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Waiting for Lady Reason
The Sex of Knowing by Michèle Le Doeuff, translated by Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code. New York: Routledge, 2003, 242 pp., $26.95 paper.Reviewed by Meryl Altman
MICHÈLE LE DOEUFF'S THIRD BRILLIANT BOOK brings her characteristic erudition and razor-edged wit to the question, both historical and timely, of whether women have a problematic relation to science, knowledge, and education as both institution and ideal. Her take on Western reason reminds me of what Gandhi is supposed to have said about Western civilization: "It would be a very good idea." As Le Doeuff said in her first book, The Philosophical Imaginary, "I have never had anything against philosophical rationality. As for its irrationality, that's a different matter."
The Sex of Knowing addresses some knotty theoretical impasses in a lucid, deceptively informal way. Its methods range from close readings of canonical texts to archival investigations of little-known figures to what Colin Gordon has called "superbly gritty vignettes of academic life." Even in translation, one would never mistake Le Doeuff's voice for anyone else's. She is no respecter of traditional academic categories--she has been accused of "zigzagging," in other words, of a freewheeling interdisciplinarity--yet her method is deeply scholarly in its insistence on real, textual evidence for every claim. She's sometimes ruthless in uncovering the "hyperbolic gaffes" of other commentators, feminist or not. I prefer the contentious bite of her writing, which tells you exactly who and what she is against, to the elliptical, even slippery style we in the US have come (perhaps unfairly) to think of as "French"; she is un-"French" also in her explicit concern to inform and instruct rather than simply impress, and in her attention to pedagogy and the next generation. Her work shows that it is possible to be immensely sophisticated intellectually and still write like a human being.
Le Doeuff, who works at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris, is a veteran of feminist activism, and her ongoing engagement with current French debates on such subjects as abortion jurisprudence, headscarves, and electoral parity is visible in The Sex of Knowing. (She quickly dispatches what Americans used to call the "new French feminism," before Christine Delphy and Claire Moses demonstrated that it was neither new, French, nor feminist; and the book has some things to say about the supposed freedom from the "male tradition" of those who light out for the territory of women's sexuality with a walletful of Daddy's credit cards, signed Lacan, Derrida, etc.) As well as a contribution to feminist epistemology (though she dislikes the term) and a treatise on feminist method, The Sex of Knowing is an oblique account of the vicissitudes of feminism in France and an attack on woolly headed mystifications of all sorts.
Interested in reperiodizing European intellectual history, Le Doeuff proposes dating the end of Antiquity to the murder of Hypatia by illiterate monks and the beginning of the Renaissance to Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies. She invites us to acquaint ourselves with the thought of intellectuals Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678) and Gabrielle Suchon (1632-1703); to see Rousseau and Descartes in the context of the feminists of their time rather than vice versa; and to rethink the textual and personal relationship between John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor in a way that notes the centrality of Taylor's thinking to their collaborative work as well as the value of Taylor's independent writing. But alongside a history of ideas, Le Doeuff is writing "a history of ideas that are never examined because they are considered too silly." She calls for an epistemology of ignorance: not "how do we know what we know?" or "what can she know?" but "what can he get away with not knowing?"--and how is it possible after all these centuries of clever argumentation that he still doesn't know it? If philosophy were the detached, monolithic reasoning machine it sometimes pretends to be, one might indeed decide to read in it no further, but as Le Doeuff shows, it is fascinatingly weirder than textbook accounts (whether traditional or feminist) suggest.
LE DOEUFF WISHES ESPECIALLY to investigate the way current conditions in scientific institutions still exclude and discourage women. She's right on the mark in seeing this as a basic matter of feminist justice: Functionalist arguments that the US needs more women in the science pipeline to beat the reds or the Japanese or whoever the enemy is this week may help feminists get funding from the National Science Foundation. But, such arguments fail to meet Kant's basic test of seeing other humans as ends in themselves, not just means to an end. Science to Le Doeuff has its broad, European meaning of research, scholarship, learning; there is no reason to pick on the hard sciences especially (as she shows with some embarrassing examples of sexist discrimination from my own field, literary study). Still, women's access to science matters, even to those who are happiest plowing other fields. Bacon's and Diderot's wider sense of the term persists, and until we have full, acknowledged competence and parity in the sciences, women will be curtseying petitioners at the library door. Le Doeuff concludes that although philosophers and scientists have by and large not been women's friends, philosophy and science--in short reason--sometimes have been and may yet more fully be.
There's lots of work to do first, though. "History is exceedingly long when debates never change and the same questions constantly recur!" says Le Doeuff. It is not difficult for a contemporary woman to place herself in the position of Christine de Pisan at the beginning of the 15th century. Pisan glanced at a book by Matheolus (otherwise unremembered) and found such a hyperbolic portrait of Woman as the font of vice that it shook her faith: She said it "made me wonder why on earth it was that so many men, both clerks and others, have said and continue to say and write such awful, damning things about women… [I]t was unlikely that so many learned men could possibly have lied on so many different occasions." Fortunately for Pisan, Lady Reason then appears to her in a burst of light, accompanied by Lady Rectitude and Lady Justice. They remind her to trust her own intelligence and judge theories about women by her own experience and observations. She and all women must defend themselves against slander, not with tears, piety, or emotional appeals to women's "different nature" but with rational argument, principled debate, and historical and practical example.
Maybe the three ladies need to come back.
I mean, haven't you ever felt that sudden sharp kick in your stomach when you're least expecting it, reading along pleasantly and taking notes in the shade, sipping iced tea--and then Kant says "A woman who has a head full of Greek….or carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics…might as well even have a beard"; or Hegel says, "Women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling"; or Nietszche says, "Good and bad women want a stick"; or Derrida says, "Woman has been excluded from philosophy by the undecidable neutrality of the subject elaborated there…perhaps metaphysical desire is essentially virile, even in what is called woman." And if you turn to feminist writers for solace, you may find, as Le Doeuff reminds us, Luce Irigaray saying, "If a woman engages with theory she will lose her capacity for pleasure"; and Claudine Herrmann saying, "A woman who wants to be educated is forced to let a little man grow inside her…the woman who makes this effort is necessarily schizoid and, we might add, a hermaphrodite." It makes you want to quit reading and go get a pedicure. Or a drink.
Some feminist scholars take the view that one or another Great Philosopher can provide useful conceptual tools for feminists, provided we overlook what he actually said about women. This is not Le Doeuff's approach. To smile demurely in the face of insults ignores the real pain and waste involved as talented young women decide serious intellectual work and professional achievement are either beyond them or not worth the effort. Le Doeuff compares such "cognitive blockage" to the difficulty a woman involved with a violent man may have in admitting that the danger she most fears has already occurred. Pretending not to notice these asides about plants and beards may be what allows them to persist.
Nor will it do anymore to say "Well, he was of his time." Women of intellect have always existed, and feminist arguments have always been available. Even early modern writers knew them and should have known better: The young Rousseau (Le Doeuff shows) did know better, but then he changed his mind and praised a sort of fraternity culture of learning. What the French call "le sexisme ordinaire" is alive and well. One can laugh at the bit with which the book opens, an outdated literary historian calling Christine de Pisan an "insufferable bluestocking." But it is harder to swallow the fact that a roomful of 17th- and 18th-century specialists gathered at the Sorbonne at the end of the 20th century had never heard of Mary Wollstonecraft and derided the idea of including her in an exhaustive reference work; or to understand how a recent book called The Renaissance Notion of Women could include nothing actual Renaissance women said or did. Time does not run in one direction; sometimes it barely seems to run at all.
BUT LE DOEUFF ALSO OBJECTS to what has been called "the feminist critique of science"--the idea that women "do science differently," more empathetically, for example, or that they should. Her dispute with writers like Evelyn Fox Keller and Carolyn Merchant is that they slip from describing a sexist view that "science is male" to apparently agreeing with that view, thus repeating the exclusion of women from science that they set out to protest. As women's studies scholars try to figure out how they can support their sisters in science, not in just the obvious ways (hire more women, pay them appropriately, encourage majors) but in intellectually deeper ones, a big barrier is how angry actual practicing women scientists are often made by accounts that seem to question their motivation and erase their hard-won presence in the field.
Her close reading of Fox Keller's classic attack on Sir Francis Bacon shows that working from modern translations results in attributing to him ideas he did not hold. "He merits being called a sexist," says Le Doeuff, "but not for the reason [Keller] says." The problem isn't his scientific method, but his attachment of it to a set of exclusionary social practices that violated its own principles. Far from being hostile to women, scientific method when understood properly is self-correcting and especially conducive to women's use, since as Le Doeuff points out, "even a little girl gets to repeat the experiment on her own and criticize the adults." It was Bacon himself who said, "Truth is no daughter of authority." Suppose we non-dutiful ones took him at his word?
In any case, to ask in some global way whether reason is "masculine" and intuition "feminine" makes little sense, since these terms are themselves unstable. "Women's intuition" has been seen by some as a lesser resource and by others as an undervalued one--but it turns out that when it was seen as a positive value (such as by Descartes, Plato, and Rousseau), it was taken to be a male quality--even what distinguished divine from human thought. Schopenhauer valued it so much that he denigrated mere reason as a female trait. This is one example of what Le Doeuff labels "desherences," which the excellent translators render as cast-offs. "Women are reliquaries or dustbins of history," says Le Doeuff. So, when desire was felt to be a problem--sin--it was put off on women as the curse of Eve; but when Freud and modernity rediscovered it, it became men's property, and some wondered whether women had libidos at all. "The insults hurled at us were not even made to measure," says Le Doeuff, as she discovers the back-story of the word "bluestocking," which originally had nothing to do with women or gender but originated as an insult directed at men who chose to wear cotton stockings as opposed to the more formal black silk. Sometimes women are associated with artificiality, at other times with Matter as opposed to Mind, and in countries where medical doctors are underpaid, more of them will be women. Annoying as this is, it ought to liberate us from the idea that we must embrace our natural… anything.
Another thing that won't do, says Le Doeuff, is women's conditional access to the institutions of knowledge--being allowed in as little sisters, research assistants, or provided we are sufficiently decorative. She makes especially fine mincemeat of the idea of valuing women's traditional knowledge as opposed to making life-saving technologies available throughout the poorest parts of the world. If there is a better way of doing something--if, for example, collaboration is better than competition in academic work--women ought not to claim it as "women's way of knowing" and congratulate ourselves for having thought of it. Rather, we should seek to teach it to everyone as a better way.
If, as Virginia Woolf observed, it is awful to be locked out of the library but even worse to be locked in, the best thing to do may be to hang out on the porch haranguing people as they come and go. Le Doeuff's tactic is to keep moving around, mounting a series of simultaneous strategic interventions at multiple pressure points, which at first seem unrelated, but in the end hold more promise of transformation than a full-frontal assault on a straw "Man of Reason." The spirit of Le Doeuff's work appeals particularly to us brainy but impossible girls who drove our teachers crazy by always wanting to know why? why? why? If, as those teachers told us, the problem is all in our heads, presumably the solutions are there as well.
Gish Jen
Photo by J. D. Sloan
The 21st-century family
The Love Wife by Gish Jen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 379 pp., $25.00 hardcover.Reviewed by Carol Anshaw
NOVELISTS HAVE BORROWED SOME NEAT TRICKS from filmmakers. The jump cut, the flashback. With The Love Wife, Gish Jen (Who's Irish?, Typical American) uses another cinematic form--the "talking heads" style of documentary. Her fictive family tells its own story through the diverse voices of its members--chiming in, talking over, contradicting, cutting each other off, looping around in time to catch up the unruly threads of their saga.
The Wong family is very 21st century, which is to say, typical in its uniqueness. The father, Carnegie Wong, is Chinese-American. Before he met his wife, Blondie, he adopted an Asian girl left on the church steps in his neighborhood. In his whitebread neighborhood, no one knew whom else to bring her to. Lizzie is now 15. Her sister Wendy, nine, is a Chinese girl Carnegie and Blondie adopted together. They have also, most recently, produced Bailey, a fair-haired baby boy of their biological own. Both Carnegie and Blondie have jobs--he in document management, she in socially responsible investments. They are a middle-aged couple bumping down the road of life, shocks worn, but engine still running.
The book begins in a tone reminiscent of domestic novels from the middle of the last century, like The Egg and I, or TV shows like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best. The kids are mouthy but adorable; the parents are wry and understanding; everyone's troubles are small and suburban. By allowing her characters to tell their own stories, the author leaves them, particularly in the book's early chapters, vulnerable to seeming self-satisfied, here and there descending to the tone of a photocopied Christmas letter. Speaking of a Chinese cousin's first impressions upon arrival, Blondie says:
Of course she was amazed by our house. We ourselves were amazed by our house--a lovely old farmhouse, walking distance to town, with a porch, and a large rolling lawn, and converted barn housing cars and other things, but these days also a black-and-white pygmy goat…. Even in the fog you could see how the house commanded its little knoll. The land settled in green swales around it, like a skirt. I had my eccentric sunflowers in back. (p. 19)This first-person telling is less cloying when the characters describe others, as in this passage in which Carnegie discusses Blondie's family:How we wished her sisters lived closer to us!--or at least visited more often. But the suburbs exhausted them. Lawn care exhausted them. Shopping bags, especially the bags made of coated stock, with ribbon handles, exhausted them. Excess packaging exhausted them. Lap dogs exhausted them.They were always needing to go home--to see working barns again, to buy oilcloth at the cooperative. To buy yarn, their whole lives were tied up, so to speak, with yarn. And children. They, of course, had four children each. (p. 105)
And then Carnegie's overbearing mother, Mama Wong (it is she who nicknamed Blondie), a self-made real-estate magnate, dies. In her will she requests that the Wong family bring the aforementioned distant cousin over from China, to help Carnegie and Blondie raise the children in the Chinese way. (Can you see trouble heading their way like a brakeless freight train?) Wanting to honor his mother, Carnegie invites Lanlan--who was abandoned by her mother, then witnessed her father's murder at the hands of the Red Guard--into their home. Now in her 40s, Lan has never married and was working in a shoe factory until it closed. Her prospects in China were not good. Nothing about her life has had any of the warm fuzziness so rife in the Wong household. She is predictably amazed by how much stuff there is in America, and how much waste. How thick and fluffy the towels, how odorless the bathrooms. But also how flavorless the fruit, how tense the people. And how hairy.
In their usual spirit of adoption, when Lanlan arrives, the Wongs give her a hearty welcome. The girls are totally charmed by her difference from their mother and her physical similarity to them. She lets them watch all the TV they want and tells them grim, riveting stories of life during the Cultural Revolution.
That baby, when she was born, her father not happy. Her father wanted a baby boy, have two girls already. So he take that baby, and he hold her by the feet like a chicken. Then he swing her and just like that, smash her against wall. And of course that baby die. (p. 276)Carnegie, for his part, begins to have guarded fantasies about Lan. Even Blondie, who has the most to lose by the introduction of Lan into the household, gives the new setup her best try. Carnegie observes her and Lan cooking together:
Blondie seemed bent on normalizing her relationship with Lan through foodstuffs. Her enthusiasm was real--Blondie was never not real--and yet she seemed to have turned herself up, as if on a cooking show. You half expected subtitling for the hearing-impaired to begin scrolling across the lower reaches of her sweater...She asked if the item was yin or yang. If it was smoked or pickled, she asked what it was like fresh. She asked where it came from, and how you knew best-quality from second-best. (p. 240)Over time, though, Lan's presence leaves Blondie feeling challenged in all the areas where she was previously secure. She admits her exasperation to Carnegie: "Only your mother, I said, would send us, from her grave, the wife you should have married."
ONCE THE TROUBLE STARTS, it's on a roll. A narrative that has been idling comfortably for nearly 300 pages suddenly surges forward through a collision course of events. Blondie quits her job; Carnegie changes his. Blondie foists on Lan a guy named Shang, a wealthy Chinese-American from Blondie's feng shui class. Lan first gets pregnant, then gets tired of being roughed up by the jerky Shang. The clincher is a bad incident that doesn't end well for the lovable goat. Then follows a realignment of affection as Lan takes off for Maine with Shang's limo driver. This leads to a dumpling shop venture, then a wrangle with some Mainers that ends worse than the goat incident. At this point, we're still not done with major plot turns.
This back-loaded narrative, reminiscent of those old joke-signs that read, "Plan Ahead," with the last letters squished against and finally falling off the edge, is not the novel's only flaw. There is also a lack of balance. The smallest things are examined microscopically, while huge events are dispatched in a page or two.
But even with its flaws, The Love Wife is never a bad book and is often a good one. In patches, it even attains a modest greatness, as when Wendy observes Shang in the back yard killing the goat with a pitchfork. Lan is wailing, but Wendy sees through this, and is proven right when Lan kicks the goat.
She kicks the goat again, and I'm surprised at the look on her face, it's not like any look I ever saw. She looks like she could be one of the Red Guards she told us about, or like one of the guys outside the car when I was just adopted in China. Lizzy said they looked like they were never ever going to get what they wanted their whole entire lives and had to watch on TV while other people did. (p. 314)There is weight to the way Jen deals with cultural chasms, with the identity issues inherent in race and affiliation, abandonment and adoption, and with the currently unfashionable idea of a woman chafing within the demands of marriage and motherhood. With its generous spirit, the book pulls for the notion of family as a mechanism inclusive and tolerant of differences within itself. And in its most brilliant dimension, the novel's construction itself reflects the loose, baggy, lost-sneaker-what's-for-dinner-the-water-heater's-broken-again chaos of family. What comes through is an endeavor greater than the sum of its fragile human parts.
The genius Colette
Colette by Julia Kristeva, translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 521 pp., $35.00 hardcover.Reviewed by Julia Balén
"I LOVE THAT WOMAN'S WRITING: it is an immediate pleasure, without 'why,'" opens Julia Kristeva's book on Colette, the third in her triptych on "female genius." Following her analyses of Hannah Arendt, the thinker, and Melanie Klein, the healer, Kristeva seems to feel compelled from the start to defend her choice of Colette as a primary example of the female genius as writer. No sooner does Kristeva proclaim her love "without a 'why'" than she begins her over-400-page explanation--part psychoanalysis, part apologia--all based in love.
Exploring in depth her reasons to love Colette, Kristeva interweaves the details of Colette's life with pieces of her many texts, often mirroring Colette in style, thus producing analysis turned reverie, history turned meditation. In places, Kristeva creates pastiches of quotes from a wide variety of Colette's texts--novels, letters, notes--to present Colette's sensibilities in relationship to topics including sex, politics, femininity, and feminism. In other sections, the identity of the speaker slips, producing a sense that texts and authors have all merged. For example, speaking of Colette's "radical shift" that replaces "the human point of view on the world with that of a sensibility supposedly belonging to a dog and a cat," Kristeva begins with analysis: "Colette wants to describe the extreme destitution of her own sensibility, pushed to the limits of animality" and in so doing
succeeds in taming and excusing the paroxysms of the psyche that, in other people dig hells and promise paradises. For her, the animal brings a touch of simplicity and humor, which, like a modest grace, saves speaking beings both from Gehenna and from ecstasy. (p. 85)But by the end of the paragraph, Kristeva's voice has merged with author and texts, and it has become completely unclear who the subject of these sentences might be:Hence, through the "Four-legged Ones," the night of the sensory slips away from vindictive rage, and its strangeness, which brings me jouissance and death, is called my animality. That is also my humor, my irony, my way of not becoming fixed as an écorché [an anatomical figure showing the muscles and bones that are visible with the skin removed], and even less as something sublime, a way of laughing about it with unlikely and, when all is said and done, probable accomplices. That animality, the figure for a sense of humor about oneself, therefore attests to a beautiful optimism. The other is not only my enemy, his beastly jouissance is inside of me: I am the beast. O animal, my soulmate, my brother. (p. 85)Effectively playing both Colette's lover and her psychoanalyst, Kristeva merges identities with her in much the same way that Kristeva claims Colette does with her mother, Sido, and presumably for the same purpose: to "transmute perversion--père-version, turning toward the father--into mère-version, turning toward the mother, to reconcile herself with her always somewhat humiliated femininity." Such merging of subjects can be dizzying.
The genius of Colette's work, in Kristeva's psycho-poetic framework, is to be found in Colette's "alphabet of the flesh," a synesthetic "interpenetration of language and the world, style and flesh." In Kristeva's analysis, Colette's "alphabet of the flesh" has two aspects: The first is "radiant" or "solar," which "delivers the 'play' of the metaphoric body to us... an alphabet of words, things, and sensations mingling indiscriminately, in which I hear the music in the letters." This "music" renders the language tangible, the text sensual. For example, Kristeva quotes from La vrilles de la vigne, in which Colette writes:
What light, what impatient youth stirred that whole day!... An acidic and urgent breeze cast a mist of rapid clouds over the sun, wilted as it passed over the tender leaves of the lime tree, and the flowers of the walnut fell like burnt caterpillars onto our hair, with the mauve blossoms of the Paulownias the color of a rainy Parisian sky.... The shoots of the blackcurrant you bruised, wild sorrel forming a rose window in the lawn, the very young, still brown mint, the sage, downy as a hare's ear--everything overflowing with an energetic and pungent sap, which I combined, on my lips, with the taste of alcohol and citronella. (p. 204)Kristeva waxes lyrical in response: "Necessarily, naturally, it is on that palate, in my voracious mouth, that the words live: Colette the musician, who continually hears herself writing, is also an eater of her words; she rolls them on her gourmand's tongue." The second aspect of Colette's alphabet is "monstrous"; it "unveils a nauseous chaos without beginning or end" and, in Colette's words, "turns to liquid, runs down the tree, and, moreover, shrinks back, congealed." In the process, Colette produces a sort of "scopic inversion," allowing the watcher to perceive herself as the watched, "to observe the uncanniness at the site of the other facing her." Boundaries like subject/object and self/other dissolve into Being.
Such creative genius, according to Kristeva's psychoanalytic frame, is due to the way Colette traverses sexual, gender, and even animal identities to transcend the pain of her existence via writing, eventually incestuously mythologizing her mother, Sido, as safe place and grounding for her own individuality and creativity. "In taking root there, the writer crosses the identity boundaries of beings, strips them of their identity, and transfers them to Being. In psychoanalytic terms, that experience could be called a sublimation of psychosis." In other words, through her "alphabet of the flesh," Colette's writing acts as poetry to put the unified subject "on trial/in process." The sensual intensity of sound, rhythms, and textures of language makes palpable the pre-linguistic drives that operate as the (usually invisible) foundation for meaning. In the process, her work renders the fiction of the static subject more obviously fictional and the boundaries between beings fluid. For Kristeva, there are discourses that particularly lend themselves to producing such breaks in identity: poetry, maternity, and religiosity. It seems that for Kristeva, Colette, in effect, engages the ruptures available via poetic language and maternity in order to produce her own earthy religiosity.
WHILE KRISTEVA IS SENSITIVE TO CRITIQUES of Colette for her failure to speak out against the Nazis or to align with the resistance (even as her best friend, Maurice Goudeket, was imprisoned), Kristeva portrays Colette as operating both within and outside of her times. In a section entitled "The Idol Cornered by History," Kristeva describes an aging and ailing Colette moving fluidly across the lines drawn in the sand of her times, acting as if it is merely sand, trusting that the political winds will change, and all the while manipulating what she could to save those she loved. What seemed most important for Colette was immediate survival and keeping the French spirit alive--not taking sides. While Kristeva does not directly say so, it seems that Colette wagered correctly that her stature as a writer would not be substantially harmed in the end, no matter which side she took. Whether Colette's age, illness, or gender played a role in the public's willingness to let her stand outside of political judgment, Kristeva does not conjecture, but the picture she paints implies this through descriptions of continued, if troubled, admiration for Colette as a writer by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. That Kristeva would encourage a nonjudgmental approach is not surprising, since her choice to work in the realm of the personal over the political bears resemblance to Colette's.
The book may prove a challenging read for many. Kristeva presupposes familiarity with the language of psychoanalysis throughout, and especially with her own work on poetic language. While chapter five offers a sketch of that framework, it won't be very helpful to those not already in the know. She also assumes throughout the text that her readers are intimately familiar with Colette's life, texts, and characters, freely referring to them without tracing connections or sources, as though she is speaking of a well-known pantheon. But readers unfamiliar with either Kristeva's psychoanalytic framework or Colette's life and oeuvre might nevertheless enjoy the book as the precious reverie of a clearly inspirational writer.
My own desire to read this book was based on my curiosity about Colette, whose work I had not read since graduate school, but whose relatively free play with sexuality and gender identity I felt might resonate with my interest in such boundary crossings, and my curiosity about Kristeva's reasons for considering her a genius. As someone who is reasonably well-versed in psychoanalytic theory and whose dissertation, in part, addressed Kristeva's earlier work, I was also curious to see what recent turns her work had taken. Indeed, many might say that it is about time that Kristeva acknowledges a woman author as producing the "revolution in poetic language" reserved for male authors in her germinal work of the same name. Perhaps her move to address what might be considered a feminist concern--female genius--might produce a broader, more political perspective. I was both pleased and disappointed. Kristeva claims that "Colette finally posited herself as equally monstrous and sublime, of no sex" and that "she stood at the crossroad of all sexes, which is also that of all differences, so that she could write in unison with the elements of Being." This, along with much of what Kristeva quotes from a variety of Colette's texts, suggests that Colette presaged today's gender/sexuality play, thus making it likely that I will return to Colette's texts for more research. As for Kristeva, while her theorization of "incestuous mother-daughter relations" proposes liberatory psychic opportunities, her language vascillates between the revolutionary and the conservative. To ask "Is there a feminine genius?" as she does in her final chapter, is to essentialize "the feminine," even as she argues that "the feminine" is available to everyone. Because she frames "the feminine" in a strictly Western, heteronormative narrative of father, mother, and child, without benefit of any materialist critique, she fails to question "the feminine" itself.
If "to write is to reinvent love," as Kristeva claims, the love that her text proclaims for Colette is as particular to Kristeva as Colette's love, writing, and genius are to Colette. Kristeva's stated purpose in writing her triptych of "female genius" is to stimulate in herself and her readers "the flowering of our singularity" by deciphering the very individual ways in which these geniuses "transcended their respective fields." While she dedicates her book to Simone de Beauvoir, she offers it in contradistinction to "the feminists" whose "totalizing ambitions" and "rebellious negativity.... [have] rigidified into a short-lived militantism" that fails insofar as it ignores "the singularity of subjects"--which she claims her project attempts to recover. It is ironic that she attempts to do so via a narrative as totalizing as the caricature of feminism she describes. Would that her love extended further.
The Times is not a-changin'
Your impression of the New York Times and other prestigious book review publications (present company excluded) is correct: The women are missing.By Paula J. Caplan and Mary Ann Palko
DECADES AGO, RESEARCH SHOWED that children assumed only men could be doctors, because that was what they saw in books. How wonderful it would be if this important discovery informed the decisions made by the editor of arguably the most powerful book review publication in North America, The New York Times Book Review (NYTBR). Alex Beam noted in a recent Boston Globe column that the NYTBR has "canonical influence in the literary community; for a writer, getting a Times review is like getting a college degree." A good review there can boost sales of a book both to individual readers and to now ubiquitous book groups.
We had the impression that the NYTBR included reviews of many more books written by men than by women and used many more male than female reviewers; but because feminists are often accused of being paranoid when they point out instances of sexism, we thought we had better check it out. We tallied 53 consecutive weeks of the NYTBR during 2002 and 2003 and found that more than twice as many book authors and almost twice as many reviewers were male as female. Specifically, out of 807 books reviewed, only 227, or 28 percent, were authored by women. Of the 775 reviews, only 265, or 34 percent, were by women reviewers. This was troubling news, for women who want to write or review a book may be less likely to make the attempt once they make the conscious or unconscious observation that those realms remain primarily male. As feminist author and organizer Gloria Steinem commented to us, this is "an imbalance of influence which is all the more bizarre, since women purchase the majority of books. It's one more instance in which women are treated as consumers but don't decide or profit from what is consumed."
As long as three decades ago this pattern began to impel expressions of concern and requests for change. The first organized protest about the representation of women in the NYTBR came in the early 1970s, when a group of feminist authors including Susan Brownmiller and Nora Ephron appealed to Max Frankel, then the editor of the Sunday New York Times, to increase the representation of women. In the 1980s, after Marilyn French and approximately 100 other women writers protested the three-to-one, male-to-female ratio for authors and reviewers, the ratio dropped to two-to-one, where it remains today, 20 years later. Responding to news about the disparities revealed in the current study, Brownmiller warned, "Constant vigilance is necessary because things start to slip" in its absence.
Last December, we e-mailed the NYTBR editor Charles McGrath and New York Times ombudsperson Daniel Okrent to report our findings. Their reactions revealed a pattern of sexist thought. Okrent replied that he would await McGrath's response before becoming involved, but ultimately, he did nothing. McGrath said, "I'm not convinced that we are guilty of a male bias--either consciously or un-. (On the editorial staff here, by the way, women outnumber men.)" He said he would look at our numbers "with interest, and if I'm persuaded that we are seriously out of whack I will certainly look into ways of redressing the balance." However, he wrote that he had "no plans at the moment for changing how we assign books" and wanted to "resist the idea that a book review's main job is to keep the numbers looking good."
With those remarks, he implied that sex equity and the quality of his publication were mutually exclusive, and that the only way to achieve sex equity would be to make it the NYTBR's primary aim. He said that they had been "making a conscious effort to use more women reviewers, and, more important, to use more women in the more prominent, attention-getting books." However, it is not true that in the Times women review prominent books as often as men. McGrath cannot have it both ways, claiming lack of concern about "the numbers," while also claiming that he tried to use more women reviewers and implying that greater sex equity would be a sign of progress.
McGrath offered three explanations for the unbalanced ratio for book authors: that "more books are written by men than women"; that he chooses books for review based on whether they are "worthy of review"; and that he chooses for review books that are "of interest to our readers." We told McGrath we had tried in vain to determine whether more books by men than by women are published, and we asked him to tell us where he had found that documentation. He did not reply. Our numerous inquiries, including to the Library of Congress, the International Publishers Association, Books in Print, Publishers Weekly, the Association of American Publication Industry Statistics, Bowker Annual, Bookwire, Random House, Simba Information Book Publishing, and www.bisc.org failed to produce any of this information. According to Book Wire (www.bookwire.com/bookwire/bookproduction/decadebookproduction.html), more than 140,000 new books are published each year. From that enormous number (even if one assumes that many are textbooks), shouldn't it be possible to find as many important books by women as by men? Even if it is true that far more books by men than by women are published, it doesn't necessarily follow that twice as many of those written by men are good and important as those written by women. (For instance, even if 100,000 books published last year were written by men and 20,000 by women, it is plausible that, by some reasonable standard, 10,000 in each category are good and important.)
McGrath's assertion that he chooses books based on whether or not they are "worthy" merely rationalizes his biases. Finally, it is an editorial and marketing decision whether to tailor the NYTBR's reviews to its current readers or to alter its reviews in order to attract new readers. McGrath misleadingly portrays the editor as unavoidably passive.
McGrath told us that the NYTBR's back-page essay is always written by a woman, and that many books by women appear in the "Notable" section and yearly "Best Books" list. In fact, though, men sometimes write the back-page essay, and more importantly, the meat of the NYTBR is the reviews, not the back-page essay or the lists. We told McGrath, "We would be more than happy to discuss with you some straightforward ideas to improve the ratios, if you would be interested in talking with us," and offered to provide him with the names of excellent women reviewers. He replied, "Our standards are so high that [a] great many writers--even published writers--don't meet them." When we asked him to describe the Times' standards so that we could suggest reviewers who would meet them, he did not reply.
We were troubled by McGrath's implication that women are less likely than men to meet the Review's standards, so we asked Okrent, the ombudsman, to step in. He replied that he had gotten "the sense that [McGrath] was mindful of the issues you raised, and that he is engaged in an ongoing effort to improve the quality and the balance of his roster of reviewers."
Further headway with the Times seemed unlikely, so we reported our findings to the public by issuing a press release. Many women writers said that our numbers were consistent with their tallies for other publications, including the Washington Post Book Review, and that the resistance we encountered at the NYTBR echoed problems they had encountered at publications ranging from the scholarly to the popular. Nearly every woman we heard from asked that we not use her name publicly, for fear of retribution. One woman said she believes that books by men get the Times' and other editors' attention because publishers "tend to put their bucks, and therefore their publicists' energies, into [books by men], and it is a sad, but real fact of life that reviewers respond when they are being pushed." She pointed out that "men still tend to read books by men, while women will read books by both men and women."
MCGRATH LEFT THE TIMES and was replaced in April 2004 by Sam Tanenhaus. A sampling of issues of the NYTBR since his arrival shows virtually no change in sex ratios from those before he came. In June, we e-mailed Tanenhaus, telling him about our data and asking whether he might "have plans to reach more equitable ratios." We read Tanenhaus' response together, and the difference in our reactions reflected a generational difference. Paula J. Caplan is 57 and was involved in the second wave of the women's movement; Mary Ann Palko is a generation younger. Caplan was not surprised by Tanenhaus' terse e-mail response, which said, "Many thanks for this. We feature many women reviewers in our pages and will continue to do so. But we don't tally the numbers or ratios and think it would be a mistake to do so." In contrast, Palko was utterly shocked and disappointed. For Caplan, who had watched for decades as feminists revealed many and varied manifestations of sexism, Tanenhaus' reply was just the latest example. But Palko had thought that because of the women's movement, little sexism remained. She thought that once the editor saw the evidence of imbalance, he would take steps to rectify the problem, which is not insurmountable.
Academia provides an example of how people at the top, instead of treating a sex-based imbalance as immutable, have taken action to solve the problem. Although many administrators in higher education say they have few tenured women faculty because women choose to leave academia, some have made a point of conducting exit interviews with women who leave teaching positions. When they learned that the women were treated badly in a variety of ways, they created programs aimed at rectifying the situation.
Even should it turn out to be true that more men than women write books, editors of publications like the NYTBR might try to identify the reasons for this imbalance and search for ways to redress it. For instance, publishers of book reviews could sponsor writing workshops aimed at encouraging women to write and providing opportunities for them to hone their skills. They could acknowledge in print that no research in cognitive psychology would lead to the expectation that men are better writers than women. Indeed, much research reveals that young girls' verbal abilities are better than those of young boys. If women in fact write fewer books and are less skilled writers of reviews than men, isn't it time to look at what happens to that verbal superiority in young girls? Does it disappear for genetic or other biological reasons, or are girls, as part of our sexist society, disproportionately discouraged from writing? OTHER GROUPS HAVE BEGUN to call attention to the imbalance of sex ratios in book review publications. Sisters in Crime (SinC), an organization for women who write mystery novels, monitors 50 publications that include book reviews. It found that in the NYTBR, the sex ratio of authors whose mystery books were reviewed matched almost exactly the two-to-one, male-to-female ratio we had obtained. Only seven of the 50 publications SinC studied reached "parity or better." In Publishers Weekly, the percentage of reviews of books by women actually declined from 50 to 43 between 2002 and 2003.
Author Elizabeth Merrick told us about three ways she believes women writers can stave off despair over this situation. One is to collect more data about women and writing. Merrick has begun to document the percentages of women writers included in what she calls "the top echelon of American letters": Harper's, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. She also tries to educate people about the disparities: She pointed out to the male editor of an e-mail book review newsletter the paucity of women authors in his mailings. He insisted that about 40 to 50 percent of the reviews he distributed were written by women-but when he actually counted and found the ratio to be only 30 percent, he was surprised and troubled. He then offered to help Merrick with her study. Merrick has also started a reading series with women friends "as a way to avoid self-destruction out of frustration on this issue." The series is called Cupcake and has a weblog at www.cupcakeseries.blogspot.com.
As this essay went to press, the first two issues of a redesigned NYTBR (October 3 and 10, 2004) had appeared. They yielded no better sex ratios for either book authors or reviewers than in our initial study, and for nonfiction reviewers the ratio was far worse, at three-and-a-half to one. How wonderful it would be if constant vigilance and support groups were not required and if equitable distribution became the norm.
Cynthia Ozick
Photo by Marion Ettlinger
Against interpretation
Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 320 pp., $24.00 hardcover.Reviewed by Jan Clausen
ALTHOUGH CYNTHIA OZICK IS COMMONLY KNOWN as a novelist, her reputation as a writer of imaginative prose really rests on her achievements in short fiction. Ozick's finest tales are sparely plotted, exquisitely shaped, almost fanatical in their devotion to unity of effect--all qualities that serve both her fabulist side and her historical-realist impulse. While The Messiah of Stockholm and The Puttermesser Papers masquerade as full-length fiction works, the former reads like a novella, while the latter comprises linked short narratives, several of which were published separately before being compiled. Like these books, Ozick's cruelly beautiful tale "The Pagan Rabbi" and her famous The Shawl (an indelible eight-page vision of motherhood in a concentration camp paired with a tragicomic novella featuring the camp survivor in her later life as a half-cracked Florida retiree) rely on sharply etched images and highly charged language. Such lapidary works imagine reality via entirely different means from those favored by the novel, what Henry James called the "loose, baggy monster," which typically forgoes perfection of form in its effort to capture something of the world's complexity.
Now, with Heir to the Glimmering World, Ozick beards the monster in its lair with mixed results. This uncharacteristically hefty volume revisits prior themes--tensions between faith and heresy; the irreducibly individual impact of the Holocaust on each of its victims; textuality as a way of life; the Jewish intellectual woman as hero--in the startling form of neo-Victorian realist pastiche.
The novel begins in the engaging voice of Rosie Meadows, who looks back from some unspecified but plainly mature vantage point upon her youthful tribulations during the Great Depression. Motherless and reared in upstate New York by her supremely inattentive father, a secular Jew who teaches math for a living while pouring his creative talents into self-aggrandizing lies, Rosie learns very early that she must make her own way. After her father's death and a romantic disappointment--"cousin" Bertram, a relative by marriage, shelters her but won't requite her crush--she signs on as a helper in an all-but-destitute family of German Jewish refugees. Elsa and Rudolf Mitwisser have arrived in New York with their five children after a narrow escape from Nazi-controlled Berlin. Rosie's duties range from nursing Elsa, a former physicist whom the ordeal has turned into the family's resident "madwoman in the attic," to heroic secretarial feats in support of Rudi's research on a group known as the Karaites. This ancient sect of heretics--"dead a thousand years," as Rudi's daughter Anneliese balefully explains--sought to uphold the supreme authority of scripture by rejecting all forms of interpretation, most especially the Talmud, with its spirals of rabbinical discussion of biblical law.
Rosie's asperity is compelling; she's naive but a fast learner and an astute observer of both her own motivations and others' behavior. "Disorder was our rule of life--disorder and my father's puffery" she says of her childhood, recalling how she became a "mad perfectionist," desperate to escape "the wilderness of my father's imagination" through "utter straightforwardness" (a goal paradoxically supported by her imaginative identification with the "gravity and independence of a sad orphanhood" portrayed in Jane Eyre). Throughout the early chapters in Rosie's voice, I relished Ozick's skill at evoking Depression-era Albany and the raw Bronx neighborhood in which the unhappy Mitwissers take up residence. I looked forward to the leisurely pleasures of a feminist bildungsroman with a 20th-century Jewish cast of characters.
I WAS IN FOR A RUDE SHOCK. As Rosie learns more about her employers --Rudi Mitwisser's identification with al-Kirkisani, the Karaites' "dissident from the dissidents"; Elsa Mitwisser's possible infidelity; the family's flight from Berlin; and the mystery of their connection to a wealthy, nihilistic American benefactor--Ozick allows Rosie to slip from her position as protagonist to a role as mere "amanuensis," the scribe to others' lives and texts. While the young woman remains a subtle interpreter of the events she observes, I could not put aside my frustration at the mismatch between her powers as narrator and her increasing marginality to the novel's action.
Surely Ozick means to make a feminist point here. Two significant temptations foster Rosie's inaction: romantic yearning for Bertram (which unfortunately is posited, not convincingly drawn) and her deepening involvement in Rudi Mitwisser's research. The latter experience, by far the more profound, whets her intellectual appetite only to draw her further into a subservient role, an irony worthy of Middlemarch's Dorothea Casaubon. While the trap is psychologically credible, its depiction frustrates the reader by rendering Rosie a mere witness to ecstasy, meanwhile blurring the ultimate significance of what she witnesses.
The text incorporates fascinating information on the Karaites, whose "glimmering world," likened by Elsa Mitwisser to the ephemeral glow of fireflies, evokes the worlds of European Jewry about to be extinguished in the Holocaust. But what does it mean, in concrete and practical terms, to reject interpretation? How does one go about reading while forbearing to think? And is Rudi's fascination with the Karaites' dizzying contradictions ultimately more a matter of scholarly ambition, spiritual intoxication, or temperamental affinity with their rejectionist posture? Rosie herself seems undecided, although a wonderful passage evoking the "polyphonic thunder" of "exegetical voices calling to one another across the centuries....Talmud, the fuguelike music of the rabbis conferring over the sense of a syllable out of Genesis" is almost worth the frustration of being left in the dark as to what the would-be silencers of that counterpoint proposed to substitute for it.
While serving as handmaiden to Rudi's obsession, sober-minded Rosie gets to observe a lush assortment of derangements afflicting the other characters. The memory of their desperate, final week in Berlin haunts both Elsa and the teenage Anneliese with the image of a terror their class privilege barely shored them against. Desperate to elude the Nazis, the family spent days riding around Berlin in a chauffered car:
Papa hired it. It had smoked-glass windows, no one could see inside. Only important people would ride in an auto like that....Fritz brought us food to eat in the auto, and when we needed to use the toilet we would hold our heads up and walk into any fine hotel. It made us nervous to do that, even though we were wearing our best clothes on purpose. (pp. 44-45)Then there is cousin Bertram's girlfriend, a heartless Communist "zealot" who changes her given name (Miriam) to Ninel, an anagram of Lenin, and rushes headlong into the jaws of the European beast, signing on to fight the Spanish fascists. Meanwhile, James A'Bair, the "Bear Boy," is kept waiting until nearly half the book is over to parachute into the mix, rudely rocking the boat of narrative focus and further undermining Rosie's presiding role.
Although Ozick devotes long tracts of prose to his story, the Bear Boy remains this novel's least compelling character. The adult but profoundly immature son of an author-father who once exploited him as the model for a wildly popular series of children's books, he comes across as the one-dimensional victim of his father's textual exploits: "He was not a normal boy, he was his father's drawing, his father's discourse, his father's exegesis of a boy." While the intellectual links to other dimensions of the novel are clear--James, who has his own reasons for opposing interpretation, resorts to a willful donning and doffing of masks that flies in the face of Rosie's disciplined self-reliance--the Bear Boy seems less like a legitimate character than a deus ex machina imported to juice up the plot. His entire life is a predictable reaction to his father's sin against him, and I resented being asked to switch channels away from Rosie's intriguing efforts at self-fashioning merely to accompany his forced march to perdition.
I suspect that Ozick intends James, a WASP iteration of Rosie's madly self-inventing father, to function as an allegorical representation of American identity confusion. Certainly his wealth, which by the end of the book promotes the Mitwissers' transition from the terrors of their European past to the complacency of a well-padded suburban life, hints at the imperial effects of the almighty US economy in the postwar world to come. Whatever the intention, I lament Ozick's choice not only to cede so much of the novel to the robotic James but also to disrupt its formal balance by interpolating third person chapters about the Bear Boy into Rosie's well-established first person narrative. Where, the reader wonders, is this new voice coming from? In a skillfully executed but perplexing maneuver, the two narrative streams are finally made to converge in a way that hints it might, after all, be Rosie herself who has supplied the Bear Boy chapters with vivid details of events she never witnessed. (But if that is the case, what of the fact that she has now compounded James' father's original sin with her own interpretive violation?)
GIVEN THE CLUES SUPPLIED by many direct references to Victorian fiction, it is tempting to suppose that this ungainly split between first and third person narration may allude to Charles Dickens' Bleak House, a novel likewise obsessed with the interpretation of texts and the curse of inherited wealth, whose chapters are famously divided between a female orphan's first person voice and an omniscient third person narrator. Heir to the Glimmering World certainly shares Dickens' preoccupation with doubles, controlling lawyers, stark reversals of fortune, very bad parenting, the scandal of illegitimacy, and the melodrama of improbable coincidence. Nor do the parallels to classic 19th-century texts end with British literature; they proliferate and threaten to overrun the narrative. Naive Rosie's brush with European complexity via her sojourn with the Mitwissers recalls a theme from Henry James rewritten from the standpoint of Jewish history. There's even a passage that evokes Herman Melville's Ahab, envisioning Rudi Mitwisser, the spiritual extremist, in the guise of a ship's captain: "he had courted the sea...he had made the storm, he was the god of the storm, he was satisfied!"
While some readers will embrace these intertextual pleasures, the seductive parlor game of tracing allusions cannot fully counteract the disappointment of seeing Rosie displaced from motive force to mere amanuensis. Nor can it long distract the reader from the nagging sense that the book's structure is like an elaborate party at which the guests, its far-flung themes, coalesce in homogeneous clumps and simply won't be made to mingle.
In the end, the novel's tragic elements dissolve in comedy. Soothed by the twin balms of Bear Boy money and affable cousin Bertram's good offices (he marries Anneliese, assuming the role of dad to a baby fathered by James A'Bair), Elsa Mitwisser abandons her madness and consents to repress the knowledge that "What is broken you cannot put it again back." Only Rosie will not be fooled, and lights out for "the genuine New York of the skyscrapers. I saw myself as the counterpart of that hungry aspirant, the Young Man from the Provinces--modernity had granted the chance of untethered motion to my own sex."
It feels satisfying to recognize in the ex-amanuensis the female reply to Alfred Kazin and his cohort, Jewish male literati who made the fateful trek from the outer boroughs to Manhattan in the same period. But why is the dawn of Rosie's self-assertion so spottily prepared for? As written, Heir to the Glimmering World offers many moments that recall the strengths of Ozick's short fiction: the Mitwissers' terror in their chauffered car, Elsa's mad cunning and prescient spite, Rudi's Ahab-like defiance, the winking out of the Karaites, Rosie as a beleaguered schoolgirl pitting defiant truth against her father's profligate imagination. These glimmers might have cohered into a full fictional world had Ozick kept faith with the agenda laid out in her opening chapters: letting Rosie tell her story.
On owning land
Above the Clearwater: Living On Stolen Land by Bette Lynch Husted. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2004, 168 pp., $18.95 paper.
Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm by Jane Brox. New York: North Point Press, 2004, 193 pp., $20.00 hardcover.Reviewed by Trish Crapo
It was a big fire: everything was burning--the log walls and the windows and the roof, even my mother's arm was on fire, alive with sparks, and my father's heart, roaring like the flames. He pushed a cardboard box out the window and leaped after it just as the ceiling collapsed in an explosion of sparks and the house swallowed itself. (p. 3)IN THESE FIRST TWO SENTENCES of her memoir, Above the Clearwater: Living On Stolen Land, Bette Lynch Husted loses everything. The log house her grandfather built burns to the ground, destroying even the idea of what "home" means. Moving into an "old rough-board shack" on the ranch felt shameful--"I didn't know what we had done to be the wrong people"--but even more troubling was Husted's sense that she never could have belonged there. As a child, she was aware that families like hers had displaced the native Nez Perce peoples in her homeland of north-central Idaho, and she tells of hearing the murmur of their voices as she made her way through the woods and meadows. She longed to know what these "Old Ones" had to say. "What does it mean to be alive on this earth?" she asks. "I didn't think I could ever really know unless they spoke to me.""I grew up with the wrong stories," Husted writes, and from this moment on, the concepts of "home" and belonging are linked not only to land but to language. As both writer and community college professor, Husted is committed to finding the stories that reflect the truth, or that are faithful to emotion--even her description of her grief during the two years her teenaged son spent as a runaway is given with unflinching attention and honesty. "If my family is going to escape the story we have found ourselves trapped inside," she writes, "we will have to learn to see it. We'll have to learn to look at the world and each other with a different vision, until every place is a home place."
Surely this commitment to really looking is what makes Husted's simple scenes kindle suddenly into more expansive observations, creating poetically charged images that accumulate complex power throughout the book. An early scene in which she and her sister Jill play in magical pink snow that made the world look as if it were "covered in pastel cotton candy" takes on menace when her mother's face pales: "The snow, Mom told us, might be pink because of the atomic explosions. Maybe it was tiny pieces of Utah falling on us in Idaho, the dust of Utah's red rock." The pink snow resonates as an image of dislocation, as well as evidence of the white European's disregard for the environment--both obvious concerns of Husted's. Later, when a "strange and disabling illness" has left her sister "moving slowly and in pain I can only imagine, each step powered by sheer determination," I thought of that snow again, melting into pinkish puddles on the kitchen floor--all the poetry bled from it.
Only rarely does the enviable smoothness of Husted's language detract, obscuring the tragedy of key moments. At one point, she writes that her mother's mother, Emily, "slipped from the bridge into the Clearwater." I had to read the passage several times before I realized that Emily had killed herself.
That Emily's death was suicide is crucial: depression and suicide emerge as recurring threads in Husted's legacy. In a chapter entitled simply "Guns," we learn that her uncle committed suicide and that her father shot himself in order to avoid a prolonged and painful death from emphysema. Suicide is about five times more likely in homes with guns, Husted writes. "In my town, it's hard to find a home without guns, and it's hard to find someone who doesn't know a family where 'five times more likely' conjures up a human face." But with a fairness you come to expect of her, Husted examines this complicated icon of the American West, writing of the exhilaration of shooting, of how it made her "real" when she was twelve years old.
I can still remember how it felt when the whirling clay birds fell out of the sky, the closest I would ever come to magic. Real, and magic? How is it, I wonder, that shooting can give us that feeling--that illusion of such oneness with the world--when the rifle racks in our pickup trucks are such an obvious barrier, a blue steel fence we keep between us and that world? You can't control the world and be the world at the same time. (p. 75)The longing for unification with the natural world pulses through Husted's book, as does her sense that native cultures have something to teach us about how to achieve it. She warns: "There's something beneath the asphalt that we're missing--and our missing it is costing us everything."
"It's a matter of finding a way back to that beginning place, five hundred years too late, and learning to begin again," she suggests, diffusing the nostalgia of that sentence with the next: "What matters, I know, is what we do now."
JANE BROX'S NEW BOOK, Clearing Land, takes us back to that "beginning place," weaving historical accounts of the first European settlers in America with personal memories of her family's farm near Lowell, Massachusetts. Clearing Land, too, begins with loss--Brox lists seven deaths on the first page: "my father, both his sisters, four of his six brothers." These deaths mark the end of a generation of farmers and the beginning of a new, tenuous era for the farm.
In clear, detailed prose, Brox writes of her family's long connection to the farm purchased by her immigrant grandparents--Lebanese on her father's side, Italian on her mother's--and the struggle to keep it economically viable as younger family members moved away and neighboring lands began to revert to woods or be devoured by suburban housing.
I can't help feeling the farm may be swallowed up soon, and a whole world will go with it… As if understanding can alleviate loss, I am trying to place our own time within the larger story of cultivation. I hope constraint amplifies, that by giving shape to the stories, to the persistent half-lives of the vanished who roam even on stinging winter days, I can see more clearly where we belong in the accumulation of beliefs, ideas, violence, necessities, and desires that have determined this country. (pp. 20-21)Once again, the emphasis is on the healing power of stories, and on understanding how history reverberates through our lives. In Above the Clearwater, Husted quotes William Bradford's description of the Pilgrims' impression of America: "'What could they see,' he asks, 'but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?'" and Husted asks, "If 'nature' is something other, something 'out there' to be feared and subdued and reshaped in our own image, what else could have happened?"
Brox elaborates on this idea. The first European settlers in New England, she points out, were so trapped in their perceptions of what agriculture should look like that they failed to see that the native peoples were already practicing it. Seeing no evidence that native peoples "possessed" the land, they took possession of it themselves. Native American agriculture involved the cultivation of light soils and seasonal rotation of crops. In contrast, the Europeans, faced with what seemed to be a boundless amount of land, abandoned fields when soil fertility declined and plowed new ground rather than work to improve or maintain the soil. This difference in attitude, both writers would agree, is at the root of the alarming abuse of American land and resources.
Throughout Clearing Land, Brox weaves primary source materials--the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Jefferson; journals kept by women who left the farm to work in the mills; lists of the contents of the ships that first came to the New World--creating "voice-overs" to the narrative. Some of these interlocking passages have the rich feel of a well-produced film documentary, allowing various elements to reverberate together. Each type of text--intimate memoir, historical narrative, quoted source material--enhances the others, and Brox is wise not to explain her juxtapositions. But though the historical information was of interest to me and grounded the memoir in the passage of time, I found Clearing Land most compelling when Brox wrote of her own life--her journeys away from the farm into the relative wildness of pre-developed Nantucket and her journeys home. Her description of the way farm work overwhelms a family, increasing tensions, was astute:
"Necessity made a world of its own," she writes,
running on at its certain pace. There was always so much to do, and time, time, time, you were always working against time, and the heat, and the rain.… My mother would be as quiet as she'd always been, setting down a platter of ham, dishes of steaming corn or baked tomatoes, olives, cheese, bread. One day I was helping to clear the dishes--I'm sure I was abstracted, already thinking ahead to the work of the afternoon--and as I set them in the sink and began to head on my way, she turned to me and said: 'It's always about the farm, isn't it?' (p. 66)Unlike many modern jobs, farming is all-consuming--you don't leave it behind at the end of the day. But Brox and her family and the neighbors she reconnects with through the grange are devoted to it despite its difficulties. Coming across a list of cattle breeds in one of her father's annual farm inventories, Brox writes:
You can't always explain how or why an aperture opens, how you fall into larger seeing, but reading those names, in his hand, after he had gone, was the first time I believe I truly understood how far he'd traveled in his life, and how much I had taken everything--most of all a feeling of security--for granted. I felt a little shame: all of a sudden I saw the deep hard work of it, the aspiration to be gotten bit by bit. (p. 47)The "deep hard work" of farming lies as much in the investment of spirit in the land as in any of the physical chores. And to farm a piece of land changes forever one's relationship to wilderness. "There are some inheritances I know I'll never be able to shake," Brox writes in the book's last pages. "Some dream of order that won't stand for death in life. Deadwood, which can look fine and defiant in the wild, ruins the idea when it's within bounds. Cultivation is a possession." And yet, in a beautiful final passage that I won't spoil for the reader by quoting, Brox cedes ownership. Both she and Husted, in examining their relationships to "homeland," learn that we both belong and don't belong. Or, to put it another way: The land is ours only as long as we realize that it's not ours.
Inez Milholland astride the white horse she
rode as herald of the 1913 parade in
Washington, DC. From Inez.The original media icon
Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland by Linda J. Lumsden. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004, 280 pp, $29.95 hardcover.Reviewed by Phyllis Eckhaus
SHE WHO SPEAKS TRUTH to power is most likely to be heard if she is gorgeous and flattering. Decades before Gloria Steinem subverted the stereotype of the "strident feminist" with glamor and wit, Inez Milholland seduced America into paying attention to women's rights. Revered by the press and the public as "one of the most beautiful women in all the land," the young activist's Gibson Girl good looks garnered crowds and front-page headlines.
Milholland toured the western states by rail in the fall of 1916, as the star speaker in a grueling publicity campaign for women's suffrage. Athletic and bold, she had always been portrayed as an Amazon. So when she collapsed in the middle of a speech to a packed suffrage rally in Los Angeles, America was shocked. And when the beloved 30-year-old lawyer and activist died weeks later from a long-neglected illness, the whole nation mourned.
The radical wing of the suffrage movement immediately claimed Milholland as a martyr. Alice Paul's Congressional Union confronted then-President Woodrow Wilson, demanding that he end "such waste of human life and effort" by finally supporting women's suffrage. His angry refusal sparked the last, most dramatic phase of the suffrage fight: Suffragettes picketed the White House, then went on hunger strikes following their arrest and imprisonment. Their wrenching struggle in Inez Milholland's name did much to push the public and the president ultimately to endorse "votes for women."
Milholland was a remarkable phenomenon, yet her brief life presented more promise than achievement. In Inez, Linda J. Lumsden manages to tease a full biography out of a few exhilarating years jammed with activism and adventure--almost two-thirds of the book deal with the four years between Milholland's graduation from law school and her death.
What lessons can Inez Milholland teach us? Lumsden suggests that her search for love, freedom, and rewarding work make Milholland a model for both her time and our own. Personally, I find this argument as flimsy as a pitch for Paris Hilton as Everywoman. Something of a beautiful monster, Milholland did what she wanted with little regard to its impact on others, fully exploiting her exception to the rules that govern the conduct of ordinary mortals. Her story fascinates, and Lumsden's book is correspondingly engrossing, a look into the life of an early media icon whose triumph was her inspiring projection of beauty, strength, and courage.
Like most images, Inez Milholland's both reflected and distorted the truth. She was indeed a fearless and imaginative fighter, challenging authority from her early days as a Vassar undergraduate. Prohibited from holding a suffrage rally on campus in May 1908, the "idol of the student body" risked expulsion by gathering her classmates in a nearby cemetery. There among the tombstones and canary yellow suffrage banners, she presented a program of speakers representing the absolute cutting edge of contemporary women's rights: suffrage militant Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton; labor leader Rose Schneiderman; lawyer Helen Hoy; and famed novelist and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who exhorted the students to revolt. The event drew coverage in the New York press. "Suffragists Invade Vassar. How Rude!" proclaimed the New York American.
The young suffragette's spirited demands gained attention for herself and her causes. Daughter of a former newspaperman, Milholland understood and relished the media. Following her graduation from college, she determined to enter law school and petitioned all-male Harvard to admit her. She urged the school to recognize that men and women must work together: "Why should not Harvard help to inculcate this new spirit of 'camaraderie' in the younger generation, instead of following, as it must sooner or later, where others point the way?" After Milholland presented the faculty with a bouquet in the suffrage colors of purple, white, and green, they voted her in. The trustees swiftly overruled the faculty. But of course, she got press coverage. "Harvard Rejects Suffragette Plea" reported The New York Times.
Milholland was physically fearless. Perhaps her most heroic moment came in 1913 when she led a huge suffrage demonstration in Washington, DC, on the eve of Wilson's first inauguration. Garbed in a white Joan of Arc-style costume of her own design, mounted on a white horse, she charged into the drunken, violent horde of men who sought to block the march, yelling at the male onlookers who stood by that they "ought to be ashamed" of themselves and that if they had "a particle of backbone" they would help the marchers fend off the spitting, vicious mob. Belatedly, the US cavalry cleared the way. Newspapers universally condemned the parade violence and praised Milholland's courage.
But the icon was also a diva, who kept her own interests paramount. She refused to testify at the congressional hearing on the riot, willfully mischaracterizing the mob as "eager and unmanageable and out for a good time." In fact, she knew better, and elsewhere condemned the conduct of the crowd and the police's failure to protect the marchers--but the hearing was inconvenient and perhaps a threat to her modus operandi, which was to flatter rather than confront authority. Her blithe solipsism routinely triumphed over principle. Arrested in 1910 along with striking shirtwaist workers, Milholland, out on bail, got the hearing delayed till the morning for her convenience--forcing the 14 picketers whose cause she ostensibly championed to spend a night in the Tombs jail. To add insult to injury, the newspapers once again made her out to be a heroine, with a banner headline along with her photo on the front page of The New York Times the next day. LIKE OTHER GROUNDBREAKING PIONEERS, Milholland had grand--arguably grandiose--dreams of success. She sought a splendid career, one that would allow her to change the world while simultaneously paying her the great sums of money necessary to underwrite the lavish lifestyle to which she had become accustomed as a rich man's daughter. Nominally a socialist, she expected to live a life replete with high-fashion gowns, maids, transatlantic luxury line cruises, and three-month summer vacations.
Lumsden attributes Inez Milholland's failure to establish that implausibly splendid career to entrenched institutional sexism. But one of the many fascinations of her richly documented biography is the evidence that Milholland was exceptionally fortunate; just as the rich are different from you and me, so too are the famously beautiful. One marvels that the white-shoe law firm, Osborne, Lamb and Garvan, which employed her following her 1912 graduation from New York University Law School, didn't fire her. While working as a clerk she continued her headline-generating activism in and around Greenwich Village, speaking out for suffrage, for underpaid retail clerks, for free speech. She invited prominent suffragists Alva Belmont and Carrie Chapman Catt to a screening of a controversial movie on prostitution, The Inside of White Slave Traffic, then persuaded them to vouch for its social relevance. Unbeknownst to Belmont and Catt, Milholland worked for the film's producers; when the producers refused to pay her, she sued them, claiming that her services included enlisting the suffrage leaders and writing letters to editors. The Times blasted the judgment-impaired young lawyer for confusing law with press-agentry; still her firm kept her on--even though she had forfeited her license to practice law, along with her citizenship, upon her marriage to a foreigner in 1913. (As late as 1915, the Supreme Court upheld the law revoking the US citizenship of women who married non-citizens, on the principle that a wife's legal identity was subsumed by her husband's.)
Perhaps the firm retained her because of her truly astonishing knack for generating press. When Milholland helped her boss finalize the defense for a man charged with murder, "spectators crowded the courtroom just to see her, and her minor role in the trial received national publicity." As the much-sought-after beauty of her era, Inez Milholland had the upper hand in her relationships with men and virtually unique leverage with reporters and editors. She wangled a reporting job for a struggling young woman graduate of Columbia Journalism School simply by penning a letter to a friendly male editor--and enclosing a photo of herself.
An advocate of "free love," Milholland exercised her power over men with abandon. She specialized in older men in bad marriages, toying with them until they declared their devotion--and then dropping them abruptly. Socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair and best-selling popular novelist John Fox Jr. were among her devastated conquests. While under her sway, the politically conservative Fox made a thousand-dollar contribution toward The Masses, the controversial socialist monthly, and accompanied her as she sought to protect striking shirtwaist workers from arrest.
In June 1913, Eugen Boissevain--a boisterous, charming, and disarmingly honest self-described "loafer"--caught a glimpse of the famous beauty and immediately changed his summer plans so that he could accompany her on a transatlantic cruise from New York. By the time they reached London, the smitten Milholland had proposed to Boissevain a reported three times. They married in Kensington a month after they met. Boissevain claimed to love Milholland's soul even better than her body. "I don't," she replied. "I love your body best." Also committed to free love, Boissevain at first encouraged his wife to have passionate affairs and tell him about them, but his enthusiasm for her extramarital amorous activities waivered some as he grew lonely from their separations and depressed by their financial woes. Still, he remained her biggest booster and constant steady supporter, encouraging her public life and taking pleasure in her achievements until her death three years later.
Milholland condemned herself for her failure to establish a lucrative career, but in fact she was an exceptionally effective social change agent--and how often does someone bucking the social order make big money? She excelled at reaching a vast audience, sacrificing the niceties of political correctness for mass appeal. Essentially an entertainer, she leavened her potentially heavy message with cheerful banter, retaining the attention of her audience with flattery and sex appeal.
There's no one way to achieve social change. Surely we need to appreciate our best messengers, no matter how flawed or difficult they may be. When I cast my vote this November, I intend to say a small prayer of thanks to Inez Milholland--and to Linda Lumsden, for bringing her back to life in this absorbing biography.
Margaret McMullan
Photo by Pat O'Connor
The mother-daughter puzzle
In My Mother's House by Margaret McMullan. New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press, 2003, 262 pp., $23.95 hardcover.Reviewed by Helen Fremont
MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS were made for literature. They offer generous helpings of passion, conflict, and drama, all packed into two overlapping generations. Margaret McMullan's intelligent and beautifully written novel, In My Mother's House, explores a particularly complicated relationship between a stubborn Viennese immigrant and her equally strong-willed American daughter as they come to grips with the aftermath of war, religious persecution, and uprooting.
As a child, Elizabeth finds her mother's silences mysterious and tantalizing. The more tenaciously Genevieve guards her history from her daughter, the more Elizabeth is determined to uncover her mother's secrets. The resulting struggle between the two--the daughter in search of connection, the mother in search of privacy and relief from psychic pain--is the central drama of the book.
Children are inevitably drawn to knots of tension in the family. Elizabeth is not particularly curious about her father's background, having grown up among his congenial relatives in Mississippi. Instead, it is her mother's brooding silences and partially expressed resentments that spark Elizabeth's curiosity. She senses that her mother occupies a world in which Elizabeth is not welcome, and the more she feels excluded, the more she tries to gain access.
"You wanted my memories," Genevieve tells her daughter at the beginning of the book. "I often thought that if I told you everything, I would somehow lose it all over again, and these scraps of memories are really all I have left of a place that is now gone. They are my inheritance and they are my own."
Genevieve, we learn, was born to a life of privilege in Vienna in the late 1920s. Her father, a wealthy Jew who had inherited a family business of parquet-floor factories, was a history professor with a passion for Catholicism. He married a French Catholic, raised his daughter, Genevieve, as a Catholic, and eventually converted to Catholicism himself, while under the Nazi occupation. The family lived in a "little palace" called the Hofzeile, enjoying a life of music, books, and social activities with the Viennese intelligentsia. Their lives changed forever in the late '30s with the rise of Nazism and the Anschluss. Just before the outbreak of the war, Genevieve's father fled Austria, followed by his wife and daughter, leaving his Jewish mother behind in Nazi-occupied Austria. The family hid with relatives in France before fleeing to England and finally immigrating to America. Genevieve's father, however, returned to his beloved Vienna after the war and lived out the rest of his life as a professor at the university there.
In Genevieve's narrative, she confesses to having been told little of her own family's heritage; she, in turn, says little to her own daughter Elizabeth, whom she raises Catholic in America. Elizabeth, left to puzzle out the incomplete pieces of her mother's past, resorts to recreating portions of that past in her own life. As a young teenager, she stops eating in order to "be ready for the Nazis when they came the second time." Later she confides to the reader, "I had never lived during catastrophe--not even near the edges of it--and despite all my efforts, despite my hunger strike, I would always be the spectator, not a victim. This made me sad and a bit resentful."
The psychological complexity of the family emerges gradually over the course of the book, as we witness the mother and grandfather's broken-off communications and interactions with each other. We begin to piece together not only the historical reality of the war, but also the emotional history of the family, as the members negotiate their way through exile, loss, and renewal. The combination of fear and betrayal make for a stormy brew that Elizabeth has absorbed since childhood. She is at once a part of the past and closed off from it.
Elizabeth's mother and grandfather both scoff at her curiosity and her tireless questions about their life in Vienna. They resent not only her ignorance but also her inquisitiveness. It is only her Jewish great-grandmother who, on her deathbed in Washington, DC, admonishes Elizabeth to "remember." Elizabeth takes the advice to heart, and resolves to discover her heritage "so that I could remember it and restore it." She becomes drawn to Judaism and begins studying and practicing the religion that her grandfather long ago abandoned, despite the fact that she is now enrolled in a Catholic school. Stung by the realization that her grandfather--absorbed in his own studies--does not really care about her, and that her mother--bitter and unavailable--has shut herself off from her, Elizabeth vows to "do what I had to do to get back what my mother seemed hell-bent on getting rid of--her father, her family, her Europeanness, her Jewishness."
She begins by telling one of the nuns at her Catholic school that her grandfather was Jewish. Her mother's reaction is swift. "How dare you," Genevieve says to her daughter. "How dare you sabotage everything we've worked for."
The more desperately Genevieve needs to distance herself from the past, the more passionately Elizabeth pursues the restoration of that past, insisting that it is not only her mother's but also her own heritage. Observing her mother and grandfather argue, Elizabeth says, "It was as though she and her father had some silent code. They both only told so much or maybe there wasn't any more to tell. All I knew was that it was up to me to fill in the blanks." By the end of the book, we come to understand that Elizabeth's search to fill the blanks is not only a role that she must fulfill for herself but also, despite Genevieve's denial, something she must do in order to restore a part of Genevieve that had been torn away years earlier. Mother and daughter need each other in order to heal from the wounds of the past and move forward into the future.
THE BOOK IS ORGANIZED into alternating mother-daughter narratives, enabling us to eavesdrop on a difficult and delicate conversation between mother and daughter over a period of decades. We are thus given a privileged position of intimacy with both characters that arouses our compassion and sympathy for each. The writing is clear, confident, and fluid, and McMullan is in full command of her story and characters. It is easy to forget that this is a work of fiction rather than a record of fact.
When Elizabeth's grandfather dies in his home town, she decides to make a trip to Vienna. Only then does her mother, now in her 60s, with failing eyesight, give her the key to the Hofzeile, the home she lost, but whose key she saved for half a century. The house had been destroyed by bombs during the war, and in its place, Elizabeth finds a concrete building occupied by Turkish immigrants. It is in Vienna that Elizabeth finally gets a sense of herself in relation to her family and her past. She remembers that
My mother had once said to me almost accusingly, "Look, you're not a survivor. You're not even a survivor's child." But just then I felt I was a survivor, and in a way, I was. I was never intended to exist. I thought: I am the ghost of all those who have died. (p. 232)With her return to the States, Elizabeth completes the task of reuniting her mother with her past. She has circled back in history to pick up the missed stitch, to complete the weave, to connect the fabric of family over the generations. And in the end, her mother joins her in the project, finally coming to realize that her daughter is right. "You have a right to know… about my other world," Genevieve says, "because now I know that what had to do with me does have something to do with you."
It is a poignant moment for mother and daughter and a comforting resolution after so much conflict and loss. The reconciliation could be considered a bit facile, turning on Elizabeth's retrieval of a token of Genevieve's childhood in Vienna. But it is, finally, love that is the agent of change for this family. Genevieve comes to realize, before it is too late, that facing and sharing her traumatic memories are necessary in order to open a pathway between mother and daughter. The past is lost forever, but the present and future lie before us.
Getting ahead
Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 216 pp., $24.95 hardcover.
Necessary Dreams: The Vital Role of Ambition in Women's Changing Lives by Anna Fels. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004, 320 pp., $24.95 hardcover.
Why Women Earn Less: How to Make What You're Really Worth by Mikelann R. Valterra. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press, 2004, 224 pp., $14.99 paper.Reviewed by E. J. Graff
ONE OF MY FAVORITE POSTERS of the 1970s showed two babies looking down their diapers (one pink, one blue), with the caption, "So that explains the difference in our paychecks." Alas, wit did not close the wage gap. For more than a decade, women's progress has been stalled at roughly 77 cents to a man's dollar. In a culture that measures success in dollar terms, that number works well as a stand-in for many other measures on which women's progress has sputtered: There are far too few women in public office, in executive positions, or in influential media jobs, and far too many in poverty or raising children with no social supports. As my grade school buddies would have put it, we're getting creamed.
Why? If you listen to mainstream discussions, you'd think it's because women are too smart to join the rat race. In this analysis, women are choosing to stay home to scrape Play-Doh off the walls rather than stay late at the office plotting corporate dominance. After all, what sane (white, upper-middle-class) woman would want to compete to make managing partner when she could instead compete to make the best birthday party decorations? Such "explanations" are the opposite of feminism, expecting women to craft private solutions to our collective problems. For my own next book, written under former Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Murphy, I've been looking deep into research on workplace sex discrimination, and here's the headline: It's ugly out there, much worse than even the most cynical feminist among us suspected. You'll hear more on that when our book is published. But it's not just men who hold women back; women hold themselves back as well. "Women don't ask," write Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever in their new book of that name.
They don't ask for raises and promotions and better job opportunities. They don't ask for recognition for the good work they do. They don't ask for more help at home. In other words, women are much less likely than men to use negotiation to get what they want. (p. ix)As a result, women are less likely to get what they want. Babcock and Laschever have the research to prove it. Babcock is an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz School of Public Policy and Management and a specialist in negotiation and dispute resolution; Laschever is a highly credentialed journalist and social science researcher. They understand that the reason most women hate negotiation and limit their ambition is what an earlier generation would have called "internalized oppression." "We want to be clear," they write:
This book is not simply a study of an inexplicable female failing that can easily be corrected. It is not about ways in which women need to "fix" themselves. It is an examination of how our culture--modern Western culture--strongly discourages women from asking for what they want. (p. 12)Babcock and Laschever's comprehensive summary of the relevant social science research is clear, useful, and sensibly organized. (Unfortunately, in an apparent attempt to make the book reader-friendly, they interject trite quotes and stories from pseudonymous "real women," which don't add much.) Women Don't Ask crisply describes the results of one study after another, fitting the puzzle pieces together to show how and why women are held back--and hold themselves back--from advancing both financially and in every other way. There's a social cost for asking, and women learn to avoid that cost--denigrating their accomplishments, backing off from achievement, worrying about being greedy, just as they were trained. None of this is a surprise--but it is astonishing to read the 360-degree, jargon-free research roundup showing how those "natural" feelings are imposed and reinforced.
Men fear asking for what they want, too--but they're expected to practice and get good at it. As with any skill (a tennis serve, a pedagogical approach), with enough practice they often learn to enjoy the game, recognizing that asking for what you want actually wins respect. Women can succeed at asking, too. Babcock and Laschever have the data to prove that, suggesting female-friendly negotiation styles that can sidestep backlash. Their book's framework may sound basic and obvious, but the assembled social science data is a goldmine for those of us who want to understand women's cramped expectations.
PSYCHIATRIST AND MEDICAL JOURNALIST Anna Fels examines this same psychic crippling, but from a quirkier, more psychological, and more political angle. Fels believes that women's warped socialization and fear of ambition are damaging to them and helpful to men, and can be overcome only with a renewed social movement. Necessary Dreams' most original thinking comes as Fels argues two points. First, she explains that ambition and recognition have gotten a bad rap. Ambition, to her, is a Maslow necessity: From infancy to elderhostel, we crave the chance to master successively more challenging tasks. Recognition--from parents, teachers, friends, bosses, spouses, or strangers--is mastery's equally necessary twin, without which humans wither as quickly as plants without sunlight. To prove her point, Fels dips into a fascinating melange of sources that include social science research on learning, corporate investigations of motivation and productivity, artists' biographies, and neurological studies. Here's the soundbite: "In terms of the economy of recognition, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer." Those who try hard and are rewarded for their achievements get the boost of energy they need to try harder; those who don't try--or who are ignored or punished when they do--lose heart and stagnate.
So guess which gender gets rewarded for ambition? You know the answer. Fels has a creative take on this crippling division, asserting that male egos are kept afloat by far more recognition than is acknowledged in mainstream (and difference feminists') psychological theories about male "autonomy" and female "interdependence." Briefly, she believes that men take praise and women's ready listening as their due, while even ambitious women get by on an impoverished, even anorexic, recognition diet. We've all seen the astonishing "level of fear, at times verging on panic, that women express when they are personally recognized for their work." Because of the ambivalence with which their hopes and efforts have been received, women, she writes, "refuse to claim a central, purposeful place in their own stories, eagerly shifting the credit elsewhere and shunning recognition." Sound like anyone you know?
While Fels' psychological take is intriguing, the research, history, and over-familiar grab bag of pop culture examples she uses to make her points are not always persuasive. Some studies are decades old, relying on 1970s assumptions that may or may not still be relevant. Others are so familiar, and summarized so dutifully, that they seem gratuitous here; we can all go reread for ourselves Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood or Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers' She Works/He Works without having to drag through a three-page rehash that adds no new insight. And some of her social history on women is flatly wrong. The book could and should have been a much shorter, sharper essay--a Harper's folio, perhaps--with most of its muddled middle synthesized into a clearer narrative line.
But hang in there, because Fels' other main message is bracing: Women and men are in a harsh power struggle at work, in society, and at home. "The stakes are not trivial," she writes. "Men have a lot to lose, and not surprisingly, they often play tough to keep their advantage." When was the last time you heard that said in public? Sexual ridicule and harassment, accusations of bad mothering, the belittling of women's interests and efforts: All these are male power plays, designed to scare women out of life's competitions. Of course men don't want to do the hair-pullingly tedious work involved in childrearing, preferring to be the Fun Daddy; who wouldn't? Fels believes that the "work/family" clash--women's attempts to have both ambition and love--is the frontline in today's war of the sexes. She argues that women are going to win eventually, as they've won the battles over women's property rights, female suffrage, marital rape, and so on. But in the meantime, many women feel alone as they're smashed up against the shoals of change, shocked by the violence of the tide against which they're swimming.
Like immigrants, Fels writes, "Women find themselves caught between a traditional culture and a quickly evolving contemporary one…. Nothing feels easy or natural. Whatever life decisions get made have a willed, experimental quality." Which is not to say that men are coasting. "Men are also in a bind," according to Fels. "If they accept women into positions of authority, they double their competition at work and lose a full-time caretaker and support system at home. Not a happy prospect."
Fels' prescription for heterosexual women (and reading her made me feel grateful yet again to be a lesbian) is twofold. First, be aware that you're walking into a shooting war, and that--no matter how fabulous your man--life during wartime can get nasty. Second, and more important, build a social movement. Fels believes that many young women who watched their moms fumble through the career vs. family trap resent feminism for this double bind. Too bad. "The feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, unfortunately, only got women part of the way, and major obstacles must still be overcome before women receive fair treatment at home," she writes. We've got to work together to finish the job, re-educating men and changing government and corporate policies.
AND NOW WE COME TO the dirty-little-secret portion of this essay. I don't know about you, but sometimes I just want to know what to do. Alternately outraged and depressed by all this brilliant analysis of my overdetermined, internalized sexism, I picked up a skinny book that had an obviously self-help subtitle: Why Women Earn Less: How to Make What You're Really Worth. Mikelann Valterra is a financial counselor who testifies about her own recovery from underearning. Her book has absolutely no social consciousness, no feminist analysis, and no research behind it: It's a purely personal look at self-defeating attitudes about money. But she sure has my number. Her simplistic discussion of "underearning women" and her cheesy exercises about how to find and shoot down all your psychological blocks were depressingly on target--and, I confess, quite helpful. I believe that intellectual authors like Babcock, Laschever, and Fels are correct: If we're to push feminism further, women have to be frankly ambitious and stand up for ourselves. We need to use whatever tools are at hand--mentors, friends, research, public policy, even self-help guides or negotiation handbooks--to get there. Because after 30 years, it's time to do something about that diaper-determined difference in our paychecks.
Making sense of faith
Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, Epistemology by Ruth Frankenberg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, 308 pp., $21.95 paper.Reviewed by Toni Lester
I HAVE TO ADMIT I approached Ruth Frankenberg's new book, Living Spirit, Living Practice cautiously at first. Reacting to her description of the book as a "study of the practice of religious and spiritual lives, and of the ways in which that practice is key to the making and remaking of everyday life," I wondered if an academic using epistemological tools to name something many consider unnamable was the right person for the job. Academics, most particularly Western, secular academics, have been applying theory to examine the faithful for some time. Unfortunately, many treat their subjects with condescension, while all the while claiming to be objective. The author is a self-identified white Jewish lesbian sociologist, who is best known for scholarship that challenges whites to own up to the way in which their race privilege influences their ability to be objective about racism. I was therefore interested to see how she would negotiate "that line between… 'knowledge' and 'belief,'" as she puts it, and if she would apply the same level of sensitivity she brings to her discussion of racism to the stories of faith covered here. I am happy to say that she has.
To accomplish her objectives, Frankenberg talked to 50 people from an impressive array of walks of life and faiths, including Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Wicca. The interviewees were also diverse in terms of their race, gender, sexuality, age, class, and physical ability. She asked them a series of open-ended questions ranging from how they communicate with God, the role that the body (as opposed or in addition to the mind) plays in their respective spiritual practices, and how they put faith into practice at work, to how the structural and dogmatic underpinnings of religious institutions encourage or hinder sexual identity and expression. The resulting narratives of belief and practice are the book's chief strength.
In "Talking to God, and God Talking Back," Nancy McKay, the white former minister of a San Francisco Bay Area Church of Christ, says that for her, transcendence involves "going inside, paying attention to whatever is present. Not denial of it, not trying to change it or fix it, but a trust that... if you really are in the truth of the moment, then the spirit comes in and works." It was in such a state of openness right after she was diagnosed with cancer that McKay heard a voice that said, "Come unto me all ye who are heavy laden and I will give you rest." This she took to be the voice of Jesus, with whom she engaged, during the course of her illness, in a series of comforting yet challenging conversations.
Frankenberg says that for most of her interviewees, spirituality means something "spontaneous and direct in the process of communing with divine and/or energetic forms--processes that might equally well take place with or without relationship to specific religious institutions"; whereas religion "signaled specific form, history, and institution, and often a sense of belonging to a particular identity group." Paying close attention to the interplay and tension between the two, she listens carefully to the ways in which her subjects ground spontaneous eruptions of the spirit within their particular institutional frameworks. Thus, just as she notes how McKay made sense of the voice she heard by placing it within the context of Christianity, she highlights how Avram Davis, the 46-year-old founder of the Center for the Study and Practice of Jewish Meditation, did much the same thing regarding his Jewish heritage.
In the chapter "Mind Embodied," Davis tells Frankenberg about his first encounter with what he believed to be the divine: "It was more me being in a place in nature and feeling a place of great light, hearing many, many voices… of great compassion, great love," he says, "advising me to study more within the tradition, to relax a little bit, to open… It felt like I was inside and outside soaked in honey." Frankenberg comments, "Avram does not say so, but context makes clear that the tradition in question [for him] is that of Judaism." Thus, she says, "[W]hile… the experience of Godtalk is spontaneous, it must also be understood as emplaced within a set of what one might call protocols of comprehension," systems of beliefs and understandings people rely on to make sense of their experience.
MYSTICS AND SPIRITUAL SEEKERS since the beginning of time have talked about hearing voices and about how love and compassion are the inevitable byproducts of contemplative or devotional intention. Certainly, action motivated by compassion or lovingkindness is a welcome phenomenon in our troubled world, whether it is the product of inner or outer voices, prayer, meditation, or the formal study of religion. Problems arise, however, when the "protocols of comprehension" Frankenberg refers to also function as barriers to inclusiveness with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, or class. True to her social-justice roots, Frankenberg therefore explores how the religious institutions with which some of her subjects are affiliated fail to adequately address this concern. Her discussion about how this dynamic is present in certain Zen and Vipassana Buddhist circles with respect to sexual orientation is particularly insightful.
Arianna Weisman, longtime Vipassana meditation teacher and self-identified "pale-skinned" Jewish lesbian, explains that, as the only openly lesbian Vipassana teacher in the US, she has been labeled a troublemaker by her mostly white heterosexual male colleagues. "I bring my understanding of Marxism, feminism, what it means to be a lesbian in this culture … with me to this tradition, and it definitely infuses it," she says. While this has generally not hindered her ability to teach, develop a following, or offer specially designed retreats for queer people, she faced troubling challenges at the beginning of her career as she looked for a permanent sangha, or spiritual home. Describing how she and her lover applied to live at Plum Village, the community created by the renowned Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, she says:
The head teacher said that we had to reapply separately. In no way could we [imply] that there was any sexuality between us, that the Vietnamese didn't understand about this kind of stuff… It was totally homophobic… that's why I say, there's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to go!… It's sad. It's really sad. (p. 239)Of course, the kind of prejudice experienced by Weisman is not unique to Buddhism. Frankenberg documents several other painful situations in which her subjects are marginalized because of their race, gender, or disability. What the interviewees in these situations have in common, she observes, is that each one "strives, through the cultivation of her or his practice, to call into question institutions that seem to fail to live up to what body, heart, mind and spontaneous relationships to path and God bring forward." Some choose to stay and work within the institutions, while others, like Weisman, eventually either strike out on their own and create more inclusive communities or join already existing ones.
Frankenberg opens each chapter with a discussion of theoretical frameworks that sets the stage for her interviews. While this structure may be useful to scholars or others comfortable with jargon-laden theory, it may be daunting to the uninitiated. Such readers would do well to skip ahead to the individual narratives, which are very accessible. Finally, there is one curious omission in this otherwise thought-provoking book. Frankenberg chooses not to reveal her own story of faith and practice (or the lack thereof), although she acknowledges that "it is, or so it seems, almost impossible for the qualitative scholar to remain utterly separate from the research site." Her decision not to engage in some level of overt subjectivity is unfortunate, especially since this is one of the chief strengths of her work on whiteness.
I therefore missed what she herself describes as the ideal situation in which the "researcher's location is visible rather than invisible, a resource rather than an obstacle." Glimpses of her point of view, however, can be found elsewhere, such as in her essay, "'When We Are Capable of Stopping, We Begin to See': Being White, Seeing Whiteness," in Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi's Names We Call Home: Autobiography On Racial Identity (1995). There, Frankenberg grapples with the apparent contradiction between Buddhist notions about the connection between suffering and attachment to the self as a fixed, never-changing identity, and marginalized people's need sometimes to affirm exactly such fixed identities as a strategy for political and psychological empowerment. Of course, Frankenberg's perspective can also be inferred from the questions she poses to her interviewees, especially when they are about issues of inclusion and exclusion. The implicit or explicit presence of Frankenberg's opinions aside, the book is an excellent assessment of the challenges of translating faith into everyday life. I look forward to hearing more from her about this subject, as well as about how those challenges have shaped her own personal journey.
Dwelling in ambivalence
The Judith Butler Reader edited by Sarah Salih with Judith Butler. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 336 pp., $29.95 paper. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence by Judith Butler. New York: Verso, 2004, 160 pp., $25.00 hardcover.
Undoing Gender by Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 2004, 273 pp., $21.95 paper.Reviewed by Heather Love
IN HER NEW COLLECTION Undoing Gender, Judith Butler offers a critique of the concept of intersubjectivity in the work of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin. In response to Benjamin's hopeful model of mutual recognition in love, Butler offers a wry rejoinder "from the ranks of ambivalence where a few of us continue to dwell." Butler has some distinguished company, for it is not just disappointed lovers who fill those ranks. Ambivalence is the keynote of the philosophical traditions with which Butler has engaged most deeply over the last couple of decades. In the preface to a 1999 reissue of her first book, Subjects of Desire (1987), Butler writes, "In a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions: What is the relation between desire and recognition, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity?"
The scene of desire and recognition that Butler keeps revisiting is the master-slave relation as portrayed in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit--hardly the stuff of high romance. These two guys very nearly kill each other before making it up; the fact that the selfhood of each depends on seeing himself reflected in the other is more a sign of fundamental human alienation than of them being "right for each other." Along with Hegel, some famously pessimistic thinkers have influenced Butler. While she has critiqued the phallocentric basis of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, she has taken up his tragic view of desire, perhaps best summed up in his statement that "there is no sexual relation." Butler's understanding of the intersection between desire and social forces is largely taken from her reading of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who argued in The History of Sexuality that the "liberation" of sexuality was not the key to freedom but rather a ruse of power, a means of managing and regulating modern subjects.
Butler has consistently described the difficulties of subjects who live in a world that precedes them and that is not of their own making. In contrast to talk about the autonomy of the individual, Butler's argument is that we do not make up the rules of our existence and that we are objects for others before we are ever subjects "for ourselves." We are not the independent authors of our actions; instead, if we are to be recognized at all, we will be forced to cite or repeat pre-existing norms and conventions. Perhaps the easiest way to grasp this concept in Butler's work is to think of it in terms of language; it is clear that if we are to communicate with others, we have to obey grammatical and syntactical rules that to a certain extent predetermine the kinds of things that are possible to say. Butler describes this situation as the paradox of subjection: In order to become a subject, one first has to subject oneself to the rules that govern social existence.
Butler first made this point in Gender Trouble (1990). She argues that when we "act like" men and women, we are not expressing some inner gender essence or core identity; rather, we are citing pre-existing norms. It is not just what we say but what we do--what we wear, how we gesture, how we walk--that sutures us into a recognizable grammar of gendered behavior. Such small acts, repeated again and again, produce the illusion of a natural ground for gender identity, but in fact no such ground exists. Furthermore, Butler argues that only by subjecting ourselves to the grammar of gender--by answering the question, "Are you a man or a woman?"--do we become subjects at all. While she does hold out hope for the possibility of subversive performances around the edges of the gender system (drag performance and butch/femme are her central examples), her theory of "gender performativity" doesn't allow for radical departures from such norms. She reminds us that while we continue to try to change the world, we remain deeply tied by desire and the need for recognition to the world as it is.
What is ultimately so strange about Gender Trouble is not what it says, but rather the fact that it has become a popular sensation. Butler herself has expressed surprise that the book has found such a large audience. Its success is odd given the highly abstract and dense style in which it is written and its total failure to deliver a "feelgood" message.
In a 1999 New Republic review of Butler's work, the feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum offered a somewhat paranoid and phobic account of the reasons for Butler's popularity. Casting Butler as a postmodern Svengali, Nussbaum describes her audience as a "group of young feminist philosophers" who are "remarkably docile" and "subservient to the oracular voice of Butler's text." Nussbaum takes Butler down for her obscure syntax; she finds a lack of philosophical rigor in her argumentation; and she attacks her politics as too stylish, caught up in "sexy" questions of representation but unconcerned with the suffering of real women. Ostensibly an attack on Butler's writing style, the article looks at times like an attack on Butler's gender style. Nussbaum's critique of Butler's emphasis on drag performance shades into a critique of "mannish domination" in butch-femme relationships, and the essay begins to sound like a familiar attempt to keep "stereotypes" (i.e., butch lesbians) from corrupting the movement.
Nussbaum's article illustrates an important feature of Butler's career: Over the years she has come to serve as a lightning rod for a whole range of feelings about the academy, critical theory, gender politics, and any number of other issues. Not all of this attention has been negative. In the early '80s, a graduate student published two issues of a fawning but irreverent fanzine entitled Judy! In general, Butler has remained fairly low key about her celebrity. While she let it be known that she did not like the 'zine and responded to Nussbaum in an op-ed essay in The New York Times, she has mostly ignored the hype. She has kept her head down and written lots of books.
AT THIS POINT, HOWEVER, the jig is up. The publication of three new books this year has made it difficult to ignore Butler's special status in the academy and in the larger intellectual world. For people who are unfamiliar with Butler's work, a new reader edited by Sarah Salih with Butler's assistance provides a good introduction. The Judith Butler Reader draws on w
