Highlights from this issue...

Zelda comes into her own
Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise by Sally Cline. New York: Arcade, 2002, 492 pp., $27.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Nancy Gray

ONE OF THE MOST ENDURING, and romanticized, images we have of early 20th-century art and culture is that of the Jazz Age. Consider the artists, writers, and dancers whose works we continue to revere. Think of the stories and exploits, the heady tales of living high and dying young, the image of expatriates squeezing every last drop of experience out of the years between the two world wars. There in the midst of it all is Zelda Fitzgerald, icon extraordinaire--a Southern belle married to one of the most celebrated writers of her day, the flapper who jumped into fountains and got her picture in the papers, the woman who had it all and then went famously mad. Her story is paradigmatic of the era, or at least it has seemed so. And it is here, in the tensions between what seems and what is, that biographer Sally Cline has found her richest material. Her aim is to set the record straight, "to give Zelda a life of her own," separate from as well as intertwined with Scott Fitzgerald's and their "golden couple" image. The structuring device Cline has chosen for this task is that of voice: Each of the book's six parts is structured around the "voices" that shaped Zelda's life, culminating in "her own voice." By that Cline means above all Zelda as artist, the aspect she feels has been most neglected by other biographers in favor of the more mythic Zelda.

Zelda (Sayre) Fitzgerald aged around 18 in dance costume in her mother's garden in Montgomery. From Zelda Fitzgerald.

Though the Fitzgeralds themselves wrote repeatedly about the costly underside of maintaining their glamorously troubled image, that image has persisted--largely, according to Cline, because Fitzgerald biographers have insisted on it. Cline's book is quite another matter. It's possible to come away from it feeling as if you know Zelda and Scott too well. Her access to published and unpublished letters, journals, manuscripts, institutional records, library archives, and people who knew or were related to Zelda is extensive, frequently going beyond that available to previous biographers. She digs carefully and relentlessly into the details behind competing or incomplete accounts, noting that even some of her interviewees who knew Zelda "found it hard to distinguish between their memories and their readings of what has become an abundance of Fitzgerald material." Cline manages to make the distinctions sharp while recognizing the connections, even the collusion, between fiction and reality in Zelda's life. What emerges is a scrupulously researched account of a woman who was always in the limelight yet was ill-equipped either to deal with it or to do without it, a complex mixture of Southern belle, Jazz Age wild child, wife, mother, and seriously ambitious artist. Cline gives us a Zelda of contradictions, a woman "both intensely private and publicly outrageous," whose competing sensibilities overwhelmed her as much as they fed her creativity. As Zelda's life with Scott moves from high adventure to bitterness, rivalry, jealousy, and illness, she seems undone by having no solid foundation to hold onto. In the end, her story reads as tragedy, her death a needless waste, leaving one wondering what she might have accomplished had things been otherwise.

One of the more fascinating aspects of Cline's approach is her liberal use of fiction as evidence for fact. Her reason for doing so is persuasive:

Zelda and Scott flourished as capricious, merciless self-historians, writing and rewriting their exploits. They used their stormy partnership as a basis for fiction, which subsequently became a form of private communication that allowed fiction to stand as a method of discourse about their marriage. (pp. 1-2)

For them, Cline says, "imagination was always more powerful than fact." Nowhere is this issue more evident than in Cline's account of the debates over Zelda's role in Scott's writing. While for the most part Cline takes an even-handed view of these two difficult personalities, her focus on what Zelda lost along the way is (perhaps inevitably) marked by impatience, if not anger, with Scott's part in it. She points out, for instance, that what Scott's biographers refer to in his work as "inspired by" Zelda's letters and remarks was in fact, "not a matter of 'inspiration' but a direct borrowing of Zelda's lines." She debunks Zelda's supposed acquiescence, reinforcing Zelda's public quip that Scott "seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home" with detailed examples of Zelda's crossing out of Scott's name on story manuscripts and replacing it with her own, or inserting "No!" and "Me" where he used her words as his own. Cline duly revisits the well-known example of Scott's insistence that Zelda remove large passages from her novel Save Me the Waltz (written while he was struggling to complete Tender Is the Night) as they, in his view, usurped his literary right to their shared experiences. Referring to Zelda's original manuscript and draft revisions as "mislaid," Cline points out that while there is no direct evidence of what deletions Zelda actually made, Zelda firmly insisted in a letter to Scott that she would revise strictly "on an aesthetic basis." Cline uses the incident to demonstrate Zelda's determination to be an artist in her own right and to stand up to Scott in the process.

 

Zelda in white knickerbockers, her outra- geous traveling outfit for the Fitzgeralds' auto trip south to Montgomery, 1920. From Zelda Fitzgerald.

WRITING IS ONLY ONE of Zelda's "three arts"; the other two are dancing and painting. Zelda's determination to train, at the late age of 27, to be a ballet dancer and her remarkable if limited success, are already well known. Most of Cline's material here will be familiar enough; but her interpretation of the effects of Zelda's commitment to her teacher, Madame Egorova, are worth noting. Both Zelda's doctors and her husband blamed her first breakdown on her "obsession" with dancing. Dancing, however, was the least of it, according to Cline. Zelda's devotion to Egorova was, in Scott's view, "abnormal," and became the basis for his accusations that she had lesbian relationships. While this may have been so while Zelda was hospitalized, Cline believes that Zelda's commitment to dancing had more to do with Zelda's desire to become independent of Scott and his need to control her. Cline covers a good deal of ground here, teasing out and correcting suppositions about their affairs; their attitudes toward sexuality (both of them more or less "bisexual" in manner and appearance, but he loudly homophobic, she speaking in terms of "desire"); their talk of divorce; Zelda's suicide attempts; and the varying states of her mental health. Cline links Scott's frantic disapproval of Zelda's dancing and his obsessive control of her writing to Zelda's increasingly frustrated and erratic behavior. She contends that Zelda's arts came most fully to the fore between 1929 and 1934, the period of her first breakdowns and hospitalizations, and suggests that art was Zelda's lifeline in her struggle to hang onto a sense of self and sanity as her life fell apart. Wistfully evoking a mythical ability to live in fire, Zelda wrote, "I believed I was a Salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment." But as an artist she was a self with vision and passion of her own.

Interestingly enough, while most of Zelda's doctors agreed with Scott that Zelda's writing and dancing were signs of her instability, they referred to her painting as "therapeutic." From Cline's descriptions of the paintings, as well as from the one reproduced on the book jacket (Ballerinas Dressing), it's clear that Zelda was not at all interested in depicting typical feminine forms. Yet her painting may have been accepted because it was seen as a less serious threat than writing or dancing to Scott's work and his status as her husband-protector. Cline regards painting as central to Zelda as a person and as an artist, as well as the art most in need of reclaiming on Zelda's behalf. She speculates that early biographers paid scant attention to it because so much of it was lost or destroyed. But Cline was able to see more than two-thirds of the paintings themselves (held mostly in private collections) and slides of the rest. Citing Zelda's visual art as "the most successfully refined of her three gifts," she examines the work Zelda produced from 1925 until her death in 1948. She interprets Zelda's technique, influences, recurrent themes, and productivity as proof of talent and as a rich source of clues about the artist behind the work. For instance, she is able to counter views of Zelda as an indifferent mother by examining the paper dolls Zelda created to delight and instruct her daughter Scottie. The hours spent painting and playing with the hundreds of fairy-tale scenes attest to Zelda's parental attentiveness. In addition, Cline looks at the characters Zelda dressed in multiple and unexpected personas as examples of her nonconformist sensibilities: "Though Zelda is partly making children's art for Scottie," Cline says, "she is at the same time subverting the conventional childhood approach by using dolls to transgress male/female boundaries." Cline argues that Zelda's unconventional vision, present in all aspects of her life, was most fully realized in her visual arts. In her view, painting stands as Zelda's greatest claim to being an artist in her own right. And because Zelda continued to develop this art so assiduously right to the end, Cline uses it, along with a careful study of hospital records, to correct previous depictions of Zelda during the eight years after Scott's death as hopelessly lost in madness.

Between 1930 and 1948, Zelda resided for varying lengths of time in seven mental clinics on two continents. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic--though her last psychiatrist told Cline that manic-depression was more likely the case--and subjected to a remarkable array of debilitating treatments. Until Scott died in 1940, he was intimately involved with Zelda's treatment as well as financially responsible for it. Cline sees his role as reflecting his need to see himself as "a junior consultant almost on a par with her doctors," who knew better than anyone else what was best for Zelda. Cline's tone becomes one of increasing indignation as she traces Zelda's experience with "madness" (the quotation marks are hers.) Criticizing Scott and the medical establishment for doing as much harm as good, she details treatments aimed at "reinterpreting" Zelda's behavior as "disappointed ambition" inappropriate to a wife, and "reeducating" her "toward femininity, good mothering and the revaluing of marriage and domesticity." Cline makes the case that Zelda's illness was at least in part a response to feeling invisible and trapped, and that her art constituted a viable attempt to break free of the roles in which she was cast.

"Family in Underwear," one of Zelda's earliest paper dolls featuring herself, her husband and child, c. 1927. From Zelda Fitzgerald.

Cline's last chapter is devoted primarily to countering the "overwhelmingly powerful myth" of Zelda as a "left-over widow" who, when not hospitalized, wandered the streets "lugging her Bible on a one-woman mission to convert the residents." Instead she shows Zelda living quite competently on her own in Asheville, North Carolina, checking herself in and out of Highland Hospital as needed and approaching life with a good deal of "clarity, healthy activity, above all enormous creative output." This is a Zelda damaged by the events of her life but, Cline suggests, coming finally into her idiosyncratic own. Yet even at the end she did not escape the mystery that had always followed her. Cline cites conflicting accounts of the hospital fire in which Zelda perished and provides no clear answers as to what really happened and why, only the conviction that Zelda died needlessly at the age of 48, still struggling to achieve all that she could. Finally, then, the voice that Cline restores to Zelda is "the voice of aspiration." It seems a fitting legacy.

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Where are the women?
The strange case of the missing feminists. When was the last time you saw one on TV?

By Laura Zimmerman

THE NEUTRAL VOICE IN AMERICA is the white male," The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt recently told me when I asked her about political opinion-making in the US since 9/11. "Everyone else is providing color commentary. A woman's opinion about Iraq or the budget is seen as a woman's opinion. The same for a black person. And white men just don't have the idea that they are affected by the fact that they are white men."

For decades, this spurious claim to "neutrality" has justified a white male monopoly of the air waves and the printed page. In today's media-driven culture, these "experts" deliver the opinions that shape our lives and the country's political system. Frequently, it's the op-ed pages, elite opinion journals, and Sunday morning news programs that explicate, promote, and even guide national decisions. When women are excluded from these venues, we're excised from the public policy-making loop. At the same time, our exclusion confirms our apparent lack of authority to speak about critical political issues. Consciously or not, audiences become habituated to male voices and bylines and dependent on white male gravitas to explain what's happening in the world. As we witnessed at the time of 9/11 and later during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, national emergencies push women even further to the sidelines. "To feel voiceless in a democracy in so difficult a time," prize-winning journalist Geneva Overholser said on National Public Radio in November 2001, "is very close to feeling disenfranchised."

Many women have felt a renewed sense of second-class citizenry in the past two years. By muting women's voices, the media has belittled our authority and leadership and removed us from the public conversation. We have also been robbed of the platform to assert political opinions that specifically affect women. "News agencies do not gather the facts about issues of concern to women," Rita Henley Jensen, editor in chief of Women's eNews, an Internet news service for e-mail subscribers and major media outlets, told me. "They do not hear women's voices, literally. And by not having access to the media, women's organizations and advocates cannot build their communities of interest." Jensen has all-too-often witnessed male editors' unlikely concepts of "women's issues." In the late 1990s, at a public talk given by a top decision-maker at The Los Angeles Times, Jensen asked how the paper was reaching out to women readers. He replied, "We have a brand-new lifestyle and home decorating section."

In the months following 9/11, women wrote only 8 percent of the op-ed articles in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, biased editorial choices persisted. "It hasn't been this bad for women scholars and journalists wanting to influence the national public agenda since the pre-women's movement days when women were completely invisible," Caryl Rivers, author and journalism professor at Boston University, wrote in an April 2003 commentary published by Women's eNews. More recently, Rivers confirmed that these conditions are still at an all-time low. "We're being systematically overlooked," she said. "I'm not talking about fringe people. People who have enjoyed access to the media are feeling very much frozen out. In the best of times women face a high barrier. Now they may be less inclined to keep hurling themselves against the barricades."

Indeed, as Rivers mentions in her article, even Pulitzer Prize winner and syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman "complained…about getting bumped too often" at The Washington Post. Jill Nelson, best-selling author and the first black woman on The Washington Post Magazine's staff, says she lost $10,000 in freelance work after 9/11. "It was an immediate post 9/11 paradigm shift," Nelson said. "If you weren't on the government-sponsored white male reaction page, you were not going to be heard." Previously contacted for commentary by CNN or other outlets every six weeks or so, Nelson went an entire year with only an occasional call--and those were to cover insignificant events such as OJ's most recent arrest.

AT BEST, MANY EDITORS are afflicted with a "one-woman-only" mentality. Currently, for example, the op-ed page of The New York Times carries Maureen Dowd. Before her, it had Anna Quindlen and before that, Flora Lewis. Before Lewis, it had no women columnists at all. "This is true in many newspapers and magazines," said Pollitt. "There's one star woman columnist. Editors don't have the 50/50 picture at all. They have the picture: men plus one woman, or maybe two." After an editor for a weekly or monthly magazine commissions one long piece by a woman, he or she has done the affirmative action for that issue. This unacknowledged quota system caps the number of accomplished women writers in major venues and all but eliminates the up and coming. Additionally, male editors tend to look for someone to father and mentor. Typically, it's another man who closely resembles them.

And then there's television. In December 2001, the White House Project, a national group advocating women's political leadership, announced that the frequency of women guests on Sunday morning talk shows dropped in the month following 9/11 from only 10.7 percent of guests to an even worse 9.4 percent. Among repeat appearances--the true measure of authoritative presence--women were a mere seven percent. The study showed that we were also afforded less airtime, placed in later segments, and underrepresented in every professional category. Nightly newscasts were equally imbalanced: A 2002 Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) study showed that in 2001, US sources interviewed on the three major networks were 92 percent white and 85 percent male. Women constituted only 15 percent of all sources, and in the categories of professional and political sources (think of all the qualified feminists you know who could have filled those seats!) a mere nine percent.

Television producers, like print editors, dislike risk-taking. As a rule, they seek sources who have been used previously, either on the air or in print--a perfect method to keep the circle of opinion-makers small and closed, making it an old-boy's network. Perhaps this stems as much from lack of imagination as from deliberate exclusion. No doubt the motives are varied and complex. But the result is clear: Television and print media suppress the views of women commentators on critical subjects like the effect of war and peace on women's lives, sexual violence and trafficking of women, how globalization affects women's lives, or what low wage earning women endure. Women commentators discussing subjects like these would cast a critical eye on the news and shake up the standard male-chosen topics.

Media leaders perpetuate sameness, exclude outsiders, and enforce unspoken quotas. Add to these norms a corporate structure that all but eliminates women from the top of the decision-making pyramid, and we're looking at a structure that nearly guarantees exclusion of feminist commentators. Especially in today's hyper-masculine, conservative culture, when progressive voices in general have been marginalized, feminists are barred from view. "I'm worried that elite journals like The Atlantic are looking for women to say provocative things," said Rivers. "That means you smash other women, dump on feminism, or say that the real victims are men. And you can't find a feminist with a show of her own on cable television and very few on talk radio."

What you can find, of course, are right-wing commentators like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter filling women's allotted air time and print space. Chances are, they will be mocking Hillary Clinton, attacking feminist "misfits," or asserting outrageous opinions, such as Coulter's that McCarthyism wasn't so bad after all. Recent articles in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation have analyzed the conservative machine that grooms and sponsors journalists (especially on college campuses), endows media think tanks, and operates a highly organized, long-term campaign to control and manipulate the media. "Our side has nothing like it," Pollitt said. "It doesn't spend the money. And when it does, it's much mushier. There's a deficiency of sharkiness." Jensen also spoke about the vast sums conservatives have poured into the media, adding that women's organizations have moved in the opposite direction by diverting their resources into direct service. The result, Jensen believes, is the stifling of women's chances to affect the political workings of the country.

BY THEMSELVES, THESE CULTURAL AND POLITICAL FORCES present huge hurdles to progressive women. Add to these the personal ones. Many women distrust what is required of political commentators. We are not inclined to be thunderous and simplistic. In our eagerness to be fair minded, we obsessively research subjects and worry too much about how we are received. Of course, we can also be bombastic, smart-alecky, and combative. But that's not our typical tone. "Commentary, punditry, op-ed writing, and also the web lend themselves to being brash and quick," media activist, journalist, and broadcaster Laura Flanders told me. "Historically, women have not been given to practice this. It's more acceptable for a man than a woman to be outrageous--but this seems to be changing on the right, not on the left."

Even people who write letters to the editor tend to be overwhelmingly male--and women also make fewer contacts with media ombudspersons. "It's not because women aren't reading the papers," said Overholser. "If you compare the percentage of women who read the paper with the percent of letter-writers, the numbers are very skewed." Other journalists, mentioning that women also submit fewer unsolicited manuscripts to magazine slush piles, speculated that we too quickly shy away from being told no, or dislike pestering people in charge--or that our lives have become so overwhelmingly busy we don't have time even to write a note. Perhaps we're not well-enough endowed with a trait that Katha Pollitt calls undiscourageability. Men are definitely not better writers, Pollitt says, and their perseverance does not necessarily win friends. But undaunted by dozens of rejections, they do increase their odds of getting published.

Then there's the problem that even those few women who have successfully entered the arena of mainstream commentary often conceal their feminist leanings. "If a female journalist does begin to advocate for women or to promote a related story, she loses credibility in the newsroom," said Jensen. "It's the same experience that African Americans and Latinas have. No one asks white men to give up their interest in sports or the military. But if a woman were to advocate running a story every day on the front page of a major newspaper about defunding rape crisis centers, she might likely be asked, 'Do you have a hang-up about this?' Her credibility would definitely be challenged." As a result, with a few well-known exceptions, feminist spokespersons mostly publish or broadcast in independent media, such as alternative websites, community radio, The Village Voice, The Progressive, and others.

There was a time when US feminists viewed the media as too abstract and elitist to claim top priority. Pained and outraged by institutions that thwarted women's lives--racism, domestic violence, the law, medicine, theology, politics, academia--we directed our attention to these. At the same time, we helped build an environmental movement, a gay rights movement, and a human rights movement. We were not slackers. We simply had enough to do.

But the days of letting the media off the hook are over. Increasingly, a vast industry run by a handful of corporate executives saturates our public and personal lives with narrow, biased ideas and opinions. And in times of crisis, like 9/11 and the war in Iraq, it goes berserk with the sound of its own voice and the sight of its own face.

For decades, a number of prescient feminists have been warning us that a state of emergency for women and people of color exists in the media industry. "A serious effort to match the right's media assault with comparable vigor is crucial," wrote Laura Flanders years before most of us were thinking about this problem, "if only to respond to those newspaper editors and TV anchors who claim they don't hear from feminists as they do from their opponents."

How to win access to both the mainstream and alternative media, how to use it to advance equality, how to exert influence--these are the big questions. But backing away from their magnitude would be a mistake. So would assuming simple answers. Nothing should stop us from talking among ourselves, making a public clamor, or joining with media activists already in gear. "What's holding us back is access," Flanders writes in the concluding pages of her book. "But so what else is new?… The right to communicate is like any right. And like any right, it will not be given. It must be won."

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A 1959 menu in The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook included canned spaghetti, packaged rolls, frozen peas and carrots, and instant lemon pudding. From Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking.

Cooking with Joy
Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America by Jessamyn Neuhaus. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, 344 pp., $42.95 hardcover.
Made from Scratch: Reclaiming the Pleasures of the American Hearth by Jean Zimmerman. New York: The Free Press, 2003, 266 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Barbara Haber

UNTIL RECENTLY, FEMINISTS DISDAINED women's role in the kitchen, seeing it as a symbol of subjugation because of the persistent and repetitious demands made on women throughout history to fill the waiting maws of husbands and children. While other domestic tasks had been studied--housework and childrearing for instance--cooking remained a distasteful reminder of women's enslavement to a hot stove. When food did attract the attention of women's studies scholars, the focus tended to be on eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa, a disease that lent itself to feminist interpretation. Self-starving young women were understood to be taking control of their own bodies as a response to the overwhelming pressures of parents and the demands of a culture where thinness has excessive value.

The celebratory aspects of cooking and food did not attract feminist scholarly interest until the late 90s. Because food is ubiquitous, essential for sustaining life, and because the kinds of foods eaten and the conventions of serving them vary from one culture to another, feminist historians and others realized they could analyze these qualities to discern issues of race, class, and gender, the feminist mantra. At the same time, studying food allowed scholars to throw new light on such broad subjects as immigration history, the history of science and technology, and the impact upon culture and society of specific foods.

Women's studies scholars are starting to interpret cookbooks--traditionally ignored by American scholars--as vital texts for understanding women's lives. In 1997, Anne Bower edited Recipes for Reading, a collection of essays that explore community cookbooks, those regional recipe collections typically published by groups of women in support of local charities. In Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote, folklorist Janet Theophano clarifies the value of cookbooks as a literary genre, and in so doing dignifies food and its importance not only to women's but to human history. Now, historian Jessamyn Neuhaus mines American cookbooks and periodical literature about cooking written between 1920 and 1963 for what these have to say about gender.

To this end, she examines a huge number of both well-known and obscure cookbooks, as well as hard-to-find magazine articles that gave women the message that cooking routine family meals was their obligation, while men were entitled to be served. These books and articles not only genderized domestic duties, but gave certain foods sex-linked characteristics. Men were perceived as meat-lovers, while women were thought to prefer daintier fare such as salads and sweets. Neuhaus is sensitive to the limitations of these texts, realizing, for instance, that their intended audience was white and middle-class, and that they were prescriptive--setting standards for what people ought to be doing rather than gauging what they actually did. Nevertheless, by amassing so many sources that make the same points, she offers persuasive evidence about the cultural ideals of the period.

The story she tells begins with post-World War I America, when cooks employed by families were finding better jobs in factories and leaving the cooking to the lady of the house. This was also a time when advancing technology lightened the work load by bringing refrigeration and electrical appliances into homes, along with new lines of canned goods and other processed foods that simplified cooking. In the cookbooks of the 1920s and 30s, Neuhaus finds that women were being encouraged to view routine cooking as an art and to approach the task with joy. She goes on to illustrate how cookbooks published during World War II encouraged women to advance the war effort by limiting their use of rationed ingredients--watering down butter or stretching meatloaf by incorporating bread crumbs. These economies would allow greater amounts of scarce food to be sent overseas to our fighting men. Postwar cookbooks reflected the broader social goal of creating "normalcy" by having women leave their jobs to return to tending the home fires. Whether or not such a return to domesticity really took place in the 50s, the prescriptive literature of the 1960s and 70s illustrates the conflict between women's domestic duties and their desire to hold outside jobs. Many cookbooks of this period offered short-cut recipes that made use of canned and frozen foods, products seen as a great boon to working women. At the same time, however, books and articles continued to hold women responsible for the routine preparation of family meals.

Neuhaus looks at cookbooks in each of these decades for their underlying messages, which she refers to as the "cooking mystique," as restrictive to women as the ideological messages described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Neuhaus offers pages and pages of examples to support her argument, a repetitive technique that weakens the effectiveness of her book to a reader longing for narrative.

Drawing from the I Hate to Cook Book (Fawcett, 1960). From Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking.

Another problem with the book is that Neuhaus does not evaluate the recipes as recipes. While the commentary provided by authors of cookbooks helps academics analyze the perceptions of these writers and the times in which they lived, cookbooks are first and foremost about the preparation of food, and should be understood for what they are. For example, Neuhaus ably describes how male cookbook writers ridicule the abilities of women who nevertheless are expected to do the lion's share of home cooking, while men perform outdoor barbecuing stunts or cook up the rare flapjack breakfast. What Neuhaus misses is that men's books about home-cooking were often excellent. Some exhibited a knowledge of how to prepare fresh vegetables when average books resorted to canned ones. One 1950s book even offered delicious and economical recipes for such foods as polenta or risotto, at a time when such dishes were relatively unknown in America. The truth is that traditional sex roles created limitations for men as well as for women. No red-blooded American male in this period could simply write a cookbook geared to home cooking, since that was thought to be a sissy preoccupation for men. He had to make fun of women first, before he could allow himself to express his own interest and creativity in the kitchen. As more academic writers turn to cookbooks and to food as instruments of social analysis, they will have to remember that food has its own history and that the techniques of cooking are complex and full of messages for those who know the language.

JEAN ZIMMERMAN UNDERSTANDS THAT LANGUAGE, for in Made from Scratch, she says, "the capacity to share homegrown cooking knowledge is critical to our spirit, strength, and happiness as a society." These are not the typical utterances of a feminist, but Zimmerman is convinced that revaluing traditional women's work, in the kitchen as well as at the quilting table, is a feminist act. She believes that the successes of feminism now allow for a broadening of its scope to include a renewed regard for the place of homemaking in women's history.

This is the theme of her book, which she illustrates in a series of chapters that include the history of homemaking, the story of the home economics movement, the tensions between homemaking and feminism, the diminution of cooking skills in America, the modern loss of home cooking, and the not quite lost traditions of needle crafts. Zimmerman frequently interjects anecdotes from her own life that dramatize the gratification to be found in the domestic arts. Aware of the objections to enforced domesticity raised by second-wave feminists, Zimmerman never glorifies homemaking, but exhibits a real understanding of the problems faced by women who choose to spend their time at it.

Throughout her book Zimmerman acknowledges that there is something gratifying about working with one's hands, and that by taking up a time-honored craft, people can literally add texture to their lives. She points out that knitting is enjoying a new popularity, especially among young people but also among professionals, mostly women, who show up at board meetings with needles clicking. Quilt-making, too, has a growing following. In earlier times, these activities brought groups of women together for convivial chatting and story-telling while they produced needed garments and blankets. These days, such crafts are hobbies more likely to be accompanied by television-watching. The social and utilitarian function of crafts is lost. Zimmerman also points out that getting satisfaction from cooking is more problematic because of the demands on women to produce frequent meals. Her advice is for women to take short-cuts by the judicious use of processed foods, but to develop at least one specialty that they can take pride in. She also suggests sharing domestic tasks with one's mate, a recommendation that has historically been hard to implement.

It is hard to know who will benefit from this book. Feminists who like to cook have never been dissuaded from doing so by negative ideological messages, and those who hate to cook are unlikely to change their minds. As for the needle crafts, I, for one, will never be persuaded to take up quilt-making, even though that particular home-based craft has received feminist support right along. Nor will I ever go near a sewing machine, despite Zimmerman's arguments about the satisfactions sewing holds for converts. For reasons having to do with an apron I attempted in my seventh grade home economics class, I have had a life-long terror of sewing machines. At the same time, I handle a Cuisinart or KitchenAid mixer as though it were a natural extension of my hand.

What matters most about Made from Scratch is that it persuasively dissociates the home arts from feminist dogma that caused women to be defensive about performing such tasks with any kind of joy. This is no small thing. After all, giving women choice has always been the most compelling argument offered by the women's movement, and the more inclusive that philosophy has grown, the better it has become.

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New blues, old photos
Outlandish Blues by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003, 50 pp., $12.95 paper.
Bellocq's Ophelia: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2002, 48 pp., $14.00 paper.

Reviewed by Adrian Oktenberg

 

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Photo by Peter Bailley

HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS takes Langston Hughes, "poet laureate of the blues," as her model in her second book, Outlandish Blues. The model has naturally been updated a bit to include such contemporary phenomena as women's shelters, gay-bashing, and Aretha, but Jeffers has retained Hughes' eloquence and elegance in her own voice, as well as his social and historical sense. You cannot write the blues, lacking music, without an ear to die for and immense control in the language; otherwise it just sounds boring and repetitious on the page. Jeffers succeeds admirably on both counts and produces a book that is lively, witty, sly, and passionate, like the blues itself.

The first section of the book begins with "Fast Skirt Blues" and ends with "Think of James Brown Pleading," so we are given the sexy, raw, desperate blues, the kind we think of right away, right away. This is part of "James Brown":

I think of James Brown pleading
to a closing door. So pretty
in his do-rag tied on straight
through the day and into the night
and right now, you are prettier
than James. The brothers in the room
wink and nod at your raw weeping....
This is the truth
I need: your crying and holding
fast to one woman at the same time.
What else is left if I can ignore your
tears or James, shoulders
draped with female screams
and royal purple, begging with all
the sweat he was capable of? (p. 15)

Jeffers takes the stories of Sarah and Abraham and their issue from the Bible and, in a series of dramatic monologues, takes a tale of patriarchy and patriarchy's God and turns it first into questioning, then argument, then redemption on female terms. It's a most remarkable story in Jeffers' hands, and echoes, in some respects but from an entirely different perspective, Alicia Ostriker's recent the volcano sequence. This is the core of the book, this argument with God's arrangements, and, while the subject matter is as old as time, the voice in which it is expressed is new, original, important, and equal to the task.

Here is the voice of Hagar, Sarah's handmaid, who bears Abraham's child because Sarah is barren. The poem is "Hagar to Sarai."

Don't give me nothing in
exchange for a beating
in my belly, sore nipples
way after the sucking is gone.
Don't thank me for my body....
Don't thank me for the back
that don't break from Abram's weight.
I know what you need--a baby's
wail in the morning,
smile on your man's face....
I know what you need;
don't give me your grief
to help this thing along.
I know how emptiness feels.
Woman, I know how
to make my own tears. (p. 22)

The angels only saved my girls to bear their father's sons.
No forgiveness, nothing in the hovering sky.
What kind of God condemns girls to carry their father's blood?
No mercy for me when I found out the truth.

No forgiveness in God's hovering sky,
and someone's to blame for making me look back.
If there was a chance for me and so much mercy above,
why wasn't I warned of the salt clinging to my skin? (p. 30)

The third and final section of the book at last brings us to the "outlandish" blues, which Jeffers explains in a quotation from the scholar Michael A. Gomez: "[N]ewly arrived Africans [in the slave trade] were classified in the North American lexicon as 'outlandish' in that they were 'strangers to the English language' and had yet to learn their new roles." This section's angry, pointed poems address slavery, lynching during Reconstruction and after, and contemporary slights and injustices in language that recalls June Jordan in her capacity as seer and righteous truth-teller.

Nod. At the very least, write a letter. Some kinds of anger
need screaming.
(From "Confederate Pride Day at Bama (Tuscaloosa, 1994)," p. 48)

 

One of E.J. Bellocq's portraits.

E. J. BELLOCQ'S STORYVILLE PORTRAITS OF PROSTITUTES, named after the red-light district in New Orleans where the photographs were taken around 1910-1912, were never intended for showing but are by now well known. It has fallen to Natasha Trethewey, in Bellocq's Ophelia, to use them as inspiration and blueprint for a book of poems. This is a brilliant conception for a woman writer from the South, and for the most part, it is brilliantly executed. The book takes the form of a series of letters home, as well as diary entries, by the subjects of Bellocq's portraits. Trethewey subverts the male gaze by not allowing Bellocq himself to speak--what we hear in this book are the voices of the women.

Trethewey manages the transformation from abused country girl alone in the big city to "fallen woman" with admirable economy and calm--"I do now have plenty to eat," the subject reports. We soon learn how she earns her keep: "I was auctioned as a newcomer / to the house...."

And then, in my borrowed gown
I went upstairs with the highest bidder.
He did not know to call me
Ophelia
(From "Letters from Storyville," p. 14)

One of the things that is striking about Bellocq's pictures of women in their off hours is how relaxed the women are. The women in the pictures are talking, drinking, playing with animals; some appear to be sharing a joke with the photographer. It is not merely that they have nothing left to lose. They look like women in full possession of themselves, so unlike most portraits of women in this era. Wittily, Tretheway imagines how this transformation comes about by having her Ophelia buy a camera. So equipped, she literally begins to see for herself, to shape her own world:

September 1911

This past week I splurged, spent a little
of my savings on a Kodak, and at once

I became both model and apprentice--
posing first, then going with Bellocq

to his other work--photographing
the shipyard....

I see,
too, the way the camera can dissect

the body, render it reflecting light
or gathering darkness....

I find myself drawn to what shines--
iridescent scales of fish on ice

at the market, gold letters on the window....
In them, the glittering hope of alchemy--

like the camera's way of capturing
the sparkle of plain dust floating on air. (p. 27)

-- October 1911
Bellocq talks to me about light, shows me
how to use shadow, how to fill the frame
with objects--their intricate positions.
I thrill to the magic of it--silver
crystals like constellations of stars
arranging on film. In the negative
the whole world reverses, my black dress turned
white, my skin blackened to pitch. Inside out,
I said, thinking of what I've tried to hide.
I follow him now, watch him take pictures.
I look at what he can see through his lens
and what he cannot--silverfish behind
the walls, the yellow tint of a faded bruise--
other things here, what the camera misses. (p. 43)

As in the poem above, Trethewey's language throughout is calm, fluid, one line moving into the next as a fish moves through water, language borne in its natural element. There is nothing easy about this, however--it was shaped so that no word is extraneous, no tone jars, and when our expectations are subverted, an explanation is given and appears plausible. In all, the book is finely crafted, elegantly played out--but not finished! It ends rather suddenly, with the portrait sitter "after the flash"--"stepping out / of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life." Looking back, I see that the entire collection is only 29 poems, and that there are gaps in the stories where I would have liked to know more. But what better compliment could be given a book than that it's too short?

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