Gloria Anzaldúa
Photo by Annie Valva
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Remembering Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004)
As a "threshold person," a nepantlera, Anzaldúa moved among worlds in
her art, her politics, and her spirituality
By AnaLouise Keating
GLORIA EVANGELINA ANZALDÚA--internationally acclaimed feminist author, cultural
theorist, and independent scholar--passed away during the week of May 15,
2004, from diabetes-related complications. One of the boldest feminist thinkers
and social justice activists of our time, Anzaldúa and her writings give courage
and inspiration to many. (To experience Gloria's impact, see the July/August
issue of the Esperanza Center's La Voz at www.esperanzacenter.org
and the online altar at gloria.chicanas.com.)
Although Anzaldúa had been living with diabetes for over a decade, many of
her readers were unaware of the disease's ongoing, debilitating effects on
her life. Even those of us who knew her well were shocked by her sudden death.
As Kit Quan, one of Anzaldúa's oldest friends and writing comadres (in keeping
with Anzaldúa's practice, I do not italicize the Spanish words in this essay)
explains, "Gloria always told me that she was going to stick around for 20
more years. She struggled with diabetes and all its complications daily...
but she was so well read on the disease... and worked so hard at managing
her blood sugars that I believed we still had more time." Anzaldua took meticulous
care of her health and was determined to live until she had completed many
more writing projects.
It is impossible to fully describe the complex, multidimensional nature of
Anzaldúa and her writings. A versatile author, she published poetry, theoretical
essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, children's
books, and anthologies. As one of the first openly queer Chicana writers,
she played a major role in defining Chicana/o, queer, and female identities.
And as editor or co-editor of three multicultural, multigenre feminist anthologies,
she helped to develop new, inclusionary movements for social justice. Although
she chose to work outside the university system (except for carefully selected
teaching engagements and conference speaking gigs), her impact on many disciplines--including
American studies, composition studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminism/feminist
theory, literary studies, and women's studies--was immense. She also played
a leading, though seldom acknowledged role in developing queer theory.
To readers of The Women's Review of Books, Anzaldúa is perhaps best
known for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,
co-edited with Cherríe Moraga. First published in 1981, this ground-breaking
collection of essays, letters, and poems is widely recognized as one of the
first multicultural feminist texts. This Bridge served as a crucial
reminder that US feminism is not and never has been a white, middle-class
women's movement. It sounded an urgent call for new kinds of feminist communities,
theories, and practices and invited women of color to develop a transformative,
coalitional consciousness. At the same time, it challenged white middle-class
feminists to acknowledge and begin working through their racism, classism,
and other biases.
In her later anthologies Anzaldúa expanded her challenges to feminism and
other social justice movements. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras:
Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists-of-Color (1990) builds
on the women-of-color feminisms found in This Bridge and is part of
Anzaldúa's ongoing effort to create coalitions between social activists inside
and outside the academy. In her preface, she rejects the inaccessible, elitist
nature of academic "high" theory (in reality no "higher" than any other theory)
and underscores the importance of inventing new theorizing methods, what she
called mestizaje theories, which "create new categories for those of us left
out or pushed out of the existing ones." Anzaldúa's most recent anthology,
this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (2002,
which she and I co-edited), takes this call for inclusive, transformative
theories and tactics even further, challenging readers to re-examine existing
identity categories and develop new forms of feminist theorizing and action,
what Anzaldúa called "spiritual activism." Based on the belief that each individual
is radically interrelated with all that exists, this visionary, experience-based
way of thinking and acting recognizes the many differences among human beings
yet also insists on our commonalities and uses them as catalysts for social
change.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is Anzaldúa's most
widely read book and was named one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by
both Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader. Although scholars often
describe Borderlands as an innovative autobiography that builds on
and expands previous uses of the genre, Anzaldúa herself described it as a
new genre: autohistoria-teoría, life-story and reflection on this story. In
autohistoria-teoría, women of color intervene into and transform traditional
Western autobiographical forms. Creating interwoven individual and collective
identities, writers of autohistoria-teoría blend personal and cultural biographies
with memoir, history, storytelling, myth, and other forms.
Anzaldúa's published works also include two bilingual children's books with
strong female protagonists: Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro
lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/ Prietita y la Llorona
(1995); a memoir-like collection of interviews, Interviews/Entrevistas
(2000); and several essays. She was within weeks of completing her dissertation
(at the University of California, Santa Cruz) and planned to publish volumes
of poetry, theory, and fiction in the near future. She won numerous awards,
including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, the Lambda Lesbian
Small Book Press Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, the
Lesbian Rights Award, the Sappho Award of Distinction, and the American Studies
Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
While US feminists have for many years insisted that "the personal is political,"
Gloria gave new depth to this phrase, delving into her own life experiences
with a rare, unflinching integrity and raw honesty. Her painful monthly menstruation,
a rare condition that began in infancy; her campesino background; her childhood
in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas; her experiences as a brown-skinned,
Spanish-speaking girl in a dominant culture that values light-skinned, English-speaking
boys; her ongoing battles with diabetes; and her "outlaw" sexual and spiritual
desires are only a few of the private issues she wove into her words. She
used this intense self-reflection and self-exposure in the service of social
justice, drawing connections between personal and systemic issues.
Anzaldúa's willingness to risk the personal--to disclose and analyze intimate
details, beliefs, and emotions despite the potential for ridicule, misunderstanding,
or rejection--is crucial to her power as a writer. As Jamie Lee Evans, one
of Gloria's writing assistants during the 1990s, asserts, "She reached in
and grabbed our hearts because she was not afraid of being intimate or loving
freely--in her work, her words, her actions, her body." As Anzaldúa incorporated
her experiences into her writing, she transformed herself into a bridge, establishing
potential identifications with readers from diverse backgrounds.
WHEN I MET GLORIA ANZALDÚA IN 1991, I was struck by her vulnerability, her
open-mindedness, and her sensitivity to other people's alienation and pain.
Deeply spiritual and intensely political, she believed in each human being's
basic goodness and potential wisdom, despite the racism, sexism, homophobia,
and other forms of rejection she had experienced throughout her life. As I
grew to know her over the past 13 years, I became increasingly impressed with
the ways her faith shaped her work. She consistently challenged feminists
of all colors as well as other social justice activists to recognize and work
to transform their racism, homophobia, classism, and other desconocimientos
(intentional and unintentional ignorance and lack of awareness). Significantly,
she was able to issue her challenges without rejecting the people themselves.
Gloria's role at the 1990 National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) conference
in Akron, Ohio, illustrates her generous spirit. Fed up with the organization's
racism and other desconocimientos, many women of color and their allies walked
out. Anzaldúa felt as betrayed as they did; she understood and empathized
with their decision. However, she chose to remain, becoming what she would
later describe as a nepantlera--a term she coined to define a unique type
of visionary cultural worker. Nepantleras are threshold people; they move
within and among multiple worlds, and use this movement to transform them.
Anzaldúa recounts her NWSA experience in her 2002 essay "now let us shift....
the path of conocimiento.... inner work, public acts," in which she explains
how, by listening carefully to all parties and revealing the flaws in all
forms of group-thinking, she and other nepantleras attempt to create broader,
more inclusive communities:
Though tempted to retreat behind racial lines and hide behind simplistic
walls of identity, las nepantleras know their work lies in positioning themselves--exposed
and raw--in the crack between these worlds, and in revealing current categories
as unworkable. (this bridge we call home, p. 567)
Anzaldúa's resistance to rigid categories and labels, coupled with her interest
in developing new alliances and identities based on affinity (what she refers
to in her most recent work as "new tribalism"), make her writings vital for
21st-century political activists, thinkers, and scholars. She challenged the
conventional views that lead to stereotyping, over-generalization, and arbitrary
divisions between groups.
When I was first invited to write this memorial piece, I realized that it
would be difficult but believed I could accomplish the task. After all, I'd
already written Gloria's obituary; I'd known and worked with Gloria for more
than a decade; and I'd read and written about her work for at least 15 years.
However, writing this essay has been even more difficult than I'd anticipated,
and I have agonized over this conclusion. Perhaps my resistance to writing
a conclusion is tied to my belief that although Gloria Anzaldúa, the embodied,
historic person, is no longer alive, Gloria Anzaldúa, the writer/theorist/philosopher/poet,
lives on and indeed grows--in her published works, in her future publications,
in her readers' hearts, minds, actions, words, and ideas. So this is not a
conclusion; it's another beginning of sorts. As Gloria wrote in the 1983 preface
to This Bridge, "Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.
Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks."
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Lucy Grealy and Ann Patchett
Photo by Jill Krementz
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Autobiography of a friendship
Truth and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett. New York: HarperCollins,
2004, 257 pp., $23.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Mary Cappello
TRUTH AND BEAUTY explores novelist Ann Patchett's long-term relationship
with fellow writer Lucy Grealy, whose death in 2002 robbed American letters
of a stunning talent. Grealy was, as Patchett puts it, "the toast of both
popular culture and all things literary" following the enormous success of
her complex and beautiful memoir, Autobiography of a Face (1994). Patchett
and Grealy's friendship takes hold under nearly anonymous but strangely intimate
circumstances: Though the two had been undergraduates together at Sarah Lawrence
College, they only "met" later when Grealy, discovering that her fellow alum
was also going to study in the University of Iowa's creative writing program,
wrote to Patchett with the unusual request that Patchett find an apartment
for each of them. As Patchett explains, she didn't yet know Grealy, but she
knew her story, the story that always preceded her, because it marked her
body, in particular her face, mouth, and jaw, in disfiguring ways: "She had
had a Ewing's sarcoma at the age of nine, had lived through five years of
the most brutal radiation and chemotherapy, and then undergone a series of
reconstructive surgeries that were largely unsuccessful." Grealy is demanding,
intense, singular, and Patchett seems drawn from the start as much to Grealy's
fierce intelligence as to her need.
Without conflating Grealy with her illness, Patchett configures a relationship
ever mediated by illness and cure. One chapter in particular could stand alone
as a meditation on the terms by which a person comes into being, tourniquet-style,
via the excruciating mechanism of the medical establishment: the doctor/patient
relationship. The details of the chapter continuously revise and undo one
another, moving from doctors' sheer lack of care to Grealy's desire to be
a favorite patient, from Grealy's having sex with a plastic surgeon on an
examining table to her presentation to Patchett's boyfriend-doctor of a snot
specimen in a Kleenex, to Grealy's expression of shame after Patchett peers
into her mouth, her gums decimated by years of medical "treatment." Patchett
says, "The doctor put Lucy back in the chair and filled her mouth with a bright
light. He told me to come around the other side and look. She couldn't open
wide at all, but what I could see was a rocky cave, the place where the loose
ends of every surgery carelessly came together." Practically toothless, unable
to close her mouth fully, numb in her lower lip, and scarred by intubations
and tracheotomies, Grealy can only experience eating as exhausting and torturous.
Near the chapter's end, Pachett hangs an x-ray of Grealy's jaw on her refrigerator:
"There was something about that x-ray that looked more like Lucy to me than
any picture I had seen."
WHERE DO WE FIND LUCY GREALY? How do we read her? Who can she be?: a poet,
a memoirist, a novelist? A lover, beloved, a friend? These questions propel
both Patchett's narrative and the vexed, exuberant, nearly impossible friendship
Grealy and Patchett shared. "So hungry for attention and interpretation,"
Patchett writes at one point, "[Lucy] would take it wherever she could get
it." At other times she pictures her as inscrutable. What is significant here
is Patchett's implication that Grealy's disfigured physiognomy made its owner
into a text demanding interpretation. In Grealy's own memoir, the problem
of self-regard is explored with philosophical aplomb: Following surgery, Grealy
has trouble recognizing herself. But, the more troubling problem is that other
people act as though they can recognize themselves (which of course
they cannot); Grealy is made to feel that her misrecognition is exceptional.
Patchett adds to this ontological conundrum turned tragedy by showing that
while Grealy is consigned to existential misrecognition, everyone else presumes
to recognize not only him or herself but Grealy too. Shopkeepers and strangers
in the street call her by name. Others always have an epistemological advantage.
Accompanying the known, recognizable Grealy is a maddeningly conventional
script, a kind of "life-sentence" that serves as an almost unbearable refrain
in both Autobiography of a Face and Truth and Beauty: "I'm ugly
and I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life." Toward the end of Truth
and Beauty, Patchett reports that Grealy, working with a new psychiatrist,
"was realizing that the enormous sadness of her life had possibly come from
a source other than her face, and that she had never been able to get completely
well because she had always been trying to fix the wrong thing." The reader
wants to shout "alleluia!"--and yet anyone who has read Autobiography of
a Face can't believe that Grealy ever really thought her face, her "ugliness,"
or her self-pronounced unlovableness was at the center of her struggle. In
fact, one of the strengths of her memoir is her refusal to identify any single,
simple, original trauma as the basis of psychic life, and in particular, psychic
pain. But perhaps a memoir can open out onto complexities that a living person
cannot.
There are narcissistic elements to any friendship: when we turn to friends
to remind us of the best elements in ourselves or to mirror ourselves back
to ourselves at twice our normal size. And there is the possibility--one that
Lucy Grealy may have craved--for one person to be another person's radical
interlocutor: a friend who might participate with her in creating a counter-narrative,
who might respond to her call from someplace other than a culturally prescribed
vantage point, who could get past her face to her embodied voice. Early in
the memoir, Patchett describes Grealy's voice: "She was shouting, but her
voice was smaller than the tiny frame it came from. It was no more than a
whisper once it passed the third row." Yet later Patchett says that as a teacher,
"Lucy could power through a class on the sheer muscle of oratory. She could
talk. She could talk on the nature of truth and beauty for hours." And Patchett
loved to listen to her talk.
Patchett accompanied and loved and held Grealy--her descriptions of carrying
Grealy when she is ill are crashingly gorgeous; and she did not, as others
had, leave Grealy bereft on an island of illness. So passionate, physical,
and intimate is the relationship that some readers will be tempted to read
the memoir as a story of unacknowledged lesbian love. In one of several stunning,
even "classic" episodes, Grealy takes Patchett and another female friend horseback
riding. Patchett describes the scene magnificently--Grealy's tiny figure dominating
not just her horse, but all three of them; the sensuousness of the perfect
day. At the end of it, Patchett screams, "'You maniac'…and [falls] into [Grealy],
sweating, thrilled." Hoping to replicate the experience, Patchett takes her
boyfriend to the stables, but they can't even make the horses leave the corral.
However one chooses to label the relationship, what seems more disappointing
than unacknowledged eros is the question of whether for either woman, the
abundant intimacy of their friendship, the fruits of the labor of their art,
and the enormous success they gained and shared could ever be enough. The
love, even the mere attention, of a man is forever held up as the ultimate
need and satisfaction. Grealy says, "I wonder if I had found the perfect man
and fallen in love but had never been able to get anything published, would
I be just as miserable as I am now?" At another point, Patchett tells Grealy
she is not alone, she has Patchett--but that doesn't seem to count.
TRUTH AND BEAUTY challenges readers not only to enter into the irresolvable
complexities of Grealy and Patchett's friendship but also to consider the
difficult subject of their companionate life-work. Late in the book, Patchett
tells about a time when Grealy, suicidal, arrived at her door. Patchett took
her for a pedicure, a massage, and a movie. They went out onto a lake in a
rowboat and discussed Grealy's plans to write a novel, but Patchett found
Grealy's imagined characters too uniformly despicable. Then, in the next breath,
she offered to write the novel for her: "We wouldn't have to tell anyone.
I could write it and then you could rewrite it so that it sounded like you."
This statement seems to be on a continuum with other doublings and points
of identification with Grealy, at the level of illness and of authorship,
that Patchett documents throughout the book, but it stands out as a startlingly
strange, wildly unbelievable, condescending and territorial admission, a truly
low point in a memoir driven, it seems, more by disclosure than by reflection.
Perhaps, alternately, Patchett's flabbergasting suggestion is simply indicative
of how clueless, how really helpless she was finally made to feel in the face
of Grealy's struggle, Grealy's need.
A reader of Truth and Beauty will want to revisit Autobiography
of a Face (or to read it for the first time). For me, Truth and Beauty
explained something about Autobiography of a Face that I had always
found troubling. The early sections of the book are like poems: The uncanny
is at work, knowledge beyond our ken, unexpected constellations of details,
evocative layerings of past and present. Pregnant silences suggest unheard
voices at play: the voice of the ill and the voice of the illness; the voice
of cultural expectations and the voice that hails from someplace else; the
voice of abjection and the voice of unarticulated sentiment. But the second
half of the book lapses into sheer reportage. Patchett describes how Grealy
had been avoiding finishing the book until one day,
Lucy finally buckled down and blasted through the last hundred
pages of her memoir. For the rest of her life she figured that this was the
way she worked best, writing very little through most of the time that was
allotted to her and then making a heroic eleventh-hour save. 'That's the way
I wrote my book,' she would say, proof that the system worked. (p. 117)
But did it?
There is no doubt that Lucy Grealy was "different." The question is, how
can difference articulate what it knows? Our culture seems to say that difference
can always write a memoir, especially if difference is accompanied by a wound.
Memoir offers opportunities for voyeurism and sharing experience. Or so the
misunderstanding of memoir's possibilities goes. Patchett describes a reading
in which five people showed up to hear Patchett read from her latest novel
while hundreds turned out to hear Grealy. But the question-answer period revealed
that the audience wasn't receiving Grealy as a writer but as a reporter of
her pain, a kind of poster child. "The cancer and subsequent suffering had
not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every
sense larger than the disease," Patchett insists. The voice preceded and superceded
the face, and if one thing remains clear it is that there weren't the right
conditions of possibility in Lucy Grealy's world to bring the voice forth,
which is to say, to hear it. Patchett's book is an ode to Grealy's longing,
leaving me to wonder if the world failed as Lucy Grealy's radical interlocutor.
One day in graduate school, Patchett and Grealy consult a fortune teller.
She predicts to Grealy, "You'll never find love… you'll never have children,
and you'll always be alone." The woman isn't so much a fortune teller as a
mind reader. Literature, at its best, writes against predictions, determinisms,
chronologies. It would be hard to predict, for example, that Autobiography
of a Face is, more than anything, a book about animals. Animals figure
as points in a complex map of desire, in a story about a girl defined by her
illness as other-than-human. In the tradition of Western thought, animals
are never neutral but rather are sites for producing knowledge and confirming
hopes about what we most profoundly are and are not. In Grealy's
memoir, animals reflect a range of possible identifications and forms of otherness--conditions
for being included in or ousted from the world. Thus, it seems an oversight
for Patchett simply to recount that Grealy was the "mascot" of Sarah Lawrence
College, a "favorite pet," a "mascot" at transvestite bars, a bird, "pettest
of her pets." In an online eulogy to Grealy, another literary friend describes
how he thought of Grealy's death while rescuing an ugly and awkward stray
dog. Shouldn't Grealy be released from this animal affiliation, especially
given her own complex rescripting of that association in her autobiography?
Ann Patchett
Photo by Tony Baker
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Reading Truth and Beauty, we can become absorbed by the tensions and
triumphs of a famous friendship--or we can turn our attention to the artistic
productions of two women writing in concert, contradiction, competition, and
conversation with each other. Choosing the latter, after leaving Truth
and Beauty, I felt the need for more Grealy, for the voice found in her
writing. Where is her poetry? I've never read it and would love to. And could
there be a better posthumous honor to this writer than the publication of
her letters--magnificently smart meditations that Patchett excerpts in her
book, on difference and art and love? At the least, they would offer a rich
resource against which to read Grealy's memoir. Then there are the still unanswered,
perhaps unanswerable questions, such as the peculiar absence in Grealy's memoir,
in light of her facial disfigurement, of any comment on the fact that she
was a twin, whether her sibling was identical or not. Or how about the moment
in Autobiography of a Face where Grealy writes: "Sometimes late at
night, when I couldn't sleep, I would call the barn, knowing no one was there,
and imagine the sound of the phone echoing in the horse-filled barn." Is the
act of telephoning the barn about wanting to "reach" the animals? About identifying
with the animal, who is wanted but cannot, by humans, be reached? Where can
we turn to find out?
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Border patrol
Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph: Southern Women, Their Institutions,
and Their Communities edited by Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond.
Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003, 323 pp., $55.00 hardcover;
Southern Women at the Millennium: A Historical Perspective edited by
Melissa Walker, Jeanette R. Dunn, and Joe P. Dunn. Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 2003, 243 pp., $44.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Kathryn McKee
TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT WOMEN have long been denied a history by both the male-dominated
academy and the men in their every day lives has become a commonplace of historical
scholarship. Thank goodness. Even though, given their audiences, it is hardly
necessary for the essayists in these two volumes to point out that women have
been consistently eclipsed in the grand narratives of war and conquest that
for centuries constituted "history," they generally do. In fact, many of the
contributors follow a course resembling this one: They establish the former
dearth of information about women; they celebrate contemporary attitudes;
and they identify what still needs to be done in their particular area. That
such a pattern exists tells us at least two things: There is now, without
question, an audience that pays attention to the lives of women, and it does
not include only other women. And scholars need to keep reminding that audience
that, buried in time and today, women are living lives that matter not just
to their immediate families but to the whole shape of the societies they inhabit.
That reminder is particularly appropriate in scholarly conversation about
women of the American South, a conversation that involved only a handful of
participants until an explosion of research during the last 30 years, initiated
by Anne Firor Scott's landmark study, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal
to Politics 1830-1930 (1970). The stereotypical images of white and black
Southern women available to anyone with a television, anywhere in the world,
index what has arguably been the most contested site of feminine identity
in the US. A rich source for probing how women have both defied societal norms
and embraced them, Southern culture even now remains deeply ambivalent about
how to define the feminine. White Southern women of a certain class and pedigree,
mythologized as the figures in whose defense the Civil War was fought, have
set the standard by which their regional sisters have been measured and against
which, if black or poor, they have failed. Although such women of privilege
appear in these two essay collections, they are fortunately not alone.
After a pronounced early focus on white Southern women keeping up appearances
in a world that had judged their cause lost, historical scholarship about
females in the South now deals in addition with the lives of African-American
and working-class women. Notably absent, at least from these two volumes,
is any sustained engagement with a more ethnically variegated South--one that
would register, for example, the fact that even many small Southern towns
now have grocery stores aimed exclusively at Hispanic clientele, and that
some intriguing Southern literature of late has been written by immigrants
to the region. Also missing is any discussion of sexual variation, most obviously
lesbianism. Still, both Southern Women at the Millennium and Lives
Full of Struggle and Triumph do a particularly good job of contextualizing
the lives and concerns of blue-collar women, black and white, for whom "belledom"
would always have been a status for someone else to claim. Both books make
significant strides toward a commendable goal articulated by Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman
in her Millennium essay: We must "break the paradigm that treats separately
white and black women's history, and, instead begin to see the parallel, cumulative,
and sometimes tandem influence of southern black and white women." Wilkerson-Freeman's
emphasis is on women in the world of politics, but contributors to both volumes
acknowledge her point in the very structures of their essays, interweaving
without hesitation the experiences of black and white Southerners, as Barbara
A. Woods does in her Millennium essay, "Working in the Shadows: Southern
Women and Civil Rights." Yet, just as intriguingly, some writers return to
that white woman stuck on her pedestal, this time in order to suggest that
we have underestimated gentility as a tool of subversion in a culture where
overt difference can lead to paralyzing isolation, while following the rules
of the game sometimes enables the players to change them.
Southern Women at the Millennium contains essays expanded from their
original format as papers delivered at a symposium held in March 2001 at Converse
College. An invited panel of seven female speakers, mainly historians, addressed
broadly the roles of women in economics, politics, civil rights activism,
higher education, rural life, literary production, and religion. Each essay
serves primarily as a scholarly review of the study of women within the field;
the collection's timely publication--just two years after the symposium--means
its contributors are usefully engaging recent historical treatments, as well
as conducting important research of their own. Particularly readable and intriguing
for its use of oral histories, for instance, is co-editor Melissa Walker's
"The Changing Character of Farm Life: Rural Southern Women."
Joe Dunn explains in the book's prologue that the organizers began assembling
the symposium and this volume "with the premise that knowledge of the past
is essential for discernment about the present and the best preparation for
envisioning the future." Certainly the essays collected here demonstrate the
first part of that philosophy in their careful articulations of "knowledge
of the past," although several of them labor under the burden of treating
such a broad range of women--black, white, working class, elite, antebellum,
postbellum--from across the South that specific examples fail to mitigate
their generalizing impulse.
Noteworthy for resisting that temptation are Amy Thompson McCandless' "'Separate
but Equal' Case Law and the Higher Education of Women in the Twenty-First-Century
South" and Anne Goodwyn Jones' "Other Southern Women and the Voices of the
Fathers." McCandless supports her provocative argument--that courts have "viewed
racial discrimination as more pernicious than gender discrimination"--with
a number of case studies and specific rulings that shed light on the inevitable
links between various forms of inequity throughout the 20th century. Jones'
essay is particularly valuable for its overview of the forces that have centered
the traditional Southern literary canon around a regional self-definition
that relies on white masculinity. Her close readings of African-American women
characters in texts by white Southern women and of white women characters
in texts by black Southern women provide fascinating insights into an interplay
literary scholars have largely ignored. Jacqueline Jones' fine essay, "Spheres
of Economic Activity among Southern Women in the Twentieth Century," usefully
extends the book's regional focus to consider economic globalization, with
a seemingly contradictory yet necessary emphasis on the local, thereby inviting
us to consider Southern women as, among other things, residents of the world.
LIVES FULL OF STRUGGLE AND TRIUMPH takes an approach opposite of
that of Millennium by featuring essays focused on individual women
and their relationships to the established structures governing their lives:
marriage, family, school boards, courts, and local, state, and national governments.
Read together, the entries chart the numerous ways in which women have resisted
and reconstituted those structures. Grouped under four roughly chronological
headings--"The Private World," "The Civil War Era," "The Segregation Era,"
and "The Era of Social Change"--the essays fall into one of two categories:
those focused on particular Southern women and those devoted to a particular
Southern organization, location, or idea.
In most cases, individual experiences lead to reflection about broader issues:
What can we learn about the institution of marriage in the 18th-century South
from the rebelliousness of the famous diarist William Byrd's wife, Lucy Parke?
How did Sarah Morgan, in her brief career as a newspaper columnist, redefine
the role of single women in the postbellum South? What do the roles of nuns
in educating young women in St. Augustine, Florida, in the middle of the 19th
century tell us about regionally inflected attitudes toward Catholicism? What
happens to our understanding of the civil rights movement when we read side-by-side
portraits of its individual black and white players (Esther Cooper Jackson,
Thelma McGee, Anne Braden, and Vivion Brewer)--virtually unknown to each other
and to most historians of the era, yet vitally important to the movement as
it played out around them?
Essays focused on groups of people offer an inviting range of topics: Anya
Jabour studies the phenomenon of the antebellum "college girl"; Karen Cox
charts the rise to power of the United Daughters of the Confederacy; Glenn
Feldman examines the tacit power of women in the Ku Klux Klan; Pamela Tyler
investigates the ambivalent relationship of Southern women to Eleanor Roosevelt.
The volume closes with a strong essay by Michelle Haberland, "After the Wives
Went to Work: Organizing Women in the Southern Apparel Industry," that unites
many of the strands running throughout the collection. Focusing on the Vanity
Fair sewing factory in Jackson, Alabama, Haberland traces efforts there at
union organization, clearly illustrating race as a variable that made the
plant a microcosm of the tensions and changes surging against its walls.
Without exception, Clayton and Salmond's selections are superbly researched
and well-written, a rarity in the world of essay collections, which are so
often uneven in quality. Yet nothing in the book is more valuable than Anne
Firor Scott's introduction, in which she lists changes in the field of women's
history since she began engaging in its practice, ranging from its topics
and sources to the practitioners themselves, which now include some men.
In his opening remarks to the Southern Women at the Millennium conference,
one of those men, Joe Dunn, wonders if "the real saga may not be the future
of 'southern women,' but the story of women in the future who happen to reside
in the region," a tantalizing observation reiterated by Carol K. Bleser in
her conclusion: "I would say that by 2050, there will not be a separate southern
women's culture; there will be only an American culture with no significant
differences for women, north or south." Neither commentator really explores
that viewpoint, and it is not particularly borne out by any essayist, most
of whom ultimately demur from prognostication. But surely the future of Southern
womanhood is worth considering, if its past is so storied and its current
students so convinced of its ongoing importance. In the opening years of the
21st century, there remain many black and white men and women who identify
themselves with the region in a vexed mixture of defensiveness and pride,
in part because they sense that Dunn and Bleser might be right: It is not
just that Southern women will lose their distinctiveness in the face of a
rapidly homogenizing America, but that the South itself will cease to command
the sense of difference that they alternately embrace and resent. As Anne
Goodwyn Jones points out in her essay, "an obsessive need to construct, to
enforce, to patrol borders can be read as a symptom of their very fragility."
The fact that Southerners are on border patrol these days may be just as likely
to guarantee the Southern woman's future as it is to spell her disappearance.
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Short readers, small rep
Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America
by Beverly Lyon Clark. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003,
257 pp., hardcover.
Reviewed by Ilana Nash
LAST FALL, AT A PARTY for new faculty at my university, I struck up a conversation
with another woman about our teaching. When I told her that my classes focus
on constructions of gender, age, race, and class in literature for and about
youth, her face broke into a broad grin. "Oh," she said, her voice rising
an octave. "You teach kiddie lit! How fun!" I felt my mood sink
to a temperature below that of the cocktail I was holding. With effort, I
refrained from asking why she assumed that my subject was particularly "fun,"or
mentioning that her use of the words "kiddie lit" negated the seriousness
of all the other words I'd uttered. Those of us who study culture produced
for youth are accustomed to reactions ranging from benign incomprehension
to amused dismissal. The derisive term "kiddie lit" reflects the belief that
anything consumed by young people is too trivial to warrant intellectual analysis,
and that any adult who attempts such work has somehow infantilized herself
in the process. If this attitude sounds familiar, it may be because you've
heard it before in the context of gender rather than age: In the not-too-distant
past, academics turned up their noses at texts for and about women.
Even people too savvy to dismiss the female anymore still feel entitled to
practice snobbery against youth.
So I was intrigued by the title Kiddie Lit; perhaps this book would
confront the biases that bedevil my field. Author Beverly Lyon Clark articulates
that mission in her preface, announcing that "children's literature as a field
deserve[s] the kind of rethinking that feminists ha[ve] been according works
by and about women.[...] Cultural critics are fond of untangling the interplay
among race, class, and gender in literary and other texts. But what if we
add age to the mix?" Her title is a confrontational tactic to make her readers
"revalue [and] ironize" the noxious phrase "kiddie lit," in a gesture she
borrows from other marginalized groups who have appropriated and redefined
the epithets culture hurls at them. Clark is not the first to suggest that
children's culture deserves serious study, or that analyses of age should
be added to scholars' analytical toolkit. But she is among the first to explore
why that point even needs to be made. How did we come to believe that books
for youth are not a legitimate topic in the first place?
Confronting the biases of those she bracingly calls "elite literary gatekeepers"
Clark examines the critical reception of children's literature over time,
focusing on 19th- and 20th-century book reviews. She reveals a history so
mercurial in its changes that readers cannot but realize how "culturally constructed"
has been our view of young people and their books. Nineteenth-century literary
critics did not segregate literature for children from that for adults; indeed,
they often celebrated writers who cultivated a cross-generational appeal.
The turn of the 20th century, however, brought cultural shifts that negatively
shaped the critical reception of children's literature. America's own youth
as a nation had long made Americans anxious to establish their equality with
Europe--to prove that they were "grown up" enough to join the sophisticated
nations of the world as an equal. "If nineteenth-century America was pervaded
by the metaphor of America as child, then the nation's emergence as a world
power in the twentieth century was marked by a desire to put away childish
things," says Clark. Part of this bid for maturity included the cultivation
of a second and related distinction, that between "high" and "low" literature;
thus, books were praised in proportion to their lack of appeal to mass audiences.
"Good literature" became the preserve of the elite, the mature, and usually
the male.
Clark illuminates her argument with selected case studies of prominent children's
writers and artists of the last 120 years. These studies diminish in power
and scope as the book progresses. The final chapters (on Alice in Wonderland,
Harry Potter, and Walt Disney) are insufficiently linked to the rest of the
book and lack strong central arguments, offering instead a plethora of repetitive
and sometimes underinterpreted evidence to demonstrate the varying attitudes
towards children's literature reflected in the critical commentary. The stronger
arguments appear at the beginning of the book, where Clark's first and most
substantial case study juxtaposes Frances Hodgson Burnett, now regarded as
strictly a children's author, and the redoubtable Henry James, one of America's
foremost men of letters. Published in 1885, Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy
found immediate success with both adults and children and received widespread
critical acclaim. James, an influential critic whose own fiction never achieved
the mass popularity that Burnett's did, was one of the vanguard of literary
"gatekeepers" who used a binary of maturity and immaturity as the foundation
for judgments that promoted an elitist, adult-centered aesthetic. Clark documents
not only James' negative critiques of Burnett's fiction, but also his suspect
use of child characters in his own novels: She suggests that What Maisie
Knew "used [young] Maisie to quash childhood and family connection," as
one facet of James' campaign to create for himself "a lasting reputation in
the academy[...] by repudiating juvenility" and to shape the methodology of
American literary criticism. The efforts of critics like James took hold over
the following years. Although Burnett's Fauntleroy was "one of three
best selling titles in the United States in 1886" and was widely included
on lists of "best books," by the 1920s the novel could hardly be found on
any such lists or even in adult libraries. Burnett's oeuvre had been redefined
as solely for children, and as the height of her imagined readers shrank,
so did her reputation among the literati.
Constructions of gender as well as age affected Burnett's decline. Noting
that "Late nineteenth century masculinity was unstable, contested, contradictory,"
Clark argues that Fauntleroy initially thrived because it "reconcile[d]
these varied strands"; by the early 20th century, however, dominant ideals
of masculinity had stabilized through discourses of the rugged and the muscular,
making the foppish Fauntleroy obsolete.
Throughout Kiddie Lit, Clark drops hints about the impact of gender
ideologies on her topic, as when she suggests that female childhood has been
even more stringently exiled from elite standards of excellence than male
childhood (as in her case studies of Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott). But
gender is a secondary focus of this work, surfacing only sporadically in provocative
insights and arguments. Among the best of these is her discussion of the qualities
critics preferred in their assessments of "good" literature. The authors who
benefited most from the newly codified standards of literary excellence--like
Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne--were those who "came
to embody the individual's struggle with an oppressive and destructive society."
Such rugged individualism opposed the world of women, children, and domesticity,
all part of the stifling society the ideal male hero strove to escape. Readers
familiar with feminist literary criticism will find Clark's observations familiar,
but her application of this material to children's issues is fresher. Surely
the traditional intertwining of women's and children's lives--and their twin
fates as Other to the adult male--has influenced their intertwined constructions
as characters in and consumers of texts.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN, HOWEVER, that children and women should remain intertwined
in our thinking today, and here I have a quibble with Clark's use of feminist
models to buttress her claims for legitimizing children's culture. Outlining
the many ways in which the academy has failed to pay proper attention to children,
Clark expresses particular disappointment with feminist theorists, whom she
faults for discussing childhood only in the context of analyzing women's experiences
as daughters: They "mask their ambivalence about children by eliding two meanings
of child--as defined by age and as defined by family relationship--so
that they can continue talking about themselves and hence ignore real children."
This is a weighty charge, indeed, to level against a woman: ignoring children
and talking about herself. Are we, then, to think of feminist theorists as
bad mommies? Clark suggests that "attend[ing] to children's perspectives"
should be a natural step for feminist scholars, given their focus on the dynamics
of marginality and exclusion. Yet scholars of race and post-colonialism, too,
analyze margins and exclusions, and Clark does not criticize their
focus on adults. Why should feminists bear that burden? American society still
insists that a woman's primary value comes from her role as a caretaker--particularly
of little ones--and as long as that oppressive state of affairs continues,
no feminist should be scolded for resisting the forced association between
women and children.
No one, however, can dispute the justice of Clark's claims for considerations
of age in cultural analyses. Her thorough documentation of the vagaries of
the reception of "kiddie lit" proves that our negative valuations of youth
culture deserve rethinking. By suggesting the links between this dismissive
attitude and the politics of gender and class discrimination, Clark makes
readers want to distance themselves from such an unseemly legacy, and
thus, perhaps, to take up the challenge. If Clark's arguments, and those of
like-minded scholars, can prompt enough of us to extend the same intellectual
respect to childhood that we currently grant to gender and race, the fledgling
field of youth studies may finally secure some respectability. On that day,
I may be able to talk about my work at cocktail parties without fearing that
someone will hand me a sippy-cup and a bib.
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Jane Addams, age 35, 1895. From
The Education of Jane Addams.
|
Creating a self
The Education of Jane Addams by Victoria Bissell Brown. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 421 pp., $39.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Kim E. Nielsen
JANE ADDAMS IS SUCH A larger-than-life figure in United States history--particularly
in the history of US women--that it is easy to assume that we know everything
about her. With Ellen Gates Starr, she co-founded Chicago's Hull-House and
then became the uncontested leader of the world-renowned settlement house.
She served as the first president of the Women's International League for
Peace and Freedom and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931; provided the initial
institutional impetus for activists Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, and Grace
Abbott, the godmothers of contemporary worker safety laws and early 20th-century
social welfare programs; theorized brilliantly about politics and democracy;
and shepherded four nieces and nephews to adulthood after the death of her
sister.
The brilliance of Victoria Bissell Brown's The Education of Jane Addams
is that Brown asks how Jane Addams became the Jane Addams of the above
litany of accomplishments. Brown charmingly admits that she initially turned
to the young Jane Addams as a strategy to comprehend the handwriting of the
older Jane Addams. (As someone who has also tried to read Addams' handwritten
notes and letters, I empathized!) By doing so she became convinced of the
importance of understanding Addams' intellectual and personal development.
Brown explores how the woman born in 1860 drew upon determination, monetary
inheritance, intellectual and religious struggle, and the dual demands of
what Addams called "the family claim" and "the social claim" to create her
mature self. The process required her to resolve the "conflict her generation
faced between traditional female duty and educated female ambition."
The fierce process of Addams' intellectual and personal development encourages
me. More than a pile of self-help books, this account of Addams' early life
reveals that personal and social change are both possible and gratifying.
As Brown points out, one of the reasons Jane Addams is so attractive as a
historical figure is that "she grounded her social theory so firmly in lived
experience." She attempted to live a life consistent with the political philosophy
she so purposefully developed.
Jane Addams grew up as the daughter of a "small-town prairie elite" father
who clearly expected as much intelligence, common sense, and public interest
from a daughter as he would have from a son. Her mother died when she was
two years old, and she gained a stepmother at the age of eight. More than
other Addams biographers, Brown credits Addams' father John Huy Addams with
providing much of her initial grounding. He encouraged in her "the subversive
belief that her understanding of politics and her knowledge of history actually
mattered." Presumably not intentionally, he also bequeathed to her the thick
entanglements of a needy extended family when he died in 1881. That extended
family, including her stepmother Anna, held firm and frequently expressed
expectations--"the family claim"--that the unmarried Addams would spend her
adult life serving them.
Addams' early adult years included an education at Rockford Female Seminary,
a short period as a society girl in Baltimore, two Grand Tours of Europe in
the 1880s, and travels from the home of one needy relative to another. Throughout
all of this, she sought ways to reconcile and live out her seemingly contradictory
values and characteristics: her ambition, her intellect, her desire to live
in accordance with Christian ethics despite her lack of Christian faith, and
her femaleness. She sought to be a "hybrid: the gracious intellectual." The
demands of her family only intensified the frustration of this process. What
is unique about The Education of Jane Addams is the importance Brown
places upon this formative period in "humbling Jane and humanizing her understanding
of spirituality and artistic expression."
WITH THE SEPTEMBER 1889 CREATION and successful launching of Hull-House,
and in "full rebellion" against all "who had ever told her to recline her
way through life," Addams very quickly became a monumental public figure.
She began by infusing Hull-House with the conviction that "the only escape
from selfishness and egocentrism was through active engagement in the common
life of the most common people," and explained the institution to the wealthy
as one designed to rescue the rich (and educated women with no professional
opportunities) from their own uselessness. Started in one building in one
of the most ethnically diverse and poorest neighborhoods of Chicago, Hull-House
soon grew to encompass an entire block and serve several thousand visitors
each week. At various times it included a dormitory for young women, clean
bathing space, a day nursery, dance space, an art gallery, health care, summer
school programs, a reading room, open meeting halls for neighborhood groups
of all kinds, and an employment bureau; it also offered classes in English
and numerous other languages, bookkeeping, political theory, contemporary
social issues, art of all kinds, sewing, singing, history--the list goes on
and on. Eventually, as Addams embraced opportunities provided by activist
Florence Kelley's dedication to improving labor conditions, the institution
took explicitly political stances and became a national leader in the successful
campaign for labor and health legislation--indeed, a primary symbol of the
Progressive Era. The effectiveness of Hull-House came from the efforts of
Addams and others to live by implementing Addams' own social theory--direct
and egalitarian democracy coupled with a fierce commitment to mutuality and
mediation (a skill she first honed juggling the demands of her family members).
To the many who lived and worked at Hull-House, for periods ranging from
several weeks to several decades, the institution offered a reason and place
to be. The lack of purpose and opportunities for young intelligent, ambitious,
educated women could be debilitating. The alternative reality created by Addams
and embodied in Hull-House attracted and thrilled both men and women. As Brown
explains it, "Hull-House was not a female space in the sense that only women
worked there; it was a female space in the sense that a nonpatriarchal style
of management governed there and none of the settlement's many male volunteers
ever thought to doubt or challenge it."
Unidentified settlement volunteer (left) visiting a Hull-House
neighborhood family. From The Education of Jane Addams.
|
To Addams, Hull-House offered family and home. First Ellen Gates Starr and
then Mary Rozet Smith provided Addams with love and partnership. Though the
historical sources are sketchy about whether or not these were what we'd today
call lesbian relationships, they were immensely important to Addams. Other
men and women, like John Dewey, became Addams' friends and Hull-House enthusiasts.
Being forced to choose "the social claim" over "the family claim" had been
painful, but, says Brown, by "choosing what looked like sacrifice, she had
chosen happiness."
What particularly struck me as I read about Addams' intellectual and personal
wrestlings with ambition and femaleness is that so many young women even now
continue to wrestle with the same issues. As a young woman, Addams "dreamt
that she could bend gender rules and become a female hero without having to
risk public scorn." That didn't happen--and for many young women, it still
doesn't happen. Addams shows us that by creating alternatives for others,
she created an alternative for herself. And as Brown insists repeatedly throughout
The Education of Jane Addams, the process of creating this alternative
was as important as the alternative itself.
Looking back, it's easy to sugarcoat Jane Addams as a cheerful do-gooder,
perhaps too willing to accommodate others. Both labor and capital criticized
her amidst the intense conflicts and economic depression of the 1890s because
she could understand both sides of the conflict. Some contemporary historians
have issued the same critique. But Brown insists that Hull-House was "no place
for sissies." Addams' positions "resulted not from political timidity but
philosophical toughness." Collective cooperation during conflict, Addams argued,
takes more daring than does selfishness.
In the midst of our wartime US presidential contest, the most thought provoking
of Addams' hard-won political philosophies is her insistence that genuine
democracy is not easy, but it is worthwhile. A primary lesson for our times
of the making of Jane Addams and her political philosophy is that democracy
takes courage. And while courage is difficult, for Addams "democracy--as a
daily practice--was the path to joy." She firmly believed that "all forms
of hostility were inherently undemocratic because they precluded the process
of participatory dialogue," thus excluding the least powerful and denying
the transformation of ideas that comes with dialogue and exchange. Presumably
this is the grounding for Addams' later public stance against war. Addams'
faith in democracy also caused her to argue that the efforts of the US government
to redistribute wealth were inherently more democratic than private charity,
because of the participatory nature of democracy. And though Addams would
be appalled by current voting rates in the US, she firmly believed that living
democracy demanded far more than voting. A great irony is that the woman denied
a vote until 1920 lived a life of democracy far more vigorously than many
of us with access to the ballot today.
Brown concludes The Education of Jane Addams in 1895. She argues that
although Jane Addams would live another complex and vigorous 40 years, by
this point "the fundamentals were in place and would not change." The greatest
compliment I can give this book is my hope that--despite the piles of books
about Jane Addams--Brown completes what she has begun, with a second book
providing her perspective on the results of the education of Jane Addams.
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Trezza Azzopardi
Photo by Steve Foster
|
Tumbling days
Remember Me by Trezza Azzopardi. New York: Grove Press, 2004, 320 pp.,
$23.00 hardcover.
Reviewed by Diana Postlethwaite
TREZZA AZZOPARDI, who grew up in a Maltese-British family, recently graduated
from a writing program at the University of East Anglia. The literary establishment
buzzed when her first novel, The Hiding Place (2000), was short-listed
for the Booker Prize in the year that Zadie Smith's higher-profile White
Teeth was overlooked. Set within a large, struggling family of Maltese
immigrants in l960s Wales, The Hiding Place evoked critical comparisons
with Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Susan Minot's Monkeys.
But I'd place Azzopardi within a British literary cohort that includes two
quite different writers: Sarah Waters and Barbara Vine.
Despite the darkness of its subject matter, I found the experience of reading
Remember Me exhilarating, moving, anything but bleak. Ironically, while
academic canon-makers these days may be more willing to acknowledge permeable
boundaries between "high" and "low" culture, the marketing gurus of bookstore
fiction still make arbitrary decisions to file "literary" and "genre" novels
on separate shelves. Thus it is that a romantic, page-turning supernatural/psychological
mystery like Sarah Waters' Affinity gets pride of place in "Literature,"
while brilliant fictions like A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine (a
pseudonym of Ruth Rendell) have to slug it out next to genre retreads in the
"Mystery/Thriller" section.
Like the novels of Waters and Vine, Trezza Azzopardi's work embraces both
poetry and plot. Like them exploring the dark side of the human psyche while
spinning a clever puzzle, it demonstrates that the page-turning attributes
of "mystery" need not be incompatible with the well-crafted, supple language
of "literature."
Remember Me takes place entirely within the mind of a 72-year-old
woman, Winnie. Winnie's "been called a hobo and a tramp and down-and-out;
a dipso, a wino"--some might say she's a "bag lady." It's the theft of Winnie's
bag that opens the book, setting in motion her imagistic and idiosyncratic
mind. Each object she's lost holds a clue: a feather, a locket, a brooch missing
its opal center, a dainty shoemaker's wooden foot or "last." Each is a sacred
talisman in the intricate tangle of Winnie's imagination and memory. "I had
been taught to believe in artifacts: to balance them, store the person in
an object."
The novelist may fly free of time and space, and Azzopardi makes rich use
of this license. Interweaving chapters of present-tense time (events immediately
following the theft of Winnie's treasures) with her memory's ever-present
past, Winnie and the reader relive central moments in her life: at seven,
at 15, at 40.
"So much has been broken, and so much stolen," Winnie reflects near the beginning
of the book. "Things can slip away and splinter." Of the many who have abandoned
or rejected her, "no one comes back." Relentlessly, the novel sounds these
themes of breakage, theft, and loss. A series of traumas causes Winnie severe
psychic damage: her mother's madness and suicide, her father's disappearance,
wartime displacement and deprivation, a forced abortion, and more--cruelty
and abuse, both physical and mental.
Even Winnie's name, we learn, isn't really her own. For the 32 years prior
to the novel's opening, she's lived on the streets at an elemental level of
survival, without language, memory, or emotion: "mostly there's no edge, just
tumbling days, which is how I like it."
As Winnie gradually reclaims her identity through the course of the novel,
Remember Me discloses surprising secrets. I won't reveal them here,
but will offer a caveat: Readers who hope for a "comic" resolution, for restoration
and reconciliation, are going to be disappointed. "Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember
me" was the parting shot of Hamlet's ghostly father. That Shakespearean remembrance
was a burden, not a blessing, and this Remember Me is also a ghost-haunted
tragedy.
IT'S POSSIBLE TO SORT OUT the constantly shifting time frames of Remember
Me. The book is divided into three "Parts" ("Before," "After," and "Rise");
in each part, sequentially numbered chapters are interrupted by unnumbered
chapters, with names like "nothing," "paradise," "bargain." The named chapters
signal that we are in the present with 72-year-old Winnie, in the aftermath
of the theft. The numbered chapters, the first of which opens with a date
("It's May 1930"), recount Winnie's remembering of her history and focus on
her thoughts and feelings at crucial moments in the first two decades of her
life.
But in another sense, these chapter distinctions are irrelevant, because
we are always inside Winnie's mind: The past is the present. The images
from past time are leitmotifs sounded throughout the book, gathering a cumulative
richness of meaning.
One of the earliest mysteries in Winnie's memory is that of her name. As
a small child, she is Patsy to her father, but Lillian to her maternal grandfather:
"I wanted to ask him why he called me by the wrong name and why my father
thinks he is the devil." Lillian is also the name of her beautiful black-haired
mother, who danced on her wedding in tiny cornflower-blue silk slippers, but
now lies in bed, "eaten up" by "ghosts": "her eyes... hard as jet; her hair,
brittle as spun sugar.... walking her tightrope, between this world and the
next."
One obsessively repeated image throughout Remember Me is that of hair.
"The girl [who] took everything [Winnie] own[s]" when the novel begins had
"hair... red as rust: Telltale. I used to have red hair, when I was a girl."
The single possession not stolen from Winnie is a "plastic bag with a face
on it. I kept it in my inside pocket, next to my heart. She didn't get that."
Later in the book, we learn that this bag contains red hair; at the end of
the novel, we find out whose.
"I'd like to say she didn't touch a hair on my head," Winnie teases the reader
as the book opens, "but that would be a lie." The thief also stole the jet-black
wig with which Winnie has obsessively covered her red hair (again, for reasons
that unfold over the course of the novel) since she was 15.
When the robbery takes place, Winnie is camping in the gutted remains of
an abandoned shop, "Hewitt's Shoe Repairs and Fittings." Hewitt and his shop
have played some significant role in Winnie's past. Half-glimpsed horrors
begin early in flashback: "Hewitt led me into the back room, for a fitting,
he said. Called it the Personal Touch. He had Devices, Methods, cunning hands."
Why has Winnie returned to this place of terrifying memories?
Fairy tales are an important motif in the novel. Winnie's raven-haired mother
merges in her imagination with Snow White "in her glass case," who "chooses
to remain asleep.... Here she is entombed, undisturbed. At night, when all
the faces go away, she has the privilege of the moon. In her head, under winking
stars, she dances."
The most stunningly written section of Remember Me is one in which
Winnie relives her mother's death. Azzopardi is scrupulous in keeping us within
the perceptions of a guilty and terrified seven year old here. Young Winnie
has disobeyed her father's orders to stay at home with her severely depressed
mother. Returning from a fair, Winnie looks up at her mother's bedroom window
to see a bizarre sight: "My father is holding my mother by the waist; they're
dancing." Shards of broken mirror cover the floor: "They are dancing on pure
light.... The floor is full of pieces of sky.... I see the black around her;
a river staining the floor. I see the ghosts, oozing."
After her mother's suicide, Winnie embarks on the picaresque existence of
an orphan in a Victorian novel: She is sent to live with her harsh grandfather,
abandoned by her feckless father, befriended by her grandfather's eccentric
lodger, and shipped off to the country to live with peculiar Aunty Ena as
the bombs of World War II begin to fall on London. Impregnated by a country
lad, the now-15-year-old outcast is banished to London, only to find her grandfather's
house deserted. Like many a seduced-and-abandoned heroine, she heads for the
heath: "I picked up my case and walked into the trees."
Here's where the plot of Remember Me takes a decidedly Sarah Waters-ish
turn. Winnie is befriended by the shyster siblings Bernard and Jean Foy, who
put her in a black wig and market her as "The Girl with the Gift," a performing
spirit medium. With a gothic flourish, the novel reveals that Winnie is the
Real Thing, one who truly can summon ghosts: "Turquoise and lapis and bluest
blue. Blue like film-light, like twilight, like winter sky.... They would
like to pay their respects to the young lady with the long black hair."
A psychologist, of course, could offer a more "rational" explanation: Delusional
Winnie has inherited her missing mother's insanity; she dons the black wig
in order to "become" her mother. The melodrama of a red-haired baby-napping
that climaxes the plot's revelations enacts Winnie's lifelong search for that
"lost baby" who is, really, Winnie herself.
But Winnie--and Trezza Azzopardi--have chosen to believe in the truths of
the imagination. It's a measure of the magic of Remember Me that the
reader is likely to agree. We leave our heroine "at the end of this world,"
happy in the company of her ghosts and eager to join their ranks.
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The Science War front
Beyond Epistemology: A Pragmatist Approach to Feminist Science Studies
by Sharyn Clough. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 167 pp., $24.95
paper;
Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology: An Examination of Gender in Science
edited by Cassandra L. Pinnick, Noretta Koertge, and Robert F. Almeder. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 275 pp., $25.00 paper.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Potter
THERE ARE TWO REASONS TO CRITICIZE the work of other feminists: to make
it better or to make it go away. Sharyn Clough's Beyond Epistemology
is animated by the first impulse; Cassandra Pinnick, et al.'s Scrutinizing
Feminist Epistemology by the second.
Pinnick, et al., represents a salvo in the Science Wars. Like post-colonial
and other critical science studies, feminist epistemology of science has succeeded
in revealing the methods, principles, and hidden assumptions that have contributed
to scientific findings that women are, for example, biologically or psychologically
ill-suited for economic, political, and other leadership roles in society.
These and other studies have provoked defenders of a traditional picture of
the sciences to respond strongly and publicly--thus, the Science Wars in the
pages of both the popular press and academic journals. Probably the best-known
Science War skirmish is the Sokal Hoax. Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York
University, published an article intended as a parody of feminist, critical
race, and other science critiques in the spring 1996 issue of the journal
Social Text. Once the article appeared, Sokal revealed his hoax in
a letter to the journal Lingua Franca. This was big news, covered on
the front page of The New York Times and in other media outlets. The
news was not that a physicist had submitted an article to a respected journal
presenting as his own views that he did not hold; it was rather that scholars
of science had been shown to be ridiculous.
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left
and Its Quarrels with Science (1994) had already undertaken the work of
discrediting feminist and other science studies in the name of defending science
against leftists, post-modern relativists, and scholars in the humanities
and in the sociology of science. Not being scientists, such scholars purportedly
cannot understand how scientific knowledge is produced. The strategy of the
book is to present as incompatible the production of scientific knowledge
through evidence and reasoning and social accounts of the production of scientific
knowledge. It ignores the arguments of feminist and other science scholars
that a complete account of science requires both.
If you liked Higher Superstition, you will like Scrutinizing Feminist
Epistemology. (Indeed, a laudatory blurb from Paul Gross graces its back
cover.) Although most of the essays in Scrutinizing are more careful
than the work of Gross and Levitt, it is still distressing to read them when
one knows the work being critiqued, for the writers attack "straw women"--unrecognizable
caricatures of feminist scholars. Having set up such "straw women," the Science
Defenders then need to explain why feminist thinkers are taken seriously,
get tenure, and have their work published in first-rate academic journals
and presses. Often, they claim that the academy has been taken over by liberals,
who have replaced good scholarship with political correctness. Gonzalo Munevar's
essay typifies this approach. "Sandra Harding's Feminist Epistemology and
Political Correctness" begins:
Why is feminist epistemology of science, as exemplified in the
work of Sandra Harding, taken seriously in academic circles? My answer to
this peculiar puzzle is that feminist epistemology of science gets its impetus
from the self-righteous cultural revolution that political correctness has
imposed on the universities and intellectual circles of North America. (p.
142)
Cassandra Pinnick, one of the volume's editors, begins "Feminist Epistemology:
Implications for Philosophy of Science" by declaring, "The central thesis of
this essay is that feminist epistemology should not be taken seriously." She
goes on to argue that feminist epistemology is caught on the horns of a dilemma:
Feminists (supposedly) claim, on the one hand, that every epistemology is merely
a function of social and political values; yet claim, on the other, that feminist
epistemology is better than its rivals. In other words, feminist epistemologists
are simple-minded, radical relativists who do not understand that their radical
relativism cannot support a claim that their own views are better justified
than their opponents'.
A second charge, nicely stated by Susan Haack in the lead essay, "Knowledge
and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist," goes like this: Feminist
epistemologists would have scientists select facts and theories because they
fit a political agenda, not because they fit the data. She says,
What is most troubling is that the label ["feminist"] is designed
to convey the idea that inquiry should be politicized. And that
is not only mistaken, but dangerously so.
It is dangerously mistaken from an epistemological point of view, because
the presupposition on which it rests--that genuine, honest inquiry is neither
possible nor desirable--is, in Bacon's shrewd phrase, a "factitious despair"
which, as he says, tends to "cut the sinews and spur of industry." Serious
intellectual work is hard, painful, frustrating; suggesting that it is legitimate
to succumb to the temptation to cut corners can only block the way of inquiry.
(p. 15)
Genuine, honest, hard work in science, Pinnick says, is apolitical; feminists,
misguided by their politics, have given up on the possibility of honest--i.e.,
value-free--inquiry.
When Science Defenders claim that feminist (and other) science scholarship
is dangerous, they are not insincere or in bad faith. Their attacks on feminist
epistemology make sense, if we understand the picture of science that they
hold: that science is the last bastion of reason against unreason. Thus, without
value-free determination of the facts, the world is in danger of degenerating
into the war of all against all, as we fight one another to the death to defend
our conflicting values. These Science Defenders perceive democracy to be fragile,
holding only so long as the common people believe that those in authority
deserve their authority because they turn to the sciences for advice on social,
economic, medical, and military policy. Thus, for the good of our democratic,
free society, science critics must be discredited. (This is a rough version
of Elisabeth Lloyd's excellent analysis in "Objectivity and the Double Standard
for Feminist Epistemologies," Synthese 104, 1995.)
THIS GRIM PICTURE is deeply connected to the epistemological beliefs animating
many of the essays in Pinnick, et al., which rely on the unstated assumption
that values and reason are totally incompatible. Science must be value-free
because values are "science-free." Science Defenders tacitly adopt a theory
of values to which, philosopher Elizabeth Anderson points out, no serious
moral philosopher currently subscribes: that values cannot be influenced or
corrected by reason or experience. This view of values is left over from positivism,
which wrote off moral values as mere expressions of emotion, the opposite
of facts; thus, "it is wrong to kill humans" does not state a moral fact,
since there are no moral facts. It is merely the equivalent of saying, "I
hate killing humans!" where one's feeling of hatred is not subject to reason
or experience. We find this assumption in Pinnick's rendition of Sandra Harding:
The problem with science, as Harding sees it, is not sexism. Instead,
the problem is that scientific knowledge reflects a set of noncognitive interests
and values that serve the political ends of Western European, white males.
(p. 21)
But it is not Harding who thinks that interests and values are noncognitive;
it is Pinnick. Most people base their values on experience, and they often learn
that what they once thought was good or best is not so. To borrow an example
from Anderson, a friend argues against our feeling that a job is no longer worth
doing, and we are persuaded; we decide it is worth doing after all.
But to thinkers like Pinnick and Haack, if values influence science, then
science is not based on reasoning from the evidence. To such Science Defenders,
feminist scholarship revealing that gender values sometimes influence the
findings of science--or going so far as to argue that feminist values can
sometimes improve science--is dangerous. It places science at the mercy
of "irrational" values and interests, undermining its position as the bastion
of reason against superstition and political tyranny.
A final example will show how deeply concerned Science Defenders are that
these dangerous feminist views are "doing irreparable harm to the entire society."
Meera Nanda's "Modern Science as the Standpoint of the Oppressed," charges
Harding and Helen Longino with denying that Western science has any "relevance
for bringing about a reasoned change in worldviews and ethical values in non-Western
societies." In a neat reversal, Nanda claims that
A big part of the problem is the fundamental asymmetry between
facts and values that lies at the heart of feminist epistemology: although
all statements of facts about nature are seen as value-laden, social and cultural
values themselves are conceptualized as cultural givens and beyond the pale
of rational criticism and reasoned change. (Italics Nanda's, pp. 160-161)
Nanda believes that feminist epistemology "renounces" the task set by John Dewey:
using science to evaluate values. She is concerned that Western feminists romanticize
non-Western traditions, failing to see that they are oppressive to women, and
that the best hope for liberation and changing old values rests with modern
science (the bastion of reason against unreason). Like other authors in this
book (Janet Kourany is the notable exception), Nanda ignores Longino's empiricism,
her frequently stated assumption that reality resists many interpretations of
it and so checks our theories about it. She sees only Longino's point that values
(also) influence scientific findings:
If different communities are free to use contextual values that
express their social and cultural aspirations for justifying knowledge claims,
regardless of coherence with what is already known about the world through
modern science, then all these positions are legitimate sciences. How will
feminists challenge the proponents of Vedic astrology? How will they respond
to the goddess theory of disease? (p. 165)
But feminist empiricism--including Harding's--has challenged oppressive views
for almost two decades by challenging both their empirical claims and
their values.
IN BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY, Sharyn Clough also criticizes feminist epistemologies
of science and offers some of the same criticisms that Haack does; but unlike
Haack, Clough does the hard work, giving detailed arguments and citing passages
in the work of Ruth Bleier, Evelyn Keller, and Helen Longino in support of
her criticism. This makes it possible for feminists to respond with further
arguments and to clarify or modify their views. (Against general attacks made
without citation or detailed criticism, we are limited to "No, I didn't say
that" and to repeating our original arguments. This is boring and has typified
the Science Wars.)
Many feminist epistemologists have taken up the work of mainstream philosophers
and shaped it for feminist ends, and Clough finds the work of Donald Davidson--an
unlikely source for feminists--instructive. Her book is a sustained discussion
of feminists' turn to epistemology from empirical science critique. Clough
maintains that Keller, Bleier, and Longino have worked under the spell of
an epistemologically mistaken view, dubbed "representationalism." Representationalists
believe that sensory data is completely unconceptualized; the human mind must
filter this undifferentiated stuff through concepts before it can be understood
as anything, as red or smooth or as an object such as a cup or ball. The mind
has no direct access to the world except through its conceptualized data,
or "representations." Davidson presents many objections to this view, the
most serious being that it invites global skepticism. The skeptic wants to
know how we can be sure we have interpreted the raw data correctly. We could
be totally wrong about everything in the world!
Science scholars, for example, Sandra Harding, might not focus on representationalism,
says Clough, but they still betray vestiges of it. Longino and Harding, she
says, see political and other values as filters for interpreting raw data.
Since they argue that scientific theories depend on political schema and values
to interpret data, they are saying that theories are relative to political
and other such values. Yet Keller, Longino, Harding, and other feminist critics
of the sciences also hold that some theories are better than others. Clough
argues that their relativism makes this impossible to support.
The problem, says Clough, arises from a representationalist use of the underdetermination
thesis. Versions of this thesis (and there are many) have been useful for
feminist epistemologists of science. The version Clough attributes to these
three scholars states that
[E]very scientific theory is underdetermined by the evidence brought
forward in its support; that is, theoretically, any particular piece of evidence
can be used to support an infinite number of theories. Conversely, for any
theory that fits the available evidence, there may be another theory that
fits the same evidence equally well. (p. 93)
For representationalists, a corollary of the undetermination thesis says: Given
that some scientific theories are chosen over others, and given that the evidence
does not determine which is better, the choice of one theory over another must
be based on a political explanatory scheme, not just on the evidence. Explains
Clough, "All our knowledge becomes relativized to our conceptual filters…. the
best we can do is pick the theory screened through the most appealing (to feminists)
and/or least partial conceptual scheme." Clough recognizes that each scholar
rejects relativism, but "[e]ach is left with a watered-down prescription for
feminist scientific method that is restricted to detecting how the filter of
culture intervenes between the world and scientific knowledge," and with advocating
that scientists choose feminist and/or other less oppressive theories.
As we have seen, this is the same charge Haack makes: Feminists urge scientists
to choose theories on the basis of politics. But whereas Haack herself assumes
that values are not amenable to evidence or reason, Clough instead attributes
this view to Longino, Harding, and Keller and argues that it is false. Values,
Clough says, are not different in kind from factual beliefs; both are based
on experience and reason.
Clough recommends that we stop doing epistemology--which she identifies with
representationalist epistemology--and go back to empirical criticism of scientific
theories that are harmful to women and Others. She advocates "working to eradicate
the harmful effects of sexism, racism, and other oppressive systems in all
aspects of scientific research, laboratory by laboratory, research program
by research program." Such empirical studies, she believes, will be "more
effective and less harmful than our current epistemological focus."
ARGUMENTS AGAINST CLOUGH'S INTERPRETATION of Harding and Longino cannot
be set out in a brief review, but neither philosopher is a representationalist.
When Longino states that background assumptions are always required to interpret
data, she means--clearly, in my view--that beliefs, including value beliefs,
are necessary in order to make an inference from the data to a hypothesis.
Moreover, this data is not unconceptualized. To take an example Clough cites,
Longino states that ancient chipped stones constitute the data to be interpreted
through a man-the-hunter or woman-the-gatherer theory. The data are already
conceptualized as chipped stones; they must be interpreted either as tools
used by men for hunting or as tools used by women for preparing food. But
this is not a representationalist view in which concepts mediate, or filter,
unconceptualized data.
Longino does argue that the available anthropological data in this case are
so few as to underdetermine the choice of hypothesis, and that most anthropologists
decided on a man-the-hunter view, supported in part by unexamined gender assumptions.
Clough points out that feminists need not urge anyone to choose an interpretive
theory on the basis of noncognitive, political values. They have good reason
for urging the more inclusive, woman-the-gatherer interpretation: It does
not rule out the possibility that men developed tools for hunting, and there
is plenty of "past empirical evidence that to ignore the role of women is
to get the 'human' story drastically wrong." A decision in favor of woman-the-gatherer
is "well supported by inductively observed instances of past scientific errors."
This is a welcome contribution to the feminist critique of the sciences and
brings us to the cutting edge of philosophical attempts to understand the
relationship between values and scientific facts. In Clough's feminist pragmatism,
do values always cash out as facts? If not, do they have any role in scientific
reasoning? Longino has been at pains to show that they do; Clough has not
spoken on the matter yet. In the chipped stones example, she substitutes a
good inductive generalization--"in the past, ignoring the role of women has
led to wrong scientific accounts of human lives"--which is a specific case
of the general epistemic methodological rule, "consider all relevant evidence
when proving a hypothesis." This leaves me wondering whether Clough believes
that the negative social value placed on women has, for example, prevented
good medical hypotheses from being even better (as they would be if women's
bodies were thought to be as important as men's); or whether it leads to bad
medical science because it is a value; or whether it can be turned into a
fact and used as evidence, as in the chipped stones case.
Beyond Feminist Epistemology brings us tantalizing questions from
an exciting new feminist philosopher.
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No post-feminists here
The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism edited by
Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin. New York: Anchor Books, 2004, 346 pp.,
14.95 paper.
Reviewed by Jennifer L. Pozner
ACCORDING TO THE CORPORATE MEDIA, Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin don't
exist. That is to say, of all the major US newspapers and magazines in the
Nexis news database, only the Washington Post and the Boston Globe
have deigned to review their anthology, The Fire This Time, four months
after its release.
Martin and Labaton are, respectively, the cofounder and first executive director
of the Third Wave Foundation, the country's only national, multiracial, multi-issue,
young women's philanthropic and activist organization, created in the mid-'90s
to make feminism "hot, sexy, and newly revolutionary." Labels were unimportant
compared to issues, and as they saw it, virtually all issues fell within their
domain. "For us, 'third wave' feminism simply meant young women and men doing
social justice work while using a gender lens," the editors write; the diversity
of subjects Fire tackles illustrate this point.
To acknowledge the presence, passion and scope of Fire's contributors
and editors would be to explode some of the media's most persistent myths:
that feminism is either "dead" (Time cover story, 1998) and a "failure"
(Newsweek, 1990; New York Times Magazine feature, 1988), or,
alternately, that "Women's Issues Face a Tough Sell" (Florida Sun-Sentinel,
2002) in our "golden age of post-feminism--Wonderbras, not burning bras" (London
Independent, 1995). As far back as 1982, the New York Times Magazine
claimed to have identified a "post-feminist generation" who supposedly rejected
the quest for equality as irrelevant and passé. Decades come and go, yet the
script remains the same: We're still being told that Gen X and Gen Y women
are apathetic about their rights, preferring the watered down version of "girl
power" hawked in Hollywood chicks-kick-ass products like Alias and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and bare-booty music videos from L'il Kim
and Foxy Brown.
Fire is the most recent entrant in a 13-year effort to refute these
misrepresentations. In 1991, journalist Paula Kamen examined post-boomer thought
in Feminist Fatale: Voices from the "Twentysomething" Generation Explore
the Future of the "Women's Movement". Mid-'90s anthologies, such as Barbara
Finden's Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation (1995)
and Rebecca Walker's To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face
of Feminism" (1995), offered generational and identity-based perspectives
on young women's political ideology and activism. By 2000, Manifesta,
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' optimistic call-to-arms, had become
a women's studies staple. Each in its own way, these texts proved that--as
I wrote in the anthology Catching A Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st
Century (2003)--"postfeminism is a fiction. Far from the media spotlight,
girls and young women are undertaking exciting, creative, and uncompromising
activism every day," using multiple strategies in pursuit of interconnected
social justice goals.
The Fire This Time attempts to advance a broader concept of what the
third wave is and what it can become. Labaton and Martin may not have commandeered
"hot and sexy" from airbrained, miniskirted GOP pundettes like Ann Coulter
and her ilk, but they have spent a decade on the front lines of a multicultural
movement informed by all the liberation struggles that have come before, including
but not limited to antiracism, queer rights, labor organizing, and international
justice. Their contributors are mobilizing to protect the rights of undocumented
female laborers ("Domestic Workers Organize in the Global City" by Ai-Jen
Poo and Eric Tang); securing legislative victories for transsexuals ("When
Transgendered People Sue and Win: Feminist Reflections on Strategy, Activism,
and the Legal Process" by Anna Kirkland); and challenging male hierarchies
in hip-hop culture ("Can You Rock It Like This? Theater for a New Century"
by Holly Bass). These young women and men are splitting open the borders of
feminism so that wealth and whiteness are decentralized and, the editors write,
"race, sexuality, nationality, and geography can move beyond being simply
'tolerated' or 'included.'" The result is "a new movement evolving from one
in which there is a dialogue about feminism and race to a feminist
movement whose conversation is race, gender, and globalization," meaning
that these have become central, not peripheral issues.
THE STRONGEST ILLUSTRATION of this new conversation can be found in Katherine
Temple's "Exporting Violence: The School of the Americas, U.S. Intervention
in Latin America, and Resistance," a hefty and powerful essay that should
be required reading for every gender and American studies student. The author
embodies the multiplicity of priorities and strategies embraced by the third
wave: She has done community development work in Guadalajara, Mexico, was
challenging corporate corruption years before targeting Starbucks was cool,
and currently serves on the board of a rape crisis center in North Carolina.
A painter, Temple has used fine art, civil disobedience, and essays such as
this one to raise national awareness of the role the School of the Americas
(SOA, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation),
a US-funded combat center, has played in training, arming, and propping up
military war criminals who commit violent massacres in Nicaragua, Mexico,
El Salvador, Panama, and other Latin American countries. Applying tools she
acquired through working in a shelter for battered refugee and immigrant women,
Temple develops a "Corporate Globalization Power and Control Wheel" to illustrate
the impact of structural adjustment policies, anti-democratic trade agreements,
and military aggression on millions of individuals, numerous governments,
and the environment:
Like batterers, those who design U.S. foreign policy understand
that someone who is strong and self-sufficient cannot be easily controlled…
Like individual abusers, U.S. foreign policy makers, multinational corporations,
and international financial institutions such as the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank use tactics that compromise and limit the internal
resources of Latin American countries. At the same time, these countries increase
their dependency upon international lending bodies and U.S. aid and currency.
Domestic and global abusers use tactics of relabeling violence, inverting
blame, and renaming the victims. Soldiers who rape and stab children call
their victims "little guerrillas." A man who batters and rapes his girlfriend
calls her "slut." (pp. 119-120)
Noting that women and children bear the brunt of the malnutrition, disease,
health care shortages, denial of education, and violence that accompany these
tactics, Temple completes the analogy by describing how SOA manuals instruct
soldiers to use rape and torture "to target people who are threatening to empower
themselves to 'leave' the abusive relationship" through union organizing; protests
against companies, dictators or the US; preaching liberation theology; or using
nonviolent civil disobedience.
Fire is most effective when, like Temple, contributors use a women's
rights framework to address injustice beyond those issues traditionally associated
with feminism, such as abortion, rape, harassment, or pay equity. Authors
spill little ink on these well worn subjects. However, this is "not to suggest…that
a new set of feminist issues is supplanting the old. Sweatshop labor and police
brutality are not new, and the defense of reproductive rights is certainly
as necessary as ever," the editors explain. Rather, readers must understand
that "'Woman' as a primary identity category has ceased to be the entry point
for much young activist work. Instead, it has become one of the many investigatory
means used to affect an indefinite number of issues and cultural analyses."
Contributors' execution of these ideas is inconsistent. Some pieces--such
as Joshua Breitbart and Ana Nogueira's "An Independent Media Center of One's
Own: A Feminist Alternative to Corporate Media" and Robin Templeton's "She
Who Believes in Freedom: Young Women Defy the Prison Industrial Complex"--deliver
research-intensive analyses that show the underexamined relevance of various
progressive topics for women. Others, unfortunately--like Elisha Maria Miranda's
"A Baptism by Fire: Vieques, Puerto Rico" and Syd Lindsley's "Bearing the
Blame: Gender, Immigration, Reproduction, and the Environment"--offer mostly
recaps of information the educated progressive already knows. When an anthology's
title includes the words "activism" and "new," it would be fair to expect
each piece to offer significant insight into innovative organizing efforts.
But where Miranda's heartfelt essay outlines the impact of US colonialism
and bombings, and immerses readers in the author's personal connection to
the people of Vieques and their cause, she has very little to say about the
role of young women in this struggle, whatever that may be. Lindsley's history
lesson on the cooptation of environmentalist rhetoric to advance hateful anti-immigration
agendas provides a wake-up call regarding immigrant women's health, safety
and welfare. Frustratingly, though, Lindsley leaves many important questions
unanswered: How are young progressive women taking action against "the greening
of hate"? What are some of the initiatives that have worked, have failed,
can stand as models for others? A little less on the history of eugenics and
a little more on contemporary political responses would have been illuminating;
instead, as with Miranda's piece on Vieques, we are supposed to implicitly
understand the issue as being part of young activists' "new" feminism simply
by the essay's inclusion in the book.
THESE LIMITATIONS ASIDE, Fire's wide-ranging table of contents reads
like what The Nation could look like if the lefty weekly's index page
was less pale and less male and its subject matter less stale. If you're looking
for a book focused primarily on the hows and whats of young feminist organizing,
some of the essays may leave you wanting. But as a primer about the ever-broadening
domain of progressive feminist ideology and activism, Fire succeeds
well enough to warrant inclusion in Women's Studies 101 reading lists, where
it should spark debate about the future of feminism.
To wit, one interviewee told Templeton that while her youth education group
employs a feminist leadership structure, "'Traditional feminist issues… have
not been on the same level of priority for me as building a movement against
racial and class oppression.'" As young progressive women are focusing their
attention on a broad range of crucial causes, from fair labor practices and
an end to sex trafficking abroad to the prison industrial complex and police
brutality at home (which some do and some do not identify as "feminist" work),
will they invest the energy needed to maintain hard-won ground on so-called
"core" issues that used to define the mainstream women's movement? If second
wave feminism's biggest weakness was its failure to fully prioritize a plurality
of race and class issues, third wavers must be careful not to replicate this
problem in reverse: Young female progressives who eliminate themselves from
more "mainstream" battles like abortion, rape, and equal pay risk leaving
fundamental issues undefended or, similarly problematic, in the hands of centrists
who do not share their belief in the interconnectedness of social justice
concerns.
But if Fire's contributors are any indication, our "feminist future
is not 'either this or that' but 'this and' that," as Labaton and Martin
write. And for one afternoon, that future could be glimpsed in the cross-section
of posters carried by the hundreds of thousands of young women and men at
the historic March for Women's Lives in Washington, DC, on April 25, 2004.
Signs urging politicians to "Cancel third world debt--money for women's health!"
waved alongside reminders that "Asian Pacific Americans Vote Pro-Choice."
Fresh-faced teens in pink "SuperWomen for Justice" capes skipped behind a
spikey-haired college student from the Young People's All Access Contingent,
who had scrawled the letters "mine" over her chest, naked but for feminist
stickers covering her nipples. As the largest single political demonstration
in DC's history, the march embodied Labaton and Martin's vision: that the
fire this time is being fueled by queer leaders and anti-war protesters, environmentalists
and sexual assault survivors, mediamakers, radical cheerleader bootyshakers,
and every young activist fighting for a world in which women matter.
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Portrait of Rosmunda Pisarni, ca.
1830. From Women's Voices
Across Musical Worlds.
|
Women making music
Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds edited by Jane A. Bernstein. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2004, 353 pp., $22.50 paper.
Reviewed by Gillian Rodger
GIVEN THE NUMBER OF ESSAY COLLECTIONS that treat aspects of gender, sexuality,
and music that have been published since the mid-1980s, there might seem to
be little to add to this subject. Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds
distinguishes itself from those other works by its breadth. As the editor
notes in her introduction, unlike earlier collections, this book is not arranged
chronologically, nor is it arranged by geographical region or theoretical
approach. Instead, the 13 essays, written by both musicologists and ethnomusicologists,
are grouped thematically and range widely in geographic location and time
period. This collection grew out of Jane Bernstein's teaching experience and
is structured for use in a classroom setting. But the writing style is far
from that of a textbook, and the book should also be attractive to the educated
general reader with an interest in gender, music, and culture.
The volume includes a number of fascinating examinations of the role of women
in European art music and of gendered aspects of this tradition, as well as
a smaller number of essays that focus on musical roles of women in world cultures
and popular forms. Bernstein prefaces each of the book's five sections with
a brief introduction, in an effort to present a broad overview of the theme
addressed. Not all of these introductions work well, but each is followed
by extensive notes that provide ample suggestions for further reading. Equally
generous bibliographies and discographies for each section are provided at
the end of the volume, along with an index.
Some of the essays in this collection are truly outstanding, particularly
Ellen Harris' "Abandoned Heroines: Women's Voices in Handel's Cantatas." Harris
examines the young George Frideric Handel's maturing compositional technique
through the laments for female voices in cantatas he composed between 1706
and 1723. In Baroque theatrical music, in which both male and female roles
were sung either by castrati (men with treble voices that had not broken because
of surgical intervention before puberty) or by women, gender difference was
demarcated by composers through compositional style.
In Handel's cantatas, most of the female characters sing laments, while male
characters are governed by rationality and emotional distance. These characteristics
are echoed in the formal structures chosen by Handel: All of the cantatas
representing male characters end with an aria, and all but one of these are
in da capo form, a structure that dominated Italian opera of his period. Cantatas
about women employ more flexible structures and more varied forms and, Harris
notes, "adhere to an earlier, seventeenth-century concept of the cantata (and
opera) as a recitative monologue (or dramatic recitation) interrupted by lyrical
passages." Like other composers of the period, Handel employed the older,
otherwise outmoded style of writing to represent the emotional turmoil of
these female characters, which could not be effectively contained in a more
rigid structure. Handel's writing for female characters, says Harris,
offered the young composer an opportunity to push the boundaries
of standard practice early in his career and provided a resonant resource
for dramatic writing throughout his life. Handel found the breadth and depth
of his own expressive voice by trying on the voices of abandoned women. (p.
254)
While Harris' essay examines the way that a male composer employed the female
voice in his works, a number of the essays in this collection discuss the ways
female performers and composers either worked within their socially expected
roles or pushed against those boundaries. This theme is particularly represented
within the first section of the book, "Public Voices, Private Voices," which
includes three strong essays, two on women's participation in European art music,
and one on nacnis or "public dancers" in Jharkhand, India. "The Illusion
of India's 'Public' Dancers," by Carol Babiracki, discusses women who are socially
marginalized because of their public displays of sexuality through dance, yet
who also bring great status to the male patrons who support them. Unlike courtesans,
a nacni does not live in an all-female community, but rather is individually
supported by a male patron, who "serves as her performance partner, her manager,
and her protector" and whose support "distinguishes her from the common prostitute."
Babiracki considers the ways that these women employ illusion in their performances
as they embody the goddess Radha and sing of her love and transcendent devotion
in their songs; off-stage they are also shrouded in mystery, concealing details
of their lives. As Babiracki notes, the nacnis' "play with realities
and 'truths' engages and challenges the meaning of cultural symbols, gender
norms, and social conventions and values." The manipulation of illusion that
is fundamental to the skills of the nacni complicates Babiracki's analysis,
and her acknowledgment of this is one of the strengths of her work.
MY OWN RESEARCH centers on male impersonators in American variety and vaudeville
and English music hall, so I turned to Heather Hadlock's essay, "Women Playing
Men in Italian Opera, 1810-1835," before I read any other part of this collection.
In this chapter, Hadlock examines performances by three remarkable opera singers
whose repertoires included a number of male roles: Giuditta Pasta, Benedetta
Rosamunda Pisaroni, and Marietta Brambilla. In three short case studies, Hadlock
notes the reactions of critics to the depiction of male roles by these women.
Pasta portrayed heroic male roles in her youth, when she had a reputation
for great beauty, and critics often commented on the discrepancy between her
appearance and that of the characters she portrayed, even as they praised
her singing and the power of her interpretation. Pisaroni, in contrast, was
seen as being well-suited to portraying men "because of her ugly, unfeminine
appearance and her majestic low notes." Her appearance enabled her to transgress
expectations of femininity in both her acting and singing. Marietta Brambilla,
like Pasta, adhered more closely to feminine ideals in her depictions of male
roles, and was best known for portraying young men, such as the young officer
in La donna bianca. Hadlock notes, "For a female singer to be 'deliziosa'
(delightful) in a male role connotes a femininity, even a triviality, inappropriate
in a Tancredi, Malcolm, or Arsace [heroic opera characters]."
During the early 19th century, opera was transitioning away from the older
style in which male and female roles were sung by castrati and/or women to
a Romantic style with a male, tenor hero and his female, soprano love interest,
and the case studies presented by Hadlock reflect this change. As I read,
I found myself wondering about the reasons for this shift. I am aware that
cross-dressed performances of the past were often more about class, social
relations, or titillation than homosexuality. It is necessary to examine performance
in its cultural context to understand how audiences received and understood
it and the aims of the performers themselves. What was happening socially
that the high voice of the castrato fell out of favor with opera audiences
and composers? Was this related to new models of gender emerging in the Italian
states during this period? Did these shifting models of gender also affect
roles for women in Italian opera? While I enjoyed Hadlock's essay I wished
that she had pursued some of these broader questions.
Despite the strengths of individual essays in this collection, I am not convinced
it reaches its stated goal of cross-cultural, comparative study. I was disappointed
by the almost complete absence of attention to issues of sexuality. With the
exception of Tammy Kernodle's essay on black female blues singers, there is
also little examination of class and race in the Euro-American context. At
times I felt that the breadth of the collection was its weakness rather than
its strength, and that the range of essays highlighted the "artificial boundaries"
between musical sub-disciplines--musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular
music study--that Bernstein hoped to cross. The contrast in approach between
ethnomusicologists, on one hand, and musicologists, on the other, was particularly
evident. However, the collection does succeed in showing the diverse ways
in which woman and music have been defined in different cultures
and at different time periods. This is its real strength.
Want
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to the Editor
Treating infertility
Amid a confusing array of resources, how to decide which you can trust
Reviewed by Barbara Seaman
IT IS COMMON ENOUGH. You may have a friend or relative or neighbor who underwent
fertility treatments. You yourself may have experienced the painful and costly
rounds of pills, injections, egg harvesting, and implantation. There's a lot
at stake when you sit down to research the safety and efficacy of different
kinds of reproductive medicine. You must be prepared to ask tough questions.
You must be skeptical of the claims made in mainstream websites and books,
for some are nothing more than marketing tools. What follows is an overview
of the history of treating infertility in this country, some feminist ideas
about it, and some recent thinking.
Although we often think of the medicalization of infertility as a 1970s phenomenon,
it actually began nearly two centuries ago, according to The Empty Cradle
(1996), the splendid history of infertility in America by sisters Margaret
Marsh and Wanda Ronner. They reveal that Lydia Maria Child and Amelia Jenks
Bloomer were among the heartbroken first-wave feminists who could not bear
children. "Beginning in the 1870s," say Marsh and Ronner,
gynecologists routinely made women's roles a subject of discussion
at their annual meetings... The idea that inappropriate behavior causes infertility
was dominant in this era and has recurred periodically ever since... The young
woman who sought a college education--or worse, a career after she earned
her degree--would most likely find herself suffering from sterility brought
on by "uterine inflammation." (p. 82)
Such ideas may sound quaint, but even today, drug companies such as Serono and
Organon, which dominate the field of infertility treatment, encourage patients
to feel guilty by promoting suspect notions, implying that infertility is on
the rise because feminism tricked women into focusing on careers. (These corporations
have even come to dominate resolve, the major support group for patients.
Although the group began as a genuine grass roots organization, disillusioned
ex-members say it has gone "Astroturf.") In a 1997 Minnesota Public Radio interview,
feminist historian Sara Evans interpreted the late 20th century's message to
women as: "See what you did? You should have been having babies and you went
off and got a PhD instead or started a business... And now you deserve what
you get." In fact, say Marsh and Roner, the infertility rate has remained constant
for a century at ten to 13 percent.
Women are also told that their fertility decreases after age 30. But if we
examine our family trees, most of us find female relatives who bore children
after age 40. My own mother bore her third and last child at 41. My stepmother,
who married late, bore her first and second children during her early 40s.
In a 1993 interview, Swiss billionaire Fabio Bertarelli, president of Serono,
which then manufactured 70 percent of the world's infertility treatments,
admitted, "Our usual customers are women over 30 who have been taking birth-control
pills since they were teenagers or in their early 20s." In the 1960s, new
female methods of contraception like birth control pills and intrauterine
devices grew popular. Young girls were started on high-dose pills too early
and kept on them too long. Some experienced temporary infertility when they
stopped taking the high-dose pills, since their normal cycling sometimes took
a year or longer to return or did not return at all without medication.
At the same time, men abandoned condoms. As a result, gonorrhea and other
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) such as chlamydia, which may scar the
fallopian tubes, increased, making women under the age of 24 the group with
the most steeply rising infertility rate. The Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) estimate that one million US women experience pelvic inflammatory disease
each year: 50 percent become sterile after three episodes; 12 percent after
just one. STDs are underdiagnosed and undertreated. In 1991, the CDC issued
a new recommendation: "Use barrier methods. Even if contraception is not needed."
In addition, during the 1950s and 1960s, several million women were exposed
to DES in their mothers' wombs, as this hormone was erroneously claimed to
prevent miscarriages. Instead, it caused vaginal cancer in some daughters
and T-shaped wombs that could not hold a fetus securely in many others. All
in all, the flight from barrier contraceptives and the consequent blossoming
of STDs plus the carelessness and naïve readiness of doctors to try out new
techniques on patients who are not informed that they are experimental subjects
contribute as much or more to infertility today as women's refusal to remain
"barefoot and pregnant."
Fertility doctors often overstate the benefits and understate the risks of
taking drugs, pushing their patients into ever more dangerous and costly treatments
while averting their eyes from obvious problems and non-drug solutions--for
example, the body-fat connection to fertility. Modern women were understandably
skeptical of grandmothers who told their sons, "Don't marry her. She's too
skinny to give you children." But in Female Fertility and the Body Fat
Connection (2002), Rose E. Frisch implies that the grandmothers were on
the right track. She found that athletic or exercising women, in splendid
condition, sometimes cross the line of having too much muscle in proportion
to their body fat (although they may not be "skinny"), causing them to fail
to ovulate. Is it malpractice to start such a woman on Clomid instead of teaching
her to slightly tweak her diet and exercise regimen? As one forthright insider
explained, "Bear in mind that if you wish to develop a reputation as a fertility
doctor, you don't want patients getting pregnant on their own."
Recent articles from medical sources such as Fertility and Sterility
and The British Medical Journal, as well as lay sources such as Popular
Science, The New York Times, and my own February 2004 piece in Oprah
magazine warn that a backlash against some US fertility practices is underway.
Wannabe parents and disinterested taxpayers alike are paying an outrageous
price for our failure to regulate fertility doctors. In England, the Human
Fertilization and Embryology Authority is firmly committed to reducing multiple
births. Here, we have no such regulatory body, and for the first time since
1958 our infant mortality rate is rising. This is attributable to the increase
in low birth-weight babies due to the multiples resulting from the use of
fertility drugs and assisted reproduction techniques (ART). (If you live in
a neighborhood populated with affluent young families you may have noticed
an increase in extra-wide or extra-long baby strollers containing twins, triplets,
and more.) In the US, 55 percent of all ART births are multiples, since we
set no limits on the number of embryos that can be inserted in a patient's
womb. Besides upping our infant death rates (five times higher for twins than
for singletons and nine times higher for triplets), these ART babies engender
huge hospital bills (one estimate disclosed that premature triplets cost $1
million each). They experience a number of long-term health problems at a
higher rate than singletons, including cerebral palsy and oxygen-induced retrolental
fibroplasia, a form of blindness.
What is more, among patients who become pregnant after assisted conception,
about one in 25 will have ectopic p
