Elfriede Jelinek Photo by J. D. Sloan

The challenging writings of Elfriede Jelinek
An Austrian feminist wins the Nobel prize in literature

By Bettina Brandt

THIS YEAR'S NOBEL LAUREATE in literature, Elfriede Jelinek, is a highly controversial author in her home country, where she is condemned for her relentlessly critical stance toward Austria's postwar politics and the mentality of its people. Praising the "extraordinary linguistic zeal," of her prose that "reveals the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power," the Swedish Academy lauded the radical feminist who, in response, declared that the unexpected literary honor should not be understood as a "flower in Austria's buttonhole."

Writing in a powerful, imagistic, shocking voice, Elfriede Jelinek is a polemicist in the style of compatriots like Karl Krauss and Thomas Bernhard, and like the latter has been called an anti-patriotic, pornographic writer. A member of the Austrian Communist party from 1974 to 1991, Jelinek has tirelessly demonstrated how the realms of economy, sexuality, and racism form a brutal patriarchal whole. She voices her brand of politics not only in her novels, plays, and essays but also from her website, ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/elfriede/, which is, unfortunately for English speakers, in German only. On the site, which has had almost 250,000 hits, Jelinek has published widely on contemporary issues in Austrian politics and society, including articles on racist police violence and diatribes against the ultra-rightist politician Jörg Haider and his so-called Freedom Party. When Haider's party joined the government a couple of years ago, she forbade performances of her plays in Austria in protest.

Though Jelinek had received numerous prestigious German and Austrian literary awards in recent years, the German-speaking literary establishment was shocked and caught by surprise to learn that such a controversial political writer had been awarded the highest international literary prize. In Die Zeit, a highbrow German weekly with a largely academic intellectual audience, a journalist bemoaned what he characterized as the moralistic high tone and hysterical finger-pointing in Jelinek's work. He mockingly labeled her "a grand regional writer" and equated the bestowing of this year's Nobel on the Austrian feminist writer to awarding "a hamster in a treadmill with the most important prize for long-distance running." Despite the fact that several of Jelinek's works have been translated into more than two dozen languages, including Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Hebrew, and, of course, English, the anglophone academic and literary worlds, by and large, remain completely unfamiliar with her and her work.

Born in a small southern Austrian village in 1946, but raised in Vienna, Jelinek is the daughter of a Czech Jewish father and a Catholic Austrian mother. Her background underlines the multi-ethnicity of the vanished Hapsburg empire. Her father, who survived the Third Reich working as a chemist in a strategically important industry, died in a mental institution in 1968. Her mother tried to make Jelinek into a musical wunderkind. While still in school, she took organ and piano lessons at the Vienna Conservatory. In college she studied art history and theater at the University of Vienna. Around that time, at age 21, Jelinek suffered a mental breakdown and started to write. Shifting her emphasis from organ and piano playing to writing, Jelinek explains, meant turning away from her extremely restrictive mother. She credits her father, who loved to argue and debate, for her fascination with the self-conscious use of the manipulative power of the spoken and written word.

IN HER FIRST NOVELS, Jelinek criticized capitalism and consumer society. Over the next decade, she took on patriarchal society. More recently, Jelinek has focused on the fascist past and anti-Semitic present of Austria and Germany. Increasingly, she turns to the theater, which she sees as politically more effective than the novel. Working in and renewing the tradition of Bertoldt Brecht's epic theater, Jelinek avoids portraying "real" men and women. Instead, she creates flat characters, stereotypes, linguistic surfaces--"billboards," as she once called them. Functioning only as amplifiers of words, they cease to exist when they stop talking. Jelinek creates and produces her plays in Germany, so the Austrian public discovers them only after a considerable delay.

The novel Die Klaviespielerin (which came out in German in 1983) is perhaps Jelinek's best-known and surely her most autobiographically inspired work. Published in English as The Piano Teacher in 1988, it marks the author's international breakthrough. This clever but disturbing novel portrays the torturous relationship between Erika, a piano teacher, and her overbearing, controlling mother. At the same time, the novel tells about the ultimately unsuccessful sadomasochistic relationship between Erika and one of her male music students. The film version of the novel, directed by Michael Haneke and starring Isabelle Huppert, won three major prizes at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001.

Lust is another infamous Jelinek novel. Marketed as "women's pornography" by the author and her German publisher, its publication was eagerly anticipated by both feminist and traditional readers of pornography. It sold more than 150,000 copies and remained on German bestseller lists for weeks, though in the end, few probably read it. Despite the marketing, Lust is not a text about women's sexual fantasies; rather it is an exasperating short novel that describes the voracious sexual drive of a company director and equates his violent lust with capitalistic greed. In an interview, Jelinek rejected all accusations of pornographic sadism, arguing that sexuality, as it develops in the conventional frame of a heterosexual marriage, with its unequal relations of ownership, is by definition an act of violence by the man against the woman. Because she analyzes while at the same time reproduces violent pornographic representations, Jelinek has posed a challenge to German feminists in their debates over pornography.

Hoping to set off a broad, overdue discussion about Austria's participation in National Socialism, in 1984 Jelinek wrote Burgtheater, a play named after Vienna's most renowned theater venue. It traces the history of two of the Burgtheater's rising stars of the 1930s, Paula Wessely and Karl Hörbiger, who by the end of the decade became symbols of the Nazi cultural industry. Wessely, Jelinek claims on her website, was the best-paid actress in that system. Denouncing the political irresponsibility of the much admired Viennese couple, Jelinek also harshly criticizes the Austrian theater-going public that, before, during, and even after World War II, turned Wessely and Hörbiger into the darlings of the Burgtheater.

With the rise of the extreme right in the Austria of the 1990s, Jelinek became the subject of a widespread defamation campaign; enormous billboards that were distributed all over the country read in large letters: "Do you love Jelinek or do you love Art and Culture?" Perhaps the Swedish Academy answered the question. Jelinek is the first Austrian writer to be honored by the Swedish Academy and only the tenth woman to receive the Nobel prize.

Elfriede Jelinek in English
The Piano Teacher. Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. (Translation of Die Klavierspielerin)
Wonderful, Wonderful Times. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. London: Serpent's Tail, 1990 (Translation of Die Ausgesperrten)
Lust. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. London: Serpent's Tail, 1992 (Translation of Lust)
Women as Lovers. Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers. London: Serpent's Tail, 1994 (Translation of Die Liebhaberinnen)

How we think
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 307 pp., $24.00 hardcover, $13.00 paper.
An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain by Diane Ackerman. New York: Scribner, 2004, 320 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Peg Aloi

TO PEOPLE WHO DO what is sometimes called "honest work"--say, growing vegetables or cutting hair or putting up drywall-- the work of the writer looks suspiciously sweatless, if not downright lazy. Writers have the dubious distinction of being able to work while appearing to do absolutely nothing. Putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard (or voice to voice-recognition software) has to happen eventually. But the process of creation, of planning, solving problems, making decisions, and receiving inspiration may be done without moving a muscle, although some writers may walk, drink coffee or knit to get the cogs turning. These two books offer profound insights into the marriage of thoughts and words, process and product, with which writers are intimately familiar. Diane Ackerman's prose is learned and lush, and her adventures among aromatherapists, musicians, and ornithologists provide intriguing frameworks for discussing the brain's workings. Alice W. Flaherty, a neurologist, is more methodical and less prone to poetic expression, but her writing is nevertheless engaging and accessible. Both writers draw upon their personal experiences to moor their theories and ideas, helping readers navigate through their dense studies with occasionally prosaic and often surprisingly gender-specific discussions of post-partum disorders, menstrual mood swings, and hormonal discrepancies.

Flaherty's interest in the connections between writing and brain function began when she experienced periods of hypergraphia, or a compulsion to write, during two periods of post-partum depression. She gave birth to premature twin sons who died and, a year later, to twin daughters who survived; both experiences catalyzed in her an intense desire to write, and Flaherty later researched the phenomenon in both medical and literary contexts. Hypergraphia turns out to be closely connected to temporal lobe afflictions commonly seen in people suffering from epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Referring to the lives and work of writers as diverse as Lord Byron, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, William Wordsworth, and Sylvia Plath, all of whom are believed to have suffered to some degree from at least one of the aforementioned conditions, Flaherty offers the opinions and findings of many biographers and medical experts on the impact of various brain disorders upon creative output. She acknowledges that the phenomenon of hypergraphia is less frequently documented in female than in male writers, but it's not clear if this is because hypergraphia occurs less frequently in women or because women's writing and its attendant difficulties have been nearly invisible until recent years.

Writer's block, the converse of hypergraphia, which Flaherty also investigates, is less easily traced to specific brain disorders and, Flaherty argues, is usually attributable in whole or in part to emotional and personal sources having to do with motivation, fear, trauma, loneliness, or performance anxiety. Nevertheless she examines the many physiological possibilities that can contribute to this frustrating and potentially career-crippling condition. In one fascinating example, Flaherty describes the effect of menstrual rhythms in the poetry of Plath, whose recently published, unexpurgated journals show that "her poetry's content and style… fluctuated dramatically with her menstrual periods." The "Ariel" poems, Flaherty says, clearly show a preoccupation with menstrual and reproductive imagery: "Their themes of barrenness, fertility, misery, bleeding and relief are overseen by the image of an inspiring but indifferent moon goddess." Flaherty points to a telling line in the poem "Poppies in July": "If I could bleed, or sleep!" Flaherty notes that women suffering from bipolar disorder, as some scholars believe Plath did, often suffer from severe premenstrual syndrome; she also notes with careful neutrality that Plath's suicide occurred during a pre-menstrual period.

Writers who occasionally suffer from writer's block may find Flaherty's exploration of hypergraphia somewhat anxiety-producing. But if this is the case, her chapters on writer's block are downright comforting; not only because she capably examines its many causes but also because she puts forth intriguing solutions, while at no time turning her intelligent and serious work into a self-help book. Midnight Disease is appealing precisely because Flaherty tempers her medical expertise with insights derived from her own curiosity and experiences as a writer. Not since reading the work of Oliver Sacks have I come across a book by a medical scholar that is so eminently readable and personally useful. My own experiences with writer's block are not inconsiderable; The Midnight Disease (a term first attributed to Edgar Allen Poe, who used it to describe the impulse that causes writing) has offered me some invigorating ideas for confronting my struggle with it. The book is a skillful study from an author whose mining of anecdotal and scientific evidence and literary and medical scholarship are as fluid, memorable, and thought-provoking as any great novel.

READING THE ESSAYS AND BOOKS of Diane Ackerman can often feel like reading an autobiographical novel. If you're like me, and occasionally find yourself drawn to reading a book while you've got a dozen writing projects on the burner (see "writer's block" above), you might have a niggling little voice in your head that says you're being "good" when you read nonfiction and "naughty" when you're reading fiction. Ackerman's nonfiction work, however, is so rich with metaphor and sensual description (she's written several volumes of poetry as well) that I confess to feeling guiltily pleasured by the time I've finished. In her previous books, A Natural History of the Senses and A Natural History of Love, Ackerman's experiences of the sensual world and her forays into idiosyncratic studies of science, art, psychology, and literature are crafted into mosaic-like texts, organized as much according to publishing logic as to her own personal mode of inspiration. Of her muse, Ackerman has said in Senses, it is "male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly."

It is not surprising that the author would eventually turn her interest to the workings of the human brain, since she has always demonstrated such fascination with her experiences of creativity and her thought processes. About a third of this book consists of sometimes playful examination of the complex workings of the brain, based on contemporary scientific case studies and experiments, as well as a number of historical examples. It's always great fun to read Ackerman's erudite, lively writing, and she is at her best when she is sorting out intricate layers of meaning, conjecture, and possibility, mellifluously melding references to science and art in the same sentence, as she does here:

The brain toils seamlessly, above and below the pond scum of awareness, integrating millions of messages, calculations, appraisals, updates--coming from the round body's imagined corners, as John Donne might say, and from its own mirrored hive, its own bees of the invisible. To its named owner, it speaks in streams of consciousness, image, and back talk. (p. 29)

This passage comes immediately after she analyzes her own sensation of hunger and her choice of a snack to assuage it (an apple, walnuts, and dark chocolate). Ackerman frequently describes personal encounters with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and strangers (not to mention animals and plants, and most often, herself) to illustrate her points. Here she considers her own hyper-curious, sensual worldview as compared to a group of her writing students

whose work was surprisingly jaded and featureless. Where was the texture of life, I wondered, the feel of being alive on this particular planet? Didn't it strike them as astonishing that they shared the planet with goldfinches and heliarc welders and dung beetles and blood brothers and shiitake mushrooms? Where was their fascination with the world pressing indelibly on what they wrote? (pp. 48-49)

Ackerman then describes an exercise in which she asks the class to look out of an open window and "choose one sensory event that seemed eloquent" to them; obviously she thinks these students capable of the same sort of ecstatic observation that she herself is. Ackerman believes deeply in the possibilities of the human mind and relates this often: "We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention." She again calls upon personal experience to explain what she means by enchantment, saying

my life had been changing, I'd been near death several times, and the simple details of being had become precious. But I also relished life's sensory festival, and the depot where nature and human nature meet. Everything that happens to us--from choosing the day's shoes to warfare--shines at that crossroads. (p. 49)

Some may find Ackerman's anecdotal, reflective approach self-indulgent or narcissistic. I do think this current book is more self-aggrandizing than her previous ones, because she frequently describes ways in which she believes her own brain is unique (her synesthesia, for example, a phenomenon in which the senses merge, giving one the perceived ability to smell colors or see music), and these anecdotes are often the point of departure for her discussion of a more general subject. Consider her moving account of a serious accident and near-death experience that she had on an expedition to a small Japanese island to see a rare breed of albatross. Her guides were strong, experienced mountain climbers. Ackerman admits she was not prepared for the physical demands of the journey to the cliffs where the albatrosses lived. She fell, breaking several ribs and suffering severe inflammation. She did not find out the nature of her injuries until days later, however, and went through a harrowing period of pain, fever, and loneliness on a remote outpost.

A noise outside. Animal? Human? Trying to call out, I again discovered I couldn't inflate my chest enough to shout. Pain was a tight suit of armor. A backlit figure appeared in the doorway. Was it real? Hallucination? What was the Japanese word for help? (p. 180)

In her delirium, Ackerman swears she saw angels:

Cold became a heavy ingot inside me. When I opened my eyes I saw an angel fluttering in the doorway, haloed in light. She metamorphosed into a beautiful white albatross with long wings and a yellow head. Again she became the angel, floating leglessly into the barracks, then she vanished in darkness, reappearing beside me. Just as suddenly she disappeared. Time passed like a well I had fallen into without hitting bottom. (p. 181)

The lens through which Ackerman sees her world (for it is a Diane Ackerman world, we just live in it) is colored by her areas of expertise: biology, anthropology, poetry, perfumery, and the more pedestrian arts of gardening and sex. Religion and politics find their way in, too. Because she is a poet, it seems appropriate that she often waxes poetic, even when discussing highly technical subjects, including the complex functions of our brains. Ackerman relishes the mystery even as she attempts to unravel it. Flaherty, in contrast, is a scientist first and a writer second. Both books eloquently explore that elusive, automatic act of thinking that most of us perform without, well, thinking about it.

Less cool, more light
Cool Men and the Second Sex by Susan Fraiman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 212 pp., $24.50 paper.

Reviewed by Meryl Altman

MANY OF US HAVE WONDERED why, after 30 years of feminist critique, the casual disparagement of women is still tolerated sheepishly or with defiant "edge," even among otherwise progressive people. Susan Fraiman's outspoken, invigorating book looks at this question through the work of a trio of influential filmmakers, a handful of queer theorists (some of them women), and three major figures in literary and cultural studies: Andrew Ross, Henry Louis Gates, and the late Edward Said. The figures she discusses are "cool" in more ways than one. They are media celebrities and "academostars." They present themselves, with some justice, as leftists, as politically savvy, as fellow-travelers to feminism. And finally they are "cool in their style of maleness." "Coolness," says Fraiman, is "epitomized by the modern adolescent boy in his anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will to separate from his mother….a picture of flamboyant unconventionality coexists with highly conventional views of gender--is, indeed, articulated through them." Race and class have their part to play as well, often through "an appeal to African-American and working-class men as embodiments of an authentic, renegade masculinity."

Cool Men and the Second Sex is a much needed, timely "speakout" book. Fraiman sets up what she means by "cool" through a reading of film, beginning with Quentin Tarantino's signature use of violence and his commitment to what she calls "narrative as adrenaline shot"--"the lurch from the daily to the deadly, from closeness to separation…from feminizing intimacy to heroic alienation." But her analysis really gets going when she shows how scholars and cultural critics have drawn on similar emotional schemas in edgy ways that run at cross purposes to their politics.

The emotional heart of this argument is in her chapter "Andrew Ross: The Romance of the Bad Boy":

As perhaps the "coolest" of my cool scholars, Ross demonstrates my thesis particularly well: though ambivalence toward feminism would seem to be at odds with hipness in a political sense, in terms of reigning cultural narratives about men and mothers, masculinity and femininity, a degree of antifeminism may actually be intrinsic to hipness, a significant part of what constitutes it as such. (p. 56)

Fraiman has if anything understated the adolescent self-indulgence of Ross, whose meteoric rise and imperviousness to embarrassment leave me mystified. It's not just the "laddishness," as the English call it, it's the absence of anything else. Ross's first book, grandiosely titled The Failure of Modernism, advanced a nearly impenetrable but sweeping theory about the 20th century ("Modernism saw…") based on a reading of only three poets, all men. It is a measure of feminism's lack of impact on the academic mainstream, as well as a comment on the absence of meaningful peer review in literary studies, that this was considered not only defensible but praiseworthy. When Ross does turn to women, you wish he hadn't, as in "This Bridge Called My Pussy," his contribution to Madonnarama (an anthology of scholarly responses to Madonna's book Sex), in which he mocks feminist debates about sexuality. He "turns again and again to popular youth cultures for political leverage and inspiration," says Fraiman. But chiming in with the celebration of black women's butts does not make one less white, and simply to assert one's solidarity with youth cultures does not make one younger.

Ross' pose is particularly disturbing because the project of left cultural studies was not simply to study culture but to change it. Ross emphasizes his Scot identity and bolsters his connection to "gangsta rap" and his slaps at the black middle class by reference to the faith-based gangs of his youth. But he never declares what he believes or takes a position clearly for or against anything he's discussing. His arguments run fast both ways; his apparent goal is to be the only one left standing at the end of the essay, smugly crossing his arms. The result is a discourse highly flavored by politics but in no sense engaged. This sort of "cool" supersophisticated put-down of everything can leave feminism looking embarrassingly over-earnest. Fraiman makes these points more politely than I have, but her careful analysis is damning.

It is a relief to turn from Ross's border skirmishing to the magisterial summations of Edward Said, who believed in something and was willing and able to say what it was. Still, Fraiman is right to see "a contradiction between fresh racial paradigms and rotten gender ones" in Said's chapter on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism. The world of the novel is underwritten materially and symbolically by the Antiguan slave trade; but Said's patronizing characterization of "cheerfully colonial…feminine nearsightedness" is possible only because he fails to consider two decades of feminist work about Austen or even to provide a close reading of her book. It's an inescapable thought that Fanny's problems simply don't interest him, are too trivial to hold his attention. In fact, he begins to seem like Austen's Sir Thomas, a brilliant man too preoccupied with world empire to attend to domestic matters. What Said shows so brilliantly about Joseph Conrad--that Conrad can't hear the complex, resistant voice of the Other--is true of Said himself but only when it comes to women. Culture and Imperialism's attack on Camus, for example, is devastatingly incisive; the section on Austen, perfunctory and misleading. Said's analysis of third-world nationalisms might have been strengthened if he had considered the complex ways such nationalisms mobilize women's bodies and deploy women's images--in the creation of "tradition" for example. Perhaps he would have come to see these intersections differently in time, if he had lived.

WHAT IS MOST PROVOCATIVE and most likely to be (as Fraiman puts it) "disconcerting" about her project is that she rarely goes after soft targets. At first I wondered why, when there is so much overt misogyny about, she would choose to criticize Henry Louis Gates, who has done more than almost anyone to get and keep black women writers in print and who attends to and praises the work of women scholars. But Fraiman presupposes a progressive academic community within which thoughtful objections may be made and heard. Her approach is a kind of disappointed love.

My rereading shows me she's right that women writers "remain a spectral, hypothetical presence" in Gates's early work, and that he mutes the feminism of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker even as he praises them. Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey brilliantly demonstrate that black writing should be read in sophisticated ways, as complex texts, not patronized as simple sociological or historical documents. But when Gates turns to Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Wilson, Fraiman shows, he unconsciously repeats that patronizing gesture (much as Said does with Austen). Fraiman is right to ask, about the oral tradition Gates finds central to black culture, "Who exactly finds sense and pleasure in reciting (or refuting) lines like 'I fucked your mama/ Till she went blind/ Her breath smells bad, / But she sure can grind'?"; and to note that Gates' claim that the folkloric trickster Esu-Elegbara is in some way an androgynous figure "despite his remarkable penis feats" is unconvincing.

Fraiman also criticizes Gates for having turned away from inclusive paradigms to focus, recently, on the crisis of black manhood. To my mind, this could be a whole lot worse. For instance, in Gates' introduction to Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, he suggests that there is something about being black and male that is more than the sum of those two qualities, but he never hands out easy generalizations. The variety of men he profiles in the book, from Louis Farrakhan to Bill T. Jones, defy generalization in any case. It's a subtle, informative book--yet we're left with 13 leaders of the race and potential role models who are all men, and that's a problem.

I continue to find Gates honest, serious, and committed, where Ross just seems narcissistic and oily. Gates may want to see the tradition he traces as more inclusive and less divided than it in fact is, so when he encounters some gender trouble, he detours around it. But this leaves blank spaces in his picture of African American culture, and because of his enormous and well-deserved influence, this is important to say.

Fraiman's explanations of why progressive male critics fall into these traps didn't quite convince me. Is Said trying to "remasculinize the colonial male"; is Gates compensating for his identification with his mother; is Ross repudiating the influence of the feminist film criticism "mothers" with whom he studied? I don't think we have to get that psychological. Each was seeking to leverage his cool outsider credibility with solid gold, insider credentials (Princeton, Yale); and this is, more or less, how "making it" has always been done.

IN FRAIMAN'S FINAL CHAPTER she joins scholars like Biddy Martin and Julie Abraham who have worried that the shift from "lesbian" to "queer" theory made possible an erasure of women, either through a focus on gender as fluid rather than stable or through the idealization of a fixed and familiar masculinity. Her disagreement with Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity is especially cogent. It is hard to prefer Halberstam's project of making "masculinity safer for women and girls" to the older feminist ideal of making the whole range of activities and pleasures (now arbitrarily gendered) open to all--particularly since the lure of male power in masculinity remains underanalyzed in Halberstam's book. Studies of men and masculinity are very much foregrounded at present, and women's studies is working hard to learn from and incorporate them, as is only right. But we are not all that far from the days when "men's studies" was, well, the whole damn curriculum, so claims about "non-hegemonic masculinities" and assertions that masculinity can be rescued from its place in the structures of domination and subordination need to be scrutinized for awareness of who actually has power.

Fraiman concludes with a fine re-reading of Leslie Feinberg's transgender memoir Stone Butch Blues in terms of the main character's "butch maternity." I can't quite go along with her idea that we should respond to the "new masculinism" by revaluing or resexualizing the maternal body, however. It's tricky to say this, because of course hostility to the maternal has been damaging to all women, but I think the problem is broader: the disparagement not only of maternity but of older women generally, including within feminism. We need more good historical and textual analyses of lesbian culture, like Linda Garber's Lesbian Poetics, as part of the "sustained political and analytical multitasking," "close, unironic engagement with the world," and "political outrage and agency for women" that Fraiman calls for in her conclusion.

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Gates writes: "We live in an age of irony--an age when passionate intensity is hard to find outside of a freshman dining hall, and even the mediocre lack all conviction…. Sometimes the relentless ironicism of contemporary culture feels like a vaccination against earnestness, which is the sort of precaution you take when you've been--in a phrase of Baldwin's--betrayed by too much hoping." Though she doesn't say so, Susan Fraiman's book resonates with this diagnosis and calls for a return to hope, for less "cool" and more light. She ought to get a hearing, both from feminists and across the left--always provided that that inclusive place, intellectual civil society, where the discussion could be held without defensiveness or posturing, really does exist.

The Bougainville Rebellion
…as Mothers of the Land: the Birth of the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom edited by Josephine Tankunani Sirivi and Marilyn Taleo Havini. Canberra, ACT, Australia: Pandanus Books, 2004, 190 pp., paper.

Reviewed by Kerryn Higgs

Map from …as Mothers of the Land.

BOUGAINVILLEANS MAY WELL BE the only people on earth who have successfully forced a transnational mining operation off their land. Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) abandoned the Panguna copper mine early in 1989 and has not returned. BCL was a subsidiary of the British-Australian mining giant Conzinc Rio, now known as Rio Tinto. …as Mothers of the Land is a remarkable collection of stories told by the women of Bougainville about their lives during the ten-year conflict that erupted over the closure of the mine and the part they played in pioneering a path to peace.

Ecologically and geographically, Bougainville is part of the tropical Solomon Island chain. The Melanesian people of the Solomons are culturally homogeneous and distinct from the varied peoples of Papua New Guinea, some 650 miles to the west. The islanders' society is matrilineal; women are the custodians of the land and, as such, have a traditional role in decision-making at the highest levels. Life is based on subsistence agriculture, fishing, and cocoa growing. The introduction says that "since first contact, colonial appropriation of large tracts of land for European plantations and the Asian domination of towns for commerce was widely resented." In the words of the landowners of Kieta:

Land is our life. Land is our physical life--food and subsistence. Land is our social life; it is our marriage; it is status; it is security; it is politics; in fact it is our only world. When you… take our land, you cut away the very heart of our existence. (p. xix)

In colonial history, national lines were usually drawn to suit the colonial powers, who often ignored ethnic boundaries and the wishes of indigenous peoples. When the British divided the Solomons between themselves and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, Bougainville was annexed to German New Guinea. The post-war settlement of 1919 retained Bougainville as part of New Guinea under Australian "trusteeship," despite its links of culture and kinship with the people of the Solomons.

Intermittent objections, requests to the United Nations for a return to the Solomons, and declarations of independence all proved fruitless. Just before Papua New Guinea became a sovereign state in 1975, Bougainvilleans, who numbered less than 200,000, again tried to secede. By this time, BCL had been mining at Panguna in central Bougainville for six years. No environmental impact assessment had been carried out. The Australian government had forcibly evicted the traditional landowners from the mine site, as well as from adjacent areas where a workforce imported from Papua New Guinea set up villages and gardens, soon encroaching further on the land. With nearly half its foreign exchange due to flow from the copper mine, Papua New Guinea suppressed the 1975 rebellion. Some autonomy was granted to Bougainville, but this involved neither control over the mine nor a share in its profits.

Once the mine was established, we are told in the introduction,

displaced Bougainvilleans found themselves dependent on the mining company… Resettled in hot fibro boxes on the edge of mountain ridges, they had to overlook the largest manmade hole in the southern hemisphere--what was once their land. Beaches along Bougainville's east coast were taken from other clans to establish port facilities…and resorts… Pristine rivers along the west coast were used as dumping channels for the tailings…depriving thousands of people of clean safe water. The [Jaba River] valley became a moonscape of slush and exposed bedrock… (p. xviii)

A former employee there, Ona founded the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and launched a campaign of disruption and sabotage, culminating in an attack on the mine's electricity supply. When he blew up the power pylons, production stopped. By May 1989, the mine was closed down. Papua New Guinea struck back, first with riot police, then the army (equipped by Australia with four US-made Iroquois helicopters), yet the BRA held its own.

Map from …as Mothers of the Land.

In mid-1990, Papua New Guinea withdrew its forces, as well as all services, and imposed a total blockade, expecting Bougainville to capitulate. Instead, the BRA, supported by politicians from the former provincial government, declared independence as the Bougainville Interim Government. Over the subsequent seven years, Papua New Guinea armed militias of young Bougainvillean men from the North, inciting a civil war; launched intermittent invasions; occupied coastal areas; plotted to hire mercenaries when Australia declined military support in 1996; and maintained the blockade--not even medicine or a telephone connection was allowed.

The stories told by the editors of …as Mothers of the Land, Josephine Sirivi and Marilyn Havini, form the central narrative thread of the collection, though accounts by nine other women round out the book. Josephine was 22 years old and engaged to Sam Kauona, a young officer of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF), when the BRA blew up the power line to the mine. Papua New Guinea sent in extra riot squads that intensified removal of villagers into "care centres" in Arawa, the coastal town that served the mine. Villages were often burned--1600 dwellings were destroyed over the next year. Sam came under suspicion from the PNGDF after he attended a meeting of rebels.

Sam was from central Bougainville and connected to the people there. When he discovered he was on an army hit list, he defected to the BRA and became its trainer and military chief. Josephine, married to him by then--and pregnant--lay low in her village south of Arawa, then moved further south to a Catholic mission. But the raids and killings kept spreading. She heard of priests brutally beaten when they tried to visit their parishioners in Arawa. Her friend Marcelline had a son who was picked up by the PNGDF; she found him, shot dead, in the morgue. Then, in July 1989, a mother and her 14-year-old daughter who were friends of Josephine's family were killed, mutilated, and their bodies desecrated. Josephine fled to a hideout in the mountains built by her family, a preparation made by many who were connected to the rebels or unwilling to live under curfew in the "care centres."

Australian-born, Marilyn married Moses Havini, a Bougainvillean, in 1971 and moved to Bougainville's Buka region. "My new adoptive Buka family," she writes, "had welcomed me into their hearts to such a degree that I melded with the clan… I had found acceptance as a 'mama'… earning respect by raising many children besides my own in the 20 years I had spent in the paradise that is… Bougainville." The Havinis, who were living in Arawa at that time, stayed on through 1989, as the violence escalated. At the start of 1990, with Moses threatened by chaotic rebel elements as well as the PNGDF, they accepted the Australian government's offer of entry for Moses and flew to Sydney. Just before the blockade was imposed, the rebels contacted Moses in Sydney and asked him to represent the rebel government to the outside world.

The first two parts of the book tell tragic and heroic stories of life during the war--focusing on the difficulties of life on the run in the mountains of central Bougainville and the courage and commitment that maintained the community.

The Bougainvilleans endured immense hardships in the mountains. There were brutal assaults--villages burned and strafed, family members killed, maimed, and raped--and the ever-present fear of helicopter attack. The mountain climate was colder than the people were used to, and their clothing was inadequate. Gardens took longer to grow and hunger was endemic. When people had to escape through the jungle, their beds in makeshift camps were soaked by the tropical rain. Childbirth was a deadly risk and illness a disaster, especially for children and the old; malaria and tuberculosis could not be treated without Western medicines. Josephine's first daughter was born in the jungle, without medical aid.

However gruelling these experiences, the tenacity and resilience of the Bougainvilleans enabled them to survive. Though many died, they revived their pre-contact traditions and combined these skills with the knowledge some had gained through Western education. Traditional agricultural knowledge was rediscovered and the old staple foods grown again. Gardens were established, distant from the hideouts and small in scale for safety's sake. The women--always the gardeners--walked miles to tend them and hauled bags of produce home in the evening. Josephine tells the story of accidentally harvesting too much one day and carrying bags as big as herself for hours into the night, over a mountain range, until she fell headfirst down a steep slope and, injured, had to crawl the rest of the way.

Older men taught trapping and hunting to the boys. Traditional healers, who had been sidelined as "witchdoctors" and "quacks" in recent history, shared their knowledge of plants and remedies and resumed practicing skills such as bone-setting. People worked out dozens of ingenious technologies, harvesting sea-salt, making soap, and inventing a fuel from coconut oil suitable for trucks and generators. Men set up small water-power projects, which brought the first electricity to remote parts of Bougainville. Solar-powered mobile radio transmitters kept the rebel leaders in touch with their people, the refugees in the Solomons, and the world beyond.

Bougainville is a strongly Christian society, and the women's organizations owed much to the support and inspiration of Catholic, United, Adventist, and Pentecostal churches. One organization, under the leadership of Adventist Ruby Mirinka, who had been the principal of the Arawa Nursing School before the war, established dozens of health clinics, community schools, and even a jungle nursing school behind the blockade--as well as launching a travelling health show teaching nutrition, sanitation, and the causes, symptoms, and prevention of diseases. Ruby's people ran the blockade with pens, books, and other aid sent by Australian trade unions and nongovernmental organizations and were involved in the training of radio operators, hydro engineers, and a dentist.

THE THIRD PART OF THE BOOK traces the unfolding of the peace process. In 1997, after numerous talks had failed, the New Zealand government offered to host new negotiations. Thirteen women were among 70 delegates sent to the first meeting at the Burnham army camp.

Bougainvilleans from opposing sides had agreed that they needed to meet together and unite before negotiating with Papua New Guinea, though how they reached this felicitous decision is not explained. The rebels flew to Burnham in the same plane as delegates allied with Papua New Guinea.

Marilyn, one of the 13 women, came in from Sydney and was part of the advance party that met the arrivals from Bougainville. By chance, the BRA and rebel government leaders had boarded earlier and were seated at the back, so delegates from the Papua New Guinea-backed government and the militias emerged first. Enemies perhaps, but many were from Buka and some were from Marilyn's adoptive Buka clan. In such a small population, ties of family and friendship still counted, despite everything--and in this moment finally cut across years of

[W]e embraced them coming through the gates. We could not let them walk past us and so we were drawn into the terminal clutching our loved ones… By the time… [our own] delegates found their way into the terminal, we were moving across the 'divide' to embrace or shake hands with everyone we knew… Then the New Zealand hospitality took over with welcome speeches and an amazing hot breakfast [of]… island-style cooked taro and sweet potato. (p. 134)

That first Burnham meeting led to a truce and, over the next year or so, a ceasefire was achieved; eventually the PNGDF left Bougainville. For Josephine, the pivotal factor at Burnham was the presence of the women. She describes a spontaneous sense of solidarity emerging among them as they poured out their harrowing experiences and their feelings about the war. After Burnham, she founded the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom, which fostered reconciliation between the warring parties and between perpetrators of brutality and the aggrieved relatives of their victims.

THIS BOOK IS NOT A HISTORY in the conventional sense. It reads more like myth or fable--unbearable suffering and brutality are resolved through a miracle of reconciliation and hope. The mosaic of accounts is non-linear. I had to rely on the Internet to create a functional timeline of events; although some maps are provided, many places are not marked, and further research was necessary to grasp the spatial dimensions of the rebel effort, the territory they held, the civilian hideouts, and the routes across the blockade.

In addition, there is little explanation of the genesis of divisions between Bouganvilleans--what, for example, induced men to join the militias? Marilyn mentions a broad division between North and South, but does not elaborate. We are also told that the conflict spread outwards from Panguna in the southern half of the country. I could only guess that the land and lives of people living in Buka where the militias originated--100 miles north of Panguna--were not much disrupted by the copper mine. It's also clear that local men served in the PNGDF and that, unlike Sam, some did not defect, perhaps because the army was their livelihood, perhaps because their clans were not affected by the mine.

Yet, however fuzzy and puzzling the facts sometimes are, the purpose of this book is to preserve the personal stories of the women who participated, and these are emotionally powerful and inspiring. Marilyn's piece about the breakthrough at the first Burnham meeting still makes me cry, and the long term impact of Bougainville's courageous women was ground-breaking.

Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom maintains its vision of a future without mining and without dependence on multinational corporations, encouraging the old barter system and self-determining local economies, caring for land and water in the context of sustainable agriculture, and pressing for the constitutional recognition of women's customary leadership roles in community and politics.

Ironically, it was a bloody civil war that restored to women their precolonial status and power. This stirring book tells how.

Postscript: At the end of 2004, UN peace monitors are due to withdraw. Free and democratic elections for an autonomous provincial government were supposed to have been held before they left; this is now thought to be unlikely, but a firm date is expected by then. A referendum on independence will not be held for another ten years. The Panguna copper mine remains closed. Bougainvilleans generally support full independence, but most have accepted autonomy as the next step.

The life and the myth
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, 512 pp., $29.95 hardcover.
Conversations with Audre Lorde edited by Joan Wylie Hall. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004, 199 pp., $20.00 paper.

Reviewed by Rebecca Johnson

Cover, Cables to rage. From Warrior Poet.

HER POEMS WERE A REVELATION. I was 23, closeted, black Catholic, and desperate to understand my feelings and their meaning for my life. The fiction and poetry of black women were my lifeline, but I had never experienced anything like Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn (1978). I read "A Litany for Survival" to the older black women with whom I organized. I wanted to discuss the meaning of "Walking Our Boundaries" with closeted and confused white nuns. I shared "Sister Outsider" with the mentally ill homeless women living in community with us. Erotic, startlingly political, lyrically complex, essentially African, unabashedly queer, these poems honored a previously unrevealed way of life.

I felt I had found a path to my own voice and way in the world. I became a devoted reader of the works of Audre Lorde, finally meeting her at the I Am Your Sister Conference, a celebration of Lorde's life, in Boston in 1990. I came out, loved and love women, and view my activism as the quintessential demonstration of that love. It was with great eagerness that I looked forward to the publication of Lorde's biography, Warrior Poet. I read Alexis De Veaux's opening pages, the first sentences in the introduction to Warrior Poet: "Audre Lorde lived two lives. As this biography proposes, in her first life the three themes of escape, freedom and self-actualization were crucial determinants." She goes on, "Crucial to understanding Lorde's two lives was coming to terms with how to write her biography." I stopped. What is this dance the author is performing, and why does it feel so distant, so cautious, so sad?

I love biography. I believe it requires the greatest skill to portray a life, to open it to public scrutiny while allowing for the inherent unknowability of any human being. I expect a biographer to reveal a certain entanglement and engagement with her subject, some obvious demonstration of strong emotion, like the opening sentences of Wrapped In Rainbows, Valerie Boyd's biography of Zora Neale Hurston: "There was never quite enough for Zora Neale Hurston in the world she grew up in, so she made up whatever she needed… young Zora lacked no material comforts. … But Zora had other needs. She needed to know for instance, what the end of the world was like." The best biography is a work of love--not uncritical idol worship, not shallow hagiography, but love demonstrated by the rendering of a life in all its complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

Was the task of explicating Audre's life merely an academic exercise? Would the whole book be one long, post-modern cliché?

It turns out that De Veaux's first act of love and sisterhood was for us readers, giving us a kind of foreshadowing that would lower our expectations, dampen any tendency to idol worship, call upon us to open up to the possibility not only of Lorde's wonderfulness but also of her sometimes intensely flawed ordinariness. In the middle of an introduction buttressed by concerns about structuring identity, historical record, triangulated constructs, and discursive interpretations was the essence of the author's dilemma.

And how to write of an Audre Lorde who was brilliant, intimidating, visionary: a woman who was creatively ambitious; financially generous toward other women writers, though she was often barely solvent herself; competitive with respect to her peers; sexually aggressive; vulnerable to any real or perceived racial slight…. How to write of her rage and oftentime violent temper; to present her as real rather than as monstrous. (pp. xii-xiii)

In fact, De Veaux's first frustrating (and frustrated?) sentences can in no way prepare us for the contradictions of Lorde's life.

Promoting Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, at the Second Women in Print Conference, Washington, DC, 1981. Left to right: Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Hattie Gosset. From Warrior Poet.

Many of us believed that Zami: A New Spelling of My Name was the defining expression of Lorde's personal history. She herself referred to it as "bio-mythography." De Veaux eschews myth. Yet it was the myth that attracted me and others to Lorde. I go to many meetings with young progressive activists and, inevitably, male or female, they refer to Lorde. She is larger than life for them. But De Veaux seeks clarity of vision; she undertakes the compassionate untangling of a woman navigating a critical historical moment. To accomplish this, De Veaux distances herself somewhat from her subject.

De Veaux helps us to answer this question: Was Lorde a pioneer, crossing barriers of race, ideology, genders, sexual orientations, family structures? Was she an icon of intentional self-definition, self-created from her multiple experiences in this capitalist, racist society? Or was she someone much more ordinary, more like you and me, who discovered the courage to look outside of the narrow boundaries imposed on her by life and by her own choices? Lorde wanted us to see only the former. De Veaux wants us to meet and learn to love the latter.

Warrior Poet is a study of how oppression shapes a life, and how, with no role models, one woman resisted and overcame racism, colorism and internalized color prejudice, nationalist superiority, homophobia, and her own sense of being unloved and unlovable to become the poetic voice and role model for several generations. How Lorde struggled her way out of these oppressions--or didn't--makes Warrior Poet sometimes painful reading.

I read Warrior Poet side by side with Conversations with Audre Lorde, a compilation of interviews. Lorde's tendency toward mythmaking generates some dissonance between the life De Veaux describes and the one Lorde presents in her own words in Conversations. Conversations is the public Audre Lorde of Black Unicorn and Sister/Outsider. It occasionally hints at the petulant, I-am-underrecognized-as-the-artist Lorde, but mostly we receive a full dose of her making her own myth. Warrior Poet, for the first time, reveals the private Lorde--the one who sought out of jealousy to keep her literary agent from taking on June Jordan as a client. Who identifies herself with "all those 'feisty, incorrigible, beautiful Black women' who insist on standing up and saying 'I am,'" but who in fact had little schooling in what it meant to be part of an Afro-Caribbean or African American community. As a child, Lorde felt, on several levels, unloved by her mother, not least because she was awkward, dark skinned (by her family's standards), and extremely nearsighted. Her mother did not allow her to socialize with African American children in the Harlem neighborhood where she lived. She attended all-white private elementary schools. By her own telling there was no one to reflect back to her the dignity and beauty of the African diaspora, no one to encourage her to strive for the good of her people: Indeed, she didn't know many Caribbean people, except for her mother's sisters in New York City.

In group social theory there is a paradigm called Johari's Window. Our self-awareness can be described as a window with four panes: things I know about myself and things others know about me, called the Arena or Open Area; things I don't know but others do know, called the Blind Spot; things I know but others don't know, called the Hidden Area; and finally, things that neither I nor others know, called the Unknown Area. When I read in De Veaux about Lorde's complex relationships with black lesbian activists, black lesbian writers, white men, her father, her lovers, her children, her therapists, her sisters, white women--just about anyone in her private life--I felt jarred by the ways the panes of Lorde's window kept shifting, expanding, and contracting--revealing and disappointing. I became aware of my own "open window" and of how much I needed--and still need--Lorde to be the perfect revolutionary black woman, the perfect sister/outsider, as an anchor for my own identity as an activist in the world.

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE of a little thing that I found disturbing in De Veaux's book. First I want to invoke Rita Dove. She writes odes to the existence of the Maple Valley Branch Library in Akron, Ohio. She learned to read there. She was nurtured by black women librarians into her writer's life. Early in Warrior Poet, De Veaux describes how Lorde learned to read at the Countee Cullen Library, the segregated, colored library in Harlem. Later, after Lorde graduated from high school, she met Ida Cullen, Countee Cullen's widow. Lorde was an admirer of Cullen's poetry. She was invited to attend writer's workshops at the Harlem Writer's Guild, the organization that worked to uphold the glorious literary legacy of Harlem. So the reader gets the sense that Lorde was aware of, and perhaps valued, African American culture, even if as a child her color-struck parents would not allow her to associate or even go to school with black children. Yet Lorde says in Conversations that all her poetic role models were white men. While she appreciates the social significance of black poets' accomplishments, she implies that black male writers like Cullen were collaborators in the oppression of women. The reader can feel her love of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Hopkins but not the continuity between that colored lady librarian who taught her to read and the black poets who made her career possible.

De Veaux says clearly that Lorde valued and cultivated a "persona as mother figure, as authority" and in some ways used that image to maintain the outsider status that was so crucial to her self-definition. This outsider status was the result of her attempt to make meaning of all the ways she did not fit in, all the places in her life where she had no one to show her the way. In Conversations she says, "I have always been the outsider because I defined it as survival." Her struggle to claim a life, to survive all the external and internalized oppression, is what gave us her poetry and her essays--"Master's Tools" and Black Unicorn and Cancer Journals and Zami. Lorde took great risks in writing such essays as "Master's Tools." How ironic it is that the academic feminists who were once insulted by her arrogance now embrace her ideas as centerpieces for theories of difference, social change, and revolutionary progress.

De Veaux explains the context for Lorde's achievements; yet, puzzlingly, her book ends in 1986. This is where Conversations is useful. It provides a chronology of Lorde's life and interviews from 1975 through 1990 on a range of issues: poetry and its writing, teaching, coming to identify as an internationalist and a woman of color, and Lorde's struggle with the cancer that took her life. Lorde was active in the world--traveling, writing, publishing, and receiving such honors as the I Am Your Sister conference and being named the poet laureate of New York state--practically until the moment of her death in November 1993.

These two books call us to embrace all of life--our own and that of our heroes--even when it is confusing or embarrassing. In that e

AIDS: A crime against women
Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS by Anne-christine d'Adesky. New York: Verso, 2004, 487 pp., $30.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Karen Kahn

I WAS SHOCKED OUT OF COMPLACENCY recently when I encountered a stunning figure in my morning newspaper. The average lifespan in some African countries is spiraling down so rapidly as a result of HIV infection that it is predicted to be no more than 35 years in the near future. Though I had known that AIDS is spreading rapidly in many parts of the world, bringing with it increased poverty, despair, and death, I had not stopped to consider the devastating toll of this disease on entire populations. AIDS has become the bubonic plague of the 21st century.

Since 1981, 20 million people have died of AIDS worldwide. Today, over 40 million people are infected with HIV; of these, the World Health Organization predicts 6 million will die in the next two years, if they are not provided with antiretroviral treatment. For Anne-christine d'Adesky, this is a crime against humanity. In her new book, Moving Mountains, she argues forcefully that "AIDS [is] not just a medical or public health issue, but fundamentally a social and political one." Though treatment could be made available to the 6 million people who need it today, d'Adesky contends, we do not have the political will. It takes only one quick look at the resources going to the "global war on terror" versus worldwide AIDS prevention and treatment to confirm that d'Adesky's righteous anger is justified.

Moving Mountains is a challenging book--intellectually and emotionally. D'Adesky pushes her readers to embrace their responsibility for this human tragedy and join the struggle to make treatment accessible around the world--and she grounds her argument in detailed field reports from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Russia. Her interest is in the

myriad challenges--political, social, medical, technical, cultural--to delivering therapy, and to issues related to disease control and the capacity of nations to mobilize their civil societies and health sectors to deliver accelerated access to AIDS medicines. (p. 9)

These are complex issues. For readers unfamiliar with the technical aspects of AIDS treatment, global trade agreements and their impact on the manufacturing and distribution of inexpensive generic drugs, and the international agencies involved in delivering prevention and treatment programs, it may take some fortitude to keep going. But there is much to learn here, making the effort worthwhile.

HIV infection may be the most important issue facing feminists today. As Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told Ms. magazine this fall, HIV "has targeted women with a raging, Darwinian ferocity." Gender inequality leaves women vulnerable to sexual transmission from husbands who abuse them or hide their HIV status. Often men refuse to use condoms, but in many circumstances, the family's desire for children simply outweighs other considerations. In war-torn areas of Africa, rape by soldiers is commonplace, leaving women stigmatized, pregnant, and ill.

Today, half of all HIV infections are among women--in Africa, the rate is 58 percent. Among 15 to 24 year olds, 75 percent of those infected are female. In Uganda, d'Adesky notes, girls aged 15 to 19 are four to six times more likely to be infected than boys of the same age. Many of these girls are infected by older men who use them for sexual pleasure.

These high rates of infection among girls and women have accelerated promotion of AZT and nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Such treatment programs have been highly successful but often do not include treatment for the mothers themselves. D'Adesky found women in Uganda "furious and desperate" about the lack of treatment for themselves, their husbands, and other members of their communities. Rather than succumbing to despair, however, they were organizing. If HIV infection has any up side at all, d'Adesky saw it here:

I realized that a positive offshoot of the AIDS crisis in Africa is the global attention it focuses on women's issues, which is helping African women to fight against long-standing legal, political, social and cultural inequities. (p.143)

Still, many Ugandan women fear revealing their HIV-status, as they may be beaten by husbands, kicked out of their homes, and abandoned. Domestic abuse is common in Uganda, where male privilege is deeply ingrained. A 2001 survey revealed that 40 percent of the women respondents had experienced domestic abuse; some women were beaten for refusing sex, and others were forced into sex as a marital obligation. As one activist with Women's Treatment Action Group (WTAG) noted:

The husbands are a real problem.... Many husbands have two wives, and sometimes these wives do not even talk to each other about HIV, even if one of them is HIV-positive. They cannot afford to tell their husbands. That is the reality we are going to have to confront. (p.152)

Uganda has been touted by the Bush administration as one of the great success stories for HIV prevention. Using an approach called ABC--abstinence, betrothal, and condoms--Uganda has reduced its seroprevalence rate from 30 percent two decades ago to less than ten percent today. However, suggesting that the decrease in transmission may be the result of high mortality rates, d'Adesky worries that, in a culture in which male privilege leaves women few options, the ABCs may be doing more harm than good. In Uganda, many married women have followed these rules, abstaining from sex before marriage, only to find themselves infected by unfaithful husbands. With little power in their relationships, these women cannot negotiate condom use to protect themselves.

Nor does the emphasis on abstinence and betrothal help marginalized communities of sex workers, drug users, or men who have sex with men. As the Bush administration pushes its conservative agenda, HIV continues to spread through these stigmatized but common activities. As AIDS activists in the US warned in the early '80s, "Silence = Death." The refusal to acknowledge the realities of nonmarital sex and intravenous drug use and to provide easy access to condoms and clean needles continues to leave countries vulnerable to widespread infection.

IN THE LAST DECADE, the face of AIDS in the West has changed dramatically. Today, the great majority of the 1.6 million people living with HIV have access to antiretroviral treatment; HIV has become a disease to be managed, rather than a death sentence. In the developing world, however, only seven percent of those in need of treatment--400,000 people--have access to effective drug therapies. D'Adesky acknowledges that providing treatment to all who need it is a tremendous challenge, but she contends it is one that the world community can meet. She is encouraged by the World Health Organization's commitment to its "3x5 plan" to provide treatment to 3 million people by 2005. Though politics and bureaucracy have slowed the process, WHO is providing important leadership in helping poor countries to acquire medications at prices they can afford.

The United States has not been an ally in that effort. The Bush administration, while widely publicizing its $15 billion commitment to stopping the spread of AIDS, has blocked the most important strategy for saving lives. Allying itself with the world's major pharmaceutical companies, the administration has used worldwide trade agreements to limit the ability of poor countries to import cheap generic drugs. According to d'Adesky, the cost of treating HIV-infected patients today could be as low as 38 cents per day. The struggle for worldwide access to antiretrovirals once again reveals the big lie about the high cost of medical care--these drugs are not nearly as expensive to manufacture and market as the pharmaceutical companies insist.

Making these drugs available to developing countries is not the only challenge in the battle against AIDS. Some claim that treatment protocols are too complex for poor, illiterate people to follow; d'Adesky insists that they are simply looking for excuses to do nothing. Her field reports demonstrate that even in the poorest communities in the world, treatment works. Widespread use of generics combined with prevention education have brought a runaway epidemic in Brazil under control in just six years. In rural Haiti, Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health organization is saving lives through a community mobilization model that "views patients as equal allies in this effort."

Farmer's team relies on Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), a somewhat controversial treatment protocol that has often been used in prisons, mental health institutions, and drug clinics to ensure that the patients take their medicines. Partners in Health has adapted DOT as a public health strategy by training members of the community to provide the support patients need to comply with difficult treatment protocols:

In Cange, [Haiti,] the ones giving out pills and supervising patient behavior... are not doctors, but peers and community members who go to patients' homes....[These] community health workers are called "accompagnateurs"--those who accompany. They don't just hand over pills; they listen, they talk, they help individuals and their families cope with a range of daily, personal needs. (pp. 107-108)

Farmer's success with DOT provides hope for communities around the world. But other challenges remain. In many developing countries, the public health infrastructure is practically nonexistent. Lack of food and clean water undermines efforts to fight both HIV and the many opportunistic infections that attack those with compromised immune systems.

An optimist, d'Adesky sees these challenges as opportunities. As countries take on the fight against AIDS, of necessity they are building up public health systems and addressing long-standing health issues such as tuberculosis, the number-one killer of HIV-infected individuals in poor countries. In Africa, AIDS has focused greater attention on a host of long-standing, complex problems, including warfare, widespread famine, lack of access to clean water, and gender inequality. Addressing the AIDS crisis will necessitate finding solutions for these threats to health and stability.

Moving Mountains is densely packed with information and infused with the author's deep commitment to AIDS activism; the book, however, suffers from some unfortunate flaws. As a compilation of previously published essays, the flow of information and argument is disjointed and sometimes difficult to follow. I wished for a single chapter explaining the manufacture and marketing of generic drugs and the impact of world trade agreements, since this information was so central to many of d'Adesky's most powerful political arguments. I was also disheartened by the poor editing that left the text littered with contradictory facts and figures that may have been the result of error--or simply of the essays having been written during different years. The author, along with her editors at Verso, unfortunately failed to turn this thought-provoking collection of essays into the kind of coherent and incisive treatise that might have engaged a broader audience in addressing one of the greatest challenges we face as a global community.

Women of the Right
Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles by Julie Ingersoll. New York: New York University Press, 2003, 181 pp., $18.00 paper.
Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism edited by Abby L. Ferber. New York: Routledge, 2004, 290 pp., $26.95 paper.

Reviewed by Esther Kaplan

JERRY FALWELL, PAT ROBERTSON, and other leaders of the evangelical Christian right often characterize their attacks on women's equality as a return to "traditional values." They see themselves as the defenders of a biblically ordained social order built around family (with, in its ideal form, a bread-winning husband and a child-rearing wife) and church (which, like the family, should be stewarded by a man). But the submission of women is actually quite a recent development in American evangelical culture. Throughout the 1800s, and well into the 1920s, evangelical Christian women frequently served as pastors, missionaries, and traveling prosyletizers. Women, like men, received calls from God to serve, and their leadership within evangelism fueled the moralistic drives for temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage that were an essential part of feminism's first wave.

It wasn't until after World War II, when the broader culture was championing Rosie the Riveter's return home, that evangelicals adopted their current anti-feminist stance, a process that reached its height with the rise of the Christian right during the 1980s and '90s and its takeover of entire evangelical denominations. It was only six years ago that the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for women's submission, and only four years ago that the Convention voted to ban women as pastors.

In her book Evangelical Christian Women, religious studies scholar Julie Ingersoll documents the tremendous amount of force it took to shove women out to the margins, and the many ways in which evangelical women have been leading an insurgency against this for the past 30 years.

Supporting the disempowerment of women didn't have to become the movement's test of allegiance, Ingersoll argues, and women within the movement may be able to unseat it yet. Gender issues are "not…even the most important ones," R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, tells Ingersoll at one point,

they are just the clear dividers in our time. Thirty years from now there will probably be different ones. Thirty years ago no one would have guessed that these would become so important. (p. 58)

After all, at one time, evangelicals' most pitched public battle was defending biblical literalism from the onslaught of Darwin--not women from the seductions of feminism.

But gender issues have become dominant, as illustrated by Ingersoll's fascinating chapter on recent disputes at Southern Baptist Theological. In the mid-1990s, after the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by conservatives, Mohler was brought in to head up its seminary, where he introduced a series of new litmus tests into the job interview process. Once the seminary's faith tests centered on biblical inerrancy, but Mohler added a series of questions about the candidates' views on abortion, homosexuality, and women's ordination. Even candidates who agreed on every point, but who accepted women's ordination, were blocked from being hired. The seminary's dean of the School of Social Work, despairing that her school would lose accreditation because these strictures would prevent her from hiring enough tenured faculty, went public with her concerns and was forced out. The School of Social Work was soon shuttered. Mohler, who had at one time supported women's ordination himself (he claims, cagily, to have changed his mind "through biblical study"), enforced the new party line at great cost, proving that he was willing to lose a respected school at his institution rather than bend on this gender-based line in the sand. Tensions were so intense at the school, according to Ingersoll's sources, that faculty members were openly weeping at one meeting with the president, and one professor left the room to vomit.

Elsewhere, Ingersoll documents women pastors being barred from conducting rituals, such as baptisms, at male-led churches and prohibited from attending pastoral retreats. She interviews women seminary students who are accused of being apostates merely for asking such questions in class as "Why is God father and not mother," many of whom end up quitting the seminary or taking antidepressants to weather the oppressive atmosphere. The result is that at schools affiliated with the Christian College Coalition, only 19 percent of senior positions are filled by women.

As Ingersoll documents, evangelical women have responded to this escalating gender oppression with small acts of rebellion--one Sunday school superintendent whose new pastor tried to fire her for insubordination marshaled the support of her congregation, who fired the pastor instead--as well as a few sustained organizational responses. The most prominent of these is an organization called Christians for Biblical Equality, which doesn't identify itself as linked to second wave feminism, but rather, according to Ingersoll, as the "rightful heir to the nineteenth-century women's rights movement." These so-called "biblical feminists" believe in equal opportunity for women, insisting, in particular, that church leadership should be open to women and that the ideal marriage is characterized by mutual submission, not a one-way submission of wife to husband. But they root these beliefs in a close reading of the Bible, sharing as they do the view of other fundamentalists, in the words of one participant, "that the Scripture is the whole counsel of God." This creates some interesting dilemmas.

Biblical feminists spend an inordinate amount of energy proving to their community that they do not threaten the conservative evangelical worldview. From the first, Christians for Biblical Equality sought out endorsements from prominent male evangelists to validate their views, and the group took strong positions against homosexuality, abortion, and sex outside of marriage that alienated many of its own members. It's clear from Ingersoll's research that there are two tendencies within biblical feminism, which will be very familiar to anyone who has studied feminism in other realms: one strand is merely accommodationist, seeking only to lift the glass ceiling; the other has the potential to offer a profound challenge to the dualisms at the heart of conservative evangelical thought. The Christian right now dominates the Republican Party apparatus--playing a decisive role on 44 state party committees--and holds tremendous sway over the current administration in Washington. Ingersoll makes a convincing case that this movement's commitment to gender inequality has become a first principle--one that underlies its stances against abortion, gay marriage, contraception, and sex education, which have gone far to shape national policy in recent years. The feminist resistance she documents, if able to assert itself, could have profound consequences not only for evangelical women but for the rest of us as well, by opening the door for a detente in our current culture wars.

THE ARGUMENTS OF ABBY FERBER and the other contributors to Home-Grown Hate are far less persuasive. Ferber introduces the collection by asserting not only that "women's bodies and control over reproduction are central to white supremacy," but that "we cannot understand this social movement without examining it through a gendered lens." While it's easy to agree that a gender analysis would add to our understanding of any social formation, the writers here fail to make a convincing case that gender ideology has strong explanatory power when it comes to white supremacists in the United States.

We certainly learn of some retrograde gender models within American white supremacist movements. Betty A. Dobratz and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile, in their essay based on interviews with husband-wife pairs from various white power organizations, bring us a thoughtful portrait of Linda Storm, a national socialist who strongly embraces the view that her primary role is to bear and raise children--what another contributor calls "racist mothering"--and elsewhere we meet an older woman who helps girls mature into racist activists, playing the role of nurturer for the movement. But the cumulative effect of these essays is to lay out a variety of gender ideologies and practices within racist movements. Some leaders argue for gender inequality based on a literal reading of the Bible, while others argue that such inequalities are "natural consequences of the evolutionary process." Still others, according to contributor Randy Blazak, echo tenets of ecofeminism in their essentialist views of women's role in reproduction. In contrast to Linda Storm, we read that neo-Nazi Erica Chase conspired to bomb Jewish and African American landmarks and that a 12-year-old girl wrote a militant poem for the newsletter White Sisters that reads, "White and proud/That's what I am/Storming the streets/Getting rid of the trash." While some movement leaders frown on women working outside of the home, the Klan has hired women in top staff positions and was one of the first national organizations to endorse women's suffrage. One essay argues that women play an important role in movement recruitment; another that women often serve as the catalyst for men to escape. As Kathleen Blee, the author of three books on women in hate movements, points out in her essay, "Women and Organized Racism," "[w]omen's activities in organized racism differ considerably across groups." The women Blee interviewed spend their time "photocopying literature, making flyers, distributing propaganda, spraying racist graffiti on buildings and highways, writing to current and potential racist activists, promoting and managing white power bands" and on and on, a list that mirrors the range of activities a woman in any social change organization would likely engage in--albeit toward very different ends. All of this is interesting--often stereotype-busting--information, but it does little to bolster Ferber's basic argument.

In fact, some of these movements' most typically sexist positions are actually, on closer examination, anchored in race. The feminist movement is evil because it is controlled by Jews. Abortions are wrong for white women because white procreation is paramount, but for people of color it should be encouraged. Women should do their own housekeeping and home-school their children not so much to comply with traditional gender roles, but to keep "mud people" (black and brown people) out of the home and to keep children safe from the polluting influence of integrated public schools.

The essays present delightful evidence that men are recruited to white supremacist movements at least in part because membership resolves some crisis of masculinity, as illustrated by a cartoon parodying the old Charles Atlas ads in the back of comic books, this one titled "The Aryan that Made a Man out of Mac." It closes with the girlfriend of the former wimp, now pumped up and covered in swastika tattoos, saying, "Oh, Mac! You are a skinhead after all!" But in the end, the traditional explanation for the growth of these movements during the 1980s, which merits only passing mention in this volume, is far more convincing: More than 11 million American workers lost their jobs due to plant closings and layoffs during the early 1980s, and hundreds of thousands of small family farms were sold off during that decade's farm crisis. Right wing hate groups were at the ready, blaming Jewish bankers, Mexican immigrant workers, and African American welfare mothers for the fate of the newly dispossessed. As we approach the fourth year of a jobless recovery, at a time when brutal anti-immigrant policies are being justified by the war on terror, this book, for all its textured portraits of white supremacist gender relations, seems oddly oblivious to these other, quite powerful social forces. Linda Storm's husband Michael, a national socialist leader, tells his interviewers at one point, "We view all of life, history, everything, from a racial perspective." Why not believe him?

The myth of balance
Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives by Mary Blair-Loy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 269 pp., $39.95 hardcover.
The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality by Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 259 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Ruth Milkman

We've all seen her, on television or in print if not in person: the talented female professional with impeccable credentials who ditched it all to become a stay-at-home mom or to work part time. At first I thought this retro, post-feminist woman was a media invention, but then I began to encounter her in my daily life--among the mothers who do volunteer work at my son's school, sitting next to me on airplanes, and even among the daughters of my older friends. No statistics are available, but clearly lots of women like these can be found among today's flourishing moneyed classes, and doubtless there are others who would join them if they could afford it.

While some popular commentators sneer at those of us who were so foolish as to think it could have been different, others offer wry if sympathetic humor (Lily Tomlin's "If I had known what it would be like to have it all… I might have settled for less!" is my own favorite). But this newly emergent phenomenon has not gotten much serious attention in the vast scholarly literature on work and family that has accumulated over recent years. Mary Blair-Loy's insightful book, Competing Devotions, helps to fill that gap.

Blair-Loy initially trained her sociological gaze on women financial executives, curious about how gender might manifest itself in a context where traditional forms of inequality between men and women were supposedly absent. Rather than look for typical or "representative" women workers, as many others have done, she adopted "the strategy of the extreme case." The elite population of female corporate executives, cultivated under hothouse conditions in the nation's top business and professional schools, barely existed a generation ago, but now it is larger than ever--if not quite as large as one might expect 40 years after the rebirth of feminism. These women are totally committed to their careers; as they told Blair-Loy, they simply adore their work, and they routinely used superlatives like "euphoria" and "thrilling" to describe their feelings about it.

It's not that sexism has been eradicated from the corporate suite. Blair-Loy came across several cases of sexual harassment as well as horror stories like the one about a woman who found a rotten fish in her desk drawer after returning from a vacation. But despite all that, these female pioneers are intensely aware of their privileged status and thoroughly treasure their hard-won positions at the top of the occupational heap.

As she began to interview these "career-committed" women (a daunting task in itself given their formidable schedules), Blair-Loy was struck by the fact that almost none of them had children. The few mothers described themselves as anomalous. They were largely absentee parents who hired nannies (sometimes on multiple shifts) to provide care and generally embraced the traditional male model of 24-7 commitment to their work.

As her research continued, Blair-Loy heard story after story about other women--by definition not in her original sample--whose initial career trajectories were similar to the executives' but who had abandoned their positions midstream when they became mothers. She ultimately decided to expand her inquiry to include these corporate dropouts, and discovered that they were just as devoted to their children as the executive women were to their careers. Moreover, most of them were extremely critical of their sisters who remained in the corporate world; indeed, they tended to castigate full-time employed mothers generally. Yet these "family-committed" women were well aware of what they had given up, presenting themselves as having chosen "an almost ascetic life path of transcending self-centeredness for the sake of others' well-being."

Blair-Loy's comparison of the two groups is an imaginative and beautifully constructed study that bristles with insight. It is not an optimistic account, however. Rather than serving up the standard menu of neat public policy fixes to achieve work-family "balance," Competing Devotions explains why even such long overdue reforms as paid family leave legislation and the proliferation of "family friendly" corporate benefits are not likely to do much to resolve the work-family conundrum without a far more fundamental set of social changes. Both corporate elite careers and motherhood, Blair-Loy argues, have deep moral and cultural underpinnings. Both are governed by what she calls "schemas of devotion" that demand total commitment to one's "calling," whether it be to the corporation or the child(ren).

THESE MORALLY LADEN SCHEMAS are so powerful that they often trump economic rationality. As many commentators have noted, businesses would save considerably on turnover costs if they found ways to retain highly trained, skilled female executives by accommodating their family commitments. But as Blair-Loy observes, even though such an approach would be consistent with the logic of profit maximization, its implicit threat to the corporate devotion schema makes it simply unthinkable.

Along similar lines, in a brilliant stroke, Blair-Loy points out the contradiction her data present to Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker's often-cited argument that the gender division of labor at home is economically rational, because families lose less income when women leave the labor market to parent than when men do. Many of Blair-Loy's family-committed interviewees had jobs paying double or triple the level of their husband's salaries, yet in every case it was they, rather than their husbands, who gave up their careers to become the primary parent. Unlike the corporate devotion schema, which is at least theoretically available to women if they are willing to minimize their involvement in parenting, the family devotion schema effectively excludes men.

Many of the "family-committed" women in Blair-Loy's sample turned out to be deeply discontented, confessing (sometimes in tears) that they found child-rearing monotonous and dull. Yet these women professed even more loyalty to the schema of family devotion than those in the sample who found genuine fulfillment in maternity, precisely because of their sense of self-sacrifice. "They can regard themselves as even more faithful mothers, because they have transcended their own personal unhappiness to serve their children," Blair-Loy observes.

Ironically, the same is true of the "mavericks" among Blair-Loy's interviewees, those few women who have found ways to combine "part-time" (i.e., 40-hour-a-week) corporate careers with mothering. They are totally dedicated to their work and at the same time never miss a school play. They leave the office promptly at 6 PM but are back at their desks from 9 to midnight while their children sleep. These women are "double heretics," whose dual allegiances threaten both schemas of devotion (and in the corporate world this "choice," when permitted at all, nearly always comes at the price of future advancement). Yet at the same time the intense commitment of these women to both schemas of devotion helps to reinforce the tenacious grip of the schemas themselves. In some respects they are even more devoted to their jobs than their coworkers, constantly keeping their noses to the proverbial grindstone and forgoing occasions for socializing, for example. Yet simultaneously, by voluntarily "taking on more domestic work and by affirming mothers' unique cultural mandate… they demonstrate the resilience and resonance of the family devotion schema."

The cultural discourse that these elite women invoked often struck Blair-Loy as unreflective and clichéd.

Career-committed group respondents listed "personal objectives" and glowed about being "challenged by new opportunities at work." Family-committed group members discussed having to "cut overhead" when they stopped working. They referred to their children as "happy little campers" thriving on "TLC." (pp. 214-215)

After initially wondering if her interviews weren't probing deeply enough, Blair-Loy "finally decided that many respondents actually understood the world in these terms."

If their self-understandings are drawn from the most common cultural denominator, it is still the case that the women Blair-Loy studied are atypical--as she is perfectly aware. Most obviously, they are enormously wealthy: The career-committed women earn huge salaries themselves, and the family-committed ones typically are married to very high-earning men. So what about the rest of us?

THIS IS PRECISELY THE FOCUS of The Time Divide, another major contribution to the sociological scholarship on work and family, in which Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson provide a critical review of the vast literature on time use, as well as their own detailed data analysis. They adjudicate between competing accounts of this subject, some of which argue that Americans are overworked (indeed, average working hours are longer in the US than in other advanced capitalist societies), and others that suggest that leisure time is more abundant today than it was a few decades ago.

Jacobs and Gerson argue that this debate obscures the gender and class divisions that are central to the process of time allocation. The overall increase in (paid) working hours, they note, mainly reflects the fact that women's involvement in the workforce has increased in recent years. And the apparent increase in "leisure" is largely a product of women spending less time doing housework rather than of any decline in hours devoted to paid work by either men or women. At the same time, parents (of both genders) are spending more time with their children than in the past.

Jacobs and Gerson highlight sharp class differences in time-use practices and preferences. The professionals and managers who get the lion's share of attention in public discussion--of whom Blair-Loy's subjects are the ultimate exemplars--are indeed facing severe time pressures; but this problem is uncommon among less affluent workers, many of whom would like to work more hours but cannot find jobs that offer that opportunity. Workers classified as "exempt" from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act--a law the Bush administration recently sought to eviscerate--work long hours of unpaid overtime, while economic restructuring has left the nonexempt majority working fewer hours than many would prefer. Jacobs and Gerson show that "the average length of the workweek has remained largely unchanged since 1970 [but that] variation around the average has increased." They also distinguish between parents and non-parents, demonstrating that both women and men with young children in most cases would prefer to spend fewer hours working outside the home than they currently do--contrary to Arlie Hochschild's influential claim in The Time Bind (2000) that parents increasingly see work as a refuge from the tempestuous world of home.

Jacobs and Gerson's careful, definitive analysis will be an indispensable reference in this field for many years to come. They conclude with a list of public policy prescriptions for such measures as paid parental leave, government provision for child care, and legislative reductions in standard working hours. As a chapter in the book (co-authored with Janet Gornick) reviewing cross-national data makes plain, these are hardly utopian suggestions but rather policies that most of the advanced capitalist world has already adopted. Yet after reading Blair-Loy, one cannot help thinking that even such basic reforms--which in any case have poor prospects of success in the US at present--would do little to undermine the hegemonic cultural assumptions, the "schemas of devotion," that continue to define both work and family in an America where the corporation is king.

Marilynne Robinson Photo by David Herwalt

Iowa meditations
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, 247 pp., $23.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Valerie Miner

MARILYNNE ROBINSON'S LONG-AWAITED second novel, written in epistolary form, is an imaginary memoir by John Ames, a Congregationalist minister of meager means and massive faith. Twenty-three years after the publication of her popular Housekeeping, Robinson resumes her psychological and spiritual exploration of survival in the face of family abandonment.

Gilead, the absorbing confessions of a pious man, transcends religion to address common secular struggles about maintaining hope and holding fast to an ethical course. At a time when so many politicians aggressively flaunt religiosity in strategic sound bites, it is refreshing to read an honest account of moral and spiritual quandaries. The Reverend Ames is a good person, not a saint. And it is his fallibility, humility, and humor--even more than his generous heart and dedicated labor--that make him appealing. Gilead is remarkable for its sensual evocation of place and keen appreciation for history as well as for its candid, often gripping, examination of conscience.

It is 1956 and the 76-year-old Ames suffers from a fatal heart condition. He lives his last days mindfully, tending to his rural Iowa congregation, visiting an ailing friend and, most importantly, composing a family record to be given to his young boy when he reaches adulthood. By writing in the second person, Robinson intimately implicates her audience; it is as if the story is addressed to "you my readers" as well as to "you my son."

Ames' measured--occasionally aphoristic--language is notable for its clarity and plain beauty. Here he introduces his son to the family:

My mother's father was a preacher and my father's father was, too, and his father before him, and before that, nobody knows….That life was second nature to them, just as it is to me. They were fine people, but if there was one thing I should have learned from them and did not learn, it was to control my temper. (p. 6)

"Gilead" is an intriguing name for a modest, weather-worn Iowa town. Geography is not the allusion here, for this place is nothing like its namesake, the fertile, mountainous region northeast of the Dead Sea. Rather Robinson is referencing etymology and scripture. "Gilead" is rooted in the Hebrew for "firm, hard, tough," an apt metaphor for Ames' character. Gilead is also where David seeks refuge from his mutinous son Absalom. In an ironic twist on biblical power-grabbing, John Ames has the family inheritance thrust upon him. His brother Edward renounces Christianity. His preacher father fails to return from a trip to Florida, leaving young Ames with the duties of his parish for the rest of his life.

This nonlinear novel takes its structure from the circumlocutory ramblings of an old man; sometimes Ames is recalling the family's arduous migration from Maine to Kansas to Iowa; sometimes he is worrying about next Sunday's sermon; sometimes he is mourning his first wife and daughter; sometimes he revels in the joys of his present domestic fortune. For the most part, this naturalistic voice succeeds; but occasionally Gilead is burdened by the self-consciousness and narrowness endemic to such a personal enterprise.

Still Robinson's book is enlivened by moments of stirring conflict and suspense. As a 12-year-old, Ames accompanies his father on a wearisome journey to Kansas in search of Grandfather Ames' grave. The boy learns about his grandfather's passionate abolitionism and his Civil War military service. He also discovers the painful estrangement between his grandfather and his pacifist father, a rift that never healed. After much adversity, young Ames and his father locate the gravesite.

There the boy looks up to see the setting sun crossing with a rising moon.

We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn't get a clear look at them. (pp. 14-15)

Ames' talent for wonder, his appreciation of the grandeur or tranquility in mundane experiences, beckons readers to look longer and deeper and more closely at the ordinary moment.

Currently, Ames' major preoccupation is his failing health and that of his lifelong friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton, now the neighboring Presbyterian minister. Will the two old men last through the spring? The summer? Meanwhile, tensions escalate when Boughton's son and Ames' godson, Jack Boughton, arrives in town. The prodigal's return pleases old Boughton and inexplicably aggravates Ames. Why is the younger man making such frequent visits to Ames' home and church? The godson becomes a kind of menacing alter ego, perhaps a treacherous Absalom. Ames grows anxious that Jack is waiting for his death to lay claim to Ames' young wife Lila and their beloved son.

MARRIAGE AND FATHERHOOD have been startling miracles in Ames' later life. Indeed, Lila arrives like an apparition; as she sits at the back of church that first Sunday, Ames' words turn to ashes on his tongue.

I remember when she lifted her dear face to me to be baptized--lifted it into the winter morning light, new-snow light--and I thought, She is neither old nor young, and I was somehow amazed by her and I could barely bring myself to touch the water to her brow because she looked a good deal more than beautiful. Sadness was a great part of it, it was. (p. 93)

Addressing his son, Ames continues, "So she has grown younger over the years, and that was because of you."

Before this second marriage at age 67, Ames spends a good many years oscillating between hollow loneliness and serene solitude. Now this blessed little family adds tender joy to his careful, final passage. These days he reads a lot; makes pastoral visits; plans to vote for Eisenhower (if he lives long enough); enjoys the glories of spring and summer and the rising cold. He experiments suspiciously with the new-fangled gift from his congregation--a television set. And of course he endures the routines of church business.

I spent this morning in a meeting with the trustees. It was pleasant. They respectfully ignored a few suggestions I made about repairs to the building. I'm pretty sure they'll build a new church once I'm gone. I don't mean this unkindly--they don't want to cause me grief, so they're waiting to do what they want to do, and that's good of them. (p. 110)

Robinson knows pastoral work first hand, as an active member and former deacon in her Congregationalist community. During the years since Housekeeping, she has addressed moral issues in church and as a public intellectual, writing two major nonfiction books. In Mother Country, she investigates the environmental damage caused by the Sellafield nuclear plant in Britain. The Death of Adam is a collection of philosophical essays addressing such thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, William Holmes McGuffie, and John Calvin, the forefather of Congregationalism. At her own congregation, she is still called upon to preach. As she tells Carin Besser in an online New Yorker interview on www.newyorker.com, "I have enjoyed the problem of exploring the sermon as a form. It is a deeply instructive experience, a very interesting way to think. And the situation is interesting--to stand in a pulpit does focus the mind, or it should."

Throughout Gilead, John Ames uses his chronicle to help himself focus on the unforeseen rewards as well as the vexing trials of his long life. He often digresses with explorations of past deeds or insights into theological questions. When he finally grasps the tormented motivation for Jack's recurrent visits, he understands that the younger man is not a stalker but a pilgrim. Ames gently offers spiritual guidance to his suffering godson: "[D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief." At another point Ames remarks,

I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. (p. 246)

Ames embraces his destiny on this stark land where circumstance has often strained his faith.

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once… Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view…. This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes it after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more…. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love--I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence. (pp. 246-247)

At one point, Ames compares writing to praying. Marilynne Robinson's literary epistle is intricately threaded with supplication and atonement and epiphany and thanksgiving. Her novel traces the evolution of one man's compassion, challenging secular and religious readers alike through Ames' meditation and testimony.

Biography of an autobiographer
Harriet Jacobs: A Life by Jean Fagan Yellin. New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2004, 394 pp., $27.50 hardcover.

Reviewed by Joycelyn K. Moody

FITTINGLY, the Project on the History of Black Writing marked its 20th anniversary on October 1, 2004, with a lecture by Jean Fagan Yellin, author of Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Throughout her lecture, "Tracking a Slave," Yellin was passionate and persuasive; everyone in the University of Kansas (KU) auditorium was enraptured as she described how she researched and wrote her biography of Harriet Jacobs who, alone among the millions of enslaved black women, left a life-record of her own making, penned before the Civil War. Yellin's 1987 edition of Jacobs' incomparable antebellum autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), has been translated into many languages, including French, German, and Japanese.

Harriet Jacobs in 1894. From Harriet Jacobs: A Life.

Yellin first became fascinated with Jacobs while working on her doctoral dissertation, published as The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (1972). Then in 1981, in a groundbreaking article in American Literature, Yellin cited a newly discovered cache of letters that Jacobs sent in 1852 and 1853 to Amy Post, a white, Quaker anti-slavery and suffrage activist with whom she briefly lived when she arrived in Rochester in the late 1840s. Yellin established that although the narrator of Incidents is called Linda Brent, Jacobs herself was a historical rather than a fictional figure, and Incidents is not a novel by its famous editor, Lydia Maria Child--a "fact" that had been robustly asserted by the influential US social historian John Blassingame. It is Jacobs' own autobiography. Yellin says that she had always doubted that Child wrote Incidents: Child was too conscientious an abolitionist to risk the fate suffered by her friend John Greenleaf Whittier, who created a scandal in 1838, when the details of a "slave narrative" he wrote were challenged by slavers as unverifiable and thus inauthentic. Whittier's gaffe had hurt the abolitionist effort, and Child would not have cast similar suspicion on the story of a formerly enslaved woman she had come to admire.

Harriet Jacobs is divided into three parts, each bearing the particular moniker by which Jacobs was known during that period of her life. As the pubescent "Hatty" of Part 1, Jacobs served as nursemaid and domestic in two prominent households in Edenton, North Carolina--her birthplace and the site of most of Incidents. In the first household she outwits a lascivious owner, James Norcom Sr.--the Dr. Flint of Incidents--by seducing his neighbor, Samuel Sawyer. After bearing two children by Sawyer, Jacobs further "escapes" Norcom by hiding for nearly seven years in her grandmother's household, under the eaves in a garret nine feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet high. In this attic-tomb, Jacobs used a tiny gimlet to carve out a "loophole of retreat" within her hideout; from this vantage point, she could sew, read, and most importantly, watch her son and daughter at play in the yard.

Yellin searched out the origins of Jacobs' pipe dream of salvation from bondage via the single, personable, aristocratic Sawyer. Such romantic fantasy was the stuff of Hollywood, but Jacobs had lived before there was a Hollywood, Yellin mused. Painstaking research into Jacobs' fantasy life revealed that her wild hope had been based on the "conjugal" experiences of an enslaved concubine cum freed mother, Rose Cabarrus, another Edenton neighbor. Onto the gentlemanly Sawyer, Jacobs pinned her hopes of stopping Norcom's ravages. Incidents divulges virtually nothing of her intimacy with her intellectually lightweight lover--only that her scheme failed. For Sawyer not only never freed their children, but in New York years later, he worked Louisa Matilda, his adolescent daughter by Harriet, as "nanny" to her half siblings by his white wife. Eventually, Sawyer sold his "mulatto" offspring to Jacobs' family. Jacobs' virulent insistence that she was not saleable chattel--that no human being is--proved bitterly insufficient to secure her own freedom: She had escaped bondage in North Carolina via sailboat in 1842 only to be sold from slavery in New York in 1852. Cornelia G. Willis, her employer at the time, purchased Jacobs' freedom to save her from imminent threat of capture under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Whereas Part 1 explores Jacobs' "Private Dreams of Freedom and a Home" as the slave girl Hatty, in Part 2 Yellin explores Jacobs' "Public Dreams of Freedom and a Home," as the anti-slavery activist "Linda [Brent]," who migrated to the Northern cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Rochester. The third section of the book is narrated by the venerable, albeit never married "Mrs. Jacobs."

AT KU, YELLIN CONFESSED, "I don't know a lot about biography. I went to conventions and workshops [for biographers]…but I'd never written one, and I surely never will again." Just what does enable biography? What does it take to learn another's life in detail intricate enough to reconstruct it? What impels such intimacy and devotion? Yellin explained that she was "hooked" by the desire to move from editing Jacobs' autobiography to writing her biography when she located the records of Jacobs' extensive work in the post-Emancipation freedom and relief movement. She pursued questions about Jacobs' sponsors and was enthralled by the information she found in letters, ledgers, and account books across New England. She discovered dozens of newspaper editorials and letters of protest against the atrocious living conditions of freed refugee slaves that Jacobs wrote during and after Reconstruction and signed with the honorific "Mrs. Jacobs." Yellin's formidable investigations took her to the gold rushes of both California and Australia, as she traced the lives of Jacobs' brother John and son Joseph.

Readers who find redundant the biography of an autobiographer should heed Henry Louis Gates' 1989 Voice Literary Supplement review of Arnold Rampersad's two-volume Life of Langston Hughes (1986)--as well as Rampersad's own Yale Review essays on "Psychology and Afro-American Biography" (1983, 1986). These scholars call for the production of more biographies of black writers and of black people generally. At KU, Yellin humbly attributed the inspiration for her own venture to another scholar of African American autobiography, William L. Andrews, who argued that a biography solidifies an author's canonical status in American belles lettres. Without one, an author remains if not obscure then at least "minor." When a colleague reproved Yellin for expending so much professional energy on someone he dismissed as a "one-book author," Yellin committed herself to carving out for Jacobs the exceptional place in the canon that she knew Jacobs deserved--and rejoined to her colleague, "Yes, but it's an amazing book!"

Autobiography differs from biography in that the former is necessarily an untrustworthy performance, fabricated by a storyteller who cannot be disinterested. Biography analyzes story and storyteller and transcends autobiography by completing its chronological, historical, and discursive gaps; thus, Harriet Jacobs includes 100 pages of notes and a "select bibliography" of over 150 citations. Yellin adds to Jacobs' story by chronicling her life after the time period covered in Incidents, from her manumission at age 39 to her death in 1897 at age 84.

Tellingly, Yellin's biography does not document the friendships Jacobs enjoyed with other black women, freeborn or enslaved. Instead, it portrays a full-tilt activist gravely absorbed in struggles quotidian and colossal for her own freedom and for the corporeal and psychosocial liberation of other black people--first from chattel slavery, then from the vicissitudes and vagaries of sudden self-reliance. Still, Jacobs' intimacy with her daughter Louisa Matilda suggests a black womanly connection that sustained her. The post-Emancipation relief activism of Elizabeth Keckley, "with whom Jacobs must have worked during the war," inspired Jacobs, Yellin suggests--but apparently across a social divide. Keckley, a former slave who had maintained her own sewing business both before and after serving as modiste in the Lincoln White House, belonged to Washington DC's "colored society." Jacobs, in contrast, was always a much humbler social servant.

Highly principled and hardworking, "Mrs. Jacobs" brooked no threat to her discursive authority by scrupulously avoiding personal and private rhetorics after she wrote Incidents. Nonetheless, Yellin demonstrates that Jacobs maintained close professional bonds with a constellation of 19th-century writers, including Child, of course, as well as Jacobs' 40-year friend and confidante Amy Post, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Forten Grimké, William C. Nell, and William Lloyd Garrison. After painful encounters with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Willis, Jacobs deliberately avoided contact with writers she judged spurious.

At KU, Yellin said of her book, "This is really a woman's story! Women are the actors throughout." But she also names a surprising number of men who helped her in her research. In her introduction to Harriet Jacobs, she describes a poignant incident in which she assumed she was being ignored by a librarian in Edenton because he was a racist who dreaded her efforts to uncover the truth about Jacobs, the writer and anti-slavery activist. Yellin decided he must fear as well Jacobs' biographer, because she was impassioned, Jewish, and female. She turned out to be wrong, and this same librarian led Yellin to her crucial discovery that Jacobs' father was an enslaved carpenter named not Daniel but Elijah. Elijah was married to Harriet's mother, then after her death to a second woman who also bore him children. This discovery highlights the way Jacobs constructed her autobiography, underscoring the exacting care with which she portrayed herself and her family. Jacobs' account of her escape from bondage may be a woman's story about women, but Yellin's journey includes numerous men who helped an extraordinary woman to re-embody another extraordinary woman's life.

Harriet Jacobs includes a now familiar photograph of Jacobs as well as a newly discovered one of her amid students at the school she and her daughter operated for blacks at Alexandria, Virginia. Additional rare photographs in the book's 16-page visual appendix include those of family members (including persons thought to be her children); the Norcoms; various anti-slavery leaders; and the woman who ultimately bought her. Also reproduced in the appendix are examples of the vital, explicatory documents that Yellin discovered.

Yellin concludes her book's acknowledgments by thanking her children and grandchildren for indulging her devotion to "Harriet." She asks, "What will life be like without her?" I suspect she'll never find out. After all, she is professor emeritus at Pace University, where she directs the Harriet Jacobs Papers Project. Undoubtedly, she will produce more Jacobs scholarship yet.

Publishing for the love of it
Small presses are changing the world, one page at a time

By Judith Niemi

IN A TIME WHEN CONGLOMERATES own the old publishing houses, and books that aren't "blockbusters" disappear from bookstore shelves in months or even weeks, when feminist and other independent bookstores are dying off at an alarming rate, small presses seem more critical than ever, and more endangered. Yet a press of one's own is a durable dream and, here in Minnesota, several new presses were born in the last year. "You have to be a little crazy to do this," warns an established small publisher.

Two new presses with political and social missions are Carol Bly and Cynthia Loveland's Bly and Loveland Press and Gail Cerridwen's Word Warriors Press. These women's implicit, in-the-bone feminism informs their work. I talked with them about their plans and dreams, and for perspective also interviewed veterans of the feminist presses Spinsters Ink and Aunt Lute.

Carol Bly says that her press' mix of story, modern brain development theory, and social work insight is "exactly the stuff that most literary presses avoid like the flu." Reviewing Bly's 1996 anthology, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, writer Mary Pipher called Bly "a one woman army fighting moral drift" because of her several decades of writing short stories and essays, teaching, and public speaking. An early chapbook, Bad Government and Silly Literature, and Changing the Bully, explicitly look at the connections among literature, ethics, and politics. She's not naïve about publishing; early in her career she managed the influential magazine of poetry and politics, The Fifties, then The Sixties and The Seventies. Cynthia Loveland has been a social worker and community activist for 40 years. She wrote two lively pamphlets published by the Minnesota School Social Workers Association, with Carol Bly as literary consultant.

The first book from their press, Three Readings for Republicans and Democrats, arrived late in 2003: a handsome, quirky work of 83 pages. It consists of two essays by Carol Bly, "How Radiation Oncology Nearly Made Me a Republican" and "My Dear Republican Mother," and a co-authored story/case history, "The Savage Stripe: How a Teenage Daughter Changed Her Dad." One common thread is understanding and empathy for the difficulties "privileged perpetrators" face in trying to achieve moral growth and alter the profitable but unscrupulous practices of their corporations. Their second book, Stopping the Gallop to Empire, they call "a first--a respectful book for educated conservatives who find themselves afraid." Says their website, www.blyandloveland.com, "If you've ever been run away with by a 4th rate gelding you know how doomed you feel. But, chances are you can stop him. Same with governments. We can do it." This urgency is another reason to self-publish. It took total immersion in the project to turn the book out in a few months. "Look," says Bly, "if the president can take time away from his family to try to wreck democracy, I can spend some months doing this work."

"We just want to write what we write, and when we want to, on our timing, and not look for permission from anybody," Loveland told a meeting of the Twin Cities chapter of the National Writers Union. She and Bly discussed the "dreadful truths" of publishing and politics and kept the room laughing with tag-team humor. "You lose your sense of humor, you've had it," says Loveland. But what about marketing? The press' target audiences include "the women who sleep with the men who run chemical companies." Yet questioners hoping for hot tips were told, "Oh, we're just learning all that." Probably the attractive, sophisticated cover art is a part of the strategy. Generally, Bly and Loveland are following familiar small publishing routes: many readings and personal contact with local and regional independent bookstores. The chain stores? "We couldn't decide," says Loveland. "We finally approached Barnes and Noble's small press division--we could always say no later. Fortunately, they turned us down." They sell books by mail or phone, but refer Internet buyers to Amazon.com. "That's inconsistent, of course," Loveland admitted, "but everyone told us we should. [Amazon.com has] only sold about three books, though."

WORD WARRIORS is a spunky new press for the creative nonfiction of authors in their late teens and early 20s--it publishes uncensored, edgy memoir by alienated, marginalized young people. Founder, editor, treasurer, and errand-runner Gail Cerridwen works alone in a northern suburb of Minneapolis. She hires young people to create the bold cover artwork and to perform almost every part of the production. With no publishing background, Cerridwen started the company on unemployment checks, credit cards, and "sheer stubbornness, almost desperation" about the needs of the young people she knew from years as an English teacher in alternative high schools. This is another press driven by exuberance and passion for social justice. "Some changes are needed around here," says her website, www.wordwarriorspress.com. "So come on, let's tilt the world on its axis, start thinking and feeling again, confound the pundits, refuse to be good little consumers, take back the nation, recapture our souls."

Cerridwen had already chosen the name Word Warriors when she met Heather Harrison, whose manuscript Yesterday's Warrior became the press' first book. This gritty memoir is unrelenting--bleak, angry, and exasperating. Harrison, by age 14, was an alcoholic and junkie. She had been kicked out of school and bounced in and out of institutions. It's astonishing that she survived to write her book, but she's been sober for seven years and, although this is mentioned only in an afterword, is now a graduate student in clinical psychology. Her story is told in the language and with the obsessive narrative drive of the teenager; there is no context, no foreshadowing of a way out. Painful as this is, the absence of any relief or explanation seems absolutely right. Much of her story is unknown, hidden, unresolved. Harrison writes with authority from the point of view of her young self. Cerridwen's astute editorial decision to encourage this resulted in the raw, honest "kick-ass memoir" that appeals to her young audience.

Cerridwen's next scheduled book is Scott Sundvall's Outlet, "the memoir of a lowly shoe pimp in a mall outlet"; in the spring of 2005 she will publish a collection of essays by Sean Daley, aka the hip-hop artist Slug of the group Atmosphere.

Cerridwen has a tough marketing challenge: controversial books (already banned by some schools) and an audience that typically doesn't read at all. She says, "Several young people have told me, 'This is the first time I ever read a book through from cover to cover.'" Cerridwen points out that some mainstream publishers have started imprints testing out the young adult market for raw, honest books--but it's deadly, she says, to call them young adult or to use any format resembling kids' books. She recently decided to use a regular distributor and a sales rep, but still uses some guerrilla marketing tactics: She's a regular contributor to websites for young people, and she maintains many lively chat groups on her own site.

WHAT LIES AHEAD for small, mission-driven presses like these? Joan Drury, who headed the feminist press Spinsters Ink from 1992 to 2000, shares her experience: Asked whether Spinsters was self-supporting, she admits, "Actually, I guess I supported it about 25 percent. But only because I was trying to get it to be nationally known, nationally respected--that's necessary for a small press to become self-sufficient." Spinsters won a number of awards from mainstream and small press organizations. "Small presses can learn to be mainstream in our marketing and distribution," Drury believes. "What's different is how we choose books--for [their] literary or political value, not asking how they will sell."

"Look, every press is political, says Drury. "Small presses may be explicit about our agendas; mainstream presses support the status quo. Right now, five houses control 80 percent of books published. That's terrifying." Does the work of some small presses become less essential as their subjects are taken up by the mainstream? "That's limited," says Drury. "In the early '90s we had a... sort of Year of the Lesbian in mainstream publishing, but by the late '90s authors were being asked to drop their lesbian characters. I know lesbian authors now writing under pseudonyms.

"I wish I'd started publishing at [age] 35 or 40. I've been in all aspects of the industry, writing, running a retreat, and a bookstore--everything but distribution. Publishing is the most exhausting; it took all my creative energy. The whole industry is in big trouble now. But some people will do what we've always done--hang in there until better times. Anyway, it's cyclical. In ten years, or 15, some young women will say, 'Hey! You know, there's no press just for us! Let's start one.' And they'll have all that energy."

After 22 years with Aunt Lute press, Joan Pinkvoss still speaks with a torrent of enthusiasm about her work. Aunt Lute can publish only three or four new titles a year, but their authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Paula Gunn Allen, and Alice Walker. Of their effort to construct a new canon through the Aunt Lute Anthology of US Women Writers, Pinkvoss says, "There's not another press that could have done it--Volume One took four years, with no money." Aunt Lute won a grant of $75,000 per year for three years from the California Arts Council--but then the council was disbanded. As grant money dries up, Aunt Lute is looking for new strategies. The mission of the press is to launch new writers, especially women writers of color. "With the feminist bookstores disappearing, the only way we can sell an author's first book is making coalitions, finding authors with strong ties to grassroots communities," says Pinkvoss. The press' nonprofit structure is meant to ensure succession, and Pinkvoss has found good coworkers--but she isn't at all ready to leave. "Absolutely the only way you can exist is to have a mission that excites you, work that excites you. Otherwise, you might as well close up shop."

Feminists have too many occasions to mourn the passing of our publishing projects; yet there's also reason to celebrate--and support--what has been done, what continues, and the spirit of those who go on inventing new presses. Clearly a part of what keeps Bly, Loveland, and Cerridwen going is that they are seasoned veterans with a long view of social change who take joy in their work.

"Oh, people complain too much about the state of publishing," says Bly. "Look, no matter who wins the election in November, they aren't going to come behead us--as happened with publishers in Germany. If you've got a desk and a warm room--" Loveland adds, "I don't worry much about the future of our press. It's our vehicle, not our baby. It's how we're doing our work right now." Gail Cerridwen is planning for "a Word Warriors so healthy and so situated in its identity that a group of younger people could take it over. Then I can write." She's as ardent about finding those young people as she is about her ten-year plan for books: "I want to bring to this generation just some of that sense we had in the '70s that we could change things!"

The breast vs. the bottle
Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture by Bernice L. Hausman. New York: Routledge, 2003, 274 pp., $26.95 paper.

Reviewed by Julia Query

MY SWEETHEART GREW UP in a small Midwestern town during the 1970s when breastfeeding was at an all time low. She didn't see anyone nurse a baby. Her images of nursing come from soft-focus formula advertisements that never feature large, sprawling, talkative toddlers with sticky fingers and jagged fingernails. "I want to nurse!" says our gleeful two-year-old son, relishing the word "nurse" and adds, after a look from me, "Please." "Oh!" winces my sweetheart, watching my son knead my breast as he nurses.

When we talk about her discomfort with nursing, she says, "It's so animalistic." She's right, of course. When I lie down to nurse Eli to sleep he often scrambles over my chest, an elbow barely missing my nose, with the squirmy single-mindedness of a piglet or a puppy jousting for a teat. There are only a few activities in our daily lives that remind us that we are animals--sex, pooping, eating chicken legs with our fingers--and nursing is one of them. Nursing is something all human mothers did for millions of years, and often until the child was years older than my son, but now it seems to many anachronistic, even perverse.

"You aren't going to nurse at my friends' barbeque are you?" asks my sweetheart. We've already had a hard week, and soon what could have been a light exchange degenerates into my declaring, indignantly, "If they were racist, and we were Latino, you wouldn't tell me not to speak Spanish to him, would you? I refuse to teach my son to submit to this anti-nursing culture!"

I was being embarrassingly hyperbolic, but I'm not the only one to do so in discussions on breastfeeding. Nursing discourses are filled with prescriptions about mothering and femininity and debates about evolution and scientific progress, individualism versus the "mother-baby dyad," labor law, family roles, and the role of the state. All of it is racialized.

Bernice Hausman's Mother's Milk is the latest addition to the small collection of books and articles by feminists analyzing breastfeeding discourses, including works by Rima Apple (1997), Linda Blum (1999), Pam Carter (1995), Katherine Dettwyler (1995), and Vanessa Maher (1992). Like some of her predecessors, Hausman analyzes formula-hawking pamphlets, La Leche League materials, and other writings on breastfeeding, noting their sexism and contradictions. She takes issue with previous feminist writings, arguing that they downplay the "biomedical significance of breastfeeding" and present bottle-feeding as liberating for women. At first, I accepted her portrayal of texts that I hadn't read. However, when it came to the books I had read, I found her contentions surprising. I hadn't seen an anti-breastfeeding subtext lurking in them, nor a postmodern wholesale dismissal of the scientific support for the immunological advantages of breastmilk. I concluded that Hausman and I have something in common: When it comes to breastfeeding, we are prone to overstatement. Hausman describes herself as a breastfeeding advocate as well as an academic and acknowledges that advocacy and scholarship are a difficult balance. Although much of her book is impressively researched, sometimes she loses her footing.

Hausman splits feminist authors into two groups, the (good) ones who support breastfeeding and the (bad) ones who do not. She argues that feminist scholars viewed nursing as a feminist practice until

in the late 1990s a new genre of feminist scholarship on breastfeeding emerged.… These works share a crucial rhetorical strategy: refute scientific claims to argue that breastfeeding promotion is largely political, having to do with the promotion of certain kinds of mothering. (p. 197)

Hausman says such feminists view "maternal nursing as itself a purely political experience, determined by conservative social discourses and solely defined by their meanings." Wow. Are feminist critics of breastfeeding discourses that extreme in their views? Do they really see nursing as a repressive practice foisted on Stepford mothers by conservative social forces?

Hausman's main argument against feminist critics of breastfeeding discourses is that such feminists deny the value of breastmilk. She concentrates on Linda Blum, whose At the Breast, she contends, "easily set aside" the scientific evidence for the health benefits of breastfeeding. However, Blum does not discount the benefits of breastfeeding; indeed, she offers solid evidence of its benefits, criticizing only the least supported claims, such as the notion that it can heighten IQ and visual acuity. Hausman quotes only Blum's doubts about such spurious claims. She also criticizes Blum for writing that, despite the benefits of breastmilk, most formula-fed babies (in the first world) "thrive." But this is true--most formula-fed babies in the US do thrive, and Hausman offers no evidence to the contrary.

Should we not think critically about the promotion of breastfeeding and the production of scientific knowledge about breastmilk? Hausman seems to think that questioning any of the many claims about breastfeeding makes one anti-breastfeeding--a simplistic with-us-or-against-us litmus test. She implies moral failure for those who flunked her test. She makes the bold statement that "In de-emphasizing the health benefits of breastfeeding, First World feminists do a disservice to the most disadvantaged women in the world." As evidence of this de-emphasis, she again points the finger at Blum, for criticizing simplistic calls to increase breastfeeding in third world countries. But Blum argues for greater concern for the health of mothers, pointing out that breastfeeding can be physically depleting for undernourished women and isn't "free"; and that simply to present statistics about infant death due to the (unsafe) use of formula is to ignore the larger social problems in which infant mortality is embedded. She clearly states that "it is safer for poor Third World mothers to feed their babies at the breast." How is she doing such mothers a disservice?

Hausman also discusses a Signs article by Jules Law (2000). He argues that many "popularly cited facts and statistics about infant feeding are not based on medical research at all," and that breastfeeding discourses naturalize a sexist division of domestic labor. Hausman points out that Law, an English professor, uses a faulty understanding of statistics in order to question findings that breastfeeding decreases ear infections. She also rightly criticizes him for using "common sense" to draw conclusions about breastfeeding.

But Law's larger project is not disabled by Hausman's criticisms. His point is not that every claim made about the benefits of breastfeeding is false, but that many, especially in popular discourse, are not based on scientific evidence. And these claims often assume and promote the idealized nuclear family, making infant care the mother's responsibility. Law points out that families make risk assessments about their children every day, but that not all risks are the subjects of public debate. He writes, "City air is clearly more toxic than infant formula, but families rarely uproot their lives for incremental reductions in an infant's exposure to carbon monoxide...[P]ediatricians are more likely to recommend a practice that will disrupt a woman's career than a relocation that may affect a man's commute." Hausman misses Law's point, criticizing him for not providing statistics about air pollution.

In addition, Law points out that having to work for a living is one of the most important factors in preventing breastfeeding. Hausman herself says that feminists should organize to make employers more accommodating of breastfeeding employees--a proposal supported by Law's article. Why is she opposed to his conclusions?

Ironically, in a world in which most women would give anything to have their partners do more childcare, Law and Hausman seem to be having a turf fight about who gets to feed the baby. Hausman wants babies to be nursed by their mothers, not just fed breastmilk pumped out previously and put into a bottle; she argues for viewing the infant as part of a "mother-child dyad." She concludes that feminists should campaign for "mothers' rights" to breastfeed. Law says choices about nursing should be made not by the mother alone but by the parenting team, taking into account the

questions about balancing the labors, pleasures, well-being, development and opportunities of a household's various members and, furthermore, as decisions that open, rather than assume the answer to, the question of who cares for children and in what ways. (Law, p. 415)

I wonder if Law isn't articulating a bid by non-lactating parents to have those precious quiet times holding their small bundles of perfect little fingers and toes, those moments when tiny eyelids flutter. Feeding a baby can be immensely satisfying, whether you are nursing or giving a bottle. It sure beats diaper duty.

ULTIMATELY HAUSMAN SEEMS to be picking a fight that isn't necessary. Couldn't it be true both that breastmilk and nursing are good for infants (in the right context) and that pro-breastfeeding claims are often overstated? That we live in a culture and economy that preclude breastfeeding for many mothers, but that bottle-feeding might, even in a utopia, be the best choice for some families? Can't feminists analyze the overstatements about breastfeeding yet work for policies, like onsite day care and flex hours, that help mothers nurse their infants? Instead, Hausman wants a unified feminist position that promotes breastfeeding. She criticizes Blum for writing that there is "no one answer and no position free of danger," [the last emphasis is Hausman's] implying that to acknowledge dangers in the promotion of breastfeeding is to fuel anti-breastfeeding campaigns.

Hausman suggests that the "biomedical discourses supporting maternal nursing" could "provide feminists and health activists with a language to press for… an expanded understanding of women's rights." Hausman fails to understand that to argue for breastfeeding using biomedical claims is not free of dangers. Feminist scholars have repeatedly shown that it is naïve to think that armed with science we can win the battles for women's rights and that scientific truth claims can't be used against us.

Hausman writes in a turgid, clunky academic style, which she thankfully interrupts with a personal voice revealing her own experiences, although not often enough to make Mother's Milk a pleasurable read. Sometimes her use of academic phrases is so vague that it is hard to figure out what she means. For instance, she wants policy changes that would make it easier for mothers to nurse--but it's hard to know what exactly "provisions for mothers... that acknowledge the unique embodiment of lactation" would consist of. Despite having few specific suggestions, she makes the grand claim that "breastfeeding-friendly workplaces" would "force men to acknowledge that their positions of power occur by virtue of women's exclusion from the public sphere." She doesn't explain how women nursing at work would lead to consciousness changes in men.

For those of us with a scholarly interest in motherhood and breast-versus-bottle debates, her book is an important, although overstated, addition. But for general readers interested in a feminist look at the politics of breastfeeding, I recommend Linda Blum's At the Breast as both more enjoyable and better scholarship.

The star-maker machinery
Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom by Adrienne L. McLean. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 272 pp., $23.95 paper.

Reviewed by Brooks Robards

FORTIES FILM ICON Rita Hayworth--born Marguerita Carmen Cansino and immortalized by Hollywood as a sex goddess--first appeared onscreen at age eight. She danced in movies with Fred Astaire, married Orson Welles, with whom she starred in The Lady from Shanghai, then Prince Ali Khan and then singer Dick Haymes. Hayworth's best remembered films include Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai, Miss Sadie Thompson, and Pal Joey. She died at age 68 from Alzheimer's disease in 1987.

Along the way to stardom, Hayworth dieted, dyed her brown hair black, then red, and endured two years of painful electrolysis to raise her hairline, in addition to changing her name. Packaged by Hollywood and defined by the culture, what was left? Plenty, says film scholar Adrienne L. McLean in an ambitious but scattershot examination of Hayworth's stardom.

McLean is interested in Hayworth's role in constructing her own identity as a star. While she concedes that this talented actress was mostly contained by the kind of patriarchal representation characteristic of the post-World War II era, she finds evidence of resistance.

All-purpose ethnicity. Lobby photo of Rita Cansino playing an Egyptian girl and Swedish Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan in Charlie Chan in Egypt. Copyright 1935 by Fox Productions. From Being Rita Hayworth.

McLean works hard to cover all the critical bases, drawing primarily on the work of Danae Clark, known for her Marxist-inflected examinations of stars as social subjects rather than commodities and her development of the notion of the actor as worker. While McLean's thoroughness is commendable, she sacrifices clarity of argument for hard-to-digest thickets of allusion and technical verbiage. She is not a concise writer.

To accept McLean's theses, the reader must also accept her use of ephemera--fan magazines, newspaper stories, studio memos, and other Hollywood memorabilia--to track Hayworth's stardom. Such sources, she rightly points out, can help uncover the reality of 1950s culture, which is often portrayed simplistically as conservative. But they can also be "bad evidence," she concedes, since they are about Hayworth rather than by her. They are secondary sources. (I assume primary evidence like letters and taped interviews was not available.)

McLean first examines Hayworth offscreen, claiming that she was responsible for maintaining an ethnic dimension to her stardom. In her earliest national media coverage, on the cover of Look magazine, she was represented stereotypically, as the Spanish dancer Rita Cansino--although not in the accompanying article, where she's identified as "Hollywood's Best-Dressed Girl." McLean concludes that Hayworth had not yet contructed an identity completely separate from that of Rita Cansino--nor would she ever. But does McLean believe that Hayworth's ethnicity remained part of her star identity simply because she talked about it publicly? She argues that Hayworth took control of the physical transformations necessary to construct herself as all-American by sharing them with the public. But does simply talking about having your forehead raised through electrolysis constitute taking control over such an extreme physical alteration? Comparisons to other stars might have clarified Hayworth's situation; without such comparative evidence, it's hard to evaluate whether Hayworth really did try to resist conventional Hollywood commodification.

McLean sees Hayworth's ethnicity both as something to be overcome and "the guarantor of her authenticity as a star." Hayworth could become a star only by changing her name to Hayworth (her mother's maiden name). Yet according to McLean it took as much to manufacture Cansino's ethnicity as it did Hayworth's Americanness. Early in her career Hayworth played Egyptian, Russian, Spanish, Mexican, and South American characters--the specifics of her ethnicity were malleable. McLean collapses Hayworth's half-Spanish heritage into a generalized Latin one, even though during the post-World War II years, Latin and Spanish ethnicities were quite different.

Hollywood female stars were expected to want children and domestic bliss more than careers. The press represented Hayworth in her domestic life as one of Hollywood's "unhappiest stars," depicting her as a "woman who had been hurt." She had a dysfunctional childhood in which she was abused by her father, and there were divorces, scandals, illnesses, and parenting troubles. Indeed, McLean succeeds in showing that Hayworth's struggles with family, domesticity, and her talent and career mirrored issues faced by many women. McLean believes Hayworth's five marriages, her parenting, and her divorces introduced new levels of complexity to the scripts fan magazines and publicity machines worked with.

McLEAN'S BACKGROUND--she has an MFA in dance--positions her well to discuss Hayworth as a dancer and musical comedy star, and she makes a broad claim for the importance of song and dance in film: "It is in the musical numbers of any film that the greatest explicit critique of established assumptions--about gender, racial, and ethnic roles, for example--is likely to take place." She believes that film scholars have often written off Hayworth as passive and objectified because they have focused too much on some of the characters in her films and not enough on how Hayworth plays those characters.

In support of this idea, she analyzes Down to Earth, an obscure 1947 star vehicle, arguing that it registers important historical changes in the musical genre. Pointing to the capacity of dancing women in movies like Down to Earth and another Hayworth vehicle, Tonight and Every Night, to destabilize gender divisions, she claims dance gives women control as agents rather than objects. Similarly, in Affair in Trinidad (1952), collaboration between choreographer Valerie Bettis and Hayworth resulted in dances that, if not exactly feminist in today's terms, suggest autonomy and an inner self and celebrate desexualized female movement and gesture. McLean examines Down to Earth's reception by dance critics and film reviewers, revealing an apparent bias against musicals without male stars or authors. She proposes that musicals starring or written by women have been ignored by film scholars and need serious scholarly attention. It is an intriguing discussion, but it feels incomplete because it can't be addressed adequately within the confines of Being Rita Hayworth.

A spread from Confidential magazine, January 1956, "Why Rita Hayworth Walked Out on Dick," in which Hayworth is depicted as Haymes' punching bag. Copyright 1955 by Confidential, Inc. From Being Rita Hayworth.

Gilda and The Lady from Shanghai did more to define Hayworth as star, McLean observes, than the rest of her 60 films put together. But McLean refutes critics who conflate the star and her roles and conclude that the two films reveal the "real" Rita Hayworth as just another synthetic Hollywood sex goddess. Musical numbers make the difference for McLean:

The contrast between the powerful, open, and communicating spectacular Gilda and the worked-upon and managed narrative Gilda serves in the end to foreground the impossible bind in which Gilda, Hayworth, and any number of other postwar women all too often found themselves. (p. 161)

Hayworth, she says, transcends her film noir characterization as a femme fatale in Gilda, but not in The Lady from Shanghai, in which Orson Welles made even the singing Hayworth seem motionless and fetishized. McLean concedes that music and dance in film are not automatically sites of female resistance, and that other performances that compete with narratives should be examined.

Rita Hayworth was surely more than the "love goddess" to which Hollywood tried to reduce her. And it is an honorable project for a feminist scholar "to re-place this woman, and other stars as yet unstudied, as subjects rather than objects." Unfortunately, the evidence McLean provides of a powerful Rita Hayworth in control of her destiny is not persuasive. I wish she had limited herself to a more thorough consideration of how song and dance affect the positioning of women in film. Crackling with ideas and references, Being Rita Hayworth reads like an unruly dissertation where the topic threatens to run away with the author.

Samina Ali Photo by Thayer Allyson Gowdy

A modern Muslim's tale
Madras on Rainy Days by Samina Ali. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, 307 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Mandira Sen

EXOTIC ON THE SURFACE, with its evocation of the traditional world of the Indian Muslim community within the walled city of old Hyderabad, Madras on Rainy Days delights the reader with its subtlety as it unfolds gracefully. Samina Ali presents a palimpsest that peels away from time to time to reveal much insight and meaning. She does this through the eyes of the protagonist, Layla, who is only 19. But Layla's ability to make sense of her encounter with two cultures--the traditional world of Muslim India in Hyderabad, and Minnesota, where she arrived as a baby of immigrant parents--infuses the book with maturity. It is emphatically not another novel of the immigrant experience in America. It relates the story of Layla's visit to Hyderabad to marry Sameer, an engineer--a wedding that has been arranged by the family elders. Indeed, America appears only as remembered past or possible future. Although Ali comments on the racial discrimination that is prevalent in the US and that all non-white immigrants must negotiate, the focus is primarily on Hyderabad, while a few fraught days in Madras provide some of the answers to the reasons behind the arranged marriage.

Why would Layla, a student at an American university, who outwardly shares the lifestyle and interests of her fellow students, acquiesce in an arranged marriage-especially when many of her middle-class peers in India have been fighting with considerable success against this practice? Is it because of the way she has been brought up in America, provided with its comforts--she drives a BMW--but always watched over by her parents, who prevent her from making friends? Young men are of course ruled out, but Layla does not mention any woman friend either. Ali is convincing in her depiction of the confusion, ambivalence, and conflicting loyalties that motivate people. Layla says,

Different worlds, and in each I was a different woman unrecognizable even to myself. I was like the two faces of the moon, new and full, one always veiled behind the other. (p. 70)

Though living in America, Layla's parents wish to perpetuate Hyderabad values and behavior that govern the lives of Muslim women, though not necessarily of Muslim men. They wish Layla to "inhabit America without being inhabited by it." Her father, whom she calls Dad, has enforced his will by beating her into submission since she was two. A successful heart surgeon, he sees no contradiction in upholding those aspects of America that appeal to him--like modern cardiology--yet enforcing traditional Muslim patriarchy at home. He has divorced Layla's mother, her Amme (Urdu for mother), and set her and Layla up in a separate apartment, while he lives with his second wife, Sabana, and their two sons-an arrangement that would go unremarked in America.

Divorce has been traumatic for Amme. She would have preferred to have remained married, acquiescing in her husband's taking of a second wife, while her status remained secure as the first wife, as is the Islamic custom in Hyderabad and elsewhere. Humiliated by what she sees as abandonment, Amme has kept the divorce a secret from her friends and relatives in India and is determined to arrange a better marriage for her daughter. Muslim patriarchy's harshness to women is a cliché, of course, and in Madras divorce is an undercurrent that pulls the daughter to conformity. Layla's father, who will not let her meet Americans, also supports an arranged marriage for her and has presented two airplane tickets to America to the bridal couple, thus encouraging Layla to perpetuate a traditional life in the West. Amme and Dad do not seem to consider at all what will happen if Layla's marriage ends in divorce, and she too is abandoned.

Engaged to Sameer while still in America, Layla is haunted by the fear that her marriage won't work-that her handsome fiancé may find her unattractive; that she will fail her mother and even cause her death. At the same time, she resists the patriarchal insistence that her sexuality is not her own but belongs to her future husband. Before she leaves for Hyderabad, she and Nate, a fellow student, make love in the room below her mother's bedroom, an act that haunts Layla throughout her marriage and her time in India.

Ali's depiction of traditional Indian sexual mores, whether for Muslims or for Hindus, is convincing. An arranged marriage is not about love but about legitimating sexuality, and the rituals and events of the marriage ceremony reiterate this bluntly. The marriage is consummated immediately, to prove the groom's virility and the bride's virtuous submission. Love and a woman's desire are not part of this social equation; love is to follow the act of marriage. And failure, like Sameer's, at quick consummation cannot be accommodated by the system. It raises the threat of sexual dysfunction and, worse, the prospect of homosexuality (lesbianism is not taken seriously), greatly to be feared and condemned. Nafisa, Layla's old ayah (who is strangely referred to as "nanny"), sees through Sameer's deception when he shows his mother the small white blood-stained cloth, specially provided, as proof of successful consummation. Layla, for her part, thinks Sameer is protecting her. She is bleeding because of a miscarriage, and Sameer has used that blood. Perhaps it is because Layla has not grown up in Hyderabad that she misses the cues. Vulnerable in a strange environment, she does not think of questioning Sameer's reluctance. Like many women, she blames herself first.

Layla enters into her traditional Muslim marriage willingly, after her initial rebellion with Nate fails. She finds that she is anxious to make the marriage succeed and does her best to conform as a good wife and a good Muslim. The paradox, as Sameer's friend Naveed points out, is that Layla does not seem "American," whereas Sameer, who refers to himself as a "lapsed Muslim" and is anxious to leave Hyderabad for America as soon as possible, dresses in American clothes and looks Western.

THE NOVEL IS SET in 1989, about six years before the transformation of this city into a high-tech center from which computer software is exported all over the world. Hyderabad is changing. But even then the Muslims of the walled city felt left out and discriminated against. Sameer tells Layla, "You have two applicants, one Hindu, one Muslim, and even if both are equally qualified, the Hindu will be hired. That's our affirmative action, baby. Keep the dominant classes dominating." There is almost no contact between Hindus and Muslims; when there is, it ends in violence or chaos. Layla's pregnant cousin, Henna, is raped and murdered by a bunch of Hindu goons; a Muslim bridegroom elopes with his Hindu girlfriend on the very day he is supposed to marry a Muslim bride.

We learn the reason for Sameer's desperation to leave India during the couple's honeymoon in Madras, which both Sameer and Layla see as a place where they may succeed in consummating their marriage. They travel there to obtain a long-desired US visa for Sameer. But they again fail to make love, which Layla believes must be because of her betrayal of Sameer with Nate, since Sameer knows the meaning of her continuous bleeding. Later, accosted by Naveed outside their hotel door, she learns that he and her husband have met during the honeymoon. Naveed is not just Sameer's friend but his lover, and Layla hears him tell Sameer, "After a month away from each other, was the lovemaking not better than before?... How can you still go to America, go on with this other life, this betrayal? I have come here to save you!" Ali shows how difficult it is for traditional societies to face up to alternative sexuality as legitimate human behavior. Marriage is seen as a way of correcting an "aberration," as well as a "cover" for homosexuality. As Layla's uncle says, Sameer's homosexuality is "recreational sex" that will right itself after marriage. Sameer's vulnerability and culpability are entangled; perhaps he did think he could break away from Naveed and his own sexual preference. When Layla confronts Zeba, her mother-in-law, with Sameer's homosexuality, she comes up not against denial--because Zeba knowingly arranged the marriage--but with a prescription to continue with the status quo. Sameer's young, college-going cousins, Asma and Zenath, recommend this too: "No, Bhabhi [sister-in-law], no, the family must remain together." Ironically it is Sameer who provides the vital help that Layla needs to set herself free.

Madras is one of the few novels that have been written about a modern Muslim woman who has to make her way in the world. It is far removed from the stereotypical images of women terrorists and fundamentalist Islam. That Islamic civilizations are varied and that Indian Islam is very different from that of the Middle East or Afghanistan is not spelled out but taken for granted, and that young Indian Muslim women try to come to terms with life like any other women in the world is a given. The book cleverly uncovers degrees of reality and morality, depicting a society that is in deep crisis, where change is coming, and with it some hope for people like Sameer and Layla. There are no villains in Madras but perhaps there is a heroine, Layla, who finds the strength to face reality and to make the decision that is right for her. Beautifully written, this tale gently asserts that tragedy is what we make of it, that destiny need not be relentless, and that we can and indeed must recover from betrayals.

Media distortions
Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975 by Patricia Bradley. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, 322 pp., $46.00 hardcover, $18.00 paper.

Reviewed by Marie Shear

THE SECOND WAVE of the women's movement sought to use the media as a lever for social change, Patricia Bradley says. Her study of that search starts with the publication of The Feminine Mystique and stops "when the initial energy of the movement was over, at least as far as mass media was concerned." She traces the trajectory: "rapid rise, peak, and disappearance from the public agenda."

Many feminists were journalists in New York City, the nation's media capital. They soon found good news and bad news: TV, newspapers, and magazines did circulate activists' messages. But the media oversimplified issues and stereotyped feminists, seizing on any novel or contentious aspect of the movement, ignoring the need for radical change by equating women's rights solely with job equity, and treating Billie Jean King's tennis victory over Bobby Riggs as a "happy ending" to the movement.

To attract readers and viewers without upsetting the status quo or unsettling advertisers, journalism uses a template of what Bradley calls "craft traditions," journalism's standards of fairness, accuracy, and objectivity. (Of course, these may be flouted in practice, and simplification, celebrity, and "human interest" may take over.) At first, journalism's craft traditions brought airtime and ink to the movement, because it seemed new and because leaders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) were media-savvy. Before long, however, the media began chewing on each morsel of discord. Fastening on women's anger rather than their issues, reporters and editors portrayed feminists as castrating harpies, much as they'd once caricatured suffragists. As Martha Weinman Lear wrote, feminism was consistently disparaged with "the cruelest weapon of them all--ridicule." Editors' and publishers' personal bias repeatedly produced negative stories, as Newsweek, Time, and other news organizations warred on the movement. The moment feminism gained a place on the media agenda, the movement "was already beginning its skid," says Bradley.

While recognizing the accomplishments of less-publicized pioneers--including Florynce Kennedy, the activist lawyer whose gorgeous, astute audacity I loved--Bradley regards Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem as the most significant second-wave leaders and Robin Morgan as the leading radical. For Bradley, Friedan's Feminine Mystique is "the founding document...the founding event." Friedan's frequently antagonistic personal style fed the media's yen for controversy and contributed to their stereotyping. She warned that the movement risked a takeover by "man-haters, lesbians, pseudo-radical infantilists, and infiltrations [sic]." Yet Bradley concludes that Friedan's book and her cofounding of NOW in 1966 have left a profound legacy.

Steinem, in contrast, adapted to media requirements by blending glamour with strong, simple, personal statements on issues and "an unflappable and witty speaking style." Bradley calls her the nation's most influential feminist. Ms. magazine, which Steinem cofounded, introduced neglected topics, such as battered women and sexual harassment, to the media agenda by coupling "subversive content" with familiar devices like covers that displayed glossy art and catchy lines. Nonetheless, Ms. was relentlessly pressured by advertisers and--like the movement as a whole--criticized by lesbians, women of color, and radicals who wanted fundamental change.

Paradoxically, Bradley says, the second wave strove for attention from the media it knew were damaging women through employment discrimination and servile images in news, entertainment, and advertising. It was tough to get coverage using orderly methods, yet protest marches and agitprop actions were treated as if shrillness, not sexism, were the story. "Strident," a code word for "lesbian," was pinned on nearly any uppity woman. Like a monster, the media could create favorites today, then ignore or savage them tomorrow in pursuit of novelty.

Through its calculated conflation of the Equal Rights Amendment with abortion rights and other incendiary issues, the far right fostered a powerful backlash, which mainstream media promoted. While organizing, publishing, televangelizing, and touring, Phyllis Schlafly and other reactionaries created their own media organs. Certain newspapers illustrated their articles on the passage of the ERA by the US House of Representatives with a photo of Rep. Martha Griffiths powdering her nose. (News of the current campaign to ratify the ERA, despite its omission from the 2004 Democratic platform, is available at www.ERACampaign.net and ERACampaign@aol.com.) Bradley's suggestions of FBI and CIA meddling with the second wave are provocative: "What has yet to be explored is how the [FBI] infiltration affected the drive for the ERA."

With the 1973 tennis match between King and Riggs, the media reduced feminism from a subject for serious journalism to a mere entertainment. The event was to Bradley "a glorious moment of triumph," but it "marked the decline of the intersection of mass media and the women's movement." By 1975, Bradley maintains, the second wave was ebbing.

MASS MEDIA's merits include a sturdy chapter on the broadcast reform movement--the attempt to diversify the ranks of management and on-air talent and to increase coverage of underreported issues. The book's discussion of the satirical origin of "bra burning" and its instantaneous transformation into a permanent, pejorative myth is welcome. There are apt descriptions of media trivialization of the August 1970 demonstrations, which marked the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage.

Bradley accurately points out that concentrated media ownership and rapid technological change have increased the obstacles to future reform and that higher numbers of female journalists have not produced extensive improvement from within, either in the stories covered or the authorities quoted, despite second-wave expectations. Bradley is correct about women who look like us and think like them; three years ago, a female New York Times Book Review editor angrily and publicly called me a "conspiracy theorist" because I'd said that female authors and book critics are underrepresented in mainstream media.

Some of Bradley's other interpretations and omissions are questionable: Female reporters were not "affectionately tolerated" during President Kennedy's televised press conferences; the grinning president and guffawing male reporters treated those pioneers like fruitcakes. The epiphanic impact of The Feminine Mystique seems exaggerated, although I remember my excitement, when Friedan addressed a demonstration in the early '70s, at seeing a woman who didn't look like arm candy acting as if she had a perfect right to speak in public.

Major intersections of media and feminism are overlooked. References to the hit TV series All in the Family, for example, mention Archie Bunker's racism but neglect the episodes that let America see and feel women's issues. When Edith Bunker, beautifully played by Jean Stapleton, encountered credit discrimination at a bank or fought off a rapist, sexism came alive for millions of viewers. Such episodes were exhilarating landmarks of social change.

Bradley's accounts of media dismissiveness can be bland; they don't convey the loathing of women that radiates from articles and illustrations in my files of the period. Nor are there references to two contradictory but pervasive media themes during the '70s: (1) Feminism is dead because it failed; and (2) feminism is dead because it succeeded and became superfluous. Either way, the media pronounced feminism a corpse.

Despite the scholarship evident from the 21-page bibliography, there is something flat about Mass Media. Had Bradley stuffed her material into an iron maiden of abstractions, I'd have groaned. But without imposing artificial unity upon untidy realities, inner logic or perspective can make a book greater than the sum of its parts. This author doesn't spot things I hadn't noticed, thereby prompting an occasional, reflective "hmmnn," or supply the small, satisfying ping as a fresh insight or juxtaposition scoots into a space in my head that I hadn't known was vacant. Even if the reader has first-hand knowledge of some of the events and people described and has scrutinized coverage of feminism as a media critic, the book produces no particular sense of recognition. Nor is it generally useful as an introduction for readers unfamiliar with the topic.

WHILE REASONABLE PEOPLE can disagree about interpretations, no reader should accept flawed usage, factual errors, and typos. Mass Media is riddled with ungainly syntax and mistakes in diction, agreement, and idiom. Words are missing; extra words look like vestiges of an earlier draft. "Antiabortion" is used as if it means "prochoice." There is babble: Efforts "coalesced two founding thrusts." A group is "a dispersal point for hiring trends." Ideas "were still undergoing inculcation." Managers did not want to be "alienating white racial attitudes." "[T]he mass media find a new take in permitting a new position to take ground rather than exacerbating what has already been done." "Moreover, adding to male uneasiness, was the difficulty of identifying lesbians, one emphasis perhaps for the use of labels of bralessness and stringy hair."

Many facts aren't. The Christian Broadcasting Network did not own 23,000 radio stations by the end of the 1970s; that's nearly three times the number of US radio stations that existed in 1980. The Democratic Party did not nominate Sargent Shriver for vice president during its 1972 convention. Anne Koedt did not write "The Myth of the Vaginal Organism." The media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) is misnamed, and names of journalists, authors, and critics are misspelled. The key word in the Virginia Slims cigarette slogan--the condescending "baby"--is left out, and the lyrics of Mary Tyler Moore's TV theme song are wrong.

All this is doubly vexing because the reader has no way to know whose lap to drop the dead mouse in. Maybe the author is inept. Maybe her impeccable manuscript was botched by others, leaving Bradley justifiably infuriated. Maybe the University Press of Mississippi was too cheap to pay a first-rate editor, hamstrung its copyeditor, and skipped proofreading altogether.

I do know that we readers need a way to blow a collective, nationwide raspberry at books with poor English and fake facts. Complaints to individual publishing houses provide no systemic remedy. Someone should start a website where readers can post quotations from indefensibly careless books, thereby warning potential purchasers, marshaling public indignation, and embarrassing publishers. I can contribute approximately 1,000 words about Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, which space constraints keep out of this review.

Meanwhile, publishers should either stop felling trees or start raising editorial standards. No publisher should be--to quote Mass Media--"alleviated from the responsibility" for sloppiness.

Copyright © 2004 Marie Shear

Theory love/hate
Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice by Carolyn Dever. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004, 256 pp., $18.95 paper.

Reviewed by Ann Snitow

SKEPTICAL FEMINISM is skeptical indeed. Carolyn Dever doubts the coherence of a wide range of feminist theories, while recognizing them in context as honorable interruptions of the also and always false coherence of patriarchal theoretical abstractions. She values theory as constitutive of feminism in even its most practical aspects, but she never leaves off noticing theory's failures--failures she sees as inevitable, giving rise, constantly, to the need for more theory and more ideas arising from practice.

Dever explores a set of related paradoxes that she has no wish to resolve. Rather, she sees health in their irresolvability. She wants both the abstraction of feminist theory and the constant critique of theory that is always, somehow, caught in the act of erasing material realities, contexts, and histories.

Here is one version of Dever's paradox:

This is the double bind of feminist theoretical production: abstraction from the local is, on the one hand, useful and necessary; on the other, it represents the failure to account for all the material claims and challenges local evidence presents. The double bind is also powerfully useful, however. It represents the formative dialectic of feminist theoretical production: feminist theory, I argue, is an ethical system that requires material challenges to any abstraction. (p. 5)

Dever is interested in a familiar divide among feminists. For many, theory has a bad name. It is abstract, therefore male. It takes no account of messy bodies, or the daily complexity of organizing actual people, or the urgent need for a more just world right now. In contrast, there are the material, the empathic, the daily, the private, the particular--all coded female. Dever stands against the repetition of this old gender division of labor, which rules abstraction out of bounds for feminists who want to make a practical difference. For example, she defends Judith Butler against critics who would have her be more nurturant and caring in response to her readers' immediate needs to understand and act. She asks, why should Butler be the good girl some of her critics seem to want? Why is it every good feminist's job to confine her activities to traditional ideas of female service?

Dever circles around the theory and practice debate, examining its usual terms critically. But though she is skeptical, she is a listener, with a sense of historical context. Dever's contribution is her respectful attention to feminist thought wherever it crops up--in the academy or in popular fiction--while she never grants any formulation enduring authority. As she puts it in epigram: Feminists "need authoritative paradigms" and they are also, necessarily, "against authoritative paradigms."

Dever takes paradoxes like these as her practice, considering feminist abstractions as a part of feminist political work, then pulling those abstractions apart to see how they may foil their own political intentions and how they may exclude. She begins her compendium of feminist theory in the 1970s with the early writings of the second wave. I can't think of a recent example of anyone reading these texts without immediately consigning them to the dustbin of history for their now well acknowledged racism, false universalism, essentialism, and homophobia. (My students, for example, rebel against reading Kate Millett or Anne Koedt or the Redstockings Manifesto, considering these outgrown and better forgotten.) But the now familiar critiques of these texts do not exhaust their interest-or their value. Dever recognizes a utopian ecstasy in those first few years that bypassed the usual alienation between thoughts and acts. The newly minted feminist activists were thinking on their feet. The voice in each text was confident; each was a kind of explosion, as if its insights might well be the catalyst for revolutionary change. The new political form, consciousness-raising (CR), was "a mode of activism that aimed to blur any distinction between the abstract and the material, the personal and the political, the individual and the collective." This breakdown of borders was itself action, and activists felt that the new way of thinking would inevitably lead to a new way of living--inside one's mind, body, community. That new taboos were arising in CR in the place of the old, that difference was obscured behind the veil of sisterhood, doesn't change the fact that these early constructions matter; they have left their imprint on what came later. Dever takes the ideas behind CR apart without patronizing the practice, which she values as part of the history of second wave feminist thought.

Similarly, when she reads an early text by Alix Kates Shulman, "Organs and Orgasms" (1971), she sees both flaws and value. Pieces like this, which named women's sexuality as natural but suborned by patriarchal culture, have not stood the test of feminist theoretical time. Shulman was eager to declare the clitoris good and the vagina bad, as the site of male pleasure only. This essentialism has been treated patronizingly in high theory, but Dever recognizes in it the key claim for women's desire--their drive toward erotic independence, a bodily foundation for all other kinds of freedom. The Shulman piece ends, "Think clitoris." Here is Dever's paradox: A clitoris must be thought. Thinking the clitoris will always lead to thinking beyond it, to wanting still more, wanting something that may not yet have a name. Theory's failures will always drive the desiring feminist back to the constant, skeptical rethinking that Dever admires in feminism's intellectual tradition.

Dever, a professor of English, interested above all in texts, is also a historian of US feminist contention. In the next turn of the body debate, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, Kathleen Barry, and Catharine MacKinnon revolted against what they saw as a naïve celebration of women's desires. Instead, they saw "eroticism as a trap best emblematized by 'fucking' as a dirty, shameful, and violent endeavor."

In yet the next turn, "radical-sex feminists" like Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga tried to reclaim the power in desire, but they found that "women's sexuality" and "lesbian sexuality" had become abstract. The space to talk about desire had closed, leaving only the politics of sexuality. Reclaiming desire was fraught with difficulty. Dever ends this tale with Carole S. Vance's interpretation of this history: The personal became political, which sometimes came to mean that feminists should police each other's desires to bring them in line with codified feminist values. Dever gives a subtle account of how feminist wishes for sexual freedom often turned into feminist prescriptions for just what that freedom should look like. The skeptical feminist admires the range of feminist theories of sexual empowerment, then notes each one's fearful shortfall.

Perhaps Dever's most thoroughgoing skepticism is reserved for the various theorizations of lesbian existence and desire. In these discussions she moves forward to the 1980s, the great era of "discourses of difference." Through critiques of Adrienne Rich and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she shows lesbians being pushed to the margins of gay studies, feminist studies, and queer theory. Lesbianism is often used to symbolize feminism's most radical position. But this heroicizing of lesbians as a vanguard makes them the servants of a heterosexual feminism, says Dever. They are used instrumentally as a "border against which the mainstream can define itself."

SKEPTICAL FEMINISM records some important evolutionary moments in US feminist theory, from Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) to The New Lesbian Studies: Into the Twenty-First Century (1996), "undertaking," Dever says, "to produce a material history of abstraction." The book's strength lies in its enduring faith that thought is not separate from action. But Dever has much less to say about the reverse proposition, that action is not separate from thought. The concept of practice is, ironically enough, under-theorized here. What beyond texts counts as political action? Through what theoretical practices have activists shaped their work? Have they consciously used theory? Unconsciously used it? What traces has theory left on collective, public thought? Does feminism have a coherent theory of power beyond the freedoms it seeks of sexuality and reproductive choice? (Perhaps not.) What exactly is "the material," which Dever mentions as a position from which to critique abstraction?

As Skeptical Feminism reaches its conclusion, theory (along with its discontents) has moved to the center. This is perhaps inevitable if one looks, as Dever asks us to look, at the context, in this case, academic publishing. Dever offers no examples of policy-makers, feminist lawyers, or US-based international organizers, many of whom face questions indiscriminately grouped under the term "globalization." Indeed, some US activists and theorist have attempted to respond to swiftly changing contexts-once again, as in the beginning, thinking fast during global encounters.

I don't mean here to ask for a different book, but Dever's argument might have more political resonance if she read the organic intellectuals who try to frame feminist actions. What a rich source of examples of the shivering collision between the need for abstraction and the resistance to abstraction posed by "the material." Practice, too, requires Dever's skeptical critique.

But this is a lack Dever herself would surely justify, given the material conditions of the production of a book like Skeptical Feminism and the social production of its audience. What Dever can offer us is a sense of the ongoing vitality of feminist theory, a dialectical process that is alive and well.

Teaching, writing, discussing--all these are political acts. As Dever knows, there are many other locations of the political, but she cannot include all of them. No single subject position can provide them. These will be the voices that talk back and destabilize the theories Dever explores.

Writing for the last issue of The Women's Review of Books--let's hope publication is only suspended for the time being--I find the topic of Skeptical Feminism apt. The Review has always been promiscuous about what writing might be of interest to feminists, taking seriously a wide range of genres, voices, interests. It has been a place where one could meet a diversity of books, crowded together in potential conversation. With the Review's passing, that meetinghouse has closed its doors, one place fewer for the feminist dialogue celeb

The UN and women's rights
Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky. New York: Zed Books, 2003, 306 pp., $25.00 paper.

Reviewed by Silja J. A. Talvi

THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIPS among global health policies, sexuality, and gender roles are too often simplified and relegated to the realm of reproductive rights. Real struggles obviously exist in the area of reproductive rights--particularly in light of eroding access for women here in the US--and are absolutely worth feminists' attention and action. But throughout the world women and girls face a host of health, sexual, and reproductive problems that go far beyond debates about choice. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky's Global Prescriptions defines women's health issues broadly and is therefore a welcome addition to the canon of writing about women and health. Most importantly, Petchesky's work provides a historical framework for understanding how and when gendered health became an international issue. According to Petchesky, the "transnational presence of women's health movements" was a result of global capitalism, the rise of antifeminist and fundamentalist forces, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

In battling this powerful trio of sociohistorical factors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) emerged as central forces in the struggle for reproductive and sexual health rights. The day-to-day work of women's NGOs, both urban and rural, became a focus of UN-sponsored women's conferences in Nairobi, Cairo, and Beijing, spurring the conceptualization of reproductive and sexual rights as human rights on par with any other essential right.

But such gains in women's rights tend to evoke a backlash. As defenders of women's rights began to participate in defining and influencing international health priorities, fundamentalist forces went on the attack. Led by the Vatican delegation to the UN and the Bush administration, conservative forces made it their mission to take exception to any move they saw as legitimizing abortion, allowing adolescents to make decisions independent of their parents, condoning diverse definitions of family, extending reproductive and sexual rights, or furthering the rights of gays and lesbians.

Petchesky writes,

Nonetheless, although women's groups failed to win explicit reference in the documents to freedom of sexual orientation or sexual expression--or even the words "sexual rights"--their gains on behalf of a sexual rights discourse woven through the Cairo and Beijing texts are little short of revolutionary. Thus, "reproductive health" includes the ability "to have a satisfying and safe sex life," and "sexual health" involves the "enhancement of life and personal relations, and not merely [disease prevention]." (p. 37)

Petchesky emphasizes that "[n]owhere does [the 1994 conference on International Population and Development in Cairo] restrict these principles to heterosexual married adults."

The platform of the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing ultimately went the furthest, proclaiming a new frontier in sexual rights for women. A section of the final 1995 Beijing document reads:

The human rights of women include their rights to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence. Equal relationships between women and men in matters of sexual relations and reproduction, including full respect for the integrity of the person, require mutual respect, consent and shared responsibility for sexual behavior and its consequences. (p. 38)

The impact was broad, Petchesky explains:

Slowly and incrementally, women's determination in all eras, countries and cultures to seek abortions, even at great risk to their lives and health, in order to gain some control over their fertility and bodies was starting to make an impact on international human rights standards. (p. 39)

The US government, in reaction, positioned itself to try to put a stop to this progress. As his first presidential act, George W. Bush lifted the Clinton-era suspension of the "global gag rule," thereby ensuring that no government body or overseas NGO could receive any US funding for reproductive health if the right to have an abortion had anything to do with the mission of the organization (even if the funding for abortion rights or education came from other sources). "Thus," says Petchesky, "have a handful of conservative U.S. politicians beholden to religious right-wing fundamentalists sought to muzzle women's health movements around the world." The results of this well-funded right-wing agenda have been devastating both in documented and as-yet-untold ways.

GLOBAL PRESCRIPTIONS is strongest when it shows the lows to which the conservative right has stooped to push its damaging and shortsighted viewpoints. At the 2000 Beijing conference, members of the Holy See contingent went so far as to wear large buttons that read "MOTHER" to emphasize what they believed should be a woman's primary role in society.

Other nations have resisted these kinds of regressive concepts, particularly where women and sexuality are concerned. Petchesky points to Brazil as an example of a nation that has a more well-rounded understanding of human sexuality, particularly when compared with the United States. Issues of racism, classism, and sexism are certainly alive and well in Brazil, but the country has been exemplary in dealing frankly with HIV/AIDS, without denying the reality of adult and adolescent sexuality, homosexuality, and all manner of sexual subcultures. Brazil has provided inexpensive, generic anti-HIV drug cocktails to people with the disease, even in the face of challenges by the World Trade Organization. Women's activism and insistence on both contraception and HIV treatment have played an integral role. Small wonder, then, that Brazil has made great strides in stemming the spread of AIDS within its borders.

Petchesky points to several other examples of women's activism in the realm of reproductive and sexual rights, including in Nigeria, where two out of every five secondary school girls have had at least one pregnancy, and most cases of HIV occur among 15-to-24-year-olds. Even there, Petchesky explains, "Government inertia or complacency has never stopped women's NGOs… from engaging in vigorous advocacy and service provision activities." Among the accomplishments of these NGOs has been the adaptation of culturally and developmentally appropriate materials to address sexuality among children, adolescents, and young adults ages six to 24. Imagine such a comprehensive approach to sexuality among youth in the United States!

The emerging power of women's NGOs is still challenged at every turn, particularly because the Catholic Church is a major funder of health services in Africa and elsewhere. It's here, with its discussion of the role of the Church in defining reproductive and sexual rights, that Petchesky's work truly edifies the reader and points to what is arguably one of the biggest challenges facing developing nations seeking funding for reproductive services. "As most of the world's states rush to divest themselves of responsibilities for social service and health care provision, ceding these to the private sector," says Petchesky, "the Church continues to expand its already vast activities and centuries of experience in this field."

Although the influence of the Church on reproductive and sexual rights is felt most strongly in counties like Nigeria and the Philippines, the US is highly vulnerable as well. The Catholic Church, in fact, is "rapidly becoming one of the most important health providers in the county," says Petchesky, emphasizing that the church already runs at least 48 HMOs. Disappointingly, she provides only vague speculation about what might be done to address the enormous challenge presented by the heavy influence of the Church. In the end, we are left wondering what to do with the crucial information she has presented.

Policy-makers, women's NGOs, and feminist theoreticians will surely benefit greatly from this book, which documents the paradigm shift in gender and reproductive politics in the United Nations. But it is regrettable that this impressively researched work limits itself to such an audience. By writing in the language of academics and policy-makers, Global Prescriptions loses an audience of feminists and activists who are also addressing these issues. To be clear, there is great value in Petchesky's timely work. Yet I wonder, as I do about many important feminist works: Is it possible to transform the exclusivity of academic and policy language into something that more readers and activists can learn from? What are the obstacles to doing so? And how can writers be inspired to reach beyond the inner circle to engage a more diverse base of readers? Global Prescriptions is an expanded version of a paper originally written for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. The tone of the work is therefore understandable. But Petchesky would have benefited from the perspectives of UN-outsiders in reshaping the book, which tends to get bogged down in acronyms. While striving to synthesize the available information on women's NGOs, Petchesky fails to interview the staff or managers of these groups, leading the reader to feel detached from the subject matter.

Still, the timing of Petchesky's book couldn't be better. A decade after the International Conference on Population and Development took place in Cairo, the UN General Assembly convened in October to promote the implementation of the plans set into motion in 1994. Things were going well--250 global leaders signed an endorsement of the plan, signifying their willingness to move forward. But President Bush refused to sign on. The reason? The plan mentions "sexual rights."

Petchesky herself no doubt would have predicted this maneuver. And, as Bush has just received another four years to promote his clearly Christian fundamentalist-influenced agenda, women's reproductive and sexual rights--indeed, our very human rights--will continue to be denied on the most basic levels.

Blue indigestion
The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness edited by Susan Koppelman. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003, 278 pp., $16.95 paper.
Venus of Chalk by Susan Stinson. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books, 2004, 204 pp., $14.95 paper.

Reviewed by Mary Titus

IN EDNA FERBER'S 1910 STORY, "The Homely Heroine," a woman writer rises to a friend's challenge to "write a story about an ugly girl" and creates Pearlie Schultz, informing her reader: "when I tell you that I am choosing Pearlie Schultz as my leading lady you are to understand that she is ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the bitter end. In the first place, Pearlie is fat. Not plump, or rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT." Able to cook but never kissed, Pearlie's sad tale follows, but receives little praise. After reading Pearlie's tale, the author's friend announces that "a steady diet of such literary fare would give her blue indigestion."

"Blue indigestion" is what I felt as well reading the stories in Susan Koppelman's latest collection, The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness. It is a culturally induced indigestion, I know, and now I even know its name--"fat-hatred." The Strange History has taught me much about the symptoms of "blue indigestion"--the endless dieting, the constant self-criticism, the disorderly eating--I confess I've had them all. And I remain uncured. Although a blurb on the back of The Strange History promises the book's contents will free readers from internalized oppression--"reading this book is a bold act of liberation from an insane culture which promotes body hatred"-- like a new fad diet, it promises what it cannot deliver. Powerful, disturbing, revelatory, wonderful--the stories in this collection are all of these, but I'd call them educative not liberating. Nevertheless, I heartily recommend them to you.

In The Strange History Susan Koppelman has gathered together 25 stories about the lives and loves of fat women. From Kate Chopin's 1895 "Juanita" to the 1997 title story by Hollis Seamon, the collection covers 100 years of American women's history. But the book is far more than a collection of short stories; it is a political publication, a forceful contribution to the movement for fat acceptance. As Koppelman states in her introduction, "fat-hatred is not about truth; it is simple, old-fashioned, and culturally condoned prejudice. Sizeism is oppression." To this end, the collection is heavily attended with framing materials intended to contextualize, enrich, and, frankly, to guide the reader's understanding. From the dedication to granddaughters, "Perfect at Any Size," to the eight opening epigraphs, to the acknowledgments, to the foreword and its annotations, to the epigraphs the editor affixed to each story, to the outstanding historical overview provided in the 40-page afterword, to its annotations, to a final bibliography--The Strange History forearms its readers. I resisted the epigraphs. I wanted the stories to appear onstage alone, so I could meet them unattended and hear them speak, at least initially, for themselves. Yet perhaps Koppelman's extensive editorial apparatus arises from her knowledge and her compassion. To struggle against "fat-hatred," we need all the scholarly--and sisterly--help we can get.

Perhaps inevitably, the selections in The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe are uneven in quality, yet all are worth reading, and some are true gems. Octave Thanet's "The Stout Miss Hopkins's Bicycle" (1897) tells of two delightful friends and neighbors, Mrs. Margaret Ellis and Miss Lorania Hopkins, who share the same "skeleton" in their closets, this "skeleton--which really does not seem a proper word--was the dread of growing stout. They were more afraid of flesh than of sin." Endless exercise regimens ensue until at last the two take on the perils of bicycling, with unexpected and happy results. Thanet's narrator says, "No other sport appears to make such havoc with the mind."

Happiness, unfortunately, is more the exception than the rule in these stories. Margaret Lee and Miss Luella Hoag, heroines, respectively, of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's extraordinary "Noblesse" (1913) and Fannie Hurst's "Even as You and I" (1919), suffer indignity and terrible physical discomfort as freak-show fat ladies. The prose in which they are portrayed is extraordinarily complex--mocking, ironic, bittersweet--a strange, tragicomic mix of sympathy and revulsion as if the authors themselves suffered from "blue indigestion" as they imagined their ungainly heroines. Here is Miss Hoag:

Between her eyes and upper lip, Miss Hoag looked her just-turned twenty; beyond them, she was antediluvian, deluged, smothered beneath the creamy billows and billows of self. And yet, sunk there like a flower-seed planted too deeply to push its way up to bloom, the twenty-year old heart of Miss Hoag beat beneath its carbonaceous layer upon layer, even skipped a beat at spring's palpitating sweetness, dared to dream of love, weep of desire, ache of loneliness and loveliness. Isolated thus by the flesh, the spirit, too, had been caught in nature's sebaceous trick upon Miss Hoag. Life had passed her by slimly. (p. 36)

be as big as a house. As big as a house with a hundred rooms. Lesbians talking, political meetings, a resource center, a library of recipes, a shelf of videos on the rhinoceros, bear, buffalo. She wants to rise out of the sea not like a goddess but like a whale, ringing the world with the slap of her great body on a wave. (p. 192)

But the fat woman's language falters; she cannot hold tight to her glorious vision: "She is what she is," the story concludes, "A little freak looking to other freaks for encouragement. In secret, because she is still afraid."

Almost no one in these stories is happy being fat; certainly no one before the 1980s. When we meet the first truly happy fat woman, in Roz Warren's wonderful 1987 tale, "A Mammoth Undertaking," she is transformed at her naked, dancing moment of triumph into a constellation, rising like "a succulent cookie in the oven," until she whooshes off into the night sky--as if the author couldn't quite imagine a happy future for her here on earth.

There is more than unhappiness in these stories, more than fear, there is also a whole lot of rage. Men abuse, rob, and rape vulnerable fat women; husbands force their wives onto diets; and thin women come in for their due-they are bony, wrinkled, starved, and cruel. Fat hatred can and does turn us against each other. But "thin hatred" is not the answer. (Reading a women's magazine just yesterday, I was struck by one woman's confession that after she lost a lot of weight on a "successful diet," some of her friends stopped speaking to her.) I found hope in the title story, the last in the collection. At its close two women sit across a kitchen table, sharing a meal. They met at Weight Watchers. One is young, withdrawn, deathly ill with anorexia; the other, older, wiser, and fat, offers her food and love. They are beginning to talk, these two women, and we all need to do the same. "Blue indigestion" may not be cured by conversation alone, but its weight on our hearts is eased when lifted from silence to speech. With all of its stories and epigraphs, forewords and afterwords, voices and visions, The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe is itself a conversation. I encourage you to join in.

THE 23RD STORY in The Strange History, "Magnetic Force" emerged from Susan Stinson's work on her first novel, Venus of Chalk (2004). The short story tempts the imagination; the novel delights it. This is an able and lovely work of picaresque fiction, celebrating the cooking, the sewing, the poetry, the bodies and the love of two big women, Lillian and Carline. Carline, the engaging narrator who writes home economics pamphlets for a living, needs to fully accept her body and her sexuality. Although she has built a good life for herself, rich in physical pleasure, loving friendships, and creative projects, external events still trigger bouts of self-hatred and emotional pain. In a broken down bus with two unlikely companions, Carline sets off on the great American road trip, riding from Massachusetts back to her Texas roots, seeking healing connection with her Aunt Frankie, the woman who raised her. Carline finds this connection and much, much more.

Venus of Chalk takes its title from a white ceramic ashtray shaped like the Venus of Willendorf that Lillian gave to Carline. It is one of many symbols in the novel--perhaps too many. Stinson delights in stuff--potholders and pincushions, clarinets and camisoles. I do too, but at times I thought the novel strained toward its metaphors. At times, too, plot astonished. If you suffered from insomnia late at night in a Kentucky motel, would you get up and go skinny-dipping in the motel pool? Carline would. I was reminded of heroines in gothic novels who leave locked bedrooms to wander, white night-gowned, clutching a small candle, down draughty hallways.

I laughed as I wrote this, though, for Carline is quite a character. And if, at moments, this first novel bursts the bounds of plausibility or pulls a muscle stretching for symbolic heights, it is still a marvelous achievement. The stories in The Strange History never convinced me that fat hatred could be completely overcome. But this novel does. When at the end, Lillian and Aunt Frankie embrace Carline, three fat women "so near that their bellies pressed," I didn't suffer any "blue indigestion" at all, and neither did a one of them.

Sparks of light
Because of the Light by Roseann Lloyd. Duluth, MN: Holy Cow! Press, 2003, 112 pp., $13.95 paper.
Buddha's Dogs by Susan Browne. New York, NY: Four Way Books, 71 pp., $14.95 paper.

Reviewed by Alison Townsend

MIDWAY ON MY JOURNEY, I found myself in a dark wood," the poet Dante wrote in The Divine Comedy over 700 years ago, of setting out to explore the geography of the soul at midlife. Poets have written about it ever since, using it as a place for both reflection and departure, a point from which to examine old attitudes and to embark on new experiences. Having turned 50 last year, I find myself actively seeking books of poetry by women of a certain age, looking for writing that can help me move into the second half of my life with courage and grace. Because of the Light by Roseann Lloyd and Buddha's Dogs by Susan Browne are both steeped in the kinds of awareness and insight that come only with having lived more than a few hard years on the planet. They are rich with hard-earned insights and understanding and distinguished by the heightened sense of mortality that makes life's abundance all the more sweet.

Roseann Lloyd

I've been following Minnesota poet Roseann Lloyd's work for nearly 20 years now with much admiration and delight. I always come away from her poetry feeling enriched by her heart and authenticity, her ability to help us see the world from a completely fresh perspective. In her marvelous third collection, Because of the Light, she uses light itself as an organizing principle, weaving it through the book as skillfully as the bright strands of color she admires in the vibrant Guatemalan weavings that appear in some of the poems. Arranged around the passage of the seasons, the metaphor of light becomes a kind of consciousness in the collection, illuminating the poet's thoughtful exploration of her travels to distant places (Guatemala, Norway, and Wales) and her reflections on midlife love and family, ancestry, female friendship, the natural world, and the politics of class and gender.

The collection opens with a series of ghazals, gleaned, according to the book's endnotes, from "the practice one summer of writing a ghazal a day, based on the images and events of the day." A Near Eastern poetic form, the ghazal is characterized by its associative quality and by its ability to yoke together seemingly unrelated images, observations, and events. In "Midsummer Ghazal: July 2," the poet instructs her class, "In the ghazal... each couplet should stand alone./ Each line, half of a jeweled bracelet." Later in the same poem, she tells the students, "The ghazal thrives on non sequiturs," adding that it also "works against narrative." This definition could describe Lloyd's approach in much of the collection, for it is the ability to see connections between things that makes her work so powerful. She is a real mistress of the open, associative poem (the collection also includes several stunning prose poems), and many of her poems proceed by imagistic leaps, a organic procedure that serves her central metaphor particularly well.

Like the Persian poet Rumi, whose poems inspire several of those in the book, Llloyd lives in the seeming contradictions of our world and finds ecstasy in the daily. "I have seen the Queen of Heaven in the black summer sky," she writes in "Midsummer Ghazal: August 20," adding, "I have heard her pass in the hush after thunder." In "Still Point," she celebrates the moment when she glimpses the next season, even in the midst of summer:

I'm weak with the fullness of summer weak with this beauty and yes! I want to marry the whole world. Today, such hesitation of the seasons -- summer in its fullness, winter dread, both present at once -- which way to go? (p. 59)

Lloyd's work is deeply grounded in (and often arises from) the natural world. It is rich with detail. A goldfinch "scallops/ through the canopy of the cornfield." Summer poems are described as "bronzy June bugs," and "mulberries leave a cosmos of purple moons on the sidewalks." When she travels to her ancestral Wales, she delights in discovering the old Welsh word glas, which means both green and blue, "the color of hills and water." As a Wisconsinite, I especially enjoy how well Lloyd describes the beauty and vicissitudes of the Upper Midwest climate. Winter roads are described as "chalky," looking as if "a giant hand has taken a fat piece of pastel/ and made sweeping/ arcs across all the roads." Summer is gentle: "You can go in and out of the house without tensing up." But it can also weigh on one "like a musty shroud."

In some of the most moving poems in the book, she describes trips to Guatemala, which she falls in love with "Because of the light/ the broad expanses of clear light/ over hazy green mountains// Because it's dark at home in the winter[.]" In Guatemala, Lloyd bears witness to hunger and poverty. More overtly political in this section, the poems never stray from intimate specificity. In the searing "Poem on the Occasion of the Festival of the Immaculate Conception, Antigua, Guatemala, & the Confirmation of John Ashcroft as Attorney General of the U.S., 2001" for example, Lloyd describes the bare

& suppose you were here today, Mr. New Attorney General, in your crispy white shirt, your shiny shoes, your black & white legal certainties--would you take off your shoes for Mary? Would you kneel to Maria Madre de Dios? Would you spread red rose petals across the stones in honor of both conception & its contra? How will you honor every living woman's immaculate life? (p. 84)

This inextricable weaving together of apparent oppositions and contradictions is what gives life meaning. "How strange," Llloyd affirms in "Rose Quartz," my favorite prose poem in the collection, "that in the end--the light and dark, the cold and warm, the angled and smooth, the hard and soft--all arise from the same dark rainbow."

SUSAN BROWNE'S DELIGHTFUL Buddha's Dogs, winner of the 2002 Four Way Books Intro Prize and my favorite poetry discovery this year, is so mature and accomplished that it's hard to believe it's a first book. Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, the collection, described as one "filled with moments of Proustian recall," by contest judge Edward Hirsch, limns the dimensions of a life rich in understanding both of what time has taken and of the gifts that come with maturity. Whether dancing with her father as a girl, describing the difficulties of growing up in an alcoholic family (where "Nothing was as frightening/ as the people I loved"), exulting in coming of age in the '60s, detailing the frustrations of teaching a boy who hates Emily Dickinson, or tenderly memorializing her mother's death, Browne's work is lit everywhere by the spark of significant detail.

It is also distinguished by her wonderful sense of humor, a quality all too infrequently present in poetry, and one that Browne knows can cut like a double-bladed knife. Feisty, biting, and bittersweet, she captures, for example, the absurdity of adolescence in "Ode to High School": "O those four long years of being stoned/ and parting my hair down the middle/ / and stitching the armhole of my tie-dyed dress/ onto my lap in Home Ec." In the frisky and exuberant rant, "Searing, Smoking, Drinking," the speaker defines the pushes and pulls that make her who she is:

Sometimes I get the urge to chug a couple of boilermakers while chain-smoking, then burn the house down, drive the car backward along the railroad tracks to the Town Lounge, slam-dunk a fuckload of martini's, and dance shitfaced on the top of the bar until I'm dragged out and thrown in the fountain to sink to the bottom like a smashed penny among drowned wishes. But it's my lucky legacy to say "No thanks, I've had enough." Everything in moderation is the goddamn-it-all-to-hell truth. Fucking shit. (p. 33)

The "smashed penny" image is pivotal, just one example of the way Browne segues smoothly from a moment of levity to one of greater import.

Humor is, of course, the other side of sadness, and an undercurrent of loss runs beneath Browne's poems. There is the core story of her experience in an alcoholic family where "the drinking began before dinner,/ and dinner consisted of drinking,/ and then there was only drinking,/ nothing in the way of drinking," a world where "the listener/ curled in the center of her bed,/ fearing the silence/ out of which the sounds would begin again." Loss is explored from another perspective in a series of poems about the poet's mother's death. In the stark "The Yard," the poet visits the lot where her mother's wrecked car has been taken, "bloodstains/ rusted into the metal where the metal had been," and finds it a place "with a panoramic view of the flat earth/ where people fall off and do not come back." In "The Use of Poetry," Browne contemplates her fatally injured mother in a list poem that builds by a process of powerful accretion. Each line begins with the anaphoric "Because...," listing things ranging from the mother's injuries, to the things in her wallet, to the articles of clothing her daughters pick out for Goodwill, building to the haunting finale: "Because each of us has to keep something."

But despite the sadness in the book, Browne remains open to the possibility of redemption through loss. In the lovely and lyrical "For Road Z," she says:

When sadness comes, drive north into Colusa Country, past Butte City, a one-saloon town, and turn left onto Road Z, and anytime is fine, but try November when the rice fields brim with first rain, and heron and crane glide low and rest like origami on the gold shore of reeds, and if you're lucky, it's close to sunset, the road turning silver, curving between the green Coastal Range and the Blue Sierras, the sky wild with changes -- pinks and purples, copper and bronze, to dark as indigo, and the stars. You are moving with them, out into the open, part of the astral traffic. (p. 69)

Late in the book, in a poem called "Easter Sunday," she ponders the details of the world around her:

The patch of sunlight is shrinking, but the iris has plummeted up among the weeds and wild raspberries, purple flames licking out of green stalks, and it's cold now, the sun gone behind the pines, their green darkened by dusk, time to go inside on this Sunday when everything is resurrecting from winter, from memory, from loss. (pp. 62-63)

The last two lines of this poem describe what Browne's poems do and is an example of her mastery of poetic closure. Her poems move from the particular to the general, ending with moments of realization that only seem quiet--then hit with a wallop.

In the beautifully condensed "Birthday," which is informed by a sonnet-like concentration of emotion and idea, Browne magics a birthday phone message from her alcoholic father into a complex meditation on time and the things in our lives we can't change, ending, "We could just keep going, the sunlight/ falling on our brief lives, no matter what we do." Possibility and reality are held in balance in a way that gives the poem a charged power. The sonically pleasing iambic phrase, "no matter what we do," conveys a sense of inevitable good, despite life's limitations. This quality is present in many of Browne's conversational and beautifully direct poems. Although only one of the poems is actually called an ode, many of the pieces in this collection are characterized by that form's sense of occasion, and the book as a whole is a celebration. "[L]et me live each moment/ through to its end," she says in "Star Food Sonata":

let me see I will never see this again, or this, or this, let me hear it as music -- the soundless cadence, shimmering rhythm between everything, the ephemeral singing one song, infinite movement. (p. 68)

Ana Maria Spagna Photo by Mike Barnhart

Building trails, finding home
Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw by Ana Maria Spagna. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2004, 168 pp., $17.95 paper.

Reviewed by Irene Wanner

ONE OF THE MOST GRATIFYING DAYS I spent in recent years was as a volunteer helping to put in the last stretch of the 93-mile Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park. Hikers going all the way around the mountain now no longer need to risk walking along a narrow, busy highway shoulder, but can cross the White River on a log bridge, vanish into a grove of vine maple, and continue into deep, tranquil forest. But where I was an utter amateur, a willing set of untrained muscles and innocent enthusiasm for one day, Ana Maria Spagna, who lives in the remote village of Stehekin on the east side of Washington state's Cascade Mountains, has made her living for many years maintaining and improving public trails. Her thoughtful and engaging book transports readers into a world of physical labor, without removing the romance of the wilderness or overlooking the job's hard-won rewards.

"It is grueling and satisfying work," Spagna notes in "Wilderness, Homelessness, and the Crosscut Saw," the first of 18 essays.

You can spend eight ten-hour days in a row clearing the thick overgrown ferns and berry brambles that obscure a trail. Then you can look back and see the open swath stretching out below as the trail takes you up and out of the woods. You can tell yourself: that's it, that's what I did this week. (p. 3)

Right from the start, action drives this narrative. The essay begins efficiently in the middle of things: Spagna and a female coworker are struggling to cut then roll a section of fallen tree from a trail. Rain, bugs, and fatigue complicate their effort, but the primary challenge is having to rely on their own ingenuity and muscle, because chainsaws are forbidden here.

Spagna pauses to explain "a boon and a loophole" in the1964 Wilderness Act.

No mechanized anything would be allowed in capital W Wilderness. No cars. No bikes. No wheelbarrows even. And no chainsaws.... The National Park Service, the federal agency created by and for urban conservationists, chose to keep their hiking constituency happy, and chainsaws raged through park trails unhindered by the pesky new legislation. The United States Forest Service, ironically, the agency of clear-cut logging, stuck to the intent and spirit of the law. If conservationists wanted Wilderness, by golly they'd get it. Sure, we'd still maintain the trails, but we'd do it--get this--with crosscut saws. (p. 2)

Picture a long blade with a handle and a human at each end, the teeth repeatedly snagging on gummy pitch, the blade sticking in a log that's wedged into wet forest loam, and you get some sense of why the chore takes all day.

Next, Spagna returns to the present, as two passing hikers snap a picture and voice a common opinion: "You've got the best job in the world." Their remark triggers a flashback about how Spagna came to work in the woods and observations about seasonal employment: "[N]o security, not great pay." She has had "thirty-five jobs in fifteen years. None longer than six months."

From here, the established pattern repeats: Present action prompts a bit of history and relevant introspection. The whole piece has the satisfying arc of a short story: There's the conflict of removing an obstacle, and by the end, something changes. But because it's nonfiction, Spagna herself, not a stand-in character, directly explores several ideas that interest her, a composition technique David Petersen, in Writing Naturally: A Down-to-Earth Guide to Nature Writing (2001), calls "ramble and return":

While an essay, by definition, wanders hither and yon, each and every ramble necessarily returns to connect, if only briefly and discreetly, with the spinal theme...before wandering off in some fresh direction. And with each exploratory ramble and return, the theme is somehow furthered toward its conclusion. (Petersen, p. 19)

As a reader, I'm immediately hooked by the conflict Spagna presents. The women's personalities develop and contrast as they speak and interact; details of setting and work are intimate and convincing. Best of all, the writing goes beyond narrow personal experience. Its "rambles" illuminate larger themes raised by the title.

As a writer and writing teacher, I admire Spagna's use of the device Petersen describes--the fluid progress of her essay, without pointless digression. Compression of time and place--an afternoon then next morning, a spot in the woods then a diner-also streamline the events. The narrative voice is appropriately casual, admirably economical, engagingly honest.

SINCE LITTLE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE is written by or deals with women who work outdoors, these essays explore fresh territory. Their service as fire lookouts in the West inspired some of Gary Snyder's poetry, Jack Kerouac's fiction, and Edward Abbey's nonfiction. Their works are classics of both the rugged-individualist and contemplative-conservationist traditions. While Spagna fits this niche, she's quieter. Often, she's the only woman on an otherwise all-male crew, the only college-educated person, and--worse, at least in the minds of many Northwesterners resentful of recent wealthy invaders from the South--a Californian. It's no accident Spagna frequently revisits the theme of fitting in, of finding home.

The book loosely follows her life. Her second piece, titled after the humorous if isolationist bumper sticker--"Welcome to Oregon: Now Go Home"--traces her beach-and-bikini childhood, then her move north to study at the University of Oregon. These memories alternate with segments describing a day spent planting trees in the rain and an evening drinking beer at a small-town tavern with coworkers. In both this essay and the next one, Spagna's friends are "young men who loved to drink," yet who are also skilled workers with fierce pride. She never depicts them as stereotypical, uneducated losers. Instead, with an outsider's insight, Spagna admits she "always envied them, their ease and their exuberance--their unquestioned sense of belonging."

Her language is rich, imaginative, playful. She loves "the shovel-and-pulaski simplicity of my trail-crew job: no computers, no phone, no meetings." (A Pulaski, about the same size but heavier than an axe, is a combination trenching and chopping tool.) But she appreciates the importance of details, too, in nature as well as in relationships. "Doing Without," in which she examines environmentalists' sometimes exaggerated messages and "subtle self-righteousness," advocates careful use of resources, not total bans. "Caring for nature, like caring for ourselves," she concludes, "is more complex and dire than just doing without"--setting up this thesis with a story about a digestive disorder she could not cure merely by complete avoidance of certain foods. "Long Distance" explores her first crush on a running coach who becomes her "first heartbreak" when he inevitably falls from his pedestal, while "Choir Practice" brings her to realize she loves a woman.

"Entombing Spiders and Other Small Shack Stories" tells of ending "the seasonal housing merry-go-round that has spun us from house to house, seventeen of them in half as many years," with the purchase of five acres where she can put down roots with friends.

Several pieces deal with building a house. Stehekin, a tourist destination in the summer, is a village of "about one hundred year-round residents," 55 miles by boat from the town of Chelan. Buying groceries--much less designing and finishing a home--is a big job. In "To the Woods," Spagna examines generosity in her small community: "We've been loaned more tools than I could name. We've begged advice on plumbing, construction, gardening. Forget living simply. We have our neighbors to thank for the fact that we are simply living."

"From the Ground Up," her longest essay, again develops complementary story lines: building a home and managing a trail crew staffed partly by volunteers. Since Spagna admits inexperience in both, the reader follows the writer in journeys of discovery. "People were impressed, I knew," she notes of her house construction, "not just because we knew so little or because we tried so hard, but because we're, well, girls." Trail work became "liberating" because it was "something I actually knew how to do," even if the paid crew and the volunteers sometimes clashed.

Volunteers have done many employees out of jobs, I learned, because each year the federal government withdraws further from funding its responsibilities in national forests and parks. Spagna's essays evoke both the frustrations and the satisfactions of her work. Through her struggles to balance building a home and building a trail with both paid workers and volunteers a lot like me, Spagna says she found "[her]self changed--more humble, more patient."

Spagna's book may change readers, too, as she demonstrates through personal experience the many ways women can succeed, indeed thrive, in challenging circumstances. Certainly a sense of pride and pleasure floods me each summer when the snow finally melts enough so that I can cross the White River, pass through the maples' welcome shade, and climb the three huge stones that now serve as steps, which we volunteers wrestled into place with metal pry bars, muscle, and laughter.