The Women’s Review of Books Vol. XX, No. 4 January 2003 74035 $4.00

In This Issue

As the expatriate British wife of a Sudanese guerrilla leader, Emma McCune desperately wanted to be “a between black and white”: Sondra Hale reviews Emma’s War, Deborah Scroggins’ story of an unlike- ly figure caught up in a perennial war that few Westerners care about, p. 9.

“’s forte is in-the- trenches journalism,” writes Kerryn Higgs in a reading of Fences and Windows, the successor to Klein’s best- selling ,p.5.

Drinking, like other kinds of con- sumption, has a gendered history of its own: Mariana Valverde reads Love on the Rocks, Lori Rotskoff ’s perceptive account of the invention of alcoholism Emma McCune and her husband Riek Machar with in the twentieth century, p. 19. their bodyguards. From Emma's War.

“Through the themes of time, per- sonality, bodily transformation, all three poets address the narrative content of their lives, and use language to inscribe The second time around heaven on earth,” writes Judith Harris by Heather Love in a review of new poetry by Betty Adcock, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Hilda This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation Raz, p. 17. edited by Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge, 2002, 624 pp., $24.95 paper. The constraints and stereotypes of 1950s femininity seem quaint and amusing to younger women, but they n 1981, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe real urgency. It is a sign of its continuing were all too real for those who rebelled Moraga published This Bridge Called My importance that AnaLouise Keating and against them: Emily Toth looks at the I Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,a Anzaldúa have published a new anthology, generation gap that opens up in Lynn book that changed the practice and politics This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Peril’s Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in of in the United States. As early as Transformation, that attempts to assess its 1987, Teresa de Lauretis traced a “shift in impact, to offer new perspectives on its Many Uneasy Lessons,p.13. feminist consciousness” to the publication themes, and to work toward a political vision of this and the 1982 collection But Some of for the twenty-first century. and more... Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by In her preface, Anzaldúa writes that This Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Bridge We Call Home is intended to “take the Barbara Smith. These two books, she wrote, model provided by This Bridge Called My Back “first made available to all feminists the - and give it a new shape.” The earlier collec- ings, the analyses, and the political positions tion offered a rich and diverse account of of feminists of color, and their critiques of the experience and analyses of women of white or mainstream feminism.” Yet the sit- color; with its collective ethos, its politics of uation of women of color remains dire, and rage and regeneration, and its mix of poetry, PRINTED IN THE USA This Bridge continues to speak to readers with continued on page three The Women’s Review Contents of Books Wellesley College Center for Research on Women 1 Heather Love This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation edited by Wellesley, MA 02481 Gloria E. Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating (781) 283-2087/ (888) 283-8044 www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview 4 Letters Volume XX, No. 4 January 2003 5 Kerryn Higgs Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate by Naomi Klein EDITOR IN CHIEF: Linda Gardiner PRODUCTION EDITOR: Amanda Nash 6 Carol Anshaw Miniatures by Norah Labiner CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Martha Nichols, Jan Zita Grover Jo Ann Citron Equality Practice: Civil Unions and the Future of Rights 7 POETRY EDITOR: Robin Becker by William N. Eskridge, Jr. ADVERTISING MANAGER: Anita D. McClellan 9 Sondra Hale Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins OFFICE MANAGER: Nancy Wechsler EDITORIAL BOARD: Margaret Andersen 10 Patricia Moran My Father’s Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances Robin Becker Claudia M. Christie by Suzy McKee Charnas Marsha Darling Anne Fausto-Sterling Carol Gilligan Sandra Harding Nancy 11 Marilyn Booth Walking Through Fire: A Life of Nawal El Saadawi by Nawal El Saadawi Hartsock Carolyn Heilbrun Evelyn Fox Keller Jean Baker Miller Ruth Perry 12 Laura Green Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote Peggy Phelan Helene Vivienne Wenzel by Janet Theophano EDITORIAL POLICY: Emily Toth Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons by Lynn Peril The Women’s Review of Books is feminist but not 13 restricted to any one conception of feminism; all writing that is neither sexist, racist, homo- 14 Julia Cole Two Poems phobic, nor otherwise discriminatory will be welcome. We seek to represent the widest 15 Leslie Brokaw Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs: How Eleven Women Escaped Poverty and Became possible range of feminist perspectives both Their Own Bosses by Martha Shirk and Anna S. Wadi in the books reviewed and in the content of the reviews. We believe that no one of us, 16 Sally Sommer Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock alone or in a group, can speak for feminism, by Mimi Schippers or women, as such; all of our thinking and writing takes place in a specific political, 17 Judith Harris Intervale: New and Selected Poems by Betty Adcock; Shadow of Heaven: Poems social, ethnic and sexual context, and a responsible review periodical should reflect by Ellen Bryant Voigt; Trans by Hilda Raz and further that diversity. The Women’s Review takes no editorial stance; all the views 18 Nan Alamilla Boyd The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Bar by Kelly Hankin expressed in it represent the opinion of the individual authors. 19 Mariana Valverde Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America by Lori Rotskoff ADVERTISING POLICY: The Women’s Review accepts both display and 20 Ellyn Kaschak Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape? by Lori B. Girshick; classified advertising. Classified rates are No More Secrets: Violence in Lesbian Relationships by Janice Ristock $1.15 per word, with a ten word minimum. The base rate for display ads is $53 per col- Carolyne Wright Two Poems umn inch; for more information on rates and 21 available discounts, call or write to the adver- Cecilia Tan The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier tising manager. The Women’s Review will not 22 accept advertising which is clearly inappropri- Books Received ate to the goals of a feminist publication; 23 however, as we are unable to investigate the accuracy of claims made by our advertisers, publication of an advertisement does not rep- resent endorsement by The Women’s Review. Contributors Advertising inquiries: call 781-283-2560. CAROL ANSHAW is the author of the novels Aquamarine, Moves and, most recently, Lucky in the Corner. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Women’s Review of Books (ISSN #0738- MARILYN BOOTH is visiting associate professor in the department of comparative literature at Brown University. She has published two academic 1433) is published monthly except August by books, most recently May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (University of California Press, 2001), and essays on early feminism in The Women’s Review, Inc., 828 Washington Egypt, masculinity and nationalism, censorship, and colloquial Arabic poetry. Her most recent translations of Arabic fiction are Somaya Ramadan, Leaves of Street, Wellesley, MA 02481. Annual subscrip- Narcissus (2002), Ibtihal Salem, Children of the Waters (2002), Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Waters (2001), and Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door (2000). tions are $27.00 for individuals and $47.00 for NAN ALAMILLA BOYD is an assistant professor in the women’s studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder where she teaches courses in institutions. Overseas postage fees are an studies, feminist theory, and women’s history. Her book, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco, will be published by the University of additional $20.00 airmail or $5.00 surface mail California Press in 2003. to all countries outside the US. Back issues are LESLIE BROKAW is a Boston-based journalist and regular contributor to the arts sections of The Boston Globe and Boston Magazine. She spent a decade available for $4.00 per copy. Please allow 6-8 writing about business for Inc. magazine, and now teaches magazine publishing at Emerson College. weeks for all subscription transactions. JO ANN CITRON is visiting assistant professor in the women’s studies department at Wellesley College, where she is teaching courses in family law and in Periodicals class postage paid at Boston, MA the Victorian novel. She is writing The Gay Divorcee, a book about the formation and dissolution of alternative families. and additional mailing offices. POSTMAS- JULIA COLE’s poems have recently appeared in Rattapallax and Spout. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn. TER: send address corrections to The Women’s LAURA GREEN is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of Educating Women: Cultural Conflict Review of Books, Wellesley College Center for and Victorian Literature (Ohio University Press, 2001). Research on Women, Wellesley, MA 02481. SONDRA HALE is a professor of anthropology and women’s studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. From her six years of fieldwork in Sudan she has written on gender, politics, religion, and war and is currently writing on Sudanese communities in exile. She has published Gender Politics in The Women’s Review of Books is a project of the Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State (1996) and is co-editing Perspectives on Genocide in Sudan. Wellesley College Center for Research on JUDITH HARRIS is the author of two books of poems, Atonement (2000) and The Bad Secret (forthcoming 2005). Her critical book, Signifying Pain: Women. As an autonomous publication it has Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, is forthcoming from SUNY Press in February 2003. She has published articles, poetry and fiction in its own editorial board and board of directors, numerous journals and books including South Atlantic Quarterly, AWP Chronicle, 13th Moon, New York Quarterly, Tikkun, The American Scholar, and Southern who set policy with regard to its editorial, Humanities Review. She teaches at George Washington University. financial and organizational character. KERRYN HIGGS is the author of All That False Instruction, Australia’s first lesbian novel. It was reissued by Spinifex Press in 2001. She is also a freelance The Women’s Review is distributed by Total environmental writer. Circulation, New York City, NY; Ingram, ELLYN KASCHAK is professor of psychology at San Jose State University and editor of the journal Women and Therapy. She is the author of Engendered Nashville, TN; and Armadillo Trading, Culver Lives and several edited anthologies, including Intimate Betrayal Domestic Violence in Lesbian Relationships. City, CA. All other distribution is handled HEATHER LOVE is a postdoctoral fellow in literature at Harvard University. Next year she will begin teaching and twentieth-century liter- ature in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania. directly by The Women’s Review. PATRICIA MORAN is associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Word of Mouth: Body/ Language in The contents of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (University Press of Virginia, 1996) and the co-editor, with Tamar Heller, of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Body in The Women’s Review Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Women’s Writing (SUNY, forthcoming in 2003). She is completing a book on the aesthetics of damage in the work of Virginia of Books are copy- Woolf and Jean Rhys. right ©2003. All SALLY R. SOMMER is a dance historian and professor who writes about dance, performance and popular culture in numerous publications, ranging from rights reserved; newspapers to scholarly journals. She worked on three PBS television documentaries on tap dance, social dance, and the Peabody Award-winning Everybody reprint by permis- Dance Now! Most recently she produced a documentary on club dancers and dances, Check Your Body at the Door. sion only. CECILIA TAN has been writing, editing, and publishing science fiction professionally since 1991, but this is perhaps only the second time she has used her degree in linguistics in a professional manner. She is the founder of Circlet Press, Inc. and the author of The Velderet, Black Feathers, and Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords. EMILY TOTH, who gnashed her teeth about the 1950s in Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious, has also published five books on Kate Chopin, plus Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia. Ms. Mentor’s monthly advice column may be found at http://www.careernetwork.com. MARIANA VALVERDE is the author of several books, including Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 1998), which won the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacobs book prize. CAROLYNE WRIGHT’s most recent collection, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Lynx House, 2000), won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize (selected by Yusef Komunyakaa), the Oklahoma Book Award in Poetry and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She has lived and taught in Oklahoma for the past few years, most recently as visiting associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oklahoma. 2 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 The second time around erhaps the most striking differ- its logic is troubling: to invert hierar- The problem of privilege and class ence between the two books is chies of competence does nothing to stratification may be at the limit of what continued from p.1 P the status of academic feminism change their fundamental structure. In This Bridge We Call Home can address. In and academic writing. This Bridge Called my own experience as a teacher, it is an article on Chicana politics, Susan M. critique, fiction and testimony, it chal- My Back pitched itself explicitly as a cri- often the students of color and stu- Guerra suggests that though issues of lenged the boundaries of feminist and tique of academic feminism, and dents from working-class backgrounds, race and have been academic discourse. The editors of its showed that vital feminist writing could not the more privileged students, who addressed in the past twenty years, class successor have attempted to stay faith- be produced outside the academic and are most drawn to theoretical and inequality remains a problem that can- ful to its revolutionary spirit and at the professional sphere. It was produced abstract texts. The authors of not be worked through. People are will- same time to speak to a very different largely by and for women who were dis- “Imagining Differently” acknowledge ing to think and talk about “’the other,’ historical moment. tant—by choice or by necessity—from this apparent paradox in their conclu- the ‘marginal,’ the ‘diaspora,’ the ‘theo- Ironically, the greatest challenge to institutions of higher learning. In her sion that “[f]or queer, colored, and ries of resistance,’ ‘identity politics.’ The this project may be the overwhelming “Letter to 3rd World Women Writers,” other disenfranchised people, theoriz- only thing they still won’t read or listen success of the earlier book. The Anzaldúa urged her readers: “There is ing is a crucial aspect of survival.” to is ‘class.’ The poverty (and Karl rhetorical and political force of This no need for words to fester in our Laura A. Harris meditates on the Marx) still taboo.” Class inequality Bridge Called My Back grew in large part mouths… They wither in ivory towers paradoxes of practicing feminism in the remains intransigent, and continues to out of its passionate outsider stance; it and in college classrooms. Throw away academy in “Notes from a Welfare underpin fundamental social and aca- is more complicated for the contribu- abstraction and the academic learning, Queen in the Ivory Tower,” in which demic hierarchies. As Harris writes, tors to This Bridge We Call Home— the rules, the map and compass. Feel she grapples with ’s classic “The academy, now the locus of much many of them working in academia— your way without blinders. To touch essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never critical work purporting to report on to raise questions of institutional more people, the personal realities and Dismantle the Master’s House.” She and effect real change in the lives of the authority and continuing race, sex and the social must be evoked—not through writes, “When Audre Lorde made her marginalized…is one of the most class inequality. rhetoric but through blood and pus and statement about the master’s house, she prominent long-standing cultural bas- This Bridge We Call Home registers sweat.” did not mean do not get an education, tions of class elitism.” striking changes in feminism over the This Bridge We Call Home continues to do not speak forcefully, do not write This Bridge Called My Back confronted past twenty years. “Women of color” speak the language of blood and pus critical essays, and do not live every day “business as usual” in the academy; there has disappeared from the title, and the and sweat, but it also speaks quite flu- in the fray of the battle (you were is no doubt that it changed many questioning of the politics of identity ently the language of abstraction, the always there). I believe she meant do women’s lives at the same time that it leaves room for a wider range of sub- rhetoric of college classrooms. Several not think the battle is ever done, do not radically altered the practice of feminist jects, including men and white people. contributors recount their first experi- think that because you made it every- politics. Now This Bridge We Call Home The scope has expanded to include ence reading the 1981 This Bridge: these one can, and do not buy into the pre- registers the extent to which the main ethnic and diasporic politics both with- primal scenes often take place in vailing myths.” challenge of its predecessor—its com- in US borders and beyond. The con- women’s studies classes, in college While Harris imagines a way of mitment to total revolution and to the tributors address the politics and libraries, in dorms—on campus, in inhabiting the master’s house that is both dismantling of academic and class hier- effects of globalization, and its rela- short. (There are significant exceptions, ethical and politically transformative, archies—has been absorbed without tion to histories of colonization and for instance the case of Donna others are more skeptical. Judith K. noticeable effect. The failure of this de-colonization. The volume features Hightower Langston, who “first read Witherow puts a much sharper edge on dream haunts This Bridge, and raises the new attention to disability, to indige- This Bridge while working on an oil refin- this question in “Yo’ Done Bridge is question of what “radical visions for nous populations in the US, to Arab ery crew” and who insists that the most Fallin’ Down,” pointing out that “Some transformation” might address the mas- American women, to the construction important thing about the 1981 book women have gotten a place at the prover- sive economic inequality that continues of white privilege and to was its ability to reach women outside bial table, while others are left to endure to structure—now more than ever—our politics. An essay by Max Wolf Valerio, academic settings.) They find them- belly-touching-backbone hunger.” public and private lives. a man, would have been selves in the paradoxical position of very hard to imagine in the 1981 Bridge. responding to the academic success of a Not only does Valerio spend a good book that presented itself as an attack deal of time praising masculinity on the academy. (among its benefits: a “white hot sexu- In her preface, Keating expresses her al drive that exists on its own terms, surprise at the number of theoretical without emotional clutter or senti- contributions she received in response Cutting edge exploration of gender, race, and nation. ment”), he dismisses the feminism of to her call for submissions. She recalls transgender academics and activists her reaction: “I’m worried. Many sub- Leslie Feinberg and Judith Halberstam missions are quite theoretical, and in this as (respectively) “sentimental” and sense indicate a remarkable change from “preachy.” This Bridge, which has been used as a Several contributors have returned model for how women of color don’t from the 1981 Bridge and offer sharp theorize in ‘white’ academic ways. Piled GENDER commentary on their earlier writings. in stacks all over my dining room floor Their self-consciousness about their as I type these words are theoretical position in the history of feminism pieces by self-identified women of color. makes for fascinating reading. In Even more remarkable: they don’t apol- CULTURE “Lesbianism, 2000,” Cheryl Clarke ogize for or justify their use of high the- revisits her essay in the original Bridge, ory.” In the end, Keating acknowledges “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance”: that “you can’t make simplistic assump- Master’s Degree in An exciting interdisciplinary “Anger is the challenge I should have tions about who does and does not use Gender/Cultural Studies program that prepares ended ‘Lesbianism’ with, instead of that theory,” but still feels that the editors ᮣ Graduate studies for students for doctoral corny ‘love’ thing,” she writes. may need to ask people to make their women and men. programs as well as careers. The shift from second- to third-wave contributions more accessible. Built on the dynamic feminism was marked by a shift in tone, ᮣ Full- and part-time interaction women’s studies, and a rejection by late 1990s zinesters, uestions of accessibility and studies. punks and of what they saw as access are crucial here. The sta- African American studies, the “corniness” of a late 1970s woman- Q tus of theory and academic ᮣ Merit awards, teaching history, philosophy, ist politics. Whether the subject is love feminism is conflicted, ambivalent and assistantships, and sociology, English, between women, institutional racism, or shifting. In “Imagining Differently: The research assistantships economics, political the road to revolution, this tonal con- Politics of Listening in a Feminist available. science, education, and flict is played out in This Bridge We Call Classroom,” Sarah J. Cervenak, Karina Home. In “‘All I Can Cook is Crack on a L. Cespedes, Caridad Souza and Andrea human services. Spoon’: A Sign for a New Generation Straub describe the “theory/testimo- For more information of Feminists,” Simona J. Hill reflects on nio” divide as it emerged in a 1998 col- ᮣ 617-521-2224 her ambivalence about the snarkiness of lege class on US latina . Many ᮣ www.simmons.edu/graduate/gender_cultural contemporary feminism, about its students in the class dismissed theoret- apparent indifference to the real facts ical discourse as abstract, elitist and Subscribe to Abafazi: the Simmons College Review of human suffering. While several con- “discursively exclusive,” but the four of Women of African Descent 617.521.2257. tributors speak of inequality in a voice authors question what they call the that is knowing and tinged by irony— “false dichotomy between theory and as in Deborah A. Miranda’s comment practice,” and argue that US feminists that she doesn’t want to “compete in of color should strive to “ how the Oppression Olympics”—others we theorize in our everyday lives to the- speak with an earnestness that seems ory’s testimonial aspects.” Such a neat untimely (“It is to my misery that I lining up of identity markers with styles would like to turn”). of discourse happens all the time, but 300 THE FENWAY BOSTON

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 3 chapter titles, both of which are often accusations of sloppy citing or lack of requests of a trade publisher. Following thoroughness are often personal offens- Letters Nicola Gavey’s positive review of the es disguised in objective critique, signify- book in Psychology of Women Quarterly, ing instead, “She didn’t cite me” or “She Dear Editors: Liberation Movement (Basic Books, 2000). your reviewer could have said that at didn’t cite me precisely where I think I Irene Peslikis, born October 7 1943, Irene was a founding member of times she had wished for a more in depth should be cited.” This happens so fre- died on November 28 2002 of all the , the leading feminist theo- analysis that a trade book can’t provide. quently in academic reviews that a savvy pains and troubles that go with poverty, retical and consciousness-raising group Most surprising, however, is the claim editor might be more aware of it. poor heath care, a devastating separation in New York City, as well as a member of that my book is autobiographical. This is As you may know, I subscribe to and being crippled. She was a feminist the earlier group New York Radical very strange and suggests the reviewer Women’s Review, and will, of course, con- artist who was one of the principal Women. She wrote “Resistances to didn’t read it. There are three or four tinue to do so. But I hope that this letter founders and organizers of the entire Consciousness,” a paper (printed in Notes moments in the 200 pages where I’ve may prompt you to direct your reviewers women’s art movement (especially on the from the Second Year) so important to the inserted personal anecdote as is common to consider audience and to help them to East Coast). She organized the first show understanding of CR, and was a key to this genre, and because, from a femi- understand the style and publishing of second wave , taught the organizer and participant of the leg- nist perspective, I feel compelled to expectations of “trade” books (as first Women and Art course on a college endary Redstockings Speak Out on include my standpoint, theoretical and opposed to “academic” books) if Women’s campus, at the State University of New Abortion at Washington Square personal. Indeed, the insertion of per- Review continues to trawl those waters. I York at Old Westbury, and was a founder Methodist Church. Anne Forer, an old sonal experience was requested by the think it’s an editor’s responsibility. of the first school, the friend from , editor because it is a “trade” book. One Sharon Lamb Feminist Art Institute, which ran a full- described her as “loving, lively, with vivid personal experience comes in the Colchester, VT time radical feminist art education pro- spectacular generosity and helpfulness. preface so it most likely stands out; how- gram for women for years. She was one She loved encouraging beginning artists. ever, there are numerous pages of inter- Meda Chesney-Lind replies: of the founders of the New York Studio Because she loved art and the experience view excerpts from over 120 other I have read Sharon Lamb’s response, School for Drawing, Painting and of doing art, she wanted everyone who women and girls that follow. Perhaps the and I have only a couple of points to Sculpture, which broke away from Pratt wanted it to have it too. She was unique statement that it was “biographical” was make. First, I most assuredly read her in 1963 and opened in 1964 in the former in understanding the uniqueness of each an editing mistake and the author origi- book. Second, I do not accept that Whitney and is still functioning. individual, and cherishing it above all.’’ nally wrote that the book contained “trade” publishing excuses the short- With another feminist artist, Pat Before her knees gave out she was a autobiographical material? Including comings I noted in my review. Finally, I Mainardi, Irene founded the journal karate giant and long distance biker. autobiographical material (a few times in did have examples of her failure to cite Women & Art, which helped to make the She also taught at the City College of a book) is vastly different from writing a material properly, but for reasons of great portraitist famous. New York, the College of Staten Island, book that is autobiographical. length, I did not include them. Here is (Alice Neel painted a portrait of Irene, the College of New Rochelle and An additional problem with the one stark example that I had earlier which was just reproduced on the cover Ramapo College. Irene was active in the review, not really related to the included but had to cut: of the Summer 2002 issue of Feminist Greek community and published art and “trade”/academic distinction, is that the In a chapter on girls and athletics (pp. Studies.) She was also one of the art history and criticism in Rozinanta, reviewer confuses my research, on chil- 189-197), she cites a “study” that finds founders of the NoHo gallery, one of Demokratia and Eleftheri-Patrida. Her dren’s sexuality, with the tremendous that while participation in Girl Scouts the, if not the, first cooperative feminist brother and sister-in law, Michael and amount of work on adolescent sexuality does not help with girls’ self-esteem, art gallery. Her political cartoons were Cindy Peslikis of Bowling Green, Ohio, being done today, again raising the ques- sports does. She notes, “One recent widely circulated in the early Women’s and her mother, also of Bowling Green tion of whether a three-book review is study, however, funded by the Girl Liberation Movement years and pub- and her husband, Richard Castellana, too hefty a task for most reviewers. My Scouts, asked 362 girls which activities lished in feminist journals and in collec- survive her. There will be a memorial at book is about children’s (aged 6-12) sexu- they did that made them feel good about tions of the feminist movement like Dear the Studio School sometime in the ality. And, I believe, because the two themselves. Unfortunately, being in the Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s future. For more information call or other books in this joint review are about Girl Scouts, an institution that has send memories to: , pre-teens and teens, the reviewer must become increasingly ‘feminized,’ did not email [email protected], home 212 982 believe my book too is about teen sex. typically make the girls feel good. 8388 or work 516 876 3103. She is simply wrong to claim that there is Athletics did.” There is no reference in Rosalyn Baxandall much work on this subject of which I’m her end notes to this study, despite other New York, NY unaware or even much work at all. I cer- aspects of the chapter being anchored to tainly am aware of Deb Tolman’s work academic research. Dear Editor, on teen-agers, and do cite it; though it There are any number of other I hope you can imagine how frustrat- strikes me as a bit obsequious of this unsupported (and in my view inaccurate) ing it is for me that The Women’s Review of reviewer to put in a plug for Tolman on statements that Lamb makes elsewhere Books ignored my two earlier books, writ- the eve of her book’s publication. in the book. One particularly struck me: ten for an academic audience and pub- Perhaps this is just a coincidence. on page 178, she blithely reports that lished by university presses, and now Also unfair is the criticism that the “The Women’s Movement of the sixties chose to review my recent “trade” book, majority of interviews were done with sometimes spoke of power very general- written for parents and the general pub- adult women looking back on their child- ly as a bad thing: Men want power; lic [The Secret Lives of Girls, November hood. As I explain in the book, in doing women want cooperation… They 2002]. Especially frustrating is that the research on children’s sexuality, especially believed that when women were in reviewer you chose seems to be unfamil- in this backlash climate, one can not charge, equality and caring would rule iar with the genre of “trade” psychology interview eight-year-olds readily about the day.” That particular point aston- books and criticizes the book for not masturbation, sexual play and games, and ished me, that the movement I being scholarly enough. My Harvard orgasm. I explain what I was able to ask remember was largely inspired by such University Press book, The Trouble with the children, include those responses, and books as . I under- Blame: Victims, Perpetrators, and Respon- go on to write about the variety of expe- stand that Lamb is distancing herself sibility (1996), reviewed by Feminism & riences older women, aged 18-80, had from her mentor, Carol Gilligan, but the Psychology, was called “courageous.” My when they were children. The reviewer emphasis on caring and victimization New York University Press edited vol- seems to imply that the book should not that she stresses in no way characterized ume, New Versions of Victims: Feminists then be titled The Secret Lives of Girls. But the early days of the Women’s Struggle with the Concept (1999), is only it is about girls even if the information Movement. Again, no citation is provid- now getting notice. But why take on a about girlhood comes from retrospective ed to support this assertion. “trade” book and complain that it’s not report. Many an experimental study, a I regret having to say harsh things up to academic standards? methodology this reviewer seems to pre- about a book that I really felt had some The reviewer, for example, criticizes fer, is based on retrospective report. The good elements (particularly her treat- the research for lack of a methodology. reliability of retrospective report, by the ment of girls’ aggression). If she were familiar with publishing way, is discussed in the book, although demands for trade books, chapters on not using the specific academic language To the Editor: methodology get reduced to a para- “retrospective” or “report.” In her review of Judith Ezekiel’s new graph or two. An author can’t use words I would also like to briefly take up the book, Feminism in the Heartland like “discourse analysis” or “snowball issue with you of reviewers accusing [November 2002], Barbara Winslow sample” when writing to parents or the authors of sloppy citation or not having made an incorrect statement about my general public, but tries instead, in a done a thorough reading of background book, The World Split Open: How the folksy style, to give the general outline material. I find it strange that reviewers Modern Women’s Movement Changed America of the research that a lay audience could are permitted to say these things in print (Penguin, 2001). She said I included understand. An explanation or justifica- without backing up such claims with evi- interviews and publications from only tion of qualitative methodology, inter- dence. Why don’t editors hold reviewers four cities—Boston, Chicago, view development, and analytical meth- to the same standards we hold our stu- Washington, DC and New York. But ods is unwarranted. dents? Perhaps it is offensive to express even a cursory reading would reveal that Your reviewer criticizes the book for doubt as to the veracity of statements I used many publications, interviews and having short chapters and provocative made by reviewers. I suspect though that examples from Los Angeles, Berkeley,

4 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, eral economics” and was inspired by the Seattle, Dayton and a dozen other cities. crash course she got there: “I realised I As a member of Ezekiel’s dissertation had been witness to something extraor- committee, I was well aware of Dayton’s Passing the ammunition dinary: the precise and thrilling moment special role and included a special sec- when the rabble of the real world tion on feminism in the heartland in the by Kerryn Higgs crashed the experts-only club where our book as well. collective fate is determined.” Ruth Rosen Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the San Francisco he transfer of real power from Globalization Debate by Naomi Klein. New York: Picador, citizens to corporations and the Dear Editor: T global “experts clubs,” camou- Since when did “feminist” stop 2002, 267 pp., $13.00 paper. flaged in a rhetoric of freedom, is a meaning common sense and become recurring theme of the book. In some sort of doublespeak for “Get “Democracy in Shackles,” Klein exam- with the program and stop speaking ines one of the touted benefits of glob- truth and stupidly hoping for a mod- aomi Klein’s first book, No alization—the idea that free trade fosters icum of fairness”? Logo, explored the marketing free societies—and finds little to sup- What is wrong with the “party” (and, N strategies and production reali- port it. In June 2001, nearly a year before yes, I do feel there is one) feminist line? ties of “cool” brands like Nike and Gap, the attempted coup in Venezuela, she Last time I checked, it meant, not equi- and the growth of opposition to sweat- was aware of what she calls “open talk” ty, but equal access to equity, regardless shop labor as people in developed in Washington about unseating of sex. countries began to understand where President Hugo Chavez, whose eco- Maybe it’s just bad timing, but at least their clothing came from. It was pub- nomic policies were left-leaning by US a couple of reviews in the December lished at the end of 1999, just as the standards. But these days, she says, the issue sure felt like an aftershock from protests outside the World Trade free market’s interference with democra- the November slam against women. Organization meeting in Seattle brought cy generally takes more subtle forms, Deborah Solomon’s incredibly disre- into public view the anti-globalization such as directives from the International spectful dismissal of the difficulties movement—activists fighting the Monetary Fund requiring cuts to public experienced by “Thirty-Something appalling human rights, labor and eco- services like health and education, or Overstressed Moms with Interesting logical records of multinational corpo- / The Herald © Gordon Terris privatization of water and electricity. Jobs” [The Bitch in the House: 26 Women rations like Nike, Shell, or Monsanto. Naomi Klein The rules of the WTO give compa- Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitiude, Work, Klein, who was not quite thirty and nies the power to override local or Motherhood, and Marriage] sounds like a “had never been involved in politics and chief economist. It closes national legislation on the environment, position a tenth-grade high-school boy didn’t much like crowds,” was catapult- with “Windows to Democracy,” snap- health and labor and to exact penalties would advance in a discussion of ed from a short book tour into a two- shots of grassroots community action. for non-compliance. When the “stereotypical jobs of a wife,” a boy and-a-half year “adventure” across the Between these, “Fencing in European Union, for example, con- completely unconscious about his own world, commissioned by The Democracy” and “Fencing in the cerned about possible links between dependencies on Mom. Globe and Mail to cover the protest Movement” look at both the real fences hormone-fed beef and cancer and male Solomon’s blithe “But it beats digging movement. She reported from the that surround trade summits, refugee infertility, banned its import (a blow to ditches” didn’t raise any flags? It’s better streets of Prague, Quebec, Genoa, and camps and free trade factory zones, and hormone producer Monsanto and US to be in the house than out in the fields? from parallel conferences like the the virtual fences—like trade agree- meat exporters), the WTO ruled this an And, no, it’s not the same thing, but if Shadow Democrat Convention in 2000 ments and patents—which limit demo- impediment to “free trade.” Products everything is reductionist, then breast and the first at cratic sovereignty and separate people like French mustard were locked out of cancer isn’t really too bad because it Pôrto Alegre in 2001. from what were once public resources. North America by tariff barriers in could have been.... Fences and Windows is a collection of “Capitalizing on Terror” probes post- reprisal for Europeans’ making their We absolutely cannot give daughters columns and speeches that begin with September 11 opportunism. own decisions about food safety. the message that we expect them to have Seattle and run through to the after- Klein’s forte is in-the-trenches jour- The negotiation of the General access to professions if what we mean is math of September 11. Most were orig- nalism. Her portraits of street protests, Agreement on Trade in Services that they cannot hope to have profes- inally published in The Globe and Mail,a repressive police tactics and the internal (GATS) is a current priority for the sions and children and a home. And few in The Nation, dilemmas of the movement are alter- WTO. GATS proposes to extend the when was the last time we said to our and . The short pieces, pre- nately humorous and horrifying, always coverage of the WTO rules to all serv- sons that we expected them to have pro- sented largely in chronological order, engrossing and colorful. On the streets ices, public and private—water, postal fessions and homes? That Everest of an are mainly grouped around the two of Quebec City, she writes, system, education, health—and will assumption for our daughters is our metaphors of her title: the “fences” of allow corporations to sue governments expectation for our sons. imprisonment, enclosure and exclusion The security forces used the directly. As shocking as this may seem, I’m not a thirty-something mom: my and the “windows” that open onto actions of a few rock-throwers… such rights are already accorded to com- husband at that time of my life was a alternative possibilities. The book opens to do what they had been trying panies under the North American Free partner in both house and parenting. But with a section called “Windows of to do from the start: clear the city Trade Agreement (NAFTA). When res- my tired female colleagues at work, my Dissent” which includes the “coming- of thousands of lawful protesters idents of the Mexican city Guadalcazar tired daughter, the tired women in pro- out party” in Seattle that closed down a because it was more convenient blocked Metalclad’s toxic waste dump, fessional garb towing cranky toddlers I WTO meeting and the beginnings of that way. the California-based insulation and haz- see struggling at 5:30 at the grocery store support from insiders like Joseph Once they got their “provoca- ardous waste abatement company sued, all seem to suggest a glaring inequity rel- Stiglitz, who defected from his post as tion,” they filled entire neigh- and Mexico had to pay them over six- ative to “fair share of household chores.” bourhoods with tear gas… teen million US dollars. And from that review, I turn to Judith People giving the peace sign to The past twenty years have seen the Van Allen’s review of Genital Cutting and the police were gassed. People rapid erosion of national sovereignty. Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. The Women’s Review of Books wel- handing out food were In the two-party democracies such as Polemics to read that it’s not the “event” comes letters from readers, sent via gassed…People having a party the US, Canada, Australia and much of but the wording of the event that makes email or regular mail. We print as under a bridge were gassed. Europe, opposition to neoliberal agen- reality. Let’s not call it “female genital many letters as we have space for; People protesting against their das has withered as both sides have mutilation”: let’s call it “cutting” as if it to make room for as many different friends’ arrests were gassed. The taken the same free market line. As a were grooming a bouquet for the dinner voices as possible, we ask readers first aid clinic treating people result, in most Western countries there table or “surgery” as if it were an answer to keep their letters to a maximum who had been gassed was gassed. is no longer any major party represent- to a disease. The disease is being born of 300 words. Letters longer than (pp. 147-148) ing the significant numbers of people female in any culture that views female this will most probably be cut, and who benefit from keeping major servic- genitals as superfluous. we may find it necessary to cut The book is a compendium of good es in state hands and who stand to lose Mary J. Fosher even briefer letters. arguments and engaging stories, com- their jobs and farms. Citizens every- Barington, NH piled with a youthful zest for the anar- where are discovering that the true All letters must include name, com- chism of a movement which has price of “free trade” is the power to Dear Editor: plete postal address and telephone opened up a wide debate on globaliza- govern themselves, as their sovereign Congratulations to Deborah number, although writers may tion’s failures and their possible solu- rights are surrendered in exchange for Solomon for her reviewing skills and request that we withhold their tions. Klein’s aim was to popularize foreign investment. integrity in telling us about Cathi names from publication. existing critiques and to track the expe- Klein cites the case of South Africa. Hanauer’s book rather than promoting rience of the developing resistance It is often assumed that deep inequali- her own agenda. She balances a sympa- Letters may be sent to The Editor, movement from its front lines. She is a ties persist there solely because of the thetic reading with good-humored and The Women’s Review of Books, reporter, not a philosopher. On theoret- long history of racial apartheid. But the sensible criticism. Let’s hear more from Wellesley College, Wellesley MA ical questions, she never poses as an massive public works Mandela envi- Ms. Solomon. 02481, or emailed to expert but presents herself as a na?f sioned when he won power were Dorothy Schneider [email protected]. who arrived in Seattle “equipped with deferred and substantially abandoned Kennett Square, PA only a limited understanding of neo-lib- under threat of the withdrawal of for-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 5 eign investment. Though South Africa ral evolutionary process. It goes hand in had little debt and was not at the hand with the progress of humanity absolute mercy of the IMF, as countries which history tells us no one can stand like Argentina are, the ANC was pres- in the way of.” Looping and listing sured to prove it could implement “Borderless freedom” is another “sound macroeconomic policies.” They grand claim that Klein scrutinizes. by Carol Anshaw adopted the standard IMF prescrip- While corporations and their cargoes tion—the transfer into private hands of may be liberated to flow unimpeded, for Miniatures by Norah Labiner. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee virtually everything owned by the state. people it’s a different story: The government’s sale of water and House Press, 2002, 381 pp., $23 hardcover. electricity utilities led to the usual price Whenever I hear the phrase “free hikes and disconnections for citizens trade,” I can’t help picturing the who couldn’t pay. In Soweto, people caged factories I visited in the have been reduced to drinking polluted Philippines and Indonesia that his is a novel that hopes for a house, peering down at her from behind water. In South Africa, Klein argues, are all surrounded by gates, reader in an easygoing mood— closed curtains.”) neoliberal policies have replaced racial watchtowers and soldiers… I Tperhaps in a hammock on a sum- Fern presents herself as omniscient, divisions with an economic apartheid think, too, about a recent trip to mer afternoon, relaxed, playful, with all privy to significant information on her which amounts to much the same thing. the South Australian desert the time in the world to linger on the subjects. If we aren’t particularly where I visited the infamous author’s lovely sentences, and patience charmed by Owen and Brigid, we do he glib equation of free trade Woomera detention centre… At enough for a narrative of small events believe in Fern’s youthful fascination with democracy is only one Woomera, where hundreds of and much digression. with them when she asks us, “Have you T example of the neoliberal Afghan and Iraqi refugees, flee- The book’s narrator, Fern Jacobi, ever found yourself in a situation that appropriation of progressive terminol- ing oppression and dictatorship tells in looping fashion a story of her- while it was improbably surreal was also ogy. In the tradition of No Logo, which in their own countries, are so self at 21—naive, backpacking around so narcotic, so desperately at a remove examined marketing strategies con- desperate for the world to see Europe. She has concluded a couple of from the rest of your life that you had structed around brand rather than prod- what is going on behind the affairs—neither satisfactory, but no choice but to give yourself over to it uct—so that the sneaker, for example, fence that they stage hunger embellished in memory. “He buttered a from the inception?” functions as a symbol of rebellion and strikes, jump off the roofs of piece of bread and handed it to me, a As it turns out, the story belongs not transcendence, rather than a shoe made their barracks, drink shampoo gesture that I multiplied into a thou- only to Owen and Brigid and Franny, by underpaid workers—Klein tackles and sew their mouths shut. sand kisses in the stairwells of a thou- but also to Fern herself. At 21, she has- many aspects of the free trade market- (p. xxii) sand hotels while a thousand bellboys n’t much life behind her, but already has ing pitch. Despite the well-documented in gabardine jackets typed for a thou- her touchstone moments. Again and evidence of growing disparities Through images like these, Klein shows sand years the complete works of again, for instance, she revisits the between rich and poor, within and that the world of the free market is “not William Shakespeare.” beginning of a now-dead affair, a meet- between nations, the rhetoric of a global village intent on lowering walls Her travels have landed Fern in ing on the steps of the college library. inevitable prosperity for all continues to and barriers, as we were promised, but a Galway, in the west of Ireland, where Labiner makes us understand how a thrive, with free marketeers frequently network of fortresses connected by she takes a job cleaning house for a moment can suspend itself within the characterizing their opponents as “ene- highly militarised trade corridors.” famous literary couple, Owen Lieb and human heart long after its actual occur- mies of the poor.” Anglo-Swedish drug Klein is an accomplished analyst of his young wife Brigid. The couple has rence and with greater meaning. and biotechnology giant AstraZeneca propaganda and has an eye for the com- returned to this house, where years ear- All the circling around this small markets its genetically modified “golden ment that captures a hidden agenda or lier Owen’s first wife, Franny—another cluster of characters, the investigations rice” as the salvation for malnourished an absurd contradiction. Supplementing young, pretty writer—was electrocuted of and reverberations from their pasts, Indian children, splicing vitamin A into her depictions of the gulf between in the bathtub. Whether it was suicide or all the pretentious and bitchy chat its product. Suppressed, of course, is neoliberal rhetoric and reality, her murder has never been established. The between Owen and Brigid, add up to the information that vitamin A disap- September 11 pieces focus on the new Mrs. Lieb is likewise a writer. She is 300-plus pages of seemingly aimless peared from their diets when diverse exploitation of that grim event by free also fragile, lonely and convinced she is meandering that terminate in a sudden Indian fields were transformed into trade opportunists. She cites, for exam- the granddaughter of Marcel Proust and extremely straightforward series of monocultures and cashcrops during the ple, an essay in The New York Times (which must rank as the ne plus ultra of soap opera-esque revelations, including “Green Revolution” (an earlier phase of Magazine “which claimed the traders literary psychosis). Fern’s real identity. the move by transnationals into India who died were targeted as ‘practitioners Brigid discovers a cache of letters agriculture, made attractive by the of liberty… the spiritual antithesis of written by her predecessor and presses uch of the book’s winding dis- promise of higher yields). the religious fundamentalist.’” She Fern to read them with her. These letters course comes in the form of This obfuscation of cause and effect, reflects on the ubiquity of the notion chronicle a familiar, sorry tale: a Mlists. The first few patches are Klein says, sums up AstraZeneca’s actu- that anything can be “sold”—from vest- depressed, pregnant writer/wife unable delicious. In describing the baffling end al aims: “Not to rethink mono-crop ed interests to foreign policy—and to extricate herself from a marriage to a of her romance, Fern thinks: farming and fill that bowl with protein offers entertaining quotes from neolib- charismatic, pathologically philandering and vitamins. They want to wave anoth- eral apologists who advocate fighting writer/husband. Reminiscent of Sylvia Maybe I had the wrong address. er magic wand and paint the white bowl terror with trade, which is, she says, Plath in many ways, Franny is likewise Maybe he moved. Maybe he golden.” This is just the latest manifes- “being ‘bundled’ (Microsoft-style) profoundly depressed by the cold in her imagined that it was I who tation of a long-term strategy of inside the with-us-or-against-us logic of house. “I cannot stave off autumn,” she stopped sending letters. Someone agribusiness: to donate seed initially and the ‘war on terrorism.’” writes. (In another literary allusion, had to. Maybe he had grown tired entrap farmers into having to buy their Klein describes her book as a collec- Franny’s biographer, whose last name is of me. Maybe he suffered from seeds in perpetuity. While the “golden tion of “ragtag writings,” and it is. It is Rhys, imagines Owen’s shadowy para- dehydration, fell on a land mine, rice” program poses as beneficent, the not for those seeking a systematic, the- mour as “a ghost trapped inside the joined a revolution, lost himself real agenda is corporate profit. oretical or cohesive examination of Klein points out that even the term globalization. It is short on historical “globalization,” publicized by its pro- contexts. There is nothing about the moters and adopted by the media, “liberalization” of capital flows and the obscures the economic changes we have advent of the speculative money mar- seen in the past twenty years. It fails to ket, nor any outline of the institutions identify what is being globalized and of global free trade and their mechan- makes the process appear ideologically ics. Her examples of the economic con- neutral, when it really represents “the sequences of the neoliberal transforma- internationalization of a single econom- tion are scattered. There’s no analysis of ic model: neo-liberalism… a set of corporatism, the eclipse of the idea of deliberate, debatable and reversible the common good, or the intrinsic limi- choices” instigated by specific interest tations of the market as arbiter of social groups. The basis for this model was decisions, such as fellow-Canadian John incubated at the University of Chicago Ralston Saul provides in The Unconscious in the 1950s and its promotion subse- Civilization. Nor is there the kind of quently financed to the tune of hun- macroeconomic perspective on the dreds of millions of dollars by big busi- sheer irrationality of IMF policies that ness. It is a phenomenon propelled by insider critic Joseph Stiglitz describes in conscious design and human agency, Globalization and Its Discontents. Klein’s more akin to the spread of a religion— approach to the failures of neoliberal- or the marketing of a product—than to ism is, as she herself admits, a collection evolution, as its advocates claim. Klein of the “best arguments” against it that quotes Pierre Pettigrew, Canada’s she has come across. Few will serve as International Trade minister: “Globali- dissertation sources. Many will be useful zation, quite simply, is part of the natu- as ammunition.

6 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 in a hurricane off a tropical US Constitution says simply that a state coast, embraced socialism, hurled may not deny to any person the equal pro- gasoline-soaked rags in a break- tection of the laws, Hawaii’s constitution away republic on the other side Slow going says that no person shall be denied the of the world. Maybe he was writ- equal protection of the laws or be discrim- ing screenplays in Hollywood. by Jo Ann Citron inated against because of race, religion, Maybe he had long-since ceased sex, or ancestry. This wording gave the to feel that catgut fine thread of Equality Practice: Civil Unions and the Future of Gay Rights plaintiffs in Baehr v. Lewin access to a obligation that had sewn us broader set of protections than the federal together. Maybe he simply forgot by William N. Eskridge, Jr. New York: Routledge, constitution would supply. And by limiting about me. (pp. 78-79) their claims to those arising under Hawaii’s 2002, 280 pp., $17.95 paper. own constitution, the plaintiffs guaranteed Lists and more lists follow, piling up on that their case would remain with the each other. At one point, we even find Hawaii state courts. After Hardwick,gay ourselves addressed with a list: plaintiffs did not want to take an equal pro- n November of 1990, Craig Dean move towards full civil rights for gays but tection case into a federal court. Dear reader of this sticky con- and Patrick Gill sued the District of to do it on little cat’s feet so as to remain Eventually, Ninia Baehr and her part- fabulation of memory, memoir, I Columbia for refusing to issue them a good members of the community in the ner found their case being argued before and molasses: please know that I marriage license. In the spring of the fol- process, is “equality practice.” the Hawaii Supreme Court. What am going to soon reveal the stu- lowing year, three more same-sex couples occurred there is a bit technical but worth pid secret candy center embed- sued Hawaii for the same reason. The o evaluate the path Eskridge examining because Eskridge’s conciliatory ded in this narrative mishap. It is marriage wars were on. wants the gay community to fol- position relies upon understanding exact- buried beneath a heap of junk Although a minority of gay rights advo- T low, it is helpful to recall how the ly what has been happening as the same- mail. It awaits you in a plain cates and theorists see same-sex marriage marriage wars began. Despite the various sex marriage cases move through the judi- brown wrapper. It is lost at sea. as an unworthy goal, and cultural meanings that accrete around it, cial system. The court decided that for It is smothered in special sauce. in this country have become increasingly marriage is simply the union of procre- purposes of the state constitution, in It is the scene of the crime. It is vocal in their determination to secure the ative sex with a particular family form that responding to claims of the bottleneck near the smash-up, freedom to marry. Their opponents are enjoys preferred legal status. Gays have based upon a person’s sex, the courts the icing on the cake, the calm equally determined to preserve marriage as made significant gains in attaining sexual must look very closely indeed at the dis- before the storm, the fly in the a heterosexual institution. freedom. Despite the shameful 1986 criminatory provision or behavior com- ointment, the frost on the pump- William Eskridge, who holds an United States Supreme Court decision in plained about, and if the state can’t come kin, the telltale heart, the pur- endowed chair at Yale Law School and is Bowers v. Hardwick that declined to extend up with an awfully good reason for it, the loined , the one that one of the country’s most respected writ- constitutional protection to sodomy discriminatory provision or behavior will got away, the last best hope, the ers on sexuality, gender and the law, has between consenting adults, 37 states have be declared illegal. great white way, the final frontier, participated prominently in these debates. repealed their sodomy laws. Gays have In legal language, the Hawaii Supreme the long and short of it, the pie In 1996, he published The Case for Same- made similar progress on the family front. Court held that the denial of the marriage in the face, the carrot and the Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized is no longer grounds for license was based upon sex, and that sex is stick, the slap and tickle, the force Commitment. Its starting point was the finding a parent unfit; homosexuals can a suspect class that triggers strict scrutiny. through which the green fuse Hawaii marriage case known as Baehr v. adopt in every state but Florida; second- What this meant was that there would be drives the flower... (p. 200) Lewin. He argued then that gays had parent adoptions have been legalized by a trial at which the state would have to achieved sexual liberty and that it was statute in three states and by appellate defend the marriage statute against the ...and so on for another twenty lines or time for that liberty to mature into the courts in seven, and are granted by judges constitutional challenge. The state would so. This method of revelation by cata- civilized commitment of marriage. Same- at the trial level in fifteen more; visitation have to show that limiting marriage to loguing lends Labiner’s story a lush, sex marriage would be good for the coun- rights for the non-biological parent fol- opposite-sex couples furthered a com- opulent texture while at the same time try, Eskridge explained, because it would lowing the breakup of a same-sex rela- pelling government interest that could not occasionally prompting the reader to draw homosexuals into the mainstream of tionship are now regularly granted; in be achieved by any less restrictive means. contemplate closing the book, shutting American life and fulfill the American Boston, when a lesbian bore a child that The state tried, and failed, to meet its bur- the tome, shelving the volume, eschew- promise of full equality for all citizens. resulted from her partner’s egg fertilized den. The trial judge ordered the state to ing the edition. America, it would seem, disagrees. in vitro, a court decreed that both women issue marriage licenses to gay couples and One wonders if any editorial pres- Employment non-discrimination statutes, could enter their names as “mother” on then immediately put his order on ice to ence was brought to bear, not only on domestic partner benefits, second-parent the child’s birth certificate. But marriage? give the state a chance to appeal. the author’s penchant for lists, but also adoptions, gays in the military: none of It would seem not. At this point, the political process took on unfortunate sentences like: “If this these arouses the political resistance that What happened in Hawaii is instructive. over with a vengeance. The Hawaii state were a poem of lost love, I would say the phrase “homosexual marriage” calls In May of 1991, Ninia Baehr and Genora legislature insisted that marriage meant a that you were a wax pencil and history forth. Eskridge, who only a few years ago Dancel (along with others) filed a legal union between a man and a woman and was a pretty pony in a picture book that argued eloquently on behalf of same-sex complaint in which they asked the state denounced the judicial branch for usurp- you needed the overlaid film of my marriage, has been looking out upon the court to declare that Hawaii’s marriage law ing legislative prerogatives. Then the peo- clear, invisible-seeming surface to more political landscape and now calls for a violated that state’s constitution because it ple were asked their opinion. The result accurately copy.” Fern herself senses principled retreat. Equality Practice: Civil denied homosexual couples the right to was that the Hawaii state constitution— our impatience. “I keep finding ways to Unions and the Future of Gay Rights is his marry. Hawaii’s constitution, like the feder- the very same document that had seemed obfuscate. And you, obligingly, politely, attempt to articulate a legal and political al constitution, guarantees citizens the to support the plaintiffs’ complaint—was continue to stick with me—but I know strategy that can press the case for equal equal protection of the laws. But Hawaii’s amended to reserve marriage to opposite- that sometimes in spite of your charita- rights for gay men and lesbians while giv- equal protection clause is more elaborate sex couples. If thy constitution offend ble nature, you can’t help but flip a few ing credence to the often hysterical resist- than its federal counterpart. Whereas the thee, rewrite it. pages ahead to see if things will improve ance that same-sex marriage arouses. in the not-too-distant future.” Press on, he counsels, but move slowly Labiner’s aspiration seems to be to and compromise with the opposition. push against the walls of the novel This conciliatory attitude will not be form, telling her story from various to everyone’s taste, but Eskridge plays the oblique angles, approximating an expe- rule of mediator rather than advocate. rience of life that is neither linear nor Sudden equality is never politically feasi- logical but valid nonetheless. The read- ble. Nor is it desirable, he cautions, if it er is given threads to follow that will produce a fierce “politics of preser- explore what it means to be female and vation” that undermines the conditions talented, Jewish, standing in the shadow for reciprocity and citizenship in the larg- cast by a ghost. Too often, though, er community. In other words, gay men these worthy and interesting themes, as and lesbians have a responsibility to the well as Labiner’s talent for reflection, larger community as well as to their own, get smothered in stylistic devices and and in the interests of being good citi- tics. Remarkably, she seems to under- zens they should accept something less stand this and asks the reader, through than full equality when it comes to mar- Fern, “Tell me, what has bothered you riage: “Equality for lesbians, gay men, most about my ramshackle ramblings? bisexuals, and their relationships is a lib- Was it the infidelities? The one-night eral right for which there is no sufficient stands worked into epic odysseys of the justification for state denial—but it is not heart? The lies, alliterations and asso- a right that ought to be delivered imme- nance, the suicides and psychobabble? diately, if it would unsettle the communi- No, go on, don’t be shy, it’s good for ty.” The name Eskridge gives to this me. It helps. How else will I learn? I’m politically pragmatic and philosophically making a list.” principled position, which strives to

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 7 Then in 1996 Congress passed, and Meanwhile, however, some states still President Clinton signed, the federal have sodomy laws. Gays can have a civil >VTLU»Z=VPJLZ1HZWKLVIDOO Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that union in Vermont and be arrested in not only limited marriage to the union of Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana,  one man and one woman but cast aside Mississippi, North Carolina, South long-settled constitutional law requiring Carolina, Utah, Virginia, Kansas, states to recognize one another’s laws, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri and records and court judgments. All over the Michigan. More to the point (since crimi- country, states began passing laws reserv- nal charges under sodomy laws, while ing marriage to heterosexuals and prom- technically possible, are unlikely) is that ising not to recognize any out-of-state you can’t order to go. At least record or court judgment inconsistent domestic partnership documents signed with this position. So much for the “full in one state are probably enforceable as faith and credit” clause of the US contracts in another state. Not so the Constitution, one of the central mecha- benefits conferred by civil union status. nisms of federalism. Last January, a Georgia court ruled that a As of this writing, 36 states have some woman had violated her divorce decree form of DOMA, including Alaska and by having her children visit her while she Hawaii. Gay men and lesbians in Hawaii was cohabiting with someone to whom got a law that established a category called she was not married—the partner in her “reciprocal beneficiaries.” As the term civil union. More recently, a Connecticut implies, domestic partners are awarded court refused to dissolve a civil union certain benefits, but the law imposes between two men, explaining that even  upon them none of the obligations that though Connecticut prohibits discrimina- ²7RP)HUUHOO7KH1HZ

8 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 that would obtain at the end of a tradi- that can be both unfair and suspect. tional marriage. Scroggins seems to be critical of those Throughout the country, these “de who disapproved of McCune’s marriage facto” parents are winning visitation Out of her depth to Machar; nonetheless, she writes of rights to their partners’ children. McCune: “She had always been attracted Sometimes the courts reason that it is in by Sondra Hale to African men, though she can hardly the best interest of the child that she have laid eyes on many Africans in continue to have a relationship with Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins. New York: Pantheon Yorkshire. Her attraction was frankly someone who has been an important fig- erotic. She found black men more beauti- ure in her life. At other times, the court Books, 2002, 389 pp., $25.00 hardcover. ful than white men, even joking with her invokes a legal doctrine like in loco parentis girlfriends that the penises of white men or “parent by estoppel” to confer a status reminded her of ‘great slugs.’” under which the partner can claim visita- A friend of McCune’s is quoted as say- tion. Recently, courts have begun to mma’s War is told as an exciting until much later the power of my white- ing, “[S]he would come out of these assess child support payments against adventure story, drawing readers ness. Emma McCune didn’t live long swamps of hell, walk into my wardrobe in the de facto parent. E into the intricacies of the little enough to begin to understand this power Nairobi, and come out looking like some- Last February a Delaware court understood “tragedy of Sudan.” The and what it meant in terms of race, class thing out of Vogue….” Scroggins hides assessed child support payments against tragedy refers to the longest-running civil and gender, and Scroggins only tangen- behind quotes from such “friends” and Carol Chambers, a non-biological parent. war in Africa, begun in 1983, although tially helps readers interpret McCune’s life colleagues that give the impression that The court reasoned that she and her part- one could date it to 1955, when southern in this way: “She had a vision of over- McCune was promiscuous, had a particu- ner had a commitment ceremony, Carol contingents of the army mutinied and coming racism through romantic love. lar penchant for Nilotics (a generalized helped to pay for the in-vitro fertilization slaughtered northerners. This war has She wanted to break the seal of her white- ethnic term that includes the Nuer, the that resulted in the partner’s pregnancy, brought famine, displacement and slavery ness—to ‘make herself that bridge group to which Riek Machar belonged), and the three of them lived together as a to the Sudanese people, and I am grateful between black and white,’” in her friend and was a beautiful but superficial woman family. This made Carol a parent for pur- to Deborah Scroggins for exposing its Bernadette Kumar’s words. who imagined herself an African queen poses of the state’s support statute. The atrocities to a larger audience. Yet her when she was no more than a “warlord’s court said that the events preceding the book is problematic in other respects, not cCune’s story runs as follows: consort.” That Scroggins may have the conception and birth constituted a sym- the least of which is the focus on Emma she was born in India in 1964 last word on McCune highlights why writ- bolic act of procreation. Similar cases McCune, a young British aid worker M to parents who were remnant ing biography can be so vexed, especially have yielded similar results in turned spouse to one of southern figures of the British Empire. A woman if the writer fears her subject because of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Sudan’s charismatic military command- of modest means and mediocre academic the horrors reflected in the mirror. In 1997, two Florida women in a com- ers, Riek Machar. talents, she first went to Sudan in 1987 mitted relationship, Emma Posik and For the better part of Emma’s War, when she was 23 to teach for the British wo issues are central to Emma’s Nancy Layton, entered into a support Scroggins skillfully interweaves her own organization Voluntary Services War, and Scroggins’ handling of agreement that the court characterized as experience in Sudan, where she covered Overseas, returning in 1989 to work for T them shows both the strengths “a nuptial agreement entered into by two the war for the Atlanta Journal UNICEF-funded Street Kids and weaknesses of this book. The first is parties that the state prohibits from mar- Constitution, with Emma McCune’s story. International (SKI). “In my heart, I’m McCune’s role in the Sudanese civil war rying.... They contracted for a permanent Her writing about the war is amazing in Sudanese,” Scroggins quotes her as say- itself, one of the bloodiest in this and the sharing of, and participating in, one its depth, revealing what a skilled jour- ing. McCune spent much of the late last century. The war is stereotypically another’s lives.” In addition to the explic- nalist can do. But as the book progress- 1980s in the south in the midst of war referred to in the Western media and by it terms of the agreement, there was, the es, the thread gets lost and even the and famine, emerging as a high-profile many scholars as a religious and racial court said, “an implied agreement that chronology seems garbled. In her ending khawagiyya (foreigner) and the wife of struggle between an Arabized Muslim [Posik’s] lifetime commitment would be chapters and epilogue, Scroggins stuffs Riek Machar, whom she married in 1991. north and a Christianized African south. reciprocated by a lifetime commitment by into a few pages too many sage com- Riek Machar was one of two leading Oh, that it could be so simple! Scroggins, Dr. Layton—and that this mutual com- ments about Africa, world politics and southern guerrilla commanders (although much to her credit, uses the “layered mitment would be monogamous.” The the meaning of Emma McCune’s life. Scroggins insists on calling him a “war- map” metaphor of Sudanese British court also said that the obligation Sometimes Emma’s War reads like a lord”), the other being John Garang, writer Jamal Mahjoub to convey the imposed on Posik to move in immediate- standard biography with a chronological leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation complexity: ly with Layton and to stay there for the narrative. At other points, it’s more like a Movement (SPLM). McCune died in a car remainder of Posik’s life was very similar war story, and McCune serves simply as a accident in Nairobi in 1993, at the age of I have often thought that you need to an “until death do us part” commit- window to the conflict. Then again, it’s a 29. Along the way with SKI, she opened a similar kind of layered map to ment. Sure looked like marriage to this critical work of investigative journalism, more than a hundred schools in southern understand Sudan’s civil war. A Florida court, and by enforcing the agree- with Scroggins on the case of “humani- Sudan while also campaigning against the surface map of political conflict, ment the court gave the women a tarian” aid abuses, exposing the characters recruitment of child soldiers. for example—the northern gov- divorce. And as this review was being who work the aid circuit. In her prologue, Such an outline, however, reveals very ernment versus the southern written, a judge in Washington state said she frames McCune and other aid work- little about the idealism, adventure and rebels; and under that a layer of that the relationship between Julia ers as romantics: “Aid makes itself out to risk with which she conducted her life. religious conflict—Muslim versus Robertson and Linda Gormley was “suf- be a practical enterprise, but in Africa at Nor does it explain why Scroggins chose Christian and pagan; and under ficiently marriagelike” that the court least it’s romantics who do most of the her as the protagonist of a 350-plus-page that a map of all the sectarian divi- would grant Gormley’s request to divide work—incongruously, because Africa book. She writes that McCune’s story may sions within those categories; and the couple’s property, allowing both outside of books and movies is hard and “shed some light on the entire humanitar- under that a layer of ethnic divi- women the same property rights given to unromantic. In Africa the metaphor is ian experiment in Africa. Or at least on sions—Arab and Arabized versus a husband and wife in a divorce. always the belly.” the experiences of people like me, people Nilotic and Equatorian—all of Marriage. The union of procreative This is a complex book, raising many who went there dreaming they might help them containing a multitude of sex with a particular family form that questions that can only be touched on in and came back numb with disillusion- clan and tribal subdivisions; and enjoys preferred legal status. Ms. a single review. So much film and litera- ment, yet forever marked.” But her iden- under that a layer of linguistic con- Chambers was responsible for paying ture on Africa makes a white person the tification with McCune is a troubled one, flicts; and under that a layer of child support because of a symbolic act center of the story—Donal Woods filled with self-doubt about the whole economic divisions—the more of procreation. Dr. Layton was bound by instead of Steve Biko (Cry Freedom), or enterprise of aid, reportage and just being developed north with fewer natural a nuptial agreement establishing a Ruth First instead of Nelson Mandela there. The consequence is a harshness resources versus the poorer south monogamous, reciprocal, lifetime com- and any number of other South African mitment between two women who had heroes (A World Apart). Emma’s War joins Emma McCune sitting on her bed at Ketbek. From Emma's War. contracted for a permanent sharing of a long line of literary depictions of one another’s lives. And when Julia Euroamericans playing out their fan- Robertson and Linda Gormley ended tasies, sometimes heroically, against a their “marriagelike” intimate domestic colonial backdrop—from Joseph Conrad partnership, they were under a court and E. M. Forster novels to Paul Bowles’ order to divide their assets on the same The Sheltering Sky to Michael Ondaatje’s terms that apply to a married couple. The English Patient to Olivia Manning’s The One of the most important elements Levant Trilogy. As Scroggins notes, of marriage’s preferred legal status is “Africa’s most memorable empire- divorce: a predictable process in which builders tended to be those romantics property and debts are allocated, and and eccentrics whose openness to the child custody, support and visitation irrational—to the emotions, to mysti- orders are issued by a judicial system that cism, to ecstasy—made them misfits in asserts jurisdiction over the dissolution of their own societies.” a committed domestic partnership. It During my own time in Sudan (six would seem that gay couples are getting years’ residence, spanning several divorced. Could it be that same-sex mar- decades), I too lived the colonial life as a riage is already here? white woman, not quite understanding

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 9 with its rich mineral and fossil fuel The second issue involves Scroggins’ deposits; and under that a layer of critique of neocolonialism in the form of colonial divisions; and under that a the “humanitarian industry”—that is, aid layer of racial divisions related to and the entire culture of helping which Her father’s daugher slavery…a violent ecosystem…. inundates many African countries with (pp. 79-80) countless outsiders, few of whom have by Patricia Moran expertise in the area, know the language, What Scroggins omits is a layered map or harbor any deep understanding of the My Father’s Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other of colonialisms, wave after wave, that groups with which they work. Their pres- have left the country divided and unable ence is at worst a kind of adventure and Second Chances by Suzy McKee Charnas. New York: to build a nation. She also omits to gen- at best a display of vacuous idealism. der the war, highlighting the horrible vic- Scroggins is rightly critical of the Nairobi Putnam, 2002, 306 pp., $23.95 hardcover. timization of women and children, as well and Lokichoggio expatriate communities as the greater role of women in holding whose version of roughing it looks like together the fabric of society. Still, she the Nile Hilton to the local people. Many teases out many of the complications of of these aid workers are women, under- amily ‘history’ is crap, nothing but oil, political Islam, and myriad militias and scoring the complicity of Euroamerican lies and baloney,” Robin McKee parties. To her, no one is a hero; no side women in the whole colonial and post- F tells his daughter, acclaimed sci- is without blame: colonial venture. ence fiction writer Suzy McKee Charnas. But Scroggins pays too little attention Yet in taking care of this difficult and tac- The Khartoum elite supplied to the positive contributions of Emma iturn man for the last seventeen years of southern and western tribes hostile McCune and to her popularity among the his life, Charnas persistently tries to illu- to the Dinka with machine guns Nuer. Almost patronizingly she implies minate her family history by questioning and encouraged them to form that the Nuer were unable to judge her only remaining parent, the father militias to raid the Dinka for cattle McCune’s character for themselves and who left when she was eight and and, some whispered, even for worshipped her blindly: she quotes one remained distant and aloof while she was women and children…. There was colleague as saying, “Everywhere we growing up. The questions Charnas an Arabic saying that summed up went…the Sudanese [the Nuer] seemed poses—”What were you doing when you the strategy of the northern elite: happy to see Emma even though she had first saw my mother? How did she look, “Use a slave to catch a slave.” The learnt little of their language. She enjoyed what was she wearing? What did you say, south and its borderlands were the sort of star attention usually afforded what did she say? When did you decide to divided among many tribes, many to royalty and celebrities. In villages, peo- marry, and what made you decide, and militias…. The region was also ple would run up to her car as she drove how and where did you ask her, and what home to smaller, weaker peoples past, bringing presents and seeking did she answer?”—remain unanswered; who had no weapons at all…. advice.” She also tends to accept the snide her father’s response is typically, “Aw, They were everyone’s victims. For remarks of other expatriates who might Suzy, whaddaya want to know for? It was the Sudan People’s Liberation have been envious or felt territorial. a long time ago.” Army [the military wing of the “Everything about Emma had a Charnas longs for a second chance to Suzy McKee Charnas SPLM] did its share of raiding, story,” remarked one of her friends. establish the kind of intimacy with her too… It was an ugly business of Another commented that McCune “was father she has longed for since child- blames herself, imagining, despite her robbery and revenge…. (pp. 83-84) always on trial with the Sudanese because hood. As she admits, however, “we don’t mother’s explanations, that her father has she was a white woman, and with the always get what we want.” What she gets left because of her. Scroggins ably describes the ethnic, expats because she had married Riek….” instead is the subject of her book, this Adding to her feelings of estrange- regional and personal splits among SPLM It seems she was on trial with her friends, newest addition to the bookshelf of ment and isolation is Charnas’ sense that members, perhaps best dramatized by the too. The gossip of close-knit communi- memoirs by adults who care for their she has in effect lost both parents. Her insurrection led by the Nuer Riek Machar ties living under a microscope is some- aging parents and then must come to mother, preoccupied with working and against the Dinka SPLM head John thing that Scroggins could have explored terms with their deaths. Charnas explores trying to find another husband, treats Garang. This brought about a temporary rather than taking so often at face value. the chasm that exists between the father- Charnas as both helpmate and confi- coalition between Machar and his group Evidently she even left out some of her daughter relationship she fantasized dante, giving her an unusually heavy bur- and the northern National Islamic Front, own interviews that presented McCune in about and the one she actually develops den of household chores and responsi- until the two guerrilla leaders were reunit- a positive light (as I learned from a per- with the man she claims is “the ghost of bility for her younger sister. “I would ed in 2002. sonal communication with a southern my father as I had known him and imag- have preferred being looked after myself, Yet part of the dramatic tension in Sudanese colleague). That so many judg- ined him all my young life...the ghost of which I thought was the crux of the this journalistic account comes from the ments of Emma McCune were not inter- the man he himself had set out to be but family bargain,” Charnas writes. “You’re question of how important Emma rogated for their racism and is never became.” not supposed to be taking care of other McCune was to the war and its political troubling, marring a well-told tale about a This second chance begins on people; someone takes care of you, intrigues. Scroggins tends to be dismis- war that few readers know enough about. impulse. When Charnas learns that her because you’re a child.” sive of her. She accuses McCune of That a young white woman in her 62-year-old father, an unknown, failed holding “a peculiarly Western idealism twenties can offer readers entry into one painter living in New York, can no longer f Charnas’ offer to her father stems that was all the more poignant for being of the most complicated and heteroge- take care of himself, she invites him to in part from a desire to be the cared- totally out of place in the context of an neous societies in the world suggests that live in an “in-law” cottage next door to I for and listened-to child at long last, African civil war. It was not a political her life is fascinating precisely because of her house in New Mexico. Admitting in taking her father in turns out to be vision that truly animated Emma as the intersection of gender, race, sexuality retrospect that this invitation was “com- another lesson in disappointment. He much as an ideal of romantic love. She and politics it represents. Yet for those of pletely crazy”—”I was a thirty-two-year- remains impenetrable, his occasional was in love with the idea of love and with us immersed in Sudan and self-critical of old woman about to import the father I remarks tantalizing glimpses into a his- the idea of sacrificing herself to it.” But our own presence there, a metaphor barely knew into a life my husband and I tory he refuses to divulge. A stray others have stressed McCune’s role as an Scroggins invokes—that of a cobra spit- had only recently begun in a part of the remark about the painter Willem de advisor to Machar, an identification that ting into a mirror—is apt. Scroggins says country new to all of us”—Charnas Kooning, for example, turns up the sur- became a double-edged sword for her this metaphor reminded her “of how the overrides her father’s objections as well prising fact that Robin had been in the when Garang’s group blamed her for the West is alternately enthralled and enraged as her own misgivings: “he could be same bar the night de Kooning got insurrection against them. Thus the term by its own reflection in Africa.” And it familiar; he would be,” she insists to her- involved in a famous brawl. “He used to “Emma’s war”; it was Nilotic custom to reminded me of why analyzing the self. “I would make it happen...I saw a know everybody in that scene, when he name a conflict after a woman who spaces some women have invented for golden opportunity to get my lost dad lived in the Village,” Charnas tells her caused it, although it is surprising that themselves in military and political strug- back at last, and I grabbed it.” sister Liza. “I hate to think of all that Scroggins feeds off such sexism. gles matters. As Charnas realizes much later, this memory and experience disappearing impulsive offer to a man she considers an for good when he dies.” Eventually, enigma springs from a deep-rooted long- however, as her father’s health disinte- ing to repair “nuclear family fission,” the grates, Charnas is forced to conclude MOVING? atomization of her family when her par- that she will never access her father’s ents divorced in the 1940s, at a time “hidden emotional life.” Don’t miss an issue! when divorce was relatively rare. “I was Charnas finds herself in tears when angry and humiliated that my family was she hears a sentimental song on the radio Please give us six to eight weeks’ notice of your change of address. We somehow broken,” she recalls. “I had about a younger woman who remembers need your OLD address (on your mailing label, if possible) as well as your three sets of aunts and uncles, solid cou- an old man’s youth for him. She mourns NEW one. Send the information to: Address Change, The Women’s ples who never quit till death did them the relationship she had wanted and will part despite various stresses I only recog- never have: “I was crying for what we Review of Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481, or phone toll- nized or learned about later. So how weren’t and hadn’t been to each other... free 888-283-8044/ fax 781-283-3645/ email [email protected]. come I was stuck with the first divorce on Some mistakes can’t be corrected. They the block and the first and only divorce in just sit there, being what they are, and all my family?” Perhaps inevitably, she the waters of your life have to curve and

10 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 flow around that damned big rock of a deals so meanly and so poorly with the mistake ever after, being shaped and problems of providing for our own formed by it.” aged parents”: Yet as this aching account makes clear, Dramatic monologue Charnas and her father do develop an [Y]ou discover the limits of the intimacy of sorts over the years they resources at your command, and by Marilyn Booth spend together. Although her father the narrow choice of possibilities never again paints—thwarting once more that they will buy. You are faced Walking Through Fire: A Life of Nawal El Saadawi by Nawal her hope to have the father of her early with the fact that you have already memory back—his habits and ways of earmarked your savings for your El Saadawi, translated by Sherif Hetata. New York: Zed Books, responding to the world become deeply own old age, as your culture sug- familiar to her. She learns to read his gests you had damned well better 2002, 251 pp., $69.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper. moods, understanding, for example, that do because otherwise you’re out when he’s grousing about his cat’s eating on the street in rags, pal. And here habits he’s really bothered about some- you are in your fifties, and your thing else (he had fallen in the kitchen dad is over eighty, and no way can n 1956, baby daughter in her arms, a Woman Doctor, to the fathers in Searching and had had trouble getting back on his you pour your meager wealth, Nawal El Saadawi traveled from and The Circling Song, to her later villains, feet). They share a love of animals: hoarded up in fear of precisely I Cairo to her father’s village, Kafr the most repulsive and in-your-face rep- Robin is at his most appealing in this loss of autonomy and health Tahla in the Nile Delta. Newly graduated resentatives of . As in the first Charnas’ loving depictions of his affec- in your own later years, down the from Cairo University Medical School, volume of her autobiography, which tionate care of the wild birds and stray black hole of this old man’s inde- she welcomed a change of air and took a appeared in English as Daughter of Isis in cats and dogs that come his way. At one terminate and open-endedly post running the government-built vil- 1999, her own father is a much more point, he feeds a flock of wild pigeons devouring future, such as it is. lage clinic. “My stride on the earth was equivocal, and more finely etched, figure, that have found a way into his attic, (p. 182) powerful, big like my village grandmoth- the recipient of ambivalent affection developing a special tie to one he calls er,” she exclaims in this second volume from his “wayward” daughter. There are “Beakless Betty,” whom he somehow Charnas’ search for the right place for of her autobiography. “I needed space, echoes here, too, of her earlier descrip- manages to feed out of his hand. Later, her father, her maneuvering through the yearned for the smell of green fields, of tions of her mother and grandmothers, in the hospital, Charnas finds him in Medicaid system, and her forthright dis- mud ovens baking bread.” who as they socialized her into the ways tears, worrying that this disabled bird will cussion of the Catch-22s facing her will El Saadawi has staked out vast space of the fathers also offered her strong die without him. He willingly walks the be of interest to anyone who has to make in her novels, autobiographical writings models of female power. dog George, even when George begins this kind of decision. “My father’s inter- and bold works on sexuality and gender Like other Arab women who write, El to pull him down, and Charnas uneasily ests and mine, thanks to this ‘system,’ are in Egyptian society. She has become an Saadawi attests to the power of women’s trades his safety for this exercise. “A now opposed,” she observes. “I need international figure, the first Arab femi- storytelling, and recalls the shaping force bond like that is not easily overridden,” him to be sick enough and stay sick nist writer to be widely read in English, a of supernatural figures who inhabit she acknowledges. “I understood by then enough to be declared by his doctor to be flamboyant speaker in university lecture women’s tales: that animals were the only people Pop in need of permanent nursing home care halls and a commanding presence on really had any use for.” so that he can stay for good...paid for by international feminist circuits. And she’s I remember the stories told to Medicaid and his Social Security pay- framed this book with spaces and dis- me by my grandmother and [the ully half of the memoir details ments. He wants to get his ankles healed tances: beginning it in her North trees near Duke] are transformed her father’s rapid decline over a fast and come home, where I can go Carolina study in 1993, among the North into witches or devils, their long F period of about two years. broke trying to buy him the services he Carolina evergreens, and ending it with tresses hanging down on either Charnas only gradually becomes aware needs to continue to live with us.” her return to Egypt in 1996, on a flight side of their heads as they reach of his growing incapacity, for her father Although Charnas never finds the inti- enlivened by an intensely sympathetic up into darkness. stubbornly hangs on to his independ- macy she seeks, she does gain a greater seatmate and a good gin and tonic. She Throughout my life devils have ence, hiding his incontinence and his understanding of why it cannot be and her husband (translator of this book surrounded me. In my village, increasingly frequent falls. But time attained; by the end of the book, she and many of her other works, and a nov- when I was still a child, I used to catches up to him: he develops emphy- seems at peace with what she and her elist in his own right) had come to Duke look for them. In Cairo, after I sema, balance problems, swollen ankles, father have managed to develop: “It University as visiting professors after had grown up, they looked for me. a skin rash on his ankles that refuses to seemed to me that our second chance of deciding to leave Egypt when El (p. 2) heal and becomes crusty with scabs and intimacy had come and gone, with full Saadawi’s name appeared on a roster of pus. Even so, Charnas does not admit amplitude, and we had made of it what it intellectuals targeted for harassment— They hover over lives as they flit through the obvious until a doctor finally tells was in the two of us to make,” she writes. and apparently a death threat—by the her pages, turning now into “visitors of her Robin needs a nursing home to heal Behind this concession lurks an uneasy Egyptian government’s most vocal oppo- the dawn”—policemen come to raid or the ankles and, after that, permanent sense of her own resemblance to this tac- nents, who call for a theocratic govern- arrest—now into enforcers of social institutional care. The search for that iturn man, whose refusal to shed light on ment based on their version of Islam. norms, or prospective suitors, or col- care—and for the money to pay for it— his emotional life matches Charnas’ own But it is El Saadawi’s early adult years leagues in the Health Ministry. is one of the most engaging parts of elisions and silences. She barely mentions in Cairo and Kafr Tahla, punctuated by Charnas’ account; she learns to her dis- her mother, for example, claiming her medical aid excursions to Suez in 1951, aughter of Isis traced El Saadawi’s may that part of the experience of car- father’s proximity has edged her mother to the Canal Zone in 1967 and to childhood—literally from ing for the elderly in the land of “fami- out of her memory; at another point, Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan in D birth—and school days, her rela- ly values” is to feel “guilt, anger, and a when her father asks her why she’s so 1968, that command most space in this tionships to parents and grandparents furious resentment that this rich, tech- good to him when he has no money to book. It might almost have been given and siblings, her moves between village nically capable, and inventive society leave her, Charnas deflects the question, the working title of a novel she was writ- and town and city school. There was a much as he deflects her questions ing in the early 1960s, “Woman concreteness to that volume that seems throughout the book. Searching for Love.” Throughout the absent here, particularly as she moves NOW on the In her very vocation as a writer, in narrative, the stories of her three mar- into the presumably wider world of Women’s Review website: fact, Charnas lives out her father’s own riages recur as dominant motifs of gen- adulthood. In Walking Through Fire, her RENEW your subscription by dreams of artistry. As she observes, our dered oppression intertwined with world often seems curiously small, Visa/MasterCard notions of what “family” consists of are national trauma, followed by a wary tri- bounded for good or ill by parental send us a DONATION culturally inflected and not realistic; umph, both serene and troubled. These ghosts, as she is hounded relentlessly by order and prepay BACK ISSUES finally, we get what we get. Charnas her- are political stories, of course, as El her opponents and by the government send us your CHANGE OF ADDRESS self seems to grant as much. At the Saadawi links marriage trajectories to the that insists on “protecting” her from its point when she dissolves in tears over entangled realities of national and sexual Islamist opposition. notify us of a DELIVERY or BILLING problem the gulf between the sentimental song politics. How can a marriage survive the Though we meet a trio of friends who find the answers to some FRE- and her own situation, she acknowl- profound disillusionment of a colonial accompanied El Saadawi from secondary QUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS. edges that her way of relating to her war fought steadily by the young yet dis- school through university and far beyond, start a NEW SUBSCRIPTION for father is, in its own way, a form of real avowed by the government? How to we never gain a sense of the larger stage yourself or as a GIFT intimacy: “Was all our joking resist the grim pressures of respectable on which activism moves. We do hear of enter our monthly CONTEST to around…our way of avoiding close ties, convention, urged by family and friends her vocal attendance at political meetings win a FREE subscription. or of expressing them? Strange, and upon a young divorcee with a child? as a student, her outspoken presence at a All credit card orders are ridiculous in a way, to feel guilt and loss What a relief when she finally meets the gathering of Nasserist politicians (about processed through our SECURE SERVER. from measuring our reality…against this quiet and lovely Sherif Hetata, a survivor which she has spoken before), her impa- We respect the PRIVACY of our song’s idyllic vision, which is mostly of aristocratic forebears and years and tience with the Ministry of Health. We readers and do not provide baloney and very rare and even then years of political imprisonment, and a see her dodging bombs to treat patients in their email addresses to any much tempered with other, less roman- steadfast supporter over nearly forty Ismailiyya. We hear of the hypocrisy of other organization or business. tic elements. It simply isn’t applicable to years of her writing and activism. student leaders, socialist politicians and WWW.WELLESLEY.EDU/ us.” In echoing her father’s sense of so- Readers of El Saadawi’s fiction will medical school professors. We read of called family “history” as baloney, find here the autobiographical correlates brief encounters with villagers and WOMENSREVIEW Charnas demonstrates just how much of male characters in her novels, from wounded soldiers with whom El Saadawi her father’s daughter she remains. the husband in her first novel, Memoirs of seems to feel a sense of connection and

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 11 tion of the sources of Islamic doctrine and practice, a revolutionary move from within that women active in gender poli- tics are taking up from Morocco to Iran. Secret ingredients Instead she writes, “I kept searching in the holy books and sayings for mention by Laura Green of the rights of women. There was noth- ing, absolutely nothing.” Whether one Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the agrees or not, surely her long history of activism has yielded some dialogue and Cookbooks They Wrote by Janet Theophano. reaction. And how might the presence or New York: Palgrave, 2002, 362 pp., absence of a community contour the ability—or not—to write? El Saadawi is $29.95 hardcover. constantly grappling with the blank page, both compelled and unable to write. Is it simply because the “Arabic language was not made for me”? Her mother tongue, f one of the insights of the women’s kept a diary in the year 1796-1797. she declares, “does not speak to me. It movement in the 1970s was that Theophano highlights both Anne was made for men, uses divine words I “the personal is political,” a parallel Hughes’ cross-class interactions with and expressions that deny my existence. and equally influential lesson was that women in her community through food God and Satan are masculine. Death is the personal is historical. Feminist schol- and recipe exchange, and Hughes’ pleas- Nawal El Saadawi masculine.” Yet she writes, as do many ars have sought documentary evidence ure in her ability—not routine for a other women. Could the awesome stare of women’s lives not only in publicly woman of her socioeconomic status— communication. But has El Saadawi of the blank page stand in for a lack of recorded words—speeches, legislation, to read and write. Hughes is grateful never felt a sense of collective political community? books—but in more private sources, when “all the cookinge bee done and work, of the shared aims and difficult As a translator of numerous novels such as the diaries and letters of other- doe make a mitie brave showe” and she negotiations that feminism means to and short stories by Egyptian and wise unknown women. can “rite in mye littel book agen.” many, in Egypt as in the United States? If Lebanese women (including El Saadawi’s Janet Theophano, a folklorist, pro- Having learned to write from another she really was the only female student Memoirs from the Women’s Prison and her poses using cookbooks as alternative woman friend, Mistress Prue, she vows from the medical school who went to novel The Circling Song), I’ve long been sources of women’s history. She argues to teach her own servant, Sarah. Hughes political meetings, as she claims, did she concerned with English-speaking read- that collections of recipes, whether copes briskly with potential conflicts have no contact with women of her gen- ers’ access to the rich, resolute presence informally compiled or commercially between sisterly solidarity and husband- eration in other faculties who were cer- of feminists in contemporary Arabic lit- published, can reveal “individual women ly authority: she conceals a gift of blan- tainly politically active and vocal and who, erature. I’ve also rejoiced in the growing telling their own life stories, their ver- kets and milk to another, poorer neigh- like El Saadawi, have written about it? range of autobiographies by Arab sions of their communities, and the bor from her husband, “hee bein a mere El Saadawi has been criticized for women available in English—works by visions they have of society and culture.” man, soe itt nott wyse” to tell him. muting others’ voices in the organization Fatima Mernissi, Leila Ahmed, Fedwa Theophano analyzes cookbooks not as she spearheaded, the Arab Women’s Tuqan, Latifa al-Zayyat and others, wel- culinary texts but as autobiographical t is interesting, if disheartening, to Solidarity Association, closed down by come alternatives to the genre of artifacts. Cookbooks’ raisons d’être—lists compare the bustling independence the Egyptian government several years “unveiling the Arab (or Muslim) woman” of ingredients and instructions— I and interdependence of Anne ago. Perhaps her strength lies in her abil- by Western journalists that have found a become for Theophano palimpsests of Hughes’ housewifery to the US middle- ity to forge ahead regardless of others, ready market among New York’s major domestic life: overlays of marginal anno- class housewife’s life in the 1960s or yet I would have welcomed her open houses. El Saadawi’s importance as an tation, letters thrust between pages, past- 1970s found in “Carol’s Cooking Stinks assessment of the value of individual activist and a bold voice in Arab femi- ed-in newspaper clippings, inscriptions Cook Book, Also a Diary as We Go versus collective work, of where her nism’s most recent half-century cannot recording the transmission of recipe On.” (The manuscript was given to projects have succeeded and perhaps be denied. I hope she’ll make her autobi- books between generations. Theophano by a friend who purchased where they could have succeeded more ography a trilogy, moving on to contem- Theophano draws her sources from it at an auction; Theophano was unable fully. I would also have welcomed a plate her role as part of a feminist histo- four centuries (seventeenth through to date it with certainty.) This loose-leaf thoughtful analysis of how she feels ry alive with many voices, productive twentieth) and from two countries, binder covers several months of Carol’s about today’s feminist Muslim reevalua- conflicts and continuing struggles. England and the United States. Though life. Theophano brings out Carol’s sim- her subjects are women who possessed mering resentment at her double shift of some degree of literacy and are mostly housework and (unspecified) wage white, they span a range of classes and labor. The binder combines daily menus It’s Never too Late... include an African American magazine (heavy on the processed foods of the editor and a Chinese physician who immi- Pringles era) with Carol’s often third- This year, celebrate the holidays by giving The Women’s Review of Books to grated to the US. The sources include person references to her exhaustion: friends, family, colleagues, your local library or women’s center—or anyone you handwritten manuscripts, commonplace “Sally [a co-worker] out all week—Carol know who will enjoy it all year long. books, in which hand-copied recipes min- will do her job as well as her own— We’ll wrap it, mail it, and send a gift card bearing your personal message to the gle with newsprint, collections produced menu’s [sic] will be interesting studies in recipient. Use this form to order your gift subscriptions; attach more on a separate by church or social groups, and commer- ‘fatigue cuisine.’” sheet if you need to. We’ll take care of the rest. cially produced cookbooks. Other women who stand out include Theophano also discusses conduct Mrs. Hannah Trimble, a farmer’s wife liv- NAME:______books and diaries that include cookery ing in the second half of the nineteenth instruction. Her intention, she writes in century in Pennsylvania, whose leather- ADDRESS:______her introduction, is to produce not a bound book includes accounts, recipes “history of cookbooks” but rather “an for food and medicine and religious verse, CITY:______STATE:_____ ZIP:______exploration of women’s lives in their and an anonymous middle- or upper-mid- PERSONAL MESSAGE:______own words.” Eat My Words succeeds best -class housewife living in southern when it gives readers tantalizing Pennsylvania in the first decades of the ______glimpses of the daily texture of an indi- nineteenth century, whom Theophano vidual woman’s life, and conveys calls “Mrs. Downing” and whose story ______Theophano’s own pleasure in cook- she pieces together from “a locally pub- books as archives and artifacts. It is less lished cookbook enclosed by a notebook GIVER NAME:______successful in conveying her subjects’ filled with recipes.” Industrious and ambi- connections to larger social, cultural and tious, “Mrs. Downing” belonged to a I ENCLOSE A CHECK FOR $27.00 PER SUBSCRIPTION (PLUS $5.00 FOR EACH SUB- historical forces. book club, exchanged recipes with SCRIPTION TO CANADA, AND $5.00 SURFACE MAIL OR $20.00 AIRMAIL POSTAGE FOR Theophano has arranged her sub- friends, went out to dinners whose culi- ELSEWHERE OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES). jects thematically under chapter titles nary details she recorded with zest and CHARGE MY VISA/MASTERCARD such as “Cookbooks as Communities,” made and sold candy, on at least one “Becoming an Author: Cookbooks and occasion, to “college girls.” Further up # ______EXP. DATE:______Conduct” and “Cookbooks as the class hierarchy, Lizzie Randolph, a Autobiography.” Autobiography, in fact, well-to-do Quaker woman living in nine- SIGNATURE:______is the keyword for her interests. She teenth-century Philadelphia, describes the Please make all payments in US dollars by check, money order or Mastercard/ speculatively and sympathetically recon- “Servants Work” she supervised as well as VISA to The Women’s Review of Books, Wellesley College Center for Research structs the lives of otherwise anony- recipes and menu plans in her “small, on Women, Wellesley, MA 02481 (or FAX your order to 781/283-3645). Allow six mous cookbook owners. In “Cook- beige and green marbled, paper-covered to eight weeks for all subscription transactions. books, Literacy, and Domesticity,” for book.” A tea party she prepared for sev- example, we meet Anne Hughes, an enteen called for, among other ingredi- eighteenth-century farmer’s wife, who ents, 350 oysters.

12 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 Theophano makes the now-familiar tion makes it harder to see the social sig- argument that speaking from a position nificance and context of the individuals of domestic authority licensed women she brings to life. (such as New England’s Beecher sisters) The way we were to stake out positions on social issues. heophano clearly loves her But the chapter divisions of Eat My archival sources, and she vividly by Emily Toth Words make it difficult for the reader to T conveys their richness and senso- grasp the social and historical field in ry appeal. “Mrs. Downing’s” cookbook, Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons which this might happen. For example, for example, is in a chapter on “Cookbooks as by Lynn Peril. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, Collective Memory and Identity,” …an assemblage of several kinds Theophano discusses Freda De Knight’s of documents: a blue-lined paper 224 pp., $15.95 paper. 1948 compendium of African American book with the words recipes, A Date With a Dish. De Knight, “Composition Book” embossed an African American woman, was an in gold on the blue front cover, an editor of Ebony Magazine. Her cook- amalgam of manuscript and or readers of a certain age, a ghost tered reading. The illustrations, showing book, Theophano writes, depicts “a newspaper clippings pasted to the hovers over Pink Think, Lynn (among other things) the impossible complex and heterogeneous African pages, a printed local cookbook, F Peril’s survey of the images of shapes of fashionable models, are good American culture that varied in class, and many loose scraps of paper femininity that bombarded and some- for a few groans. The sidebars, mostly region, professions, and educational inserted into the blue text.... Over times brainwashed women in the 1950s. quoting “experts” from the 1950s, usual- backgrounds.” Like De Knight’s book, time, and with use, bindings Peril shows how educators, ads, advice ly fall somewhere between barfworthy How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945) by broke, pages were no longer con- books, board games, magazines and and weird: Do you know the difference the middle-class Chinese immigrant fined, and a new configuration movies all colluded in teaching girls that between necking and petting? Are you a Buwei Yang Chao, a physician and a emerged. What I held in my hand they should aim to be good little wives, career woman? “Are you diverting as you philologist’s wife, quietly insists on its eighty years later was a federation sweethearts and mommies, and nothing reach into your slip?” cultural, as well as culinary, significance. of texts. (p. 133) else. Little girls were supposed to wear Peril seems to think a lot of this is Chao’s cookbook carries a preface by frilly pink and play with dollies. funny and archaic, but she never looks the Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck, who Theophano’s reverence for her arti- Adolescents were to devote hours to into who benefited from stereotyping and “consider[s] this cookbook a contribu- facts can sound portentous, however, studying the art of pleasing “him,” limiting women. For those of us who tion to international understanding.” when she deals with relatively recent including being perky and always seem- lived through that time, those images De Knight’s and Chao’s books ones, such as the Hadassah cookbook, ing to be fascinated by whatever fascinat- were not just fluff. Fighting against them appeared after World War Two and used about which she writes: “Food, a promi- ed him. (I spent countless tedious hours made us what we are—and got us mad similar rhetorical tactics—polite but nent symbol of Jewish identity, became sitting around in a ham radio truck. enough to create the women’s movement. firm assertions and representations of a potent vehicle for the Rochester Argh.) Young women were to appear Which brings me to the ghost: Betty the refined cultural contributions of Hadassah’s depiction of its own com- weak, tender-hearted and empty-headed, Friedan, whose 1963 book The Feminine excluded groups. Yet Theophano dis- munity past and present.” Potent for the better to trap that protective male Mystique did much of what Peril’s does, cusses Chao’s book some two hundred whom? I wondered—these are large breadwinner and be set for life. “Girls” but with much more flair and energy. pages after De Knight’s, in a chapter on claims for a fundraising cookbook pro- (the universal term for us) were also sup- Friedan cared passionately about the “Recipe and Household Literature as duced by a chapter of a still-flourishing posed to be sexy—but of course we were trapped housewives who were her sub- Social and Political Commentary.” A organization. supposed to withhold our final favors ject, for she had been one. her chapters Date with a Dish, meanwhile, shares a Eat My Words does not convincingly until the wedding ring was produced. on “The Sexual Sell” and “Housewifery chapter with In Memory’s Kitchen, a manu- demonstrate that cookbooks can serve Peril writes about all this in a lively, Expands to Fill the Time Available,” for script compiled by the inmates of the as more than supplementary sources of breezy style that makes for easy, unclut- instance, told us how our mothers had Terezin concentration camp, and a 1972 women’s history. The light such artifacts collection of kosher recipes by the shine on women’s lives and social worlds Rochester, New York, chapter of the is indirect and inconclusive. But we can Jewish women’s group, Hadassah. be grateful to Theophano for sharing a Chao’s cookbook, which Theophano wealth of material details—the 350 oys- Rutgers University describes as “an evocation of the past, a ters, the cracked leather bindings—and nostalgic representation of regional cui- personal details—Anne Hughes’ erratic Director of Women’s Studies sine,” De Knight’s Date with a Dish and spelling and sisterly generosity; “Mrs. In Memory’s Kitchen are all, to one degree Downing’s” social ambition. Theophano The Women’s Studies Program of Rutgers University-Newark is or another, nostalgic attempts to pre- has researched and represented her sub- searching for a new Director at the associate or full professor level to serve a culture in the face of brute his- jects sympathetically; in doing so, she has lead a 30-year-old program, with a major, a minor, and a new gradu- torical forces. Theophano’s analysis sug- enriched our appreciation for the texture ate-level concentration available in Women’s Studies. The Faculty of gests such connections, but the absence of women’s domestic lives across cen- of chronological or rhetorical organiza- turies and an ocean. Arts & Sciences is undertaking major initiatives in urban and metro- politan studies, women’s health issues, globalization, and the study of race and ethnicity. 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The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 13 © Michele Lee Willson lious selves, for she finds fatophobia per- That is exactly what Betty Friedan Peril, though, does not know enough sonally wounding and enraging. called the feminine mystique: the women’s history. She criticizes women But the rest of Pink Think lacks that assumption that all women (or at least all who used Lysol as a douche, for instance, kind of drive. The book seems to have white, middle-class ones) would fit one but doesn’t seem to know that it was also come about because Peril’s hobby is col- mold for life. Friedan wondered why and used for self-induced abortions. She lecting old advice books, home econom- how; Peril doesn’t seem to be after any makes fun of young men’s magazines for ics texts and other “femoribilia.” Much of kind of general truth. Friedan inter- not mentioning birth control, but doesn’t Pink Think is really a catalogue of her col- viewed editors who claimed that women know that contraception was considered lection, an emptying of her notebook aren’t interested in history or ideas; evil and unmentionable. (Until 1965, for (there’s this, there’s that), with no analysis unfortunately, Pink Think seems to shy instance, it was illegal to sell contraceptives of what she’s found and what it all means. away from both. in Connecticut, and until the appearance Too often, Peril throws together of AIDS in the 1980s, condoms were ink think” seems tacked on belat- quotes from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, never sold publicly on drugstore shelves.) edly as a unifying concept, and it’s as if American women’s lives were P really the same thing as femininity: unchanged for some thirty or forty years. hat’s most frustrating, though, She doesn’t admit that many women of is Peril’s refusal to engage with Pink think is a set of ideas and the 1940s were seeking a return to stabil- W ideas. She doesn’t distinguish attitudes about what constitutes ity and domesticity, a security denied to between advice and reality (prescription proper female behavior; a group- them by the Depression and World War and description), and seems to think that Lynn Peril think that was consciously or not Two. It made some sense to advise a if experts said women should be docile, adhered to by advice writers, man- woman to be a virgin before marriage in women actually were docile. She mocks been oppressed and silenced. We vowed ufacturers of toys and other con- the 1940s, when reliable birth control was beauty standards, but doesn’t analyze not to let that happen to us. sumer products, experts in many not available, abortion was illegal and an their economic and social purpose. They Peril, as far as I can tell from the book, walks of life, and the public at out-of-wedlock pregnancy often meant will always be impossible for most is fortyish, has lived in Seattle, Chicago large, particularly during the years an end to education as well as a life of women to achieve—for the standards are and Oakland, loves lipstick and high heels, spanning the mid-twentieth centu- poverty and shame. Virginity was simple based on scarcity and difficulty. Pink but was very pissed off by images of girly- ry—but enduring even into the self-preservation. Think could have been a corrective or a ness when she was growing up as a fat kid twenty-first century. Pink think But by the 1970s, “save it for your continuation of The Feminine Mystique in Catholic school. Her section on “Fatty assumes there is a standard of spouse” (a slogan at “decency rallies” in (both books take white, middle-class and Fiction” is excellent; it’s the best and most behavior to which all women, no the late 1960s) was unnecessary. The heterosexual as a norm)—but Lynn Peril original part of the book. She notes that matter their age, race, or body type, daughters of the women of the 1940s does not even list Betty Friedan’s book in fictional fat girls are often motherless and must aspire…. [This] mythical were on the Pill, which became available her bibliography. (She does, however, socially maladjusted, they’re kept out of standard... suggests that women in 1960. The daughters were protesting misquote Friedan, claiming that she plays and fashion shows, and they’re and girls are always gentle, soft, discrimination against women, wearing wrote about “the problem with no insulted by classmates, parents and delicate, nurturing beings made of microminis, streaking if they wanted to name.” Friedan actually called it “the strangers. But once they lose weight, “sugar and spice and everything and having legal abortions. They scoffed, problem that has no name.”) She quotes they’re miraculously transformed into nice.”...Integral to pink think is the rightly, at the remnants of “pink think,” a few women thinkers, briefly, but doesn’t popular beauties, which means “they lose belief that one’s success as a and some of them are now teaching even begin to examine what her fore- their anger” and become ordinary, boring woman is grounded in one’s alle- women’s studies, which scarcely existed mothers knew about beauty, advice, cuties. Peril prefers their chubby and rebel- giance to such behavior. (pp. 7-8) before the 1970s. power, money, popular culture and more. The problem is that Peril rarely empathizes with women. She mentions lesbians only once, and when she reports that graduates of women’s colleges often didn’t marry, she doesn’t note that many of them led fulfilled lives in love with other women. Even in the benighted Fortune Sleeper 1950s, there were many women who escaped the world of pink think. It said stubbornness is not a virtue Someone is gathering Peril can also become, well, snotty. and I ate the cookie and realized the last of the soup, “Judy,” for instance, is a young woman I really prefer a fortune that is is scraping a spoon Peril doesn’t know, but who originally more of a prediction, not just a truism on the smooth bottom of a bowl. owned the secretarial school textbooks that are now in Peril’s collection. Peril my mother could have told me. The fortunes I am looking for the noise. writes blithely and cruelly: “Judging by her I like seek me out in the world of seekers I look around at my people, school-girl scrawl, I imagine Judy was less with a message, they tell me a thing my family and friends, gathered concerned with future office work than I hadn’t guessed: Your son will be a great thinker, here in the room of my dream, wowing the boys in her high school home- room with newly learned make-up tips.” is one I got once that I loved because eating the food I have made Meanwhile, pink think is hardly dead. it took a chance it might miss its mark for them. I need to tell someone, Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s The or change someone. I loved how it sent me my mother, my sister, my dead Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the on my way, how if I opened it and had no son grandmother, please stop it. Heart of Mr. Right was a huge bestseller in the last decade. Magazines are full of it was a path to follow, a sign: bear fruit Please have another bowl, anxiety-producing articles about how you and when you do don’t worry, your son may be use your crust of bread, must diet and work at pleasing your man a dropout, druggie, liar but he’s thinking, go to the next course, in bed. Even beauty standards are far he’s a real thinker. Or if I had only daughters stop your scraping. more stringent than they were in the 1950s, when it was enough to be clean- and I opened it I’d know that they must But I wake up instead, scrubbed and wear falsies if nature had- marry thinkers. And isn’t this brought to the surface n’t given you impressive breasts. Now, if how to raise children, after all, you must by the real voice, you want to have the ideal body, you have give up your stubborn urge to control them, you in our bed, to starve yourself and spend thousands of dollars on breast implants. This isn’t to shape their life as you would have shaped scraping the spoon of your breath progress, and there’s no reason to be your own if you’d known enough back then, back and forth in the soup smug about the present. or been paying attention, and this is of your sleep, scraping still more sleep Peril, finally, doesn’t have any recom- an impulse I really should curb, before from your bowl of darkness mendations for ending the cruel fool- ishness of pink think. Betty Friedan, I have children and get set in my ways, until I roll you over, once she saw the waste of women’s and now I’m back to stubbornness, which bend with you to the bowl, and eat. lives, declared, “This has to stop,” and as a prophecy fits me, and is not a virtue, went on to found the National and I am old enough to see that now. Organization for Women and try to —Julia Cole change the world. Lynn Peril’s reaction to pink thinking seems to be more like, “How silly. Oh, whatever.” Rather than occupying herself with what it means to think pink, I wish Lynn Peril—like Betty Friedan before her— had seen red.

14 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 Building a better shoestring by Leslie Brokaw

Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs: How Eleven Women Escaped Poverty and Became Their Own Bosses by Martha Shirk and Anna S. Wadi. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002, 306 pp., $26.00 hardcover.

ute doesn’t say enough about these little mocs,” reads the copy C for item twenty in the Lakota Crafts Online Catalog (lakotafund.org), a Lucille Michelle Garza (far left) chats with some of her regular customers collection of products made by members outside a skate park. From Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs. of the Oglala Lakota Nation of South Dakota. The “Baby Mocs”—and they are he 35 pages devoted to Yasmina somehow. I didn’t know until I read it here cute—will set you back $43, but the price Cadiz’s story are about the only that Massachusetts is one of many states includes personalization: artisan Roselyn T stretch of the book that isn’t a that offer something called an Individual Spotted Eagle hand-beads any three col- cavalcade of disaster. Sharon Garza, the Development Account, a state-sponsored ors you want into the fringed leather hot-dog cart woman, is more typical of savings program that matches savings by moccasins, and the shoes are built to the women profiled here. She struggles low-income workers at a ratio of up to order. “Draw an outline of your baby’s with an ex-husband who only sporadical- eight dollars to one (www.acf.hhs.gov/ feet,” reads the copy at the web site. “We ly pays child support, a child who dies of programs/ocs). The stories are told will add some for growth.” Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a daugh- chronologically instead of by lesson or Roselyn Spotted Eagle pulls in less ter with severe asthma, allergies and back challenge, and information on how to than $10,000 a year from her beading and problems (who nevertheless becomes her contact microlenders is perfunctory. quilting. She lives in a three-bedroom partner in the outdoor venture) and a There are a lot of missed opportunities trailer on the Pine Ridge Indian homeless brother who dies of cirrhosis for presenting usable information to Reservation with her physically disabled Roselyn Spotted Eagle. From Kitchen on a city street. Garza’s daughter and would-be entrepreneurs. adult daughter and mentally disabled Table Entrepreneurs. business partner Michelle takes an entre- Perhaps the primary function of this grandson. But for her, this income and preneurship class called B!ZWORK$ at her book will be to show policy-makers and these circumstances constitute hard-won in the tens of thousands—at crucial high school, a course targeted at teens funders the power of these programs. success: her craft work used to add up to points in their businesses’ growth. The who appear likely to drop out of school. “The budgeting and decision-making fewer dollars, and her previous home was research behind Kitchen Table “I never considered myself at-risk, and workshops started me to thinking about a two-room cabin with an outhouse. Entrepreneurs was sponsored by the Ms. when they used that term, I’d be insult- how important it was to budget,” says Now she sells her work through her own Foundation for Women (co-author ed,” says Michelle Garza. Roselyn Spotted Eagle; the workshops, Spotted Eagle Enterprises, fulfilling Wadia is program director for the Reading so many harrowing stories is write the authors, “helped her move from orders that come from the reservation Foundation), which provides resources the equivalent of facing an unplowed thinking of her work as a hobby to regard- and over the Internet at the Lakota Crafts and funding for microenterprise groups sidewalk full of snow—you know you ing it as a real business.” “So that microen- web site. “Things are so much better for such as the Lakota Fund, which gave have to go through it, but it’s hard to terprise programs can continue to provide us now,” she says. Roselyn Spotted Eagle her first loan and muster a lot of enthusiasm for the trudge. quality services to their existing clients and coordinated her twice- The authors present their eleven stories expand to reach latent demand,” they rec- monthly repayments of straightforwardly and without much levi- ommend “public funding should be not $17.44. Shirk and Wadia ty, and readers might find the book more just sustained, but increased.” spotlight the five-hundred- of a responsibility than a pleasure. Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs adds up to an plus programs that provide It’s not clear that Kitchen Table indictment of a system in which a woman these modest yet crucial Entrepreneurs is intended for struggling loses her Social Security if she succeeds in loans nationally and put faces microentrepreneurs; they are likely to be supplementing it too well; in which a on the programs’ recipients. too busy to read it. And in any event, the missed rent check makes the difference The power of a small loan book doesn’t seem to be designed as a between having a home and losing it; in to change a person’s life is guide. Its practical tips, for instance, aren’t which funeral expenses can tap out a fam- almost improbable. But loads bulleted, so interesting ideas get swallowed ily’s life savings. It’s a solid addition to the of businesses are started with up. More people might take advantage of body of literature that, as the authors teeny amounts of capital, and so-called “remnant ads,” which magazines write, “bear witness to how owning a Lucille Barnett Washington explains to a customer not all start-ups remain mod- sell late in each production cycle at dis- small business can transform a woman’s exactly what repairs his car needs. From est. For instance, fully fourteen counts of up to 65 percent—Yasmina life, not only in economic terms, but in Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs. percent of the 2002 Inc. 500— Cadiz used them at first to advertise her terms of her self-esteem and her contri- the annual listing by Inc. maga- lamps—if the suggestion was highlighted bution to her community.” Poverty is a grim subject, and Martha zine of the fastest-growing privately held Shirk and Anna S. Wadia’s Kitchen Table companies in the country—were started Entrepreneurs, which tells the stories of with less than $1,000 in seed capital, HALF NATION UNDER GOD Roselyn Spotted Eagle and ten other including the founders’ personal assets. ONE WOMAN’S WARNING women, is equal parts miserable and (Almost half—41 percent—were started encouraging. The victories are some- with less than $10,000.) A chilling prediction for a country swept up by times heartbreakingly modest. Roselyn These women are tenacious, and that conservative nationalism and subdued by terroristic fear Spotted Eagle’s mother sold off all the they can even bring themselves to get out HALF NATION UNDER GOD, a fast paced political family possessions to pay for her drink- of bed some mornings is a minor miracle. thriller, is set in the near future. The United States is fractured along moral and religious lines. Abortion, education, welfare, ing; her husband almost killed her when Yasmina Cadiz had her lean personal and the media are regulated entirely by state governments. he stabbed her in the neck and the back. years, making $250 a week as a furniture Armed guards patrol state borders. With a $400 loan from the Lakota Fund, saleswoman, working part-time on top of Following the lives of an investigative reporter, a young Hispanic woman forced into servitude to repay her four Spotted Eagle is able to buy a batch of full-time to pay her bills, but she now runs months of foster care, the chief advisor of a presidential hope- beading supplies in one swoop. Another Punctilio, Inc., which sells high-end ful, and a revolutionary leader determined to abolish religious woman achieves her dream of owning a Fortuny lamps from Italy. These are luxu- rule, the reader is brought deep into a world of political, moral, religious, and intellectual control, a world less distant from our hot-dog cart. Another is glad when she ry goods: the “Cesendello A Stello” floor own than we might like to admit. A world led by a mostly can pay herself a salary of $425—every lamp, for instance, sells for $1,690 at the white religious right, where the liberties of women and two weeks. company web site (punctilio.com). Cadiz’ minorities have been sacrificed in the name of morality and for the illusion of security. The threads that tie the stories microloan partner was the Women’s Self- Pick one up at your local indpendent or woman owned bookstore together are that all eleven women start- Employment Project, which lent her Use your Visa or MC on line at www.EruBooks.com or toll free 877-218-3074 ed independent businesses to ease them $15,000 in 1998 for initial inventory and Send $19.00 to Eru Books, 7014 E. Golf Links Rd. #176 Tucson, AZ 85730 out of the most desperate poverty, and advertising costs. By the end of 2000, $14.00 + $5.00 Shipping (allow 7 business days) Trade Paperback, 342 page s all eleven received “microloans”—some Cadiz had revenues of $136,000 and ISBN:097209360-5 Bookstores order from Baker & Taylor or Eru Books as small as several hundred dollars, a few $16,000 in profit. visit www.erubooks.com for a sneak preview

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 15 woman a kind of stylish, soft-ish domi- sions, could be a homophobe. You know natrix who verbally and metaphorically what I gotta say to that guy? Fuck you! could “kick ass.” In her world, there were Then again, no thank you.” This time Performance artists two kinds of guys: those who dress and Schippers lightens up: “Intragender sexu- act like geeks, and scruffy musicians in al contact no longer reflects an internal by Sally Sommer loose jeans, old plaid shirts and the ubiq- essence or identity; it’s a way to be ‘cool’ uitous boots. The book sings when and countercultural. In other words, the Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Schippers captures the competitive, sassy bodacious of mainstream banter and interactions of these self-pro- rock is transformed in alternative hard Hard Rock by Mimi Schippers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers claimed “sluts.” The most spirited pas- rock into an audacious queer sexuality.” sages record the repartee. In one short But even in her first chapter, University Press, 2002, 208 pp., $20.00 paper. exchange between two women, the place- Schippers admits that she has prescriptive ment and use of loaded key words like intentions: “My hope is that more people “girlfriend,” “lesbian” and “bitch” reveal will consciously look to and develop their the rapid reversals and playfulness that own strategies for negotiating gender and he idea that gender is a constant- Chicago as a participant/observer, gath- mark their world. The scene: outside a sexuality in face-to-face interaction—per- ly shifting performance has been ering information about its “anti-sexist bar-club. The players: Maddie, Colleen, haps even getting some ideas from the T around for a long time. Certainly approaches” to rock music norms. She an unnamed man and the silent pages of this book.” And she optimisti- “gender maneuvering” is at the heart of interviewed members of alternative hard- Schippers. Maddie and Schippers are cally believes that doing is becoming, rock music, where ‘60s cock-rock bad rock bands that have little name recogni- walking towards the club. As they pointing out that “when individuals or boys like Mick Jagger pranced onstage in tion to those outside the circle (L7, approach Colleen, she turns and whispers groups in any setting gender maneuver, they tight silver pants, scarves and stacked Soundgarden, Babes in Toyland, Poster loudly to the man with her: can potentially produce alternative gender heels. In the ‘70s, glam metal bands like Children, 7 Year Bitch) and documented and sexual relations.” This is true. But Kiss or Black Sabbath wore makeup, long interactions among the young men and “Did you know she’s a lesbian?” this kind of change happens so slowly we fingernails, wigs and platform heels. Yet women on the scene. Rockin’ Out of the with a nod toward Maddie. She will all be dead first. these guys-dressed-as-girls enjoyed Box contains attractive ingredients: inter- laughed and then said, “Not only Vainglorious objectives return to admiring publicity and the “booty/ie” of esting fieldwork, a catchy title and that, but she’s a bitch, too.” bedevil the last chapter, on “Feminist sex with countless female groupies. This cover—a tough-glam girl strums a guitar Maddie laughed and spat back, Politics.” Given the tone of these final makes rock, writes Mimi Schippers in with her head thrown back, dressed in “And don’t you wish you could be?” pages, the agenda seems tacked on, as if Rockin’ Out of the Box, “one of the few combat boots, fishnet stockings and “Hey, I’m a bigger bitch than it were the result of bad editorial advice cultural spaces in which men have short-shorts—even an interview with you could ever dream of being.” to make the book more accessible. crossed gender boundaries and not lost Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. One imagines Both Maddie and Colleen Schippers confesses that her aim is to status.” Then in the early ‘90s, “riot-grrls” it will be a smart, lively read. laughed, hugged, and continued a alter certain gendered identities and in combat boots kicked onstage with But reader beware: Schippers warns in playful banter about who deserved behaviors in order to begin to “dismantle “genre-defining styles, music, and prac- her first sentence that “this is a book first membership in the “lesbian club” male dominance.” She knows this can tices,” sometimes playing for all-female and foremost about gender.” Actually this and “bitch club.” By the tone of only change with massive collective audiences. For a sociologist like is a book about gender theory, which their exchange, it was clear that activism. “However, simultaneously Schippers, interested in how people “do” explains why most of it reads like a there was something admirable working to transform macro institutional gender, rock is the perfect topic. reworked dissertation. She analyzes “struc- about being a lesbian and a bitch. structures and the localized structure of Schippers moves beyond the grrls, turations,” another of those spectacular After chatting a few minutes, specific settings and face-to-face interac- because she’s interested in male/female coined-words of social theory (in this case, Maddie said, “Well, we’re going in. tions—and importantly, identifying the transactions. Between 1992 and 1995, she from Anthony Giddens)—that is, what See you in there.” connections between the two—just hung out in an alternative-rock circle in happens in face-to-face interactions. As if “Now be careful, she’s a les- might do the trick.” proving to an unsympathetic committee bian,” Colleen said to me as we Perhaps in an effort to hasten the dis- that she really does understand the univer- walked away. mantling, she gives the reader a list of sally obvious theory that gender is played Maddie quickly responded, questions to ponder: “The first thing is to Ohio State University out on a spectrum of behaviors, she “She knows. She’s my girlfriend. take a long hard look at one or more of Women’s Studies / repeats herself so many times, in slightly Jealous?” your daily or weekly activities. What do African and African American Studies different tones, that she makes opaque the Colleen laughed and said, you do for fun? Where do you work? very thing she is trying to clarify. “Yeah, but I have my own girl- What organizations do you belong to? But when Schippers stops theorizing friend,” and with a small gesture Identify how the heterosexual matrix The departments of Women’s Studies and begins reporting on Chicago’s alter- toward the man she was standing takes shape: How are masculinity and and African and African American native-rock world, or does quick sum- with triumphantly yelled, “He is femininity situated in relation to each Studies invite applications and nomina- maries of gender theory heavy-hitters really a she!” Everybody, including other in a way that reproduces male dom- tions for a full-time, tenure track posi- (Michel Foucault, , Judith the man, laughed. (pp. 128-129) inance and/or ?...how do tion in the field of Black Women’s Butler and many more), or talks about those expectations get produced and sus- Studies (including an African American herself, the book rocks. A lover of rock The exchange is filled with affection tained? And most importantly, how can focus). Candidates must have a strong music since early adolescence, she and wit. When these two women give it to you fuck with them?” By this point, she cranked up the volume and strutted each other, there is knowingness about has maneuvered herself into the role of commitment to interdisciplinary teach- around her room playing air guitar, feel- the codes and a challenge in how fast they an author of a Glamour-style self-help ing and research and be committed to ing powerful as she momentarily embod- can slide the identifiers around. This is the quiz on How to Please Your Man. working equally with two departments. ied men whose “‘fuck you/fuck me’ atti- stuff of Schippers’ dream, a “structura- The contrast between didactic solemni- Specialization open; interdisciplinary tude[s] struck a chord.” This thimble-full tion” filled with layers of allusions. As if ty and the sassy alternative hard rocker- research background preferred. of personal story, which begins her sec- infected with their glee, her subsequent bitches is embarrassing or poignant. Take Requirements include PhD in relevant ond chapter, provides more insight than analysis rocks along—until, as if sudden- the discussion of an interview Schippers field; preference given to candidates all the pages of jargony explanations ly concerned about the clueless reader or conducted with L7’s Donita Sparks. In with PhD or graduate certificate in about how the “hegemonic gendering of that stern doctoral committee, she starts response to one of her questions, Sparks Women’s Studies and/or Black Studies. masculinity and femininity” coexists with decoding and deconstructing with her says, “[Feminism] is part of me and the Preference also given to candidates “the maneuvering of gendered sexuality.” theoretical hatchet, reducing the obvious songs come out of my experience…[how- with PhD currently in hand. In other to redundancies: “Meaning emerged from ever] if you listen to our songs they’re uni- cases, appointment contingent upon chippers sees the Chicago scene in the interaction, and importantly, the sexu- versal. Men and women can relate to the early ‘90s as a world divided al organization of the interaction itself them…. I’m not writing as a woman. I’m completion of degree by June 2003. into “assholes” (the hopelessly emerged through the play of meanings.” writing as a human being.” Schippers feels Send letter of application, c.v., and S clueless and bigoted) and admirable compelled to summarize: “As it is for the three letters of recommendation to: “bitches” and “sluts” (the knowing and ortunately, there are other other women in 7 Year Bitch, feminism is unbigoted). The women are queens, instances in which Schippers is part of Sparks’ life and informs her expe- Prof. Sally Kitch while the men seem little more than F courageous and slightly irreverent. riences, but rather than making her lyrics Dept. of Women’s Studies handmaidens. To be a top-notch per- She steps back and playfully manipulates explicitly political, her songs can appeal to Ohio State University former/participant in alternative hard- the theory, controlling it rather than let- both women and men, and are about 286 University Hall rock circles, a young woman needed a ting it control her. In the middle of a ‘cool people against assholes,’ not ‘girls Columbus OH 43210-1311 fast mouth, specialized vocabulary and, chapter on “Sexuality and Gender against boys.’” above all, a fabulous fashion sense and Maneuvering,” she describes how a jour- Rocker girls have been shifting gender Search Committee will begin reviewing attitude. The preferred look was slut- nalist called an alternative hard-rock male hierarchies all along, with biting humor, applications January 15, 2003, and tough: combat boots, tiny minis or singer a homophobe (most un-cool), and it gives vibrancy to their music, their will continue until the position is filled. shorts, bad tights or fishnet stockings, because he used the word “faggot” in his social structures and Schippers’ book. grungy T-shirts with an old-band logo, lyrics. The singer retorts: “‘[I]t’s scary Obviously she loves them and revels in black lace bras, no hair or wild hair, no when some fucking critic…mixes up their outcast status. But she cannot allow The Ohio State University is an EO/AA makeup or too much makeup. metaphor and reality. It’s kind of hard to them their own voices. The schoolmarm employer. A cunningly gendered mishmash of imagine how someone like me, someone intercedes and succeeds in undercutting clothing and accessories made this who’s given men head on several occa- the boldness of these wild women.

16 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 Imagine the lives of such words. from down the street, this time a Subtle as the interiors of antique mockingbird, jars, which, like the emperor’s toy, can Death and transfiguration they shape their enclosed dark do it better. (p. 13) because we hold them to be; by Judith Harris and name after name, they give us The ear controls rhythm and sound, and the many…. also tone, but never allows syntax alone Intervale: New and Selected Poems by Betty Adcock. to govern the line. Voigt’s line is all Whatever we hoped to say motion and cadence, like a waterfall. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, it was there all the time. (p. 75) In a concluding poem, she declares: “I want to bring outdoors inside,/ the natu- 2001, 181 pp., $28.95 hardcover. llen Bryant Voigt’s poems are per- ral and wild, picked by my hand,/ but fectly realized, rare in their formal nothing is blooming here but daffodils,/ Shadow of Heaven: Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt. E variety and textured innovations archipelagic in the short green/early on the lyric. Shadow of Heaven is Keatsian grass…” Then we learn that the one she New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, 87 pp., in its themes—balancing tensions addresses is ill: “there is a shadow on between transience and stasis, light and your lungs, your liver/ and elsewhere, $21.00 hardcover. dark, the heavenly and earthly. The soul’s hidden…” Death has its own delicate Trans by Hilda Raz. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan appetite is perfectly balanced in weight growth; the poet brings her flowers to the and airiness. As its title suggests, this one who is in need of them: “I’m bring- University Press, 2001, 87 pp., book creates a shadow of the other- ing you a sun, a children’s choir, host/ of worldly through worldly replication. But transient voices…” The voices are not $26.00 hardcover. Voigt’s poems reach into abstraction only transient in Voigt’s hands; they endure. when the literal has been exhausted. There is delicacy and hardness in the n Trans, Hilda Raz pushes past the luminous poem “Largesse,” which opens ordinary limits of what is socially ane Kenyon put the poet’s task suc- from one high window— the collection: I acceptable. Quoting Kierkegaard in cinctly: “the poet’s job is to tell the I guessed the story I would learn the poem, “What We Want,” she J whole truth and nothing but the truth by heart: Banging the blue shutters—night- acknowledges life’s vexations and suffer- in such a beautiful way that people can- how women’s hands among sharp rain; ings—and takes refuge in writing, explor- not live without it.” In the work of Betty instruments and a deep gash opened the yard. ing the difficulties of invalidism and the Adcock, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Hilda learn sleep, the frieze like metal By noon, the usual unstinting sun anatomical enterprise of change as her Raz the tradition of women’s poetry darkening, but also wind, the olive trees gone daughter undergoes a surgical transfor- descends from Dickinson through the land sown deep with salt. silver, mation from female to male. In Kenyon’s intense emotional impulses. (p. 126) inside out, and the slender cypresses, “Prelude,” which deals openly with the They show us histories of love, need, like women in fringed shawls, subject of transsexualism and sex- pain and satisfaction, reaching for the Intervale shows a poet’s articulate intel- hugging themselves… (p. 19) change, the mother continues her vigi- unknowable and making it known. As ligence and magical intensity. Adcock is lance, present at the death of one anato- Voigt writes, “I looked up./ That’s where drawn to tough-minded, socially defeated The image is earthly and miraculous; my and rebirth into another: one looks in the grip of a dream.” characters. In “Blind Singer” her techni- nature recalls women, as women recall Betty Adcock’s Intervale is a collection cal skill is matched by her compassion for nature. The poet is an observer, seeming- …to climb on the plane, dating from her 1975 book, Walking Out, the singer, who grows larger than life in ly detached but devout in her love of through subsequent volumes (Nettles, her Christ-like martyrdom: what she sees. The window frames the transfer, hoisting luggage Beholdings, The Difficult Wheel) to new perspective just as the earth frames our into the overhead bins, and arrive work. In elegies for loved ones, political She plays the local taverns. Her vision of what the window looking into at your side, child, in time poems and requiems for vanishing farm- voice heaven would, or could, contain. for your long surgery to come lands, she gives us a wide range of human has range and an odd disorder Voigt’s sequence of gem-like sonnets tomorrow values and human emotions. Her mother not quite blues, not quite another expresses the artist’s will to change and to and I’ll be there, your mother, died when Adcock was six, and the poet thing. be changed by the world. In some of the where I belong reflects on her own motherless image, a that uncertain edge brings people in, longer, extended verses, the rapid accu- the old miracle of your birth belief child in a “cracked photograph.” In ret- though she’s not graceful under mulation of partial images creates an enough rospect, she realizes that her loss has led the applause impressionist effect of light reflecting off to see us through cut and clamp, her to open herself up to the mystery of she knows as a coursing of little objects, as in the beautiful opening to the blood price language. “I am six years old buried/ in stones downhill Sonnet 13: I signed to pay, and will, and will the colorless album. My mother is dead/ or her carpenter grandfather’s myself I forgive no one.” bright handful of dropped nails. The cardinal sings and sings: onto the plane… Out of a chasm of loss, the child must (p. 104) hunter’s horn; I’m here, child, your absolute cross the distance between herself and then, artillery. The round red door company the fugitive mother. Nature will become a For Adcock, human beings and nature to its heart as you are changed—radically— maternal substitute, a shadowy border- are both noble and savage; tragedy touch- is always open. And now the same from one thing to another. land in which the child takes refuge, es all of us. Unflinching in “To My song (p. 31) exploring its recesses, “that skyblue Father, Killed in a Hunting Accident,” southern fall blue/ over the four o’clocks she attempts to make sense of the larger and drone/ of weeping that drains like a order in which her father’s fate was shadow from the house.” enclosed. Reminiscent of Wordsworth’s From personal histories to the mythic “Hart-Leap Well,” the poem depicts meanings of kinship to the waning away nature’s conserving order when objects of farmlands and the encroaching of are subject to decay. The speaker imag- industry, Adcock captures moments that ines the place of her father’s death as a might otherwise go unnoticed. Her land- place worthy of praise: scapes are changeable: burgeoning and robust one moment, damaged or faded Poised in any prayer I make for light, the next. Yet within that transient land- to catch the way it glances off the scape there are obdurate forms, like world, Greek ruins, that stand their ground in your ignorant knife is spite of everything. While conventional praising the river, praising religion plays only a minor part in these currents of canebrake, pinewoods, poems, one feels the presence of a com- thickets under the wild sky— munity chorus, the townspeople with whatever lives there lost their solid faith turned to the hills. There and whatever is helped to die. are portraits of women in the back- (p. 101) woods, or daughters and adopted grand- daughters, poems like “Ella Richard,” Adcock’s themes include the examina- “For Tai Lane Ruinsky,” or “Elizabeth tion of language itself. In “Two Words,” Cornered.” Naming is a ritual of remem- language is a field from which we have brance and welcoming, a repetition, as in ample room to pick and choose, for our the poem, “Remembering Brushing My own uses: Grandmother’s Hair”: Swifts. To grow to stay, to braid and bend It is a word for visible wind.

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 17 Gender change is a kind of rebirth, but Living Out Loud, the reinvigo- also an undoing of the mother’s own life rates the main characters’ troubled hetero- and creativity. sexuality. In Boys on the Side, the film’s fic- Unlike Adcock or Voigt, Raz’s stan- Supporting cast tional and utopian lesbian bar, Teatro zas are dense with itemized objects, Carmen, frames heterosexual resolutions. taking count of things so numerous, by Nan Alamilla Boyd Hankin observes that the character Holly they seem to want to break out of the (Drew Barrymore) becomes successfully form. The child must be out-born of The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar engaged to her policeman boyfriend there, her own genetic inheritance; she is too but a sexual relationship between Robin full from within. She becomes a “son.” by Kelly Hankin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota (Mary-Louise Parker) and Jane (Whoopi The body has willed itself into a new Goldberg) is foreclosed. Later, the party shape, a new configuration, but not Press, 2002, 248 pp., $18.95 paper. celebrating the birth of Holly’s child takes without great suffering. place not at the Teatro Carmen, as one In an age of inspiration books that might expect, but in a domestic space lack inspiration, Trans is surprising, and sometimes shocking, in its assent he politics of visibility have long to the mortality we must all confront. structured lesbian and gay social In poignant, passionate incantations, T movements. Early Raz captures the poetry of human dig- activists struggled to break the conspiracy nity even when the body betrays itself, of silence that trapped lesbians and gay even when it is mutilated beyond men in damaging stereotypes. An abun- recognition. dance of images, they argued, could work In “Mother-In-Law,” Raz gives against negative stereotypes to produce empathy for the residents in the nursing social tolerance. Today, as Kelly Hankin home a vocabulary. She translates observes, there is an abundance of queer silence, transforming despair into utter- images on television and in film. Hankin ance, exposing the threshold states focuses on representations of the lesbian between the gains and losses of quotid- bar in such films as Bound, Living Out Loud, ian existence: Boys on the Side, Chasing Amy, The First Wives Club, French Twist, Henry and June and Basic They share their socks Instinct. She also finds images of the les- and everything else on this floor, bian bar on television programs like Ellen, sitting Roseanne, Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, NYPD Blue, Law and Order still on the floor, taped in, forever and Sex and the City. But what sense can be Rikki Streicher (right), now-deceased owner of Maud's, with a bartender, in strangers. made of these representations? Do they Last Call at Maud's. From The Girls in the Back Room. They’re all one of the guys in the signal the success of a politics of visibili- chairs, sitting ty? What kind of cultural work do these were partly marketed and consumed as because “[t]he lesbian bar is a liminal space still, their socks held forever in images accomplish? alternatives to the standard story of het- that, after heterosexuality has been negoti- common. Sad eyes. (p. 53) Hankin argues that mainstream repre- erosexual romance, assert a heterosexist ated and rejuvenated, can be discarded.” In sentations of the lesbian bar work to con- point of view? Each depicts the lesbian Living Out Loud, the redemptive possibili- There is nothing wanting in these tain rather than expand lesbian spatial and bar as a cultural space that welcomes or ties of the lesbian bar are even more pro- poems, although they deal with the trou- sexual liberation. As she puts it, these rep- enables heterosexual pleasure and surveil- nounced. The main character, Judith (Holly bling hunger of those who are defense- resentations are “part of a broad cultural lance. In Chasing Amy, for instance, when Hunter) is dramatically transformed after a less, diseased, or in need. They simply project working to maintain heterosexual Banky (Jason Lee) and Holden (Ben night at a lesbian bar where she walks to expose the nerve. spatial supremacy.” She observes that Affleck) unintentionally visit a lesbian bar, the center of the dance floor and becomes There are other poems in Trans: poems most public spaces—for example the Banky expresses arousal rather than dis- surrounded by a multiracial cast of beauti- about teaching, poems about loving, employee lunch room, the airport, the col- comfort or alienation: “When am I ever ful women who caress her body. The expe- poems about being a wife and a compan- lege football game—are overtly hetero- going to get the chance to see this shit live rience changes her not into a lesbian but ion, poems about Nebraska and the peo- sexual, but the lesbian bar is a space osten- without paying for it?” This sentiment is into a happier and healthier heterosexual ple who inhabit its cold climate. Raz is sibly free from the voyeuristic possibilities echoed in an episode of Law and Order in who stops defining herself through men. careful to craft the speech of each poem, of what feminist film theorist Laura which Detective Munch (Richard Belzer) as in the dramatic narrative, “Drought: Mulvey calls “the male gaze.” It is here investigates a lesbian bar: “There’s gotta he most interesting part of Teaching, Benedict, Nebraska”: that lesbians have historically maintained be ten women for every woman in this Hankin’s book is her analysis of some degree of autonomy. In mainstream place.” These comments reveal a hetero- T how representations of the lesbian When the neighbor seen Ma media, however, depictions of the lesbian sexual male fascination with lesbian sexu- bar, both in movies and on television, are running in the road, she come bar are staged as part of a heterosexual ality, and they filter the scene through the authenticated by the inclusion of “real les- too. story line—that is, lesbians and lesbian perspective of male rather than female bians” or signifiers of lesbian culture and Then the kids from the farm, and space are a backdrop for the more impor- desire. Mainstream representations of the community. Hankin observes that the les- Judy from York, her girl tant story of heterosexual romance. lesbian bar, Hankin argues, are limited by bian café scene in Ellen was shot at Little just back from the hospital with Hankin argues that representations of the a heterosexist logic that “rarely permits Frieda’s, a real lesbian coffeehouse in Los tonsils, wrapped up in a quilt lesbian bar in mainstream film and televi- heterosexuality to capitulate [sic] its privi- Angeles, and k. d. lang made an appear- (like the doctor said). We all went sion fix and flatten the possible meanings lege as the moral and literal center of ance in that episode as a lesbian folk into the storm cellar of lesbian public space and transform those narratives.” singer. In Bound, lesbian writer Susie Bright and Juddy, my oldest, insisted on what might otherwise be understood as a While some mainstream representations (“Susie Sexpert”) made a cameo in the bar pushing up the door site of queer sexual liberation into a tool of the lesbian bar sexualize lesbians from a scene; to further authenticate the film, just as the funnel passed so his for heterosexual dominance. heterosexist point of view, others depict it Bright was credited as the film’s “technical boys could see it go So how do films like Chasing Amy, Boys as a space that is useful or curative for het- consultant.” In Boys on the Side, the Indigo —David still on the kitchen floor, on the Side and Living Out Loud, films that erosexuals. In both Boys on the Side and Girls performed as part of the bar’s les- they wouldn’t let me touch him bian band, and The First Wives Club fea- before the doctor—and all of us The lesbian bar scene in The Killing of Sister George. From The Girls in the Back Room. tured lesbian comedian Lea DeLaria as a there for half an hour butch bar dyke. Chasing Amy’s bar scene till it passed, the sheriff ’s men was staged at New York’s Meow Mix, a stationed one at each corner real lesbian bar, and actress Guinevere of the section to watch for the Turner appeared in a cameo role as a ambulance. (p. 5) nightclub entertainer. Why do representations of the lesbian These three poets reveal to us not bar demand such authentication when only what we want, but what we need to other locales do not? Hankin argues that know: how beauty is inlaid in even the quasi-documentary ethnographic repre- frailest of truths, and truth is the frailest sentations objectify and exoticize the sub- flesh transformed and made beautiful ject; lesbian spaces become an extension again. They give us a glimpse of process, of heterosexual public space or territory. how we negotiate living in the natural To clarify this point, Hankin devotes a world where values are contingent on whole chapter to Robert Aldrich’s The emotions. Through the themes of time, Killing of Sister George (1968), the first personality, bodily transformation, all Hollywood film to represent a lesbian bar. three address the narrative content of Because it was shot just after the collapse their lives, and use language to inscribe of the Hollywood production codes that heaven on earth. forbade direct references to homosexuality

18 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 in films, Aldrich’s production played on a gender relations in this well-written, the- social fascination with lesbians and lesbian oretically sharp, jargon-free book. She public space. As Hankin’s research reveals, does fall into one trap, a common one in Aldrich added the lesbian bar scene to the Drinking gender feminist cultural and social history. This script and insisted that it be shot in a real is the portrayal of “experts” (who are not lesbian nightclub, the Gateways Club in by Mariana Valverde always properly differentiated from each London. A paper trail of office memos other) as having great powers to define and publicity material illustrates how Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post- psychic and cultural life. Childbirth may Aldrich attempted, through location well have been successfully medicalized scouts, treatment of lesbian “extras” and World War II America by Lori Rotskoff. Chapel Hill, NC: by the 1950s; but according to my own film techniques like handheld camera research—which is not contradicted by inside the bar, to depict lesbians in the bar University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 307 pp., Rotskoff ’s findings—alcoholism was not. ethnographically. As a result, the “genuine The disease model of alcoholism was lesbians” in the bar scene who played $45.00 hardcover, $18.95 paper. legitimated by alcohol researchers pub- themselves “not only were framed ...as lishing in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on documentary subjects but were meant to Alcohol in the forties and fifties, but it was be publicly consumed as such as well.” not invented by them. Rotskoff cites one Publicity material for the film emphasized TV commercial now showing on the 1930s was called “alcoholism” of the leading postwar “experts,” E. M. the Gateways Club’s authenticity and high- Ontario public television (paid became the vice or disease of the middle- Jellinek, but she does not notice that lighted Aldrich’s success at “effortlessly A for by the province’s Liquor class white guy, not only in movies such Jellinek’s data for his influential model of penetrating . . . the historically guarded Control Board) gives a quick sketch of as The Lost Weekend but also, to a remark- the stages of the disease of alcoholism secret space of Gateways.” The space of two contrasting masculinities—drunk vs. able extent, in real life. But if the postwar came exclusively from AA, not only the lesbian bar was representationally responsibly sober. A middle-aged white alcoholic was a male, he was not male in because AA members were the only sub- reconfigured as a heterosexual territory. guy is shown downing a large whisky on the same way as the saloon customers of jects but, more importantly, because his way out of a party. The camera the 1910s. First, saloon drinking was Jellinek relied solely on data from a sur- ankin cautions us to be careful weaves a bit, just in case we didn’t get it. working-class drinking. Secondly, the vey designed and administered by AA readers of mainstream texts, As he bids goodbye he finds that the saloon men might have been married, but itself, a survey whose questions already H even those like Ellen that seem to host has seized his car keys. When he for them drinking was a matter of rela- embodied the AA theory about phases present a lesbian point of view. But what demands their return, the host pulls out tions with other men—as shown in Jack such as “hitting bottom.” of lesbian-produced materials? How do his waistband and drops the bunch London’s remarkable account of blue- In the case of alcoholism (and proba- lesbian-made independent films represent “down there.” This might provoke a collar, drink-centered masculinity in his bly in other fields) the relationship the lesbian bar? In her final chapter, wince of discomfort in a lesser man, but memoir John Barleycorn, a neglected work between experts and lay practitioners has Hankin persuasively argues that “lesbian not in this paragon of responsible that Rotskoff uses to good effect. The never been top-down. Although Rotskoff media practitioners can reshape and resist domesticity. The host then dares the postwar alcoholic, by contrast, was essen- seems to think that large numbers of the ideological work of popular lesbian drunk to “go get them”—the keys, one tially as well as existentially tied to his alcoholic men were seeing psychiatrists in bar depictions in their own productions.” supposes—and succeeds in calling a cab wife. His wife had to become a helpmeet the postwar period while their wives were More important, lesbian-made bar films, for his guest. in recovery if the couple aspired to post- being seen by social workers, my sense is including Forbidden Love (1992), Last Call at Lori Rotskoff ’s original and percep- war companionate marriage. Enter Al- that public hospitals and Veterans Maud’s (1993), The Riverview (1994) and The tive book shows the crucial role played Anon—the support group for spouses of Administration hospitals provided little Boy Mechanic (1996), reflect their makers’ by drinking and sobriety in the historical alcoholics—a hitherto neglected topic in more than basic detox; in the long run, anxiety about the decline in the number of development of the masculinities that the history of drinking and sobriety. there can be little doubt that the Salvation lesbian bars. To different degrees, they my TV commercial presents as ahistori- Army and AA have provided more treat- express concern for the future of lesbian cal types. She argues that behaviors and otskoff ’s chapter on the alcoholic ment to American alcoholics than any public space. Forbidden Love, for instance, ideas around alcohol consumption— marriage, the most original in the psychiatric institution. balances a narrative about the shift from including those of avid drinkers, AA pio- R book, illuminates the profound Psychiatry, especially in the US, some- secrecy to liberation in lesbian history with neers, Al-Anon wives, liquor advertisers, contradictions felt by the wives in early times dismissed alcoholism as non-psy- a nostalgic yearning for the past, suggest- filmmakers and therapeutic experts— Al-Anon groups. Their husbands’ drink- chiatric, and at other times saw it as a ing that the lesbian bar of earlier eras may were crucial in shaping white middle- ing had in many cases forced them to get mere symptom of deeper, more real have offered women something that pres- class gender positions in the decades paying jobs and take on other household problems. AA’s success was largely due ent-day lesbian bars do not. Although she from the repeal of prohibition in 1933 to responsibilities. When husbands later to the psychological and public relations is suspicious about the role of nostalgia the mid-1960s. Love on the Rocks shows tried to get sober by going to AA, wives genius of its founders; but it also owed here, Hankin concludes that because les- that it is possible, and indeed very fruit- often expressed ambivalence. They did something to the fact that neither medi- bian bars are not known for their longevi- ful, to study masculinity and femininity and did not want to return to their tradi- cine nor psychiatry were keen to monop- ty, nostalgia may be “a legitimate response in their interaction with one another— tional role. They did and did not want olize alcoholism, particularly its treat- to the spatial inequalities that lesbians con- even though the complexity of this task their husbands to go out to “meetings” ment. The few psychiatrists who wrote tinually face in the public sphere.” is compounded by the fact that, as the five nights a week. And they faced their for the specialized journals Rotskoff Juxtaposing mainstream representa- TV commercial shows, alcohol does not problems not with the simple views of examined did claim alcoholism as a psy- tions to lesbian-made representations of always act to unify masculinity. the temperance movement—which had chiatric object, but general medical jour- the lesbian bar may seem a superficial Respectability and excess are constructed told women that their husbands’ drinking nals would have told a different story. exercise to some readers, but this tech- interactively, both within each gender was a sin, period—but with the cumber- In Britain, by contrast, alcoholism nique allows Hankin to forge a link and between genders. some apparatus of postwar psychology, was heavily psychiatrized—whether as a between lesbian film production and les- Rotskoff begins by sketching the which insisted that emotional security cause or an effect of the weakness of bian spatial autonomy. She expands this demise of the temperance-era narrative was the wife’s job, just as financial securi- AA in that country is difficult to say. The analysis in a chapter that analyzes a lesbian of the working-class drunkard and his ty was the husband’s. In keeping with British Journal of Inebriety (later renamed bar scene in the 1976 “blaxploitation” film victimized wife. The well-known failures this, many Al-Anon wives expressed British Journal of Addiction) could be used Foxy Brown, asking whether this scene, of Prohibition, as well as the rise of unrealistic expectations about the intima- to support social and cultural historians’ which seems homophobic on the surface, powerful consumer industries and adver- cy level to be expected from marriages standard claims about experts’ medical- allows for black lesbian spectatorship and tising, meant that targeting the demon that, in most cases, had been through izing experience. But American sources identification. While this is an interesting rum was no longer feasible. But the long many years of anger and resentments. do not confirm this by now classic tale. question, it shifts the focus of the book American history of Puritanism did not It was in AA that many men learned Rotskoff seems to sense that the usual away from heterosexual spatial supremacy. suddenly end in 1933: rather, the linger- to talk about emotions. But the focus on story about experts does not quite apply: Hankin’s goal is to make a case for “com- ing anxieties about drink, and generally alcoholism as the common bond meant “I do not mean to inscribe a rigid sepa- plex spectatorship.” But by including a about pleasure, were now focused not on that in most cases their new emotional ration between professional/medical chapter on how lesbians of color view a substance but on a deviant minority. skills were site-specific and mostly gen- authorities and the lay experts of AA representations of the lesbian bar, she In the period from the 1930s to the der-specific. Wives often felt resentment and Al-Anon,” she writes. But this is unintentionally highlights the absence of 1960s, alcohol consumption was cultur- at being left behind while their recover- confined to a footnote, not integrated such analysis of lesbian spectatorship in ally normalized—what would 1940s ing husbands went off twelve-stepping into the book’s analytical structure. her other chapters. While she makes a per- Hollywood have done without the ever- (i.e. helping other male alcoholics). Nevertheless, Rotskoff has given us a suasive case for filmmaker Etang Inyang’s present whisky and the ever-present cig- While Al-Anon had no absolute rule wonderful book showing that it is possi- positive treatment of Foxy Brown’s lesbian arette?—in part thanks to the emergence against divorce, it certainly pushed ble to study family and gender relations bar scene, she is less successful in explain- of a separate “alcoholic” identity upon women to work hard at embodying the dynamically and interactively while also ing why so many lesbians eagerly consume whom the longstanding anxieties about impossible ideals of postwar wifehood. illuminating other fields, in this case the mainstream images of lesbian bar life. losing control could be projected. If you Yet as Rotskoff recognizes, despite its cultural history of consumption prac- Hankin’s strength lies in looking at were not an alcoholic, you could now social conservatism, without Al-Anon tices. Perhaps she will now turn her tal- films rather than analyzing their recep- enjoy your three martinis and see your- many wives would have felt nothing but ents to other equally neglected topics tion. Through her eyes we become much self as practicing what one alcohol despair and, probably, self-blame (some- that lend themselves to articulating the more sophisticated viewers of main- expert called “enlightened hedonism.” thing that temperance-era wives were not complex relations between “problem” stream films that assimilate the space of Stigmatized minorities have usually encouraged to feel). consumption, gender, family and sex. lesbian bars into yet another story about been cultural or economic losers. But the Rotskoff enriches cultural studies as Maybe Casablanca was really about the heterosexuality. postwar period was atypical: what after well as our understanding of family and masculinity of smoking?

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 19 lowed up with phone calls and email. them. Not wanting to define themselves Ninety percent of the respondents as victims, they often were unable to agreed to a follow-up conversation. name or understand the situation at all Although Girshick’s focus is primarily on until well after leaving the partner. No safe spaces sexual violence, she also treats various Girshick seems to favor expanding the forms of battering as integrally related. meanings of existing terminology, but by Ellyn Kaschak Of her seventy respondents, about half there is an argument to be made for reported having been repeatedly abused. introducing new language. This is neces- Woman-to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It Rape? Girshick argues that asking if female sary, yet disheartening. We have uncov- sexual violators and rapists are simply ered so many forms of abuse: how by Lori B. Girshick. Boston: Northeastern University acting like men reflects internalized many words must we have for it? In and what she calls “bipho- either case we must be mindful of the Press, 2002, 201 pp., $16.95 paper. bia.” She questions why we would expect legal arena, since many of the relevant No More Secrets: Violence in Lesbian Relationships one analysis to fit all sizes and suggests laws have been written with heterosexu- that feminist theory requires re-examina- als in mind. Nine states specifically by Janice Ristock. New York: Routledge, 2002, tion or extension in this area. Her reading exclude same-sex violence from domes- of the stories she heard convinced her tic violence statutes. 226 pp., $21.95 paper. that power and domination lead to inti- mate violence, an explanation commonly o More Secrets is much more aca- used for heterosexual violence: while het- demic in tone and content. erosexual men generally enjoy the privi- N Beginning with a lengthy review camera moves in for a close-up, Two more passionate contributions leges of gender, it is often men with little of prior literature, Janice Ristock devel- close enough for the reluctant yet have been added to this literature. Woman- power outside the relationship who seek ops a sophisticated, postmodern, feminist A fascinated viewer to see the to-Woman Sexual Violence: Does She Call It to exercise domination within it. Girshick and Foucauldian analysis. Her language is bruised and bloody face of a woman Rape? focuses on rape and sexual violence, proposes a “continuum of violence” for frequently dense and prone to jargon: beaten or raped by someone she knows, connecting these acts with other forms of lesbians in which the overriding reason perhaps intimately, and whom she proba- intimate violence. No More Secrets: Violence for rape is control. She focuses on the A focus on the relations of power bly “loves.” But wait a minute. Permit the in Lesbian Relationships examines battering interplay of sexism, racism, homophobia within a specific context could help eye a closer look, the camera lens to and domestic violence, including sexual and violence: in an oppressive and violent us to move away from abstract widen enough to include the figure of the violence. Both Lori Girshick and Janice society in which homophobia and racism notions of victims and perpetra- perpetrator. What if that attacker is Ristock decry the heterosexual bias in exist, violence may take different forms tors toward an exploration of how another woman? For many—lesbians existing theory and practice. They and have different effects. power operates in particular rela- included—the idea of rape and other respond with empirical studies of lesbian Lesbian communities struggle with tionships, where we can examine forms of sexual violence between and bisexual women, exploring the impli- denial and lack of services, leading to ter- the complexity of women’s lives, women can still shock and produce dis- cations of their findings with depth and rible isolation and the abandonment of and scrutinize the power dynamics belief and denial. The illusion that political awareness. Both call for an survivors. Lesbian couples tend to share in women’s intimate relationships woman-to-woman violence does not understanding of woman-to-woman vio- the same friends, who often feel pressed and in other areas of their exist silences and damages the survivors, lence that takes into consideration the to choose sides. Girshick points out that lives….an analysis that involves and threatens the integrity and safety of special circumstances of lesbian and many women have been in therapy and both-and constructions of social the entire community. bisexual women of all classes and ethnic- know the language of “victimhood”; a reality, in which we resist binary The first book on violence in lesbian ities in a homophobic culture. female perpetrator can use this informa- either/or positions. (p. 128) relationships was written in 1986, almost tion to appear innocent. More than one twenty years ago. Since then other books oman-to-Woman Sexual Violence is of the violators in her study is a charis- For Ristock, the lives of the women she have appeared, as well as articles in the lucid and accessible, of equal matic woman active in the movement studies are secondary to the analysis, popular media and public service cam- W interest to the general reader against sexual violence. The victims of which seeks to provide new and multiple paigns in many American cities. It and the professional or academic. Girshick same-sex violence have no safe networks meanings of woman-to-woman abuse, should be no secret or surprise that this often quotes the words of survivors them- of their own. frequently quite successfully. form of violence exists. Yet resistance selves, and readers looking for experiences Services for lesbian survivors of abuse Ristock rejects any universal cause of remains strong, perhaps nowhere similar to their own and support for speak- are often absent or minimal, Girshick violence, whether patriarchy, gender, or stronger than in lesbian communities, ing out will readily find both in these pages. notes. Many agencies claim that there is power and control. She proposes that where the actual number of assaults are The study was based on a question- no call for these services. In fact, this there are many reasons for women to be grossly underreported. naire (reproduced in the appendix) fol- group needs the visible presence of out- abusive, and that each must be examined reach programs, along with staff mem- separately. She focuses on the way lan- bers prepared for working with lesbians guage creates and limits perceptions, ques- and also with women of color (who may tioning the assumptions built into cate- identify more strongly as women of color gories such as perpetrator and victim/sur- than as lesbian or bisexual). Therapists vivor. In addition to emphasizing the and counselors are often not properly interaction of violence with sexism, trained to assess and treat assault and vio- racism and homophobia, as does Girshick, lence among lesbians. Many are unaware she includes factors such as being closet- that the first priority in such volatile cir- ed, first relationship, immigration and dis- cumstances should be the protection of location from the original community, and the abused rather than couples counsel- the use of drugs and alcohol. ing. Girshick recommends that every ini- Ristock illuminates what is marginal- tial counseling session should include ized by the dominant white, middle-class screening for violence and sexual assault. heterosexual perspective on domestic Girshick stresses the importance of violence. For example, Western feminists language: do we use the same words for make assumptions about the meaning of women sexually assaulted by women? In home, public and private that may not half her cases, the survivors initially apply to the experiences of immigrant used no labels and didn’t have the lan- women. For domestic workers, for exam- guage to describe what had happened to ple, an employer’s private space is both

20 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 public and private. Such boundaries are sis is the only depth approach, and it authors—of the existence of a larger ered destructive, to be replaced with for- not fixed, but defined by circumstance. reflects uncritical thinking in precisely the “lesbian community.” Perhaps the very giveness, while a perpetrator’s worst vio- Ristock’s work was done primarily in area where Ristock should have expertise idea that there is a lesbian community, or lent behaviors may be accepted as the Canada, where there has been a strong or should have sought it. Her own communities, is a romantic and utopian outcome of her psychological history feminist anti-violence movement. Foucauldian, post-modern feminist analy- myth reminiscent of the earlier one that and, by implication, minimized or even Focusing on six Canadian cities, she sis should have led her to other questions proclaimed women’s sisterhood. There is excused. This injustice does not occur all interviewed 102 lesbians who had been in as well. But perhaps one researcher can not a need for careful definition of communi- the time, but it occurs frequently enough abusive relationships and seventy femi- do everything, and she does raise many ty, reexamination of our use of language to call for vigilance. nist service providers who have worked important questions for understanding and of material and relational reality. In Both Girshick and Ristock insist that with this form of violence. The majority violence in lesbian relationships. my own experience and that of many therapists must not simply borrow were white. Survivors had experienced Ristock repeatedly underscores the other observers, lesbians typically have wholesale the theories and models devel- many kinds of violence including direct importance of confidentiality of clients extended friendship networks of friends oped by white, middle-class, heterosexu- battering, destroying property, hurting and anonymity of service providers. and former lovers, but rarely belong to a al theorists for clients from the same pets, throwing things, and what Ristock Though most therapists and researchers recognizable larger community. groups. Yet, while neither author is het- calls financial abuse and sexual assault. might agree with her, I would suggest that I lament, with many of the respon- erosexual, each describes herself, and the (Disclosure: Ristock presented a prelimi- the issue of privacy must be seriously dents, that the mission has shifted from majority of her research subjects, as nary analysis of some of these data in my reassessed, since it protects batterers and ending and chil- white, middle-class and well-educated. edited anthology, Intimate Betrayal: precludes a community response. While I dren to serving them. A revolution has To these authors and to all researchers Domestic Violence in Lesbian Relationships.) understand the protective nature of con- turned into a service industry. If counsel- who can only find subjects who are pri- The range and complexity of the fidentiality, the privatizating of abuse can ing and psychotherapy can be faulted for marily white—after over thirty years of impact and aftermath of abuse are far- do a disservice to the very woman and their contributions to this turn of discussion of this issue in second-wave reaching. It can be extremely difficult for communities that we want to serve. events—and I believe that they can— feminism and in spite of their own battered lesbians to break the silence. Another issue future theorists might they have also contributed to a shift in awareness that they cannot generalize Survivors often feel shame and shock in wish to consider, as some already have, is cultural values. For example, a survivor’s from this group—I have two final words. a society that already shames lesbians. the assumption—made by both of these judgment and anger may now be consid- Try harder. Women experience loss of self-esteem and trust as well as material loss of jobs and homes. Since the abusers include in their ranks therapists, professors, bosses and police officers, survivors remain Chain Letter from Miami As I Drive Over an Irrigation Ditch at the silent, fearing disbelief or worse. End of Summer, I Think of a Small-Town As other studies have found, the bat- Ricky Martin goes on living La Vida Loca. American Preacher tered lesbians of Ristock’s sample tended Manatees drift up the Gables Waterway to receive their primary support from in winter, but if this is warm for Miami (with apologies to James Wright) friends and family, rather than from agen- anhingas spreading their wings over flame-trees’ cies, shelters, the police, or the courts. shadowed limbs would be headline news. Where is the sea, that once When friends did not want to get Poinciana, your branches speak to me solved the whole loneliness involved or believed the lies of the abus- of love, croons the ballad singer in the Pink of the Midwest? er, lesbians were more likely to use coun- Flamingo Lounge, Castro’s face burned Written A.D. 1960 seling services outside their circle of into Mount Trashmore, smoking a Cojiba friends and family. This expensive solu- stogie, as viewed from the last plank Preacher Bob, half-cracked old trouble-maker, tion, says Ristock, is rooted in white, mid- of a balsa sinking off Key Biscayne. what’s the point? dle-class North American values. Like I think of you, Girshick, she notes that many therapists Manatees surface in the waterways, gray unsteady, hoisting the Good Book aloft are not trained to deal with lesbian abuse. and stolid as submarines from the Forties, on the brown lawns of Mid-America State U. Many survivors felt that they grew the state’s endangered species. Elián while you’re being dragged by your hanks stronger and learned from the experience González clings to his inner tube in breakers heavenward like a sinner in much the way that survivors of serious off Key Biscayne, but he’s lucky, adrift in the hands of a pissed-off god. illness may do. They often developed the in a winter sea warm even for Miami You’ll make it, I guess, ability to help themselves, rather than to with Castro’s face stenciled on Mount by millennium’s end. respond passively. This defies the popular Trashmore like a throw-away child’s. image of battered women, who are not Poinciana, the flame-tree’s fleshy blooms But it is 1999, it is almost the season supposed to get angry for fear of losing upstage you, now until the dawning day. for Y2K, and the backyard oil pumps of Central their status and being seen as culpable. Oklahoma Ristock suggests some alternative How can the crooner’s lyrics soar above keep salaaming like iron locusts toward the East, approaches. There are already some les- pink plastic flamingos showing up overnight appeasing the prophets of OPEC. bian/bisexual-only counseling services. on the governor’s lawn, miraculous as mushrooms Where is that born-again coed Going against standard practice for het- after rain, or Castro’s voice declaiming from whom you called a jezebel? erosexual couples, couples counseling is the Burning Bush? “Elián’s mamita died Where are your catalogues in which you lay sometimes considered useful with lesbian to make him free,” he chants, with manatees Victoria’s Secrets bare? your rantings partners. Other alternative ideas are com- who sink like wounded mermaids into the canals, of everlasting fire on women’s flowered panties? munity-based, such as forums on building the state’s official poster children. We know what happened to the sea, healthy relationships and the use of com- Elián and Castro upstage each other and with the ozone layer doing its strip-tease munity theatre to provide information on the nightly news, while music’s magic heating up this Eden of greenhouse gases, and education. While I find these efforts the sea has promised: I will come again. commendable, it is ingenuous to believe perfume fills the air, the winter’s global Where will the Midwest be then, Bob, that this information will change the warming signals. Immigration lawyers and will you still be lonely? I can see nothing behavior of more than a few batterers. If subtract young Elián’s days at sea of the hot air that bloweth there are many reasons for battering, then from his father’s take-home pay, where it listeth of your preaching. perhaps there are as many solutions. and crowds of demonstrators show up The synod that subsidizes you to heckle the on his great-uncle’s Little Havana lawn hell-bound s a feminist therapist with many like mushrooms after rain, promising stays tastefully out of view years’ experience, I must take issue to form a human chain, like George and no one in the multitude jeering at your jeremiads A with some seriously mistaken ideas Wallace at the schoolhouse door, is your friend. about psychotherapy presented in No More defying the federales’ due process. When the trumpet blares Secrets. Ristock repeats a common but erro- for the millennial shutdown neous stereotype that most feminist thera- Castro’s face beams from the Goodyear will any of the Holy City’s twelve gates pists are lesbians. Perhaps she means to blimp, then he touches his cigar tip open to your access code? describe her own sample, but she does not to its gas jet. In the cartoon BOOM Or will you be standing there say so. Nor does she seem aware of the that follows, Hermanos al Rescate bomb between the charred hulls of the grain elevator different forms of therapy—especially the hell out of the homeland, manatees and the football stadium, like a nuclear shadow certain schools of feminist and multicul- dive into flame-shadowed canals like Gulf burned into a wall at ground zero, tural therapies—that take class, race, sexu- War submarines, and Elián and his father holding the end of a shorted power cord al orientation and ethnicity into considera- vanish into the blur of their propeller scars. for a thousand years? tion. Ristock also believes unquestioningly “I’m in charge here!” shouts the governor that only a psychoanalytic approach can as TV anchors lip-synch into pink microphones probe deeper currents of conflict, desire and Ricky Martin goes on living La Vida Loca. —Carolyne Wright and identification, to answer questions such as why abusers lie, for example. It is naïve, at best, to assume that psychoanaly-

The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 21 American women seeking to have their letters pub- lished alongside those of Win some, lose some male readers in Amazing had had the right to vote by Cecilia Tan for only a handful of years. Forward-thinking, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier. technologically-minded editor Gernsback and his Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002, fan followers may have been on the leading edge 295 pp., $19.95 paper. in terms of their knowl- edge of science; their belief that their greater intelligence and interest in wo keys to successful scholarship The book is defined by two moments: science made them supe- are choosing a subject sufficiently the first issue of Amazing Science Fiction, rior to non-sf readers T narrow and well-defined to allow edited by Hugo Gernsback, in 1926, and may have, in some meas- for thorough investigation and redefining the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr., ure, made them more that same subject in some novel or eye- Award in 1991, which is awarded annual- open-minded than “mun- opening way. Justine Larbalestier has ly to the work of science fiction or fanta- danes.” But the fan letters done both. sy that most provocatively explores issues in Amazing (and other By limiting her inquiry to the specific of gender. (The Tiptree Award was magazines), as well as the science fictional subgenre known as the named for the male pseudonym of sf sex-battle stories them- “battle of the sexes” story, Larbalestier writer Alice Sheldon, whose fiction in a selves, embodied the pre- has isolated a unique strain of pulp sci- then male-dominated field raised gender vailing sexist attitudes of ence fiction. The innovation comes in her issues regularly.) I applaud Larbalestier . August 1951 cover of Thrilling Wonder Stories. From expanded definition of science fiction for beginning her inquiry at the birth of The typical battle of The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. (sf), which includes not just the stories the genre, instead of concentrating on the sexes story features an themselves, but the community of the well-trodden ground of the feminist all-women alien race or society which Women need to be the benefici- human beings surrounding them: the sf utopias of more recent decades, for becomes converted/defeated to restore ary of “more responsibility in writers, editors and readers (“fans”) that choice introduces much intriguing the “normal” heterosexual order. After running things”—a gift bestowed whose early interactions with the genre, material to readers who may not be famil- exploring the lockstep evolution of the upon them by men. If only men mostly through the letters pages of the iar with the pulps of the 1920s-1950s. genre’s fannish communities in her first would treat women well, the early seminal sf magazines, shaped the Science fiction is the literature of the chapter, Larbalestier digs into the texts world would be a better place and boundaries of the genre itself. future, of social change and utopian themselves, pointing out the sexism not open warfare between men and Larbalestier sees science fiction as a visions. At the time of Amazing’s debut, only of the misogynist action and women would be avoided. It is no movement, so investigating the texts with- very few women were trained or working themes but of their language and even surprise that the hero’s “girl” is out discussing their social context would in the sciences, but today’s readers might grammar. It is as if Larbalestier the sci- not the actor in any of these be, at best, incomplete. Her approach is expect that sf would have been ahead of entist were to look both at the behaviors clauses, any more than women are particularly apt for the “battle of the sexes” the curve in depicting gender equality of an animal and its DNA. in the final sentence. (pp. 78-79) story, in which themes mirror changes (or and fair representations simply because it lack of them) in relations among sf read- was utopian. Larbalestier proves that s a longtime reader of the genre Silverberg’s is one of the less laugh- ers, writers and society at large since 1926. expectation wrong. She points out that and a linguist, I was at first skepti- able tales that Larbalestier discusses. A cal of her approach, which looked Many of the sex-battle stories and novels September 1939 cover of Startling Stories. From The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. a lot like editorial nit-picking. By the time rely upon the rape of the heroine to con- I was partway through the third chapter, vert her to her properly submissive place I was won over. Linguistically, in the natural order. Given the sexually Larbalestier points out, the female char- non-explicit nature of these stories, the acters in these stories do not appear as “rape” usually consists of a single kiss. the subjects of sentences. They have no Larbalestier quotes parallel passages from agency; instead, they are the medium on many stories. This one, from “The whom the male hero acts. Even in debat- Priestess Who Rebelled” (1939), is repre- ably “pro-feminist” texts like Robert sentative of these breathless scenes: Silverberg’s “Woman’s World” (1957), “equality” is framed in a way that pre- “There is a custom in our tribe...a cludes itself. In this tale the hero, whose mating custom which you do not engagement was recently called off, vol- know. Let me show you—” unteers to be sent into the future, where He leaned over swiftly. Meg felt the world has become matriarchal; the mighty strength of his Larbalestier interprets the story for us: bronzed arms closing about her, drawing her close. And he was He is seized by the men as a sav- touching his mouth to hers; close- ior who will lead a revolt against ly, brutally, terrifyingly. the women. He wakes up to dis- She struggled and tried to cry cover that none of it was real; he out, but his mouth bruised hers. was merely [undergoing psycho- Angerthoughts swept through her logical tests] ... On discovering like a flame. But it was not that his experiences in the anger—it was something else— woman-dominated world were that gave life to that flame.... induced dreams the hero decides There was a body-hunger not to go into the future. throbbing within her that hated his ”I knew now that there was no Manness...but cried for it! (p. 60) sense running off to the future; things weren’t any simpler there. Larbalestier comments, “The constraints “I knew what I would do. I against representing sex at the time... would find my girl, take her out meant that it could only represent pene- someplace [sic], talk over all our tration and orgasm metaphorically and misunderstandings. I was confident metonymically.” we’d patch things up somehow. “All I had to do to make our t is no wonder that, with writing like marriage work was be a little more this, a debate arose in the letters col- considerate—and let her share the I umn of Amazing about the place of responsibilities, instead of trying women in science fiction. Many writers, to run the whole show myself. including the teenage Isaac Asimov, Yes, I thought, as I started down spoke out against the inclusion of such the familiar, dirty old twentieth- “mush” in the magazines, where science century street. Women needed to was supposed to be king. Although some be given more responsibility in female fans tried to point out that having running things.” women in the stories did not necessitate

22 The Women’s Review of Books / Vol. XX, No. 4 / January 2003 love interest, or “mush,” they were largely shouted down. The inherent sex- ism of the time equated women with The Bookshelf sex, sex with love, romance with mush. As the young Asimov pointed out in Each month we list the recently published books received during the preceding month or so which we think readers of the Women’s one of his many letters to Astounding Review will want to know about. This is, however, a very partial selection of the books by and about women published each month. Science Fiction, “many top notch, grade- Our listing is informational, not evaluative; the only annotation added is a brief indication of the subject-matter, where the title is not A, wonderful, marvelous, etc. etc., self-explanatory. All are non-fiction titles published in 2002, unless otherwise noted. authors get along swell without any women [characters] at all.” He named several contemporary giants of the field Shemeem Burney Abbas, The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual: Devotional and politics of gender influence Western medicine.) and complained that lesser writers Practices of Pakistan and India. Austin, TX: University of Texas Norma Manatu, African American Women and Sexuality in the Cinema. couldn’t “bring the ‘feminine interest’ Press. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. into a story without getting sloppy” and Bill Adler, ed., America’s First Ladies: Their Uncommon Wisdom, from Wendy Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. New Martha Washington to Laura Bush. Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade. York: Cambridge University Press. (A collection of essays placing resorting to love-interest mush. It was Harriet Hyman Alonso, Growing Up Abolitionist: The Story of the the writer’s work in a variety of literary, cultural and political con- telling that Asimov and other male fans Garrison Children. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. texts.) argued that editors could solve their Diane Anselmo, Women’s Choices, Women’s Lives: Learn From 30 Not So Carole Maso, Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo. New York: problems by cutting stories with female Ordinary Women How the Power of Choice Can Change Your Life. Counterpoint. (A series of prose poems inspired by the life and characters rather than by improving the Lincoln, NE: Writer’s Showcase. work of the artist.) quality of the writing overall. (It is well Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Glenna Matthews, Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender documented that many editors did not Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (A collection of Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford knowingly purchase stories from female twenty essays about women on the screen, behind the scenes and University Press. writers, hence the predominance of in the audience.) Felicia Mitchell, ed., Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature Appalachian Women’s Poetry. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee male pseudonyms.) and the Urgency of Space. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Press. Early pulp sf willingly entertained (Exploration of the spatial and sexual borderlands of Chicana life.) Nina Chandler Murray, The Cruise of the Blue Dolphin: A Family’s notions that seemed superficially for- Mary Brewer, ed., Exclusions in Feminist Thought: Challenging the Adventure at Sea. Guilford, CT: Lyons. (A family on the verge of ward-thinking (“What if there were an Boundaries of Womanhood. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic. collapse bands together on a 1933 ocean voyage.) all-female parthenogenic society?”) at (Questions about the status of feminism and its many faces are Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the the same time that it needed to re-estab- addressed by a number of specialists and activists.) Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. lish the status quo (for example, the sex- Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland, eds., Hemingway and Women: Sheila Nickerson, Midnight to the North: The Untold Story of the Inuit battle stories in which all-female soci- Female Critics and the Female Voice. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Woman Who Saved the POLARIS Expedition. New York: Jeremy P. eties must be converted to heterosex- Alabama Press. (Challenges traditional views of the writer’s por- Tarcher/Putnam. trayal of women in his work.) Martha P. Nochimson, Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2. Austin, ism). It was not until the feminism of Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, Barbara Bair and Maree de Angury, eds., TX: University of Texas Press. (A look at the physical component the 1960s and 1970s that a significant The Selected Papers of Jane Addams Volume 1: Preparing to Lead, 1860- to onscreen chemistry as well as its influence on gender relations.) number of stories—mostly written by 81. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ann Oakley, Gender on Planet Earth. New York: The New Press. (An women—knowingly subverted this situ- Claudia Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Durham, NC: impassioned call to recognize the way gender infiltrates every ation. Larbalestier points to the publica- Duke University Press. (An investigation of the construction of aspect of our lives.) tion in 1972 of Joanna Russ’ “When It the child as both a natural and cultural body.) Bill Overton, Fictions of Female Adultery, 1684-1890: Theories and Changed” as the turning point. Russ is a Mary Higgins Clark, Kitchen Privileges: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Circumtexts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. feminist scholar, so it is not surprising Schuster. (An autobiographical account of the writer’s experiences Ellen Peel, Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist that her fiction has been written out of and influences.) Utopian Fiction. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Eleanor McCallie Cooper and William Liu, Grace: An American Woman Patricia Rind, Women’s Best Friendships: Beyond Betty, Veronica, Thelma awareness and reaction to the shortcom- in China, 1934-1974. New York: Soho. and Louise. New York: Haworth. (Using a mixture of first person ings of the sex-battle texts. Elaine Forman Crane, Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell. accounts and commentary, explores the nature of women’s The worlds imagined by Russ and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (The mysterious death of a friendships.) other feminist writers who followed her seventeenth-century woman and the events surrounding it.) Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. New seem at first sight remote from those of Sharon L. Dean, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Edith Wharton: York: Oxford University Press. (A biography of the renowned the sex-battle texts. Larbalestier argues Perspectives on Landscape and Art. Knoxville, TN: University of classicist.) convincingly that both are part of the Tennessee Press. (A study contrasting the ways that the two writ- Juana Maria Rodriguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive same genre, the same conversation. By ers responded to the changes taking place in both the physical and Spaces. New York: New York University Press. (A look at queer taking the clichés that characterized the social landscape.) Latino/a identity and the relationship to activism, immigration law Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, and cyberspace.) early pulps (lone man crash-lands on all- Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Suzanna M. Rose, ed., Lesbian Love and Relationships. Binghamton, NY: women’s planet) and turning them inside (An exploration of how film captures time and its participation in Haworth. (An introduction to the range of lesbian attitudes and out for consciously feminist purposes, the overall structuring of time.) behaviors in love, friendship, self-image and society.) the work of Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Lorraine Nye Eliot, The Real Kate Chopin. Pittsburgh, PA: Dorrance. Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the U.S. Charnas and James Tiptree Jr./Alice Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life . Boston: Apparel Industry. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sheldon remains a part of the genre, University of Massachusetts Press. (A biography of the writer, Ulinka Rublack, ed., Gender in Early Modern German History. New York: even as it struggles against it. Larbalestier journalist, essayist and suffragist.) Cambridge University Press. examines a few canonical examples, Marjorie Garber, Quotation Marks. New York: Routledge. (A look at Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De, eds., Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in notably Russ’ “We Who Are About To” the history of words, including the assignment of gender to inani- the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia. Durham, NC: Duke mate objects and the practice of quoting others.) University Press. and Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t Ellen Bromfield Geld, View from the Fazenda: A Tale of the Brazilian Simone Schwarz-Bart, In Praise of Black Women 2: Heroines of the Slavery See,” to establish this point. She leaves Heartlands. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. (A portrayal of the Era. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. detailed examinations of feminist nation from the point of view of a fifty-year resident and farmer.) Bernard Schweizer, Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and the Female Epic. utopias to monographs like Sarah Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Westport, CT: Greenwood. (An assessment of the literary career Lefanu’s In the Chinks of the World Machine Politics in America. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. (Updated of the critic, journalist and novelist.) (1988) and Natalie M. Rosinsky’s Feminist reprint of Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right.) Rebecca Grant Sexton, ed., A Southern Woman of Letters: The Futures (1984). Larbalestier is more inter- Raymond F. Gregory, Women and Workplace Discrimination: Overcoming Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. Columbia, SC: ested in the rapturous reception of “The Barriers to Gender Equality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University of South Carolina Press. (The letters of a nineteenth- University Press. Women Men Don’t See” by the male- century novelist and supporter of the Confederacy.) Carol E. Henderson, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women. Minneapolis: University dominated industry when Tiptree was African American Literature. Columbia, MO: University of of Minnesota Press. (The role played by French-speaking black thought to be male, contrasted with the Missouri Press. women in the movement that signaled the awakening of a pan- perception of its overtly feminist themes Sharon L. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in African consciousness.) after 1976, when Tiptree was revealed as Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Susie C. Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Alice Sheldon. The ensuing flap in letters Roberta Ann Johnson, Whistleblowing: When It Works—And Why. Sanctified Self. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. (A columns and in the sf community Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. (With topics such as the Enron look at women of the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition and how sanc- became yet another skirmish in the battle scandal and the space shuttle Challenger, examines the impact that tification influenced their ministries.) of the sexes. informants have both globally and locally.) Jeanette Stokes, 25 Years in the Garden. Durham, NC: The Resource Esther Katz, ed, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger Volume 1: The The struggles between men and Center for Women & Ministry in the South. (A collection of femi- Woman Rebel, 1900-1928. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. nist inspirational essays.) women in sf communities are not a thing Richard Kostelanetz, ed., The Gertrude Stein Reader: The Great American Charlotte Templin, ed., Conversations with Erica Jong. Jackson, MS: of the past, as Larbalestier notes in her Pioneer of Avant-Garde Letters. New York: Cooper Square. University Press of Mississippi. (A series of interviews from 1973 chapter about the award that bears Jacqueline Kramer, Buddha Mom: The Path of Mindful Mothering. New to 2001 with the novelist and poet.) Tiptree’s name. By 1991, the Internet York: Tarcher/Putnam. (A guide to incorporating spirituality in Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of These Women: was beginning to replace the letters pages parenthood.) Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network. Boston: University of of magazines as the forum for reader Sharon Kurtz, Workplace Justice: Organizing Multi-Identity Movements. Massachusetts Press. and author community-building. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Focusing on Elina Vuola, Limits of Liberation: Feminist Theology and the Ethics of Larbalestier quotes from the archives of Columbia University’s union campaign of 1991, examines identity Poverty and Reproduction. New York: Sheffield Academic. politics in labor movements.) various Internet sf bulletin boards and Robyn Wiegman, ed., Women’s Studies on its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Dorothea Lange, In Focus. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. (A Institutional Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (An her own extensive interviews with the collection of photographs by the artist and the commentary of assessment of the present and future of women’s studies.) “founding mothers” and makes clear that participants from a 2001 colloquium.) Cathy Winkler, One Night: Realities of Rape. Walnut Creek, CA: many men still view women writing sf as Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore, Gender and the Social Construction of AltaMira. (One woman’s long and ultimately successful struggle to interlopers. The battle is not over. Illness. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. (An analysis of how the power bring her rapist to justice.)

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