The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XX, No. 8 May 2003 74035 $4.00

I In This Issue

I The first biography of Zora Neale Hurston to appear in over 25 years, Wrapped in Rainbows is a gracefully written account that quotes liberally from Hurston’s own eloquent words, says reviewer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, who also asks whether author Valerie Boyd should have looked more deeply at the woman behind the icon, p. 8.

I Susan McDougal served 21 months in prison for refusing to testify before grand juries investigating the White- water case against Bill and Hillary Clinton. She tells her story in The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk—but reviewer Emily Maruja Bass concludes that McDougal has not really come clean, p. 5.

I Jean Kilbourne, whose own books and films have presented pioneering Zora Neale Hurston, 1934. From Wrapped in Rainbows. analyses of the exploitation of women in advertising, examines Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, Alissa Quart’s new exposé of how corporations are manipulating adolescents, p. 7. Good women by Adele Logan Alexander

I Was Emmeline Pankhurst, the Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America most well-known of England’s mili- by Martha Saxton. New York: Hill & Wang, tant suffragettes, ultimately a radical feminist or a conservative? June 2003, 380 pp., $30.00 hardcover. Purvis ponders Pankhurst’s life and I political evolution in a new biography, n Being Good, Martha Saxton explores century frontier Missouri, especially St. reviewed by Barbara Winslow, p. 13. the ways in which various American Louis. Examining the cycles of women’s I societies have defined morality, in par- lives from childhood into puberty, ticular, women’s virtue, and the conse- through adulthood (with and without quences for those who diverged from the male partners, with and without children), I and more... “straight and narrow.” Saxton explains why into old age, Saxton shows the “lifelong 05> and how this moral quest among women interrelationship among women’s behav- of differing races and classes truly matters. ior, feelings, and the moral system To accomplish this complicated task, designed to control them.” Saxton compares black, white, and native Little has been written previously (cer- American women in seventeenth-century tainly little that I know of) that compares 0374470 74035 colonial Massachusetts; eighteenth-centu- the various experiences and expectations PRINTED IN THE USA ry Tidewater, Virginia; and nineteenth- continued on page four The Women’s Review Contents of Books Wellesley College Center for Research on Women I Wellesley, MA 02481 1 Adele Logan Alexander Being Good: Women’s Moral Values in Early America by Martha Saxton (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview 3 Linda Gardiner I THE WAY WE WERE: Founding editor Linda Gardiner looks back at twenty Volume XX, No. 8 years in the editor’s chair May 2003 5 Emily Maruja Bass I The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Refused to Testify Against the FOUNDING EDITOR: Linda Gardiner Clintons and What I Learned in Jail by Susan McDougal EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash Judith Beth Cohen I All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Martha Nichols, 6 Jan Zita Grover 7 Jean Kilbourne I Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart POETRY EDITOR: Robin Becker ADVERTISING MANAGER: Anita D. McClellan 8 Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts I Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler EDITORIAL BOARD: Margaret Andersen I Robin Becker I Claudia M. Christie I 10 Helena Goscilo I The Slynx and Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians Marsha Darling I Anne Fausto-Sterling I by Tatyana Tolstaya Carol Gilligan I Sandra Harding I Nancy Hartsock I Carolyn Heilbrun I Evelyn Fox Keller I Jean Baker Miller I Ruth Perry I 11 Susanna J. Sturgis I Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories and The Mount Peggy Phelan I Helene Vivienne Wenzel by Carol Emshwiller EDITORIAL POLICY: 12 Heather Love I An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures The Women’s Review of Books is feminist but not restricted to any one conception of feminism; by Anne Cvetkovich all writing that is neither sexist, racist, homo- phobic, nor otherwise discriminatory will be 13 Barbara Winslow I Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography by June Purvis welcome. We seek to represent the widest pos- sible range of feminist perspectives both in the books reviewed and in the content of the 14 Martha Gies I Selected Prose and Prose-Poems by Gabriela Mistral; A Queer Mother for reviews. We believe that no one of us, alone or the Nation by Licia Fiol-Matta in a group, can speak for feminism, or women, as such; all of our thinking and writing takes place in a specific political, social, ethnic and 16 Kate Daniels I The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds sexual context, and a responsible review peri- odical should reflect and further that diversity. 17 Emily Toth I Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman by Sheryl St. Germain The Women’s Review takes no editorial stance; all the views expressed in it represent the opinion of the individual authors. 17 Elaine Terranova I Two Poems ADVERTISING POLICY: 18 Marie-Elise Wheatwind I What Night Brings by Carla Trujillo The Women’s Review accepts both display and classified advertising. Classified rates are The Bookshelf $1.15 per word, with a ten word minimum. 19 The base rate for display ads is $53 per col- umn inch; for more information on rates and available discounts, call or write to the adver- tising manager. The Women’s Review will not accept advertising which is clearly inappropri- Contributors ate to the goals of a feminist publication; however, as we are unable to investigate the ADELE LOGAN ALEXANDER is an associate professor of history at George Washington University. Her most recent publication accuracy of claims made by our advertisers, was Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926. She is preparing a book about the African-American publication of an advertisement does not rep- resent endorsement by The Women’s Review. internationalist, Ida Gibbs Hunt. Advertising inquiries: call 781-283-2560. EMILY MARUJA BASS practices law in New York. The National Law Journal named her one of ten “Stand Out Attorneys” in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for the year 2000. The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN #0738- JUDITH BETH COHEN is the faculty coordinator of the interdisciplinary studies master’s program at Lesley University in 1433) is published monthly except August by Cambridge, Massachusetts. She recently completed a memoir, Shocking Mother: A Daughter’s Story, and is looking for a publisher. Her The Women’s Review, Inc., 828 Washington Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. Annual subscrip- recent fiction can be found in 581Split, The Best of Rosebud, and Points of Entry: Cross-Currents in Storytelling. tions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for KATE DANIELS is the author, most recently, of Four Testimonies: Poems. She teaches in the English department at Vanderbilt University. institutions. Overseas postage fees are an additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 surface mail MARTHA GIES teaches creative writing at the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and at a to all countries outside the US. Back issues are summer workshop in Veracruz, Mexico. Her many published essays and short stories include works on Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, available for $4.00 per copy. Please allow 6-8 and her own travels in Chile. weeks for all subscription transactions. Periodicals class postage paid at Boston, MA HELENA GOSCILO, UCIS Research Professor of Slavic at the University of Pittsburgh, writes on gender and culture in Russia. She and additional mailing offices. POSTMAS- has authored and edited more than a dozen volumes, among them TNT: The Explosive World of Tatyana Tolstaya’s Fiction and Politicizing Magic: TER: send address corrections to The Women’s From Russian to Soviet Wondertales (with M. Balina and M. Lipovetsky). Her current projects include Fade From Red: Screening the Ex-Enemy Review of Books, Wellesley College Center for During the Nineties, which analyzes celluloid images of former cold war antagonists in Russian and American film. Research on Women, Wellesley, MA 02481. JEAN KILBOURNE is the author of Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, a lecturer, and the creator of The Women’s Review of Books is a project of the Wellesley College Center for Research on several award-winning films, including the Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women series. There is an extensive resource list on her Women. As an autonomous publication it has website, www.jeankilbourne.com. its own editorial board and board of directors, HEATHER LOVE is a postdoctoral fellow in literature at Harvard University. Next year she will begin teaching gender studies and who set policy with regard to its editorial, twentieth-century literature in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. financial and organizational character. The Women’s Review is distributed by Total SHARIFA RHODES-PITTS writes about books for Africana.com, the Boston Phoenix, and Black Issues Book Review among others. She is Circulation, New York City, NY; Ingram, originally from Houston, Texas. Nashville, TN; and Armadillo Trading, Culver SUSANNA J. STURGIS discovered women’s fantasy and science fiction in the late 1970s and has been reading, reviewing, and occa- City, CA. All other distribution is handled directly by The Women’s Review. sionally writing and editing it ever since. Her first novel, recently completed and currently in search of a publisher, is, however, set in the here and now. The contents of The Women’s Review ELAINE TERRANOVA’s latest book of poems is The Dog’s Heart. Her work has appeared on Philadelphia buses as part of the Poetry of Books are copy- in Motion project. She teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia and is a senior editor for the on-line review, Frigate. right ©2003. All rights reserved; EMILY TOTH, Robert Penn Warren Professor of English at Louisiana State University, has published five books on Kate Chopin and reprint by permis- five others about women’s secrets, including Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. Her Inside Peyton Place: the Life of Grace sion only. Metalious has been optioned for the movies, and her “Ms. Mentor” monthly advice column is at http://www.careernetwork.com, click on “Ms. Mentor.” MARIE-ELISE WHEATWIND is a recovering academic who currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She divides her time between free- lance writing and bookslinging at the world’s largest independent bookstore. BARBARA WINSLOW, an assistant professor in the school of education and the coordinator of the women’s studies program at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism. She is writing a book about the women’s liberation movement in Seattle, Washington. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 goal was, quite simply, to change the world with words. That moment has long since passed. Of The way we were the many feminist presses and magazines that sprung up in the 1970s and ‘80s, only a handful remain, struggling for visibility Founding editor Linda Gardiner looks back and readership. We did change the world, but it changed us too. at twenty years in the editor’s chair Some of the classics of the new move- I ment had already been published by 1983—books by Kate Millett, bell hooks, s I hand over the Women’s Review to dle and bag them, and finally haul them off Germaine Greer and others—but our first its new editor in chief, Amy to the post office. year saw reviews of Cynthia Enloe’s Does A Hoffman, I’ve been thinking back Well, we haven’t done all of that for a Khaki Become You? The Militarization of to our early days and the changes we’ve long time. Technological advances have Women’s Lives; Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: seen over the years. What seem most tangi- eliminated much of the to-and-fro, fetch- A Black Feminist Anthology; Rosalind bly and immediately different are the mate- and-carry. While the workload never Pollack Petchesky’s Abortion and Woman’s rial conditions of publishing. In 1983 we seems to diminish, the work itself has Choice; Tatiana Mamonova’s Women and had no personal computers (we were been transformed in ways none of us Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union; unusually fortunate in having access to a could have predicted. and Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. text-editing program on the mainframe at It’s harder to sum up the less tangible Now, while titles on topics unimagin- Linda at the Second International Wellesley College, our host institution then changes. In 1983, although the second able in 1983 arrive in the Review’s offices Feminist Book Fair, Oslo, 1986. and now). Even fax machines were a thing wave of the women’s movement had been daily—women mathematicians, women of the future. Every month the manu- swelling for over a decade, to publish writ- bullfighters, women in Palestine or South These days originality, diversity, and breadth scripts—typed by the authors and manual- ing by and about women was still per- Korea, queer studies, disability studies— reside in the totality of what’s being pub- ly corrected or retyped by the editor—were ceived as peculiar. I remember calling a fewer writers aspire to produce the kinds lished, rarely in any one book. But once hand-delivered to the typesetter, who then colleague who edited an academic journal of innovative books we once reviewed in upon a time, it seems, everyone was reading retyped them all over again. We collected to pick his brains on some detail: When I almost every issue. Feminist scholars rarely and arguing about the same key books and the output in the form of long strips of explained the purpose of our forthcoming address their writing to readers outside authors. Now we’re fragmented into many photo paper, which we then manually cut publication, his baffled reaction was “But academia, and economic changes have smaller communities, and while much has up and pasted onto boards to create the do you really think there’s a need for any- made it harder than ever for independent been gained, something that inspired many layout. Our first printer was in Brattleboro, thing like that?” Fortunately for the enter- writers to find time to craft original, wide- of us to found feminist enterprises of all Vermont, exactly two and a quarter hours prise, women, in growing numbers, ranging, carefully researched work. It’s not kinds has been lost. from our offices. Every month we drove thought there was. Tremendous excite- accidental that the titles I listed above were The Golden Age is always a myth, but the boards up to Brattleboro, watched as ment greeted the announcement of the published by small presses: Kitchen Table, after this many years in the editor’s chair per- they were filmed and made into plates and, Review; with no money for publicity, we Longman and Crossing Press, all out of haps I can be forgiven for a little nostalgia many hours later, saw the thousands of relied mostly on word of mouth, as did business, and Beacon and South End tinged with disillusionment. The tide of newsprint copies rolling off the presses. practically every other feminist enterprise, Press, two of a shrinking community of feminism in the US has been ebbing; but the Then we loaded the (literally) tons of and we generated over a thousand sub- independent publishers. The books we longer history of feminism, and of feminist paper by hand into the rental van and, scribers and over $10,000 in personal review now come largely from academic publishing, reminds us that the tide does somewhere around midnight, sometimes donations before the first issue appeared. presses and the few surviving trade hous- turn. When it does, I know that The Women’s in a snowstorm, drove them all back and The movement was doing our marketing es with an interest in writing by women. Review of Books will still be there, swimming unloaded them. For the next three days we for us, and we joined a vibrant feminist If the ground has already been broken, with the sharks and surfing the waves as they did nothing but label each copy, sort, bun- publishing community whose common it’s unfair to expect groundbreaking work: break. I plan to be around to see it. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 3 Good women “Good mothers” raised self-deny- confirmed white suspicions about their self-reliance and survival strategies ing, virtuous, obedient children with a sexual standards and behavior.” among black women: “Liberty, among continued from p.1 harsh and seemingly unloving Saxton argues that in the early the most frequently invoked words in approach. As Puritan women aged, and American South black women sought to the antebellum period meant for white of women in these societies, and how were often widowed, they gained retain a complex network of traditional women emotional freedom of expres- the ideologies that shaped their lives increased moral authority, presumably West African values, especially concern- sion. For slave girls it meant something differed from one place and century to because sexuality, it was argued, no ing the elevated status of motherhood. much more tangible, the freedom to the next. These evolving standards, and longer threatened proper behavior. They did that in a patriarchal slave soci- live with their families... unmolested.” the perceived manifestations of The paired themes of sin and salvation ety that tolerated, even encouraged, For most of them, however, that hope women’s “goodness” and conversely loomed large throughout Puritan interracial sex—but only, of course, was not realistic. Black women experi- “badness” both reflected and influ- women’s lives, as they were considered when the man was white and the woman enced frequent, forced separations enced the development of the new ordained by God to bear a dispropor- black. That formula maintained and from their close kin, and childhoods nation into the country we know today. tionate share of suffering, yet also god- even reinforced the young South’s curtailed by work and sexual maturity. Although Saxton discovers layers of lier than men. They could sometimes “proper” racial and sexual hierarchies. Saxton sums up the “false dicho- privilege, with power grounded in claim the moral high ground. Black women’s perceived sexual willing- tomies” between black and white upper-class status, whiteness, and male- Saxton looks beyond white women ness, Saxton explains, “justified their sta- women’s sexuality and power, writing ness, elite white women, always and their relationships with God and tus as prey.” Marriage in the slave com- that “white women’s power depended repressed in at least some ways by their family to examine the tense relation- munity was never officially recognized, absolutely on a perception of their men, often benefited (as they still do) ships between Puritans and Indians and but with the blessing of masters, “mar- chastity [while]... black women’s power from the subjugation of others of their between Puritans and Africans. To the riages,” in fact, were common. They existed in spite of persistent attacks on sex. In fact, especially in the South, Puritans, their interactions with those were respected, however, only insofar as their sexual integrity.” Whites believed upper-class white women gladly accepted “outsiders,” which were determined by they served the master’s personal, sexu- that black women had no concerns about the comforts of privilege, even at the racist stereotypes, seemed to reinforce al, and economic purposes. In relation- sexual purity, and childbearing economi- expense of any substantive degree of white people’s purity and virtue. ships with their children, eighteenth- cally benefited slaveowners, especially personal empowerment. Although many people imagine that century white Virginia women moved after the 1808 ban on the importing of Saxton begins by examining women most “Africans” in the New World lived away from familial relationships perva- slaves from Africa. The sexual exploita- in and around Boston during the mid- as slaves in the antebellum South, sively characterized by harsh correction tion of female slaves often began when to late 1600s. Puritan girls, steeped in Saxton shows that though colonial to ones based in overt tenderness. Black they were quite young. Many white doctrines of original sin, were educated Massachusetts was hardly a “slave soci- women, on the other hand, believed women thought that black women and to obey their elders and ultimately to be ety,” it was “a society with slaves.” Male their children, especially daughters, white men were sexually free. But of docile with their spouses. Their church and female blacks, most of them needed “tough love” to survive the hard- course for white men sexual freedom trained them to seek and cast out sin enslaved under law by the 1670s, were ships that life would throw in their paths. was part of being full human beings with and wickedness within themselves and accused and convicted of crimes, espe- The book’s third section, to which political rights, capable of self-actualiza- others. Although chastity was a central cially crimes involving sexual miscon- Saxton assigns the greatest weight, tion. That kind of freedom was almost moral criterion for female goodness, duct, in numbers that far exceeded their examines nineteenth-century Missouri. beyond black women’s imagining. sex within marriage played a key role. small percentage in the community. She depicts a society that superimposed Saxton’s sources are appropriately Domestic happiness, supposedly Essentially, Saxton argues, Africans East Coast values onto what remained rich and varied: letters, diaries, newspa- insured by a vigorous sex life, reflected were effectively excluded “from moral largely a frontier. Missouri’s residents pers, court records, oral histories, and the higher purpose of loving God. Says membership in the community.” But included white people of French, more. I suspect that the preponderance Saxton, “Puritans saw marriage in a among whites as well as blacks, sexual German, and English ancestry, of material available about elite white new, hopeful light, an institution indis- misconduct in general, and adultery in Catholics as well as Protestants. It was a women, as compared to that about pensable to creating godly societies.” particular, was a far more serious mat- slave state bordered by free territory, poor whites, blacks, and native ter for women. where European settlements bordered Americans, frustrated her. Upper-class Indian ones. Slavery, governmental poli- white women receive more attention nlike colonial Massachusetts, in cies towards Indians, and a variety of than others, especially native eighteenth-century eastern national and religious traditions con- Americans, in Being Good. But, to her THE FOOL’S JOURNEY U Virginia the Anglican church tributed to a complex moral climate. credit, she does try. LYNN C. MILLER dominated religious, and therefore Violence was often close at hand: in I question Saxton’s use of the word moral thinking. By the early Federal whites’ bellicose interactions with sold in reference to indentured servants, “...a smart, satiric send-up of period, the area’s population was Indians, the inherent lawlessness of which reinforces the commonly held the Machiavellian world of roughly half of British ancestry and slavery, brutality towards individual belief that there was little difference ivory tower passions and half of West African ancestry. With few slaves, and ever-present threats of between slavery and servitude. One of Booklist exceptions, the black people were all insurrection. I yearned to read here the unique characteristics of American politics.”--- slaves. Although in Massachusetts hard about interactions between Indians and slavery was that the ownership of the work seen as a virtue for all, in Virginia, African Americans, but found nothing. person was total and perpetual, carrying those who could afford not to work did In this society, Saxton says, “Feelings over from one generation to the next. not work. Early Virginia’s elite white achieved new validity in moral and fam- In contrast, servitude in the colonies women learned quickly to hate anyone ily life.” She calls this altered perspec- was limited in years and never inherited. who was different from them. They tive “sentimental individualism,” gener- One’s services could be sold for a period exploited Africans and benefited from ated by the post-revolutionary quest for of time, but not the person herself. their labor, while the rapid displace- personal freedom and the pursuit of Most indentured servants were white. ment of the local Indians provided happiness. In this environment, Saxton White people in early Virginia, or any- additional land and new wealth. Like argues, “national purposes depended where else in the American South, how- their men, elite white women frolicked on the elevation of the female charac- ever, were never slaves. Saxton knows and enjoyed themselves. Physical labor, ter.… [M]aternal love replaced original this, but her usage may mislead readers. especially in the fields, was a necessary sin as the origin of the core of virtue in Saxton makes a significant contribu- activity only for the poor, especially the the American citizenry.” These new tion to the extremely difficult field of enslaved black poor. “Slave girls,” national moral goals, of course, only cross-race analysis in women’s history. Saxton says, “grew up learning that empowered privileged white people. She has set herself a challenging goal: “Wow! Very amusing.” their role was to work hard in a society Saxton explains that in nineteenth-cen- to examine women’s morality rather --Jane Marcus where work was devalued.” tury Missouri, “the white family’s than a more quantifiable subject and Young white women in Virginia redeeming moral value acquired an then to examine “goodness” across ...a perfectly pitched, dead- learned early that being attractive to extra shimmer of reflected purity from race and class lines, as well as halfway on satire of academic and flirtatious with men was a virtue in the widespread representation of its across the country, over three cen- manners... fabulously funny, their pleasure-loving society. As Saxton supposed negative, the slave family.” turies. “Separate moral codes for pros- writes: “A good time was its own justi- White nineteenth-century women in perous whites and all others has per- and abounds in incisive fication.” For these women, virtue con- Missouri were expected to be financial- mitted the dominant group not to give observations... (also) a sisted of individuality and self-fulfill- ly dependent on men and to find satis- weight to the critiques of those who stunning vision of Edith ment through intimate friendships, in factions in their homes, marriages, and have profited less... from the economic Wharton’s life...”---Orlando contrast to Puritan self-repression and children. In contrast, slave women had and political system,” she writes in Sentinel participation in godly community. to develop a strong sense of autonomy, conclusion. She effectively debunks the Virginia’s white females understood harden their feelings towards their idea of an undifferentiated “women’s 304 PAGES $18 PAPER well the defining differences between spouses and children lest they be sepa- ISBN 0-9701525-8-2 sphere” and shows instead how time, themselves and what others of their rated, and learn how to survive on their place, religion, and especially class and winedale race considered the brutish, promiscu- own. In this climate, black women were race shaped both the ideologies and the houston ous African women living around and not usually subservient to the men with realities of female morality. More sig- www.winedalebooks.com among them. As a result, Saxton says, whom they lived. “Marriage” did not nificantly, she shows why and just how MEMBER, TEXAS A&M UNIV. PRESS CONSORTIUM “black women’s presumed lascivious- define them as it did most white much these factors mattered and have ness made them acutely vulnerable to women. The culture that encouraged even carried over to shape contempo- sexual predation, and this, of course, dependency in white women stimulated rary American society. I

4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 I could understand why a group of women Unfortunately, by the time McDougal destined to spend 24 hours a day together gets this far, my mistaken notions that she in close quarters would want to hear the had acted in a consistent fashion and out Still not talking details of one another’s lives—but outside of selfless or commendable motives had of prison, the pull of such distractions as gone the way of the tooth fairy. Like me, by Emily Maruja Bass work, the refrigerator, and Antiques you may have thought that she never Roadshow is strong. cooperated with the Office of The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Refused to Testify Independent Counsel. Untrue—she did, n the final third of the book, or at least she says she attempted to on Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail by Susan McDougal’s memoir becomes more several occasions. More importantly, you I engaging, as she recounts her experi- might imagine that she had high-minded McDougal with Pat Harris. New York: Carroll & ences in the seven different prisons in reasons for refusing to testify before the which she was incarcerated. She is better at grand jury. Nope, wrong again. Graf, 2003, 384 pp., $25.00 hardcover. telling other people’s stories than she is at McDougal offers several reasons for telling her own. The self-serving tone that having refused to testify under oath: She I characterizes the earlier section of the book feared being charged with perjury, and she is totally absent in the last third. Perhaps it worried that anything she said would be s anyone who has studied law will tax returns; whether there was any connec- is because she isn’t the focus of the story “twisted” by “aggressive and intimidat- tell you, whether or not to testify is tion between Whitewater and the mysteri- any more—Butch, Sveta, Amy, and every- ing” prosecutors or the media. She had A one of the most difficult decisions ous death of deputy White House counsel woman are. Perhaps she stopped feeling cooperated before and hadn’t liked the criminal defendants have to make. As long Vince W. Foster Jr.; whether records con- sorry for herself because she no longer felt results. And she felt that refusal was the as they refrain from testifying, the focus cerning Whitewater from Hillary Clinton’s alone. She “had a community of people... only way that she could “regain just a little remains on the prosecution’s version of law firm had been mislaid or destroyed; Bill [she] was growing to care about.” Strangely bit of control” over her life. events—and it is the prosecution’s credibil- Clinton’s sexual escapades; and, finally, enough, as McDougal acknowledges, she Friends and colleagues of mine have ity that is on the line. If the defendant takes whether there had been a cover-up on any not only survived prison; she thrived there. refused to testify before grand juries in the stand, all that changes. Many defen- of these issues by the White House. Some of the stories McDougal tells order to protect client confidences. Some dants choose to speak when they’d be bet- Susan McDougal was twice called to about prison life are funny, like the inmates’ have gone to jail over ethical questions. ter off keeping mum. Susan McDougal testify before the grand jury investigating attempts to turn leftover prison-issue fruit But McDougal did not have a cause, nor had her fifteen minutes of fame during the Whitewater and twice refused. In between into homebrew. Some are inspiring, like did she act to protect others. Her choice Clinton years for going to prison rather these appearances, she was tried and con- Butch’s ultimately successful battle to beat was simply strategic. Yet the Whitewater than testify before a grand jury about her victed on four out of eight counts related one last round of drug charges. Finally, fiasco was not something that happened role in the Whitewater scandal. But what- to Whitewater. Four counts were dis- some are harrowing, like the description of to her alone—it victimized an entire ever the merits of her original decision not missed. The charges on which she was con- the sound-proof plexiglas “Hannibal nation. As one of its principal perpetra- to testify in two grand jury appearances and victed related to the misapplication of a Lecter cell,” constructed to enable its occu- tors, McDougal still owes it to depositors, at her first trial, her attempt to foist her Small Business Administration loan for pant to see everything going on around to people who dealt with her S&L, and to story on us in a self-serving memoir is a $300,000. Although the funds had been her, but to hear nothing. This may repre- those taken in by her real estate pitches to mistake. She may have finally decided to obtained for use in a marketing campaign sent the most brutal form of isolation open the books and explain what hap- talk, but she still has not come clean. by one of her companies, they were authorities have yet devised to deal with pened and why. She had a unique oppor- Between 1980 and 1992, 32 out of the deposited into the McDougals’ personal inmates they consider recalcitrant. tunity in writing her book to make a con- 36 savings and loans (S&Ls) chartered in account. In a second Whitewater-related Together, these stories serve as an eloquent tribution to the debate over how US Arkansas went belly-up, according to Blood trial (“Whitewater II”), Susan McDougal call for prison reform, with new facilities, financial institutions should be structured Sport by James B. Stewart, a well-researched was tried on charges related to her previous more enlightened policies and expanded and operated, and by whom—and she account of Whitewater. McDougal refusals to testify. This time, she chose to programs for women. blew it. I remembers, testify in her defense and was acquitted of an obstruction of justice charge. The jury I was absolutely amazed at how easy hung on two criminal contempt charges, it was to suddenly own an S&L in and the Office of Independent Counsel THE ATHEIST Little Rock, especially when neither decided not to retry them. On the eve of Madalyn Murray O’Hair Jim [McDougal, her husband] or I his departure from office, President Bryan F. Le Beau had any expertise in running one. Clinton granted McDougal a pardon. “Le Beau provides a temperate and dispassion- This pretty much summed up the McDougal attempts in her memoir to ate account of the life of a woman who was sel- attitude toward S&L ownership in paper over financial and ethical questions dom either.” —Newsday the ’80s. [Banks] required a ton of she should have answered years ago. While documentation for a person to get a the misdeeds associated with the “A rewarding book.”—The Baltimore Sun loan or to wire money, or even to McDougals’ enterprises—Madison Bank “Far more than a biography, The Atheist uses open a checking account, but any and Trust, Madison Guaranty Savings and the exchange between this public figure and her idiot could own and run an S&L. Loan, and Master Marketing—may not have tumultuous times to suggest broad lessons (pp. 78-79) been in the same league with the financial about fame and infamy, freedom and responsi- shenanigans of someone like Charles bility, patriotism and jingoism, family, gender, Apparently, many idiots did. The Federal Keating, a major figure in the S&L scandal, and humanity.” Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, neither were they isolated pecadillos. —Richard P. Horowitz, University of Iowa the government agency created to deal with McDougal’s book is really two in one 387 pages the widespread S&L failures of the 1980s, binding. The first 230 pages provide an $29.95 cloth • 0-8147-5171-7 itself became insolvent and taxpayers account of her youth, her failed first mar- As founder of the American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O’Hair loudly and ended up holding a multibillion dollar bag. riage, her more promising second brashly challenged organized religion and its place in American society and gov- Against this background, Whitewater courtship, and other details of her personal ernment. Bryan F. Le Beau offers a penetrating assessment of the woman who became the one-word shorthand for a far- history. She treats Whitewater only superfi- led the battle against school prayer in the 1960’s, and who, in 1964, was declared ranging investigation into a series of finan- cially. Seventy or so pages into the volume, by Life magazine as “the most hated woman in America”—a title she wore like a cial dealings that either directly or indirect- I began wondering why on earth McDougal badge of honor. ly involved President Bill and Hillary thought readers would care about all this. Clinton. Strictly speaking, it referred to a That is one question, though, that she does failed land development scheme in which answer. Imprisoned for refusing to testify LOVE THE SIN they had been equal partners with Susan the first time she was called before the Sexual Regulation and the McDougal and her husband. But by the grand jury, McDougal discovered, “Your Limits of Religious Tolerance time the investigation was finished, the first night in jail is your worst night.” Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini probe had considered questions about the “Subtle and original ...Their powerful argu- financial practices and failings of several [B]ut the women at Faulkner ments might help feminists to explain pro-sex McDougal-controlled enterprises; whether County Jail were determined to help values to Christians who, knowing their own Hillary Clinton had inappropriately repre- me through it... Several of the denominations’ struggles against established sented any of them before state agencies women gathered around me and churches, understand the value of religious presided over by then-Governor Clinton’s started telling stories about their freedom.” —The Women’s Review of Books appointees; whether the then-Governor lives, which were alternately heart- Jakobsen and Pellegrini illustrate the intensity had done political favors for the breaking and hilarious. After the of America's obsession with sex in the name of McDougals or their companies in exchange laughter had died down, someone values and the dangers it poses to some of our for their covering the Clintons’ Whitewater explained that every new girl who 190 pages most basic freedoms. debts; whether funds had been diverted to comes through has to play a game $21.95 cloth • 0-8147-4264-5 the Clintons through the McDougals’ S&L called, “How did you get here?” or the Whitewater Development You start from when you were very a Company; whether the Clintons had given young and explain how you ended NYU PRESS www.nyupress.org Whitewater appropriate treatment on their up in jail. (p. xiv)

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 5 itor.” Despite her dementia, his wife choose such a questionable mouthpiece keeps them laughing with her teasing for delivering the news? According to sense of humor: “You so old man— this obsessional, self-proclaimed nerd, Bad seeds how you get so old?” she scolds him. genetic engineering must be considered It’s Momoko who, despite her confu- more dangerous than Saddam Hussein’s by Judith Beth Cohen sion, forces her stubborn husband to biological weapons or North Korea’s accept his daughter when she shows up nukes. Surely the problem is more All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki. New York: Viking, unexpectedly. nuanced; some workers in international nutrition feel optimistic about the 2003, 417 pp., $ 24.95 hardcover. ust as Yumi returns to grapple with prospects of genetically engineered her history, her parents become the crops. Ultimately, Ozeki’s diagrammatic I Junwitting hosts of a group of young treatment of good vs. evil is too neatly environmental activists, and her mother’s drawn. Her generational parallels leave iven the multitude of worries real-estate work doesn’t seem to bother love of rare plants ends up sparking the us with pity for dying seniors like Lloyd that confront us, the dangers Yumi, but it’s an understatement to say rest of the novel’s action. After he’d sold and Momoko, and disgust for self-indul- G posed by genetically engineered she’s ambivalent about her daughterly his land and stopped farming, Lloyd had gent baby boomers like Yumi and her plants may escape the attention of most responsibilities: created a mail-order seed business with old beau. The messianic activists, off to readers, but Ruth Ozeki’s second novel Momoko, which developed a devoted the WTO protest in Seattle, appear to be highlights their lethal potential. My Year I’d made this odyssey for the chil- following. The Seeds of Resistance, a our only hope. of Meats, her 1998 debut book, took on dren. I thought I owed it to them, group of anarchic eco-activists, subse- Although the novel doesn’t succeed the beef industry and the dangers of to let them meet their grandpar- quently find the Fullers on the Internet on literary terms, I admire Ozeki for synthetic hormones. All Over Creation fol- ents. But Cass was clearly thinking and take up residence on the farm in tackling a relevant social issue. The lows three generations through a show- along very different lines, and it order to learn at their feet. Ozeki endows information she communicates places down over genetically engineered potato filled me with panic. (p. 75) this five-person band with the sensual All Over Creation in the tradition of plants. Ozeki, also a documentary film- playfulness of old hippies and the in- tomes like Moby Dick with its treatise on maker, brings a wide cast, shifting points The prospect of caring for your stub- your-face tactics of groups like ACT UP. whaling. From Ozeki, I learned that of view, and vivid landscapes to this born ailing parents in frozen Idaho may During their Mr. Potato Head action Luther Burbank introduced cloning, story. Yet her zany characters often com- be tough, but readers are more likely to staged in a local supermarket they barri- and that our perfect French fry is cut pete with her political message. Readers sympathize with childless Cass when she cade themselves, lecture shoppers on the from a potato that’s an identical replica like me are left wondering: Does she real- chastises her friend, “Sometimes I think dangers lurking in their shopping carts, of its mother plant. The average ly believe we may be facing the end of you don’t deserve those kids of yours. and deliberately get arrested. In their American eats 165 pounds of potatoes the natural world, or is she simply having Sometimes I just want to snatch them Spudnik-mobile, the group evokes mem- a year; one potato can produce 36 fries; fun with the messianic self-righteousness away.” In Yumi’s defense, she freely con- ories of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. and peanuts are the most pesticide-satu- of her activist creations? fesses her many faults, she loves her kids, Using their computer savvy, they operate rated food in the American diet. Among The novel’s main character is Yumi and her unconventional approach to a profitable erotic website that supports the thirty genetically engineered crops Fuller—called “Yummy” by just about mothering can be refreshing. When six- their political actions. approved by the US government, there’s everyone—the daughter of a Japanese and-a-half-year-old Ocean confronts her But even with deft strokes like the a tomato plant injected with fish genes mother and an American GI who grew about smoking, Yumi calls her daughter bar-code tattoo on one Seeds’ neck, to increase its resistance to cold. In fact, up on a potato farm in the dull Idaho a “righteous little fascist.” characters like Lilith and her protegee, Ozeki says, sixty to seventy percent of town of Liberty Falls. But before much In Liberty Falls, Yumi spends most pregnant Charmey, come across as car- processed foods contain some geneti- is conveyed about her, the narrative of her time drinking too much and run- toonish earth mothers. Readers learn lit- cally modified corn or soy. leaves Yumi and switches to Cass, a ning off for motel trysts with her old tle of the Seeds’ past histories, why they Like many readers, I enjoy novels that childhood friend and the current caretak- teacher-seducer. In a tidy coincidence, choose unilateral actions, or what sus- impart knowledge, and sending a politi- er of Yumi’s aging parents. Ten pages he just happens to be in town doing tains their dedication. cal message through fiction is an later, we’re back in Yumi’s head, and the public relations work for Cynaco, the Just as Ozeki used meat as the central admirable project, yet it has its risks. By point-of-view rollercoaster continues, company that produces NuLife pota- metaphor in her first novel, here seeds the time the book appears, the issues moving from Yumi to her parents, to her toes, a genetically engineered line sold permeate the narrative. The book’s may already seem dated. Few explicitly ex-boyfriend, even to a drifting teenager to the locals. In her father’s lap, Yumi opening image equates the earth with a political novels outlast their historical named Frank Purdue. Although this had learned about his hero, Luther piece of fruit: “Imagine the planet like a moment, and when they do, they’re shifting focus may work well in film, here Burbank, the father of the modern split peach, whose pit forms the remembered more for the cause they it keeps readers from feeling close potato. Lloyd Fuller schooled his daugh- core.…” Good seeds, like the young espoused than their literary merit. Upton enough to the characters to care much ter well about the guts required to grow activists, or the exotic varieties in the Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle protested about them. potatoes, but he doesn’t approve when Fullers’ seed catalog, are pitted against unrestrained industrial development and At fourteen, Yumi had a brief affair she applies his teachings to her own life. bad seeds like Cynaco’s lethal the horrid conditions in meat-packing with her high-school history teacher, got As she helps her father die, Yumi grows Terminator, which destroys itself so factories. After its publication, meat sales an abortion (described in a detailed flash- up, tries to be a better mother, and farmers must purchase new stocks every declined, and President Theodore back), then ran away. The novel’s action comes to realize that she loved her dad season. Genetic engineering proponents Roosevelt ordered a congressional inves- takes place thirty years later, with the so much she had to flee to escape his might claim that plants created to tigation of meat-packing plants, which prodigal daughter summoned home by disapproval. Still, she never becomes a destroy their predators eliminate the ultimately led to the passage of the Meat Cass because Yumi’s father is dying and gripping character, and it’s difficult to need for dangerous pesticides, thus Inspection Act. In the nineteenth centu- her mother has Alzheimer’s. Yumi arrives care about her future. increasing food production and feeding ry, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery from Hawaii with three kids in tow—son More appealing are Yumi’s parents, more of the world’s hungry. But the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed minds Phoenix, daughter Ocean, and baby Lloyd and Momoko. To help Momoko Seeds’ leader, a computer guru nick- and became part of the history canon. Poo—each from a different father. with her Alzheimer’s, Lloyd tapes up named Geek, rejects this argument. The But can novels still move us to politi- Leaving the baby’s dad, uprooting her signs all over the house: “Toaster,” “Mr. problem of hunger, he explains, isn’t cal action? Certainly they can inform and kids, and abandoning her teaching and Coffee” and “Livingroom greet the vis- lack of food but a failure to distribute raise consciousness while engaging us in America’s riches to hungry populations. a human story. These earlier books Coincidentally, while I was reading All appealed to readers’ emotions, but they Over Creation, a story on National Public didn’t try for laughs. They had another Poets in the Public Sphere Radio reported that the American west, advantage. When reading was still the The Emancipatory Project of the very heartland of food production, primary form of communication, books American Women’s Poetry, has the largest number of hungry people could more easily pack a political wallop. 1800–1900 in the country. Today most people look to film, the Paula Bernat Bennett Geek tells the sceptical Yumi that Internet, or other media for information seeds are like language, and that changing on social controversies. Ozeki, herself “This ambitious and substantial work makes a the “semantics” through genetic engi- the daughter of a Japanese mother and significant contribution to an emerging field that neering changes “the meaning of life American father, made the much-praised Bennett herself helped bring into being. There is itself.” In another lecture, he goes 1995 autobiographical documentary film beyond the language analogy and claims no doubt that this book will be the most impor- Halving the Bones. Entered in many film that seeds are narratives whose stories festivals, it was shown on PBS and nom- tant single survey of nineteenth-century are more important than books: “They inated for the International Documen- American women’s verse yet to appear.” know how to transform sunlight into tary Association Award. Using shifting —Virginia Jackson, New York University food and oxygen so the rest of us can viewpoints, family documents, and imag- Paper $22.50 ISBN 0-691-02644-0 survive.” If the diversity of plant forms inative juxtapositions, she focused on Cloth $55.00 ISBN 0-691-02645-9 Due May is destroyed through monocultural farm- reconciling her Japanese ancestry with ing and genetic engineering, Geek warns, her American upbringing. I leave Ozeki’s nature itself will die, and all we’ll have second novel wondering if her message left are genetically modified mutants. about the dangers of manipulated meat Yet if Ozeki wants readers to take and plants would have had a greater Princeton University Press 800-777-4726 • WWW.PUP.PRINCETON.EDU this pronouncement seriously, why impact on screen. I

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 NEW FROM HARVARD Exploitation as cool by Jean Kilbourne How Sex Changed Sensing the Self A History of Transsexuality Women’s Recovery from Bulimia Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers in the United States SHEILA M. REINDL JOANNE MEYEROWITZ “Using clinical inter- WINNER OF THE STONEWALL AWARD FOR views conducted with by Alissa Quart. New York: Perseus Publishing, NONFICTION SPONSORED BY THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S GAY, LESBIAN, BISEXUAL, women recovering 2003, 239 pages, $25.00 hardcover. AND TRANSGENDER ROUND TABLE from bulimia nervosa “This unusually intelli- …Sheila Reindl has I gent and straight- constructed a forward cultural history thought-provoking here has never been a propaganda While soft drinks ruin the health of children …convincingly shows study that manages to effort as prolonged and successful and contribute to the epidemic of obesity, that our coming to be both scholarly and T as that of advertising in the past their sale in schools funds sports and view ‘biological sex’— highly readable…Sensing the Self ultimately fifty years or so. Alissa Quart’s book is a extracurricular activities. A boy in Georgia the physical markers of succeeds in providing both clinicians and welcome addition to the increasing body of was suspended from school for wearing a femininity and mas- laypersons with an unusually patient-centered literature on this topic, and the first I know Pepsi T-shirt on “Coke Day.” Schools force culinity—as malleable picture of the journey out of bulimia.” rather than immutable constituted one of the of to focus exclusively on teenagers. As students to watch “news” programs larded —Rebecca Sherman, most profound moral, social, legal, and medical Quart points out, marketing to teens has with commercials in exchange for basic RADCLIFFE QUARTERLY changes in twentieth-century America.” Author photo: ©2000 Allison Evans • $19.95 paper existed since the word teenager was coined by cable equipment. Corporations provide —ATLANTIC MONTHLY Madison Avenue in 1941. But there has schools with curricular materials straight out Author photo: Pat Swope • 20 halftones • $29.95 cloth Hearts of Wisdom been an exponential increase in the amount of Saturday Night Live, such as a nutrition American Women Caring for Kin, and intensity of advertising that teenagers curriculum from McDonald’s and an envi- Sexual Blackmail 1850-1940 are exposed to, even in their schools, as well ronmental curriculum from Exxon. A Modern History EMILY ABEL as on the streets and in their homes. In 1989 Teens’ recreational spaces have been ANGUS McLAREN corporations spent about $600 million on taken over by advertisers. Marketers hire Drawing on antebellum slave narratives, white marketing to kids. In 1999 they spent twen- young people to infiltrate communities of “By culling examples farm women’s diaries, and public health ty times that amount. In addition, marketers other young people, to hang out at the malls from the New York records, Abel puts together a multifaceted spend billions of dollars on psychological and skateboard parks, finding out what is Times and the Times picture of what caregiving meant to American women—and what it cost them—from the research designed to get them into the heads trendy and cool. They report back to head- of London, legal pre-Civil War years to the brink of America’s and thus the wallets of young people. quarters, where rebellion and originality can reports, film TV and tabloids, McLaren entry into the Second World War. Even more damaging, however, is the be processed into edgy ads for beer and shows not just how $19.95 paper extent to which teens unwittingly collude with burgers, shampoo and cigarettes. Quart sexual blackmail these powerful interests and end up branding takes us on a guided tour of the worlds of reflects social mores, Strangers and Kin themselves, often in the name of rebellion these teen “trendspotters,” as well as the but also the ways in which sexual deceit and The American Way of Adoption and self-expression. As an ad in Advertising world of the adult “cool hunters” who secrecy have affected legislation…The book BARBARA MELOSH Age, the major industry publication, says, exploit them and who shamelessly admit tracks sexual blackmail from repressive “Adoption is a quin- “These days kids don’t want to grow up to be that they are willing to make kids feel bad Victorian times to today, when exposure of tessentially American athletes, comedians or movie stars. They want about themselves in order to sell products. sexual secrets if far less damaging…Deftly institution, says… to be highly leveraged brands.” It is this cor- In one of the most intriguing chapters, organized and full of gripping facts and cri- Barbara Melosh, in porate colonization of teenagers’ hearts and Quart analyzes the change in films targeting tique, Sexual Blackmail makes reading history that it embodies opti- minds that Quart describes best. young people in just the past fifteen years. a wicked indulgence.” mism, generosity of Unlike older Americans, today’s teens Once the stories of outsiders (such as —Lily Burana, WASHINGTON POST spirit and confidence have been the targets of massive marketing 1985’s The Breakfast Club), most films for Author photo: Scott Dippie in ‘social engineering.’ 11 halftones, 1 line drawing • $35.00 cloth campaigns almost literally since birth. young people these days are paeans to con- In Strangers and Kin, “There will be a first step, a first word and, summate insiders—sports stars, cheerlead- Melosh offers a history of adoption from the of course, a first French fry,” says a recent ers, rich kids and beauties (Clueless, She’s All Dilemmas of Desire early 20th century to today. Drawing on McDonald’s ad, one of several that Quart That, Bring It On). Many of these films fea- Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality records of adoptions and individual stories, uses to illustrate her points. Research has ture young women who are rescued from DEBORAH L. TOLMAN she presents thoughtful comments on cur- found that at the age of six months, babies outsider status by the fashion advice of “For all the panicky ink devoted to teen sex, rent debates surrounding adoption, including begin to recognize corporate logos. Not sur- more popular peers. Transformation in until now there has been no academic study transracial adoption and the ethics of inter- prisingly, by adulthood, the average these films is brought about by makeovers on what teenage girls actually want.Tolman national adoption.” American can identify 1000 corporate logos not morals, costume changes not courage. …fills that gap by focusing on girls’ desires, —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (but only ten plants). There are two main These films, basically long versions of com- rather than on the social ills they’re usually Author photo: Susan Miller • $29.95 cloth reasons why children and teens are so mercials or MTV clips, are designed to cele- quizzed on…The teenage voices she has attractive to advertisers. First, they have a lot brate consumption and materialism. collected are articulate and refreshing… Female Spectacle of disposable income and are more than [Tolman] makes a convincing case for why The Theatrical Roots of willing to part with it to buy CDs, clothing, ven worse, however, than this inva- we should listen: girls in touch with their Modern Feminism cosmetics, and more. American teens spent sion of educational and recreational own desires make safer, healthier choices SUSAN A. GLENN $155 billion on such products in 2000 alone. space is the advertisers’ invasion of about sex.” E Female Spectacle reveals the theater to have —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Even more important, however, is the fact teens’ private spaces. As Quart says, “brands been a powerful new source of cultural 1 table • $26.95 cloth that they are developing brand loyalty, a have infiltrated preteens and adolescents’ authority and visibility for women. Ironically, concept of great importance to manufactur- inner lives.” Branded teens tend to be self- theater also provided an arena in which ers and advertisers. loathing, since the message at the heart of Appropriately producers and audiences projected the Children begin asking for specific brands most advertising is that you can never really Subversive uncertainties and hostilities that accom- almost as soon as they can talk. This “nag measure up. Quart explores how girls are Modern Mothers in panied changing gender relations. From factor,” as advertisers call it, is an important seduced into eating disorders and cosmetic Traditional Religions Bernhardt’s modern methods of self-promo- marketing strategy. Children are encouraged surgery in an attempt to look like models, TOVA HARTMAN tion to Emma Goldman’s political theatrics, to lobby their parents day and night. An ad while there is increasing pressure on boys to HALBERTAL from the female mimics and Salome dancers to the upwardly striving chorus girl, Glenn for an online store features a baby and the be like their favorite video game action “This small gem of a book opens a new shows us how and why theater mattered to copy, “He’ll make you laugh. He’ll make you heroes. Teens are made to feel that products conversation about mothers. Illuminating the women and argues for its pivotal role in the cry. He’ll make you buy him lots of stuff.” are their friends and corporations their allies. inner voices of women raising daughters in emergence of modern feminism. According to a poll commissioned by the This is especially poignant and perilous at a the orthodoxies of Judaism and Catholicism, it 27 halftones • $18.95 paper Center for a New American Dream, the time when personal and familial relationships reminds us that all mothers mother in ortho- average American child aged 12 to 17 will are so often bleak and fragile. As young peo- doxy. Rarely have I seen the intelligence of ask his parents nine times for a product he ple seek meaning, identity, and connection in mothers so respected or their conflicts wants, even in the face of repeated denials. brands, individuality and imagination are portrayed with such eye-opening honesty.” Fifty-five percent of kids said their parents undermined, idealism is perverted, and a —CAROL GILLIGAN would eventually give in. sense of political powerlessness is embedded $29.95 cloth Children and teens are not only constant- deep in their psyches. Perhaps most tragical- HARVARD ly assaulted by ads on television, radio, bill- ly, they learn to mistake consumer choice for UNIVERSITY boards, the Internet, and in magazines, they free will, fashion statements for freedom. PRESS are also captive audiences for advertisements Quart, a journalist, makes a powerful 800 405 1619 in their schools. Quart vividly describes how case that a commodified youth culture is www.hup.harvard.edu underfunded school systems, desperate for dangerous as well as depressing. She cash, sell their students to corporations. explores forms of branding that go beyond

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 7 advertising, such as the pressure on young to understand it. But this is the point: people to get into “brand-name universi- How might a new biography of Zora ties” and the new phenomenon of teen Neale Hurston complicate the life of an “memoirists” who trade their secrets for Iconography icon for an audience that takes her exis- celebrity and end up as packaged as their tence for granted? As with all biogra- books. Many teens who can’t get pub- by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts phies, the main object is to make the sub- lished post their traumas and confessions ject come alive, in motion and in color. on websites, some with cameras that cap- Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston Boyd ascends to the task with impres- ture them living their lives, posing, some- sive confidence. A seasoned journalist times half-dressed. As Quart says, “It by Valerie Boyd. New York: Scribner, 2003, and former arts editor of the Atlanta makes sense to these teens to merchandise Journal-Constitution, she writes with an their bodies and experiences.” 528 pp., $30.00 hardcover. ease, a grace likely honed by years under Although Quart’s style is smart and the pressure of deadlines. Her life of sassy and her book is not meant to be aca- I Hurston is achieved with equal urgency, demic, I wished for notes and references and with the vigor of fresh discovery. and for more depth. Her conclusions are he critic is wise, upon receiving a is tromping through the American South Also refreshing is the absence of the based on interviews with teens, most of book for review, to toss the cover toting pistol and tape recorder; she trem- trappings one might expect from a biog- whom seem to be white and middle- or T of that book aside: thoughtfully bles with visions, seduces every man, rapher writing after the triumph of cul- upper-class. There are huge numbers of out of reach for preservation should the woman, and child in sight, makes the tural theory. Imagine lost or future theses teens who don’t have the luxury of worry- volume be fit to travel from the stack of scene and then disappears entirely, lost in on Hurston read through the lens of the ing about getting into college at all, let things read on duty to a spot in her pleas- cruel poverty. Ironically, Zora-Icon is the various disciplines: feminist psychoanaly- alone into a brand-name college. I found ure library; or (if the critic is me) relegat- fruit of the earnest toil of a past genera- sis making much of her fraught relation- myself wondering what differences she ed to the black hole next to her desk, atop tion whose rediscovery, or as this book ships with men; performance theory might have discovered with other ethnic other detritus of the trade, including (but prefers in its hagiographic mode, “resur- going wild with ever-shifting identities; groups and classes. She does compare the not limited to) other book covers, bound rection” of Hurston was done against the revisionist anthropology questioning her quinceanera, the Latino cultural celebration galleys not worth the paper they’re print- tide of a hostile mainstream. It was neces- methods in the South with that gun and of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, with lavish bar ed upon, and semi-literate press releases sary in order to validate the very existence tape recorder, or the veracity of her find- and bat mitzvah parties and Sweet Sixteen thick with gushing, bribed blurbs. of a black feminist lineage. The famous ings in Haiti, where she became an initi- parties, but I wondered how this commer- Disposal did not cross my mind when mandate from Alice Walker’s essay ate of Voodoo. Any of these takes might cialization of a rite of passage manifests contemplating the cover of this latest “Looking for Zora” encapsulates the task: be compelling, but such biographies also itself in poor communities. Interestingly, book, Wrapped in Rainbows, the new biog- “We are a people. A people do not throw risk obliterating the lives they are meant most of the working class teens and teens raphy of Zora Neale Hurston. Never their geniuses away. And if we do, it is our to tell, leaving a paper doll where a per- of color featured in the book are activists mind what is said about judging, books, duty as witnesses for the future to collect son once stood. Boyd’s book is not the working to change the system. and covers: the exterior of this tome poses them again for the sake of our children. If work of a scholar pale from years chasing Quart ends the book with anecdotes a vexing riddle. Is it real? Or rather, is she necessary bone by bone.” Now that the wraiths in the archives. In fact, its shape about young people who are fighting back real? She is, one presumes, Zora. But here work of the bone collector is done owes much to the genre of long profiles and resisting exploitation in many different she is shown in full color: a face ripped (Walker took her own words literally, in glossy woman’s magazines. This is a ways, ranging from protesting in the streets out of the sepia past, made contemporary locating the unmarked grave of Hurston populist Zora, a book to be devoured by and in the schools to creating alternative with honey colored skin and red lips fram- and providing it with a headstone), the reading groups. Ably summarizing and forms of entertainment. Although these sto- ing the immortal smile. Zora as she may children find the remains perfect for contextualizing Hurston’s major works, ries are inspiring, they can create the impres- have looked in dreamy Technicolor gives a ancestor worship, in a sort of cultural Boyd provides no fresh readings. Perhaps sion that individual effort will solve this shock to the historical sense. Forgiving the necrophilia. A heroine whose tumultuous that is the overdue work of some future problem. In truth, the commercialization of rather literal rendering of the book’s title, life is high on entertainment value is scholar: The party line on Hurston has our culture is increasingly a public health the cover image seems perfectly to ani- inevitably flattened in death. Zora is a changed so little since the middle eighties problem. As such, it can only be addressed mate the hefty proposition (and dilemma) byword for sassy, romantic, black girl and is so widely agreed upon that stu- by changing the environment, which requires of the pages within. bohemia, the Queen of the Harlem dents can consult online cheat sheets. collective action and legislation. Some school The first Hurston biography in over 25 Renaissance. She has become a wax-figure districts are refusing to sell their students to years bears a peculiar burden. Its subject, mascot. Her legacy is determined, her rapped in Rainbows insists, above advertisers. On a grander scale, some whose existence was once little more than place in history confirmed, and the ways all, on being a good story. European countries have entirely banned a rumor, was this year commemorated on to feel about her fixed. W Taking cues from its subject— advertising that targets children. Another a United States postage stamp. Marched a master prose stylist—the pages seem legislative possibility would be to end the tax out of anonymity and into the canon by Hurston at home in blessed with the presence of Zora her- deductibility of advertising and use some of brigades of feminist, womanist, and mul- New York, demonstrating the self. In fact, page after page features the the money to fund media literacy in our ticulturalist culture warriors, Zora Neale Crow Dance. From Wrapped in Rainbows. actual words of Zora, through excerpted schools. It is, of course, important to get Hurston is now Zora-Icon. Everyone is letters and substantial quotations from corporate hucksters out of our schools. on a first-name basis with Zora-Icon, and Hurston’s memoir and her autobiograph- More important, though, we must adequate- everyone knows her story. The colorized ical fictions. At first, one is startled, ly fund public education and vote people Zora of Wrapped in Rainbows seems perfect though pleased, to find a biographer so at into office who value children as more than for a moment when Frida and Virginia, one with her subject. Boyd has crafted a consumers. We must also combat the those other one-name heroines of the sec- narrative voice perfectly suited to widescale deregulation of consumer protec- ond wave, suffer on the big screen, all fur- Hurston’s life and work; high-toned, ele- tion and antitrust laws (leading to increased rowed brows and gant hyperbole slips into honeychile ver- concentration of media ownership) begun pursed lips in a fever nacular. The product seems a fulfillment by Reagan and continuing with Bush. of feminine creation. of the benediction (quoted by Boyd in a The influence of advertising and mar- Zora: The Movie will recent interview) from Hurston’s first keting on our lives is far, far more perni- have all the crucial biographer, Robert Hemenway, who said cious now than when I began studying it scenes: There she that a new life should be written, and by over thirty years ago. However, there has goes dancing around a black woman. The reasons for this are also been a positive change and that is the Harlem measuring most evident in Boyd’s language, and proliferation of organizations and coali- Negro heads; now she leave one to wonder if she has not indeed tions that have sprung up to counter the initiated a whole new model, ready for power of the advertisers, such as perfection, of how the lives of black Commercial Alert, Dads & Daughters, and The un- women might be written. The intimacy the Adbusters Media Foundation. I wish troubled afterlife achieved is admirable, but after a while Quart had included a list of resources in of an icon is a one wants to feel some friction between her book. References to books such as thing Hurston the two. There is no resistance. Boyd Naomi Klein’s bestseller No Logo, Robert herself might seems to have written a book with full McChesney’s Rich Media, Poor Democracy, have found quite cooperation, as if she were a ghostwriter and David Korten’s When Corporations Rule pleasing, so hired to tell the authorized story. (The the World would buttress Quart’s arguments active was she in book is dedicated “to Zora Neale and broaden the discussion. the production of Hurston, for choosing me.”) Alissa Quart has written a frightening personal mythol- Boyd follows Hurston trustingly, and important book. Branded is the per- ogy during her acknowledging the obvious omissions fect title, since it captures the sinister own lifetime. and half-truths of Hurston’s memoirs nature of what corporate America is Perhaps this is a with the wink of a co-conspirator. While doing to teens today—searing them, luxurious gripe, made by a critic born painting her as the ultimate yarn-spinner, owning them, herding them. It is hard to after the first Hurston biography of inventive dreamer, and teller of tall tales, imagine a more important mission than 1977, who has never known a world Boyd takes her neat episodes at face rescuing our children from this soul- without Zora, who knew that face on the value, including her account of her life as destroying, collective fate. I postal stamp before she was old enough the fulfillment of prophetic visions

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 too busy sharp- ening my oyster knife. (p. 172) Zora would Organized Women reject the theoretical weeping over her bones, and want her life to remain a good story: Her bones are the words themselves, words so improbable that they still shock, and you wonder, how she could have said it, how she could have dared, and under what repri- sals? This biogra- phy, with her words scattered so liberally throughout, sends you back to the work itself. On the new Hurston at a football game in Durham in 1939. postage stamp, Zora TheWrapped in Rainbows cover photo. is shown in full color. It is a famous experienced during childhood— picture. She is looking over her shoulder although mystical beliefs aside, Hurston’s out of the corner of her eyes, head visionary narrative has always seemed, to cocked and mouth open wide in laugh- me at least, a literary device as artful as ter. Colorized, she floats in front of a the one for which Their Eyes Were blazing blue, purple, and orange sunset. Watching God is now famous. Hurston, The same image in black and white is who in her fictions gave permission to the one I associate with my first memo- Queer Latinidad tell the black, female, Southern life, also ries of finding her, on my mother’s Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces • Juana María Rodríguez invented the convention by which all fic- shelves, on the cover of the post-resur- Sexual Cultures Series • 227 pages • 0.8147.7550.0 • $18.00 paper tions black, female, and Southern are rection 1979 volume, I Love Myself When “Vital and sassy and smart...Rodríguez is careful, attentive, dynamic, disorienting, and exhilarating read by the wider society as wholly auto- I am Laughing and Then Again When I am as she reads political and cultural events, literary and theoretical tests, and the nuances of language biographical. At the hands of Boyd, she Looking Mean and Impressive. The title, use for a complex cultural subject in process. A fabulous read.”—Judith Butler suffers this herself; her words are taken Boyd tells us, quotes Zora looking at Rodríguez rectifies the dearth of scholarship of queer Latino/a identities by documenting the as gospel. To paraphrase a Hurston quip: herself, writing to Carl Van Vechten ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. Her tongue is in Boyd’s mouth. about a recent sitting that produced Quotations are so frequent and extensive another famous portrait: Zora, the seri- that Boyd’s narrative is almost ventrilo- ous modernist, contemplative in front American Jewish Women’s History quism. The voice of the biographer and of a graphic backdrop. It is fitting that A Reader • Edited by Pamela S. Nadell her struggle to comprehend her subject Boyd’s most original contribution is the 360 pages • 0.8147.5808.8 • $24.00 paper is completely lost. proper identification of yet another “An impressive compendium of essays, painting a broad and diverse portrait of American Perhaps Zora was her own best biog- famous portrait which, as recently as the Jewish women. Written by some of the most incisive historians of the American Jewish community, the chapters examine Jewish women in many different venues: the home and the rapher, and iconographer, and there are 2002 collection of letters edited by Carla marketplace, religious and secular institutions, and picket lines and cultural institutions.” no words better than her own. In order Kaplan has routinely been misidentified —Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University to succeed as a black female professional as Hurston. Boyd sees the historian’s Including such contributors as Joyce Antler, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Alice Kessler-Harris, Paula writer before such a thing existed, mistake as a posthumous trick, Zora- E. Hyman, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan D. Sarna, there is currently no other reader conveying Hurston had to become her own icon, Everywoman giving life to the anony- the breadth of the historical experiences of American Jewish women available. her own myth, writing and creating her- mous from beyond the grave. One self while being subject to the often might also see the woman, anonymous “An Interracial Movement of The Poor” vicious creations of those for whom she again, as the opposite of Zora-Icon, Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s • Jennifer Frost was a novelty and a nuisance. By virtue of some trace of what can never be known 266 pages, 9 illustrations • 0.8147.2697.6 • $40.00 cloth her times, Hurston’s capacity for the real or collected. Studying the misidentified, A Choice Outstanding Book of the Year was compromised. The new treatment impenetrable sepia photograph, one “. . . the finest study to date on the ill-fated Economic Research and Action Project, or ERAP, doesn’t trouble Hurston’s myth: Boyd has replaces it on the mantel, an ancestral launched by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1963. . . . An outstanding work.” written, in part, a biography of Zora- portrait to be regarded from a comfort- —Choice Icon. If a critic wanted trouble, she able distance. I In her study of activism before the age of identity politics, Frost has given us the first full- might call it post-feminist. A post-femi- fledged history of what was arguably the most innovative community organizing campaign in nist biography of Zora-Icon needn’t This woman, iden- post-war American history. wring its hands over questions of truth, tity unknown, has often representation, and subjectivity. It does- been misidentified as Zora Neale Voicing Chicana Feminisms n’t go pinching itself the whole time to Hurston. From Wrapped in Rainbows. Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity • Aída Hurtado be sure she really exists. It quotes at lib- Qualitative Study in Psychology Series • 360 pages • 0.8147.3574.6 • $19.00 paper erty because no one said it better. It does- “Hurtado aptly narrates how ‘our intellectual daughters’ negotiate personal, social, and sexual n’t see the need to make Zora into a identities, face challenges, and triumph over adversities in bedrooms, kitchens, classrooms, work places, and various communities. . . . Hurtado constructs a compelling tapestry of political cause, but could easily lend itself to mak- activism, resistance, and self-empowerment, contributing richly to and inspiriting Raza studies.” ing her into a movie. Boyd doesn’t apolo- —Gloria E. Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza gize for any of it, and one feels that Hurston wouldn’t either. She might Going South respond to the whole melancholic indus- Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement • Debra L. Schultz, try of Zora ancestor worship with a foreword by Blanche Wiesen Cook quote from the 1928 essay “How It Feels 248 pages, 20 illustrations • 0.8147.9775.X • $17.95 paper To Be Colored Me”: “In her valuable new book, Going South, Schultz draws on ample oral histories to explore numerous facets of the women’s efforts, paying as much attention to the effects of religion, There is no great sorrow damned class, and sexuality as to the impact of race. What emerges is an indelible portrait of these up in my soul, nor lurking behind white Jewish women as brave mavericks.”—The Washington Post my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do “Sharply observant . . . Schultz never resorts to easy answers, always trying to find a historical not belong to the sobbing school truth that’s balanced between fact and empathy.”—Publishers Weekly of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose a NYUNYU PRESSPRESS feelings are all hurt about it.... No, www.nyupress.org 1.800.996.NYUP I do not weep at the world—I am

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 9 of an enormous library. He realizes that Even a perfunctory perusal of the allegedly omniscient Fyodor Tolstaya’s fiction makes clear that her for- Kuzmich, a cowardly dwarf, merely pla- midable talent is geared to the short Dystopian dreams giarizes Russian literature and generates sprint, not to long distance. The architec- meaningless, self-promoting Decrees. tural shakiness and narrative freneticism by Helena Goscilo After a coup, his newly installed succes- observable in her later, longer stories sor, Benedikt’s father-in-law, duplicates (“Sleepwalker in a Fog,” “Limpopo,” and The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated by Jamey Gambrell. his deposed predecessor’s totalitarian the untranslated “Plot”) obtrude more scenario. Indeed, proliferating replication conspicuously in the novel. Inasmuch as it New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, instead of original creativity rules the comprises a series of static vignettes that abject world of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk. The never wholly cohere, The Slynx partially 278 pp., $24.00 hardcover. novel concludes with yet another explo- reproduces the mayhem it attempts to sion, survived by Benedikt and the depict. Like the image of Russia it pres- Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians humanistic Oldeners–the literally fire- ents, the novel operates by repetition, not breathing Stoker Nikita Ivanich (a repos- development. It has nowhere to go, for by Tatyana Tolstaya, translated by Jamey Gambrell. itory of culture, hence deifier of the process of repeated deconstruction Pushkin) and Lev Lvovich, the appropri- ultimately leads to a blind alley. The end New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, ately garrulous Dissident. of the novel is self-consciously indetermi- 2003, 242 pp., $15.00 paper. As in many utopias and dystopias, The nate: A failed auto-da-fé that effects Slynx conveys timelessness by scrambling Nikita Ivanich and Lev Lvovich’s ascen- I temporal layers. The future appears as a sion to heaven. This conclusion sooner post-Blast regression that reversed human resembles a desperate device to escape uring the lugubrious early 1980s, novel, which may be read as a dystopian evolution and reinstated neolithic condi- the consequences of the narrative than a which marked the last gasp of summation of Russia’s historico-cultural tions: Fire is a recent acquisition (hence secure command of plotting and closure. D Brezhnevian stagnation in obsessions; more narrowly, as a satire on the esteem accorded Stokers); the modern The unconvincing playfulness of Nikita Russia, Tatyana Tolstaya exploded like a post-Soviet Russia; and most broadly, as wheel, just invented, awaits implementa- Ivanich’s disengagement—when in radiant firework against the lackluster an often hilarious dramatization of the tion; people hunt for food; and the privi- response to the question, “So you mean backdrop of late-Soviet fiction–an indis- way words acquire meaning. Like most of leged enjoy sleighs as the sole means of you didn’t die? Huh? Or did you?” he tinguishable expanse mired in weary Tolstaya’s fiction, The Slynx is a showcase transportation. Names such as Jackal; the responds, “Figure it out as best you quasi-realism. Stylistically rooted in for luxuriant richness of language, which ancient medieval Tatar appellation of can!”—in fact registers authorial impasse. Russia’s experimental 1920s, the 21 short ultimately emerges as the book’s hero. Murza, or feudal lord; the medieval terem, Tolstaya’s juxtaposition of elements stories she published between 1983 and Probably the most accessible aspect of in which women used to be sequestered, from high and popular culture, of tragic 1991 focused on time, memory, imagina- The Slynx is its dystopian layer. The per- as an architectural structure; and adults’ and trashy, heinous and hilarious, tempts tion, and yearning in a vivid prose com- functory plot traces the standard stages obsessions with food and such inane critics to situate her within Russian post- bining dazzling tropes, precise yet sensual of the dystopian paradigm, using capital- games as leapfrog convey the pervasive modernism. (The dust jacket of The Slynx descriptive particulars, abrupt shifts ization to indicate milestone events and larval level of existence. advertises it as a “postmodern literary between plangent and satirical registers, key phenomena. As a Consequence of a Superstition, dread, oblivion, and illit- masterpiece.”) But Tolstaya has an impas- and a profusion of cultural echoes from (presumably nuclear) Blast that occurred eracy form the base of the society, sup- sioned allegiance to humanistic values and literature, myth, and folklore. Not stalwart more than two centuries ago, the popula- porting a manipulative, cynical minority. a reverence for language, literature, and ideological do-gooders, but recalcitrant tion of Fyodor-Kuzmichsk has mutated While reflexively eulogizing the despotic high culture–which she always identifies children, hapless dreamers, and compas- into humanoids whose bodies eerily and tyrant who debases and enslaves them, with Pushkin. Noncommittal linguistic sionate, grotesquely hulking pensioners comically display animal features (tail, the populace irrationally fears the fabu- games, the juggling of ironic and ulti- populated her fictional universe. The first, claws, gills), as well as multiple, relocated lous creature bred by its own animistic mately discredited positions, and the slim volume of Tolstaya’s selected prose, physical parts in endlessly grotesque per- imagination: the semi-feline, semi-avian absence of an implicit center have little printed in a run of 65,000 copies in 1987, mutations (udders and ears sprouting slynx–a mysterious, sinister agent of place in her works, which, on the con- sold out in a matter of hours, to be fol- from knees, feet, armpits; feathers pro- doom dwelling in a forest that is a trary, celebrate culture and its perceived lowed by translations in approximately a truding from skulls and eyes). Residing in metaphor for the society’s collective achievements while mourning their ero- dozen languages, including two what formerly was called Moscow (built, unconscious. Ultimately, the slynx sym- sion in the contemporary world. Anglophone anthologies: On the Golden like Rome, on seven hills), but now con- bolizes an ineradicable national mytholo- Porch and Sleepwalker in a Fog. sists of vast, desolate provincial stretch- gy that paralyzes the entire culture and ushkin also figures prominently in After a stint in 1988 as writer in resi- es, with forests in the north and chains it to self-perpetuating atavism. the twenty journalistic pieces com- dence at the University of Richmond, Chechens to the south, the inhabitants The Slynx offers a bleak vision of P prising Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Virginia, Tolstaya spent the 1990s on the eat “firelings,” worms, and mice (the last Russian culture and its national myths, Russia and Russians, which vary in genre, lecture circuit, participating in confer- doubling as currency), smoke and drink whose distinctive features are knee-jerk length, and depth, from the three-page ences, teaching at sundry American uni- swamp rusht, or reeds (also boiled for logocentrism; a pseudo-life governed by autobiographical note “Lies I Lived” to versities, and garnering a reputation as a ink), and communicate in a substandard habitual devotion to “beliefs” rather lengthy book reviews and essays on every- bilious and not overly informed critic of language that transparently deforms con- than attention to empirical circum- day life (“The Price of Eggs”) and Russian American feminism, education, and schol- ventional Russian and emphasizes the stances; the arbitrary exercise of power literature (“Pushkin’s Children”). arship. She eventually settled in Princeton, population’s lack of familiarity with the and censorship; persecution of dissent; a Provocation is Tolstaya’s forte, and the where she acquired a house and a green printed word (“feelosophy,” “pudential,” palatine center of entitlement and an flexibility of the various genres permits card, but once the Soviet Union dissolved, “moozeeum,” “more-alls”). Within this ignored, benighted periphery; and her to indulge in it uninhibitedly. In its she returned to Russia and gradually surreal universe, from which writing as a impregnable apathy amidst intolerable proclivity to hyperbole, rhetorical reprised her former role of a volubly col- general skill has vanished, hares fly, living conditions. panache, polemicism, unexpected twists orful presence in Moscow’s energetic cul- chickens lay poisonous eggs, pseudo- Readers intent on unearthing an allego- of thought, and sardonic tone that occa- tural life. With the new century, she fin- people called Degenerators pull sleighs, ry of post-soviet transformations in the sionally sharpens into sarcasm or congeals ished The Slynx (Kys’ in Russian), received and Stokers keep home fires burning. novel would have no difficulty linking its into archness, Tolstaya’s journalism is not a number of awards, and launched her genesis to the Chernobyl disaster, which, so different from her fiction. Predictably, career as the co-host of a television talk niversal amnesia presides over indeed, coincided with Tolstaya’s embark- Tolstaya lauds Robert Conquest’s meticu- show on Kul’tura, the culture channel, this primitive society, only a ing on the novel. Key aspects of the lously documented study of Stalin’s bearing the coyly inaccurate but revealing U minority of its impossibly aged 1990s, in fact, appear in The Slynx: the purges, Great Terror, and ridicules label “School of Malicious Gossip.” Oldeners retaining any memory of the prominence of a corrupt, self-serving oli- Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s sententious pro- Heroically translated by Jamey past. Despite the communal services that garchy; the marginalization of high cul- nouncements. She uses both occasions to Gambrell, Tolstaya’s linguistically com- approximate socialist institutions (e.g., the ture; the emergence of a New Russian air her views on Russia’s triumphs and tra- plex novel The Slynx elicited mixed critical Dining Izba, the Work Izba, the “in-speak,” which violates every conceiv- vails, as well as the West’s perceptions reactions in Russia, ranging from disap- Warehouse), a rigid class hierarchy divides able grammatical rule; wholesale national (invariably, misperceptions!) of them. Her pointment and irritated bewilderment to citizens into the powerful (Saniturions) amnesia, paradoxically co-existing along- scathing review of Gail Sheehy’s obtuse hosannas proclaiming it “an encyclopedia and the average, troglodytic Golubchiks. side the reinstatement of old street names, study of Russia under Gorbachev justly if of Russian life” and The Great Russian Fyodor Kuzmich, the “cult of personali- institutions, and Europeanized terminolo- nastily rebukes the author for inaccuracies Novel, rendering Tolstaya a “classic of ty” ruler, has arrogated to himself all past gy; the devaluation of the majority’s living and facile conclusions based on scant evi- Russian literature.” The work’s ambitious- and present artistic production, which standards; the exposure of an ostensible dence; but these are precisely the flaws ness may be inferred from the titles specially trained Scribes uncomprehend- benefactor as a despot, and so forth. In undermining Tolstaya’s own glowing Tolstaya assigns its thirty-three chapters: ingly copy and disseminate in brochures short, the cultural and political apocalyptic assessment of Francine du Plessix Gray’s Both playfully and portentously, they con- that the citizens, prohibited from reading chaos that blighted Russia’s nineties like- light-weight Soviet Women. She punctuates sist of letters from the Church Slavonic Olderprint books as fatal to their health wise permeates the novel. In her essay her essay on Gray with rants against what alphabet. This hubristic device connotes (radiation!), consume in a spirit of enthu- “The Russian World” (1993), Tolstaya Tolstaya believes is feminism: “Happily comprehensiveness, adverts to origins siastic ignorance. characterized Russia as a huge insane asy- free of the dry, rigid rationalism of her (and regression), and introduces a comic True to dystopian formulas, the novel lum embracing one absolute—rela- Western colleagues, Francine Gray” element. Critics have read the novel in traces the government Scribe Benedikt’s tivism—and one constant—chaos—sus- noticed what “many of her more simple- various ways, and indeed the possibility of subversive quest for the forbidden–the pended in mythological time. The Slynx minded compatriots” did not: “[T]hat diverse interpretations is a theme of the Book–which culminates in his discovery depicts precisely such ahistorical disorder. Russian, even Soviet, society is matriar-

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 chal.” Only the irresponsible conviction that ing tales spun by her neighbors about the matriarchy is compatible with hair-raising “Water Master,” the narrator ventures up statistics in male violence against women— the river to the dam that the water mas- including the beating and murder of spous- Horse play ter—a powerful man in this arid land— es and “loved ones,” sexual trafficking, and tends. She learns the true secrets, which pornographic hiring practices—can explain by Susanna J. Sturgis aren’t secret at all, of course, at least not such a blinkered notion. from one who dares look them in the eye. Perhaps the most satisfying entry, the Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories by Carol Emshwiller. “Mrs. Jones” is a cautionary tale about gnomic sketch “Snow in St. Petersburg,” the danger of meeting the alien face to marvelously illustrates Tolstaya’s talent for Brooklyn, NY: Small Beer Press, 2002, 270 pp., $16.00 paper. face but seeing only the reflection of one’s conjuring up the visual and atmospheric prior expectations. Cora and Janice are through eloquent detail and deftly wrought The Mount by Carol Emshwiller. Brooklyn, NY: Small two middle-aged sisters who live, bonded images. The reviews and articles related to by bickering, in the farmhouse left them Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin occasionally Beer Press, 2002, 232 pp., $16.00 paper. by their parents. Both expected to marry, assume an unpleasantly condescending but neither did: “As girls they worked hard tone, and Tolstaya’s positions vary accord- I at domestic things: Canning, baking bread ing to her allegiances du jour, but her opin- ome science fiction writers need Ten years before, the narrator of and pies, sewing... waiting to be good ionated stance, zestful humor, and colorful abstruse scientific terms to create “Creature” sought refuge in the backcoun- wives to almost anybody, but no one came metaphors and similes make for enjoyable, S the aura of a different time; some try from a disintegrating world. He notes: to claim them.” In Emshwiller’s stories, if sometimes annoying, reading. What fantasists use unpronounceable and bare- waiting is rarely enough, but searching is might surprise readers unfamiliar with ly spellable names to transport their read- There’s a war been going on for a not without risks. Janice investigates the Tolstaya’s views is how stereotypical her ers to another world. Not Carol long time, but never any action strange light at the far end of the orchard; opinions can be: “Russians feel,” whereas Emshwiller. Emshwiller’s sentences are here—not since I’ve been around. she tries to remake the alien according to “dry” Westerners think; the American pub- transparent and elegant at the same time. Missiles fly overhead, satellites float her own expectations, which are shaped lic is prudish, whereas the Russian is not; Her vocabulary, though rich and flexible, in the night sky, but nothing ever by such works as “How to Turn Your Man the erudition of Americans such as Stephen is never arcane. She lays those sentences happens here. The war goes on, into a Lusting Animal.” Janice survives the Cohen, who have thoroughly studied and down one after another, and with them back and forth above me. experience, by no means unscathed; the written about Russia for several decades, she creates situations both familiar and Sometimes I can see great bursts of same might be said for the reader. The can be “glib” but the impressions of strange: It’s not hard for the reader to see light. I wonder if there’s anything epiphany that comes to both sisters is America presented as authoritative insights how she got there, but she’s definitely left on either side. No man’s land is nearly overwhelmed by the questions by Tolstaya, who lived in the United States never been there before. the safest place to be. (p. 88) reverberating in the reader’s mind: Would off and on for a decade, presumably are Both the humans and the aliens in I ever go that far? Have I already? not. Such binaries, whether explicit or Emshwiller’s new story collection, Report It’s not surprising that he greets the very How far have I gone, what do I take for implied, reveal Tolstaya at her least persua- to the Men’s Club, are satisfyingly complex, large creature who knocks at his shack granted, and who’s underwriting all my sive. But whatever the disappointments of even unfathomable, yet implacably of our with “Hello, new and dangerous friend.” comfortable assumptions? Such questions this collection, ultimately the brevity and world. Given time and necessity, most of Emshwiller has a contagious affinity lurk in Carol Emshwiller’s every line. In punch of most of its contents will appeal to us are capable of accepting the unusual, for these wild, harsh landscapes and the her great novel Carmen Dog, the animals readers unfamiliar with Russian culture and the outrageous, and even the appalling as people who choose, or are forced by cir- gradually become human women while history–precisely those whom Tolstaya pre- downright normal. So these characters cumstance, to live there. In their way these the human women are becoming animals. supposes throughout. Informed devotees and situations insinuate themselves into landscapes are more dangerous, less for- The resulting comedy is outrageous, of her luminous early stories, however, will our lives, questioning, enhancing, contra- giving, and harder to communicate with poignant, and disturbing, often within the experience nostalgic yearning of the sort dicting everything we thought we knew. Is than any alien; they shape the people who same paragraph. The man of the house, Tolstaya evoked with inimitable poetry in the feral “Desert Child” an alien or not— embrace them in ways that city dwellers contemplating the simultaneous transfor- those very works. I and does it matter? might find strange. Despite the forebod- mations of his wife into a snapping turtle

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 11 Ay, there’s the rub, and it’s one of the two major questions posed by the novel. In chapter two, young Charley takes over the narrator’s role and retains it for the Less celebration, more trauma rest of the book. Charley—that’s his human name; his registered name is by Heather Love Smiley, by Beauty and out of Merry Mary—is well bred, a paragon among An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Seattles who aspires to a racing career as glorious as that of his celebrated grand- Public Cultures by Anne Cvetkovich. Durham, NC: Duke dam. What’s more, he has been chosen as personal mount to His Excellent University Press, 2003, 400 pp., $22.95 paper. Excellency, Future-Ruler-of-Us-All, who despite his (Charley thinks of him as a he) I lofty title is still little more than a baby. Charley’s prospects are excellent. If he f you are gay or lesbian, you learn us that even the most catastrophic public does as he’s told and doesn’t break any early on how to dodge particular events are lived on the bodies and in the rules, he can look forward to fame, pres- I kinds of questions. One of my least minds of individual subjects. Cvetkovich’s tige, and a comfortable life. favorites is: “What do you think made daring conjunction of public and private In the course of the novel, Charley is you gay?” People are insatiably curious raises challenging questions about scale, introduced to an alternative. In the moun- about the causes of homosexuality, and relative importance, and the politics of

© Susan Emshwiller tains live the Wilds, former mounts who as a publicly gay person you are in for a everyday life. In a disarming moment early Carol Emshwiller have escaped to freedom and some who lot of impromptu lay psychoanalysis. in the book, she writes, “Trauma discourse were never mounts at all. Their leader is The main problem with this line of has allowed me to ask about the connec- and his pedigreed setter into a young Heron, Charley’s father, whom Charley questioning is that it assumes that same- tion between girls like me feeling bad and woman, ponders: has long idolized—based on a picture— sex desire needs an explanation. If you world historical events.” but doesn’t meet until the Wilds stage a politely return the question (“How did The great strength of Cvetkovich’s He understands finally that it is a raid on the Hoot town where Charley you get to be straight?”), you are likely to book is its directness. She notes the desirable young woman he is look- lives, kill quite a few Hoots, and liberate draw a blank stare. Heterosexuality’s important role that discussions and rep- ing for, and the more he thinks the Tames. The Wilds live a hard life, great triumph is its ability to appear so resentations of sexual abuse have played about it the more desirable she growing their own food, making their own natural, so self-evident that it needs no in creating lesbian public culture. Not becomes. What’s more, she’s his. He clothes, devising their own rules. It has its explanation. Rather, it works like an invi- only has the representation of childhood picked her out, bought her, trained attractions, but Charley has his doubts. Is tation marked “Regrets Only”: only sexual abuse been central to many canon- her, taught her everything she this intangible freedom worth the tangible those who don’t come to the party are ical lesbian texts (one thinks, for instance, knows (or so he thinks, anyway), comforts and the prospect of being the required to account for themselves. of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of disciplined her, took her—or used best, the champion—a concept that the For women, the choice to be with Carolina) but many debates about lesbian to take her—for walks.... And what Wilds have put aside? Heron himself is another woman often gets read as a mat- S/M, butch-femme, and pornography a good hard worker she has turned flawed, inarticulate, often scary; little like ter of defensiveness or disappointment have been argued with reference out to be in the end! How sweet the picture that Charley has clung to, but rather than desire. In particular, many (whether explicit or not) to highly and uncomplaining! Just the sort of enough like it to be disturbing. people tend to explain lesbianism as a charged questions of sexual trauma. wife he always wanted. (p. 9) The second major question posed by response to what they politely call “bad Cvetkovich doesn’t dodge what she calls The Mount has two parts: Is there any way experiences with men”—by which they aptly “the specter of causality” but rather s with Carmen Dog, the guiding out of this all-too-common dilemma, in seem to mean, more simply, sexual abuse. takes this question head-on: “Does metaphor of Emshwiller’s new which the independence of some depends While such an account of the origins of Incest Make You Queer?” reads the title A novel, The Mount, is drawn from on the exploitation of others, and if so, lesbianism aims to be sympathetic, it is of a section of one chapter. This book the relationship between humans and what is it? Charley’s relationship with his bound up with attempts to “cure” homo- provides no answer to this question and other animals, and like the earlier work its “Little Master” seems to hold a key, if not sexuality and with the idea of lesbianism does not concern itself with the question power is grounded in a simple reversal of the key, in Emshwiller’s view; it dominates as man-hating. On the whole, lesbians of the origin of lesbianism. Instead, the taken for granted. What if humans the novel almost from start to finish, play- have been so resistant to this account of Cvetkovich poses such questions strategi- were not the riders but the ridden? The ing point-counterpoint to Charley’s strug- their desire that they have rejected out of cally, in order to break through layers of alien Hoots—so the humans call them; we gle to come to terms with his father. This hand any consideration of the relation silence and to clear ground for a consid- never learn what they call themselves— is not a comfortable or comforting posi- between lesbianism and childhood sexual eration of lesbian existence that is “nei- have long since broken the humans to bit tion, to assert that affection, respect, and abuse. There is, however, a significant ther utopian nor pathological.” and bridle. Any horseback rider will rec- even love can survive the gross power overlap in lesbian public culture and in ognize Hoot training methods, imple- imbalances of race, class, gender—even communities formed in response to sex- vetkovich’s bold tone is consis- ments, and skills. To further clarify the slavery. Carol Emshwiller conveys the dif- ual abuse. In her powerful book, An tent with the approach of many analogy, the humans are kept in stalls and ficulties with exquisite eloquence. Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich C of the materials in her “archive.” paddocks, and what’s more, they’re bred Consider Charley’s early exchange with explores this rich territory, offering an Cvetkovich uses this term, borrowed in according to the Hoots’ needs: the Little Master: extended meditation on the relation its particular inflection from the work of Tennessees for speed, the Seattles for between lesbianism and trauma. Lauren Berlant, to designate the texts, endurance and weight-carrying ability. “I love you,” he says. “I love Cvetkovich offers an expansive defini- many of them ephemeral and insistently Because these “mounts” are clearly homo you more than our trainer. I only tion of trauma, describing it as “a name “minor,” that she draws on to document sapiens, the analogy to slavery is clear. love him a little tiny bit.” for experiences of socially situated politi- lesbian experiences and intimacies. This Equally obvious, though perhaps harder He always talks better when he cal violence.” She draws on work in psy- arresting collection of cultural objects to acknowledge, is the analogy to relation- talks to me. I think the others scare choanalysis, Holocaust studies, and femi- gives the book a rough-and-ready feel ships between contemporary men and him. They’re always yelling at him. nism in order to describe the myriad that is appealing and quite rare in aca- women. As to who is really riding whom, Then, “You may speak,” he says. ghostly and long-term effects of social, demic writing. Several times, Cvetkovich and whose needs are being met—this is, As if he’s suddenly turned into our psychological, and physical violence. She expresses her dissatisfaction with main- as usual, more complicated than it looks. trainer himself. Even the same tone considers a range of traumatic experi- stream and anodyne versions of lesbian With her unerring ear for the most of voice. (p. 32) ences including sexual abuse, homopho- culture, saying at one point in reference precise, most resonant word, Emshwiller bic violence and violence against women, to the South Asian queer film Khush,“I calls the Hoots “hosts.” The mount There’s no doubt in my mind: The the massive losses of the AIDS crisis, and want less celebration and more trauma.” “hosts” the rider; the Hoot is the host. Mount is a brilliant book. But be warned: It the dislocations of migration. Cvetkovich The punks, activists, sex-workers, high “Host” does not mean master or boss or takes root in the mind and unleashes after- is drawn to trauma as a site of exchange femmes, and macho sluts whose work is supreme being. A host tree’s strength is shocks at inopportune moments. I spend between public and private, and argues represented here are very obliging: They sapped by a parasite vine; my dog may several hours a day around horses. that we need to question the distinction provide loads of trauma, served up with contract Lyme disease from the ticks he Yesterday I was pulling (shortening and between major, important, historical trau- only modest helpings of celebration. hosts; human hosts may be exploited by thinning) my mare’s thick, winter-grown ma and individual, minor, everyday trau- Consider, for example, a hilarious and their guests, even while they are praised mane. Some books say that horses don’t mas. Trauma as she defines it belongs nei- strikingly candid excerpt from Michelle for their hospitality. The relationship of feel their mane hairs being pulled out by ther to the well-lit public sphere of social Tea’s 1998 novel The Passionate Mistakes Hoot and human is, in a word, symbiotic. the roots, but from the way my easy-going catastrophe nor to the shadowy realm of and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in Chapter one makes clear why Hoots need mare tossed her head, I know the books individual abuse—rather, it is the inter- America that Cvetkovich cites in a chapter humans: their legs are too weak for loco- are bunk. Why am I doing this, I won- section between these two realms that is specifically addressed to therapeutic cul- motion; without their mounts, they can’t dered, not for the first time. Because of interest to Cvetkovich. tures of sexual abuse: get around. The Hoot narrator of chapter braided manes are customary in dressage By tracing the social dimensions of pri- one is abandoned in the forest by his/her and hunter shows, and short manes are vate trauma, she situates trauma outside of Me and Liz had that book The (Hoot gender is not clearly understood by easier to braid. Customary? Whose cus- medical discourse, refusing to see it as a Courage to Heal. We were obsessed humans) hitherto trusted mount. Hoot tom? Was it the horses’ idea? matter of individual victims and perpetra- with it, we studied it. You know vulnerability is clear from the get-go. Why We may all be human, but most of us tors. At the same time, she traces the inti- how people turn to religion in times do the humans put up with it? are also Hoots. I mate effects of social trauma, reminding of crisis. I needed dogma, some-

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 thing solid and sure. There’s that sphere that makes up for the fail- whole part of The Courage to Heal ures of the public sphere, provid- that says that maybe you were ing the space for emotional expres- molested but you blocked it out and sion that is not available elsewhere. The most prominent suffragette that’s why you’re so fucked up right Writing about these emotional and now. That was our favorite part. Liz sexual intimacies becomes a way of by Barbara Winslow would try to convince people they forging a public sphere that can had been molested, going over the accommodate them. (pp. 81-82) Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography by June Purvis. New York: checklist at the front of the book: Do you have nightmares Are you Cvetkovich traces the way that butch- Routledge, 2002, 448 pp., $30.00 hardcover. afraid of sex Promiscuous femme and S/M served historically as Argumentative Overly-Passive? At sites of healing that were not confined to I the same time it did explain every- the private (bourgeois) space of the ther- thing. I mean, everyone’s fucked up apist’s office. For the women involved in mmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), the Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst was the and men, who can trust them. Who such communities, subcultural sexual leader of England’s militant suffra- daughter and granddaughter of liberal knows what we’ve been through. forms served as intimate but shared E gette movement before World War reformers. She fell in love with and mar- Anything was possible with my spaces of experimentation and pleasure. One, has joined the pantheon of Princess ried the older, radical, but never financially stepfather’s eye at my door… We Through writing, activism, performance, Diana, Margaret Thatcher, Florence or politically successful barrister Richard loved it all except for the section on and video, and through exchanges in Nightingale, and Queen Elizabeth I in Pankhurst. Purvis describes how the prostitution which we conveniently bars, sex shops, and music festivals, sexu- BBC2’s recent popularity poll of Britain’s Pankhursts moved from Liberalism to the ignored. (pp. 110-111) ality constituted a way of life that was at greatest leaders. Emmeline, along with her democratic socialism of the Independent once public and private. daughter Christabel, is forever associated Labour Party (ILP) and how Pankhurst’s For Cvetkovich, these “punk dykes with militant suffragism and the slogan forays into the slums of Manchester working as hookers” are exemplary read- vetkovich herself participates in “Votes for Women,” and has often been forged her feminist consciousness. ers of The Courage to Heal: Tea’s memoir this process of making individual characterized as the woman ultimately Quoting from unpublished letters, Purvis attests both to the importance of self- C trauma public in presenting her responsible for winning women’s suffrage; affectingly describes Pankhurst’s deep grief help books as tools for survival and to archive. Through her careful attention to a statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, the after the death of her beloved husband and their inevitable shortcomings, their fail- a range of minor cultural objects, she park adjacent to Parliament, honors her her desperate attempts as an impoverished ure to account for “the messy and con- lends weight to a range of experiences alone of women suffrage leaders. widow to educate her children and find tradictory realities of sexual experi- and emotions often considered too June Purvis, a prominent historian of meaningful employment as well as political ence”—or, as Tea might have said, for minor to be of interest. In a chapter on women’s suffrage, has written a passionate, fulfillment. This is the best and most how fucked up everyone is. “legacies of trauma,” Cvetkovich articu- partisan, well-documented and political impassioned part of the book. Purvis’ Throughout the book, Cvetkovich lates what seems to me the central aspira- biography of England’s most prominent political narrative includes fascinating and pays careful attention to such realities, tion of this book: suffragette. (My own book, Sylvia Pankhurst: powerful sketches of Pankhurst’s compli- attempting to imagine a form of politics Sexual Politics and Political Activism is part of cated and intense relationships with family, alive to trauma and capable of respond- The oral histories of AIDS Purvis’ Women and Gender History series.) WSPU comrades, friends, foes, politicians, ing to the “unpredictability and contin- activists propose new ways of rep- She writes that she hopes to “capture and world leaders, as well as analyses of gency of affective life.” In exploring resenting and countering trauma— the magic and complexity of [Pankhurst’s] suffragette tactics, strategy, and theory. rather than disavowing such difficulties, modes of response that do not personality as well as the double burden she An Archive of Feelings builds on recent oppose militancy… but instead faced as a political leader and mother” and urvis recounts Pankhurst’s long writing on emotion and experience in glimpse within the material speci- to do justice to this “feminine feminist who involvement in the struggle for queer and transgender studies, as well as ficities of queer intimacy and love was both of her time and before her time.” P women’s suffrage and her growing on earlier traditions of thought in the structures of feeling that can For too long, perceptions of Emmeline impatience at the inertia of the constitution- African-American studies, ethnic studies, build new political cultures. (p. 237) Pankhurst have been based upon the writ- alists of the National Union of Women’s Marxism, and feminism. Such work is ings of her middle daughter Sylvia, whose Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). In response, challenging because it attends to the An Archive of Feelings attempts to doc- books, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and ambiguity of life at the margins, where ument the specificities of queer intimacy Account of Persons and Ideals and The Life of Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Originally, there is no sharp distinction between and love, and in doing so it points toward Emmeline Pankhurst: The Suffragette Struggle for she wanted to connect women’s suffrage oppressors and victims. In tracing the alternative forms of politics that allow Women’s Citizenship, a combination of histo- with the democratic socialism of the ILP, intimate effects of the homophobia, sex- for the contradictions and idiosyncracies ry, memoir and Mommie Dearest, portray but in the course of suffrage agitation, ism, and racism, Cvetkovich offers a por- of private experience. This approach is Pankhurst as a gifted but ruthless leader, a Pankhurst moved politically to the right. The trait of lesbian public culture that is as crucial in dealing with trauma, which woman who put the cause of woman’s suf- WSPU is best known for initiating the poli- attentive to shame and alienation as it is tends to drive a powerful wedge between frage before that of family, and a less than cy of “militancy”—that is, challenging the to pride and solidarity. how we are supposed to feel and how we loving mother who turned her back on her complacency of Edwardian England. Cvetkovich offers several examples of actually do feel. husband’s commitment to socialism. Suffragettes (the name given to the militants sites of exchange between public and pri- Cvetkovich’s approach to this compli- Subsequent accounts, such as George who forced themselves into the public vate life. In her interviews with lesbians cated set of issues is refreshingly blunt, Dangerfield’s, The Strange Death Of Liberal sphere) confronted politicians, held enor- involved in ACT UP, Cvetkovich consid- as she takes on political and psychic real- England, and David Mitchell’s The Fighting mous demonstrations and parades, engaged ers activism in its “felt and even traumat- ities that are anything but exemplary. Pankhursts: A Study in Tenacity, although in acts of vandalism, got arrested, and held ic dimensions,” describing the way that Trauma’s signature effects—messiness, based in part on Sylvia Pankhurst’s writings, hunger strikes—they even confronted the this group served as a site of organizing, ambivalence, and wayward desire—are are misogynistic and patronizing. Purvis’ king. As suffrage militancy escalated, friendship, desire, and collective mourn- everywhere in evidence here. As book gives us a different picture of a bril- Pankhurst and her elder daughter, ing. This collection of personal reflec- Cvetkovich writes the history of trauma, liant political tactician, charismatic leader, Christabel, exercised political control over tions on this sustaining yet fraught it goes something like this: bad things and loving wife and mother grappling with the WSPU, forcing out dissidents, even activist culture offer a good example of happen; they make girls feel bad; feeling the challenges of combining political expelling her socialist daughter, Sylvia, and what Cvetkovich has in mind with her bad can make you act bad. Cvetkovich activism and motherhood. exiling her other dissident daughter, Adela, idea of the archive: An Archive of Feelings suggests that forging lesbian public cul- records the kind of history that is often tures that are attentive to the workings of considered too idiosyncratic to merit trauma will mean making bad girls and serious attention. In doing so, it main- bad behavior central. tains a culture that, through the linked An Archive of Feelings features a testa- traumas of death and burnout, is threat- ment to its strong appeal to bad girls in ening to fade into oblivion. the form of a blurb by the delightfully Cvetkovich also considers butch- bad Kathleen Hanna, known primarily as femme and S/M sexual cultures as sites the front-woman for queer punk band Le of exchange between public and private. Tigre. She writes, “Avoiding bullshit She describes the intimacy of butch- moralism and sentimentality, Ann femme as a form of addressing public Cvetkovich breathes new life into the traumas such as poverty and harassment. study of trauma. This is the book I looked for in so many libraries and book- What is remarkable about butch- stores, and never found. It is not only femme culture is how, building on brilliant but totally necessary.” It is fitting the resourcefulness of working- that a book that describes the passionate class culture, it has forged survival identifications inspired by lesbian texts strategies for weathering traumatic would include such testimony to its own affective experience without bene- power to change lives. In writing a book fit of public recognition or institu- that shuttles between queer criticism and tional support. Within butch- lesbian popular culture, Cvetkovich both femme culture, the intimacy of documents and participates in the forg- sexuality serves as a semi-public ing of a new political culture. I The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 13 to Australia. Once war was declared in 1914, Pankhurst and Christabel stopped their suf- frage militancy and became ardent patriots. Pankhurst became a leading anti-Bolshevik, Rediscovering Gabriela Mistral even traveling to Russia to demonstrate against the Russian Revolution. She died in by Martha Gies 1928 while running as a Conservative candi- date for Parliament and never reconciled Selected Prose and Prose-Poems by Gabriela Mistral, edited and with her daughters Sylvia and Adela. In Purvis’ view, Emmeline and translated by Stephen Tapscott. Austin, TX: University of Christabel Pankhurst were political fore- runners of second wave radical feminists: Texas Press, 2002, 246 pp., $34.95 hardcover. We cannot understand Emmeline A Queer Mother for the Nation by Licia Fiol-Matta. and Christabel Pankhurst unless we see them as feminists who… earlier, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pioneered… concerns—the power of men over women in a male- 2002, 269 pp., $19.95 paper. defined world, the recognition that I while men retained a monopoly of power, socialism would be just as disadvantageous to women as capi- Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst t the time of her death, in 1957, But the good news is that there’s a talism, the importance of a woman- in prison uniforms, October, 1908. the Chilean poet Gabriela new interest in Mistral today: two books only movement as a way for women From Emmeline Pankhurst. A Mistral was a giant, the first published in 2002 and four more coming to articulate their demands and raise Latin American writer to have won the out this year. their consciousness, the commonali- Unlike other women’s suffrage groups, the Nobel Prize and an internationally Stephen Tapscott’s volume includes a ties all women share despite their WSPU ended its campaign for the vote so known figure who had served as diplo- rich variety of short texts—literary pro- differences, and the primacy of put- as not to interfere with the war effort. matic consul in five countries. Her files, essays, stories for children, prose ting women, rather than the consid- According to Purvis, during the war death stopped deliberations at the poems, biographies of religious figures, erations of say, social class, political Pankhurst embraced a “patriotic feminism, United Nations, where she had once small fables extolling the romance of affiliation or socialism first. (p. 6) which emphasized women’s contribution represented Chile, as twenty delegations ordinary things, and writings on educa- to the war effort and to militarism”; for eulogized her. Cardinal Francis tion and current events—and provides an Purvis emphasizes that Pankhurst’s fem- “Emmeline Pankhurst, as for other femi- Spellman said a Requiem mass for her excellent introduction to Mistral’s prose. inism “embraced all women, stressing gen- nists of her time, militarism and imperial- at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and when her der not class issues, recognizing that divi- ism were ‘as intuitive’ as anti-militarism body was flown home to Santiago, er best-known writings on sions between women perpetuated male and anti-imperialism have been to femi- President Carlos Ibañez declared three teaching are here, including the power… it was a feminism that put women nists in recent times.” I would argue days of national mourning as 200,000 H prose-poem, “Teacher’s first.” This does not convince me that the instead that by 1914, most feminists and Chileans attended a second funeral. In Prayer,” the first line of which (“Lord, feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst or the suffragists were challenging militarism as a eulogies, she was counted among the You who were a teacher, forgive that I WSPU “embraced all women,” or “put means of resolving international conflict. great universalists and compared to teach...”) is etched on her tomb over- women first.” Intent upon portraying Furthermore, Pankhurst’s embrace of mil- Gandhi. It was said—as it is always looking a biblical landscape of lush vine- Pankhurst in a positive light, Purvis does itarism and British imperialism has little to said—that though the world would no yards at Monte Grande. Mistral began as not acknowledge the thirty years of femi- do with the empowerment of women or longer have Gabriela Mistral, it would an assistant teacher at age fourteen, and nist scholarship that have challenged the “putting women first” and nothing to do always have her work. had worked for eighteen years in the notion of an all-embracing “woman first” with the concerns of radical/separatist Yet here in this part of the world Chilean schools before she went to feminism. In the first place, the WSPU did feminists during the second half of the we’ve not had as much of it as one might Mexico, in 1922, at the invitation of not support votes for all women. Basing its twentieth century. have thought. Her literary executor, Education Minister José Vasconcelos claim to equal rights on their roles as Purvis takes great pains to dissociate Doris Dana, published Mistral’s selected (best known for having commissioned builders of the nation and empire, the herself and Pankhurst from the socialism poems in 1971. Were it not for the murals from Diego Rivera, José Orozco WSPU demanded the vote on the same of Sylvia Pankhurst and the socialist femi- efforts of Marjorie Agosín and White and David Siqueiros and for his idealistic privilege as men claimed—in other words, nism of second wave feminism, pointing to Pine Press, responsible for collections in hopes for one melded “cosmic race”). class- and nation-based suffrage, which by the male domination of the social demo- 1993 and 2000, we would have had very There, she spent two years working on definition excluded the majority of women cratic ILP, Labour Party, and trade unions little after that. educational reform projects, including in England and in the empire. and that of socialist parties and socialist Nor have we had much in the way of the founding and inventorying of countries. Purvis explains that Pankhurst biography: In addition to two volumes, libraries. Teaching was a noble calling for urvis describes a meeting in Chicago, joined the Conservative Party because of written more than 25 years ago by Mistral, as evidenced by her 46 precepts Illinois, in 1913, at which Pankhurst its opposition to labor militancy, the women who knew her personally, there called “Thoughts on Teaching.” Paddressed over 2,000 African Labour government, Bolshevism, and free is only Elizabeth Horan’s 1995 study, American women and men at the love. But here again, Purvis’ analysis raises which has already gone out of print. 1. Everything for the school; very Institutional Church on South Dearborn new questions: Was the Labour Party more Gabriela Mistral: Pública y secreta, published little for ourselves. Street. According to Purvis, Pankhurst’s male-dominated than the Conservative in 1991 by the Communist leader and 2. Teach always, in the courtyard speech aroused Party? Did the Conservative Party equal the Chilean cultural icon, Volodia and on the street, as if they were male-dominated trades union’s concerns Teitelboim, is available only in the origi- the classroom. Teach with your “volatile emotions” amongst the for equal pay, an end to sweated labor, and nal, as part of the Random House demeanor, expression, and words. black women when she described domestic violence, and a greater voice in Español series. 3. Live the beautiful theories. Live the “good they could accomplish for decision making? How could Pankhurst’s The situation is different, of course, with kindness, energy, and profes- their race by working for the staunch support of British imperialism and in Latin America, where Mistral has been sional integrity…. reforms their white sisters advocat- its control over the lives of millions of col- continuously read, esteemed, and quot- 12. You should be worthy of your ed.” Emmeline’s world-view was onized women fit a definition of “women ed. Patricia Rubio lists 132 books and job every day. Occasional success- that of a common sisterhood first” feminism? monographs in her 1995 bibliography. es and exertions are not enough. between all women; furthermore, In light of Purvis’ sympathy with radical Why did Mistral’s reputation languish (pp. 154-155) she assumed she could speak on feminism, I was puzzled by her treatment in this country? One theory is that she’s behalf of all women, black and of lesbianism within the militant move- been dismissed because her work While all of Mistral’s writing may be white, poor and rich. (p. 236) ment. While Purvis is correct to point out includes some skip rope rhymes for chil- said to be suffused with spirit, certain the demeaning and prurient way in which dren, but I don’t buy it. My own theory religious themes especially concerned While “the WSPU did include racial Dangerfield, Mitchell, and Martin Pugh is that her universalist mind—her love of her, and Tapscott has not shied away oppression in their rhetoric,” Purvis writes, (The Pankhursts) discuss issues of sexuality the earth and her concern for human from them. “Profile of Sor Juana Inés de its “racial analysis was always subsidiary to within the WSPU, she is vague about what rights—put her out of synch with the la Cruz” is dated 1923/1952, which is to that of gender, and like many feminist analy- makes their work upsetting; is it because last few decades, the same decades in say Mistral either added or edited sec- ses of the time, much less well developed.” they are writing about women’s sexuality or which the names of Romaine Rolland, tions just five years before her death of What is jarring about this example is Purvis’ because they are discussing homosexuality Ramakrishna, and even Rabindranath pancreatic cancer in 1957. Mistral writes, failure to comment on the racial implications within the WSPU? Tagore have been all but forgotten. If of Pankhurst’s point of view. She does not The strength of this meticulously docu- we add to that her Catholic mysticism What’s so astounding is that [Sor discuss the WSPU’s position on racial sister- mented biography is that Purvis provides and her dedication to teaching we have, Juana] was so foresightedly ahead hood; the WSPU did not support extending keen insight into the political and personal in an irreligious culture where children of her time; she lived what many the franchise to Britain’s colonial subjects, forces that drove Emmeline Pankhurst are marginalized if not despised, a recipe men, and some women, live and there is no evidence that the WSPU onto the international stage. Its radical fem- for obscurity. Since her death, the mate- through today: in youth, the fever championed racial equality among women. inist perspective will be appreciated—and rialism that Mistral hoped Christianity of the culture itself; later, the fla- Purvis’ characterization of Pankhurst as debated—by suffrage and feminist histori- might vanquish has metastasized to vor of fruit overripe in the a feminist after 1914 is also unconvincing. ans for a long time. I monstrous proportions. mouth; and at the end, the con-

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 trite search for that simple glass of giving us back, not a jumble of disparate reader knows the basic facts of Mistral’s 1918 Mistral asked for a transfer from water that is eternal Christlike parts—teacher, poet, diplomat, Third career, among which she picks and Los Andes to Patagonia, presumably to humility. (p. 144) Order Franciscan, traveler, hostess, con- chooses in order to demonstrate her get some distance on this heartache. versationalist and correspondent—but belief that Mistral’s actions and words Two years later, when she was trans- istral also wrote literary sketch- simply the one part that interests her weren’t always commendable, leaving me ferred to Temuco, she resumed writing es of the Cuban poet-patriot most: lesbian. Or rather, since we have to wonder why she took Mistral as her to him. Their unpublished correspon- M José Martí (“My love for Martí no evidence that Mistral ever had a subject, since she finds so little to dence consists of hundreds of letters is a kind of gratitude, for the writer, who same-sex love affair, closet lesbian. admire. written between 1913 and 1922. is the most clearly American influence on Queer Mother is a difficult read, full of In “Image is Everything,” Fiol-Matta Magallanes died in 1924, at age 46. I find my work, and...for the terribly pure contorted syntax, academic jargon, pas- analyzes 21 photographs of Mistral and Mistral’s avowals to Magallanes ( “Te amo leader...an enormous relief from the sive constructions, and the obligatory, “proves” Mistral’s sexual preference mucho, mucho. Acuéstate sobre mi corazon” or soiled leaders we have endured and will ubiquitous references to Michel Foucault. from what she sees. Her discussion is “I love you so very, very much. Bed continue to endure.”); of the Argentine The very first sentence of chapter one witty and provides an interesting history down upon my heart.”) more persuasive poet and teacher, Alfonsina Storni, one will discourage some readers: of studio photography in Chile. than Fiol-Matta’s assertions that Mistral, of the many people among Mistral’s However, not everyone will arrive at her in her photographs, cuts “an unmistak- acquaintance who committed suicide (“I By examining Mistral’s status as conclusions. One example suffices: Fiol- ably masculine, strikingly butch” figure. have never seen a lovelier head of hair: it ‘race woman’—a public position Matta takes Mistral’s long frontier skirts But that will be up to the reader, as well is extraordinary, like noontime moon- that she fiercely claimed, as and practical jackets, because they were as future writers, to decide. light. It was once golden, and some sweet opposed to any public nonnorma- not what everyone else was wearing, as Already this year, Elizabeth Horan blond memory still lingers in the white tive sexual stance—it’s immediate- evidence of her closet lesbianism. Yet an has published the correspondence curls.”); and of Rilke, who had died in ly clear that Mistral was instru- older Chilean teacher friend of mine, between Mistral and the Argentine writer 1926, a year before Mistral wrote “An mental in instituting sexual and studying these same photographs, sees and publisher Victoria Ocampo; Tace Invitation to Read Rainer Maria Rilke. racial normativity through nation- only the low wages that rural teachers Hedrick has published a new study of (“For him, poetry was not the one urgent alist discourse. (p. 3) were paid. Mistral once wrote to a friend race and identity in the work of Mistral, hour when the verse...leapt from the man that when she first caught sight of the Cesar Vallejo, Frida Kahlo and Diego like sparks from a wheel: for him, poetry This is a sad way to begin a book Statue of Liberty, she envied her the Rivera; and the versatile and prolific was the day, the season, and the year.”) about a person who wrote so beautifully. practicality of her toga. For myself, I Ursula K. LeGuin has selected and trans- Mistral’s “message” (recado was her “Perhaps original sin is nothing more think of nonconforming dress as the lated a new edition of Mistral’s poems. name for this short, first-person prose than our fall into that rational, anti- prerogative of the artist—like Picasso’s In December, the faithful Agosín will form) on the language of her country- rhythmic mode of expression into which capes or Georgia O’Keefe’s black garb bring out Gabriela Mistral: the Audacious man Neruda, whom she first met in 1920 the human race has descended...” Mistral (in the desert!). Traveler. when he was a 16-year-old Temuco suggests in “How I Write,” one of the Fiol-Matta is not the first to have her And now what is needed is a good schoolboy and she the new girl’s school- essays included in Tapscott’s collection. suspicions about Mistral’s sexuality. biography, lest Mistral suffer the same teacher, could be a description of her Mistral’s biographer, Volodia fate as Uruguayan poet Delmira own poetic style: ueer Mother is not so much a sus- Teitelboim, while devoting a breathless Agustini, of whom Mistral wrote, tained narrative as it is seven sep- chapter to her nine years of love letters :...[H]e no doubt feels...distaste for Qarate essays, linked by the to the well-known Chilean poet Manuel She was, and continues to be, the abstruse and dandified language. author’s interest in examining selected Magallanes Moure, insinuates that her best, irrevocably the best. If we We need only remember the cloy- aspects of Mistral’s life and work in relationships with women went beyond forget her, it is because our race ing linguistic horde of “nightin- order to show that Mistral was often in friendship. Mistral’s letters to still doesn’t understand what gales” and “delicacies” and league with the state. Since she was gen- Magallanes did not come to light until could be called the guardianship “roses” that kept us stuck in a erally employed by the state as teacher or 1978, when Sergio Fernández published of the dead greats: how to honor second-rate modernismo if we want diplomat this would seem obvious, but 38 of them as Cartas de amor y desamor. them in an everyday way, and to to appreciate this gust of salty sea using the biases and vocabulary of queer This was ultimately an unrequited love. love them so that they could par- air with which Neruda cleanses theory, Fiol-Matta manages to imply Magallanes married a woman of his own don the imperfect means we use his own sky and makes clear his something rather more sinister. (higher) social class, a cousin, and in to praise them. (p. 173) I desire for clarity in general. Her seven essays vary greatly in their Another part of Neruda’s orig- ability to entertain or to persuade. inality has to do with his themes. Chapter six concerns Mistral’s involve- He has moved beyond those ment in politics at the University of sticky-sweet settings of our Puerto Rico, where she was a visiting lec- poems: twilights, the seasons, turer in 1931 and 1933, and where she idylls of the verandah or the gar- had been asked to give the commence- den. (p. 202) ment address in 1948, before the cere- mony was cancelled because of student Tapscott gives us generous examples strikes. Puerto Rico is Fiol-Matta’s native of Mistral’s comic gift. “If Napoleon country, and this chapter and chapter Had Never Existed” is a charming put- seven, which examines the correspon- down of a history professor who can’t dence between Mistral and the wife of understand why Mistral prefers to spend Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, are her days enjoying the almond, mimosa, valuable contributions to Mistral studies. plum, and cherry blossoms of the Another chapter discusses how Corsican springtime rather than pay a Mistral, who was blond and had blue- visit of tribute to Napoleon’s house. “If green eyes, emphasized the part-Indian Napoleon had stayed on his fierce ethnicity of her Argentine father rather island,” Mistral muses, “there would be than her mother’s Basque heritage. In about five million more French eyes to Mexico in the early 1920s, Mistral enjoy their Mediterranean...” increasingly identified with the indige- Of the 51 pieces in this volume, only nous peoples with whom she was work- 16 are available in Marjorie Agosín’s edi- ing to establish rural schools. Fiol-Matta tions. Tapscott’s translations of Mistral’s sees this as a shift in Mistral’s public per- “prose as tight as verse” are both lyrical sona and attributes it to her willingness and precise. The book is bilingual, all the to be a pawn of the state, specifically in pieces are dated, and he supplies useful the assimilation schemes of José notes clarifying her references, most of Vasconcelos. For me, it’s easier to con- them to other authors whose names nect it with her Franciscan spirituality, so appear frequently in her work. Mistral’s deeply ingrained in Mistral that she knowledge of literature and her acquain- would later ask to be buried wearing the tance with other writers was vast. She habit of the Third Order. Mistral’s cham- counted Amado Nervo, Miguel de pionship of the poor predates Mexico: Unamuno, Stefan Zweig and Jacques In Chile, years earlier, she had been Maritain among her friends. To a library denied admission to normal school in Vicuña she once donated from her because her first prose publications were own collection 1,800 volumes signed by too socialist, and she had been fired their authors. from a post as school clerk for having If Stephen Tapscott presents the committed the infraction of admitting to breadth and wholeness in Mistral, Licia the school poor girls whose social stand- Fiol-Matta does the opposite: In A Queer ing did not measure up to the rest of the Mother for the Nation, she takes apart student body. But Queer Mother is not Mistral’s persona with the intention of biography, and Fiol-Matta presumes the

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 15 work, the invisible edge between life and on my inner wall. Now I have death, the dead and the living, between spent them, blood and milk (as she has called it), and yet I breathe… (p. 74) Gritty and alive between joy and terror. “The thought of the people/ who loved those lost ones In “The Older,” she is even more by Kate Daniels springs up” in the narrator’s “mind like a/ explicit and audacious, celebrating the work party of love in a graveyard,/ lean- fifty-year-old’s “withery and scrawny” The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ing over the holes in the ground…” body, enjoying its “silvery/ witheriness, This is one of the several things that the skin thinning,” its “ruched wraith.” 2002, 123 pp., $25.00 hardcover, $15.00 paper. Olds has always done well: to evoke the She even admires the “fine/ birth skin” weight of love, the unreasonable and of her stomach that “pucker[s]/ and I extreme cost of loving. In Olds’ poems, hang[s], in tiny peaks, like wet stucco.” all love is libidinal. (In an astonishing turn Has there ever been a poet who loved so hen I was a child, my best © Don Hamerman in “What It Meant,” a poem about the entirely and without prejudice the friend’s family occasionally took Virgin Mary, Olds transforms the human body? W me with them to visit some eld- Christian lily imagery into an O’Keefe-ian erly relatives who lived on a small, working metaphor for the Holy Mother’s very …I can imagine being eighty… farm outside of Richmond, Virginia. The human vagina.) She never lets us forget …and making love with the same original, two story, wood-frame farm- that love is composed equally of lion and animal house, probably built around the turn of lamb. In her work, those two creatures, so dignity, the tunnel remaining the century, had been abandoned by the opposed in their natures, are not merely the inside of a raspberry bract. residents sometime after World War Two lying down together, agreeing to coexist. Suddenly, I look young to myself for a small, efficient ranch-type house that Their struggles for embodiment and next to that eighty-year-old, I look had been constructed about a hundred feet immanence continue throughout their like her child, my flesh in its away. We children spent the entirety of union. In Olds’ poems, the barrier loosening drape each visit in the dusty and gloomy rooms between the two worlds is rent, violently, showing the long angles of these of the ghost house, rearranging crumbling again and again. At all times, of course, strange burlap bags of feed corn, rusty tools, and Sharon Olds violence disrupts. Violence can silence bones like cooking-utensil handles broken bits of ancient furniture. It was destructively with physical torture or in heaven. (p. 68) good training for a poet. As we threw open how deeply embedded within us are the injury; or, as in “The Releasing,” it is capa- windows and peered up chimneys, my insistent claims and patterns of our ori- ble of silencing transcendentally with Olds’ mid-life celebrations of embod- imagination was firing wildly with images gins, the post-coital exhaustion: iment lead her into other unusual and and narratives of the lives that might have unexpected places. Although her poems passed in these abandoned rooms. And as genes of [the] birth-family, pulled, [I] touched, first, a caduceus of have insisted (even obsessed) on the cen- I busied myself in this way, my own activ- keening hairs, trality of sensual life in making meaning ities initiated another life there, so that one and grieving and scathing, along mine and maybe his, they felt in human life, here, some of the poems might imagine (and I did) future genera- each other, scraping and dipped conjure magical realist images of what tions of children—mine—who would craving… (p. 106) in honey-glaze, and dried, I tugged could be called libidinized spiritual return to an even more multi-layered expe- at their states, mysteriously unrestricted by the rience, layer after layer of life and memo- In “The Headline,” the narrator, read- helix gently, and something lack of a physical body. In “The ries of life… ing a newspaper headline about a father crackled Tending,” the narrator imagines herself, This is something like the metaphor who has been murdered, possibly by his and something tore delectably and pre-birth, in what appears to be a garden that convenes Sharon Olds’ latest collec- own son, ponders the many meanings of something broke like a cello string of aborted fetuses, “water[ing] them tion of poems, The Unswept Room. Since patricide. What unfolds during her rumi- sounding its furling. When I softly with salt water.” And in “Heaven to Be,” 1982 when the publication of her second nation is a realization of how immense in hooked another she envisions her posthumous self and volume, The Dead and the Living, jolted the number are the layers of influence others crystallized hawser and it split, the way her “spirit would rise to my American poetry reading community with have upon us, and the ways we change and spitting belly-skin and out/ like a sheet of wax its frank and randy treatment of female are changed by them. Here is the poet- minute fresh kindling, and sparks paper the shape of a girl.” heterosexuality and maternity and its rep- archeologist on her knees in the dirt, with of rosin, I Clearly, the philosophical and spiritual resentations of familial dysfunction, Olds the small and delicate tools of her trade, sensed the entry, underneath, development within so many of the has produced a body of work that has going back, uncovering the ways we are closing, some, and understood poems in The Unswept Room suggests a moved inexorably into the investigation connected to and affected by others. that the crinked besotted sewing- poet who is preparing herself for the of the higher registers of those themes. threads had been remainder of life rather than mourning At times, her narrative voice has taken on a young man on a vision quest, holding the gates of the body her past or bemoaning lost opportuni- a relentless, even obsessive quality, as she who goes, in hunger and thirst, open… (p. 42) ties. Perhaps that is possible for Olds has insisted on unencumbered access to when adulthood because her rich vision of human life has subject matter that had been foreclosed approaches, out onto the plain lds has been better than anyone deepened to a conception that is both of by earlier, canonical approaches to poetry where his father else at representing the gritty and beyond space and time. Or perhaps that demanded suspect, sexist “decorum” went before him, and his father’s O facts of the body’s sensual and it is because the room of Olds’ life is yet regarding the privacies of female experi- father, procreative life. One of the questions her unswept, redolent with the delicious ence. Almost singlehandedly, she has and his father’s father’s father, and work has raised concerns how a female detritus that composes any life, as she presided over the demolition of the his father’s poet whose subject has been female sub- suggests in the title poem, “The unspoken prohibition in poetry against father’s father’s father’s father’s jectivity will address middle- and old age, Unswept”: literary representations of women father. (p. 85) with its climacteric images of tattered, undressing men for the pure pleasure of sagging female flesh, in a culture where Broken bay leaf. Olive pit. it. She has ruthlessly deconstructed the The volume begins with an astonishing the currency, economic and otherwise, Crab leg. Claw. Crayfish armor. dynamics of oedipal triangulations and piece, “Unknown,” that brings to mind measures itself in the lithe, unmarked-by- Whelk shell. Mussel shell. interrogated the family romance both as the events of September 11. Olds has time, and sexually vital bodies of young Dogwinkle. Snail. daughter and as wife and mother. Now, in never been a poet to shy away from the women. In “49½ ,” the narrator is “in Wishbone tossed unwished on. her sixtieth year, without abandoning her specifically political dimensions of poetry shock” because she has “[n]o more eggs. Test characteristic intensity, she continues to or to quaver before the difficulty of How can I be/ myself without any eggs?” of sea urchin. Chicken foot. disquiet and decenter, but in a newly approaching an event in the wake of its Here in this volume, Olds shows us Wrasse skeleton. Hen head, ruminative voice that bespeaks the jour- occurrence. (Back in the 1980s, she pub- what her most perceptive readers must eye shut, beak open as if ney of mid-life. lished a poem on the explosion of the have realized all along: that her celebra- singing in the dark. Laid down in In these 57 poems (one can’t help won- space shuttle Challenger, envisioning what tion of embodiment is limited neither to tiny dering if there is one poem for each year we had all feared to imagine, the final youthfulness and fecundity, nor, paradox- tiles, by the rhyparographer, of the poet’s life as she completed the vol- moments in the capsule.) In “Unknown,” ically, merely to our physical lives, our each scrap has a shadow—each ume), Olds revisits old territory—sex, the narrator observes a picturesque young attractiveness and prowess. The shadow cast marriage, motherhood, and divorce—and family picnicking on a beach, an image so menopausal persona in “49½” quickly by a different light. Permanently familiar characters—newlyweds and lovers sweet and harmonious that we are not sur- admits her own eggless autonomy: fresh in the bliss of early sexual union, new prised to find it precipitously ruptured: husks of the feast! When the guest mothers, empty nesters, and adult children [T]here is someone here—all along has gone, struggling with issues of attachment. As … for an instant, I wonder There was a spirit here. O I am the morsels dropped on the floor carefully as an archeologist, she combs if this is the little family my relative passing beyond matter are left through the accoutrements of a life in late killed, when he was drunk, with his and I am still in matter! It has been as food for the dead—O my middle age. Like any good archeologist, car… so long characters, she is not deterred by repetition, slowness, (p. 3) since I have been a being like this. my imagined, here are some or the failure of patterns or meaning to When I was in the womb, thirty fancies of crumbs reveal themselves quickly. Olds has always At once, we are deep in the psychic ter- years of half-lives beaded their from under love’s table. understood the necessity for slowness, and ritory that has characterized all of Olds’ dew (p. 123) I

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 We always prefer color and exaggeration © Paul Griffiths over “facts.” We wallow in intimate and shameless stories and have no taboos. (A Gumbo for the soul New York friend of mine, trying unsuc- cessfully to organize a union in south by Emily Toth Louisiana, was startled by the number of people who, on first acquaintance, told Swamp Songs: The Making of an Unruly Woman her all about their diarrhea.) It’s hard to switch cultural codes. If by Sheryl St. Germain. Salt Lake City: University of you move, like St. Germain, from grandiose New Orleans to a down-to- Utah Press, 2003, 227 pp., $21.95 hardcover. earth place like Iowa, and you’re accus- tomed to spilling your lurid confessionals I to everyone in the grocery line, then you’ll undoubtedly be viewed as a bab- any visitors to New Orleans— analytical, to make sense of the world she bling pervert. That happened to me when especially sour academics, nice had to leave. She is like Joyce or Yeats I moved from New Orleans to North M bright Midwesterners, and looking back at beautiful, melancholy Dakota in the mid-1970s—and like St. Sheryl St. Germain orderly people—find it appalling. Ireland—or like countless African Germain, I consoled myself by making Though their types are in the book, Americans who’ve written about the gumbo. And then watched while friends een by a drunk driver; father dead they’re not the primary audience for warm communities and lush beauties of picked out the oysters and the crab legs, at fifty-four of cirrhotic liver; Sheryl St. Germain’s Swamp Songs.The the South they had to escape. St. just as St. Germain’s midwestern guests cousin turned prostitute and rest of us are. Germain also reminds me of Kate do, saying, “It looked too much alive.” junkie dead at thirty of drug and St. Germain, born in New Orleans in Chopin, who wrote with love and depth New Orleans is too spicy, too intense alcoholic overdose. (p. 13) 1954, now lives and teaches in Iowa, about Louisiana but spent her entire writ- for Middle American souls. Visitors often where the food is as bland as the land- ing career in St. Louis. She knew what it comment that New Orleans is dirty and It would “seem unbelievable in a work scape and the people are earnest and means to miss New Orleans. smelly, which it is. After midnight, parts of fiction,” she admits—but it’s not morally straight arrow. Which means that, Often expatriates are interpreters to of the French Quarter often reek of piss uncommon here, where drama and pas- like most expatriate New Orleanians, she outsiders, and St. Germain is a smart and and vomit, while people stagger around sionate intensity always win out over a feels out of place. And so, like literary clever guide to the culture and peculiari- in drunken, amorous hazes. survival instinct. exiles everywhere, she writes about home ties of south Louisiana. Most of her This brings me to the life story that St. with love and longing for a lost world. fourteen essays begin with a personal Germain tells, much of which is stuff he most gripping part of Swamp Swamp Songs, St. Germain’s first book news peg, such as her memory of that families elsewhere keep hidden. She’s Songs is, in fact, the story of her of prose after four published poetry col- Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Then, as if she’s the eldest of half a dozen children born T doomed brother François, always lections, is full of the rhythm, pathos, and a camera pulling back, she’ll explain the to parents of Cajun and Creole descent troublesome, always being beaten by humor of south Louisiana, a land sus- background that a non-Louisiana reader (Cajuns, she explains carefully, are rural; their father. He was also the sibling who pended in a swamp. The villages south of will need—why there are hurricanes, Creoles are urban; and New Orleans looked most like St. Germain; like her he New Orleans are disappearing into the sea what the term Creole means. Then she’ll cooking is the sublime fusion of both). was dark, and they did drugs together. at the rate of 25 or 30 square miles a year, return to the original story—or, with an She grew up in rural Kenner, now the She quit—but a few weeks after a mar- and much of the low-lying land may be unpredictable but assured air, she’ll leave suburb where you land if you fly into riage that was supposed to straighten open sea in fifty years. Even now most of it behind entirely and soar into a New Orleans. St. Germain went to him out, François was dead of an over- south Louisiana, including New Orleans, metaphoric, poetic meditation. She Catholic school and got engaged for the dose. St. Germain stopped going to could be wiped out by one big hurricane. writes, for instance, of the trash fish in first time at seventeen (not uncommon church and went back to Dallas, where But New Orleanians generally don’t Lake Pontchartrain, wondering “how then). What’s also not uncommon are her she was in grad school. She’s the only dwell on that. We eat and drink, dance they were able to transform the shit of family tales: one of her family to go to college, the and laugh, and wear absurd costumes the lake into such exquisite nourishment, only one to move away, and the only one (and not just at Mardi Gras). We flee and I remember the moment it occurred ...a litany not too unusual for a to stop drinking. Even the household from grownup things like planning, good to me that perhaps I needed to learn this middle- or lower-class family from parakeet is a tippler. government, or clean streets. We’d rather transforming act. My first poems... New Orleans—brother jailed at Some of Swamp Songs is hilariously be naked in the summer heat. searched for insight and epiphany.” eighteen, dead of a drug overdose funny. My favorite section is St. St. Germain’s book is a fascinating This is a memoir by a poet as well as a not long after being released from Germain’s description of the women’s oscillation between that point of view— kind of historian, but New Orleans his- jail; brother-in-law dead of suicide Mardi Gras in rural Louisiana, where her wild self—and a writer’s pull to be tory, like the land, is chronically unstable. at nineteen; nephew killed at eight- pious Catholic wives and moms dress up

The Lesson Her Stories

That was Edena’s mother, My mother loved to cry. Oh, how Which was why she needed her stories. whizzing the mixer, eggs, butter, had I thought she cried for me? They carried her into the future pulled down into its vortex, I see now it was for my father, like the shopping cart like a demonstration while other mothers what he said, or the time riding ahead of her whipped and whipped a spoon. he left without a word. with our food for the week. Her hair was neat in the nest of a bun, Like the ironing board oh, maybe one erring feather of flour. And she cried as she that blocked the kitchen door. No cleaner kitchen. That kitchen listened to her stories. was a lab for the science of marriage. The fifteen minute intervals She had to be thinking in someone else’s life, of her own strong back, When her father came home, Our Gal Sunday, Helen Trent, her legs and sex, he sat at the bench and that ended with a gasp, with that slapping hand I knew well. Edena played him her lesson. His big hand an exclamation point. For I too had a use. beat on the dark wood flank. I was stubborn as a mule. If she made a mistake a twitch Stories broken up Something, love, was on came into her eye as he bellowed into details she collected daily, the other side of that door the notes. Though she was good staying where she was. it was clear he was better. She knew from them what happened and I wanted to come back to a woman outside of her house. smelling of it. But for now Then he’d call for the dinner she had me and split up and they said I could stay. After, She knew that a man her life for me, piece by piece, she washed while I dried. We came out was a starting place not too much at once, so that to watch, on the sofa, her father and that the wrong one moved you I would stay to hear cover her mother, moaning and touching, back and back. That a woman until the end, until I grew up. rubbing away the differences. was on this earth like an animal, for the use, More than once, this part what interested her, of the lesson, as often as I the use the woman was put to. was there, so they meant it to stick. —Elaine Terranova

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 17 in clownish and colorful costumes and to nightmares or surreptitious incest beards and truck around the countryside, and sexual abuse after a child’s bedtime. shaking down their neighbors, climbing Instead, the nightmares of the Cruz trees, rolling around and pelting each Beyond Springfield women are actual, waking realities. It is other. It’s a wild, unruly, feast-of-fools usually at dusk or after the evening meal kind of yearly celebration, and one that by Marie-Elise Wheatwind that Marci and Corin are subjected to St. Germain—who compares herself to their father’s violent rages. Trujillo Medusa in her own wildness—revels in What Night Brings by Carla Trujillo. Willimantic, CT: describes these beatings in belt-welting, seeing. But her enjoyment is hampered buckle-bruising detail. Their mother, by the presence of her dour, controlling Curbstone Press, 2003, 242 pp., $15.95 paper. Delia, is also subjected to Eddie Cruz’s British boyfriend—who, I suppose, wrath, which often continues after the stands in for those nay-sayers and poop- I girls’ bedtime. But the abuse he releases ers who hate New Orleans. on his wife is more often verbal and e .Corinne © Tee A. Swamp Songs is also a very sexy book, eading Carla Trujillo’s What Night psychological. and I suppose one could say that St. Brings, I was often reminded of Marci and Corin are helpless witness- Germain has a dirty mind (a quality I R my own adolescence in the 1960s. es to these episodes, but Marci’s person- always find charming in women, because Trujillo brings back the parallels with ality does not mirror her mother’s sub- there aren’t enough of us). She claims screen door-slamming clarity: the expec- missive passivity. Marci believes that that “the various interesting ways in tation to be home from school before anything can happen, and she holds out which one might use the tongue are not Dad arrived; the understanding that for a miraculous change in her life, appreciated in Iowa,” whereas in New everything be “shipshape,” with supper because the answers she seeks from the Orleans, when she’s swallowing an oys- on the table when Dad walked in the nuns or her mom always seem exasper- ter, “it slid into me, as warm and slimy as door; and then, if we’d been good, those atingly incomplete. sperm.” Even the Shriners’ little scooters twilight hours together in front of the For example, Marci’s mother reveals at a Carnival parade emit “slobbering TV, watching sitcom families with their that Marci’s cousin, Raylene, was actually grumbles” like “the first grunts of sex.” perfect, harmonious lives. Like Trujillo’s a boy when she was born but a year later The best books are, of course, those adolescent protagonist, Marci Cruz, I became a girl. Quizzing her mother about that grab at your heart and confirm your often longed to be part of a more peace- how the doctors could make such “a mis- prejudices (oops—I mean your brilliant ful, loving family than the one I lived in. take” about Raylene’s gender, Marci insights). Swamp Songs is also a celebra- In fact, I remember plotting (after learn- refuses to accept “I don’t know” as an tion of south Louisiana’s heavenly cui- ing the name of my favorite TV family’s Carla Trujillo answer: sine: “Many New Orleanians would, in hometown) to run away to idyllic fact, rather be in hell than eat bad food.” “Springfield” when I was ten or eleven disappear. I didn’t pray for him to “Didn’t you ask?” Food is a powerful and symbolic com- years old. But when I looked up die, just to leave. If I really wanted “No.” My mom was ironing munion, much like religion: her grandfa- Springfield in the index of our Hammond’s him dead, I didn’t say it because clothes. She dipped her fingers in ther had “an unholy love” for garlic dip. Atlas of the United States, I discovered it that would be a sin. A big one. And a pot of melted Niagara starch When St. Germain smells red beans was a common name for towns in the I couldn’t have big sins because I and flicked the drops over my cooking, she thinks of her mother, “and Midwest, all of which were located a wanted something else from God. dad’s blue work shirt. that smell enters me like her love and her thousand miles away—in Illinois, Ohio Something special. (p. 1) “How come?” I stood next to sorrow.” I’m reminded of Laura or Michigan—too far to bicycle from the the ironing board and tried to get Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate—and boxy, post-World War Two housing of The “special” request Marci makes to her to look at me, but she’d only indeed, south Louisiana is more like my neighborhood in suburban California. God is also a “big one.” In addition to stare at the shirt. Mexico than Iowa. Swamp Songs inspired Like the mythical “Springfield” of TV- her prayers to get rid of her father, “Porque it’s not polite to ask me to cook up a pot of gumbo, the land, the fictional working-class neigh- Marci’s most fervent, secret desire is to those kinds of questions, that’s Cajun equivalent of chicken soup for the borhood of What Night Brings is sketchy. be changed from a girl to a boy. why.” She stood with her legs soul. St. Germain compares it with San Lorenzo is located in northern Marci’s reasons for this wish are com- spread like a soldier, holding the Proust’s madeleine—but of course it California’s East Bay, where Marci Cruz’s plex. In her “Supergirl” dreams, she fan- steaming iron like a smoking gun. tastes much better, and it has legs. dad works at “the Chevy plant” and some tasizes about saving beautiful girls. (p. 25) I happened to finish reading Swamp of his friends work at an unnamed refin- Usually “a mean man was hurting the Songs on the first weekend after the US ery close to an unnamed freeway. girl. I’d beat the man up, then carry her nlike Delia, Marci is neither sto- invasion of Iraq, a truly shameful act. As Although Trujillo’s first novel is ground- away. She would be so happy I saved her, ical nor polite. Fiercely protec- always, wars are fought by the poor and ed in a region and time period rich in his- she’d want to marry me.” Knowing that U tive of her mother and sister, the unfortunate, and so thousands of torical significance, there’s little detail or “you can’t be with a girl if you are a girl,” she understands the need to “be good” young Louisianians have been sent away description to give a sense of place. Marci’s petitions to God are intended to in order to avoid her father’s beatings from their homeland for no good reason. What’s missing is the landscape beyond help her stay within the acceptable con- and to get prayers answered. But she has Our soldiers are also Louisiana expatri- the nailed-together vegetable boxes fines of her Catholic beliefs while also learned to be innocently coy and ates right now, like Sheryl St. Germain— Marci has cultivated on the cement patio acknowledging the understanding of cynically precocious when her questions and stories about their longing for home, of her backyard and the larger orchards puberty gleaned from her school science can’t be answered. For example, when family, friends, and crawfish season fill and farmland so abundant in that time. book. It tells her that by age fourteen, “a her mother scolds Marci for asking our newspaper columns. I wish I could While we’re given a sense of the main boy’s birdy gets bigger.” To be on the about a nun’s wedding band, explaining send them copies of Swamp Songs, for street of any small town—its safe side, Marci prays for a transforma- that the nun’s “husband was Jesus,” some comfort, for St. Germain express- Woolworth’s, pizza parlor, gas station, tion by the time she turns twelve, so she Marci won’t let this rest: es what they are feeling, even down to a and Greyhound bus depot—I’d like to can “grow into” her new persona. chapter on the delights and challenges of have been given a glimpse of the ocean, Another reason Marci wants to be a “How are all the nuns on this eating crawfish. or more of a whiff of the seasons as boy is “to grow big muscles,” like the planet supposed to share one man Swamp Songs is a gripping and Marci bicycled to and from school, men in her Uncle Tommy’s muscle mag- who isn’t even alive anymore?” poignant memoir, intelligent and funny library, and home. azines: “Then, I’d be able to beat up my “They make do.”… and humane, with the joie de vivre you These may be small quibbles. Like a dad.” This need to get stronger is one “How?” I asked. “Who kisses find only in Louisiana. It is a spicy lot of coming-of-age novels, What Night of the driving themes in What Night them and sleeps with them at gumbo, a slithery oyster, and a gem. I Brings is not about its geographical or Brings, for Trujillo’s title does not allude night?” sociological location but about the more universal internal dynamics of family. It is through her portrait of one Mexican- MOVING? American girl’s twelfth year of life that SUPPORT THE WOMEN’S REVIEW Trujillo touches on the Vietnam war, the Don’t miss an issue! “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure women’s liberation movement, and the Please give us six to eight weeks’ so lasting,” said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Reading may sexual revolution and shows how they be cheap, but publishing isn’t. Like many periodicals, we notice of your change of address. contribute to the growing consciousness can’t bring in all the income we need through subscription, We need your OLD address (on of a young Chicana lesbian during this advertising and newsstand sales alone. Unlike many periodicals, your mailing label, if possible) as volatile period of herstory. we’re not bankrolled by wealthy individuals or large foundations. We’ve been In the opening paragraph of the well as your NEW one. Send the supported from the start by hundreds of readers who have contributed novel, eleven-year-old Marci Cruz information to: Address Change, amounts ranging from one dollar to several thousand. We depend on those reveals a begrudging compassion for her donations to cover the small but real gap between income and expenses. The Women’s Review of Books, father’s life, despite the violence she and Help us stay healthy: please add a donation, no matter how large or small, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA her sister, Corin, have suffered from when you start or renew your subscription. Think about including a bequest 02481, or phone toll-free 888- him. Her prayers are tempered by fears to the Women’s Review when making out your will. And if you have the 283-8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ instilled by Catholicism: resources now, take out a lifetime subscription: at only $300 it’s a real bargain! email [email protected]. YOUR DONATION TO THE WOMEN’S REVIEW IS TAX-DEDUCTIBLE Every single day of my life I went to bed asking God to make my dad

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 “Ay! Marcía. Malcriada! You and your nasty questions.” (p. 19) The Bookshelf There were times while reading What Night Brings that I had to put the book Each month we list the recently published books received during the preceding month or so that we think readers of the Women’s down. Trujillo’s descriptions of the girls’ Review will want to know about. This is, however, a very partial selection of the books by and about women published each month. beatings are so true to life that I found Our listing is informational, not evaluative; the only annotation added is a brief indication of the subject matter, where the title is not myself thinking, Oh no, please, not self-explanatory. All are nonfiction titles published in 2003, unless otherwise noted. another one. Yet the relentless violence is not gratuitous. Whether it occurs after a Teresa Palomo Acosta and Ruthe Winegarten, Las Tejanas: 300 Years Indiana University Press. union discussion or at the kitchen table of History. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Devon Abbott Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, following a child’s refusal to eat a morsel Elsie Arnold and Jane Baldauf-Berdes, Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen: Empowerment, Activism. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. the family is too poor to waste, we see Eighteenth-Century Composer, Violinist, and Businesswoman. Lanham, Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in the father’s reasons for his brutal behav- MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2002. Sixteenth-century Bologna. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ior. What is commendable is that Antje Ascheid, Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Trujillo’s eye never wavers; she shows us Cinema. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Random House. the children’s reality and their growing Karen Beckman, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism. Durham, Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. toughness, something to admire in the NC: Duke University Press. (Examination of vanishing and reap- Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. (Examination of free face of their abuse. pearing woman in film—derived from Victorian stage magic acts.) love thought and questioning of the inequalities of marriage in Other sympathetic adults in the René P. Bersma, Titia: The First Western Woman in Japan. Amsterdam, America in the late-nineteenth century, contradicting notions of Cruz’s extended family try to interfere The Netherlands: Hotei Publishing. (History of a Dutch the era as sexless and repressed.) with Eddie Cruz’s actions. Marci and woman’s journey to Japan in the nineteenth century, in violation Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, Professing Feminism: Education and Corin turn to their aunts and uncles, of the country’s isolation decree.) Indoctrination in Women’s Studies. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. and after one beating, a call goes out to Isabella Bird, Letters to Henrietta, edited by Kay Chubbuck. Boston, MA: (Expanded version of 1994 book claiming that making women’s their maternal grandmother, who drives Northeastern University Press, 2002. (Letters of a nineteenth- studies serve a feminist political agenda has harmed scholarship west from Gallup, New Mexico, to take century woman traveler, sent abroad to recover from illness, to in the field and alienated potential supporters.) the girls home. These interventions are her homebound sister.) Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley, CA: always thwarted, however, by Eddie Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and University of California Press. Cruz’s tyranny as the patriarchal, con- the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and trolling force of their home. One of University Press. Citizenship in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. the aunts advises the girls to call the Patricia I. Brown, A League of My Own: Memoir of a Pitcher for the All- Judith A. Ranta, The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native police the next time Eddie beats them, American Girls Professional Baseball League. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. American Mill Worker. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. but she is discouraged by her husband, Pamela Cheek, Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Deborah L. Rhode, ed., The Difference “Difference” Makes: Women and who tells the girls the police will take Placing of Sex. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Leadership. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. them away to live with strangers. In the (Exploration of how Enlightenment literature built modern Christy Rishoi, From Girl to Woman: American Women’s Coming-of-Age context of Chicano/Latino culture, to national and racial identity from images of sexual order in the Narratives. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. be removed from family is unthinkable, public sphere.) Victoria E. Rodríguez, Women in Contemporary Mexican Politics. Austin, even when staying means enduring Shuqin Cui, Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of TX: University of Texas Press. escalating mistreatment. Chinese Cinema. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar Despite the girls’ powerlessness, Ann Daly, Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown, America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. What Night Brings is a novel about CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. Fiona C. Ross, Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Marci’s heroism, her intellectual and sex- Patricia S. E. Darlington and Becky Michele Mulvaney, Women, Power, Commission in South Africa. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press. ual curiosity and her stubborn desire not and Ethnicity: Working Toward Reciprocal Empowerment. New York: Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s only to survive but to conquer the fear, The Haworth Press. Global Factories. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. homophobia, and brutality in her life. At Kathy Davis, Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies Barbara Sato, The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media, and Women in night, Marci finds strength in her rich, on Cosmetic Surgery. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Interwar Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. imaginative fantasy life, even as her faith Lorraine Nye Eliot, The Real Kate Chopin. Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance Ellen Schattschneider, Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a in God weakens. In her waking life, Publishing. Japanese Sacred Mountain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marci Cruz relentlessly questions Heba Aziz El-Kholy, Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Gender in (Examination of a Shinto shrine founded and mostly attended authority, challenging the nuns and Low-Income Cairo. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. by women.) Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in Mother Superior about the contradic- Elisabeth A. Frost, The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry. American Civil Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. tions between Catholicism and science. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press. (An argument for a broader definition of the avant-garde, focusing on the poets Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, She enrages her father (when he returns Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Howe, and and Giroux. (Examination of viewers’ responses to visual docu- months after abandoning his family) by Harryette Mullen.) mentation of cruelty, war, and disasters.) “disowning” him and referring to him as Dena Goodman, ed., Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen. James B. South, ed., Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and “Eddie” instead of “Dad.” She bargains New York: Routledge. Trembling in Sunnydale. Chicago: Open Court. (Philosophers ana- with God, Baby Jesus, and the Virgin Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkeley, CA: lyze the television show.) Mary for a miraculous sex change. Kelsey St. Press. Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History Since the Renaissance. New Of course, some of her efforts are Sharon Hamilton, Shakespeare’s Daughters. Jefferson, NC: York: Palgrave, 2002. (Study of women history writers examining met with discouraging results: her McFarland. (Examination of father-daughter relationships in how gender shapes the writing of history and its role in the attempt to teach herself karate from a Shakespeare’s plays.) development of feminist consciousness.) library book “works” with a neighbor Trudier Harris, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the Robert Storr, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Allan Schwartzman, Louise boy but not with her uncle; her plan to South. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bourgeois. New York: Phaidon. (Photographs of the artist’s work.) “spy” on her father, taking photographs Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. New of his infidelities, is discouraged by from Home and Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. York: Cambridge University Press. adults who see that she needs more than Shahrukh Husain, The Goddess: Power, Sexuality, and the Feminine Divine. Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust. “proof ” to change her father’s behav- Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. (Cross-cultural New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ior; her “scientific question” to the exploration of goddess-worship.) Mary Ann Tétreault and Robin L. Teske, eds., Partial Truths and the town librarian about whether or not a Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond, eds., The Cinema of Kathryn Politics of Community: Feminist Approaches to Social Movement, girl can change into a boy is misinter- Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. London, England: Wallflower Community, and Power, Volume Two. Columbia, SC: University of preted when the librarian shows her a Press. (A look at the work of the prominent and controversial South Carolina Press. copy of The Christine Jorgensen Story in filmmaker.) Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa, eds., Tortilleras: Hispanic and “one of the loudest whispers” Marci Elizabeth Louise Kahn, Marie Laurencin: Une Femme Inadaptée in U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression. Philadelphia, PA: Temple has ever heard. But Marci never lets Feminist Histories of Art. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. (An University Press. these setbacks defeat her. Although her examination of the life and works of the artist and her connec- María de los Angeles Torres, ed., By Heart/De Memoria: Cuban prayed-for sex change doesn’t occur, tion to feminism.) Women’s Journeys In and Out of Exile. Philadelphia, PA: Temple she gets her first kiss from her first les- Ann N. Madsen, Making Their Own Peace: Twelve Women of Jerusalem. University Press. (Eleven women recount their experiences living bian girlfriend, a tender and unexpected New York: Lantern Books. through and after the Cuban revolution.) reward at the end of a long, brutal year, Ida Magli, Women and Self-Sacrifice in the Christian Church: A Cultural Freya von Moltke, Memories of Kreisau & the German Resistance. and we get to witness it. History from the First to the Nineteenth Century. Jefferson, NC: Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (Memoir by a mem- What Night Brings is the most forth- McFarland. ber of the Kreisau Circle, a resistance group that participated in right coming-of-age story that I’ve read Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh, eds., Etel Adnan: Critical the attempted assassination of Hitler.) from the Chicana/Latina lesbian literary Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist. Jefferson, NC: Dorothea E. Von Mücke, The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the community. I hope to see an older, McFarland, 2002. Fantastic Tale. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. wiser, and even feistier Marci again in Carol Mason, Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Louise Wagenknecht, White Poplar, Black Locust. Lincoln, NE: Trujillo’s future novels, standing her Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. University of Nebraska Press. (Memoir of growing up in one of ground against a backdrop of the farm- Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the the West’s last company mining towns at the end of the 1950s workers’ strike and the brown beret Imagined South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. lumber boom.) movement, those urgent extra-familial Debra Meyers, Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives: Meira Weiss, The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society. issues of her time. I Free Will Christian Women in Colonial Maryland. Bloomington, IN: Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 8 / May 2003 19 students nearing completion of dissertation http://home.earthlink.net/~nshiffrin, are asked to submit a one-page description of [email protected]. THE HOLY LET- Classified your scholarship and courses you would be TERS (poems) and MY JEWISH NAME interested in teaching (one per semester), (essays) order from publisher tutional rate. 2337B 18th St., NW, along with a curriculum vitae, three letters of http://www.greatunpublished.com or author Booksellers Washington, DC 20009. Attn.: WRB. (202) recommendation, and a writing sample (e.g., POB 1506 Santa Monica CA 90406 234-8072; www.offourbacks.org. chapter of dissertation). Applications are due 310.302.1107. by May 14, 2003. Teaching Fellows will meet with speakers for the Fisher Center lecture Feminist Editor. Ph.D. Prize-winning series in the Fall and Spring, and will present author. 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