Highlights from this issue...

Read Linda Gardiner's farewell editorial from our May, 2003 issue.

Looking back
Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End by Sara Evans. New York: The Free Press, 2003, 288 pp., $26.00 hardcover.
Women, Power and AT&T: Winning Rights in the Workplace by Lois Kathryn Herr. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003, 200 pp., $47.50 hardcover, $18.95 paper.

Reviewed by Susan Brownmiller

SARA EVANS USES THE IMAGE of a tidal wave to describe the feminist insurgency of the second half of the twentieth century. No one who lived through it would argue with her metaphor, or debate the thematic aptness of chapters titled "Undertow," "Crest," "Deep Currents." Well, I would debate "Resurgence." I see an unstoppable continuation of practical gains, but if we are talking about organized action, "Eddies and Ripples" would be more exact.

Several activists from the glory years of feminism, including me, have felt a powerful compulsion to get our history on paper before it is lost. Each historian uncovers fresh material or stresses events ignored in previous works; each is beholden to the prior efforts and, not surprisingly, offers a different perspective. Ours was not a movement that spoke in one voice. Geographical distances alone were sufficient to affect perspective, particularly about who said what first.

Evans comes to the job with great credentials. A civil rights and antiwar activist with socialist ideals, she was on the scene in Chicago in 1967 at the lusty birth of the West Siders, arguably the first radical women's group in the country. Within a year she had started a consciousness-raising group at the University of North Carolina, where she was pursuing her graduate studies in history. After a spate of spinoffs and splits that were characteristic of the women's liberation movement, Evans and some likeminded young mothers in her original group formed Lollipop Power, whose aim was to create nonsexist picture books for preschoolers. She produced one children's book for Lollipop and then blazed an original trail as a historian with Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. Personal Politics remains an indispensable classic for those seeking to understand the ties of feminist activism to the radicalism that preceded it in the ongoing American struggle for social justice.

How do you ride a tidal wave and land right side up to report it? The sheer force of the material, not to mention its breadth, is enough to drown the hardiest witness, especially one who wishes to honor all conflicting currents while she amends and clarifies the existing record. In Tidal Wave Evans deliberately sacrifices a narrative drive and a linear chronology in a brave attempt to be comprehensive. Movement struggles share her pages with accounts of personal transformations; government backlash in the Reagan years jostles for space with societal changes. Little-known women receive more attention than recognizable names, by strategic intention.

I admire the way Evans traces the evolution of feminism's lesbian presence from a starting point of invisibility in the late sixties, when everyone was assumed to be straight and those who weren't were quaking, to the Michigan Women's Music Festival a decade later, where "women's culture," and the use of the word "woman" itself, had become interchangeable with a lesbian lifestyle. I believe she overestimates the influence of socialist feminism; the great, creative leaps in conceiving of and politicizing new issues (rape, battery, sexual harassment) owed nothing to the Marxist-feminist discussion groups. I wish Evans had narrowed her canvas drastically to a discussion of the lesbian presence, or the socialist presence, or the struggle to involve black women, or to one of about ten phenomena, including spirituality and transformations in organized religion, that she tries to follow. She would have produced a more readable book.

Evans is writing for an academic audience, but that is no excuse for not wrestling the demon of all-inclusiveness to the ground. I understand that in-the-text attributions are a convention in academia, and in Evans' hands they are a sweet form of generosity, but she is too free with this tipping of the hat to earlier scholars. Sentences that begin "Alice Echols has described," "As Susan Brownmiller recounts," "Indeed, as historian Ruth Rosen has demonstrated conclusively" assume that a reader is familiar with all the literature, or will dash off to look up the cites. More problematically, such sentences carry a halo of authority and an aura of diligently researched, non-debatable fact.

We know the FBI played a devious role in the Black Panther Party and set faction against faction in the far left, but Ruth Rosen, in The World Split Open, did not demonstrate conclusively that FBI infiltrators were behind some or any of the feminist movement's chaotic moments. (In my book In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution, I offered the tart observation that one movement crazy could do the work of ten agents provocateur.) When Evans wishes to explain the fractious, destructive behavior at the Sagaris women writers conference in Vermont in 1975, she uses Rosen as her authority. This is not scholarship; it is ideologically inspired thinking. A few more easy, convenient cites in subsequent books, and the feds will have been granted a starring role in our movement's history that they never achieved in life.

BY FAR," EVANS WRITES, "the single greatest impact of the women's movement was in the American workforce." Lois Kathryn Herr, in Women, Power, and AT&T, reports meticulously on one such impact. Herr, a member of NOW, was stymied in lower-level management at Ma Bell when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took on the telephone giant during the Nixon years. Her "I was there" story is an exciting contribution to business and government lore as well as to feminist history, one that points the way, I hope, toward future avenues of scholarship.

The AT&T story is fascinating. Affirmative action in major corporations was conceptualized initially as a benign, moderate Republican approach to ameliorating racial discrimination. Certainly it was preferred by the Nixon White House over earlier strategies for integration, such as school busing, that the Democrats had favored. Its use as a remedy for sex discrimination was something that happened along the way, thanks to the almost accidental language of Title VII and the feminist wave that surged during the Nixon years. The EEOC under chairman William H. Brown III, a black Republican appointee, did not have enforcement powers. Herr reports that the president referred to Brown on one of his tapes as "that thin fellow that heads equal opportunities." In his Nixonish way he added that unlike others of Brown's kind, "He's got it." More to the point, Brown had a strong protector in Nixon advisor Len Garment. He also had a staff of longhaired radical lawyers left over from the sixties.

One of those longhairs, David Copus, a former Peace Corps volunteer, made it his personal mission to bring EEOC charges against AT&T on the grounds of racial discrimination. The new feminist militancy inside and outside the government alerted Copus and his boss to Ma Bell's sorry record on sex discrimination, which was more blatant and egregious than its record on hiring and promoting minorities.

The EEOC filed its charges against the telephone giant in December 1971. NOW, headed in those years by Wilma Scott Heide, fed the EEOC a stream of employment statistics and psychological studies, and outfitted NOW's small army of local chapters with media kits and organizing guides to keep up the pressure on the local Bells. With a kind of chutzpah that seems amazing today, NOW lobbied hard for an official role in the negotiating process and met with AT&T's top management on several occasions. In a real sense Heide's volunteer team was the beneficiary of a power vacuum. The phone company's two labor unions, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Communication Workers of America, sat on their heels during most of the negotiations.

Ma Bell was a natural target for the women's movement. Lorena Weeks, a Southern Bell employee in Georgia, had sued the company in 1966 when it denied her a switchman's job that was off-limits to women. Several early signs of the gathering feminist wave had come from low-paid telephone operators in AT&T's famously female ghettos across the country. Working shoulder to shoulder in cramped, windowless quarters, Bell System operators labored under strict supervision with regulated bathroom breaks, a dress code that excluded trousers, and no chance for advancement.

Weeks, who won her case in court, was among those who testified at an EEOC hearing in Washington in February 1972. A hearing in New York City that May, at which some NOW members spoke, was disrupted by phone operators from a militant group called CULA, the Center for United Labor Action. The AT&T Alliance for Women, a group Herr had formed from a scattering of female representation in management, kept a low profile. The alliance ran issue-oriented discussion meetings for employees after regular work hours, and its braver members sometimes wore equal-opportunity buttons. They declined to sponsor an activists' newsletter that Herr wrote and distributed to Bell workers.

The phone company, with one million employees, was horrified to hear itself described in the EEOC charges as "the nation's largest oppressor of women." Herr's interviews with AT&T executives from that era reveal some well-meaning individuals who did not know what had hit them. The top honchos were no more clueless than male management elsewhere in corporate America. They relied on the old standbys that women did not wish to have careers in a corporate hierarchy or desire to perform "non-traditional" work in the high-paid crafts that were an exclusively male domain.

A settlement, called a Memorandum of Agreement, was negotiated in January 1973. It did not get major news coverage, Herr believes, because of the Watergate scandal, then in full swing. The EEOC and NOW won on the issues of affirmative action timetables and back pay, and lost on the issue of paid maternity leave. By the following year, the number of women in management had increased by 25 percent, and the number of women in crafts jobs had increased by 78 percent. "Gradually," Herr writes, "the AT&T numbers would change at even higher levels."

Ma Bell was hit by a court-ordered divestiture in 1982 that broke the telecom monopoly into a chain of little Bells, ostensibly to encourage fair competition and lower rates for consumers. Ironically, Herr's career at AT&T, which had prospered under affirmative action, was stymied once again by divestiture. Her dream in the giddy days of the EEOC settlement of rising to the executive suite was not to be. She left the company in the 1990s, started a new career in academia, and eventually harnessed her energies to write the story she had lived through and helped make happen.

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Marjane Satrapi Photo by Aslan Arfae

Growing up graphic
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. New York: Pantheon, 2003, 160 pp., $17.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Debbie Notkin

IN THE SECOND PANEL OF PERSEPOLIS, Marjane Satrapi lets her readers know what we can expect from the rest of the book. The panel shows four little girls in Islamic veils, lined up in a neat little row. On the far left, we see the barest suggestion of a fifth girl. The text reads, in part, "This is a class photo. I'm sitting on the far left so you don't see me." Satrapi, like all autobiographers, controls what we see and how we see it; unlike many, however, she is extremely cognizant of her control and wants her readers to share her understanding. We are in good hands, and we know it at once.

In the nearly two decades since the first book publication of Art Spiegelman's Maus, the graphic novel has become recognized as a medium for serious narrative. Satrapi, now an established cartoonist in France, has chosen a medium that both suits her talents and makes her work accessible to a wide contemporary audience, perhaps including people of the age of her younger-self protagonist. The format also permits Satrapi to provide invaluable wordless commentary on some of her core points. For example, the visual of a kindly bearded god cradling a religious young girl in his arms conveys a sense of the child's religious feelings at a visceral level.

Persepolis stands up well from a variety of different perspectives: It's a telling memoir of girlhood; an informative and empathic window into the life of Iranian progressives as the country shifted from a dictatorship of the greedy to a fundamentalist regime; and a graphic novel providing immediate impact. As such, the personal, the political, and the aesthetic are all well-represented, and all are given comparable weight.

Ironies abound in Persepolis. An Iranian woman from a leftist family uses the quintessentially western format of the graphic novel to tell an incontrovertibly middle-eastern story. A young girl with deep religious beliefs is thrown into the center of a fundamentalist revolution, which she sees through the lens provided by her progressive, rationalist family. A regime committed to pushing an entire populace into a fundamentalist worldview not only pushes this protagonist away from religion, but out of the country.

Despite the message of that second panel (which follows a panel of Satrapi by herself, in the center of the space) the story by no means renders Satrapi invisible. On the contrary: She is the unmistakable protagonist of her own tale, visible in almost every panel, her voice the only storytelling voice. Yet, by cutting herself out of the "class photo," she begins with an unmistakable graphic reminder that, as she is literally marginalized in the panel, so her life has been marginalized throughout the story and beyond: as a child in her parents' home, as a progressive growing up during a fundamentalist takeover, as a woman in a man's world, as a rebellious teen in an environment where rebellion can be literally deadly.

Although her story once she leaves Iran is not the subject of this tale, we can be certain that she has been marginalized as the emigré she becomes at the end of the story, and as the cartoonist she currently is. She is both ironically aware and accepting of that marginalization, willing to acknowledge its funny side, without trivializing.

Satrapi's stark black-and-white illustrations rely mostly on static images: Only at a few junctures, notably in fantasy sequences where the young protagonist is comprehending the death and destruction around her, do we see much in the way of movement in the panels. Panels vary in size, but not in shape, and each is contained in a box; the form is conventional and simple.

Persepolis is by no means a "comic book," yet Satrapi's sense of humor pervades it just as it might pervade a prose work on a similar subject. None of the humor is without its pointed commentary, which often only makes it funnier. Here is Satrapi at age ten, laying out for her grandmother the laws she intends to promote when she becomes a prophet: "Rule Number Eight: No old person should have to suffer."

"In that case," says grandmother, "I'll be your first disciple. But tell me how you'll arrange for old people not to suffer."

"It will simply be forbidden," says Satrapi, spreading her arms in youthful confidence in the simplicity and clarity of it all.

SATRAPI PORTRAYS GROWING UP in a world that is changing so dramatically as to be both confusing and demanding. The bright, aware, compassionate child does not have an easy time of it. When the family maid falls in love with the son of the family next door, Satrapi's parents' assumptions about class fall under their daughter's undamaged scrutiny. She cannot comprehend how her otherwise liberal, egalitarian parents can condemn the maid for ignoring class boundaries. The ten-year-old girl crawls into bed to console the teenaged maid: "When I went back to her room she was crying. We were not in the same social class but at least we were in the same bed."

Her uncle, a released political prisoner, comes to live with the Satrapis, and he and young Marji come to care deeply for one another. He gives her an only slightly prettified version of his story.

When Uncle Anoosh disappears, Satrapi's father tells her that he left the country without saying goodbye, but eventually admits that he has been returned to prison. She has one chance to visit him in jail before he is executed. Upon his death, in one of the book's most poignant moments, she bids farewell to the (unidentified) white-bearded god whom she had once seen as a protector.

Satrapi's mother is threatened on the street by fundamentalist men and, days later, wearing the veil is made compulsory for all women. The war with Iraq forces the family into basement shelters, strikes fear into the populace, elicits deeper fundamentalism from teachers and police, and brings a family of refugees into Satrapi's home. A friend's father gets 75 lashes for owning videocassettes, a deck of cards, and a chess set.

Yet, somehow, the family continues to live a surprisingly "normal" simulacrum of its previous life. Rather than stopping their parties and card games, they simply increase their protective efforts. Satrapi's friends still manage to score cigarettes, to sneak out of class for hamburgers, to party when "punk rock is in": We cannot help but superimpose western teenagers in torn black t-shirts and cheek piercings on these fully-veiled Iranian teenagers. When Satrapi demands that her mother cover her for cutting class, and her mother refuses, she thinks "Dictator! You are the guardian of the revolution of this house!" Although Satrapi uses the cultural symbols of the Middle East, her phrase is not unlike the American teenager's "What makes you think you can run my life?"

As the fundamentalist regime tightens its grip, the ever-increasing dangers of the family's life are contrasted with a dogged attachment to normality. Readers get the impression that omnipresent danger forgotten or denied characterized Satrapi's girlhood. It is difficult to say whether this is a literary unwillingness to dwell in a constant sense of impending disaster or an accurate presentation of how people actually function under desperate circumstances.

Toward the end of the story, however, the tone changes dramatically. When Satrapi's street is bombed and her Jewish neighbors are killed, a completely black panel proclaims "No scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and my anger." The young woman who emerges from this experience is too angry to be afraid. Her parents, clearly fearing for the life of their passionate daughter, arrange for her to leave the country, preferring to give her up and to send her to live in exile rather than to take the risk of keeping her at home.

In her preface, Satrapi says, "I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I didn't want those Iranians who lost their lives… to be forgotten." In the end, however, this is only one of many levels on which the reader experiences this story. Whether the preconceptions you bring to this book are about Iran, teenage girls, fundamentalist regimes, graphic novels, or all of the above, Satrapi's unswerving commitment to the complex truth over the comfortable platitude will shake your expectations and eventually satisfy you in a new way.

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The original Rosie
Rosie's Mom: Forgotten Women Workers of the First World War by Carrie Brown. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002, 240 pp., $35.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Jeanne Schinto

The note on the back of this photograph of a Pennsylvania brickyard states, "They are girls." From Rosie's Mom.

MANY READERS ARE FAMILIAR with Rosie the Riveter, the poster girl (literally) for defense work during World War II. Millions of real Rosies worked either directly for defense or for supporting industries while soldiers battled Germany and Japan. But what of women workers during the first world war? A number of middle- and upper-class women volunteered in Europe as Red Cross nurses or ambulance drivers in that earlier conflict. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, famously, visited hospitals and drove their Ford, "Auntie," for the American Fund for French Wounded. But a million working-class women also made munitions and filled hundreds of other defense-related jobs at home. In Rosie's Mom, Carrie Brown has written the story of that female labor force, illustrating it with dozens of vintage photographs hidden in archives for decades.

Brown is to be thanked for providing the images of a unique period in women's history essentially lost until now. Commendable, too, is her attempt to show how these women workers fit into the larger history of unionism and our country's ongoing struggles with issues of race and class. Each of her chapters highlights a particular city or particular kind of work in a given year. But while she narrates skillfully, she does so exhaustively at times, especially toward the beginning of the book, when readers may find themselves impatient to get to the fresh material and photos. At other times, the individual blocks of crisp text could be those of a neatly organized museum exhibit catalogue, well-intentioned but generic, lacking the individual response that some of these images demand, and it's not surprising that Brown has worked as a curator.

Laborers at Busch terminal in Brooklyn, NY. From Rosie's Mom.

She cites two reasons for why this important piece of history has been forgotten. First, the United States came late to World War I, and this conflict did not have nearly the impact on American lives as World War II. Second, the women of the first war machine were largely immigrants and African Americans. They were seen as only laborers--"workers often resented by the men around them," in Brown's words, not "symbols of patriotic service."

Before Rosie's time, women already employed before the war making "white goods" (corsets and other underwear) could switch to making grenades with relative ease. According to Brown, "[the] middle-class ideal of being a wife free to tend her home and children" had never been a realistic goal for them. Unlike Rosie, they neither relinquished that life to work in war-busy factories nor returned to it after armistice. The fictional Rosie might have worried that she'd lose her femininity performing a "masculine" job. (In the poster, designed to reassure women entering factories in the 1940s, Rosie has painted lips and penciled eyebrows in addition to muscled forearms.) Rosie's Mom worried only that she wouldn't be able to buy her children bread.

Scores of these women stitched the linen coverings for airplane wings at Curtiss Aeroplane in Buffalo, caulked wooden boats in the Portsmouth shipyards, and operated lathes at the General Electric plant in Fort Wayne. But no woman, working or otherwise, had yet voted in an American election. As Brown tells it, the women's suffrage campaign was indirectly advanced by the women working for the war cause. President Wilson appealed to the Senate with these words: "'We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?'" Approval of suffrage, Wilson urged, was "'vital to the winning of the war and to the energies alike of preparation and of battle.'"

The Great War sparked the Great Migration of sharecroppers' families from the South. In Chicago, as immigrant women entered war-related industries, black women moved into vacancies in places like commercial laundries, because it was difficult for them to get better-paying factory work (except as strike breakers). In meat-packing plants, they were given the "dirtiest, wettest, smelliest jobs," Brown underscores. Wherever they were employed, they did the work that, as one employer put it, "'no white women would do.'" Still, the women themselves considered this progress. Brown quotes from a letter one of them wrote home with pride: "'I work like a man. I am making good.'"

Poor women's food riot in New York. From Rosie's Mom.

When farm girls left their families to work as mill girls in the nineteenth-century textile industry, great care was taken to preserve their "morals." No mill boys worked alongside them. Nearly a hundred years later, men and women mingled in factories. How to solve the problem of safeguarding females' "dignity" under the circumstances? Brown reports that Mary Van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation, hired as a consultant to the Ordnance Department in wartime Washington, suggested a novel solution in 1917: Hire female supervisors. It remained theoretical in a world where management met the challenge in less revolutionary ways. At Rock Island Arsenal in Rock Island, Illinois, where 1,000 women worked with 12,000 men--operating drill presses, punch presses, and milling machines; assembling rifles, fuses, and detonators--the women started work 30 minutes later than men and went home 15 minutes earlier, so, as Brown puts it, "they could travel to and from work without being harassed in the yard and jostled on the overcrowded streetcars."

THE CONTRIBUTION ROSIE'S MOM makes to photographic history will be clear to anyone who knows the field. Most of the pictures fall into the category called "occupationals," which usually means scenes of men at work as well as portraits of men in their work clothes, often displaying the tools of their trade. Here, though, there are women, not men, holding metal mallets and power chisels in their obviously capable hands; dressed in streetcar conductor uniforms; and operating formidable pieces of heavy machinery. Many of the women wear overalls (or "womanalls," as they were called back then). Brown notes that someone wrote on the verso of a photograph of women and wheelbarrows in a Pennsylvania brick yard, "They are girls."

Virtually all of the pictures are posed, not candid. Some of the subjects' expressions look more obediently cheery than authentically felt. These are, for the most part, government-commissioned photographs. You'll find here no intentionally shameful images of the bad working conditions in war plants. The picture of two women filling hand grenades without protective clothing was made before such clothing was required.

Electric arc welders at the Landers, Frary, and Clark plant in New Britain, CT. From Rosie's Mom.

Most of the images are purely documentary, not meant to be artful, but several manage to be both. There is a well-composed picture of three female laborers at a railroad terminal in Brooklyn lounging on the cow catcher of a steam engine, their caps set at jaunty angles. The black circle in the engine's center, high above their heads, looks like the nose of a friendly beast they have tamed. The women's camaraderie is almost palpable. So is the satisfaction they have gained from their work--and their paychecks.

After the war, with the men home again, there were massive layoffs. Only a little less predictably, there was widespread turmoil. Brown includes a picture of a "poor women's food riot" that broke out in January 1919 on the Lower East Side of New York. She notes that the women overturned food pushcarts, but, as riots go, the picture makes it seem subdued. No rocks are in these women's hands, but there are infants in some of their arms.

"For black women," Brown writes, "the loss of war jobs was made more painful by racial violence." Thirteen days of race riots in Chicago in May 1919 left 38 people dead. What progress violence didn't destroy, bigotry often did: One employer replaced white women at a tannery during the riots, then did not rehire any blacks when it was over, believing that the two races couldn't work together.

Despite such setbacks, Brown believes that "while female workers of the First World War gained little that was lasting for themselves, they did smooth the way for the next generation." She couldn't have known when she started work on Rosie's Mom how topical this book would be when published. As images of the present war are being created, many include those of women not only making bombs but using them in battle. A step forward or back? The question is, and will continue to be, a hotly debated one.

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Caroline Knapp Photo by Mark Morelli

Seeking control
Appetites: Why Women Want by Caroline Knapp. New York: Counterpoint, 2003, 224 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Clea Simon

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT? The answer, as intimated in the late Caroline Knapp's new book Appetites, comes in two parts. The first seems to be control: If we can't control our own lives, then we want to control our bodies--no matter what the cost. The second would be comfort: We want the ease in our skins that men seem to have and that 30 years of contemporary feminism, she writes, have only pushed farther away. "Why women want," her subtitle, raises a more complex question, and the author, who died last year at the age of 42 from cancer, wrestles with it with both intelligence and empathy as she tries to untangle eating disorders, the contradictions of contemporary feminism, and the primal pull of wanting.

When Caroline Knapp was in her twenties, she suffered from anorexia, the eating disorder that provides the central focus of this short, intense book. Recalling what her goal had been two decades later, she describes her body in terms better suited for machinery. "Tight, taut" or "stripped-down, spare, angular" are her words of choice for the ideal she starved herself to achieve, at one point reaching a weight of eighty-three pounds on a diet of 800 calories a day. While she pulled herself back from this particular self-inflicted madness, the descriptions remain apt for this searingly analytical and intimate writer. Knapp bares every emotion she can, as cleanly and tightly as she can, examining even the pain it costs to cut through self-deception. Pairing her stories with a wide range of scholarly and popular feminist sources, from Carol Gilligan to Susan Faludi, she achieves something close to her desired razor sharpness, slicing through advertising, pop psych, and post-feminist backlash to tackle our discomfort with our appetites.

This is not exactly new ground. When she writes that as "women get psychically larger... they're told to grow physically smaller," she echoes Susie Orbach's 1978 manifesto Fat is a Feminist Issue and a dozen books since. Nor is there much new in her observation, in a passage heavily referencing Jean Kilbourne's Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising, that in order to fit Madison Avenue's idea of perfection, the female body's "flows must be managed, its odors fended off... it must be strapped down." Still, Knapp has a sense of balance in what she chooses to explore, and about her own motivations. Appetite issues, she acknowledges, are "luxury problems" in a world where starvation kills millions, and in a country where chronic obesity has seriously damaged public health. She is not, she admits, speaking for all ethnic or religious groups. She has focused on her own life, as an upper-middle-class, college-educated white woman, and done so with a clarity and intensity that is sure to prove enlightening to others like her.

Despite her clean, sharp mind, Knapp's prose style tends toward the dense, with long passages linking together her research and meditations. These can read as wordy to the point of redundancy. Knapp describes her decision to end therapy, "not because I'm 'done' or 'cured' or conflict-free but because I've finally (or so we hope) gotten the point." Readers would have gotten the point with fewer words, certainly.

But while such repetitions and clarifications border on fussiness, at their best they build a rhythm that carries the reader along. Harnessed into metaphors, they make the abstract, the emotional, tellingly real. Describing her "starving years," she writes about her equations, measuring food "earned" or "monitored" and "controlled" in her own version of E=MC2. "I took a perverse kind of pleasure in these exhibitions of personal calculus, the anxious little jigs that women would do around food," she writes.

Such images--the math turned into a nervous dance--border on poetry. Throughout, Knapp provides masterful descriptions, mapping the too-easily delineated bones of her fleshless arm or giving that missing physicality to metaphors. One woman, her confident innocence marred by her mother's scorn, becomes "a fine, elegant piece of paper from thick stock, suddenly, then repeatedly stained with inkblots of shame." She describes sculling on the Charles River, the exercise that helped woo her back to health, in a single shell, "a giant knitting needle" on the water, herself "a skinny woman atop a skinny boat, poised to learn something about strength, confidence, and the nature of power."

The beauty of the sport and her joy in improving at a new skill, Knapp explains, finally counter her fear of gaining weight, even as the strenuous exercise adds pounds to her frame. Ultimately, the graceful sport gives her even more: a reason to appreciate her newly muscled body. "I began to feel something I may never quite have felt as a woman before, which was integrated and strong and whole, the body as a piece, the body as responsive and connected to the mind, the body as a worthy place to live."

WITH SUCH DETAIL SEWN THROUGHOUT, it is strange to note several omissions that haunt the book. Despite frequent references to her mother's art, for example, we never see it. We read of her studio, "a small room crammed with canvases and frames and oil paints," but Knapp does not describe the paintings themselves. Her mother is rendered as voiceless, frustrated, her art made secondary to her duties as a housewife, and that dismissal makes this choice confusing. Did these hidden canvases, perhaps, clue Knapp in to the frustration her mother felt? If so, why do we not see them, too? When she does turn to description, Knapp has a painter's touch, but such skill makes the absences more noticeable. Saddening, as well, is her disappointment with the contemporary feminist movement, about which she seems conflicted. Did 1970s feminism simply pave the way for 1980s consumerism, as she states at one point? Did it expose adolescent girls to abuse by granting sexual freedom without a sense of self? Not all of us experienced the movement this way, but Knapp apparently did.

More disturbing, perhaps, are the emotional blanks. Knapp is a master of guilt, capable of understanding and explicating all the ways this insidious emotion can creep into the gaps created by any forward movement. She can empathize with a wide range of interview subjects, and her writing about sadness is greatly moving. But the anger that common sense and experience suggest must accompany at least some of these self-injurious behaviors is strangely absent. We hear other women raging against their bodies, their words faithfully recorded by Knapp. "I hate my body, I hate my thighs," one interview subject says. "I'm such an idiot." She understands the power of this fury, calling women's anger "generally the most efficient catalyst for change." But what of Knapp's own rage? Given all the examples of other women's fury, her own calmness seems suspect, as if she were either denying her anger or refusing to name it. Even when she mourns her anorexia, that mourning moves directly from guilt into sadness, with no acknowledgment of the terrible energy that must have fueled such a powerful affliction. Musing on an observation by Germaine Greer, "Women don't get angry enough. What women do is get sad," her impulse is to cry.

Such naked reactions are honestly, faithfully--and often poetically--recorded here in an accessible scholarly and historic context. As such, this book will undoubtedly appeal to Knapp's fans, and likely open some eyes. For the reader who has a little more experience with either these sources or such emotional turmoil, however, this book never quite makes the obvious next move into deeper insight. Beautifully argued, and passionately written, it retains a certain emotional detachment. Sadly, and finally, Appetites leaves the reader with the impression of a woman who lived too much in her head.

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