Highlights from this issue (reviews section)...

The First Automobile, 1939 or earlier. Oil on cardboard. 9-3/4 x 11-1/2 inches. From Grandma Moses in the 21st Century.

As American as apple pie
Grandma Moses in the 21st Century by Jane Kallir, with contributions by Roger Cardinal, Michael D. Hall, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan and Judith E. Stein. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, 264 pp., $65.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Patrice Clark Koelsch

COULD THERE HAVE BEEN a more appropriate name for an icon of rustic virtue than Grandma Moses? Mary Anna Robertson Moses appeared on the American art scene at exactly the right time in the middle of the American Century. A self-taught painter who found her artistic vocation after she had outlived her functional roles as wife and mother, Moses embodied Yankee virtues of industry, thrift and independence. Her subjects were not so much American as they were pure Americana.

Moses was 78 when she was "discovered" by collector Louis Caldor, who saw her paintings in a drugstore window in upstate New York. Caldor bought the paintings, met Moses, and eventually prevailed upon Manhattan gallery owner Otto Kallir to mount a one-woman show, "What a Farmwife Painted." Shortly thereafter Gimbel's department store made "Grandma" Moses the centerpiece of its 1940 Thanksgiving Festival. (Critics initially referred to the artist as Mrs. Moses, but the Herald Tribune insisted the locals venerated her as Grandma Moses.)

Shenandoah Valley, South Branch, circa 1938. Oil on oilcloth. 19-3/4 x 14 inches. From Grandma Moses in the 21st Century.

Kallir recognized the popular potential in both the artist and her work, and took the unprecedented step of licensing her images. In 1947 the Hallmark Company sold sixteen million holiday cards featuring Moses' bucolic winter scenes. "Grandma Moses," the phenomenon that comprised the person and the work, embodied patriotism, nostalgia, anti-intellectualism, the myth of the yeoman farmer and the idea that talent and tenacity will be recognized and rewarded.

The artist's biography is a female version of a Horatio Alger story. Moses had been a domestic servant, a farmwife, a mother, a widow, a grandmother, an embroiderer and a preserver of jams and jellies before she took to painting in her seventh decade. She started painting to keep herself busy rather than to satisfy any special inclination to express herself. In doing so, she satisfied a cultural need to confirm traditional ideas about women's role and sphere. Her surprising productivity and longevity made her a national treasure. Harry Truman adored her, Dwight Eisenhower collected her, John Kennedy saluted her, Edward R. Murrow interviewed her and Jerome Hill made her the subject of a documentary film narrated by Archibald MacLeish. When the artist celebrated her hundredth birthday, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared "Grandma Moses Day," and she was featured in a Life magazine cover story. She painted into her final months, and when she died at the age of 101 in 1961, she may have been the best known female American painter ever.

My Forefathers’ Mill, 1940 or earlier. Oil on pressed wood. 14 x 12 inches. From Grandma Moses in the 21st Century.

Forty years after her death, Grandma Moses is no longer a such a household word, though she continues to be a cottage industry. The racial and political ruptures that characterized the sixties introduced a view of America past and present that had nothing in common with the dreamy communal hive regularly depicted in Grandma Moses' work. Even so, those images--and the image of the down-home image-maker--have their enthusiasts. Moses' devotees flock in pilgrimage to the Bennington Museum in Vermont, located in the geographical orbit of "Grandma Moses Country," which houses a significant permanent collection of her paintings and memorabilia. When Asian financial markets were booming in the eighties, Grandma Moses' paintings were promoted, exhibited and collected in Japan. In 1989 Cloris Leachman inaugurated the now widely-produced one-woman show, "Grandma Moses: An American Primitive." Calendars, note cards and commemorative plates still sell to a niche market.

GRANDMA MOSES IN THE 21ST CENTURY appears to be part of this posthumous effort to keep the artist alive. The coffee-table volume accompanies a traveling exhibition; Jane Kallir, granddaughter of Otto Kallir and now co-director of the gallery that continues to represent the Moses estate, curated the exhibition and organized the book. Her introductory essay tries to provide a rationale for a revival of interest in Moses' work.

One of the first artists to be hailed as a media superstar, and possibly the most successful female artist of her era, Moses is nonetheless surprisingly invisible when it comes to histories of postwar painting. While her relative neglect may in part be attributable to the fact that her work does not conform to any of the accepted modernist "isms," it is interesting to note...that even feminists--quick to denounce conventional art historical hierarchies because of their male biases--have failed to claim Grandma Moses. Nor has Moses received much attention from advocates of so-called Outsider Art, perhaps because her work is seen as being too cheerful and conventionally pretty to qualify. The principal reason for Moses' relative neglect may be found, paradoxically, in the extremity of her success. Moses was a folk artist until she became famous, but then she became a popular painter, and her art was dismissed because of its mass appeal. (pp. 13-14)

The Old Checkered House, 1944. Oil on pressed wood. 23-15/16 x 43-1/16 inches. From Grandma Moses in the 21st Century.

The essays that follow handle Moses with the protective white cotton gloves mandated by museums. Artist Michael Hall locates her among regionalist artists and gently notes that, in comparison with the strong political sensibilities of the Depression Era Regionalists, "[b]y the 1940s, Regionalism had lost some of its social urgency and was being transformed into a kind of 'feel good' form of cultural tourism." What had been genuinely populist became simply popular. Hall respectfully attributes Moses' continued success--even when Abstract Expressionism splashed down hard--to the impresarial instincts of Otto Kallir. Instead of "location, location, location," it was "placement, placement, placement."

In "The White-Haired Girl: A Feminist Reading," independent art historian Judith Stein asserts that Moses was an artist, even though the press treated as her a domestic wonder who happened to paint. A Gimbel's Thanksgiving ad declared: "Grandma's the biggest artistic rave since Currier & Ives hit the country. She's the white-haired girl of the USA who turned from her strawberry patch to painting the American scene at the wonderful age of 80." Most of Stein's essay describes the cozy publicity that swaddled Moses, but while that underscores the sexism of the era, it doesn't really count as "a feminist reading." Stein never gets beyond the surface of the story, never examines the depth of Moses' apparent collusion with the making of the myth.

Smithsonian curator Lynda Roscoe Hartigan traces the relationship of memory to imagination, suggesting that Moses drew upon memories of late adolescence and early adulthood as a way both of "maintaining a sense of usefulness and self-esteem [and] transmitting information across generations," turning her into an exemplar of the "life-review" that accompanies aging. Hartigan respectfully reiterates Moses' dictum that "Memory is history recorded in our brain," but she never looks at the shadow side of her idealized nostalgia.

In a carefully researched effort, Roger Cardinal correlates picture with place, filling in the geography and history associated with Moses' life and oeuvre. Although she liked to think of herself as a "memory painter," Moses adapted and adopted images. Picture postcards and Currier and Ives prints provided the compositional armature in some paintings. Sometimes Moses even cut out and then traced over illustrations from magazines using carbon paper.

Waiting for Santa Claus, 1960. Oil on pressed wood. 12 x 16 inches. From Grandma Moses in the 21st Century.

Moses could paint (she is widely regarded as an emphatic colorist), but she never learned to draw. Her people are generic and doughy with pieces of coal for eyes, and her horses and cows are shovel-headed. In a few paintings she uses a cut-away to reveal a domestic interior in the larger context of outdoor agrarian activity. It's an intriguing device that falls somewhere between a cinematic technique and the paper windows of an Advent calendar. It might be argued that there is a movie-like feel to many of Moses' compositions: as the musical theme is introduced we see the village, the farm, the countryside from the vantage of the omniscient overhead camera. We are offered the blooming, buzzing whole, but we don't yet know which of the tiny, busy figures are the actors and which are the extras.

Although Moses' signature lack of a fixed perspective can be visually engaging, there is little about the work that is psychologically or emotionally convincing. Even her historically-based paintings, such as the various depictions of the revolutionary Battle of Bennington and the fire that destroyed Troy, New York, present the events as a painless pageant. There is nothing self-critical or significantly reflective in the paintings--or in the essays in this volume. By limiting herself to images that were deliberately "pretty," "nice" and "pleasant," Moses constructed a comfortable niche that seems uncomfortably insular to those who prefer substance rather than sentiment in art. By limiting themselves to a polite appreciation of their subject, the contributors to this volume fail to make a convincing case that the artist or her work will--or should--have any enduring significance in the 21st century.

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Fighting for her life
A Woman Soldier's Own Story: The Autobiography of Xie Bingying by Xie Bingying, translated by Lily Chia Brissman and Barry Brissman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 336 pp., $26.50 hardcover.

Reviewed by Gail Hershatter

Xie Bingying, 1937. From A Woman Soldier’s Own Story.

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1926, a young Chinese woman joined 250 other students, fifty of them women, on a train northbound to Wuchang in central China. Acting without the knowledge of their families or schools, they had passed a test to enter the Central Military and Political School. It was a tumultuous time. In fragile alliance with the fledgling Communist Party, the Nationalist Party was conducting a northern expedition against warlords whose internecine battles had divided China and increased its vulnerability to foreign powers. The revolutionary forces had already reached central China, and it was there that the young woman hoped to receive military training and join the effort to unify the nation. She was barely twenty years old.

Her military career did not begin auspiciously. When she and a friend got off the train at a village station to find a toilet, the train left without them, and they spent the evening dodging leering men until a widow reluctantly agreed to shelter them for the night. Arriving at Wuchang, the young woman learned that the admissions quota of students from her province was to be reduced; after helping to lead a protest, she was expelled before she had even enrolled. She reregistered to take the entrance exam, claiming a new native place (Beijing) and inventing a new name for herself: Xie Bingying. Under this name, she took first place in the exam, going on to become not only a soldier in the Northern Expedition but a journalist, fiction writer, memoirist, teacher, marriage rebel, bohemian, political activist and ultimately one of China's better-known literary figures.

This memoir, deftly translated by Xie's daughter and son-in-law in consultation with Xie, who died in San Francisco in 2000, combines both volumes of her autobiography. The first, published in Chinese in 1936, has been translated twice before into English but has long been out of print. It begins with her childhood and ends with her arrival in Shanghai in 1928.(1) The second has not previously been translated in full. It was published in China in 1946 and takes the story through her itinerant career as student, teacher and writer in Shanghai, Beijing, Japan and Fujian, ending with the first years of China's war of resistance against Japan. Other recent publications have given English-language readers access to the work of Chinese women writers, as well as to the retrospective stories of women who fought with the Communists. But Xie's memoir is unique as a contemporary, first-person account of a young woman who took up arms and then returned to a civilian milieu that presented challenges as daunting as those of the battlefield.

Xie Bingying's act of self-naming at the military academy in Wuchang prefigured other acts of self-invention. Like many other women of her generation, she joined the revolution in pursuit of two goals: to save the nation and to rescue herself from an imminent marriage arranged by her parents. "I believe that what motivated nine out of ten of my female schoolmates to become soldiers, in those days, was their wish to escape the pressure of their feudal families and to search for their own futures," she writes, going on to note that the act of donning military uniforms and taking up weapons changed these young women into revolutionaries and nationalists. Her life narrative is indeed "a woman soldier's own story," in which the woman soldiers on and on, the battle lines running through families and schools as well as the military front.

Xie Bingying in Changsha, around 1926, before she became a soldier. From A Woman Soldier’s Own Story.

IN KEEPING WITH THIS LIBERATORY THEME, Xie casts herself as a rebel from birth. Born in 1906 in rural Xietuoshan, Hunan, she was the daughter of an educator who was away much of the year and a mother whom she describes as "Xietuoshan's Mussolini." The youngest of five children, she aggravated her mother by playing with village boys, unsuccessfully resisting having her feet bound (she later unbound them), and staging a hunger strike so that she could continue her schooling. In 1927, after she returned from the army and her mother locked her up until she agreed to marry, Xie escaped repeatedly. Carried in a sedan chair to the home of her in-laws, she eventually gave them the slip as well, persuading her husband to agree to dissolve their unconsummated marriage. Volume One ends on a note of triumph, when she arrives by boat in the freewheeling international metropolis of Shanghai: "We left behind the reeking smoke and sweat of the third-class cabin and stepped out onto Bund [sic] of Huangpu, full of new hope."

Yet Xie's story is far more complex than this rebel-finds-her-true-destiny tale would suggest. To begin with, her mother is an ambiguous figure. "[B]rimming with notions about how a proper wife and a proper woman should behave," adamant "that a female should be humble and should respect the male," her mother nevertheless wielded enormous power, not only over her adult sons, but over the village community. "Whenever the members of the village council [who would have been, without exception, male] could not find a solution to a situation, they had only to invite her to speak a few words and all questions were answered," comments Xie, indicating that her mother routinely transgressed the conventional boundary between the "inner" domestic realm and the "outside" world of local politics. When a village gossip threatened to disband the village school if Xie was allowed to be the first girl to attend, her mother mustered all her local prestige to make sure Xie was enrolled. Later, her single-minded insistence on forcing Xie to marry caused Xie's older brother to say, "Mother is far more fierce and frightening than any autocratic emperor in history, whether ancient or modern, in or out of China." Tellingly, it was Xie's mother who wielded the law of the father: "Mother would insist on carrying through the law of the feudal society, namely, that if the father wants the child to die, then it must die."

Powerful women are not a new trope in Chinese history. Nevertheless Xie's account points up the ridiculous insufficiency of the potted histories of silent, subservient women--demure, suffering, invisible outside the home--crafted by early twentieth-century cultural revolutionaries. And Xie's eventual reconciliation with her mother, in which their differences were not resolved but merely enclosed in silence, suggests that the emotional entanglements of family relations in China, as elsewhere, cannot be reduced to a political morality play.

A SECOND ORDER OF COMPLEXITY is added by the latter part of the book, which describes Xie's life as an unmarried woman in 1930s China. As any student of recent Chinese history knows, Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House had already been a canonical text in urban China for more than a decade. Nora's choices--her departure, her choice of self above family, her defiant door slamming--all spoke to a generation struggling to define Chinese modernity. As an embodiment of self-affirming resistance for young men and women alike, Nora was Everyman. As a literalized model for women, however, she posed certain problems summarized by writer Lu Xun in 1923: "What happens after Nora leaves home?" Lu Xun's answer was bleak: in the current state of Chinese society, with its limited economic options for women, Nora would have no choice but to return to her husband, starve or take up a life of prostitution.

Xie's life after fleeing her marriage, while less dire than the fate Lu Xun imagined for Nora, shows the precariousness of the new world that urban youth were attempting to create. Caught on this ill-defined battlefield between old and new social practices, she was often hungry, cold, dirty and ill. Police repeatedly closed down schools in which she was enrolled. She and her friends were often arrested on suspicion of anti-government activity, and she had to leave more than one job precipitately when rumors began to circulate about her political allegiances. Her love affairs (some alluded to, one described in more detail) were based on shared ideals, intense emotional attachment and expectation of complete mutual understanding. They did not turn out happily; she became estranged from her lover Qi even before their child was born. Later, the relationship in ruins and Qi in prison, she was unable to care for her infant daughter while supporting herself by teaching and writing, and she left the child with Qi's mother. Later still, Qi's mother foiled Xie's attempts to reclaim her daughter, and the relationship was never reestablished.

Through it all, Xie taught and wrote, traveling twice to Japan to study, visiting a region governed by left-leaning military men in rural Fujian, reprising her early military career as a frontline nurse and propagandist when Japan began its full-scale invasion of China in 1937. She describes interludes of almost exalted happiness, flashes of anger and despair and, through it all, her writing, which sustained her when other enterprises failed. The terrain across which she moved was not a clearly blazed road to liberation, for women or for the nation. It was unmapped, murky, sometimes dangerous, and she was often a drifter or a refugee.

THE THIRD COMPLEXITY of Xie's autobiography is its narrative of twentieth-century politics--or more precisely, what it does not narrate about those politics. She wrote this account for insiders, not for history students. She does not explain anti-imperialism, or the May Fourth Movement, or how the vocabulary of feudalism came to dominate youthful accounts of family life; her Chinese readers would have known all of this. Her account of a night march during the Northern Expedition is unforgettable, but her memoir is not the place to go for an account of what the Northern Expedition was about or how the Communists were purged from the United Front during the months she was in the army. One cannot use the text itself (except for a single helpful footnote provided by the translators) to understand why her army unit was suddenly disbanded on orders from above, sending her and hundreds of other women back to the controlling embrace of their families, or why she and her friends were repeatedly threatened with arrest. Each of these events had its background, of course, but Xie does not provide it--in large part, I believe, because her autobiography was written and published in a China controlled by the same Guomindang government responsible for the purge, the disbanding and the arrests. The silences in her book can be read as indicators of the perilous political environment in which Xie lived and worked.

Xie Bingying outside her apartment in San Francisco, 1992. From A Woman Soldier’s Own Story.

At the same time, it is worth noting that Xie's allegiance to progressive, even revolutionary, causes did not draw her to the Communists. "I was a lover of freedom and did not wish to join any party whatever," she tells us toward the end of the second volume. "In newspapers and magazines we had been reading only about infighting--I purge you, you overthrow me--and we never saw anyone writing about setting aside private opinions and working hard for the future of the country and our people."

Her disclaimers aside, Xie's decades of political engagement remind readers that the Chinese revolution was not a narrow story of political party building or a single-minded march toward popular mobilization. It was full of social and personal experiments, of individual stories worked out in the interstices of big and visible events, of people negotiating daily life without knowing how the political story would end. Xie's autobiography is a precious glimpse into that vanished world of revolutionary uncertainty.

(1) The first translation of Volume One was Girl Rebel: The Autobiography of Hsieh Pingying, translated by Adet and Anor Lin with an introduction by their father, the famous cultural interpreter Lin Yutang (John Day Company, 1940). In 1943 another, somewhat truncated version appeared as Autobiography of a Chinese Girl: A Genuine Autobiography, translated and with an introduction by Tsui Chi (G. Allen & Unwin, 1943). Reprinted with a new introduction by the British China scholar Elisabeth Croll, this edition is now out of print.

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Home on the range
Standing Up to the Rock by T. Louise Freeman-Toole. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, 213 pp., $26.00 hardcover.
A Geography of Saints by Penny Allen. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2001, 263 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Lisa Knopp

Waiting for the mail boat at Somer’s Creek, 1943. From Standing Up to the Rock.

THESE TWO BOOKS describe a new type of westering journey: away from the urban areas familiar to their authors, whose families had lived in the West for several generations, to a seemingly simpler life east of the Cascade Mountains in rural Oregon, Idaho and Washington. "Sometimes to find the true West," writes Louise Freeman-Toole in her collection of essays, "you have to go in a different direction entirely."

Freeman-Toole grew up in Los Angeles. While her family's longevity in this city is rare--she compares having "a long family history in Southern California" to being "a root vegetable among a bunch of hydroponic tomatoes"--it did not make Southern California home for her. She yearned for a safer, friendlier, less costly place to raise her two children, and found it first in Moscow, Idaho, where she and her family lived for one year, then in nearby Pullman, Washington, where they lived for several more years.

On a ranch located 64 miles south of Pullman, in a canyon on the longest free-flowing stretch of the Snake River, Liz Burns and her father Dooley raised cattle and guarded the petroglyphs pecked into the rock by the ancestors of the Nez Perce. Freeman-Toole becomes friends with both father and daughter and their hired hand, Bertie. With her new friends, she rounds up and brands calves, kayaks on the Snake River, picks apricots, explores the caves on nearby Craig Mountain and attends the centennial celebration of the founding of the Burns homestead.

Sturgeon taken near Lewiston, 1930s. From Standing Up to the Rock.

Freeman-Toole was drawn to the Burnses in part because they enjoyed a continuity that her own family lacked. Dooley, born in 1915, used kerosene lamps, trekked to the outhouse and spent his Saturday nights dancing at the schoolhouse, as had his father and grandfather. As a child, Liz, just three years Freeman-Toole's senior, chopped wood, hauled water, cleaned kerosene lamps, played with the descendants of the Nez Perce children that her father had once played with, and lived a largely solitary life on her family's ranch. And she was taught to "stand up to the rock," a phrase used by old-timers that meant "standing on your own two feet, overcoming your fears, and facing up to the situation."

In contrast, Freeman-Toole found little to connect herself with earlier generations of her own family. While Liz continued the work of her father and grandparents, Freeman-Toole's father worked in "the exciting new field of computers." As a child, Freeman-Toole did nothing more "arduous than load the dishwasher and practice the piano" or hang out at the beach. Since her parents strove to "create a family from scratch, with its own traditions and rules, unblemished by any contact with the past," she grew up with no religion, ethnicity, or history. If LA ever had been "a real place," it was before her time. As a high school senior, Freeman-Toole saw Southern California as "paper thin, insubstantial, all surface. I longed for mystery, complexity, depth. I wanted solidity." She wanted nothing more than to leave her home town.

Redondo Beach Pier and Lightning Racer Roller Coaster, 1919. From Standing Up to the Rock.

At the Burns ranch, Freeman-Toole felt she had found a place that she could enjoy without the burden of the "useless nostalgia" that she feels for Southern California. "I was relieved to find that I could have an interest in the ranch's past without regretting that it has faded away." Her goal was to visit the ranch often enough to let it "seep so deep into my bones that it would stay with me no matter how far away I may go." This desire to possess a place in which one has neither a past nor a future seems fanciful. Most of us are bound to a physical place because it was the setting for significant events in our personal or cultural history, because we've invested many years of our lives there, or because we hope for a future there. Liz Burns, for instance, is bound to her ranch in part because she has "walk[ed] the same daily routes over the years, wearing those trails through the meadows, circling deeper and deeper, spiraling into the core." Even though hers is one of the last remaining ranches in the area (the surrounding land is owned by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, the Idaho Department of Lands, the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service) and "the government is crouched, vulturelike, up there, 'just waiting to starve us out,'" Liz has desires for the ranch that extend beyond herself: she hopes that someday, a family will live there again.

More realistic than her efforts to claim the Burns' ranch as home and the Burnses as family are Freeman-Toole's efforts to find home by establishing connections with her own ancestors, a journey which she explores in several of the book's essays. Through the diaries of Grace Ingalis Howard, she is able to flesh out the life story of this great-grandmother whom she had only known as a scolding, "irascible old woman." Since Louise and her father had barely known his mother, Smokey, they travel to Alaska and become acquainted with her through visiting the place where she had lived. When the Freeman-Toole family leaves Washington so that Louise and her husband can attend graduate school in Illinois, she searches for the story of her family before their migration from the Upper Midwest to California. When she locates the burial place of one set of her great-great-grandparents near Iola, Wisconsin, she weeps with joy at having found "somewhere to rest those family members I've been packing around for so long."

Grace (Inglis) and Charles Howard, Minneapolis, MN, ca. 1901. From Standing Up to the Rock.

While Freeman-Toole's excursions into her family's past provide her a journey home of sorts, they lack the interest and vitality of the parts of the book devoted to her Los Angeles childhood and her ten-year friendship with the Burnses. In the end, she realizes that leaving LA for Idaho was prompted by the same urge that had led her ancestors to leave the Upper Midwest for California--"a belief that we could do better for ourselves in a new place." Claiming this pioneering spirit allows her to find a place for herself within several generations of family history.

IN A GEOGRAPHY OF SAINTS, Penny Allen tells how she left Portland, Oregon, and her career as a film-maker for the high desert country of central Oregon, where she and her partner, Peter, worked as caretakers of a ranch for no payment, no rent and free use of the horses. Allen went there, she tells us, to "write a book, start anew, find my peasant roots, try to live with someone I was in love with." Peter wanted to live in a place where people wouldn't "know anything at all about me, about us." But of course, the West is not an empty place. The couple live near the community of Saints, population 800, where people are in need of Peter's legal expertise. Forty miles north of their ranch is Rajneeshpuram, "the strange city carved out of the dust early in the Reagan years" by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and a thousand of his followers.

Peter provides legal counsel to Faith Gaines, whose son Billy was sexually abused by Ed Dyer, a US Forest Service employee and member of the Mormon Church. He fights the illegal clear-cutting of the "giant, ancient ponderosas" growing in a seldom visited gorge. Allen plans to interview cult members at Rajneeshpuram and write about them.

Soon, the pair get to know the locals: Buck Buckner, the Vietnam vet and hobo who "patrols" their ranch; Larry Lazio, the state ditch rider, who explains to Peter how the community of Saints and the surrounding area do and do not work, as Peter digs out the gravel blocking his 218-foot irrigation pipe; Hamilton Jones, a ranch owner, elitist and local expert on human and natural history of the area, who holds a Ph.D. in zoology from Yale; Harve Dorrance, who got his head shot off a century earlier over water rights and now haunts the caretaker's apartment on Hamilton Jones' ranch; Darlene Osborn, who tells Allen the story of how the Bhagwan and his followers took over the town of Antelope, which had once been her home; and Siddha, the psychiatrist at Rancho Rajneesh, whom Allen comes to think of as "my shrink." Allen's presentation of the eccentric neighbors leaves one wondering who is and isn't to be trusted. Like her, we catch "the high desert paranoia" that leads her to arm herself.

Penny Allen (© Eric Edwards)

Allen and her partner struggle with their roles as caretakers--of the ranch, of each other, of their neighbors and region. Allen is remarkably sensitive to the ways in which landscape determines perceptions. She tells us that she and Peter were "unprepared for the psychological demands of a big sky. We did not at first know how to live in keeping with such a theatrical setting... The picture asked to be filled in, to have dynamic human activity in the foreground, a little sin." Elly Starr, the print shop clerk, says that in the high desert country of central Oregon people either "obsess or repress, those are your choices here." Allen, who has her own share of obsessions, expands Elly's observation:

Up on the high desert obsessions endure, for good or for ill. Events fix in the imagination like the dust hanging in the air long after the commotion has passed. Most observers blame the isolation, which keeps one's perspective tightly focused. Others fault the aridity and extremes of temperature... Up there, things don't rust or mold but persist and take on grandiose proportions. (p. 58)

And the landscape determines the form and pace of the book: in the sparsely populated high desert "the nature of stories is that they spin out slowly." True to its setting, A Geography of Saints reads like a good mystery story: the plot "spin[s] out slowly," with unexpected twists and resolutions.

Recent years have seen an explosion of memoirs by women focused on the act of seeking and finding home in a rural part of the American West--Kathleen Norris' Dakota, Theresa Jordan's Riding the White Horse Home, Lisa Dale Norton's Hawk Flies Above and Mary Clearman Blew's Bone Deep in Landscape, to name but a few. In her collection of personal essays, Louise Freeman-Toole compares her experiences of home as a transplanted urbanite with those of people long rooted in a particular rural place. Some of the connections she makes feel natural; others are strained. Penny Allen's tightly woven narrative offers less idealistic reflections on the possibility of finding home in an unfamiliar place. While neither author breaks new ground, both offer fresh explorations of some of the perennial themes of this sub-genre.

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Missing in action
Whatever happened to the gender gap?

by Jennifer L. Pozner

LET’S CALL IT "The Case of the Missing Gender Gap." Ever since September 11, corporate media have denied that men and women have significant differences of opinion on terrorism and war, despite contradictory evidence in polls conducted before and after we dropped our first bomb on Afghanistan. To solve this mystery we have to start at the beginning of George W. Bush’s new world order—when, in the president’s words, anyone who did not support America’s "war on terrorism" would be judged to be in cahoots with "the evildoers."

Following the devastating attacks, major news networks subjected a shocked nation to video clips of the Twin Towers being struck by planes, exploding in flames and collapsing, often accompanied by "Oh my God!" audio, on repetitive-loop day and night. (Talk about a recipe for post-traumatic stress disorder.) These painful images sometimes appeared in split-screen while anxious anchors interviewed current and former White House and Pentagon officials, security experts and CIA spooks, who presented military retaliation and civil liberties rollbacks as necessary and inevitable. While such sources made up more than half the authorities appearing on NBC, ABC and CBS in the week following the attacks, experts from the international law community who could advocate legal, non-military responses to crimes against humanity were nowhere to be seen on these programs, according to a survey by the media watch group FAIR.

Feminists and progressives who dared give the question "Why do they hate us?" an answer more substantial than the ubiquitous "because we love freedom"—say, by noting that the Arab world has never forgotten Madeleine Albright’s 1996 comment on CBS that half a million dead Iraqi children were "worth the price" of US sanctions—were quickly labeled traitors, or worse. When Susan Sontag sinned in the New Yorker’s first post-9/11 issue by noting that US foreign policy might have contributed to the vicious anti-American sentiment behind the attacks, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter blasted her in a scathing column titled "Blame America At Your Peril." It was "ironic," Alter hissed, that "the same people always urging us to not blame the victim in rape cases are now saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it." And when a small but vocal peace movement called for the US to "prosecute the criminals" rather than bomb innocent Afghans, their dissent was either ignored or distorted by a derisive press—as when the New York Times reported a late September anti-war action in DC under the headline "Protesters in Washington Urge Peace With Terrorists."

Amid this "with us or against us" feeding frenzy, poll stories proliferated, with headlines like the Washington Post’s September 29 "Public Unyielding in War Against Terror; 9 in 10 Back Robust Military Response." The numbers seemed overwhelming: the "9 in 10" figure measured Bush’s approval rating, while upwards of four-fifths of the public generally supported some sort of military action. According to the Post, Americans were "unswerving" in their support for war and unified in their "demand for a full-scale response."

BUT WERE THEY, REALLY? Buried at the end of the 1,395-word story was the striking information that women "were significantly less likely to support a long and costly war" then were men, and their hesitant support might develop into "hardened opposition" over time. In fact, though 44 percent of women said they’d favor a broad military effort, "48 percent said they want a limited strike or no military action at all" [emphasis added].

The gender gap appeared again in an October 5 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, which found that 64 percent of men thought the US "should mount a long-term war" and just 24 percent favored limiting retaliation to punishing the specific groups responsible for the attacks—but that women were "evenly divided—with 42 percent favoring each option." Though 88 percent of women and 90 percent of men support some military action, women reconsider in greater numbers as soon as conditional questions are asked, Gallup’s analysis showed. For example, only 55 percent of women said they would support military action if a thousand American troops would be killed, whereas 76 percent of men would still support a lengthy war under these circumstances; women were also much less likely than men to support war if it would continue for several years, bring about an economic recession, or provoke further terrorist attacks at home.

When presented with only two possible post-9/11 alternatives—"drop some bombs" or "do nothing"—it’s not surprising that majorities of the public would choose the former. What’s alarming is that politicians, pundits and the press first roundly ignored the Post and Gallup data about women’s more conditional approach to the "war on terrorism," then claimed the traditional gender gap familiar from the Persian Gulf and Kosovo crises had disintegrated with the Twin Towers.

Polls whose results seemed to confirm the media’s image of a flag-waving, Rambo-embracing populace met with a much warmer reception. When an early November poll by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pew Research Center for People & the Press found that women’s support for increased military spending doubled from 24 to 47 percent after September 11, and that the same number of men and women (64 percent) now favor the creation of a missile defense shield, a front-page Christian Science Monitor story reported that "Women’s voices are resonating across the country and doing away—for the first time in recent history—with the gender gap on many military issues." The article was headlined "In this war, American women shed role as ‘doves’"—even though separate Gallup data, also from November and referenced in the same article, showed that women were more than twice as likely as men to be "doves." The Pew research was featured in outlets from leading dailies to tabloids (e.g., the Daily News), debate shows (e.g., The McLaughlin Group) and the conservative press (e.g., Insight on the News). The Washington Post crowed, "When it comes to attitudes toward the military, men are from Mars, and so are women," while a Washington Times op-ed praised "Missile Defense’s Feminine Mystique."

While polls were covered selectively, news content about women and war was often opportunistic. Outlets seized on the restrictive burqa forced on Afghan women as a symbol of the Taliban’s cruelty and a reason why they should be vanquished, and ran triumphant visuals of women removing their coverings upon the Taliban’s ouster—yet only rarely devoted serious attention to the history of extreme violence and sexual assault committed against Afghan women by the US-endorsed Northern Alliance, or asked whether they might oppress or violate women once installed in the Afghan government. On the domestic front, the Bush administration was portrayed as a bastion of women’s empowerment. Andrea Mitchell began a late November MSNBC segment this way: "In the war on terrorism, American women are playing a major role at almost every level, especially the top. It’s a striking contrast with the way women have been treated in Afghanistan." Republican bigwigs like Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin are "not only making the strategy; their gender is part of the strategy, a weapon to attack the Taliban’s treatment of Afghan women," Mitchell said. As a result, a Republican official told the Washington Post in early January, George W. Bush "has not only erased any question about legitimacy, he has also erased the gender gap."

PERHAPS THE GRADATIONS in women’s support for or opposition to the war didn’t make the news because focusing on simple, surface-level "do you or don’t you?" questions requires less research and investigation—always premium in our profit-driven, time-is-money media climate—and provided sexier numbers. Certainly women’s differing degrees of dissent might have seemed inconsequential to some of the country’s most powerful—and pro-war—journalists. Time magazine’s defense correspondent Mark Thompson confessed to warm fuzzies for tight-lipped military leader Donald Rumsfeld, telling the Chicago Tribune that "Although he has not told us very much, he has been like a father figure." With stars (and stripes) in his eyes, CBS’ Dan Rather actually volunteered to suit up, telling Entertainment Tonight that if George Bush ever "needs me in uniform, tell me when and where—I’m there." ABC’s Cokie Roberts unself-consciously admitted an almost blind faith in our boys at the Pentagon: "Look, I am, I will just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff," she told David Letterman. "And so, when they say stuff I tend to believe it." (This eager journalistic acceptance was surely music to the ears of the unnamed military official who told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that lying would be an integral part of the Pentagon’s press strategy.)

But to find the simplest reason why women’s perspectives were missing or misrepresented by media, forget all this cerebral posturing. A college-style drinking game will do the trick. The rules are simple (and almost guaranteed not to get anyone drunk). Grab a few friends and the remote control, start flipping between network news broadcasts, pour a drink every time a female expert is interviewed about terrorism and war. I promise you, you’ll end up parched—and peeved.

Take the Sunday morning talk shows on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox, for example. According to a study released in December by the White House Project, a nonpartisan women’s leadership group, women were a measly 11 percent of all guests on five of these influential, agenda-setting programs from January 1, 2000 to June 30, 2001. As if this wasn’t dismal enough, that number fell to just nine percent for six weeks after September 11. And women fared no better in print: in the month after the terrorist attacks, men wrote a whopping 92 percent of the 309 bylined op-eds published by the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, according to a survey I conducted for FAIR.

To Nancy Nathan, executive producer of NBC’s "Meet the Press," the underrepresentation of women on programs like hers is irrelevant. "I don’t think the female viewpoint is different from the generic, overall viewpoint," Nathan told me. There’s no conspiracy to suppress women’s voices, she said, it’s just that men hold most power-positions in Washington, so they are the most sought-after guests. Women might have unique perspectives to add to health care or reproductive services discussions, she added, and with those sorts of stories the talk shows might be able to book people outside the male-dominated pool of officeholders. But programs like "Meet the Press" "are not having long discussions about issues that are not at the forefront of the agenda." The White House Project study’s authors can "advocate more women on the air," Nathan said; "but the object here is to deliver the news, not to get women on the air."

Nathan’s perspective perfectly echoes one of journalism’s most entrenched conventions: news is what the powerful say and do, not what the public experiences. But Sunday morning talk shows move the public debate by framing certain topics as cutting-edge and others as unimportant—if they were to address reproductive rights or health care regularly, those issues would be at the forefront. Not to mention that women are invested in all issues, not just abortion and breast cancer; women are ninety percent of the world’s sweatshop workers, for example, and are doing groundbreaking work in feminist economics—meaning that journalism and those who rely on it suffer when women are overlooked as sources for stories on globalization, labor and world finance.

The news-follows-power principle not only eschews diversity, but its self-perpetuating cycle prevents change. Social and political issues will continue to be filtered through a primarily white, male, corporate lens, thereby reinforcing their authority and sidelining women, people of color, labor and all marginalized groups and issues.

WASHINGTON POST columnist Judy Mann ended the year with this reflection:

...a society in which women are invisible in the media is one in which they are invisible, period... Women are a majority in the United States. By rights, in a democracy, we should occupy 50 percent of the slots on the op-ed pages of America’s newspapers. We should occupy 50 percent of the top editorships in newspapers. We should be allowed to bring what interests us—as women and mothers and wives—to the table, and I don’t mean token stories about child care. I mean taking apart the federal budget and seeing if it is benefiting families or the munitions millionaires. I mean looking at the enormous amount of money we’ve squandered on the "war on drugs" and asking the obvious question: Why are we building more prisons instead of rebuilding broken lives? I mean challenging the miserly foreign-aid budget and raising hell because we are not doing our share to educate women and girls in emerging countries. The Taliban could never have taken root in a society that educated and empowered females.

Mann’s final headline read, "A Farewell Wish: That Women Will Be Heard." For that wish to become reality, we need to force the issue. Write the Post and encourage them to replace Mann with an analytically and politically savvy feminist writer. Pressure the Sunday talk shows to interview female experts, and to recognize that women’s concerns focus on cutting-edge issues, but will only be seen as such if they are subject to healthy debate in prominent forums. Contact local news outlets when women are ignored, distorted, or covered in opportunistic ways. Conduct studies calling attention to the gender breakdown of particular outlets’ bylines and sources, then hold press conferences, release reports and attempt to meet with editorial boards to discuss ways to improve. Organize around the concept that journalism has a responsibility to cover a variety of perspectives, not just those of people in power.

Media conglomerates are not magnanimous; they will not change their priorities without major incentives. In the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt would only speak to female reporters at her press conferences, forcing newspapers to employ women journalists. In the 1970s, newspapers and TV networks had to be sued before they’d stop discriminating against women in hiring and promotion; feminist columnist Anna Quindlen began her decade-long run on the New York Times op-ed page as a result of one of those class-actions, and proceeded to write about gender, race, class and sexuality issues as if they mattered.

It’s time for us to reprioritize media as a top feminist issue. Today, Quindlen’s spot at the Times is filled by Maureen Dowd, who’s often as inclined to write about high-society balls as feminist concerns. Today, right-wing women like Ann Coulter, Kathleen Parker, Peggy Noonan, Mona Charen, Amy Holmes, Laura Ingraham maintain a high profile in the mainstream media, while progressive feminist writers like media critic Laura Flanders or journalist Barbara Ehrenreich are most often heard in the Left press. And today, NBC darling Katie Couric’s astronomical new salary notwithstanding, women still have little power inside the media industry: according to various studies (cited in "Power Shortage for Media Women," Extra!, August, 2001), they are only 13 and 14 percent of radio and TV general managers, 20 percent of news executives in Fortune 1000 news companies, and 12 percent of corporate board members in media/entertainment companies

We need to ask ourselves: What are we going to do about this, today?

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• Linda Gardiner lgardiner@wellesley.edu
• The Women's Review of Books
• Wellesley College Center for Research on Women
• Created: April 2nd 1996
• Last Updated: March 20th 2002
• Expires: No expiration