Highlights from this issue...

The way we were
Founding editor Linda Gardiner looks back at twenty years in the editor's chair

AS I HAND OVER THE WOMEN'S REVIEW to its new editor in chief, Amy Hoffman, I've been thinking back to our early days and the changes we've seen over the years. What seem most tangibly and immediately different are the material conditions of publishing. In 1983 we had no personal computers (we were unusually fortunate in having access to a text-editing program on the mainframe at Wellesley College, our host institution then and now). Even fax machines were a thing of the future. Every month the manuscripts--typed by the authors and manually corrected or retyped by the editor--were hand-delivered to the typesetter, who then retyped them all over again. We collected the output in the form of long strips of photo paper, which we then manually cut up and pasted onto boards to create the layout. Our first printer was in Brattleboro, Vermont, exactly two and a quarter hours from our offices. Every month we drove the boards up to Brattleboro, watched as they were filmed and made into plates and, many hours later, saw the thousands of newsprint copies rolling off the presses. Then we loaded the (literally) tons of paper by hand into the rental van and, somewhere around midnight, sometimes in a snowstorm, drove them all back and unloaded them. For the next three days we did nothing but label each copy, sort, bundle and bag them, and finally haul them off to the post office.

Well, we haven't done all of that for a long time. Technological advances have eliminated much of the to-and-fro, fetch-and-carry. While the workload never seems to diminish, the work itself has been transformed in ways none of us could have predicted.

It's harder to sum up the less tangible changes. In 1983, although the second wave of the women's movement had been swelling for over a decade, to publish writing by and about women was still perceived as peculiar. I remember calling a colleague who edited an academic journal to pick his brains on some detail: When I explained the purpose of our forthcoming publication, his baffled reaction was "But do you really think there's a need for anything like that?" Fortunately for the enterprise, women, in growing numbers, thought there was. Tremendous excitement greeted the announcement of the Review; with no money for publicity, we relied mostly on word of mouth, as did practically every other feminist enterprise, and we generated over a thousand subscribers and over $10,000 in personal donations before the first issue appeared. The movement was doing our marketing for us, and we joined a vibrant feminist publishing community whose common goal was, quite simply, to change the world with words.

The staff of the Women's Review, ca. 1989: Anita McClellan (still here!), Linda Gardiner, and Ellen Cantarow.

That moment has long since passed. Of the many feminist presses and magazines that sprung up in the 1970s and '80s, only a handful remain, struggling for visibility and readership. We did change the world, but it changed us too.

Some of the classics of the new movement had already been published by 1983--books by Kate Millett, bell hooks, Germaine Greer and others--but our first year saw reviews of Cynthia Enloe's Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives; Barbara Smith's Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; Rosalind Pollack Petchesky's Abortion and Woman's Choice; Tatiana Mamonova's Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union; and Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider.

Now, while titles on topics unimaginable in 1983 arrive in the Review's offices daily--women mathematicians, women bullfighters, women in Palestine or South Korea, queer studies, disability studies--fewer writers aspire to produce the kinds of innovative books we once reviewed in almost every issue. Feminist scholars rarely address their writing to readers outside academia, and economic changes have made it harder than ever for independent writers to find time to craft original, wide-ranging, carefully researched work. It's not accidental that the titles I listed above were published by small presses: Kitchen Table, Longman and Crossing Press, all out of business, and Beacon and South End Press, two of a shrinking community of independent publishers. The books we review now come largely from academic presses and the few surviving trade houses with an interest in writing by women.

If the ground has already been broken, it's unfair to expect groundbreaking work: These days originality, diversity, and breadth reside in the totality of what's being published, rarely in any one book. But once upon a time, it seems, everyone was reading and arguing about the same key books and authors. Now we're fragmented into many smaller communities, and while much has been gained, something that inspired many of us to found feminist enterprises of all kinds has been lost.

The Golden Age is always a myth, but after this many years in the editor's chair perhaps I can be forgiven for a little nostalgia tinged with disillusionment. The tide of feminism in the US has been ebbing; but the longer history of feminism, and of feminist publishing, reminds us that the tide does turn. When it does, I know that The Women's Review of Books will still be there, swimming with the sharks and surfing the waves as they break. I plan to be around to see it.

Good women
Being Good: Women's Moral Values in Early America by Martha Saxton. New York: Hill & Wang, 2003, 380 pp., $30.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Adele Logan Alexander

IN BEING GOOD, Martha Saxton explores the ways in which various American societies have defined morality, in particular, women's virtue, and the consequences for those who diverged from the "straight and narrow." Saxton explains why and how this moral quest among women of differing races and classes truly matters.

To accomplish this complicated task, Saxton compares black, white, and native American women in seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts; eighteenth-century Tidewater, Virginia; and nineteenth-century frontier Missouri, especially St. Louis. Examining the cycles of women's lives from childhood into puberty, through adulthood (with and without male partners, with and without children), into old age, Saxton shows the "lifelong interrelationship among women's behavior, feelings, and the moral system designed to control them."

Little has been written previously (certainly little that I know of) that compares the various experiences and expectations of women in these societies, and how the ideologies that shaped their lives differed from one place and century to the next. These evolving standards, and the perceived manifestations of women's "goodness" and conversely "badness" both reflected and influenced the development of the new nation into the country we know today. Although Saxton discovers layers of privilege, with power grounded in upper-class status, whiteness, and maleness, elite white women, always repressed in at least some ways by their men, often benefited (as they still do) from the subjugation of others of their sex. In fact, especially in the South, upper-class white women gladly accepted the comforts of privilege, even at the expense of any substantive degree of personal empowerment.

Saxton begins by examining women in and around Boston during the mid- to late 1600s. Puritan girls, steeped in doctrines of original sin, were educated to obey their elders and ultimately to be docile with their spouses. Their church trained them to seek and cast out sin and wickedness within themselves and others. Although chastity was a central moral criterion for female goodness, sex within marriage played a key role. Domestic happiness, supposedly insured by a vigorous sex life, reflected the higher purpose of loving God. Says Saxton, "Puritans saw marriage in a new, hopeful light, an institution indispensable to creating godly societies."

"Good mothers" raised self-denying, virtuous, obedient children with a harsh and seemingly unloving approach. As Puritan women aged, and were often widowed, they gained increased moral authority, presumably because sexuality, it was argued, no longer threatened proper behavior. The paired themes of sin and salvation loomed large throughout Puritan women's lives, as they were considered ordained by God to bear a disproportionate share of suffering, yet also godlier than men. They could sometimes claim the moral high ground.

Saxton looks beyond white women and their relationships with God and family to examine the tense relationships between Puritans and Indians and between Puritans and Africans. To the Puritans, their interactions with those "outsiders," which were determined by racist stereotypes, seemed to reinforce white people's purity and virtue. Although many people imagine that most "Africans" in the New World lived as slaves in the antebellum South, Saxton shows that though colonial Massachusetts was hardly a "slave society," it was "a society with slaves." Male and female blacks, most of them enslaved under law by the 1670s, were accused and convicted of crimes, especially crimes involving sexual misconduct, in numbers that far exceeded their small percentage in the community. Essentially, Saxton argues, Africans were effectively excluded "from moral membership in the community." But among whites as well as blacks, sexual misconduct in general, and adultery in particular, was a far more serious matter for women.

Unlike colonial Massachusetts, in eighteenth-century eastern Virginia the Anglican church dominated religious, and therefore moral thinking. By the early Federal period, the area's population was roughly half of British ancestry and half of West African ancestry. With few exceptions, the black people were all slaves. Although in Massachusetts hard work seen as a virtue for all, in Virginia, those who could afford not to work did not work. Early Virginia's elite white women learned quickly to hate anyone who was different from them. They exploited Africans and benefited from their labor, while the rapid displacement of the local Indians provided additional land and new wealth. Like their men, elite white women frolicked and enjoyed themselves. Physical labor, especially in the fields, was a necessary activity only for the poor, especially the enslaved black poor. "Slave girls," Saxton says, "grew up learning that their role was to work hard in a society where work was devalued."

Young white women in Virginia learned early that being attractive to and flirtatious with men was a virtue in their pleasure-loving society. As Saxton writes: "A good time was its own justification." For these women, virtue consisted of individuality and self-fulfillment through intimate friendships, in contrast to Puritan self-repression and participation in godly community. Virginia's white females understood well the defining differences between themselves and what others of their race considered the brutish, promiscuous African women living around and among them. As a result, Saxton says, "black women's presumed lasciviousness made them acutely vulnerable to sexual predation, and this, of course, confirmed white suspicions about their sexual standards and behavior."

Saxton argues that in the early American South black women sought to retain a complex network of traditional West African values, especially concerning the elevated status of motherhood. They did that in a patriarchal slave society that tolerated, even encouraged, interracial sex--but only, of course, when the man was white and the woman black. That formula maintained and even reinforced the young South's "proper" racial and sexual hierarchies. Black women's perceived sexual willingness, Saxton explains, "justified their status as prey." Marriage in the slave community was never officially recognized, but with the blessing of masters, "marriages," in fact, were common. They were respected, however, only insofar as they served the master's personal, sexual, and economic purposes. In relationships with their children, eighteenth-century white Virginia women moved away from familial relationships pervasively characterized by harsh correction to ones based in overt tenderness. Black women, on the other hand, believed their children, especially daughters, needed "tough love" to survive the hardships that life would throw in their paths.

The book's third section, to which Saxton assigns the greatest weight, examines nineteenth-century Missouri. She depicts a society that superimposed East Coast values onto what remained largely a frontier. Missouri's residents included white people of French, German, and English ancestry, Catholics as well as Protestants. It was a slave state bordered by free territory, where European settlements bordered Indian ones. Slavery, governmental policies towards Indians, and a variety of national and religious traditions contributed to a complex moral climate. Violence was often close at hand: in whites' bellicose interactions with Indians, the inherent lawlessness of slavery, brutality towards individual slaves, and ever-present threats of insurrection. I yearned to read here about interactions between Indians and African Americans, but found nothing.

In this society, Saxton says, "Feelings achieved new validity in moral and family life." She calls this altered perspective "sentimental individualism," generated by the post-revolutionary quest for personal freedom and the pursuit of happiness. In this environment, Saxton argues, "national purposes depended on the elevation of the female character.… [M]aternal love replaced original sin as the origin of the core of virtue in the American citizenry." These new national moral goals, of course, only empowered privileged white people. Saxton explains that in nineteenth-century Missouri, "the white family's redeeming moral value acquired an extra shimmer of reflected purity from the widespread representation of its supposed negative, the slave family."

White nineteenth-century women in Missouri were expected to be financially dependent on men and to find satisfactions in their homes, marriages, and children. In contrast, slave women had to develop a strong sense of autonomy, harden their feelings towards their spouses and children lest they be separated, and learn how to survive on their own. In this climate, black women were not usually subservient to the men with whom they lived. "Marriage" did not define them as it did most white women. The culture that encouraged dependency in white women stimulated self-reliance and survival strategies among black women: "Liberty, among the most frequently invoked words in the antebellum period meant for white women emotional freedom of expression. For slave girls it meant something much more tangible, the freedom to live with their families... unmolested." For most of them, however, that hope was not realistic. Black women experienced frequent, forced separations from their close kin, and childhoods curtailed by work and sexual maturity.

Saxton sums up the "false dichotomies" between black and white women's sexuality and power, writing that "white women's power depended absolutely on a perception of their chastity [while]... black women's power existed in spite of persistent attacks on their sexual integrity." Whites believed that black women had no concerns about sexual purity, and childbearing economically benefited slaveowners, especially after the 1808 ban on the importing of slaves from Africa. The sexual exploitation of female slaves often began when they were quite young. Many white women thought that black women and white men were sexually free. But of course for white men sexual freedom was part of being full human beings with political rights, capable of self-actualization. That kind of freedom was almost beyond black women's imagining.

Saxton's sources are appropriately rich and varied: letters, diaries, newspapers, court records, oral histories, and more. I suspect that the preponderance of material available about elite white women, as compared to that about poor whites, blacks, and native Americans, frustrated her. Upper-class white women receive more attention than others, especially native Americans, in Being Good. But, to her credit, she does try.

I question Saxton's use of the word sold in reference to indentured servants, which reinforces the commonly held belief that there was little difference between slavery and servitude. One of the unique characteristics of American slavery was that the ownership of the person was total and perpetual, carrying over from one generation to the next. In contrast, servitude in the colonies was limited in years and never inherited. One's services could be sold for a period of time, but not the person herself. Most indentured servants were white. White people in early Virginia, or anywhere else in the American South, however, were never slaves. Saxton knows this, but her usage may mislead readers.

Saxton makes a significant contribution to the extremely difficult field of cross-race analysis in women's history. She has set herself a challenging goal: to examine women's morality rather than a more quantifiable subject and then to examine "goodness" across race and class lines, as well as halfway across the country, over three centuries. "Separate moral codes for prosperous whites and all others has permitted the dominant group not to give weight to the critiques of those who have profited less... from the economic and political system," she writes in conclusion. She effectively debunks the idea of an undifferentiated "women's sphere" and shows instead how time, place, religion, and especially class and race shaped both the ideologies and the realities of female morality. More significantly, she shows why and just how much these factors mattered and have even carried over to shape contemporary American society.

Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston, photographed in Chicago by Carl Van Vechten, 1934. From Wrapped in Rainbows.

Iconography
Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd. New York: Scribner, 2003, 528 pp., $30.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

THE CRITIC IS WISE, upon receiving a book for review, to toss the cover of that book aside: thoughtfully out of reach for preservation should the volume be fit to travel from the stack of things read on duty to a spot in her pleasure library; or (if the critic is me) relegated to the black hole next to her desk, atop other detritus of the trade, including (but not limited to) other book covers, bound galleys not worth the paper they're printed upon, and semi-literate press releases thick with gushing, bribed blurbs.

Disposal did not cross my mind when contemplating the cover of this latest book, Wrapped in Rainbows, the new biography of Zora Neale Hurston. Never mind what is said about judging, books, and covers: the exterior of this tome poses a vexing riddle. Is it real? Or rather, is she real? She is, one presumes, Zora. But here she is shown in full color: a face ripped out of the sepia past, made contemporary with honey colored skin and red lips framing the immortal smile. Zora as she may have looked in dreamy Technicolor gives a shock to the historical sense. Forgiving the rather literal rendering of the book's title, the cover image seems perfectly to animate the hefty proposition (and dilemma) of the pages within.

Hurston at home in New York, demonstrating the Crow Dance. From Wrapped in Rainbows.

The first Hurston biography in over 25 years bears a peculiar burden. Its subject, whose existence was once little more than a rumor, was this year commemorated on a United States postage stamp. Marched out of anonymity and into the canon by brigades of feminist, womanist, and multiculturalist culture warriors, Zora Neale Hurston is now Zora-Icon. Everyone is on a first-name basis with Zora-Icon, and everyone knows her story. The colorized Zora of Wrapped in Rainbows seems perfect for a moment when Frida and Virginia, those other one-name heroines of the second wave, suffer on the big screen, all furrowed brows and pursed lips in a fever of feminine creation. Zora: The Movie will have all the crucial scenes: There she goes dancing around Harlem measuring Negro heads; now she is tromping through the American South toting pistol and tape recorder; she trembles with visions, seduces every man, woman, and child in sight, makes the scene and then disappears entirely, lost in cruel poverty. Ironically, Zora-Icon is the fruit of the earnest toil of a past generation whose rediscovery, or as this book prefers in its hagiographic mode, "resurrection" of Hurston was done against the tide of a hostile mainstream. It was necessary in order to validate the very existence of a black feminist lineage. The famous mandate from Alice Walker's essay "Looking for Zora" encapsulates the task: "We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if we do, it is our duty as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children. If necessary bone by bone." Now that the work of the bone collector is done (Walker took her own words literally, locating the unmarked grave of Hurston and providing it with a headstone), the children find the remains perfect for ancestor worship, in a sort of cultural necrophilia. A heroine whose tumultuous life is high on entertainment value is inevitably flattened in death. Zora is a byword for sassy, romantic, black girl bohemia, the Queen of the Harlem Renaissance. She has become a wax-figure mascot. Her legacy is determined, her place in history confirmed, and the ways to feel about her fixed.

The untroubled afterlife of an icon is a thing Hurston herself might have found quite pleasing, so active was she in the production of personal mythology during her own lifetime. Perhaps this is a luxurious gripe, made by a critic born after the first Hurston biography of 1977, who has never known a world without Zora, who knew that face on the postal stamp before she was old enough to understand it. But this is the point: How might a new biography of Zora Neale Hurston complicate the life of an icon for an audience that takes her existence for granted? As with all biographies, the main object is to make the subject come alive, in motion and in color.

Boyd ascends to the task with impressive confidence. A seasoned journalist and former arts editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she writes with an ease, a grace likely honed by years under the pressure of deadlines. Her life of Hurston is achieved with equal urgency, and with the vigor of fresh discovery. Also refreshing is the absence of the trappings one might expect from a biographer writing after the triumph of cultural theory. Imagine lost or future theses on Hurston read through the lens of the various disciplines: feminist psychoanalysis making much of her fraught relationships with men; performance theory going wild with ever-shifting identities; revisionist anthropology questioning her methods in the South with that gun and tape recorder, or the veracity of her findings in Haiti, where she became an initiate of Voodoo. Any of these takes might be compelling, but such biographies also risk obliterating the lives they are meant to tell, leaving a paper doll where a person once stood. Boyd's book is not the work of a scholar pale from years chasing wraiths in the archives. In fact, its shape owes much to the genre of long profiles in glossy woman's magazines. This is a populist Zora, a book to be devoured by reading groups. Ably summarizing and contextualizing Hurston's major works, Boyd provides no fresh readings. Perhaps that is the overdue work of some future scholar: The party line on Hurston has changed so little since the middle eighties and is so widely agreed upon that students can consult online cheat sheets.

Hurston at a football game in Durham in 1939. Cover photo from Wrapped in Rainbows.

Wrapped in Rainbows insists, above all, on being a good story. Taking cues from its subject--a master prose stylist--the pages seem blessed with the presence of Zora herself. In fact, page after page features the actual words of Zora, through excerpted letters and substantial quotations from Hurston's memoir and her autobiographical fictions. At first, one is startled, though pleased, to find a biographer so at one with her subject. Boyd has crafted a narrative voice perfectly suited to Hurston's life and work; high-toned, elegant hyperbole slips into honeychile vernacular. The product seems a fulfillment of the benediction (quoted by Boyd in a recent interview) from Hurston's first biographer, Robert Hemenway, who said that a new life should be written, and by a black woman. The reasons for this are most evident in Boyd's language, and leave one to wonder if she has not indeed initiated a whole new model, ready for perfection, of how the lives of black women might be written. The intimacy achieved is admirable, but after a while one wants to feel some friction between the two. There is no resistance. Boyd seems to have written a book with full cooperation, as if she were a ghostwriter hired to tell the authorized story. (The book is dedicated "to Zora Neale Hurston, for choosing me.")

Boyd follows Hurston trustingly, acknowledging the obvious omissions and half-truths of Hurston's memoirs with the wink of a co-conspirator. While painting her as the ultimate yarn-spinner, inventive dreamer, and teller of tall tales, Boyd takes her neat episodes at face value, including her account of her life as the fulfillment of prophetic visions experienced during childhood--although mystical beliefs aside, Hurston's visionary narrative has always seemed, to me at least, a literary device as artful as the one for which Their Eyes Were Watching God is now famous. Hurston, who in her fictions gave permission to tell the black, female, Southern life, also invented the convention by which all fictions black, female, and Southern are read by the wider society as wholly autobiographical. At the hands of Boyd, she suffers this herself; her words are taken as gospel. To paraphrase a Hurston quip: her tongue is in Boyd's mouth. Quotations are so frequent and extensive that Boyd's narrative is almost ventriloquism. The voice of the biographer and her struggle to comprehend her subject is completely lost.

Perhaps Zora was her own best biographer, and iconographer, and there are no words better than her own. In order to succeed as a black female professional writer before such a thing existed, Hurston had to become her own icon, her own myth, writing and creating herself while being subject to the often vicious creations of those for whom she was a novelty and a nuisance. By virtue of her times, Hurston's capacity for the real was compromised. The new treatment doesn't trouble Hurston's myth: Boyd has written, in part, a biography of Zora-Icon. If a critic wanted trouble, she might call it post-feminist. A post-feminist biography of Zora-Icon needn't wring its hands over questions of truth, representation, and subjectivity. It doesn't go pinching itself the whole time to be sure she really exists. It quotes at liberty because no one said it better. It doesn't see the need to make Zora into a cause, but could easily lend itself to making her into a movie. Boyd doesn't apologize for any of it, and one feels that Hurston wouldn't either. She might respond to the whole melancholic industry of Zora ancestor worship with a quote from the 1928 essay "How It Feels To Be Colored Me":

There is no great sorrow damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.... No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. (p. 172)

Zora would reject the theoretical weeping over her bones, and want her life to remain a good story: Her bones are the words themselves, words so improbable that they still shock, and you wonder, how she could have said it, how she could have dared, and under what reprisals? This biography, with her words scattered so liberally throughout, sends you back to the work itself.

This woman, identity unknown, has often been misidentified at Zora Neale Hurston. From Wrapped in Rainbows.

On the new postage stamp, Zora is shown in full color. It is a famous picture. She is looking over her shoulder out of the corner of her eyes, head cocked and mouth open wide in laughter. Colorized, she floats in front of a blazing blue, purple, and orange sunset. The same image in black and white is the one I associate with my first memories of finding her, on my mother's shelves, on the cover of the post-resurrection 1979 volume, I Love Myself When I am Laughing and Then Again When I am Looking Mean and Impressive. The title, Boyd tells us, quotes Zora looking at herself, writing to Carl Van Vechten about a recent sitting that produced another famous portrait: Zora, the serious modernist, contemplative in front of a graphic backdrop. It is fitting that Boyd's most original contribution is the proper identification of yet another famous portrait which, as recently as the 2002 collection of letters edited by Carla Kaplan has routinely been misidentified as Hurston. Boyd sees the historian's mistake as a posthumous trick, Zora-Everywoman giving life to the anonymous from beyond the grave. One might also see the woman, anonymous again, as the opposite of Zora-Icon, some trace of what can never be known or collected. Studying the misidentified, impenetrable sepia photograph, one replaces it on the mantel, an ancestral portrait to be regarded from a comfortable distance.

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Exploitation as cool
Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart. New York: Perseus Publishing, 2003, 239 pages, $25.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Jean Kilbourne

THERE HAS NEVER BEEN a propaganda effort as prolonged and successful as that of advertising in the past fifty years or so. Alissa Quart's book is a welcome addition to the increasing body of literature on this topic, and the first I know of to focus exclusively on teenagers. As Quart points out, marketing to teens has existed since the word teenager was coined by Madison Avenue in 1941. But there has been an exponential increase in the amount and intensity of advertising that teenagers are exposed to, even in their schools, as well as on the streets and in their homes. In 1989 corporations spent about $600 million on marketing to kids. In 1999 they spent twenty times that amount. In addition, marketers spend billions of dollars on psychological research designed to get them into the heads and thus the wallets of young people.

Even more damaging, however, is the extent to which teens unwittingly collude with these powerful interests and end up branding themselves, often in the name of rebellion and self-expression. As an ad in Advertising Age, the major industry publication, says, "These days kids don't want to grow up to be athletes, comedians or movie stars. They want to be highly leveraged brands." It is this corporate colonization of teenagers' hearts and minds that Quart describes best.

Unlike older Americans, today's teens have been the targets of massive marketing campaigns almost literally since birth. "There will be a first step, a first word and, of course, a first French fry," says a recent McDonald's ad, one of several that Quart uses to illustrate her points. Research has found that at the age of six months, babies begin to recognize corporate logos. Not surprisingly, by adulthood, the average American can identify 1000 corporate logos (but only ten plants). There are two main reasons why children and teens are so attractive to advertisers. First, they have a lot of disposable income and are more than willing to part with it to buy CDs, clothing, cosmetics, and more. American teens spent $155 billion on such products in 2000 alone. Even more important, however, is the fact that they are developing brand loyalty, a concept of great importance to manufacturers and advertisers.

Children begin asking for specific brands almost as soon as they can talk. This "nag factor," as advertisers call it, is an important marketing strategy. Children are encouraged to lobby their parents day and night. An ad for an online store features a baby and the copy, "He'll make you laugh. He'll make you cry. He'll make you buy him lots of stuff." According to a poll commissioned by the Center for a New American Dream, the average American child aged 12 to 17 will ask his parents nine times for a product he wants, even in the face of repeated denials. Fifty-five percent of kids said their parents would eventually give in.

Children and teens are not only constantly assaulted by ads on television, radio, billboards, the Internet, and in magazines, they are also captive audiences for advertisements in their schools. Quart vividly describes how underfunded school systems, desperate for cash, sell their students to corporations. While soft drinks ruin the health of children and contribute to the epidemic of obesity, their sale in schools funds sports and extracurricular activities. A boy in Georgia was suspended from school for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt on "Coke Day." Schools force students to watch "news" programs larded with commercials in exchange for basic cable equipment. Corporations provide schools with curricular materials straight out of Saturday Night Live, such as a nutrition curriculum from McDonald's and an environmental curriculum from Exxon.

Teens' recreational spaces have been taken over by advertisers. Marketers hire young people to infiltrate communities of other young people, to hang out at the malls and skateboard parks, finding out what is trendy and cool. They report back to headquarters, where rebellion and originality can be processed into edgy ads for beer and burgers, shampoo and cigarettes. Quart takes us on a guided tour of the worlds of these teen "trendspotters," as well as the world of the adult "cool hunters" who exploit them and who shamelessly admit that they are willing to make kids feel bad about themselves in order to sell products.

In one of the most intriguing chapters, Quart analyzes the change in films targeting young people in just the past fifteen years. Once the stories of outsiders (such as 1985's The Breakfast Club), most films for young people these days are paeans to consummate insiders--sports stars, cheerleaders, rich kids and beauties (Clueless, She's All That, Bring It On). Many of these films feature young women who are rescued from outsider status by the fashion advice of more popular peers. Transformation in these films is brought about by makeovers not morals, costume changes not courage. These films, basically long versions of commercials or MTV clips, are designed to celebrate consumption and materialism.

Even worse, however, than this invasion of educational and recreational space is the advertisers' invasion of teens' private spaces. As Quart says, "brands have infiltrated preteens and adolescents' inner lives." Branded teens tend to be self-loathing, since the message at the heart of most advertising is that you can never really measure up. Quart explores how girls are seduced into eating disorders and cosmetic surgery in an attempt to look like models, while there is increasing pressure on boys to be like their favorite video game action heroes. Teens are made to feel that products are their friends and corporations their allies. This is especially poignant and perilous at a time when personal and familial relationships are so often bleak and fragile. As young people seek meaning, identity, and connection in brands, individuality and imagination are undermined, idealism is perverted, and a sense of political powerlessness is embedded deep in their psyches. Perhaps most tragically, they learn to mistake consumer choice for free will, fashion statements for freedom.

Quart, a journalist, makes a powerful case that a commodified youth culture is dangerous as well as depressing. She explores forms of branding that go beyond advertising, such as the pressure on young people to get into "brand-name universities" and the new phenomenon of teen "memoirists" who trade their secrets for celebrity and end up as packaged as their books. Many teens who can't get published post their traumas and confessions on websites, some with cameras that capture them living their lives, posing, sometimes half-dressed. As Quart says, "It makes sense to these teens to merchandise their bodies and experiences."

Although Quart's style is smart and sassy and her book is not meant to be academic, I wished for notes and references and for more depth. Her conclusions are based on interviews with teens, most of whom seem to be white and middle- or upper-class. There are huge numbers of teens who don't have the luxury of worrying about getting into college at all, let alone into a brand-name college. I found myself wondering what differences she might have discovered with other ethnic groups and classes. She does compare the quinceanera, the Latino cultural celebration of a girl's fifteenth birthday, with lavish bar and bat mitzvah parties and Sweet Sixteen parties, but I wondered how this commercialization of a rite of passage manifests itself in poor communities. Interestingly, most of the working class teens and teens of color featured in the book are activists working to change the system.

Quart ends the book with anecdotes about young people who are fighting back and resisting exploitation in many different ways, ranging from protesting in the streets and in the schools to creating alternative forms of entertainment. Although these stories are inspiring, they can create the impression that individual effort will solve this problem. In truth, the commercialization of our culture is increasingly a public health problem. As such, it can only be addressed by changing the environment, which requires collective action and legislation. Some school districts are refusing to sell their students to advertisers. On a grander scale, some European countries have entirely banned advertising that targets children. Another legislative possibility would be to end the tax deductibility of advertising and use some of the money to fund media literacy in our schools. It is, of course, important to get corporate hucksters out of our schools. More important, though, we must adequately fund public education and vote people into office who value children as more than consumers. We must also combat the widescale deregulation of consumer protection and antitrust laws (leading to increased concentration of media ownership) begun by Reagan and continuing with Bush.

The influence of advertising and marketing on our lives is far, far more pernicious now than when I began studying it over thirty years ago. However, there has also been a positive change and that is the proliferation of organizations and coalitions that have sprung up to counter the power of the advertisers, such as Commercial Alert, Dads & Daughters, and the Adbusters Media Foundation. I wish Quart had included a list of resources in her book. References to books such as Naomi Klein's bestseller No Logo, Robert McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy, and David Korten's When Corporations Rule the World would buttress Quart's arguments and broaden the discussion.

Alissa Quart has written a frightening and important book. Branded is the perfect title, since it captures the sinister nature of what corporate America is doing to teens today--searing them, owning them, herding them. It is hard to imagine a more important mission than rescuing our children from this soul-destroying, collective fate.

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Emmeline Pankhurst, Boston, October 1910. From Emmeline Pankhurst.

The most prominant suffragette
Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography June Purvis. New York: Routledge, 2002, 448 pp., $30.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Barbara Winslow

EMMELINE PANKHURST (1858-1928), the leader of England's militant suffragette movement before World War One, has joined the pantheon of Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher, Florence Nightingale, and Queen Elizabeth I in BBC2's recent popularity poll of Britain's greatest leaders. Emmeline, along with her daughter Christabel, is forever associated with militant suffragism and the slogan "Votes for Women," and has often been characterized as the woman ultimately responsible for winning women's suffrage; a statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, the park adjacent to Parliament, honors her alone of women suffrage leaders.

June Purvis, a prominent historian of women's suffrage, has written a passionate, partisan, well-documented and political biography of England's most prominent suffragette. (My own book, Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism is part of Purvis' Women and Gender History series.)

She writes that she hopes to "capture the magic and complexity of [Pankhurst's] personality as well as the double burden she faced as a political leader and mother" and to do justice to this "feminine feminist who was both of her time and before her time."

For too long, perceptions of Emmeline Pankhurst have been based upon the writings of her middle daughter Sylvia, whose books, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals and The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst: The Suffragette Struggle for Women's Citizenship, a combination of history, memoir and Mommie Dearest, portray Pankhurst as a gifted but ruthless leader, a woman who put the cause of woman's suffrage before that of family, and a less than loving mother who turned her back on her husband's commitment to socialism. Subsequent accounts, such as George Dangerfield's, The Strange Death Of Liberal England, and David Mitchell's The Fighting Pankhursts: A Study in Tenacity, although based in part on Sylvia Pankhurst's writings, are misogynistic and patronizing. Purvis' book gives us a different picture of a brilliant political tactician, charismatic leader, and loving wife and mother grappling with the challenges of combining political activism and motherhood.

Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in prison uniform, October 1908. From Emmeline Pankhurst.

Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst was the daughter and granddaughter of liberal reformers. She fell in love with and married the older, radical, but never financially or politically successful barrister Richard Pankhurst. Purvis describes how the Pankhursts moved from Liberalism to the democratic socialism of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and how Pankhurst's forays into the slums of Manchester forged her feminist consciousness. Quoting from unpublished letters, Purvis affectingly describes Pankhurst's deep grief after the death of her beloved husband and her desperate attempts as an impoverished widow to educate her children and find meaningful employment as well as political fulfillment. This is the best and most impassioned part of the book. Purvis' political narrative includes fascinating and powerful sketches of Pankhurst's complicated and intense relationships with family, WSPU comrades, friends, foes, politicians, and world leaders, as well as analyses of suffragette tactics, strategy, and theory.

Purvis recounts Pankhurst's long involvement in the struggle for women's suffrage and her growing impatience at the inertia of the constitutionalists of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). In response, Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Originally, she wanted to connect women's suffrage with the democratic socialism of the ILP, but in the course of suffrage agitation, Pankhurst moved politically to the right. The WSPU is best known for initiating the policy of "militancy"--that is, challenging the complacency of Edwardian England. Suffragettes (the name given to the militants who forced themselves into the public sphere) confronted politicians, held enormous demonstrations and parades, engaged in acts of vandalism, got arrested, and held hunger strikes--they even confronted the king. As suffrage militancy escalated, Pankhurst and her elder daughter, Christabel, exercised political control over the WSPU, forcing out dissidents, even expelling her socialist daughter, Sylvia, and exiling her other dissident daughter, Adela, to Australia. Once war was declared in 1914, Pankhurst and Christabel stopped their suffrage militancy and became ardent patriots. Pankhurst became a leading anti-Bolshevik, even traveling to Russia to demonstrate against the Russian Revolution. She died in 1928 while running as a Conservative candidate for Parliament and never reconciled with her daughters Sylvia and Adela.

In Purvis' view, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were political forerunners of second wave radical feminists:

We cannot understand Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst unless we see them as feminists who… earlier, pioneered… concerns--the power of men over women in a male-defined world, the recognition that while men retained a monopoly of power, socialism would be just as disadvantageous to women as capitalism, the importance of a woman-only movement as a way for women to articulate their demands and raise their consciousness, the commonalities all women share despite their differences, and the primacy of putting women, rather than the considerations of say, social class, political affiliation or socialism first. (p. 6)

Purvis emphasizes that Pankhurst's feminism "embraced all women, stressing gender not class issues, recognizing that divisions between women perpetuated male power… it was a feminism that put women first." This does not convince me that the feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst or the WSPU "embraced all women," or "put women first." Intent upon portraying Pankhurst in a positive light, Purvis does not acknowledge the thirty years of feminist scholarship that have challenged the notion of an all-embracing "woman first" feminism. In the first place, the WSPU did not support votes for all women. Basing its claim to equal rights on their roles as builders of the nation and empire, the WSPU demanded the vote on the same privilege as men claimed--in other words, class- and nation-based suffrage, which by definition excluded the majority of women in England and in the empire.

Purvis describes a meeting in Chicago, Illinois, in 1913, at which Pankhurst addressed over 2,000 African American women and men at the Institutional Church on South Dearborn Street. According to Purvis, Pankhurst's speech aroused

"volatile emotions" amongst the black women when she described the "good they could accomplish for their race by working for the reforms their white sisters advocated." Emmeline's world-view was that of a common sisterhood between all women; furthermore, she assumed she could speak on behalf of all women, black and white, poor and rich. (p. 236)

While "the WSPU did include racial oppression in their rhetoric," Purvis writes, its "racial analysis was always subsidiary to that of gender, and like many feminist analyses of the time, much less well developed." What is jarring about this example is Purvis' failure to comment on the racial implications of Pankhurst's point of view. She does not discuss the WSPU's position on racial sisterhood; the WSPU did not support extending the franchise to Britain's colonial subjects, and there is no evidence that the WSPU championed racial equality among women.

Purvis' characterization of Pankhurst as a feminist after 1914 is also unconvincing. Unlike other women's suffrage groups, the WSPU ended its campaign for the vote so as not to interfere with the war effort. According to Purvis, during the war Pankhurst embraced a "patriotic feminism, which emphasized women's contribution to the war effort and to militarism"; for "Emmeline Pankhurst, as for other feminists of her time, militarism and imperialism were 'as intuitive' as anti-militarism and anti-imperialism have been to feminists in recent times." I would argue instead that by 1914, most feminists and suffragists were challenging militarism as a means of resolving international conflict. Furthermore, Pankhurst's embrace of militarism and British imperialism has little to do with the empowerment of women or "putting women first" and nothing to do with the concerns of radical/separatist feminists during the second half of the twentieth century.

Emmeline Pankhurst's statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster, 1930. From Emmeline Pankhurst.

Purvis takes great pains to dissociate herself and Pankhurst from the socialism of Sylvia Pankhurst and the socialist feminism of second wave feminism, pointing to the male domination of the social democratic ILP, Labour Party, and trade unions and that of socialist parties and socialist countries. Purvis explains that Pankhurst joined the Conservative Party because of its opposition to labor militancy, the Labour government, Bolshevism, and free love. But here again, Purvis' analysis raises new questions: Was the Labour Party more male-dominated than the Conservative Party? Did the Conservative Party equal the male-dominated trades union's concerns for equal pay, an end to sweated labor, and domestic violence, and a greater voice in decision making? How could Pankhurst's staunch support of British imperialism and its control over the lives of millions of colonized women fit a definition of "women first" feminism?

In light of Purvis' sympathy with radical feminism, I was puzzled by her treatment of lesbianism within the militant movement. While Purvis is correct to point out the demeaning and prurient way in which Dangerfield, Mitchell, and Martin Pugh (The Pankhursts) discuss issues of sexuality within the WSPU, she is vague about what makes their work upsetting; is it because they are writing about women's sexuality or because they are discussing homosexuality within the WSPU?

The strength of this meticulously documented biography is that Purvis provides keen insight into the political and personal forces that drove Emmeline Pankhurst onto the international stage. Its radical feminist perspective will be appreciated--and debated--by suffrage and feminist historians for a long time.

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