The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XXI, No. 8 May 2004 74035 $4.00

I In This Issue ©Jill Krementz

I Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat goes beyond the head- lines to explore the effect upon the lives of ordinary Haitians of their country’s years of political chaos and terror in The Dew Breaker. Cover story D

I Three new biographies of Harriet Tubman may bring a wel- come end to the confusion of the diminutive, Southern-born “General,” who rescued her family and others from slavery, with Sojourner Truth, the six-foot-tall, Northern feminist of a previous generation, says historian Adele Alexander—who also explains why she’s fed up with “role models.” p. 4

I Paula Gunn Allen, author of Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat, reveals what Edwidge Danticat, author of The Dew Breaker. the Native American “Brave Woman” said when she appeared to Allen, a poet and artist as well as a scholar, in a vision. p. 13 The penance of speech I Are women who have cosmetic by Rhonda Cobham surgery victims of the patriarchy or are they asserting control over their The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, lives and bodies? Dr. Randi Hutter 2004, 244 pp, $22.00 hardcover. Epstein diagnoses the silicone I breast implant controversy and The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and ristide’s desperate struggle to govern This time, however, both hunter and prey Perils of Medical Enhancement. p. 15 in Haiti is barely mentioned in are the monstrous progeny of Haiti itself. A Edwidge Danticat’s new novel. Her The narrative line in The Dew Breaker is focus is mostly on the ways in which events strung across a series of linked short stories in the 1980s, near the end of the Duvalier that leads to a single question: Can the tales regime, continue to haunt Haitians who we tell about our past offer us any alterna- I and more... have since migrated to America. tives in the future other than those of Nevertheless, the nagging uncertainties sur- becoming either hunter or prey? The 05> rounding Haiti’s recent crisis reverberated answer, like the answer to the riddle about like the shadow pain of an amputated limb trees and their shadows with which the all through my reading of The Dew Breaker. book closes, depends on perspective: the The narrator in Danticat’s last novel, The angles from which the multiple plots illumi- Farming of Bones, bore witness to the geno- nate character; the chronology the entire 0374470 74035 cide of Haitians at the hands of their narrative imposes on events; the quotidian PRINTED IN THE USA Dominican neighbors in the mid-1930s. continued on page 3 The Women’s Review Contents of Books Center for Research on Women 1 Rhonda Cobham I The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat Wellesley College 106 Central Street 4 Letters Wellesley, MA 02481 (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 4 Adele Logan Alexander I Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton; www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories by Jean M. Humez; Bound for the Promised Land Volume XXI, No. 8 by Kate Clifford Larson May 2004 Martha Gies I Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform edited by Diana Taylor and 6 EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman Roselyn Costantino [email protected]

8 Judith Barrington I Occasions of Sin by Sandra Scofield; Wishing for Snow by Minrose Gwin; PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman [email protected]

9 Louise W. Knight I Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe POETRY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: by Valarie H. Ziegler Robin Becker 10 Miriam Sagan I Fools and Crows by Terri Witek; Granted by Mary Szybist; Miracle Fruit ADVERTISING MANAGER: by Aimee Nezhukumatathil Anita D. McClellan [email protected] 11 Joanne M. Braxton I Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat by Paula Gunn Allen OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler 13 Joanne M. Braxton I Pocahontas’ voice: A conversation with Paula Gunn Allen [email protected] 14 Lesley Hazleton I Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied Land by Amira Hass STUDENT WORKERS: Nissa Hiatt, Martha Ortiz, Bethany Towne 15 Randi Hutter Epstein I The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement by Sheila Rothman and David Rothman EDITORIAL MISSION: To give writ- ing by and about women the serious crit- 16 Marie Shear I Millicent Fenwick: Her Way by Amy Schapiro; Pat Schroeder: A Woman of the ical attention it deserves. We seek to rep- House by Joan A. Lowy; Fire in My Soul by Joan Steinau Lester resent the widest possible range of fem- inist perspectives both in the books we 17 Elaine Sexton I Two poems choose to review and in the content of the reviews themselves. 18 Eileen Boris I The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America by Dorothy Sue Cobble ADVERTISING IN THE WOMEN’S 19 Harriet Casdin-Silver I Women, Art, and Technology edited by Judy Malloy REVIEW: Visit www.wellesley.edu/ WomensReview to book an ad online; 20 Nancy Berke I Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis, Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for preview the current issue and classified Uncompromising Romantics by Sasha Cagen ads; and download a media kit including display, classified, and line rates, sizes 21 Serinity Young I Cleopatra Dismounts by Carmen Boullosa; Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting and shapes, policies, and deadlines. Image of an Icon by Francesca T. Royster The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN 22 Lynne Gouliquer I Officially Gay: The Political Construction of Sexuality by the US Military #0738-1433) is published monthly by Gary L. Lehring; Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military edited by except August by The Women’s Review, Aaron Belkin and Geoffrey Bateman Inc. Annual subscriptions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for institu- 23 The Bookshelf tions. Overseas postage fees are an additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 sur- face mail to all countries outside the US. Back issues are available for $4.00 Contributors per copy. Please allow 6-8 weeks for all subscription transactions. ADELE LOGAN ALEXANDER is an associate professor of histo- through the stories of 23 workers who work the night shift. She is a Periodicals class postage paid at ry at the George Washington University. Her publications include long-time activist in international human rights and for low-income Boston, MA and additional mailing Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia and Homelands and housing in Portland, Oregon, where she lives. Gies was a foreign Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family. She is working on a observer in the 1994 Mexican presidential elections and teaches creative offices. biography of the Pan-Africanist intellectual, Ida Gibbs Hunt. writing at Traveler’s Mind, a summer writing workshop in Veracruz. POSTMASTER: send address correc- JUDITH BARRINGTON’s third book of poetry, Horses and the LYNNE GOULIQUER left the Canadian military after 16 years to tions to The Women’s Review of Books, Human Soul, will be published in the spring of 2004. Her most recent pursue graduate studies at McGill University. Her main research Center for Research on Women, book, Lifesaving: A Memoir, won the Lambda Literary Award and was a interests focus on the interplay between institutions, gender, sexuali- Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the ty, and identity. Wellesley, MA 02481. Memoir. She is the author of Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. LESLEY HAZLETON lived in and reported from Israel from 1966 The Women’s Review of Books is a project NANCY BERKE is the author of Women Poets on the Left. She is work- to 1986. Her books include Jerusalem, Jerusalem and most recently, Mary: of the Wellesley Centers for Women. ing on a book about single women. a Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother. EILEEN BORIS, Hull Professor of Women’s Studies at the LOUISE W. KNIGHT is adjunct professor of communication stud- The Women’s Review is distributed by University of California, Santa Barbara, directs the Center for Research ies at Northwestern University. Her forthcoming book is Becoming A Total Circulation, New York City, NY, on Women and Social Justice. Co-editor of Major Problems in the History Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, 1860-1898. and Ingram, Nashville, TN. All other of American Workers, she writes on gender, race, labor, and citizenship. MIRIAM SAGAN’s most recent books are a memoir, Searching for a distribution is handled directly by The JOANNE M. BRAXTON, a former Mellon Scholar at the Wellesley Mustard Seed: A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story, and a collection of Women’s Review. College Center for Research on Women, edits the Women Writers of poetry, Rag Trade. The contents of The Women’s Review of Color biography series for Praeger Publishers. She is the author of ELAINE SEXTON is the author of the poetry collection Sleuth. Her Books are copyright © 2004. All rights Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition, and a poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals includ- reserved; reprint by permission only. collection of poetry, Sometimes I Think of Maryland, and other works. ing the American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Hubbub, New Letters, Prairie HARRIET CASDIN-SILVER is an acclaimed pioneer in the art of Schooner, Rattapallax, and River Styx. She lives in New York City, where holography. Based in Brookline, Massachusetts, she exhibits her work she works in magazine publishing. internationally. MARIE SHEAR is a writer and editor by trade, a satirist and musical RHONDA COBHAM teaches in the departments of English and theater lover by temperament, and a feminist by necessity. black studies at Amherst College. Her articles on Caribbean and SERINITY YOUNG is a research associate in the division of anthro- African literatures have appeared in Callaloo, Research in African pology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Literatures, and Transition She has edited The Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion and An RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN, MD, is a freelance writer based in Anthology of Sacred Texts By and About Women, and authored Dreaming in New York City. the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery and Practice and Courtesans and MARTHA GIES is the author of Up All Night, a portrait of a city told Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconography and Ritual. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 The penance of speech All the registers available to her charac- Caribbean narrative of childhood, in Like Danticat’s previous novels, The continued from p.1 ters make their appearance in the sto- which Creole communities figure as Dew Breaker succeeds in transforming Haiti ries. The text indicates their presence by sites of rural innocence that the boy and its diaspora from an abject spectacle to details—a stone in a glass of water, an meticulously documenting the media protagonist celebrates, even as he a symbol of the persistence of human dig- overflowing ashtray, three snippets of through which these multiple languages moves away from femininity, orality, nity in the face of terror. Even the hunters fabric—through which the stories are filtered. There are New York AM and pastoral freedoms towards mas- in this grim passion play seem to struggle locate or sublimate pain. Danticat’s talk radio broadcasts in French and culinity, text, and the disciplines of for redemption through the penance of unexpected juxtapositions intensify Creole; answering machine cassettes modernity. Danticat’s story inverts this speech. Like their prey, they carry on their the quiet tragedies on the periphery of containing messages in stilted English paradigm. Instead of sitting with the bodies the scars left by the indignities they the action. Thus, a casual sexual liaison that start off with “Alo!” ; notebooks child protagonist at the feet of a wise have suffered and inflicted. And yet those one story mentions in passing seems crammed with English sentences in old griot who instructs us in the myths same bodies continue to yearn for beauty merely ornamental in a plot that focus- barely decipherable script; tables bear- of his people’s origins, we lounge with and order and the possibility of love. es on the protagonist’s reunification ing food or drinks over which the teenager Claude, as he imports the There is nothing sentimental about with his newly arrived wife. When the American English is peppered with hip-hop idiom of Flatbush Avenue into Danticat’s novel. It has etched into my same liaison resurfaces at the margins Haitian expressions like sezi—the a new myth of origins about a son who imagination images I would prefer to think of another story, from the perspective Creole word for crazy—or Kennedy— destroys his father in order to feed his have no basis in reality. But, like the mouth of the woman whose happiness it Creole slang for secondhand American drug habit. Claude cannot speak Creole, that contains both speech and silence in destroyed, we discover that the small clothes. Much of this linguistic variety yet he is one of the few protagonists in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, from which cruelties we easily forgive in fictional is transcribed onto the page in English, the novel who comes close to achieving Ka gets her name, this novel’s unlikely heroes and close friends may be sus- but Danticat alerts the reader each time absolution through narrative. Another combination of shadows, rhythms, and ceptible to the same scrutiny as the the language shifts. In one tense man writes down his story in a formal silences captures the aspirations all immi- enormities of which we accuse our exchange between the protagonist, Ka, letter addressed to his unborn child. A grants bring with them, the nightmares we most sadistic enemies. and her father, for example, the three woman learns how to “parcel out [her] are trying to escape, and the fantasies of Danticat’s use of language raises the language registers represented are cru- sorrows” in stories and songs among joy, loss, and longing that tie us inextricably stakes in the wider debate over the cial to the emotional nuance of the pas- her friends, “each walking out with to imagined homelands in the Caribbean, most effective way to represent the sage. Ka’s continued identification with fewer than we’d carried in.” in Brooklyn, and beyond. I Creole voice on the page. Unlike the father she can no longer trust; his Patrick Chamoiseau’s Martinican need, after year’s of silence, to explain Creole in his Prix Goncourt-winning himself to her; the necessity and impos- novel Texaco, which acquires a patina of sibility of their communication—all are innocence in response to the corrupt- indicated in their awkward shifts ing dominance of colonial French, between Haitian English, Haitian Danticat’s Haitian Creole is used by Creole, and American English: “For the first time we hear the painful state officials as well as ordinary Haitian people. Consequently, her nar- “I say rest in Creole,” he pref- and poignant voices of black women rators cannot claim to speak a language aces, “because my tongue too that has no alliances with institutional heavy in English to say things ”* authority. Moreover, Danticat sees like this, especially older things.” in all their humanity and complexity. Caribbean Creoles as vital, increasingly “Fine,” I reply defiantly in metropolitan, phenomena that change English. continuously in response to new politi- “Ka,” he continues in Creole, cal and linguistic challenges. The title “when I first saw your statue, I The Dew Breaker, for example, is one wanted to be buried with it, to translation of shoukèt laroze, an expres- take it with me into the other sion that refers to the silent, magical world.” way in which dew “falls,” or “breaks,” “Like the Ancient Egyptians, as they say in Haitian Creole, on the “ I continue in English. early morning leaves. As Danticat He smiles, grateful, I think, explains, Haitians under Duvalier’s that in spite of everything, I can regime often used the term ironically to still appreciate his passions. name the state-sponsored torturers (p. 17) who typically descended upon their victims in the silence before dawn. But And then there are the endless, Danticat’s title also signifies on Jaques empty silences that leave their bearers Roumain’s 1946 novel, Les Gouverneurs scarred and bloated: A reflection in a de la rosée, translated into English by shiny metal elevator door grotesquely Langston Hughes as Masters of the Dew. inflates the body of a woman who can Roumain co-opts the picturesque, rural speak to no one about the pregnancy imagery of shoukèt laroze into his she has aborted. The bruised, calloused novel’s rewriting of Romeo and Juliet as hands of a child bear silent witness to Haitian pastoral. His translation of the the daily torture of the classroom. Like Creole phrase allows him to connect the novice journalist who interviews a Haiti’s feudal past to his utopian vision wedding seamstress in one story, the for a triumphant proletariat future in a reader is challenged to imagine “men modern nation state, where men will be and women whose tremendous agonies masters of the elements, capable of filled every blank space in their lives. transcending narrow allegiances to Maybe there were hundreds, even thou- family and clan. At the time Roumain sands, of people like this, men and was writing, nationalism in Europe women chasing fragments of them- “There are gems of stories here, rich details amid tales already had demonstrated a sinister selves long lost to others.” For these of heartbreaking loss.” —THE WASHINGTON POST proclivity for co-opting “authentic” silent characters, the issue is not one of folk customs and language to support authenticity—which choice of language the agendas of totalitarian regimes. is most politically correct for describing “This is one of the first brave steps in beginning to fill the However, Roumain’s translation of their pain—but of ontology—how obliterated stories of black women’s many sexualities.” shoukèt laroze elides that possibility in does one begin to describe a pain that the Creole context. Danticat’s alterna- exists beyond language? —NAOMI WOLF, AUTHOR OF THE BEAUTY MYTH tive translation suggests violence as well as mastery. It makes visible the he answer, for Danticat, seems “Do not miss this pathblazing book!”—*CORNEL WEST, excesses of the nationalist, socialist, to be that stories must be told and capitalist ideologies that have T with whatever words we have— UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF RELIGION, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY stunted Haiti’s growth during the six even the stories about their victims that decades that separate The Dew Breaker torturers revisit in their dreams. One from Masters of the Dew. crucial moment of storytelling occurs Visit www.triciarose.com Available Wherever Books are Sold Freed from the myth of a morally deep in the Haitian countryside. The untainted Creole, as well as from the scene is reminiscent of Joseph Zobel’s PICADOR assumption that Creole-speaking sub- 1955 novel Rue Cases-Nègres, better jects never think or speak on their own known to American audiences in its What to Read Next behalf within the discourse of moder- 1983 adaptation for the screen by www.picadorusa.com nity, Danticat can use any language reg- Euzhan Palcy as Sugar Cane Alley.The ister she chooses to carry her message. film follows the conventions of the

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 3 Letters Sojourner Tubman and Dear Editor, And this June 2004, we will officially Thanks to Carol Cohn (Women’s launch the International Women’s Review, February 2004) for recognizing Commission in Jerusalem (to be fol- Harriet Truth the extraordinary initiatives women lowed by a protest demonstration at the around the world are engaged in as we Separation Wall in Abu Dis). The fol- by Adele Logan Alexander try to leverage the potential of UN lowing month we will begin the process Security Council Resolution 1325 for the of returning to the Security Council to Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton. social and political change work we are inform them that we decided not to doing. Here is just one more example. wait—that the situation and the reali- New York: Little, Brown, 2004, 288 pp., $25.95 hardcover. The Palestinian and Israeli women of ties we are living demand that we not the Jerusalem Link had an opportunity wait—and we went ahead and estab- Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories by Jean M. Humez. to present our vision of a just and sus- lished an IWC without them and that, tainable peace between our peoples in light of UN Resolution 1325, we are Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, before the UN Security Council in May now asking for the recognition we 458 pp., $45.00 hardcover. 2001. We challenged the Security require and deserve. Council to implement its own Terry Greenblatt Bound for the Promised Land by Kate Clifford Larson. Resolution 1325 through the establish- Former director, ment of an International Women’s Bat Shalom of the Jerusalem Link New York: Ballantine Books, 2003, Commission (IWC) that would: Activist in Residence, Global Fund for Women 380 pp., $26.95 hardcover. 1) Ensure the significant partici- San Francisco, CA pation of women, including civil I society women, in any Israel/ Dear Editor: his is a true story (at least I heard it and the school bearing her name is appro- Palestine peace negotiations and Anne Fausto-Sterling asks in her on FM radio and read it in the New priately situated in Manhattan. At nearly six related initiatives. April 2004 article, “Is Science T York Daily News, and therefore take feet, Truth was almost a giant for her day, 2) Secure immediate and continu- Objective?” She goes on to describe cur- it to be true): In the fall of 2002, a while Tubman was physically tiny. ous peace negotiations until a just rent governmental policies that directly deservedly famous liberal candidate for the When confronted by reporters about and sustainable peace is achieved. curtail research on human sexuality, United States Senate took her campaign to Clinton’s historical gaffe, a campaign aide 3) Guarantee that women’s per- HIV, contraception, and abortion. I the Sojourner Truth School. During her somewhat testily explained no real “mis- spectives, issues, and experiences agree. These policies produce lamenta- photo-op appearance that day she told the take” had been made (note how the pas- be considered in any future settle- ble results and increase human misery. attentive, all-female, mostly African- sive voice avoids any assignment of ment of our conflict. Nevertheless, I think Ms. Fausto- American students how fortunate they responsibility) because the moral of her Sterling is mistaken to imagine that were to have for their “role model” the candidate’s story remained the same. For the past two years we have been research can ever by objective or separate inspirational black woman who had Perhaps the real question should be why involved in envisioning and conceptual- either from the collective political life or escaped from slavery in the South via the even the most well intentioned and well izing an IWC as a coalition of Pales- even from the particular individual who Underground Railroad and then returned informed white Americans usually have tinian, Israeli, and international women asks questions and collects evidence. over and over again to emancipate others room for only one antebellum black who are committed to promoting the “Natural science does not simply of her race by bravely helping them follow woman in their pantheon of heroes, or alternative model of political dialogue describe and explain nature; it is part of the North Star to freedom. why black women seem so easily fungible. and political culture we have developed the interplay between nature and our- The students seem to have been Without doubt, both Sojourner Truth and over the past ten years, and who support selves; it describes nature as exposed to appropriately reverential to their distin- Harriet Tubman should rank as American our joint political principles that are our method of questioning.” Werner guished guest and attempted to suppress icons. Two US postage stamps, dozens of grounded in mutual respect for the Heisenberg explained that there is no their giggles. Only later did someone from laudatory “juvenile” books, several anti- rights and dignity of both peoples. separation from the “detached observ- the press point out to Hillary Rodham quated biographies, and thousands of visu- During this period we were also able to er” and “objective reality” in his 1927 Clinton that she had presented the biog- al images attest to Tubman’s heroism and garner significant support through lob- paper “The Uncertainty Principle.” The raphy of “General” Harriet Tubman— her continuing celebrity. But Truth and bying and advocacy efforts in most observer and the observer are united. not Sojourner Truth. Tubman should not be confused with one European parliaments, the EU, in local Lynn Somerstein Truth was a remarkable woman, but she another, nor should they be black female and international women’s organiza- New York, NY was a full generation older than Tubman, “role models” (a term that drives me up tions, and on Capitol Hill. The and from the North. She gained her free- the wall because it’s used only in reference Jerusalem Link continues to educate and Anne Fausto-Sterling responds:Ms. dom when slavery ended in that region and to minorities and women, white men pre- mobilize local women about the initia- Somerstein seems to have missed the never lived in the South or had any affilia- sumably not needing any). Hillary Clinton tive and about the relevancy and the sig- point of my article. I apologize for not tion with the Underground Railroad. For may have “channeled” Eleanor Roosevelt nificance of the 1325. having been clearer. much of her life she was a New Yorker, in the White House for her own purposes,

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4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 but how often are those two former first their condescending, often puzzling and Maryland about a dozen times in the 1850s, ladies mistaken for one another? contradictory images of black Americans. probably escorting out with her about 60 With their new autobiographical stud- Tubman herself deliberately shaped or 70 always-terrified, often-reluctant peo- Johns Hopkins Press ies, Catherine Clinton (no relation, I pre- many of these stories. Humez is at her best ple formerly held in bondage. Most were sume, to the esteemed senator), Jean M. when she analyzes the oral storytelling tra- relatives or close friends. The reports of Health Books Humez, and Kate Clifford Larson con- ditions in which Tubman (who never Tubman emancipating thousands through- tribute notably to overcoming the all-too- learned to read or write) was raised. out the South via the Underground prevalent perception that a black woman is “Tubman’s motives for public perform- Railroad have been vastly exaggerated. a black woman is a black woman, and that ance of her life stories,” she writes, “were Within a few years, Tubman had black women’s life stories can be freely a mixture of the practical, the political, and achieved legendary status in abolitionist cir- substituted for one another and then con- the religious.” cles in many northern venues. For reasons veniently trotted out during Black History All three books provide the facts of of personal safety, she made her home in Month—when, we must admit, all of Tubman’s life, as much as they can be Canada, a short distance across Niagara these books were published. More than 60 known. And all three authors also appro- Falls. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act endan- years have passed since the most recent priately acknowledge their (or anyone’s) gered runaways anyplace in the country by “adult” biography of Harriet Tubman inability to determine beyond doubt such subjecting them to recapture and return to appeared, and we might ask why, in 2004, basic biographical details as Tubman’s their owners if they remained in the United we suddenly see three new ones. But exact date of birth, number of siblings, or States. She became a coveted and inspira- regardless of why, they are welcome. sexual experiences. tional lecturer on the antislavery circuit; Humez, a professor of women’s stud- met with John Brown, who solicited her ies and the author of Gifts of Power and assistance in plotting his ultimately ill-fated Mother’s First-Born Daughters, takes only raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s about 100 pages to recount, tersely and Ferry; and became widely known as both well, the facts of Tubman’s life. The “Moses” and “General Tubman.” remainder of her book is comprised of a Slaves could not actually enter into legal thoroughgoing analysis of the copious marital contracts, although they always “The authors have succeeded in the challenging task of writing a book that contemporary stories and more recent believed their unions to be valid. All three will educate and empower women with texts about Tubman. Clinton uses roughly authors devote ample attention to the dev- HIV to fully participate in their care.” 200 pages to relate the same story and astating dissolution of Harriet’s “marriage” —Judith S. Currier, M.D., Larson a total of 300. The vast differences to John Tubman, a free man of color in UCLA Center for Clinical AIDS in length are not correlated with quality, Maryland. Harriet and John married before Research and Education but say a lot about how each writer went her initial escape, but he declined to move $15.95 paperback about her task, and whom she most likely north with his wife. On one return trip sev- sees as her audience. eral years later, when Harriet hoped John Clinton’s biography is the most read- might finally have changed his mind, she able of the three, though I gasped at so learned that he had remarried during her fundamental an error as the assertion that absence. Her heart was broken, but her Delaware was a free state, from an emancipatory mission continued. acclaimed professor whose works include After the start of the Civil War, Harriet The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Tubman reluctantly took on menial assign- Old South and The Other Civil War: American ments as a laundress and cook for Union Women in the Nineteenth Century. This book troops, especially black ones. Far more also seems less extensively researched than importantly, she soon negotiated the the others. It almost feels as if Clinton Woodcut of Harriet Tubman in Civil War opportunity to put her skills to better use as scout attire. From Harriet Tubman: rushed to publish in order to get her book a spy and undercover scout for the Union, The Life and the Stories. out to the public along with the others. supplying crucial information through her She compensates well, however, with a affiliation and easy rapport with the already true storyteller’s narrative voice and insurrectionary network of black men and insightful speculations about details that arriet Tubman, Araminta Ross at women still enslaved in the South. she cannot know for sure. birth, was born on an Maryland Numerically, her leadership of a raid by Larson’s work, her first book, still H Eastern Shore plantation some- Union troops in 1863 was more significant retains the meticulous characteristics of time around 1820. Araminta chose the than all of her antebellum journeys on “A valuable reference. Is the drastic the superior dissertation that it once no name Harriet for herself as a young behalf of the Underground Railroad com- operation, which is one of the most doubt was, and it does credit to this woman and took her first husband’s sur- contentious medical issues, often bined. During one single day of battle, she performed unnecessarily? Are there Simmons College lecturer who also works name when she married. Interestingly, the essentially negotiated the emancipation of alternatives? Is the operation’s effect on a on behalf of the soon-to-open Under- great abolitionist Frederick Douglass was 700 enslaved South Carolinians. woman’s emotions and sexuality worth ground Railroad Freedom Center in born in a neighboring county at virtually For many years she tried to convince it? The authors, who are specialists in the Cincinnati, Ohio. But she sometimes over- the same time, although none of these the government to acknowledge her field of obstetrics and gynecology, whelms the reader and clutters Tubman’s authors speculates about the commonality offer a balanced view.” wartime work. When her efforts were —John Langone, New York Times story with insignificant characters present- of their experiences. unsuccessful, she solicited the help of $16.95 paperback ed only in passing. More than 250 names Tubman grew up in a fractured but lov- influential friends. Most of her claims were appear in her index only once! Once she ing family and experienced all of the trau- rejected, and she received only a small pen- found a tidbit, no matter how small, nei- mas associated with American slavery— sion based on her work as a wartime nurse ther she nor her editor seems to have been physical abuse, dire hardship, deception, and cook, and ultimately as a “widow.” Her able to bear to leave it out. Nonetheless, separation from loved ones, and lack of efforts as a military leader of men—in her loving attention to detail enriches the education. An overseer hurled a heavy time she came to be called “the black Joan story and adds enormously to our under- metal weight that hit Harriet on the tem- of Arc”—while widely acknowledged dur- standing of Tubman’s evolving worlds. ple, resulting in what all three authors ing the war by a variety of Union officers Humez, with obvious scholarship, agree was an acute form of temporal lobe and supported by her New York congress- cogently argues that the creation and dis- epilepsy. As a result, Tubman often heard man, were never fully appreciated or semination of the Tubman legends, often voices and music and received inspirational rewarded by her country. by Tubman herself, are in many ways as visions. Throughout her life she periodical- After the war she married again, pre- important as the biographical facts them- ly fell into deep trances from which she sumably happily, though briefly, to Nelson selves. Not to confuse the two heros once could hardly be roused. There seems little Davis, who died in 1888. She remained again, but in her splendid analytical biogra- question that this trauma-induced nar- close to the African-American church, phy, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, Nell coleptic condition was inextricably inter- which provided her with both spiritual and Irvin Painter does a better job than Humez twined with her deep religious beliefs. social comfort. She became committed to of analyzing symbolism and explaining Thus all three authors have, by necessity, the cause of women’s suffrage and spoke that “the symbol we require in our public written spiritual biographies of Tubman. often on its behalf. I have to wonder what life still triumphs over scholarship.” The trauma of seeing two of her sisters the politically correct, elite white suffra- Most of Humez’s book is devoted to the sold, shackled, attached to slave coffles and gists really thought of an illiterate black “Congratulations to the authors of this multiple presentations of Tubman over the taken south, and the probability of falling woman such as Tubman. But, no matter. sensible book, which gives information past 150 years. These stories, culled from a victim to the same fate herself, devastated She served their purposes. to dispel the myths and settle the huge variety of sources and often excerpted Harriet and convinced her of the pressing More important during her later years arguments surrounding cesarean section in a nonthreatening way.” at length, provide even more vivid portray- need to escape, which she did in 1849. She in Auburn, New York, were basic matters —Ian Jones, Medicine Today als of Tubman’s life than Humez’s biogra- fled through nearby Maryland and of survival and her own charitable cam- $14.95 paperback phy itself. The long tradition of slave narra- Delaware to the North and became affiliat- paigns on behalf of her extended family tives is represented here, as well as primary ed with black and white leaders of the and other African Americans even needier sources that mirror the racism of the times Underground Railroad, especially in than she. She turned to domestic work The Johns Hopkins University Press in which they were written, especially in Philadelphia. Thereafter she returned to and pig farming for sustenance; fed, 1-800-537-5487 • www.press.jhu.edu

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 5 clothed, and housed dozens of her Elsewhere, Costantino describes diverse relatives; and took special interest Hadad performing Heavy Nopal, a piece in and essentially raised a “niece,” whom in which a bandaged woman with her Clinton insightfully speculates may have Off-off Broadway arm in a sling hobbles onstage on crutch- actually been her own daughter—the es and sings, “You beat me so last night product of rape by a white man. These by Martha Gies and still I can’t leave you.” Costantino efforts culminated in the creation of the says she’s seen this segment four times, Tubman Home, a modest residence for Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform edited by and each time Hadad’s audiences break indigent black people that was supported into wild laughter, though after the show by local and national groups, especially Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino. Durham, NC: Duke they admit they were disturbed. those comprised of middle-class black Costantino tells a story about Hadad women. All three biographers portray University Press, 2003, 445 pp., $23.95 hardcover. drawing harsh criticism from a group of Tubman as a truly dedicated, generous, feminists at a performance in San and selfless woman, whose later years, I Francisco ten years ago. They questioned while unheralded, may have been her Hadad’s politics, “a female performer who finest. Her celebrity and mythic status n Holy Terrors, editors Diana Taylor flaunts her body—a marked body, accord- increased as her health declined in her and Roselyn Costantino have assem- ing to them, with no chance of recupera- early 90s and she died, a long-time resi- I bled 26 documents, including critical tion in existing systems of representation. dent of the Tubman Home, in 1913. readings by scholars, artists’ statements Hadad replied sharply, maintaining that and manifestos, texts for the stage, and her performance must be situated and n all of these books I missed a gender interviews with their subject playwrights, analyzed within its Mexican context.” analysis of this woman who saw the that give a crazy quilt account of women And what is that Mexican context? I need to wear bloomers in wartime performing theater in Latin America. The destruction of the Mayan codices by and seems to have been called “General” The book is difficult to summarize Spanish colonists, the first of many acts or “Moses” far more often than “Aunt because the 15 artists profiled are work- over the last 500 years aimed at silencing Harriet.” What did it mean in the 19th ing in eight different cultures—more, indigenous cultures. Not to mention the century to be strapped with a masculine really, if you recognize that Mexico City exclusion of women from any participa- identity? How and why did that identity cabaret theater is worlds apart from tion whatsoever in the power structure come about? Why is it that black women indigenous street theater in Mayan of New Spain. were and are so often asked to “prove” Chiapas. What links them is the shared As Costantino sees it, Hadad’s work their gender? Consider Sojourner Truth’s sense that the writer’s vocation entails a means to “celebrate cultural experiences apocryphal “ar’n’t I a woman,” and her moral imperative to speak out on social that lie at the base of national identity; to widely reported (true or not) baring of issues, a sensibility more common in critique contemporary political and eco- her breast to prove that she was a woman. Latin America than here in the US. nomic policy; to recuperate and articulate (I’ll resist the temptation here to speculate These playwrights and performers the sexuality, sensuality, and human further about the inordinate outrage over have developed a visceral art in coun- desires repressed by the morality imposed Janet Jackson’s recent exposure.) tries beset by economic hardship, by the patriarchal institutions that struc- Clinton, Humez, and Larson all, in chronic illiteracy, and cultural isolation. ture Mexican society; to demonstrate the their own appropriately individual ways, Some, in performing their work under centrality of woman’s body to those insti- provide excellent insights into the life of repressive governments, have put their tutions; and finally, to entertain.” As for Harriet Tubman and the changing world lives on the line. her San Francisco critics, “To attempt to that shaped her—a world that she, in Taylor is director of the Hemispheric force such choices on a work for it to be turn, reshaped. Sixty years in the making, Institute on Performance and Politics at considered feminist, Hadad insists, reveals these still may not be the definitive works New York University, where she also a position as authoritarian as the systems on Tubman. teaches performance studies and she attempts to dismantle.” She has, as Let us now make room in our historic Spanish. A well known author in her Costantine neatly understates, “demon- pantheon of American heroes, not only field, Taylor redefined “performance” strated a strong resistance to censorship for Harriet Tubman, but also for a great to include such events as Mayan and of her freedoms as an artist, a woman, variety of both heralded and unsung AIDS theater, the Mothers of the Plaza and a Mexican.” black women: mothers, daughters, and de Mayo, and Argentinean drag culture sisters; Northern and Southern; short in her book Negating Performance, pub- ther Mexican artists include the and tall; enslaved and free; educated and lished ten years ago. In 1997, she took 2000 Obie winner Jesusa illiterate; prophets, generals, and foot sol- her premise further with Disappearing Playwright Ema Villanueva asked passers- O Rodríguez who, along with her diers. We need to see not dozens but hun- Acts, in which she analyzed Argentina’s by to write their opinions of the student Argentine partner Liliana Felipe, runs El dreds more biographies about these little- dirty war as though the players—the strike at the National Autonomous Habito Cabaret and La Capilla Theater in known women. And let’s heed carefully Argentine military, the intimidated pub- University of Mexico on her Mexico City’s Coyoacan; the well-known the words of Nell Painter, who writes of lic, and the individuals who dared to body. From Holy Terrors. playwright Sabina Berman, whose work Tubman and Truth: “Many people con- challenge the dictatorship—were in fact was made available in translation last year fuse the two because both lived in an era players on a stage, and their actions— What followed was a mixture of by Illinois University Press (The Theatre of shadowed by human bondage, but [they] the disappearances, concentration parodied artistic forms: visual art, Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and were contrasting figures.” With three new camps, torture, and public protests in dance, music, and theatre of differ- Other Plays); and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, biographies of Tubman, each full of the street—a kind of theater. ent genres...Hadad donned a full, a Tzotzil Mayan woman who is one of insight and information, there is no Of the 15 theater artists represented green ‘peasant’ skirt of the nine- the founders of FOMMA (Forteleza de la longer any excuse for confusing her with in Holy Terrors, six are Mexican (compris- teenth century, with a frilly femi- Mujer Maya or Mayan Women’s Strength), Sojourner Truth. I ing roughly a third of the book), two nine white blouse trimmed in red, the theater troupe and community collec- Argentinian, and two Puerto Rican. thus featuring the colors of the tive from Chiapas. Although FOMMA Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, and Peru Mexican flag, which were also visi- dates from 1994, the year of the Harriet Tubman outside the Zapatista pronouncement, Cruz’s work Harriet Tubman Home, circa 1912. are represented with one artist each. ble in her glittery eye makeup and From Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Stories. Editor Costantino, associate professor large, kitschy earrings... [H]er long, goes back several years before that. Una of Spanish and women’s studies at black hair [was] woven into two Mujer Desesperada was first performed in Pennsylvania State, contributes a valuable braids decorated with red, white, 1991 and actually funded by the Mexican in-depth essay on Lebanese-Mexican and green striped ribbon. Giant government in 1993. cabaret artist Astrid Hadad. white calla lilies attached to her Two street performers complete the Hadad, who has performed around back formed a crown or large Mexican section: the world, is probably better known to frame around her head that evoked “Mexico City-based artists Katia North Americans than are some of the the Diego Rivera painting of a Tirado and Ema Villanueva both critique other artists in the book. Not only does young indigenous woman holding how female bodies are positioned within she come to New York several times a such flowers. Finally, Pancho Villa- patriarchal culture and politics,” writes year, but La Bodega, the Mexico City style bullet belts crossed over her Antonio Prieto Stambaugh in his essay, cabaret where Hadad has performed chest like a dark, ominous substi- “Wrestling the Phallus, Resisting since 1990, is in a nice area of the city, tute for a pearl necklace. Hadad Amnesia: The Body Politics of Chilanga where tourists can safely go. danced and sang well-known lyrics Performance Artists.” [Chilango/a is Here is Costantino describing the first of a traditional song: “I am a vir- slang for someone who lives in Mexico time she saw Astrid Hadad perform at La gin watering my flowers/and with City.] “Working in a cultural environ- Bodega, in this instance in the show Cartas the flowers, my identity.” In this ment that reproduces the ideal image of a Dragoberta (Letters to Dragoberta): way, she playfully juxtaposed the women as silent and passive, they aggres- image of the humble, passive sively create ‘noise’ within silence, a dis- Hadad walked through the crowd, indigenous girl of Rivera’s painting turbance not necessarily dependent on climbed onto the stage, and joined with a feisty virgin or a playfully speech, for they may resort to the per- her two musicians, Los Tarzanes. seductive prostitute. (pp. 191-192) formance of silence as a way of unset-

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 sored her in 1994 for an art object in the barefoot. There is a pot of us to feel the weight of guilt and under- form of a newspaper that included Cuban earth in front of her, stand it as something incorporated into Cubans both on and off the island along with a deep plate of water the Cuban’s body and the nation’s body.” expressing their feelings on the Cuban and salt. She bows in front of the On the island there’s the guilt of racial state. Both Bruguera and Muñoz (himself containers in a slow, mechanical violence; off the island there’s the guilt of a Cuban American) believe the two fashion and carefully mixes the having gotten away. groups have more in common than their dirt and the salt water in her Five years ago, Indiana University strident political expressions might lead hand. She proceeds to eat the dirt Press published Latin American Women the rest of us to believe. slowly. Bruguera continues to eat Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories,a Here’s his description of Bruguera dirt for about an hour. Eating collection of essays analyzing work by performing El peso de la culpa (The Burden dirt slowly in a ritualistic fashion 15 playwrights. Three of these play- of Guilt): is a performance of empathy wrights show up in the new where she identifies with the lost Taylor/Costantino volume (Argentina’s The first version of the perform- indigenous Cuban. (p. 404) Griselda Gambaro and Diana ance was staged at the Sixth Raznovich, and Mexico’s Sabina Astrid Hada in Cartas a Dragoberta. Havana Biennial (1995). While Muñoz sees himself and his New Berman), which, with its emphasis on From Holy Terrors. Bruguera was not officially York, Cuban-American friends linked by performance, expands on the earlier vol- allowed to perform during this guilt to those Cubans who remained on ume and introduces 12 new artists. tling their audiences into another way of Biennial, she nonetheless staged the island. “Rather than differentiate Holy Terrors is a work rich in ideas, seeing the body politic.” an alternate performance... In between different kinds of Cuban history, and personalities, and an One photograph cuts through the ver- this version...Bruguera awaits her Americans—us and them, myself and the important source book for learning, biage: in a production shot of Katia audience inside her house in Other Cuban—I want to consider the not only about theater in these eight Tirado’s Exhivilazación: Las perras en celo Havana. Behind her is a large and way in which there are structures of feel- Latin American countries, but also (Exhibition/Ex-civilization: Bitches in expansive Cuban flag that the ing that knit cubanía together despite dif- about key political issues, the risks of Heat), two naked (not counting the artist has made out of human ferent national pedagogies and ideologi- free expression, and the health and masks and knee pads) actresses in a hair. She wears the headless car- cal purchases,” he writes. Thus, he under- nearly unchartable diversity of the wrestling ring are down on their hands cass of a lamb like a vest of stands Bruguera’s El peso de la culpa to be women’s movement. It is lavishly illus- and knees with a vacuum cleaner tube armor atop a white outfit. She is “a form of materialist critique that asks trated with photographs. I stretched between their vaginas. Although this particular show took place in an art gallery, Tirado has also per- formed this piece in the Merced Market and “without previous warning” in a new from nebraska small neighborhood plaza. Asian American Women Ema Villanueva, born in 1975 (ten The Frontiers Reader years after Tirado), used public nudity in Edited by Linda Trinh Võ and Marian Sciachitano 2000 to attract attention to the UNAM with Susan H. Armitage, Patricia Hart, and (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Karen Weathermon the National Autonomous University of Asian American Women brings together landmark Mexico) strike after it had been underway scholarship about Asian American women that for ten months and talks were stalled. has appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women According to her website, www.geoci- Studies over the last twenty-fi ve years. ties.com/colaboratorio/inicio.html,how- $29.95 paper ever, this phase of her work ended on August 9, 2003, following “some 180 per- Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the formances and site-interventions in sev- Law in Venezuela, 1786–1904 eral countries.” By Arlene J. Díaz Country by country, performer by per- former, there are rich treasures to be dis- Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in covered in Holy Terrors, though I was dis- Venezuela examines the effects that liberalism appointed that Argentinian Griselda had on gender relations in the process of state Gambaro was represented by only a brief formation in Caracas from the late eighteenth to one-act called Strip. Gambaro, born in the nineteenth century. $39.95 paper | $65 cloth 1928, is the most celebrated playwright in ENGENDERING LATIN AMERICA Argentina, as the introduction points out, and has won 12 national awards. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton In 1990 I saw a production of her Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives full-length play The Walls: A man is kept Edited by Amelia María de la Luz Montes locked in the room of a house where he and Anne Elizabeth Goldman is waited on by an attendant who has no answers to the mystery of his detain- At once richly historical and critically nuanced, these essays appraise a politically complex ment and who denies the man’s con- Mexican American writer alternately celebrated as tention that the very walls are moving in marginalized and censured for her identifi cation on him—a phenomenon that the audi- with a social elite. ence can clearly see for themselves. The $35 cloth | POSTWESTERN HORIZON theatrical power of the piece has stayed with me these 14 years, as has my Ngecha impression of her artistic prescience: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change Gambaro wrote The Walls in 1963, some Edited by Carolyn Pope Edwards years before Argentina’s dirty war (1977- and Beatrice Blyth Whiting 1981), in which an estimated 12,000 Ngecha is the monumental and intimate study of “leftists” were disappeared. modernization and nationalization in rural Africa in the early years following Kenyan independence he work of Cuban Tania in 1963, as experienced by the people of Ngecha, Bruguera was a happy discovery. a village outside Nairobi. T Born in Havana in 1968, $60 cloth Bruguera went to school in Cuba and then earned an MFA in performance Sister to the Sioux The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman, from the Chicago Art Institute. José 1885-1891 Muñoz, Taylor’s colleague at NYU, pro- Edited by Kay Graber University of vides an essay called “Performing Introduction by Theodore D. Sargent Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Nebraska Press Burden of Guilt,” which, despite its “[Sister to the Sioux] is of value to historians and occasional lapses into a turgid academic anthropologists for a wealth of information useful Publishers of Bison Books style, is a fascinating account of how one in shading in the era of Lakota reservation life woman has steered a precarious course during the 1880s.”—Western Historical Quarterly 800.755.1105 | www.nebraskapress.unl.edu between the US and Cuba without find- $12.95 paper | New Bison Books Edition ing herself in jail. Muñoz says he first became interested in Bruguera after the Cuban state cen-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 7 passages set in a time closer to the pres- ent, but her inconsistent shifts in verb tense are distracting. Instead of bringing Motherless daughters the reader closer to events, as she may intend, her present-tense narration of by Judith Barrington childhood episodes, by sliding unpre- dictably into past tense, undermines her Minrose Occasions of Sin by Sandra Scofield. New York: reliability as a narrator and interrupts the Gwin, left. flow of what should be a gripping story. Virginia W. W. Norton, 2004, 256 pp, $24.95 hardcover. The book reads as if Holman is still Holman, too close to the child who experienced below. © Marion Ettlinger Wishing for Snow by Minrose Gwin. Baton Rouge, LA: the horror of being imprisoned inside her mother’s hallucination to revisit that Louisiana State University Press, 2004, time in retrospect, adding the layers of Salvaggio © Ruth insight that would make the work more mother 230 pp, $24.95 hardcover. than simply a shocking story. Vivian whose men- Gornick, in The Situation and the Story tal illness Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad (2001), claims that events such as those presented by Virginia Holman. New York: Simon & Schuster, recounted in Rescuing Patty Hearst com- her with so prise the “situation.” The “story” many seem- 2003, 244 pp., $23.00 hardcover. emerges when the writer hones her lan- ingly insolu- guage and digs deeply into the situation. ble dilem- I To some extent, Holman’s book is engag- mas. In one ing simply because of the drama, which memorable ope Edelman, in her excellent takes the reader into a frightening world passage, she book, Motherless Daughters where a psychotic mother is in thrall to describes the strange beauty of her H (1994), points out that even her voices. But memoir, no matter how mother singing “Somewhere over the though we live in a country full of moth- extraordinary the events, demands Rainbow” as she pushes her cart along erless children, “the loss of a mother is thoughtful interpretation that gives grocery store aisles: one of the most profound events that meaning to them. will occur in a woman’s life, and like a Holman’s mother remains more of a When she sang, it was as if she loud sound in an empty house, it echoes sketch than either Scofield’s Edith or were pushing something too large on and on.” The ways in which the loss Gwin’s Erin, both of whom are named through her throat and mouth, of a mother echoes into each of these within the first two lines of their stories. sound that was more than sound, writers’ adulthoods is likely to resonate Holman’s mother Molly remains “my that was somehow being forced with many readers, whether they have mother” or “mom” until page 29, when into voice, and by being forced, actually lost a parent or simply missed out an aunt addresses her by name. This is became beautiful. on some of the mothering we all need. symptomatic of the fact that this mother Sandra Scofield’s mother, Edith, died Sandra Scofield with her mother. Cover never becomes a complete character in Shhhhhh, we would say. Mama in 1959 at the age of 33. The author was photo from Occasions of Sin. her own right; she is still, by the end of hush. (p. 71) in high school at the time, and her moth- the book, the mentally ill mother whose er, who had long been sick with a kidney Using any evidence they can find and delusions her adult daughter is just begin- This tenderness in no way precludes disease had, in many ways, been absent unearthing both painful and joyful ning to challenge. Because she is not fully Gwin from admitting her anger on the from the author’s childhood. Minrose memories, both describe a search for present, the focus of the book falls on next page: “In the end all I wanted was to Gwin’s mother, Erin, suffered from men- the woman they might have come to the writer herself as she relies on her shut my mother up, lock my mother up.” tal illness, probably chronic depression, know, or to understand differently, if childhood predicament to capture the Erin’s poems add a rich layer to the throughout her daughter’s childhood, they’d had the chance. sympathy of the reader. picture that Gwin paints of her, and the which was marked by Erin’s rages, nerv- Scofield is an accomplished novelist Scofield and Gwin, in contrast, focus mother is marvelously present through- ousness, unpredictable moods, and phys- who moves into the memoir genre with their books squarely on the women out the book. She even appears in Gwin’s ical violence: “[S]he would scream at us grace, taking pains to let the reader whose problems influenced them for life. adult world as a ghost, talking back to her and hit us with vigor and determination, know what is remembered, what sur- This does not mean that they are absent daughter in a way that reminds me of the as if this were part of her job.” As a mised, and what learned from other from their own stories: Indeed, through long-dead father in Mary Gordon’s mem- young adult, Gwin had to commit her sources. Gwin, a lyrical writer whose their fully realized portraits of their oir The Shadow Man (1996), with whom mother twice to mental institutions until, prose is a delight, uses the poetry her mothers, they reveal themselves. Gordon has imaginary dialogues. “All that in 1988, Erin died of cancer. mother wrote in later life, as well as the Foregrounding their mothers allows talk,” says the ghost of Erin, “and you don’t At the end of Virginia Holman’s book, diaries she kept as a child in the 1930s, them to become essential characters know the first thing about it.” By continuing her mother, Molly, is alive but institution- to piece together her portrait. without evoking the self-preoccupation to put words into her mother’s mouth, alized. This mother suffered her first psy- of many memoirs. Gwin reveals the depth of her effort to chotic episode in 1974 when Holman was emoir, even when it focuses on understand what life must have been like in third grade. Believing she had been someone other than the oth of these memoirs address the for her mother: inducted into a secret army, Molly kid- M author, is different from many challenges of mother-loss. napped her two daughters and holed up researched biography: It is a story from B For example, according to I was in my prime. All you children. with them in a summer cottage, whose the author’s memory, supplemented by Edelman, it is common for motherless Long nights and the smell of the windows she painted black while she set the tales others tell and, in some cases, by children to experience difficulty with mimosa. Dog-tired all the time and when it up as a field hospital for the war she diaries or other documents. Gwin, like intimacy. They may go to great lengths he’d finally come home after being on the believed was on the way. Scofield, tells us what we can count on as to avoid grieving, which, she says, is road all week he’d never even talk to me. Scofield and Gwin both focus on their personal recollection and what we can- something that teenagers are not yet Just threw himself down like a stone. If searches for an adult understanding of not. She includes phrases like, “…at least equipped to do. Instead, they become he’d just said something to me how’s the their mothers’ lives. As Scofield writes: this is what I’ve been led to believe by excessively involved in romance or brief weather been here or how’s your mother everyone concerned,” or “Someone, I sexual affairs. “Sometimes, parked in a or what have you been up to all week it Why, when my mother was don’t remember who, told me…” car with a boy who hardly knew me, I might have been all right. (p. 80) buried, was her person forgotten? The periodic attacks on memoir, would wonder what my mother would Why did no one give me reason to based on its potential for factual inaccu- say if she could see us,” writes Scofield, In spite of the turbulent events, admire her, my mother, my racy, are probably responsible for these addressing this issue with the directness Gwin’s is an essentially quiet book, which model? We never spoke of her authors’ anxiety to acknowledge that that characterizes her book. Her sexual takes its time to get going, with a long accomplishments or her dreams… their memories might be faulty. But the behavior both distracted her from her introduction to the earlier generations of Did no one stop to think that I anxiety is unnecessary: When memory is grief and enabled her to think she was Gwin’s southern family. I wished for a lit- might turn out just like her, just mined for detail and merged with the getting even with her mother, who just a tle editing at the beginning and end, but like I thought she was? (p. 20) insights of an adult who can step out- few weeks before her death had had her- like Scofield, Gwin has written a memo- side her story and shape it into art, as self photographed naked. “You’re not the rable story. Like Scofield, Gwin understands that both these authors do, the genre shines only one! I might have been screeching to Rescuing Patty Hearst, in spite of losing a mother can mean getting stuck with authenticity. heaven,” says Scofield of her feelings at Holman’s intriguing idea to merge her with your perceptions at the time of her Holman’s book is more problematic. these times. personal story with the turbulent public death or withdrawal. The frozen view She has a startling set of events to work Another challenge is the anger a events of 1974, never quite rises to the with which you are left may be idealized with, but she fails to use the strengths of daughter inevitably feels towards an heights of the other two books. Their or a source of neverending rage. Both the genre and the resources of language inadequate or absent mother. Although luminous language, together with years of authors set out to leave behind their to make the most of them. Her prose is expressing such anger is for many a real reflection that have obviously led to real childhood relationships with their uneven, and the form she has chosen taboo, Gwin describes it with honesty, retrospective wisdom, make Wishing for mothers and the complicated feelings does nothing to enhance her narrative. conveying the complexity of simultane- Snow and Occasions of Sin both graceful engendered by their abandonment. She alternates scenes from the past with ously loving and being furious at the and enlightening. I

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Grant’s Private Woman, Public Person: An Association for many years and as presi- Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from dent of the New England Woman’s Club 1819 to 1868 (1994), both of which are Howe’s “battle-him” for decades; lectured on women’s issues out of print. The first deals with her across the country; published a biography feminism and her conversion in a sooth- by Louise W. Knight of Margaret Fuller; and served on the ing way, as if it were all part of life in committee that successfully reconciled Boston in the mid-19th century. The Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia the two branches of the women’s suffrage second is the more profound explo- movement in 1890. While she remained in ration and wrestles at length with Ward Howe by Valarie H. Ziegler. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity her marriage, she continued to rebel Howe’s changing ideas about women against Chev’s strictures, now with a clear and the intellectual and emotional jour- Press International, 2003, 228 pp., $24.00 hardcover. conscience. Her persistent courage in the ney that preceded her conversion. face of his determined, angry efforts to I control her is remarkable. It was only just ow we have Valarie H. Ziegler’s before his death in 1876 that they were Diva Julia: The Public Romance and n a patriarchal society in which girls with the devoted but emotionally distant emotionally reconciled. N Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe. and women are carefully and subtly Chev, and lacking female friends, she Howe’s story—both of her struggles Ziegler, who is professor of religious I convinced to rank themselves as men’s recorded her misery and perplexity in her in her marriage and her evolution and studies at DePauw University, is the first inferiors, feminism often arrives as a con- diary, her letters to her sister, and her contributions as a social reformer— biographer to consult the extensive version experience. At what age the flash poems. The other was her intellect. A should be more widely known. Aside papers of Howe’s daughter, Laura E. of understanding happens and by what voracious reader since childhood, she from her autobiography, Reminiscences Richards. These have provided her with a means varies greatly, but the jolt it gives to turned to books for comfort. She (1899), and her three daughters’ new window into the private life of the living is unmistakably the same. The land- searched the pages of philosophers Pulitzer-prize winning biography of her, Howe family, particularly from the chil- scape of one’s life is transformed. Comte, Hegel, and Kant and explored Julia Ward Howe (1915), there have been dren’s points of view. Ziegler therefore For Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), her faith for answers. Initially, she only two biographies until now, both by focuses her book on Julia’s frustrations famous as the author of the “Battle thought her need for something more historians: Deborah Pickman Clifford’s in her marriage and her experiences as a Hymn of the Republic,” the jolt came was due to her creative imagination, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Biography mother, and on the four Howe daugh- late. She entered marriage committed to which she believed set her apart from of Julia Ward Howe (1978) and Mary ters, both as figures in the story and, for traditional views about women’s place most women. Initially, her faith was in and had six children—four more than her gifts, not her gender. she wished—because she felt a duty to Thus, her first rebellions against serve her husband’s pleasure. But her Chev’s authority were literary. She husband’s obsession with controlling her secretly and anonymously published her and his determination to restrict her life first book of poems, Passion-Flowers,in to home and family weighed upon her. A 1853 and endured Chev’s fury when its gifted writer, Howe left letters and essays author was discovered. Two plays (pub- and, eventually, speeches and books, that lished under her own name) soon fol- fully document her difficult journey lowed. Then in 1861 she wrote a poem from the dark side of patriarchy to the that could be sung to the Civil War tune, self-affirming side of womanhood. “John Brown’s Body.” When it was pub- The marriage began like a fairy tale. In lished in the Atlantic Monthly in early 1843, Julia Ward, a petite, 23-year-old 1862, the North gained a powerful hymn budding poet from a wealthy New York to the righteousness of the war and a City family married the dashing, lanky new woman to admire. Suddenly 41-year-old medical doctor and social famous, she began to form ties outside reformer, Samuel “Chev” Gridley Howe. her home. She joined the Ladies Social They were deeply in love. Julia was beau- Club and the Boston Radical Club and tiful, vivacious, brilliant, a gifted singer, began to lecture on philosophical and and the center of attention at any party; religious questions, although Chev for- Chev was handsome, heroic (he had bade her to do so. She started a literary fought in the Greek Revolution and magazine. She became a cofounder of received a medal of honor from the the New England Woman’s Club and, in Greek government), and deeply commit- the wake of African Americans gaining ted to his work as head of Boston’s the vote, a tentative supporter of famous Perkins Institute for the Blind. women’s suffrage. Also an advocate for education and Still, as she tells the story, she did not prison reform, he would soon become a believe in women’s full equality until one leading abolitionist. In retrospect, Julia day in November 1868, when she attend- probably “married the man she wished ed the organizing meeting of the New to become” (as we used to say in the England Woman Suffrage Association ’70s)—someone with a deep engage- and listened for the first time to a ment in social justice issues. women’s rights speech by the brilliant At the time of her marriage she orator Lucy Stone. Howe carefully understood the rules—that she was to recorded her conversion at age 49 in her have no life or identity outside that of autobiography. “During the first two- wife and mother. She wrote of her hus- thirds of my life, I looked to the mascu- band, “I am perfectly satisfied to sacrifice line ideal of character as the only true to one so noble and earnest the day- one… In an unexpected hour a new light dreams of my youth.” She intended to came to me, showing me… the new meet Chev’s demands for absolute obedi- domain... of the true womanhood.” ence. In a poem written during her first Stone’s whole-hearted vision of woman year of marriage, she observes hopefully: as man’s equal partner in intellect and politics became her own. As she would When once I know my sphere, write in an 1893 speech reproduced in Life shall no more be drear, Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary I will be all thou wilt; History of American Feminism (1997), “To To cross thy least desire shall be all [that] society expects of women, let guilt. (p. 34) them add the enlightened mind [and] the liberal and resolute will.” But she never succeeded in “knowing Within the year, Howe had become a her sphere.” In the years that followed, major player in the women’s rights move- Julia was lonely, restless, and unhappy in ment. She cofounded the American the restricted domesticity of her mar- Woman Suffrage Association and the riage; she was also frequently disobedient Woman’s Journal with Lucy Stone in 1869. and felt deeply the guilt she had predict- In the years that followed she published ed she would feel. Chev’s coldness and Sex and Education, a collection of essays temper tantrums made her situation par- intended to rebut the damaging theory of ticularly painful. Dr. E. H. Clarke that the higher education Two things saved her. One was her of women harms her reproductive capac- www.nyupress.org writing. Unable to establish intimacy ities; served as president of the

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 9 Laurence novel,” after its main character. The theme is gender ambiguity; stun- ningly, the work anticipates Virginia Woolf’s Orlando by almost eighty years. Three debuts In the story, Howe, in Ziegler’s words, “dismantled the ideology of separate by Miriam Sagan spheres, offering in its place the gen- dered fluidity of the hermaphrodite Fools and Crows by Terri Witek. Washington, DC: Laurence and the transfigured lovers [his/her friends and almost-lovers], Eva Orchises, 2003, 79 pp., $14.95 paper. and Rafael.” Ziegler explores the impli- cations of the novel’s ideas for Howe’s Granted by Mary Szybist. Farmington, ME: early struggles not only to find some- thing redeeming about how she suffered Alice James, 2003, 58 pp., $13.95 paper. in her marriage but also to sort through her confusion about gender roles and Miracle Fruit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Dorset, VT: her desire to somehow escape the restricted ones that were her cultural her- Tupelo Press, 2003, 75 pp., $14.95 paper. itage. (Consideration of Williams’ I insights on the novel are restricted to endnotes; his new analysis of it, The first book of poetry is a debut, the Ehrie © Kjersti Hermaphrodite, Or, the Laurence Manuscript poet’s attempt to create a work- Julia Ward Howe lecturing The Yellow [2004], was published too late for such A able voice and persona—a mask House Papers. From Diva Julia. consideration in Ziegler’s book but is of poetry through which the individual included in the bibliography.) can speak. Because contemporary poetry three of them, as shapers of their moth- Ziegler is also interested in Howe’s is a wide field, with many styles and er’s reputation after her death. Her inten- early philosophical lectures about trends, first books tend to show the influ- tion is to portray “the heady process by women’s place, arguing that in them ence of teachers, if the poet has an aca- which Julia Ward Howe’s search for Howe “laid the groundwork for her demic background, or of a self-identifi- autonomy and respectability produced a future career as a women’s rights cation with a poetic movement or ethos. literary tradition that established her as activist.” Unfortunately, Howe’s later, Often, first books are years in the mak- an American icon.” In her view, the more feminist speeches, particularly ing, polished and re-polished, until they daughters, aided by Howe, whose autobi- those given after Chev’s death, are not win a contest or find a publisher. This ography is silent about the misery of her given the same close analysis. Nor does process results in both strengths and marriage, were determined to make Julia Ziegler attempt to examine the factors weaknesses. First collections show hard into an “eminent public figure,” even if outside of personal experience that work, but sometimes lack idiosyncrasy or Mary Szybist it required active suppression of the shaped Howe’s thinking. The ideas of real experimentation. The following painful realities of their not-always- Margaret Fuller and Lucy Stone, to three volumes are all first books, with all happy family life. name only two of the women intellectu- that that implies. in a day-dreamed tapestry, figures Ziegler organizes her book into five als who were major influences on Howe, The main poetic technique Terri clamber very long chapters. Although sequenced are not discussed. Witek uses in Fools and Crows is ekphra- toward a viewpoint, harmonize chronologically, internally they are Perhaps the biggest challenge Ziegler sis. The concept originates in ancient lust and eating: ordered, with the exception of Chapter faced was how to deal with Howe’s Greek poetry: originally it meant a set what we want combines in a giddy, 1, around themes. Each chapter, after extensive and wide-ranging social reform piece or a description of a work of art sunlit opening with a brief narrative about career, which began in the late 1860s and within a longer poem—such as the landscape of pleasure. (p. 24) important events for the selected time continued through the early 1890s. This description of a shield set in The Iliad. period, consists of sections on Howe’s is virtually unexplored territory, since However, lyric poets soon started writ- This, the poet says, goes on to include marriage, children, literary efforts, and only one biographer, Deborah Clifford, ing poems based solely on works of “edible dreams” and “a world of nights ideas about women. While this structure has addressed it, and Clifford was writ- art—a tradition that continues today. which gets lighter.” keeps these themes before the reader, ing in 1978, when much of the work by The first section of Witek’s book is Religious feeling and iconography— narrative flow suffers under its weight, historians on women’s social reform his- called “Courting Couples,” and starts particularly Catholic—also inhabit these with the result that the story of Howe’s tory had yet to be undertaken. Ziegler with a view of the original couple: poems. A woman named Mary—the transformation (in Ziegler’s terms, her faced the opposite problem—a wealth of Virgin or an ordinary person?—learns it struggle for autonomy), the central story historical studies. Perhaps her cursory “Did you bring it? is the day of her death in a poem that fea- of her remarkable life, disappears as a treatment was the wisest course to fol- asks naked Eve of Adam tures both an archangel and a stack of story, even if information related to it low, given her great interest in the family in great Dürer’s engraving. She mail, the mythic and the mundane. Poems appears on every page. dynamics and her desire to write a short doesn’t adore him about a series of holy cards continue the The great strength of the book is book (the text, excluding endnotes, yet, has been inattentive all morn- theme of ekphrasis but also veer into Ziegler’s portrait of the marriage, or comes to a mere 168 pages). Still, in a ing to his string more contemporary material. There is an rather Howe’s experience of it. This is work aiming to trace Howe’s search for of loose poses as Dürer sketched entire section on Fatima—the vision of detailed and compelling. The author autonomy, a deeper examination could the more striking Our Lady who appeared to three children. quotes repeatedly from Howe’s diaries, have been justified. ones.... (p. 11) Here, pure belief wars with the observer’s letters, and poems to convey Chev’s Julia Ward Howe was a complex, view—the vision of the children versus efforts to control his wife and her suf- multifaceted person to whom no single The poems that follow respond to the vision of the writer. fering under his domination. When he biographer can do full justice. Judging paintings by artists ranging from Van At times the book feels overly struc- punished her various acts of disobedi- from clues in other biographies of her Eyck to Degas, although the details of tured, as if the poet stayed too close to ence early in the marriage by refusing to (although not Ziegler’s), a whole study 15th- and early 16th-century Dutch the formula. The positive effects of speak to her for days, Julia’s ability to could be done of Howe’s religious painting seem particularly to attract the chance and happenstance are missing. write poetry disappeared for a time. “My thought. Her roles in the women’s suf- poet. The surreal miniatures that inhabit But when Witek is at her best, the poems voice is still frozen to silence,” she wrote frage movement and the women’s club Hieronymous Bosch’s world prove fertile cohere. In “The Fool’s Arrival,” she her sister, “my poetry chained down by movement are other studies yet to be ground for her imagination: writes about a medieval archetype that an icy bond of indifference, I begin to written. I first encountered Howe as a appears in paintings and on tarot cards. believe that I am no poet, and never was, child, when I read a children’s biography, The Fool represents a fresh start, inno- save in my own imagination.” Julia’s Jean Brown Wagoner’s marvelous Julia Terri Witek cence as well as foolishness, not a bad struggles with self-doubt and her later Ward Howe: Girl of Old New York (1945; © Nancy Barber emblem for a poet: self-assertions are vividly portrayed. now out of print). It was the first biog- Unique among Howe’s biographers, raphy about a woman I ever read, and He strides into the city with a crow Ziegler has a particular interest in Howe the memory of it has stayed with me all furbelowing each wrist.... (p. 59) as a writer of poetry, plays, and fiction. these years. At the time, I loved her Although she decides against providing a imaginative, independent spirit and her As the poem progresses, “we know he’s “systematic examination” of these devotion to books and writing. Now, I one of us,” as a bird’s song “seizes the works, perhaps because it has already am drawn to her dogged determination city by each head, each hand.” been done by Gary Williams in Hungry to work through the puzzles and pain in Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward her life, to take her ideas and the world imilar themes can be found in Howe (1999), Howe’s imaginative writ- seriously, and to accept responsibility Granted by Mary Szybist, which ings loom far larger in Ziegler’s treat- for aligning, and re-aligning, her life and S won the 2002 Beatrice Hawley ment than any of Howe’s reform work. her beliefs. Ziegler’s work brings the Award from Alice James Books. This Most intriguing is an untitled, unfinished passionate, determined Howe once poet writes about love, religious longing, novel written in the 1840s and early again vividly before us and for that we and art. Images from classical art and lit- 1850s, which Ziegler refers to as “the can be grateful. I erature are touchstones, as in the poem

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 But what a luxury to be without hands, stiff and lazy as all utensils are with only the back crook of a head A shaman writes biography and a neck silver and long as an unraveled snail. (p. 16) by Joanne M. Braxton

Such imagistic shifts are the most inter- Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat esting thing in this poet’s work. As this is a first book, Szybist is a poet to watch. by Paula Gunn Allen. New York: HarperCollins, 2003 imee Nezhukumatathil’s first I book Miracle Fruit is distinguished A by a lively approach both to life ocahontas was the Indian princess and poetry. In the collection, three who saved the roguish Captain John worlds collide: her mother’s Philippines; P Smith from certain death, only to be © James Thomas Stevens © James her father’s India; and her own contem- abandoned by him. Or so goes American Aimee Nezhukumatathil porary America. The collision is a source myth. Now Paula Gunn Allen sets another of inspiration, as in “One Bite”: myth, created from a Native or First “Naked and Unashamed Are Two American worldview, alongside the story Different Moments”: Miracle fruit changes the tongue. that John Smith popularized in 1624—17 One bite, years after he met Pocahontas and eight If I were a classical nude, the and for hours all you eat is sweet. years after she had died and was no longer distance between my breasts Placed around to contest his version of events. would be the same as the distance alone on the saucer, it quivers like I teach at the College of William and from my breasts to my navel, it’s cold Mary in Virginia, where locally, from my navel to the division of from the ceramic, even in this Pocahontas is known as Matoaka. A large my legs. (p. 4) Florida heat. (Prelude) body of water and a nature preserve on the campus named in her honor date back But of course, the poet is not a classi- These poems deal not just with cul- to the college’s founding. Pocahontas, cal nude, but a real woman. In “Idealized ture but also with language and how which means “mischief,” or something Head” real life intrudes: words mutate and acquire meaning. In similar to it, was Matoaka’s childhood “Fishbone,” food, words, and meaning nickname. After she was kidnapped, bap- It lasts like this no matter what I all combine: tized, and married to John Rolfe, she do. became known as Lady Rebecca Rolfe. I scour shorelines, smooth my wet At dinner, my mother says if one According to Allen, she had yet another Pocahontas engraving by Simon Van de hair from the wind. gets stuck name, Amonute, which denotes her stand- Passe. The only portrait done in her I try to keep you off and further in your throat, roll some rice into ing as “an initiate and a powerful practi- lifetime, 1616. From Pocahontas. off a ball tioner of the Dream-Vision People, a but even the gulls, hung low in the and swallow it whole. She says shaman-priestess in modern terms.” she uses a (deliberately) “random, almost clouds, things Rather than establishing new and chaotic system of narrative” that employs are gathering in the damp scent of like this and the next thing out of unknown facts about Pocahontas, Allen Native American rhetorical devices such your shadow. (p. 9) her mouth focuses on “the importance of story.” as repetition, deadpan humor, and shift- When new information does emerge, not ing points of view, which may confuse In “Two Figures Lying On A Bed is did you know Madonna is pregnant? all of it can be verified outside of the oral and/or alienate some readers. Allen con- With Attendants,” a couple is described (p. 3) tradition, which is to say in written, white tinually redirects determined readers to in abstract terms: and/or masculinist sources. Allen supple- her initial premises for greater under- In “Falling Thirds,” the poet looks at ments obviously biased 17th-century standing—or perhaps as a form of liter- The one good eye of the room connections that transcend differences: English sources with material from travel- ary revenge. After all, Native Americans wide open on the pillow, on the ers who kept notes on Native languages, have always been expected to do things in most legible head. Across the world, when children customs, beliefs, and material culture and the way of the dominant culture. In this call out for a friend, their mother, the inferences she draws from these. Thus, text, the dominant is on the periphery, Why else would two people her book is really about “his/story” vs. and the Native-identified author makes shut their favorite white goat—they “her/story,” with Allen speaking for the rules. Some readers may put the book their green blinds and half have Pocahontas. This takes a certain amount of down in frustration, but others will be fall into each other? (p. 53) the same intonation, the same fall arrogance, but according to the logic of the intrigued by the challenge. and lilt to their voice, no matter Native spiritual universe as described by Generically, Pocahontas should probably The strength of Szybist’s poetry is Allen, she, like Pocahontas herself, must be classified as biomythography, the term that it is precise and polished. Its their language.... (p. 17) follow the dictates of her spirit guides. Audre Lorde invented to describe her weakness is that a true poetic voice The first problem for most readers of memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. rarely breaks through the smooth sur- The language of these poems seems Pocahontas will be getting a handle on the Both works blend biography and myth. face. Only in a few poems, such as the to be handled effortlessly; it is both craft- story itself. A careful reading of the intro- Allen says that because she herself is a oddly intriguing “When I Was A Spoon ed and conversational. The poems in duction is the key to understanding “mixed-blood, hybrid woman…. In My Mother’s Kitchen” does the Miracle Fruit aim to create harmony and Allen’s narrative. In it, Allen lays out the Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, poet break free from some self- to make the ordinary magical—and they overall pattern of her work, her method- Entrepreneur, Diplomat is a mixed-breed or imposed restraint: succeed. I ology, and her intentions. In her words, hybrid study, as American Indian life in the

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 11 United States is a mixed-breed or hybrid spiritual path. She would have gone Chicakahominy River and to contact life.” “Pocahontas,” Allen says, “like her at the direction of the Council of Powhatan, the ‘king’ of the Powhatan people, can never be known in terms of Women, responsible for teaching Alliance.” Smith was captured by the MATRICIDE ‘facts’ bereft of the spiritual tradition that and guiding her along with the direc- Pamunkey, Pocahontas’ tribe, which had IN defined her and her people, or understood tion of her manito. (p. 28) duly noted that that “the coming of the outside the spirit-centered world they Virginia Company…marked the third LANGUAGE inhabited.” She explains that she is writing Dream-visions were a frequent practice incursion of strangers.” The tribe had to against the traditional Western biography, of Algonquin people. One dream-vision decide what to do with him. WRITING THEORY “a process that singles out an individual, prophecy, prevalent among the Powhatan Like Mossiker and other recent schol- cuts her out of the total biota, or life sys- since “ancient times,” was recorded by ars, Allen emphasizes the complexity and IN KRISTEVA tem, within which she lives and from Englishman William Strachey during a sophistication of Powhatan society and which she derives her identity, and gives visit he made to Jamestown in 1610: the tendency of the culture-bound AND WOOLF her value and prestige above the rest.” Allen English invaders to misinterpret what they contrasts this Western approach to biogra- There be at this tyme certayne saw and experienced. Allen takes us back phy with what she calls the “Native tradi- Prophesies afoote amongst the to Werowocomoco, the ritual center and tional life story,” which is “situated within people enhabiting about us…which the royal court of the Powhatan the entire life system: the community of his [Powhatan’s] priests continually Confederacy, on the fateful night of living things, geography, climate, spirit put him in feare of…How from January 8, 1608, when the Powhatans had people, and supernaturals.” She seeks to the Chesapeak Bay a Nation should John Smith’s head on the chopping contextualize the story of Pocahontas arise, which should dissolve and block—but Allen’s is a very different story within “the sacred narratives, ceremonial give end to his Empier. from Smith’s self-aggrandizing adventure occasions, daily concepts and assumptions, …that twice they should give narrative, from which he emerges as the and interactions with the other world” that overthrowe and dishearten the irresistible and all-powerful white male. a Native storyteller would include within Attempters, and such Straungers Because he was a warrior and a leader the frame of the story of as should envade their Territorye, of his own people, the captured Smith, Pocahontas/Matoaka, “as a matter of or laboure to settell a plantation by Powhatan custom, was entitled to course.” Underscoring the hybridity of her amongst them, but the third tyme undergo certain tests to determine project, Allen employs Algonquin con- they themselves should fall into whether he would live or die, although cepts and words and attempts to base her their Subjection and under their Smith had no way of knowing this. Kept interpretations of Pocahontas on “a Conquest. (pp. 34-35) captive and taken from village to village Powhatan worldview.” As a storyteller, for weeks, he was feasted and otherwise Allen asks her readers to enter the universe Pocahontas, says Allen, “was trained well treated. Allen argues that the leaders of Pocahontas, a woman who walked both from early childhood in the sacred ways of among the confederacy likely “met and with power and with “powa,” the ability to a Beloved Woman—a certain kind of med- concurred: This man and his people were dream in a prophetic way. icine woman or priestess—because her the threat depicted in Pocahontas’ Allen’s book differs from biographies birth name, Matoaka or Matoaks, is Dream-Vision.” A ritual during the Feast such as Frances Mossiker’s Pocahontas: The thought to mean ‘white (or snow) feather’”: of Nikomis, a celebration of regenera- Miglena Life and Legend (1996) not only in this tion, would determine whether Captain emphasis on matters of the spirit but also Since a white feather, or numerous John Smith of the Virginia Company Nikolchina in Allen’s placement of Pocahontas rather white feathers, always signifies a could be remade as a Powhatan: than Captain John Smith at the center of Beloved Woman and is carried or the story. Her woman-identified bio- worn by such women most of the In the transformation from one “In this brilliant book, mythography posits a woman (i.e., time, it is likely that she did indeed state to another, the prior state or Miglena Nikolchina uses Pocahontas) as a real person, which she have that “calling,” or vocation, condition must cease to exist. It sees as another challenge to the tradition- from birth. Her clan name, must “die.” During the Nikomis the work of Julia Kristeva, al Western biography: Matoaka, signified her station in festival, John Smith would undergo which she explicates in life—her destiny, if you will. It fore- just such a ritual—magical—trans- It has also long been the modern shadowed the part she would play in formation. The purpose of this strikingly original ways, way to frame the female as an the transformation of the Powhatan “adoption” or remaking ceremony to address the question of adjunct to the male. In this mode, a peoples and of the land they knew is to magically change an man is a person. A woman is as the tsencommacah. (p. 31) Englishman into a Powhatan. If why so many women writers attached to a male, thus enjoying a the magic works, the new man will imagine themselves to be the sort of vicarious personhood. One Allen cites several familiar images of belong to the tsenacommacah. (p. 42) locates a woman’s identity by show- Pocahontas where she is either carrying first of their kind . . . . ing her relationship to the real white feathers or wearing white feathers In this Native rebirthing ceremony, I've never read anything human being—husband, father, or soft down laced into her hair. As an ini- attended by as many as 300 Indians who brother, or king—and thereby tiated Beloved Woman (one among did not know what the outcome would be, quite like this book; judges her significance. This conven- many), or a Beloved Woman in training, “John Smith was ‘remade’ as an Indian it seems to me to bring a tion, like the separation of the per- Allen suggests, Pocahontas would have man named Nantaquod” and designated son from the matrix of her life, is been given the responsibility, even the werorance, or chief of Jamestown, owing new dimension to the ways not a convention of the Oral obligation, to make life-and-death deci- allegiance to Powhatan. In saving Smith’s in which we've understood Tradition in Indian country. (pp. 2-3) sions under certain circumstances. life, Pocahontas, then not more than 12 Thus, it was in her role as a Beloved years old, acted in her ritual capacity as ‘traditions’ of women writers nce Allen’s premises are under- Woman that Pocahontas spied on the fort Beloved Woman, not as a forlorn and and approaches to the study stood, one can begin to read, or at Jamestown, diverting the Europeans lovestruck Native. O rather to negotiate the narrative. with her “mischief ” and reporting to her Not long after, Smith would endure a of women and literature.” Allen introduces us to a very different Powhatan people what she saw and heard. near mortal wound and be returned to - JOAN W. SCOTT Pocahontas from the one we have known, As a nascent entrepreneur, she and her England, unfit for further duty. His Institute for Advanced a barely pubescent girl who was “by birth, family helped her husband John Rolfe English colleagues told Pocahontas that he Study, Princeton, NJ vision, training, and circumstance the establish a new, hybrid blend of native and had died. Only many years later, in agent of change.” Spanish tobacco as the most profitable England, as Lady Rolfe, did she learn the cash crop in Virginia. She eventually truth. Meeting Smith in England, the out- Paperback • $24.00 As the spring equinox approached, served as a de facto diplomat between the raged young mother at first could not bear Pocahontas knew it was time for English and the Powhatans and between even to look at him, but when she did, she her apowa, or Dream-Vision.... At the Virginia Company and the English. challenged him, not for abandoning her, midmorning she quietly stepped but for failing to live out his remade life out of the longhouse where she hen 26-year-old John Smith set and to keep the promises he had made as lived—-a half-cylindrical structure sail for Virginia in December Nantaquod to bear allegiance to his adopt- made of bark and animal skins W 1607, he too became an agent ed father, Wahunsenacawh, the Powhatan. OTHER PRESS lashed to wooden frames. She left of the great change foretold in the tsena- Chief Anne Richardson, primary leader the central area of the village, commacah, although he lacked the fore- of today’s Powhatan confederacy calls www.otherpress.com walking out through fields where knowledge of his role that Pocahontas, as Pocahontas “cutting edge work.” Others, the deer shared path with her, a Powhatan initiate, possessed. Smith was impatient with the form and the emphasis To order call toll free 1-877-THE OTHER across shallow streams, until she “a new breed of Englishman—thrill seek- on story rather than his/story, will dismiss or email [email protected] came into a clearing. er, entrepreneur, man on the make,” says it out of hand. But as a scholar of women’s To receive email updates from Other Press: …Pocohantas had been directed to Allen. “While Christian in faith, he was life writings, I find Pocahontas tremendously www.otherpress.com/subscribe the proper hobbomak, a natural sacred more interested in adventure than spiritu- interesting. As a new form of biography, it structure, by her manito—her sacred ality of any sort.” As the loser at a game interrogates and reinvents a familiar story AVAILABLE AT BOOKSTORES medicine power, her connection to of craps, Smith drew a dangerous mission and articulates it from the perspective of the Great Spirits that directed her “to locate the headwaters of the those who have long been voiceless. I

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 How does your book differ from, say, obscure or that they discount or dismiss Pocahontas: The Life and Legend by out of hand. Frances Mossiker (1976)? Pocahontas’ voice JB: What makes your book a neces- PGA: Mossiker wrote her book before sary read? by Joanne M. Braxton the Disney version crashed upon us, lucky woman. PGA: It gives a clear view of who we A conversation with Paula Gunn Allen I relied on the Mossiker book a lot, were (as Americans) and maybe of who but her story of Pocahontas is largely we might be. It locates us now, four hun- I concerned with the English. Pocahontas dred years since we began. There is an has at best a supporting role to the cen- old saying, “Begin each journey as you aula Gunn Allen, of Lebanese © Melinda Faye tral story. Even the explanations of the mean to end it,” which I take to mean and Laguna-Pueblo descent, Powhatan world were English/American that the way you view your task and the P has been tremendously produc- academic historiography and ethnogra- attention and quality you give to your tive as a poet, a writer, and a phy, which as a general rule have little efforts define the result. spokesperson for women’s and Native bearing on Native people’s views of their American issues. Allen has published own world. What I wanted to do in my JB: Have you seen the statue at almost 20 books, including five books book was to make Matoaka the central Jamestown of John Smith, with its of poetry and Pocahontas: Medicine figure—the entrée, not a nice side dish, inscription in Latin reading “To Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat. large footnote, or ingénue. Conquer is to Live”? Mossiker, a fine historian and great Joanne Braxton: Why did you decide writer, wrote from outside [of PGA: By the way, Jamestown wasn’t to write about Pocahontas? Pocahontas’ story] in every way (other Jamestown in the period in question than sex). I write as a somewhat outsider (1617-1623). It was James Fort. Maybe Paula Gunn Allen: Very briefly, because and a somewhat insider; that is, I am thinking of it as “Fort James” would she had spoken to me across the years. I academically trained, but in interdiscipli- make its role and significance clearer. It had encountered Charles Larson’s chap- nary studies. My PhD is in American occurs to me that there are “Forts” all ter, in his book American Indian Fiction Studies with a concentration in over the place, probably lots more of (1978), about Pocahontas’ influence on Paula Gunn Allen American-Indian Studies. I am modern, them than the Greco-Roman capitol American literature, specifically not 17th century, but because of my aca- buildings that symbolize the truth in our American-Indian fiction. She more or He figured in it mainly because the manito said demic background and personal inclina- civilization/situation. less “said” my poem “Pocahontas, to Her so. But in another way I guess he did give me tions I know quite a bit about the peri- I salute the truthfulness of whoever English Husband, John Rolfe,” which I fever…and all of us too. Most died from it.” od. I am familiar with historiographic did the statue and inscription; it’s just wrote in 1978-1979. That was over two I heard her most directly near her bur- and ethnographic methodologies, hav- too bad that smell isn’t part of the decades ago, of course, and as with all ial place at Gravesend, England, on the ing studied both and spent a great deal bronze-effect! Smith really liked to trav- “sendings” it was and is subject to my banks of the Thames, near the only of time reading in these and related el and write about his adventures. Maybe own abilities to “hear” and transcribe structure left from the year she was fields such as religious studies and com- the inscription in Latin should read, “To accurately—which has everything to do offloaded, dying or already dead and parative religion. I also know American- Brag is to Be.” with what I know and my own biases. unceremoniously buried in the church Indian methodologies, which differ I also like that he’s looking out to sea. That is, what I can hear depends on what there. She didn’t use words. She was a rather widely from those of historiogra- East-Coast Americans think the US is in I recognize and how I map or contextu- sense of beauty, as in iyani, orenda, hozho, phy or ethnography. I’ve read scores if Western England or Europe. Maybe alize what is said or sent. wakan, powa—mani. It’s not a not hundreds of books by American- sometime in the next century they’ll real- Also, because a book group—a com- modern/postmodern American-English Indian writers in just about every disci- ize it ain’t so. One hopes. pany that devises book projects and hires language sort of thing. Perhaps that sense pline except hard science. I am Indian, someone to do the writing—wrote of beauty is what gives rise to the arts: an immediate descendent of mother- JB: What do you think of the statue in requesting that I suggest someone to do poetry, music, painting, sculpture, right Indian society, Laguna Pueblo. I Jamestown of Matoaka? the job [of writing a new biography of dance—the state one reaches when hear- am also a poet and artist. Pocahontas]. I accepted, after several ing some superb violinist or singer; read- My book takes Pocahontas from the PGA: She looks like a 19th-century Plains weeks’ thought, but the results were very ing a mind-stopping poem; seeing some situation of victim to that of actor; from Indian—a Lakota, Pawnee, or Kiowa. I unsatisfactory to me, so I withdrew after natural sight—the Pacific shores, moon- object to subject of her own story. Its pri- found it aggravating. I guess the sculptor, agonizing months of trying to do what light, a jillion stars at 2 AM. The English mary context is Algonquin, not Anglo- or whoever commissioned the thing, my editor wanted. In the meantime, and Scots countryside is loaded with that American. I mention major issues that worked on the principle “seen one, seen HarperSanFrancisco accepted my pro- quality. (I wish I had an English word for find no place in any other account, such ’em all.” There is a companion Pocahontas posal that I write the book the way I saw it other than “beauty,” because “beauty” as the free market and its influence on statue that was given to Gravesend by, I fit. So, the book group’s desire that the might signal hair, cosmetics, Hollywood, English policy, Algonquin/Powhatan think, the Virginia Heritage Society, or book be written for an average audience, babe, doll, which are generally about as conventions such as the Medicine Dance, some Virginia group involved in say a newspaper-reader level of literacy, far from what I mean as you can get. Dream Visions, and other Algonquin/ Pocahontas and Fort James history. It’s had to be ditched because I couldn’t do it Horace called it “the sublime”; Powhatan institutions. I wasn’t out to beautiful, of course, but as I said, the and remain faithful to the story of Pythagoras, “the golden mean.”) demonize the English but to connect Algonquins, including the Powhatans, did- Pocahontas’ actual life. Translated, she said, “I’m here. Where I them with the Powhatans. I don’t know n’t dress like Plains Indians. In fact, they I think they had envisioned a book want to be. Where I was supposed to be. of any study that does that. didn’t dress like they did in the centuries about the popular Pocahontas who gave England. A promissory note, sort of. A promise From an American-Indian context I following the invasion. I would like a stat- John Smith fever and Disney and a vow, a bridge.” can “read” data recorded by the early ue of Pocahontas in Powhatan undress, as Corporation beaucoup bucks. Not that I English in the region in a way that clari- I tried to get on the cover of my book (no would mind the latter. And lord knows JB: I don’t know if you identify as a fies much that Mossiker and others find luck there, either.) I Pocahontas gave me more fever than lesbian writer, but you are often ever Peggy Lee sang of—I’m still recov- included in “the club” by others. Does ering from a bout lasting four years so your orientation make a difference? far (or 26, depending). I just couldn’t down-mind my writing, however much I PGA: I do accept “lesbian,” though I’m wanted to. So I wrote the book with the probably more accurately “bi.” Except, able help of my Harper’s editor Eric of course, I’m actually human. I don’t Writing the Brandt and, alas, gave up my dreams of fall in love with or get turned on to a movie, a big bank account, and a shiny sexes/genders, after all. I am most like- Mind Alive new car! ly to be drawn to border people, to Through Proprioceptive Writing® I think the whole thing was a set-up by those who although female, seem male, with Drs. Linda Metcalf and Tobin Simon the manito (little mysteries) to get and those who although male, seem August 1-6, 2004 Pocahontas’ story out at this troubled female. I’m a sucker for white hair. at the Medomak Retreat Center and tumultuous time and in the way I However there’s little likelihood that I in the heart of Midcoast, Maine would present it (with a lot of assistance would ever have a domestic partnership, from my own mysterious movers). marriage, or long term relationship with Awaken your Imagination gay males, not of the very femme type, Rekindle your Creative Fires Discover your Authentic Voice JB: What did Matoaka say when she for sure. I think I am neither/nor, “No Demands. No Hype. A wealth of stimulating spoke to you? both/and. Right now I’m of the celiba- individual and group support” cy school of human sexuality, the saints For details visit PWriting.org & www.medomakcamp.com. PGA: She said, “He [John Smith] give me be praised. Have been since time out of Call us at 212.213.5402 fever…not! That smelly, hairy, old man! He mind, 15-plus years. couldn’t give even my mother fever! I had a task, a job, and it was with and for the tsena- JB: There are many books on commacah [the land of the Powhatan people]. Pocahontas—so why another one? The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 13 water from the kitchen faucet, contaminated not. In Drinking the Sea she wrote, “I had with sewage. And all the time, literally a hoped that my reports would wake Israelis stone’s throw away, are the lush, spacious up to what was happening in Gaza, but Reporting in the flesh homes and gardens of Jewish settlements. while readers have a right to know, they do Palestinians wait for hours for exit per- not have an obligation, nor are they required by Lesley Hazleton mits, only to be turned away by the Israeli to translate knowledge into action.” And in Civil Administration—a name that seems Reporting from Ramallah: Reporting from Ramallah: An Israeli Journalist in an Occupied straight out of George Orwell. Even those who have such permits can get turned back at Israeli political consciousness has Land by Amira Hass, edited and translated by Rachel Leah Jones. a checkpoint at a soldier’s whim. “You can get refused, and continues to refuse, to an exit permit if you’re about to die,” Gazans grasp the sum total of the details, Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2003, 208 pp., $14.95 paper. joke, and even then, Hass shows, not always. characteristics, actions, and conse- She has an eye for the sharp, painful quences of ongoing Israeli rule over I detail: She notes the smell of decaying bod- another people.... Today, reports on ies buried by bulldozers during the attack on ‘Palestinian suffering’ are perceived as mira Hass describes herself as “an lating violence. In this I believe they are dev- the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, and the national treason. Israelis conclude expert in Israeli occupation.” The astatingly wrong. This is a conflict that can- sight of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture that the suicide bombings are the A recipient of numerous awards (includ- not be resolved by self-imposed blindness. littered with urine and feces after Israeli result of a murderous tendency of ing the Press Freedom Hero award from the Understanding is essential. And one way to forces have gone in and trashed everything the Palestinians, their religion, and International Press Institute in 2000, the begin understanding the Palestinian-Israeli in sight: “Someone even managed to defe- their mentality. In other words, peo- Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award in conflict is to read Amira Hass. cate into the photocopy machine.” ple turn to bio-religious explanations, 2002, and the UNESCO World Press Her first book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Sometimes the psychological sadism not socio-historical ones. This is a Freedom Prize in 2003), she is the Palestinian was written in 1996 and published in the seems even worse. A young man on his way grave mistake. If one wants to put an affairs correspondent for Ha’aretz—the “New United States three years later. It is an to his wedding was stopped by soldiers at a end to the terror attacks in general, York Times of Israel,” as it were. extraordinarily detailed account not only of roadblock. When they asked why he was all and the suicide bombings in particu- There have been other Israeli reporters the occupation and its brutalizing effects, dressed up, he told them. lar, one must ask why the majority of on Palestinian affairs over the years, but but also—Hass plays no favorites—of the Palestinians support them... [and this Hass is both the only woman and the only pervasive corruption and brutality within “So what will you say if we keep is] because they are convinced that such reporter to live in the community she the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA may you here for an hour,” they asked. they, their existence, and their future reports from. She lived in Gaza from 1993 have the nominal right to rule but, in fact, “Nothing,” he said. as a nation are the real targets of the to 1997, and since then, has lived in Hass points out, it cannot so much as lay a “And two hours?” Also nothing. Israeli regime. (pp. 173-174) Ramallah on the West Bank. water pipe without permission from the “And three?” Here he went silent. To her, this seems entirely unremarkable. Israeli military authorities. When they reached “Seven?” he said Hass has no intention of making herself As a journalist, she says she needs to experi- he would kill himself. Finally, they the center of the story—her subject is the ence the occupation “in her own flesh,” as teel yourself when you read Hass. Her detained him for four hours. (p. 127) occupation, not herself—but there is at least they say in Hebrew. “If I were asked to cover friends and neighbors are well an indication of where her determination French affairs, I would go and live in Paris S acquainted with both Israeli and What it all adds up to, Hass said in her and purity of perception come from in the and travel a lot in France, not write about Palestinian jails. They have been arbitrarily Berkeley talk, “is total strangulation.” What introduction to Drinking the Sea at Gaza, France from Germany,” she said last year in arrested, detained, beaten, and tortured. she did not say, but what I couldn’t help where she talks about her parents, both of a session of Conversations with History at Their lives are entirely controlled by Israeli thinking, is that this seemingly incomprehen- whom were Holocaust survivors. the Institute of International Studies in soldiers. Sick infants die at checkpoints as sible, slow destruction of Palestinian society, Her mother, Hanna Levy-Hass, was a University of California-Berkeley. “This is ambulances are held up; five year olds are culture, and everyday life has a deliberate Sarajevo Jew who joined Tito’s partisans basic in this sort of journalistic work.” shot by stray bullets (“In Gaza they do not political purpose: Not to stop terrorism, as and was forced to surrender to the Nazis She’s right, of course—if she were in believe in stray bullets,” she notes acerbically). the Israeli administration claims, but to when they threatened to kill every woman Western Europe. But imagine a Tutsi Farmers are shot trying to get to their fields, induce what is politely referred to in Israel as in the Montenegrin town of Cetinje. Taken reporter living among Hutus and reporting which wither and die. Teachers cannot get to “population transfer.” The phrase was once to the concentration camp of Bergen- for a Tutsi newspaper, or a Belfast their schools; doctors cannot reach their clin- restricted only to the extreme right wing, but Belsen, she gathered every scrap of paper Protestant reporter doing the same in a ics. Houses are demolished not only as col- since Ariel Sharon’s government has been in she could find and, at great risk, wrote Catholic stronghold, or a Serb in a Bosnian lective punishment, but to clear free lines of power it has become part of the national down what was happening in minute hand- enclave. Then, multiply by nearly 40 years of fire for the Israeli military. A nature reserve is political debate. Make life impossible enough writing (her book, Inside Belsen, was finally occupation, annexation, and repression. For uprooted to make way for a “bypass road” to for Palestinians, the reasoning seems to be, published in 1982). Her father spent four an Israeli Jew, to live in Israeli-occupied be used exclusively by Jewish settlers. and they will move elsewhere—Jordan, years in the Transnistria ghetto, escaping a Palestine for well over a decade, and to One of the most chilling pieces in her Lebanon, anywhere but the Occupied typhus plague only to lose his toes to frost- report from there for the leading Israeli second book, Reporting from Ramallah—37 Territories—“of their own accord.” bite. Hass describes her parents’ legacy as newspaper, is to place oneself at the very dispatches culled from over 500 between Again and again, as I read Hass, I ask “a history of resisting injustice, speaking heart of the conflict. 1997 and 2002—is a long interview with an myself how she continues. Why hasn’t she out, and fighting back.” But what really This is what makes Amira Hass’ voice so Israeli sharpshooter who explains to her burned out, as so many others have? Where stuck in her mind was her mother’s memo- extraordinary. Her deep, inside knowledge is why it’s okay to shoot children. In an army does she get the moral fortitude and deter- ry of a group of German women watching reflected in every word she writes. She is that once prided itself on its rule that sol- mination to continue despite the ever-esca- “with indifferent curiosity” as she and oth- indeed an expert in Israeli occupation: in its diers do not have to obey orders they con- lating violence and despair? Typically, she ers were being herded from a cattle car into brutality, its random acts of sadism, and its sider illegal, this young man finally falls back downplays her courage. The only death Bergen-Belsen. “For me, these women repression of every aspect of Palestinian on “Twelve and up you’re allowed to shoot. threat she mentions—and there have to became a loathsome symbol of watching life. This is no doubt why so few people in That’s what they tell us.” have been dozens, from both Israelis and from the sidelines, and at an early age I the United States have read her: They don’t The children get the message. “If you’re Palestinians—comes at the very end of her decided that my place was not with the want to know. They are not alone. Many of a Jew, where’s your gun?” a ten-year-old boy first book, and then only to make the point bystanders.” In the end, Amira Hass says, the people most directly affected don’t want asks Hass in Drinking the Sea at Gaza.In of how welcoming most Palestinians have “my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither to know either. Ramallah, a 12 year old arguing with his been to her. Although she never mentions from adventurism nor from insanity, but When I was last in Jerusalem, two years mother yells that she’ll be sorry because “I’ll hate mail in her writing, she did say in an from that dread of being a bystander, and ago, the West Bank and Gaza were hermeti- go to the border, a Jew will shoot me, and I’ll interview last year with Robert Fisk in the from my need to understand, down to the cally sealed off not only from Israel itself but die.” A girl shot in the back asks: “Didn’t the British newspaper The Independent, “I get last detail, a world that is, to the best of my from the rest of the world. Nobody could go soldier know I just went out to get some messages saying I must have been a kapo [a political and historical comprehension, a in or out except by special permission of the bread?” A three year old asks his father “Are Jewish concentration camp overseer for the profoundly Israeli creation.” Israeli military. But Hass’ dispatches in the Jews born like us, little babies, or are they Nazis] in my first incarnation. Then I’ll get The recent Sharon-Bush deal is no less Ha’aretz continued, detailing what life was born already big with uniforms and guns?” an e-mail saying ‘Bravo, you have written a profoundly an Israeli creation. It swaps mil- like for Palestinians under Israeli occupation, Just as effectively, Hass details the ener- great article—Heil Hitler!’ Someone told me itary withdrawal from most of Gaza and siege, and closure. It was painful reading— vating, soul-eroding everyday details of life they hoped I suffered from breast cancer... dismantling of the Israeli settlements there she pulled no punches—but essential. under occupation: the constant power fail- There are thousands of these messages.” for a permanent Israeli claim to large swaths “Did you read Amira Hass today?” I’d ask ures; the phones that don’t work for months of the West Bank. This territorial shell friends. Inevitably, the answer would be along at a time; the frustration of never knowing ass has no illusions. She continues game gives Sharon what he has been work- the lines of, “Oh no, I can’t stand reading her how long it will take you to make what was to work in what she sees is a high- ing for all along—superpower-blessed any more. I don’t want to know. It’s too much once a five-minute drive—it could be five H ly patriarchal society, where access annexation of much of the West Bank—in already. Whatever we’re doing to the hours or more, depending on the check- is accorded her as a kind of honorary man. return for giving up the losing proposition Palestinians, they’ve called it on themselves.” points—or even if you’ll be able to get She watches bleakly as Palestinian women, of occupying Gaza, which will be left in a These are not bigots or settlers. They are where you want to go at all; the cars confis- who had begun to organize and take active territorial, political, and economic vacuum. good, liberal people who detest Ariel Sharon cated at whim; the homes searched and gra- political roles in the first Intifada of the late Chaos seems inevitable in Gaza; “popula- and everything he stands for but are bat- tuitously vandalized; the insults hurled by 1980s, have been relegated back to the tion transfer” looms in the West Bank. tered, as they point out, by too many suicide soldiers at checkpoints; the bureaucracy that kitchen and the veil with the rise of Islamic More than ever, we will need to rely on jour- bombs. They also seem to be battered by would put Kafka’s imagination to shame; the fundamentalism. nalists like Amira Hass simply to find out something else—a loss of the sense that impossibly repressive taxation; the trickle And she continues to write knowing that what is happening—if she, and her newspa- there’s anything they can do to stop the esca- that passes for a shower; the foul-tasting the people who most need to read her do per, can stay the course. I

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 The tone of the book is set in the go on to explain how estrogen became introduction, where the Rothmans an accepted “cure” for menopause describe the increasingly “flimsy line despite clues that it could promote can- Extreme makeovers between cure and enhancement.” “Ours cer. In the early years of the 20th centu- is a culture,” they explain, ry, women were considered captives of by Randi Hutter Epstein their hormonal swings, unlike men who in which physicians enjoy great were free agents. Doctors believed that The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical discretion in defining what consti- women needed all the help they could tutes a disease and what com- get, even if that meant taking drugs not Enhancement by Sheila Rothman and David Rothman. plaints warrant their interven- yet proven safe or effective. tions... Should unhappiness reflect Subsequent chapters discuss liposuc- New York: Pantheon, 2003, 292 pp., $25.00 hardcover. dissatisfaction with short stature tion (including the turf battles between or body fat or signs of aging, then dermatologists and plastic surgeons); I medicine is right to apply its testosterone treatments; growth hor- knowledge of hormones or its mone for children; and finally, longevi- his January, in a surprise move, the of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to surgical techniques in order to ty treatments. Food and Drug Administration Present (1978). David Rothman is a pro- relieve it. (p. xi) While some of these technologies are T (FDA) chose not to heed the fessor of social medicine and history, targeted at men, the Rothmans focus on advice of its expert panel, which had and studies the social impacts of medi- The cynicism simmers. female treatments. Device and drug man- deemed silicone gel breast implants safe cine. He is the author of Strangers at the The Rothmans begin with a brief ufacturers know that the vast majority of enough to market. Deferring a decision, Bedside: A History of How Law and overview of the history of hormone their paying clients are women. Mark B. McClellan, the FDA commis- Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision- therapy, including the discovery of sioner, requested more data. So, for now, Making (1992). insulin. The history of endocrinology Our culture encourages women, silicone implants cannot be marketed and obstetrics is woven together with much more so than men, to focus freely. Yet, they are available to breast can- heir book is the latest in a long bizarre anecdotes, such as that of the on their bodies, to carry on a cer survivors and healthy women who history of critiques of medical 19th-century Parisian midwife who highly charged dialogue with agree to participate in a clinical trial. T enhancement technology. Many claimed that her cocktail of guinea pig stereotypic images.... Plastic sur- What is going on? A product is of these books were written by disgrun- ovaries boosted health and energy. They gery also provides a means to sat- deemed safe enough for cancer patients tled patients or by gender studies schol- but too dangerous for everyone else? ars exploring how culture seduces and Are policy-makers truly worried about degrades women. The Pursuit of Perfection dangers, or are they catering to the is markedly different. It is not an assault From whims of politicians? on the media and culture, and it is not a Once again, women are confused and diatribe against women who seek to angry, and rightly so. This time silicone enhance their beauty. Still, it is seething Ohio University Press breast implants are in the news. A few with anger. The Rothmans direct their ire months ago, it was hormone replacement at zealous doctors and greedy drug com- therapy. Before that, fertility drugs. When panies catering to the whims of their Body Story the experts say there is “no evidence of customers (“patient” would be an inap- Julia K. De Pree danger,” does that mean the treatment is propriate term). “Body Story captures the complexity and fragility of safe, or the data are lacking? “Perhaps most disappointing,” write one woman’s struggle to attain peace with her body. In language that is both spare and lyrical, De Pree creates Each of these debates concerns the Rothmans, a compelling narrative.”—Susan Bordo women’s faith in the US regulatory 208 pages, cloth $24.95, paper $13.95 process. Do we trust the so-called medicine itself has provided very experts to make health decisions for us? little leadership. It is not surprising The Grasinski Girls Or must we investigate every health deci- that drug companies will be less The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made sion for ourselves? interested in educating consumers Mary Patrice Erdmans The oft-told silicone implant story to be skeptical about new products Using the oral histories of her mother and aunts, Erdmans includes the downfall of Dow-Corning, than in persuading them to have explores the private lives of these working-class Polish- Inc., a multibillion-dollar global company, their physicians prescribe the latest American women in the post–World War II generation. which, many claim, was driven to bank- pill. But surely medicine has an 352 pages, illus., cloth $49.95, paper $24.95 ruptcy because of faulty lawsuits and a obligation to be more proactive tort system gone awry. One claimant, and diligent. (p. 233) Beyond Hill and Hollow whose physician said her autoimmune Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies symptoms had begun long before she The Pursuit of Perfection is a readable Edited by Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt had implants, was awarded $25 million. book aimed at the educated consumer Appalachian studies and women’s studies unite in a Then, she refused to have the implants who likes a good read about medical diverse collection that explores such topics as the hidden removed. (Rheumatologist Frank B. mavericks and their weird experiments. It lives of Appalachian prostitutes, urban women in the 1800s, rural women in company towns, and an African American Vasey, who has made a name for himself will appeal to skeptical patients, who will Appalachian poet from the 1900s. as the leading proponent of the silicone- be intrigued by the behind-the-scenes 248 pages, cloth $44.95, paper $22.95 autoimmune link—publishing scientific picture of the medical establishment. But papers and consumer-oriented books, the greatest fascination, for me, lay not testifying before Congress, and serving as with the peddlers of enhancement treat- The Tangled Roots of a paid expert witness defending plaintiffs ments, but with the American public, Feminism, Environmentalism, suing implant makers—has said that which seems to have an insatiable and Appalachian Literature about half of the hundreds of patients appetite for anything touted to promote Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt he has treated for silicone-induced illness youthful appearance and sexual vigor— Engelhardt explores the writings of Appalachian nevertheless refuse to remove their even when there is a glaring lack of evi- women and the origins of ecological feminism. implants.) It is a story that has pitted doc- dence regarding safety. 248 pages, illus., cloth $49.95, paper $24.95 tors against doctors and feminists against The book is organized chronological- feminists. In the end, it illustrates how ly, with each of the eight chapters focus- Gabriela Mistral public health decisions are made when ing on a particular technology. The scientific information is lacking; how the Rothmans compare the excitement sur- The Audacious Traveler Edited by Marjorie Agosín public responds to risk; how the media rounding the early years of hormone Explores the complex legacy of the only Latin American adores a scare story; and how social and research to the optimism driving genetic woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. cultural attitudes leave many women research today. Back then, we were told, Her writings reveal a passionate voice for freedom and justice. patients baffled and frightened. If we “we are our hormones,” much the way 304 pages, paper $26.95 can’t trust medical professionals and gov- we are now told, “we are our genes.” The ernment regulators to make decisions Rothmans write, Writing Women in Central America about breast implants, how can we trust Gender and the Fictionalization of History them when it comes to hormone replace- By looking back, particularly on Laura Barbas-Rhoden ment therapy or fertility drugs? the history of such hormones as An innovative and interdisciplinary look at women These are just the sorts of questions estrogen and testosterone, and writers’ critical engagement with Central America. addressed in The Pursuit of Perfection by looking now at plastic surgery 224 pages, paper $23.00 Sheila M. Rothman and David J. and growth hormone, we will be Rothman, a prolific husband and wife better able to understand the www.ohio.edu/oupress team. Sheila Rothman, a professor of promise and perils of novel Ohio At your local bookseller Ohio University Press • Swallow Press public health, writes about the history of genetic enhancements, framing or call 740-593-1154 medicine and women’s issues. She is the the real and specific challenges Scott Quadrangle, Athens, Ohio 45701 author of Woman’s Proper Place: A History that lie ahead. (p. x)

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 15 of lawsuits by women who claimed the implants had made them horribly ill. This time around, policy experts say the decision to postpone approval is Pepper in the soup unlikely to spur high-stakes legal bat- tles, although it may reignite bitter by Marie Shear debates between pro- and anti-regula- tion feminists and health advocates, all Millicent Fenwick: Her Way by Amy Schapiro. New Brunswick, of whom have been watching the breast implant controversy closely. NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 282 pp., $29.00 hardcover. They see the implant debacle as a sym- bol of how the government deals with Pat Schroeder: A Woman of the House by Joan A. Lowy. women’s health issues. On one side are people like Diana Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Policy Research for Women 2003, 216 pp., $24.95 hardcover. and Families, a consumer group based in Washington, DC, who believe that Fire in My Soul by Joan Steinau Lester as authorized by Eleanor restricting silicone implant sales until Holmes Norton. New York: Atria Books, 2003, we have more evidence of safety is not Preparing a woman for liposuction. paternalistic at all. Women should be 370 pp., $25.00 hardcover. From The Pursuit of Perfection. able to rely on the FDA to ensure that drugs and devices are safe, they say. I isfy women’s desire to reshape They hail the FDA’s recent decision to their bodies, even as the compe- seek additional data as one that may n their book about the president they’ve She was reelected three times before tition between surgeons and der- protect the public against a potentially called “Shrub,” Bushwhacked, Molly Ivins losing the 1982 US Senate race to a matologists for control of the toxic device. These consumer advo- I and Lou Dubose call Americans Democrat, Frank Lautenberg, in a cam- lucrative liposuction market cates, backed by a small cadre of scien- “tough, funny, sassy, brave, smart, and full paign Schapiro describes as inept; exposed women to ever increas- tists, are convinced that silicone gel of fight. They get pissed-off, they endure, Fenwick cited the building of a public ing risk. Meanwhile, rival femi- triggers autoimmune-like illnesses, they fight like hell, they start all over— swimming pool in the 1950s as her great- nist camps debate whether such with symptoms like chronic fatigue and whatever it takes.” Ivins and Dubose might est achievement. NOW did not back her, enhancements are demeaning to debilitating pain. At the least, recent be describing the politicians in these biog- Schroeder later observed, because it want- or empowering of women, a studies show that such implants rup- raphies—Millicent Fenwick, Pat Schroeder, ed Democrats to control the Senate. The diversity of opinions that gives ture and harden much more frequently and Eleanor Holmes Norton. The books following year, President Reagan appoint- abundant space and legitimacy to than previously thought. So, women are, in order, an able work about a late- ed her ambassador to the United Nations a variety of enhancements and who get silicone implants are making a blooming aristocrat, a good journalist’s Food and Agricultural Organization, a helps explain why some women long term commitment to their sur- report on a piquant feminist, and a passable position she held until she retired in 1987. will take risks, even inordinate geons: They will have to have their account of a protean activist. You have to give Fenwick her props for risks, to achieve a benefit that implants removed or replaced about Few women born in 1910 eventually opposing President Ford’s pardon of others consider trivial or every ten years. served four terms in the US House of Richard Nixon and for learning to care demeaning. (pp. xviii-xix) On the other side are physicians and Representatives as Millicent Fenwick did. about abortion rights, inner-city poverty, feminists who lambasted the FDA for Born into immense wealth and and racism. “[O]ne thing people cannot While the Rothmans claim not to preventing women from making their entrenched power, Amy Schapiro writes, bear,” she said, “is a sense of injustice.” take sides in the cosmetic surgery own health choices, such as Dr. Susan Fenwick felt “terrible” when she wasn’t Yet I grew restless while she made cor- debates (empowering vs. demeaning), Love, founder of the National Breast allowed to join a fox hunt at age four. sages as a Republican volunteer at about they give more time and the best lines to Cancer Coalition and author of Dr. Susan Intellectually curious and an avid read- 50, feeling that anyone spared the exhaus- the critics. They point to Susan Bordo, a Love’s Breast Book. Even if some of the er, Fenwick had to leave school at 15: Her tion of poverty, and even the time-con- professor of English and women’s stud- dangers were proven, wrote Love, “I’m stepmother considered education unim- suming chores of middle-class life, had ies, who wrote that although women still not sure I’d support a ban.... Implants portant for girls. Fenwick’s husband, a had ample freedom to involve herself in may appear to have freedom of choice, may cause problems but that is no reason charming liar and playboy, abandoned her policy before then. At her funeral in 1992, they are still entrapped in “the sadly con- to deprive a woman who, fully informed, and their children. Needing to earn her a grandson said that Fenwick “showed tinuing social realities of dominance and chooses to take the risk. People take risks way for the first time, she began a 14-year that indeed one can fight for change with- subordination.” every day.” Love and others argue that stint at Vogue magazine. Pressured into out breaching decorum.” Whatever the fad, the Rothmans the restrictions are not about safety but writing a book about etiquette—a topic claim that each new treatment follows a about gender politics, and that those who she thought trivial—she became the pri- ercifully, Pat Schroeder and similar, inevitable path from discovery claim they are wary of silicone are really mary author of a bestseller, Vogue’s Book of Eleanor Holmes Norton are to widespread use: First, there is the opposed to cosmetic surgery. You can Etiquette, drawing 13,000 people to one M indecorous. Roughly 30 years concoction of a seemingly wacky treat- loathe breast enhancement surgery, they event on her book tour. younger than Fenwick, coming of age in ment like crushed animal ovaries. Next, say, but it is a woman’s prerogative. In 1952, having left Vogue, Fenwick an era ripe for civil rights and feminism, savvy markers transform the initial What’s more, a woman’s decision to became a civic volunteer in New Jersey, both had a shorter chronological and psy- ridiculous remedy into a must-have enlarge her breasts is personal and has no helping the NAACP, the National chological trajectory to the US House, and treatment. In the third phase, the treat- impact on anyone else’s health. Conference of Christians and Jews, legal neither has a whiff of dilettante about ment is transformed from luxury item to According to the Rothmans’ time- aid, and prison reformers. She climbed the her. Two years before Fenwick won her medical necessity. (Flip through a popu- line, silicone breast implants have Republican Party ladder. After service in House seat at age 64, Schroeder, a lar women’s magazine, and you are sure passed the media scandal phase. We can the state assembly and as state director of Colorado Democrat, was elected at age to find an article insinuating that cos- already see evidence that they are consumer affairs, she was elected to the 32. When she left the House 24 years metic surgery is no longer an indulgence becoming necessities: Over two million US House in 1974, one of 18 women later, she had fought for women’s rights but rather is crucial for women stymied American women have implants. The among 435 representatives. with memorable wit; withstood venomous by insecurity.) typical client is in her 30s, white, mar- In the House, her assertiveness and personal attacks; been passed over as vice Widespread use never occurs without ried, college educated, and healthy (only patrician aura combined with her gender presidential candidate in favor of the less at least a few customers suffering from about 20 percent of implant recipients and age to make her distinctive. Garry experienced and less independent toxic side effects. These reactions—lipo- have had breast cancer), according to a Trudeau fans followed the adventures of Geraldine Ferraro; and become a “hero to suction gone awry, hormone therapy recent survey by the American Society her alter ego, Lacey Davenport, in legions of liberals who admired her and silicone implant-triggered illness- for Aesthetic Surgery. Doonesbury cartoons. She opposed con- uncompromising championship of es—become media events. Public out- The number of women opting for gressional pay raises, fought for Soviet underdog causes.” At her best, writes Joan rage follows the media blitz. breast augmentation continues to dissidents, and led in establishing a com- A. Lowy in Pat Schroeder, she welcomed the The inevitable conclusion? Wise increase despite the lawsuits, the com- mission to monitor international compli- role of maverick, “skewering her ideolog- manufacturers know that scare stories plaints, and the fears of silicone-induced ance with the Helsinki Accords on human ical foes and invigorating her supporters.” may dampen sales temporarily, but as illness. As the Rothmans demonstrate, rights—an effort that forms the most The child of populists, she made Phi the Rothmans portray, the lure of beau- the business of life-enhancement tech- substantive section of Schapiro’s book. Beta Kappa, then earned a degree from ty, sexiness, and longevity is ultimately niques thrives despite lack of scientific Yet Fenwick dealt with constituents’ prob- Harvard Law School. When she applied stronger than a few negative reports. evidence, reports of potential dangers, lems by handwriting thousands of letters to law firms, they asked whether she and regulations. instead of seeking systemic solutions. could type. he story of silicone gel-filled “Since there is so much allure for She supported the Equal Rights The House climate was scarcely implants followed a trajectory consumers,” they write, “and so much Amendment and was committed to abor- balmy. The feudal lout who chaired its T that the Rothmans could have financial gain for physicians, there is lit- tion rights. But according to Pat Schroeder, armed services committee humiliated easily predicted. The first time the FDA tle doubt that surgical enhancement, like “[I]t was hard for her to understand the her. Democratic leaders distrusted her limited the marketing of silicone medical enhancement, will go forward women who don’t have money.” Schapiro and never let her chair a full committee. implants, back in 1992, the decision without significant attention to the says, “[W]omen’s organizations did not Other Democrats, who privately agreed triggered a media frenzy and a torrent risks.” Let the buyer beware. I embrace her, nor did she embrace them.” with her on issues, clammed up or envied

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 her national stature. The military detest- Today she heads the Association of workers, who were chiefly women of and union members—crisscrossing class ed her challenges to its bloated spending. American Publishers. color, under the minimum wage law. and color lines. She has called herself “a For seeking punishment of the brass hats Among these books, Pat Schroeder is the She went national when President black militant” and “a feminist who tries who assaulted nearly 100 women at the best match between a quotable subject Carter chose her to head the US Equal to be realistic.” Lester calls her “ever the Tailhook convention or protected the and a capable writer. Lowy’s well paced Employment Opportunity Commission realpolitick strategist—a trait some leftists perpetrators, she was showered with sex- work is enlivened because Schroeder (EEOC), an agency choked by neglected would ever fault.” ist slime, which Lowy unfortunately does would “wield political ridicule like a whip,” cases, whose offices were infested with The many quotations from Norton in not quote. and her sallies don’t date. Of Pentagon rodents. Within a year, Lester says, the Fire in My Soul are a mixed blessing. They She pushed for controversial programs pork she said, “If it’s designed to shoot or EEOC had been “transformed.” spare us an author’s faux omniscience like the Women’s Health Equity Act and fly or go boom, we’ll buy it.” On activism Combining boldness with an understand- about her subject’s thoughts and feelings. for abortion rights and day care. She she said, “If you see something, pounce ing of process, Norton issued EEOC But Norton’s lifelong habit of glossing worked for lesbians and gays in the mili- on it. To the pouncer goes the mouse.” guidelines on affirmative action and sexu- over conflicts tends to flatten the book. tary and against deadbeat dads, congres- On the double standard she said, “Women al harassment for use by courts hearing One of only four African-American sional pay raises (like Fenwick), the who sleep around in [Washington] are such cases. Thanks to President Reagan, women in the House when she was first Vietnam War, and nuclear weapons testing. called sluts. Men who do it are called sen- she was succeeded by Clarence Thomas, elected, Norton claims that “there were She insisted that women be included in all- ators.” On political independence she who quickly undid her accomplishments. no male-female difficulties.” Such sunni- male government medical testing and pro- said, “I was hard to paper-train.” Back in the private sector, by then “an ness or denial may help her focus on work moted funds for breast cancer research. icon of the civil rights and women’s move- and minimize stress, but it makes for When she won a battle, others leanor Holmes Norton’s life is ments,” Norton taught law, wrote, and bland reading. And yet bland she’s not. At snatched her laurels. After her eight-year uncommonly vivid, stretching from spoke. She urged blacks and liberals to work, Lester says, Norton can be a fero- campaign for parental and medical leave, E protests in college to combative, seize the initiative by defining fresh agen- cious martinet. When displeased, an she was relegated to the audience as pragmatic advocacy in and out of govern- das, instead of merely defending them- EEOC staffer said, Norton would “do President Clinton signed it into law, sur- ment. Fire in My Soul, by Joan Steinau selves against the “virulent” Right. open-heart surgery on you.” rounded by male senators and representa- Lester “as authorized by” Norton, quotes Her 1990 campaign for delegate to the Quotations aside, Fire in My Soul has tives basking in the photo op. She decid- extensively from 54 interviews with her House of Representatives from too many mistakes: missing and mis- ed not to run for president in 1988, find- because, Lester says, African-American Washington, DC, nearly blew up: Her hus- spelled names, erroneous dates, and mod- ing the process dehumanizing, cried women’s voices are too seldom heard. band had repeatedly failed to file their city ifiers dangling like fruit bats. Some refer- briefly in public when she announced her During the 45 years the author has known taxes. The betrayal ended their marriage of ences to feminist history are inaccurate. decision, and was bitter about the scorn her, Norton has “both educated and infuri- 25 years. Despite the scandal, she won the The huge women’s march in New York her tears evoked. ated me, sometimes simultaneously.” Lester election and still holds the seat. occurred in August 1970, not September. When her 12th term ended in January sees in her “the warrior’s complexity.” In October 1991, she joined Hoary fictions about bra burning and the 1997, Republican zealots, by then in the With roots as far from Fenwick’s as you Schroeder, Barbara Boxer, and five other way that the word “sex” became part of majority, were frog-marching the House can get, Norton, great-grand-daughter of female representatives striding up the the 1964 Civil Rights Act are perpetuated. back to the Stone Age, having already slaves, was born to parents who prized Senate steps to demand hearings into Time for ratifying the Equal Rights razed the congressional women’s caucus education. Stimulated by family talk of Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harass- Amendment ran out in 1982, not 1984 she had cofounded and led. She was race, politics, and civil rights, she was ment against Clarence Thomas, whom (although a network of advocates at “weary and disheartened,” Lowy says, and groomed from childhood to be outspoken. the elected President Bush had nominat- www.ERACampaign.net maintains that chose not to run again. “I wanted to go Already a magnetic speaker and ed to the Supreme Court, thereby the ERA can still be ratified if three more out at the top of my game,” said impressive organizer at Antioch College, becoming part of what I have called the states agree). Norton herself, with her for- Schroeder. Norton proceeded to Yale Law School as women’s Iwo Jima photograph. Even midable intellect, dedication to justice, Lowy is an appreciative, though not one of a minuscule number of African- after hearing Hill, most male senators strategic savvy, foul temper—and joyous, uncritical, biographer. She reports that American students and—like Schroeder at didn’t “get it.” Thomas was confirmed— celebratory dancing—makes this account Schroeder exaggerated one cheesy inci- Harvard Law—one of a handful of by Democrats. Republicans were a Senate worth reading. But publishers should quit dent with the head of the armed services women. She risked her life to support the minority. Had majority leader George skimping on copyediting. committee. In her autobiography, 24 Years Southern civil rights movement. Mitchell gotten three of the 11 Rollicking Schroeder, flaming Norton, of House Work (1998), Schroeder wrote Norton brought her keen analytic mind Democrats who voted yes to vote no, and even elegant Fenwick have all had to that he forced her and a black male repre- and what a friend called “a passion that is Thomas would have been defeated. devise their own roles as steely pioneers. sentative to share a single chair when the more than most people can take” to the In the House, Norton strove for state- Fenwick and Norton have been personal- committee met. Lowy says the incident American Civil Liberties Union, as an hood and home rule for the District of ly reticent, refusing to discuss their broken lasted one day, not two years, though the attorney for Representative Adam Clayton Columbia and full voting rights for its marriages, while Schroeder, who remains bigotry was relentless. (Another critic for Powell Jr., Muhammad Ali, white delegate. She was opposed by Tom married and seems to be the most suc- the Women’s Review and I unwittingly supremacists, and the female researchers DeLay, the Texas Republican who is cur- cessful mother, has based some of her spread the inflated story, as have writers who sued Newsweek for sexism. rently House majority leader, who called political action on personal experience. All for other publications.) Twice named to chair New York City’s the nation’s capital “a liberal bastion of three are driven, tenacious in adversity, Schroeder was “the preeminent sup- Commission on Human Rights, she iden- corruption and crime” with a “hug-a- indefatigable workaholics, and admirers of porter of women’s rights in Congress,” tified discriminatory patterns in public thug attitude.” Eleanor Roosevelt. Schroeder and Lowy concludes. “When it came to artic- schools, real estate, and banking, and tried All along, she has woven connections Norton, in particular, have put pepper in ulating and defending the liberal view- to stem white flight. Seeking systemic with an array of outsiders—scholars, our political soup. I point—a role as valid as that of legisla- remedies, she successfully pressed the socialists, civil rights activists, Jewish tive mechanic—she had few equals.” state of New York to bring household organizations, civil libertarians, feminists, © 2004 Marie Shear

Poetry by Elaine Sexton

The Masticate Class

In the days, waiting, every move I lasted two days minding a child in the house led to the clerestory at the Beach Club on the thin window, where a nest turned its insides strand of sand, where my family lived to me. In an orbit of sticks, shredded but did not belong. I took the job debris, in a clutch of pink rhododendrons, in the mouths of newborn robins my older sisters held before me, cracked from their tombs, their beaks my sisters, who sat every summer, always open to eat, my mother returns gladly, reading books, getting tans, from the dead as the mother bird earning money for college. masticates worms, crickets, a livery of small creatures dug from the earth. I remember the 2nd day I knelt licked my glass. Idle, like the idle rich All day I watched. All day I chewed by the pool, the Altantic Ocean parents at the bar, I watched their child on this verb, all stressed syllables in sight, the Isles of Shoals as if reading would be stealing as my lover chopped carrots clear in the distance. the attention they paid for. This was and onions in the kitchen, as a cat curled her claws in the bark of a tree. I watched a girl not much younger my lesson. Back and forth she swam, than I, swimming laps. The sun back and forth I weighed belonging bleached the water in the pool & not belonging, the salt water, licking its sides the way my soft drink always free, the steps to it, already mine.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 17 Unions offered an avenue for women’s within both major political parties. They leadership as both the wives of members, argued for pegging wages to the content of through a burgeoning auxiliary movement, the job rather than the characteristics of the Labor feminist foremothers and as trade unionists themselves. They worker, the principle of comparable worth; envisioned social rights to cushion the indi- the Equal Pay Act that finally passed in 1963 by Eileen Boris vidual against the vagaries of the market restricted equal to identical, thus undermin- through social security and unemployment ing their goal to re-assess the worth of The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social insurance. Removal of employment barri- women’s jobs. In union contracts, they won ers, they recognized, was insufficient to maternity leave and child care. They fought Rights in Modern America by Dorothy Sue Cobble. Princeton: overcome structures of inequality. Instead, for racial equality, including coverage of a combination of government supports, domestic service and agriculture under Princeton University Press, 2004, 325 pp., $29.95 hardcover. collective bargaining, and grassroots organ- labor law, organizing domestic labor, open- ization could bring wage earners the ing up white women’s jobs to African I income necessary to improve their stan- Americans, and ending segregation in the dard of living. To be sure, the unions were community as well as the workplace. Cobble as Myra Wolfgang, the feisty far more diverse in organization, thought, rife with male dominance; the “brothers” explains how unions in service industries international vice president of and demography than usually presented— did not always bargain with the preferences tied to appearance and customer preference, W the Hotel Employees and now appears to have had longer roots. By of the “sisters” in mind. When it came to like the flight attendants, held onto racial Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), a the 1950s, the National Women’s Party work time, for example, men desired norms, while industrial unions, like the feminist? She led the charge against the (NWP) faced “survival in the doldrums,” “lumps of leisure,” but women sought a UPWA, were more apt to challenge them. Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), calling but feminism grew among women in shorter “workday” to cope with their “dou- Labor feminism reached its pinnacle Betty Friedan the “Chamber of mixed-sex organizations, like the ble day,” and increased time for family and during the Kennedy administration with Commerce’s Aunt Tom” during a 1970 Communist Party, “the liberal establish- community life. Ester Peterson at the helm of the debate. Wolfgang defended sex-based ment,” the trade unions, and civil rights Women’s Bureau, the President’s hours, wage, and other “protective” laws groups. Cobble’s stunning reinterpretation Indeed, women constituted “the other Commission on the Status of Women, that progressive era reformers had pro- persuasively shows that we’ve been look- labor movement” that emerged in the and the Equal Pay Act. But fissures over moted to improve the working conditions ing in the wrong place for a mass move- I 1940s, not the 1930s when labor histo- sex-based protective laws widened when of wage-earning women. Equal rights ment after suffrage and before women’s rians generally locate the rise of white, UAW women joined with the newly feminists charged that these laws impeded liberation. She names this movement male-dominated industrial unionism. formed National Organization for women’s advancement into jobs previous- “labor feminism.” Women swelled the ranks in those sectors Women (NOW) to challenge these laws. ly reserved for men and, bolstered by the Beginning with World War II, millions of the economy—service and government Labor market differences account only prohibition against sex discrimination in of women fought against workplace dis- employment—that would continue to wit- partially for this division. Women in heavy the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they pushed the crimination on the basis of sex, race, age, ness union growth over the next half cen- industry found state protective laws courts to overturn women-only labor stan- and marital status, and for equal pay, child tury. From 18 percent of all unionists in impeded their obtaining better paid work, dards. Was Wolfgang out of step with the care, and the right to combine employment 1956, women became a third of the organ- while those in female-dominated indus- times? Yet she then sent her daughter and motherhood. They sought access to ized labor force by century’s end, but in the tries without other recourse clung to undercover to organize the Detroit better jobs, often sex-typed as male, but pink-collar industries of garments, commu- them. Some older women with workplace Playboy Club. The resulting contract nego- also enhancement of the light manufactur- nications, and wait work, they had long pre- seniority in male-dominated industries tiated the length of bunny suits, a perhaps ing, service, and clerical occupations where dominated. The experience of making “valued job security over job opportunity small but still significant step toward the majority of them were already laboring. good wages during World War II, lost dur- and saw protective laws and the gender empowering women in the workplace. These “working-class women tended to see ing reconversion to peacetime production divide they reinforced as enhancing What about Ann Draper? She coordi- themselves as worker and mother, bread- when women returned to lower paying employment security.” Others preferred nated the West Coast “buy union” cam- winner and homemaker”; they sought equal office and service work, encouraged working in a community of women or paigns of the Amalgamated Clothing rights but also special accommodations, women to fight “to extend economic citi- rejected “heavy” work, while still others Workers of America (ACWA) and co- like maternity leave, to make equality possi- zenship to new groups of workers through stood in solidarity with beneficiaries of founded Union WAGE (Women’s Alliance ble. They would revalue housework and state-mandated rights and benefits and protective laws. Following the elimination to Gain Equality), which promoted a labor carework, whether performed for one’s through union contracts in numerous local of most of the state protective laws by ERA that would maintain women-only family or for a wage; indeed, the worth of settings.” This story of feminism’s working- 1970, with an expanded female workforce labor laws until they could be extended to the first was central to the upgrading of the class face is intrinsically linked to the fate of “with different histories, class sensibilities, men, rather than eliminating such sex- second. Trade unions bred this “other the labor movement and its feminization. and family ties,” the labor movement based protections in the workplace. Three women’s movement,” as Cobble brilliantly Cobble deftly portrays a remarkable finally endorsed the ERA. years after feminists threw bras into a names the search for economic and social generation who “remade” early 20th-cen- In the 1970s, a new labor feminism led “freedom trash can” at the 1968 Miss justice that labor feminists championed tury social feminism, the term historians by flight attendants and clerical workers America Pageant, Draper dangled before into the 1970s. use to describe women reformers commit- organized women’s associations, like 9 to 5, California’s Social Welfare Commission a With much subtlety, Cobble puts con- ted to state-level labor standards. Unlike outside of union structures. While still ragged bra purchased at Woolworth’s— temporary feminism’s equality-difference their foremothers, labor feminists focused demanding higher wages and workplace what a woman could afford under the conundrum in historical perspective. Here on “rights” more than “protection,” control, their understanding of gender as state’s budget for the minimum wage is a book that makes class as important a women as citizens, producers, and con- socially constructed applied the “personal is worker. “This poverty wage,” she declared, category of analysis as race or gender. She sumers more than as mothers. But, like the political” to “interaction between men and “should be thrown into the garbage can.” locates our contemporary work and fami- earlier generation, theirs was a cross-class women at work and the ‘sexploitation’ of An independent socialist, Draper ly agenda—such as paid family and med- alliance, consisting of working-class union- women’s bodies.” Through collective bar- fought for women’s economic rights at ical leave, comparable worth, and remu- ists and college-educated women who held gaining and the courts, they ended discrim- work and working-class women’s right to nerated carework—in the struggles of a staff positions in various unions and the ination against pregnant workers. The new have the time and resources to care for previous generation that understood that AFL-CIO, like Katherine Ellickson, Ester feminism transformed the labor feminists, their families, eschewing individualist solu- the right to a job was not enough to Peterson, and Gladys Dickason; with the who founded the Coalition of Labor Union tions for solidaristic or class based ones. obtain the economic equity on which US Women’s Bureau; and in old-line organ- Women (CLUW) in 1974. By the 1980s and Yet the Jewish Draper—along with Addie first-class citizenship depends. She recov- izations, like the National Council of 1990s when university clerical workers won Wyatt, the first African-American woman ers their refusal “to privilege breadwin- Negro Women. Through its Labor union recognition, Cobble observes, “labor on the national staff of the United ning over caregiving and... gender equity Advisory Committee, the Women’s Bureau feminists had increased their numbers and Packinghouse Workers of America based on assimilation to the male sphere.” under Democratic administrations turned leadership in a class movement that was (UPWA), German-American Mary this network into a rapidly declining in power and prestige.” Callahan of the International Electrical Women answer the telephones at a UAW hall in national one; the labor She relegates most of her criticism to the Workers (IUE), poor white Carolyn Davis Milwaukee, WI, as part of labor’s “get out the vote” cam- feminists, in turn, pro- epilogue: Labor feminists, she says, and African-American Lillian Hatcher of paign during the 1958 elections. From The Other Women's Movement. vided the Bureau with remained tied to an industrial unionism out the United Automobile Workers of a platform of job of sync with the concerns of white collar America (UAW)—has been forgotten in rights, wage justice, and service workers for issues of quality of the popular equation of feminism with and family supports. service and customer interaction. They professional upward mobility. Now During the early rarely challenged men at home or sought to Rutgers University historian Dorothy Sue post-war years, labor transform masculinity, even when “destabi- Cobble has recovered, in the politics and feminists unsuccess- lizing gender hierarchies... by revaluing thought of such trade unionists, a feminist fully offered the those things deemed female.” legacy that in its embrace of female differ- Women’s Status Bill, A reconfigured labor force, Cobble con- ence refused to conform to “men’s ways.” which would have cludes, demands a new class politics; “the She provides a usable past for those of us removed negative gen- next women’s movement” must still quest who wish to revalue women’s labors. der distinctions, as an after economic equity. Speaking Spanish The standard story still laments the alternative to the and organizing around immigrant rights, death of feminism after suffrage. The ERA, which the NWP the next labor feminists are doing just that. “first wave,” we now know, persisted into first proposed in the They are continuing the unfinished strug- the New Deal, shaping its labor and social 1920s and which by gle to upgrade carework, gain living wages, welfare programs. The “second wave”— then had support and enhance daily life for us all. I

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 become concerned with the changing tions have become part of the art-sci- relationships of elements within an ence game. Immersion in art as a sub- overall structure…and with the coherent lime or cathartic experience becomes Putting guts into the machine transmission of ideas from one place more difficult to achieve, especially if and time to another.” the whole artwork consists of buttons by Harriet Casdin-Silver Two other important aspects of com- and a little screen. puter art are presented in “Women and Molnar’s heuristic approach to her Women, Art and Technology edited by Judy Malloy. the Search for Visual Intelligence” by computer-generated work was also sig- Patric D. Prince, in her discussion of nificant. Prince proclaims “Molnar’s Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003, Jasia Reichardt and Vera Molnar, early early recognition of the computer’s abil- entrepreneurial advocates and practi- ity to save and rework artistic research is 541 pp., $39.95 hardcover. tioners of computer art. Reichardt curat- crucial to the history of digital art and ed an exhibition of digital art in 1968 at one of the important elements of con- I London’s Institute of Contemporary temporary graphics.” Art that included 325 participants. Each he title of this review originated Except for a few important video- work had to be explained to 60,000 visi- oan Jonas started her video work in with Melbourne computer artist makers like Steina and Joan Jonas, and a tors. Spectators especially wanted to the late 1960s. A staunch feminist, her T Linda Dement, who speaks for a few acoustic artist/performers and understand “how,” and as art and tech- J paper in Women, Art and Technology, large segment of techno-artists when dancer/choreographers, Women, Art and nology have moved forward, explana- “Transmission,” talks of women’s issues: she says she wants to put guts into the “Video became a vehicle for women’s machine. However, others want the voices. It was unexplored territory. I was machine to be a machine and stay faith- interested in the condition that video and ful to machine machinations. And a performance were unexplored.” This was third group—including Australian artist true for many technologically oriented Stelarc, who is male—wants to attach women artists, who felt that they could put machine-like elements to themselves to their own stamp – a women’s stamp – on continue the evolution of the body. a relatively new medium and bypass the Zoë Sophia’s essay “Contested paternalism inherent in traditional paint- Zones: Futurity and Technological Art,” ing and sculpture. encourages the conclusion that (In The New York Times of December Australian artists are the most futuristic 19, 2003, Roberts Smith reviewed Jonas’ of any on the globe. Along with Stelarc’s recent exhibition at the Queens Museum idea that “the body must burst from its of Art—unfortunately closed March 14, biological, cultural and planetary con- 2004. Smith seems to have been aston- tainment,” Australia has also spawned ished by this “long overdue survey of Artists in Cyberculture, a 1993 video docu- Jonas’ work…Its revelations are almost mentary that states, “We move under the guaranteed to knock you sockless.” Hats shadow of our machines….for our time off to the Queens Museum and is over and their time has begun.” squished tomatoes to the major muse- Not so, say the group of Australian ums of this country who are still myopic cyberfeminists known as VNS Matrix: Pamela Z manipulating tools she used in the 1995 San Francisco Contemporary about great women artists, preferring to Male power may be declining, but women Music Players’ performance of a Louis Andriessen piece. Photo show male stars such as Nam June Paik will explore coevolutionary possibilities by Marion Gray. From Women, Art and Technology. and Matthew Barney.) between women and technology. Indeed we have already seen this happen: Though sperm may still be necessary to procre- Technology deals mostly with computer New Books from Yale ation, the presence of a male body is not. arts and communications. A more However, Stelarc is not alone in see- descriptive title for the book might have Warrior Lovers Resilience and Courage ing machines as partly human and been “Women, Art, and Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality Women, Men, and the Holocaust humans as partly machines. Linda Communications.” Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons Nechama Tec Austin, based in Portland, Oregon, and In this thought-provoking “Aided by her knowledge of Leslie Ross in New York City deal with rtists have engaged in question- book, Salmon and Symons many of the key languages similar concerns in an entirely different, ing, envisioning, building and focus on slash fiction, an of Holocaust survivors, almost primitive way. Austin, a choreog- A using telecommunication struc- erotic subgenre written Tec has produced the best rapher/dancer and Ross, a tures since at least the early days of by and for women. The and most comprehensive authors discuss the impor- gender analysis of Jewish composer/performer/instrument radio,” writes Californian Anna Couey in tance of evolutionary Holocaust survivors and builder, write in “Pigs, Barrels, and her encompassing paper, “Restructuring history to human sexual resisters to date.” Obstinate Thrummers” about their indi- Power: Telecommunication Works psychology, then demon- —Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild, Women’s vidual works as well as their collabora- Produced by Women.” She describes strate how sex differences Review of Books in erotica reflect the different selection tions. Ross describes her Tentacled Bellows dancers physically located in one part of Winner of the 2001-2002 National Jewish pressures men and women have faced. $12.00 (1989), which started with her idea to the United States dancing with others Book Award in the Holocaust category $35.00 build a machine that would enable her to located elsewhere in a space created by Eleanor Rathbone control a series of drones but leave her technology. Slow-scan television and and the Politics Never Marry a Woman hands free so she could play the bas- two-way cable TV techniques have of Conscience soon. Bellows, a veritable Rube Goldberg enabled the interactive communication with Big Feet Susan Pederson contraption, is pictured in Women, Art of artists in areas as far flung as Women in Proverbs from around the World This major new biography Mineke Schipper and Technology: a series of attachments, Amsterdam, Japan, and Massachusetts. illuminates both the public tubes, and cymbals with Ross and her One of the artists engaged in this activ- From Jamaica to Japan, from Ghana to and private sides of the Germany, this unique anthology of proverbs bassoon in the middle. Ross was unpre- ity was the late Sarah Dickenson, who, as life of Eleanor Rathbone about women provides revealing insights pared for the visual impact the weird quoted by Couey, declared, “Because of (1872-1946), who lived a into the female condition across centuries construction would have. Indeed, she the interaction of artists over the elec- life of passionate political and continents. $40.00 and social engagement, became somewhat jealous of it—she tronic media channels, a specific form of becoming one of the most important wanted more attention paid to her sound art began to emerge, rooted in the fine British women of the early twentieth New in paper accomplishments, since she “was so arts but shaped by the electronic media century. 31 illus. $40.00 The Corset happy with the broad range of groaning, themselves. In effect, we began to see A Cultural History howling, multiphonic, percussive, and the development of a new visual and Common Bodies Valerie Steele pure pitch tone it could generate.” spatial language that bridged the arts and Women, Touch and Power in “The Corset is at once Pig, an Austin and Ross collaborative technology, for it was not concerned Seventeenth-Century England couture eye candy dance and sound construct is described with the art object but rather with art as Laura Gowing and intellectually by Austin as “the intersection of human communication.” “This is a wonderful enlightening.” and constructed entities, bringing out Jennifer Hall, another of the commu- book . . . offering a new —Women’s Review of Books perspective on why men the mechanical limitations and possibil- nications artists applauded by Couey, Named one of the Best Books of the Year needed women to regulate 2001 by the Toronto Globe & Mail ities of the human body as well as the was a graduate student and researcher at each other and on why expressive and animate qualities of non- the Center for Advanced Visual Studies women were willing to do Selected for inclusion in the “Books to human objects and gadgets.” Actually at the Massachusetts Institute of so. A provocative and Remember” list by the New York Public Library machine/humans are not so futuristic Technology in the early 1980s. In 1985 persuasive piece of history.” —Cynthia Herrup $38.00 after all. Think hip and knee replace- she founded Do While Studio, “an artist Winner of the 2002 Millia Davenport Publication Award, sponsored by the ments, heart replacements, cataract studio space for technology collabora- Yale University Press Costume Society of America operations that insert a brand new lens tion.” She says in the paper that she co- yalebooks.com 110 b/w + 30 color illus. $24.95 paperback in your eye. authored with Blyth Hazen, “We have

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 19 From the video realm we also hear © Marion Ettlinger from well-knowns Steina and Dara Birnbaum as well as lesser-known artists. Steina’s paper, “My Love Affair Cheatin’ hearts, single hearts With Art: Video and Installation Work,” describes her discovery of by Nancy Berke video with her partner and collaborator Woody Vasalka, in 1969: “What a Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis. New York: rush!…As soon as I had a video camera in my hand – as soon as I had that Pantheon, 2003, 207 pp., $24.00 hardcover. majestic flow of time in my control – I knew I had my medium.” Steina’s instal- Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics lations include Tokyo Four (1991)—“all about death,” said one old man, and by Sasha Cagen. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, Steina countered, “At that moment I knew he had really seen it, but it is not 2004, 159 pp., $19.95 hardcover. really just about death”—and the stun- ning Borealis, (1993), which uses four I screens with images of rivers and ne of the provocative questions love be any less controlled? By elevating oceans and mountains on both sides of that Laura Kipnis asks in Against adultery, the fiercest of taboos, to a form each screen. O Love is this: “Why has modern of social protest, Kipnis asks her readers Steina’s essay is honest, earthy, and love developed in such a way as to maxi- to make a much needed critical evalua- Laura Kipnis fun. “I like most of the initial record- mize submission and minimize freedom tion of modern marriage, which she play- ing,” she says. “Sleet or snow or howling with so little argument about it?” This fully renames “the domestic gulag.” An social power. We submit to marital love rain, I love that part, especially if I am question, which the author poses to “rat- endorsement of adultery as the solution and the domestic strife that accompanies alone out in nature.” She tells her stu- tle a few convictions” about a subject to marital hegemony may seem implausi- it as if we had no choice and no will to dents about “the way galleries sew up the near and dear to everyone’s hearts, could ble to some and immoral to others, but challenge their ubiquitous pull. The art scene and make the artists kiss ass. I also be raised by the author of Kipnis, a professor of media studies at salves of modern domesticity—marriage always tell them they do not have to kiss Quirkyalone. Sasha Cagen’s book cele- Northwestern University, reminds us that counseling, psychotherapy, and the self- ass…it is every artist’s duty to be disobe- brates single life over the “dull relation- a polemic is meant to stir up debate. help industry—are among Kipnis’ tar- dient…there is no grander life than the ships” she says young people feel com- Kipnis does not seriously propose adul- gets: They help to construct love and creative, artistic life. It is the unknown, pelled to embrace as a necessary rite of tery as an appropriate response to marital coupling as traumatic experiences that the exploration, the fact of being your passage. While these two books are vast- discord; she merely wants her readers to can be eased, even cured. Kipnis also own person on your own time.” ly different in scope and tenor, both feel uncomfortable with a naughty sub- takes a poke at the expert language of In conclusion, Women, Art and ignite debate over what it means to love ject. Yet, there is an essential truth about love counseling. If love is the ines- Technology includes a tremendous in a society that fetishizes coupling. one of her main observations. Love has timable byproduct of social and emo- amount of fascinating information— Adultery, Kipnis’ subject, and singleness, become work. And if love becomes tional health, then, the experts warn us, and a tremendous amount is left out. Cagen’s, have historically been represent- work, then marriage maintains the work if we want to be in a couple we must We need more literature about women ed as dangerous social breeches. ethic. And adultery is a return to “become more lovable.” and art and science until one day the Against Love is a theoretically romance, or at least a “sit-down strike of Our thralldom to love is best illustrat- playing field is level, and we have art informed, delightfully brash polemic. In a the love-takes-work ethic.” ed by the images of love in popular cul- and science without splitting genders. society in which all social life is overtly as Kipnis builds much of her polemic ture, which are largely negative—of the It’s happening. I well as covertly regulated, why should around our fascination with desire’s “can’t live with you, can’t live without intractability. Desire is great; we all have you” variety. One of Kipnis’ stylistic it, yet it controls us—we do not control flares (and there are many such flares in it. Adultery represents the state of desire this book, so many that at times the text that makes love seem possible, even can be overwhelming) is recurring refer- Arizona . . . though a repressive society ruling from ences to New Yorker cartoons, like this Desert Patriarchy on high forces us to stifle our longings. one: “Man watches TV as wife makes Invoking Freud’s famous work Mormon and Mennonite Communities in the Chihuahua Valley dinner. Caption: ‘Life without Parole.’” JANET BENNION Civilization and Its Discontents, Kipnis The book’s argument is enhanced by Three Anglo communities in northern Mexico have ordered their claims that modern love and its domestic Kipnis’ clever play between low and high. lives around male supremacy, rigid religious duty, and a rejection of partner, marriage, have become symbol- The wisdom these cartoons display about modern technology and culture. In explaining their way of life, ic fences against the wayward urges, the pitfalls of modern intimacy is com- Bennion sheds light not only on these particular communities but which cut the path to adultery. With the plemented throughout by the radical also on the role of the desert environment in the development and maintenance of fundamentalist ideology in other parts of the United same bravura that shapes much of this social theory (Bloch, Wilhelm Reich, States and around the globe. polemic, Kipnis borrows from the influ- Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault) that “An excellent work . . . full of well-observed comments, memorable ential German philosopher Ernst Bloch, underlies Kipnis’ critique of coupling. characters, and human interest. It reads well as literature as well as who maintained that a combination of Still, feminist readers might find it curi- science.” —Claudia L. Bushman, co-author, Building the Kingdom: A hope and utopian desire is what propels ous that Kipnis prefers these “intellectu- History of Mormons in America 230 pp., 36 illus., $45.00 cloth most individuals to act. She suggests that al dads” to second-wave feminist cri- adultery is an attempt to achieve tiques of marriage and monogamy, which The Keepsake Storm utopia—a motivation to remake love. are absent from her polemic but are cer- GINA FRANCO This is a bold assumption, given the tainly no less radical in their analysis of A verse cycle that probes the depths of the heart—a meditation on the social opprobrium that accompanies domestic love. meaning of life in a difficult world. Drawing on the rich tradition of adultery, but a keen observation, Kipnis rounds out her polemic with a storytelling in Latino literature, Franco explores the transformative nonetheless: We don’t cheat to hurt. We look at “spousal politics.” At the center power of compassion as she addresses themes of cultural alienation, lost family roots, and the uncertain resiliency of the self. cheat because we’re idealists, looking for of this discussion is, of course, the pub- “Gina Franco does the impossible thing that lyric poets set out to the ultimate expression of love. lic scrutiny of former President Clinton’s do: she retrieves the storm of being in its unsettling breadth, the Kipnis makes her point about adultery sexual indiscretions. Citing the 1990s as world’s devouring, the thou-art-that of transformation: hunger, love, as longed-for utopia by providing a sam- an “adulterous decade,” Kipnis examines death.” —Alice Fulton pling of answers to the question, “what our national politics as a game of dueling A Camino del Sol book. 104 pp., $15.95 paper can’t you do because you’re in a couple?” hypocrisies. Moral marauders attempt to Back in print! Filling almost ten pages of text, these guilt-trip adulterers into halting (or con- Women’s Seclusion and Men’s Honor “can’ts” make amusing and thought-pro- template halting) their transgressions by Sex Roles in North India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan voking reading. Kipnis’ list includes pro- insisting, “Think of the children.” Yet in DAVID G. MANDELBAUM hibitions against everything from pot what other context, Kipnis asks, does Hindus and Muslims of northern South Asia share the belief that smoking, junk food eating, and joke our society think of the children? She women should seclude themselves from men and that men must telling to banking, dressing, and sending quotes statistics that are probably all too supervise the conduct of women. This book explains why these e-mails. These relationship regulations familiar to readers of The Women’s Review concepts—purdah and izzat—are so crucially important to so many people. indicate how love is maintained. In fact, of Books: The United States is one of the “A broadly based, sensitive, and balanced analysis . . . a highly the word “can’t” is itself the operative lowest ranking of all industrialized readable book.” —Contemporary Sociology term in the “domestic gulag.” Thus, nations when it comes to child health “Those interested in gender systems should find this work of great Kipnis explains adultery’s utopian lure: and welfare, education, daycare, and value.” —American Anthropologist “If modern love has power over us affordable housing. 153 pp., $19.95 paper domesticity is its enforcement wing.” Not that Kipnis is an out-and-out n Quirkyalone, Sasha Cagen endeav- The University of Arizona Press advocate of flexing our cheatin’ hearts. ors to create a movement for those Tucson AZ 85721 • 1-800-426-3797 • www.uapress.arizona.edu Still, she would like her readers at least to I who have not yet found their soul- question modern marriage’s omnipresent mates. While she is not against love or

20 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 coupling, she celebrates “our emancipa- speaks to a generation of Internet-savvy tion from compulsory coupledom.” young people. Cagen also maintains that Cagen, a San Francisco-based writer and quirkyalones constitute a “gay-friendly, editor of the magazine To-Do List, feels open-minded population,” yet she leaves Beyond Elizabeth Taylor that no one should be in a relationship the major difference between gays and for the sake of belonging to a socially lesbians and heterosexuals largely unar- by Serinity Young sanctioned couple. But there is more. ticulated: Because gay coupling is not “Quirkyalone” has become an identity socially sanctioned, resistance to status Cleopatra Dismounts by Carmen Boullosa, translated by for many. Those who seem never to be quo coupling is a wholly different experi- in relationships and who spend more ence in the gay community. Geoff Hargreaves. New York: Grove Atlantic, time alone or with close friends make up Using James Baldwin as a the core of Cagen’s newly anointed quirkyalone example also points to 2004, 192 pp., $22.00 hardcover. quirkyalone movement. some gaps in Cagen’s research. She Cagen begins her manifesto with an includes him in a chapter on Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon explanation about how her “movement” “quirkyalones throughout history.” was born—an epiphany on the subway Baldwin’s gay relationships suggest that by Francesca T. Royster. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, that led to an essay, which created a stir in while his expatriate life might be con- the alternative media community. The sidered “quirky,” he wasn’t alone. Other 2003, 258 pp., $19.95 paper. quirkyalone “movement” appears to be quirkyalone examples such as Nina I fueled by events such as “quirkyalone Simone, Katharine Hepburn, and the day,” a sort of anarchist Valentine’s Day, Japanese courtesan Sei Shonagan as well as a website, www.quirkyalone. appear to reflect Cagen’s list of favorite leopatra, actually Cleopatra VII, The scribe’s job is to transmit the com. As much as I am intrigued by the artistic oddballs rather than the con- was born in Egypt in 69 BCE words that are dictated; issues of truth creation of a movement to celebrate sin- summate representatives of single life. C and committed suicide on and accuracy are not relevant to his gle life, especially as a statement against While Cagen seems more at ease with August 10, 30 BCE She was a descendent trade, and his own personality cannot compulsory coupling, Quirkyalone is never pop culture examples, I wondered of Ptolemy, one of Alexander the enter the record. Yet, as the scribe’s grip exactly clear about how a “movement” of about those women artists who favored Great’s generals, who created a royal on the present loosens, he wrestles like-minded single people actually works. their work over conventional family life, dynasty that ruled Egypt for 300 years. mightily with memories that suck him Most single people do not claim their for instance, Janet Frame or Zora Neale Like Alexander, her ancestry was down only to spit him up. Inevitably, relationship status as an identity—and in Hurston. Weren’t these women Macedonian, or northern Greek. She our sense of Cleopatra’s charisma—her an age of identity politics, how does one quirkyalones? was the first in her line to actually speak power to attract and compel others— make a movement out of a newly named Quirkyalone has various other contra- Egyptian in addition to her first lan- comes from his struggle to face his own identification? How do singles as a group dictions. While quirkyalones prefer their guage, which was Greek. So much for intoxication with her, to understand unite and across what lines? solitude to getting involved in “practice historical facts. Under review here are how distorted his memory has become, Cagen may belong to a “post-femi- relationships,” Cagen is uncomfortable two very different books about and finally to recognize her within her nist” generation, but she maintains that about accepting what becomes a reality Cleopatra; one is an act of imagination, own fantastic realm. “the quirkyalone is clearly a feminist for many single women as they age. She and the other engages her various the- Diomedes’ memory seduces him idea.” She insists that it is not a cult or makes a problematic statement when she atrical and cinematic depictions, espe- down three different paths, on which “nation,” and promotes “quirkyalone” observes: “Of course, we don’t want to cially in terms of race, from we meet three Cleopatras at different as a term of empowerment for those be forty-six and in a relationship for only Shakespeare to the present. periods of her life. There is Cleopatra individuals who value the independent, the third time, but we’re not so sure we Years ago the French feminist with Anthony (the woman in love); single life. Be single and proud, Cagen like the alternative either.” Quirkyalone as Monique Wittig called upon women to Cleopatra as a teenager (the woman of announces. Resist the backlash era’s a whole never really reconciles the com- remember a time when women were action); and finally Cleopatra among push toward compulsory coupling plicated choices that can influence an powerful, or, if memory failed, to the Amazons (the woman on the line (shades of Kipnis’ polemic here). individual’s relationship status. invent such a past. Whether or not they between the patriarchal and matriarchal Cagen warns her readers of the toxic According to Tuula Gordon, a Finnish are aware of answering Wittig’s call, worlds). It is in the last segment, in effects of the self-help industry’s cou- sociologist who has studied single feminist novelists have re-imagined his- which Cleopatra is propelled into the pling frenzy. On the bookshelf of women, single life is a complex choice torical and mythic women long impris- magical world of the Amazons by an quirkyalone health hazards are texts determined by numerous competing cir- oned within the strictures of male opening in the cosmos, that Boullosa’s ranging from the how-to’s What Men cumstances. What is more, love is some- understanding. Christa Wolf’s deeply visionary powers immerse the reader in Really Want by Herb Goldberg and The times just the luck of the draw. If one is felt depiction of the Trojan War, a realm that both fascinates and repels. Rules by Sherri Schneider and Ellen Fein driven by Cagen’s principle of no com- Cassandra, and Marion Zimmer She accomplishes this in large part to the conservative social theory of promise, why judge the 46 year old who Bradley’s presentation of the women through the sensual strength of her Barbara Whitehead’s Why There Are No has had only three relationships? Maybe around King Arthur in The Mists of writing: We see, feel, touch, taste, and Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the this hypothetical figure is a quirkyalone Avalon come to mind. Now Mexican smell sea, earth, blood. It is a fantastic New Single Woman. pioneer, who never found a love to call novelist Carmen Boullosa has reinter- realm and Boullosa’s skills as a writer For readers wondering who exactly her own and refused to settle for the preted Cleopatra in Cleopatra Dismounts. are fully deployed in her subtle shading these quirkyalones are, Cagen offers sta- dull relationships that came knocking at The novel is carefully constructed over of the border between the everyday tistics, graphs, and pie charts. Her infor- her door. Choosing to remain single in a the quicksand of memory itself. It is and the mythic. Cleopatra is not, how- mal demographics describe the average marriage culture has many more com- narrated by Cleopatra’s scribe, a eunuch ever, passively swept up into this magi- quirkyalone as a heterosexual, urban plexities than Cagen entertains in her named Diomedes addled by the blasting cal realm; her imagination draws her to dweller between the ages of 25 and 45, zine-like liberation document. The tan- currents of history that had him first it. The power that fascinates others is with most hovering gled reasons why peo- transcribe Cleopatra’s history from her also what allows her to perceive things around 30, the author’s ple become and remain own dictation, then destroy the record that are hidden to most. It makes her age. Cagen also provides Illustration from Quirkyalone. single are relatively of that history so that new versions daring and draws her toward forces that profiles complete with uncharted territory, could be invented to suit Rome’s patri- might even surpass her own. When photo-booth pictures of which Cagen fails to archal pride and Orientalist fantasies. among the Amazons, she balances quirkyalones. These explore. include friends, acquain- There is, neverthe- tances, and diverse, well- less, much to admire known male figures about Quirkyalone. such as the ’80s rock Cagen’s use of inspira- musician Morrissey and tional quotes, her the novelist James exploration of “self- Baldwin; however, as matrimony,” the value the author notes, the she places on friend- Special Offer quirkyalone identity is ship, her profiles of largely claimed by quirkyalones, her chap- To Book Group Members women. ter on couples who Send us the names and addresses of the people in your While Quirkyalone maintain quirkyalone group and we will send each of them a free sample copy may be affirming for lifestyles, and her hom- of The Women's Review of Books. any woman who values age to the sitcom herself and her friend- Golden Girls reveal an GO BEYOND OPRAH ships first, its target endearing and novel audience is clear. Its approach to creative, Send addresses to Book Group Offer zine-like format, which alternative lifestyle Women's Review of Books includes illustrations, choices. It’s a text for Wellesley Center for Research on Women typographic variations, individuals who strug- 106 Central Street patchwork collage, and gle to resist a culture of Wellesley, MA 02481 daybook-style writing, conformity. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 21 between choices, between worlds: patri- straints that accompany the Cleopatra archy/matriarchy, Rome/Egypt, the icon for black women... become a real and the mythic. Boullosa’s means to articulate the desire for cre- Cleopatra is rendered with a will that ative possibility and control.” She cites Ask and tell has the potential to move or even dis- Leslie Uggams, who in 1968 became the solve boundaries. first African American to portray by Lynne Gouliquer Boullosa keeps a tight rein on her Cleopatra in Her First Roman, a musical narrative, peppering it with established parody of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. In Officially Gay: The Political Construction of Sexuality by the historical references, all the while her book on beauty and etiquette, The emphasizing the deceptiveness of Leslie Uggams Beauty Book, Uggams pro- US Military by Gary L. Lehring. Philadelphia: Temple memory and the way each person’s posed a new and quite specific defini- responses to events shapes her or his tion of African-American womanhood University Press, 2003, 229 pp., $19.95 paper. world. By suggesting that Cleopatra’s as respectable, tasteful, and ladylike. In choices still dangle before us, she makes the book she advises her readers to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Debating the Gay Ban in the Military Cleopatra’s story all women’s story. avoid “flashiness, overtly sexual looks and any look that calls attention to edited by Aaron Belkin and Geoffrey Bateman. Boulder, CO: n Becoming Cleopatra Francesca itself.” Ironically, Uggams warns her Royster, too, sets Cleopatra free by readers against the “Cleopatra look.” Lynne Rienner, 2003, 201 pp., $18.95 paper. I documenting her many theatrical The blaxploitation film Cleopatra I and cinematic depictions, which she is Jones (1973) defined another model for careful to place within their historical African-American women. Jones is an he year 2003 marked the 10–year sitions of the military and is not repre- contexts. She begins with Shakespeare’s all-powerful superhero, but at the same anniversary of the “don’t ask, sentative of US society in general. Desch Antony and Cleopatra, in which race plays time she represents an ideal of the T don’t tell” military ban on openly argues that Republican political orienta- a crucial role, with Shakespeare imagin- authentic black woman based on the gay servicemen and women. The publica- tion and southern regional origin corre- ing Cleopatra, and all of Egypt, as black cultural nationalism that was tion of these two books, therefore, is late with negative attitudes about homo- black: “Think on me,/ That am with sweeping the country in the ’70s. She is timely. Together, they offer an intellectu- sexuality. Thus, as the military becomes Phoebus’s amorous pinches black.” Yet a complex character with competing ally stimulating treatise on the subject of more homogenous, antihomosexual atti- in spite of our cultural reverence for loyalties to the two worlds she bridges: homosexuality, the US military, and US tudes become more entrenched. Shakespeare, even to this day Cleopatra that of the white power of the CIA and society. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell consists of In a similar sociopolitical discussion, is rarely cast as black. the black power of her old neighbor- the proceedings from the conference, “Is David Segal notes that in foreign mili- Royster’s historical acumen informs hood, the Watts section of Los the Gay Ban Based on Military Necessity taries, gender integration co-varies with her discussion of the birth of film, Angeles. Queen Latifa pushed the role or Prejudice?” held at the University of the integration of homosexuals. In other which she shows coincided with of Cleopatra even further in Set It Off California, Santa Barbara, in 2000. words, the more that women are accepted heightened interest in the Orient and (1996), in which she played a lesbian Excluding the editors’ introduction and a and incorporated into all roles of a Egypt as well as with fluid categories bank robber named Cleo. This film historical overview by expert Timothy nation’s military, the greater the likelihood of immigrant whiteness. For example, dramatizes the dead-end lives of black Haggerty, Aaron Belkin and Geoffrey that homosexuals will be officially accept- Italians and Jews were perceived as less single mothers stuck in low-paying Bateman’s book reads like a lively debate. ed and protected against discrimination. white than immigrants of Anglo-Saxon jobs, for whom crime is their only Thinkers, researchers, and gay former From the perspective of the military, ancestry. Orientalist fantasies and racial chance at a way out. soldiers discuss the issues of soldiers’ the nation, and lesbian and gay male sol- ambiguity came together when Theda In her epilogue, Royster brings the privacy, military unit cohesion, the eco- diers, the cost of the ban is enormous. Bara was cast in the silent film Cleopatra reader back to the question of nomic and individual social costs of the According to Dixon Osburn, the human (1917). Despite the fact that Bara Cleopatra’s race through her discussion policy, and the experiences of other mili- cost to individual soldiers manifests described herself as “a nice Jewish girl of the Chicago Field Museum’s exhibi- taries. The format, while unconventional, itself physically and psychologically from Cincinnati,” the Fox film studio tion, “Cleopatra of Egypt: From is refreshing and encourages the reader because of the violence and harassment invented a more exotic, Arabian past History to Myth,” in October 2001. The to engage actively with the issues. that result from living in a homophobic for her. (They made up her name by exhibition, too, raised the question, In contrast, the focus of Officially Gay culture of hostility. He believes that the spelling “Arab” backwards and ordered “Was Cleopatra black?” and answered is the construction of homosexual iden- fact that one of the country’s largest her to remain silent during interviews, by stating that this would not have been tity. Gary L. Lehring describes how dis- employers is allowed to discriminate and pretending that she did not speak an issue in Egypt. But as Royster’s study tinctive social-political forces, particular treat homosexuals as second-class citi- English.) Royster argues that Bara’s shows, Cleopatra’s race has been and to certain time periods, successfully zens invites harassment at the least, and racial indeterminacy as a Jewish remains an issue today. She remarks “inscribed” their ideas about homosexu- probably aggression. woman complemented Cleopatra’s pointedly that in the exhibition it was ality into US law and military policy. He Osburn reports that the military racial indeterminacy. acknowledged that Cleopatra’s race is shows how the intertwined domains of spends over 30 million dollars annually to Cleopatra’s race is again raised in unknown, yet it featured a white marble US politics, power, and law define, con- train new soldiers to replace those dis- Cecil B. De Mille’s Cleopatra (1934) bust of her image. And nowhere did it strain, and control the territory where charged for homosexuality. He notes fur- when a minor character asks “Is she include a discussion of Cleopatra in identities such as homosexuality are con- ther that the cost of the hunt for uni- black?” The question is laughed away in African-American culture, although it structed. Both books predict that the ban formed homosexuals (e.g., hours spent the film, but for Royster it lingers. did include images of Cleopatra in will eventually be lifted. Each, in its own on military investigations, discharge Cleopatra is both of Egypt and above it. American popular culture. Royster has manner, offers strategies and warnings boards, command time, lawyers, and liti- In the film, her power is a product of demonstrated that Cleopatra’s race concerning the timing and process for gation) has never been calculated. Thus, her whiteness, which is contrasted and remains a question that resonates with the elimination of the policy. the actual monetary cost has been down- emphasized through the presence of meaning above and beyond any particu- The exclusion of homosexuals from played and even ignored, which for a her black slaves. This is continued in lar historical moment. the US military is examined from the per- nation caught with enormous public debt George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra continues to intrigue us spective of various disciplines in Don’t and responsibilities represents a ques- Cleopatra (1900), filmed in 1946 with because she is one of the few women Ask, Don’t Tell. For example, from a legal tionable practice. Vivian Leigh, whose whiteness was pur- in history who held great political point of view, Diane Mazur notes that The discussants in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell posely highlighted to contrast with the power, yet we cannot get a handle on military policy and laws, especially those essentially agree that the ban will be struck blackness of her slaves. her. In very different ways these two concerning women and homosexuals, down, but not in the near future. In con- Despite this history, Royster argues books reposition Cleopatra yet again, have traditionally been exempt from clusion, they offer the following points: that for African-American women “the still keeping alive her vitality, allure, close scrutiny for constitutionality. The Mady Segal and Dixon Osburn foresee creative possibilities as well as the con- and power. I notion that the military is distinct from Congress overturning the policy. In con- civil society and requires a separate disci- sidering this policy change, however, plinary system has led the judicial system Lawrence Korb cautions that military essentially to defer to all military policy effectiveness will need to be considered. decisions. Mazur argues that such defer- Nathaniel Frank notes that the evidence MOVING? ence supports an unhealthy separation suggests that effectiveness would not be Don’t miss an issue! between the military and civil society. harmed. Indeed, says Laura Miller, because Ultimately, civil society begins to lose the lesbian and gay soldiers would come out ability to control its military–an undesir- slowly and in small numbers, it is unlikely Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. able outcome for a democratic state. that this would create a large-scale prob- Michael Desch analyzes this civil-mili- lem in the US military. Jay Williams sums We need your OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as tary cleavage from a sociopolitical view- up: “Lifting the ban will not be horren- well as your NEW one. Send the information to: Address Change, point. He suggests that the US “military dous ...[but] not problem free.” is much more homogenous than it has The Women’s Review of Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA been at any time in the past.” Soldiers, n Officially Gay, Lehring argues that in more than ever before, tend to come the last century, the emergence of 02481, or phone toll-free 888-283-8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email from the southern states, and in increas- I the homosexual identity left behind a [email protected]. ing numbers, they identify as legacy of controversies. This is especially Republicans. This demographic shift, he the case for the US military, with its says, is in sharp contrast to past compo- problematic policy regarding homosexu-

22 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 ality. Lehring believes that three power- ask, don’t tell” policy and the passage of seeking social institutions—religion, Defense of Marriage Acts may be inter- medicine, and psychiatry/psychology— preted as major setbacks for the gay and The Bookshelf played a central role in the sociopolitical lesbian movement, they can also be seen construction of homosexual identity: “As as last-ditch political moves by powerful systems of ‘truth’ production, these three but threatened social groups. Regardless The Bookshelf provides a sampling of books of interest by and about women that we’ve discursive systems have helped delineate of which interpretation you adopt, received in our office recently. For a more extensive listing, please visit our website, and define gay identity,” and sexuality in Lehring argues that, to date, most gains www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview. general, he says. The values of these have come as the result of mobilizing three institutions regarding sex and sexu- social pressure for securing equal rights. Andrea Barnet, All-NNight Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, ality are embedded in US laws, such as But, he warns that the gay and lesbian 1913-11930. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2004, 260 pp., paper. A sympathetic the now invalidated state sodomy laws movement should not be satisfied with exploration of the lives of women in New York City when feminism took hold of and recent federal and state Defense of advancing only on this front. While this the country and the youth defied the conventions of the previous generation in a Marriage Acts, and military policy. Today, progress is good and necessary, there are way that leaves lasting imagery even today. Barnet presents the lives and works of negative ideas and values that were part reasons to beware. As Mary Katzenstein women poets, artists, singers, writers, and entrepreneurs such as Mina Loy, of early understandings of homosexuali- notes in her book Faithful and Fearless: Isadora Duncan, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Marianne Moore, Bessie Smith, ty remain enshrined in official discourse, Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and and A’Lelia Walker through their own words and images as well as through despite social changes. Military, “Equal opportunity norms pro- Barnet’s lively commentary. An entertaining and engaging picture of the Jazz Age When President Clinton planned to vide no possibility for feminists who emerges, as well as these women’s contributions to racial and social equality. lift the ban that made the presence of gay might wish to challenge the war-making Lyn Mikel Brown, Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls. New York: New men and lesbians in the military illegal, functions of the military as masculinist.” York University Press, 2003, 259 pp., hardcover. Using interviews with 421 the Joint Chiefs openly rebelled. Having Similarly, Lehring cautions that if gay girls of vastly different socio-economic, racial, and geographical backgrounds, found a directive from their commander- men and lesbians focus only on equal Brown analyzes the phenomenon of “girlfighting.” She criticizes previous studies in-chief distasteful, members of the mil- rights they risk losing the ability to chal- of this problem because of their tendency to view the sometimes tempestuous itary hierarchy entered the political arena lenge defamatory definitions of homo- relationships between girls strictly on the psychological level, ignoring the social in an attempt to influence the outcome sexuality and the culture of the US mili- and political constructs that influence and reinforce such behaviors. She argues of a political decision. In the process, tary that supports them. When homosex- that a more accurate and helpful perspective on girls’ and women’s relationships says Lehring, civilian control over the ual identity is narrowly defined as an must recognize the outside forces that sustain competitive structures, and she military was threatened. equal rights issue, obsolete values con- calls for a de-internalizing of the problem. Brown declares that to change the pat- The military’s justifications for con- cerning sex and sexuality that are embed- terns of female animosity we must address the social environment as well as the tinuing the ban have changed over time. ded in US law may be left unchallenged. individual. The earliest rationale to justify the ban Each of these books makes a unique Elinor Burkett, So Many Little Enemies, So Little Time: An American Woman in All the was based on the “immorality” of same- and important contribution to the grow- Wrong Places. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004, 325 pp., hardcover. sex relations. This rationale was then ing body of literature concerning the Burkett lived in the Russian-speaking country of Kyrgyzstan immediately follow- replaced by a psycho-medical classifica- debate on the US military’s ban on ing September 11, 2001. As a Fulbright professor traveling with her husband, tion of homosexuals as mentally unsta- homosexuality. Though Gary Lehring Burkett’s trip to Central Asia landed her right in the midst of an international cri- ble, developmentally delayed, untrust- could have devoted more analysis to the sis. Unable to discern hatred among the people that she interacted with on a day- worthy, and easily blackmailed. role of gay men and lesbians themselves to-day basis and feeling no danger, she opted to remain in an area of the world Following the mobilization of gay and in defining homosexual identity, the that most Americans feared. Drawing on the e-mails she exchanged with people lesbian activists, homosexuality was strength of the book lies in his demon- back home, Burkett highlights the disparity between her experiences in Central declassified as a mental disorder. The stration of how sociopolitical attitudes Asia and the former Soviet Union and the conceptions and experiences of most rationale for keeping homosexuals out of and values are translated into laws and Americans at that time. the military was again modified. Now the policy. As for Belkin and Bateman’s military says it must maintain the ban to book, some readers may fault the authors Sharron Dalton, Our Overweight Children: What Parents, Schools, and Communities Can protect straight men’s privacy and unit for not including discussants in favor of Do to Control the Epidemic. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, cohesion. Both books note that the US the ban. However, proponents of this 292 pp., hardcover. Dalton begins this informative, scholarly, yet accessible book military actively fights to maintain its viewpoint refused invitations to partici- with the frightening information that about one third of children in the United current discrimination against homosex- pate in the conference. Belkin and States are obese, and that this condition is leading to a surge in related diseases uals by appealing to entrenched anti- Bateman raise questions that successfully such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. She goes on to discuss the nega- homosexual attitudes, while ignoring all shed light on this perspective. Thus, for tive social and psychological effects that accompany overweight and proposes a scientific research and opinions that do readers on both sides of the issue, these solution to the problem. Stressing prevention and recognizing that there is no not support its position. books further our understanding and quick fix, Dalton calls upon parents and families, school systems, and communi- Still, Lehring also sees the lifting of the offer useful, diverse, and divergent facts, ties to take an active interest in the health of the nation’s children. She advocates ban as inevitable. While Clinton’s “don’t findings, and arguments. I providing children with nutritional meals and snacks and promoting physical activity rather than sitting at home in front of the television or computer. She argues that overconsumption of food and lack of aerobic activity are trends that the whole society will have to take on if they are to be reversed. Madeleine Gagnon, trans. Howard Scott and Phyllis Aronoff, Women in a World Calling All Poets at War: Seven Dispatches from the Front. Vancouver, BC, Canada: Talonbooks, 2003, 319 pp., paper. Beginning with a preface by Benoîte Groult that equates and Writers: war with the oppression of the female, this book highlights women’s experiences in war at the close of the 20th century. Gagnon writes of the women of Kosovo, Our July 2004 issue focuses on Bosnia, Israel, Palestine, and Pakistan in a literary voice rather than a detached new books of fiction and poetry. journalistic one to deepen the emotional impact of their words. Early in the book, Gagnon poses the question of how to record the silence of women. With her gift of seeing to the heart of things and her eloquence, she proceeds to bring Has your book been advertised voice and silence together to give the reader a clear picture of what women’s lives yet in the Women’s Review? are like in wartime. Marybeth Holleman, The Heart of the Sound: An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost. 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Book your ad by June 1. journal entries from the time when she was in an abusive marriage and her com- mentary ten years after leaving that marriage, Black Eye is a moving piece of work Camera ready delivery by June 10; in which Strasser attempts to reason out why she remained in the relationship On-ssale date July 1 - August 20, 2004. even though she had the means to leave. Strasser brings the reader along on her journey of self-discovery, starting with the illness of her mother when Strasser Click the “discounted ad was a young girl through her husband’s the verbal and eventual physical abuse. rates” link on our homepage, Her choice to leave him coincided with her rediscovery of her long-dormant cre- ative voice: Her writing flourished after she took her two young boys and left. www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview The story reaches no neat conclusions and is more powerful for it. Her voice is one of a woman who is still learning to this day. continued on next page

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 8 / May 2004 23 continued from previous page Sunny Greece! Small island house! Weekly, Melissa Walker, ed., Country Women Cope with Hard Times: A Collection of Oral monthly. On isolated terraced mountain slope Histories. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004, 208 pp., Classified overlooking sea. Breathtaking sunsets, moon- hardcover. Through a series of interviews with 17 women born between 1890 sets. Dramatic hikes. Marvelous peace. and 1940 into Tennessee and South Carolina working-class families, Walker Book your classified ad at www.wellesley.edu/ Moonrock: (614) 986-6945; email: WISE- highlights the struggles of a group outside the scope of most written histories. WomensReview or e-mail [email protected] [email protected]. These rural farming women from the South tell of their daily struggles with weather, shortages, and illness. Women’s tasks in this period included food preparation (sometimes for many people, if there were hired workers for the Publications Miscellaneous crops at that time); clothing production; and childcare and care for sick or eld- erly family members. Some of the women interviewed lived in comfortable Need materials on the contemporary feminist Historian needs apartment Cambridge/ houses that their families owned, while others were tenant farmers who might movement? The monthly feminist newspaper Boston to sublet August 1-28. Contact not even have sufficient protection from the elements. Each story begins with a off our backs has been reporting on the move- Harriet Alonso: (718) 469-3926; or short biographical note by the editor/interviewer, which is followed by the ment since 1970. We have published detailed [email protected]. woman’s first-person account. This book chronicles a history that has until now coverage of every NWSA conference. Use off often been confined to the oral traditions of family life, passed from grand- our backs in your classes. $25 per year. $30 Feminist editor. Ph.D. Prize-winning author. mother to child, escaping the notice of outsiders. institutional rate. 2337B 18th St., NW, Twenty years’ experience editing every imagi- Martha Ward, Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau. Jackson, MS: Washington, DC 20009. Attn.: WRB. (202) nable kind of writing. References provided, University Press of Mississippi, 2004, 246 pp., hardcover. With a lively and 234-8072; www.offourbacks.org. including many happy WRB readers. (510) vibrant narrative voice, Ward tackles the mystery that surrounds the mother and 524-7913; [email protected]. daughter of the same name who lived in New Orleans in the mid-19th century. Some people still make pilgrimages to the Laveaus’ single tomb, and gossip Job Opportunities WRITING COACH AND EDITOR. Get abounds concerning these Catholic, French-speaking, Creole women who chal- that article or book into print with coaching or lenged white supremacy and led tumultuous lives. Famous for their practice of FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, INC., nineteen- editing from author praised by Charlayne Voodoo, both the women fell in love with unattainable men, had a vocation to year-old newsletter (editorials, poetry, reviews, Hunter-Gault, Gloria Steinem and Maya comfort the suffering, and were icons for the newly freed black population. The more) by and for women sexual-abuse sur- Angelou. www.JoanLester.com/; (510) 548- mother-daughter team felt the call of the spirit world and chose to follow it, vivors, seeks new members for its part-time, 1224. ignoring the voices of those who would label their choice sinful. The text is volunteer Editorial Collective. No publish- supplemented with extensive notes and a chronology. ing experience needed. Must be available two Editor. Books, dissertations, smaller projects. meetings/month in Cambridge, MA. Raise Cornell Ph.D. Background in anthropology, Marjorie Weinberg, The Real Rosebud: The Triumph of a Lakota Woman. Lincoln, your voice! Email: [email protected]. history and literature. $25/hour. Contact Carol NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 86 pp., hardcover. A friend and at: [email protected]. student of Rosebud Yellow Robe, Weinberg tells the story of the woman whose name, many believe, Orson Welles used as the key to his movie Citizen Kane. Music Whether or not this was the case, through her dedication to the education of herself and others, Rosebud Yellow Robe was an inspiration to many, and her Women’s Music. Laura Powers, Emmy-nom- The Women’s Review of Books grandson contributes a moving foreword to this biography. Yellow Robe was inated, “Legends of the Goddess”: www.lau- Classified Rates: born in South Dakota into a proud Lakota family and later moved to New York rapowerscom. Haunting, ethereal. City after attending college in her home state. At that time Native women who $1.25 per word (1-3 insertions) actively pursued higher education were rare, but that did nothing to deter her. $1.15 per word (4-7 insertions) Yellow Robe went on to bring the story of her people to the rest of the country Travel $1.05 cents per word (8+ insertions) through radio programs and storytelling. I All classified ads must be prepaid. Phone numbers Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Vacation home. Sea Ranch, Northern and e-mail addresses count as two words, abbrevia- Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 280 pp., paper. Examining California. Weekly. Use 10 miles ocean bluff tions as one word each. works by both black and white writers and thinkers in the United States, trails. Email: [email protected]. I Copy must reach us by the 5th of the month prior Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, Wright argues that black writers wrote in to an issue cover date (e.g., May 5 for the June issue). dialogue with works by whites. She looks at works by Thomas Jefferson, G. W. Carol Christ, She Who Changes, Re-IImagining I F Hegel, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, which were later countered by W. E. the Divine in the World (Palgrave-MacMillan, Advertising is accepted at the publisher’s discre- tion. Services and products have not been tested; list- B Dubois, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. By looking at women 2003), leads two programs in Greece: ings do not imply endorsement by The Women’s writers Naomi King, Carolyn Rodgers, and Andrea Levy, Wright demonstrates Goddess Pilgrimage in Crete and Sacred Review of Books. that women are now finding their voices within the framework of theories Journey in Greece. Ariadne Institute, For more information or to place your ad, posited by their male counterparts, similar to the way those men countered the P.O. Box 303 Blue River, OR. 97413;(541) call Anita at 781-283-2560 work of white philosophers. 822-3201; [email protected]; or email [email protected]. — Bethany Towne www.goddessariadne.org/.

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