abolition, and women’s suf- cagily, to have changed his mind “through he arguments of Abby Ferber and frage that were an essential part of femi- biblical study”), enforced the new party the other contributors to Home- nism’s first wave. line at great cost, proving that he was will- T Grown Hate are far less persuasive. It wasn’t until after World War II, when ing to lose a respected school at his institu- Ferber introduces the collection by assert- the broader culture was championing Rosie tion rather than bend on this gender-based ing not only that “women’s bodies and con- the Riveter’s return home, that evangelicals line in the sand. Tensions were so intense trol over reproduction are central to white adopted their current anti-feminist stance, a at the school, according to Ingersoll’s supremacy,” but that “we cannot under- process that reached its height with the rise sources, that faculty members were openly stand this social movement without exam- of the Christian right during the 1980s and weeping at one meeting with the president, ining it through a gendered lens.” While it’s ’90s and its takeover of entire evangelical and one professor left the room to vomit. easy to agree that a gender analysis would denominations. It was only six years ago Elsewhere, Ingersoll documents add to our understanding of any social for- that the 16-million-member Southern women pastors being barred from con- mation, the writers here fail to make a con- Baptist Convention passed a resolution ducting rituals, such as baptisms, at male- vincing case that gender ideology has calling for women’s submission, and only led churches and prohibited from attend- strong explanatory power when it comes to four years ago that the Convention voted ing pastoral retreats. She interviews white supremacists in the United States. to ban women as pastors. women seminary students who are accused We certainly learn of some retrograde In her book Evangelical Christian Women, of being apostates merely for asking such gender models within American white religious studies scholar Julie Ingersoll questions in class as “Why is God father supremacist movements. Betty A. documents the tremendous amount of and not mother,” many of whom end up Dobratz and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile, force it took to shove women out to the quitting the seminary or taking antidepres- in their essay based on interviews with margins, and the many ways in which evan- sants to weather the oppressive atmos- husband-wife pairs from various white gelical women have been leading an insur- phere. The result is that at schools affiliat- power organizations, bring us a thought- gency against this for the past 30 years. ed with the Christian College Coalition, ful portrait of Linda Storm, a national Supporting the disempowerment of only 19 percent of senior positions are socialist who strongly embraces the view women didn’t have to become the move- filled by women. that her primary role is to bear and raise ment’s test of allegiance, Ingersoll argues, As Ingersoll documents, evangelical children—what another contributor calls and women within the movement may be women have responded to this escalating “racist mothering”—and elsewhere we able to unseat it yet. Gender issues are gender oppression with small acts of meet an older woman who helps girls “not…even the most important ones,” R. rebellion—one Sunday school superinten- mature into racist activists, playing the Albert Mohler, president of Southern dent whose new pastor tried to fire her for role of nurturer for the movement. But Baptist Theological Seminary, tells insubordination marshaled the support of the cumulative effect of these essays is to Ingersoll at one point, her congregation, who fired the pastor lay out a variety of gender ideologies and instead—as well as a few sustained organi- practices within racist movements. Some they are just the clear dividers in zational responses. The most prominent leaders argue for gender inequality based our time. Thirty years from now of these is an organization called on a literal reading of the Bible, while there will probably be different Christians for Biblical Equality, which others argue that such inequalities are ones. Thirty years ago no one doesn’t identify itself as linked to second “natural consequences of the evolution- would have guessed that these wave feminism, but rather, according to ary process.” Still others, according to would become so important.(p. 58) Ingersoll, as the “rightful heir to the nine- contributor Randy Blazak, echo tenets of teenth-century women’s rights move- ecofeminism in their essentialist views of After all, at one time, evangelicals’ most ment.” These so-called “biblical femi- women’s role in reproduction. In contrast pitched public battle was defending bibli- nists” believe in equal opportunity for to Linda Storm, we read that neo-Nazi cal literalism from the onslaught of women, insisting, in particular, that church Erica Chase conspired to bomb Jewish Darwin—not women from the seduc- leadership should be open to women and and African American landmarks and tions of feminism. that the ideal marriage is characterized by that a 12-year-old girl wrote a militant But gender issues have become domi- mutual submission, not a one-way submis- poem for the newsletter White Sisters that nant, as illustrated by Ingersoll’s fascinating sion of wife to husband. But they root reads, “White and proud/That’s what I chapter on recent disputes at Southern these beliefs in a close reading of the am/Storming the streets/Getting rid of Baptist Theological. In the mid-1990s, Bible, sharing as they do the view of other the trash.” While some movement leaders after the takeover of the Southern Baptist fundamentalists, in the words of one par- frown on women working outside of the Convention by conservatives, Mohler was ticipant, “that the Scripture is the whole home, the Klan has hired women in top

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 staff positions and was one of the first national organizations to endorse women’s suffrage. One essay argues that the school women play an important role in move- The myth of balance ment recruitment; another that women among the ruins often serve as the catalyst for men to by Ruth Milkman escape. As Kathleen Blee, the author of three books on women in hate move- Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women ments, points out in her essay, “Women A and Organized Racism,” “[w]omen’s Executives by Mary Blair-Loy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard new activities in organized racism differ con- siderably across groups.” The women University Press, 2003, 269 pp., $39.95 hardcover. collection Blee interviewed spend their time “pho- of tocopying literature, making flyers, dis- The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality poetry by tributing propaganda, spraying racist graffiti on buildings and highways, writ- by Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson. Cambridge, MA: ing to current and potential racist distinguished activists, promoting and managing Harvard University Press, 2004, 259 pp., $45.00 hardcover. poet white power bands” and on and on, a I list that mirrors the range of activities a woman in any social change organiza- e’ve all seen her, on television or multiple shifts) to provide care and gener- Adrienne tion would likely engage in—albeit in print if not in person: the tal- ally embraced the traditional male model toward very different ends. All of this is W ented female professional with of 24-7 commitment to their work. interesting—often stereotype-busting— impeccable credentials who ditched it all to As her research continued, Blair-Loy Rich information, but it does little to bolster become a stay-at-home mom or to work heard story after story about other Ferber’s basic argument. part time. At first I thought this retro, women—by definition not in her original In fact, some of these movements’ post-feminist woman was a media inven- sample—whose initial career trajectories most typically sexist positions are actual- tion, but then I began to encounter her in were similar to the executives’ but who had
 
   ly, on closer examination, anchored in my daily life—among the mothers who do abandoned their positions midstream race. The feminist movement is evil volunteer work at my son’s school, sitting when they became mothers. She ultimately
  because it is controlled by Jews. next to me on airplanes, and even among decided to expand her inquiry to include Abortions are wrong for white women the daughters of my older friends. No sta- these corporate dropouts, and discovered because white procreation is paramount, tistics are available, but clearly lots of that they were just as devoted to their chil- but for people of color it should be women like these can be found among dren as the executive women were to their encouraged. Women should do their today’s flourishing moneyed classes, and careers. Moreover, most of them were own housekeeping and home-school doubtless there are others who would join extremely critical of their sisters who their children not so much to comply them if they could afford it. remained in the corporate world; indeed, with traditional gender roles, but to keep While some popular commentators they tended to castigate full-time employed “mud people” (black and brown people) sneer at those of us who were so foolish as mothers generally. Yet these “family-com- out of the home and to keep children to think it could have been different, oth- mitted” women were well aware of what safe from the polluting influence of inte- ers offer wry if sympathetic humor (Lily they had given up, presenting themselves grated public schools. Tomlin’s “If I had known what it would be as having chosen “an almost ascetic life The essays present delightful evidence like to have it all… I might have settled for path of transcending self-centeredness for that men are recruited to white suprema- less!” is my own favorite). But this newly the sake of others’ well-being.” cist movements at least in part because emergent phenomenon has not gotten Blair-Loy’s comparison of the two membership resolves some crisis of mas- much serious attention in the vast scholar- groups is an imaginative and beautifully ADRIENNE RICH culinity, as illustrated by a cartoon parody- ly literature on work and family that has constructed study that bristles with insight. ing the old Charles Atlas ads in the back accumulated over recent years. Mary Blair- It is not an optimistic account, however. of comic books, this one titled “The Loy’s insightful book, Competing Devotions, Rather than serving up the standard menu In The School Among the Aryan that Made a Man out of Mac.” It helps to fill that gap. of neat public policy fixes to achieve work- closes with the girlfriend of the former Blair-Loy initially trained her sociologi- family “balance,” Competing Devotions Ruins, Adrienne Rich wimp, now pumped up and covered in cal gaze on women financial executives, explains why even such long overdue confronts dislocations swastika tattoos, saying, “Oh, Mac! You curious about how gender might manifest reforms as paid family leave legislation and and upheavals in the are a skinhead after all!” But in the end, itself in a context where traditional forms the proliferation of “family friendly” cor- United States at the the traditional explanation for the growth of inequality between men and women porate benefits are not likely to do much to beginning of the of these movements during the 1980s, were supposedly absent. Rather than look resolve the work-family conundrum with- twenty-first century. which merits only passing mention in this for typical or “representative” women out a far more fundamental set of social In fierce and musical volume, is far more convincing: More workers, as many others have done, she changes. Both corporate elite careers and poems, she traces the than 11 million American workers lost adopted “the strategy of the extreme case.” motherhood, Blair-Loy argues, have deep imprint of a public their jobs due to plant closings and layoffs The elite population of female corporate moral and cultural underpinnings. Both are during the early 1980s, and hundreds of executives, cultivated under hothouse con- governed by what she calls “schemas of crisis on individual thousands of small family farms were ditions in the nation’s top business and pro- devotion” that demand total commitment experience: personal sold off during that decade’s farm crisis. fessional schools, barely existed a genera- to one’s “calling,” whether it be to the cor- lives bent by collective Right wing hate groups were at the ready, tion ago, but now it is larger than ever—if poration or the child(ren). realities, language blaming Jewish bankers, Mexican immi- not quite as large as one might expect 40 itself held to account. grant workers, and African American wel- years after the rebirth of feminism. These hese morally laden schemas are so fare mothers for the fate of the newly dis- women are totally committed to their powerful that they often trump “One of a handful possessed. As we approach the fourth careers; as they told Blair-Loy, they simply T economic rationality. As many year of a jobless recovery, at a time when adore their work, and they routinely used commentators have noted, businesses of major American brutal anti-immigrant policies are being superlatives like “euphoria” and “thrilling” would save considerably on turnover costs poets whose justified by the war on terror, this book, to describe their feelings about it. if they found ways to retain highly trained, every new work for all its textured portraits of white It’s not that sexism has been eradicated skilled female executives by accommodat- is a cause for supremacist gender relations, seems oddly from the corporate suite. Blair-Loy came ing their family commitments. But as Blair- oblivious to these other, quite powerful across several cases of sexual harassment Loy observes, even though such an excitement, Rich social forces. Linda Storm’s husband as well as horror stories like the one about approach would be consistent with the is… stunning in Michael, a national socialist leader, tells his a woman who found a rotten fish in her logic of profit maximization, its implicit her use of skewed, interviewers at one point, “We view all of desk drawer after returning from a vaca- threat to the corporate devotion schema penetrating life, history, everything, from a racial per- tion. But despite all that, these female pio- makes it simply unthinkable. spective.” Why not believe him? I neers are intensely aware of their privi- Along similar lines, in a brilliant stroke, language.” leged status and thoroughly treasure their Blair-Loy points out the contradiction her —Library Journal hard-won positions at the top of the data present to Nobel Prize-winning econ- occupational heap. omist Gary Becker’s often-cited argument To the Women’s Review: As she began to interview these that the gender division of labor at home Sorry to hear about the Review folding. “career-committed” women (a daunting is economically rational, because families NORTON With all the crap being published every- task in itself given their formidable sched- lose less income when women leave the Independent publishers since 1923 where you’d think there’d be room for a lit- ules), Blair-Loy was struck by the fact that labor market to parent than when men do. Available wherever tle substance. almost none of them had children. The Many of Blair-Loy’s family-committed books are sold Jennifer Camper few mothers described themselves as interviewees had jobs paying double or Brooklyn, NY anomalous. They were largely absentee triple the level of their husband’s salaries, www.wwnorton.com parents who hired nannies (sometimes on yet in every case it was they, rather than

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 7 their husbands, who gave up their careers are married to very high-earning men. So to become the primary parent. Unlike the what about the rest of us? corporate devotion schema, which is at least theoretically available to women if his is precisely the focus of The The Bougainville Rebellion they are willing to minimize their involve- Time Divide, another major contri- ment in parenting, the family devotion T bution to the sociological scholar- by Kerryn Higgs schema effectively excludes men. ship on work and family, in which Jerry Many of the “family-committed” Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson provide a …as Mothers of the Land: the Birth of the Bougainville Women women in Blair-Loy’s sample turned out critical review of the vast literature on time to be deeply discontented, confessing use, as well as their own detailed data for Peace and Freedom edited by Josephine Tankunani Sirivi (sometimes in tears) that they found analysis. They adjudicate between compet- child-rearing monotonous and dull. Yet ing accounts of this subject, some of and Marilyn Taleo Havini. Canberra, ACT, Australia: these women professed even more loyal- which argue that Americans are over- ty to the schema of family devotion than worked (indeed, average working hours are Pandanus Books, 2004, 190 pp., $? paper. those in the sample who found genuine longer in the US than in other advanced I fulfillment in maternity, precisely because capitalist societies), and others that suggest of their sense of self-sacrifice. “They can that leisure time is more abundant today ougainvilleans may well be the only copper mine, Papua New Guinea sup- regard themselves as even more faithful than it was a few decades ago. people on earth who have success- pressed the 1975 rebellion. Some autono- mothers, because they have transcended Jacobs and Gerson argue that this B fully forced a transnational mining my was granted to Bougainville, but this their own personal unhappiness to serve debate obscures the gender and class operation off their land. Bougainville involved neither control over the mine nor their children,” Blair-Loy observes. divisions that are central to the process Copper Limited (BCL) abandoned the a share in its profits. Ironically, the same is true of the of time allocation. The overall increase in Panguna copper mine early in 1989 and Once the mine was established, we are “mavericks” among Blair-Loy’s intervie- (paid) working hours, they note, mainly has not returned. BCL was a subsidiary of told in the introduction, wees, those few women who have found reflects the fact that women’s involve- the British-Australian mining giant ways to combine “part-time” (i.e., 40- ment in the workforce has increased in Conzinc Rio, now known as Rio Tinto. displaced Bougainvilleans found hour-a-week) corporate careers with recent years. And the apparent increase in …as Mothers of the Land is a remarkable themselves dependent on the min- mothering. They are totally dedicated to “leisure” is largely a product of women collection of stories told by the women of ing company… Resettled in hot their work and at the same time never spending less time doing housework Bougainville about their lives during the fibro boxes on the edge of moun- miss a school play. They leave the office rather than of any decline in hours ten-year conflict that erupted over the clo- tain ridges, they had to overlook promptly at 6 PM but are back at their devoted to paid work by either men or sure of the mine and the part they played the largest manmade hole in the desks from 9 to midnight while their chil- women. At the same time, parents (of in pioneering a path to peace. southern hemisphere—what was dren sleep. These women are “double both genders) are spending more time Ecologically and geographically, once their land. Beaches along heretics,” whose dual allegiances threaten with their children than in the past. Bougainville is part of the tropical Bougainville’s east coast were both schemas of devotion (and in the Jacobs and Gerson highlight sharp Solomon Island chain. The Melanesian taken from other clans to establish corporate world this “choice,” when per- class differences in time-use practices people of the Solomons are culturally port facilities…and resorts… mitted at all, nearly always comes at the and preferences. The professionals and homogeneous and distinct from the varied Pristine rivers along the west coast price of future advancement). Yet at the managers who get the lion’s share of peoples of Papua New Guinea, some 650 were used as dumping channels for same time the intense commitment of attention in public discussion—of miles to the west. The islanders’ society is the tailings…depriving thousands these women to both schemas of devo- whom Blair-Loy’s subjects are the ulti- matrilineal; women are the custodians of of people of clean safe water. The tion helps to reinforce the tenacious grip mate exemplars—are indeed facing the land and, as such, have a traditional [Jaba River] valley became a moon- of the schemas themselves. In some severe time pressures; but this problem role in decision-making at the highest lev- scape of slush and exposed respects they are even more devoted to is uncommon among less affluent work- els. Life is based on subsistence agricul- bedrock… (p. xviii) their jobs than their coworkers, constant- ers, many of whom would like to work ture, fishing, and cocoa growing. The ly keeping their noses to the proverbial more hours but cannot find jobs that introduction says that “since first contact, n 1988, the discovery of even richer grindstone and forgoing occasions for offer that opportunity. Workers classi- colonial appropriation of large tracts of copper deposits triggered a new wave socializing, for example. Yet simultane- fied as “exempt” from the 1938 Fair land for European plantations and the I of rebellion. The Panguna landown- ously, by voluntarily “taking on more Labor Standards Act—a law the Bush Asian domination of towns for commerce ers, led by Perpetua Serero and her broth- domestic work and by affirming mothers’ administration recently sought to evis- was widely resented.” In the words of the er Frances Ona, demanded massive com- unique cultural mandate… they demon- cerate—work long hours of unpaid landowners of Kieta: pensation from BCL; BCL refused to strate the resilience and resonance of the overtime, while economic restructuring negotiate with them. The Papua New family devotion schema.” has left the nonexempt majority working Land is our life. Land is our physi- Guinea government commissioned an The cultural discourse that these elite fewer hours than many would prefer. cal life—food and subsistence. environmental assessment, conducted by a women invoked often struck Blair-Loy as Jacobs and Gerson show that “the aver- Land is our social life; it is our New Zealand company, which delivered unreflective and clichéd. age length of the workweek has marriage; it is status; it is security; it the astounding finding that the mine had remained largely unchanged since 1970 is politics; in fact it is our only caused no environmental damage. Frances Career-committed group respon- [but that] variation around the average world. When you… take our land, Ona stormed out of the November 1988 dents listed “personal objectives” has increased.” They also distinguish you cut away the very heart of our meeting where the report was presented, and glowed about being “chal- between parents and non-parents, existence. (p.xix) swearing he would shut down the mine. lenged by new opportunities at demonstrating that both women and A former employee there, Ona founded work.” Family-committed group men with young children in most cases In colonial history, national lines were the Bougainville Revolutionary Army members discussed having to “cut would prefer to spend fewer hours usually drawn to suit the colonial powers, (BRA) and launched a campaign of disrup- overhead” when they stopped working outside the home than they who often ignored ethnic boundaries and tion and sabotage, culminating in an attack working. They referred to their currently do—contrary to Arlie the wishes of indigenous peoples. When on the mine’s electricity supply. When he children as “happy little campers” Hochschild’s influential claim in The the British divided the Solomons between blew up the power pylons, production thriving on “TLC.” (pp. 214-215) Time Bind (2000) that parents increasing- themselves and Germany at the beginning stopped. By May 1989, the mine was closed ly see work as a refuge from the tempes- of the 20th century, Bougainville was down. Papua New Guinea struck back, first After initially wondering if her inter- tuous world of home. annexed to German New Guinea. The with riot police, then the army (equipped by views weren’t probing deeply enough, Jacobs and Gerson’s careful, definitive post-war settlement of 1919 retained Australia with four US-made Iroquois heli- Blair-Loy “finally decided that many analysis will be an indispensable refer- Bougainville as part of New Guinea copters), yet the BRA held its own. respondents actually understood the ence in this field for many years to come. under Australian “trusteeship,” despite its In mid-1990, Papua New Guinea with- world in these terms.” They conclude with a list of public poli- links of culture and kinship with the peo- drew its forces, as well as all services, and If their self-understandings are drawn cy prescriptions for such measures as ple of the Solomons. imposed a total blockade, expecting from the most common cultural denom- paid parental leave, government provi- Intermittent objections, requests to the Bougainville to capitulate. Instead, the inator, it is still the case that the women sion for child care, and legislative reduc- United Nations for a return to the BRA, supported by politicians from the Blair-Loy studied are atypical—as she is tions in standard working hours. As a Solomons, and declarations of independ- former provincial government, declared perfectly aware. Most obviously, they are chapter in the book (co-authored with ence all proved fruitless. Just before Papua independence as the Bougainville Interim enormously wealthy: The career-commit- Janet Gornick) reviewing cross-national New Guinea became a sovereign state in Government. Over the subsequent seven ted women earn huge salaries themselves, data makes plain, these are hardly utopi- 1975, Bougainvilleans, who numbered less years, Papua New Guinea armed militias of and the family-committed ones typically an suggestions but rather policies that than 200,000, again tried to secede. By this young Bougainvillean men from the North, most of the advanced capitalist world time, BCL had been mining at Panguna in inciting a civil war; launched intermittent has already adopted. Yet after reading central Bougainville for six years. No envi- invasions; occupied coastal areas; plotted to To the Women’s Review: Blair-Loy, one cannot help thinking that ronmental impact assessment had been hire mercenaries when Australia declined The Women’s Review of Books has been even such basic reforms—which in any carried out. The Australian government military support in 1996; and maintained a steady stream of thoughtful information case have poor prospects of success in had forcibly evicted the traditional the blockade—not even medicine or a tele- about important and underrecognized the US at present—would do little to landowners from the mine site, as well as phone connection was allowed. books in my life since I was a little girl (my undermine the hegemonic cultural from adjacent areas where a workforce The stories told by the editors of …as mom has always subscribed). assumptions, the “schemas of devo- imported from Papua New Guinea set up Mothers of the Land, Josephine Sirivi and Courtney Martin tion,” that continue to define both work villages and gardens, soon encroaching Marilyn Havini, form the central narrative Brooklyn, NY and family in an America where the cor- further on the land. With nearly half its thread of the collection, though accounts poration is king. I foreign exchange due to flow from the by nine other women round out the book.

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 and their clothing was inad- the same plane as delegates allied with speeches and an amazing hot break- equate. Gardens took Papua New Guinea. fast [of]… island-style cooked taro longer to grow and hunger Marilyn, one of the 13 women, came in and sweet potato. (p. 134) was endemic. When people from Sydney and was part of the advance had to escape through the party that met the arrivals from That first Burnham meeting led to a jungle, their beds in Bougainville. By chance, the BRA and truce and, over the next year or so, a cease- makeshift camps were rebel government leaders had boarded ear- fire was achieved; eventually the PNGDF soaked by the tropical rain. lier and were seated at the back, so dele- left Bougainville. For Josephine, the piv- Childbirth was a deadly risk gates from the Papua New Guinea-backed otal factor at Burnham was the presence of and illness a disaster, espe- government and the militias emerged first. the women. She describes a spontaneous cially for children and the Enemies perhaps, but many were from sense of solidarity emerging among them old; malaria and tuberculo- Buka and some were from Marilyn’s adop- as they poured out their harrowing experi- sis could not be treated tive Buka clan. In such a small population, ences and their feelings about the war. without Western medicines. ties of family and friendship still counted, After Burnham, she founded the Josephine’s first daughter despite everything—and in this moment Bougainville Women for Peace and was born in the jungle, finally cut across years of warfare. Freedom, which fostered reconciliation without medical aid. between the warring parties and between However gruelling these [W]e embraced them coming perpetrators of brutality and the aggrieved experiences, the tenacity through the gates. We could not let relatives of their victims. Map from …as Mothers of the Land. and resilience of the them walk past us and so we were Bougainvilleans enabled drawn into the terminal clutching his book is not a history in the con- Josephine was 22 years old and engaged to them to survive. Though many died, they our loved ones… By the time… ventional sense. It reads more like Sam Kauona, a young officer of the Papua revived their pre-contact traditions and [our own] delegates found their way T myth or fable—unbearable suffer- New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF), combined these skills with the knowledge into the terminal, we were moving ing and brutality are resolved through a when the BRA blew up the power line to some had gained through Western educa- across the ‘divide’ to embrace or miracle of reconciliation and hope. The the mine. Papua New Guinea sent in extra tion. Traditional agricultural knowledge shake hands with everyone we mosaic of accounts is non-linear. I had to riot squads that intensified removal of vil- was rediscovered and the old staple foods knew… Then the New Zealand rely on the Internet to create a functional lagers into “care centres” in Arawa, the grown again. Gardens were established, hospitality took over with welcome timeline of events; although some maps are coastal town that served the mine. Villages distant from the hideouts and small in were often burned—1600 dwellings were scale for safety’s sake. The women— destroyed over the next year. Sam came always the gardeners—walked miles to under suspicion from the PNGDF after he tend them and hauled bags of produce attended a meeting of rebels. home in the evening. Josephine tells the Sam was from central Bougainville and story of accidentally harvesting too connected to the people there. When he much one day and carrying bags as big as discovered he was on an army hit list, he herself for hours into the night, over a defected to the BRA and became its train- mountain range, until she fell headfirst er and military chief. Josephine, married to down a steep slope and, injured, had to him by then—and pregnant—lay low in crawl the rest of the way. her village south of Arawa, then moved Older men taught trapping and hunting further south to a Catholic mission. But to the boys. Traditional healers, who had the raids and killings kept spreading. She been sidelined as “witchdoctors” and heard of priests brutally beaten when they “quacks” in recent history, shared their tried to visit their parishioners in Arawa. knowledge of plants and remedies and Her friend Marcelline had a son who was resumed practicing skills such as bone-set- picked up by the PNGDF; she found him, ting. People worked out dozens of ingen- shot dead, in the morgue. Then, in July ious technologies, harvesting sea-salt, mak- 1989, a mother and her 14-year-old daugh- ing soap, and inventing a fuel from coconut ter who were friends of Josephine’s family oil suitable for trucks and generators. Men were killed, mutilated, and their bodies set up small water-power projects, which desecrated. Josephine fled to a hideout in brought the first electricity to remote parts the mountains built by her family, a prepa- of Bougainville. Solar-powered mobile ration made by many who were connected radio transmitters kept the rebel leaders in to the rebels or unwilling to live under cur- touch with their people, the refugees in the few in the “care centres.” Solomons, and the world beyond. Australian-born, Marilyn married Bougainville is a strongly Christian Moses Havini, a Bougainvillean, in 1971 society, and the women’s organizations and moved to Bougainville’s Buka region. owed much to the support and inspiration “My new adoptive Buka family,” she of Catholic, United, Adventist, and writes, “had welcomed me into their Pentecostal churches. One organization, hearts to such a degree that I melded under the leadership of Adventist Ruby with the clan… I had found acceptance Mirinka, who had been the principal of as a ‘mama’… earning respect by raising the Arawa Nursing School before the war, many children besides my own in the 20 established dozens of health clinics, com- years I had spent in the paradise that is… munity schools, and even a jungle nursing Bougainville.” The Havinis, who were liv- school behind the blockade—as well as ing in Arawa at that time, stayed on launching a travelling health show teach- through 1989, as the violence escalated. ing nutrition, sanitation, and the causes, At the start of 1990, with Moses threat- symptoms, and prevention of diseases. ened by chaotic rebel elements as well as Ruby’s people ran the blockade with pens, the PNGDF, they accepted the books, and other aid sent by Australian Australian government’s offer of entry trade unions and nongovernmental for Moses and flew to Sydney. Just before organizations and were involved in the the blockade was imposed, the rebels training of radio operators, hydro engi- contacted Moses in Sydney and asked neers, and a dentist. him to represent the rebel government to the outside world. he third part of the book traces The first two parts of the book tell the unfolding of the peace tragic and heroic stories of life during the T process. In 1997, after numerous war—focusing on the difficulties of life on talks had failed, the New Zealand govern- the run in the mountains of central ment offered to host new negotiations. Bougainville and the courage and commit- Thirteen women were among 70 dele- ment that maintained the community. gates sent to the first meeting at the The Bougainvilleans endured immense Burnham army camp. hardships in the mountains. There were Bougainvilleans from opposing sides brutal assaults—villages burned and had agreed that they needed to meet strafed, family members killed, maimed, together and unite before negotiating with and raped—and the ever-present fear of Papua New Guinea, though how they helicopter attack. The mountain climate reached this felicitous decision is not was colder than the people were used to, explained. The rebels flew to Burnham in

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 9 provided, many places are not marked, and dose of her making her own myth. Warrior further research was necessary to grasp the Poet, for the first time, reveals the private spatial dimensions of the rebel effort, the Lorde—the one who sought out of jealousy territory they held, the civilian hideouts, The life and the myth to keep her literary agent from taking on and the routes across the blockade. June Jordan as a client. Who identifies her- In addition, there is little explanation by Rebecca Johnson self with “all those ‘feisty, incorrigible, beau- of the genesis of divisions between tiful Black women’ who insist on standing Bouganvilleans—what, for example, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux. up and saying ‘I am,’” but who in fact had induced men to join the militias? Marilyn little schooling in what it meant to be part of mentions a broad division between North New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, an Afro-Caribbean or African American and South, but does not elaborate. We are community. As a child, Lorde felt, on sever- also told that the conflict spread outwards 512 pp., $29.95 hardcover. al levels, unloved by her mother, not least from Panguna in the southern half of the Conversations with Audre Lorde edited by Joan Wylie Hall. because she was awkward, dark skinned (by country. I could only guess that the land her family’s standards), and extremely near- and lives of people living in Buka where Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, sighted. Her mother did not allow her to the militias originated—100 miles north socialize with African American children in of Panguna—were not much disrupted 2004, 199 pp., $20.00 paper. the Harlem neighborhood where she lived. by the copper mine. It’s also clear that I She attended all-white private elementary local men served in the PNGDF and that, schools. By her own telling there was no one unlike Sam, some did not defect, perhaps er poems were a revelation. I was of an introduction buttressed by concerns to reflect back to her the dignity and beauty because the army was their livelihood, 23, closeted, black Catholic, and about structuring identity, historical record, of the African diaspora, no one to encour- perhaps because their clans were not H desperate to understand my feel- triangulated constructs, and discursive age her to strive for the good of her people: affected by the mine. ings and their meaning for my life. The fic- interpretations was the essence of the Indeed, she didn’t know many Caribbean Yet, however fuzzy and puzzling the tion and poetry of black women were my author’s dilemma. people, except for her mother’s sisters in facts sometimes are, the purpose of this lifeline, but I had never experienced anything New York City. book is to preserve the personal stories of like Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn (1978). And how to write of an Audre Lorde In group social theory there is a paradigm the women who participated, and these I read “A Litany for Survival” to the older who was brilliant, intimidating, called Johari’s Window. Our self-awareness are emotionally powerful and inspiring. black women with whom I organized. I visionary: a woman who was cre- can be described as a window with four Marilyn’s piece about the breakthrough at wanted to discuss the meaning of “Walking atively ambitious; financially generous panes: things I know about myself and the first Burnham meeting still makes me Our Boundaries” with closeted and con- toward other women writers, though things others know about me, called the cry, and the long term impact of fused white nuns. I shared “Sister Outsider” she was often barely solvent herself; Arena or Open Area; things I don’t know Bougainville’s courageous women was with the mentally ill homeless women living competitive with respect to her peers; but others do know, called the Blind Spot; ground-breaking. in community with us. Erotic, startlingly sexually aggressive; vulnerable to any things I know but others don’t know, called Bougainville Women for Peace and political, lyrically complex, essentially real or perceived racial slight…. How the Hidden Area; and finally, things that nei- Freedom maintains its vision of a future African, unabashedly queer, these poems to write of her rage and oftentime ther I nor others know, called the Unknown without mining and without dependence honored a previously unrevealed way of life. violent temper; to present her as real Area. When I read in De Veaux about on multinational corporations, encourag- I felt I had found a path to my own voice rather than as monstrous. (pp xii-xiii) Lorde’s complex relationships with black les- ing the old barter system and self-deter- and way in the world. I became a devoted bian activists, black lesbian writers, white mining local economies, caring for land reader of the works of Audre Lorde, finally In fact, De Veaux’s first frustrating (and men, her father, her lovers, her children, her and water in the context of sustainable meeting her at the I Am Your Sister frustrated?) sentences can in no way prepare therapists, her sisters, white women—just agriculture, and pressing for the constitu- Conference, a celebration of Lorde’s life, in us for the contradictions of Lorde’s life. about anyone in her private life—I felt jarred tional recognition of women’s customary Boston in 1990. I came out, loved and love Many of us believed that Zami: A New by the ways the panes of Lorde’s window leadership roles in community and politics. women, and view my activism as the quin- Spelling of My Name was the defining expres- kept shifting, expanding, and contracting— Ironically, it was a bloody civil war that tessential demonstration of that love. It was sion of Lorde’s personal history. She herself revealing and disappointing. I became aware restored to women their precolonial status with great eagerness that I looked forward referred to it as “bio-mythography.” De of my own “open window” and of how and power. This stirring book tells how. to the publication of Lorde’s biography, Veaux eschews myth. Yet it was the myth that much I needed—and still need—Lorde to Warrior Poet. I read Alexis De Veaux’s open- attracted me and others to Lorde. I go to be the perfect revolutionary black woman, Postscript: At the end of 2004, UN ing pages, the first sentences in the intro- many meetings with young progressive the perfect sister/outsider, as an anchor for peace monitors are due to withdraw. duction to Warrior Poet: “Audre Lorde lived activists and, inevitably, male or female, they my own identity as an activist in the world. Free and democratic elections for an two lives. As this biography proposes, in her refer to Lorde. She is larger than life for autonomous provincial government first life the three themes of escape, free- them. But De Veaux seeks clarity of vision; ere is an example of a little thing were supposed to have been held dom and self-actualization were crucial she undertakes the compassionate untangling that I found disturbing in De before they left; this is now thought determinants.” She goes on, “Crucial to of a woman navigating a critical historical HVeaux’s book. First I want to to be unlikely, but a firm date is understanding Lorde’s two lives was coming moment. To accomplish this, De Veaux dis- invoke Rita Dove. She writes odes to the expected by then. A referendum on to terms with how to write her biography.” tances herself somewhat from her subject. existence of the Maple Valley Branch independence will not be held for I stopped. What is this dance the author is De Veaux helps us to answer this ques- Library in Akron, Ohio. She learned to read another ten years. The Panguna cop- performing, and why does it feel so distant, tion: Was Lorde a pioneer, crossing barriers there. She was nurtured by black women per mine remains closed. so cautious, so sad? of race, ideology, genders, sexual orienta- librarians into her writer’s life. Early in Bougainvilleans generally support full I love biography. I believe it requires the tions, family structures? Was she an icon of Warrior Poet, De Veaux describes how Lorde independence, but most have accept- greatest skill to portray a life, to open it to intentional self-definition, self-created from learned to read at the Countee Cullen ed autonomy as the next step. public scrutiny while allowing for the inher- her multiple experiences in this capitalist, Library, the segregated, colored library in I ent unknowability of any human being. I racist society? Or was she someone much Harlem. Later, after Lorde graduated from expect a biographer to reveal a certain more ordinary, more like you and me, who high school, she met Ida Cullen, Countee entanglement and engagement with her discovered the courage to look outside of Cullen’s widow. Lorde was an admirer of To the Women’s Review: subject, some obvious demonstration of the narrow boundaries imposed on her by Cullen’s poetry. She was invited to attend Unbearable! The sad news from the edi- strong emotion, like the opening sentences life and by her own choices? Lorde wanted writer’s workshops at the Harlem Writer’s tor’s desk arrived, of course, on the first of Wrapped In Rainbows, Valerie Boyd’s biog- us to see only the former. De Veaux wants Guild, the organization that worked to mo(u)rning after the election. And the rea- raphy of Zora Neale Hurston: “There was us to meet and learn to love the latter. uphold the glorious literary legacy of sons you list for the “demise” of the publica- never quite enough for Zora Neale Hurston Warrior Poet is a study of how oppression Harlem. So the reader gets the sense that tion are a litany of all our losses. in the world she grew up in, so she made up shapes a life, and how, with no role models, Lorde was aware of, and perhaps valued, Let me join the many who will be thank- whatever she needed… young Zora lacked one woman resisted and overcame racism, African American culture, even if as a child ing you for being there. Each issue was like no material comforts. … But Zora had colorism and internalized color prejudice, her color-struck parents would not allow a visit from old (and new) friends. And you other needs. She needed to know for nationalist superiority, homophobia, and her her to associate or even go to school with have meant even more than that to so instance, what the end of the world was own sense of being unloved and unlovable black children. Yet Lorde says in many. When I was asked review a woman’s like.” The best biography is a work of to become the poetic voice and role model Conversations that all her poetic role models memoir of the civil rights movement, and love—not uncritical idol worship, not shal- for several generations. How Lorde strug- were white men. While she appreciates the then another and another, the tasks took my low hagiography, but love demonstrated by gled her way out of these oppressions—or social significance of black poets’ accom- scholarship and teaching in whole new the rendering of a life in all its complexity, didn’t—makes Warrior Poet sometimes plishments, she implies that black male writ- directions. My students and I thank you for ambiguity, and uncertainty. painful reading. ers like Cullen were collaborators in the the foundation of what became my courses Was the task of explicating Audre’s life I read Warrior Poet side by side with oppression of women. The reader can feel in Writing the Civil Rights Movement. And merely an academic exercise? Would the Conversations with Audre Lorde, a compilation her love of Byron, Keats, Shelley, thus my career came full circle to where I whole book be one long, post-modern cliché? of interviews. Lorde’s tendency toward Wordsworth, Hopkins but not the continu- had started as an activist 40 years ago. It turns out that De Veaux’s first act of mythmaking generates some dissonance ity between that colored lady librarian who May we all bring the courage, determi- love and sisterhood was for us readers, giv- between the life De Veaux describes and the taught her to read and the black poets who nation, fellowship, and outrage of those ear- ing us a kind of foreshadowing that would one Lorde presents in her own words in made her career possible. lier struggles to bear upon this ever-more- lower our expectations, dampen any ten- Conversations. Conversations is the public De Veaux says clearly that Lorde valued perilous world. Thank you for being there. dency to idol worship, call upon us to open Audre Lorde of Black Unicorn and and cultivated a “persona as mother figure, Margo Culley up to the possibility not only of Lorde’s Sister/Outsider. It occasionally hints at the as authority” and in some ways used that Amherst, MA wonderfulness but also of her sometimes petulant, I-am-underrecognized-as-the- image to maintain the outsider status that intensely flawed ordinariness. In the middle artist Lorde, but mostly we receive a full was so crucial to her self-definition. This

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 outsider status was the result of her attempt find yourself drawn to reading a book to make meaning of all the ways she did not while you’ve got a dozen writing projects fit in, all the places in her life where she had on the burner (see “writer’s block” no one to show her the way. In Conversations How we think above), you might have a niggling little she says, “I have always been the outsider voice in your head that says you’re being because I defined it as survival.” Her strug- by Peg Aloi “good” when you read nonfiction and gle to claim a life, to survive all the external “naughty” when you’re reading fiction. and internalized oppression, is what gave us The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, Ackerman’s nonfiction work, however, is her poetry and her essays—“Master’s so rich with metaphor and sensual Tools” and Black Unicorn and Cancer Journals and the Creative Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty. description (she’s written several volumes and Zami. Lorde took great risks in writing of poetry as well) that I confess to feel- such essays as “Master’s Tools.” How iron- New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 307 pp., ing guiltily pleasured by the time I’ve fin- ic it is that the academic feminists who were $24.00 hardcover, $13.00 paper. ished. In her previous books, A Natural once insulted by her arrogance now History of the Senses and A Natural History embrace her ideas as centerpieces for theo- An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain of Love, Ackerman’s experiences of the ries of difference, social change, and revo- sensual world and her forays into idio- lutionary progress. by Diane Ackerman. New York: Scribner, 2004, syncratic studies of science, art, psychol- De Veaux explains the context for 320 pp., $25.00 hardcover. ogy, and literature are crafted into mosa- Lorde’s achievements; yet, puzzlingly, her ic-like texts, organized as much according book ends in 1986. This is where I to publishing logic as to her own person- Conversations is useful. It provides a chronol- al mode of inspiration. Of her muse, ogy of Lorde’s life and interviews from o people who do what is some- writing and its attendant difficulties have Ackerman has said in Senses, it is “male, 1975 through 1990 on a range of issues: times called “honest work”—say, been nearly invisible until recent years. has the radiant silvery complexion of the poetry and its writing, teaching, coming to T growing vegetables or cutting hair Writer’s block, the converse of hyper- moon, and never speaks to me directly.” identify as an internationalist and a woman or putting up drywall— the work of the graphia, which Flaherty also investigates, It is not surprising that the author of color, and Lorde’s struggle with the can- writer looks suspiciously sweatless, if not is less easily traced to specific brain disor- would eventually turn her interest to the cer that took her life. Lorde was active in downright lazy. Writers have the dubious ders and, Flaherty argues, is usually attrib- workings of the human brain, since she the world—traveling, writing, publishing, distinction of being able to work while utable in whole or in part to emotional has always demonstrated such fascination and receiving such honors as the I Am Your appearing to do absolutely nothing. and personal sources having to do with with her experiences of creativity and her Sister conference and being named the poet Putting pen to paper or fingertips to key- motivation, fear, trauma, loneliness, or thought processes. About a third of this laureate of New York state—practically board (or voice to voice-recognition soft- performance anxiety. Nevertheless she book consists of sometimes playful exam- until the moment of her death in ware) has to happen eventually. But the examines the many physiological possibil- ination of the complex workings of the November 1993. process of creation, of planning, solving ities that can contribute to this frustrating brain, based on contemporary scientific These two books call us to embrace all problems, making decisions, and receiving and potentially career-crippling condition. case studies and experiments, as well as a of life—our own and that of our heroes— inspiration may be done without moving In one fascinating example, Flaherty number of historical examples. It’s always even when it is confusing or embarrassing. a muscle, although some writers may describes the effect of menstrual rhythms great fun to read Ackerman’s erudite, live- In that embrace is the freedom for which walk, drink coffee or knit to get the cogs in the poetry of Plath, whose recently ly writing, and she is at her best when she Audre Lorde struggled. I turning. These two books offer profound published, unexpurgated journals show is sorting out intricate layers of meaning, insights into the marriage of thoughts that “her poetry’s content and style… conjecture, and possibility, mellifluously and words, process and product, with fluctuated dramatically with her menstru- melding references to science and art in which writers are intimately familiar. al periods.” The “Ariel” poems, Flaherty the same sentence, as she does here: To the Women’s Review: Diane Ackerman’s prose is learned and says, clearly show a preoccupation with I admit it: I took The Women’s Review of lush, and her adventures among aro- menstrual and reproductive imagery: The brain toils seamlessly, above Books for granted. As a reader, I knew I could matherapists, musicians, and ornitholo- “Their themes of barrenness, fertility, and below the pond scum of always turn to the WROB if I wanted a feminist gists provide intriguing frameworks for misery, bleeding and relief are overseen awareness, integrating millions of take on a much-hyped (or underreported) discussing the brain’s workings. Alice W. by the image of an inspiring but indiffer- messages, calculations, appraisals, novel, political screed, or academic analysis. Flaherty, a neurologist, is more methodi- ent moon goddess.” Flaherty points to a updates—coming from the round When a new issue arrived I’d cattycorner cal and less prone to poetic expression, telling line in the poem “Poppies in July”: body’s imagined corners, as John pages in my mental filing system, always but her writing is nevertheless engaging “If I could bleed, or sleep!” Flaherty Donne might say, and from its intending to go back to those pieces exploring and accessible. Both writers draw upon notes that women suffering from bipolar own mirrored hive, its own bees of women’s unique experiences of war and cor- their personal experiences to moor their disorder, as some scholars believe Plath the invisible. To its named owner, porate globalization, deciphering gendered theories and ideas, helping readers navi- did, often suffer from severe premenstru- it speaks in streams of conscious- nuances in science fiction, or advancing new gate through their dense studies with al syndrome; she also notes with careful ness, image, and back talk. (p. 29) arguments on the evergreen topics of race, occasionally prosaic and often surprising- neutrality that Plath’s suicide occurred class, and gender. ly gender-specific discussions of post- during a pre-menstrual period. This passage comes immediately after Now that I hear the Review is closing up partum disorders, menstrual mood Writers who occasionally suffer from she analyzes her own sensation of hunger shop, I find myself reacting as I would in a swings, and hormonal discrepancies. writer’s block may find Flaherty’s explo- and her choice of a snack to assuage it (an breakup: I regret all the pieces I never got Flaherty’s interest in the connections ration of hypergraphia somewhat anxi- apple, walnuts, and dark chocolate). around to reading. As a writer, I’m kicking between writing and brain function ety-producing. But if this is the case, her Ackerman frequently describes personal myself over the profiles, reviews, and analyses I began when she experienced periods of chapters on writer’s block are downright encounters with family, friends, lovers, intended to pitch but put off until a later date. hypergraphia, or a compulsion to write, comforting; not only because she capably colleagues, and strangers (not to mention This newspaper always allowed me the space during two periods of post-partum examines its many causes but also animals and plants, and most often, her- to offer a progressive feminist analysis sorely depression. She gave birth to premature because she puts forth intriguing solu- self) to illustrate her points. Here she con- missing from most corporate news outlets. twin sons who died and, a year later, to tions, while at no time turning her intelli- siders her own hyper-curious, sensual Sadly, the alternatives don’t do much to twin daughters who survived; both expe- gent and serious work into a self-help worldview as compared to a group of her advance women’s underheard voices on pro- riences catalyzed in her an intense desire book. Midnight Disease is appealing pre- writing students gressive issues: the contributors’ pages for lefty to write, and Flaherty later researched cisely because Flaherty tempers her med- pubs like The Nation and Extra! show the same the phenomenon in both medical and lit- ical expertise with insights derived from whose work was surprisingly jaded continued underrepresentation of female writ- erary contexts. Hypergraphia turns out her own curiosity and experiences as a and featureless. Where was the ers as the corporate press they criticize. to be closely connected to temporal lobe writer. Not since reading the work of texture of life, I wondered, the feel As a feminist media critic and freelance afflictions commonly seen in people suf- Oliver Sacks have I come across a book of being alive on this particular journalist, I am losing one of the only outlets fering from epilepsy, bipolar disorder, by a medical scholar that is so eminently planet? Didn’t it strike them as that always welcomed my voice. And as read- and schizophrenia. Referring to the lives readable and personally useful. My own astonishing that they shared the ers, we will find that the cultural landscape and work of writers as diverse as Lord experiences with writer’s block are not planet with goldfinches and will be less rich and nuanced without The Byron, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, inconsiderable; The Midnight Disease (a heliarc welders and dung beetles Women’s Review of Books. That said, every- Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, William term first attributed to Edgar Allen Poe, and blood brothers and shiitake one who misses the Review should make a Wordsworth, and Sylvia Plath, all of who used it to describe the impulse that mushrooms? Where was their fas- personal commitment to support independ- whom are believed to have suffered to causes writing) has offered me some cination with the world pressing ent media outlets and feminist media proj- some degree from at least one of the invigorating ideas for confronting my indelibly on what they wrote? ects, from the magazine Bitch: Feminist aforementioned conditions, Flaherty struggle with it. The book is a skillful (pp. 48-49) Response to Pop Culture, to the Center for offers the opinions and findings of many study from an author whose mining of New Words (formerly New Words biographers and medical experts on the anecdotal and scientific evidence and lit- Ackerman then describes an exercise Bookstore), to Women In Media & News impact of various brain disorders upon erary and medical scholarship are as fluid, in which she asks the class to look out of (WIMN), the grassroots media analysis, train- creative output. She acknowledges that memorable, and thought-provoking as an open window and “choose one sen- ing, and advocacy group I direct. If we value the phenomenon of hypergraphia is less any great novel. sory event that seemed eloquent” to women’s participation in the public debate, frequently documented in female than in them; obviously she thinks these stu- we must do our best to defend it. male writers, but it’s not clear if this is eading the essays and books of dents capable of the same sort of Jennifer L. Pozner because hypergraphia occurs less fre- Diane Ackerman can often feel ecstatic observation that she herself is. Brooklyn, NY quently in women or because women’s R like reading an autobiographical Ackerman believes deeply in the possi- novel. If you’re like me, and occasionally bilities of the human mind and relates

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 11 this often: “We can’t enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep atten- Poetry tion.” She again calls upon personal experience to explain what she means by enchantment, saying

my life had been changing, I’d been near death several times, and the simple details of being had become precious. But I also rel- ished life’s sensory festival, and the depot where nature and human nature meet. Everything that happens to us—from choos- ing the day’s shoes to warfare— shines at that crossroads. (p. 49) We Did © Jean Wolfe Some may find Ackerman’s anecdotal, I got lost and ended up taking reflective approach self-indulgent or nar- somebody else’s trip to Maine cissistic. I do think this current book is There was the dancefloor more self-aggrandizing than her previous where she learned to dance — ones, because she frequently describes it was raked (and had linoleum tiles) ways in which she believes her own brain There were the Mexican jumping beans is unique (her synesthesia, for example, a stuck between the pp. of a book phenomenon in which the senses merge, There was the livercolored spaniel, giving one the perceived ability to smell the painting of the summerhouse colors or see music), and these anecdotes across the bay, the hot springs are often the point of departure for her in the cold river (in Maine?) discussion of a more general subject. and the industrial park Consider her moving account of a seri- where the locals trysted ous accident and near-death experience And I mustn’t forget that she had on an expedition to a small the reunion where she sat Japanese island to see a rare breed of between two people who where albatross. Her guides were strong, expe- terrified to see each other again rienced mountain climbers. Ackerman And the room where we pushed admits she was not prepared for the the twin beds together, she and I physical demands of the journey to the cliffs where the albatrosses lived. She fell, breaking several ribs and suffering severe inflammation. She did not find out the Dog Left at a Strange Place nature of her injuries until days later, however, and went through a harrowing Is this my new life? period of pain, fever, and loneliness on a remote outpost. The rooms all garble Everything smelling so loud A noise outside. Animal? Human? No place to put my smells Trying to call out, I again discov- Their smells nowhere to be found ered I couldn’t inflate my chest Where are the eyes to look into? enough to shout. Pain was a tight suit of armor. A backlit figure Am I waiting? appeared in the doorway. Was it real? Hallucination? What was the And what of the new ones Japanese word for help? (p. 180) who watch me eat my food without my food place In her delirium, Ackerman swears she to be safe in? saw angels: Is this the dish that used to be Cold became a heavy ingot inside always the same dish? me. When I opened my eyes I saw an angel fluttering in the doorway, It is all startle startle haloed in light. She metamor- my nose and ears can’t stop — phosed into a beautiful white alba- it - them - light - it - food tross with long wings and a yellow dish - them - cold floor - screen door - head. Again she became the angel, snuffle dust - it - it - ringing - floating leglessly into the barracks, them - door - it - then she vanished in darkness, behind me and all moving — reappearing beside me. Just as suddenly she disappeared. Time The song of the chicken bone passed like a well I had fallen into secret in the garbage without hitting bottom. (p. 181) might as well not be in the uproar - The lens through which Ackerman I avoid it just as though sees her world (for it is a Diane it didn’t get through to me Ackerman world, we just live in it) is col- All hitting me hitting me ored by her areas of expertise: biology, what is about anthropology, poetry, perfumery, and the to start? more pedestrian arts of gardening and sex. Religion and politics find their way —Paula Bonnell in, too. Because she is a poet, it seems appropriate that she often waxes poetic, even when discussing highly technical subjects, including the complex functions of our brains. Ackerman relishes the mystery even as she attempts to unravel it. Flaherty, in contrast, is a scientist first and a writer second. Both books elo- quently explore that elusive, automatic act of thinking that most of us perform without, well, thinking about it. I

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 Poetry

My Mother’s Chair Ode to Utensils after Charlie Smith Coming home late, I’d let myself in with my key, tiptoe up the stairs, Opening the drawer, I like the old-fashioned egg beater best, and there she was, in the family room, green painted handle so worn and flaked one lamp burning, reading her newspaper the blanched wood underneath shows through. in her velvet-and-chrome swivel chair, I like to see the evidence of another hand beneath my own. I like how the twin rotors spin as though it were perfectly natural in tandem, whipping up ghost breaths across my face. to be wide awake at two am, I like the old apple corer and potato masher, feet propped on the matching the ones you find in flea markets or farmhouses, ottoman, her orthopedic shoes and the hinged egg slicer that, when opened, underneath, two empty turtle shells. is like the miniature lyre I used to pluck in the windowed corner of my mother’s kitchen, On the table beside her, its perfect slices of cooked egg like cross sections like a mummy equipped for the afterlife, of boiled sun. I like the church key’s one tooth she’d have her ashtray and Kents handy, biting tin lids so that cans sigh with pleasure. her hand-mirror and tweezers, eyeglass case, Strainers, funnels, slotted spoons, spatulas, ladles, tea balls her crossword puzzle dictionary. excite me. At night in bed, I swoon over catalogues of cookery, and imagine my life as it will never be. Glancing me up and down, she never Utensils that sift flour, rice potatoes, plane cheese, appeared to be frisking me, even when, knives that are specialists, with blades just seconds before, coming home that pare and bone, fillet and carve— from a date, at the front door, gizmos that zest lemons, curl butter, strip an ear of corn of its kernels, I’d stuck my tongue into a boy’s mouth. unravel its strands of silk— cherry pitter, pepper mill, mortar and pestle, hand-cranked I’d sit on the sofa, and bum her cigarettes; grinder gnashing down chunks of raw meat and shitting them out and as the room filled up with smoke, in one long continuous sentence— melding our opposite temperaments, peeler undressing the modest carrot, meat thermometer we’d talk deep into the night, like diplomats stuck in the turkey’s breast, barely grazing the wishbone— agreeing to a kind of peace. O utensils, I like your tangs and tines and tongs and prongs. Unlike me, you work without complaint. I’d feign indifference—so did she— When I close your drawer on you huddling in the dark, about what I was doing out so late. do you pray to your ancestors, those ancient scoops Later, when I became a mother myself, made of horn and shell, joint bone and knuckle, my mother was still the sentry at the gate, while I recline, cleaning my teeth with thorns? waiting up, guarding the bedrooms. —Jane Shore After her funeral, her chair sat empty. My father, sister, husband, and I couldn’t bring ourselves to occupy it. Only my daughter climbed up its base To Nancy Drew on Her 50th Birthday and spun herself round and round. What secret does the old clock hold now? In the two years my father lived alone Where does the hidden staircase lead? in the apartment over their store, It’s time to mount the 99 steps, I wonder, did he ever once sit down accept the secret in the old attic. on that throne, wheel hub The clues have been there all along around which our family had revolved. in your diary, in the old album, in the velvet mask you struggle But after my father died, to remove. You need to answer the invitation the night before I left the place for good, to the golden pavilion, read the mysterious letter the building sold, the papers signed, of your own blood, lean against before the moving vans drove away, the crumbling wall and listen dividing the cartons and the furniture to the mystery of the tolling bell. Although you wish you’d never started on this quest between my sister’s house and mine, for the missing map, now you have a thousand miles apart, it in your hand, you must follow it I sat on the sofa—my usual spot— to the message in the hollow oak, cross and stared at the blank TV, the empty chair; the haunted bridge to face the wooden lady then I rose, and walked a few steps across the room, and the statue whispering what you do not want to hear. and sank into her ragged cushions, put my feet up on her ottoman, rested my elbows on the scuffed armrests, Where do you live? stroked the brown velvet like fur. My God, it still smelled like her! And how long have you lived there? Do you have any children? Swiveling the chair to face the sofa, This is my mother speaking I looked at things from her point of view: to me in a room where her grandchildren’s © Debi Milligan What do you need it for? photos cover the walls. You look tall, So I left it behind, along with the blinds, she says, and your hair is so curly. the meat grinder, the pressure cooker. You still don’t comb it. I know who you are. I just wasn’t expecting someone so young.

—Kathleen Aguero

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 13 Poetry

Hester Speaks Indian Reservation 1971 1. Listen child, Great great-grandmother Hester could dance to what you imagine I know a saucer of water on her head to memories you do not have— the price of not having a price me lying beside Settindown Creek having been stolen by a God-fearing before the cotton mill’s wheel Scots Irish Georgia mountain man began churning the water whose sons would march with Lee before the white man always someone having to march stole me from the past having to trail behind history and fear. and built the covered bridge before I was old enough I have her Cherokee cheekbones. to know my Cherokee name When I was only four formed from dancing spirits I even had a single feather headband that call me on the wind. I wore over long dark braids. My brother would shoot at me 2. with his Lone Ranger cape pistol Even without memory, march me around the yard I knew I should never until naptime, when I dreamed of dancing. cut my hair— so I grew it past the hips —Karen Head that birthed a line to you kept it in two tight braids I would tie together across my waist the ends hanging loose between my legs thickly woven, separate lives

3. I do not remember how I learned to dance a cup and saucer filled with well-water balanced on my head how I managed not to spill anything why I did it the first time why I continued

4. My Christian name was a mistake a misspelling of Esther, another foreign bride. She knew her real name— Hadassah was careful about revealing herself but had memories, choices— I did not marry a king could not save my people

5. When you dance, child, do you feel me? I’ve watched you spin wildly unafraid unashamed unaware it is me you hear, my cup tipping over, whispering a new name for the rhythms you cannot resist.

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 Poetry

Just Home from Those Streets

your feet also walked daughter—soft hand dark eyes, light voice— where errands spring up as women approach bent next to her like the safe cracker reseeding themselves once accomplished. while buses huff and seagulls spiral down Towards home I cursed myself for forgetting mayo, crackers it seems, a squeaking wire to Brooklyn lamp posts and. . . something else . . . and searching the sky (what could they need in Park Slope yet of all our imports above rank-and-file brownstones, above their curbside they make us feel most worldly) losing part of my daughter’s story sycamores tilted like muskets to the city, as you did yours the neighborhood’s overture looking skyward as we do for vengeance, remorse the accrued tracks of our spoken details lifted just plain feeling lost that’s when your new between mouth and ear and still floating. death passed over me as a lacy cloud That dusk when I spread the white tablecloth that’s when I knew rain announcing sidewalks (a motion I recognized in the rippling of a sting would always refresh my grief. ray at the aquarium) it settled like sky cover We are simply forgetful opportunists so my heart broke to keep our gestures, our imperial jays pinching foil and ribbons connections our tables set and cleared. in the crosswalk between present and possible

for instance beside your cloud

a newly spied penthouse garden amused me

and—as though eating in front of the starving—

I considered the simultaneous

taste for home and streets © Avigail Schimmel how the walker craves the terrace’s fitted spruce and daisies

while its hidden resident perks up hearing sandals Lost, So We Come Here

tap concrete The page, as to a lake covered in mist in the open world below. And cast our lines, fishing for the gone Through white cover thinking Forget forgetting. I reminded myself What, that experience goes under not to regret loose ends Then sends ripples from the fathoms Like script to the end of the margins... and thought of someone absentmindedly touching the fringes Or sometimes we plant our feet here As at the margins of the sea. The tide’s of a prayer shawl—we traffic Crusted outline offers itself like breath in loose ends— On glass, but we dare not write there As one son did in September 12 dust: so I walked on remembering Dad I came looking for you —Matt a stroll here with my waist-high —Jessica R. Greenbaum

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 15 Poetry

From a Hammock Between Aroma-Trees Coral

Lie back and the air holds you I came down for this, strung between shore and tideline, to hang flat as a shadow your head towards the mountain, over their subtle landscape, your feet going before you to the island. You rock unseen; their ferns of coral parting aromas spread their green feathers to let me in, my thighs over your woven boat. No sudden light, grazing their mock fungus. no leaving, only the steady gleam of sky on water. This is your body, When they see me, they scatter this the space it swings in. Look, like hail or seed, the sun rolls between your bare toes changing direction quickly, like an orange. A firefly’s spark. their little panic glinting bright blue. A black angel trails its shred of fin.

They swim round and under me, lead me to deeper places, starfish joined like blue fingers.

I can crush thousands of soft bodies, close my hand, snap off their brittle histories.

The blackened antlers pierce me through my soles

© Joanna Eldredge Morrissey as blood leeches out of me,

leaves its rusty smoke across their sky. They know where to find me.

—Susan Wicks

Photo of a Girl 14: Merrill, Wisconsin 1925

Spring wind blows her scarf How can she know what flight holds?— but her gaze is unruffled, the 3-room apartment a block from the el, a moody look renowned kitchen full of scrubbed longjohns dangling as adolescence. She poses from the ceiling like a row of hanged men, against a telephone pole, dumbwaiter raised up from the basement, weight on her left leg the husband’s shot glass, her right bent at the knee. the ration stamps, miscarriages, lost boy— Hands in overalls pockets, © Jan Simmons what flight holds in that lifetime wool sweater underneath, fourteen full years later, wherein scarf the attention of a girl she’ll bear down, expel me. who knows how to dress. The overalls are much too long— maybe one of her brother’s?— but she makes the 4-inch cuff seem the new rage from Paree. The Moment Her flair shows from head to toe: for Stephen, who caught it the cloche hat with pleats, the two-toned leather, pointy shoes. Packed in snug as stones in the wall behind them She’s a farm girl who wants mortared by costume, twelve Irish schoolgirls to split for the city. wait for a Dublin bus. They’re an unstable mass, Who could blame her? grey jumpers, pink shirts can’t contain them. —the bare, muddy yards, gray Red cardigans deconstruct into laprobes and cushions. clumps in the narrow road. Running shoes are favored for getaway, And not a leaf yet on those two trees grey knee socks rolled or falling down. outside the plain white house; One cranes her neck to see outside those sheds out back with planks the shelter. One leans toward a friend leaning drunk against the walls. showing the path through jet curls. She’s the only one here One looks away, stroking her chin like a dad. except the photographer, she’s Half part their lips in a Gaelic rendition of cheese. the most interesting sight for miles. One spits a stray lock off her mouth, Her brunette hair matches one wonders who is this man with the camera? the dark seeds of her eyes. In shades, the Hollywood starlet pouts for his lens. One side of it behaves, the other tries Their feet touch pavement, climb to escape in a curl like a question. each other, hover, go en point, twist on edge. Ah and her left strap has fallen, No Rockettes, these twelve nervy schoolgirls as if she’s already begun to shed each kicking her way out of orbit. overalls for something more chic. —Carole Simmons Oles

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 Poetry

Ice Skating We asked Robin Becker, who has served as the Women’s Review’s poetry editor since 1986, to contribute some of her own recent work Our daughter is gone now, to complete this special section. forever, a tragedy, so we skate way far over in the distance, remotely visible, Island of Daily Life two pitiable lurchers, where the surface is wafery thin This one is for Sandy and the light is bad, who loves poems about ordinary things. where no one would choose to skate For her, I’ll keep my abstractions had God not pointed an icy, peremptory finger to a minimum and praise and said, “There.” the open carpentry of the summer cabins for their impromptu shelves But you, you, and your family, where every ledge invites a wildflower bouquet with your bulky knitted sweaters or a drawing from a child at camp and whimsical peaked caps, or a special stone plucked from the lake, you are right in the center where the ice is thick, and I praise the lake and safe, with its dappled beach and sloping light, and your daughter laughs hard, the comforting iterations two bright pink spots high on her cheeks, of rowboat, bathing cap, splash, as she skates backwards, where lakefront trees and small docks exhaling her breathy love for you. flare in the late afternoon, and a neighbor Tea Time calls softly to her daughter it’s time to go, don’t forget your things… Losing your daughter, This poem gets up early for the Saturday losing your daughter to murder, requires adjustment. yard sale and celebrates the evening walk across the mowing with Leslie Like, say, through low-bush blueberries you are sipping tea and someone in the shadow of Monadnock reaches over and to Miriam’s for dinner fantastically yanks on the screened-in porch. your heart from your chest Sometimes guests from the city. and it clatters, pumping, Always the dog in his summer onto the table haircut announcing his arrival. and there it is, there is the matter, This poem honors the poached fish and the beans, your whole heart, the goat cheese and the wine, that brilliant engine, the poems read aloud after dinner that tuber, for their attention vulgar, purple, to the quiddities, to aspects red of our communal selves, and you simply don’t die, sheared of the theoretical. you see, This poem celebrates the passing you blanche, of the dish and the return of the bowl, and your brain beats on, and then, and then, the full moon now high above October lakes, shining invariably, on a thousand forgotten beach books. you reach down to straighten a spoon. (in memory of Sandra Kanter, 1944-2004) —Kathleen Sheeder Late Butch/Femme

Long accustomed to playing the butch I saw you for the femme I thought you were— long-waisted, well-bred, the hostess who knew to fold the napkin in the wineglass. But I had not watched you square your shoulders before the arborist, determined to take down the holly to save the oak.

No, you said, the pin oak goes, the holly stays. The gutter man who wants his check will have to repair the drain he botched. Please have your son call me, you say, your fingers ready for another call. In the cellar, among the foraged dressers, you measure and sand and strip. O handy lover, come in for the lunch I made, with your retractable blade, your small drill, your paint brushes bristling.

—Robin Becker

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 17 ter. Muslim patriarchy’s harshness to Hindu girlfriend on the very day he is sup- women is a cliché, of course, and in posed to marry a Muslim bride. Madras divorce is an undercurrent that We learn the reason for Sameer’s des- A modern Muslim’s tale pulls the daughter to conformity. Layla’s peration to leave India during the couple’s father, who will not let her meet honeymoon in Madras, which both by Mandira Sen Americans, also supports an arranged Sameer and Layla see as a place where marriage for her and has presented two they may succeed in consummating their Madras on Rainy Days by Samina Ali. New York: airplane tickets to America to the bridal marriage. They travel there to obtain a couple, thus encouraging Layla to perpet- long-desired US visa for Sameer. But they Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, 307 pp., uate a traditional life in the West. Amme again fail to make love, which Layla and Dad do not seem to consider at all believes must be because of her betrayal $24.00 hardcover. what will happen if Layla’s marriage ends of Sameer with Nate, since Sameer I in divorce, and she too is abandoned. knows the meaning of her continuous © Thayer Allyson Gowdy© Thayer Allyson Engaged to Sameer while still in bleeding. Later, accosted by Naveed out- xotic on the surface, with its evoca- America, Layla is haunted by the fear that side their hotel door, she learns that he tion of the traditional world of the her marriage won’t work—that her hand- and her husband have met during the E Indian Muslim community within some fiancé may find her unattractive; that honeymoon. Naveed is not just Sameer’s the walled city of old Hyderabad, Madras she will fail her mother and even cause her friend but his lover, and Layla hears him on Rainy Days delights the reader with its death. At the same time, she resists the tell Sameer, “After a month away from subtlety as it unfolds gracefully. Samina Ali patriarchal insistence that her sexuality is each other, was the lovemaking not better presents a palimpsest that peels away from not her own but belongs to her future hus- than before?... How can you still go to time to time to reveal much insight and band. Before she leaves for Hyderabad, America, go on with this other life, this meaning. She does this through the eyes of she and Nate, a fellow student, make love betrayal? I have come here to save you!” the protagonist, Layla, who is only 19. But in the room below her mother’s bedroom, Ali shows how difficult it is for tradition- Layla’s ability to make sense of her an act that haunts Layla throughout her al societies to face up to alternative sexu- encounter with two cultures—the tradi- marriage and her time in India. ality as legitimate human behavior. tional world of Muslim India in Ali’s depiction of traditional Indian Marriage is seen as a way of correcting an Hyderabad, and Minnesota, where she sexual mores, whether for Muslims or for “aberration,” as well as a “cover” for arrived as a baby of immigrant parents— Hindus, is convincing. An arranged mar- homosexuality. As Layla’s uncle says, infuses the book with maturity. It is riage is not about love but about legiti- Sameer’s homosexuality is “recreational emphatically not another novel of the mating sexuality, and the rituals and sex” that will right itself after marriage. immigrant experience in America. It events of the marriage ceremony reiterate Sameer’s vulnerability and culpability are relates the story of Layla’s visit to this bluntly. The marriage is consummat- entangled; perhaps he did think he could Hyderabad to marry Sameer, an engi- Samina Ali ed immediately, to prove the groom’s break away from Naveed and his own neer—a wedding that has been arranged virility and the bride’s virtuous submis- sexual preference. When Layla confronts by the family elders. Indeed, America Why would Layla, a student at an sion. Love and a woman’s desire are not Zeba, her mother-in-law, with Sameer’s appears only as remembered past or possi- American university, who outwardly shares part of this social equation; love is to fol- homosexuality, she comes up not against ble future. Although Ali comments on the the lifestyle and interests of her fellow stu- low the act of marriage. And failure, like denial—because Zeba knowingly racial discrimination that is prevalent in the dents, acquiesce in an arranged marriage— Sameer’s, at quick consummation cannot arranged the marriage—but with a pre- US and that all non-white immigrants especially when many of her middle-class be accommodated by the system. It raises scription to continue with the status quo. must negotiate, the focus is primarily on peers in India have been fighting with con- the threat of sexual dysfunction and, Sameer’s young, college-going cousins, Hyderabad, while a few fraught days in siderable success against this practice? Is it worse, the prospect of homosexuality Asma and Zenath, recommend this too: Madras provide some of the answers to because of the way she has been brought (lesbianism is not taken seriously), greatly “No, Bhabhi [sister-in-law], no, the family the reasons behind the arranged marriage. up in America, provided with its com- to be feared and condemned. Nafisa, must remain together.” Ironically it is forts—she drives a BMW—but always Layla’s old ayah (who is strangely referred Sameer who provides the vital help that watched over by her parents, who prevent to as “nanny”), sees through Sameer’s Layla needs to set herself free. her from making friends? Young men are deception when he shows his mother the Madras is one of the few novels that of course ruled out, but Layla does not small white blood-stained cloth, specially have been written about a modern Muslim mention any woman friend either. Ali is provided, as proof of successful consum- woman who has to make her way in the convincing in her depiction of the confu- mation. Layla, for her part, thinks Sameer world. It is far removed from the stereo- sion, ambivalence, and conflicting loyalties is protecting her. She is bleeding because typical images of women terrorists and that motivate people. Layla says, of a miscarriage, and Sameer has used fundamentalist Islam. That Islamic civi- that blood. Perhaps it is because Layla has lizations are varied and that Indian Islam Different worlds, and in each I was not grown up in Hyderabad that she is very different from that of the Middle a different woman unrecognizable misses the cues. Vulnerable in a strange East or Afghanistan is not spelled out but even to myself. I was like the two environment, she does not think of ques- taken for granted, and that young Indian faces of the moon, new and full, tioning Sameer’s reluctance. Like many Muslim women try to come to terms with one always veiled behind the other. women, she blames herself first. life like any other women in the world is a (p. 70) Layla enters into her traditional given. The book cleverly uncovers Muslim marriage willingly, after her initial degrees of reality and morality, depicting Though living in America, Layla’s par- rebellion with Nate fails. She finds that a society that is in deep crisis, where ents wish to perpetuate Hyderabad values she is anxious to make the marriage suc- change is coming, and with it some hope and behavior that govern the lives of ceed and does her best to conform as a for people like Sameer and Layla. There Muslim women, though not necessarily of good wife and a good Muslim. The para- are no villains in Madras but perhaps there Muslim men. They wish Layla to “inhabit dox, as Sameer’s friend Naveed points is a heroine, Layla, who finds the strength America without being inhabited by it.” out, is that Layla does not seem to face reality and to make the decision Her father, whom she calls Dad, has “American,” whereas Sameer, who refers that is right for her. Beautifully written, enforced his will by beating her into sub- to himself as a “lapsed Muslim” and is this tale gently asserts that tragedy is what mission since she was two. A successful anxious to leave Hyderabad for America we make of it, that destiny need not be heart surgeon, he sees no contradiction in as soon as possible, dresses in American relentless, and that we can and indeed upholding those aspects of America that clothes and looks Western. must recover from betrayals. I appeal to him—like modern cardiology— yet enforcing traditional Muslim patriarchy he novel is set in 1989, about six at home. He has divorced Layla’s mother, years before the transformation of To the Women’s Review: her Amme (Urdu for mother), and set her T this city into a high-tech center It was a great disappointment to learn Can’t remember birthdays and Layla up in a separate apartment, while from which computer software is export- that your wonderful publication is soon to or anniversaries? he lives with his second wife, Sabana, and ed all over the world. Hyderabad is chang- cease. Since taking over as documentalist at their two sons—an arrangement that ing. But even then the Muslims of the the Simone de Beauvoir Institute’s Reading Keep track of important would go unremarked in America. walled city felt left out and discriminated Room in 1993, I have come to look forward annual celebrations with the Divorce has been traumatic for Amme. against. Sameer tells Layla, “You have two to your publication each month and have Spirit of Women She would have preferred to have applicants, one Hindu, one Muslim, and found it so useful when trying to decide Perpetual Calendar remained married, acquiescing in her hus- even if both are equally qualified, the what to order for our small library on our band’s taking of a second wife, while her Hindu will be hired. That’s our affirmative small budget. It was also one of the most Send $10 for a single copy to: status remained secure as the first wife, as action, baby. Keep the dominant classes reasonably priced publications. The quality RavenMark • 138 Main Street is the Islamic custom in Hyderabad and dominating.” There is almost no contact of writing has been superb and I have learnt Montpelier VT 05602 elsewhere. Humiliated by what she sees as between Hindus and Muslims; when there much from your reviewers over the years. 802.223.5507 abandonment, Amme has kept the is, it ends in violence or chaos. Layla’s Thank you for enhancing my work. [email protected] divorce a secret from her friends and rel- pregnant cousin, Henna, is raped and Carol R. Mitchell Discounts available for bulk orders atives in India and is determined to murdered by a bunch of Hindu goons; a Montreal, PQ arrange a better marriage for her daugh- Muslim bridegroom elopes with his

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 Addressing his son, Ames continues, “So © David Herwalt she has grown younger over the years, and that was because of you.” Iowa meditations Before this second marriage at age 67, Ames spends a good many years by Valerie Miner oscillating between hollow loneliness and serene solitude. Now this blessed Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. New York: Farrar, Straus little family adds tender joy to his care- ful, final passage. These days he reads a and Giroux, 2004, 247 pp., $23.00 hardcover. lot; makes pastoral visits; plans to vote for Eisenhower (if he lives long I enough); enjoys the glories of spring and summer and the rising cold. He arilynne Robinson’s long-await- recalling the family’s arduous migration experiments suspiciously with the new- ed second novel, written in epis- from Maine to Kansas to Iowa; some- fangled gift from his congregation—a M tolary form, is an imaginary times he is worrying about next Sunday’s television set. And of course he endures memoir by John Ames, a Congregationalist sermon; sometimes he is mourning his the routines of church business. minister of meager means and massive first wife and daughter; sometimes he faith. Twenty-three years after the publica- revels in the joys of his present domestic I spent this morning in a meeting tion of her popular Housekeeping, Robinson fortune. For the most part, this naturalis- with the trustees. It was pleasant. resumes her psychological and spiritual tic voice succeeds; but occasionally They respectfully ignored a few exploration of survival in the face of fam- Gilead is burdened by the self-conscious- suggestions I made about repairs Marilynne Robinson ily abandonment. ness and narrowness endemic to such a to the building. I’m pretty sure Gilead, the absorbing confessions of personal enterprise. they’ll build a new church once Mountains would seem an imper- a pious man, transcends religion to Still Robinson’s book is enlivened by I’m gone. I don’t mean this tinence from that point of address common secular struggles moments of stirring conflict and sus- unkindly—they don’t want to view…. This whole town does about maintaining hope and holding pense. As a 12-year-old, Ames accompa- cause me grief, so they’re waiting look like whatever hope becomes fast to an ethical course. At a time when nies his father on a wearisome journey to do what they want to do, and it after it begins to weary a little, so many politicians aggressively flaunt to Kansas in search of Grandfather that’s good of them. (p. 110) then weary a little more…. I think religiosity in strategic sound bites, it is Ames’ grave. The boy learns about his sometimes of going into the refreshing to read an honest account of grandfather’s passionate abolitionism Robinson knows pastoral work first ground here as a last wild gesture moral and spiritual quandaries. The and his Civil War military service. He hand, as an active member and former of love—I too will smolder away Reverend Ames is a good person, not a also discovers the painful estrangement deacon in her Congregationalist commu- the time until the great and gener- saint. And it is his fallibility, humility, between his grandfather and his pacifist nity. During the years since Housekeeping, al incandescence. (pp. 246-247) and humor—even more than his gener- father, a rift that never healed. After she has addressed moral issues in church ous heart and dedicated labor—that much adversity, young Ames and his and as a public intellectual, writing two At one point, Ames compares writing make him appealing. Gilead is remark- father locate the gravesite. major nonfiction books. In Mother to praying. Marilynne Robinson’s literary able for its sensual evocation of place There the boy looks up to see the set- Country, she investigates the environmen- epistle is intricately threaded with suppli- and keen appreciation for history as ting sun crossing with a rising moon. tal damage caused by the Sellafield nuclear cation and atonement and epiphany and well as for its candid, often gripping, plant in Britain. The Death of Adam is a thanksgiving. Her novel traces the evolu- examination of conscience. We just stood there until the sun collection of philosophical essays tion of one man’s compassion, challenging It is 1956 and the 76-year-old Ames was down and the moon was up. addressing such thinkers as Sigmund secular and religious readers alike through suffers from a fatal heart condition. He They seemed to float on the hori- Freud, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, William Ames’ meditation and testimony. I lives his last days mindfully, tending to his zon for quite a long time, I sup- Holmes McGuffie, and John Calvin, the rural Iowa congregation, visiting an ailing pose because they were both so forefather of Congregationalism. At her friend and, most importantly, composing bright you couldn’t get a clear look own congregation, she is still called upon a family record to be given to his young at them. (pp. 14-15) to preach. As she tells Carin Besser in an boy when he reaches adulthood. By writ- online New Yorker interview on ing in the second person, Robinson inti- Ames’ talent for wonder, his appreciation www.newyorker.com, “I have enjoyed the mately implicates her audience; it is as if of the grandeur or tranquility in mun- problem of exploring the sermon as a the story is addressed to “you my read- dane experiences, beckons readers to form. It is a deeply instructive experience, ers” as well as to “you my son.” look longer and deeper and more closely a very interesting way to think. And the Ames’ measured—occasionally apho- at the ordinary moment. situation is interesting—to stand in a pul- ristic—language is notable for its clarity Currently, Ames’ major preoccupation pit does focus the mind, or it should.” and plain beauty. Here he introduces his is his failing health and that of his life- Throughout Gilead, John Ames uses son to the family: long friend, the Reverend Robert his chronicle to help himself focus on the Boughton, now the neighboring unforeseen rewards as well as the vexing Sanctified Trial My mother’s father was a preacher Presbyterian minister. Will the two old trials of his long life. He often digresses The Diary of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fai a Confederate Woman in East Tennessee and my father’s father was, too, men last through the spring? The sum- with explorations of past deeds or Edited by John N. Fain and his father before him, and mer? Meanwhile, tensions escalate when insights into theological questions. When Cloth / 1-57233-313-8 / $42 / 488 pages / 37 before that, nobody knows….That Boughton’s son and Ames’ godson, Jack he finally grasps the tormented motiva- life was second nature to them, Boughton, arrives in town. The prodigal’s tion for Jack’s recurrent visits, he under- just as it is to me. They were fine return pleases old Boughton and inexpli- stands that the younger man is not a people, but if there was one thing cably aggravates Ames. Why is the stalker but a pilgrim. Ames gently offers I should have learned from them younger man making such frequent visits spiritual guidance to his suffering god- and did not learn, it was to control to Ames’ home and church? The godson son: “[D]octrine is not belief, it is only my temper. (p. 6) becomes a kind of menacing alter ego, one way of talking about belief.” At perhaps a treacherous Absalom. Ames another point Ames remarks, New in “Gilead” is an intriguing name for a grows anxious that Jack is waiting for his Paper! modest, weather-worn Iowa town. death to lay claim to Ames’ young wife I think there must also be a pre- Geography is not the allusion here, for Lila and their beloved son. venient courage that allows us to this place is nothing like its namesake, be brave—that is, to acknowledge Holy Boldness the fertile, mountainous region north- arriage and fatherhood have that there is more beauty than our W omen Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self east of the Dead Sea. Rather Robinson been startling miracles in eyes can bear, that precious things Susie C. Stanley is referencing etymology and scripture. M Ames’ later life. Indeed, Lila have been put into our hands and Paper / 1-57233-310-3 / $18 / 304 pages / i “Gilead” is rooted in the Hebrew for arrives like an apparition; as she sits at the to do nothing to honor them is to “firm, hard, tough,” an apt metaphor for back of church that first Sunday, Ames’ do great harm. (p. 246) Ames’ character. Gilead is also where words turn to ashes on his tongue. New! David seeks refuge from his mutinous Ames embraces his destiny on this Constance Fenimore Woo son Absalom. In an ironic twist on bib- I remember when she lifted her stark land where circumstance has often Selected Stories and Travel Narrativ Edited by Victoria Brehm and Sharon L. De lical power-grabbing, John Ames has the dear face to me to be baptized— strained his faith. Cloth / 1-57233-353-7 / $44 family inheritance thrust upon him. His lifted it into the winter morning 368 pages / illustrations brother Edward renounces Christianity. light, new-snow light—and I I love the prairie! So often I have No Space Hidden His preacher father fails to return from thought, She is neither old nor seen the dawn come and the light The Spirit of African American Yard W Grey Gundaker and Judith M. McWillie a trip to Florida, leaving young Ames young, and I was somehow amazed flood over the land and everything Paper / 1-57233-356-1 / $26.95 with the duties of his parish for the rest by her and I could barely bring turn radiant at once… Here on 360 est. pages / 208 illustrations of his life. myself to touch the water to her the prairie there is nothing to dis- This nonlinear novel takes its struc- brow because she looked a good tract attention from the evening ture from the circumlocutory ramblings deal more than beautiful. Sadness and the morning, nothing on the TOLL FREE ORDERING: 800-621-2736 of an old man; sometimes Ames is was a great part of it, it was. (p. 93) horizon to abbreviate or to delay. www.utpress.org

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 19 Yesterday’s Warrior became the press’ first CONGRATULATING the book. This gritty memoir is unrelent- Women’s Review of Books ing—bleak, angry, and exasperating. Publishing for the love of it Harrison, by age 14, was an alcoholic on twenty-one years of and junkie. She had been kicked out of publishing excellence by Judith Niemi school and bounced in and out of insti- tutions. It’s astonishing that she survived Small presses are changing the world, one page at a time to write her book, but she’s been sober New from MICHIGAN for seven years and, although this is I mentioned only in an afterword, is now a graduate student in clinical psychology. n a time when conglomerates own “We just want to write what we write, Her story is told in the language and the old publishing houses, and and when we want to, on our timing, and with the obsessive narrative drive of the I books that aren’t “blockbusters” not look for permission from anybody,” teenager; there is no context, no fore- disappear from bookstore shelves in Loveland told a meeting of the Twin shadowing of a way out. Painful as this months or even weeks, when feminist Cities chapter of the National Writers is, the absence of any relief or explana- and other independent bookstores are Union. She and Bly discussed the “dread- tion seems absolutely right. Much of her dying off at an alarming rate, small ful truths” of publishing and politics and story is unknown, hidden, unresolved. presses seem more critical than ever, and kept the room laughing with tag-team Harrison writes with authority from the more endangered. Yet a press of one’s humor. “You lose your sense of humor, point of view of her young self. own is a durable dream and, here in you’ve had it,” says Loveland. But what Cerridwen’s astute editorial decision to Minnesota, several new presses were about marketing? The press’ target audi- encourage this resulted in the raw, hon- born in the last year. “You have to be a ences include “the women who sleep with est “kick-ass memoir” that appeals to little crazy to do this,” warns an estab- the men who run chemical companies.” her young audience. lished small publisher. Yet questioners hoping for hot tips were Cerridwen’s next scheduled book is Two new presses with political and told, “Oh, we’re just learning all that.” Scott Sundvall’s Outlet, “the memoir of a social missions are Carol Bly and Cynthia Probably the attractive, sophisticated lowly shoe pimp in a mall outlet”; in the Loveland’s Bly and Loveland Press and cover art is a part of the strategy. spring of 2005 she will publish a collec- Gail Cerridwen’s Word Warriors Press. Generally, Bly and Loveland are following tion of essays by Sean Daley, aka the hip- These women’s implicit, in-the-bone familiar small publishing routes: many hop artist Slug of the group Atmosphere. Gates of Freedom feminism informs their work. I talked readings and personal contact with local Cerridwen has a tough marketing chal- Voltairine de Cleyre and the with them about their plans and dreams, and regional independent bookstores. lenge: controversial books (already Revolution of the Mind and for perspective also interviewed vet- The chain stores? “We couldn’t decide,” banned by some schools) and an audi- Eugenia C. DeLamotte erans of the feminist presses Spinsters says Loveland. “We finally approached ence that typically doesn’t read at all. She Ink and Aunt Lute. Barnes and Noble’s small press division— says, “Several young people have told me, “[Gates of Freedom] gives a fi ne Carol Bly says that her press’ mix of we could always say no later. Fortunately, ‘This is the first time I ever read a book selection of de Cleyre’s work, while articulating it to con- story, modern brain development theory, they turned us down.” They sell books by through from cover to cover.’” temporary critical and cultural and social work insight is “exactly the mail or phone, but refer Internet buyers Cerridwen points out that some main- concerns . . . . The book’s orga- stuff that most literary presses avoid like to Amazon.com. “That’s inconsistent, of stream publishers have started imprints nization, its tendency to tackle the flu.” Reviewing Bly’s 1996 anthology, course,” Loveland admitted, “but every- testing out the young adult market for the most diffi cult issues head on, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, one told us we should. [Amazon.com has] raw, honest books—but it’s deadly, she and its careful selection of pub- writer Mary Pipher called Bly “a one only sold about three books, though.” lished and unpublished work are says, to call them young adult or to use all superb.” woman army fighting moral drift” any format resembling kids’ books. She —Cary Nelson, University of Illinois because of her several decades of writing ord Warriors is a spunky new recently decided to use a regular distribu- short stories and essays, teaching, and press for the creative nonfic- tor and a sales rep, but still uses some public speaking. An early chapbook, Bad W tion of authors in their late guerrilla marketing tactics: She’s a regular Liberating Government and Silly Literature, and teens and early 20s—it publishes uncen- contributor to websites for young people, Economics Changing the Bully, explicitly look at the sored, edgy memoir by alienated, margin- and she maintains many lively chat Feminist Perspectives on Families, connections among literature, ethics, and alized young people. Founder, editor, groups on her own site. Work, and Globalization politics. She’s not naïve about publishing; treasurer, and errand-runner Gail Drucilla K. Barker and early in her career she managed the influ- Cerridwen works alone in a northern hat lies ahead for small, mis- Susan F. Feiner ential magazine of poetry and politics, suburb of Minneapolis. She hires young sion-driven presses like these? The Fifties, then The Sixties and The people to create the bold cover artwork W Joan Drury, who headed the “This book is a must-read for Seventies. Cynthia Loveland has been a and to perform almost every part of the feminist press Spinsters Ink from 1992 to every future economist, under- social worker and community activist for production. With no publishing back- 2000, shares her experience: Asked graduate and graduate, and for 40 years. She wrote two lively pamphlets ground, Cerridwen started the company whether Spinsters was self-supporting, every women’s studies student. It published by the Minnesota School on unemployment checks, credit cards, she admits, “Actually, I guess I supported is a great read for the rest of us. It should be required reading for Social Workers Association, with Carol and “sheer stubbornness, almost desper- it about 25 percent. But only because I every policy-maker at the WB, Bly as literary consultant. ation” about the needs of the young peo- was trying to get it to be nationally IMF, and WTO.” The first book from their press, Three ple she knew from years as an English known, nationally respected—that’s nec- —Sandra Harding, Graduate School of Readings for Republicans and Democrats, teacher in alternative high schools. This is essary for a small press to become self- Education and Information Studies, UCLA arrived late in 2003: a handsome, quirky another press driven by exuberance and sufficient.” Spinsters won a number of work of 83 pages. It consists of two passion for social justice. “Some changes awards from mainstream and small press Strong Voices, essays by Carol Bly, “How Radiation are needed around here,” says her web- organizations. “Small presses can learn to Weak History Oncology Nearly Made Me a site, www.wordwarriorspress.com. “So be mainstream in our marketing and dis- Early Women Writers and Canons Republican” and “My Dear Republican come on, let’s tilt the world on its axis, tribution,” Drury believes. “What’s dif- in England, France, and Italy Mother,” and a co-authored story/case start thinking and feeling again, con- ferent is how we choose books—for found the pundits, refuse to be good lit- Pamela J. Benson and history, “The Savage Stripe: How a [their] literary or political value, not ask- Teenage Daughter Changed Her Dad.” tle consumers, take back the nation, ing how they will sell.” Victoria Kirkham, Editors One common thread is understanding recapture our souls.” “Look, every press is political, says “This exceptional collection and empathy for the difficulties “privi- Cerridwen had already chosen the Drury. “Small presses may be explicit makes a timely statement about leged perpetrators” face in trying to name Word Warriors when she met about our agendas; mainstream presses the status in the literary canon of achieve moral growth and alter the prof- Heather Harrison, whose manuscript support the status quo. Right now, five texts by women writers. It offers itable but unscrupulous practices of their houses control 80 percent of books pub- a wonderful range of fresh new corporations. Their second book, Stopping lished. That’s terrifying.” Does the work perspectives, and it positions the Gallop to Empire, they call “a first—a To the Women’s Review: of some small presses become less the work of its contributors in a splendidly interlocking series of respectful book for educated conserva- On behalf of the University of Georgia essential as their subjects are taken up by essays that range across several tives who find themselves afraid.” Says Press I want to tell you how sad we are that the mainstream? “That’s limited,” says centuries in Italy, France, and their website, www.blyandloveland.com, the WROB will be suspended after the Drury. “In the early ’90s we had a... sort England.” “If you’ve ever been run away with by a December issue. Please know that we will of Year of the Lesbian in mainstream —William J. Kennedy, Cornell 4th rate gelding you know how doomed miss you very much, and look forward to the publishing, but by the late ’90s authors University you feel. But, chances are you can stop day you start your presses again. The were being asked to drop their lesbian him. Same with governments. We can do Women’s Review is such a resource for read- characters. I know lesbian authors now TO ORDER it.” This urgency is another reason to ers, myself in particular, and the loss is truly writing under pseudonyms. 800.621.2736 great. Know that we will be at your side when www.press.umich.edu self-publish. It took total immersion in “I wish I’d started publishing at [age] the project to turn the book out in a few The Women’s Review returns (and it will!) as 35 or 40. I’ve been in all aspects of the months. “Look,” says Bly, “if the presi- faithful advertisers and devoted readers. industry, writing, running a retreat, and a The University of dent can take time away from his family Clara Platter bookstore—everything but distribution. MICHIGAN PRESS to try to wreck democracy, I can spend Athens, GA Publishing is the most exhausting; it took some months doing this work.” all my creative energy. The whole indus-

20 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 try is in big trouble now. But some peo- women’s sexuality as natural but sub- ple will do what we’ve always done— orned by patriarchal culture, have not hang in there until better times. Anyway, stood the test of feminist theoretical it’s cyclical. In ten years, or 15, some Theory love/hate time. Shulman was eager to declare the young women will say, ‘Hey! You know, clitoris good and the vagina bad, as the there’s no press just for us! Let’s start by Ann Snitow site of male pleasure only. This essential- one.’ And they’ll have all that energy.” ism has been treated patronizingly in After 22 years with Aunt Lute press, Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice high theory, but Dever recognizes in it Joan Pinkvoss still speaks with a torrent the key claim for women’s desire—their of enthusiasm about her work. Aunt by Carolyn Dever. Minneapolis, MN: University of drive toward erotic independence, a bod- Lute can publish only three or four new ily foundation for all other kinds of free- titles a year, but their authors include Minnesota Press, 2004, 256 pp., $18.95 paper. dom. The Shulman piece ends, “Think Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Paula clitoris.” Here is Dever’s paradox: A cli- Gunn Allen, and Alice Walker. Of their I toris must be thought. Thinking the cli- effort to construct a new canon through toris will always lead to thinking beyond the Aunt Lute Anthology of US Women keptical Feminism is skeptical indeed. cal work, then pulling those abstractions it, to wanting still more, wanting some- Writers, Pinkvoss says, “There’s not Carolyn Dever doubts the coher- apart to see how they may foil their own thing that may not yet have a name. another press that could have done it— S ence of a wide range of feminist political intentions and how they may Theory’s failures will always drive the Volume One took four years, with no theories, while recognizing them in con- exclude. She begins her compendium of desiring feminist back to the constant, money.” Aunt Lute won a grant of text as honorable interruptions of the also feminist theory in the 1970s with the skeptical rethinking that Dever admires $75,000 per year for three years from the and always false coherence of patriarchal early writings of the second wave. I can’t in feminism’s intellectual tradition. California Arts Council—but then the theoretical abstractions. She values theory think of a recent example of anyone Dever, a professor of English, inter- council was disbanded. As grant money as constitutive of feminism in even its reading these texts without immediately ested above all in texts, is also a historian dries up, Aunt Lute is looking for new most practical aspects, but she never consigning them to the dustbin of histo- of US feminist contention. In the next strategies. The mission of the press is to leaves off noticing theory’s failures—fail- ry for their now well acknowledged turn of the body debate, Andrea launch new writers, especially women ures she sees as inevitable, giving rise, con- racism, false universalism, essentialism, Dworkin, Susan Griffin, Kathleen Barry, writers of color. “With the feminist stantly, to the need for more theory and and homophobia. (My students, for and Catharine MacKinnon revolted bookstores disappearing, the only way more ideas arising from practice. example, rebel against reading Kate against what they saw as a naïve celebra- we can sell an author’s first book is mak- Dever explores a set of related para- Millett or Anne Koedt or the tion of women’s desires. Instead, they ing coalitions, finding authors with doxes that she has no wish to resolve. Redstockings Manifesto, considering saw “eroticism as a trap best emblema- strong ties to grassroots communities,” Rather, she sees health in their irresolv- these outgrown and better forgotten.) tized by ‘fucking’ as a dirty, shameful, and says Pinkvoss. The press’ nonprofit ability. She wants both the abstraction of But the now familiar critiques of these violent endeavor.” structure is meant to ensure succession, feminist theory and the constant critique texts do not exhaust their interest—or In yet the next turn, “radical-sex fem- and Pinkvoss has found good cowork- of theory that is always, somehow, caught their value. Dever recognizes a utopian inists” like Amber Hollibaugh and ers—but she isn’t at all ready to leave. in the act of erasing material realities, ecstasy in those first few years that Cherríe Moraga tried to reclaim the “Absolutely the only way you can exist is contexts, and histories. bypassed the usual alienation between power in desire, but they found that to have a mission that excites you, work Here is one version of Dever’s paradox: thoughts and acts. The newly minted “women’s sexuality” and “lesbian sexual- that excites you. Otherwise, you might as feminist activists were thinking on their ity” had become abstract. The space to well close up shop.” This is the double bind of feminist feet. The voice in each text was confi- talk about desire had closed, leaving only Feminists have too many occasions to theoretical production: abstraction dent; each was a kind of explosion, as if the politics of sexuality. Reclaiming mourn the passing of our publishing proj- from the local is, on the one hand, its insights might well be the catalyst for desire was fraught with difficulty. Dever ects; yet there’s also reason to celebrate— useful and necessary; on the other, revolutionary change. The new political ends this tale with Carole S. Vance’s inter- and support—what has been done, what it represents the failure to account form, consciousness-raising (CR), was “a pretation of this history: The personal continues, and the spirit of those who go for all the material claims and mode of activism that aimed to blur any became political, which sometimes came on inventing new presses. Clearly a part of challenges local evidence presents. distinction between the abstract and the to mean that feminists should police each what keeps Bly, Loveland, and Cerridwen The double bind is also powerful- material, the personal and the political, other’s desires to bring them in line with going is that they are seasoned veterans ly useful, however. It represents the individual and the collective.” This codified feminist values. Dever gives a with a long view of social change who the formative dialectic of feminist breakdown of borders was itself action, subtle account of how feminist wishes take joy in their work. theoretical production: feminist and activists felt that the new way of for sexual freedom often turned into “Oh, people complain too much theory, I argue, is an ethical sys- thinking would inevitably lead to a new feminist prescriptions for just what that about the state of publishing,” says Bly. tem that requires material chal- way of living—inside one’s mind, body, freedom should look like. The skeptical “Look, no matter who wins the election lenges to any abstraction. (p. 5) community. That new taboos were aris- feminist admires the range of feminist in November, they aren’t going to come ing in CR in the place of the old, that theories of sexual empowerment, then behead us—as happened with publish- Dever is interested in a familiar divide difference was obscured behind the veil notes each one’s fearful shortfall. ers in Germany. If you’ve got a desk and among feminists. For many, theory has a of sisterhood, doesn’t change the fact Perhaps Dever’s most thoroughgoing a warm room—” Loveland adds, “I bad name. It is abstract, therefore male. It that these early constructions matter; skepticism is reserved for the various the- don’t worry much about the future of takes no account of messy bodies, or the they have left their imprint on what came orizations of lesbian existence and desire. our press. It’s our vehicle, not our baby. daily complexity of organizing actual later. Dever takes the ideas behind CR In these discussions she moves forward It’s how we’re doing our work right people, or the urgent need for a more just apart without patronizing the practice, to the 1980s, the great era of “discourses now.” Gail Cerridwen is planning for “a world right now. In contrast, there are the which she values as part of the history of of difference.” Through critiques of Word Warriors so healthy and so situat- material, the empathic, the daily, the pri- second wave feminist thought. Adrienne Rich and Eve Kosofsky ed in its identity that a group of younger vate, the particular—all coded female. Similarly, when she reads an early text Sedgwick, she shows lesbians being people could take it over. Then I can Dever stands against the repetition of by Alix Kates Shulman, “Organs and pushed to the margins of gay studies, write.” She’s as ardent about finding this old gender division of labor, which Orgasms” (1971), she sees both flaws feminist studies, and queer theory. those young people as she is about her rules abstraction out of bounds for fem- and value. Pieces like this, which named Lesbianism is often used to symbolize ten-year plan for books: “I want to bring inists who want to make a practical dif- to this generation just some of that ference. For example, she defends Judith sense we had in the ’70s that we could Butler against critics who would have her change things!” I be more nurturant and caring in response to her readers’ immediate needs to understand and act. She asks, why should 7KDQN\RX:RPHQ·V5HYLHZ Butler be the good girl some of her crit- To the Women’s Review: ics seem to want? Why is it every good Just got the latest copy of WROB and feminist’s job to confine her activities to IRU\RXUFRPPLWPHQWWRZRPHQ·V read your editorial letter. That is a damn traditional ideas of female service? shame, to put it as mildly as I can. Especially Dever circles around the theory and ZULWLQJVYRLFHVDQGLGHDV since I then looked at this week’s New York practice debate, examining its usual terms Times Book Review and saw that they seem critically. But though she is skeptical, she to have responded to [your November article is a listener, with a sense of historical con- on the underrepresentation of women writ- text. Dever’s contribution is her respectful ers there] by going practically as far in the attention to feminist thought wherever it :H·OOPLVV\RX other direction as possible. Which leads me to crops up—in the academy or in popular think that there’s a strong chance that the fiction—while she never grants any for- WROB will resurrect itself in one form or mulation enduring authority. As she puts another in the near future. I certainly hope so. it in epigram: Feminists “need authoritative 7KH&HQWHUIRU1HZ:RUGV ZZZFHQWHUIRUQHZZRUGVRUJ In commiseration—and disappointment, paradigms” and they are also, necessarily, zFQZ#FHQWHUIRUQHZZRUGVRUJ and anger— “against authoritative paradigms.” +DPSVKLUH6WUHHW Lesley Hazleton Dever takes paradoxes like these as &DPEULGJH0$ Seattle, WA her practice, considering feminist abstractions as a part of feminist politi-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 21 feminism’s most radical position. But this “Fat women in this culture are battered heroicizing of lesbians as a vanguard women,” I could rarely muster up a good makes them the servants of a heterosex- head of anger when I read these stories. I ual feminism, says Dever. They are used Blue indigestion have puzzled about this a great deal. instrumentally as a “border against which Perhaps, as one of the epigraph authors the mainstream can define itself.” by Mary Titus confesses, “I can still be persuaded, when I’m not in my right mind, that thin people keptical Feminism records some The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories are happier, prettier, more focused, more important evolutionary moments balanced…that they’re better people than I S in US feminist theory, from Kate of Women and Fatness edited by Susan Koppelman. am. But that is the wounded me.” These Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) to The New words find corresponding echoes in the Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-First New York: The Feminist Press, 2003, stories themselves. Elana Dykewomon’s Century (1996), “undertaking,” Dever 278 pp., $16.95 paper. free flowing, “The Language of the Fat says, “to produce a material history of Womon” (1992), struggles to claim for abstraction.” The book’s strength lies in Venus of Chalk by Susan Stinson. Ann Arbor, MI: self-affirmation the wounding language of its enduring faith that thought is not fat oppression and almost reaches its goal, separate from action. But Dever has Firebrand Books, 2004, 204 pp., a triumphant wish to much less to say about the reverse $14.95 paper. proposition, that action is not separate be as big as a house. As big as a from thought. The concept of practice I house with a hundred rooms. is, ironically enough, under-theorized Lesbians talking, political meetings, here. What beyond texts counts as polit- n Edna Ferber’s 1910 story, “The tended and hear them speak, at least ini- a resource center, a library of ical action? Through what theoretical Homely Heroine,” a woman writer tially, for themselves. Yet perhaps recipes, a shelf of videos on the practices have activists shaped their I rises to a friend’s challenge to “write a Koppelman’s extensive editorial apparatus rhinoceros, bear, buffalo. She wants work? Have they consciously used theo- story about an ugly girl” and creates Pearlie arises from her knowledge and her com- to rise out of the sea not like a ry? Unconsciously used it? What traces Schultz, informing her reader: “when I tell passion. To struggle against “fat-hatred,” goddess but like a whale, ringing has theory left on collective, public you that I am choosing Pearlie Schultz as we need all the scholarly—and sisterly— the world with the slap of her great thought? Does feminism have a coher- my leading lady you are to understand that help we can get. body on a wave. (p. 192) ent theory of power beyond the free- she is ugly, not only when the story opens, Perhaps inevitably, the selections in The doms it seeks of sexuality and repro- but to the bitter end. In the first place, Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe are But the fat woman’s language falters; ductive choice? (Perhaps not.) What Pearlie is fat. Not plump, or rounded, or uneven in quality, yet all are worth reading, she cannot hold tight to her glorious exactly is “the material,” which Dever dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT.” and some are true gems. Octave Thanet’s vision: “She is what she is,” the story con- mentions as a position from which to Able to cook but never kissed, Pearlie’s sad “The Stout Miss Hopkins’s Bicycle” (1897) cludes, “A little freak looking to other critique abstraction? tale follows, but receives little praise. After tells of two delightful friends and neigh- freaks for encouragement. In secret, As Skeptical Feminism reaches its con- reading Pearlie’s tale, the author’s friend bors, Mrs. Margaret Ellis and Miss Lorania because she is still afraid.” clusion, theory (along with its discon- announces that “a steady diet of such lit- Hopkins, who share the same “skeleton” Almost no one in these stories is tents) has moved to the center. This is erary fare would give her blue indigestion.” in their closets, this “skeleton—which real- happy being fat; certainly no one before perhaps inevitable if one looks, as Dever “Blue indigestion” is what I felt as ly does not seem a proper word—was the the 1980s. When we meet the first truly asks us to look, at the context, in this well reading the stories in Susan dread of growing stout. They were more happy fat woman, in Roz Warren’s won- case, academic publishing. Dever offers Koppelman’s latest collection, The Strange afraid of flesh than of sin.” Endless exer- derful 1987 tale, “A Mammoth no examples of policy-makers, feminist History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other cise regimens ensue until at last the two Undertaking,” she is transformed at her lawyers, or US-based international Stories of Women and Fatness. It is a cultur- take on the perils of bicycling, with unex- naked, dancing moment of triumph into organizers, many of whom face ques- ally induced indigestion, I know, and now pected and happy results. Thanet’s narra- a constellation, rising like “a succulent tions indiscriminately grouped under the I even know its name—“fat-hatred.” The tor says, “No other sport appears to make cookie in the oven,” until she whooshes term “globalization.” Indeed, some US Strange History has taught me much about such havoc with the mind.” off into the night sky—as if the author activists and theorist have attempted to the symptoms of “blue indigestion”— Happiness, unfortunately, is more the couldn’t quite imagine a happy future for respond to swiftly changing contexts— the endless dieting, the constant self-crit- exception than the rule in these stories. her here on earth. once again, as in the beginning, thinking icism, the disorderly eating—I confess Margaret Lee and Miss Luella Hoag, hero- There is more than unhappiness in fast during global encounters. I’ve had them all. And I remain uncured. ines, respectively, of Mary E. Wilkins these stories, more than fear, there is also a I don’t mean here to ask for a differ- Although a blurb on the back of The Freeman’s extraordinary “Noblesse” whole lot of rage. Men abuse, rob, and ent book, but Dever’s argument might Strange History promises the book’s con- (1913) and Fannie Hurst’s “Even as You rape vulnerable fat women; husbands have more political resonance if she read tents will free readers from internalized and I” (1919), suffer indignity and terrible force their wives onto diets; and thin the organic intellectuals who try to frame oppression—“reading this book is a bold physical discomfort as freak-show fat women come in for their due—they are feminist actions. What a rich source of act of liberation from an insane culture ladies. The prose in which they are por- bony, wrinkled, starved, and cruel. Fat examples of the shivering collision which promotes body hatred”— like a trayed is extraordinarily complex—mock- hatred can and does turn us against each between the need for abstraction and the new fad diet, it promises what it cannot ing, ironic, bittersweet—a strange, tragi- other. But “thin hatred” is not the answer. resistance to abstraction posed by “the deliver. Powerful, disturbing, revelatory, comic mix of sympathy and revulsion as if (Reading a women’s magazine just yester- material.” Practice, too, requires Dever’s wonderful—the stories in this collection the authors themselves suffered from day, I was struck by one woman’s confes- skeptical critique. are all of these, but I’d call them educa- “blue indigestion” as they imagined their sion that after she lost a lot of weight on a But this is a lack Dever herself would tive not liberating. Nevertheless, I hearti- ungainly heroines. Here is Miss Hoag: “successful diet,” some of her friends surely justify, given the material condi- ly recommend them to you. stopped speaking to her.) I found hope in tions of the production of a book like In The Strange History Susan Koppelman Between her eyes and upper lip, the title story, the last in the collection. At Skeptical Feminism and the social produc- has gathered together 25 stories about the Miss Hoag looked her just-turned its close two women sit across a kitchen tion of its audience. What Dever can lives and loves of fat women. From Kate twenty; beyond them, she was ante- table, sharing a meal. They met at Weight offer us is a sense of the ongoing vitality Chopin’s 1895 “Juanita” to the 1997 title diluvian, deluged, smothered Watchers. One is young, withdrawn, death- of feminist theory, a dialectical process story by Hollis Seamon, the collection cov- beneath the creamy billows and bil- ly ill with anorexia; the other, older, wiser, that is alive and well. ers 100 years of American women’s histo- lows of self. and fat, offers her food and love. They are Teaching, writing, discussing—all ry. But the book is far more than a collec- And yet, sunk there like a beginning to talk, these two women, and these are political acts. As Dever knows, tion of short stories; it is a political publi- flower-seed planted too deeply to we all need to do the same. “Blue indiges- there are many other locations of the cation, a forceful contribution to the push its way up to bloom, the tion” may not be cured by conversation political, but she cannot include all of movement for fat acceptance. As twenty-year old heart of Miss Hoag alone, but its weight on our hearts is eased them. No single subject position can Koppelman states in her introduction, beat beneath its carbonaceous layer when lifted from silence to speech. With provide them. These will be the voices “fat-hatred is not about truth; it is simple, upon layer, even skipped a beat at all of its stories and epigraphs, forewords that talk back and destabilize the theories old-fashioned, and culturally condoned spring’s palpitating sweetness, dared and afterwords, voices and visions, The Dever explores. prejudice. Sizeism is oppression.” To this to dream of love, weep of desire, Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe is itself a Writing for the last issue of The end, the collection is heavily attended with ache of loneliness and loveliness. conversation. I encourage you to join in. Women’s Review of Books—let’s hope pub- framing materials intended to contextual- Isolated thus by the flesh, the lication is only suspended for the time ize, enrich, and, frankly, to guide the read- spirit, too, had been caught in he 23rd story in The Strange being—I find the topic of Skeptical er’s understanding. From the dedication to nature’s sebaceous trick upon History, “Magnetic Force” Feminism apt. The Review has always been granddaughters, “Perfect at Any Size,” to Miss Hoag. Life had passed her by T emerged from Susan Stinson’s promiscuous about what writing might the eight opening epigraphs, to the slimly. (p. 36) work on her first novel, Venus of Chalk be of interest to feminists, taking seri- acknowledgments, to the foreword and its (2004). The short story tempts the imagi- ously a wide range of genres, voices, annotations, to the epigraphs the editor Sexually abused, socially isolated, self- nation; the novel delights it. This is an interests. It has been a place where one affixed to each story, to the outstanding hating—many of the women in these sto- able and lovely work of picaresque fic- could meet a diversity of books, crowd- historical overview provided in the 40- ries evoked my pity and my fear. Though, tion, celebrating the cooking, the sewing, ed together in potential conversation. page afterword, to its annotations, to a with the best advice of the epigraphs, I the poetry, the bodies and the love of two With the Review’s passing, that meeting- final bibliography—The Strange History know that “Dieting is social control of big women, Lillian and Carline. Carline, house has closed its doors, one place forearms its readers. I resisted the women”; that “Fear of fat keeps women the engaging narrator who writes home fewer for the feminist dialogue celebrat- epigraphs. I wanted the stories to appear preoccupied, robs us of our pride and economics pamphlets for a living, needs ed—in theory—in Skeptical Feminism. I onstage alone, so I could meet them unat- energy, keeps us from taking up space”; that to fully accept her body and her sexuality.

22 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 Although she has built a good life for rassment leave me mystified. It’s not just the herself, rich in physical pleasure, loving “laddishness,” as the English call it, it’s the friendships, and creative projects, exter- absence of anything else. Ross’s first book, nal events still trigger bouts of self- Less cool, more light grandiosely titled The Failure of Modernism, hatred and emotional pain. In a broken advanced a nearly impenetrable but sweep- down bus with two unlikely companions, by Meryl Altman ing theory about the 20th century Carline sets off on the great American (“Modernism saw…”) based on a reading of road trip, riding from Massachusetts back Cool Men and the Second Sex by Susan Fraiman. New York: only three poets, all men. It is a measure of to her Texas roots, seeking healing con- feminism’s lack of impact on the academic nection with her Aunt Frankie, the Columbia University Press, 2003, 212 pp., $24.50 paper. mainstream, as well as a comment on the woman who raised her. Carline finds this absence of meaningful peer review in liter- connection and much, much more. I ary studies, that this was considered not only Venus of Chalk takes its title from a any of us have wondered why, sets up what she means by “cool” through a defensible but praiseworthy. When Ross white ceramic ashtray shaped like the after 30 years of feminist critique, reading of film, beginning with Quentin does turn to women, you wish he hadn’t, as Venus of Willendorf that Lillian gave to M the casual disparagement of Tarantino’s signature use of violence and his in “This Bridge Called My Pussy,” his contri- Carline. It is one of many symbols in the women is still tolerated sheepishly or with commitment to what she calls “narrative as bution to Madonnarama (an anthology of novel—perhaps too many. Stinson defiant “edge,” even among otherwise pro- adrenaline shot”—“the lurch from the daily scholarly responses to Madonna’s book Sex), delights in stuff—potholders and pincush- gressive people. Susan Fraiman’s outspoken, to the deadly, from closeness to separa- in which he mocks feminist debates about ions, clarinets and camisoles. I do too, but invigorating book looks at this question tion…from feminizing intimacy to heroic sexuality. He “turns again and again to pop- at times I thought the novel strained through the work of a trio of influential film- alienation.” But her analysis really gets going ular youth cultures for political leverage and toward its metaphors. At times, too, plot makers, a handful of queer theorists (some of when she shows how scholars and cultural inspiration,” says Fraiman. But chiming in astonished. If you suffered from insomnia them women), and three major figures in lit- critics have drawn on similar emotional with the celebration of black women’s butts late at night in a Kentucky motel, would erary and cultural studies: Andrew Ross, schemas in edgy ways that run at cross pur- does not make one less white, and simply to you get up and go skinny-dipping in the Henry Louis Gates, and the late Edward Said. poses to their politics. assert one’s solidarity with youth cultures motel pool? Carline would. I was remind- The figures she discusses are “cool” in more The emotional heart of this argument is does not make one younger. ed of heroines in gothic novels who leave ways than one. They are media celebrities and in her chapter “Andrew Ross: The Romance Ross’ pose is particularly disturbing locked bedrooms to wander, white night- “academostars.” They present themselves, of the Bad Boy”: because the project of left cultural studies gowned, clutching a small candle, down with some justice, as leftists, as politically was not simply to study culture but to draughty hallways. savvy, as fellow-travelers to feminism. And As perhaps the “coolest” of my cool change it. Ross emphasizes his Scot identity I laughed as I wrote this, though, for finally they are “cool in their style of male- scholars, Ross demonstrates my thesis and bolsters his connection to “gangsta rap” Carline is quite a character. And if, at ness.” “Coolness,” says Fraiman, is “epito- particularly well: though ambivalence and his slaps at the black middle class by ref- moments, this first novel bursts the mized by the modern adolescent boy in his toward feminism would seem to be at erence to the faith-based gangs of his youth. bounds of plausibility or pulls a muscle anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will odds with hipness in a political sense, But he never declares what he believes or stretching for symbolic heights, it is still a to separate from his mother….a picture of in terms of reigning cultural narra- takes a position clearly for or against any- marvelous achievement. The stories in flamboyant unconventionality coexists with tives about men and mothers, mas- thing he’s discussing. His arguments run fast The Strange History never convinced me highly conventional views of gender—is, culinity and femininity, a degree of both ways; his apparent goal is to be the that fat hatred could be completely over- indeed, articulated through them.” Race and antifeminism may actually be intrinsic only one left standing at the end of the come. But this novel does. When at the class have their part to play as well, often to hipness, a significant part of what essay, smugly crossing his arms. The result is end, Lillian and Aunt Frankie embrace through “an appeal to African-American and constitutes it as such. (p. 56) a discourse highly flavored by politics but in Carline, three fat women “so near that working-class men as embodiments of an no sense engaged. This sort of “cool” their bellies pressed,” I didn’t suffer any authentic, renegade masculinity.” Fraiman has if anything understated the supersophisticated put-down of everything “blue indigestion” at all, and neither did a Cool Men and the Second Sex is a much adolescent self-indulgence of Ross, whose can leave feminism looking embarrassingly one of them. I needed, timely “speakout” book. Fraiman meteoric rise and imperviousness to embar- over-earnest. Fraiman makes these points

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 23 more politely than I have, but her careful potential role models who are all men, and analysis is damning. that’s a problem. It is a relief to turn from Ross’s border I continue to find Gates honest, serious, skirmishing to the magisterial summations of and committed, where Ross just seems nar- AIDS: a crime against women Edward Said, who believed in something and cissistic and oily. Gates may want to see the was willing and able to say what it was. Still, tradition he traces as more inclusive and less by Karen Kahn Fraiman is right to see “a contradiction divided than it in fact is, so when he encoun- between fresh racial paradigms and rotten ters some gender trouble, he detours around Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS gender ones” in Said’s chapter on Jane it. But this leaves blank spaces in his picture Austen’s Mansfield Park in Culture and of African American culture, and because of by Anne-christine d’Adesky. New York: Verso, Imperialism. The world of the novel is under- his enormous and well-deserved influence, written materially and symbolically by the this is important to say. 2004, 487 pp., $30.00 hardcover. Antiguan slave trade; but Said’s patronizing Fraiman’s explanations of why progressive characterization of “cheerfully colonial… male critics fall into these traps didn’t quite I feminine nearsightedness” is possible only convince me. Is Said trying to “remasculinize was shocked out of complacency in many circumstances, the family’s because he fails to consider two decades of the colonial male”; is Gates compensating recently when I encountered a stun- desire for children simply outweighs feminist work about Austen or even to pro- for his identification with his mother; is Ross I ning figure in my morning newspa- other considerations. In war-torn areas vide a close reading of her book. It’s an repudiating the influence of the feminist film per. The average lifespan in some of Africa, rape by soldiers is common- inescapable thought that Fanny’s problems criticism “mothers” with whom he studied? I African countries is spiraling down so place, leaving women stigmatized, preg- simply don’t interest him, are too trivial to don’t think we have to get that psychological. rapidly as a result of HIV infection that it nant, and ill. hold his attention. In fact, he begins to seem Each was seeking to leverage his cool out- is predicted to be no more than 35 years Today, half of all HIV infections are like Austen’s Sir Thomas, a brilliant man too sider credibility with solid gold, insider cre- in the near future. Though I had known among women—in Africa, the rate is 58 preoccupied with world empire to attend to dentials (Princeton, Yale); and this is, more or that AIDS is spreading rapidly in many percent. Among 15 to 24 year olds, 75 domestic matters. What Said shows so bril- less, how “making it” has always been done. parts of the world, bringing with it percent of those infected are female. In liantly about Joseph Conrad—that Conrad increased poverty, despair, and death, I Uganda, d’Adesky notes, girls aged 15 to can’t hear the complex, resistant voice of the n Fraiman’s final chapter she joins scholars had not stopped to consider the devas- 19 are four to six times more likely to be Other—is true of Said himself but only when like Biddy Martin and Julie Abraham who tating toll of this disease on entire pop- infected than boys of the same age. it comes to women. Culture and Imperialism’s attack I have worried that the shift from “lesbian” ulations. AIDS has become the bubonic Many of these girls are infected by older on Camus, for example, is devastatingly inci- to “queer” theory made possible an erasure of plague of the 21st century. men who use them for sexual pleasure. sive; the section on Austen, perfunctory and women, either through a focus on gender as Since 1981, 20 million people have These high rates of infection among misleading. Said’s analysis of third-world fluid rather than stable or through the idealiza- died of AIDS worldwide. Today, over 40 girls and women have accelerated pro- nationalisms might have been strengthened if tion of a fixed and familiar masculinity. Her million people are infected with HIV;of motion of AZT and nevirapine to pre- he had considered the complex ways such disagreement with Judith Halberstam’s Female these, the World Health Organization vent mother-to-child transmission of nationalisms mobilize women’s bodies and Masculinity is especially cogent. It is hard to pre- predicts 6 million will die in the next two HIV. Such treatment programs have been deploy women’s images—in the creation of fer Halberstam’s project of making “masculin- years, if they are not provided with anti- highly successful but often do not “tradition” for example. Perhaps he would ity safer for women and girls” to the older fem- retroviral treatment. For Anne-christine include treatment for the mothers them- have come to see these intersections differ- inist ideal of making the whole range of activ- d’Adesky, this is a crime against humani- selves. D’Adesky found women in ently in time, if he had lived. ities and pleasures (now arbitrarily gendered) ty. In her new book, Moving Mountains, she Uganda “furious and desperate” about open to all—particularly since the lure of male argues forcefully that “AIDS [is] not just a the lack of treatment for themselves, hat is most provocative and most power in masculinity remains underanalyzed in medical or public health issue, but funda- their husbands, and other members of likely to be (as Fraiman puts it) Halberstam’s book. Studies of men and mas- mentally a social and political one.” their communities. Rather than suc- W “disconcerting” about her project culinity are very much foregrounded at pres- Though treatment could be made avail- cumbing to despair, however, they were is that she rarely goes after soft targets. At ent, and women’s studies is working hard to able to the 6 million people who need it organizing. If HIV infection has any up first I wondered why, when there is so much learn from and incorporate them, as is only today, d’Adesky contends, we do not have side at all, d’Adesky saw it here: overt misogyny about, she would choose to right. But we are not all that far from the days the political will. It takes only one quick criticize Henry Louis Gates, who has done when “men’s studies” was, well, the whole look at the resources going to the “global I realized that a positive off- more than almost anyone to get and keep damn curriculum, so claims about “non-hege- war on terror” versus worldwide AIDS shoot of the AIDS crisis in Africa black women writers in print and who attends monic masculinities” and assertions that mas- prevention and treatment to confirm that is the global attention it focuses to and praises the work of women scholars. culinity can be rescued from its place in the d’Adesky’s righteous anger is justified. on women’s issues, which is But Fraiman presupposes a progressive aca- structures of domination and subordination Moving Mountains is a challenging helping African women to fight demic community within which thoughtful need to be scrutinized for awareness of who book—intellectually and emotionally. against long-standing legal, polit- objections may be made and heard. Her actually has power. D’Adesky pushes her readers to ical, social and cultural approach is a kind of disappointed love. Fraiman concludes with a fine re-reading embrace their responsibility for this inequities. (p.143) My rereading shows me she’s right that of Leslie Feinberg’s transgender memoir Stone human tragedy and join the struggle to women writers “remain a spectral, hypotheti- Butch Blues in terms of the main character’s make treatment accessible around the Still, many Ugandan women fear cal presence” in Gates’s early work, and that “butch maternity.” I can’t quite go along with world—and she grounds her argument revealing their HIV-status, as they may be he mutes the feminism of Zora Neale her idea that we should respond to the “new in detailed field reports from the beaten by husbands, kicked out of their Hurston and Alice Walker even as he praises masculinism” by revaluing or resexualizing the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and homes, and abandoned. Domestic abuse them. Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey maternal body, however. It’s tricky to say this, Russia. Her interest is in the is common in Uganda, where male priv- brilliantly demonstrate that black writing because of course hostility to the maternal ilege is deeply ingrained. A 2001 survey should be read in sophisticated ways, as com- has been damaging to all women, but I think myriad challenges—political, revealed that 40 percent of the women plex texts, not patronized as simple sociolog- the problem is broader: the disparagement social, medical, technical, cultur- respondents had experienced domestic ical or historical documents. But when Gates not only of maternity but of older women al—to delivering therapy, and to abuse; some women were beaten for turns to Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Wilson, generally, including within feminism. We need issues related to disease control refusing sex, and others were forced into Fraiman shows, he unconsciously repeats that more good historical and textual analyses of and the capacity of nations to sex as a marital obligation. As one patronizing gesture (much as Said does with lesbian culture, like Linda Garber’s Lesbian mobilize their civil societies and activist with Women’s Treatment Action Austen). Fraiman is right to ask, about the Poetics, as part of the “sustained political and health sectors to deliver accelerat- Group (WTAG) noted: oral tradition Gates finds central to black cul- analytical multitasking,” “close, unironic ed access to AIDS medicines. (p. 9) ture, “Who exactly finds sense and pleasure in engagement with the world,” and “political The husbands are a real prob- reciting (or refuting) lines like ‘I fucked your outrage and agency for women” that Fraiman These are complex issues. For readers lem.... Many husbands have two mama/ Till she went blind/ Her breath calls for in her conclusion. unfamiliar with the technical aspects of wives, and sometimes these smells bad, / But she sure can grind’?”; and to In Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, AIDS treatment, global trade agree- wives do not even talk to each note that Gates’ claim that the folkloric trick- Gates writes: “We live in an age of irony—an ments and their impact on the manu- other about HIV, even if one of ster Esu-Elegbara is in some way an androg- age when passionate intensity is hard to find facturing and distribution of inexpen- them is HIV-positive. They can- ynous figure “despite his remarkable penis outside of a freshman dining hall, and even sive generic drugs, and the internation- not afford to tell their husbands. feats” is unconvincing. the mediocre lack all conviction…. al agencies involved in delivering pre- That is the reality we are going Fraiman also criticizes Gates for having Sometimes the relentless ironicism of con- vention and treatment programs, it may to have to confront. (p.152) turned away from inclusive paradigms to temporary culture feels like a vaccination take some fortitude to keep going. But focus, recently, on the crisis of black man- against earnestness, which is the sort of pre- there is much to learn here, making the Uganda has been touted by the Bush hood. To my mind, this could be a whole lot caution you take when you’ve been—in a effort worthwhile. administration as one of the great suc- worse. For instance, in Gates’ introduction to phrase of Baldwin’s—betrayed by too much HIV infection may be the most impor- cess stories for HIV prevention. Using an Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,he hoping.” Though she doesn’t say so, Susan tant issue facing feminists today. As approach called ABC—abstinence, suggests that there is something about being Fraiman’s book resonates with this diagnosis Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for betrothal, and condoms—Uganda has black and male that is more than the sum of and calls for a return to hope, for less “cool” HIV/AIDS in Africa, told Ms. magazine reduced its seroprevalence rate from 30 those two qualities, but he never hands out and more light. She ought to get a hearing, this fall, HIV “has targeted women with a percent two decades ago to less than ten easy generalizations. The variety of men he both from feminists and across the left— raging, Darwinian ferocity.” Gender percent today. However, suggesting that profiles in the book, from Louis Farrakhan always provided that that inclusive place, inequality leaves women vulnerable to the decrease in transmission may be the to Bill T. Jones, defy generalization in any intellectual civil society, where the discussion sexual transmission from husbands who result of high mortality rates, d’Adesky case. It’s a subtle, informative book—yet could be held without defensiveness or pos- abuse them or hide their HIV status. worries that, in a culture in which male we’re left with 13 leaders of the race and turing, really does exist. I Often men refuse to use condoms, but privilege leaves women few options, the

24 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 ABCs may be doing more harm than that treatment protocols are too complex good. In Uganda, many married women for poor, illiterate people to follow; have followed these rules, abstaining from d’Adesky insists that they are simply sex before marriage, only to find them- looking for excuses to do nothing. Her The breast vs. the bottle selves infected by unfaithful husbands. field reports demonstrate that even in the With little power in their relationships, poorest communities in the world, treat- by Julia Query these women cannot negotiate condom ment works. Widespread use of generics use to protect themselves. combined with prevention education Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Nor does the emphasis on abstinence have brought a runaway epidemic in and betrothal help marginalized commu- Brazil under control in just six years. In Culture by Bernice L. Hausman. New York: Routledge, nities of sex workers, drug users, or men rural Haiti, Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in who have sex with men. As the Bush Health organization is saving lives 2003, 274 pp., $26.95 paper. administration pushes its conservative through a community mobilization agenda, HIV continues to spread through model that “views patients as equal allies I these stigmatized but common activities. in this effort.” y sweetheart grew up in a small milk. I concluded that Hausman and I As AIDS activists in the US warned in the Farmer’s team relies on Directly Midwestern town during the have something in common: When it early ’80s, “Silence = Death.” The refusal Observed Therapy (DOT), a somewhat M 1970s when breastfeeding was comes to breastfeeding, we are prone to to acknowledge the realities of nonmarital controversial treatment protocol that has at an all time low. She didn’t see anyone overstatement. Hausman describes her- sex and intravenous drug use and to pro- often been used in prisons, mental health nurse a baby. Her images of nursing self as a breastfeeding advocate as well vide easy access to condoms and clean institutions, and drug clinics to ensure that come from soft-focus formula advertise- as an academic and acknowledges that needles continues to leave countries vul- the patients take their medicines. Partners ments that never feature large, sprawling, advocacy and scholarship are a difficult nerable to widespread infection. in Health has adapted DOT as a public talkative toddlers with sticky fingers and balance. Although much of her book is health strategy by training members of jagged fingernails. “I want to nurse!” impressively researched, sometimes she n the last decade, the face of AIDS in the community to provide the support says our gleeful two-year-old son, relish- loses her footing. the West has changed dramatically. patients need to comply with difficult ing the word “nurse” and adds, after a Hausman splits feminist authors into I Today, the great majority of the 1.6 treatment protocols: look from me, “Please.” “Oh!” winces two groups, the (good) ones who sup- million people living with HIV have access my sweetheart, watching my son knead port breastfeeding and the (bad) ones to antiretroviral treatment; HIV has In Cange, [Haiti], the ones giving my breast as he nurses. who do not. She argues that feminist become a disease to be managed, rather out pills and supervising patient When we talk about her discomfort scholars viewed nursing as a feminist than a death sentence. In the developing behavior... are not doctors, but with nursing, she says, “It’s so animalis- practice until world, however, only seven percent of peers and community members tic.” She’s right, of course. When I lie those in need of treatment—400,000 peo- who go to patients’ homes.... down to nurse Eli to sleep he often in the late 1990s a new genre of ple—have access to effective drug thera- [These] community health workers scrambles over my chest, an elbow bare- feminist scholarship on breast- pies. D’Adesky acknowledges that provid- are called “accompagnateurs”— ly missing my nose, with the squirmy feeding emerged.… These works ing treatment to all who need it is a those who accompany. They don’t single-mindedness of a piglet or a share a crucial rhetorical strategy: tremendous challenge, but she contends it just hand over pills; they listen, puppy jousting for a teat. There are only refute scientific claims to argue is one that the world community can they talk, they help individuals and a few activities in our daily lives that that breastfeeding promotion is meet. She is encouraged by the World their families cope with a range of remind us that we are animals—sex, largely political, having to do Health Organization’s commitment to its daily, personal needs. (pp. 107-108) pooping, eating chicken legs with our with the promotion of certain “3x5 plan” to provide treatment to 3 mil- fingers—and nursing is one of them. kinds of mothering. (p. 197) lion people by 2005. Though politics and Farmer’s success with DOT provides Nursing is something all human moth- bureaucracy have slowed the process, hope for communities around the world. ers did for millions of years, and often Hausman says such feminists view WHO is providing important leadership in But other challenges remain. In many until the child was years older than my “maternal nursing as itself a purely helping poor countries to acquire medica- developing countries, the public health son, but now it seems to many anachro- political experience, determined by con- tions at prices they can afford. infrastructure is practically nonexistent. nistic, even perverse. servative social discourses and solely The United States has not been an ally Lack of food and clean water undermines “You aren’t going to nurse at my defined by their meanings.” Wow. Are in that effort. The Bush administration, efforts to fight both HIV and the many friends’ barbeque are you?” asks my feminist critics of breastfeeding dis- while widely publicizing its $15 billion opportunistic infections that attack those sweetheart. We’ve already had a hard courses that extreme in their views? Do commitment to stopping the spread of with compromised immune systems. week, and soon what could have been a they really see nursing as a repressive AIDS, has blocked the most important strat- An optimist, d’Adesky sees these chal- light exchange degenerates into my practice foisted on Stepford mothers by egy for saving lives. Allying itself with the lenges as opportunities. As countries take declaring, indignantly, “If they were conservative social forces? world’s major pharmaceutical companies, on the fight against AIDS, of necessity racist, and we were Latino, you wouldn’t Hausman’s main argument against the administration has used worldwide they are building up public health systems tell me not to speak Spanish to him, feminist critics of breastfeeding dis- trade agreements to limit the ability of and addressing long-standing health would you? I refuse to teach my son to courses is that such feminists deny the poor countries to import cheap generic issues such as tuberculosis, the number- submit to this anti-nursing culture!” value of breastmilk. She concentrates on drugs. According to d’Adesky, the cost of one killer of HIV-infected individuals in I was being embarrassingly hyperbol- Linda Blum, whose At the Breast, she con- treating HIV-infected patients today could poor countries. In Africa, AIDS has ic, but I’m not the only one to do so in tends, “easily set aside” the scientific evi- be as low as 38 cents per day. The struggle focused greater attention on a host of discussions on breastfeeding. Nursing dence for the health benefits of breast- for worldwide access to antiretrovirals once long-standing, complex problems, includ- discourses are filled with prescriptions feeding. However, Blum does not dis- again reveals the big lie about the high cost ing warfare, widespread famine, lack of about mothering and femininity and count the benefits of breastfeeding; of medical care—these drugs are not near- access to clean water, and gender inequal- debates about evolution and scientific indeed, she offers solid evidence of its ly as expensive to manufacture and market ity. Addressing the AIDS crisis will necessi- progress, individualism versus the benefits, criticizing only the least sup- as the pharmaceutical companies insist. tate finding solutions for these threats to “mother-baby dyad,” labor law, family ported claims, such as the notion that it Making these drugs available to devel- health and stability. roles, and the role of the state. All of it can heighten IQ and visual acuity. oping countries is not the only challenge Moving Mountains is densely packed is racialized. Hausman quotes only Blum’s doubts in the battle against AIDS. Some claim with information and infused with the Bernice Hausman’s Mother’s Milk is about such spurious claims. She also crit- author’s deep commitment to AIDS the latest addition to the small collection icizes Blum for writing that, despite the activism; the book, however, suffers from of books and articles by feminists ana- benefits of breastmilk, most formula-fed To the Women’s Review: some unfortunate flaws. As a compilation lyzing breastfeeding discourses, includ- babies (in the first world) “thrive.” But I worked on a feminist novel for 20 years. of previously published essays, the flow ing works by Rima Apple (1997), Linda this is true—most formula-fed babies in I finished it this week. What do you mean of information and argument is disjoint- Blum (1999), Pam Carter (1995), the US do thrive, and Hausman offers no you won’t be there to review it once it’s pub- ed and sometimes difficult to follow. I Katherine Dettwyler (1995), and evidence to the contrary. lished?! I’m so distraught. wished for a single chapter explaining the Vanessa Maher (1992). Like some of her Should we not think critically about On the other hand, I’m sure I would not manufacture and marketing of generic predecessors, Hausman analyzes formu- the promotion of breastfeeding and the have been able to complete this novel with- drugs and the impact of world trade la-hawking pamphlets, La Leche League production of scientific knowledge out The Women’s Review of Books. I read agreements, since this information was so materials, and other writings on breast- about breastmilk? Hausman seems to every issue I received—sometimes every central to many of d’Adesky’s most pow- feeding, noting their sexism and contra- think that questioning any of the many word of every issue! It inspired me to go for- erful political arguments. I was also dis- dictions. She takes issue with previous claims about breastfeeding makes one ward and continually challenged me to heartened by the poor editing that left the feminist writings, arguing that they anti-breastfeeding—a simplistic with-us- think in new directions, as well as giving me text littered with contradictory facts and downplay the “biomedical significance or-against-us litmus test. She implies a sense that what I was doing was part of figures that may have been the result of of breastfeeding” and present bottle- moral failure for those who flunked her something bigger. error—or simply of the essays having feeding as liberating for women. At first, test. She makes the bold statement that I am going to go into mourning over the been written during different years. The I accepted her portrayal of texts that I “In de-emphasizing the health benefits of demise of The Women’s Review of Books. author, along with her editors at Verso, hadn’t read. However, when it came to breastfeeding, First World feminists do a With love and thanks to all your writers unfortunately failed to turn this thought- the books I had read, I found her con- disservice to the most disadvantaged and reviewers, who have made such a dif- provoking collection of essays into the tentions surprising. I hadn’t seen an anti- women in the world.” As evidence of ference in my life, kind of coherent and incisive treatise that breastfeeding subtext lurking in them, this de-emphasis, she again points the Alexis Krasilovsky might have engaged a broader audience in nor a postmodern wholesale dismissal finger at Blum, for criticizing simplistic Los Angeles, CA addressing one of the greatest challenges of the scientific support for the calls to increase breastfeeding in third we face as a global community. I immunological advantages of breast- world countries. But Blum argues for

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 25 greater concern for the health of moth- be made not by the mother alone but by ers, pointing out that breastfeeding can the parenting team, taking into account be physically depleting for undernour- the ished women and isn’t “free”; and that Sparks of light simply to present statistics about infant questions about balancing the death due to the (unsafe) use of formula labors, pleasures, well-being, by Alison Townsend is to ignore the larger social problems in development and opportunities which infant mortality is embedded. She of a household’s various mem- Because of the Light by Roseann Lloyd. Duluth, MN: clearly states that “it is safer for poor bers and, furthermore, as deci- Third World mothers to feed their babies sions that open, rather than Holy Cow! Press, 2003, 112 pp., $13.95 paper. at the breast.” How is she doing such assume the answer to, the ques- mothers a disservice? tion of who cares for children Buddha’s Dogs by Susan Browne. New York, NY: Hausman also discusses a Signs article and in what ways. (Law, p. 415) by Jules Law (2000). He argues that many Four Way Books, 71 pp., $14.95 paper. “popularly cited facts and statistics about I wonder if Law isn’t articulating a bid by I infant feeding are not based on medical non-lactating parents to have those pre- research at all,” and that breastfeeding cious quiet times holding their small bun- idway on my journey, I found discourses naturalize a sexist division of dles of perfect little fingers and toes, myself in a dark wood,” the domestic labor. Hausman points out that those moments when tiny eyelids flutter. M poet Dante wrote in The Divine Law, an English professor, uses a faulty Feeding a baby can be immensely satisfy- Comedy over 700 years ago, of setting out understanding of statistics in order to ing, whether you are nursing or giving a to explore the geography of the soul at question findings that breastfeeding bottle. It sure beats diaper duty. midlife. Poets have written about it ever decreases ear infections. She also rightly since, using it as a place for both reflec- criticizes him for using “common sense” ltimately Hausman seems to be tion and departure, a point from which to to draw conclusions about breastfeeding. picking a fight that isn’t neces- examine old attitudes and to embark on But Law’s larger project is not dis- U sary. Couldn’t it be true both that new experiences. Having turned 50 last abled by Hausman’s criticisms. His point breastmilk and nursing are good for year, I find myself actively seeking books is not that every claim made about the infants (in the right context) and that of poetry by women of a certain age, benefits of breastfeeding is false, but that pro-breastfeeding claims are often over- looking for writing that can help me many, especially in popular discourse, are stated? That we live in a culture and move into the second half of my life not based on scientific evidence. And economy that preclude breastfeeding for with courage and grace. Because of the these claims often assume and promote many mothers, but that bottle-feeding Light by Roseann Lloyd and Buddha’s Dogs the idealized nuclear family, making might, even in a utopia, be the best by Susan Browne are both steeped in the infant care the mother’s responsibility. choice for some families? Can’t feminists kinds of awareness and insight that come Law points out that families make risk analyze the overstatements about breast- only with having lived more than a few assessments about their children every feeding yet work for policies, like onsite hard years on the planet. They are rich day, but that not all risks are the subjects day care and flex hours, that help moth- with hard-earned insights and under- Roseann Lloyd of public debate. He writes, “City air is ers nurse their infants? Instead, Hausman standing and distinguished by the height- clearly more toxic than infant formula, wants a unified feminist position that ened sense of mortality that makes life’s but families rarely uproot their lives for promotes breastfeeding. She criticizes abundance all the more sweet. our world and finds ecstasy in the daily. “I incremental reductions in an infant’s Blum for writing that there is “no one I’ve been following Minnesota poet have seen the Queen of Heaven in the exposure to carbon monoxide...[P]edia- answer and no position free of danger,” [the Roseann Lloyd’s work for nearly 20 years black summer sky,” she writes in tricians are more likely to recommend a last emphasis is Hausman’s] implying that now with much admiration and delight. I “Midsummer Ghazal: August 20,” adding, practice that will disrupt a woman’s to acknowledge dangers in the promo- always come away from her poetry feeling “I have heard her pass in the hush after career than a relocation that may affect a tion of breastfeeding is to fuel anti- enriched by her heart and authenticity, her thunder.” In “Still Point,” she celebrates the man’s commute.” Hausman misses Law’s breastfeeding campaigns. ability to help us see the world from a moment when she glimpses the next sea- point, criticizing him for not providing Hausman suggests that the “biomed- completely fresh perspective. In her mar- son, even in the midst of summer: statistics about air pollution. ical discourses supporting maternal nurs- velous third collection, Because of the Light, In addition, Law points out that hav- ing” could “provide feminists and health she uses light itself as an organizing prin- I’m weak with the fullness of ing to work for a living is one of the activists with a language to press for… an ciple, weaving it through the book as skill- summer most important factors in preventing expanded understanding of women’s fully as the bright strands of color she weak with this beauty and yes! breastfeeding. Hausman herself says that rights.” Hausman fails to understand that admires in the vibrant Guatemalan weav- I want to marry the whole world. feminists should organize to make to argue for breastfeeding using biomed- ings that appear in some of the poems. Today, employers more accommodating of ical claims is not free of dangers. Arranged around the passage of the sea- such hesitation of the seasons — breastfeeding employees—a proposal Feminist scholars have repeatedly shown sons, the metaphor of light becomes a summer in its fullness, winter dread, supported by Law’s article. Why is she that it is naïve to think that armed with kind of consciousness in the collection, both present at once — opposed to his conclusions? science we can win the battles for illuminating the poet’s thoughtful explo- which way to go? Ironically, in a world in which most women’s rights and that scientific truth ration of her travels to distant places (p. 59) women would give anything to have their claims can’t be used against us. (Guatemala, Norway, and Wales) and her partners do more childcare, Law and Hausman writes in a turgid, clunky reflections on midlife love and family, Lloyd’s work is deeply grounded in Hausman seem to be having a turf fight academic style, which she thankfully ancestry, female friendship, the natural (and often arises from) the natural world. about who gets to feed the baby. interrupts with a personal voice revealing world, and the politics of class and gender. It is rich with detail. A goldfinch “scal- Hausman wants babies to be nursed by her own experiences, although not often The collection opens with a series of lops/ through the canopy of the corn- their mothers, not just fed breastmilk enough to make Mother’s Milk a pleasura- ghazals, gleaned, according to the book’s field.” Summer poems are described as pumped out previously and put into a ble read. Sometimes her use of academic endnotes, from “the practice one summer “bronzy June bugs,” and “mulberries bottle; she argues for viewing the infant phrases is so vague that it is hard to fig- of writing a ghazal a day, based on the leave a cosmos of purple moons on the as part of a “mother-child dyad.” She ure out what she means. For instance, she images and events of the day.” A Near sidewalks.” When she travels to her ances- concludes that feminists should cam- wants policy changes that would make it Eastern poetic form, the ghazal is charac- tral Wales, she delights in discovering the paign for “mothers’ rights” to breastfeed. easier for mothers to nurse—but it’s hard terized by its associative quality and by its old Welsh word glas, which means both Law says choices about nursing should to know what exactly “provisions for ability to yoke together seemingly unrelat- green and blue, “the color of hills and mothers... that acknowledge the unique ed images, observations, and events. In water.” As a Wisconsinite, I especially embodiment of lactation” would consist “Midsummer Ghazal: July 2,” the poet enjoy how well Lloyd describes the beau- To the Women’s Review: of. Despite having few specific sugges- instructs her class, “In the ghazal... each cou- ty and vicissitudes of the Upper Midwest I did want to write and thank you for all tions, she makes the grand claim that plet should stand alone./ Each line, half of a jew- climate. Winter roads are described as that WROB has given me over the years. I “breastfeeding-friendly workplaces” eled bracelet.” Later in the same poem, she “chalky,” looking as if “a giant hand has am grieving for its closing. But I understand. would “force men to acknowledge that tells the students, “The ghazal thrives on non taken a fat piece of pastel/ and made sweeping/ Here in Bloomington we came to the same their positions of power occur by virtue sequiturs,” adding that it also “works against arcs across all the roads.” Summer is gentle: place with our feminist bookstore. When it of women’s exclusion from the public narrative.” This definition could describe “You can go in and out of the house closed I felt as if a friend had died. Now with sphere.” She doesn’t explain how women Lloyd’s approach in much of the collec- without tensing up.” But it can also weigh the passing of the WROB I feel as if a teacher nursing at work would lead to conscious- tion, for it is the ability to see connections on one “like a musty shroud.” is leaving. How much I learned! How many ness changes in men. between things that makes her work so In some of the most moving poems new authors I met! What doors opened in For those of us with a scholarly powerful. She is a real mistress of the in the book, she describes trips to my mind! I am not an academic, or even a interest in motherhood and breast-ver- open, associative poem (the collection also Guatemala, which she falls in love with teacher of English, just an ordinary lover of sus-bottle debates, her book is an includes several stunning prose poems), “Because of the light/ the broad expans- books and women’s writing. important, although overstated, addi- and many of her poems proceed by imag- es of clear light/ over hazy green moun- I wish you and all the staff well and hope tion. But for general readers interested istic leaps, a organic procedure that serves tains// Because it’s dark at home in the that a new possibility will emerge. in a feminist look at the politics of her central metaphor particularly well. winter[.]” In Guatemala, Lloyd bears wit- Antonia Matthew breastfeeding, I recommend Linda Like the Persian poet Rumi, whose ness to hunger and poverty. More overtly Bloomington, IN Blum’s At the Breast as both more enjoy- poems inspire several of those in the book, political in this section, the poems never able and better scholarship. I Llloyd lives in the seeming contradictions of stray from intimate specificity. In the

26 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 searing “Poem on the Occasion of the while chain-smoking, then burn The patch of sunlight is shrinking, change, ending, “We could just keep going, Festival of the Immaculate Conception, the house down, but the iris has plummeted up the sunlight/ falling on our brief lives, no Antigua, Guatemala, & the Confirmation drive the car backward among the weeds and wild matter what we do.” Possibility and reality of John Ashcroft as Attorney General of along the railroad tracks to the raspberries, are held in balance in a way that gives the the U.S., 2001” for example, Lloyd Town Lounge, purple flames licking out of green poem a charged power. The sonically pleas- describes the bare feet of the women cel- slam-dunk a fuckload of martini’s, stalks, ing iambic phrase, “no matter what we do,” ebrants, then asks and dance shitfaced on the top of and it’s cold now, the sun gone conveys a sense of inevitable good, despite the bar behind the pines, life’s limitations. This quality is present in & suppose you were here today, until I’m dragged out and thrown their green darkened by dusk, time many of Browne’s conversational and Mr. New Attorney General, in in the fountain to sink to the bottom to go inside on this Sunday beautifully direct poems. Although only your crispy white shirt, your shiny like a smashed penny when everything is resurrecting one of the poems is actually called an ode, shoes, your black & white legal among drowned wishes. from winter, from memory, from many of the pieces in this collection are certainties—would you take off But it’s my lucky legacy loss. characterized by that form’s sense of occa- your shoes for Mary? Would you to say “No thanks, I’ve had (pp. 62-63) sion, and the book as a whole is a celebra- kneel to Maria Madre de Dios? enough.” tion. “[L]et me live each moment/ through Would you spread red rose petals Everything in moderation The last two lines of this poem describe to its end,” she says in “Star Food Sonata”: across the stones in honor of both is the goddamn-it-all-to-hell truth. what Browne’s poems do and is an exam- conception & its contra? How will Fucking shit. ple of her mastery of poetic closure. Her let me see I will never see this you honor every living woman’s (p. 33) poems move from the particular to the again, immaculate life? (p. 84) general, ending with moments of realiza- or this, or this, The “smashed penny” image is pivotal, tion that only seem quiet—then hit with let me hear it as music — Light, as the governing metaphor of just one example of the way Browne a wallop. the soundless cadence, the collection, is closely aligned in this segues smoothly from a moment of levi- In the beautifully condensed “Birthday,” shimmering rhythm between book with the search for happiness. But ty to one of greater import. which is informed by a sonnet-like concen- everything, where there is light there is also darkness, Humor is, of course, the other side of tration of emotion and idea, Browne mag- the ephemeral singing and the latter is not absent in these hon- sadness, and an undercurrent of loss ics a birthday phone message from her one song, infinite movement. est and searching poems. In “Natt og Dag: runs beneath Browne’s poems. There is alcoholic father into a complex meditation (p. 68) Return to Norway After 25 Years,” Lloyd the core story of her experience in an on time and the things in our lives we can’t I movingly captures this duality by meditat- alcoholic family where “the drinking ing on the name of a violet that comes to began before dinner,/ and dinner con- embody her own attitude toward life. sisted of drinking,/ and then there was Walking with friends, the poet tries to only drinking,/ nothing in the way of FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES decide if the flower should be called drinking,” a world where “the listener/ “Day and Night” or “Night and Day,” curled in the center of her bed,/ fearing “because the night/ is the mother of the day. the silence/ out of which the sounds FIVE COLLEGE WOMEN’S STUDIES RESEARCH CENTER Not the other/ way around.” In the end she would begin again.” Loss is explored A collaborative project of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, says, “I had to go with Mette’s naming,/ from another perspective in a series of being who I am. Because it pleased me./ poems about the poet’s mother’s death. and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Comforted me even... Because the night is/ In the stark “The Yard,” the poet visits the mother of the day.” the lot where her mother’s wrecked car The Center invites applications for its RESEARCH ASSOCIATESHIPS for 2005- This inextricable weaving together of has been taken, “bloodstains/ rusted into 2006 from scholars and teachers at all levels of the educational system, as apparent oppositions and contradictions the metal where the metal had been,” and well as from artists, community organizers and political activists, both local is what gives life meaning. “How finds it a place “with a panoramic view of and international. Associates are provided with offices in our spacious facil- strange,” Llloyd affirms in “Rose the flat earth/ where people fall off and ity, library privileges, and the collegiality of a diverse community of femi- Quartz,” my favorite prose poem in the do not come back.” In “The Use of collection, “that in the end—the light and Poetry,” Browne contemplates her fatally nists. Research Associate applications are accepted for either a semester or dark, the cold and warm, the angled and injured mother in a list poem that builds the academic year. The Center supports projects in all disciplines so long as smooth, the hard and soft—all arise from by a process of powerful accretion. Each they focus centrally on women or gender. Regular Research Associateships the same dark rainbow.” line begins with the anaphoric are non-stipendiary. We accept about 15 Research Associates per year. “Because...,” listing things ranging from usan Browne’s delightful Buddha’s the mother’s injuries, to the things in her International applicants may also apply for 1 of the 2 one-semester FORD Dogs, winner of the 2002 Four Way wallet, to the articles of clothing her S Books Intro Prize and my favorite daughters pick out for Goodwill, building ASSOCIATESHIPS for Fall 2004 or Spring 2005, which offer a stipend of poetry discovery this year, is so mature to the haunting finale: “Because each of $12,000 plus a $3,000 housing/travel allowance in return for teaching (in and accomplished that it’s hard to believe us has to keep something.” English) one undergraduate course in the Women’s Studies Program at the it’s a first book. Alternately hilarious and But despite the sadness in the book, University of Massachusetts or the Women and Gender Studies Department heartbreaking, the collection, described as Browne remains open to the possibility at Amherst College. UMass and Amherst College seek a total of two experi- one “filled with moments of Proustian of redemption through loss. In the love- enced researchers and teachers to strengthen their undergraduate curricu- recall,” by contest judge Edward Hirsch, ly and lyrical “For Road Z,” she says: lum and, in the case of the university, to complement the graduate program. limns the dimensions of a life rich in understanding both of what time has When sadness comes, drive north For Fall 2004, the University of Massachusetts seeks a researcher with expert- taken and of the gifts that come with into Colusa Country, past Butte City, ise in the Middle East or Latin America with an emphasis on globalization, maturity. Whether dancing with her father a one-saloon town, and turn left transnational studies or postcolonial studies. Research should focus on gen- as a girl, describing the difficulties of onto Road Z, der, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality within the context of globalization. growing up in an alcoholic family (where and anytime is fine, but try Candidates whose work crosses traditional academic boundaries preferred. “Nothing was as frightening/ as the peo- November For Fall 2004 or Spring 2005, Amherst College seeks a researcher who is also ple I loved”), exulting in coming of age in when the rice fields brim with first an experienced teacher and who works on the Middle East, Latin America, the ’60s, detailing the frustrations of rain, teaching a boy who hates Emily and heron and crane glide low and Asia or Africa with expertise in the field of gender in the media especially in Dickinson, or tenderly memorializing her rest the context of war and civil unrest. Ford Associates need not be studying mother’s death, Browne’s work is lit every- like origami on the gold shore of their own region of origin. where by the spark of significant detail. reeds, It is also distinguished by her wonder- and if you’re lucky, it’s close to Applicants for both programs should submit a project proposal (up to 4 ful sense of humor, a quality all too infre- sunset, pages), curriculum vitae, two letters of reference, and application cover quently present in poetry, and one that the road turning silver, curving Browne knows can cut like a double- between sheet. In addition, Ford applicants should submit a two-page description of a bladed knife. Feisty, biting, and bitter- the green Coastal Range and the women’s studies course they are prepared to teach that includes their peda- sweet, she captures, for example, the Blue Sierras, gogical goals and techniques. absurdity of adolescence in “Ode to the sky wild with changes — High School”: “O those four long years pinks and purples, copper and Submit all applications to: of being stoned/ and parting my hair bronze, Five College Women’s Studies Research Center down the middle/ / and stitching the to dark as indigo, and the stars. Mount Holyoke College armhole of my tie-dyed dress/ onto my You are moving with them, out 50 College Street lap in Home Ec.” In the frisky and exu- into the open, berant rant, “Searing, Smoking, part of the astral traffic. South Hadley, MA 01075-6406. Drinking,” the speaker defines the push- (p. 69) Deadline is February 14, 2005. For further information, contact the es and pulls that make her who she is: Center at TEL 413.538.2275, FAX 413.538.3121, email Late in the book, in a poem called [email protected], website: http://www.fivecolleges.edu/sites/fcwsrc Sometimes I get the urge “Easter Sunday,” she ponders the details to chug a couple of boilermakers of the world around her:

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 27 wing agenda have been devastating both lenge presented by the heavy influence in documented and as-yet-untold ways. of the Church. In the end, we are left wondering what to do with the crucial The UN and women’s rights lobal Prescriptions is strongest information she has presented. when it shows the lows to Policy-makers, women’s NGOs, and by Silja J. A. Talvi G which the conservative right feminist theoreticians will surely benefit has stooped to push its damaging and greatly from this book, which docu- Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights shortsighted viewpoints. At the 2000 ments the paradigm shift in gender and Beijing conference, members of the reproductive politics in the United by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky. New York: Zed Books, Holy See contingent went so far as to Nations. But it is regrettable that this wear large buttons that read “MOTHER” impressively researched work limits 2003, 306 pp., $25.00 paper. to emphasize what they believed should itself to such an audience. By writing in be a woman’s primary role in society. the language of academics and policy- I Other nations have resisted these makers, Global Prescriptions loses an audi- he complex relationships among International Population and Develop- kinds of regressive concepts, particular- ence of feminists and activists who are global health policies, sexuality, ment in Cairo] restrict these principles to ly where women and sexuality are con- also addressing these issues. To be clear, T and gender roles are too often heterosexual married adults.” cerned. Petchesky points to Brazil as an there is great value in Petchesky’s time- simplified and relegated to the realm of The platform of the 1995 United example of a nation that has a more ly work. Yet I wonder, as I do about reproductive rights. Real struggles obvi- Nations Conference on Women in well-rounded understanding of human many important feminist works: Is it ously exist in the area of reproductive Beijing ultimately went the furthest, sexuality, particularly when compared possible to transform the exclusivity of rights—particularly in light of eroding proclaiming a new frontier in sexual with the United States. Issues of racism, academic and policy language into access for women here in the US—and rights for women. A section of the final classism, and sexism are certainly alive something that more readers and are absolutely worth feminists’ attention 1995 Beijing document reads: and well in Brazil, but the country has activists can learn from? What are the and action. But throughout the world been exemplary in dealing frankly with obstacles to doing so? And how can women and girls face a host of health, The human rights of women HIV/AIDS, without denying the reality of writers be inspired to reach beyond the sexual, and reproductive problems that include their rights to have control adult and adolescent sexuality, homo- inner circle to engage a more diverse go far beyond debates about choice. over and decide freely and respon- sexuality, and all manner of sexual sub- base of readers? Global Prescriptions is an Rosalind Pollack Petchesky’s Global sibly on matters related to their cultures. Brazil has provided inexpen- expanded version of a paper originally Prescriptions defines women’s health sexuality, including sexual and sive, generic anti-HIV drug cocktails to written for the United Nations issues broadly and is therefore a wel- reproductive health, free of coer- people with the disease, even in the face Research Institute for Social come addition to the canon of writing cion, discrimination and violence. of challenges by the World Trade Development. The tone of the work is about women and health. Most impor- Equal relationships between Organization. Women’s activism and therefore understandable. But tantly, Petchesky’s work provides a his- women and men in matters of sex- insistence on both contraception and Petchesky would have benefited from torical framework for understanding ual relations and reproduction, HIV treatment have played an integral the perspectives of UN-outsiders in how and when gendered health became including full respect for the role. Small wonder, then, that Brazil has reshaping the book, which tends to get an international issue. According to integrity of the person, require made great strides in stemming the bogged down in acronyms. While striv- Petchesky, the “transnational presence mutual respect, consent and shared spread of AIDS within its borders. ing to synthesize the available informa- of women’s health movements” was a responsibility for sexual behavior Petchesky points to several other tion on women’s NGOs, Petchesky fails result of global capitalism, the rise of and its consequences. (p. 38) examples of women’s activism in the to interview the staff or managers of antifeminist and fundamentalist forces, realm of reproductive and sexual rights, these groups, leading the reader to feel and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The impact was broad, Petchesky including in Nigeria, where two out of detached from the subject matter. In battling this powerful trio of explains: every five secondary school girls have Still, the timing of Petchesky’s book sociohistorical factors, nongovernmen- had at least one pregnancy, and most couldn’t be better. A decade after the tal organizations (NGOs) emerged as Slowly and incrementally, cases of HIV occur among 15-to-24- International Conference on Population central forces in the struggle for repro- women’s determination in all year-olds. Even there, Petchesky and Development took place in Cairo, ductive and sexual health rights. The eras, countries and cultures to explains, “Government inertia or com- the UN General Assembly convened in day-to-day work of women’s NGOs, seek abortions, even at great risk placency has never stopped women’s October to promote the implementa- both urban and rural, became a focus of to their lives and health, in order NGOs… from engaging in vigorous tion of the plans set into motion in UN-sponsored women’s conferences in to gain some control over their advocacy and service provision activi- 1994. Things were going well—250 Nairobi, Cairo, and Beijing, spurring fertility and bodies was starting ties.” Among the accomplishments of global leaders signed an endorsement of the conceptualization of reproductive to make an impact on interna- these NGOs has been the adaptation of the plan, signifying their willingness to and sexual rights as human rights on tional human rights standards. culturally and developmentally appro- move forward. But President Bush par with any other essential right. (p.39) priate materials to address sexuality refused to sign on. The reason? The But such gains in women’s rights among children, adolescents, and young plan mentions “sexual rights.” tend to evoke a backlash. As defenders The US government, in reaction, adults ages six to 24. Imagine such a Petchesky herself no doubt would of women’s rights began to participate positioned itself to try to put a stop to comprehensive approach to sexuality have predicted this maneuver. And, as in defining and influencing internation- this progress. As his first presidential act, among youth in the United States! Bush has just received another four al health priorities, fundamentalist George W. Bush lifted the Clinton-era The emerging power of women’s years to promote his clearly Christian forces went on the attack. Led by the suspension of the “global gag rule,” NGOs is still challenged at every turn, fundamentalist-influenced agenda, Vatican delegation to the UN and the thereby ensuring that no government particularly because the Catholic women’s reproductive and sexual Bush administration, conservative body or overseas NGO could receive any Church is a major funder of health rights—indeed, our very human forces made it their mission to take US funding for reproductive health if services in Africa and elsewhere. It’s rights—will continue to be denied on exception to any move they saw as legit- the right to have an abortion had anything here, with its discussion of the role of the most basic levels. I imizing abortion, allowing adolescents to do with the mission of the organiza- the Church in defining reproductive to make decisions independent of their tion (even if the funding for abortion and sexual rights, that Petchesky’s work parents, condoning diverse definitions rights or education came from other truly edifies the reader and points to of family, extending reproductive and sources). “Thus,” says Petchesky, “have what is arguably one of the biggest To the Women’s Review: sexual rights, or furthering the rights of a handful of conservative U.S. politicians challenges facing developing nations I can’t tell you how sad and angry I am gays and lesbians. beholden to religious right-wing funda- seeking funding for reproductive serv- that The Women’s Review of Books will quit Petchesky writes, mentalists sought to muzzle women’s ices. “As most of the world’s states publishing at the end of the year. I have health movements around the world.” rush to divest themselves of responsi- been a reader for at least ten years and an Nonetheless, although women’s The results of this well-funded right- bilities for social service and health occasional reviewer when Linda Gardiner groups failed to win explicit refer- care provision, ceding these to the pri- was editor. But it is mainly as a woman, as a ence in the documents to free- vate sector,” says Petchesky, “the feminist, as a scholar, as a human being that dom of sexual orientation or sex- Church continues to expand its already I profited from the range of knowledge I ual expression—or even the To the Women’s Review: vast activities and centuries of experi- obtained just reading the reviews. And yes, words “sexual rights”—their gains I am so sorry that The Women’s Review ence in this field.” from the books that I bought or borrowed on behalf of a sexual rights dis- of Books is winding up its distinguished Although the influence of the to continue discussions begun with course woven through the Cairo adventure in publishing. I have been a Church on reproductive and sexual reviews. There is no women’s journal that is and Beijing texts are little short of subscriber since the beginning, as well as a rights is felt most strongly in counties so global in the fields of women’s interest revolutionary. Thus, “reproductive writer and a reviewee. I read the latest like Nigeria and the Philippines, the US than the Review. Yes, I read first as a profes- health” includes the ability “to issue with admiration for the writing and is highly vulnerable as well. The sor of American literature, for the fiction have a satisfying and safe sex life,” the book selections. I hope the review will Catholic Church, in fact, is “rapidly reviews—but then there were the histories, and “sexual health” involves the somehow be restarted. It is still an becoming one of the most important the testimonies, the ethnographies, the “enhancement of life and person- absolutely necessary publication, and health providers in the county,” says political and social and psychological stud- al relations, and not merely [dis- surely someone with deep pockets will rec- Petchesky, emphasizing that the church ies I would never be aware of. All totally ease prevention].” (p. 37) ognize that. already runs at least 48 HMOs. read by the next issue. Margaret Morganroth Gullette Disappointingly, she provides only Annette Zilversmit Petchesky emphasizes that “[n]owhere Waltham, MA vague speculation about what might be Brooklyn, NY does [the 1994 conference on done to address the enormous chal-

28 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 essay and the next one, Spagna’s friends are home—is a big job. In “To the Woods,” “young men who loved to drink,” yet who Spagna examines generosity in her small are also skilled workers with fierce pride. She community: “We’ve been loaned more tools Building trails, finding home never depicts them as stereotypical, unedu- than I could name. We’ve begged advice on cated losers. Instead, with an outsider’s plumbing, construction, gardening. Forget by Irene Wanner insight, Spagna admits she “always envied living simply. We have our neighbors to them, their ease and their exuberance—their thank for the fact that we are simply living.” Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw unquestioned sense of belonging.” “From the Ground Up,” her longest Her language is rich, imaginative, playful. essay, again develops complementary story by Ana Maria Spagna. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University She loves “the shovel-and-pulaski simplici- lines: building a home and managing a trail ty of my trail-crew job: no computers, no crew staffed partly by volunteers. Since Press, 2004, 168 pp., $17.95 paper. phone, no meetings.” (A Pulaski, about the Spagna admits inexperience in both, the I same size but heavier than an axe, is a com- reader follows the writer in journeys of dis- bination trenching and chopping tool.) But covery. “People were impressed, I knew,” ne of the most gratifying days I a common opinion: “You’ve got the best she appreciates the importance of details, she notes of her house construction, “not spent in recent years was as a vol- job in the world.” Their remark triggers a too, in nature as well as in relationships. just because we knew so little or because O unteer helping to put in the last flashback about how Spagna came to work “Doing Without,” in which she examines we tried so hard, but because we’re, well, stretch of the 93-mile Wonderland Trail in in the woods and observations about sea- environmentalists’ sometimes exaggerated girls.” Trail work became “liberating” Mount Rainier National Park. Hikers going sonal employment: “[N]o security, not great messages and “subtle self-righteousness,” because it was “something I actually knew all the way around the mountain now no pay.” She has had “thirty-five jobs in fifteen advocates careful use of resources, not total how to do,” even if the paid crew and the longer need to risk walking along a narrow, years. None longer than six months.” bans. “Caring for nature, like caring for our- volunteers sometimes clashed. busy highway shoulder, but can cross the From here, the established pattern selves,” she concludes, “is more complex Volunteers have done many employees White River on a log bridge, vanish into a repeats: Present action prompts a bit of his- and dire than just doing without”—setting out of jobs, I learned, because each year the grove of vine maple, and continue into deep, tory and relevant introspection. The whole up this thesis with a story about a digestive federal government withdraws further from tranquil forest. But where I was an utter piece has the satisfying arc of a short story: disorder she could not cure merely by com- funding its responsibilities in national amateur, a willing set of untrained muscles There’s the conflict of removing an obsta- plete avoidance of certain foods. “Long forests and parks. Spagna’s essays evoke and innocent enthusiasm for one day, Ana cle, and by the end, something changes. But Distance” explores her first crush on a run- both the frustrations and the satisfactions Maria Spagna, who lives in the remote village because it’s nonfiction, Spagna herself, not a ning coach who becomes her “first heart- of her work. Through her struggles to bal- of Stehekin on the east side of Washington stand-in character, directly explores several break” when he inevitably falls from his ance building a home and building a trail state’s Cascade Mountains, has made her liv- ideas that interest her, a composition tech- pedestal, while “Choir Practice” brings her with both paid workers and volunteers a lot ing for many years maintaining and improv- nique David Petersen, in Writing Naturally: A to realize she loves a woman. like me, Spagna says she found “[her]self ing public trails. Her thoughtful and engag- Down-to-Earth Guide to Nature Writing (2001), “Entombing Spiders and Other Small changed—more humble, more patient.” ing book transports readers into a world of calls “ramble and return”: Shack Stories” tells of ending “the season- Spagna’s book may change readers, too, physical labor, without removing the al housing merry-go-round that has spun as she demonstrates through personal expe- romance of the wilderness or overlooking While an essay, by definition, wanders us from house to house, seventeen of them rience the many ways women can succeed, the job’s hard-won rewards. hither and yon, each and every ramble in half as many years,” with the purchase indeed thrive, in challenging circumstances. “It is grueling and satisfying work,” necessarily returns to connect, if only of five acres where she can put down roots Certainly a sense of pride and pleasure Spagna notes in “Wilderness, briefly and discreetly, with the spinal with friends. floods me each summer when the snow Homelessness, and the Crosscut Saw,” the theme...before wandering off in some Several pieces deal with building a finally melts enough so that I can cross the first of 18 essays. fresh direction. And with each house. Stehekin, a tourist destination in the White River, pass through the maples’ wel- exploratory ramble and return, the summer, is a village of “about one hundred come shade, and climb the three huge You can spend eight ten-hour days theme is somehow furthered toward year-round residents,” 55 miles by boat stones that now serve as steps, which we in a row clearing the thick over- its conclusion. (Petersen, p. 19) from the town of Chelan. Buying gro- volunteers wrestled into place with metal grown ferns and berry brambles that ceries—much less designing and finishing a pry bars, muscle, and laughter. I obscure a trail. Then you can look As a reader, I’m immediately hooked by back and see the open swath stretch- the conflict Spagna presents. The women’s ing out below as the trail takes you personalities develop and contrast as they up and out of the woods. You can speak and interact; details of setting and tell yourself: that’s it, that’s what I work are intimate and convincing. Best of did this week. (p. 3) all, the writing goes beyond narrow person- al experience. Its “rambles” illuminate larg- Right from the start, action drives this er themes raised by the title. narrative. The essay begins efficiently in the As a writer and writing teacher, I admire middle of things: Spagna and a female Spagna’s use of the device Petersen (5-!.)4)%3).34)454% coworker are struggling to cut then roll a describes—the fluid progress of her essay, section of fallen tree from a trail. Rain, without pointless digression. Compression bugs, and fatigue complicate their effort, of time and place—an afternoon then next &ELLOWSHIPS but the primary challenge is having to rely morning, a spot in the woods then a on their own ingenuity and muscle, because diner—also streamline the events. The nar- 4HE5NIVERSITYOF#ONNECTICUT(UMANITIES)NSTITUTE5#() chainsaws are forbidden here. rative voice is appropriately casual, INVITESOUTSTANDINGUNIVERSITYANDCOLLEGEPROFESSORS Spagna pauses to explain “a boon and a admirably economical, engagingly honest. INDEPENDENTSCHOLARS WRITERS MUSEUMANDLIBRARY loophole” in the1964 Wilderness Act. ince little contemporary American lit- PROFESSIONALSTOAPPLYFORARESIDENTIALFELLOWSHIPTHAT No mechanized anything would be erature is written by or deals with COMESWITHASTIPENDOF 3UCCESSFULCANDIDATES allowed in capital W Wilderness. No S women who work outdoors, these WILLDEVOTEANACADEMICYEARATTHE3TORRSCAMPUSOF cars. No bikes. No wheelbarrows essays explore fresh territory. Their service even. And no chainsaws.... The as fire lookouts in the West inspired some THE5NIVERSITYOF#ONNECTICUTTORESEARCHANDWRITING National Park Service, the federal of Gary Snyder’s poetry, Jack Kerouac’s fic- DISCUSSIONANDSCHOLARLYCOLLABORATIONWITHOTHER5#() agency created by and for urban tion, and Edward Abbey’s nonfiction. Their FELLOWS!PPLICATIONMATERIALS INCLUDINGTHREELETTERSOF conservationists, chose to keep their works are classics of both the rugged-indi- hiking constituency happy, and vidualist and contemplative-conservationist RECOMMENDATION MUSTBERECEIVEDBY*ANUARY  chainsaws raged through park trails traditions. While Spagna fits this niche, &ORCOMPLETEINFORMATIONANDGUIDELINES VISITWWW unhindered by the pesky new legisla- she’s quieter. Often, she’s the only woman tion. The United States Forest on an otherwise all-male crew, the only col- HUMANITIESUCONNEDU Service, ironically, the agency of lege-educated person, and—worse, at least clear-cut logging, stuck to the intent in the minds of many Northwesterners 5NIVERSITYOF#ONNECTICUT(UMANITIES)NSTITUTE5#() and spirit of the law. If conserva- resentful of recent wealthy invaders from tionists wanted Wilderness, by golly the South—a Californian. It’s no accident #OLLEGEOF,IBERAL!RTS3CIENCES they’d get it. Sure, we’d still maintain Spagna frequently revisits the theme of fit- 'LENBROOK2OAD 5  the trails, but we’d do it—get this— ting in, of finding home. 3TORRS #4  with crosscut saws. (p. 2) The book loosely follows her life. Her 0HONE   second piece, titled after the humorous if Picture a long blade with a handle and a isolationist bumper sticker—“Welcome to &AX   human at each end, the teeth repeatedly Oregon: Now Go Home”—traces her % MAIL5#() UCONNEDU snagging on gummy pitch, the blade stick- beach-and-bikini childhood, then her move ing in a log that’s wedged into wet forest north to study at the University of Oregon. loam, and you get some sense of why the These memories alternate with segments chore takes all day. describing a day spent planting trees in the Next, Spagna returns to the present, as rain and an evening drinking beer at a small- 777(5-!.)4)%35#/..%$5 two passing hikers snap a picture and voice town tavern with coworkers. In both this

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 29 ass Media’s merits include a logic or perspective can make a book sturdy chapter on the broad- greater than the sum of its parts. This M cast reform movement—the author doesn’t spot things I hadn’t Media distortions attempt to diversify the ranks of man- noticed, thereby prompting an occa- agement and on-air talent and to sional, reflective “hmmnn,” or supply by Marie Shear increase coverage of underreported the small, satisfying ping as a fresh issues. The book’s discussion of the insight or juxtaposition scoots into a Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, satirical origin of “bra burning” and its space in my head that I hadn’t known instantaneous transformation into a was vacant. Even if the reader has first- 1963-1975 by Patricia Bradley. Jackson, MS: University permanent, pejorative myth is wel- hand knowledge of some of the events come. There are apt descriptions of and people described and has scruti- Press of Mississippi, 2003, 322 pp., $46.00 media trivialization of the August 1970 nized coverage of feminism as a media demonstrations, which marked the critic, the book produces no particular hardcover, $18.00 paper. 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage. sense of recognition. Nor is it general- Bradley accurately points out that ly useful as an introduction for readers I concentrated media ownership and unfamiliar with the topic. rapid technological change have he second wave of the lesbians, pseudo-radical infantilists, and increased the obstacles to future hile reasonable people can women’s movement sought to infiltrations [sic].” Yet Bradley con- reform and that higher numbers of disagree about interpreta- T use the media as a lever for cludes that Friedan’s book and her female journalists have not produced W tions, no reader should accept social change, Patricia Bradley says. cofounding of NOW in 1966 have left a extensive improvement from within, flawed usage, factual errors, and typos. Her study of that search starts with profound legacy. either in the stories covered or the Mass Media is riddled with ungainly syn- the publication of The Feminine Steinem, in contrast, adapted to authorities quoted, despite second-wave tax and mistakes in diction, agreement, Mystique and stops “when the initial media requirements by blending glam- expectations. Bradley is correct about and idiom. Words are missing; extra energy of the movement was over, at our with strong, simple, personal women who look like us and think like words look like vestiges of an earlier least as far as mass media was con- statements on issues and “an unflap- them; three years ago, a female New York draft. “Antiabortion” is used as if it cerned.” She traces the trajectory: pable and witty speaking style.” Times Book Review editor angrily and means “prochoice.” There is babble: “rapid rise, peak, and disappearance Bradley calls her the nation’s most publicly called me a “conspiracy theo- Efforts “coalesced two founding from the public agenda.” influential feminist. Ms. magazine, rist” because I’d said that female thrusts.” A group is “a dispersal point Many feminists were journalists in which Steinem cofounded, introduced authors and book critics are underrep- for hiring trends.” Ideas “were still New York City, the nation’s media neglected topics, such as battered resented in mainstream media. undergoing inculcation.” Managers did capital. They soon found good news women and sexual harassment, to the Some of Bradley’s other interpreta- not want to be “alienating white racial and bad news: TV, newspapers, and media agenda by coupling “subversive tions and omissions are questionable: attitudes.” “[T]he mass media find a new magazines did circulate activists’ mes- content” with familiar devices like Female reporters were not “affection- take in permitting a new position to take sages. But the media oversimplified covers that displayed glossy art and ately tolerated” during President ground rather than exacerbating what issues and stereotyped feminists, seiz- catchy lines. Nonetheless, Ms. was Kennedy’s televised press conferences; has already been done.” “Moreover, ing on any novel or contentious aspect relentlessly pressured by advertisers the grinning president and guffawing adding to male uneasiness, was the diffi- of the movement, ignoring the need and—like the movement as a whole— male reporters treated those pioneers culty of identifying lesbians, one for radical change by equating criticized by lesbians, women of like fruitcakes. The epiphanic impact of emphasis perhaps for the use of labels women’s rights solely with job equity, color, and radicals who wanted funda- The Feminine Mystique seems exaggerat- of bralessness and stringy hair.” and treating Billie Jean King’s tennis mental change. ed, although I remember my excite- Many facts aren’t. The Christian victory over Bobby Riggs as a “happy Paradoxically, Bradley says, the sec- ment, when Friedan addressed a Broadcasting Network did not own ending” to the movement. ond wave strove for attention from demonstration in the early ’70s, at see- 23,000 radio stations by the end of the To attract readers and viewers with- the media it knew were damaging ing a woman who didn’t look like arm 1970s; that’s nearly three times the out upsetting the status quo or unset- women through employment discrimi- candy acting as if she had a perfect number of US radio stations that exist- tling advertisers, journalism uses a nation and servile images in news, right to speak in public. ed in 1980. The Democratic Party did template of what Bradley calls “craft entertainment, and advertising. It was Major intersections of media and not nominate Sargent Shriver for vice traditions,” journalism’s standards of tough to get coverage using orderly feminism are overlooked. References president during its 1972 convention. fairness, accuracy, and objectivity. (Of methods, yet protest marches and agit- to the hit TV series All in the Family, for Anne Koedt did not write “The Myth course, these may be flouted in prac- prop actions were treated as if shrill- example, mention Archie Bunker’s of the Vaginal Organism.” The media tice, and simplification, celebrity, and ness, not sexism, were the story. racism but neglect the episodes that let watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in “human interest” may take over.) At “Strident,” a code word for “lesbian,” America see and feel women’s issues. Reporting (FAIR) is misnamed, and first, journalism’s craft traditions was pinned on nearly any uppity When Edith Bunker, beautifully played names of journalists, authors, and crit- brought airtime and ink to the move- woman. Like a monster, the media by Jean Stapleton, encountered credit ics are misspelled. The key word in the ment, because it seemed new and could create favorites today, then discrimination at a bank or fought off Virginia Slims cigarette slogan—the because leaders of the National ignore or savage them tomorrow in a rapist, sexism came alive for millions condescending “baby”—is left out, and Organization for Women (NOW) were pursuit of novelty. of viewers. Such episodes were exhila- the lyrics of Mary Tyler Moore’s TV media-savvy. Before long, however, the Through its calculated conflation of rating landmarks of social change. theme song are wrong. media began chewing on each morsel the Equal Rights Amendment with Bradley’s accounts of media dismis- All this is doubly vexing because the of discord. Fastening on women’s abortion rights and other incendiary siveness can be bland; they don’t con- reader has no way to know whose lap anger rather than their issues, issues, the far right fostered a powerful vey the loathing of women that radi- to drop the dead mouse in. Maybe the reporters and editors portrayed femi- backlash, which mainstream media pro- ates from articles and illustrations in author is inept. Maybe her impeccable nists as castrating harpies, much as moted. While organizing, publishing, my files of the period. Nor are there manuscript was botched by others, they’d once caricatured suffragists. As televangelizing, and touring, Phyllis references to two contradictory but leaving Bradley justifiably infuriated. Martha Weinman Lear wrote, femi- Schlafly and other reactionaries created pervasive media themes during the Maybe the University Press of nism was consistently disparaged with their own media organs. Certain news- ’70s: (1) Feminism is dead because it Mississippi was too cheap to pay a first- “the cruelest weapon of them all— papers illustrated their articles on the failed; and (2) feminism is dead because rate editor, hamstrung its copyeditor, ridicule.” Editors’ and publishers’ per- passage of the ERA by the US House it succeeded and became superfluous. and skipped proofreading altogether. sonal bias repeatedly produced nega- of Representatives with a photo of Either way, the media pronounced I do know that we readers need a tive stories, as Newsweek, Time, and Rep. Martha Griffiths powdering her feminism a corpse. way to blow a collective, nationwide other news organizations warred on nose. (News of the current campaign to Despite the scholarship evident raspberry at books with poor English the movement. The moment feminism ratify the ERA, despite its omission from from the 21-page bibliography, there is and fake facts. Complaints to individual gained a place on the media agenda, the 2004 Democratic platform, is avail- something flat about Mass Media. Had publishing houses provide no systemic the movement “was already beginning able at www.ERACampaign.net and Bradley stuffed her material into an remedy. Someone should start a web- its skid,” says Bradley. [email protected].) Bradley’s iron maiden of abstractions, I’d have site where readers can post quotations While recognizing the accomplish- suggestions of FBI and CIA meddling groaned. But without imposing artifi- from indefensibly careless books, ments of less-publicized pioneers— with the second wave are provocative: cial unity upon untidy realities, inner thereby warning potential purchasers, including Florynce Kennedy, the activist “What has yet to be explored is how the marshaling public indignation, and lawyer whose gorgeous, astute audacity [FBI] infiltration affected the drive for embarrassing publishers. I can con- I loved—Bradley regards Betty Friedan the ERA.” To the Women’s Review: tribute approximately 1,000 words and Gloria Steinem as the most signifi- With the 1973 tennis match between I am so sorry that the Women’s about Mass Media and the Shaping of cant second-wave leaders and Robin King and Riggs, the media reduced Review has experienced so many finan- American Feminism, which space con- Morgan as the leading radical. For feminism from a subject for serious cial problems. I haven’t any ideas, for I like straints keep out of this review. Bradley, Friedan’s Feminine Mystique is journalism to a mere entertainment. so many others, simply exulted in the exis- Meanwhile, publishers should either “the founding document... the founding The event was to Bradley “a glorious tence of the WROB as it kept us from stop felling trees or start raising editori- event.” Friedan’s frequently antagonistic moment of triumph,” but it “marked major bouts of depression, given the al standards. No publisher should be— personal style fed the media’s yen for the decline of the intersection of mass political situation. to quote Mass Media—“alleviated from controversy and contributed to their media and the women’s movement.” By Alden Waitt the responsibility” for sloppiness. I stereotyping. She warned that the move- 1975, Bradley maintains, the second Meigs County, OH ment risked a takeover by “man-haters, wave was ebbing. Copyright © 2004 Marie Shear

30 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 reveal the “real” Rita Hayworth as just another synthetic Hollywood sex god- dess. Musical numbers make the differ- Classified The star-maker machinery ence for McLean: Job Opportunities by Brooks Robards The contrast between the pow- erful, open, and communicating Women’s Studies, Assistant Professor, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom spectacular Gilda and the Transnational Feminism. Arizona State worked-upon and managed nar- University, West Campus, New College by Adrienne L. McLean. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers rative Gilda serves in the end to of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, foreground the impossible bind Department of Women’s Studies, Phoenix, University Press, 2004, 272 pp., $23.95 paper. in which Gilda, Hayworth, and AZ. Assistant professor of Women’s any number of other postwar Studies in Transnational Feminism, tenure- I women all too often found track, beginning August 16, 2005. ESSEN- orties film icon Rita Hayworth—born McLean sees Hayworth’s ethnicity both as themselves. (p. 161) TIAL FUNCTIONS: Teach five courses Marguerita Carmen Cansino and something to be overcome and “the guaran- per year (3-2 per semesters) contributing to F immortalized by Hollywood as a sex tor of her authenticity as a star.” Hayworth Hayworth, she says, transcends her film the degree in Women’s Studies and other goddess—first appeared onscreen at age could become a star only by changing her noir characterization as a femme fatale in interdisciplinary undergraduate and gradu- eight. She danced in movies with Fred Astaire, name to Hayworth (her mother’s maiden Gilda, but not in The Lady from Shanghai, ate programs within the college, and con- married Orson Welles, with whom she starred name). Yet according to McLean it took as in which Orson Welles made even the duct research on transnational feminist in The Lady from Shanghai, then Prince Ali much to manufacture Cansino’s ethnicity as it singing Hayworth seem motionless and studies. The successful candidate will teach Khan and then singer Dick Haymes. did Hayworth’s Americanness. Early in her fetishized. McLean concedes that music women’s studies courses including gender Hayworth’s best remembered films include career Hayworth played Egyptian, Russian, and dance in film are not automatically and international development; women, Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai, Miss Sadie Spanish, Mexican, and South American char- sites of female resistance, and that other cultures, and society; and introduction to Thompson, and Pal Joey. She died at age 68 from acters—the specifics of her ethnicity were performances that compete with narra- women’s studies. Provide service to the Alzheimer’s disease in 1987. malleable. McLean collapses Hayworth’s tives should be examined. department, campus, and community. Along the way to stardom, Hayworth dieted, half-Spanish heritage into a generalized Latin Rita Hayworth was surely more than REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS: Ph.D. dyed her brown hair black, then red, and one, even though during the post-World War the “love goddess” to which Hollywood in women’s studies or a closely related endured two years of painful electrolysis to raise II years, Latin and Spanish ethnicities were tried to reduce her. And it is an honor- field. Degree must be completed by time her hairline, in addition to changing her name. quite different. able project for a feminist scholar “to re- of appointment. Demonstrated excellence Packaged by Hollywood and defined by the cul- Hollywood female stars were expected to place this woman, and other stars as yet in teaching relevant courses in women’s ture, what was left? Plenty, says film scholar want children and domestic bliss more than unstudied, as subjects rather than studies at the university level and research Adrienne L. McLean in an ambitious but scat- careers. The press represented Hayworth in her objects.” Unfortunately, the evidence record commensurate with appointment. tershot examination of Hayworth’s stardom. domestic life as one of Hollywood’s “unhappi- McLean provides of a powerful Rita DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS: Potential McLean is interested in Hayworth’s role in est stars,” depicting her as a “woman who had Hayworth in control of her destiny is for record of external funding. APPLICA- constructing her own identity as a star. While been hurt.” She had a dysfunctional childhood not persuasive. I wish she had limited TION DEADLINE: December 15, 2004; she concedes that this talented actress was in which she was abused by her father, and herself to a more thorough considera- if not filled, then the 15th of each mostly contained by the kind of patriarchal there were divorces, scandals, illnesses, and par- tion of how song and dance affect the month until the search is closed. APPLI- representation characteristic of the post-World enting troubles. Indeed, McLean succeeds in positioning of women in film. Crackling CATION PROCEDURE: Applications War II era, she finds evidence of resistance. showing that Hayworth’s struggles with family, with ideas and references, Being Rita must include cover letter, including a brief McLean works hard to cover all the critical domesticity, and her talent and career mirrored Hayworth reads like an unruly disserta- statement of teaching and research inter- bases, drawing primarily on the work of issues faced by many women. McLean believes tion where the topic threatens to run ests, curriculum vitae, evidence of teaching Danae Clark, known for her Marxist-inflected Hayworth’s five marriages, her parenting, and away with the author. I excellence, writing sample, and three letters examinations of stars as social subjects rather her divorces introduced new levels of com- continued on back cover than commodities and her development of plexity to the scripts fan magazines and public- the notion of the actor as worker. While ity machines worked with. McLean’s thoroughness is commendable, she sacrifices clarity of argument for hard-to- cLean’s background—she has an United Nations digest thickets of allusion and technical ver- MFA in dance—positions her well to With over 400 titles biage. She is not a concise writer. Mdiscuss Hayworth as a dancer and issued each year, To accept McLean’s theses, the reader musical comedy star, and she makes a broad United Nations Publications, covers the range of subjects must also accept her use of ephemera—fan claim for the importance of song and dance in being tackled by the UN, its agencies, and partners. magazines, newspaper stories, studio memos, film: “It is in the musical numbers of any film Whether it is peace and security, human rights or and other Hollywood memorabilia—to track that the greatest explicit critique of established development the subject is most likely to be covered by UN Hayworth’s stardom. Such sources, she right- assumptions—about gender, racial, and ethnic Publications, which, since the first printing of the UN ly points out, can help uncover the reality of roles, for example—is likely to take place.” She Charter have been providing valued information to those in 1950s culture, which is often portrayed sim- believes that film scholars have often written government, academia and business. plistically as conservative. But they can also off Hayworth as passive and objectified be “bad evidence,” she concedes, since they because they have focused too much on some are about Hayworth rather than by her. They of the characters in her films and not enough are secondary sources. (I assume primary evi- on how Hayworth plays those characters. dence like letters and taped interviews was In support of this idea, she analyzes Down not available.) to Earth, an obscure 1947 star vehicle, arguing McLean first examines Hayworth off- that it registers important historical changes in The Impact of AIDS screen, claiming that she was responsible for the musical genre. Pointing to the capacity of Sales #: E.04.XIII.7 maintaining an ethnic dimension to her star- dancing women in movies like Down to Earth ISBN: 9211513979 dom. In her earliest national media coverage, and another Hayworth vehicle, Tonight and Pages: 192 on the cover of Look magazine, she was rep- Every Night, to destabilize gender divisions, Price: $22.50 resented stereotypically, as the Spanish dancer she claims dance gives women control as Rita Cansino—although not in the accompa- agents rather than objects. Similarly, in Affair nying article, where she’s identified as in Trinidad (1952), collaboration between cho- “Hollywood’s Best-Dressed Girl.” McLean reographer Valerie Bettis and Hayworth concludes that Hayworth had not yet con- resulted in dances that, if not exactly feminist tructed an identity completely separate from in today’s terms, suggest autonomy and an This report documents the wide-ranging impacts of HIV/AIDS: on that of Rita Cansino—nor would she ever. inner self and celebrate desexualized female population size and growth and national mortality levels; on families But does McLean believe that Hayworth’s movement and gesture. McLean examines and households; agricultural sustainability; business; the health ethnicity remained part of her star identity Down to Earth’s reception by dance critics and sector; education, and economic growth. It also shows that the AIDS simply because she talked about it publicly? film reviewers, revealing an apparent bias epidemic will continue to have devastating consequences for She argues that Hayworth took control of the against musicals without male stars or authors. decades to come for virtually every sector of society. Divided into two physical transformations necessary to con- She proposes that musicals starring or written parts, part one is an attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of struct herself as all-American by sharing by women have been ignored by film scholars available studies on the impact of AIDS while part two presents them with the public. But does simply talking and need serious scholarly attention. It is an summaries of selected studies. about having your forehead raised through intriguing discussion, but it feels incomplete electrolysis constitute taking control over because it can’t be addressed adequately with- such an extreme physical alteration? in the confines of Being Rita Hayworth. Comparisons to other stars might have clari- Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai did more United Nations Publications, Department of Public Information Sales and Marketing Section, Room DC2-0853, Dept.A503, New York, N.Y. 10017 fied Hayworth’s situation; without such com- to define Hayworth as star, McLean observes, Tel. 212-963-8302; Fax. 212-963-3489 - E-Mail: [email protected]; Internet: parative evidence, it’s hard to evaluate than the rest of her 60 films put together. But http://www.un.org/publications VISA, MC and AMEX accepted. whether Hayworth really did try to resist con- McLean refutes critics who conflate the star ventional Hollywood commodification. and her roles and conclude that the two films

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXII, No. 3 / December 2004 31 continued from page 31 following areas will be privileged: publish- ing/editing, multicultural/postcolonial litera- For a complete listing of books received by the Women’s Review in November, of recommendation. Please send complete cies, visual rhetorics, corporate communica- please see our website, http://www.wellesley.edu/womensreview. dossier to: Women’s Studies Search, c/o tions. The position, to begin July 1, 2005, is Monica Oberthaler, Arizona State subject to budgetary approval. Qualifications formance studies an advantage. Ph.D. and evi- telephone: 404-727-6424; email: University West Campus, P.O. Box 37100, include a Ph.D. or equivalent terminal degree dence of the likelihood of a distinguished [email protected]; on the web at Mailcode 3051, Phoenix, AZ 85069-7100. in English or related field (Communications, teaching and research career required. All www.chi.emory.edu; or you may write to: ABOUT THE WEST CAMPUS OF ASU Journalism, Creative Writing). We particularly members of the faculty teach in a wide-rang- CHI, 1715 North Decatur Road, Atlanta, WOMEN’S STUDIES DEPARTMENT: The encourage candidates who combine practical ing undergraduate curriculum. Please send GA 30322. department brings together faculty with a vari- experience with historical and theoretical C.V., writing sample (c. 25 pages) and dossier ety of academic backgrounds, theoretical per- scholarship, and demonstrate excellence in by November 10 to: Peter S. Donaldson, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, spectives and life experiences to offer a rich both teaching and research. Demonstrable Head, Literature Faculty, MIT, 14N-407, 77 SANTA BARBARA, WOMEN’S STUD- atmosphere for learning. The Women’s Studies ability to engage productively with the con- Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA IES PROGRAM DISSERTATION department has strong cross-cultural and inter- cerns of a remarkably diverse student body is 02139-4307. MIT is an affirmative SCHOLARS, 2005-2006. The Women’s national perspectives. The department is inter- a considerable asset. It is expected that the suc- action/equal opportunity employer. Studies Program at the University of disciplinary in its approach, structured so the cessful candidate will participate in the teach- California, Santa Barbara, invites applications study of gender is at the center of the curricu- ing rotation in our introductory courses, lead Humanities, Chinese Culture: The for two fellowships for the academic year lum. GENERAL INFORMATION: As a new specialized upper-year seminars, and, either Division of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, 2005-2006. Applicants must be advanced to American university, Arizona State University immediately or very soon, contribute to the York University invites applications for a candidacy and expect completion of the dis- is a force for discovery, turning students into graduate programme. Salary will depend on tenure-track position at the rank of sertation during the term of residence. leaders who shape the future. In its 20th year, qualifications and experience. All qualified Assistant or Associate Professor in Chinese Women’s Studies Dissertation Scholars will the West campus of ASU, located in Phoenix, candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Culture, with preference being given to can- teach 1 undergraduate course and present 1 fulfills this mission through interdisciplinary Canadian citizens and Permanent Residents didates with a wide-ranging knowledge of colloquium. The duration of the award is 9 teaching, research and community engage- will be given priority. Deadline for applica- Chinese thought systems and Chinese reli- months, and the fellowship grant is approxi- ment. The campus serves more than 7300 stu- tions: December 1, 2004. Note: email appli- gions. Expertise in Buddhism and/or mately $20,000. Scholars are required to be in dents and offers 29 bachelor’s degree pro- cations will NOT be accepted. A letter of Chinese science is desirable. Full details and residence during the entire fellowship period. grams, nine master’s degrees, eight profession- application, Curriculum Vitae, and a sample of complete application information are at The Women’s Studies Program has a multidis- al certificates and is currently developing its the applicant’s written work (no longer than 25 http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs. Deadline to ciplinary, multicultural curriculum and faculty. first doctoral degree program. Please visit our pages) should be sent to (additionally, candi- apply: December 1, 2004. York University is Applicants from the humanities or social sci- web site at http://www.west.asu.edu/.ASU is dates should arrange for letters of recommen- an Affirmative Action Employer. The ences should demonstrate research and teach- an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action dation from three referees to be sent directly Affirmative Action Program can be found ing interests in the intersections of race, class, employer in policy and practice. to the same address): Professor Kim Ian on York’s website. All qualified candidates gender, sexuality and cultural difference. The Michasiw, Chair, Department of English, York are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian Program is especially interested in candidates The Chicana/o Studies Program in the University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, citizens and Permanent Residents will be who can contribute to the diversity and excel- College of Letters & Science at the Ontario M3J 1P3 CANADA. Phone: given priority. lence of the academic community. The University of Wisconsin-Madison seeks to 416/736-5166; Fax: 416/736-5412; Email: University of California is an EEO/AA fill an appointment at the level of associate or [email protected]. York University is an Employer. The deadline for the complete file full professor to be tenured 100 percent in the Affirmative Action Employer. The Affirmative to be received in our office is 4:00 p.m. on Chicana/o Studies Program. Applicants Action Program can be found on York’s web- Travel Friday, January 28, 2005. No fax or e-mail should have credentials commensurate with site at http://www.yorku.ca/acadjobs or a submissions will be accepted. To apply, such rank at major research institutions as well copy can be obtained by calling the affirmative Europe too far? Come to Montreal! complete the Application to UCSB Women’s as a distinguished record of scholarship, teach- action office at 416/736-5713. Lindsey’s B&B for Women, 4-star rating. Studies Dissertation Fellowship (www. ing, and service. Rank will depend upon quali- Elegant, restored Victorian; walking distance w omst.ucsb.edu/ABDScholars/ fications and will be consistent with College The Department of Women’s Studies at to everything. www.lindseys.ca; (888) 655- ABDInfo.html) and mail along with a cover and University policy. Area of specialization is Emory University invites applications from 8655; [email protected]. letter, curriculum vitae, a brief description of open, and applicants in the social sciences and teachers/scholars with expertise in dissertation project, a writing sample (approx- the humanities as well as interdisciplinary Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Vacation home. Sea Ranch, Northern imately 25 pages), and 3 letters of reference scholars are encouraged to apply. The candi- Studies and Queer Theories. Ours is a sen- California. Weekly. Use 10 miles ocean bluff to: UCSB Women’s Studies Program, date’s scholarship and teaching must engage ior position (tenured associate or full pro- trails. Email: [email protected]. Fellowship Selection Committee, Attn: Chair the broader field of Chicana/o and/or fessor), and we are looking for a person with Leila Rupp, 4631 South Hall, Santa Barbara, Latina/o studies. We are especially interested an established research profile in some aspects TOUR THE BALTICS with International CA 93106-7110. in candidates whose work applies cultural stud- of LGBT studies who is committed to educat- Women’s Studies Institute, June 2005. ies, diasporic, and transnational methods to the ing both undergraduates and Ph.D. students. Women’s concerns, politics, spirituality, and Editor. Books, dissertations,small projects. study of cultural geographies, social move- We are open to a variety of disciplinary, inter- the arts, culture, and history of Lithuania, Cornell Ph.D. Background in anthropology, ments, and/or gender relations, but all candi- disciplinary, and methodological approaches to Lativa, Estonia. IWSI, PO Box 1067, Palo history and literature. $25/hour. Contact Carol dates whose scholarship and teaching address LGBT studies. The ability to teach Queer Alto, CA 94302; telephone (650) 323-2013; at [email protected]. key aspects of the relationships among culture, Theories on both graduate and undergraduate [email protected]; http://www.iwsi.org. society, geography, ethnicity, race, gender, and levels is important. The appointment is full WRITING COACH AND EDITOR. Get sexuality will be considered. Candidates with time in Women’s Studies, but a joint appoint- Carol Christ, She Who Changes, Re-IImagining that article or book into print with help from administrative experience or evidence of ment is possible. The Emory Department of the Divine in the World (Palgrave-MacMillan, author praised by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, administrative potential are encouraged to Women’s Studies values diversity and inclusive- 2003), leads two programs in Greece: Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou. Dissertation, apply. Applications received by November 22, ness, collegiality, intellectual rigor, and social Goddess Pilgrimage in Crete and Sacred fiction, self-help, essay, book proposal—you 2004, are assured of full consideration, but the and political engagement. We will begin Journey in Greece. Ariadne Institute, P.O. name it, I’ve edited it. www. search will remain open until the position is screening applicants December 1, 2004, and Box 303 Blue River, OR. 97413;(541) 822- JoanLester.com;(510) 548-1224. filled for start date of August 22, 2005. Due to will continue until the position is filled. Please 3201; [email protected]; the Open Records Law, we must disclose, send a letter of application, your CV, and the www.goddessariadne.org. Feminist editor. Ph.D. Prize-winning author. upon request, names of all candidates who contact information (including email) of three Twenty years’ experience editing every imagi- have not requested confidentiality in writing; references to: Chair, Senior Search, Sunny Greece! Small island house! Weekly, nable kind of writing. References provided, finalists cannot be guaranteed confidentiality. Department of Women’s Studies, Candler monthly. On isolated terraced mountain slope including many happy WRB readers. (510) Applications consisting of a cover letter, C.V., Library 128, Emory University, Atlanta, GA overlooking sea. Breathtaking sunsets, moon- 524-7913; [email protected]. copies of representative publications, and full 30322. Emory University is an Affirmative sets. Dramatic hikes. Marvelous peace. contact information (including email address- Action/Equal Opportunity employer. Moonrock: (740) 986-6945; email: WISE- THE MCGILL CENTRE FOR es) of at least three referees should be sent to: [email protected]. RESEARCH AND TEACHING ON Professor Camille Guerin-Gonzales, The Department of Women’s Studies at WOMEN invites applications from women’s Chicana/o Studies Program, University of the University of South Florida invites studies scholars for Visiting Scholar posi- Wisconsin-Madison, 312 Ingraham Hall, 1155 applications for a tenure-track position of tions in 2005-2006. The Centre offers office Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin Assistant Professor in the field of lesbian Miscellaneous space, support and participation in Centre 53706. The University of Wisconsin-Madison studies-queer theory, to begin Fall 2005. activities; research funding of $1,000 is avail- is an EO/AA employer with a strong commit- Detailed information about the position, qual- Junior and Post-Doctoral Fellowships, able. CLOSING DATE: November 30, 2004 ment to the achievement of excellence and ifications, application, and the Department of Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory (Candidates requiring prior assurance of a diversity among its faculty. Women’s Studies is available at: University. The Center for Humanistic position in order to apply for outside funding http://www.cas.usf.edu/womens_studies/. Inquiry at Emory University is accepting are invited to apply one year in advance). Applications are invited for a tenure-track USF is an AA/EEO institution. applications for 3 Junior and Post-Doctoral Please include a copy of your curriculum vitae, appointment at the Assistant Professor fellowships for an academic year of study, a brief outline of your proposed research, level in the Department of English, Faculty Assistant Professor, The Literature Faculty teaching, and residence in the Center. The copies of two recent short publications, and of Arts at York University. The position at MIT is seeking a tenure-track (beginning or deadline for submission of completed appli- names of two referees to: Dr. Shree Mulay, offered is in our innovative new program in continuing) assistant professor. Emphasis on cations is February 24, 2005; awards will be Director, McGill Centre for Research and Professional Writing/Rhetoric. Fields of either twentieth-century literatures in English announced in mid-April 2005. Application Teaching on Women, 3487 Peel Street, specialization are open but applicants with or British/American literature post-1945. forms and further information are available Montreal QC, H3A 1W7 Canada; e-mail: experience and expertise in one or more of the Additional expertise in film, media or per- from the Center for Humanistic Inquiry via [email protected].