The Women's Studies Review

The Women's Studies Review The Ohio State University Volume 6 No. 5 Center For Women's Studies September /October 1984 In this issue: Reviews Review of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Page 2 Edited by Barbara Smith. by Elaine Upton Pugh Review of Gender Gap: Bella Abzug's Guide to Political Page 4 Power for American Women. By Bella Abzug with Mim Kelber. by Willa Young Review of John A. Phillips' Eve: The History of An Idea. Page 5 by B .A. St. Andrews Review of Richard J. Schrader's God's Handiwork: Images of Page 7 Women in Early Germanic Literature. by Deborah S. Ellis Review of A Very Private Eye. Edited by Hazel Holt and Page 8 Hilary Pym. by Janet Overmyer Review of Diane Kurys' film, Entre Nous. Page 9 by Vivian Schaefer. Editor's Note This issue of The Women's Studies_ ~eview_ We may have started another introduces new content-to-be-reviewed: film kind of tradition as well: that of and other visual media. I hope Vivian instituting a change with each issue of the Schaefer's review of "Entre Nous" begins a Review. Actually, I kind of like the idea, tradition of thoughtful, provocative, and although I'm sure I'd receive negative feminist critique of film in our criticism on this from any reputable publication. Film has for too long been management agency. Anyway, in our next considered a somewhat inferior scholarly issue, we'd like to open up a line of pursuit--an avocation, if you will, But no communication between us and our readors, in feminist involved in the interdisciplinary the form of letters-to-the-editor. We're study of women in culture can avoid the hoping that this communication will enliven consequence, the importance, of the the Review by providing a forum for the representation of women in visual media. issues as well as formal critique of material. While critiquing the content of film I encourage you to respond to reviews, narrative is an important aspect of reviewers, and to the issues being talked reviewing, an equally important about. Send letters to me, Terry Hartley, consideration for us is the recognition of at the Center for Women's Studies. women involved in the creation, production, Thanks, and distribution of film, Terry Hartley Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Edited by Barbara Smith. New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983. Elaine Upton Pugh, Dartmouth, New Hampshire Home Girls is a large book. No, not In the Introduction to Horne Girls editor like Volume S of Encyclopedia Brittanies or Barbara Smith writes: The World Bibliography of Bibliographies or the illustrated Riverside edition of the Home Girls has been a long time complete works of Shakespeare or even the coming. I am thinking not so much of Norton Anthology of Poetry, Nevertheless, the two years from its conception in it is a large book, large enough that the mid-1981 to its publication in 1983, reviewer can hardly hope to do justice to it but of the far longer span it has and also large in its achievement of taken to prepare a space for its bringing together over 30 voices of black existence, the years devoted to women--feminists, often lesbian-feminists, building consciousness and a movement who are political activists, poets, fiction so that a book like this one becomes writers, literary and art critics, a inevitable. feminist therapist, a musician. In a country where the media insure that there is a paucity of constructive images of black In retrospect an anthology like Home G_irls women, among black people often possessed of may seem inevitable, but only because of an homophobic and anti-feminist sentiments, and indomitable urge for expression, visibility, among white feminists where many, though and consciousness-raising arose within the surely not all, do not wish to genuinely hearts and minds of women like Smith, Gloria confront difference, Home Girls is a large Hull, and Lorraine Bethel, the three editors achievement. Seeing this anthology on a of Conditions Five: The Black Women's Issue bookshelf is like gazing at a place once (1979) of which Home Girls is a nearly demolished and long forgotten. To continuation, By now one has come to open the doors of that once nearly destroyed appreciate the quality work presented by and now reconstructed dwelling evidenced in Barbara Smith, who also co-edited But Some the pages of Home Girls is to find oneself of Us Are Brav~ (1982) with Hull and amazed at the psychic variety and sometimes Patricia Bell Scott. In the context of sheer richness of the voices within. these former collections Home Girls seems inevitable. Yet it is nonetheless another attempt to dress in what I take to be an achievement against the odds. acceptable white middle-class fashion mark these photographs (the one exception is Bernice Johnson Reagan's, a photograph of The volume is graced by Afrikan drawings her as an adult and a more contemporary and contains five sections. The first picture). The black feminist and lesbian section--The Blood, Yes, the consciousness in the written work of the Blood--inscribes a space of origins, calls adult contributors suggests a long forth essential and multifaceted qualities progression from the consciousness in the of home. The poem by Toi Derricote opening photographs, thi~tion is a call for a god-child and blood sister to "stand in the same dream" of commitment "to each other's souls," to self in a sphere not defined by men, marriage, A Hell of a Place to Ferment a children. The poem evokes the dark beauty Revolution, the last section, looks forward and the self-identified way of the emerging with a poem by June Jordan, a story by black woman. Other home and Cheryl Clarke, pieces on black feminist woman-identified family relationships are organizing (interviews and group presented in works such as the lyric-prose discussions), an essay on black feminist piece by Michelle Cliff, the West Indian therapy, a speech on the difficulty and born woman who can pass for white, a liquid necessity of coalition politics, and a and richly rhythmic poem by the highly movement into spirituality for personal and underrated New York poet, Alexis DeVeaux, collective strength, for the achievement of and other poetry and testimonials by black justice, and for saving the planet. In this women struggling with the problems of origin section Alice Walker, a writer who struggled and identity created by European colonialism and recently rose to prominence, looks back as transplanted onto the soils of the to Zora Neale Hurston, a neglected black Americas. woman writer who came before Walker, By recognizing Hurston, Walter's essay ironically reminds one of a past of neglect, invisibility, absence of identity, psychic A second section is devoted to essays instability, denial of cultural roots and of about black women artists, mainly writers, spiritual as well as physical nourishment, and a third section contains poems, essays, denial of a home, This has been the fate of and stories about and by black lesbians, all peoples of color in the United States, although other sections of the anthology and doubly the fate of black women made also present black lesbians. For example, inferior and absented because of both their in an essay on black lesbians in literature race and sex. by women, Jewelle Gomez notes the scarcity of black lesbians in literature and says that when they do appear it is often in "titillation literature." Some may ask, But readers of Home Girls might begin to "Why write about black lesbians?" Gomez feel that the pen can be mighty, can be a reminds us that nature abhors a vacuum and way to turn inward to one's place of origin she suggests that history is incomplete as and outward to inscribe and real-ize a long as a group of people remain in the destiny, It would be well, I believe, that shadows. a future volume of Home Girls or of another anthology contain more and richer visionary writing, This does not mean that the attention to the complex results of multiple After section three the reader may take oppression should be ignored, They should a brief turn through the Home Girls photo certainly continue to be explored in depth, album. This section, whatever the intent of but always, I would hope, with a sense not the editor, suggests to me still further the only of what has been wrong but also of what largeness of the achievement of this can be right--that is, liberating, anthology. Contributors to the anthology are harmonious, whole. Thus, it seems that shown in photographs of themselves as black women writers, therapists, musicians, children, often with their family members. lawyers, and activists of various kinds must The photographs suggest something of the give increasing attention to their potential estrangement process of black girls on the as eradicators of poverty, crime, and the way to womanhood. Straightened hair and an destructions of capitalist competition and nuclear power, "Home girls" must become voices (such as Toni Cade Bambara's edition, increasingly aware of their potential as The Black Woman, 1970) show that the days of creators of spaces of renewal, mental invisibility and silence are numbered. health, harmony with nature, and revival of Gloria Hull's poem, "for Audre," in which what is joyful and holistic in ancient Hull quotes the poet Audre Lorde, is a Mrikan traditions, poignant expression of the essence of Home One thing seems sure: Home Girls as Girls: "Our labor is/more important well as other collections of black women's than/our silence." - Gender Gap: Bella Abzug's Guide to PoliUcal Power for American Women.

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