Highlights from this issue...

Wishful thinking
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex by Judith Levine. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 299 pp., $25.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Louise Armstrong

TALK ABOUT TIMING. To publish a book subtitled "The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex" smack into the gale-force headwinds of scandal over sexual aggressions against children by priests, and the cover-up thereof, is bound to draw--well, just what it has drawn. Even before the book's publication date of May 1, I typed in "Judith Levine" on Google's search engine and turned up hundreds of references. Many of the ones I checked were outcries of outrage at Levine's alleged "pro-pedophilia" and alleged exoneration of "intergenerational sex." Since the book had not yet been published, it is doubtful that many of the outcriers had read it.

Over and over I saw Levine quoted as responding that "What's happening to me is a perfect example of the hysteria my book is about." Well, I may be among that group Levine labels a "rump caucus of feminists" who she says "singled out pornography not only as the [a?] cause of sexual violence to women but as a species of sexual violence itself"--but nonetheless I believe fair is fair; a book should be read before issuing catcalls.

What is the book about? And to whom does Levine attribute the hysteria?

It's a mixed bag in more senses than one. Chapter titles include: "Censorship," "Manhunt: The Pedophile Panic," "Therapy: 'Children Who Molest' and the Tyranny of the Normal," "Crimes of Passion: Statutory Rape and the Denial of Female Desire," "No-Sex Education: From 'Chastity' to 'Abstinence'," and "Compulsory Motherhood: The End of Abortion." Levine says that at bottom this book is about fear, and "about how that fear got its claws into America in the late twentieth century and how, abetted by a sentimental, sometimes cynical, politics of child protectionism, it now dominates the way we think and act about children's sexuality."

On the good news front, Levine attributes hysteria--both in her book and about her book--to the religious Right. Her impassioned plea to restore sex education for children to the schools couldn't be more timely. Advocacy for sex education to encourage condom use, to provide reliable information on sexually transmitted diseases and the real danger of AIDS, is both worthy and urgent. Says Levine, "Parents, when asked, overwhelmingly rise in favor of sexuality education covering a wide variety of topics, including contraception and even abortion and sexual orientation... Of a national sample of parents surveyed in 2000 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 98 percent put HIV/AIDS prevention on the list of desired topics to be taught in schools, with abstinence following close behind at 97 percent." What that says to me is that parents want their kids to be safe any way that can be accomplished--if not by sex ed, then by wishful thinking.

Most of us probably deplore, as Levine does, the movement toward abstinence-only sex ed; many of us laughed (I know I did) at the proselytizing some years back that conversion to abstinence could produce a "second virginity." However, Levine seems more enthused about the sex in sex ed than the safety. She worries that teachers sanitize sex, quoting one female high school student speaking to a CBS reporter: "When schools teach you about sex, it's just a big blah." "This is a penis. This is a vagina..." chimes in a male student.

Levine's answer to this: take away the deed of intercourse and advocate pleasure--the pleasure of "outercourse"--which I gather means informed petting. "Because outercourse breaks down the gender roles, it is a boon to sexual equality... Take intercourse out of the picture, and the sex differences that were left in the bedroom can be swept out too." Here, I think, we're faced with Levine's own wishful thinking. There is, after all, a great deal of sex information--about intercourse, outercourse, whatever--available to kids in this culture. Whether or not you agree with Levine about the "hysteria" over pornography available to children on the Internet and sex talk on Internet chat lines, you can just hear blasé students saying, "When schools teach you about outercourse, it's a big blah." "This is a blow job. This is a hand job..."

BUT THE WISHFUL THINKING here seems to me more profound than that. Some few pages back, Levine has told us that teens are heartily devoted to gender roles: "To deviate [from gender norms] is not accepted." And gendered norms include gendered thought. Boys who subscribe to the norms of masculinity are, we are told, less likely to use condoms, more likely to be violent toward girls (including, I add, through date rape and the use of rape drugs). Nor, Levine tells us, is femininity good for girls. Girls concerned with looking pretty are more likely "to have sex while high on drugs, and to take risks, such as unprotected intercourse. The less 'girly' a girl is, the more she'll take hold of her own sexual destiny, having sex when, with whom, and in what ways she wants." Just not, I suppose, with any of the gender-normative boys who are chasing the gender-normative girls. Is the answer to this really school-talk about "outercourse" (even if you could get such talk into the schools)? Or is it cracking down on the male "normativity" which carries with it the sense of male sexual entitlement, and continuing to work--as radical anti-violence feminists have been working for years--to censure (not censor) both the reality and the imagery of male sexual aggression?

However. Having acknowledged the fact of male sexual aggression, which is, of course, constantly being reinforced by images and narratives that pervade the culture, Levine then proceeds to endorse those images and narratives, deploring--even mocking--the "hysteria" not only over Internet pornography, but child pornography, predatory pedophiles and age-of-consent/statutory rape laws.

By way of illustration of the wrongness of it all, we get an anecdote about Heather and Dylan, as brought to our attention by that exemplar of the calm and considered, the Maury Povich show. (It strikes me as peculiar, if you are complaining about hysteria, to turn for your example to a show whose ratings depend on kicking up some.) Heather, 13, met Dylan, 21, online. They rendezvoused. He wooed. Her parents forbade. "But passion likes obstacles," Levine writes lyrically, "and the lovers persisted." Heather's parents, at wits' end, went to the police and got a restraining order. The two lovers took off. The media fell upon the story ("lured off the Internet"), and when the two got caught, Dylan faced 12 to 24 jail-time. According to his lawyers, had the two not met on the Internet there would have been no publicity and Dylan would have got off with a lighter sentence. Or, more likely, no sentence at all: where the girl won't testify, and where there is no media hype, charges don't get pressed.

What is the moral of this story according to Levine? That statutory rape laws presume there is only one desiring partner, the man. Well, no. They presume there is one adult and one minor, and that the adult holds the power card; it is just part of our old friend the gender-normative that the adult will usually be male. Sometimes--I am trying not to be "hysterical" here--that male will be a pimp: the Department of Justice numbers the children and adolescents lured into prostitution in the US at 400,000. Do the kids "consent"? If they are runaways or throwaways they consent to the promise of protection and a roof over their heads. If they are bored, disaffected young girls from the middle west trafficked to California or Nevada, they "consent" to flattery and false promises of adventure. Last May 7th, in a San Francisco Examiner article, "American Girls for Sale," Adrienne Sanders wrote, "The majority of underage prostitutes in San Francisco are not from impoverished Asian or European countries. They are honey-haired teenagers hauled in from America's Heartland. Magnet cities along the so-called Pacific Pipeline trafficking circuit...can't get enough of them... Johns prefer young blondes and will pay a premium to have sex with them. The Nordic belly of our country overflows with fair-skinned teenagers hungering for new lives."

Our friend Dylan, according to Levine, is a misunderstood sweetie, a bit simple but non-predatory. Maybe so. But if he is, then Levine is banging our heads against a straw man, an anomaly (it probably wouldn't have made the Maury Povich show if it weren't). If one of the social goals shared by Levine and the Right--and the rest of us--is the reduction of teen pregnancy and disease, then sanctioning a thirteen-year-old's dropping out of school and running off with (in her eyes) an older man is not going to help us out here. Laws are made with an eye toward social goals. Prosecution, in individual cases, is discretionary. Levine advocates reducing the age of consent to twelve where the girl is willing/wanting. This seems to me a triumph of enthusiasm for children's right to sex over any sense of reality about the vulnerability of your basic twelve-year-old and (yes) the number of predatory males on the loose.

HERE, ONCE AGAIN, Levine does not so much ignore reality as toss it in as a disclaimer. She writes, "Of course, young women do get raped: almost all rape victims are female, and more than half of the nation's rape victims are under eighteen... The younger a girl and the wider the age difference between her and her older male sex partner [sic], moreover, the more likely she is to feel coerced into having intercourse, at least the first time." Hunh? Add to these girls the kids lured into prostitution, eighty percent of whom were abused at home by fathers and funny uncles (older male "sex partners"), and it becomes hard to share Levine's jubilant optimism that teaching girls to understand and proclaim and act on their own sexual desire is key to putting them in charge of their sexual destiny. In the world that we live in, it is far more likely that such advocacy will simply further the child-as-seducer myth that has plagued young girls for centuries, and until fairly recently has branded them "accomplice-witnesses" in courts when they complain of incestuous rape, allowing judges to allege molested six-year-olds had been dressed seductively, or tell a raped fourteen-year-old to "just get over it."

Levine points to the trend that started when feminists unmasked the prevalence of highly gendered incest/child sexual abuse. Within moments, our attention was diverted to the day care abuse scandals--and to a "hysteria" over pedophiles lurking anywhere and everywhere (except in the home). As the day care cases began to topple, burgeoning "fathers' rights" groups raced in, wildly waving and pointing and saying, "See?"--hoping to throw a blanket of suspicion over all allegations of sexual abuse. Shortly thereafter, they conjured False Memory Syndrome, False Accusation Syndrome, Parental Alienation Syndrome... As Levine acknowledges, "Even if child-sex crimes against strangers are rare, incest is not." Well, but shouldn't the prevalence of this sexual insult to children make us a bit nervous for those victims who might be sitting in the proposed "sex-as-pleasure" education classes?

The word "hysteria," which Levine uses repeatedly, minimizes a reality for children which she herself quietly acknowledges. She writes, "Of at least one phenomenon we have plenty of evidence: kids are having sex they don't want, and the ones who say they don't want it tend to be girls." I am truly perplexed by the way her advocacy of pleasure fails to compute with this acknowledged reality. Despite all of the problems and sexual dangers she has pointed to, her conclusion rings out like an anthem:

Sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle to self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness. There are many ways in which even the smallest children can partake of it. Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child--for accomplishment, connection, meaning, and pleasure--can be marvelously fulfilled. (p. 225)

Swell. Then bring back into the room that "rump caucus" of radical feminists who have long been fighting the treatment of children as sexual commodities. (And no, I don't mean ban family photos of two-year-old Susie in her bath.) Bring back sex-safety information in the schools. But above all, get serious about those who do prey on children: the pimps and the traffickers and, yes, the pornographers. Get serious--not "hysterical," serious--about the fathers, stepfathers, grandfathers and church Fathers who sexually exploit the children over whom they wield immense power. Those, after all, are the folks to whom we should be preaching abstinence.

Or else? Under the title "Cambodia Launches Child Sex Crackdown," the BBC reported on May 7th: "Secret filming by the BBC last year showed that [Cambodian] children of primary school age are regularly sold for sex, and many of their clients are British men. But in an effort to teach children to protect themselves [my emphasis] a new project has been launched by Buddhist monks....to educate children about sex tourism and how they can avoid getting caught in the trap."

Some crackdown (the kids are being sold for sex). But it is first cousin to the "prevention programs" that have been set up in schools here. In other words, for all the talk of child-saving and child-empowering, the message is: Kids, you're on your own. It doesn't seem right, somehow, to tell them they should be enjoying it.

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To Kabul with love--and money
V is for vagina, A is for aid to Afghan women

By Sarah L. Rasmusson

Eve Ensler and Jessica Neuwirth in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo by Jessica Neuwirth.

KNOWN IN THE US for her controversial and highly successful play The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler--playwright, performer, anti-war activist and feminist--may be better known since the war in Afghanistan as a cash-in-hand donor to women. It may be a while before her Obie-award-winning off-Broadway show debuts in Kabul. But Ensler, usually seen urging women to talk out loud and in public about their private parts, is using her passion and her play to raise money for Afghan women who are working to rebuild their lives, communities and country.

Post-Vagina Monologues fame, Ensler and her vulva activism are nearly synonymous. And she's clearly determined to put her money where her mouth is. Nearly four million dollars will have been awarded by June 30, 2002, to organizations and programs that fight violence against women through V-Day, an organization that raises money primarily through performances of The Vagina Monologues to promote all women's right to be safe in their bodies everywhere.

The play, based on interviews Ensler conducted with dozens of women from around the world about their vaginas, is a collective yet unique testimony. Begun as a one-woman show four years ago, it's now in production on stages and college campuses worldwide, with rotating three-woman casts of notable performers and community leaders. It has become a political vehicle for raising awareness--and money--for women's charities all around the globe. All the proceeds of the play's performance on or around Valentine's Day--also affectionately called V-Day--are donated.

"Women are as fierce and as determined as ever. And they really have a very clear idea about what they want to do in Afghanistan," Ensler told a crowd of more than 120 anti-war and women's rights activists on March 12th at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York City during an evening discussion of her recent trip to Kabul. "They want to rebuild schools, they want to build clinics. And they need money. They don't need ideas. They don't need intervention. They don't need people to tell them what to do. They are very clear about that, 'Give us your money and we will rebuild our country.'"

Four days earlier, Ensler was in Kabul celebrating International Women's Day with Afghan women--the first time in six years that day had been celebrated there. More than eighty women came--only forty were expected due to security and safety concerns for women traveling alone--from all across the country "with incredible spirits, incredible tenacity, incredible hopes, in the middle of nothing," Ensler told her audience. "The visual scene there is just destruction everywhere," she said in between sips of water and the "Kabul cough" caused by air-borne dust from all the bombing. "You really feel like you are inhaling the remains of buildings and people and imagination."

Now Ensler is establishing direct funding channels for Afghan women's reconstruction projects. With a staff of ten and supporters all around the world, V-Day is the first organization to put money physically into the hands of Afghan women. Ensler heads both a donation drive and a diplomacy campaign to make sure that women are not only part of the aid process but also at the receiving end.

Ensler is quick to point out that V-Day was raising money for Afghan women's activism under the Taliban long before the "war on terrorism" made fighting patriarchal "evil-doers" hip and patriotic. For the past two years V-Day has supported the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an organization of Afghan women mostly living in exile from their country, who have been fighting for women's rights since 1977 and now demand the separation of religious from political processes, a democratic government that will ensure Afghan women's rights and disarmament after the war. V-Day donations have financed underground schools for girls, health services for women and the forbidden video cameras that were hidden underneath women's burqas to capture ill-treatment by the Taliban. Funding RAWA is still necessary, Ensler contends. The women do not feel safe enough to become an above-ground group. "Their lives are still threatened by people who do not want them around," she told her audience on March 12th, adding, "You can shave off people's beards but you don't change their consciousness."

Eve Ensler, Hibaaq Osman and Jessica Neuwirth in Kabul. Photo by Jessica Neuwirth.

ENSLER'S DECISION to aid the women of Afghanistan came about in the same way she decided to create V-Day: impromptu, uncoordinated at first, driven by feverish frustration to help women who are not safe or free from violence and need. A week after the September 11th attacks, she organized Women for Afghan Women--a grassroots group for women from Afghanistan and neighboring countries and their supporters living in New York--out of her living room. They have met almost every Tuesday since then to discuss and plan non-violent responses to war and identify women's special needs and experiences in New York City and Afghanistan during this time.

This year Ensler requested that all worldwide performances of her play allocate between one and ten percent of their proceeds to the women of Afghanistan. "It's very moving to see many colleges and campuses give the full ten percent," she said. How much does that add up to? Between $200,000 and $400,000 has been raised for women in Afghanistan, mostly from Vagina Monologues performances throughout last February, Ensler told me, hesitant to toss out a precise number while money is still coming in. Ensler is clearly a drama queen and an idea maven. Electricity flies when she's sharing big concepts and grand plans, but questions about costs, budgets, and details tend to be dismissed.

Most of the money V-Day raises, Ensler says, will go to RAWA to serve Afghan women's needs. Some of those needs are pretty basic. V-Day bought sixteen satellite phones and gave them to RAWA members, since landline communication is impossible when telephone wires have been obliterated. "RAWA has never been able to call from Pakistan to Afghanistan and now for the first time they can," Ensler said to the rousing cheer of the New York audience on March 12th. V-Day is also paying RAWA's long-distance phone bills.

Some of the needs being met are less material. V-Day gave $10,000 to rebuild and replant what used to be a women's garden in Kabul. The park now is a sooty, bombed-out hole guarded by soldiers. Ensler says the soldiers stand guard there merely to preserve "a memory of Kabul when it was green and beautiful." She met with Dr. Sima Samar, the Women's Minister of Afghanistan, in Kabul. "We asked what V-Day could do for them and Samar explained that there was a woman's garden that used to be a beautiful place where they used to grow almond groves, plant flowers, put on theatre in a special dancing room." Ensler describes the park as "a safe park, like a safe house," for women and children in Kabul to go to relax, "and, of course, they will be able to pray."

The money going to RAWA is having an effect on boys as well. RAWA took Ensler on a tour of schools and literacy groups outside Islamabad. She described one school as "a rag-tag building" where boys attend school in the morning and girls attend school in the afternoon "in rooms the size of closets." "We went into this class of Afghan refugee boys and we asked them what they thought of women," Ensler recalls. Their reply: "We love women! We believe women are the future. We believe women should be equal." Ensler added, "Well, of course, they're RAWA boys. They're the antidote to all the fundamentalist schools."

At the literacy schools where the bulk of V-Day funding goes, Ensler visited with women in their thirties and forties who are learning how to read and write--sitting in the evening in the same chairs their sons and daughters sat in during the day. "Of all the things we saw, that was the most hopeful--because it is underground, it is clandestine, it is people helping people. They get no government support, but they are doing the real work."

Several small projects are under way to raise money both here and overseas. V-Day has completed an hour-long documentary about the trip to Kabul, which Ensler says will be sold in the fall to make money for Afghan women. Like many of these projects hastily being pulled together, specifics of price and availability are yet to be determined. To help spread the message of American women's solidarity with Afghan women, V-Day has provided $3000 in start-up money for a cottage jewelry business. Headed by Shafiqua Habibi, Afghan women will design, produce and sell blue beaded bracelets with the slogan "Afghanistan is Everywhere" on them. "We are giving them money," Ensler said, "to make between two and three hundred and see if they will be marketable."

Larger, long-term projects will include funding literacy programs and orphanages. V-Day has already paid for research into the incidence of acts of domestic violence against women throughout Afghanistan; the first draft of the study is in Ensler's hands right now. A network of activist women called V-Day Friends was formed in support of Afghan women last December at the Brussels Afghan Women's Summit for Democracy, and V-Day will continue to help build that network. Once the peace process has begun, V-Day may be able to fund another urgent need: a disarmament program. "What the US government is doing is just putting more guns in the hands of the Northern Alliance. And what's going to happen is they are going to turn around and use those guns," Ensler said, adding, "Every single woman we met said we need disarmament. We need to get rid of these guns."

It is difficult to say exactly how the money is being administered, says Ensler, as if refusing to be slowed down by bureaucratic details. "Every dime that RAWA gets goes into something specific and concrete," she assured me. V-Day paid for all 84 people who went with her to celebrate International Women's Day in Kabul. That big an entourage must be expensive, but Ensler shut down the question about how much that trip cost, saying, "I don't want that published." Ensler herself does not receive a salary from V-Day for her work as an author, performer, or organizer, and is simply thankful that the money is reaching the women it was raised for. She believes that "the spirit of cooperation" has prevented misuse of the funds, despite the prevalence of corruption in war-torn, warlord-run Afghanistan. "That isn't even a concern at this point," she said flatly. She also says she hears a lot of excuses for why money isn't getting to Afghan women, like the fact that all the banks have been destroyed. "Well, put the money in your bags," she tells her audiences--"that's what we did."

Ensler gets furious over military spending, saying, "It costs a half a million dollars each day to continue to bomb Afghanistan, and the Women's Minister has received $9,000 in aid thus far," explaining that money was earmarked simply to remove the rubble of Samar's bombed-out office building. "If you look at the math and what we are focusing our priorities on, it is so grotesque. It is out of control. It is insane."

AT THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY ceremony in Kabul, four girls dressed in traditional Afghan costume presented four doves to the high-level officials present, including Noeleen Heyzer, the Executive Director of the United Nations Women's Fund, Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai, Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Afghan ministers Samar and health minister Dr. Suhaila Seddiqi. "It was a fantastic metaphor moment," Ensler recalled, "because three of them flew and one of them just refused. It sat on the desk of all the ministers. The Minister of Health started to whack it. The dove sat and considered and had a limp flight to a little perch. Everyone laughed but everyone knew that that was the state of Afghanistan--that there is this possibility, but it's not complete and it's not assured. There's this fourth bird that isn't flying yet." The flight of the fourth dove ultimately depends on aid.

Many Americans Ensler talks to are under the impression that American money is already benefiting Afghanistan. "When I tell them no funding is getting through, they are shocked." On December 12th Bush signed the Afghan Relief Act, in part to assist the women and children of Afghanistan. Even though he and Laura Bush have made the plight of Afghan women their number one rallying cry, no money was attached to that bill. "We have used Afghan women as fodder. We said we are bombing this country to rescue Afghan women," Ensler said. "We have promised them something and delivered nothing."

During the media blitz every front page and TV broadcast featured the burqa as the ultimate marker of women's oppression under the Taliban. But Afghan women themselves have not been haggling over the apparent backwardness of their apparel. They have focused on girls' right to go to school and women's right to go to work and earn equal pay, the right to political representation, greater access to media outlets, and the right for all to adequate health care and personal safety. These demands were presented as the Brussels Declaration, a document made by and for Afghan women. V-Day helped bring more than fifty Afghan women leaders--many meeting each other for the first time--for a two-day UN-sponsored Afghan Women's Summit in Belgium early last December.

Making women's status a priority during wartime has been difficult. "There is a split," Ensler points out, "between very progressive people who believe that you have to assert women's rights right away or it's never going to happen, and people who think you have to be incremental and get to it later. My feeling is 'get to it later' means get to it never."

Ensler will say outright that V-Day's mission is to end violence by the year 2005. That's right. Eradicate all forms of violence against women--end it everywhere for all women within the next three years.

The women's garden in Kabul might be in bloom then.

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Unsung heroine
Just for a Thrill: Lil Hardin Armstrong, First Lady of Jazz by James L. Dickerson. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002, 241 pp., $26.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Leslie Gourse

Lil Hardin Armstrong at the piano. From Just for a Thrill.

JAZZ BOOK JUNKIE THAT I AM, I have often wished that I could find material on pianist Lil Hardin, the second of trumpeter Louis Armstrong's four wives, who played in Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens Bands in Chicago in the 1920s. Hardin wasn't just his piano player--she was his manager, mentor, guide and exceptionally loyal wife. It was she who recognized his great talent, taught him a little about how to dress, and urged him to go to New York and make other moves to spread around his joyful sound. Taking her advice, he eventually established himself as an international star. She was the brains behind all Armstrong's enterprises for many years. That was her greatest strength, and that's about all that jazz historians have known about Hardin.

At last a writer has come along with the desire to praise Lil Hardin, whose adult life centered around Armstrong at a time when women didn't count for much in the jazz world. As James L. Dickerson aptly writes: "Throughout jazz history there has been a sexist bias against women." Hardin had little chance to make a name for herself independent of Armstrong, and though a lesser talent than he--almost everyone was--she definitely deserves a place of honor in jazz history. That is undoubtedly why Dickerson has underplayed Armstrong's well-deserved superstardom in this book. Armstrong's career has been very well documented in movies, on videos and in books; it's easy to find out about him. So Just for a Thrill gives him short shrift, while Lil's accomplishments--exceptional for her era, when jazz was such a macho art--are put on a pedestal.

In that era, only pianist, composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams, who was willing to live a hard life on the road, beat the odds against a woman succeeding in the overwhelmingly male-dominated jazz world. Less of a genius than Mary Lou but nevertheless gifted as a player, composer and bandleader, Lil Hardin would probably never have left a noteworthy legacy of recordings had she not been affiliated with Armstrong. Her musical gifts were secondary, and without Armstrong in the 1920s and several other major male jazz musicians whom she hired later for her bands, she would have been just another unsung, underemployed heroine of jazz. Her alliance with Armstrong was a stroke of good fortune for her career, though not for her love life.

Dickerson, an experienced storyteller and jazz and blues historian, has delved into the meager sources on Hardin's early life and used them to construct a fascinating, sometimes surprising book. Sympathetic to her plight as a woman in jazz in the 1920s, he regards Lil Hardin as a "visionary with a heart of gold," a co-founder of jazz with Armstrong--surely an overstatement of the case--and a prolific songwriter. Much of his book digresses from her actual experiences, probably because so little has been documented about her pre-Armstrong life, and instead recounts the social, economic and racial history and ambience of the era in which she worked, a time when gangsters ruled in the club world. And so we learn a great deal about Memphis, New Orleans, Nashville, Chicago and New York and the gangsters who created the world in which jazz musicians worked. We also learn about how Lil Hardin manipulated her position in the music world, using her courage and intellect to steer Louis, without success, away from gangsters and his beloved marijuana.

HARDIN DEMONSTRATED HER TALENT by playing the family's piano at the age of six and convincing her mother to provide her with classical music lessons. Then she had to battle her mother's disapproval of a career in pop and jazz music. Hardin won out, determined as usual to work hard and get her way, characterizing herself as "pushy" and "assertive." For the most part, the attractive little firebrand had no compunctions about pushing her way into jobs and then lying to her mother and anyone else about anything that helped her. She lied about having a college degree from Fisk University (though later in life she did get several degrees). She lied about her age, shaving off two years and claiming to have been born in 1900. She lied about her father, William Hardin, saying that he died when she was two.

Dickerson doesn't explain the motives for her mendacity. They may never be known. But he makes it clear that no one bothered to demand the truth of her because she was a woman. Armstrong believed her lies about college degrees and other awards; other people may simply have taken her at her word.

Lillian Beatrice Hardin was born in 1898, the granddaughter of a slave. She was nineteen when she and her mother, a cook, migrated from Memphis' poorest ghetto to the South Side of Chicago. Her mother was horrified by the South's increasing bigotry and the influence of raunchy Beale Street's music on her daughter.

In Chicago, Hardin accepted a job as a sheet music demonstrator; in those days, stores hired musicians to play sheet music for customers. One day, Jelly Roll Morton sat in on the store's piano and made a tremendous impression on Hardin. "He hit the piano--well, his left hand and his right hand were both loud--and his feet were stomping." This technique quickly plotted the course of her life. "I imitated him after that," she said. "Boy, I only weighed around eighty-five pounds, and from then on you could hear all eighty-five of 'em."

Becoming known around town for her playing at the store, Hardin found jobs playing "hot" music with the New Orleans Creole Jazz Band at the DeLuxe Café. Her mother found out and began picking up "Hot Miss Lil," as she called herself, at the stroke of one as soon as the gigs ended, to Hardin's embarrassment. But her mother's vigilance paid off; if Hardin was old-fashioned, as Armstrong eventually called her, she was also articulate, modestly sophisticated, elegant--and rather prudish. She ran anytime a man looked at her for too long. Her mother feared a world that she believed was "evil to the core," while Hardin viewed it as "a kind place filled with opportunity." The blend of their beliefs helped shape Hardin's ideas about how to live and guided her focus on her career. Unlike many female musicians, she didn't base her moves on socializing with her bandmates, all of them men.

The Hot Five (left to right): Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr, Kid Ory and Lil Hardin Armstrong. From Just for a Thrill.

THE BAND MOVED UP A NOTCH from the DeLuxe to play at the Dreamland Café, where New Orleans trumpeter Joe "King" Oliver joined and took over the band. Renaming it King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, he booked the group at other clubs such as the Royal Gardens. Lil remained at Dreamland for a while. When Oliver sent his former protegé, Louis Armstrong, an invitation to join the band, the New Orleans trumpet player fell in love with petite Lil Hardin at first sight. It took Hardin a while to realize that this chunky, badly dressed hick three years younger than she was a brilliant musician; he soon became the love of her life. Oliver also hired other fine New Orleans musicians, such as clarinetist Johnny Dodds and trombonist Honore Dutrey. "With the addition of Lil again on piano, Oliver had the hottest jazz band in Chicago, perhaps even in the entire country," says Dickerson.

Although Armstrong played second trumpet, everyone knew he was Oliver's superior. Soon Hardin encouraged Armstrong to leave. They collaborated in such ventures as his Hot Fives and Hot Seven recording bands. Dickerson understandably glorifies Hardin's contributions to Armstrong's career and early jazz, stressing Armstrong's penchant for marijuana and girlfriends immeasurably less bright and talented. Other biographers have stressed Armstrong's genius and charm; by focusing on Hardin instead of treating her as a handmaiden to Armstrong's genius, Dickerson plays up Armstrong's less attractive qualities. He makes sure the readers know that Armstrong was a difficult husband with a roving eye. Hardin bought a lakeside cottage to entice her husband into spending time with her alone, enjoying music away from his girlfriends, but she couldn't tame him. Armstrong's biographers don't mention these infidelities. Eventually she gave up, heartbroken, and sought a divorce. Singer Alberta Hunter, a friend of Lil's from the 1920s, said, "She never got over it."

In middle age, as Hardin's commercial appeal waned, she tried careers as a clothes designer and a restauranteur. Her restaurant failed. To his credit, her most loyal clothing customer was Armstrong. In his own way, he was grateful to her, even if he came to depend on others for guidance for his career moves.

Hardin never remarried and was "devastated" by Armstrong's death on July 6, 1971. About 500 people attended his funeral, including an emissary from the White House. Lil died only seven weeks later on August 27, just as she finished one of her rare public performances. Only "a handful of mourners showed up" for her funeral.

Several years later, musicians began to praise her. Trumpeter Jonah Jones, who played in her later bands and eventually became honored for his work with dancer Fred Astaire, said he thought she was "a most wonderful woman." Influential Columbia Records jazz producer John Hammond called her "loveable and... saintly and kind," "Louis's wife and protector during those early rough days in Chicago." In the end she was accorded the credit due her for Armstrong's success.

Dickerson's portrait of Armstrong's position in jazz history is somewhat skewed by its emphasis on Armstrong's failures as a husband. But in its uncovering of Hardin's forceful, pioneering personality and contribution to his exceptional success, no other book has sung her praises so informatively.

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Reviewed by Judith Fetterley

IN HER MOST RECENT BOOK, Carolyn G. Heilbrun observes that Jacques Barzun's A Stroll with William James is by his own definition "the record of an intellectual debt." When Men Were the Only Models We Had could itself be seen as such a record, but it would be more accurate to call it the history of an emotional wound and the settling of an intellectual score. In her latest book, Heilbrun wrestles with a problem familiar to many academic women of her own generation and perhaps to women of subsequent generations as well--how to make peace with the fact that for the men who were her only models she simply didn't exist. Heilbrun wants to be generous to the men who in some sense "saved" her life, but her desire to be generous comes up against her need to write herself into existence despite the misogyny of her models. The result is a book that tacks back and forth between recording an intellectual debt, baring a psychic wound and revealing that in fact the emperor has no clothes.

Clifton Fadiman, the immensely popular and influential book reviewer of the 1940s and '50s, was her earliest model. He showed Heilbrun how a writer could be both "intellectual" and "available," what we today might call a public intellectual. Heilbrun early knew that she wanted to be such a writer and from him she learned both that it could be done and how to do it. Fadiman modeled a tone, a voice and a way of relating to an audience that guaranteed engagement. He was also the first to introduce her to Henry James, and he directed her attention to that quality of "awareness" in James that "became and has remained the quality I most prize in people." Yet in his reviews Fadiman missed "no chance to insult women"; even Jane Austen did not escape the meanness of his "severely misogynist gaze" and "his definition of a bad book came close to being a book of female authorship." How could she have failed to notice this? In truth, "bizarre" (shouldn't the word here be "painful"?) as it seems to her now, she realizes that, in choosing her models, "I not only ignored their lack of respect for women, I applauded it."

Heilbrun never met Fadiman, so his failure to recognize her existence can hardly be seen as personal. Still her relation to him is emblematic: he played a large role in her life; she did not exist for him.

For her relationship with Barzun, first her teacher and later her colleague at Columbia, more than an acquaintance yet not quite a friend, Heilbrun has "no word." She has no difficulty finding the words to describe what he offered her--"respect and attention." He found her "an acquaintance worth savoring," always made time to respond to her letters, and included her first detective novel in his 1971 anthology, A Catalogue of Crime. Unique in her experience, his "impersonal companionship" allowed her "to imagine that what earlier seemed an unattainable 'male' vocation . . . would not be forever absolutely denied to me." Nevertheless, that feminism might play a major role in cultural and intellectual history never occurred to him. In writing of Alice James (the wife of William James), he applauds her indispensable secretarial service and her "resonant, well-modulated voice," qualities that made her the ideal companion for this "unusually gifted man." Reflecting on his words, Heilbrun recalls "Lear's encomium on Cordelia, a phrase emblazoned in my day at the entrance to the Wellesley Library." Even then she thought it was "marvelously inappropriate," for the "Wellesley girls of my day," she says, "should, rather, have been told to rage, rage against almost everything."

Rage simmers beneath the surface of Heilbrun's treatment of Lionel Trilling, the most influential of her models. Admission to the seminar he taught with Barzun was for Heilbrun the most important event of her graduate career; he and Barzun discussed her work as if her ideas mattered and together they taught her the importance of "readable, clear, elegant prose" free of the "jargon" they both despised. Trilling's influence on Heilbrun far overshadowed that of the other two: "Fadiman offered an example of how I might hope to write, Barzun offered kindly and invaluable instruction and support, but Trilling represented in his person and publications the very model of a literary personage grappling with a complex social world." In his ability to connect the study of literature to the moral and political life of the nation, Trilling identified the furthest reach of the profession she aspired to enter. Yet "never once in anything he said did Trilling admit women to the fellowship of learning," nor to "the peculiar reality of the moral life" as he understood it.

Trilling's impact on Heilbrun--overwhelming, absolute, passionate--led her from the start to want to "confront" him, to force him to recognize her existence. She remembers thinking, "one day he will confirm my right to be part of the struggle he embodied, of the yearning he expressed." When Men Were the Only Models We Had can be read as perhaps one final attempt on Heilbrun's part to force such a recognition, even as she recognizes, just as she did so long ago, the hopelessness of her effort.

THREE EXTRAORDINARY MEN, models for Heilbrun of what she herself might become, yet each in his own way incapable, or, perhaps, as she notes of Trilling, choosing to be incapable of recognizing in her someone potentially like themselves. "Why," then, she asks, "do I remember my veneration of them as the single most compelling passion of my youth?" And why, even after feminism "rescued me both from the hope of becoming one of the boys and from the realization of that role's high cost," has "their magic still prevailed?" Readers interested in possible answers to these questions should turn their attention to Susan Kress's elegant and perceptive Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position (University Press of Virginia, 1997), which engages them and in particular offers a complex analysis of Heilbrun's relation to Trilling. Readers interested in exorcism, however, should read When Men Were the Only Models We Had. As she criticizes her male models and reveals that in fact the emperor has no clothes, Heilbrun herself models one way of managing the pain women like herself have suffered from the misogyny of men who were their teachers.

Least influential of the three, Fadiman is the most easily handled. Heilbrun remarks that at a certain point she simply stopped reading him, a subtle but damning observation. He was, however, "in a sense returned to me in the writings of his daughter, Anne Fadiman." In a fine rhetorical move, she makes the daughter the origin of her father, Zeus springing from Athena's head: her writing evokes his, but with his misogyny "excised." Heilbrun reveals that Fadiman failed to achieve the academic life he desired because the Columbia English department had room for only one Jew and, as Alfred Kazin tells it in New York Jew, the department chair told Fadiman "we have chosen Mr. Trilling." With obvious pleasure in the irony, Heilbrun notes that she became the professor he wanted to be, while "he was, in the end, 'only a reviewer,' whose words were hardly remembered in detail from one review to the next."

Barzun, the most generous of her models, elicits the least negative treatment. Still, Heilbrun presents him as a dinosaur, a man forever stuck in a particular historical moment, incapable of change. He serves, however, to focus Heilbrun's gravest charge against them all--their failure to listen to women and their failure to acknowledge the existence of feminism as a serious moral, social and intellectual movement. This imperviousness to change reflects at once their arrogance and her ineffectuality. It is the brick wall against which she hurls herself. Barzun may have been the most generous to her personally, but he failed, just as the others did, in generosity toward what mattered to her most.

AS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL of her three "guys" (Heilbrun's use of such colloquialisms is perhaps the least effective of her strategies for breaking the spell of her models), Trilling still exerts power over her despite her assertion that she is "troubled to find how little appeal Trilling has for me today." Indeed, the anxiety apparent in her treatment of Trilling suggests the persistence of his effect on her and the persistence of her effort to engage his attention. Heilbrun writes as if Trilling might at any moment rise from the grave to denounce her; he would, she believes, have despised her suggestion that Kate Fansler, the hero of her own detective fiction, shares much in common with the hero of his lone novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), a book that failed to impress her and whose 1975 reissue she "picked up remaindered at Marboro for a dollar." Yet as Heilbrun knows, even were it possible, Trilling would no more in death than in life consider her opinion worth his notice.

Heilbrun charges Trilling, as she charges Barzun, with a refusal to change. While she once attributed his waning power over her to her own maturation, today she realizes that it came from his "stasis" and particularly from his "refusal to take any notice of or to offer any understanding, if not encouragement, to the women's movement." Rereading his work, Heilbrun finds evident his dislike of feminists, his fear that women will intrude on male power and his resistance to seeing women as persons like himself; she recalls that due to his influence Columbia was one of the last male colleges to become co-educational. Trilling's intense and unalterable misogyny, Heilbrun concludes, cost him not only his chance at the "greatness" he desired; it cost him his chance at influence, his chance to be a good father, as well. Encountering the same resistance to feminism in his disciples, men of her own generation, she proposes that his influence actually damaged them far more than his failure to recognize her existence damaged her.

Quoting Trilling quoting Freud quoting Goethe--"What you have inherited from your fathers, truly possess it so as to make it your own"--Heilbrun comments: "But if Trilling was my intellectual father, I have so far made what he taught me my own that he seems, for me although perhaps not for his male 'disciples,' to have quite faded away. That is surely what fathers should do." Given what she has let us know of Trilling, we can well imagine that fading away is the last thing this particular father would wish to do. And he would most certainly find abominable the idea that his influence would persist, not through the work of his male disciples but rather through "women's literary work."

On my car I have a bumper sticker that reads, "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people." This is a notion none of Heilbrun's models chose to get. When Men Were the Only Models We Had suggests that in so choosing they made a serious mistake. Their magic cannot survive her exposure of their misogyny. Emperors without clothes, they have nothing to cover their nakedness from the eyes of readers for whom Heilbrun's words have authority--in good part because she occupies the very ground they sought so hard to deny her.

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Jamming the wind
Bike Lust: Harleys, Women, and American Society by Barbara Joans. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001, 256 pp., $21.95 paper.

Reviewed by Emily Toth

Barbara Joans. From Bike Lust..

USUALLY YOU DON'T have to walk and talk like a badass to be an anthropologist. But for Barbara Joans, it sometimes helped. She's a New York Jew--a reader, an intellectual, a lover of the great indoors. She's loudmouthed about women's rights and gay rights but a coward and a nerd around machines. What better person to do an insider investigation of Harley-Davidson culture?

You've got to admire her perseverance and her guts. She's an academic, a mother and grandma who, because her husband, Ken Harmon, is a weekend biker, decided to check out that macho, macho world. But to study Harley-Davidson bikers--the independent, big, scary outlaw types--she found it wouldn't be enough to be the "bitch in the back" on her husband's hog. She'd have to learn how to drive a Harley-Davidson herself.

At first, even "passengering" made her queasy. She ached from the tiny passenger's seat and cringed at tight turns, and she always had to pee. She nibbled on Ken's ear and begged him to stop and make love. While other bikers at a "run" (a community biker gathering) were happily, drunkenly pitching tents in the mud, she was contacting fellow academics and finding the last dry campsite in the county.

But what I've just described occurs more than halfway through Bike Lust. Joans' preface encourages us to read the book in any order, and her first chapters are about the background and history of Harleys and their male riders, followed by "cultural analysis" and then "the armchair experience of jamming the wind."

I'm a docile academic, so I read the book straight through, figuring that she must have chosen its order to make a point. The first five chapters were slow going, though not because of jargon, that bane of university press books. Joans' prose is easy and accessible to the community she's writing about, but it's also very repetitive and full of short, choppy sentences: subject-verb, subject-verb. Sometimes that's fine: "She knew what she was capable of achieving and what she wanted. She wanted her man, but she wanted her job too. She liked making money. She liked making her own decisions." But the same sentence structure can grow a bit tedious, like an overdose of Hemingway.

Bike Lust consists of pieces that may have been conference papers and articles, and they have not been blended into a coherent narrative. For instance, each chapter includes, almost in the same language, a hymn to the diversity of Harley riders. No longer are they all mean, beer-bellied, outlaw white guys. Now they may be female, gay, rich, black, skinny, or any age. They're just folks who enjoy "jamming the wind" on a Harley--the biggest, most expensive, toughest bike there is. Joans keeps praising this diversity every few pages until her last chapter, which is about the racism of traditional, core Harley owners. Those guys are also, she admits, homophobic, misogynistic and anti-Semitic, but isn't most of America? It's a very odd ending.

THE FIRST FIVE CHAPTERS are really about male riders. Women did ride (that is, drive) Harleys in the 1920s and 1930s, but after World War Two, at the height of the feminine mystique, Harleys were for men who refused to be domesticated (as in Marlon Brando's 1954 movie The Wild Ones). A true biker was a brawny, working-class, tough guy who could "wrench"--fix his bike or even rebuild it. He had to, because Harleys were very unreliable, until Japanese competition forced the Milwaukee-based company to build a bike that didn't chronically break down. Increased reliability made big hogs appealing to yuppies, and nowadays the company creates its community through local and national chapters of HOG (Harley Owners' Groups). There's also LOH (Ladies of Harley); women buy some ten percent of the Harleys sold in the US.

Joans interviews the big-name men among the bikers of northern California and tries to make them seem articulate, but they often come across as stilted as well as repetitive. Each one recites the Harley history--how the company almost went under, how it was rescued by smart technical and marketing changes. Each one says the Harley is part of his self-definition, and each one talks about Harley culture. Joans transcribes their exact words, sometimes even repeating what they say. (For example, one informant who "was in a perfect position to reflect upon Harley culture" is quoted as saying, "Yes, there is a Harley culture.") I got very antsy.

Then, suddenly, with Chapter Six ("Women Jamming the Wind"), the book perks up. Now we get the book that Joans evidently wanted to write. She quickly differentiates Lady Passengers and Passionate Passengers from "The Biker Chick"--the half-naked, leather-clad babe draped over bikes in ads and calendars and magazines. Joans interviewed only one Biker Chick, a nervy young woman who'll jump on the back of a bike with a rider she scarcely knows, surrendering her safety or even her life for his approval and his passport to a life of adventure.

Joans is more intrigued by the new types of women who ride: the Woman Biker, who both rides and wrenches; the Woman Rider, who wrenches a little; the Lady Biker, who rides but does not wrench. The Lady Bikers depend most on male support, and Jayne Kelly de Lopez--a glamorous lawyer and mother of six--is Joans' best example. The women are thoughtful and not repetitive, and some are clearly dedicated to mentoring each other. They teach each other to ride, laugh at "female complaints" while they're riding together, attend each other's births and keep a protective eye on new and vulnerable young women. One of them redefines "feminine" as "just being yourself," but adds that it means choosing your own style and attitude, including "being aggressive if you want," or even better, "competent and aggressive."

This section reads like a memoir, although anthropologists like Joans might call it a description of methodology. Joans is usually more descriptive than analytical, and especially with the women, she's more a reporter than a judge. Once among the Harley women, she becomes the engaging hero of her own narrative--an outspoken young woman who took off for California in the 1960s and joined a counterculture commune but didn't throw away her middle-class roots. She earned a PhD., became a poet and activist, and much later hooked up with Ken, a Texas-born Vietnam vet who takes her for some great adventures in the last big section of Bike Lust.

Bernie and Dick McKay. From Bike Lust.

A "RUN" INCLUDES all the preparations for a heroic journey, as well as unpoetic chafed legs, bugs in the teeth and "brain buckets" (helmets, required by law in California, and reviled by bikers). Riders in black leather and helmets all look alike, so a woman can get the same respect and freedom from harassment that a man has always had. Joans' informant and friend, Debby Lindblom, likes plowing down the street in full gear on a Harley because it makes pedestrians "scurry." She can look as serious, fierce and shit-kicking as any Harley man.

Joans finds that biker runs are changing. Her first Redwood Run, in the mid-1990s, features a "pit" (reminiscent of literary descents to the underworld), surrounded by a ring of men holding up signs saying, "Show us your tits!" By the late 1990s, the run has changed from a mostly male orgy with ol' ladies and groupies to an almost-family picnic, with wives and children. And though there are still wet T-shirt contests, now there are also wet shorts contests, in which uncomfortable-looking men are hosed down and judged by women.

The last part of Joans' book is a celebration of strong women: the throngs of riders at runs and the 500-plus women of Dykes on Bikes, the wildly diverse, beautiful and powerful contingent that starts the Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade every year in San Francisco. A lot of these women wear standard biker gear, but other "Dykes on Bikes" are outrageously femmy--in purple panties, pointy-heeled boots, lacy bras, or nothing but thongs. Joans, who rode with them, loved every minute.

The best of Bike Lust is a story about defiant women who claim to have made it on their own, yet Joans is the only female rider who gives credit to the women's movement for opening the road. Her book would be a better read, I think, if she had organized it as a genuine memoir that began with herself on a bike instead of first leading us gingerly through the lives of biker men. It's almost as if she began writing a novel without a hero, twitching and repeating herself until she discovered midway through the book that she was rightly the protagonist of her own tale.

Another uncertainty: sometimes she writes like an academic, while at others, she imitates (a bit awkwardly) the grammar and style of her biker informants--overplaying, a bit, the role of the badass bitch. Yet, it's a role she makes enticing. Joans can be a lively storyteller, and she made me very curious about how it would feel to ride a Harley and "jam the wind." Besides, she tells us that if a woman sits just right, a Harley will give her some very good vibrations. After reading Bike Lust, I think I would like to hear us roar.

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