The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XXI, No. 3 December 2003 74035 $4.00

I In This Issue

I Political organizers are serious, while the patrons of drag bars and cabarets just wanna have fun, right? Julie Abraham challenges the cate- gories in her review of Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco. Cover story D

I Before she died, Carolyn Heilbrun contributed a final essay to the Women’s Review—a discussion of Beautiful Shadow: A Biography of Patricia Highsmith. The piece expresses Heilbrun’s lifelong inter- est in writing women’s lives, and we publish it with pride and sadness, along with a tribute to the late scholar and mystery novelist. p. 4 Kay Scott (right) and tourists at Mona's 440, a drag bar, c. 1945. From Wide Open Town. I When characters have names like Heed the Night, L, and Celestial, we could be nowhere but in a Toni Morrison novel. Despite Tales of the city its title, Love, her latest, is more by Julie Abraham philosophical exploration than pas- Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 by Nan Alamilla Boyd. sionate romance, says reviewer Deborah E. McDowell. p. 8 Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 319 pp., $27.50 hardcover. I I The important but little-known n Wide Open Town, Nan Alamilla Boyd so much lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender feminist Lucy Stone, who stumped presents queer San Francisco as the scholarship, have served as key points of the country for women’s suffrage, Iproduct of a town “wide open” to all reference in US queer studies over the past forms of pleasure, all forms of money-mak- two decades. kept her own name after marriage, ing, and the conjunction of the two. Boyd’s To embark on any such project is a bold and advocated for divorce, is the work is the latest addition to a series of move. But to take up San Francisco was par- subject of a much-needed new place-based studies by historians and anthro- ticularly brave, given the many already avail- pologists as well as geographers and urban- able accounts of queer San Francisco. San biography, Woman’s Voice, ists—including George Chauncey’s Gay New Francisco was the setting for one of the ear- Woman’s Place. p. 16 York, Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline liest studies of lesbian feminist community, Davis’ Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (about by Deborah Wolf, in the late 1970s. The city I and more... Buffalo, New York), Esther Newton’s Cherry appeared as the model of gay urban life in Grove, Fire Island, Marc Stein’s City of Sisterly geographer and social critic Manuel Castells’ 12> and Brotherly Loves (about Philadelphia), and 1983 landmark study The City and the Moira Rachel Kenney’s Mapping Gay L.A.— Grassroots (to which so many studies of that take their particular locations as the queer urban life still refer), and in journalist frame for detailed explorations of social and in journalist and cultural critic Frances relations, politics, and culture. Such studies, Fitzgerald’s attempt to characterize the 0374470 74035 each in their own way carrying forward the 1980s, in part through a portrait of the PRINTED IN THE USA impulse to recovery that was the origin of continued on page three The Women’s Review Contents of Books Wellesley College Center for Research on Women Wellesley, MA 02481 1 Julie Abraham I Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 by Nan Alamilla Boyd www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview Volume XXI, No. 3 4 Letters December 2003

4 REMEMBERING CAROLYN HEILBRUN EDITOR IN CHIEF: Amy Hoffman [email protected] 5 Carolyn G. Heilbrun I Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash [email protected] 7 Marie J. Kuda I Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s by Marijane Meaker CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Martha Nichols, Jan Zita Grover

8 Deborah E. McDowell I Love by Toni Morrison POETRY EDITOR: Robin Becker

ADVERTISING MANAGER: Anita D. McClellan 10 DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR: Lisa London talks to Alison Bechdel about 20 years of cartooning [email protected]

and her new book, Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler [email protected]

12 Laurie Stone I The Unprofessionals: A Novel by Julie Hecht EDITORIAL BOARD: Margaret Andersen I Robin Becker I Claudia M. Christie I 13 Karen Rosenberg I Eleanora Duse: A Biography by Helen Sheehy Marsha Darling I Anne Fausto-Sterling I Carol Gilligan I Sandra Harding I Nancy 14 Frieda Gardner I The Lightning Field by Carol Moldaw; The Cloud of Knowable Things Hartsock I Evelyn Fox Keller I Jean Baker Miller I Ruth Perry I Peggy Phelan I by Elaine Equi Helene Vivienne Wenzel 15 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz I My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile EDITORIAL POLICY: The Women’s Review of Books is feminist but not by Isabel Allende restricted to any one conception of feminism; all writing that is neither sexist, racist, homo- 16 Louise W. Knight I Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman’s phobic, nor otherwise discriminatory is wel- come. We seek to represent the widest possi- Rights Movement by Joelle Million ble range of feminist perspectives both in the books reviewed and in the content of the 17 Julia Query I Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor reviews. We believe that no one of us can speak for feminism, or women, as such; all of by Harlyn Aizley our thinking and writing takes place in a spe- cific political, social, ethnic, and sexual con- 18 Sandra Kohler I Two Poems text, and a responsible review periodical should reflect and further that diversity. The Women’s Review takes no editorial stance; all the 19 Silja J. A. Talvi I Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity views expressed in it represent the opinion of by Chandra Talpade Mohanty the individual authors. ADVERTISING POLICY: 20 Susan Ware I Kate Remembered by Scott Berg Visit www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview to book an ad online; preview the current issue 21 Sarah Lucia Hoagland I Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation, Bio/Diversity by Susan Hawthorne and classified ads; and download a media kit including display, classified, and line rates, sizes and shapes, policies, and deadlines. 22 Enid Shomer I We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-1890 by Jana Harris The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN #0738- 23 The Bookshelf 1433) is published monthly except August by The Women’s Review, Inc., 828 Washington Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. Annual subscrip- tions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for institutions. Overseas postage fees are an Contributors additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 surface mail to all countries outside the US. Back issues are JULIE ABRAHAM teaches LGBT Studies at Sarah Lawrence writer, and lecturer on lesbian history and culture since 1969. After available for $4.00 per copy. Please allow 6-8 College. She is the author of Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing 57 years in Chicago she now lives in Hemingway’s boyhood home, weeks for all subscription transactions. and Modern Histories (Routledge) and is currently working on The Oak Park, Illinois, researching and lecturing on his extensive con- Periodicals class postage paid at Boston, MA City of Feeling, a study of the interdependent histories of modern nection to lesbians in his life and art. and additional mailing offices. POSTMAS- homosexualities and modern cities, to be published by the LISA LONDON is the associate publisher of the Feminist Press TER: send address corrections to The Women’s University of Minnesota Press. Review of Books, Wellesley College Center for at the City University of New York. Research on Women, Wellesley, MA 02481. ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ has a doctorate in Latin DEBORAH E. MCDOWELL is Alice Griffin Professor of The Women’s Review of Books is a project of the American History, specializing in indigenous peoples of the English at the University of Virginia. Her latest book is an edition Wellesley College Center for Research on Americas. She has published numerous scholarly books and articles, of Pauline Hopkins’s novel, Of One Blood. Women. As an autonomous publication it has and two literary memoirs, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie and Outlaw JULIA QUERY produced and co-directed the film Live Nude its own editorial board and board of directors, Woman: Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975. A third memoir on Girls UNITE! She and her 15-month-old son often travel to uni- who set policy with regard to its editorial, Reagan’s war against Sandinista Nicaragua will be published in 2004. versities to screen the film. She is currently writing a thesis about financial and organizational character. FRIEDA GARDNER is a poet and social activist living in modern parenting books. The Women’s Review is distributed by Total Minneapolis. Her manuscript, The Play of Origins, circulates. KAREN ROSENBERG is a writer of plays, fiction and essays. Circulation, New York City, NY; Ingram, Nashville, TN; and Armadillo Trading, Culver CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN was the Avalon Foundation She has just returned from a playwriting residency in Denmark Professor in the Humanities Emerita at Columbia University. Her City, CA. All other distribution is handled and is completing an essay on the values of Russian revolutionar- directly by The Women’s Review. final book was When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My Teachers ies. She has finished her first novel, sections of which have The contents of The Women’s Review of Books Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. appeared as short stories, and is planning her second. are copyright ©2003. All rights reserved; SARAH LUCIA HOAGLAND is professor of philosophy and ENID SHOMER is the author of four collections of poetry, reprint by permission only. women’s studies at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago. She is most recently Stars at Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran, author of Lesbian Ethics, and co-editor of For Lesbians Only with Julia and of Imaginary Men, winner of both the Iowa Fiction Prize and Penelope, and Re-reading the Canon: Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly the LSU/Southern Review Prize. She is the poetry series editor for with Marilyn Frye. She is a collective member of the Institute of the University of Arkansas Press. Lesbian Studies in Chicago, a staff member of the Escuela Popular LAURIE STONE’s most recent books are Close to the Bone and Norteña, and a Research Associate of the Philosophy Interpretation Laughing in the Dark. She teaches creative writing at Fairleigh and Culture Center, Binghamton University. Dickinson University. LOUISE W. KNIGHT is adjunct professor of communication SILJA J. A. TALVI is an award-winning journalist and essayist studies at Northwestern University. Her forthcoming book, based in Seattle. She has a master’s degree in women’s studies from Becoming A Citizen: Jane Addams and the Rise of Democracy, 1860-1898, San Francisco State University. will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. SUSAN WARE’s Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the SANDRA KOHLER’s poems have appeared in numerous maga- American Century includes a chapter on Katharine Hepburn. Her zines. A book of her poems, The Country of Women, was published current project is a biography of radio talk show pioneer Mary by Calyx in 1995. Margaret McBride. The next volume of Notable American Women MARIE J. KUDA has been an independent scholar, free lance will appear in November 2004. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 Tales of the city controlled by organized crime. In the (Society for Individual Rights), continued from p.1 1940s, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown could embraced social life, organizing observe, “There is no organized crime in dances, drag shows, “bowling San Francisco; the crime is all organized nights, tennis matches, hiking expe- Castro district, in Cities on a Hill. And then by the police department.” In the absence ditions, a softball league, card there is the abundant literature of San of the Mafia, queer people owned clubs games, discussion groups, and Francisco queer life, of which the best and bars, so waitresses from one estab- camping trips,” as well as candi- known example, Armistead Maupin’s lishment were able to start others of their dates’ nights at which local political Tales of the City series, has even made it on own. Audiences contained local queers as aspirants appeared, and campaigns to television. All of these and many other well as straight tourists. Consequently the offering legal advice to those materials have contributed to San performances of queers as queers provid- caught by police entrapment. Bar Francisco’s status as the imagined home- ed both a tourist draw and a base for the Fem-butch couple at Mona's 440, life and political engagement both land of various LGBT and queer nations, growth of a sense of community among c. 1945. From Wide Open Town. offered platforms for a few individ- or as the gay “mecca,” as the city has been the locals. Boyd describes the develop- uals to publicly identify themselves called. Such predecessors—not to men- ment of transgender, gay male, and les- Francisco’s economic development, as gay or lesbian—José Sarria, Phyllis tion such a status—are a lot to live up to. bian cultures through these processes in should usefully complicate recent analyses Lyon and Del Martin of the Daughters of Nan Boyd succeeds admirably at her task, San Francisco, as sometimes interwoven of contemporary queer tourism within Bilitis. Yet it was not necessary to be “out” and leaves me hoping for more. and sometimes distinct entities, but as the United States and abroad. to participate in bar life or join a political “Why San Francisco?” is the first ques- often as not sharing the same spaces and At the same time, Boyd’s work insis- organization—most regulars at either the tion such a history produces, and her best identifications. As Esther Newton would tently calls to mind that of her predeces- bars or DOB, Mattachine, or SIR meetings answer is, inevitably, history—a history document of the 1960s in Mother Camp, sors. Again we are presented with an did not use their real names. that incorporates and finally fosters the the drag performer was the emblematic opposition between the political values, Despite the various romances of bar development of queer cultures. San homosexual in the queer and straight engagements, and effects of the world of life or of political activism through which Francisco was a port city that only flour- worlds during these decades. the bars and the world of political we read our histories, the achievement of ished after the gold rush of 1848 brought Wide Open Town is meticulously activists, especially the early homophile queer San Francisco seems to have been floods of people from many nations, researched. Drawing on the many oral his- movement. Again there is an emphasis on that there was little need to choose many more men than women. Sexual per- tories Boyd conducted to complement her the 1960s as a cultural breaking point, between assimilation or outlaw status. missiveness and money combined with a work in the archives, she begins each chap- although Boyd argues that in San Instead, the schoolteachers hung out at very rapid rate of growth to make the city ter with an extended autobiographical Francisco, the shifts that are identified the bars, convinced they were nevertheless a place where a politician could campaign statement, allowing her subjects to appear nationally with Stonewall in 1969 had keeping their secrets, and however visible for office “on the platform that anti-vice full-force and even to speak in ways that already begun by the mid-1960s. She takes the activists’ efforts, it was still much easi- interests were bad for business,” as did P. challenge her own analysis in subsequent up the familiar opposition of “covert” vs. er to get people to come out to a dance H. McCarthy, a successful labor candidate pages. Key figures in San Francisco’s LGBT “overt” homosexuals, those committed to than to a meeting. Should we be surprised? for mayor in 1909 who “vowed to make cultural and political life emerge from her assimilation and those affirming differ- To pose the bar goers against the politicos San Francisco ‘the Paris of America.’” pages—bar queers, bar owners, activists, ence, which she maps over her account of is to presuppose a scarce economy of Police records are the key to this study, some who are all of the above. Like other the split between politicos and bar goers. political virtue, in which either the bar as sources of evidence of LGBT public place-based queer studies, the physical, But in 1961, as Boyd explains, the city’s world or the homophile groups must presence. Boyd offers ample discussion of structural quality of the city is largely most popular drag queen, José Sarria, come out ahead. But is political virtue so prostitution and Prohibition, liquor absent from her discussion. While she “staged a run for city supervisor from his scarce? Is assigning virtue our task? What authorities and legal decisions, across the argues persuasively for the importance of pulpit at the Black Cat,” one of the city’s are we really worried about—class differ- whole period she covers. There were queer daily life in contrast to self-con- most popular gay bars, with the message ences, or the connections between pleas- phases when the political authorities of scious political activism for the develop- that “Gay is Good!” The city’s most suc- ure and politics? Wide Open Town suggests this city clamped down as hard as those of ment of queer San Francisco, her empha- cessful homophile organization, SIR that it’s time for a new paradigm. I any other, most notably in the later 1950s sis remains nevertheless on public rather during the mayoralty of George than private life. The locations of different Christopher, backed up by then police clubs and bars are carefully mapped, while chief Frank Ahern. What is most striking, housing is only intermittently discussed. though, is the degree to which enforce- Except for employment in the clubs and ment was variable or contested: In the bars, and the surrounding world of prosti- 1910s some city officials opposed the tution, or the references to work in the criminalization of prostitution; in the autobiographical statements that preface 1920s the city “was a stronghold against the chapters, jobs are a secondary subject. the prohibition of alcohol.” Sexual permissiveness and money oyd challenges a number of tru- combined to produce public settings for isms. There is the common the performance of deviance, from vaude- B assumption that women were only ville stages in the 1920s, to nightclubs of peripherally involved in the history of the 1930s and 1940s, and gay bars in the drag performance, which her account of, post-World War II decades. The literal and pictures from, Mona’s 440 quite performance of queerness, on stage, by effectively belies: “[I]n the post- men and also women in drag, often in Prohibition years, when Finocchio’s conjunction with performances of racial advertised itself as the place ‘Where Boys difference, were the draw at all of these Will Be Girls,’ Mona’s marketed itself as venues. Especially after Prohibition, the the place ‘Where Girls Will Be Boys.’” clubs and bars where tuxedo-clad pianist Manuel Castells’ frequently invoked asser- and singer Gladys Bentley, in the decades tion that lesbians are not territorial and after her Harlem career, and torch singer therefore do not form or inform urban Beverly Shaw, who always “sang directly” neighborhoods or make political claims in to the women in her audience, were head- the ways that gay men do is contradicted liners and drag revues flourished were by Boyd’s description of the North Beach supported in large part by tourists drawn district in the 1930s and 1940s, where she by San Francisco’s reputation for vice. In argues that lesbians “did take up public fact, the “periods of anti-vice activism [in space. They did acquire a geographic basis the city]—the 1850s, 1870s, 1910s, and for the development of new social identi- 1950s—produced a wealth of print mate- ties. Moreover, the visible presence of les- rial that advertised and drew international bians in the public sphere altered the rela- attention to San Francisco’s vice districts.... tionship between the state—the policing San Francisco’s reputation for vice thus agencies that regulated public life—and became its calling card.” lesbian society.” In this sense, the development of San Finally, her demonstration of the Francisco’s queer culture was based on the degree to which economic interests pro- commodification—indeed the self-com- duced queer San Francisco suggests that modification—of queer persons. Sexual LGBT activists may need to reassess cri- permissiveness and money had combined tiques of commodification in contempo- to produce settings in which LGBT persons rary queer life, which minimize the posi- could have jobs as queers, as they sup- tive effects of economic forces. It is per- ported themselves doing shows. haps too late and beside the point to What might be called the “public decry the present phase of queer market- investment” in San Francisco’s vice scene ing. Her work on the role of tourism, meant that club and then bar life were not which was at the center of much of San

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 3 Letters Remembering Carolyn Heilbrun Dear Editor: natives of California offered only very As a Montana native who has spent sporadic organized resistance to white most of my life in Western states such as incursion. Most of the tribes were I Idaho, California, and Colorado, I was nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in greatly amused to read A Lady’s Life in the close alignment with their environment, Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. To any- and despite periodic clashes with other Many readers of The Women’s Review of Columbia University of © Photo courtesy one familiar with Western life of a centu- tribes, they were ill-equipped, both physi- Books were saddened to learn of the death ry ago, it is obvious Miss Bird read too cally and spiritually, for any form of sys- of pioneering feminist scholar Carolyn many dime novels before she visited tematic warfare. Heilbrun. For us on the staff, losing her America. Her vivid imagination wove Interestingly enough, female ethnogra- means losing a part of our history: She those tales into her travelogue, which she phers, among them Theodora Kroeber, was instrumental in founding the Women’s wrote for publication in England. As any the novelist Ursula LeGuin’s mother, Review and served as one of our editorial author must do, Miss Bird wrote for her were often the ones to publicize the advisers from the very beginning, putting audience, who wanted to read about the anthropological data that could preserve us in touch with potential writers and barbaric Americans and how pathetic we some memory of these dying cultures. subscribers, and writing often herself. We were due to our ingratitude in rebelling Kroeber’s wonderful small monograph, will miss her intelligence, her creativity, against English rule. Ishi in Two Worlds:A Biography of the Last and her insight. Her accounts of riding 30 miles Wild Indian in North America provides a In July, Heilbrun contributed an arti- through a snowstorm, alone because no wrenching portrait of the last remaining cle to our special issue about Women man was brave enough to tackle it; round- Yahi (Yana) Indian. And in my own small Aging. At 77, she was the oldest contrib- ing up 800 cattle singlehandedly in one town of St. Helena, Yolande Beard wrote utor to the issue, which she emphasized day; describing Mountain Jim’s loss of an a slim volume on The Wappo, still one of in our editorial discussions with her. In eye to a grizzly, all made me laugh aloud. the very few studies of this tiny indige- the article, she talked (not for the first A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains nous tribe. time, as readers of her book The Last Gift ought to be shelved in Fantasy and I shall Such a rich and varied—and now near- of Time knew) about making the choice suggest it to my librarian. ly lost—culture should not be dismissed, to continue living beyond age 70. She Linda Hutton even by accidental oversight or inatten- wrote of her constant awareness that she Life Beyond Sixty (1997). Only after receiv- Decatur, IL tion to language. might at any moment fall victim to “a ing tenure from Columbia in 1972 did she Judith Rose devastating, unanticipated assault from reveal she was also the creator of Kate To the Editor: St. Helena, California/ some bodily failure,” saying, “If each day Fansler, the English professor-heroine of Certainly Isabella Bird’s opinions fail Meadville, Pennsylvania is a loan from eternity, one spends it with a series of mystery novels written under to “map onto our conventional political the joy known to gamblers betting every- the pseudonym Amanda Cross. alignments,” as Rebecca Steinitz notes in Rebecca Steinitz responds: thing on a last roll of the dice. The pay- “She was my literary idol,” said her review, “White Ladies Traveling” Ignorance is no excuse, but I must off is intensity.” At some point, though, Barbara Levy, a teacher of writing at (October 2003). Nevertheless, it is confess that I had never heard the term the intensity must have failed her. “I have Brandeis University and Harvard unfortunate that Steinitz herself chose “Digger Indians,” and so I simply fol- always believed that, over 70, one should Extension. “Heilbrun began writing fem- to echo Bird’s language, especially in lowed Bird’s usage without questioning be as free to choose one’s death as one inist criticism, mixing personal informa- regard to “Digger Indians.” This was a it. Obviously this was a mistake, for must, earlier, be free to choose whether tion with literary insights, at a time when term of contemptuous dismissal, rough- which I apologize. or not to give birth,” she stated. In her colleagues had been trained, as had ly equivalent to the use of “nigger” in October, she committed suicide. she, in what was then called the New regard to African Americans, and one Her decision has shaken her commu- Criticism. The New Critics focused solely that is startling within the context of a The Women’s Review of Books nity of admirers, many of whom wrote on text. Any context, even a knowledge feminist review. welcomes letters to the editor. to us at the Women’s Review. Anne of the author’s life, was considered extra- The “perfect savages” described by Mail your letters to Amy Hoffman, Eggebroten, of the UCLA Center for neous.” Adds Susan McGee Bailey, exec- Bird were, at the time she was taking in Editor in Chief, Women’s Review of the Study of Women, calls Heilbrun “the utive director of the Wellesley Centers for the sights of California, being systemati- Books, Center for Research on pre-eminent literary feminist of the lat- Women, which Heilbrun supported Women, Wellesley College, 106 cally murdered by settlers and miners, in Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. ter 20th century, writing both fiction and enthusiastically, “For me, her books chal- addition to being enslaved by the benevo- feminist cultural analysis.” She compares lenging prevailing notions of ‘women’s Or, fax them to the attention of lence of Spanish missionaries. Some Amy Hoffman at (781) 283-3645. waking to Heilbrun’s obituary in the place’ were beacons of sanity. Her under- miners carried collections of “digger” newspaper to what it must have been like Or, e-mail them to standing of our commitment to research scalps and teeth as trophies, which they [email protected] waking to Virginia Woolf’s, although she that can touch the lives of all women was displayed to interested parties. This, of Or, visit our website at points out that Heilbrun managed what a source of inspiration and energy.” course, makes Bird’s comment that the www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview Woolf could not “when she carved out Heilbrun had an extraordinary influ- Indian “problem” will never be solved and use the handy form. for herself a place in the English depart- ence even on those she had never met. until the “Indian is extinct” even more Please make sure to include your mailing ment of Columbia University. Instead of As Murphy Henry, a Women’s Review read- appalling. The genocide here was in address and phone number in your letter. retiring quietly in 1992, she left er told us “with a sad heart,” many ways more insufferable than that We especially appreciate letters of 300 Columbia in a blaze of protest at the practiced upon the Eastern and Plains words or less. entrenched patriarchal values of the men I subscribed to The Women’s Review of tribes of Native Americans, in that the she had worked with for 32 years, telling Books years ago because I saw the New York Times in an interview, Carolyn Heilbrun occasionally wrote ‘When I spoke up for women’s issues, I for you.... Her writings were crucial was made to feel unwelcome in my own to my understanding of feminism department, kept off crucial commit- and put me on a path leading to a The Women’sI Review of Books tees, ridiculed, ignored.’” master’s in women’s studies, a small Heilbrun was born in East Orange, newsletter called Women in makesH a great Winter Solstice gift! New Jersey, in 1926 and spent her child- Bluegrass—that would be bluegrass 6 hood in Manhattan, “roller skating for music—and finally to a book in (It works for Christmas, Hanuka, Kwanza, New Year, and birthdays, too.) hours or devouring biographies,” as she progress about women in bluegrass G * told an interviewer from Wellesley for the University of Illinois Press. I College, from which she graduated in had hoped to send her a copy, so * Reviews of the latest feminist scholarship, fiction, poetry, and memoir. 1947. She met her husband, James she could know how far her influ- Heilbrun, while he was a student at ence reached. I understand her * Special issues on topicsN ranging from8 Women Aging to M G Harvard, and they married the evening death was all about choice, and I Asian Women in Diaspora. before he left for service in World War II. respect that, or at least I’m trying to, They had three children. She received her but I so wish she were still around. * Writing8 that respects your intelligence. doctorate in literature in 1959 and began teaching at Columbia in 1960, where she Back in August, Heilbrun contacted us * became a star professor, known for her with an idea for a review. As it turns out, Order your gift subscription online at www.wellesley.edu/WomensRevie*w—easy! courses on modern British literature and her essay about Beautiful Shadow: A Life of feminist theory. Among her scholarly Patricia Highsmith is probably one of the H IOr call toll free (888) 283-8044 works are Toward a Recognition of Androgyny last things she wrote. Fittingly, it com- (1973), Reinventing Womanhood (1979), bines her interest in biography, particular- Or mail in the form on the backM cover of this issue. Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), Hamlet’s ly in writing women’s lives, and in mystery Check, VISA, Mastercard accepted Mother and Other Women (1990), The novels. We publish it with pride and grief. * H Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria —Amy Hoffman Steinem (1995), and The Last Gift of Time: Editor in Chief

4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 Quintessentially noir by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson. London: Bloomsbury, 2003, 534 pp., $32.50 hardcover. I

ritics of suspense fiction are views with Highsmith’s friends, col- inclined to divide all such works, leagues and lovers, which form the core C with more neatness than preci- of this book.” In addition to this “core,” sion, between “noir” and “cosy.” “Cosy” Wilson, who is English, offers up bits of suggests a milieu the reader recognizes as American culture that he clearly culled ethically familiar, therefore one pro- from selective reading; too sweeping, foundly besmirched by the intrusion of they suffer from a lack of complexity. murder; “noir” fiction focuses on crimi- The biography more than makes up for nal goals and the criminal consciousness. these inadequate historical morsels with The terms also serve to distinguish the abundance of Highsmith’s own testi- between crime and detective fiction, mony—which is likely to astonish anyone between violence for its own sake and for whom morality and ethics of any kind detection for the purposes of law and are essential to endurance. Wilson is not morality—at which noir literature sneers. an elegant writer, but on the subject of Girlfighting According to stereotype, men write Highsmith rather than American culture Betrayal and Rejection among Girls “noir” and women write “cosy.” The first he is efficient and all-encompassing. of these allegations is, if not exact, the Highsmith’s first two novels remain Lyn Mikel Brown truer, although most women writers of her most successful, the best written and detective fiction would scorn the label the best composed: Strangers on a Train Cloth $27.95 “cosy” as slander. What is beyond debate (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) “In this brilliant work, Lyn Mikel Brown unveils the is that a woman who conceives of herself set the pattern for all the subsequent complexities behind girlfighting, revealing how girls’ as profoundly masculine will probably work published under her own name. ‘meanness’ springs from their struggles to have power write noir fiction. Among Patricia (The recent movie of The Talented Mr. and to make sense of their secondary position in society. Highsmith’s models were American male Ripley, like the Alfred Hitchcock version This book is by far the best available on girls’ aggression.” writers like Dashiell Hammett and of Strangers on a Train, seriously belies the Raymond Chandler, who placed their motivations of the characters and the —Dana Crowley Jack, author of Behind the Mask: tough heroes on mean streets where pristine plotting in the books.) Although Destruction and Creativity in Women's Aggression murder is unexceptional. Wilson asserts that Ripley in The Talented The real distinction between “noir” Mr. Ripley is a device with which and “cosy” is a moral one: Does the Highsmith was attempting to dismantle author ultimately endorse morality—not the coziness of conventional crime writ- convention, but Judeo-Christian ethics ing, she did not, in fact, dismantle it—she and laws? By any definition, Highsmith is had no discernible effect upon it. As the ultimate noir novelist. In Mortal Wilson himself points out, when her Consequences: A History from the Detective sales were at a low point and only Agatha Story to the Crime Novel, Julian Symons, Christie and Mickey Spillane were selling, who greatly admired Highsmith’s novels, along came P. D. James, who would suc- understood that “violence is necessary to cessfully advance the cause of morality her, because the threat or actuality of it and law, though hardly in a manner that produces her best writing.” Biographer could be described as “cosy.” Andrew Wilson quotes from her note- books: “I believe people should be n truth, Highsmith wrote as she did allowed to go the whole hog with their because that was the way she thought perversions, abnormalities, unhappiness,” I and lived and ameliorated her suffer- and “[p]erversion interests me most and ing. In Strangers on a Train, for example, is really my guiding darkness...I love to two men casually meet and agree to write of cruel deeds. Murder fascinates “trade” murders to prevent either from me...Physical cruelty appeals to me most- being identified as the murderer. Bruno ly [ellipses Wilson’s].” She also wrote that goes through with his murder, but “The morbid, the cruel, the abnormal Lawrence fails; he is eventually destroyed fascinate me.” Wilson quotes one friend by guilt, an emotion Highsmith despises. who observed that the effect of Discussing Ripley, Wilson claims that Highsmith’s books is chilling, “partly “[Highsmith] cleverly seduces the reader because it seems to Patricia Highsmith into identifying with Ripley [as with that eating breakfast, walking the dog, Bruno] until by the end our moral and committing murder have come to responses have been so invaginated, we occupy the same moral space.” Wilson are actively on the side of the killer.” Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers explains that “Highsmith describes mur- This, however, does not accurately depict der with a certain joie de vivre, while it is the response of the reader who willingly An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls clear that many of her killers... relish the follows Highsmith’s murderers’ thoughts Stephanie Wellen Levine, foreword by Carol Gilligan act of snuffing out another life.” He then yet does not convert to their motives. asks: “What was Highsmith’s own rela- From the beginning, Highsmith wres- Cloth $26.95 tionship to morality?” His biography tled with two obsessions: her admiration “This absorbing ethnography acts as one subculture’s answers that question with detailed and, for men and corollary hatred of women; corrective to Reviving Ophelia, in that it offers a refreshing for those even slightly inclined toward and the conviction that she was a male in portrait of adolescent girls who are far from insecure.” the “cosy,” unnerving detail. a female body. Every writer she admired Wilson did not know Highsmith in was male and, frequently, obsessed with —Publishers Weekly (starred review) life, but she obviously overwhelmed him killing. (In the whole biography, the very with material after her death. “In addition few famous female writers named are to keeping incredibly detailed diaries, she referred to only in passing.) Highsmith’s NYU PRESS recorded her creative ideas, observations imagination, including her use of women a and experiences in what she called her as muses and conquests, was entirely ‘cahiers’ or working journals. She was male. The favor was returned: Graham www.nyupress.org also a prolific letter writer....It is these pri- Greene, Arthur Koestler, and Gore Vidal vate documents... together with inter- all considered her superior to other crime

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 5 writers (although in Vidal’s case, they of short stories, she wrote, “my Little identification in the body of a woman as because nearly all her literary models seem mainly to have shared a detestation Tales of Misogyny consists of seventeen severely damaging. She “could not sus- were European male writers. of Jews and Israel). Highsmith herself very short stories on the foibles of the tain a relationship [with a woman] for He defines her quintessential themes believed that her hatred of women was female sex—bitter, grim, and black- longer than two or three years.” She as “homo-eroticism, the allure of the the fault of her mother, whom she humored.” It should come as no surprise wrote, “There is something perverted double and the erasure of identity,” and loathed in childhood and continued to that she had vociferous opinions about within me, that I don’t love a girl any certainly her writing of exchanges of loathe throughout her life. As Wilson the women’s movement. Women became more, if she loves me more than I love identity and guiltless murder sustained reports, early on, she wrote the outline of her lovers; men became her friends. her.” If Highsmith met an attractive her; she wrote to enable herself to live. a story (never published) in which a girl Wilson never makes clear his opinion woman they became lovers within a few One journalist who knew her believed appears to be a kind soul and fetches her of her, nor does he allow himself much hours of meeting. She lived, in short, a her talent arouse from her genuine mother a nice cup of hot milk. “Then the interpretation: He may have been wise to stereotypically male, even macho life. amorality; as he explained, some novelists girl takes out a pair of scissors from her avoid this. In addition to being a misogy- Says Wilson, “She recognized her insa- like Martin Amis “do a very good job of pocket and, with a smile, plunges them nist and an anti-Semite—“The Israelis did tiable appetite for a constant supply of amorality, but the bottom line is Amis is into her mother’s breast, turning and not ever want peace because, she believed, new conquests and the inherent destruc- probably not an amoral person. But I twisting them with all her might.” they were yearning for the next Holocaust tiveness of her habit, yet she felt unable think Pat really was amoral. There was Highsmith’s abhorrence of women is and they ‘love to be hated’”—Highsmith to resist its power, classifying herself as this strange blankness about her.’” palpable, although Wilson claims, with- was a racist of startling proportions: “She something of a ‘degenerate.’” Each of The only exception to Highsmith’s out explicit evidence, that the issue of imagined life in New York in fifty years’ Wilson’s chapters, once he has covered fiction of violence is her one lesbian Highsmith’s misogyny divides critics: time when she would see ‘coons hanging her childhood, recounts less than two novel, The Price of Salt, which is without One of her friends, for example, reports from 50th story windows, plugging their years of Highsmith’s life, as she moved violence, murder, or death. She pub- that “The idea of women in a library neighbors (other coons) before taking the from lover to lover and place to place. lished it under a pseudonym in 1952, and appalled her, the thought that they could lift down to fleece their pockets.’” She But wherever and with whomever she gave it a happy ending because in those be menstruating at the same time as read- also wondered in almost the same breath was, she felt compelled to write, compar- years novels of homosexual love—and ing was disgusting... Women, she said, why the foetuses of aborted babies could- ing the unsatisfactory draft of a novel to there were not many—were required to were dirty, physically dirty... She talked n’t be used to feed animals. “the feelings of those suffered by a lover have a tragic ending. In a 1983 afterword, about women almost as if she was some- What is one to make of all this? who has failed to pleasure his mistress.” Highsmith wrote, “One of the main thing other, like she wasn’t one.” Of Little Certainly she experienced the confine- She traveled to Europe and preferred it characters, if not both, had to cut his Tales of Misogyny, one of her collections ment of her abilities, ambitions, and male to America—probably, Wilson surmises, wrists, or drown himself in the swim- ming pool of some lovely estate, or one had to say goodbye to his partner, having decided to go straight.” The House of Jacob In addition, gay novels of the time Sylvie Courtine-Denamy were “usually about men.” She criticized Foreword by Julia Kristeva Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic, The Well of Translated by William Sayers Loneliness, because she thought it “por- “Ranging over three continents, several countries, and a dozen generations, trayed lesbians as ‘inverts,’ men trapped [Courtine-Denamy] recounts the fates of various relatives up through her parents in women’s bodies, not simply women as they move through Salonika, Constantinople, Bayonne, Varna, Vienna, Israel, who happened to love other women”— America, Paris, and the Nazi occupation. . . . As a capsule of history, this is an which was puzzling coming from the ambitious undertaking by a woman driven to preserve a culture and, especially, woman we come to know in Wilson’s a language that has no home country.”—Library Journal. 22 illustrations, 1 map, $26.00 biography, who felt from an early age that she was a boy shackled in a girl’s body Veiled Empire and who claimed to have “an unmistak- Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia ably masculine identity.” Douglas Northrop “Douglas Northrop masterfully analyzes a wealth of archival information from s with many subjects of biogra- Uzbekistan, made accessible after the collapse of the USSR, on arguably one of phy, Highsmith aging and ill Stalin’s most celebrated revolutionary campaigns in Central Asia. Veiled Empire A becomes more lovable and more is a path-breaking and highly sophisticated work that carefully unpacks the attractive, as though suffering rendered events surrounding what came to be a highly symbolic piece of female clothing, her more human. Or, perhaps those who to explore much deeper contestations over power and identities and to demonstrate knew her in old age speak of her more the limits of Soviet power as well as the pull of changing loyalties through kindly. Yet there remains an anomaly: time.”—Nazif Shahrani, Indiana University. 37 illustrations, 5 maps, $57.50 cloth, $25.95 paper Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. Originally published in 1966, Plotting Green Desire and Writing Suspense Fiction was written for Imagining Early Modern English Gardens The Writer magazine. Two decades later Rebecca Bushnell Highsmith added a foreword explaining For Rebecca Bushnell, early modern English gardening books tell a fascinating her purpose in careful, reasonable words: tale of the human love for plants and our will to make them do as we wish. “I talk about my beginnings...[and] also Green Desire describes the innovative design of the old manuals, examining about my failures and mistakes; I learned how writers and printers marketed them as fiction as well as practical advice from them, and perhaps others can learn for aspiring gardeners. Along with this attention to the delights of reading, it from them.” Throughout, the book is analyzes the strange dignity and pleasure of garden labor and the division of rational, pleasant, and readable, although men’s and women’s roles in creating garden art. 16 illustrations, $29.95 Highsmith explains that she finds “the Paternalism Incorporated public passion for justice quite boring Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865–1940 and artificial, for neither life nor nature David Leverenz cares if justice is ever done or not.” “Paternalism Incorporated considers the (generally overlooked) complexity Despite similar remarks, honest but not of paternalism, and, through that inquiry, offers new insight into the rise of disturbing, her book supplies a valuable corporate culture in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century U.S.” guide to the writing, publishing, and —Priscilla Wald, Duke University. $39.95 marketing of books. She knows that Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750 beginning writers wish to sell their books, and her tone is forthright and, Edited by Marion Gibson apart from a reference to killing a terra- A unique collection of materials, including works of literature as well as historical documents, Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550–1750 provides a pin for a stew that even she finds horri- broad view of how witches and magicians were represented in print and fying, quite mild. She even remarks, sur- manuscript over three centuries. 5 illustrations, $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper prisingly to a reader of this biography, that she does not think her books should Making Women Pay be in prison libraries. It is not easy to rec- The Hidden Costs of Fetal Rights oncile this reasonable endeavor with the Rachel Roth portrait that emerges from the Wilson “Women are assigned almost total responsibility of assuring the health and biography, raising the question of well-being of fetuses; and it is women, Roth shows, who pay the cost of fetal whether a writer’s private jottings and rights policies. Exactly how these policies undermind the position of women personal letters ought to be presented and why they are unnecessary makes for an interesting reading.”—Hypatia with such completeness; perhaps they $18.95 New in Paper give an unjust slant to the subject’s char- acter. The function of private notebooks and personal letters is precisely to allow Cornell University Press www.cornellpress.cornell.edu At bookstores, or call (800) 666-2211 for comments not intended for public scrutiny. They contain passing thoughts;

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 she loved and would always love...It would be Carol in a thousand cities.” Carol sacrifices custody of her child. Highsmith: Another view The lovers see each other across a crowded restaurant, and the book ends by Marie J. Kuda in a Hollywood fade as they move towards each other. A few things date Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s by Marijane Meaker. the novel. The amount of copy devot- ed to smoking and drinking is about Cleis Press, San Francisco, 2003, 207 pp., $14.95 paper. equal to that in a Hemingway novel or a Bette Davis movie. And as Taylor I told the her audience in 1974, “Today, the wife would find a good feminist lawyer and win custody.” n 1959, when Patricia Highsmith Shockproof Sydney Skate. Meaker has and Marijane Meaker met at a dyke gone on to receive dozens of awards as espite this book’s title, I I bar in Greenwich Village, they were a writer of juvenile and young adult fic- learned more from it about already household names to lesbian tion under the names of M. E. Kerr D Meaker than about Highsmith. readers under their respective noms de and Mary James. When Meaker and Highsmith met, Patricia Highsmith with one of her adored plume, Claire Morgan and Ann Aldrich. As Claire Morgan, Highsmith pub- Meaker, already in a relationship, was cats. From Beautiful Shadow. It would have shocked their contempo- lished her lesbian novel The Price of Salt smitten. They immediately began a two- raries to find these two women, whose in 1952 to good reviews. It had mod- year horizontal tango that would last they reflect particular moods of anger or reputations were polar opposites, in erate success in hardcover, then sky- longer than their romantic feelings for despair and thus may be unrepresenta- bed together. rocketed in paperback sales. Valerie each other: When they finally split, each tive of the whole person. Much of Meaker’s memoir of her Taylor, whose first lesbian novel, woman found closure by brutally mur- I wished, after reading this biography, relationship with novelist Patricia Whisper Their Love, sold two million dering the fictional counterpart of the that the words of Julian Symons had Highsmith reads like the lesbian pulp copies, described the impact of the other in respective novels. Meaker was been allowed to define her: “She has a fiction she wrote during the post-World book to the 1974 Lesbian Writers closeted, jealous, possessive, and professional ability to order a plot and War II heyday of paperback originals. Conference in Chicago: Claire unfaithful. Dissembling to her then create a significant environment, but As Ann Aldrich, Meaker raised the ire Morgan, she said, broke the mold of lover of eight years, she spirited what takes her books beyond the run of of early lesbian feminists with a series lesbian formula fiction, which until Highsmith away to a farmhouse in intelligent crime stories is the intensity of of nonfiction titles that perpetuated then had been aimed at heterosexual Pennsylvania to isolate her from poten- feeling brought to the central figures.” negative stereotypes and took pot-shots males. Morgan’s positive heroines, real tial competition and social or business Symons admits that Highsmith is an at The Ladder, the nascent publication of women who overcame obstacles to contacts who might claim her time. acquired taste, and a taste that some the nation’s first lesbian rights organiza- their love, attracted a huge lesbian However, Meaker retained contact with never acquire, but concludes that “There tion, the Daughters of Bilitis. Her work readership. Jeannette Foster further her old lover and friends with whom are no more genuine agonies in modern was referred to as “poisonous but suggested that the arguments Morgan she would confide and complain. In literature than those endured by the cou- entertaining,” presenting lesbians as proposed for the validity of “variant public she reacted furtively when ples in her books who are locked togeth- “disgusting or unnatural creatures.” She love” presaged the swing of the liter- Highsmith put her arm around her, er in a dislike and even hatred that often was described as a “prolific and nega- ary pendulum toward “favorable treat- wanted to walk down the street holding strangely contains love.” tive author...her books hardly worth the ments of variance” in fiction. hands, or reached out to touch her With a subject like Highsmith, tor- time or price”; and accused of “run- On re-reading, The Price of Salt across a restaurant table. Both left a tured by the sense of being bodily mis- ning down her relatives.” Meaker wrote holds up well. Nineteen-year-old sales- posh restaurant without protest when placed, compelled to thrash out at the genre pulps in the 1950s and 60s under clerk Therese is smitten by an elegant they were refused service because they world in her anger and misery, a biogra- another pseudonym, Vin Packer. As customer and contrives to meet her. were wearing pants. pher needs to choose his materials with Packer, Meaker published Spring Fire, Carol is in the process of seeking a Meaker tantalizingly name-drops tact and discretion. Above all, he needs which Jeannette Howard Foster, in her divorce. Mutually impassioned, the the subjects of Highsmith’s conversa- to grant her the indulgence of sophisti- pioneering opus Sex-Variant Women in women take off on a cross-country tions with her: Truman Capote, Gore cated interpretation. The reader of this Literature: A Historical and Quantitative jaunt, followed closely by a detective Vidal, Ned Rorem, Janet Flanner, Jean biography can hardly fail to recoil from Survey (1954), characterized as “a sym- hired by Carol’s husband, who threat- Cocteau; but then she tells nothing of much that is revealed. For those, like pathetic treatment which bows to ens to take sole custody of their what was said except, “It was a two Symons, with the critical adroitness to orthodox standards by ending tragical- daughter. When Carol returns to deal bottle night.” In fact, drinking proba- focus upon Highsmith’s qualities as a ly.” (Foster understandably erred in with her husband and his lawyers, bly accounts for a lot of lapses. writer, a biography such as this must be identifying Packer as “an established Therese loses faith. She considers Meaker says she gave up trying to keep found lacking. Excessive detail and only male author.”) It would be 1972 before returning to her old boyfriend and up with Highsmith, and while not call- moderate narrative skill here combine to lesbian reviewers would approve of finds a career in New York. But, as she ing her an alcoholic, recounts her leave Highsmith besmirched and the Meaker’s literary treatment of lesbians is about to embark on an affair with a drinking in detail, including the time reader repelled. I by acclaiming her humorous novel, stage actress, she realizes “it was Carol Meaker mistakenly took a hefty swal-

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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 7 low of Highsmith’s 80-proof morning for Meaker, rose to meet a woman, orange juice. and picked up her pants by their Meaker’s sources for several of her crease before sitting down. Highsmith Vin Packer plots were contemporary preferred Europe to America and felt Philosophy of the heart murders, a New Zealand parricide, a she was more highly regarded there. notorious US matricide, even the There are hints that Highsmith’s by Deborah E. McDowell Emmet Till case. Her method of writ- Southern upbringing left her tinged ing differed from that of Highsmith, with racism. When Lorraine Love by Toni Morrison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, who drew her plots mostly from whole Hansberry, whom Meaker had met at cloth, wrote on a rigid schedule, and a party, invited Meaker to the opening 2003, 208 pp., $23.95 hardcover. did not discuss her work in progress. of the film version of A Raisin in the Meaker, although a commercial suc- Sun, Highsmith demurred saying: “I I cess, was envious of Highsmith’s know the plot. Colored person thwart- respectability as a well-reviewed main- ed, then colored person triumphant. hat is this thing called love that his attention you’d think he was a preach- stream hardcover author. In turn, It’s not my concern.” cannot stand alone, but depends er”? While the entire cast of female charac- Highsmith seemed envious of Still, it is disconcerting, if Meaker is W on modifiers and conjunctions ters seems obsessed with Cosey—May, his Meaker’s mass-market sales and easy to be believed, to see the 70-year-old to complete it, to give it heft and meaning? daughter-in-law; Vida, the former recep- income: Hardcover authors were paid Highsmith portrayed as racist and anti- There is “brotherly” love, “platonic” love, tionist at his resort; L, its former cook and percentage royalties doled out annually Semitic. In a bitter epilogue Meaker “puppy” love, “courtly” love, and of the narrator; and Junior, the randy secre- on the sales of each copy; paperback makes her case, summarizing some let- course, that most vexing, confounding, tary—the novel revolves around Heed and writers received two cents a copy for ters and a final visit Highsmith paid her ever-elusive “romantic” love. Love often Christine, these two friends turned mortal each book printed regardless of sales. a few years before her death. Meaker shows up in common parlance with a part- enemies, who have squandered their lives While they were together, Meaker notes that the novel Ripley Under Water ner, as in love and death, love and lust, love (and their friendship) nursing and rehears- received an $8,000 check from a reprint (1991) was dedicated to the Intifadeh and hate, love and war, and that reverent, ing grudges and resentments decades old. run. She notes, “I got twice what Pat and the Kurds and suggests that consecrated pairing, love and marriage, As with all of Morrison’s narratives, the did for one book.” Highsmith’s anti-Israeli stance was “a which “go together like a horse and car- reader will have to wrestle with this book, Meaker describes Highsmith as displacement, that her real anger might riage,” in the words of the popular ditty which is not brought easily to heel. Like her “gentlemanly” in her manners and have been at American publishers who ending with the rhyming couplet, “This I previous novels, this one is elliptical and appearance: blazer, soft shirt, ascot, she felt were largely Jewish, and unap- tell you brother, you can’t have one with- slow to give away its secrets and then, at and slacks. Highsmith opened doors preciative of her work.” I out the other.” We know, of course, that that, in jagged pieces. We come to know we can and more often do have one with- Cosey and his women shard by shard. out the other: marriage without love and, A “handsome giant,” a “heavy drinker,” conversely, love without marriage. A love- and a committed womanizer, whose less marriage, sullied from the start, is the “pleasure was in pleasing,” Cosey is Gifts of Insight and Inspiration mainspring of Toni Morrison’s latest descended from a “long line of quiet pros- novel, Love; a marriage between the 52- perous slaves and thrifty freedmen.” year-old Bill Cosey (his second) and his 11- Rumored like his father to be a police THE STRANGE year-old child bride, Heed the Night, informant, he is deemed nonetheless the HISTORY OF whom Cosey purchases from her father “county’s role model,” whose blood- for $200 and a pocketbook. soaked money financed Cosey’s Hotel and SUZANNE LAFLESHE You can guess you’re in a Toni Morrison Resort, now boarded up and much of its and Other Stories of Women novel when you encounter such a situation, surrounding acreage sold in parcels to and Fatness not to mention a character named Heed developers who throw up slapdash houses Edited by Susan Koppelman the Night, whose relatives are named that blight the town of Oceanside. The awe “Every woman should read this book . . . Solitude, Righteous Morning, Winsome, and envy of the townspeople eking out a Buy this book, eat what you like, and and Joy. Reading on, you find that Heed hardscrabble existence at a fish cannery, your dinner table conversations will never has hired a young sex-pot and reform Cosey’s resort “lived on even after the hotel be the same. This book is a feast of school parolee named Junior, whose toes was dependent for its life on the [local knowledge for students and scholars in have merged together to form a hoof (Pan blacks] it once excluded” from its doors. literature, women’s studies, American cul- perhaps?); by then you know for certain But even when we learn these surface ture, and American life.” —EMILY TOTH that you have landed on Morrison’s narra- details, Cosey remains much the mystery $16.95 paperback tive planet, populated by the outcast and man, who takes shape and texture from dismembered, the uncanny and grotesque. what each person needs and finds in his When Junior appears, wearing no under- portrait, which once hung behind the WOMEN ON WAR wear, answering Heed’s ad for a secretary hotel’s reception desk, and now above An International Anthology of Writings and companion, Cosey has been long dead, Heed’s bed. “Painted from a snapshot,” the from Antiquity to the Present leaving behind his next of kin: Heed, his portrait is gilded by each viewer, spun from Edited by Daniela Gioseffi widow, and Christine, his granddaughter, the filaments of fantasy. For Heed, the who were once intimate childhood friends. image is “exactly like” the man. “What you “Framed by Gioseffi’s brilliant overview Eight months older than her former play- see there is a wonderful man,” she tells of the world’s crises, these vivid and mate cum bride cum grandmother, Junior, who has already found in Cosey’s visionary writings inspire and galvanize. Christine is sent away following the mar- portrait the man she needs to see: both the This book offers the great gift of hope riage, exiled from the house “throbbing father and the “Good Man” she never had. and understanding on every page.” with girl flesh made sexy.” After Cosey’s His “kind eyes... promised to hold [her] —BLANCHE WIESEN COOK death, she returns to Silk, the coastal town steady on his shoulders,” through “an $19.95 paperback where Cosey had established “the best and orchard of green Granny apples heavy and best-known vacation spot for colored folk thick on the boughs.” on the East Coast.” Like a character in a This vision of paradise and plenitude WOMANKIND Greek tragedy, she is determined to exact embodied in a person is bound to be shat- Faces of Change Around her revenge on Heed, the woman who dis- tered, especially since, in this book, Cosey, the World placed her in her grandfather’s favor and the love object, the beau ideal, is himself so Text by Donna Nebenzahl affection; but more, to assert her “claim of shattered—“an ordinary man” with Photographs by Nance Ackerman blood” on Cosey’s estate, “equal to Heed’s “cracked-glass eyes” who has been claim as widow.” “ripped... by wrath and love.” A stunning portrayal of courage in Encamped in separate quarters in the Cosey isn’t the only character “ripped” photos and text, Womankind pays three-story house that Cosey built at One by love in this novel, in which acts of vio- tribute to the inspiring work of Monarch Street, Heed and Christine lence, present and remembered, are much women activists and leaders who engage in pitched battles, “bruising fights the norm. A girl named Pretty Fay is gang are fighting for human rights, with hands, feet, teeth and soaring raped; Junior’s uncles chase her in a truck, social justice, women’s equality, objects,” before settling into an “unnegoti- seemingly for sport, running her over and and cultural freedom. ated cease-fire.” Nearly as famous a resi- crushing her toes. Heed sets Christine’s bed $29.95 paperback dence as Beloved’s 124 Bluestone Road, on fire, and Christine shows up at Cosey’s Cosey’s imposing house, resembling a funeral with a switchblade in her hand. But church, harbors several ghosts of its own, perhaps the quintessential act of violence perhaps none more haunting than the is Cosey’s marriage to Heed, which “laid ghost of Cosey. the brickwork for [his] ruination” and hers, Rediscover the Feminist Press at CUNY Just who was this Bill Cosey? What as well—all because he wanted to replace Available at better bookstores or order direct: motivated him to marry a girl almost 50 the son he’d lost, and for that “only an 212-817-7920 www.feministpress.org years his junior? What manner of man was unused girl would do.” No child issues he, who had “women fighting so hard for from the marriage and Cosey—“the dirty

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 one who introduced [Heed] to nasty,” to other’s bodies; no Sula mounting her lover, wished-for body will set all to right. far-flung. According to the narrator in Love, the reek of “liquor and an old man’s busi- looking into his “golden eyes and the vel- Because both Christine and Heed each cast “Having men meant sharing them,” ness”—sees the error of his ways and vet helmet of [his] hair, rocking, swaying” the other as the wronging partner in her although every lover typically wants “the returns to his long-time lover, the mysteri- to the “creeping disorder that was flooding life’s drama, “Big Daddy” Cosey, the lead- largest slice,” unwilling if not ill-prepared ous Celestial, a “sporting woman,” whose her hips”; no First Corinthians “tilt[ing] ing man, gets off scot-free. As the novel to “know the real” love, “the better kinds, “face [is] cut from cheek to ear.” [her lover’s] chin up with her fingers and moves, perhaps too hastily, to its conclu- where losses are cut and everybody bene- plant[ing] a feathery kiss on his throat.” sion, Heed and Christine arrive at the fits. It takes a certain intelligence to love ne might reasonably wonder why Despite all of Cosey’s rumored lovers, his mutual realization that Cosey was indeed like that.” Few of Morrison’s characters there is so much violence in a “pleasure in pleasing,” there are few an illusion, “everywhere and nowhere,” seem endowed with such intelligence, their O book called Love, why violence descriptions of pleasure in this text, except that each had “made him up.” But they lives and choices attesting to the far more repeatedly usurps the space that love might perhaps for Junior’s trysts with Romen, the reach the greater realization that they common reality that love and intelligence hold. Commonly the fantasied antidote to 16-year-old male Heed hires as yardman “could have been living [their] lives hand in are mutually exclusive. We tend to love first psychic wounds and losses, real and imag- and errand boy. hand instead of looking for Big Daddy and think later, if at all. ined, love is an expected unguent, a form What can we really ever know of love, everywhere.” In seeking to “possess” If Morrison ultimately offers a more of medication, pain’s “natural” anodyne. the novel seems implicitly to ask, especially Cosey and then his material legacy, these sobering, cold-eyed view of love than one But Morrison takes a harsher, tougher, less since so many other things come mas- former friends forget they once might hope to find in a novel titled Love, she romantic view of love, one fashioned from querading in its name: greed, obsession, “belonged” to the other, “shar[ing] stom- has blown a kiss, as it were, to her most the accumulated wisdom of the ages, a wis- betrayal, possessiveness, jealousy, envy, and achache laughter, a secret language, and ardent readers, has tendered a kind of dom infused throughout her novels. While above all love’s impostor, sex, “the clown knew, as they slept together that one’s valentine—a retrospective or compendium this novel must be seen on its own terms, of love.” According to this novel’s mysteri- dreaming was the same as the other one’s.” of her earlier takes on love. The distance of course, it is also useful to place it in the ous narrator, who prizes secrecy, sex This language is reminiscent of Sula’s between the first words proper of The Bluest context of Morrison’s earlier work. stands, much the same as violence, in the deathbed memory of the days when she Eye (1970)—“Quiet as its kept”—and those In Love she reprises her most familiar place where love might be. Women espe- and Nel were “girls together,” so close that of this new novel—“the women’s legs are scenes and situations of love gone badly cially “open their legs rather than their they merged to form “two throats... one spread wide open”—represents not merely wrong, twisted and distorted into surrealis- hearts,” which hide the wounded “sugar eye and ... had no price.” Morrison here a chronological sweep but a philosophical tic shapes, often bizarre beyond belief. One child, the winsome baby girl curled up reprises that earlier novel’s exploration of journey into the heart of love, at times a thinks of the possessive/protective love somewhere inside,” playing in their minds how women turn into rivals and competi- darkened continent blazed by Morrison’s that compels Sethe to kill her baby girl, their own versions of a somebody-done- tors for men (more boys than men), whose luminescent prose, her dazzling lyricism, Beloved, in an effort to spare her the cer- somebody-wrong song that another’s affections are always splintered, divided, her labor of love. I tain social death of slavery; the obsessive love that leads Joe Trace, the older man, to new books new books new books new books new books new books new books new books fatally shoot Dorcas, his younger lover (Jazz); the God-like love that compels Eva Women and War to burn her drug-addicted son alive, or the self-sacrificing love that drives her to hurl Jenny Matthews her crippled body from a top-floor window “The pictures chosen by Matthews for this collection resonate with a rare compassion. They serve to remind us that there is in a futile effort to save her daughter no glory in war, but after all the evils of the world have fl own engulfed in flames (Sula). But Morrison’s from Pandora’s war chest, there is one thing left: hope.” exploration, from book to book, of love in —foto8 magazine all its guises began, significantly, with the Paper $29.95 love of whiteness as physical ideal. Pecola’s The Goddess tragic, ultimately maddening, yearning for Power, Sexuality, and the Feminine Divine blond hair and blue eyes in The Bluest Eye set the template in many ways for the work Shahrukh Husain that followed. Indeed, Morrison’s poignant, Nearly 200 color photographs pack this informative and accessible book on the many faces and roles of one of our finely wrought dramatization of Pecola’s most enduring and culturally widespread archetypes—the ardent desire for the “look of love” (at least Mother Goddess. in the Western world) is underneath it all, a Paper $14.95 desire to be loved, noticed, recognized. It is in The Bluest Eye that Morrison condemns the idealization of “physical beauty,” along Myth, Montage, and State of Virginity with its counterpart, “romantic love,” the Visuality in Late Medieval Gender, Religion, and Politics in an two “most destructive ideas in the history Early Modern Catholic State Manuscript Culture of human thought,” she writes. Her first Ulrike Strasser novel’s penultimate paragraph could serve Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea “Doing for early modern virginity and convents as an epigraph to the latest: Marilynn Desmond and what Lyndal Roper did for marriage and Pamela Sheingorn prostitution, Strasser shows how control of Love is never any better than the sexuality comprised a key component of state lover. Wicked people love wickedly, “This book is a rich reservoir of scholarship that expansion. State of Virginity transcends disciplinary opens up wide new vistas thanks to its broad and methodological boundaries and will surely violent people love violently, weak theoretical perspectives.” have an impact on a variety of fi elds.” people love weakly, stupid people —Nancy Regalado, New York University —Joel Harrington, Vanderbilt University love stupidly... The lover alone pos- Cloth $65.00 Cloth $55.00 sesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in Women and Laughter in Now in Paper! the glare of the lover’s inward eye. Our Sisters’ Promised Land Medieval Comic Literature Women, Politics, and As the heart’s desire of Love, Bill Cosey is Lisa Perfetti Israeli-Palestinian Coexistence literally frozen in the glare of his lovers’ “. . . a fascinating and timely study of medieval Ayala Emmett inward eyes—Heed’s, Christine’s, Junior’s, attitudes toward women’s laughter in religious Vida’s, L’s, and May’s—becoming whatever and didactic literature as well as philosophical and “A groundbreaking study. . . . Where most studies each needs him to be: “Friend,” “Stranger,” medical treatises. . . .” ignore or marginalize women’s role in the peace —E. Jane Burns, University of North Carolina process, Emmett highlights women as political “Benefactor,” “Lover,” “Husband,” actors and shows their capacity to bridge the chasm Cloth $57.50 “Guardian,” “Father,” the roles that double between two hostile peoples.” as the chapter titles, the last of which is, —Cynthia Saltzman, Rutgers University tellingly, “Phantom.” Abandoned Women Paper $22.95 Love is ultimately abstract in its treat- Rewriting the Classics in Dante, ment, more philosophy of love than its Boccaccio, and Chaucer Lewd and Notorious expression. But if this seems the least Suzanne Hagedorn Female Transgression in the emotionally felt, the least passionately sur- Eighteenth Century “This is an impressive and important book, written charged of Morrison’s novels, it is perhaps clearly and gracefully. The ‘abandoned woman’ is Katharine Kittredge, Editor because her aim is not to write a love story, a crucial presence in medieval literature, worth Hags, tarts, killers, and freaks—this compelling at least as that genre is conventionally studying both for her own sake and for the sake of collection explores the representations of understood, with expectations of sweaty the intertextual structures that male writers build eighteenth-century female aberrations and around her.” grotesques. palms and lustful scenes of romance —Tom Stillinger, University of Utah requited or renewed. Love’s terms here are Cloth $59.50 / Paper $24.95 Cloth $60.00 far from “cozy.” There are no bedroom scenes of couples like Violet/Violent and Joe Trace lying underneath the covers in check out our online catalog at www.press.umich.edu available in bookstores the dark, whispering to each other what is The University of Michigan Press or call 800-621-2736 in their hearts, tenderly exploring each

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 9 interaction of words and images. perspectives just add more McCloud continues: “Traditional think- dimensionality to the strip. ing has long held that truly GREAT Dykes to watch out for works of art and literature are only pos- While Bechdel’s contemporaries see sible with the two [words and pictures] the comic strip as a mirror for their kept at arm’s length. Words and pic- lives, the generation that grew up with Lisa London talks to Alison Bechdel about 20 years of cartooning tures together are considered, at best, a Bechdel’s strip see it somewhat differ- diversion for the masses, at worst, a ently. For those of us in the third wave, and her new book, Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based product of crass commercialism.” the characters in the strip were our However, the rise in the prominence future public face and concrete evi- Life-Forms to Watch Out For (Los Angeles: Alyson and prestige of the graphic novel over dence of a vital lesbian subculture— Publications, 2003, 128 pp., $13.95 paper). the last 20 years has brought with it a one that was well-established, political willingness to look at the comic strip as at its core, media (and humor) savvy, I a valid form of cultural exchange. and female-focused but flexible. Bechdel agrees that comics can play this Bechdel is particularly attuned to n 1982, recent college graduate role: “The comic strip observes culture, documenting generational differences Alison Bechdel sent a letter to a but it also is culture. I see my role really among her readers and in the charac- I friend; in the corner she drew a as a kind of cultural anthropologist.” ters in the strip. There is no lack of cartoon character, and in a short nota- If we are to consider Bechdel a cul- evidence of a real cultural and political tion off to the side, penned the phrase tural anthropologist, hers would certain- divide among different generations of “Dykes to Watch Out For.” For ly be a radical discipline for study— feminists—and as our cultural anthro- Bechdel, it was a declaration: “We are, pushing boundaries both in and out of pologist, Bechdel is on the case. In her you and I, dykes to watch out for.” her academy. From the beginning and introduction to this new collection, she Thousands of cartoon panels later, much to the dismay of many an editor, confronts this divide straight on: Bechdel and the characters in her Bechdel insisted on including sex and “Lately, the young activists I meet comic strip are celebrating their 20th sexuality in the visual language of the seem to have cut their teeth organizing anniversary. Bechdel’s comic strip has strip, making it too controversial to run gay-straight alliances in their day-care become a cultural institution, especially in certain newspapers: “Right now, my centers. And many have moved if one uses the customary definition of strip runs in about 50-60 newspapers beyond the need for even the cate- the word institution: “an established across the US and in Canada. Although gories ‘gay’ and ‘straight.’” organization or foundation, especially the number of gay papers is starting to one dedicated to education, public Self portrait by Alison Bechdel plateau,” Bechdel tells me, vidence of other divides—cul- service, or culture.” tural, political and social—also Education? Public service? How can potential imagery of film and painting My strip reads slightly differently E abound in Dykes and Sundry a comic strip be declared a cultural insti- plus the intimacy of the written word.” depending on whether you see it Other Carbon Based Life Forms to Watch tution? In fact, there is a long-standing In many ways, the argument against in the paper, or in one of my Out For. The title itself is a playful com- tradition of bias against the comic strip comics as a valid art form is the same as books. The newspaper format ment on inclusiveness—and it is as a valid medium for conveying cultur- that used to discredit other popular gives it a very quotidian aspect, it indeed Bechdel’s self-deprecating al information and meaning. Yet, in forms of culture: mass-produced films, becomes a part of everyday life. humor that has kept the strip feeling Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud television, advertising, and games—all You read it at breakfast or in the fresh for so many years and has helped argues that, “Comics offers tremendous of which convey many intricate layers bathroom. And that reinforces to bridge the divides. One of the more resources to all writers and artists…it of cultural meaning and information, the content of the strip—these divisive dialogues in this collection offers range and versatility with all the while engaging audiences through the small domestic moments in the comes from the “trannie-baiting” that characters’ lives. Lois and Mo engage in. In this inter- change, Lois lies to the transphobic One of the only strips in the history Mo, telling her that she has decided to of publicly distributed comics to fea- transition into a man. There is a dis- ture women together in bed, Dykes to tinct tension in the exchange: Watch Out For has for years cultivated a familiar, everyday visual language. The Mo (leaving a message on Lois’ spaces her characters inhabit are for answering machine): “Lois, Hi. I the most part interiors: living rooms, guess you’re out. Listen, call me. beds, kitchens. I, uh….want to apologize for say- It is precisely the exploration of these ing I couldn’t be your friend if intimate spaces that allows so many you turned into a man, okay? So, TEACHING FELLOWSHIP readers to identify with her characters uh…Happy New Year.” [Cut to UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA and the way they navigate their lives. In Lois and her friend listening to fact, many would argue that Bechdel’s the answering machine] WOMEN’S STUDIES PROGRAM strip acts as both a cultural marker and a Lois’s friend: “But you’re not WOMEN’S STUDIES PROGRAM DISSERTATION SCHOLARS prism through which American lesbian transitioning.” subculture has refocused itself. Bechdel Lois: “I know. I just felt like The Women’s Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her characters have meant different yanking her chain. She was really invites applications for two fellowships for the academic year, 2004-2005. things to different generations of les- being transphobic and it pissed Applicants must be advanced to candidacy and expect completion of the dis- bians and non-lesbians. In a November me off.” [Cuts back to Mo and sertation during the term of residence. Women’s Studies Dissertation 2001 article in Ms. magazine, Judith Sydney] Levine, herself a prolific author, coined Mo: “God, she pisses me off! Scholars will teach one undergraduate course and present one colloquium. the phrase “dykegeist” to describe the Acting like I’m being oppressive The duration of the award is nine months, with the fellowship grant of way Bechdel has reflected back the daily when she’s the one betraying approximately $20,000. Scholars are required to be in residence during the essence of contemporary, second-wave, every tenet of feminism for a entire fellowship period. lesbian and feminist life. Bechdel’s char- chance to grab some male privi- acters reflect a reality not otherwise lege!” The Women’s Studies Program has a multidisciplinary, multicultural cur- present in the media. In fact, it is in this Sydney (Mo’s girlfriend): “Isn’t it riculum and faculty. Applicants from the humanities or social sciences role that Bechdel has felt the most pres- a tenet of feminism that gender should demonstrate research and teaching interests in the intersections of sure. She explains, is culturally constructed?” race, class, gender, sexuality and cultural difference. The Program is espe- When I first started out, I knew Bechdel comments: cially interested in candidates who can contribute to the diversity and excel- exactly who my audience was— lence of the academic community through research, teaching, and service. other young, college-educated There’s a lot of hostility against lesbian feminists like me. And I transexuality among lesbians— The deadline for the complete file is 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 29, 2004. followed a fairly strict party this idea that if you transition No fax or e-mail submissions will be accepted. To apply, please complete the line—I’m pathologically nice, so from female to male [or reverse] on-line application form located on our website: www.womst.ucsb.edu. In political correctness came very you’re “leaving the club.” I think addition, send cover letter, curriculum vitae, a brief description of dissertation naturally to me. But over the I’ve been pretty up front about years I introduced Stuart, the the ways Mo is intolerant.. I project, a writing sample (approximately 25 pages), and three letters of refer- token white male. And Sydney, think a lot of lesbians aren’t ence to: Professor Leila Rupp, Chair, Women’s Studies Program, University of the evil women’s studies profes- willing to go on record and say California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-7110. sor, who takes some irritatingly that they feel this betrayal. I’m conservative positions—she’s trying to be honest without The University of California is an EEO/AA Employer. hawkish on Iraq, for example. being hurtful, which is some- But I think these non-party-line times a hard balance.

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 There has been much debate, both in the strip and outside of it, of the demise of the “sub” in “lesbian subculture.” As Madonna kisses Britney, and Rosie O’Donnell cuts her hair, where is the evi- dence of “a social group within a nation- al culture that has distinctive patterns of behavior and beliefs?” Bechdel says,

I feel like as a cultural reporter, I’ve violated the prime directive. In making this subculture more visi- ble through my comics, I’ve had a hand in contributing to its demise.

In the strip we see this loss of com- munity in the closing of the women’s bookstore, Madwimmin, a plotline that directly reflects reality. In the last ten years, over 170 women’s bookstores have closed their doors as mega-stores have moved in. Where, then, will lesbian com- munity happen? Where will the gathering places be? On this point Bechdel is uncharacteristically optimistic:

I’ve been anxious and worried about this development for so long that I really feel like I’ve moved through it, I’m done. I mean, of course I was very sad to let Madwimmin Books go, but now in the strip I have Bounders (the rival chain bookstore) and get to make all sorts of jokes about Mo having to shelve Ann Coulter. It’s all grist for the mill. Plus I see a lot of parallels between the loss of queer com- munity and the loss of communi- ty in general, as corporations are busy paving over the real world with WalMarts. Fortunately, les- WILLIAMS COLLEGE bianism seems ultimately uncom- Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellowships modifiable to me. What can it sell, and to whom? I’m hoping Academic Year 2004-2005 we’ll start to see a reverse politi- cization—community happening In 1985 Williams College established the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellowships to underline the importance of diversi- more locally, person to person. ty on college faculties by encouraging able minority students to complete the doctoral degree and to pursue careers in college teaching. The Bolin Fellowships enable at least two graduate students from underrepresented groups to Panel by panel, person by person, in devote the bulk of their time during the academic year to the completion of dissertation work in residence at chronicling the lives and loves of a Williams College. group of friends, Bechdel has charted, Named in honor of its first black graduate, who was admitted to Williams in 1885, the Bolin Fellowships will be and in some cases, propelled cultural awarded to graduate students from underrepresented groups who are working toward the Ph.D. in the humanities and political shifts. Growing up, Dykes or in the natural, social, or behavioral sciences. to Watch Out For was a vital cultural thread of lesbian subculture woven ELIGIBILITY: Applicants must be U.S. citizens and must have completed all doctoral work except the into my life, and helped to shape my identity as a third-wave feminist. You dissertation by the end of the current academic year. see, I first encountered Mo and the girls TERMS: The stipend for 2004-2005 is $30,500. The College will also provide housing assistance, in my junior year of high school. It was academic support including office space and computer and library privileges, and an 1986 and all was Reagan and ruffles in allowance of up to $4,000 for research-related expenses. the world. Buried in the back of some During the year of residence at Williams, the Bolin Fellows will be affiliated with an alternative newspaper, near the sex ads, appropriate department or program and will be expected to teach one one-semester course, were four little panels that would come normally in the fall semester. to represent more to me than I could APPLICATION: Candidates should submit two full sets in hard copy form (electronic applications will not be guess at the time. As a straight little girl accepted) of each of the following materials, postmarked by January 1, 2004: from tiny-town America wearing Laura • a full curriculum vitae Ashley and prepping out on Duran • a graduate school transcript and three confidential letters of recommendation Duran (why are guys in make-up so • a copy of the dissertation prospectus, preferably limited to 10-15 pp. attractive?)—my world was less than • a description of teaching interests small, and entirely heterosexual. Then in sauntered Mo, striped shirt and glass- RESPOND TO: William J. Lenhart es, and suddenly there was a much larg- Dean of the Faculty er world outside Montville, Williams College Connecticut (pop 14,000)—and it con- P.O. Box 141 tained some very cute girls. Suddenly, I Williamstown, Massachusetts 01267 had something to aspire to: I wanted to NOTIFICATION: Candidates will be notified of the Selection Committee’s decision by early March 2004. become a “dyke to watch out for.” And while my life choices have led me Williams College is a coeducational liberal arts institution, offering undergraduate education to its 2,000 stu- down a bewildering variety of roads— dents. The College has built its reputation on a long tradition of outstanding teaching and scholarship and on straight, not straight, sometimes bent the academic excellence of its students. Among the opportunities that Williams offers its students and approxi- backwards while trying to go forwards— mately 260 faculty members are interdisciplinary programs and centers, including the Multicultural Center, the Bechdel, Mo and the girls (and guys!) have Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Center for Environmental Studies as well as always been one step ahead of me, stand- extensive library and museum collections, expanding theatre and dance facilities, a center for information tech- ing at the fork in the road, with a little sign: “Try this way; it’s interesting and, by nology, and well-equipped laboratories. See also Williams College website (http://www.williams.edu). the way, really funny.” So, Alison, thanks An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer for the road signs (Danger Ahead!), kudos, and happy anniversary. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 11 and the ravages of aging. She’s an acciden- things—she knows that her woes have a tal Zen guide, ushering us to unexpected place on a landscape that includes war and vistas by seeking to go nowhere. terrorism, but that they don’t take up the The comedy of perspective In The Unprofessionals, Hecht pushes the entire frame. performance envelope of her eccentric Hecht’s comedy is an antidote to work by Laurie Stone style, testing whether she can arrest our that, in order to guarantee it’s tackling seri- attention for the duration of a novel. ous themes, demands with a swagger that The Unprofessionals: A Novel by Julie Hecht. New York: Everything is the same in this book as in we train our eyes on big people doing big the previous two, except the mindscape is things—on mountains, in raging tempests, Random House, 2003, 240 pp., $23.95 hardcover. more ravaged, fusing funny and excruciat- poking around in corrupt governments, ing into a pleasurably uncomfortable cooking up late capitalism’s dinner of the I spasm. The narrator still has no focus, still poor world. Hecht makes large comedy out shops and cooks for a ghostly husband, still of small, rude materials, creating some- el Brooks defines tragedy as, occasionally alludes to photographic proj- thing of the alchemy of Art Spiegelman’s “when I have a hangnail.” ects, and still feels the assaults of aging and Maus, where, in the form of a comic book M Comedy, he says, is “when you other kinds of fragility avalanching into the about animals, the Holocaust is set on a fall off a cliff and die.” The joke is about void of her. With this material, Hecht is human plane, and we’re shown how indi- our failure to gauge the relative size of acute. In next to nothingness, she accom- vidual destinies are marked by world things. What’s personal, no matter how plishes Olympian feats of deadpan. events, and how the drives of the inner life petty, will always be big, and what’s happen- The book begins in a crisis, where the determine the way masses of people ing to someone else, no matter how cata- narrator feels she has lost both her soul behave. strophic, will always be small. Brooks is riff- and her looks. Mirrors are muggers: “The The failing of The Unprofessionals—and ing on the comedy of perspective, a form summer look was worse [than the winter for me it doesn’t entirely succeed—is the that knows what tragedy knows—that our one],” she assesses, second character Hecht draws into the grasp of other people is limited, our blun- story, another unnamed person known as ders repetitious, and that humans commit I remembered when I recalled the “the boy.” He is 21, a heroin addict tail- atrocities—but isn’t shocked by the knowl- initial horror with which I’d viewed spinning toward a death the narrator tries edge. The tone is mordant and rueful, not my image in a mirror near the prod- to forstall. The son of a famous surgeon, savage and spitting the way satire often is— uct section of a haircutting parlor in the boy is ten when the narrator meets him Swift’s for example—raging against bar- Nantucket the summer before. At and immediately connects with his discon- barisms with the same disappointment as first I didn’t realize the person was nection from his bourgeois family. He is tragedy but without tragedy’s faith in tran- Julie Hecht myself, or my former self, or the her Mini-Me. They seldom meet in the scendence. In the comedy of perspective, physical form in which the former flesh. The flesh and its demands are what there’s potential for empathy and identifica- bafflement about what makes other people self had once resided. My beige both wish to escape, so the phone becomes tion more than for the expression of appear connected to life. She acknowledges linen skirt was wrinkled and worn their medium. They talk at night, some- sadism that seems to power the joke. having a “narcissistic personality disorder” thin from Clorox-washing, my white times for as long as six hours, sharing fears This comedy floats a line of narratives as well as being depressed, and you can’t linen shirt ill fitting and smashed, and distastes. Like a Beckett character that are pretty much standup performances. argue with her. Her life is shrunken by pho- and my hair already too light, straw- marooned on a wasteland or buried to her Sometimes they’re called novels, sometimes bias and cushioned by money, the source of like and unkempt. When I saw this neck inside a mound, the narrator is sus- memoirs, sometimes collections of linked which isn’t always made clear, though on image, I left the parlor immediately. tained by conversation. It is her narrow short stories, sometimes meditations— the narratives’ periphery is a bread-earning (pp. 10-11) ledge, though she’s not tempted to leap. among them (the list is idiosyncratic) Moby and bread-eating husband. She is as phobic about death as the boy is Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Tropic of Cancer, On In Hecht’s stories, a day in the narrator’s n addition to stockpiling Xanax, attracted to it, and that is the root of the the Road, Naked Lunch, The Liars’ Club (Mary life can be consumed with buying organic chocolate, and “Dr. Scholl’s gel-and- problem both in their relationship and in Karr), The Blue Suit (Richard Raynor), Go coffee beans, which need to be hunted I foam innersoles,” the narrator watches the structure of the book. Now (Richard Hell), How I Came Into My down in the limited shopping opportuni- David Letterman, consults Dr. Andrew Human contact opens the narrator to Inheritance (Dorothy Gallagher), Getting a Life ties of Nantucket (where some tales are Weil to fend off toxicities, and sorts slides herself and the world. In the way the boy (Helen Simpson), The Camera My Mother set), then ground in another location, for her next book, Look at the Moon. “My nurses his unhappiness, the narrator sees Gave Me (Susanna Kaysen), and Julie because the health-food store where the last book of photographs was of people her own process. He’s a snob, a xenophobe, Hecht’s trio: Do the Windows Open? a short beans must be purchased lacks a grinder. and included one of my husband titled, and a political conservative, qualities she story collection; Was This Man a Genius? ,an She needs the coffee to banish headaches, ‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Recycle,’” she abhors, but she tolerates him, hoping he’ll account of the author’s exchanges with the which are infrequent, a fact she bemoans, says. “Another photograph of him was grow. She dithers about people she finds dif- late comedian Andy Kaufman; and her lat- since they provide an excuse for caffeine. titled ‘The Stranger.’ The idea came to me ferent from herself—other people in gener- est, The Unprofessionals. When she rouses herself, it is to photo- when I told him I felt alone and separate al—so she’s not reproachful. Kindly—and Hecht calls The Unprofessionals a novel, graph peculiar subjects, like the houses from everyone and everything in the world. this is where the comedy is most keenly and I’ll call it a novel, too, though the voice where poet Anne Sexton lived and a repro- Without looking up from his crossword funny and painful—she tries to give him a of the unnamed narrator is identical to the ductive surgeon with his dog. Why? In the puzzle, he’d said, ‘That’s man’s fate.’” reason to live, quoting Freud’s famous pro- ones driving her two earlier works. The first case, because she wants to investigate Elsewhere she confides, “I was married to gram, “love and work,” while realizing she Hecht narrator takes a can-opener to her how poetry can arise from the suburbs. In a man who liked to say, ‘You knew when herself is clinging to the concepts only by mind and peels it back. Readers peer into the second, she wants to see if a man you married me that I didn’t talk.’” her fingernails. Cling she does, though, and wires, sardines, and lint—no attempt is whose favorite procedure is the hysterecto- One chapter is devoted to the narrator’s we cheer her valor. Awash in grief, she is not made to make things compatible or pre- my can reveal a human side when posed late-evening visits to a discount drugstore a nihilist. She’s a moralist who doesn’t sentable. This narrator has no focus for her beside an animal. The reader comes to and a T.J. Maxx, where she converses to her require that life have meaning. life. Her monologue is a litany of fears, understand that this woman’s mind, bereft horror, though not unwillingly, with anoth- Unfortunately, the detachment she blow-by-blow accounts of routine experi- of goals and ambitions, is free to contem- er closing-time prowler, desperation bind- applies to her own failings is suspended in ences, free associations, and expressions of plate what most people avoid: loss, entropy, ing them like buddies in a chain gang. relationship to the boy. She loses her per- Another chapter takes place during a ses- spective, waxing romantic and sappy. He sion with her cat-obsessed electrologist—“I comes off like a reluctant, selfish boyfriend, Ohio Wesleyan University wanted to prevent my eyebrows from grow- available because of his neediness rather ing together in case I fell into a coma.” than because of concern for her. With his Department of Modern Foreign Languages Assistant Professor of Spanish There, she recalls other attempts to shore adolescent opinions, solipsism, coldness, up her crumbling packaging, including this and emotional evasions—he continually lies Ohio Wesleyan University invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant exchange with a yoga teacher who doesn’t to her about his drug use—he remains a Professor level, for a specialist in Latin American literature and culture with teaching lift weights. “‘Do you walk on your hands cipher, though Hecht means for us to be as experience and publications. Appointment will be made by March 5, 2004. Starting date three hours a day’? she asked when I com- delighted by him as the narrator is. Far too will be August 16, 2004. Teaching responsibilities will be on all levels of language and lit- mented on her shoulder muscles. The dis- much of the book is taken up with the erature with three courses each semester. Ph.D. (or ABD with degree in hand by July 1, cussion ended in a moment of silent tact.” doomed cause of selling him, and the novel 2004) is required. All teaching is at the undergraduate level. All applicants should have Whatever irritation I felt about the nar- is nearly scuttled by it. rator’s willful ignorance of modern exis- It’s a relief when the boy is out of the native or near-native fluency in Spanish and a strong interest in language teaching. tence and her reliance on her moneyed sta- picture, and we’re once again alone with File review will begin on December 15, 2003, and will be completed by January 30, 2004; tus was dissolved by her unsentimental the narrator’s solitude. Back she goes to however, all application materials must be on file by January 15, 2004. Please send letter view of human helplessness. Hecht’s teller the discount drugstore’s alarming of application, vita, three letters of reference, transcripts, an example of scholarship, and is a white coat chronicling the bumped- denizens and to the electrologist with her statement of teaching philosophy to: Dr. Donald E. Lenfest, Chair, Department of nose follies of her lab-rat self, and in that sorrowful pets. These creatures, in fact, Modern Foreign Languages, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio 43015 detachment the reader is free to contem- have more to give the narrator than the plate life’s inescapable indignities. The boy, and we’re not asked to cuddle them. In its continuing efforts to enrich its academic environment and provide equal educa- more despairing and pained the narrator They see her, which excites a tumble of tional and employment opportunities, Ohio Wesleyan University actively seeks and becomes, the cooler and more unflappable observations and ruminations that again encourages applications from women and minorities. her voice grows. We trust her, too, because draw the reader into the vivid unswept she understands the relative size of room of this rare intelligence. I

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 convinced him to start writing plays. He visiting her mother and, for years, her considered her a subject worthy of his daughter’s presence put Duse in a dour pen and apparently plagiarized her conver- mood and disturbed her ability to work. A La Duse sation shamelessly. “The author saw his cause of this breakdown is given in a let- ideal interpreter, and the actress saw her ter to one of her lovers: “But you can’t say by Karen Rosenberg ideal writer” is Sheehy’s apt, pithy summa- everything,” she wrote. ry. And those ideals may well have kept Eleanora Duse: A Biography by Helen Sheehy. New York: them together long after good sense Who can you tell, for example, would dictate otherwise. Duse continued about the sadness, the physical, yes Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 400 pp., $32.50 hardcover. to finance his theatrical work even when physical repulsion, alas, of a hand losing money, and the relationship ended that touches you? The heart goes I only when he wrote a leading role for a back and forth all day between the younger actress. Duse was later caught try- desire to help, and the instinct that nstage, she almost never used ing to set fire to his house. revolts, because of a word, some rouge, powder or any other minor thing, some character trait O make-up, and that alone was f life on the road generally puts stress that reminds you, implacably, of its enough to mark the young Italian actress on relationships, then this was espe- origin.—the father’s like that.—in Eleanora Duse as exceptional in the late I cially true for Duse who, Sheehy has her, and you see him. No—it’s hor- 19th century. The change from dim oil calculated, rarely stayed put longer than a rible! Such sorrows cannot be writ- lamps to brighter gas and then even month in her life. Born into an Italian act- ten down! (p. 173) stronger electric lighting made her aes- ing family, she was taken on tour to cold thetic successful. Suddenly the audience rented rooms where she knew no other The woman who spoke nostalgically of could see the expressiveness of bare skin: children. She attended neither school nor the clasp of her mother’s hand, the her face grew pale or flushed in response church. When she was not onstage herself, actress who was praised for her own to emotions. With her lack of blemishes, she was alone, because her parents were expressive hands, was disgusted by her Duse bespoke health and beauty, setting a onstage. Her mother provided closeness daughter’s touch. And whom does she high standard for future performers, but and comfort—Duse remembers her pity in this passage? Not the rejected she was also willing to appear ugly when mother’s small hand clasping her tightly. child, but herself. Sheehy is surprisingly she believed a part called for it. Only when But she died when Duse was 14, and Duse tolerant of Duse’s shortcomings as a par- she was older did she doctor her stage continued to travel with an acting compa- ent. She says, “Duse may have been a bad appearance, donning wigs to hide grey ny that included her father. By the time mother, but she had been, by the stan- hair and using some cosmetics. Before the she was 20, she was pregnant by a writer dards of the day, an exemplary father.” Onstage, Duse often rejected conventional cinema codified naturalness, she had “feminine” postures, 1882. From and editor who refused to marry her, Yet, no matter how many bills she paid, defined it as an actress, then a director Eleanora Duse. though she begged him, “Save me from Duse was not just emotionally distant but and, not long afterwards, the owner and the solitude of my silent room.” Their hostile to a child who was not responsible manager of her own theater company. and granted herself the privilege of a son, born in secrecy, soon died, and Duse for whom she resembled. Time and time Her speech and movement, too, were brain, a soul and a unique personality, but felt responsible. True, she was comforted again, Duse played the victim in relation perceived to be less stagey than the norm. she did not extend that same privilege to by Matilde Serao, a budding Neapolitan to her lovers and conveniently forgot her While theatrical convention demanded the women she played.” The words writer two years her senior and one of her culpability vis-à-vis her child. “I am a that she imitate the postures in visual art, “human being,” “brain,” “soul,” and “per- most significant female friends. But no poor thing who belongs to no one but particularly in sculpture, Duse abandoned sonality” are so indeterminate and subjec- one could distract her from the theme of myself. But what can I do about it?” she pictorial models. “[W]ithout a corset,” tive that they offer little insight into per- a lost son, which time did not dissipate but wrote to d’Annunzio. After her daughter notes her new biographer, Helen Sheehy, forming style. Even phrases like “declam- rather intensified. married and settled down in England, “she could ‘curl up like a cat’ on the sofa, atory, stereotypical acting” are too general Her marriage, shortly thereafter, to a Duse hardly saw her. To another one of or stretch full length with her arms over to convey the practices from which Duse Neapolitan actor brought her respectabili- her lovers, she wrote, “Just to see her was her head, even cross her legs like a man.” deviated. Sheehy’s readers may well won- ty and a baby daughter, Enrichetta, but sufficient to cause a world of regret in my Her acting style was identified with free- der what exactly were the “conventional she was deeply ambivalent about both of soul!!—A world (of regret)!—. And I can dom, spontaneity, and audaciousness—as aria-like moments,” then called “points,” these changes. The tie to her husband was do nothing for her either.” Evidently when she touched the leg of her leading that Duse eschewed. Sheehy, who has severed more easily, and she found other Duse did not understand her attitude man with a hand. A look, a gesture was at published other books on theater, appears lovers. Her letters to them suggest she towards her daughter as a decision that least as important to her as words. Sheehy fully capable of specificity about historical sought more intimacy than they were will- could be changed. quotes her as saying, “When I must performance, and I wish she had allowed ing to give, yet this neediness may have The picture of Duse that emerges express violent passion, when my spirit is herself more detail. been only one aspect of her divided per- from Sheehy’s biography is of a woman gripped by pleasure and sorrow, I often am Actually, Bernhardt and Duse had sonality—the aspect she was more willing who coped with the tremendous demands silent, and on stage I speak softly, barely more in common than their competition to voice, perhaps because it fit her soci- of a successful theatrical life by putting murmuring.” She was known for her paus- would imply. Both imitated the masculine ety’s accepted role of the long-suffering enormous demands on others. When she es both before lines and within them that body language of their era. A photo from woman. Her desire for independence was visited her close friend Giulietta, she suggested she was thinking and feeling, 1892 shows Duse seated in a dress, but more likely to be demonstrated than artic- expected fresh bed sheets each night, and not merely reciting what she’d memorized. with her legs spread and her elbows rest- ulated: by her long periods alone when she she also took Giulietta’s husband as her “What is more eloquent than silence?” she ing on her knees; Bernhardt liked to play read voraciously or prepared a role and by lover without any apparent guilt or regret. asked once. “When we see a person who is Hamlet and other male roles. In their her virtually incessant touring, not just in Even those who didn’t know such details still and silent, don’t we immediately ask: hard-driving business operations, they Europe but in the Americas and Russia. of her personal life damned her “egoism” what’s wrong? What’s disturbing them?” If were also exceptional women of their Meanwhile her daughter was shunted or hailed her “freedom.” Sheehy’s accom- you recognize many elements of modern time, quick to exploit the media. Both aside. Duse sent her from a wet-nurse to a plishment is to fall into neither extreme acting here, that’s no coincidence: skillfully used absence—or the threat of boarding school and, occasionally, a sana- but, rather, to allow the reader to appreci- Stanislavsky cited her example in it—to drive up ticket sales: Bernhardt may torium. It was a troubled relationship on ate the energy as well as the pain of this rehearsals of his Moscow Art Theater. have made a few too many farewell tours, both sides. Enrichetta was often ill when enormously talented woman. I It isn’t easy to describe performances but Duse (to borrow a quip about opera for which there are no sound and film diva Montserrat Caballé) was often avail- As Cleopatra, late 1880s. From Eleanora Duse. recordings, and Sheehy has done an able for a limited number of cancellations. admirable job of collecting the reactions And despite the contrasts in their public of witnesses, in many languages. She notes personae, each constructed and tended the shift in theatrical practice from Sarah her image with care. Bernhardt marketed Bernhardt’s grand entrances, which called herself incessantly as an eternally youthful attention to the presence of the diva, to and iconoclastic genius, while Duse, who Duse’s unobtrusive appearances onstage, ostensibly shunned critics, wooed them as sometimes obscured by other actors. She La Duse, the incarnation of Art, above points out that Duse’s interpretation of a the gossip and sensationalism of the role varied, while Bernhardt’s offered pre- entertainment world. As Sheehy cannily dictability to her audiences. Yet Sheehy notes, “There was a publicity campaign on does not explore the Duse/Bernhardt Duse’s behalf, but it was so subtle the rivalry. She states, “For the first time they public believed Duse was a great artist [Duse’s audience] were seeing a woman above such vulgar manipulation.” playing a human being onstage in all her In her efforts to elevate the theater complexity and completeness,” which fails (and, with it, herself), Duse was aided by to explain what it was about Bernhardt and her most famous lover, the Italian writer other leading actresses of the time that Gabriele d’Annunzio. It was, in part, a seemed simplistic and incomplete. professional collaboration. She needed Sheehy suggests, “As a professional new repertory by someone who shared woman, Bernhardt behaved like a man her enthusiasm for symbolist theater and The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 13 Though Moldaw writes excitingly about © Jane Bernard what might be called feminist “body con- sciousness,” her poems in The Lightning Field Subject vs. object touch only lightly on social/political mat- ters. Despite this absence, I found the by Frieda Gardner adoption poems, which include one vivid and sorrowful depiction of miscarriage, The Lightning Field by Carol Moldaw. Oberlin, OH: touching in their understatement and indi- rection. It’s as if Moldaw wants us to feel Oberlin College Press, 2003, 69 pp., $15.00 paper. the combination of hesitation and desire in her steps toward motherhood, as in her The Cloud of Knowable Things by Elaine Equi. description of waking up one morning feel- ing more like a nesting bird than a mother. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, Also, she knows that her act requires her attention to the process of the mother’s 2003, 849 pp., $15.00 paper. childbirth, and to the “great meandering waves” of air that take her to China. I n American poetry, a pendulum swings prised, meditative, and sensual. On the sur- laine Equi, who once produced a Carol Moldaw back and forth between subject and face of her work are rich sound and varia- chapbook called Friendship with I object. At present, in many quarters, tion of rhythm and line. A few steps deep- E Things has a less reflective and more there’s a move away from autobiographical er in lie wells of feeling and complexities playful style than Moldaw, though she’s is radiant, while the banal is opaque or self-grounded poetry toward work that of thought. equally serious in intent. She has an eye and often comes at the poet’s experience indirectly, “The Lightning Field” names not only schooled in surrealism and popular culture obscure. I prefer the latter, with its through attention to objects—animate or Moldaw’s book, but the central section of and a voice ranging from conversational, murky not—or to the dynamics of language itself. poems devoted to her experience of to gnomic, to comic, to “no-ideas-but-in- agate, mushroom, ocher back- Like all neat divisions, the subject-object Walter De Maria’s site-specific land art things” notational. In The Cloud of Knowable ground music— split works best when it is transcended, installation in the New Mexico desert. It Things, she jokes and riffs, makes pro- its corridor of lurk. (p. 4) subverted, or attacked. Poetry gives us long might sound unpromising to hear that nouncements and lists, adopts the voice of moments of complex awareness closer to Moldaw describes wandering with her both robin and branch, and interviews her- Here we encounter the “cloud” sur- the actual wavering of experience than to beloved in and around a huge grid of self. Here’s her take on the grand theme of rounding the “knowable” banal, and Equi the clean lines of philosophy. Here are two “Four hundred equidistant stainless steel inspiration: “With her/ winged robot// is here to make it fabulous, to draw atten- fascinating “mid-career” poets who often poles,” but she turns the place into a post- and chalice of limeade.// She’s the imagi- tion to what is “inarticulate” and there- “speak” their worlds through objects. Both modern cathedral, a center of the universe nation!” fore attractive in what seems beneath show us how subject and object are mutu- easily related to the ancient oracle sites she There’s all the serious work of notice. In two long poems, “Trenton” and ally implicated. describes in the book’s concluding section. Language poetry in this book, but Equi is “Reset,” she does comparable work for It takes Carol Moldaw until page seven Moldaw uses similes, science, references not above a little New York School off- the urban landscapes that have become of The Lightning Field to use the pronoun to weaving and Vermeer, memories, and hand explanation or seductive how-to. In visual clichés behind the opening credits “I.” From the very beginning her “Studies stories to show how this artwork opens up two versions of “The Sensuous Reader,” on nightly cop shows. in Pen and Ink” offer vivid imagery, a wide inner and outer worlds for her. She plays she hands out advice designed to jog us In “O Patriarchy,” Equi wants to see and quirky range of reference (Krishna, with words; coming upon a “scuffed clod from the habit of reading. “Open any the crusty social construction anew, with a Croatia, crumpled paper and bed sheets, of desert scrub—/ an omphalos among book/ and look to see// if the author/ is Dickinsonian “slant,” as “Inaccessible/ corn snakes, and yashmaks [veils used by the obelisks.” She’s brought to fear and inside the words/ your eyes caress.// Read and remote// behind the drawbridge of Muslim women to cover the face]), and an grief over her childlessness: Backwards/ and up and down.// Skim the penis.” What are regarded as patri- interesting tension between disciplined diagonally.” The tone is light and ironic, archy’s “contracts” seem “natural as rain.” description and disturbing imagery. But ...this sheet of rain and the effect prompts disquieting ques- Intention is “kindly.” But in the end “if a the noticing poet remains in shadow. evaporates/ is throttled/ bottle- tions about we “handle” books. woman/ is offended,/ she finds no one How strange is poem #5, wherein the necked Other ways of playing with form can be there to blame.” Rather than explore the “I” first appears. The speaker is looking at in the sky’s throat/never nears heard in her parodic maxims (“Everyone offenses, Equi evokes a remote and regal DaVinci notebook drawings that have never needs a wise man/ in a glass hut”; “Out of institution that silently aligns itself with been illuminated so that both sides of the grazes/ never wets /the the frying pan and into the choir” ), turns the very nature of the universe. paper can be seen at once. First a straw- tantalized ground (p. 32) on common expression (“A grace in the Typically, there is “a woman” but no berry “bleeds through” to reveal “a fetus gloom”; “A fork in the wave”), or direc- autobiographical Equi in “O Patriarchy.” floating on the back.” Then we’re looking Botanized geometry (“the austere expanse, tion-giving (“I’m at the corner of Can’t & Equi is interested in narrative self-disclo- at “the coition of a hemi-sected man / and the sleek/ sparsely planted forest of tem- Won’t./ In the kiosk between Aroma & sure even less than Moldaw. “The story of woman” and a “tube from the testicles” pered poles”) yields to animal life made Automatic,// Squirm & Squall”). Try these my skin/ is long and involved,” she says leading to the heart (italics Moldaw’s). The metaphorical: in your own home and see what happens to in “Autobiographical Poem,” and quickly “I” enters quietly, via memory; watching a your internal compass. moves to other non-stories of mouth, videotape of surgery, she sees ovaries “like ...not just jackrabbits, lizards, Equi’s title, The Cloud of Knowable Things, hair, and bones. “Early Influence” is a sponge or coral.” Then back to DaVinci: blue-winged moths, gilia, and is a play on The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th- philosophical poem about language’s “Here, the woman’s heart’s / a dial.” The grasshoppers century gnostic religious text designed to power to define, and the poet admires the “I”’s reaction to all this sex-related imagery flinging themselves against my face teach us how to uncover deep but hidden resistance of “my mother [who] lives comes without transition: but also spiritual truths. Equi’s reversal points between other people’s words.” Ironically, a sense of seemingly endless toward the cloudy, complex nature of of course, this mother takes in language ...I hear my own timer ticking, possibility. (p. 34) things that may seem easily recognizable. as a kind of “landscape she moves ticking fast, the parts dissected, On the cover page, over a photograph of through/ half-listening, unimpressed.” tagged, Moldaw doesn’t need to see actual light- an urban skyline floats a chalk-like drawing But Equi’s not sharing a story about neg- ning at play between the installation’s of a cloud. As with H. D. and Emily lect; she wants us to notice her mother’s and reassembled, but never yet poles. Simply walking among them brings Dickinson, both presences in this book, a resistance, her “most political act.” disarmed. on a “languor-inducing rhythm of... recur- simple image can lift us right off our solid Language is friend, enemy, guide, Or detonated. (p. 7) rence” and lots of free-but-relevant associ- ground and into new worlds of meaning. magician, and con artist in Equi’s book; it ation. Finally, she writes, “you are stopped For all her sophistication, Equi is not is a pleasure to hear her use it to light up The “I” seems jolted alive by self- short/ by an innocuous-looking juncture, pious toward the literary past. Reading and darken the fast-moving world. She awareness; there’s no explosion, but plenty and forced/ to scrutinize the meaning of Dickinson, she begins to hear the voice of gets you to dwell on her poems even as of stuttering “t’s”. Artist has been moved your next step.” Mia Farrow reciting “Heart! We will for- she’s saying “Get out of the way” or “No by artist, and has this to say about the The most directly personal of Moldaw’s get him!/ You and I—tonight!” And so loitering.” And, like Carol Moldaw, she experience: “The deeper I delve, the more poems, and those I can imagine some read- on, with commentary from Farrow’s guides you to the “hidden-in-plain sight” I feel objective.” We’re not to hear more ers taking exception to, are about her adop- melodramatic performances (“in a poor of the spirit world with almost no ges- about the poet’s heart or her potential for tion of a daughter from China. Some may boy and skirt, [Farrow] walks by herself,/ ture at all. dissolution in death or sex. She’s after the impatiently wonder why she spends so visiting each word slowly as if it were a feeling of objectivity, and wants to honor much time on those migrating birds when grave”) until Dickinson’s poem of A woman DaVinci’s “living page,” which has altered she just wants to find out when the baby romantic agony both opens in Hollywood in a wavy room her awareness. might have been born. Why does Moldaw and adds complexity of feeling, and wit, changes into starlight Call it reticent, objective (or settle for the vague phrase “beyond where to the usual script. Objectivist), classically restrained, or she could keep you” when she could have In a prose poem called “The Banal,” as silence lifts Parnassian, Moldaw’s presentation of self been talking politically and concretely Equi effects a campy and serious turn on its hat and world is almost always mediated by about why the baby’s mother gave up her the naming of objects. in passing things, particularly art objects. But she child? Why does she have to italicize and this courts revelation from these things in a “mine” with typical American possessive- Even with its shitload of artifacts, we call occult. voice variously curious, passionate, sur- ness when the baby is finally in her arms? the everyday (“Women and Magic,” p. 40) I

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 © William Gordon plotting to prevent the election of a Socialist in Latin America. US dollars, through the Central Intelligence Agency The first September 11th (CIA), poured into Chile in support of the other candidate, but Salvador Allende by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz won by a landslide. The Nixon adminis- tration’s plan to topple the Socialist gov- My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile ernment began the day of the election, ending with the military coup. For read- by Isabel Allende. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, ers who want to learn about the day-to- day coup planning in Washington DC, a 224 pp., $23.95 hardcover. book of recently declassified documents is available, edited by Peter Kornbluh: The I Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. his year marked the 30-year American “magical realism.” Another of anniversary of the US-supported her novels, Paula, is clearly a memoir about y Invented Country is not chrono- Isabel Allende T coup that brought down the dem- her grown daughter’s coma and ultimate logically constructed, which ocratically elected Socialist government death from a rare disease in 1992. Nor is M does cause some repetition. life story into most of the chapters, and it of Chile and ushered in the violent 17- Allende averse to including her feminist The 16 chapters cover a variety of topics, makes for riveting reading when she year reign of military dictator Augusto and political views—-most of which including geography and landscape, anchors the narrative in this way. Pinochet. Some 3,200 Chilean citizens, would be considered “left wing” by US Santiago the city, the influence of the However, she often strays into impres- and a number of foreigners, were killed standards—in her fictions. That such a Catholic Church, the role of women, eth- sionistic, even stereotypical generaliza- for political reasons, including 1,200 who writer is also a best-selling celebrity author nicity, nationalism, and history. Like tions about the Chilean people. remain unaccounted for. The coup was a in the United States is remarkable. As she many celebrity memoirists, Allende too Allende decided to write the book watershed in the life of novelist Isabel writes in My Invented Country, “Before you often refers the reader to her other works from memory and impressions, forgoing Allende: As a member of the intelli- ask me why a leftist with my surname for information rather than summarizing research and collaboration of memory gentsia and a relative of the assassinated chose to live in the Yankee empire, I will it in the present one. She works her own and facts. This works well enough where president Salvador Allende, her life was tell you that it wasn’t by plan, not by any increasingly endangered, and she fled the stretch of the imagination.” country in 1975, first to Venezuela and later to the United States. orn in 1942 to a beautiful upper- FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES Her new book, My Invented Country, is a class Chilean mother and a self-described nostalgic memoir of Chile B Chilean diplomat father while they and a farewell love letter to her mother- were posted in Lima, Perú, she and her FIVE COLLEGE WOMEN’S STUDIES RESEARCH CENTER: A collabora- land. Allende, who currently lives in mother were soon abandoned by Tomás tive project of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith California, decided to write the memoir Allende. The mother with her three small Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst after the September 11th, 2001, attacks in children, including Isabel, went home to the United States. In her introduction, her parents’ house in Santiago. It was she explains why: during that time that Allende would listen The Center invites applications for its Research Associateships for to the stories of her grandmother and 2004-2005 from scholars and teachers at all levels of the education- Until only a short time ago, if great-grandfather that she later immortal- al system, as well as from artists, community organizers and politi- someone had asked me where I’m ized in her fiction. Ten years later, from, I would have answered, Allende’s mother married another cal activists, both local and international. Associates are provided without much thought, Nowhere; Chilean diplomat who took the family with offices in our spacious facility, computer access, library privi- or, Latin America; or, maybe, In along to his posts in Bolivia and then in leges, and the collegiality of a diverse community of feminists. my heart I’m Chilean. Today, how- Beirut. Allende attended English lan- Research Associate applications are accepted for either a semester ever, I say I’m an American, not guage schools in both places, which simply because that’s what my explains her wonderful command of spo- or the academic year. The Center supports projects in all disciplines passport verifies…but because a ken English, although she writes in so long as they focus centrally on women or gender. Research terrorist attack destroyed the twin Spanish. Allende returned to finish high Associateships are non-stipendiary. However, international appli- towers of the World Trade Center, school and college in Santiago, and at 20 cants with expertise in Latin America, Asia or Europe may apply for and starting with that instant, married a fellow student. Not yet having many things have changed. We chosen the vocation of a writer, she one of the two special one-semester Ford Associateships for Fall can’t be neutral in moments of cri- worked from 1959 to 1965 for the United 2004 or Spring 2005, which offer a stipend of $12,000, plus a sis. This tragedy has brought me Nations’ Food and Agriculture $3,000 housing/travel allowance in return for teaching (in English) face to face with my sense of Organization in Santiago. After her identity. (pp. xi-xii) daughter, Paula, was born in 1963, the one undergraduate course at Mount Holyoke College. The Weissman young couple, with baby in tow, spent Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts will co-sponsor the asso- Allende goes on to describe what was the two years in Europe, living in Brussels ciates and invites applicants to consider contributing to our year- repeat of a nightmare for her: and Switzerland. They returned to Chile, long focus on The World and Water: (Re)Source of Power in the where her son Nicolás was born. By a blood-chilling coincidence— In the late 1960s, Allende began her 21st Century with a special emphasis on design (architectural, fur- historic karma—the comman- writing career in Santiago as editor and niture, graphic, or product design as well as urban and landscape deered airplanes struck their US columnist for a feminist magazine she design), documentary studies in film and photography or perform- targets on a Tuesday, September helped establish. The magazine existed ance in an international context. Preference given to applicants with 11, exactly the same day of the for seven years, closing following the week and month—and at almost 1973 coup. During the same period, performance or production experience and whose work crosses tra- the same time in the morning—of Allende also worked in television, having ditional academic boundaries. Applications welcomed from visual the 1973 military coup in Chile, a her own popular interview show and artists, film and video makers, architects and designers, dancers and terrorist act orchestrated by the becoming a local celebrity. In 1970, as her CIA against a democracy… That journalism career took off, her cousin actors, as well as academic scholars. Ford applicants need not be distant Tuesday in 1973 my life Salvador Allende was elected first studying their own region of origin. was split in two; nothing was ever Socialist Party president of Chile. The again the same, I lost a country. Chilean Socialist Party was related to Applicants for both programs should submit a project proposal (up That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was European Socialist parties that held also a decisive moment; nothing power off and on without posing a per- to 4 pages), curriculum vitae, two letters of reference, and applica- will ever again be the same, and I ceived threat to the United States. tion cover sheet. In addition, Ford applicants should submit a two- gained a country. (p. xii) In wake of the election of Allende, page description of a women’s studies course they are prepared to Chile was an exciting place for journalists, My Invented Country is Allende’s first intellectuals, artists, social activists, femi- teach, which includes their pedagogical goals and techniques. memoir, but she has long mined her own nists, and other sectors of the popula- Submit all applications to: Five College Women’s Studies Research life and experience for her fiction. Her tion, except for the small upper class, Center, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College Street, South Hadley, first novel, The House of the Spirits, con- because electricity and change were in the MA 01075-6406. Deadline is February 16, 2004. For further infor- tained many of the stories she had heard air, and more freedom existed than even from her grandmother and great-grandfa- traditionally democratic Chile had ever mation, contact the Center at TEL 413.538.2275, FAX ther. The supernatural quality of these experienced. However, even during 413.538.3121, email [email protected], website: stories established her reputation as the Allende’s campaign the Nixon adminis- http://wscenter.hampshire.edu/ “female Gabriel Garcia-Marquez,” after tration—under the hard gaze of the Columbia-born master of Latin Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—was

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 15 memory is the essence of the story, but reflects Chilean upper-class ignorance not when she gets facts wrong. In partic- and disdain, if not blatant racism. ular, an early chapter titled, “A Two long chapters, “A Breath of Millefeuille Pastry,” is troublesome. History,” and “Gunpowder and Blood,” Rediscovering Lucy Stone Allende asks, “Who are we, we make up the most powerful and passion- Chileans?” Her discussion of the native ate—and political—heart of this book. by Louise W. Knight Mapuches, who make up about 10 per- After tracing the century and a half of cent of the Chilean population, and a development of democratic institutions Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of huge majority in their homeland in the in Chile following liberation from the southern part of the country, trivializes Spanish empire, Allende is back to the Woman’s Rights Movement by Joelle Million. and romanticizes them: “Some Mapuche September 11, 1973, and the crushing of tribes have rebelled in recent years, and those institutions. She muses about how Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, the country cannot ignore them much different her life (and surely that of mil- longer. In fact, they are somewhat in lions of Chileans) would have been if not 2003, 360 pp., $49.95 hardcover. vogue.” The Aymaras from the Andean for the coup: “Were it not for that event, region of Chile do not fare much better: it’s clear that I would never have left I “They are affable by nature…” But I was Chile, that I wouldn’t be a writer, and that most startled by this claim: “African I wouldn’t be married to an American n 1858, the most famous and accom- hood of Boston, was torn down long blood was never incorporated into and living in California.” plished advocate for women’s rights ago. The Commonwealth of Chilean stock, which would have given us Allende ends the book with “The I in the United States was Lucy Stone. Massachusetts and the Massachusetts rhythm and color…” Had Allende done Country Inside My Head,” in which she Ten years later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation for the Humanities installed a little research, she would have found briefly summarizes her life since 1973 gave credit where it was due, saying, a bronze relief of her, among others, in that there is a sizeable population of and professes her true allegiance to liter- “Lucy Stone was the first speaker who the Massachusetts State House in 1999, Afro-Chileans in the north of Chile in ature, which she writes has defined her: really stirred the nation’s heart on the and the City of Boston recently dedicat- Arica. Then she could have queried why “Word by word I have created the per- subject of woman’s wrongs.” Stone was ed a memorial honoring Stone, Abigail this was unknown to her while growing son I am and the invented country in also the first paid national lecturer on Adams, and Phillis Wheatley; but when up. As stated, the breezy dismissal which I live.” I women’s rights; the moving force behind film documentarian Ken Burns did a the first national Woman’s Rights three-part series on the history of the Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, women’s suffrage movement, it focused in 1850 and the seven conventions that on Stanton and Anthony and barely followed; the first person to travel the mentioned Stone, whose efforts for suf- country organizing women to petition frage before the Civil War were far more and, later, to lobby state legislatures for extensive. A microfilm and three vol- the vote; the person whose example and umes of Stanton’s and Anthony’s passionate words inspired Susan B. important papers have been published Anthony, Frances Willard, Ernestine to date (with three more volumes Rose, and Carrie Chapman Catt, among planned), but there are no plans that I many others, to advocate for women’s know of to publish Stone’s papers in rights; the founder and co-editor of the either print or microfilm. Aside from most successful and widely read the biography of Stone written by her women’s rights journal of the 19th cen- daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, only tury, The Woman’s Journal; and the two biographies have been published, WILLIAMS COLLEGE founder of the American Woman’s Elinor Rice Hays’ unfootnoted Morning U.S. Latino/a Studies Suffrage Association. All Americans Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone, 1818- today are in her debt for her pioneering 1893 in 1961, and Andrea Moore Kerr’s American Studies contributions to the now more than better documented Lucy Stone: Speaking 150-year-old, still needed, women’s Out for Equality in 1992. Williams College invites applications for a visiting position in U.S. Latino/a rights movement. That is, until now. Joelle Million, an Studies and American Studies for 2004-2006. This rank-open search is for a two- Her impact was achieved first and independent scholar from Wilbraham, foremost as an orator. Touring the coun- year appointment. U.S. Latino/a Studies is an emerging program at Williams Massachusetts, has just published try lecturing on women’s rights in the Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place. The arrival College with four faculty members, whose scholarship and teaching focus on 1840s and 1850s, Stone persuaded thou- of a new biography of Stone is cause for U.S. Latino/a Studies. sands of women and men to join the celebration; we have so much to learn cause. “Woman must take her rights as about her place in history. Million’s Candidates’ interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching should fall at the inter- far as she can get them,” she told the book, even more than the earlier biogra- sections of U.S. Latino/a and American Studies. The American Studies Program first national women’s rights convention phies, corrects the distortions in the his- seeks to strengthen comparative ethnic studies and to situate the United States in 1850, and must “demand [the rest] in torical record created by Elizabeth Cady and the field within a transnational context. Candidates whose work is compar- the name of a common humanity... We Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s History want that Woman should be the co-equal of Woman Suffrage, which mentions Stone ative and/or transnational are particularly encouraged to apply. Areas of spe- and [partner] of Man in all the interests, mostly in passing, or, in a few cases, for cialization include literary and cultural studies, contemporary social issues or and perils and enjoyments of human her distinctly notorious exploits. social movements, and/or gender and sexuality. life.” In 1854 she said the country need- As Million’s title suggests, the biogra- ed a “revolution” to “shake [the phy covers only part of Stone’s life, Candidates are expected to have the Ph.D. in hand by time of appointment. Constitution] in pieces” and replace it from her birth in 1818 to 1869, when Advanced candidates are expected to have the Ph.D. and an established record with one “in favor of righteousness that the women’s suffrage movement split in research and teaching. knows no sex, color, or condition.” into two organizations—the National, Trained in oratory at Oberlin led by Stanton and Anthony, and the Send a letter detailing current research interests and teaching areas, curriculum College, she spoke to audiences as large American, led by Stone. The book thus vitae, three letters of recommendation, and a writing sample. Applications, as 4,000 without aid of a microphone. covers the earliest years of the women’s Quick on her feet, humorous in rebut- which will be reviewed starting December 1, 2003, should be sent to: Carmen rights movement, which historians have tal, skilled in establishing an emotional rarely covered in sufficient detail, tend- Whalen, Chair, Latino/a Studies Search Committee, Williams College, Stetson connection with her audience and earn- ing to focus instead on the post-Civil Hall, Williamstown, MA 01267 ing its goodwill, she consistently War period, when the federal amend- impressed those who heard her. One ment for woman’s suffrage was intro- Williams College is a coeducational liberal arts institution, offering undergradu- reporter thought she possessed “pow- duced, advocated, and eventually adopt- ate education to its 2,000 students. The College has built its reputation on a ers of extempore address rarely [seen] ed into law in 1920. long tradition of outstanding teaching and scholarship and on the academic even [in] celebrated male orators.” But the three decades before the Civil excellence of its students. Among the opportunities that Williams offers its stu- Yet today, recognition of her accom- War were the years when women and plishments is thin on the ground—liter- their male supporters broke open the dents and approximately 260 faculty members are interdisciplinary programs and ally. Lucy Stone’s birthplace—the taboo issue of women’s rights, aired their centers, including the Multicultural Center, the Oakley Center for the house’s fieldstone foundation is all that legal, economic, educational, and social Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Center for Environmental Studies as survives—was rescued only last year grievances, and began the long, arduous well as extensive library and museum collections, expanding theatre and dance from developers by the Trustees of process of reform that is yet to be com- facilities, a center for information technology, and well-equipped laboratories. Reservations, with the aid of the towns- pleted. After anti-slavery lecturers and See also Williams College website (http://www.williams.edu). people of West Brookfield, writers Angelina and Sarah Grimké Massachusetts, and the Commonwealth advocated for women’s rights in the As an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer, Williams College of Massachusetts; eventually the prop- 1830s, the movement began to organize especially welcomes and encourages applications from women and minorities. erty will be open to the public, but in the 1840s. As Million makes clear, the $140,000 must be raised first. Her for- western New York women’s rights meet- mer home in Dorchester, a neighbor- ings in Seneca Falls and Rochester in

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 1848 were just the first in a series of development of Stone’s ideas and the women’s rights gatherings. Million pro- broader meaning of her work. vides fascinating details about how Connections are not made between Stone, with the support of William related events or issues. Why did Lucy Creating “gay-bies” Lloyd Garrison, addressed the annual Stone not wish to marry? When and how convention of the American Anti- did Stone’s feminist consciousness by Julia Query Slavery Society in Boston in late May of emerge and why? What is the signifi- 1850 and called for a national conven- cance of the National Women’s Rights Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm tion to establish a formal women’s rights Conventions of the 1850s to the birth of movement. By October, she and Pauline the women’s rights movement? What Donor by Harlyn Aizley. Los Angeles: Alyson Davis, aided by Abby Kelley, Harriot was Stone’s significance to the move- Hunt and others, had organized this ment as a theorist? The material to Publications, 2003, 256 pp., 14.95, paper. national convention in Worcester, answer these questions lies scattered, I Massachusetts, and, to their amazed and therefore dormant, in the book. delight, over 1,000 women and men Complexity and contradiction are also ne of the great advantages of California struggling artists donate came. only implicit. For the most part Million being a lesbian is that, if you sperm, while in the South white Million’s book is impressively sets aside a primary responsibility of the O wish to be a parent, you needn’t supremacists bent on creating an researched. Having dug through biographer—to synthesize and assess. fall in love with good genetic material. Aryan nation donate in order to archives, read extensive newspapers, cor- Million sometimes fails to give a Your heart is free to love wonderful enhance their genetic load. (p. 29) respondence, and local and national rounded picture of an issue. One of the apples from bad trees. The downside to reform journals of the day, she casts many interesting subjects she covers is selecting sperm is that you immediately Faith, like Aizley, is a “short Jewish les- light on many crucial developments of Stone’s view on divorce reform. Million turn into an amateur geneticist about to bian in jeans and T-shirt. Lip balm. the 1850s. She has much to say about discusses this briefly at three points, embark on the basically immoral experi- Fleece.” But they have their differences: Stone’s central role in organizing the first each time because the issue arises in ment of making a real human baby with “[W]e fall into the following categories: eight of the National Women’s Rights Stone’s correspondence. Million cor- deliberately selected ingredients. You Extrovert/Introvert. Patient/Impatient. Conventions; about how Stone and rects an old assertion, circulated by must decide which traits you believe are MTV/PBS. Anal Expulsive/Anal other leaders of the different reform some historians, that Stone adamantly genetic (alcoholism? avid reading? high Retentive. Known Donor/Unknown groups (anti-slavery, temperance, opposed Stanton’s decision to speak grade point averages? Republicanism?) Donor.” Faith wants a known donor. women’s rights, and divorce and dress about the question at the 1860 Woman’s and prioritize them. In Buying Dad, Harlyn Using a recently added option, donors reform) aligned, disagreed, and realigned Rights Convention. While Stone still Aizley raises many of the ethical issues to sperm banks can check a box if they over their often interlocking issues; and thought, as she had since 1857, that involved with choosing sperm, as well as wish to allow their offspring, once they about the petition campaign for women’s divorce and other marriage issues mer- the exhausting, infuriating, and disheart- turn 18 years old, to contact them; they suffrage that Lucy Stone organized— ited a separate convention and were not ening logistical hurdles, which she makes are also paid $20 more if they check that which may well have been the first solely women’s rights issues since men hilarious in the re-telling. box. Some sperm-shoppers want known nationally coordinated, state-by-state were so centrally involved, she wrote Ignoring my better judgment, which donors—perhaps because of recent law- campaign for women’s rights in United Stanton, “I am glad you will speak on nagged at me that I needed to sleep while suits by children of sperm donors looking States history. Million provides mar- the divorce question....God touch your my toddler was sleeping, I stayed up late for their biological fathers, or perhaps velous detail about the ups and downs of lips if you do speak on it.” But Million into the night reading Buying Dad and try- because of Greek myths in which unex- organizing, the strong bonds of affec- fails to alert the reader to related impor- ing to keep my laughter from waking my pected tragedy befalls those who are igno- tion that were built, and the pain caused tant information—for example, that slumbering son. Harlyn Aizley presents rant of their true parentage. But Aizley by misunderstandings and disagree- Stone accepted Stanton’s invitation in herself as a stereotypical Jewish, neurot- worries about the disadvantages of having ments. It is all very human and familiar. 1853 to attend the New York Woman’s ic, mildly self-hating lesbian in her a known donor. When petty differences threatened to State Temperance Society Convention account of choosing a sperm donor and disrupt the third National Woman’s where Stanton spoke on the divorce trying to get pregnant, but she doesn’t In eighteen years not only will our Rights Convention in 1852, Lucy Stone question and where, to Stanton’s stay two dimensional for long. Because I donor potentially become a part wrote to a friend that it was disillusion- delight, Stone spoke eloquently in sup- also had to choose sperm, I would have of our lives, but so might our ing to find “so much selfishness instead port of Stanton’s position. Or that read any book about the process. Luckily, children’s eight half-siblings (sup- of real interest in the cause.” Stone’s view on divorce reform, like Aizley is that wondrous type of humor posedly each donor is allowed to Million also examines at length Henry Stanton’s and many other women’s, was writer who dares to be vulnerable and sire only ten children, assuming Blackwell’s unflagging two-year courtship based on her emphatic conviction that open without losing her timing. Like we take two of those slots...) and of Lucy Stone, Stone’s deeply ambivalent “drunkenness so depraves a man’s sys- Annie Lamott’s nonfiction, Aizley’s com- their families. Will the donor still feelings about marriage and Blackwell, tem that he is not fit to be a father,” a ical tale is woven from the heavy threads be strapped for cash? Will he be and the early years of their union. She view that takes on great poignancy of life and death, of love and discrimina- met by a horde of nervous les- wrote to him eloquently of the necessity when one realizes from reading about tion, and of the ethical dilemmas raised bians? Will he want our phone for her to maintain her financial, legal, Stone elsewhere (Million downplays or by new technologies. number? Will he want money? and moral independence if she became omits the persuasive supporting evi- After Faith, Aizley’s partner, is thrilled Will he leave us be? Will he even his wife, and when they did marry in dence) that Stone’s own father was an to find a sperm bank that provides clients be alive? (p. 40) 1855, these terms were honored in the alcoholic. Consequently, Stone’s views with pictures of the donors and happens marriage contract that they drew up and on divorce never come into focus. to be in the South, Aizley writes: Here I felt a little disappointed with signed. They also read a “marriage More broadly, there is the general Aizley. She’s sticking to her joke, but when protest” at their wedding, affirming their absence of a strong narrative voice. While I worry, but know better than to I was considering donors, I was struck by belief that “marriage should be an equal there are moments, particularly when confess to Faith, that Southern the pain and disappointment my child and permanent partnership” and reject- Million is writing about Stone’s courtship sperm donors are racist, anti- might feel if, after 18 years of wondering ing the “radical injustice of present laws.” and marriage, when that voice comes Semitic, homophobic, and pro-mili- and fantasizing about his biological father, Lucy Stone insisted, despite many legal alive, the book is mostly a dry read. Few tary.... I become obsessed with he were met with a flat rejection by a man obstacles, that she keep her maiden name paragraphs have topic sentences to guide California sperm. I decide that in who hardly remembered being paid for and not take Blackwell’s, launching a fem- the reader through the thicket of materi- inist practice that millions of women al. Stone wanders in and out of the story have since adopted. as if by chance. Character development is ignored altogether, even though many he book is in many ways one of richly informative quotations are provid- the most fascinating I have read in ed. It is as if the passionate, articulate T a long time. Yet I did not read it Lucy Stone is trapped behind a glass wall ASSISTANT PROFESSOR/FACULTY FELLOW with feelings of pleasure; I had to compel and holding scribbled messages up to be The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality myself to pick it up and finish it. Why? read, unable to establish a fully human First, it is confusing. The facts are connection. This kind of writing drains FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCE often under-identified or inadequately meaning out of a story that is crammed The Faculty of Arts and Science of New York University invites applications for an linked. I found myself flipping pages full of powerful, dramatic, and important appointment as Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), beginning September 1, 2004, pending budgetary and back and forth and wondering, “What information—both about Stone and administrative approval. The initial appointment will be for one year, renewable annually convention is this?” and “Anniversary about the movement. for a maximum of three years. Candidates must have completed a Ph.D. no earlier than three years before the date of appointment, have a strong commitment to teaching, and week meeting of what?” and “Petition to Lucy Stone is one of the United be active in research on any aspect of Gender and Sexuality Studies in either the do what?” When Million backtracks States’ great early feminist visionaries, humanities or social sciences. Special consideration will be given to candidates whose research focuses on international or transnational issues. The candidate is expected to chronologically, she fails to signal clearly organizers, and advocates. Million’s teach three courses per year, the nature of which will in part depend on the candidate’s her return to the narrative “present,” contribution to bringing her back to qualifications. The CSGS sponsors an active schedule of public events and long-term necessitating more flipping of pages. public attention is huge. At the very projects, and the candidate should be willing to plan, promote, and participate in such events and projects. Please send a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, a 20-page Woman’s Voice is also deficient in inter- least, students and scholars will benefit writing sample, a sample syllabus, and 4 letters of reference by March 12, 2004, to: pretation. Million supplies wonderful from her heroic scholarship, while gen- Carolyn Dinshaw, Director, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York details on many fascinating subjects but eral readers will eagerly wait for the University, 285 Mercer Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-6653. rarely steps back from the day-to-day next, perhaps more artfully written, NYU is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. story to help the reader understand the biography to appear. I

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 17 his sperm and who hadn’t given much be the last time I have absolute One sperm bank that I researched images; the joke is often in an unexpected thought to checking that box. privacy, quiet, space, self-centered- online, which provided charts to enable juxtaposition or outcome. So comics use ness? Have I had enough freedom sperm-shoppers like me to compare stereotypes. Aizley expresses anti-racist ut Buying Dad isn’t a serious inves- to open myself to responsibility, donors across an array of categories, had positions, but the use of stereotype about tigation of the “gay-by boom,” obligation, somebody else’s life? placed the category that interested me the others is always unclean. She uses loaded B the ethics of alternative insemina- Maybe it’s something about the air, most so far to the right of the first cate- phrases—such as referring to a sperm tion, or the lack of government oversight or maybe it’s having had a whole gory on the chart—race—that I ended up donor who is part European and part into the marketing of sperm—although week in which to gorge myself on comparing the donors without seeing Asian as a “cross-breed.” I cringed when that book should be written. For every privacy that causes me finally to their race. My number one choice was a she wrote further that his sperm “are time that Aizley goes for the joke and feel full, sated, to think, Okay, I’ve man in law school who had previously mixed-race, potent, horny cross-breeds sidesteps an issue, there is another when had my share. (p. 120) been an English major, played the saxo- who run downstairs on Christmas morn- she uses her humor to illuminate the phone, spoke a foreign language, and ing all piss and vinegar and know the complexities. For instance, her hilarious And Aizley can be funny, vulnerable, and enjoyed playing basketball. He turned out proper way to hold a pair of chop- and neurotic suspicions of sperm banks realistic in the same paragraph. On going to be African American. My first thought sticks”—but I stuck with her until the (some based on real life examples, like for an intrauterine insemination, she says, was that I should still buy his sperm— end, when she said, “They’re going to do the sperm bank whose director deceitful- since he was my first choice, it would be it, I know they will. Because neurotic ly sold only his own sperm) make one I position one foot and then the racist not to do so. Then my partner said thoughts of not doing it will never even consider the fact that both the donors other inside the friendly, feminist that it would be racist not to consider the cross their tiny non-Jewish XY minds.” and the sperm banks want to sell their oven mitts that are draped over the complexities of raising an African- Ouch! What if she chooses this sperm, sperm. Why did the vast majority of the cold steel patriarchal stirrups and American child, since we are both and her child is not as smart as she had donors I checked out claim to have lean back. The nurse-midwife European-American. I talked about it with hoped? Would she blame the Asian straight A averages and no alcoholic rela- seems a million miles a way. It’s friends, including some who were the only “side”? Have buyer’s regret? (Actually, tives? Who is making sure the sperm both intimate and desolate, like oral dark-skinned children in their families. I sperm are either X or Y.) donors aren’t lying? Buyers of sperm are sex: The person with whom you read some of the many books about Maybe the mistake is in placing race left to devise their own, idiosyncratic vet- are sharing one of life’s most pri- cross-racial families. Is there a difference before all other differences. Frankly, a ting procedures. “We rule out a very vate moments is south of your between European-Americans adopting child who didn’t like to read would be far young bicycle-riding Jew” writes Aizley, equator in a whole other time zone, children from other countries or more different from me than a nerdy little “because of the following statement: “I while you are way up north like a American children of color and white voracious reader of any hue. During my look forward to traveling to Paris one day reindeer. It’s lonely like that now people inseminating with sperm from own search, I ruled out sperm from a to visit the Van Gough [sic] Museum.” with the midwife between my legs men of color? I think there are fewer eth- friend who is a visual artist, because his Although Aisley rarely goes a page busily inserting a speculum. I feel ical questions in adopting children who family are all visual artists who don’t read. without a joke, interspersed with her so small and alone and incapable of already exist than there are in choosing to Buying Dad will be familiar and com- funny stories are deeper ones, about her making the choices required to cre- make a child of a race different from that forting to women (straight and gay) who mother’s ongoing fight with cancer, about ate a family. My girlfriend is at of the rest of the family. have contemplated buying sperm and a her fears about having a baby: work, my mother has cancer, and Aizley raises the question of race twice, fun introduction to the topic for people the second of two very expensive first at the beginning of the book, when who have never thought about it. It would It is eighteen degrees outside and and time-consuming donors may she is opposed to using sperm from men make a good assignment in various college inside I’m warm and dry, free to be a bust. (p. 196) of color; then again in the middle of the classes, from lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans- decide to meditate or cook or book when she reconsiders. I wish she gender studies, to ethics, to bedside man- clean, make a phone call or take a My mother was also dying of cancer had explored the issue more deeply and ners for medical students. For me, the bath. If we have a baby it will while I was trying to get pregnant. My with less stereotyping. Often, she relies on pleasure of the book was unsettling— never be like this again. Even chil- friend’s father was dying while she tried. A stereotypical tropes about Jews to sketch Aizley’s situation was so similar to mine dren grown and far away are with dying parent seems to propel some of us herself; but the part of Buying Dad that that reading her book was like encounter- you always. Being ready to have a towards procreating. Aizley and I had really made me wince was her use of racial ing a plagiarized version of the one I baby is being ready to give this up. another similarity too—we both consid- stereotypes in her jokes about choosing haven’t written. But she did a much better I wonder: Am I ready for this to ered race while looking for sperm. sperm. Humor demands established job than I would have. I

Poetry by Sandra Kohler

December You Change

The woman who complains aging means the end of sex You change your life, but vow to hold on makes her husband take up ballroom dancing. to what you care for, old patterns, pastimes, friends. You are only an hour from the city It is dawn, it is December, everywhere hunters you lived in, there are trains, you have a car. are in the woods; they are armed, they are stalking, But it’s frightening to disembark at the deserted heavy and freighted, longing for prey. A voice from station at midnight, walk the black lot, streets; the woods lures: come and eat crumbs, follow you dislike sleeping in the cramped guest rooms the path. Eating is crucial, the way in and out of of city friends; there’s heavy rain on the one the long apprenticeship we call desire. Grannies, afternoon you’re planning to drive instead. we wait for the wolf, fulfillment: to be at last and again fit morsels for craving’s palate. We turn You dream you are searching the shelves students, novices of arcane arts; we have learned of a huge supermarket, lit by cold gray nothing, amassed nothing, we are light and malleable fluorescence, on a day when the light outdoors, as young branches, dreaming ourselves rootless, free filtered through icy rain, is the harsh stare of as we have never been. Root and branch, we cling those barren aisles. You find every kind of milk to life: is this bond punishment or gratified desire? under its glare but the one variety you need Dactyl or anapest–that extra beat that quivers over for your recipe. Choice bewilders you, breath–rising or falling? What matters is whether a failure to act consequential as decision. the morning lasts; what matters is the music which has been noise in our ears for a lifetime. The first missed dates–the concert, play– can be explained but after that nothing convinces friends your abandonment is not deliberate, willed. You don’t know whether you are inventing excuses to justify an absence you regret or wish for. You find you cannot live the two lives of hope and need at once; cannot inhabit the two selves you’ve constructed for these landscapes, shells put on and off for the day. You are willing this absence. The mystery is who is doing the willing, who you have become now that you’ve changed.

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 arrives in the midst of escalating and against all forms of generalization and as bloody clashes between Hindu fundamen- arguing for difference over commonali- talists and Muslims: ties,” it is still difficult to ascertain where, Learning from the particular exactly, she expects others to draw the It was heart-wrenching to see my line. When is it appropriate to talk about by Silja J. A. Talvi hometown become a war zone, global women’s similarities and when with streets set on fire and a daily about their differences? Mohanty never Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing death count to rival any major terri- makes the distinction clear. torial border war. The smells and Mohanty is at her strongest in the last Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Durham, NC: textures of my beloved Mumbai, of section of her book, where she proposes home, which had always comforted that the feminist movement—and the field Duke University Press, 2003, 312 pp. $21.95 paper. and nurtured me, were violently dis- of women’s studies—discard the “feminist- rupted. The scent of fish drying on as-tourist” and “feminist-as-explorer” mod- I the lines at the fishing village in els of inquiry into third world women’s Danda was submerged in the smell lives. A “comparative feminist studies handra Talpade Mohanty envi- bypasses virtually all of the writings of of burning straw and grass as model” that emphasizes mutuality, co- sions a world of racial equality younger, “third wave” feminists on the whole bastis [clusters of houses] responsibility, and common interests holds C and economic stability, where topics of ethnicity, class, sexual orienta- were burned to the ground. The more promise: “Rather than formulating women and men are free to live creative tion, and feminist activism. very topography, language and rela- activism and agency in terms of discrete lives and to choose whom they love. She Her peculiar oversight seems to have tionships that constituted ‘home’ and disconnected cultures and nations, [this knows that utopian visions like these are stemmed in large part from her decision were exploding. What does commu- model] allows us to frame agency and resist- far from being realized. But Mohanty also to republish essays from the 1980s—with- nity mean in that context? (p. 132) ance across borders of nation and culture.” believes that a genuinely egalitarian world out updating—and then trying to fit these Such a vision of transcultural, transna- can be generated by the right combination together with newer analysis. The end Moments of crisis like these, Mohanty tional feminist solidarity is particularly of engaged pedagogy, collective action, result is a book that flows in stops and says, make people pay close attention to important these days, when conservative and the cultivation of a truly inclusive, starts, revealing the extent to which even identity. The emergence of virulently nationalism, privatization, religious funda- transnational feminist movement. the author seems to be unsure about the patriarchal fundamentalist movements has mentalism, mass incarceration, and eco- It is toward this end that Mohanty merits of her approach. It is as if challenged Indian feminists to “rethink the nomic globalization have taken hold as offers her newest work, Feminism without Mohanty, for all of her acknowledged relationship of nationalism and feminism dominant methods of control in many Borders, providing readers with gleanings influence in the field of feminist studies, in the context of religious identities.” parts of the world, including the US. from the last two decades of her writing. doesn’t trust that she’s been heard or heard Mohanty sees promise in the fact that Since the 1980s, Mohanty has co-edit- correctly. And so she repeats the same ut these kinds of questions apply to the antiglobalization movement has imple- ed several influential anthologies, includ- refrains throughout this book in an effort the global arena as well, as religious mented many of the democratic decision- ing Third Word Women and the Politics of to ensure that they get across. B fundamentalism and “economic making processes so familiar to feminists, Feminism. At the center of much of her Mohanty is at her best when she insists and ideological colonization” have taken and argues for the centrality of women’s theoretical work has been her argument that overgeneralization about third world root across the North and South. The issues to the movement as a whole. that the lives of third world women—and women’s lives is a habit that Western fem- accompanying reconstructions of gender women of color generally—have contin- inists must break. Notions of global sis- roles are pressing issues for both sexes. If we look carefully at the focus of ued to be marginalized in women’s studies. terhood aren’t always valid, she explains, Mohanty consistently asserts that the antiglobalization movements, it Even when the intent has been one of especially when Western feminists try to Western feminists—and feminist move- is the bodies and labor of women multiculturalist inclusion, Mohanty argues, locate “experiential unity” in women’s ments in general—should cease trying to and girls that constitute the heart the lives of women of color have all too lives. Commonalties exist, but differences establish the commonality of women’s of these struggles. For instance, in often been decontextualized, generalized, also abound: “Claiming universality of experience, instead emphasizing common the environmental and ecological and/or viewed with pity through a dis- gender oppression is not the same as argu- interests and goals. Mohanty is particular- movements such as Chipko in torting, Eurocentric lens. In particular, ing for the universal rights of women ly critical of anthropologists and feminist India and indigenous movements Mohanty examines the most problematic based on the particularities of our experi- writers who have examined subgroups of against uranium mining and breast- trends within the present-day American ences.” Mohanty writes. third world women, such as those in par- milk contamination in the United feminist movement, including what she ticular tribes or occupations, and then States, women are not only among terms careerist academic feminism and I argue that the challenges posed extrapolated from these small groups to the leadership: their gendered and neoliberal consumerist feminism. by black and Third World femi- make generalizations about all women of racialized bodies are the key to Mohanty’s willingness to take on these nists can point the way toward a those regions or nations. Western femi- demystifying and combating the dimensions of American feminism prom- more precise, transformative femi- nists who have portrayed third world processes of recolonization put in ises an intriguing analysis. And while she nist politics based on the specifici- women as victims rather than as potential place by corporate control of the indeed hits her mark at points throughout ty of our historical and cultural or realized agents of change also (under- environment. (p. 249) the book, she also unintentionally ends up locations and our common con- standably) earn Mohanty’s wrath. demonstrating the stifling insularity of texts of struggle. (p. 107) Her perspective regarding the dangers And while Mohanty complains that she self-referential, academic feminism. of generalization is on point—that is, until sees a lack of feminist analysis in anti- Feminism without Borders is unnecessarily Mohanty calls for a “politics of she herself holds forth with generalizations globalization activism and scholarship, she weighed down by so much dense and dis- engagement” rather than a “politics of about third world women. For instance, she also sees a genuine opportunity for seeds tracting jargon that it becomes the very transcendence,” noting that such an proclaims in her chapter, “Cartographies of of an egalitarian future to be sown thing that Mohanty criticizes: Feminist approach necessitates making the effort to Struggle: Third World Women and the through collaborative, constructively criti- thought that is so removed from the lives learn mutual histories as well as seeking Politics of Feminism,” “Third World cal, and non-coercive organizing. and language of everyday women as to be unlikely coalitions: women have always engaged with femi- “[T]o articulate feminism within the inaccessible or even irrelevant. nism.” In “Women Workers and the framework of antiglobalization work is Mohanty is an intellectual capable of This means being attentive not Politics of Solidarity,” Mohanty even says also to begin to challenge the unstated great theoretical thought. But when she only to the grand narrative or that she is charting the “ideological com- masculinism of this work,” she writes. writes loftily of her own “nonsynchro- ‘myth’ of capitalism as ‘democra- monalities of the exploitation of (mostly) “The critique and resistance to global nous temporality” or posits that the “def- cy,’ but also to the mythologies poor Third World women workers by glob- capitalism, and the uncovering of the nat- inition of ‘the Third World woman’ as a that feminists of various races, al capitalist economic processes.” uralization of its masculinist and racist monolith might well tie into the larger nations, classes, and sexualities Although Mohanty writes that she is values, begins to build a transnational economic and ideological praxis of ‘disin- have inherited about one anoth- “misread when I am interpreted as being feminist practice.” I terested’ scientific inquiry and pluralism er… Dialogue across differences is that are the surface manifestations of a thus fraught with tension, competi- latent economic and cultural colonization tiveness, and pain. (pp. 124-125) of the ‘non-Western’ world,” she risks los- ing all but her most tenacious readers. Sometimes this pain is personal. Feminism without Borders becomes even Mohanty writes poignantly of her own more detached from women’s lives in struggles to engage the various aspects of 2003 because of its constant, almost her identity. In these sections, her writing exclusive reference to feminist research gains clarity and urgency. Describing her Special Offer from the 1980s. There is no question that relationship to her birthplace, Mumbai this decade was a kind of golden age of (Bombay), Mohanty ties her eloquent per- To Book Group Members provocative thought in women’s studies— sonal narrative to the political implications Send us the names and addresses of the people in your group and whose women writers of color included of her experiences traveling between the we will send each of them a free sample copy of The Women's Audre Lorde, Angela Y. Davis, Gloria US and India. Never feeling fully a part of Review of Books. Send addresses to Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Norma Alarcon, either society, Mohanty nonetheless feels Book Group Offer Barbara Smith, and many others. But closest to “home” when she is in India The Women's Review of Books Mohanty inexplicably waits until the last and speaks her mother tongue, Marathi. Wellesley Center for Research on Women 106 Central Street section of her book to weave in discus- But when she visits in 1992, Mohanty Wellesley, MA 02481 sion of more recent feminist work. She (who was born into a Hindu family)

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 19 by her loyal friends and staff, slips into senescence. Notable is the constant presence of her longtime companion, The Hepburn enigma Phyllis Wilbourn, whom Hepburn calls “my Alice B. Toklas” and whose fre- by Susan Ware quently addled but often hilariously funny asides enliven the narrative. Less Kate Remembered by Scott Berg. New York: successful are long passages describing a bizarre dinner with Michael Jackson at Putnam, 2003, 370 pp., $25.95 hardcover. the height of his fame, and Warren Beatty’s “exercise in vanity” (his, not I hers) in wooing Hepburn for a small part in a 1994 movie, with Berg serving hen I took on the task of edit- summarily instructed by Hepburn, the as an increasingly bemused (and exploit- ing Notable American Women in daughter of a urologist, to use the facil- ed) intermediary. W 1997, I began a deathwatch: ities before coming up the stairs to inter- Much attention has been paid to Would Katharine Hepburn die in time view her. (Readers will immediately Hepburn’s revelations about her long- to make it into the volume so I could notice that this book is as much about time relationship with Spencer Tracy, write the essay? At that point, she was Scott Berg as it is about Katharine specifically the fact that he once struck over 90 and in declining health. As a life- Hepburn.) He complied, and almost her and that on another occasion she long fan of the actress, I certainly want- immediately seems to have fallen under spent a night locked outside his Beverly ed her to leave life with the same spirit her spell. She took to him as well, and a Hills hotel room while he was in a of independence with which she had fast friendship ensued. They both real- drunken stupor. Alcohol runs like a lived it, but I also realized that if she ized the value of some of the things that thread through the book, with many of didn’t die by our cutoff date of January she was telling him. “You should write the conversations occurring over drinks 1, 2000, she might have to wait 25 years all that down,” she said after yet another and Hepburn becoming just a bit too to appear in the next volume. In the end late night talk. And yet Hepburn was not fond of her Scotch as her years advance. Katharine Hepburn. From it is just as well I didn’t wait. Katharine willing to have her innermost thoughts Beyond an embarrassing textbook-level Kate Remembered. Hepburn lived for three more years, and private musings exposed until after analysis of Tracy’s psychological need to dying on June 29, 2003, at the age of 96 her death, so the manuscript lay, a close- drink that Berg tries out on Hepburn late self-absorbed, non-reflective character at her home in Connecticut. ly kept secret, until it was rushed into one evening by the fire, there are few who seemed to put up a sign that said Hepburn’s death was front-page news, print just days after she died. insights into Spencer Tracy’s struggle “don’t go there” whenever she confront- in part because she was one of the last Berg claims that Hepburn often with alcoholism and how Hepburn ed unpleasant news or issues requiring relics of Hollywood’s golden age. Far less seemed more reflective than usual when helped him to keep his demons at bay. emotional depth. She lived life on her reclusive in her later years than she had he was around, without offering any doc- Berg does point out that far from being own terms, but with very little engage- been early in her career, a mythic status umentation for such a sweeping state- shackled and tied down by Tracy’s prob- ment in the wider world, curiously distant had grown up about her. “I’m like the ment. In fact, the book covers familiar lems in the 1950s, Hepburn experienced from the political, cultural, or literary cur- Statue of Liberty to a lot of people,” she ground and offers few new insights or a heady period of personal and profes- rents of the tumultuous decades in which once said. “When you’ve been around so revelations to anyone who has more than sional growth. The real gap in her pro- she lived. (Her 1991 memoir, appropri- long, people identify their whole lives a passing knowledge of the actress’s life. fessional vita is from 1962 to 1967, quiet ately titled Me: Stories of My Life, is just as with you.” The obituaries and tributes The narrative jumps back and forth years she spent with Tracy before their superficial and self-centered, making it acknowledged the power of that identifi- between Berg’s reconstructions of their final movie together, Guess Who’s Coming sound as if she had never read a book, cation, but still seemed curiously flat, conversations (he did not use a tape to Dinner?, and Tracy’s death just weeks had a serious conversation, or learned almost as if their authors were just going recorder) and a chronological rehash of after they finished shooting. Katharine anything about the craft of filmmaking through the motions. Shouldn’t there her career, where we learn that her Hepburn would live another 36 years, from her years in Hollywood.) This may have been more to say about this figure favorite part was Tracy Lord in The never taking another male partner. of course be true of many actors, not just who had come to symbolize female inde- Philadelphia Story, her favorite actress was Hepburn, but her reputation for inde- pendence onscreen and off? Greta Garbo, and the key to understand- n the author’s note to Kate pendence and integrity leads fans and So it was with great anticipation that I ing the eccentric Howard Hughes was Remembered, Berg talks about his long- admirers to expect more. Liberation learned that Scott Berg, a superb biogra- that he was hard of hearing. Anytime a I term plan as a biographer to write “a without ideals isn’t very interesting in the pher, was publishing a book that drew on slippery subject appears, such as the sui- collection of objectively told life stories long run. Perhaps that is why the obituar- his 20-year friendship with Hepburn. cide of her brother Tom when she was a of great American cultural figures of the ies after her death sounded so flat. Finally, perhaps, we would get beyond teenager, or suspicions that Hepburn was twentieth century, each representing a We don’t need any more biographies the standard storyline and learn more a lesbian, it is invariably left hanging, different wedge of the Apple Pie.” So far of Katharine Hepburn. Nothing new is about what made this complicated unchallenged. Oddly, some of the most he has tackled editor Maxwell Perkins, going to be said. What we do need is to actress tick. Given his unprecedented probing insights come from another movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, and avia- probe more deeply the complicated but access and his demonstrated skill at set- aging relic of the Hollywood era whom tor Charles Lindbergh, all with stimulat- exhilarating meanings of her onscreen ting biographical subjects in their histor- Berg befriended, Irene Mayer Selznick, ing and thought-provoking results. Why presence and the off-screen persona she ical contexts, Scott Berg would finally who bemoans the late-in-life antics of not make Katharine Hepburn the next in so carefully constructed and maintained give Hepburn her historical due. her former friend Hepburn, whom she this progression, taking on among other over the course of her long career. Why Alas, Berg has not given us that book. now considers shamelessly overexposed. challenges the chance to investigate do fans and followers, especially women, From the moment he first rang the Although this was probably not issues of women and gender in American project onto her their own strivings for doorbell at her townhouse at 244 East Berg’s intention, some of the book’s life? Berg demurs by saying that he independence, autonomy, and liberation? 49th Street in New York in 1983, he most haunting images are of the strug- became too close to Hepburn to write What is so alluring about the unabashed parked his critical faculties at the door, gles, setbacks, and compromises of about her objectively. But that raises the self-centeredness of her life—did she act or rather the bathroom, where he was growing old, as Hepburn, surrounded question of whether a broad cultural as a safety valve for thwarted ambitions? biography of Hepburn, whom Berg When she says she has lived like a man, claims (without substantiation) “estab- why not rephrase it to say she has lived University of Massachusetts Boston lished the greatest acting career of the like a different kind of woman? What 20th century, perhaps ever” could have does Hepburn’s career say about the for- Assistant Professor succeeded in matching the significance of tunes of 20th-century feminism, espe- The Women’s Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston his earlier subjects. Having myself har- cially the highly individualistic variety she seeks applicants for a tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor, bored a lifelong fascination with the embodied in action if not always in with scholarly expertise in global or transnational feminisms and interests either in public policy or in U.S. gender/sexuality history. Position to begin in actress and even at one point having words? How did her athletic build and September 2004. Ph.D. required; field open. A record of successful teaching in toyed with trying to write such a book propensity for wearing pants influence interdisciplinary Women’s Studies is highly desirable. The new hire will par- myself, I now have my doubts. 20th-century notions of beauty and style? ticipate fully in program and curriculum development, teach new and existing In some fundamental ways, the What do her early transgressive perform- undergraduate courses (including general education courses), advise and mentor Katharine Hepburn remembered (or ances and gender ambiguity (even when students, and maintain an active record of research and publication. We seek a candidate with a strong interest in teaching at an urban public university with a remembering, in the title’s double entren- playing conventional heterosexual roles) diverse student body. dre) in this book is quite consistent with suggest about the possibilities for Applications will be accepted through January 15, 2004. Send CV, writing the Katharine Hepburn who has been women’s onscreen liberation, indeed for sample, and names of three references to: University of Massachusetts lurking on the edges of her popular moving beyond gender norms entirely? Is Boston, Human Resources, Search 515a, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston MA image for years, especially in the last there a link between her gender-blending 02125. E-mail any questions to: decades of her life. She was bossy, performances and her lifelong pattern of [email protected]. University of ordered friends and staff around, and relationships with women as well as men? UMass Boston is an Affirmative Action, Massachusetts was used to getting her way. (Berg once These are just a few starting points for a Equal Opportunity, Title IX employer and found her rifling through his suitcase; strongly encourages women, members Boston deeper, richer exploration of her endur- another time she smashed an ice cream ing appeal. of all ethnic groups, and people with www.umb.edu disabilities to apply. cone in his face when he made a wise- The moral is: Don’t hang onto her crack she didn’t like.) She was a selfish, every word. Hang onto her image. I

20 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 World, but notes that these days protests indigenous peoples, Roma, gays and les- arise from both wealthy and poor bians, any better. nations. Multilateral trade rules threaten She provides many significant exam- Resisting globalization social rights, including social services ples of resistance to global such as health delivery systems, as the capitalism/colonialism, ranging from by Sarah Lucia Hoagland rights of capital take over the rights of the Internet-launched initiative that citizens. In other words, some of us who blocked the MAI (Multilateral Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation, Bio/Diversity are relatively privileged white folks in the Agreement on Investment), to young “free” world are coming to experience a African-Americans from the Bronx who by Susan Hawthorne, North Melbourne, Victoria, version of the exploitation and coercion waged protests against Nike, to Indian people of color have experienced all farmers who destroyed genetically mod- Australia: Spinifex Press, 2002, 464 pp., along, in the “free” world as well as in ified cotton crops when they found out colonized worlds. they were unknowingly doing trials for $19.95 paper. She is particularly concerned about Western companies. what happens under global capitalism to I what she calls the “diversity matrix”— Organic and traditional farmers, members of groups who “fall outside fisherpeople from around the here is no modernity without example, in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, [Western] cultural forms (Africans, ‘ori- world, and forest peoples, have coloniality. So argue Latin women tend trees that produce multiple entals,’ gypsies and indigenous peoples), become politically active because T American subaltern theorists products. They have resisted the felling or fall short of them in some way this is where many of the battles whose tradition is a philosophy of liber- of these trees to plant tobacco and the (women, the poor, the disabled, gays and are now being played out.... At ation. European modernism’s intellectu- economic conversion to a cash economy. lesbians).” And she argues that national the forefront of many of these al and economic beginnings lie in 1492: Says Susan Hawthorne, sovereignty is critical in resisting colo- battles are women. Administrative strategies and practices nizing globalization, particularly in Across the world, women do the Spanish generated in colonizing the The trend in the Western world resisting the export model. While this is the vast majority of the mainte- Americas yielded the concepts such as has been away from recognizing accurate, national movements that have nance work, as farmers and gar- “progress” and “development” that the use value of sustainable prac- challenged Anglo-European coloniza- deners, as maintainers of home ground European modernism. In other tices, away from biodiversity and tion don’t necessarily treat many mem- life and relationship between peo- words, Western enlightened, civilized ecological regeneration, and bers of the “diversity matrix,” such as ple and places... Indigenous peo- thought emerged from the bureaucratic toward a system which highlights challenges of colonization.1 This con- individualism at the expense of ceptual framework drives and normal- the community, homogeneity at izes US and Anglo-European domina- the expense of diversity, efficien- tion. Globalization is neocolonialism, cy at the expense of humanity, nourishing widespread poverty, famine, and the commodification of the debt trap, and more. everything at the expense of cre- One of the many gifts of Susan ativity. (p. 102) Hawthorne’s Wild Politics is the unrelent- ing analysis and illustration of ways neo- Globalized capitalist management is colonialism is promoted under the ban- undermining biodiversity, leading to ner of Western liberalism and economic planetary disaster. globalization. Bringing together research Global capitalism is neo-colonialism. and arguments from hundreds of Some players promote the exploitation FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY sources and taking up the work of femi- of “free” resources by bioprospectors Associate Professor in Africana Studies nists, ecologists, and indigenous peoples, on the grounds that organisms and she challenges globalization and argues ecosystems are wild and therefore part Florida Atlantic University (FAU) invites applications and nomina- for biodiverse sustainability. Moreover, of the public domain. Others appropri- tions for a tenured or tenure-track position as Associate Professor in she raises the complex relationship ate land, shifting farmers into producing Africana Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters. between colonization and women. exports that make them dependent and The successful candidate will have an earned doctorate or equivalent, Central to Susan Hawthorne’s work is line Western pockets. Export-oriented and an impressive record of university teaching, scholarship, and/or the thesis that the “wild” is not separate privatization and industry is presented as creative activity that is broadly-based and addresses topics and issues from daily living. Citing Marilyn Waring, the solution for nations in debt; howev- that reach across the arts, humanities, and/or the social sciences. she notes the false choice Western cul- er switching to an export economy Disciplinary affiliation and area of specialization are open, but all ture presents of approaching the “wild”: undermines preexisting sustainable applicants should possess demonstrated competence in areas related Either ecologically damaging develop- economies rendered invisible by to African-American Studies, African culture and history, and the ment of allegedly empty land or preser- Western economics. Moreover, global African Diaspora. vation of that land for Western mas- powers are leading players in the devel- culinism’s recreational violence against opment of this debt. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to participate in a animals. She argues that even Deep Citing Vandana Shiva, Susan range of undergraduate and graduate programs in Arts and Letters, Ecology’s efforts at removal of all Hawthorne notes that the Green and to pursue the development of new programs such as Africana human traces to protect the land is a col- Revolution was a “disguised coloniza- Studies and Caribbean Studies. The College includes eleven academic departments (Anthropology, Art, Communication, English, History, onizing move. “Wilderness”—the idea tion of diversity,” destroying local sys- Languages & Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, of an area untouched by human habita- tems of farming, fishing, and forestry. Sociology, and Theatre) as well as certificate and degree programs in tion—is a Western romantic invention Still other players have fed the Western Classical Studies, ESL Studies, Ethnic Studies, Film and Video that denies the dynamic relationship public with a steady diet of the necessi- Studies, Holocaust and Judaic Studies, Latin American Studies, over thousands of years between indige- ty of technological intervention, while Liberal Studies, Peace Studies, and Women’s Studies. The Ph.D. pro- nous peoples and the land. promoters of biotechnology operate on gram in Comparative Studies features the nationally recognized Public A wild politics acknowledges our premises that lead to failures, which in Intellectuals track, as well as a new track in Literatures, Literacies, relations to the land, from urban com- turn provide an “endless spiral” of busi- and Linguistics. munity gardens and rural organic farm- ness opportunities. For example, geneti- ing to indigenous economies that sus- cally engineered crops are grown using FAU is a rapidly growing public university on seven campuses, tain the environment. Susan Hawthorne antibiotics, which then increase bacterial enrolling nearly 26,000 students. This position will be housed prima- challenges us to see the wild in our- resistance, leading not to the reduction rily on our Broward County campuses, which are located near the selves, “in all of us, in our gardens, in of genetic engineering but to research recently founded African-American Research Library and Cultural laneways, in the canopies of trees, in into the genetic engineering of antibi- Center. For more detailed information about Florida Atlantic city creeks, in marshlands and man- otics. Other players, transnational com- University and the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters, see groves.” Her goal is to decolonize panies, move into countries where they our Web site at: http://www.fau.edu/divdept/schmidt. Western imagination. can pay even lower wages, they prey on Applications will be reviewed until the position is filled. Letters of A politics of the wild challenges indigenous peoples, rural people, and application should respond to the position criteria and be accompa- Western divisions between humans and young women, as exemplified in the nied by a current curriculum vitae and the names, addresses, email nature, draws on indigenous understand- growth of Mexican maquiladoras— addresses, and phone numbers of three references. Applications and ings of interdependence, and acknowl- transnationally owned, tax-exempt fac- nominations should be sent to: Anthony Julian Tamburri, Associate edges those who are primarily responsi- tories that produce products for Dean, The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters, Florida ble for sustainability—women. export—as a result of NAFTA. The Atlantic University, 2912 College Avenue, Davie, FL 33314. Email: “Indigenous peoples and many Third book is rich with such arguments and [email protected] World peoples, largely women, have concrete examples. Confidential inquiries may be directed to the search committee coordi- managed to maintain the biodiversity of nator, Associate Dean Anthony Julian Tamburri, at 561/297-3861. their environments,” in varied capacities usan Hawthorne acknowledges such as farmers and gardeners, home- the earliest voices against global- Florida Atlantic University is an Equal Opportunity/Equal Access Institution. makers and relationship builders. For S ization came from the Third The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 21 ples and many Third World peo- tional corporations and even inspires ples, largely women, have man- the intentions of at least some of the aged to maintain the biodiversity globalizers. Drawing on the work of of their environments. (p. 260) indigenous women writers such as Midwestward, ho! Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Vandana Shiva, Susan Hawthorne’s argument is that and Marimba Ani, as well as the work by Enid Shomer many women are the wild types. of Diane Bell on indigenous women in Australia, Susan Hawthorne is propos- We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889-1890 he makes an overwhelming case ing a way of thinking outside the con- clarifying the exploitation, greed, ceptual framework of Western culture. by Jana Harris. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, S and endangerment of the planet I agree this is critical. She mentions col- that come from corporate management lective responsibilities for land in many 2003, 109 pp., $14.95 paper. practices. However, her primary concern indigenous cultures and wants seems to be appeals for (responsible) Westerners as well to view the land as a I policies and management on the part of living entity for which we have respon- governments and corporations. For sibility. But I’m not sure a Western con- n two previous books of poetry The transformation from dry example, in a critique of the Convention cept of responsibility—itself a value of and one novel, Jana Harris wrote in research to this succulent re-enact- on Biological Diversity introduced at the European modernism and colonial- I the voices of 19th century pioneers ment of frontier life with its daily 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, ism—is any more translatable in rela- who succeeded in reaching the Pacific hardships and pleasures is accom- she argues that global culture needs to tion to indigenous cultures than is Ocean. We Never Speak of It: Idaho- plished in the details. And while the shift such that “the poorest and most Western knowledge. I’m not convinced Wyoming Poems, 1889-1890, uses dramat- poems never flaunt their vast archival vulnerable citizens [are] moved to the that what white activists and academics ic monologues by fictitious composite underpinnings (Harris even inter- centre of the decision-making struc- respond to when thinking in terms of characters to portray the lives of a dif- viewed centenarian descendants), they tures,” and that “national laws need to being responsible has anything to do ferent segment of that great mass of are chock full of period flare. We put the requirements and wishes of with the values and practices among the humanity yearning westward: those learn, for example, from Mrs. Staunton communities at the center of legislation indigenous peoples she is referring to. I whose plans changed, who were by that in “Cottonwood, capital/of rather than the pursuit of individual or suspect it is much more tied to values happenstance or tragedy stranded in Idaho’s wide empty scablands// corporate profit.” of responsibility as practiced by corpo- Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming in settle- ....Like everyone else,/ our Christmas In what universe? rate executives. We were raised in the ments that sprang up along the caravan tree/was a five-foot tall/tumbleweed.” Imagining management and power same tradition, after all. We went to trail. In the era before antibiotics, vacci- (“Lesson Three: Total Eclipse of the without injustice, particularly in the school together. nations, and good nutrition, these pio- Sun”) The diction and syntax, a con- midst of the current drive to empire, is Moreover, collecting everyone neers endured as commonplaces cata- vincing fusion of 19th-century usage an idea equal in its romanticism to the harmed by globalization under the con- strophic illness, the deaths of children, breathed through the dust, the rough notion of “wilderness” that she exposes. cept “diversity matrix” reinscribes a abusive parents, and unhappy mar- and tumble of the West, rarely falter. A great deal of her work draws on con- romanticized concept of “women.” For riages, often in a natural setting at odds Appropriate echoes of the Bible, that cepts and models from indigenous peo- example, while raising the complex with human aims. bulwark of rhetoric and literacy, along ples. However translating and enacting relationship between colonization and Consisting of 28 monologues and 25 with adage-laden Victorian morality these ideas into Western culture is women, Susan Hawthorne does not period photographs with such enticing shape the language with color and another matter. In my mind, the weakest take up relationships between white titles as “The Zephyr Cabin,” “Girls grace. Mrs. Staunton’s lesson on arith- part of her argument lies in her sugges- women in Anglo-American-European Making Pioneer Snow Woman,” and metic concludes with this cautionary tions aimed at improving management societies that “dominate the land with “Outdoor School Room,” this ambi- catechism: at the global level. monocultural cropping and harvesting tious book achieves a level of authen- Both “responsibility” and “individu- systems” on the one hand, and Third ticity that is the fruit of meticulous “Class unlike our sinful selves, alism” are central to the Western cultur- World women largely responsible for research married to the poet’s passion what is the one thing al drive to empire. Susan Hawthorne maintaining “the biodiversity of their for her material. that Arithmetic never does? addresses individualism as she notes that environments” on the other. How do A dozen residents of the mythical In one sure voice they answer: an individualistic view of the world radical lesbian US academics like me, town of Cottonwood, Idaho, speak grounds the privatization of land and together with Mexican women sucked here, but we are most often privy to the Unlike our sinful selves, global appropriation of indigenous into the maquiladoras whose products I inner life of the school teacher, Frances Sums and debits never lie.” resources. But individualism also leaves consume, work to destabilize our rela- Staunton, who is the ear of the com- (“Sums and Debits,” p. 61) many white Western feminists turning tionships under global capitalism and munity and the last outpost of away from grassroots collectivity and reframe our interdependency? Under a “Civilization.” Pupils from the Hobst Listen to Mrs. Frank Smith, petition- toward state institutions (collectivities) good deal of the strategizing provided family are also frequent commentators. er at divorce court, whose testimony attempting to manage globalization. by Susan Hawthorne, I am left to The book spans two years, a substantial about her husband is rich in demoraliz- For example, some US women of engage policy-makers. I would argue slice of life on the high plains through ing detail: color argue that much white feminist that change toward biodiversity the seasons and as plans play out or work addressing domestic and sexual requires not a push for policy and founder. While there is no plot per se, ....When the baby violence has turned to social service and responsibility which involves staying in unrequited love is one of the anchoring screamed for a week, I told him ultimately the state, failing to recognize charge, but what María Lugones calls threads in the rich fabric of pioneer life I had to take her to the dentist. connections between state violence and “street level theorizing” with grassroots that Harris has woven. He called me vile names, interpersonal violence in the lives of activism. So rather than talk about bet- women of color. Remedies pushed for ter management and passing better by white women have resulted in med- laws, I would prefer more thinking on icalization and criminalization of local strategies of resistance. woman-abuse which, while helping Grassroots resistance, community some white women, have made the situ- activism, assembleas populares. ation worse for women of color. (See Books I care about engage me, offer www.incite-national.org/involve/state- me a rich menu of ideas for uptake, Support The Women’s Review of Books ment.html.) I think it a mistake to turn argument, and action. By this standard, to state and global organizations to Wild Politics is fabulous, and Susan remedy the consequences of global cap- Hawthorne has done us all a tremen- “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” italism. dous service. Unfortunately, getting into -Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Susan Hawthorne provides a run- the book is tedious, and parts are repet- ning critique of Western epistemology itive. Some of her initial analysis would and scientific methodology, arguing be best discussed at the end as we reflect Reading may be cheap, but publishing is not. that indigenous women’s knowledge on all she presents. And at least one con- practices are not translatable into fusing reference stands out: While Western epistemology. This is a fine Barbara DuBois argues that women Advertisements and subscriptions pay for only part of what it costs us argument. But the same lack of trans- inhabit our worlds with “double con- to publish The Women’s Review of Books. From the start, you, our latability holds true for indigenous con- sciousness,” the concept originated with readers, have generously helped us to make up the difference. cepts of responsibility. Susan W. E. B. DuBois. Hawthorne’s appeal to greater Western Overall, Susan Hawthorne brings corporate and legal responsibility con- together an outstanding array of mate- Please send your tax-deductible contribution of any amount to The cerns me. In the first place, if the driv- rial, and if you’re willing to do some Women’s Review of Books, Wellesley Center for Research on Women, ing force of globalization is greed, why digging, Wild Politics offers fertile would anyone think that a call to ground. I 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. responsibility would be intelligible to the globalizers? 1 Walter Mignolo. The Darker Side of the More importantly, responsibility Renaissance (Ann Arbor: The University of often frames the rhetoric of transna- Michigan Press, 1995).

22 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 drew his fist back, then let twenty-five head of livestock starve The Bookshelf Classified rather than sell them to buy medicine for infant gum Attentive readers will note that we now have a new format for the Bookshelf, which Book your ad at www.wellesley.edu/ complaint. aims to provide you with a little more information than in the past about books we’ve WomensReview or e-mail [email protected] ....When I had nineteen teeth received in our office recently. As always, the Bookshelf is only a partial listing of the drawn out, he made me ride books by and about women published each month. Booksellers home Patricia I. Brown, A League of My Own: Memoir of a Pitcher for the All-AAmerican Girls in a lumber wagon without Professional Baseball League. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. In her first-person account, dinner Brown details her experiences growing up as a girl who loved baseball in the 1940s and later slammed doors so that United States. Her struggles to play the game and her eventual acceptance into and my head might split.... success with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League are detailed in an (“I Try So Hard,” pp. 62-64) engaging and accessible way. In a lively narrative, Brown comments on the prejudices she found against women in baseball and her determination to stay true to her dream. ven in this hardscrabble exis- tence, there are rhapsodic Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Re-iimagining the Divine in the World. New York: E moments, occasions for the Palgrave Macmillan. In response to a perceived stagnation in the world of religious Publications lyrical voice Harris has created for and spiritual practices, in Jewish and Christian sects and in the goddess movement, Mrs. Staunton. Abandoned by her Christ seeks to uproot traditional ideas and open up possibilities for further participa- husband 30 years ago, she stands tion and identification among women with God. The author encourages those of the REVOLUTION, SHE WROTE. An uncon- alone, barefoot on the riverbank in her Judeo-Christian faiths especially to think about how spiritual identity can be renewed ventional take on feminism and politics. “secret place”: by thinking about God as female. $17.95. www.RedLetterPress.org Martha Cornog, The Big Book of Masturbation: From Angst to Zeal. San Francisco, CA: I study the cool white Down There Press. A comprehensive anthology, this book seeks to bring the reader 5 AM. POETRY: Alicia Ostriker, Robin Light of mirrored stars to a greater understanding of the history, social significance, and depiction of mas- Becker, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Toi Derricotte, Floating in night ink turbation in Western society. Doctors, theologians, philosophers, and laypeople are all Virgil Suarez, Denise Duhamel, Bob Hicok, And drink the thin represented, along with literary sources that dispel myths and increase awareness on Crystal Williams, Dean Young. “Brilliantly Blue milk of your face. all sides of this traditionally taboo subject. edited”—Chiron Review. $15/4 issues: 5 AM, Box 205W, Spring Church, PA 15686. Anne de Courcy, Diana Mosley: Mitford Beauty, British Fascist, Hitler’s Angel. New ....How long York: William Morrow. Drawing on interviews with Mosley, her family, and her will the lifeless broth of you acquaintances, along with her personal diaries and writings, the author lays bare the be the only sustenance my Job Opportunities facts of Mosley’s life. Entering the fascist arena upon her involvement with her sec- soul craves?... ond husband, Mosley became friendly with Hitler, reason enough for many to dis- (“The Inclement Weather Position in Gay and Lesbian miss her. This book attmpts to be sympathetic toward the woman while still con- of the Heart,” p. 72) Studies/Queer Theory. The Women, demning her political views. Gender, and Sexuality Program at Trinity Credible and emotionally fluent, Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on College (Hartford, CT) seeks candidates for a Harris’s poems turn on a dime, flash- Democracy. Boston: Beacon. Beginning with the 1970s but focusing on the 1990s, tenure-track position at the advanced assistant ing from humorous burlesque to deep- Duggan traces the links between political and social reform and the redistribution of or associate level to teach courses in gender est poignancy. There is only one thing wealth. She argues that the economic changes that led to an increasingly small num- and sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, feminist lacking in this work: elegance and for- ber of people controlling the majority of the financial resources were products of theory, and queer theory. The candidate mal virtuosity. In the most affecting neoliberal movements and other social and political changes. She goes on to say that should have significant publications and teach- poem, “Swans, A Letter Not Sent,” a reformers need to recognize this link if they are to succeed in narrowing the gap ing experience in these fields and must be pre- closing heroic couplet, the only one in between the rich and the poor. pared to assume the directorship of the pro- the book (and possibly accidental), Farideh Goldin, Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman. Hanover, NH: gram in the near future, on a rotating basis. gives the poem its final forcefulness Brandeis University Press. The story of a young Jewish girl growing up in Iran in Ph. D. required; field open. Trinity College is and purity of feeling. On the verge of the middle of the 20th century, Goldin’s book recounts the details of her strongly an AA/EOE and welcomes applications from madness, Mrs. Staunton observes as religious upbringing. From the marriage of her mother as an adolescent to her emi- women, minorities and handicapped persons. mockingbirds gration to the United States as a young woman, Goldin discusses women’s roles and Send cover letter, c.v., and three letters of rec- how women adapt to or escape from them. In a society where a woman’s greatest ommendation by February 1, 2004 to WMGS hammered out lyrics as magpie ambition was thought to be the acquisition of a husband, Goldin found her own Search Committee, c/o Juliet Manalan (97-99 tails path, refusing to relinquish the things that were important to her. Crescent Street Building), Trinity College, 300 flagged the iambic clomp- Summit Street, Hartford, CT 06106. Helen Gremillion, Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center. Durham, NC: clomp of a saddle horse’s beat. Duke University Press. Critiquing the standard treatment of patients in this country But Early Modern European History (c. 1450- who suffer from anorexia nervosa, Gremillion focuses on her time in a reputable facil- pyrite eyes only blinked, 1700) University of Maryland. Tenure-track ity and her observations of the therapies practiced there. She draws on science, femi- floated on; assistant professorship. Any specialization in nist studies, and anthropology to discuss why patients are so often resistant to treat- the Order of Aphrodite wanted Western Europe, including the German- ment, arguing that many of the methods are counterproductive and only reinforce the no song. (p. 69) speaking lands and the British Isles. Position focus on weight and bodily ideals. She positions both the family unit and the staff as contingent upon funding. The UMD is an obstacles to the patients’ desired autonomy and struggle to be in control of the self. Harris’s poems succeed in spite of AA/EOE employer; we encourage applica- their form, not because of it. Linda Lawrence Hunt, Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America. tions from women and minorities. For best Throughout this volume, she ignores Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press. To rescue her family from the economic consideration, send materials by December 1, all the formal elements that could depression of the late 1800s, Helga Estby accepted a $10,000 wager to walk from 2003. Send letter of application, c.v., 1-page have made these monologues virtu- Washington state to New York at a time when women’s safety depended on having a abstract of research and three letters of rec- osic poems as well as convincing his- male escort. This is the re-creation of Estby’s adventurous cross-country trek with ommendation to: James Henretta, torical simulacra. Line and stanza her daughter. Department of History, University of breaks are inconsistent and chaotic, Jennifer Vaughan Jones, Anna Wickham: A Poet’s Daring Life. Lanham, MD: Madison Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7315. falling on words such as but, or, on, Books. Using interviews with the poet’s family, her works, and what can be found of that, in, etc., obliterating every oppor- her correspondence, Jones crafts an engaging account of the trials and successes of University of Maryland, Department of tunity for added emphasis, a richer Wickham’s life. Jones puts the poetry of the artist into context for the reader, detail- Theatre, Assistant Professor of Voice and music, and the hovering possibilities ing her familial and marital relations as well as her unrequited love for another Acting. Tenure-track, academic-year position of enjambment. Still, these poems are woman. Even her eventual suicide was accompanied by a poem, allowing the reader a with expertise in voice and acting, beginning unusually appealing, and this is a book final glimpse into the mind of the artist. August 2004. Completion of search is contin- worth reading. An afterword by the gent upon availability of funding. Preferred Ellyn Kestnbaum, Culture on Ice: Figure Skating & Culture Meaning. Middletown, CT: author explains her methodology and qualifications are an M.F.A. or Ph.D. with an Wesleyan University Press. A comprehensive look at the world of figure skating, would have served the collection bet- emphasis in Performance and a specialization this book touches on all aspects of the popular spectator sport. From the history of ter as a preface. in Voice for the Stage. Salary is commensurate the sport to the perceptions of society concerning the sexuality of male participants For centuries in the United States, with qualifications and experience. For best to the ideal of the female body on ice, Kestnbaum explores how figure skating was the West was an emblematic idea that consideration, apply by December 1, 2003, to: shaped by cultural assumptions, and some of viewers’ misconceptions. To further aid propelled thousands into the wilder- Carmen Coustaut, Associate Professor and understanding, she has included a helpful appendix of skating terms. ness. Harris has dramatized a subset of Search Chair, Department of Theatre, that venture that has been little noticed Nan Levinson, Outspoken: Free Speech Stories. Berkeley, CA: University of California University of Maryland, 2810 Clarice Smith but that is relevant for every genera- Press. Through biographical accounts of people in the post-September 11th United Performing Arts Center, College Park, MD tion: those whose reality fell shy of the States, policies and practices surrounding the First Amendment are explored. The 20742. For complete information, please refer dream of the continent’s far shore, and struggle to take full advantage of what many consider an inalienable right is played to http://www.theatre.umd.edu/Spotlight/ who fashioned a notion of America out in various arenas; from the educational system to the artistic and publishing positionannounce.html. AA/EEO wherever they found themselves on the worlds. The stories remind us of the power and importance of the individual voice. great frontier. I —Bethany Towne continued on back cover

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 3 / December 2003 23 continued from page 23 and graduate teaching of women’s studies Women’s Studies, Feminist Theories, and our core courses, including feminist theories, Practicum in Feminist Theory and Collective Miscellaneous Middlebury College seeks to fill an appoint- scope & methods in women’s studies Action, as well as advanced courses in her/his ment in the Women’s and Gender Studies research, and an interdisciplinary research specialty. The successful candidate will likely RUTGERS INSTITUTE FOR Program at the level of Associate Professor seminar, along with advising, research/schol- have the Ph.D. in hand and some teaching RESEARCH ON WOMEN invites appli- (with tenure) starting in fall 2004. arship, and program/college service. experience, though ABD candidates will be cations from postdoctoral scholars in any dis- Disciplinary specialization is open. Areas of Applicants should also be prepared to teach considered. Gettysburg College is a highly cipline whose research focuses on women competency should include one of the fol- core liberal arts courses, including a first year selective liberal arts college located within 90 and gender. Visiting scholars whose work lowing: international study of women’s and seminar, an interdisciplinary Sophomore minutes of the Washington/Baltimore metro- connects with the IRW’s 2004-2005 faculty- gender issues; or race and ethnicity, particu- Seminar on Multiculturalism in the U.S. politan area. Established in 1832, the College graduate seminar “Diversity: Theory and larly outside the United States. The candidate and/or a Junior Seminar in experiential/serv- has a rich history and is situated on a 220-acre Practice” are especially welcome. The IRW would also direct the program in rotation with ice learning involving Chicago women’s com- campus with an enrollment of 2,500 students. offers private offices, library privileges and other faculty members beginning in 2004. munities. DePaul University is committed to Gettysburg College celebrates diversity and contacts with Rutgers’ many leading scholars Applicants must hold the doctorate and have recruiting a diverse faculty to complement the especially invites applications from members working on women and gender. Next door to teaching experience in women’s and gender diversity of its student body and of Chicago of any group that has been historically under- the Institute, the Wittenborn Scholars studies. They must also demonstrate a strong area communities. Therefore we especially represented in the American academy. The Residence offers attractive, low-cost housing research and publication record, commitment encourage applications from candidates College assures equal employment opportunity reserved for scholars affiliated with the IRW to undergraduate teaching, interest and skill in reflecting such diversity. The Women’s and prohibits discrimination on the basis of or the other women’s units. Applications will administration, and experience working col- Studies Program offers an undergraduate race, color, national origin, gender, religion, be accepted until all positions are filled. For laboratively with colleagues and community. major and minor and a graduate certificate. sexual orientation, age, and disability. To apply information please check our webpage: We are looking for someone who can invigor- The Program also serves two Master’s level please send a letter describing teaching and http://irw.rutgers.edu; email: [email protected] ate the WAGS program, enhance the WAGS graduate programs offering a Women’s research interests. Please include the names gers.edu; or call (732) 932-9072. curriculum, and make an important intellectu- Studies concentration. We are committed to and contact information for three references, al contribution to the community. Deadline connections between academic women’s stud- and a copy of your curriculum vitae. Send to: CENTER FOR HUMANISTIC for applications is Dec. 1, 2003. Send letters ies and broader communities. Ph.D. is Search Committee, Women’s Studies Program, INQUIRY, EMORY UNIVERSITY.The of application, c.v., and three letters of rec- required by date of appointment; salary will Campus Box 2450, Gettysburg College, Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory ommendation (at least two of which speak to be commensurate with requisite experience. Gettysburg, PA 17325. University is accepting applications for up to teaching ability) to: Paula Schwartz, Director, Applications received via e-mail will not be three Junior and Post-Doctoral fellowships Program in Women’s and Gender Studies, accepted. Deadline: December 15, 2003. Women’s Studies Assistant Professor, for an academic year of study, teaching and c/o Denise Heath, Warner Hall, Middlebury Please send letter of application, vita, Minnesota State University, Mankato. residence in the Center. Deadline for submis- College, Middlebury, Vermont 05753. sample syllabi, a writing sample (i.e., a recent Ph.D. required. Review of applications begins sion of completed applications is February Middlebury College is an Equal Opportunity publication or similar example of relevant January 7, 2004. For more information, see: 26, 2004; (award will be announced in mid- Employer committed to recruiting a diverse scholarship), evidence of teaching success MSU Employment at: www.mnsu.edu; or con- April 2004). Application forms and further faculty to complement the increasing diversi- (e.g., copies of student evaluations), and three tact: Women’s Studies, Minnesota State information are available on the web at ty of its student body. current letters of recommendation to: Ann University, Mankato, 109 Morris Hall, www.chi.emory.edu, by e-mail at Russo, Program Director and Chair of the Mankato, MN 56001; (507) 389-2077. [email protected], or write: CHI, 1715 North The Women’s and Gender Studies Search Committee, Women’s and Gender Decatur Road, Atlanta, GA 30322. Program at DePaul University invites appli- Studies Program, DePaul University, 2219 N. cations for a full-time, tenure-track position at Kenmore Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614-3504; Travel LIGHTBOX CO of NEW ENGLAND the rank of Assistant Professor beginning Fall Phone: (773) 325-1774. lightboxes for SAD, sleep problems, 2004. Consideration will be given to appli- Carol Christ, She Who Changes, Re-Imagining PMS, all biological rhythm disorders: 800 cants with a Ph.D. in women’s and/or gender The Women’s Studies Program at the Divine in the World (Palgrave-MacMillan 853-6456; www.lightboxco.com; llevin@ studies or another interdisciplinary field as Gettysburg College invites applications for a 2003), leads two programs in Greece: hms.harvard.edu well as those with backgrounds in other disci- tenure-track appointment in Global/Third Goddess Pilgrimage in Crete and Sacred plines, particularly the social sciences. We Wave Feminism at the rank of Assistant Journey in Greece. Ariadne Institute, P.O. WRITING COACH AND EDITOR. Get especially invite applicants whose work focus- Professor, beginning fall 2004. Candidates Box 303 Blue River, OR. 97413; (541) 822- that article or book into print with coaching or es on transnational analysis, comparative his- should have a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies or a 3201; [email protected]; www. editing from author praised by Charlayne torical analysis, globalization, and/or multi- relevant field with training in Women’s Studies. goddessariadne.org. Hunter-Gault, Gloria Steinem and Maya cultural feminist analysis. Preference will be A social science concentration is preferred. We Angelou. www.JoanLester.com; (510) 548-1224. given to candidates with formal graduate have a special interest in candidates with a his- Sunny Greece! Small island house! Weekly, background and teaching experience in tory of community and/or social activism. monthly. On isolated terraced mountain slope Editor: Experienced, award-winning, Ph.D., women’s studies, feminist or gender studies, Candidates must be committed to undergradu- overlooking sea. Breathtaking sunsets, moon- Feminist writer. Can mentor or edit disserta- or with demonstrated relevant scholarly pro- ate teaching and have a strong research pro- sets. Dramatic hikes. Marvelous peace. tions, theses, or grant proposals. Reasonable ductivity and research/teaching competen- gram. Teaching duties include core courses, Moonrock: (614) 986-6945; email: WISE- rates. Electronic or print. Contact Joan at: cies. Responsibilities include undergraduate such as our team-taught Introduction to [email protected]. [email protected].

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