Frieda's Feminist Book Blog

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC

2011-12-16T20:42:00.000-08:00

"Women Were In It From the Beginning"
Guest review by Jo Freeman (full review with additional links at http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/book-review-hands-on-the-plow

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young and Dorothy M. Zellner,
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010, 616 pp.

Of all the Sixties civil rights organizations, the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee was the one which most inspired young people all over the country. SNCC – pronounced snick – grew out of the sit-ins that started in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, and rapidly spread throughout the South to protest race discrimination.

Women were in it from the beginning. Ella Baker, an experienced activist in her fifties, had had a heavy taste of male chauvinism in her three years with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When she invited the student protestors to come together at her alma mater, Shaw University, in April, to co-ordinate their actions, she did not want them to follow the same path.

During the next few years SNCC expanded from protesting segregation to organizing communities. Staff went farm to farm and door to door persuading some of the most oppressed people in the U.S. that the time had come to throw off their shackles. For this they were beaten, jailed, and sometimes killed. The risks they took created a camaraderie which has remained to this day.

In this book 52 women who worked in SNCC in the 1960s tell their stories. They come from many walks of life: black and white, North and South, farm and city. They organized in the field and worked in the office. They demonstrated in the streets and went to jail. Some came and went, some stayed for years. Their stories flesh out a civil rights history which has emphasized the heroics of men.

Those who contributed to this book chose what to write about. The editors organized their recollections into ten sections, each with a preface. Geography and chronology roughly structure the book, but only roughly.

While the common theme is that all the authors are women, this is not a book about women. We don’t learn much about women as a group and only a little about them compared to men – not even the ratio of males to females, or the gender dimensions of work. There is no discussion of "the role of women in SNCC" or any attempt at feminist analysis. It is, as the subtitle says, accounts by women in SNCC.
Nonetheless, there are enough paragraphs on women to fill about six of the 616 pages.

Women were a major presence in the local communities in which SNCC worked. One of them, Victoria Gray Adams of Hattiesburg,* Mississippi, wrote that "Women were out front as a survival tactic. Men could not function in high-visibility, high-profile roles where we come from, because they would be plucked off.... The white folks didn’t see the women as that much of a threat.... They didn’t know the power of women, especially black women."

Annie Pearl Avery of Birmingham,** Alabama, writes: "In the South, black women were more able to exercise their rightful privileges than black men. On SNCC projects there was sexism toward women, because this was a way of life for all women. Sometimes I felt limited because we weren’t allowed to drive the cars.... The male chauvinism was there, but I don’t think it was intentional. It wasn’t as dominant in SNCC as it was in SCLC, which Miss Baker told us about."
　
Historians see SNCC as a seedbed of the women’s liberation movement, but the women in this book remember SNCC as a nurturing family which taught them skills and gave them a breadth of experience that they had not found elsewhere. "[W]orking with SNCC was an empowering and egalitarian experience." No one has memories of being demeaned and only a few of being restricted in any way because of their sex. One wishes they could compare their experiences to those of SNCC men to see if there was any difference.

For example, Dottie Zellner writes that when she first met Jim Forman, executive director of SNCC, he asked her "Can you type?" Not in this book is the question Forman first asked of Julian Bond, which was "What can you do?" (I heard Bond tell that story at Forman’s memorial service). At the time, the different assumptions about male and female capabilities captured in these different questions was so embedded in the culture that no one questioned them, and, years later, apparently they still don’t. Instead Dottie recounts that Forman’s "greatest gift was the ability to immediately match each person’s skills to the organization’s needs."

Forman put Bond in charge of SNCC communications. After Dottie (not yet married to Zellner) earned her stripes as a typist, Forman realized that she could also write and let her assist Bond. Indeed Forman assigned several women to the communications office, with the result that this book has excellent descriptions of how SNCC got the word out to the press about what the movement was doing.

The belief that the women’s liberation movement was rooted in SNCC dates from a paper on "Women in the movement" presented at a SNCC conference in the fall of 1964. One of 30 to 40 papers submitted for discussion, it was authored anonymously. Two of the authors – Mary King and Casey Hayden – later became known when they published a somewhat different version. Two more – Elaine DeLott Baker and Emmie Schrader Adams – acknowledge their authorship in this book. According to the editors, the women who submitted this paper were all white, though we don’t know how many there were.

The paper began with a list of "gender inequalities ... all concerning black women," derived from observation and informal discussions among women after several "demonstrated in the office, protesting the expectation that women would always perform certain secretarial tasks." Hayden and Adams insist that the paper really wasn’t about women in SNCC but about the larger culture. "The openness of SNCC, ... the invitation to critique the organization ... provided the arena."

The abundance of first-person stories make this a very valuable book from which future historians of the civil rights movement will learn much. But someone still needs to explain what was it about SNCC that fostered a feminist perspective.
___________________
* The current Mayor of Hattiesburg is Johnny Dupree, an African-American who was also the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of Mississippi in 2011. He received 39 percent of the vote. A prior poll showed that there was a 3 percent gender gap, with women favoring Dupree. Blacks favored Dupree by a ratio of four to one.
** Birmingham has only had black mayors since 1979. All were male except for Carole
Smitherman who was Acting Mayor for two months in 2009.

Larry's Party, by Carol Shields

2011-11-11T21:05:00.000-08:00

Larry's Party, by Carol Shields (Random House first Canadian edition, 1997, 339 pp.)

Carol Shields (1935-2003) is a prominent member of the canon of Canadian writers. Although she is originally from the US and once won a Pulitzer prize (for The Stone Diaries), I had never heard of her until I moved to Canada. After finding out about her, I happened to read something of hers that I didn't care for, and so a second book of hers, The Box Garden, languished on my dresser unread for several years until I finally got around to giving it a try. I thought it was fairly original and nicely written, so I looked for something else by Shields in the public library, and the only thing they had on the shelf that day was Larry's Party.

A good book is always better, I'd say, if you expect nothing much of it in advance, so I don't want to overpraise it. Not much that is exciting happens, really, in Larry's Party. It covers twenty years of a man's life, from his twenties to his forties, 1977 to 1997; and during that time Larry learns a pretty interesting profession, marries twice, has one child, gets sick and recovers, lives in two countries, and slowly goes through a process of maturing.

What makes the book especially exciting to me, really, is its apparently unique structure. It's not chronological internally, and yet its overall motion is a chronology. At one point, Larry has a body scan for medical reasons, and the way the scan slices the body into segments seems to be related to the way Shields slices Larry into different views that can be put together to make a whole picture of the man.

Each chapter is focused on a specific aspect of Larry, and similar events are repeated in different chapters, through the lens of this different focus. The fifteen chapters include Larry's Love, 1978; Larry's folks, 1980; Larry's Work, 1981; Larry's Words, 1983; Larry's Penis, 1986; Larry's Search for the Wonderful and Good, 1992; Larry's Threads, 1993-4; Larry's Living Tissues, 1996.... By the end of the book, we know Larry quite intimately, as a person, similarly complex to ourselves.

There's a story about Shaw, that he was asked how he wrote such interesting women characters. He is said to have replied: "I imagine that a woman is a person like myself, and that is how the trick is done." In Larry's Party, Shields has reversed that gaze. In the last scene, the women in Larry's life have quite a discussion about gender and the role of men, which at this point we can consider from inside the persona of a pretty decent man, who is able to hear it without discomfort.

In my experience it is fairly rare for a novel to have an original structure that is both very evident and very functional. The great exemplar that comes to mind is Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Larry's Party is nothing so monumental, but it stands out as being constructed with mastery of the craft. The research Shields did into garden mazes is also very gratifying.

-FW

Ms. Magazine Library

2011-09-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

https://www.facebook.com/wingsradio#!/media/set/?set=a.10150312289568540.360163.15914543539&type=1

Ms. Magazine is re-organizing its library. The pictures show quite a few covers of books a lot of us must have read.

Cow

2011-05-08T21:24:00.000-07:00

Cow by Susan Hawthorne (Spinifex 2011), 166 pages, trade paperback

Susan sent me a copy of Cow and I find it fascinating but difficult to explain. There are all these different cows with different names of goddesses and mythical and historical figures, references I vaguely recognize in many cases, but they also have viewpoints and voices that are credible as those of cows in some ways, and as tale-tellers in others. There are a few marginal notes, which are great, but if there were as many marginal notes as I really needed, they would be longer than the poems. That said, the stories and scenes in the poems seemed to just whisk me along through the book even though I didn't know how I got there exactly or where we were going. It has an airy quality, like being out in a meadow or riding on a magic carpet or something. I recommend the trip.

Here's a review Susan linked to from her FaceBook page, written by someone who has gotten a bit more handle on the structure than I:

http://medusacoils.blogspot.com/2011/05/review-cow-by-susan-hawthorne.html

Letters from Egypt

2011-02-28T16:16:00.000-08:00

This is a guest review of Letters from Egypt by Lucy Duff Gordon. This book has gone through many editions since it was first printed in 1865. The most recent edition is a paperback released by Virago Press in 2007. Virago is a publisher specifically for books written by women. There is also an online version for e-readers. Here, by permission from the blog Isis Unveiled, is Leona Graham's review. - FW

Isis Unveiled: Letters from Egypt, The Freedom March & The Shared Pain of Revolution

by Leona Graham on 28 February, 2011 (in Anthropocene Diary)

Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt (1st edition, 1865) reveal a woman in love with her adopted country, an Egypt that has changed in many ways since the 1860′s when she was writing to her husband Alick (Sir Alexander Duff Gordon) and her mother, Sarah Austin. In many others, it is the same, ancient land where injustice has reigned for centuries. The impact of Lucie’s letters, even after 146 years, is still profound. The first batch were reprinted three times in the first year of their publication (1865). Two more editions were published in 1875 and 1902, and a centenary edition in 1969. My (appropriately) well-worn ‘Virago Travellers’ copy is a 1986 reprint of the 1983 publication. The Letters‘ long-lasting, continuing popularity is justified, for despite my initial skepticism (having been put off by Frank’s biography and a fictional account of Lucie’s English lady’s maid Sally, Mistress of Nothing) because of her ‘upper class point of view’, I quite soon put aside my judgments of Lucie’s class and privilege as I drank in her absolute love of Egypt and its suffering people. The Egypt of Tuesday, November 11, 1862 (the date of the first letter in the 1983 edition) is one under the Pashas’ malign power. Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. The first ‘modern’ viceroy of Egypt was Muhammad Ali, followed by Said and then, Ali’s nephew Ismail (from 1863). British rule was yet to come; in fact, Lucie avers that many Egyptians (of several classes) were asking for British intervention, to help them out of their desperate plight.

Lucie’s picture of the brutal misery of the people, over taxed and forced into labor (the corvee--building the Suez Canal and other projects at the whim of the Pasha) is painful, even now, or especially now, in light of recent events and the peoples’ suffering under the Mubarak dictatorship. Then the French were hated as they were the financiers and builders of the canal. In her ‘new’ 1983 Introduction to the Letters, (the original introduction that of the famous English doyen of letters and family friend, George Meredith), Sarah Searight refers to the ‘unveiling of modern Egypt’ (to ‘the west’) as stemming from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798; the accompanying French artist Dominique Vivant Denon provided extraordinary images; access to Egypt was largely unavailable till then due to the ‘prevailing anarchy’ of the Ottoman Empire.

I leave you to discover the fascinating details of Lucie’s journeys up and down the Nile, her stays in Luxor where she endeared the people to her by becoming their healer, her trials and tribulations, and her special devotion to her servant, Omar, the paramour of Sally (by whom she became pregnant), whose dismissal and disappearance is not remarked on; one supposes the daughter (Janet Ross) edited out any (?) references to the ‘scandal’.

Lucie’s Egyptian adventures all came about because she was forced to travel abroad to a warm country (in truth, a very hot one) to relieve the symptoms of TB, made worse by wet and cold British weather. It now seems an accident of sweet fate that she found herself and gained literary fame through her love of Egypt and its people. In today’s Egypt, she would may have had to evacuate, like my resident pal finally had to–but today she returns on the first flight back to Luxor, to the land she too has fallen in love with, that she has adopted and it, her. During the time of her brief exile we have seen events unfold, the powerful virus of revolution spread–The Freedom March across North Africa and into the Gulf states–and beyond, strangely reflected by the battle in Wisconsin USA to hold onto western democratic rights (“Our turn will come”, my husband says, ominously), to gather as a body to demand workers’ rights over capitalistic chicanery by big, brutal moneyed forces. We call these gatherings ‘unions’. The Misguided Right, funded by predatory corporations and bad governments, has attempted to turn the word ‘union’ into a bad word.

Words are such powerful tools; we have to constantly be on our guard to protect them, and those who dare to speak them. Free speech has been won at great cost by our ancestors; it is our duty to protect what they lived and in many cases, died for.

Each day, as The Freedom March has proceeded across North Africa and our TV and computer screens, I have been viscerally impacted. When they were battling for their rights in Tahrir Square in Cairo, I felt as if I were there with them, as a woman, beside the other women. In Libya, where I have never visited, it was at first harder to envision myself (unlike Tunisia and Egypt where I have spent time) and thus the despair, rage and pain I felt seemed at first not to be able to find a place to concretely ‘link to’. And then suddenly it happened: I was inside the houses with the women (there have been few images of women seen outside in the crowds, but some have been); I was one of them too, as they bravely opened their doors to let in and look after wounded strangers, the ‘pro-democracy protesters’, boys and men who could be their fathers, brothers, sons. And sometimes I went out with them, carefully. Many householders had (according to some reports) been gathering supplies, as they foresaw some of what was to come with the Egyptian uprising and revolution. They were somewhat prepared. Their sacrifice, both men and women, adults and children, is great. The fear is palpable; the determination even greater. They speak of a revolution that is about honour, the honour of the individual’s role in the state, of remaking the state with the blood and bodies and minds of the protesters. As their mangled bodies pile up in hospitals and morgues, are buried in hasty graves, some dug by Gaddafi forces to hide massacres, our common sense of Power to the People takes on a new note of urgency. And finally in the last few days and hours, ‘the international community’ through the United Nations has started to make its voice heard–our unified planetary human voice in fact as represented by the UN, an institution that many retrograde people (especially in the USA) have been trying to diminish and even destroy. Individual states have also raised their voices and imposed sanctions that hopefully will curtail the remains of the Gaddafi regime (and not the Libyan people at large). We can only hope that these diehards finally will see the writing on the wall and disperse, leaving Gaddafi and his ever declining circle of thugs isolated and ultimately available for the international justice for war crimes. That China and Russia (and Iran, as it was unanimous) also agreed to the UN statement is hypocritical but rather useful for future finger-pointing when their own peoples demand change.

The shared pain so many of us feel with regard to the uprisings and revolutions for democracy in Tunisia and Egypt (still very much ‘a work in process’ as we’ve seen in the last few days) and now Libya, as well as Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and most recently Oman, is salutary. For many of us in the ‘democratic west’, our heroic ancestors won the rights of democracy long ago; we are watching the future heroic ancestors for those in North Africa and the Gulf States (and beyond). We don’t honour our ancestors sufficiently for the deeds of bringing us freedom from despotic rulers and regimes. By honouring the present democracy freedom fighters (and they all avow that aim for a civil society, one with democratic institutions) we help to rectify our remissness as it it brings the shock of recognition: it brings the world closer, and in particular it brings those of differing cultures and religions, especially Christians and Muslims, closer. Those on the far right (and far left although the latter doesn’t really exist any more in the west) who try to undermine democratic human rights, who for the sake of personal and corporate greed try to wrest those rights from ‘we the people’ (selling off public utilities and woodlands to the highest bidder for example) or want to have the advantage of crimepetitive capitalism (as my cousin Gary calls it) need to think again, look back in respect and renew their commitment to what makes life ‘in the west’ free–relatively speaking that is. There’s a level at which such a selfish citizen or entity is a little Ben Ali, Mubarak or Gaddafi: that member ‘of the public’ who wants the advantages that democratic taxation gives without paying for them or lazy types who want it all without putting in honest labour to deserve them; they end up being the same crazy selfish entity. The ‘democratic body politic’ will survive despite a certain number of aberrants, but when the boat tips with too many on board, we could drown in the open seas of crass materialism, gross, untrammeled uncontrolled capitalism and selfishness, so we’d best rethink nasty prejudices, all sides, as we watch the Freedom March across North Africa.

May the March proceed as the Ides of March approach….

Caesar, then Anthony after him will fall, when and who and what will replace them? Another tyrant like Augustus? Or a new body politic informed with wisdom born of the pain of revolution?

Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

2011-02-21T09:38:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Jo Freeman for sharing her many interesting feminist book reviews. Please also follow her columns at SeniorWomen Web - Frieda

Betty Friedan’s Book

by Jo Freeman

A review of
Strange Stirring:
The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
by Stephanie Coontz
Basic Books, 2011, xxiii, 222

When Coontz’ editor asked her to write about the impact of The Feminine Mystique she sat down to re-read a book she thought she knew well, but in fact, had never read. She had heard and read so much about it over the years, that she had absorbed its message without having read it at all.

It was her mother who told Coontz, a child of the Sixties, about the 1963 book, and her mother’s generation that had been excited by it. When Coontz assigned it to her own students, they found it “boring and dated.” So much had changed since 1963, that the book that stirred a generation of women didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.

Her students had no idea how much their grandmothers had to learn about their own unhappiness, let alone why they had to learn it. So Coontz set out to write about a generation of intelligent, well-educated women who had been marginalized by their own society. She wanted to understand how being confined to the home had undermined their sense of self and self-worth, until Friedan told them about “the problem that has no name.”

She began by reading the numerous letters Friedan received after publication of her book, and some that Friedan wrote herself. She also went through oral histories and did interviews of women who had read and been moved by the book. The bulk of her book is based on this research, as she relates the stories of women whose lives were changed by reading Friedan’s book. Some of them thought that Friedan had literally saved their lives.

The women who paid the “price of privilege” were mostly white and middle-class, but Coontz devotes a chapter to African-American and working class women. She criticizes Friedan for ignoring the African-American experience, but acknowledges that it was a different experience. She points out that overall, black women faced different problems and had different priorities; only a few found that Friedan’s book had something to say to them.

Working class women were also left out of the book; Coontz reviews the many studies done on such women to explain why. Essentially, less education led to lower expectations and lower expectations led to greater satisfaction with what they had. The college-educated women that Friedan wrote for – and about – expected more out of life; society’s insistence that such expectations were unhealthy created its own social pathology.

Betty Friedan’s book was successful because it explained something than needed explaining, and did so in compelling language. “The book was a journalistic tour de force,” Coontz, concludes, “combining scholarship, investigative reporting, and a compelling personal voice.” It was also well promoted by its publisher.

The book’s success generated many myths, some fostered by right-wingers and some by Friedan herself. Among these, that Fridan was herself “just another unhappy housewife” when in fact she was a successful free-lance writer, who got her start working for labor and left-wing publications. Coontz argues that Friedan hid her past in order to avoid being discredited by professional anti-communists looking for red influence behind every dissident idea.

While The Feminine Mystique certainly didn’t jump-start the women’s movement, it was able to ride the wave of female discontent that jelled into organizational protest in the mid-1960s. The book’s success and Friedan’s celebrity made it easier for the nascent movement to attract press attention and thus attract members. The movement would have happened without Betty Friedan’s book, but it happened faster with it. For that Coontz and every other feminist is grateful.

_______________________________________________
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You Came Here to Die, Didn’t You? Registering Black Voters One Soul at a Time, South Carolina, 1965

2011-02-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

The Second Freedom Summer

By Jo Freeman

A review of
You Came Here to Die, Didn’t You?
Registering Black Voters One Soul at a Time, South Carolina, 1965
by Sherie Holbrook Labedis
Roseville, CA: Smokey Hill Books, 2011, xviii, 187 pp.
You can buy this book directly from the author, through her webpage at www.sherielabedis.com.

Most people have heard of Freedom Summer, when a few hundred mostly white college students went to Mississippi in 1964 to try to break white opposition to local blacks becoming voters, to run freedom schools, and generally to defy Southern racial practices.

Few know that there was a second freedom summer in 1965. The first Freedom Summer was run by a confederation of civil rights organizations, though SNCC took the lead. The organizations went their separate ways in 1965, dividing up the states so they didn’t overlap or compete.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, best known as Dr. King’s organization, brought between three and four hundred young people to six Southern states for a project called SCOPE – Southern Community Organization for Political Education. Expecting the Voting Rights Act to pass in June, its purpose was to get local blacks registered to vote.

However, the VRA didn’t become law until August 6, so the young volunteers had to deal with numerous county boards of registrars, some more willing than others to process long lines of aspiring voters, and various state laws limiting who could register.

Sherie Holbrook was in her freshman year at Berkeley when the march on Selma caught her attention (and that of a lot of others). She signed up with SCOPE and in June went from Berkeley, California, to Berkeley County, South Carolina. Her book is about that summer, based on a journal she kept, her memories, interviews with people she worked with, and photographs.

It was like going to a foreign country. Local blacks spoke a Gullah dialect – a patois of English and West African languages handed down over time – which she didn’t understand. She hadn’t known any black people in the rural California town she was raised in and had never seen the poverty and sheer neglect of people’s needs that she saw in South Carolina.

There were lots of new experiences she had to adjust to: sharing a bed, eating fatback, being stared at as she walked down the street, children who wanted to feel her blond hair, watching a hog killed for dinner, and white Southern hostility.

Being a civil rights worker sounds glamorous, but it’s mostly drudgery punctuated by fear. Most days were rather routine – going door to door in oppressive heat and humidity talking to people “one soul at a time.”

Many people were afraid to register; standing in line at the courthouse is a public act; a list of registered voters is a public list. A lot were apathetic; they’d been told so long that voting wasn’t for them that registering just didn’t seem like something they needed to do. Some were illiterate and couldn’t meet the minimal requirements to register.

Then there’s the fear. The black elementary school down the block from the Freedom House where Sherie and her project workers lived was set on fire; a fire truck came but no water was available to put out the flames. Less than two weeks later, a black church only a little farther away was firebombed by two white men in a truck. The message was clear: GET OUT.

One day two different groups tried to integrate local eateries in the county seat. The one Sherie entered was immediately closed and everyone told to leave. As she drove off with her co-workers two cars followed and eventually ran her off of the road. The whites in those cars got out, smashed the windows of her car, dragged two black guys out of the project car and beat them up.

The other group at a different restaurant was ignored by the management when they occupied two tables, but not by the patrons, or one particular patron, who was big enough and strong enough to throw each of them out the door as they endeavored to stay non-violent. One white, female civil rights worker was thrown through the plate glass door, ripping open the skin of her thigh. At the local hospital the white doctor stitched her up, then yelled at her to get out and never come back.

It’s always easier to write about the causes of fear than every-day drudgery, and the author’s descriptions of these scares and others make her summer sound exciting – in both senses of the word. She does this as though she’s writing a novel; her account of these events is gripping. But in the long run it’s the drudge work that counts.

That drudge work produced some sweet moments. One that Sherie cherishes still was when Rebecca Crawford learned how to write her name. Another was taking 150 people to the courthouse to register to vote on the only registration day in July. Or when local blacks packed the courtroom to see that one of them got a fair trial, before being thrown out by the magistrate who didn’t want to be part of “a show.”

There were also some comic moments, such as when the FBI showed up to investigate the church burning, and the South Carolina police asked the project workers what they did to cause someone to burn down a church and a school. Or when the sheriff arranged for them to be served in one of the restaurants they had been thrown out of to avoid a threatened lawsuit.

At the end of the summer she left wondering if she had accomplished anything. The obvious success of taking several hundred people to be registered that summer was outweighed by her guilt over the church and school burnings. That summer had left a permanent impact on her life; what had it done for the people she worked with? These questions were on her mind when she returned to South Carolina a few years ago to talk to the people she had worked with (some of whom she had stayed in touch with over the years) and find out what they had done with their lives.

She came away reassured that the summer project had made a difference. At the very least it gave local blacks a sense of hope, a feeling that others cared about them, and a belief that change was possible. “Once we got the votin’ fever” one said, things just had to change.

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She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker

2010-12-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

by Brigid O'Farrell, Cornell University Press, 2010, 304 pp.

On December 10, 2010, World Human Rights Day, the AFL-CIO is hosting an event at its headquarters in Washington DC to honour Eleanor Roosevelt. The speakers are Liz Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and Julie Kushner, director of Region 9A of the United Auto Workers, and, Brigid O'Farrell, the author of this book.

Human Rights Day is an appropriate date because of Roosevelt's prominent and pivotal work in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, has now been translated into 375 languages, and counting.

Especially pertinent to workers and the labour movement are these three articles of the Declaration:

Article 23

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25

1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

--from The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, official English translation.

It is noteworthy that the recently created United Nations Human Rights Council is developing a method for reviewing and delivering opinions on human rights complaints on a regular basis.

According to the unions organizing the Friday, December 10, event, Eleanor Roosevelt "was born to privilege and married a U.S. President, but Eleanor Roosevelt was a committed, lifelong advocate for workers and a proud union member for more than 25 years. She Was One of Us reveals—for the first time—the story of our greatest First Lady’s deep ties to the American Labor movement."

The Cornell University Press webpage for the book is more explicit about Roosevelt's union membership, in the AFL-CIO's Newspaper Guild. I have not yet seen the book, but here is the remainder of the description from the publisher's site:

Brigid O'Farrell follows Roosevelt—one of the most admired and, in her time, controversial women in the world—from the tenements of New York City to the White House, from local union halls to the convention floor of the AFL-CIO, from coal mines to political rallies to the United Nations.

Roosevelt worked with activists around the world to develop a shared vision of labor rights as human rights, which are central to democracy. In her view, everyone had the right to a decent job, fair working conditions, a living wage, and a voice at work. She Was One of Us provides a fresh and compelling account of her activities on behalf of workers, her guiding principles, her circle of friends—including Rose Schneiderman of the Women's Trade Union League and the garment unions and Walter Reuther, "the most dangerous man in Detroit"—and her adversaries, such as the influential journalist Westbrook Pegler, who attacked her as a dilettante and her labor allies as "thugs and extortioners." As O'Farrell makes clear, Roosevelt was not afraid to take on opponents of workers' rights or to criticize labor leaders if they abused their power; she never wavered in her support for the rank and file.

Today, union membership has declined to levels not seen since the Great Depression, and the silencing of American workers has contributed to rising inequality. In She Was One of Us, Eleanor Roosevelt's voice can once again be heard by those still working for social justice and human rights.

This event and book came to my attention through the US National Council of Women's Organizations. Brigid O'Farrell is a member of NCWO, and she researched labor issues at NCWO and at the Women’s Research and Education Institute (WREI). She is now affiliated with the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University.

Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson's first ladies

2010-12-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

by Kristie Miller.
Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010

Guest review by Jo Freeman. This review has been reposted by permission of the author, from Senior Women's Web at http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/woodrow-wilson-s-women

Woodrow Wilson's Women

More than most men, Woodrow Wilson needed women. He needed their love, their support and their companionship. In the confines of his home, he surrounded himself with women. He had two wives (sequentially), one mistress, and three daughters.

Theirs is a complex story of love and politics. In this book, Ellen and Edith come alive as real persons and not just appendages to their famous husband, even though they eagerly took on the job of helpmate as their major role in life. The author tells their story in an engaging manner while opening a new window on the character of our 28th President and the entire Wilson presidency.

Born in Savannah, Georgia on May 15, 1860, Ellen Axson met Woodrow Wilson in Rome, Georgia when she was 23. A talented artist, she was convinced that no man was good enough for her. Both were the children of Presbyterian ministers with strong allegiances to the Confederacy, though her Southern roots were deeper.

Woodrow was on his way to an academic career. Ellen quickly set aside whatever ambitions she had to become a model faculty wife. She translated scholarly articles from German and digested other material to save him time. She studied home economics so she could better manage her household and entertain his colleagues. In her spare time she reared and home-schooled their daughters.

After Woodrow became President of Princeton University in 1902 her responsibilities increased. She had to entertain constantly, relieving her husband of a responsibility he did not like. She became his advisor on the intricacies of academic politics. All this was good training for her two years as wife of the Governor of New Jersey and then first lady. As Woodrow moved into electoral politics, she helped shape his ideas and write his speeches. Indeed many thought that she was the better politician of the two.

Woodrow and Ellen were a devoted couple, writing intimate and passionate letters to each other whenever they were apart more than a few days. This did not prevent him from establishing an intense friendship with Mary Allen Hulbert Peck, a married woman he met in Bermuda in 1907. Woodrow had been ordered to take a rest for his health; Ellen had stayed behind to care for an ill daughter. Wilson continued his relationship with Mary, writing and visiting her for years. Ellen was wounded, but the only change it made in their life was that she made more time for her own painting.

Ellen was just as ambitious for Woodrow as he was. She wanted to be the wife of a great man. When he became President she continued to be his sounding board and chief advisor, sitting in on meetings and helping with his correspondence. She also lent her name and prestige to various charitable endeavors in addition to her own projects, one of which was designing the White House rose garden.

Ellen died of kidney failure on August 6, 1914. Woodrow wept profusely; her death left him totally depressed and despondent. Friends wondered if he could carry on as President. Seven months later he found a balm for his pain.

Edith Bolling had also married at 23, to Norman Galt in 1896. Born in a small town in Virginia, her formal education was spotty as her family was large and her brothers got preference. She married the son of a jewelry store owner in Washington, D.C., and herself became the owner in 1908 after the men died. Her only child was born prematurely, living just three days.

Her route to the grieving widower was through Woodrow’s friend and personal physician, who was dating a friend of Edith’s. One contact led to another until Edith had her first dinner with Woodrow in the White House on March 23, 1915. Within a few weeks he had professed his love and was writing her daily.

They married on December 18, 1915, later than Woodrow wished but still close enough to Ellen’s death to provoke some unseemly gossip.

Before marrying Edith, Woodrow had to extricate himself from his relationship with Mary, who had divorced her husband in 1912. It’s unclear whether Woodrow was no longer emotionally attached to Mary at the time Ellen died, or whether he did not think she would make a suitable first lady.

Whatever the reason, he did not call her to his side, though she seems to have expected as much. After he became engaged to Edith, he sent Mary a “Dear John” letter. He also sent her several sizable checks as she was in financial straits. Despite rumors that Mary might publish some of Woodrow’s letters to her, there was no scandal.

Once married, Woodrow could seldom bear to be away from Edith, sharing his work as well as his leisure with her. She would often read dispatches to him from abroad, or decode messages and code his to be sent oversees. She made phone calls for him, reviewed his speeches and generally acted like an extension of his own self.

Although Edith had long tasted independence, she devoted her life to a man who, according to her social secretary, “needs love and care more than any I have ever seen.” She rose with him at 5:00 a.m. to make him breakfast in order not to disturb the servants. She watched over his diet and his exercise, and made sure that his work was interspersed with some fun.

In the Spring of 1919 Woodrow suffered what in retrospect look like a series of small strokes. At the time they were attributed to various causes, particularly overwork. They presaged the major stroke he suffered in October, which paralyzed his left side. In between he had more bouts of disability, especially on a September tour through the US to sell the League of Nations to the public. The tour was cut short in Utah after what would be his last speech. As their train rushed the ailing President home, Edith wrote that their life was “in ruins.”

The extent of Woodrow’s disability was not disclosed to the public, though there was much speculation that he had suffered a stroke. Even when word leaked out after four months of dissimulation, it was still unclear how ill he was. Woodrow had long suffered from high blood pressure, but at the time the only treatment was rest – which became impossible during the treaty negotiations in Europe and the fight for the League. Now Edith made sure he got plenty of rest, mostly by not letting anyone with official business see him at all.

When Woodrow’s mind was able to function some of the time, Edith took over the task of deciding what matters should be brought to his attention and what should be delegated to others in the Administration, or simply ignored. She thought work would help restore him to heath if it wasn’t too strenuous or upsetting.

Edith watched closely over her husband, acting as his gatekeeper, determining which public business was important enough to take up his limited time and energy. She spoke with the officials who wanted to talk to Woodrow and decided whom to allow into his sick room. Decisions on appointments and other matters were announced by her. All this led to speculation that she had become the first woman President. While it’s unlikely that she made any decisions, she gave the impression that she was more than her husband’s amanuensis.

There was little pressure for Woodrow to resign, partially because no one knew how much or how soon he would recover. Vice President Thomas Marshall made no effort to take over. He had been kept out of the loop since taking office in 1913, tasked solely with presiding over the Senate. Edith knew more about the affairs of state – thanks to four years of Woodrow’s tutelage – than the Vice President did.

After his Presidency ended, the Wilsons moved into a newly purchased house in Washington. Woodrow did some writing, but he was very frail, dying on February 23, 1924. Edith lived there another forty years, sharing the house with one or more siblings until her death on December 28 (Woodrow’s birthday), 1961. She spent these decades promoting her husband’s legacy, controlling access to his papers, and generally being the dean of all First Ladies. Others may have thought that she was the woman who would be President, but she never did.

Jo
www.jofreeman.com
http://www.seniorwomen.com/authors/authorpageFreeman.html

I asked the reviewer: I wonder how much she influenced his decision in January 1918 to support women's suffrage "as a war measure." He had been busting the picketers outside the White house the year before, but somehow he met with Carrie Chapman Catt and they exchanged causes - she backed the war, and he backed suffrage. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wilson/portrait/wp_suffrage.html - FW

Answer: "Edith appears to have had no interest in Suffrage one way or the other. Woodrow moved gradually from opposition to support. One of his daughters was a suffrage supporter; she may have had some influence on her father. Read my review of the Alice Paul book [ http://feministbook.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html ], or better yet, read the book." -JF

A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, by Mary Walton

2010-11-05T23:15:00.000-07:00

Guest review by Jo Freeman:
"Persistence Pays"

A review of
A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot
by Mary Walton
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, xi, 284 pp.

One hundred years ago, a fragile looking young woman disembarked from an ocean liner in Philadelphia to be greeted by her mother and a handful of reporters. During her two years of work for woman suffrage in Great Britain with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), headed by the controversial Emmeline Pankhurst, Alice Paul had become hot copy in her own country. In the next decade she would become even more so as she led the militant wing of the suffrage movement to victory in 1920.

This book chronicles her life through that momentous achievement, with a short Epilogue for the rest of her 92 years. The middle portion of her life was lived in relative obscurity, but before she died on July 9, 1977 she was celebrated widely for the cause she led after she returned to the US in 1910.

At that time the US suffrage movement was just beginning to emerge from years of “the doldrums” after gaining equal suffrage for women in four states in the 1890s. A victory in Washington State in November of 1910 brought the number to five. While the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was focused on attaining suffrage state by state, Alice Paul resolved to do it by Constitutional amendment.

Initially she persuaded NAWSA to make her the head of its Congressional Committee. In that capacity she staged a pageant on March 3, as Woodrow Wilson arrived in Washington for his inauguration the next day. Walton describes what happened in a chapter aptly entitled “I did not know men could be such Fiends.”

She also addresses the matter of why the parade had a separate section for black women, a matter that has haunted feminists down to the present day. Turns out that who marched where was much more complicated than the decision of one woman to conform the public procession to the cultural norms of a Southern city, and it wasn’t all that segregated.

Paul soon formed her own organization, the Congressional Union, to push for a federal amendment. She started her own newspaper and raised her own funds. She did not consult with NAWSA on any of this, or even report on the activities of its Congressional Committee which she still headed. Not surprisingly, NAWSA’s leadership was not happy at this, and the two groups soon went their separate ways.

While Walton’s biography includes much on the organizations Paul headed and the women she worked with, NAWSA is mentioned mostly as an impediment to Paul’s work. One would never know that the women who worked on Carrie Chapman Catt’s winning plan were much of a factor in gaining the 19th Amendment.

Woodrow Wilson, however, gets his own chapter. A good deal of Paul’s activity was focused on him, and not on the Members of Congress who had to pass a Constitutional Amendment. Wilson was, as Walton points out, “a complex man.” He preferred the company of women to men, but saw them only as homemakers whose God-given job was to make men comfortable.

Although Wilson personally did not believe in woman suffrage, he tried to keep it out of his 1912 campaign. Nonetheless he was willing to meet with suffragists – both NAWSA and Paul’s – many times. In 1914, after seven meetings with suffragists in almost two years, he announced that he would vote “yes” in the New Jersey referendum on suffrage (it lost). This was a major shift in his personal views, but did not mean he was for a federal amendment.

Paul was already racheting up the pressure by sending her women to campaign against all Democrats – even those who supported suffrage – in the Western states where women could vote. She borrowed from the British suffragists the idea that it was necessary to hold the party in power responsible for all policy positions, and to punish all candidates who were members of that party regardless of their personal views or votes on suffrage.

The 1914 campaign was a trial run for that of 1916, when a new organization – the National Woman’s Party – was formed to inflict on the Democrats the wrath of the women. This campaign, which was much publicized at the time, gets surprisingly little attention in this book.

The author devotes considerable pages to the “Silent Sentinels” outside the White House. Under Alice Paul’s command they took up their places in January of 1917 and stayed for over a year. Initially they were ignored by the White House, though certainly not by the press which showered them with disdain and ridicule.

Their banners often contained Wilson’s own stirring words about democracy, especially after he asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2. But in June, they told a visiting Russian delegation that AMERICA IS NOT A DEMOCRACY ... TELL OUR GOVERNMENT THAT IT MUST LIBERATE THE PEOPLE BEFORE IT CAN CLAIM FREE RUSSIA AS AN ALLY. Russia had just recently overthrown the Czar and was in the midst of a revolution.

This banner enraged not just the President but the American people, some of whom physically attacked the sentinels and ripped up their banners. Official tolerance of the pickets ended and arrests began. Over the next two years over 500 women were arrested and 168 served time in jail.

Some of that time was served in the Occoquan Workhouse, whose superintendent took great pleasure in giving the women a hard time. When they refused to eat the worm-filled food, he had them force fed. The stories they told the press about this experience made them martyrs.

A year after the silent sentinels raised their banners and two months after New York joined the growing number of states to enfranchise women, Wilson asked Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment granting women suffrage as a war measure. It still took another eighteen months and a new Congress before the requisite two-thirds of both houses voted to do so.

Even then victory was not certain. In fact the 36th State barely ratified it in time for most, but not all, women to vote in the 1920 general election. It was an exciting time. Walton tells this story in a compelling style that lets you live the experience.

Reprinted, courtesy of the author, from http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/alice-paul-and-the-battle-for-the-ballot

See also: www.jofreeman.com

Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity

2010-09-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

by Marguerite Rigoglioso. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)

I have not yet seen this book, it's coming out at the end of September 2010. It's the second book by this author, who also wrote The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece. My interview with her about Virgin Birth can be heard at http://www.wings.org/ftp/Lo-bandwidth%20transfers/lo-2007/%2335-07VirginBirth29_38.mp3.
There's another podcast about her new book at http://gnosticmedia.podomatic.com/player/web/2010-09-05T21_52_45-07_00.
Marguerite has forwarded a press release and the table of contents for the new book. - FW

=========================

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 16, 2010

NEW BOOK ILLUMINATES ANCIENT GODDESSES, ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES, and THESMOPHORIA

Palgrave Macmillan announces the release of the pioneering new book Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity by Marguerite Rigoglioso.

Various goddesses of the ancient Mediterranean world were once understood to be Virgin Mothers––creators who birthed the entire cosmos without need of a male consort. This is the first book to explore evidence of the original parthenogenetic power of deities such as Athena, Hera, Artemis, Gaia, Demeter, Persephone, and the Gnostic Sophia. It provides stunning feminist insights about the deeper meaning of related stories, such as the judgment of Paris, the labors of Heracles, and the exploits of the Amazons. It also roots the Thesmophoria and Eleusinian Mysteries in female parthenogenetic power, thereby providing what is at long last a coherent understanding of these mysterious rites.

"An original piece of scholarship that dares to imagine traditions at the foundation of Western culture in an entirely new light."
–– Gregory Shaw, author of Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus

Marguerite Rigoglioso, Ph.D., is a member of the faculties of Dominican University of California, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where she teaches courses on women and religion. Her pioneering research on female deities and women’s religious leadership in the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Feminist Theology, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Societies of Peace, She Is Everywhere, Trivia, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, where her paper on the cult of Demeter and Persephone in Sicily received an honorable mention for the New Scholar Award. She is also the editor of Where to Publish Articles on Women’s Studies, Feminist Religious Studies, and Feminist/Womanist Topics.

A detailed table of contents follows:

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning: Chaos, Nyx, and Ge/Gaia

CHAPTER 2
Athena/Neith/Metis: Primordial Creatrix of Self-Replication
Metis
Neith
Neith as an Autogenetic Deity
Identification of Metis and Neith
The Greek Athena's Roots in North Africa
The Relationship of Neith/Metis/Athena to the Libyan Amazons
The Grecization of Neith/Athena and Her Cult

CHAPTER 3
Artemis: Virgin Mother of the Wild, Patron of Amazons
Artemis as Creatrix
Artemis and Her Mother, Leto
Artemis's Connection with Athena/Neith
Artemis and the Amazons
Artemis as Parthenos

CHAPTER 4
Hera: Virgin Queen of Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld
Mythological Evidence for Hera as a Great Goddess
Evidence at Samos for Hera as a Virgin Mother
Evidence at Argos for Hera as a Virgin Mother
Hera's Parthenogenetic Birth of Ares, Hephaestus, and Typhon
Hera as Guardian of Parthenogenetic Secrets
Hera, the Hesperides, and the Apples of Parthenogenesis
"Judgment of Paris" as Loss of Parthenogenetic Power
Heracles as Foe of Parthenogenesis
The Lernaean Hydra
The Nemean Lion
The Ceryneian Stag
The Oxen of Geryones and Stymphalian Birds
The Belt of Hippolyte
The Apples of the Hesperides

CHAPTER 5
Demeter and Persephone: Double Goddesses of Parthenogenesis
Older Roots for Demeter as Great Goddess
Who Was Persephone?
Signs of Parthenogenesis in the Demeter/Persephone Mythologem
Reconstruction of the Demeter/Persephone Mythologem: Pure Parthenogenesis Interrupted
Persephone as Holy Parthenos
Persephone's Connection with Virgin Mother Goddesses
Persephone's Connection with Weaving
Persephone's Connection with the Bee
Persephone's Connection with the Pomegranate
Persephone's Connection with Flower Gathering
Persephone's Parthenogenetically Related Title
Persephone as Paradigmatic Raped Virgin Mother
Persephone as Virgin Mother of the God's "Double"
Persephone as Virgin Mother of (the) Aeon
As Above, So Below: The Appropriation of Divine Birth Priestesshoods
Daughters of Danaus as Divine Birth Priestesses
The Melissai of Paros as Divine Birth Priestesses
Metanaera of Eleusis as a Basilinna
Metanaera's Daughters as Divine Birth Priestesses
Divine Genealogies of Legendary Founders:
The Advent of Dionysus and Hieros Gamos in the Eleusinian Tradition
Degeneration of Esoteric Knowledge: Demophoön's Failed Immortalization
The Great Beneficence of Demeter: Making the Best of a Patriarchal Situation
The Thesmophoria: Known Fragments
Thesmophoria as Commemoration of Pure Parthenogenesis
Matriarchal, Amazonian Elements in the Rite
The Centrality of Chastity/Virginity
Bawdy Joking and Inner Tantra
Friendliness Toward the Pomegranate
Entering an Altered State of Consciousness
Altered-State Ascents and Descents
Pursuit, Penalty, and Beautiful Birth
The Eleusinian Mysteries: Known Fragments
The Lesser Mysteries
The Greater Mysteries
The Eleusinian Mysteries as Cosmic Rape and Birth of the God
Female Origins of the Rite
Entering Altered-State Reality
Being Raped: The Dildo of Descent
Baubo as Dildo
Grieving for the Matriarchy
Witnessing the Divine Birth
Uniting (with) the Ineffable

CHAPTER 6 by Angeleen Campra
Sophia: Divine Generative Virgin
Sophia as Bridge to an Older Paradigm
Sophia of the Valentinian Cosmogony
Summary of the Valentianian Creation Story
Parthenogenesis in Sophia's Story
Sophia in The Thunder: Perfect Mind
Parthenogenetic References in Thunder
Parthenogenetic References in Other Gnostic Texts
Wisdom as the Ability to Generate Life –– Parthenogenetically
The Legacy of the Loss of Female Parthenogenetic Power

For more about the author and her works, check this site: http://cultofdivinebirth.com

Rupert Murdoch vs. feminist writing: Vicki Noble

2010-09-19T18:43:00.000-07:00

The following statement by Vicki Noble was written in the context of a discussion about how it has come to be that right-wing women in the US have appropriated the term "feminist." She gives a chilling insight into the difficulty of disseminating radical feminist writings and voices today. - FW

Yes, all wonderful questions—why indeed are there apparently no radical feminists speaking out these days in America, speaking to the younger women, writing books and communicating? I believe my personal experience almost certainly serves to generalize about the process by which our voices have been eliminated from the larger public discourse in this country.

In 1994, Rupert Murdoch bought HarperSanFrancisco, thus temporarily ending the long publishing careers of many early Bay Area feminist authors and creative artists (myself, Judy Grahn, Starhawk, for example). At that moment, all our most well-known classic books began, unceremoniously, to be put out of print. It’s not that we didn’t fight this, but I’m afraid it was a done deal. (Each of us has resurrected over the years, so I’m not whining, we’re all continuing to do our work—I’m just telling you the history, which for many people is unknown.) An excellent article in [The Nation] Magazine in the late 1990s, called “The Corporatization of Publishing,”* articulated the widespread negative effects of this phenomenon on a much larger (global) scale. (Independent bookstores, distributors, and publishers went out of business, along with individual artists.)

In case you might think this was subtle or negotiable in any way, or that I’m overstating the case, I’ll give you a blatant example of how direct the message was to us: In 1997, an editor at Three Rivers Press (an offshoot of Random House) told me, after publishing a book on Motherpeace and in response to a subsequent book proposal, “If you take the Goddess and the kundalini out of it, we might be able to publish it.” Since it was a book on ecstatic healing in the Goddess tradition, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that could have even been possible for me to do (had I been interested in selling my soul so directly to the corporation).

During the same period of time (late 1990s), I stopped being invited to teach at places like Omega Institute in New York, I think because my radical feminist message is too “confrontational” in comparison to some of the new mainstream and corporate women who jumped on the Goddess bandwagon and began to produce and attend workshops and conferences for women (Women of Power; Women, Money, and Power; etc.). Groups like “Gather the Women” emerged with conferences on what they publicized as the brand new notion of women coming together to make changes in the world. Now the public commercial centers for growth and “new age” teachings can offer events for women without rocking the boat, offending anyone, or requiring any profound transformation or change (especially to social structures or capitalism). It was an effective marketing strategy. The success of this overall strategy can be seen in the emerging numbers of women who are excited, apparently, about having discovered that their gender gives them a step up the ladder right now—-while working actively in support of patriarchal corporate, capitalist and mainstream religious values and goals (i.e. They work against reproductive rights and threaten the gains we made three decades ago, they cut social services and gut social programs that feminists established in the 1970s, and they keep their eye on the money).

Even NPR (National Public Radio) has recently admitted that it no longer ascribes to its original mission of providing alternative programming to the mainstream. They have their marketing strategy too! Yoga Journal went mainstream in the last decade, changing its look and shortening its articles to please some imagined public that no longer has the attention span to read something thought-provoking.

We’re simply watching global capitalism do what capitalism has always done: It rapaciously sucks up everything interesting or profitable, turns it inside-out in the usual patriarchal mode of colonization and appropriation, and then spews it back out at us in a pseudo form that we can buy. Anything that holds to its original purpose or integrity is relentlessly denied or viciously stamped out, erased, made invisible. Anyone who can’t be bought just disappears from the public arena.

So—-where did all the feminists go? Well, I’d say we’re all still here, getting older but holding our own, disseminating our wisdom where we can, rocking the boat whenever possible, passing on our genes and our ideas, and always, ALWAYS, creating new forms that respond to the real needs of our communities.

A great and positive example of this creative feminist work behind the scenes is the steady building of the Matriarchal Studies and Gift Economy movements in the last decade. This creative international coalition of feminist activists, Goddess scholars, and indigenous healers, elders, and leaders who come together periodically to discuss, analyze, distill, and refine the discourse on Matriarchal Studies (thanks to Gen and Heide** and their pioneering leadership) is thrilling. It is one of the obvious places where the unstoppable underground stream of female intelligence is again springing up to the surface and taking form.

Perhaps we can begin to take some actions and make some international headway by speaking back (organizationally) to some of these emerging mainstream pseudo-feminists and celebrity political women who are being thrust in our face by the media. I’m up for it.

Love, Vicki

=========author note============
A bibliography of works by Vicki Noble appears with her Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicki_Noble . Note that the article on her is currently rather slight - perhaps those who know her work would like to add to it. - FW

============footnotes=========

*The article appeared in The Nation June 3, 1996, and its author, publishing veteran André Schiffrin, also published a related memoir: The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).

** Genevieve Vaughan; and Dr. Heide Göttner-Abendroth, Director of International Academy HAGIA.

On The Farm, Robert William Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing Women

2010-09-12T07:25:00.000-07:00

by Stevie Cameron (Knopf Canada, August 20, 2010: 768 pages)

With the Pickton serial murder case no longer under appeal, the publication ban is off, and Knopf Canada has released Stevie Cameron's book about the case. A government investigation of the handling of the case has now been promised. Cameron is best known for her investigative books about political corruption in Canada. One of the first to read and review On the Farm is Lee Lakeman. Here is her review:

In On The Farm, Robert Pickton and the Tragic Story of Vancouver’s Missing and Murdered Women, Stevie Cameron relays many details of the conviction of Robert Pickton for murdering and butchering six women and the likelihood that he killed fifty: poor, mostly prostituted, women, one third of whom were Aboriginal. She catalogues a decade of data into one readable narrative that some will see as encyclopedic, though it relies almost totally on the official versions, constructed by the police, the courts, the commercial media, local governments and the harm reduction networks involved.

Cameron includes simple biographies from the hierarchy of characters who usually define these issues and authorize these versions: mostly johns, pimps, wife beaters, boyfriends, sugar daddies, rapists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, handlers, reporters, police and politicians and those charged by the state or community services as ‘victim assistance’ or ‘harm reduction” workers to destitute women. Of Pickton, we get the cliché: he had a horrible mother and childhood and he is motivated by revenge against a prostitute he described as thieving and dangerous. Cameron seems not to notice the sex bias. She contradicts no authority.

Some compassion for individuals at risk or under pressure warms the bare facts but chafes against her over abundant regard for the professional (class) credentials of the hundreds activated after women are harmed or dead. We get many of their cv’s. But their credentials would not have saved us. Throughout, she seems to accept the current social relations that lead us to this colossal legal and social failure. No substantial investigative reporting here only those admissions that authorities have already packaged into their next demand (as in the 2005 Vancouver Police Review that insists it would all be over if we had a regional police force and a nicer attitude to “sex workers”). It is as though the material racism, class biases and sex discrimination are solved.

She reminds us that the murdered women were trapped but she understands that trap as the personal mistake they made of choosing boyfriends and husbands that introduced them to vicious drugs and the mistake they made of getting into the killer’s car. The violence, poverty and racism they suffered previously, the refusal of authorities to interfere with the men who preceded him or with Pickton’s pre murderous activity goes unconnected. She concludes only that “we do not know if women are safer”.

Women suffer hideous abuse including prostitution, disappear and die at the hands of men every year in every major city in Canada. Aboriginal women remain especially vulnerable. Women live without adequate incomes, social services or advocacy. The criminal law is applied in a discriminatory fashion that sustains male violence. The statistics are not even disputed anymore. But that hierarchical status quo maintains hundreds if not thousands of women in prostituted squalor and binds together three groups of women: Pickton’s dead, those still prostituted, and millions of other women in Canada. They are bound into a disadvantaged class that lacks adequate social and legal intervention, documentation or protection from violence against women. Cameron’s narrative, absent as it is of any other stated intention, upholds an unacceptable status quo in which fifty women or more went to their deaths.

No experts on the equality obligations of states to women, no police civilian oversight experts or media monitors or Aboriginal women or anti-violence feminists are consulted interviewed or quoted for expertise. Is there no need to change that hierarchy?

Nor did Stevie Cameron give voice to a single escaped victim although she does relay two second hand stories of the anonymous women she calls Jane Doe and Sandra Gail Ringwald. The first is a name given to half a skull found in a local slough in 1995 that leaves us to worry how long ago Pickton began killing. The second is the story of a woman who survived in 1997, reported Pickton to authorities, but was left to protect herself from further violence. Case dismissed. The attempt to murder her never did result in a case, even of solicitation. Eliminating her evidence from the Pickton murder case accounting for the missing women prevented his conviction of first degree murder by blinding the court to the extent of his evil planning.

The book confirms the mind-numbing bigotry and ignorance of individuals with the criminal justice system but more importantly, the common ideology underpinning our institutions and their functionaries: women are not trusted as victims or witnesses, are deemed unreliable, exaggerating their plight and in themselves dangerous, unworthy of the protection of law. Poverty is constructed as individual responsibility separate from race and sex. In praising tiny accommodations and kindnesses (like the lunch passes for those at court or the tent supplied by the police so the families could see the killing fields) and in refusing to rage against the status quo, the book seems to accept the steady application of social and legal policy that replicates these deadly horrors over and over again.

Prostitution remains unchallenged as an activity of men as though women don’t mind and are not at risk or harmed. Like most women’s legal and social complaints of men’s sexual violence, prostitution is not treated like a serious crime. Only weeks after an apologetic review of police failures in the Pickton case, the new police chief, challenged to explain a 20% increase in sexual assault cases excused his force by saying the cases were not “aggravated by violence” as though he didn’t know that all sexual assault was against the law and a serious transgression of the collective rights of women.

Almost all the women victimized by Pickton first suffered criminal beatings, assaults and sexual exploitation at the hands of other men, assaults either from fathers or step- fathers, husbands, boyfriends, or pimps, assaults that should have been prevented and went unpunished, that rendered the women broken and vulnerable to this deadly predator. To three women he was a “sugar daddy” who paid for wife-like duties then threatened with violence if not obeyed. Those women entered Wish Drop In and “low barrier shelters” where prostitution is talked about as a job and successfully they solicited more vulnerable women to “service” Pickton. Of these, many were disabled physically and mentally. Some were not in a state to give consent to anything.

Uncontested too is that he was known as an “ordinary john”. In spite of the law, unimpeded by police, social workers or hotel staff, Pickton solicited women on the street, in the bars where he was known and through pimps in the downtown eastside ghetto. It is likely he solicited too for the men around him at his brother’s Piggy’s Palace, in the butchery, for the truckers he employed, for the Hells Angels across the street. Such facts should give chills to those promoting a laissez fair attitude to the sex industry.

Virtually all workers against violence against women know the ongoing systemic failure to protect women from the men who abuse them including those women who offer themselves as complainants and witnesses. The failure to properly investigate, prosecute and convict, insulated Pickton in the 1997 events that Cameron tells of Ringwald. That woman, whose consent was impaired by drugs, was solicited in Vancouver, confined in Pickton’s house in Coquitlam, sexually assaulted if not raped, beaten and threatened with death. She was stabbed when she defended herself with a knife from his kitchen and although badly bleeding managed to run across the street nearly nude and still in a handcuff. She was rescued by a passing couple and hospitalized. She told. Police retrieved the key to the handcuffs from his pocket. Those in the criminal justice system judged her inadequate and themselves as helpless. They abandoned her and the case. Pickton disintegrated over the decade into his life as serial killer convicted of murdering six women, confessing to killing 49 and dreaming of killing 75. #

Lee Lakeman is a longtime Canadian frontline worker and activist, best known for her work with the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres and Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter.

Max Dashu reviews Agora, the movie

2010-09-09T20:13:00.000-07:00

I did not go see the film Agora - about the revered ancient female philosopher and scientist Hypatia - during its short stay in Vancouver; I was put off by the trailer, which looked artificial and pompous to me. Nevertheless, quite a few women I know did go see it in theatres. One of those is the remarkable Max Dashu, whose review (link here) goes into far more and more accurate background and detail about Hypatia than the film did. Be sure to visit and read the review and look around her website.

Quoting Max's biography from the review page:

Max Dashú is known for her expertise on ancient female iconography in world archaeology, goddess traditions, and women shamans. In 1970 she founded the Suppressed Histories Archives to research mother-right cultures, female spheres of power, and the history of their repression. Drawing on her collection of over 15,000 slides, she uses images to teach global womens' history and cultural heritages. Her critique of Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (2000) has been influential in opening up space for consideration of egalitarian matrilineages. (“Knocking Down Straw Dolls" (2000) republished in Feminist Theology 13.2 (2005), Sage Publications, UK)

The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State

2010-07-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

by Lee Ann Banaszak
New York: Cambridge, 2010, xv, 247 pp.

Guest review by Jo Freeman - original at http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/the-feminist-moles-in-the-federal-government-1?page=2

========================================================================

The Feminist Moles in the Federal Government

by Jo Freeman

The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State
by Lee Ann Banaszak
New York: Cambridge, 2010, xv, 247 pp.

When I was in college long ago there was an ongoing debate on working inside the system vs outside of the system. To those who wanted to change society, working outside the system was pure; working inside was a form of corruption.

As I watched the women’s liberation movement emerge and unfold in the late 1960s and 1970s, and read more deeply in US history, I realized that this was a false dichotomy. The “system” was bigger than the government and other institutions. Indeed the best way to bring about change was a two-pronged approach, with people “inside” and “outside” the government working for the same goal, if not necessarily with the same methods.

I wrote a bit about that in my first book, The Politics of Women’s Liberation. In her new book Lee Ann Banaszak has proven it.

A major reason so much new law benefitting women was passed in the early 1970s was because insider feminists came out of the woodwork after the women’s liberation movement became public in 1970. Once outsider feminists created a visible demand, the insider feminists used their positions and their knowledge to write the laws and regulations implementing those laws which outsider feminists and Members of Congress (another type of insider) promoted.

Using snowball sampling, Banaszak tracked down women who worked for the federal government and were also involved in the early women’s liberation movement. She relied on oral histories of those who were dead and interviewed those who were living. She put together the story of those who pushed the feminist agenda inside the agencies they worked for and fed crucial information to women outside who could mobilize press attention and constituency pressure on government decision makers.

Banaszak tells us that her 40 informants were highly educated (63% had a post-graduate degree), mostly from middle to upper-middle-class parents, and ten percent non-white. While some of the insiders were men, Banaszak doesn’t say if any of her informants were male. Nor is there a list of interviewees anyplace, though the oral histories are listed.

Some of these people were already working inside the government when the feminist movement erupted in the late 1960s and some joined it later. Some were true moles – keeping quiet about their own policy preferences while arranging for key decision makers to hear feminist views on crucial issues or even sneaking in a few changes in rules and regulations to benefit women. Others were advocates within the government, especially after agencies set up women’s programs in response to the women’s movement. Banaszak found that two-thirds of the feminist insiders worked in “women’s policy offices” at some point in their governmental career.

The range of insider views on what needed to be done was similar to that of feminist outsiders. Some insiders believed that extensive social, political and economic changes were necessary for women’s liberation, and others that women could take care of themselves if they only had an equal chance with men.

The range of their actions was different, largely because the opportunity structure was different. Crucial insiders, especially in the early years, initiated litigation. They could not be the attorneys of record, but they could identify areas for action, refer plaintiffs and write the briefs. A lot of the early court decisions interpreting employment discrimination law were shaped by feminists inside the government who had to stay in the shadows because of their jobs.

Many also participated in feminist marches, though not in “zap actions” or guerilla theater. Occasionally government appointees were speakers at the rallies. At other times insider feminists arranged to have protests directed at their own agencies when they thought it necessary. Working for the federal government was not a serious detriment to protest, at least as private persons.

The insider feminists worked on many issues besides employment discrimination though that got the bulk of their attention. Banaszak identifies educational equity, development, childcare, abortion and violence against women as the major arenas. She provides a of couple quick case studies to show how they did it.

Most of these goals were achieved before Reagan became President in 1981 – under administrations that were supportive or at least benign. While the conservatives did toss a lot of insider feminists out of the government and limit what others could do, Banaszak shows that opportunities for action still existed even in a hostile environment.

A lot depended on where feminists were located in the bureaucracy and who were their supervisors. Basically, they slipped back under the radar, becoming moles more like the early 1960s feminist insiders. In that capacity they could still feed information where it could do the most good, award grants and improve policies around the edges. Banaszak concludes that the sympathy of the Administration matters, but not as much as scholars have said it does. Insider feminists were quite creative in slipping through the cracks.

A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway 1904-1953

2009-12-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

My review of
A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway 1904-1953
edited by Kristie Miller and Robert H. McGinnis
Preface by Blanche Wiesen Cook
Tucson, AZ: Arizona Historical Society, 2009, xvi, 325 pp.

has just been posted to SeniorWomen Web at
http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanLettersRooseveltGreenway.html
You can read it at that link or posted below my name.

Jo
http://www.JoFreeman.com
http://www.seniorwomen.com/authors/authorpageFreeman.html

The Private Lives of Two Public Women

Long after her death in 1962, readers remain fascinated by Eleanor Roosevelt – her life, her comments, her views. Isabella Greenway is barely known outside of Arizona – the state she represented in Congress from 1933 to 1937 – but her fifty-year friendship with ER was longer than that of any other of ERs many acquaintances.

Both came from privileged backgrounds, they met in New York as debutantes and stayed in close contact until Isabella's death in 1953. They both married in 1905; the couples spent part of their honeymoons together in Europe. Isabella was two years younger but in her 67 years she had the more challenging life, which Miller detailed in her 2004 biography. [http://www.seniorwomen.com/ca/cw/04/cult121404.html]

Isabella married three times, was widowed twice and had three children. ER was married once, widowed once, and had six children, of whom one died in infancy. Isabella moved to New Mexico with her older first husband in 1910 after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Expected to die in a few years, the family lived in a tent with their two children for four years before building a home. A year after Bob Ferguson died in 1922 Isabella married his best friend, John Greenway. A little over two years later her second husband died on an operating table in New York.

In the wilds of New Mexico Isabella had to nurse her husband and home school her kids. ER also had to nurse her husband after he contracted polio in 1921, but she had a broader support system and more ready access to medical assistance. Nonetheless, her life, like Isabella's, was punctuated repeatedly by illnesses, accidents and death.

Indeed, if these letters have a major theme, that is it. These privileged women and their families spent much of their lives – especially their early adulthood – coping with physical ailments. Presumably they had the best medical care money could buy, but to judge by their letters, major portions of their lives were spent coping with suffering, their own and that of their families and close friends. TB, whooping cough, polio and infections consumed a lot of their time and thoughts.

Illness also meant travel. I was struck by the number of times Isabella and her family took the train to New York to see doctors. She sent her children to California for high school, but there is no mention of seeing any doctors in L.A.

Except for the election of 1912 when both women supported the candidacy of ER's uncle Teddy, neither paid much attention to politics before 1920 (or if they did they didn't write about it). They weren't involved in woman suffrage or any of the other Progressive movements of the era.

ER plunged into political work in the twenties, initially to serve the career aspirations of her invalid husband. She and some of her New York friends organized women into the Democratic Party in upstate New York, the value of which became readily apparent when her husband ran for Governor in 1928.

John Greenway took his new bride to Arizona where he owned copper mines. He was planning to retire from business and go into politics when he died. In a sense Isabella fulfilled his ambitions, becoming a civic activist and Arizona's Democratic National Committeewoman. After ER's husband was elected President he brought Arizona's sole Member of Congress into his administration and Isabella easily won election to replace him.

During FDR's first term, ER and Isabella could see each other frequently because they were both in D.C. There are fewer letters, but enough to know that Isabella didn't always see eye-to-eye with FDR. Nor did she like being in Congress; she chose to not run for re-election in 1936.

Back in Arizona she pursued her civic and business interests. In 1940 she supported Wendell Wilkie for President, which caused a temporary breech in her friendship with ER. Nonetheless, their relationship survived and the two women worked together again during and after World War II.

While it might sound simple to compile a book of letters, especially of two women who were public figures, an enormous amount of work went into this book. Tracking down the letters, deciphering the handwriting, identifying the people, places and events and generally making sense of private communications is no small task.

One can see the dedication and the scholarship of Miller and McGinnis in the numerous explanatory paragraphs interspersed between the letters and in the extensive footnotes which are fortunately printed at the bottom of each page. There is as much authorship as editing in this book. We should be grateful to them for giving us this portrait of an enduring friendship and a peek into the private lives of two public women.

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE NEW DEAL

2009-11-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

THE WOMAN BEHIND THE NEW DEAL: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience

By Kirstin Downey

NY: Nan A. Talese Books [a subdivision of Knopf/Doubleday - all of which now belong to Random House - just like all your favourite brands of dessert now belong to Nestle- FW], 2009. 480 pp.

Reviewed by Jane Woodward Elioseff (Guest review reprinted from www.internetreviewofbooks.com by permission of the author)

Frances Perkins (1880 –1965), suffragist and labor advocate, destroyed many of her letters and papers before she died, with the result that only archivists and historians and a few former students still remember her. Even so, Kirstin Downey, a former Washington Post reporter, has written an entirely credible biography of Perkins based on the public record, on Downey’s productive searches in various neglected archives and private collections of Frances’s letters, and on interviews with her daughter and those of her colleagues and friends who are still living. The Woman Behind the New Deal describes not only Frances’s political career, but also her marriage and her close friendships with reform-minded, socially prominent women, as well as her relationships with suffragists, settlement house reformers, socialists, unionists, combative labor leaders, Tammany Hall toughs, and such major figures as Winston Churchill, Al Smith, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

In February 1933, at the start of FDR’s first term as US president, Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, strongly recommended to her husband that his secretary of labor should be Frances Perkins, whom Franklin had known for twenty years, the past four working side by side with her while he was governor of New York. He appreciated Perkins’s intelligence, energy, and political savvy. Most importantly, he trusted her. When Frances met with Franklin in New York City to discuss the appointment, she arrived with a paper in her hand listing what she wanted to accomplish if she accepted his offer:

The scope of her list was breathtaking. She was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of American society, with enactment of historic social welfare and labor laws. To succeed, she would have to overcome opposition from the courts, business, labor unions, conservatives.

Perkins asked FDR to approve her legislative agenda: a forty-hour work week, a minimum wage, worker’s compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and national health insurance. Perkins and her determined political allies achieved it all--except for health insurance. Opposition by the American Medical Association was too strong.

Few people rise to high office in Washington, D.C. without thick skins and hard work in the political trenches. It is difficult to imagine the heartless animosity and unjust criticism Perkins experienced as a woman in public life. Her views were so progressive that conservative members of the House of Representatives tried to impeach her in 1939 for failing to enforce US immigration laws, a move by the House that the Supreme Court disallowed. The unhappy congressmen wanted Frances out for refusing to deport suspected Communists and for doing her best to help the thousands in Europe fleeing the Nazis. She was single-handedly responsible for saving the Geneva staff of the International Labor Organization by persuading Canada to admit them when the state department denied them entry to the US. The ILO became the only League of Nations entity to survive the war.

Perkins served twelve years as our fourth secretary of labor (1933-1945). She did not engage in self promotion, did not hold press conferences, but was loved and admired by those who knew her well. She never forgot or neglected a friend, high or low, and her dedication to the common good was unflagging. When the political tide was against her, she accepted what progress could be made and tried again the next year. In 1946, she published The Roosevelt I Knew, a biography of FDR. Her close friendship with Franklin was not romantic--it was a meeting of minds and spirits. She was the first person he wanted to see when he started his Washington workday and often the last person he talked with in the evening.

Fannie Coralie Perkins had studied physics and chemistry at Mount Holyoke College, and in 1904, after two years back home with her family, she answered an advertisement for a science teacher at a small women’s college in wealthy Lake Forest, near Chicago. Downey writes that immediately upon arriving Fannie reinvented herself. “She changed her birth name, her faith, and her political persuasion.” She left the Congregationalist Church and became a high-church Episcopalian. Joining the Episcopal Church, “placed Frances in the most upscale milieu in tiny Lake Forest . . . gave her a ready social stepladder.”

While she was teaching in Lake Forest, she also volunteered at Hull House, which gave her the social work training she had been lacking and introduced her to a large national circle of social activists, including the writer Upton Sinclair. After three years, she heard about a job in Philadelphia Talking with factory girls earning $6 a week who lived in basements and survived on bread and bananas, Frances learned, Downey says, that women were barred by their gender from union participation. Frances decided that she needed to go back to school to be able to debate economic and labor issues more effectively. “Studying alongside men for the first time [at The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania], she realized the depth of her own intelligence.”

One of Frances’s professors at Wharton, impressed by her aptitude, helped her arrange a fellowship at Columbia University. In 1910, she earned a master’s degree in political science and then took a job heading the New York office of the National Consumer’s League. She moved to Greenwich Village, “a center of intellectual ferment.” Sinclair Lewis fell in love with her and regularly proposed marriage until she wed government reformer Paul Caldwell Wilson in 1913.

Frances attended church every morning of the week while she was working in Washington. Three or four times a year, she made a silent retreat at a Maryland convent where the mother superior was her spiritual advisor. Frances could see auras, and this was an aid in assessing character and recognizing talent. Downey writes that Perkins worried about the growing secularization of America. It was incomprehensible to Frances to think of excluding religion from public life altogether, for it was her religious motivation--to do what Jesus would want one to do--that drove her and fueled all that she had done.

This book is beautifully organized, with helpful chapter titles, footnotes divided and renumbered by chapter, a strong bibliography, a good index, and many interesting black and white photographs, though I would wish for more photos of union leaders and suffragists.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Other Frances Perkins books (from Wikipedia):

Keller, Emily. Frances Perkins: First Woman Cabinet Member. Greensboro: Morgan Reynolds Publishing, 2006. ISBN 978193179891.
Martin, George Whitney. Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976. ISBN 0395242932.
Pasachoff, Naomi. Frances Perkins: Champion of the New Deal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0195122224.
Perkins, Frances. The Roosevelt I Knew. New York: Penguin Group, 1946. ISBN 0670607371.
Severn, Bill. Frances Perkins: A Member of the Cabinet. New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1976. ISBN 080152816X.

The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens

2009-11-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

Kate Gilhuly, The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens.
Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 208. ISBN
9780521899987. $80.00.

_____

Reviewed by S. Larson, Bucknell University

<http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b
&id=a069fbbc73&e=a74ab719fa>

In this volume, Kate Gilhuly presents a number of case studies helpful in understanding the various roles assigned to females in the Athenian imagination. This matrix, as she calls it, centers upon three categories of the feminine: the prostitute, the wife, and the ritual agent. In varying manifestations, hierarchies and conflations, this structure not only informs our understanding of how the Athenians envisioned the female but also directly pertains to issues of Athenian civic identities and attitudes toward sexuality, exchange, and female performance. Additionally, it is by examining the constantly contested and negotiated roles of the female in literary production that we can better explicate evolving Athenian
constructions of masculine subjectivity; it is in this focus that Gilhuly's book excels.

Gilhuly's Introduction contains a notable although brief tracing of classical scholarship on women to date. She deftly discusses the interplay between these works and concomitant and recent trends in studies of ancient pederasty, homosexuality, and sexuality; here she stresses the importance of the often ignored discourse of heterosexuality and rightly categorizes her own work as an all-encompassing study both in constructions of gender and in the history of sexuality. Her work concentrates not on the reality of ancient sexualities as much as on the imagination of social reality and the construction and maintenance of it through the malleable categories and performance of these three female roles. Here Gilhuly also demonstrates the polysemy involved in each role. She notes broad contexts in which each wide-ranging category served a useful function: e.g., the prostitute in
conversations about conflict and instability; the ritual performer in contexts of historical upheaval between elite and demos; the wife in the middle as the seeming lack between both these public roles.

Gilhuly's Introduction is the weakest section of the book. Here some of Gilhuly's attempts at theorizing these three female roles fall into what seem like already well-understood categories. After discussing the varied roles that both the prostitute and the ritual performer enact, for example, Gilhuly states "both the prostitute and the ritual agent played a public role and could therefore signify different facets of public feminine performance" (19). It is not clear why this relatively obvious conclusion needed so much background comment, except to serve as a possible foil to Gilhuly's next point about the wife envisioned as the female occupying the space between these two more public roles. Gilhuly's Introduction also
suffers from a problem common enough in preludes to more complicated accounts: condensed versions of upcoming chapters often fail to convince because they must omit so much of the real core of the argument; the supporting details fall through the cracks and the conclusions begin to sound like assumptions.

Gilhuly's chapters are stronger individually. In Chapter Two she discusses pseudo-Demosthenes' Against Neaira and demonstrates how the speech regulates masculine identity and its associations with various types of transactions through the lens of the "tripartitite discourse of the feminine." Gilhuly opens by noting that the same three divisions of the feminine outlined in her Introduction also operate within the Athenian penalty of atimia, the very charge which the accused Stephanos tried to impose upon Apollodoros, the prosecutor of the speech. That this evidence comes from outside the literary works that Gilhuly discusses in this book adds credence to her
argument; she could have emphasized this point more strongly.

In this chapter Gilhuly also notes the synchronicity between Apollodoros's portrayal of Stephanos's dealings with women and each of the three spheres of the feminine. She argues that through consistent portrayals of Stephanos's exchanges of women as short-term transactions, the prosecution essentially accuses Stephanos of disregarding Athenian social ideals of exchange and democratic citizenship. Apollodoros establishes both his own and Stephanos's masculine subjectivity through lengthy analysis of the kind of transactions of women both men make; this focus helps explain the speech's obsessively detailed narration of the story of Neaira and Phano.

Gilhuly also finally and persuasively contextualizes Apollodoros's description of Pausanias, the infamous Spartan king, who appears in this speech linked to Plataia, the Boiotian city-state allied to Athens that received harsh treatment at Theban and Spartan hands both in Apollodoros's narrative and in Thucydides (although the two accounts differ on noteworthy points). Gilhuly argues that Pausanias's appearance in the speech, juxtaposed with the emphasis on Plataian loyalty to Athens, historically
grounds the present opposition between Apollodoros and Stephanos; the insane medizer Pausanias corresponds to Stephanos in terms of his extremism and his threat to the stable order of civic life; Plataia, Athens' faithful friend since the late sixth century, mirrors Apollodoros's character as a victim of aggression still loyal to the long-term goals of the Athenian community.

Gilhuly's reading provides a coherent and meaningful way in which to read the speech as a whole and those parts of it that have troubled previous commentators in terms of their length and relevance to the charge.

In her third chapter Gilhuly turns to Plato's Symposium, a work so overanalyzed that taking it on here voluntarily makes a bold statement in itself. Gilhuly concentrates, however, not only on Diotima, whose identity has encouraged countless speculations, but also on the other women in the text. To Gilhuly the auletris, the women inside the house (but outside the symposium), and Diotima herself offer a structural continuum of the feminine that simultaneously informs Plato's model of pederasty. Gilhuly's Introduction to this chapter, much like her Introduction to the work as a whole, foreshadows her upcoming conclusions too briefly; this reviewer would have rather seen less a general prelude than an immediate beginning to the
argument, which Gilhuly takes up only after nearly ten pages of introductory
comment.

Gilhuly ultimately observes that by structuring the masculine identities of the Symposium against this feminine matrix (which includes the present but absent Diotima), Plato's Socrates offers a more complex image of masculinity than merely the binary opposition often found in analyses of this dialogue. She nicely explicates the first triad of speeches (of Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachos) as ultimately espousing a negative, often hostile attitude toward women and a binary understanding of female sexuality in opposition to the purest expression of physical eros through homosexuality. The speeches of Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, however, are shown to offer a more nuanced approach to eros by complicating the canonical gender categories in the first triad of speeches. After persuasively problematizing the case for modern positivistic acceptance of Aristophanes' famous speech, Gilhuly argues that, by speaking through Diotima, Socrates presents the feminine matrix in the service of defining the eros of the philosopher, an eros which
should be seen as the transcendent apex of metaphysical contemplation, much as Diotima's role as female ritual agent symbolizes the topmost position in the feminine matrix imagined in the Symposium. Further, Diotima's status in this speech as a "discursive absence," rather than as a person imagined as attending this gathering, emphasizes the absent (but also formulaically real) realm of philosophic eros which Socrates espouses. This vertical hierarchy of the feminine also informs the model of pederasty, which should thus be seen as more of a mutual path of ascent toward what is philosophically beautiful and beyond the polis as opposed to a more
canonically interpreted binary power relationship. The chapter as a whole is
undoubtedly interesting, but to this reviewer at times the conclusions did
not seem fully proven but rather more suggested by the discussion offered.

Gilhuly follows her interpretation of Plato by resuscitating Xenophon's Symposium, a work which has historically suffered in comparison (Chapter Four). Here Gilhuly argues that the feminine continuum, moving from the prostitute to the priestess, structures Socrates' argument for improved relations between the demos and the elite of the polis. In doing so she details how aristocratic masculine identity is figured in the text as a spectacle with both public and private viewing in mind. Gilhuly's
descriptions of the characters involved and each spectacle make this chapter a good candidate as a reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. In her first section and through direct reading of the text, Gilhuly nicely explicates the latent (and historical) hostility between Socrates, Kallias, and various other guests at the party; she deftly illustrates Xenophon's creation of the erotic spectacle and the symposiasts as objects of the text's gaze; and she contextualizes the difficult position of Autolykos, the eroticized performer who both needs to exhibit elite decorum as a passive recipient of the symposiasts' gaze but also to display his individual prowess as an athletic victor and thus as a visible actor in
his own right. Throughout Gilhuly pays close attention to scholarship on civic viewing in other works by Xenophon, in other genres, and also in an Athenian context generally. She argues that Xenophon objectifies the symposium itself as a means of allowing this elite gathering to function comfortably within the now democratic civic gaze.

Working off of Kurke (1999),1 <> Gilhuly returns to the categories of the feminine by arguing that Xenophon uses the three levels of the feminine matrix to delineate the Athenian demos. She makes a particularly nice point about the demos (who historically judged Socrates) cast as the hired entertainment (read: prostitutes) and thus as a malleable group interested in furthering its own interest with the elite; the entire trial and condemnation of Socrates is thus subtly called into question. Moreover, she suggests that the entertainers embody the full range of the female continuum: from the porne as acrobat to the ritual agent as wife, seen in
the basilinna-like re-creation of the marriage between Dionysos and Ariadne.

Gilhuly thus also suggests that the troupe, in playing the role of the demos, offers a image of itself as hetairai in relation to the elite, a still-restricted status which limits any true reciprocity between the two.

In the end, however, to Gilhuly Socrates constructs a new vision of the proper relationship between the demos and the elite in his concluding speech (and here I do a disservice to the complexity of Gilhuly's argument): the philosopher becomes the erastes of the city itself, and the demos becomes a subject desiring elite culture. Complementing Socrates' redefinition of the city into a pederastic polis, at the same time Xenophon offers a speech in which the female entertainer is transformed into the quasi-ritual agent (as wife of Dionysos), thereby emphasizing the importance of heterosexual norms on which the citizenry is based.

Gilhuly's final and most convincing chapter treats Aristophanes' Lysistrata. Gilhuly nicely historicizes the play as she unpacks the multiplicity of meanings behind its display of cultic and erotic roles for women; she rightly often sees both roles as embodied within one character, such as Myrrhine. Elaborating on the work of Stroup and Faraone, Gilhuly suggests that the play's confusion of female categories, such as the cultic figure and the prostitute, leads to their convergence via complementary sacrificial and symposiastic imagery. Further, in interpreting female ritual practice in terms of potential political implications, Gilhuly argues that the ritual agents Lysistrata (as Eteoboutad Lysimache) and Myrrhine (associated with Athena Nike, chosen by lot) present an Aristophanic model of successful interaction between the elite and demos respectively. Lysistrata controls Myrrhine much as the elite ought to direct the demos; here Gilhuly draws the reader to Aristophanes' Frogs where the poet may be espousing a similar view of an inclusive demos with elite leadership. Further, Gilhuly reads Lysistrata's weaving metaphor both as evidence for the conflation of different roles of women through habitual engagement in the same pastime and also as a positive political prescription for inclusivity.

This reviewer would have liked to hear more on the weaving metaphor, as the brevity of Gilhuly's account did not answer a niggling concern I have always had with its appearance: how might the Athenian audience have perceived a feminine weaving metaphor applied to the demos in 411? Could a positive message from Aristophanes about inclusivity (via imagery of female weaving) really have resonated at this time?

Gilhuly's historical analysis of the Lysistrata, however, remains impressively convincing. The convergence between ritual and sexual agents, together with Gilhuly's plausible identification of Lampito as an allegory for Sparta (through the very real Agis II) also suggests to Gilhuly that the women from Sparta, Boiotia, and Corinth introduced in the beginning of the play represent Athens' main enemies at the time of the play's production. This supposition is nothing new, but Gilhuly's reading of these historical enemies through the lens of the sacrificial imagery that is involved in the language of relevant passages as well as through the identities of
Lysistrata and other Athenian characters as ritual agents, underscores a dark yet simultaneously comic brutality against Athens' enemies inherent in Aristophanes' presentation. Likewise the language denoting the Spartan, Boiotian and Corinthian women transforms from hetairai-like descriptions to their literal embodiment at the end of the play as Diallage, an anatomically and geographically-divided porne and thus as a "sacrificial surrogate" for the earlier women; the end result of these embodied women is a complete physical objectification and thus metaphorical subjugation of Athens' traditional enemies. On the basis of these and other details of the play, then, Gilhuly concludes that the while the women of Greece presented in the Lysistrata are overtly involved in suggesting peace with Sparta, in a less obvious but deeper way, the women at the same time present a dark critique of the enemy in terms of ritual sacrifice and subjugation.

In this chapter Gilhuly also details the various animals with which women are associated and explicates the sacrificial and sexualized imagery that each animal evokes in the play: the heifer, the Boiotian eel, and the white horse. By unpacking various references to the eel in both the play and other literature, Gilhuly argues for the eel as symbol of the female as a sexualized ritual victim. Gilhuly also nicely contextualizes Lysistrata's joking about acquiring a white horse as a reference to Spartan women: not only to the Leukippides but also to the white horse involved in Tyndareus' oath before marrying Helen, as described by Pausanias.

Aside from matters of content, at times Gilhuly's writing confuses the issues. Occasionally she seems not to return to themes promised in the beginnings of chapters or describes them obliquely with a confusing result. In discussing Xenophon, for example, Gilhuly spends many pages dealing with issues not directly related to this matrix of sex and gender, at least on the surface. In setting up her argument (Chapter Four, pp. 100-10), then, it would have been nice for her to reassure her reader how these larger issues would bear more directly on the themes of the book, since it is not always clear where the argument is heading. At times this chapter reads more like a series of erudite discussions than complementary parts of a coherent picture. The middle sections of Chapter Two in particular would benefit from reminding the reader how the discussion pertains to the strands of argument that Gilhuly identifies as her goal in each subsection (pp. 100-19). Such confusion could have easily been cleared up by adding incisive concluding commentary at the end of each internal chapter division instead of immediately turning to the next subsection.

Minor typographical errors are minimal (p. 102, fortitude, in quotation at top of page; p. 119, problem in printing elision in the first line of the Greek text; p. 130 aspazomenon printed with a grave accent instead of a smooth breathing). Certain more substantive errors occur in bibliography and citation. Kurke is incorrectly cited on p. 112 by both date of publication and page number for a quote of huge length (footnote 41; the proper citation should be Kurke 1999, 219). Moreover, at the footnote's end Gilhuly shortly adds that Xenophon actually inverts the paradigm Kurke outlines in the quote. To this reader an explanation of this assertion would have been preferable . In terms of the symposium (not to mention Aristophanes), Gilhuly is also missing the work of Nick Fisher from Harvey and Wilkins' collection The Rivals of Aristophanes (London 2000; Chapter 22: "Symposiasts, fish-eaters and flatterers: social mobility and moral concerns"), in which Fisher argues that the symposium of the late fifth century, precisely the time in which both Plato's and Xenophon's works are set, was not at all an elite event. More also could be made, particularly in Gilhuly's discussion of Xenophon, of the historical distinctions between the terms polis and demos, which are not synonyms. Less important but also
missing from the bibliography is my own article on the anonymity of respectable women in Herodotus (CJ 101.3, 1-20), which, although not entirely relevant to any of the authors Gilhuly treats per se, would have strengthened Gilhuly's tangential remarks, made repeatedly throughout the book, about the general tendency of fifth and fourth-century Athenians to refrain from naming citizen wives in public.2 <>

Gilhuly's work concentrates on four pieces of literature dating from 411 to 343, but she treats them in a confusing chronological order: Demosthenes first; followed by Plato; then Xenophon; with Aristophanes last. This order was not satisfactorily explained, particularly in light of the focus of Chapters One, Three, and Four on the feminine continuum in relation to themes of long-term civic order. Chapter Two on Plato's Symposium understandably rather more concerns the world beyond the polis. The reader would have liked more of a stated rationale for this thematic and chronological scheme.

Whatever the weaknesses of the book, however, Gilhuly has written an admirable study of the interplay between the three female roles of prostitute, the wife, and the ritual agent in late fifth and fourth-century Athenian literature. The implications of the combination and conflation of these roles in the works she has selected should have far-reaching effects on how we read additional texts that depend on these roles as part of their cultural code in defining both the female and also the masculine subject constructed upon it.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction
2 Collapsing Order: Typologies of Women in the Speech "Against Neaira"
3 Was Diotima a Priestess? The Feminine Continuum in Plato's Symposium
4 Bringing the Polis Home: Private Performance and the Civic Gaze in
Xenophon's Symposium
5 Sex and Sacrifice in Aristophanes' Lysistrata
6 Conclusion

_____

Notes:

1. <> L. Kurke 1999, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece, Princeton.
2. <> Cp., D. Schaps 1977, "The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women's Names," CQ 27, 323-331.

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-- Creatures of a day! What is a man? What is he not? Man is a dream of a shadow.
epameroi: ti de tis; ti d'ou tis; skias onar anthropos.
-- Pindar, Pythian 8, 95-6.

Mythogyny: Canadian women elders' stories

2009-09-04T21:11:00.000-07:00

Mythogyny:
real lives far more impressive
than myth could ever be

An anthology of personal stories and lessons learned by women elders in BC
Oral histories produced by the Women Elders in Action

* I watched my mother be abused, psychologically, and saw her lack of choices in life and how everything was based on my father’s life. I was conscious of that but I didn’t really see it in my life – I lived it – and while I was living it, feminism arose. And so the words started being there…—Marjorie Drayton

* I’ve had everything done to me imaginable and I’m not an abuser and I’m not an alcoholic and I’m not a drug addict. You don’t have to be what social workers tell you you’re going to be.—Sheila Baxter

*I walked out of the marriage with nothing, he owned everything. But I didn’t have to write him out a cheque at the end of every month.—Colleen Carroll

Available September 15, 2009 from Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT) with financial assistance from the Women’s Program, Status of Women Canada and 411 Seniors Centre Society. To pre-order: call 604-684-8171 x 228 or email: jwestlund@411seniors.bc.ca

Read more on Mythogyny. Click on the link below.

http://www.en.wordpress.com/tag/mythogyny/

Jan Westlund, Coordinator
Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT)
411 Dunsmuir Street
Vancouver V6B 1X4
p: 604-684-8171 ext 228
f: 604-681-3589

HOW MYTHOGYNY WAS BORN:

Seventy-eight low-income women elders of BC’s lower mainland have oral histories in the new anthology Mythogyny. Thanks to a project by WE*ACT (Women Elders in Action), these women relived dramatic experiences of the 1920s through to the present day.

Senior women who underwent extensive training in interview techniques helped choose the subjects, record and transcribe their stories, and then edit them into a book that had cohesion and nothing unnecessary in it.

What turned out as a predominant theme are the myths they grew up with, especially in marriage, the realities they faced and how in debunking and surviving the falsity of myths, these women lived lives more impressive in their reality than myth could ever be.

The myths uncovered included the shocking discover that marriage is not happily ever after, the idea that $9 an hour is a living wage, fighting myths of racism and that women can't drive forklifts. Also, bomb shelters can be a good place to party.

A number of the storytellers recall “patches of Eden” in places they grew up as they moved in BC like the Doukhobor communities. Some poignant events have also turned up like a woman finding her biological mother who, it turned out, was the caregiver her adopted parents had hired for her as a baby.

Most of the storytellers are now in their seventies, a few in their sixties and four in their nineties. In the course of the book’s production, two have died.

Most turn out to be immigrants from Europe, and England, a few from the US, four from Asia including three from the Philippines. A lot of them live in Vancouver, a number in Abbotsford, Burnaby, Langley, Maple Ridge, Nelson, and Smithers. One or two come from Delta, Grand Forks, Nanaimo, Port Moody, Sooke, and Telkwa.

Mythogyny is the output from a story gathering project called “Lessons Learned: the Lives and Times of Women Elders in BC”, which Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT) undertook with financial assistance from the Women’s Program, Status of Women Canada and 411 Senior Centre Society in Vancouver. WE*ACT is an initiative of 411 Senior Centre. The book will be available in late September.

For more information, call Jan Westlund at 604-684-8171 local 228 or email jwestlund@411seniors.bc.ca.

Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development

2009-07-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

by Wendy Harcourt (London: Zed Books, 2009)

This is a new book that just came out in June of this year. The UK ordering site is here: http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/book.asp?bookdetail=4301 - it's available in both hardback and paperback.

Zed summarizes the book thus:

Body Politics in Development sets out to define body politics as a key political and mobilizing force for human rights in the last two decades. This passionate and engagingly written book reveals how once tabooed issues such as rape, gender based violence, sexual and reproductive rights have emerged fully fledged into the public arena as critical grounds of contention and struggle. Engaging in the latest feminist thinking and action, the book covers a broad range of key gender and development issues, including women's human rights, fundamentalism, sexualities and new technologies. It describes the struggles around body politics for people living in economic and socially vulnerable communities. The viewpoints are diverse - from the self, family and community to the public at national and international levels. The book's originality comes through the author's rich personal insights, her own engagement in feminist activism, global body politics, women¹s movements, and gender and development policy debates.

The book has been blurbed by Cynthia Enloe, Gita Sen, and Peggy Antrobus among others - all revered authors in the study of women and development.

Thanks to Bernedette Muthien in South Africa for sending out a review of the book from the AWID website, which I quote extensively below. AWID is the Association for Women's Rights in Development www.awid.org. Please also visit the review on the AWID website. There, you will find links to most of the organizations that are listed in this review, and a question and answer session with the author. - FW

http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics

What have we done to Bodies? Wendy Harcourt’s Reflections on Body Politics

AWID shares highlights from Wendy Harcourt’s new book Body Politics in Development and speaks with the author about the implications of her arguments for women’s rights activists, advocates, academics and development practitioners.

by Masum Momaya
[Masum Moyama is the curator of the International Museum of Women www.imow.org]

In Body Politics in Development, Wendy Harcourt re-centers what has become invisible through processes of advocacy and action: bodies. Bodies that are reproductive, productive and caring, violated, sexualized and rendered through technologies.

As Harcourt points out, historically, women’s experiences of their bodies, whether violated, exploited or commodified, have long catalyzed their political engagement; and, in aggregate, “body politics [has been] a key mobilizing force for human rights over the last few decades” (p. 24).

Harcourt argues that unpacking and understanding body politics is particularly important because, in the process of bringing women’s multiple needs and concerns into the development discourse, female bodies have often been essentialized and robbed of their agency - even within the global women’s movement.

To curtail this in the future, Harcourt takes both a retrospective and prospective look at how bodies are taken up in gender and development discourses and practices - and suggests self-reflective, alternate approaches that seek to re-center embodied experiences in development processes and policymaking, without essentializing them.

In Body Politics in Development, the author organizes her discussions of how the female body has been and is positioned in gender and development discourses into five categories of bodies: reproductive bodies, productive bodies, violated bodies, sexualized bodies and techno-bodies. For each category, she traces both how the body is positioned and what this means for activists and advocates working on various issues.

Below are highlights of Harcourt’s arguments for each of the five categories, accompanied by a partial list of organizations** that are working with alternate approaches.

Reproductive Bodies

Historically, policymakers and practitioners have tied the agency, experiences and needs of women to their biological abilities to give birth and their social roles as mothers. In the developing world, women have been targeted as sites of medical and social intervention in policies aimed at curbing population growth.

After decades of lobbying by feminist activists, the 1975 Cairo Programme of Action represented a shift from a longstanding paradigm focused on population control to one that emphasized reproductive rights. Gains were made in terms of reproductive rights agendas, which viewed women as subjects with agency rather than simply as sites of intervention, but social and economic inequities related to reproductive rights and health remained unchallenged and unaddressed.

By the 1980s, neoliberal policies were undermining the reproductive health agenda. Pressured to invest more in growing their economies by international lending institutions, governments in developing countries cut back on spending for social welfare, including health and education. Resources for ensuring reproductive health diminished.

In the late 1990s, women’s rights activists were, for the most part, left out of the construction of the Millennium Development Goals, a set of priorities adopted by United Nations member states to spur development. The Cairo language, based in autonomy and rights, was replaced by technocratic language focused on service provision. An example of this is the emphasis on reducing maternal mortality.
Currently, given the paucity of government money available for service provision almost everywhere in the world, most services have been privatized, opening up a commercial market for biomedical goods and services and potential exploitation of women’s bodies. This includes, for example, the provision of health-related information by corporations rather than governments or civil society organizations and the testing and “dumping” of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for disease prevention and treatment.

Some feminist and women’s rights organizations are fighting for an approach based in autonomy and rights in which structural inequities, as well as legacies of racism, homophobia, fundamentalism and militarism are considered and addressed.

Examples of Organizations Working From Alternate Approaches

African Partnership for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls (AMANITARE)
Articulacion Feminista Marcosur
Asian Pacific Resource and Research Centre for Women (ARROW)
Catholics for Choice
Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR)
Engender Health
International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)
International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)
International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC)
Ipas
Isis International
Reproductive Health Outlook (RHO)
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective

Productive Bodies

Historically, development practitioners and policymakers highlighted women’s economic contributions in order to position them as agentic subjects in development processes rather than simply as passive recipients of aid. International lending institutions such as International Monetary Fund and World Bank began to view making “investing in women” as important to furthering development and achieving returns on loans and investments. Interestingly, recent language from the United Nations, governments and even NGOs has paralleled this, emphasizing that women are “good investments” in business, government and development projects.

In some cases, this rhetoric reaffirms that “poor women from the South are a source of globally flexible, docile and cheap labor” (p. 69) and that women are valuable as sources of free labor and producers of goods that bring money into economies - but not necessarily as human beings, in and of themselves, with human rights.

Alternatives to this rhetoric include a rights-based approach, in which women and all people are seen as bearers of rights with intrinsic value. Also, community economies, whereby producers and consumers are local and means of exchange can be more closely monitored, provide alternatives to exploitative global production chains where women are trapped in a “race to the bottom.” Furthermore, transnational feminist solidarities, especially amongst workers organizing across borders and economies, serve to resist this rhetoric and its accompanying exploitative practices.

Examples of Organizations Providing Alternatives to the “Investing in Women” Rhetoric

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)
Feminist Dialogues at the World Social Forum
Global Women’s Strike
International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE)
WIDE Europe

Violated Bodies

Over the last half-century, sexual and gender-based violence has been mainstreamed into gender and development discourse through its framing as a health issue, causing organizations such as the World Health Organization and government ministries of health to pay attention to it as part of achieving health outcomes.

This framing raised the visibility of multiple forms sexual and gender-based violence, including domestic violence, rape, femicide and honor killings, amongst organizations and the general public, sometimes through shock. It also catalyzed a charity approach, in which people acted and donated to “help poor, pitiful victims over there in that remote, primitive part of the world.” This approach often supplanted an approach that holds perpetrators, governments and legal systems accountable for human rights violations or allows or recognizes agency for those who have been violated.

Furthermore, celebrities made the issue visible via films and campaigns for NGOs. In considering these campaigns, Harcourt wonders if there is a “risk of confusing real life misery and tragedy with the glamour and fictional lives of the stars? (p. 103) And, she asks, “are we just adding one more story to a billion dollar industry based on violence and sexism?” (p. 106)

Moreover, recently, military aggression has been justified in the “guise of protecting subjugated women and bringing civilization and prosperity to natives who are unable to govern autonomously” (p. 115) as is the case of the United States’ military intervention in Afghanistan.

Alternatives to solely health-based, celebrity-driven, charity-oriented approaches to sexual and gender-based violence include rights-based approaches that recognize longstanding legacies of power and domination across lines of gender, socioeconomic status, membership in religious communities, nationality and global positioning.

Examples of Organizations Employing a Rights-Based Approach to Counter Gender-Based Violence

African Partnership for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women and Girls (AMANITARE)
Articulacion Feminista Marcosur
Breakthrough
INCITE Women of Color Against Violence
MenEngage
Pathways of Women’s Empowerment
Shirkat Gah
Women Living Under Muslim Laws

Sexualized Bodies

Within development discourse, black and brown bodies are sexualized and characterized as needing to be saved, rescued and re-educated, e.g. in discussions around FGM and prostitution. Sex, particularly amongst those in the Global South, has been articulated as problematic, i.e. “people are having too much sex,” “people are having unprotected sex,” and “people are engaging in nonconformative sexual practices.” These opinions have validated and legitimated intensified regulation of bodies and sexual practices and harnessed anxieties about sex.

Some governments and NGOs based in the Global North, sometimes in conjunction with some religious institutions in the Global South, have pushed to enact policies that, according to Harcourt, “further advance imperialist ambitions,” for example the George W. Bush administration’s Global Gag rule.

Activists have been working to reclaim the subjectivity of their own sexuality. For example, sex worker rights movements speak of “selling sex as a livelihood choice through which people have agency, including the right to self-determination, to work and to self-express” (p. 141). Some of them fight for erotic justice. According to Harcourt, erotic justice “recasts sexual pleasure as a source of physical, psychological, intellectual and spiritual well-being; instead of othering traditional practices or sexual minorities, [it] conceptualizes everyone as having potential for diversity in sexual desire, including same-sex desire” (p. 154)

Examples of Organizations Employing a Sexual Rights and/or Erotic Justice Framework

BAYSWAN
CREA
Naripokkho
Network of Sex Workers Project
The Pleasure Project
Sexual Policy Watch

Techno-Bodies

Through technologies, bodies are fragmented and commodified. The process of development often entails delivering technologies in ways that are racist, gendered and heteronormative. An underlying assumption is that if money and skills are available, inserting high-tech solutions into the mix is the best option to address any problem, regardless of ethical and environmental consequences. In most cases, given global power inequities, developing countries have no choice but to embrace these technologies if they want to build successful economies.

With the advent of new methods of research and intellectual property laws, life and life forms (e.g. seeds, genes, etc.) are privatized and can be owned. Common heritage is no longer off-limits to either commercial or scientific interests seeking exclusive control.

Moreover, biotechnology has made the entire notion of the body more fluid. A new eugenics and enabling of building the perfect self, body and abilities labels any deviations as deficient. Further research is needed to unpack the gendered dimensions of rapidly developing technologies.

Harcourt asks, “what are the responsibilities of companies, scientists, policymakers and the public in the global north towards poor women and men in the global south who are bearing the brunt of the unregulated and unethical practices of biotech research and industry?” (p. 188-189)

Examples Organizations Monitoring the Technologization of Bodies through a Feminist Lens

Center for Genetics and Society
Committee on Women, Population and the Environment
The Corner House
Generations Ahead
Navdanya
Population and Development Program at Hampshire College
Related AWID Resources
Factsheet on Why New Technology is a Women’s Rights Issue
Factsheet on Facing the Challenges of New Reproductive Technologies
Factsheet on Nanotechnology
Factsheet on Gender Equality and New Technologies

In conversation with AWID, Wendy Harcourt reflects on what her analysis means in practice for women’s rights advocates. [Please visit the AWID weblink to read the interview portion of this review, as well as to find links to the organizations listed above - the original site is:

http://www.awid.org/eng/Issues-and-Analysis/Issues-and-Analysis/What-have-we-done-to-Bodies-Wendy-Harcourt-s-Reflections-on-Body-Politics ]

For more information about Body Politics in Development, see Wendy Harcourt’s website.http://www.wendyharcourt.net/Body_Politics_in_Development.html

Dahlia Cassidy

2009-06-28T01:05:00.000-07:00

by Anne Cameron (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2004)

This book is highly unusual, and the picture on the cover (left) has absolutely nothing to do with its content.
There's not one word about lipstick in the book. It's actually all about work. I imagine the heroine, Dahlia Cassidy, as looking a lot like the author, Anne Cameron (right) only really tall and strapping, as she would have to be to do so much, so much, so much work.

For one thing, Dahlia is a single mother of a vast brood of bastards (they use the term themselves) by various fathers, plus she's the primary support at least part of the time for some of her sisters' kids as well. As best I could count them, there were 9 children living in her house by the end of the story.

When we first meet Dahlia, she's just had a pretty horrendous sexual experience with a "Frenchman" and more or less decides to just give up on sex and concentrate on making a living for everybody. She plays music in a bar, but also does "fungus plucking" (wild mushroom harvesting) and tree-planting, each in their season. Luckily she has a childless, child-loving sister who stays home with the kids while Dahlia goes out for weeks and maybe months of tree-planting under the most grueling conditions of labour and weather. Later in the story, the family ends up on a farm, and ex-farm-girl Dahlia gets to show her chops doing a remarkable roster of grueling chores including cleaning out a cow barn and a chicken shed and harvesting hay (2 crops per year) on a miserably uncomfortable tractor, and in the off-season has a job clearing brush. I'm reminded of a saying the old folks used to use: "It's a great life if you don't weaken."

Reading all these descriptions of how hard and rather painfully but pretty much uncomplainingly Dahlia works to support her family was really interesting, but it left me feeling very uncomfortable about myself and my capacity for lying around reading books. The very gratification I felt reading about the work felt vaguely like reading pornography, my body living vicariously through the descriptions.
The work descriptions were longer and more realistic than the descriptions of the child-rearing. Maybe because the children grow up quite a few years' worth in just 264 pages, their personalities, while distinct from one another, are pretty much sketched in. Their behaviour problems are also almost nonexistent, and that was to me the part that was hardest to believe. Nevertheless, tales about large families are enjoyable. I did find the book hard to put down.

Anne Cameron has written lots of books - you can find a list of them on Wikipedia. Her most famous was apparently Daughters of Copper Woman (1981), which according to her current publisher has sold over 200,000 copies. Harbour Publishing's website also gives this generic author description:

Anne Cameron was born in Nanaimo, BC. She began writing at an early age, starting with theatre scripts and screenplays. In 1979, her film Dreamspeaker, directed by Claude Jutra, won seven Canadian Film Awards, including best script. After being published as a novel, Dreamspeaker went on to win the Gibson Award for Literature. She has published more than 30 books, including the underground classic Daughters of Copper Woman, its sequel, Dzelarhons, novels, stories, poems and legends - for adults and children. Her most recent novels are Family Resemblances, Hardscratch Row, and a new, revised edition of Daughters of Copper Woman. She lives in Tahsis, BC

I didn't mention yet that Anne Cameron is a lesbian. In Dahlia Cassidy, there is some lesbian interest, but it's really rather slight; as mentioned, it's the work - low-paying intensely physical labour - and the very successful fulfillment of family responsibilities - that occupies most of the space.

One final note about publishers. Harbour Publishing is "an award-winning independent book publisher owned and operated by Howard and Mary White. The company was established in 1974 and is based on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast." They are not the original publisher of all Anne Cameron's works, although they seem to be trying to get all her books under one roof now. Daughters of Copper Woman was originally published by the feminist-operated Press Gang in Vancouver - a press that survived in various conformations until 2003. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/002026-285-e.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Gang_Publishers

Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America

2009-06-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

by Jane S.Jaquette (Editor, Contributor), Marcela Ríos Tobar (Contributor), Jutta Marx (Contributor), Jutta Borner (Contributor), Mariana Caminotti (Contributor), Gioconda Espina (Contributor), Beatriz Kohen (Contributor), Flávia Piovesan (Contributor), Julissa Mantilla Falcón (Contributor), Virginia Vargas (Contributor), Teresa Valdés (Contributor), Alina Donoso (Contributor), Gabriela Montoya (Contributor)

This book is coming out July 1. Maria Suarez forwarded the link to advance ordering on Amazon.com - I find it very interesting that Amazon tends not to list the publishers of books it is selling. Perhaps this is to keep you from ordering directly from the publisher? By googling, I was able to discover it's from Duke University Press.

Here's the blurb from the Duke catalog

Latin American women’s movements played important roles in the democratic transitions in South America during the 1980s and in Central America during the 1990s. However, very little has been written on what has become of these movements and their agendas since the return to democracy. This timely collection examines how women’s movements have responded to the dramatic political, economic, and social changes of the last twenty years. In these essays, leading scholar-activists focus on the various strategies women’s movements have adopted and assess their successes and failures.

The book is organized around three broad topics. The first, women’s access to political power at the national level, is addressed by essays on the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile, gender quotas in Argentina and Brazil, and the responses of the women’s movement to the “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. The second topic, the use of legal strategies, is taken up in essays on women’s rights across the board in Argentina, violence against women in Brazil, and gender in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru. Finally, the international impact of Latin American feminists is explored through an account of their participation in the World Social Forum, an assessment of a Chilean-led project carried out by women’s organizations in several countries to hold governments to the promises they made at international conferences in Cairo and Beijing, and an account of cross-border organizing to address femicides and domestic abuse in the Juárez-El Paso border region. Jane S. Jaquette provides the historical and political context of women’s movement activism in her introduction, and concludes the volume by engaging contemporary debates about feminism, civil society, and democracy.

Contributors. Jutta Borner, Mariana Caminotti, Alina Donoso, Gioconda Espina, Jane S. Jaquette, Beatriz Kohen, Julissa Mantilla Falcón, Jutta Marx, Gabriela L. Montoya, Flávia Piovesan, Marcela Ríos Tobar, Kathleen Staudt, Teresa Valdés, Virginia Vargas

“This is an important, timely, and fascinating examination of women, feminism, and democratization in Latin America. It is also a terrific read and another major contribution by Jane S. Jaquette, who has brought together a first-rate team of authors with extensive knowledge of the countries about which they write.”—Valentine M. Moghadam, author of Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks

“Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America gives one a sense of the dynamism of feminist thinking in Latin America. The essays address national and regional women’s movements’ significant yet partial successes over the past twenty years as well as the ways that the movements have more recently confronted urgent political strategy choices such as whether to rely on judicial solutions or to engage with the World Social Forum.”—Cynthia Enloe, author of The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire

“Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America is a timely intervention in debates that should matter to feminists everywhere. Using freshly collected data, the authors evaluate questions like the impact of gender quotas on politics, the relationship between global feminism and national policies, and the impact of neoliberal restructuring and democratic transition on specific women’s movements. Engaging and clear, the essays offer new insights into issues that demand our attention.”—Gay W. Seidman, author of Beyond the Boycott: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism

Jane S. Jaquette is Bertha Harton Orr Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of Politics, Emerita at Occidental College in Los Angeles. A past president of both the Association for Women and Development and the Latin American Studies Association, she is the editor of Women and Gender Equity in Development Theory and Practice (also published by Duke University Press), Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe (with Sharon Wolchik), and The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Feminism and the Transition to Democracy

I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

2009-06-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

by Nora Ephron (NY: Knopf, 2006)

Nora Ephron may be a very good writer, but this is not a very good book. Luckily, I was given it for free by my sister Dina, because if I had paid Canadian $26.95 I would have been really mad. The text is so relaxed and shallow, it would be even slightly sub-par if it were a blog one could read for free. Nevertheless, as I was stuck with only this to read on a 9-hour bus ride followed by a cross-country flight, I finished the whole thing.

There were three interesting points at which I turned down the page, and in order to save you $26.95 (less 30% off because it's remaindered), I'll just tell you what they are.

1. The chapter Parenting in Three Stages. Actually, now that I look at it, it wasn't that good - maybe I turned down the corner to mark my place when I fell asleep.

2. On page 119, Ephron writes that after college she read Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook and it changed her life, giving her "epiphany after epiphany." This is really interesting, because typically Betty Friedan gets the credit for kicking off the US feminist movement in 1963 with her nonfiction book The Feminine Mystique, but The Golden Notebook was published a year earlier, in 1962. Ephron writes "just before the second stage of the women's movement burst into being, I was electrified by Lessing's heroine, Anna, and her struggle to become a free woman. Work, friendship, love, sex, politics, psychoanalysis, writing - all the things that preoccupied me were Lessing's subjects, and I can remember how many times I put the book down, reeling from its brilliance and insights."

This passage shed light for me on Lessing's denial of being a feminist. Not only was she sick of isms after her stint with Communism, but she had arrived at the feminist insights without the feminist movement and could take credit for having published them first. It reminds me of my refusal to join the National Organization for Women when it arrived in Austin, Texas, and found its home at the already existing Women's Center I'd helped to create. No, I'm not joining you, I insisted, you are joining me.

3. Two pages farther on, the last turned-down corner. I think it was because Ephron touted Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White as "probably the first great work of mystery fiction ever written." I couldn't remember if I'd read it or just tried to read it, and was thinking I would check my perception. Or maybe it was because at the end of the page Ephron compares coming to the surface from dipping into a great novel to "the rapture of the deep." I myself use the term "the rapture of the deep" to refer to what happens to poets at poetry readings when they can't stop themselves and they lose sight of what the audience is thinking about their work or how long they've gone on. I know for a fact this is not a new phenomenon, because I remember seeing an 18th-century drawing on the wall at the Robert Burns museum in Scotland. It showed a poet reading to an audience, half of which was comatose and the other half yawning.

Maybe putting an audience to sleep is not such a bad thing. My reading of I Feel Bad About My Neck didn't even make me feel bad about my own neck, which is both wrinkled and double-chinned now even though I'm a bit younger than Nora Ephron; it just made me sleepy enough to go back and back to my airplane nap - which, while not as relaxing as an actual lying-down nap, has at least being oblivious to boredom to recommend it.

--Frieda Werden

The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story

2009-06-21T17:09:00.000-07:00

by Hanan al-Shaykh (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; NY: Random House, 2009)

Judith Weiss sent a link to this US review of a book released in the US yesterday.

http://www.counterpunch.org/larson06192009.html

It was also released in the UK June 1 - a British review is here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-locust-and-the-bird-by-hanan-alshaykh-trans-roger-allen-1696910.html

Al-Shaykh, who is from Lebanon, was estranged from her mother as a child, when the mother divorced her elderly husband from an arranged marriage and married a man she loved. Having no leverage, she had to give up her two daughters to be raised by the husband's family. Years later, the mother followed the daughter's career as a writer, and eventually challenged her to write a book based on the life of a woman who did not have privilege or many choices - herself.

I have not read this book, which was only released in the US two days ago, and probably isn't even available yet in Canada. However, it has been warmly reviewed and should be of great interest.

397 Ways to Save Money

2009-06-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

by Kerry Taylor (HarperCollins Canada, 2009).

I haven't read this book yet, but Leah McLaren gave it a plug in the Jun 6 2009 Globe & Mail (yes, in the dreaded Style section, which has only McLaren and the horoscopes to make it worth opening at all). Apparently, saving money is now stylish. For poor people, this means all those rich and formerly rich people have started competing with us for the most economical stuff. And that makes all the economical stuff go up in price faster than the expensive stuff. In 2007, the Canadian government admitted there was about a 2% cost of living increase; however, the price of the cheapest lunch on campus had risen from $4 to $5 - a 25% increase!

Anyway, here's a link to more about Taylor's book:

http://canadawomen.blogspot.com/2009/06/397-ways-to-save-money.html

L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement

2009-05-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

by Ruth Milkman (New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. 244 pp.)

This book is co-reviewed with another US labour writer's book here (thanks to Ernesto Aguilar for posting the link on Facebook):

http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/remaking-labor-from-the-top-down-botton-up-or-both/

Here's a quote from the review (by Steve Early):

Now a professor of sociology at UCLA and director of its Institute of Industrial Relations, Milkman has watched how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC), and Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) have revitalized themselves and/or the L.A. County Labor Federation. In her view, looking to union members to rebel against corrupt, ineffective, or undemocratic unions and refashion them into something better is an exercise in wishful thinking and existential frustration—”Waiting For Lefty” reborn as “Waiting For Godot.” According to Milkman, proponents of the rank and file approach long championed by Moody naively assume “that if only the legions of top union brass would step aside and allow the rank and file’s natural leaders to take command, labor would no longer be so impotent.” In reality, she writes, “this approach glosses over the complex and multi-layered character of union leadership and various political configurations that are possible across those layers."

Milkman believes “that, when International leadership is progressive, it can be a powerful force for promoting innovation at the local union level” and rooting out “business unionism.” “As is now well documented, many of the most successful initiatives of the SEIU [and other Change to Win affiliates] have actually been ‘top down’ efforts, engineered not by the rank and file but by paid staff in the upper reaches of the union bureaucracy…The recent ascension of leaders with both extensive formal education and activist experience in other movements to high-level positions in key unions has injected dynamism into the labor movement….The most vibrant and innovative unions are those that combine social movement-style mobilization, with carefully calibrated strategies that leverage the expertise of creative, professional leaders.”

I was especially interested in the serious discussion of the Janitors for Justice movement, which was seeded by organizers in the way Milkman describes. There's a Hollywood film I recently found at a VHS sale, about the Janitors for Justice strike. It stars Adrien Brody and Pilar Padilla, was directed by Ken Loach, and produced by Rebecca O'Brien. It's called Bread and Roses (2001). The film shows the victory of the strike, but not the later erosion of the victory, as described in this review:

Milkman regards SEIU’s Justice for Janitors (JfJ) campaigns to be an unqualified success and model for union-builders everywhere. “Justice For Janitors originated as part of a strategic union rebuilding effort,” she explains.” It was conceived by SEIU’s national leadership and relied heavily on research and other staff-intensive means of exerting pressure on employers.”

To their credit, JfJ organizers helped pioneer comprehensive, community-based campaigns that by-passed the NLRB to win union recognition via card check and neutrality—by targeting building owners who were the real power behind cleaning service contractors. SEIU employed direct action tactics, including civil disobedience, built strong ties with immigrant communities, and presented the workers’ cause in a way that elicited sympathy and support from that part of the broader public concerned about social justice and better treatment of oppressed minorities.

According to Milkman, in the original JfJ struggle in Los Angeles in 1988-90–plus subsequent efforts in many other cities–”rank-and-file mobilization played a critical role in its success.” Nevertheless, as Moody notes, this “mobilization” has rarely translated into a leading role for immigrant janitors in managing the affairs of their own SEIU locals. By the mid-1990s, JfJ activists in Los Angeles were complaining about Local 399’s out-of-touch leadership, its neglect of day-to-day workplace issues, and the lack of rank-and-file participation in union decision-making. Many supported a successful electoral insurgency, led by the “Multiracial Alliance Slate.” But, in 1995, the SEIU national leadership quickly nullified the Alliance’s election victory by throwing the local into trusteeship and later moving L.A. janitors into a much larger, regional building services local. In L.A. Story, Milkman barely acknowledges that there was “widespread criticism” of SEIU over this pivotal development. She dismisses “Multiracial Alliance” organizing activity as an unfortunate “outbreak of factionalism” that, only “on the surface, appeared to involve rank and file rebellion against the local SEIU officialdom.”

In both Canada and the US, depiction of labour is very scarce - in the news, in academia, and in the movies, so I was happy to get the link to this information.

Late Nights on Air

2009-05-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

by Elizabeth Hay (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2007)

Elizabeth Hay is quite a well known Canadian writer, with previous novels that were finalists or winners for major national book awards. Especially pertinent to this book, she formerly worked for CBC Radio in Yellowknife (as well as Winnipeg and Toronto). Late Nights on Air is set in Yellowknife in the summer of 1975, and revolves around characters who work at the CBC radio station there. Especially prominent are two young women in their 20s - Dido, who starts out very confident, and Gwen, who starts out very timid. If one of these characters is based on Hay, herself, I'm betting it's the timid one. There's also an older man named Harry, who as the story begins is on his way down the career ladder, and an assortment of other characters who are important but in a sense not central.

As a radio person myself, I love the parts of the story that have to do with learning about radio - the mic technique, the creation of sound effects, recording in the field, and so forth. During the period of the story, CBC is re-focusing its efforts and television is on the verge of eclipsing radio - although, for me, radio is still more important than television even in the CBC of today, and still the best-produced element of the national network.

More deeply explored than the radio angle of this book is the North, and in the end I would say the North is truly the principal character. The Yellowknife of this period is lovingly detailed, but as the book expands, the story grows to encompass the extensive Federal inquiry on a 2,200-mile gas pipeline planned to run from Prudhoe Bay across the Yukon on to the south. Hay and Gwen were great admirers of Canadian Supreme Court Justice Thomas Berger, who traveled for three years around the Arctic listening to witnesses, with great respect for all. I have found some of the CBC's coverage of these hearings archived online and even more powerful, video clips as well as audio from the hearings here. The CBC website confirms Hay's impression, that Berger's "report shocked the government that appointed him, and was heralded by some as 'Canada's Native Charter of Rights.'"

A related aspect of Late Nights on Air revolves around the history of the doomed 1927 expedition led by explorer Jack Hornby to Canada's Northwest Territories. About the last third of the book is devoted to two men and two women from the radio station following in Hornby's footsteps, and becoming intimately acquainted with the spartan but various terrain of the Canadian Arctic. This section is beautifully written and creates strange and lovely pictures in the mind.

The way the book is built includes many surprising changes of the wind - both literally, and in terms of the direction of the story. Hay has a way of throwing out little warnings that something dire is going to happen in the future and leaving you waiting for it in a state of suspense, wondering if the part of the story she's telling now is going to reveal the disaster or not.

There's a lot of love and awe in this story. The human dynamics seem mostly realistic, and sometimes spark sharp memories for me. There is also the makings of an interesting reading list, if one wants to collect the wide variety of literary and historical references that appear throughout. I found the book informative and engaging and recommend it very much.

-- Frieda Werden

Old Friend from Far Away, The Practice of Writing Memoir.

2009-04-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

by Natalie Goldberg, link to review by Alice Embree in The Rag Blog

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/author-of-writing-down-bones-visits.html

S.K.I.R.T.S. in the Boardroom: A Woman's Survival Guide to Success in Business and Life

2009-03-27T08:03:00.000-07:00

by Marshawn Evans, JD (Hoboken NJ [published simultaneously in Canada]: John Wiley and Sons, 2009)

Reviewed by Dinita Caldwell

S.K.I.R.T.S. in the Boardroom delivers a realistic and relatable approach and perspective for all women looking to achieve success in the workplace. This book is an excellent resource for young women, current executives and entrepreneurs of all backgrounds who inspire to elevate their careers. To read the rest of this book review click here.

(Link forwarded by Jim Ellinger of Austin Airwaves and Hopeton Hay, host and producer of Economic Perspectives on KAZI-FM, Austin, Texas [Mondays 5:30-6 p.m. 88.7 FM)

Bad Chemistry

2009-01-08T23:23:00.000-08:00

by Nora Kelly (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993)

I like mystery novels, but the older I get the more demanding I am about the quality of them. I want lots of background research to be in evidence, good writing, interesting characters, and a political slant that doesn't offend my feminism.

I'm happy to report that even though this novel by Nora Kelly is an old one, it's worth digging out and reading. Since the author is from Vancouver, you can still find it in the Vancouver Public Library, but I also have seen copies available through Amazon, along with more works by Kelly in the same genre.

The background research in this novel has a lot about a university chemistry department in Cambridge, England, its facilities, work, organization, technology, and human interactions. The descriptions are clear and concise and really evoke the lab in one's mind. The story also involves a feminist reproductive rights group and offers a naturalistic portrayal of the characters and their way of working.

The lead character is a feminist historian from Canada who is carrying on a long-distance relationship with a Scotland Yard detective -- perhaps slightly far-fetched, but not impossible. I really liked the conversations the various feminists had about men, police, and each other. They had political, social and temperamental differences but their way of dealing with each other was insightful and decent. I also liked the way the people from the different groups and places had tangential relationships that reasonably brought them together over the problem of the crime.

The character of the murdered woman was very plausibly drawn and the tension between her way of operating in the masculine environment of the lab and in the the feminine environment of the Pregnancy Information Service (yes, PIS*) seemed very realistic.

The plot came together remarkably well. There were many different pieces from the fairly large cast of characters that led to the solution, and the way the result emerged gave a satisfaction similar to that of a scientifically solved problem. It didn't leave me feeling as if the author had dragged in red herrings or had made specious claims of proof just to end the story. The murderer got well and properly nailed.

I plan to look for other books by Nora Kelly - I gather there are 4 with the Gillian Adams character, the feminist historian. The other three are In the Shadow of King's, My Sister's Keeper, and Old Wounds. One online source said Kelly was working on a fifth book.
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*Kelly has a penchant for raunchy acronyms for feminist groups - there's another one in My Sister's Keeper.

The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays

2009-01-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

by Carolyn Gage (forthcoming, 2009)

I saw Carolyn Gage perform her one-woman show The Second Coming of Joan of Arc at the US National Women's Studies Association conference a few years ago. It was really gripping, and had a wonderful feminist and historical analysis of Joan's achievements, how and why she got screwed over by the troops and the King, and how the butch dyke aspect of this warrior's character was papered over by religious appropriation.

A few years after I saw the show, Gage allowed me to include the audio from one of her performances of this work in the radio series WINGS: Women's International News Gathering Service. I edited it into three half-hours, along with an author interview. This was one of the most successful program series ever to appear on WINGS. You can hear it streaming online through the University of South Florida Women's Studies Department website (find the right page by going to www.wings.org and clicking on Archives). The archives site is searchable - you can find the three programs using the search term Gage.

Carolyn Gage is a very prolific writer with numerous books published not only of plays but also of essays. Some of her books are the kind of thing you want to keep by your bed and read a few pages every morning to keep your fire alive.

Now, "The Second Coming of Joan of Arc" is included in a new anthology about to be released. You can find all the information about ordering this and her other books on her website: www.carolyngage.com

Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975

2008-12-18T15:22:00.000-08:00

edited by Barbara J. Love, foreword by Nancy F. Cott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 576 pages

From the late 1970s through the 1990s, I worked in women's history - Texas women's history, with the great, late historian Ruthe Winegarten, and a sizeable group of other women who collectively formed the Texas women's history project and its successor activities. We had a thrilling time collecting artifacts for a major museum exhibit, and data and stories enough for many articles and books (many in fact still being written). One thing that experience taught me, however, was that women have not been leaving enough documentation of their/our activities, for the historians to come.

That's one reason that a book like Feminists Who Changed America is very important. It provides a starting place for looking for who was involved in the movement, where they came from and what they accomplished. The book includes 2,250 entries, almost all of them written by the subjects themselves, but subject to the guidelines and promptings of the editors. Compiling this book was clearly a labour of love, and also one that must surely have required a vast store of patience and forebearance, in working with so many strong-willed authors to set down their own contributions to women's history, mostly in 1/3 of a page or less.

As I dip into the book at random (unfortunately, it's too large to keep on the back of the toilet), I learn more about old friends and heroines. Here's Allie Hixson, for example, who has volunteered almost full-time to try to get the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution passed (nope, it's not in there yet!). Turns out she has a doctorate in English but was denied a full-time teaching position because she was a woman. Thinking about the Equal Rights Amendment, I try looking up Sissy Farenthold, who got the Texas Equal Legal Rights Amendment finally introduced and passed in the early '70s, when she was still the only woman in the Texas House of Representatives. Probably she was too modest to write her own bio.

I have to say here, in the interests of full disclosure, that I am one of the subjects in the book, and probably one of the tardiest and hardest to work with. My biggest problem was that I was being asked to write about my own accomplishments, but almost all my accomplishments as a feminist have been co-accomplishments with other women. Barbara required me to reduce this contextualization in the interests of space and conformity, and to a degree I complied.

The internal dynamics of creating the book must have also been fairly strenuous. Besides Barbara Love as the Editor, there were 31 other women working at one or another editorial level, 3 researchers, 19 advisory board members, a 3-member outreach committe with its own chair, an indexer, ten photographers whose work is included on the cover and in a 16-page black and white photo essay, a web technician, a graphic designer, and an office administrator.

Looking in the book for the biography of its editor, I find that Barbara Joan Love was born in 1937, that she joined the US National Organization for Women (NOW) very early - in 1967. She published a book called Foremost Women in Communication in 1970, and went on to be part of the Lavender Menace and work on lesbian and gay issues. She co-authored one of my favourite early books on the lesbian feminist movement, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman (1972). She was also an early matriarchalist and futurist, and despite all this managed to be appointed by the White House as a New York delegate to the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston. The project for Feminists Who Changed America was done in collaboration with the Veteran Feminists of America.

Obviously there are various kinds of problems with this book. Despite having 2,250 entries, that is really a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers of women, surely at least in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who made major contributions to the US feminist movement in that period alone. This is no doubt in large measure due to the subjects themselves demurring to write their histories, either from modesty or time or not knowing about the opportunity. (I don't know if there were histories left on the cutting room floor.)

Also, the introduction by Nancy Cott is quite short and slight - a few notes on the etiology of the women's movement, decribing it as "fragmenting" into many smaller groups. I would have chosen a different term - feminists who emerged during this period all owned the feminist movement in different ways and defined it for themselves, applying it at the grassroots and personal level, and not mainly in national organizations. Professor Cott is a professor of American History at Harvard and has a book out from Yale Press titled The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), which goes into depth on the subject of how modern feminism came to be. I expect a lot more can be written about what it became starting from the data provided in Feminists Who Changed America.

The biggest structural handicap of Feminists Who Changed America from the point of future history writers is that the index isn't really an index - just a list of the names of the women mentioned with the pages they are on, so you can't for example search by organization or newspaper name if you've forgotten who the founder or the editor was.

My best suggestion is that this is a project that was perhaps done in the wrong medium. While it makes an impressive book (and an expensive one), it would have much more scope and utility as a web-based cache of knowledge - it would be automatically searchable and also more easily expandable for the stories that didn't get finished by the deadline. It's my hope that once Barbara Love recovers from making the book she will recover her futurism and consider a move into the 21st century medium.

Meanwhile, you can help her recover what she spent out of her own pocket to put this book together, by ordering a copy and getting your library to do the same. It will speak volumes (well one volume anyway) about your politics when you have it on your coffee table - and with its large comfy size and water-resistant cover, it will also make an excellent and symbolic chair-booster for the toddlers you'd like to see standing on their foremothers' shoulders by and by.

The publisher's listing is here:

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/83pce6fh9780252031892.html

Or you can order through the editor herself: BJLove@msn.com

It's $80 US (but you get a discount if you're in it).

-Frieda Werden

Last Stop Sunnyside (the first Dana Leoni mystery)

2008-12-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

by Pat Capponi (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2006)

I couldn't put down til I finished all of Capponi's nonfiction books: Upstairs in the Crazy House (1992), Dispatches from the Poverty Line (1997), The War at Home (1999), Bound by duty: walking the beat with Canada's cops (2000/2001), and Beyond the Crazy House: changing the future of madness (2003); so, it was a thrill to find her name on a paperback in the Mystery section of the Brittania branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

The themes Capponi explored so grippingly in the earlier books - realities of life among Canada's crazy, poor, and marginalized - serve her as a rich and believable source of background for genre fiction. And the safety of the genre may help her get her core message a lot further.

This mystery has many characters, and they work together to solve the case. There is also a lot of background of the community and its institutions, including the cheap Single Room Occupancy (SRO)living spaces; the local bar that serves breakfast; the local drop-in centre, its activities, and how its staff juggle the needs and eccentricities of the people who come there; and the way that different neighbourhoods of poor and richer exist side by side on the map and yet so far apart. There is also a secondary mystery in a richer venue that interlocks with the main one. The guilt (and sometimes the anger) of those who have more wealth upon looking in the faces of those who have less are touched upon. And so are the cops, who are not the enemy exactly, but they don't care for the marginal as much as the marginal care about each other. The marginalized are also very diverse, and so among them they can put together some interesting resources for their teamwork. As in Capponi's non-fiction, the writing is clear, to the point, vivid, and unsentimental, even about emotional matters. Overall, a satisfying read for fans of the mystery genre who prefer non-cozy settings and characters.

Pat's second mystery, The Corpse Will Keep, came out this year, 2008, and is previewed in the paperback of the first one. It has the same set of characters in a progression from their first escapade. Mystery publishers usually want an author to commit to a series of at least 3 novels with the same characters to get a contract, so we should be able to expect another one in the next couple of years.

Keep writing, Pat! You're a gem.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Capponi

Antigone Magazine Fundraising Calendar

2008-12-02T22:00:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

We REALLY need your help! With only one month left of 2008, we still have 500 copies of our 2009 Dreams for Women Calendars left to sell! The money raised by selling these calendars is instrumental for us to launch Antigone For Girls (a magazine written by and for girls aged 10-15 that will encourage them to get involved in leadership and politics).

The 2009 Dreams for Women Calendar is a non-profit calendar featuring 12 postcards sent in from around the world depicting men and women's Dreams for Women (Ex. 'I dream of a world where no woman is seen and not heard'). The funds raised from the sales of the calendar go to the Antigone Foundation (www.antigonemagazine.wordpress.com).

Please forward this e-mail on and let everyone know what a great project, organization and calendar this is. Buy copies of the calendar for yourself or as holiday gifts for family and friends. Or buy one for a special woman in your life who has helped YOU make your dreams come true!

For Bloggers:

We're giving FREE calendars to the first 15 bloggers who write about the calendars and pay a $5 shipping fee at this link:

http://antigonemagazine.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/dreams-for-women-blogger-giveaways/

For Non-Profit Organizations:

Raise money for your organization by selling calendars! We sell calendars to non-profits at half price and allow them to sell them to raise money for their organizations! Find out more information here:

http://antigonemagazine.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/its-here-the-dreams-for-women-2009-calendar-is-here/

This is a great opportunity to buy a cool feminist gift for the holidays and to support a great organization! See below for more information about the Dreams for Women project and calendar!

Take care,

Amanda Reaume
Executive Director
The Antigone Foundation
www.antigonamagazine.wordpress.com

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Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
- Gloria Steinem

Antigone Magazine's Dreams for Women postcard art project is launching it's 2009 Dreams for Women calendar featuring postcards submitted by men and women around the world! The calendar seeks to help raise money for The Antigone Foundation and to provide a way other women's organizations around the world can also fundraise for their own organizations. As part of this launch, we have created a video in which men and women share their dreams for women equality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBQP5uM12kg

The Project:

Featured in Ms. Magazine, in the International Women’s Museum, and on Feministing.com, the postcard art project has attracted worldwide attention and interest, garnering media attention and submissions from as far away as Japan, Germany, Brazil, France, Portugal, Romania and Los Angeles. The Dreams for Women art project asks women and men of all ages to depict their hopes and dreams for women (examples include “I dream of a world with more female leaders” and “I dream of a world where no woman is seen and not heard”) by painting, drawing, writing,sketching or decoupaging them onto a postcard.

Inspired by the popular mail-art project PostSecret.com, a postcard art project that encourages people to send in their secrets, Dreams for Women strives to be a feminist PostSecret. Instead of asking what your secrets are, the project wants to know what your dreams for women are.The Antigone Foundation began receiving submissions in January 2008 and has received hundreds of submissions so far. Their YouTube videos,which showcase the project, have also received thousands of hits.

The project, which is coordinated by a small group of dedicated young women ranging in ages from 20-24, is committed to envisioning progress for women around the world. According to founder Amanda Reaume, dreaming is essential to change: “the postcards we have received and continue to receive keep expanding our vision of the future, and keep adding more voices to the conversation of what that future will look like for women.”

The project was started out of a desire to encourage women and men to envision a better future for women and to help fund work towards that future. Dreams for Women has thus launched a fundraising calendar. The calendar,featuring 12 postcard submissions from around the world, will be sold for $20 and is available via Antigone Magazine’s blog www.antigonemagazine.wordpress.com.

Indeed,the project hopes to raise money to officially launch the Antigone Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that will encourage young women to get involved in leadership, politics and activism. The organization will continue the work started by Antigone Magazine, a publication about women, politics, leadership and activism that started at UBC and has since expanded to a national subscription base, as well as, to the University of Toronto.

Fundraising with Dreams for Women

The organization also hopes to help raise money for other women's organizations around the world. They will be selling the calendars in bulk at a discounted price so that other women's groups can use it for fundraising. Groups who buy any amount over 10 copies for fundraising purposes will pay only $10 per calendar. They will then be able to resell the calendar for $20 and raise money for their organizations. There are also opportunities for organizations to be able to raise money online using the calendars with absolutely no obligation. For more information please e-mail antigonemagazine@hotmail.com or check out their website here:

http://antigonemagazine.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/its-here-the-dreams-for-women-2009-calendar-is-here/

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Giving for Giving - the video

2008-11-22T00:27:00.000-08:00

My friend Genevieve Vaughan is the author and editor of many books, ranging from the long and scholarly For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange, to children's books. Some of her books can be downloaded online, as well as ordered in physical print copies. A recent film biography of her life has come out, and I want to share that with the blog readers. Here is my first attempt to embed a YouTube link. The film is about an hour long and the 8 short sections will play continuously. Enjoy!

Special thanks to Felicia Hayes for posting this video on YouTube.

MORE ABOUT GENEVIEVE VAUGHAN'S THEORY OF THE GIFT ECONOMY:

The following text is adapted from a description of Genevieve on a program where she was a featured international speaker in 2007.

Genevieve Vaughan works at the intersection of theory and practice through her theorization of the gift economy as a counter-discourse addressing patriarchy and global capitalism.

The gift economy is one in which goods are distributed to needs. The logic is based on “mothering” in which a relationship between giver and receiver is one in which the former responds to the needs of the latter. The transaction of giving and receiving creates bonds which can be seen as the basis of the circulation of goods in economies without markets as such. These gift transactions have been viewed through the market perspective as exchanges ( do ut des); however, the maternal distribution of good directly to needs can be seen as a foundational social principle which has been absorbed and co-opted by market exchange, but not eliminated.

Considering mothering as a mode of distribution that coexists with or lies beneath the market economy allows us to think of it as an economic structure with its own superstructure of ideas and values: other-oriented, people-before-profits values, coming from and validating the process of unilateral giving and receiving.

The gift principle informs Homo Donans in opposition to ego centered homo economicus and is an important element in the values that motivate work for social changes and a vision of alternative “nurturing” economics based on need and not on profit.

These values and the gift mode of distribution already exist though they are presently burdened by parasitic Capitalist Patriarchy. By bringing them forward we can create the leadership necessary for a maternal revolution.

Genevieve Vaughan has made four ebooks available (free) online at her website: Homo Donans; Il Dono/The Gift: A Feminist Analysis; Women and the Gift Economy and For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange. Website: http://www.gift-economy.com/index.html

Elephant Rocks, by Kay Ryan

2008-08-21T15:45:00.000-07:00

(NY: Grove Press, 1996)

A poetry publisher and vendor recommended this book to me during the end-of-conference bargain period at the US National Women's Studies Association conference, probably the year it was published.

I kept it on my headboard for a few years, and made some stabs at reading in it, but never got on the poet's wavelength. Then a month or so ago, a friend sent me a link to the New York Times story about Ryan being named the new Poet Laureate of the United States. This honour is granted by the Librarian of Congress and has nothing to do with Bush, as evidenced by the statement that Ryan lives with her partner, presumably lesbian.

Remembering that I had a book of hers tucked away, I plucked it from the shelf and put in a bit more effort on liking the poems, and the effort was rewarded.

Ryan teaches remedial English and no great reading skill is required for this book. She uses mostly short, plain words, mixed with words she has invented for the occasion, such as kinden (for becoming more kind), and goodiary (not be be confused with bestiary). Even though the words are simple, reading the work well takes good skill for paying close attention, visualization ability, and a readiness to find a joke.

All the poems are quite short. Ryan has been compared to Emily Dickinson, and I think justly so because of not only brevity but also terseness and the originality of modifiers and the way the poems give to inquiry when you start to poke them. It seems obvious she has learned something from Dickinson. However, Ryan seems more down to earth, concrete and practical.*

In fact, Ryan's work is so practical that since she became Poet Laureate, I have taken to typing out poems of hers to send to people for special occasions. On the engagement of one couple, I sent them "A Plain Ordinary Needle Can Float on Pure Water," because I knew that these folks had gone through a long period of learning to harmonize their relationship. And to a member of my high school class (Class of '64), who made a gallant public apology for the racism he had lashed out with in his youth, I sent "Age," the poem that starts "As some people age/ they kinden."

I think to Patricia Cohen, who wrote that New York Times article headed "Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate," I might send a copy of Ryan's poem "Outsider Art." It ends with the phrase: "...We are not/pleased the way we thought/we would be pleased." But I would add that I don't mind being pleased in a way I hadn't thought I would be pleased when I first took a look at the work of Kay Ryan.
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* You can see a photo of Ryan in the NYT article, and a photo of Emily Dickinson here . I confess that I had remembered Dickinson as more of a femme, but in this picture she, too, looks rather dyke-ish. I also thought of Dickinson as young, but she lived to 56. Ryan is now 62.

- Frieda Werden

Century of Struggle

2008-08-15T15:52:00.000-07:00

CENTURY OF STRUGGLE:
The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States
By Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick
432 pages Enlarged edition, Belknap Press 1996

Reviewed by Jane Woodward Elioseff [original at The Internet Review of Books ]

In London in 1840, over strong American objections, the World Anti-Slavery Convention ruled that only male delegates would be seated. Women delegates were relegated to the balcony and asked to observe the proceedings in silence.

The gods must have been laughing. Among the banished women, Eleanor Flexner tells us, were Lucretia Coffin Mott, an ordained Quaker minister whose home in Philadelphia “was a busy station on the Underground Railroad,” and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young wife “destined to be the leading intellectual force in the emancipation of American women.” Mott became Stanton’s preceptor.

Flexner’s wonderful Century of Struggle, first published in 1959, is the foundational book in what was to become the field of women’s studies. A friend gave me a copy in 1973, just as the second wave of the women’s movement was cresting, and the book deeply affected my thinking. I had a history minor in college and absorbed a number of narratives, but history itself had reached me as if it were a form of literature. I could not have articulated this at age twenty, and am not now suggesting that as a student I had any historiographical insight. But I do mean to convey that reading Century of Struggle in my early thirties made the historical past gloriously three-dimensional and personally relevant for the first time.

Over the years, I’ve gratefully drawn on Century of Struggle to develop scripts for two anniversary celebrations of the Nineteenth Amendment (ratified August 26, 1920). I’ve reviewed this enlarged edition for Amazon.com, used it while team-teaching an adult learning class called “Leaning Left,” and last year co-authored a Wikipedia article about Flexner’s life and work. Rereading long sections of Century of Struggle for this review, I’m astonished how rich the book continues to be.

During the first half of the nineteenth century many of the great names in the abolitionist movement, and in the increasingly separate and distinct women’s rights movement, belonged to Quakers. Best known today are Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, who won the right for women to speak in public, the indefatigable Susan B. Anthony, and astronomer Maria Mitchell, who so opposed slavery she gave up wearing cotton. Flexner writes, “Alone among the larger religious denominations, the Quakers permitted [women] a voice in church affairs, allowed them to speak in ’meeting,’ and ordained them as ministers.”

Until New York passed the Married Women’s Property Act in 1848, women had no political rights and few legal protections in those states whose civil laws were modeled on English common law (exceptions were the legal codes of Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, which derived from Roman law). In some circumstances, a woman might own property and sign contracts as a feme sole, but she lost her separate legal identity when she married. All of her possessions and any wages she might earn became the property of her husband. Even when inherited land or money had been placed in trust for her, she could still be impoverished by her husband. In divorce, she could lose her children.

There is no better account than Flexner’s of American women’s courage and political genius in a time when they had no right of assembly and no right to petition freely. In 1834, former president John Quincy Adams, then serving in the US House of Representatives, proved himself Abigail Adams’s true son by defending women’s right to collect signatures and present petitions, against the arguments of conservatives alarmed by the political progress of the abolitionists.

It was a crushing disappointment to abolitionists that the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) expanded the franchise to include any adult male inhabitant of the United States but not women, who had worked passionately to end slavery. It required another fifty years to secure the vote town by town, state by state, and to achieve ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In her preface to the 1975 expanded edition of Century of Struggle, Flexner quotes Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Schuler:

Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could. It was a continuous, seemingly endless chain of activity. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links in that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended . . . It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean to women before the end was allowed in America.

In the preface, Flexner says that her goal in writing Century of Struggle was to trace the development of the women’s rights movement “from its scattered beginnings early in the nineteenth century on a number of different fronts—education, employment, trade union organization, the professions, the law, the franchise—down to the enactment of the suffrage amendment in 1920; to keep that struggle in perspective against the growth of this nation and of such related reform movements as the abolition of slavery, temperance, and the organization of trade unions—bearing in mind that never at any time were these women without the support of far-seeing and loyal men.”

Historian Ellen Fitzpatrick’s valuable foreword to the 1996 edition of Century of Struggle includes a political biography of Flexner, who was active in the Communist Party and various other causes in the 1930s and 1940s. Flexner dedicated the book to her mother, Anne Crawford Flexner (1874-1955), who marched in suffrage parades and whose success as a playwright and children’s author made it possible, after her death, for Eleanor to live and work as an independent scholar.

Jane Woodward Elioseff is a writer and editor living in Houston.

Bodily Harm

2008-05-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

by Rachel Billington (London: MacMillan, 1992, 339 pp.)

The author of this book is a novelist, a columnist, and also a consultant to a prison newspaper. The plot is something like The Bridge of San Luis Rey in reverse; two characters start by converging in an incident of unpremeditated murderous assault by a male clerk upon a woman customer in a shop. From there the story follows each of their lives as they deal with parallel losses of liberty (he in prison, she through her injuries and trauma), denial, healing processes, how they are seen by others, and new plateaus of stability. Aside from the very end, I thought this novel a highly realistic view of all too common events that are rarely examined. An important read for our times. - FW

Anne of Green Gables and other Morally Delicious Fiction

2008-04-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

This is the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables, a revered Canadian children's book about a girl who some might say gets by just upon a smile. But the values embodied in the small redheaded foster child include cheerfulness, openness, frankness, industriousness, generosity, respect, and good will. With that, a society can be so much. This is a good moral line to adhere to.

Another morally delicious novel that is well known is The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. A young part-Cherokee woman from Kentucky sets out in an old car and passes through Oklahoma, where a motherless baby is handed to her on a Cherokee reservation. Her car breaks down in Tucson and she develops relationships with women of various types there - sharing housing, work, child-minding, etc. The heroine is industrious, frank, loyal, generous, respectful, as cheerful as she can manage, psychologically insightful, and of good will. She knowingly communicates in symbols, gestures, and words, with her housemate and with the child she has been given. She affects people's self-image and their behaviour in very subtle and incremental ways. Most of the story is about attachment, how people attach to each other, and very specifically about invisible support systems that people provide for each other. The bean tree is exposed by the end as a metaphor of this.

A novel more artistically thrilling than either of these yet clearly related is Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson. Here the principal image and eponymous symbol is a gun. The lead character is a runaway wife who falls back on her patrimony and makes a living creating fishing flies. Her two friends, a mother and daughter, are on her wave length. The mother formerly juggled guns as a travelling performer; she still has one gun. She uses it to do a psychological and moral intervention in the path of the abandoned violent husband, who is careering toward violent vindictiveness. The heroine becomes a cook at a fishing camp where the owners have a child. Through symbolic and psychological intervention, and willingness to exercise her own specific powers, she works skillfully at pulling people who are pushing their home apart through anger, back towards a functioning community.

In each of these three books, the drama of building cooperative life is very gripping.

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If you like the concept of these books, you might also like to read my review of Gwethalyn Graham's Swiss Sonata

Gone Quiet by Eleanor Taylor Bland

2008-03-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

published by the Penguin Group, 1994

Long ago, I ran into a woman I otherwise respected reading a romance novel, and, knowing she had a gay husband, I joked that this type of fiction was a "squirrel cage for the heart." Turning the joke on myself, a loather of romance novels and reader of mystery novels, I dubbed mysteries as "squirrel cages for the mind." But even this cheap form of mental exercise can be done well or badly. To me, the best mystery novels are the feminist ones, and I prize the names of feminist series writers who can be relied upon for multiple works in this genre.

Eleanor Taylor Bland is such a writer. In this book, the third featuring her black female detective Marti MacAlister, Bland deals with the painful and hard to face subject of child sexual abuse and its long-term consequences. The book before it in this series, Slow Burn, which I have not yet read, but hope to, deals with arson against an abortion clinic and child pornography.

I like the tone of Bland's books. Her main character is sensible, respectful of others, cautious but not timid, and has a good sense of herself. She takes note of sexism but she picks her battles. She brings an urban sensibility to a small-town police department, and sometimes contrasts the police forces of the two locales. She is widowed with a daughter and shares housing with another single mother. She is recovering from grief and has a prospective boyfriend who is a widower and a single father. I know from books I have read from later in the series that Marti and Ben do become a couple, but in Gone Quiet they are only starting to get beyond just-friends. Unlike many mystery novels featuring female detectives, this one doesn't rely on a romance-novel subtext to appeal to women readers.

Bland herself is a woman of colour, which not always the case with writers who have lead characters of colour. This spares one the uneasy feeling attached to reading books in which an author appropriates a culture not his or her own (even if the authors do what seems to be a bang-up job of a good read, like Tony Hillerman's Navaho detective series and Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency set in Botswana.)

Bland was born in Boston on December 31, 1944, earned degrees in Accounting and Education from Southern Illinois University (accountants figure as characters in Gone Quiet ), and moved to Waukegan, Illinois in 1972. According to the Who Dunnit website, "The town of Lincoln Prairie, fictional location for her novels, is actually a mix of Waukegan, North Chicago and Zion." This site also reports that Bland is a charter member of the twenty-year-old feminist mystery writers group Sisters in Crime.

As of this writing, there are at least 13 published books by Bland, and luckily I have only read three of them, so I have a treat ahead. Here's the list as found on a UK site:

Series
Marti MacAlister
1. Dead Time (1992)
2. Slow Burn (1993)
3. Gone Quiet (1994)
4. Done Wrong (1995)
5. Keep Still (1996)
6. See No Evil (1998)
7. Tell No Tales (1999)
8. Scream in Silence (2000)
9. Whispers in the Dark (2001)
10. Windy City Dying (2002)
11. Fatal Remains (2003)
12. A Cold and Silent Dying (2004)
13. A Dark and Deadly Deception (2005)

Since that list was published, she's released:

Suddenly A Stranger (2007)

There's probably one for 2006, though I haven't located it on the web yet.

She's also edited an anthology:
Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (2004).

Capsule descriptions of this and ten of the mysteries can be found on the African American Literature Book Club site

The photos on this page are borrowed from the African American Literature Book club and from a biography/criticism site online called V/G - Voices from the Gaps

Additional link of interest: http://www.answers.com/topic/eleanor-taylor-bland

Murder Off Mike

2008-02-20T00:39:00.000-08:00

by Joyce Krieg (NY: St. Martin's Press, 2003

This is the second murder mystery I've read in a week where big corporatization threatens a small, well-run business. This one makes a strong plea against the onslaught of satellite-run right-wing-programmed radio stations buying out local radio stations. It's written from the point of view of a female talk show host at a local station in Sacramento, California, and has nice details of how a station is run. Instead of knowing karate, Shauna K. Bogart's touch of machisma is having a first class radio-telephone operator's license. It's timely to read right now her reminder that it was Bill Clinton who signed the Teleommunications Act of 1996 that set this consolidation spree in motion. There is also a swipe at greenwashing (related to a gubernatorial candidate handily named Greene), an insight into how radio contests are rigged and by whom, and of course a couple of handsome guys for the heroine to choose from.

Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Political Change in America

2008-01-29T23:00:00.000-08:00

by Laura Flanders

(NY?: Penguin, 2008)

I haven't yet read this book, but I received a self-promotional email from the author that I thought I'd post. I also found a customer review on Amazon that starts like this:

Blue Grit is what the Democratic Party needs. It's a little bit like soul it's a lot like grits. Whether they get it or whether they will ever get it is another story.

The story that Laura Flanders tells in her prescient book is one that the fourth estate--fawning over Barack Obama's rout in Iowa--would have been well advised to read. They might have learned a thing or two: That progressive movements are not built over night and that they are not built on the backs of candidates, no matter how inspiring they are. Flanders is not a conventional campaign correspondent...

I know Laura Flanders from her feminist radio days at New York's WBAI-FM, back in the 1980s. She went on to be a radio host in left-leaning commercial and internet radio, and the author of several books. You can find out more about here on her own website and in Wikipedia.Here's her note to the friends on her email list about the re-issue of this book:

Dear Friends,

Blue Grit is just out in paperback, from Penguin Books, updated and with a new intro by Naomi Klein (Shock Doctrine.)

The extraordinary turn out in the Democratic primaries so far only confirms the hypothesis I laid out in Blue Grit that somethiing is shifting in this country -- from the bottom up.

The picture of our political process is changing (check out my story on Suites vs. Streets in the new "Reseeding the Grassroots" issue of the Nation magazine.) But the real work lies ahead.

For a glimpse of the grassroots upsurge that I believe is giving the status quo a push, check out the new, updated Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Political Change in America.

As Blanche Cook wrote in Ms, the Blue Grit folks I write about offer "a roadmap for our journey out of the darkness".

There are fascinating implications for the future of our country -- and our movement work.

Please read the book, review it at Amazon/Powells/Barnes and Noble and/or your favorite site.

And pass this message on. This is the moment to make sure that grassroots organizers get the credit they deserve. Is history made by a few great women or men? I don't think so. Right now it's being made by Americans with Grit. Find out who -- and how -- in Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Political Change in America.

Links to feminist reviews in Internet Review of Books

2008-01-29T22:16:00.000-08:00

Ellen Bravo has an illustrious background with the US working women's organization 9 to 5. Her book is

TAKING ON THE BIG BOYS:
Or why feminism is good for families, business and the nation By Ellen Bravo
294 pp. The Feminist Press $15.95

Here's a salient quote from the review by Marilee Kenney Hunt

Bravo relies on her lifetime experience in 9to5 and as a speaker and activist for equity to provide real-life stories that illustrate her points. Using humor along with seriousness of cause, she dispels the myth that all feminists are sourpuss men-haters constantly grinding their axes on those around them. She certainly wields her weapons—mostly her tongue and pen—but in such a way as to help those with good intentions and a desire for change, and an understanding of what needs to be changed, find out how to embrace the cause and move it forward.

She notes that the big boys’ tactics are minimizing, trivializing, patronizing, catastrophizing and demonizing.

You can read the rest at:

http://internetreviewofbooks.com/nov07/taking_on_the_big_boys.html
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Back before Hillary Clinton was in the Senate, it was Kay Bailey Hutchison, the first female US Senator from Texas, who received more corporate donations than any other Senator. Kay Bailey ran on a pro-choice ticket, but once she got elected she voted for all the anti-abortion bills in sight. It was once speculated that she would be a Republican candidate for US President, but it didn't come to pass, at least not yet. The reviewer gives Kay Bailey more or less a C grade on this book:

Talk to my Aunt Mabel
LEADING LADIES: American Trailblazers
By Kay Bailey Hutchison
416 pp. Harper $25.95

Reviewed by Ruth Douillette

Salient quote from review:

Hutchison writes, “Hillary Clinton, at this writing, is the most serious woman candidate for president in our nation’s history.” She says of Laura Bush, “Laura Bush has blossomed as First Lady and is universally respected for her beautiful manners. And she is likely the most well-read First Lady our country has ever had.”

Read the rest at:

http://internetreviewofbooks.com/oct07/leading_ladies.html

Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and ...

2008-01-11T19:53:00.000-08:00

[NB: To hear Bella Abzug, visit the WINGS archive and scroll down to #32-06 & #33-06 Women's Agenda to Save the Planet - a radio documentary in about the World Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet, convened by Bella Abzug in Miami in 1991, to hammer out women's demands for the UN environment summit in Rio. Women's Agenda 21 is still ahead of its time today. - FW]

Guest Review by Jo Freeman - original at seniorwomen.com

Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook up Politics Along the Way: An oral history

by Suzanne Braun Levine and Mary Thom
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, 320 pp

The subtitle tells it all. Love her or hate her, Bella Abzug never failed to make an impression. She pushed and shoved her way through life, pursuing good causes with single-minded determination and trampling over friends and foes alike.

This oral history is not a conventional one; most of the words are not Bella’s but those of over a hundred people, compiled, edited and shaped into a rough narrative by two former Ms. editors. The result is like an impressionist painting, using vivid flashes of memory to evoke a subjective understanding more than provide the actual facts of Bella’s life story.

Fortunately the "authors" provide a chronology at the beginning of each chapter from which one can glean the basic outline of her life and the crucial events of the times in which she lived. Between her birth as Bella Savitzky on July 24, 1920 and her death on March 31, 1998 Bella experienced the Depression, Zionism, World War II, left–wing causes, the Cold War, the civil rights, feminist and antiwar movements, the U.S. Congress, globalization, and the United Nations.

In many ways this unconventional woman led a very conventional life. One of two daughters in an extended family of Russian Jews, her father ran a butcher shop and her grandfather took her to synagogue, where she sat upstairs in the women’s section. Her sister reports that "we were good kids – nothing like the rebellious kids today."

Bella’s childhood cause was Zionism, though she later became disillusioned with the kind of state Israel turned into. While at Hunter College she joined the left-wing American Student Union, became student body president and made life-long friends.

Married at age 24 to Martin after a "stormy courtship," their mutual devotion transcended his death 42 years later. She had one miscarriage, two daughters, and a black housekeeper who raised them in Westchester County. Known for her hats, she took pride in being well dressed, from her carefully applied make-up to her girdle.

But in other ways she defied convention from an early age. An athletic tomboy, she wanted to be a lawyer at a time when very few women even thought of trying to enter that male domain. She graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1945 after making law review, joined the National Lawyers Guild and worked for a while for a left-wing law firm which represented unions.

Concluding that she couldn’t work for someone else, she opened her own law office in New York City, though from the brief descriptions of her cases it appears to have been mostly a pro bono practice. Fortunately her husband made good money as a stockbroker or Bella’s life might have had a different trajectory.

Free to devote her time to good causes, she represented a black man on death row in Mississippi and actors called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. She was very active in Women’s Strike for Peace, constantly prodding it to lobby Congress as well as demonstrate. These connections came in handy when she successfully ran for Congress in 1970. During her three terms she became such an expert on procedure that even those Members who hated her asked her advice. Bella was just beginning to make a place for herself in the House when she gave it up to run for the Senate in 1976.*

That was a fateful decision; in a four person race she lost the Democratic primary by one percent. She spent the next decade trying to get back into the House, or some other elected office, while also working to advance a women’s political action program.

Gradually she went global, eventually co-founding the Women’s Environment and Development Organization to put gender on the agenda of the United Nations. After a few international conferences, women around the world looked to her as a role model; after her death the UN General Assembly honored her with a special tribute.

Understanding Bella Abzug requires reconciling some serious contradictions. While this book provides some hints, it still leaves one wondering exactly how Bella succeeded as well as she did. Her performance as a politician gets such mixed reviews that it’s hard to believe everyone is speaking of the same person.

On the one hand, everyone agrees that she had an extremely abrasive personality. Most of the people in this book describe her yelling and screaming and making nasty comments to them. One the other hand, she had a band of devoted friends and followers and was never estranged from her family. Where outsiders saw anger, they saw affection and dedication. When she needed them, they rallied around her.

Bella’s public appeal made her an international celebrity who could excite a crowd even of those who didn’t like her politics. But New York voters, from 1976 onward, chose someone else to represent them.

This is a tantalizing book. It tells some good stories, but makes you want more. Consider it a tasty appetizer to the serious biography of Bella Abzug that awaits its author.

* I worked on that campaign, and later interviewed many of those involved as part of a project to study women’s campaigns by the Center for the American Women and Politics. Ruth Mandel, then director of CAWP, incorporated my research into her book, In the Running: The New Woman Candidate, but it was not separately published.

Like everyone who knew her, I have my own Bella stories. I wrote one of them as part of my report on the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. Go to http://www.jofreeman.com/womenyear/beijingreport.htm and "find" Bella.

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Jo Freeman’s next book, We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in March.

Jo Freeman is a political scientist and attorney. Her most recent book is At Berkeley in the Sixties: Education of an Activist (Indiana U. Press 2004). Her previous book, A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) was reviewed by Emily Mitchell, a Senior Women Web Culture Watch critic.

Other books include The Politics of Women's Liberation, winner of the 1975 American Political Science Association's prize for the Best Scholarly Book on Women and Politics; five editions of Women: A Feminist Perspective (ed.). Jo edited Social Movements of the Sixties and Seventies and (with Victoria Johnson) as well as Waves of Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties. She has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from NYU's School of Law. Visit her website, www.jofreeman.com and email her at joreen@jofreeman.com

©2007 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomenWeb

The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

2008-01-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

by Amy Stewart (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004. 213 pp.)

You might ask what's feminist about earthworms. Well, for one thing they have no gender discrimination problems - they're all part male and part female, and as I would find out from reading this book they choose their mates partly by which other worm is the right length to match up the male and female holes of each to each.

Another thing they have in common with women is that working mostly completely beneath notice they can move mountains.

Not only can worms move mountains of earth - making it fertile as they go - they can move mountains of vegetable peelings and even mountains of shit. There's a lot in this book about the "domestication" of earthworms into waste recycling factories. I started googling for updates and found that pig-farm waste, a huge source of river pollution, is on some farms being turned into good fertilizer, thanks to masses of Eisenia fetida - the red wrigglers. As Stewart explains, there are engineering requirements to preserve the worms' health and get good product results, but these are pretty manageable.

Also, earthworm castings are much better for soil sustainability and productivity than chemical fertilizers. But, if this is to become a principal method of waste disposal, there has to be a market for the result. This and other tidbits in her book about nutritional values have convinced me that I ought to consistently choose organic produce when I shop, not just for my health, but to do my bit to drive up demand for better agricultural practices.

Of course, you can grow your own - including your own worms. Back in 1997, I interviewed the author of one of the early books on this subject: Worms Eat My Garbage, written by Mary Appelhof. I'm pleased to find that her recommendations are catching on quite widely. There are now several types of worm bins on the market for the small gardener, and Stewart cites ten different worm websites and web forums. Mary Appelhof's is www.wormwoman.com . Appelhof passed away in 2005, but her website, like the worms, is more or less immortal.

Worms are wonderful, but they are not good for everything, by the way. When the dominant wormstock (immigrants from Europe) are introduced into forests that didn't have them before (by for example careless fishing-bait disposal) - the worms can destroy the indigenous ecology by eating up all the leaf-mould ("duff") that local plants and creatures require.

There's quite a lot about Charles Darwin in the book. When he'd retired from world traveling, he wrote his last book based on research in his backyard and home laboratory: The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits (1897). The old boy was apparently looking forward to being eaten by worms after his death (yes, it seems he really was an atheist - a believer instead in the mysteries of co-creation of beings) - but he was too famous for the burial he'd planned, and his corpse was carted off to lie next to other scientists immured away from the soil, in Westminster Abbey.

I think I picked this book up on sale at the Simon Fraser University bookstore. It was originally going to be a present for my sister who teaches school science, but I'm glad I read it before sending it away. I strongly recommend it as a pleasant and enlightening read, and also as a gift for anyone who reads at middle school level or above. I guess that's one more thing I'd call feminist about this book - it's sensible and plain-spoken - and, dare I say it? down to earth.

Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker

2007-11-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

This guest review by Jo Freeman originally appeared at:
http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanAlice.html

"Princess Alice"

a review of
Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
by Stacy A. Cordery
Viking - Penguin Group (USA)
October 2007
xiv, 590 pp.

The United States doesn’t have a royal family, but sometimes it has royalty. Dubbed Princess Alice by the press, the eldest daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt acted the part and kept the nickname – not always happily – for the rest of her 96 years.

Moving into the White House at age 17 when her father succeeded the assassinated William McKinley, she was an instant hit with the press. Smoking, gambling and driving automobiles at a time when proper young ladies just did not do those things, her actions and words sold papers. Indeed, the widely read stories about her shenanigans encouraged other young women to emulate her long before the flappers of the 1920s.

TR took advantage of people’s fascination with his teen-age daughter to send her on political and diplomatic missions where she was treated like royalty. She loved the attention, and politely stood in endless reception lines as a representative of her father.

Born on February 12, 1884 to TR’s first wife Alice Lee, who died two days later, she was raised by her aunt for her first three years, joining her father only after he married again. Step-mother Edith added four boys and another girl to Teddy’s brood, but none would ever be as demanding, or as well known, as Alice.

Although the star at the first debutante ball ever held at the White House, she was jealous of the "better" one given her sister six years later. President Roosevelt once commented to a friend that "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both."

Typical of a daughter of the privileged class, she lacked formal education but not money. A trust fund from her mother’s family gave her an annual income but she always felt like she couldn’t keep up with her very wealthy friends. During the social season she looked for a rich husband and settled on Nicholas Longworth, a Member of Congress from Ohio, 15 years her senior with family wealth of his own. With him she lived in comfort until his death in 1931.

Nick was a rising star in Congress when they married and a powerful one as Speaker from 1925 until the Democrats won the House in the election of 1930. They shared a passion for politics and an active social life, but not much else. Nick had several mistresses, dying in the home of one them. Alice had her own lover, Senator William Borah of Idaho, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1920s, with whom she had a daughter in 1925.

She forgave Nick his sexual disloyalty but not his political disloyalty. In the election of 1912 he supported the re-election of fellow Ohioan William Howard Taft (his mentor in politics) for President rather than her father. (TR beat Taft, but Wilson won the election). The Longworths stayed together as a Washington power couple (divorce was socially unacceptable) but otherwise went their own ways.

Alice did not like Nick’s family, or Ohio. While she rejected suggestions that she succeed Nick in Congress, she maintained a residence in Cincinnati so she could vote and be a delegate to Republican National Conventions. But she lived out her life in the District of Columbia, where she eventually became known as "the other Washington Monument."

With the access and status conferred by her father, her husband and her lover, Alice played the game of Washington insider for several decades. She educated herself on the issues of the day through prolific reading, conversations with some of the best minds in the country, and attendance at Congressional committee meetings and debates. Her political acumen was lauded by her contemporaries. Her house became a salon and her dinner parties the place to find out what was really going on.

Although petrified by public speaking, in an intimate atmosphere she was captivating. Senators John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon said that she was their favorite dinner partner and she never lacked for male companionship. After Borah’s death in 1940, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis became her "steady companion" for many years.

Alice acquired a reputation as a wit, noted for her barbs and repartee. She often said that she cared nothing for social convention or what other people thought of her. She liked being outrageous and spoke her mind with an attitude of "detached malevolence" (her words). One of her best friends gave her an embroidered pillow which Alice proudly showed off. It said: "If you haven’t got anything good to say about anyone come and sit by me."

Her acid tongue became more vitriolic when her fifth cousin became President. She despised FDR and his programs, and never passed up an opportunity to say so -- even though cousin Eleanor still invited her to the White House. In 1935 she began a regular newspaper column with critiques of the New Deal that readers wouldn’t find in Eleanor’s "My Day" column.

Following her father, Alice began as a progressive Republican but over time became an isolationist and a conservative. She was a central figure (along with Borah) in the Irreconcilables who lobbied against the League of Nations; her home was their headquarters. Twenty years later she became a charter member of the America First Committee which demanded that "Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat."

She supported Taft over Eisenhower in 1952 – even though he was the son of her father’s 1912 opponent. In the 1960s she shifted direction, supporting Lyndon Johnson, the civil rights movement and eventually feminism and gay rights (though she stood by Nixon when few others did).

This book is full of fascinating stories about a fascinating woman. Like the British aristocracy, Alice was so secure in her position that she could do and say what was not proper without fear of social ostracism. The rules just didn’t apply to her.

While telling Alice’s story, the author also provides insight into this branch of the Roosevelt family. They and their marital partners had more than their share of alcoholism and suicides. Alice’s uncle (Eleanor’s father), at least one brother, husband, and son-in-law, all had their lives ruined or shortened by alcohol – even during Prohibition.

There are also glimpses into the social mores of the upper class. It appears that while divorce would have been scandalous, sleeping around and stealing each other’s mates was not – even for socially proper women. While Alice imbibed as a teenager, she became a Dry during Prohibition out of disgust at the way her social class misused alcohol (she did like to go against the grain).

This book is more than a biography. It’s a social history and a family history. As Alice did with many of her books, you will stay up late reading for the sheer pleasure of it.

The Cleft

2007-10-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

by Doris Lessing (London: Fourth Estate [HarperCollins], 2007, 260 pp.)

The Cleft was published only a few months before Lessing was announced as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, for her prolific lifetime of writing. For those who maintain The Golden Notebook (1962) was the high point of Lessing's literary achievement, The Cleft will be another in a long series of further disappointments. The Golden Notebook remains far and away Lessing's most literarily controlled piece of writing. It uses a complex set of rubrics, but its content replays a great deal that appears in the five-volume semi-autobiographical Martha Quest series (The Children of Violence). Two of the books of that series appeared in print after The Golden Notebook, but judging by style I'd hypothesize that really only the last, The Four-Gated City (1969) represents the stylistic and content breakthrough Lessing learned and one might say earned from doing the restrictive exercise of putting together The Golden Notebook.

Somewhere in the middle of The Four-Gated City, Lessing abandons realism (albeit a realism with a bit of psychic phenomenon involved) and the present, and takes the world and her characters into a period of massive dislocation. As best I can tell from my own intense but not total reading of her works, this is her earliest foray into the "space fiction" genre that is much derided by many of her reviewers.

Personally, I'm very delighted with many of Lessing's works of space fiction. In The Golden Notebook, there are many different kinds of fragments agglomerated into a single structural concretion. In the later works, the pieces are given their own space and are more accessible to contemplation. Lessing's brilliantly thought-provoking Shikasta series makes me think of Anais Nin's conception of her own series of short novels, Cities of the Interior, which Nin describes as "a mobile in space." There's a lot of space, literally as well as figuratively, between the different novels in Lessing's Shikasta series. But my favourite Shikasta novels, especially The Marriage between Zones Three, Four and Five, and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, contain strong insights and a lot of the very wicked Lessing sense of humour. They are not science fiction (a genre I actually loathe) at all, but closer to the satirical fantasy tradition of Gulliver's Travels.

The Cleft is not precisely "space fiction," but one might call it "time fiction." Its framework is very clever - an historian in the Roman Empire looks back at documents he says survive in his time from ancient transcriptions of an even more ancient oral tradition. The position of the historian is within the prototypical literate colonial society that still gives form to our own time. He is attempting to re-create the origins of gender relations, beginning with parthenogenetic females, who suddenly start giving birth to more and more deformed monsters, who eventually become understood as both human themselves and necessary for future human fertility.

Lessing often says that she is not a feminist. Recently she was quoted as saying that all the topics feminists thought they invented were being discussed long before that [her ism, which she describes herself as having exorcised with the writing of The Golden Notebook, was Communism]. She also, if you take the evidence of The Children of Violence series, had a somewhat sadistic mother, which would incline one not to put all hope for the world upon the mothering sex. So, it is not too surprising, although hard to approve, that she has the early females in her story rejecting and sometimes torturing and mutilating the deformed creatures that are the male babies. Tortured escapees from female society (helped by eagles) are the founders of the separate and different male society. Frankly, I don't feel the female ur-society she lays out depicts enough of the frustrations and thwarted ambitions that would ordinarily go into making sadists psychologically, and so the torture reports seem a bit gratuitious. But by having the historian who tells the stories be male, and much of the oral history he analyzes being from males, she builds in a rationale for this possible distortion. Clearly, Lessing is speculating from her own nearly 9 decades of human experience about how it came to be that men fear women and women disapprove of men and consider them careless of the essentials of human security and development.

I'll leave this review without a great deal more comment. The Cleft has something of the emotional feel (or lack of emotional feel) of the Canongate Myths series - in which well known and great writers were set the task of rewriting ancient canonical tales. In The Cleft, one is left to suspect that the tale that is being rewritten was perhaps expunged from the canon - perhaps indeed around the time of the Roman Empire. Stories of woman born from man cover over this old story of man born from woman, at first rejected, ultimately necessary, changing woman's life irrevocably, but still without her wellbeing and that of their children firmly at heart.

Postscript: CBC Radio's program Writers & Company just re-aired a 2004 interview with Doris Lessing, by Eleanor Wachtel. You can listen to this (it's 52 minutes long) in Real Audio at:
http://cbc.ca/writersandcompany/media/071014_lessing.ram

The Garden of Ruth

2007-08-20T02:32:00.000-07:00

by Eva Etzioni-Halevy (New York: Plume Books [Penguin], 2007), 293 pp.

The author of this book promoted it avidly to me, which inclined me to dislike it, but I don't.

At first I thought it was going to be an historical excuse for a romance novel, but I changed my mind. What's best about the book is its meticulous but not overburdened description of a place and time familiar from the Hebrew bible. Actually, two places and times. The first heroine of the book, Osnath, is a literate young woman who arrives in Bethlehem as a visitor, just in time to meet the young shepherd David who is first showing the signs of talent and leadership that will make him a king. The two sides of that king's personality are also soon apparent - I'll say no more, in case you read the book.

Osnath, being literate, starts looking around her host's scroll room and finds some fragments of writing that intrigue her. The main plot of the book is her successful investigation of the story of David's grandmother, Ruth, the Moabite whom many remember as allying herself with her mother-in-law Naomi: "whither thou goest, I shall go..."

Halevy fills in the blanks of that rather sketchy story of Ruth in a plausible manner that includes facts of ancient family law - in this book, somewhat laxly enforced. Of considerable interest to me as a feminist were the parts dealing with polygamy and the areas of sexual liberty the heroines explore. It almost felt like watching a barrel race, seeing the author guide her story this way and that between the givens of the biblical story and related facts.

Something that is pleasing but also possibly dubious about The Garden of Ruth is the almost modern sensibility that the author creates for her protagonists, who lived approximately 3,000 years ago. Looking on the web, I found the author's website and her Study Guide for the book. Here's a sample question:

14. Although this story takes place in biblical times, some of the issues Ruth deals with--unwanted pregnancy, religious persecution versus tolerance, religious conversion--are still relevant today. Discuss these issues as they relate to the time of the novel and the modern day. Have people progressed since biblical times? Are we any more adept at dealing with these situations than Ruth was?

The idea that a woman or women may have written some biblical literature is not new. See, for example, The Book of J by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), a re-translation and analysis of writings from the time of David's son Solomon, opining that the anonymous author must have been a woman.

One of the things I wondered about in The Garden of Ruth was the fictional tale-writer's name, Osnath. The only traces I found of this word on the web related to Sarah (or Sara) Osnath-Halevy, a 1930s folk-singer from Yemen Perhaps a relative of the author? I asked Etzioni-Halevy - emailing her in Israel - and she'd never heard of the singer. She says that Osnath was the name of Joseph's wife, and that her heroine was from that same tribe, the tribe of Efraim.

Etzioni-Halevy's historical note at the back of the book explains that her novel is set in the time of transition between the rule of the judge/prophet/generals (Osnath's uncle is the judge/prophet Samuel, who anoints David) and the time of the kings. In a way, you could say that federalism was taking place among the tribes. These developments are mentioned in The Garden of Ruth, but as background.[NB: There are disputes among historians as to the times of Biblical events and indeed whether many of them happened at all as reported.]

Probably my biggest disappointment in this book was that Etzioni-Halevy chooses a thoroughly heterosexual reason for Ruth to follow Naomi from Moab to Bethlehem. Their relationship was nicely depicted as somewhat fond but largely practical. I'm waiting for someone else to write a version in which Ruth and Naomi are in love with each other, and having babies for Boaz is just a job.

Clayoquot: The Sound of My Heart

2007-06-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

by Betty Shiver Krawczyk (Victoria, BC, Canada: Orca Books, 1996, 215 pp.)

Betty Krawczyk (locally pronounced KRAW-zik) is in jail right now. She got arrested for demonstrating on Eagle Ridge Bluffs against the tearing down those eponymous bluffs in order to widen the highway to the Whistler ski resort. Part of the issue is the coming Olympics. Part is the cheapness of the province and its PPP partners (Public-Private Partnerships, in which the public helps business turn our infrastructure into a profit centre) in not being willing to pay for a tunnel. Krawczyk was born in 1928, so she is no spring chicken, but as she says in this book,

...the closer one gets to the natural world, the less one fears death. ... However, if one loses one's fear of death one naturally becomes a rebel.

Clayoquot is the story of Krawczyk's radicalization. The book intercuts two different timelines: a "present" story about her life in a cabin at Clayoquot Sound and how that led to her becoming an activist for old-growth forests, and a biographical narrative. The latter starts with her Catholic Cajun girlhood in a close-knit Louisiana community; she got cold-shouldered out of there when she refused to oppose racial integration. After that she did things like get married a few times, have kids, work. She met feminists and other progressive people and thought about their ideas. You can see that she was not just a natural "aginner" but gradually found her way to a different way of thinking, relating, and acting on the basis of experience.

When I first started reading, I was a little put off by all the misspellings, but after a while I decided it wasn't the mark of a poor author, but a literally poor publisher who wouldn't spring for proofreading. The book is physically very nicely published, though; it's a trade paperback with good paper, decent-sized type, and an attractive stiff cover that has built-in flaps you can use to mark your place.

The shape of the book's writing is skillful: her characterizations are pithy and empathetic; dramatic events are recounted, but not milked for length; the intercutting of different time periods adds a lot of suspense, and simultaneously covers for the abandon with which she jumps from one pivotal event in her life to another. As we read, we find out that she taught herself to be a professional writer, and that her early work was for "true confessions" magazines (a genre I must confess I consumed avidly in my early teens).

I haven't finished the book yet, I'm reading it slowly and savouring it. One of the early scenes is of a mass campout against old-growth forest logging, and it reminds me of a similar scene in Jeannette Armstrong's Whispering in Shadows (see my review in the 2006 section of this blog). Armstrong is a First Nations woman, and Krawczyk writes about not talking with the indigenous people then, because she didn't know what to ask. Obviously, she recovered from this reticence later. At Eagle Ridge Bluffs, she was arrested along with respected Aboriginal Elder Harriet Nahanee. Harriet died February 24 2007 at age 71, of an illness that went untreated for the two weeks she was forced to serve in jail for blocking the road development. The picture to the right is from an article about the two of them and their cause that appeared in the online newspaper The Tyee in March of 2007.

(Right, Betty Krawczyk; centre, Harriet Nahanee. Photo by C. Grabowski)

Six Weeks to Toxic

2007-06-04T20:34:00.001-07:00

by Louisa McCormack (Toronto: Key Porter Books, Ltd., 2006)

It alarms me that so many interesting novels by women can be picked up for a song at the Vancouver Public Library. It delights me, but it alarms me, because this means the books have been de-accessioned and are no longer circulating from the library shelves. However, I've checked the online catalogue, and this one, at least, can still be requested - there are three copies available.

I bought it mainly because the author has worked for CBC Radio One, and I love CBC Radio One, it's one of the best things about living in Canada. (Of course, if you don't live in Canada you can still listen online.) According to producers I've heard explaining this, each CBC program has a carefully outlined plot structure, with planned delights at fixed points on the show's clock. As a formula, it works. Their shows also tend to have mysterious titles (like DNTO, which was recently replaced by Q), and so Six Weeks to Toxic seemed promising.

Actually, when I started reading it I was a little shocked - there was a lot of language that even in Canada you might not want to be reading out on the radio. Canadians are more insulted by violence and intolerance in media than USAns and less by sex and excretion, but the CBC recently got reprimanded by the CRTC, for allowing the word fuck to air, in a violent if literary context, at a time when children were likely to be listening.

In Six Weeks to Toxic, two close female friends expose a lot about their bodily functions and sex experiences, and even write a faux magazine for each other's enjoyment only, with the telling title of Gash.

In my day, we did all that stuff, and sometimes wrote about it, but we were always conscious that we were being transgressive. In this writing, acts committed with food are more blatantly transgressive than those committed with sex.

Another thing that shocked me was thinking "oh, so this is chick lit and I'm reading it!" There were a lot of descriptions of clothes and men and envy of others' physical attributes. What kept me going through this part was that the heroine is a foley artist - a person who makes the sound effects that accompany movies, and one of the most interesting careers to read about. Did you know that you can make the clinking sound of a knight's chain mail clothing by manipulating the links of a key chain?

The other thing that kept me reading was the teaser description in teeny letters on the book's cover: "Women break up with men all the time. But there are no rules for breaking up with your best friend..." Anyone who has ever had a friendship that became oppressive can't help but be intrigued by that story line.

The book is short, and I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that my opinion of the heroine steadily improved throughout the book, and the boyfriend and his dog both grew endearing as well. Plus, everyone in this culture McCormack depicts has a tongue-in-cheek way with words that is so not baby-Boomer-earnestness that it's refreshing. So, if you're in Vancouver and you have a VPL card, you might want to check this out.

Loose Theatre: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Theatre Activist

2007-06-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

by Margaretta D'Arcy (Trafford Publishing: Victoria BC, Canada; Crewe, Cheshire, London, 2005)

Margaretta D'Arcy is a well known Irish playwright, one of the few women ever to receive the Cnuas, a lifetime Arts Council income grant. She talks about her plays and about the award (and the politics of the award) in this book, but it is much more devoted to the theatre of activism in which she has long engaged. Causes to which she has lent this talent include, among others: labour rights, Irish nationalism, peace, ending the US Cruise Missile presence on Greenham Common in England, the Measuring and Counting of Women's Unwaged Work, international community radio, Wages for Housework, and the annual Women's Strike.

Having known and admired Margaretta for quite a few years, I was very interested in Part One of the book, which tells about her peculiar upbringing. She had an Irish Catholic former freedom-fighter for a father and a Russian Jewish doctor for a mother. As she was born in 1934, the social milieu of the time made emphasizing the Catholic angle less conspicuous, and she and her sisters were sent to Catholic boarding school. There, she discovered the impressive power of the church's theatricality, which created in her a fervent if temporary religiosity.

As a young woman, Margaretta became an actress and began to hang with theatrical types. She met and eventually married and had offspring with playwright John Arden, and has collaborated with him on many plays and radio dramas of a political nature. In this book, she writes of witnessing the emergence of a new, comparatively wild and flexible, sort of theatre, of which she and John were among the well known practitioners.

One of the largest sections of this book covers Margaretta's years of involvement with the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camps. These camps (which were named for the different-coloured gates of the base) had the aim of reclaiming commons land in England that had been confiscated for a US cruise missile base. While very committed and spending a lot of time there, Margaretta also retained her inbred outsider stance throughout, and this allows her to honestly portray the factionalism, moods, and snitty behaviours of Peace Camp participants and their allies, while at the same time crediting their courage, stubbornness in the face of intimidation (and even death), and their almost unbelievable final success. The book is composed partly of new writing but also greatly, especially in this section, of edited selections from diaries and letters and fliers, raw hunks of the mood from the actual days of D'Arcy's life.

Margaretta D'Arcy has written other books, including Tell Them Everything, Awkward Corners (with John Arden), and Galway's Pirate Women: a global trawl. You can find D'Arcy's books and videos as well as streaming audio from her station, Radio Pirate Woman, on her website http://www.margarettadarcy.com/.

-- Frieda Werden

Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President

2007-06-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

by Jill Norgren
(New York: New York University Press, 2007)

(Guest review by Jo Freeman)

Belva Lockwood was an ambitious women, and Belva Lockwood is an ambitious book.

Famous in her day for many "firsts," the US Postal service put her face on a stamp in 1986. Because her papers were largely destroyed by her grandson after her death in 1917, to write this biography Norgren had to track Lockwood's "footprints" through newspapers, legal archives, and letters sent to others that found their way into family files. This took a prodigious amount of work over many years. The result is worth the wait.

Although best known for running for President in 1884 and 1888, Lockwood was one of the pioneers who broke the barriers to women practicing law. She was the second woman admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia and the first admitted to practice before the U. S. Supreme Court. Active for suffrage, peace, temperance and other causes, she was constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible.

Born on October 24, 1830, in upper New York state, Belva Ann Bennett had an early appetite for education. At the age of 14 she taught in a rural school, chafing that she was paid half the salary of her male counterpart. She would eventually get a degree from a Methodist seminary for women and a law degree from National University Law School but each of these required surmounting obstacles created by her sex and her need to support herself.

Her seminary education and early career as a teacher -- a common but poorly paid position for a woman -- might not have been possible had she not been widowed at age 22. Teaching sharpened her ambition. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Belva sent her 16-year-old daughter to be educated at her own alma mater and set off to Washington D.C. in search of opportunity. She found it as "Washington's Lady Lawyer" after a long and rocky trek to her law degree and admission to various bars. In the meantime she earned her living as a rental agent, newspaper correspondent and sales representative, and lecturer.

Drawn to politics, Belva traveled the South in 1872 as a paid campaigner for Horace Greeley. In May of that year the notorious Victoria Claflin Woodhull had herself nominated for President at a convention she called for that purpose, but did little more. How Lockwood came to run for President in 1884 on the same "Equal Rights Party" ticket are "colored by ego and memory." Suffice it to say that men ridiculed her and some prominent Suffrage leaders strongly disapproved. But Lockwood did what Woodhull did not do and ran a full campaign.

Lockwood was very pleased with her efforts. Her campaign generated enormous publicity, opportunities to travel, large audiences who paid to hear her speak, and almost five thousand votes. She even made a small profit. Success prompted her to try again in 1888 but this campaign produced more disapproval and less satisfaction.

Norgren repeatedly points out Lockwood's flair for self-promotion, of which her Presidential campaign was just one example. That talent not only made her a prominent figure in her lifetime but left the newspaper stories which made her biography possible. Lockwood's love of publicity was merged with genuine devotion to several causes, making it difficult to identify her motivations.

Despite her ardor for universal suffrage, she never found a niche for herself in the Suffrage Movement. Instead she became a fixture in the peace movement and a spokeswoman for the Universal Peace Union. She was a frequent delegate to conferences urging peace and arbitration as the solution to conflict. She spoke up for popular causes such as temperance and unpopular causes such as the Mormons.

Belva married twice, but spent most of her life as a widow – the best situation for an educated woman during an era when wives were subject to their husbands and spinsters seen as less than full women. Her first husband died four and a half years after their marriage, leaving behind the daughter who would remain Belva's companion until an early death at age 44. In 1868 she married Ezekiel Lockwood, an elderly dentist, becoming a widow for the second time nine years later. Their only child died at 18 months.

Family was very important to Belva. In 1877 she bought a large house on F St. where she housed her law practice, her daughter, and various members of her extended household. Spare rooms were rented out. The day-to-day law practice of mostly pension and land claims was handled by her daughter and other relatives. Belva was the "rainmaker" for the family firm, attracting clients through her travels and lectures. She wrote the briefs and conducted the trials for the occasional high profile case. After her daughter died, her law practice disintegrated.

By the time she died at age 86, Lockwood's star had long since faded. Her house was sold to pay her debts. Her only heir shipped her papers to a pulp mill. She had lived through a vast transformation of her society but her fondest goals were yet to be realized. She still could not vote. Her country had just voted to go to war and the prohibition amendment had not yet passed. Much more time would pass before her life and her dreams would be celebrated.

This book is a good read. It provides an enjoyable and enlightening narration of US history and women's history as well as the history of a life.

--Jo Freeman

Jo Freeman is a political scientist and the author of many books and articles about women. You can find out more about her on her website
http://www.JoFreeman.com

Jo Freeman's guest review of Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would be President was originally posted to Senior Women Web
http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanBelva.html

Ms. Magazine

2007-02-04T00:23:00.000-08:00

If you haven't been reading or subscribing to Ms Magazine lately, you should give it another try. Since being taken under the Feminist Majority umbrella, it has developed into a women's news magazine with sharp reporting and layout. I actually read it now. For quite some time I subscribed or bought it on the newsstand out of loyalty to the movement, but then when I'd look at it my eyes would just glaze over. After the heady days of its debut years in the early 1970s, its editorial content was reportedly held in check by, at various times: the will of advertisers, being purchased by a male publisher, and being really short of dough. For years it also had a boring and hard-to-read layout. And also perhaps there was an editorial board somewhere that kept saying "let's not step on anybody's toes in the women's movement." Often there was a bit of a hagiographic feel.

The Feminist Majority < www.feminist.org >, a major US feminist group headed by former NOW President Ellie Smeal, has been a long time building a broad-based constituency with a lot of emphasis on enrolling youth, and has also worked very hard to raise money to support a substantial operation. Their foregrounded agenda has been a funny patchwork of issues, which I suppose were the ones they could best raise money around, including getting the US to legalize RU-486 (the French abortion pill), support for women in Afghanistan, analyzing the gender gap in US elections, feminist internships for college women, and, curiously, women and policing. They also have long had an online news section of their website. Smeal really throws herself and her organization wholeheartedly behind their major activities, and they have a good track record. They were the creators of the very successful Feminist Expo '96 for Women's Empowerment and the followup Feminist Expo 2000, events that showcased the variety and activity of the US women's movement.

Another thing about FemMaj is that they are based in the Washington DC area instead of New York where Ms was started, and because of that placement they are very active in the National Council of Women's Organizations. NCWO is a coalition of both membership organizations and research groups that specialize in women's issues. < www.womensorganizations.org >

FemMaj also has links to wealthy Hollywood feminists.

Apparently FemMaj can now afford to support this slick quarterly print publication whose only ads are for nonprofit organizations, and can pay reporters and editors for current analytical stuff. Adopting the well-known Ms. instead of starting a new publication was a stroke of genius, and after a hesitant beginning, they are really putting a new and I think more exciting spin on it. I'm sure they are counting on subscriptions to help pay for it of course, and I do plan to renew. They also now involve Ms. in political actions, like delivering a "We Had Abortions" petition to the US Congress.

For more on Ms try this link (which includes daily news updates):
www.msmagazine.com

F.W.

Itsuka

2007-01-14T09:59:00.000-08:00

by Joy Kogawa (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992)

This is one of the most exciting political novels I have read.

Joy Kogawa is beloved by Canadian readers for her first novel Obasan (1981), which tells the story of a young Japanese Canadian girl, Naomi, caught up in the dispossession, relocation and scattering of Canada's Japanese community during World War II. The titular Obasan is Naomi's eldest aunt, an issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) who cares for Naomi and her brother Stephen through the terrible time. Kogawa later wrote a children's book based on these experiences called Naomi's Road (1986), which was made into a short opera and toured to schools in British Columbia by the Vancouver Opera. Kogawa is also a poet - which shows in the vivid and accurate language of her fiction.

This second novel begins when a painfully introverted Naomi, now in her forties, finally leaves the prairie and her job teaching English in a rural Bible college, and arrives in Toronto, to live with a very different relative - Aunt Emily.

The title Itsuka is a Japanese word for someday. Most of the beginning of the novel is about what happened to Naomi and Stephen after the end of the previous book - the someday of a child's adulthood. Among Kogawa's insights there are very penetrating lines about rural Christian fundamentalism and naturally something about prejudice directed at children isolated from most of the members of their own race and culture.

The remainder of the novel is primarily about struggle within the Japanese community over whether to ask the Canadian government for reparations for what was taken from them, and then how to manage the process among themselves. The process Kogawa depicts must obviously have been built on close observation of her community; however, the nature of the struggle, is much like that in many emerging groups. Beginning with resistance to autocracy, democratic organization emerges within the community; and during the process of struggle, leaders emerge and pride and a sense of community identity come to be.

There is an article about Kogawa in the Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Kogawa > that mentions that Itsuka has been re-written, and re-titled with the name of the fictional aunt, Emily Kato(2005). However, Itsuka is still in circulation at the Vancouver Public Library. There is also a biography page about Kogawa online: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/kogawa_joy_nakayama.html . Here's a website with interesting study notes about the relationships of the people in her books: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/canada/kogawa.html (it's also where I borrowed the photo, which has been de-linked from its original source). Finally, there's this page devoted to the campaign to buy and save the Kogawas' original house in Vancouver: http://www.kogawahouse.com/

--Frieda Werden

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

2006-12-29T15:29:00.000-08:00

by Barbara Ehrenreich (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2005)

[Guest review by Elayne Clift]

I’m old enough to remember “the man in the gray flannel suit” whose future was assured as long as he slogged off to an office cubicle every day, loyal to the corporation that rewarded his fealty with a proverbial gold watch. But I’m also young enough to be intimately aware of the new corporate culture depressingly described by Barbara Ehrenreich in Bait and Switch.

In her 2005 book, Ehrenreich lays out the reality of a world in which unemployment, underemployment and “anxious employment” prevail among America’s white-collar, shrinking middle-class. Ehrenreich went underground (as she did in Nickel and Dimed) to research the plight of professionals who have been downsized, outsourced, and otherwise displaced, often because they excel at their jobs, thereby commanding higher salaries and benefits. She describes a world in which competent, formerly successful people sink further into the morass of the modern work world, a world in which they have become disposable.

I could have been one of her research subjects. Not once but three times over the course of my midlife career I was pushed out of an organization or institution for which I’d performed well and to which I felt deeply committed. In my case it wasn’t because I made buckets of money; it was that I threatened someone above me, usually for truthtelling, which can morph into the perception of disloyalty, when in fact it is exactly the opposite. In each case, I spent more time than I care to remember job-searching, becoming despondent, and belittling myself in the name of being “realistic.” The first time it happened I was unemployed for three years. I grew morbidly depressed. Then I wrote an article about the experience in which I compared prolonged unemployment to three disease processes: First, the unemployed are treated as if they have a communicable disease. Stay away or you might catch it! Given enough time the long-term unemployed experience Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. PTSD-like nightmares flare up in which you go over ad nauseam what went wrong. Finally, one begins to experience the death and dying of his or her professional persona. First articulated by Elizabeth Kubler Ross for the terminally ill, the stages include denial, anger, bargaining (with God), depression and acceptance. I share this because I understand what people experience when subjected to the harsh consequences of today’s economic reality. But enough about me.

What Ehrenreich has put her finger on is the fact that the middle class in America is in trouble and may be disappearing. Economists have fancy terms for discussing the phenomenon. They talk about “income volatility”and something called the “knowledge economy.” Layoffs become“downsizing” or “outsourcing.” In an article for The Nation (11/6/06), Ehrenreich shares these compelling facts: Those who try to compete by earning graduate degrees often find themselves in debt in excess of $40,000 before they get started. And starting salaries are insufficient to cover healthcare, housing and energy costs. At the same time, benefits are shrinking rapidly. More than 20 percent of working college graduates [in the US] now have no health insurance, up from 17 percent five yearsago. “This is the new world of the middle-class,” Ehrenreich writes, “haunted by debt, stalked by layoffs, pinched by vanishing pensions and health benefits, and forced into ever more contingent forms of work as ‘real’ jobs give way to benefit-free contract work.” The middle class, she says, now “hover just inches above the working poor.”

That’s why Ehrenreich and other activists have formed United Professionals < www.unitedprofessionals.org >. Modeled on AARP [the American Association or Retired Persons] and with start-up funds in hand, the membership organization has three main goals: community building to combat the stigma attached to unemployment; advocacy on issues such as universal health care and social security regulations; and services like legal advice. Says Ehrenreich, “By focusing on the troubled middle class, we help make the point that poverty, far from being a matter of ‘bad choices’ or character flaws, can happen to any of us.”

Reading Ehrenreich’s important if upsetting book reminded me of a young woman I met recently. Young and vibrant, she was a voluntary “commercial sex worker.” In other words, a prostitute. A graduate of one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country and now working on a master’s degree in psychology, this is what she told me: “I did all the right things. I excelled at the best schools, networked till I was blue in the face, dressed for success for hundreds of interviews. But I couldn’t get a job. So I went straight to the big boys with the big bucks. Now a big part of my job is eating a lot of steak and shrimp.” What do you say to a smart, energetic, entrepreneurial twenty-three year old woman who’s already lost hope of attaining dignified work? I wish when I met her I’d known about United Professionals. It might at least have been a start.

--by Elayne Clift

----------------

Elayne Clift is the author of many books. Find descriptions of them and a bio of Elayne at: http://www.sover.net/~eclift/

Women and Children First

2006-12-14T21:31:00.000-08:00

by Michele Landsberg (Markham, Ontario, Canada: Penguin Books, 1983)

[Review by Frieda Werden]

As a fairly recent immigrant to Canada (2002), I have catching up to do about Canada's feminist history. This book helped a lot. Michele Landsberg was a columnist for a number of newspapers, notably the Toronto Star, and also articles editor of Chatelaine magazine for seven years. ( Chatelaine, according to Canadian feminist media activist Judy Rebick, was a mainstream magazine but also so feminist that when US founding feminist Betty Friedan was trying to place some excerpts from her then-forthcoming book The Feminine Mystique, Chatelaine rejected it as being too old hat. )

In the Introduction, Landsberg describes herself as "neither a radical nor a traditionalist... a committed feminist who is also a monogamous wife and devoted mother." In those roles alone, she appears to have had quite an impact: her husband is Stephen Lewis, who is currently [2006] advocating for a much more powerful and better-funded organization for women at the United Nations; one of her three children, Avi Lewis, is married to and works with Naomi Klein (whose own mother, Bonnie Klein, made the anti-pornography film Not a Love Story); Landsberg and Lewis's two daughters, Ilana and Jenny, are both described as feminist in an article on the Stephen Lewis Foundation website ( http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/news_item.cfm?news=210 ) .

Women and Children First was my travel book on a recent trip to Jordan, and it made a big impact on me. For one thing, Landsberg advocates passionately on behalf of maternal leave, breastfeeding, and childcare. In light of the recent abolishment of the very new Canadian national childcare plan by the recently-installed Conservative government, this reading gave me a huge pang for more than 23 years of feminist effort and advocacy for the childcare cause in Canada -- finally come to fruition and then cruelly set back by Bush-wanna-be Stephen Harper and his Republican clones.

The essay on breastfeeding evokes a kind of sensuous motherhood rarely seen in print [see my previous blog entry on Sharon Olds, for another author with similar sensibility], but it isn't in the least sentimental. Landsberg explains that as infants are "dependent, with a ferocity of need that non-parents simply can't imagine, an immediate response from the mother is the barest minimum of courtesy." In another paragraph about negative responses to breastfeeding in public, she writes,

It's hard for new mothers to understand that mentality which associates loving nurture with obscene sexual display. But there it is. Two warring views of the world. Which shall prevail? The babies , of course, must have right of way.

I really like it about Landsberg that she keeps building bridges between the personal world and the political world. We did used to say that "the personal is political" -- and it still is.

Each chapter in this book consists of a group of Landsberg's columns from the Toronto Star, sewn together by later-written integuments. A particularly trenchant chapter is called "Our Bodies, Men's Rules." It includes columns on

an all-female mental women's mental health clinic
the reality of menstrual cramps (it's not "all in your head") and a new treatment using anti-prostaglandin drugs
toxic shock syndrome and the shocking revelation that "feminine hygiene products," including tampons, required no government testing or labeling (unlike condoms)

and goes on to deliver a smashing indictment of the encroachments of anti-abortion extremists, and a caring view of women's right and necessity to make their own decisions about their bodies.

Another chapter takes on a myth that is still being pushed in major newspapers of Canada (and the US) today -- the idea that somehow there is a conflict going on between feminists and mothers. Landsberg writes

many women I know manage to combine feminism and motherhood in a comfortably pragmatic blend. They are aware that the price of motherhood is very high, and feel that the cost should be shared more democratically than it is now. Feminists have been among those who fought for more humane childbirth, maternity pay, day care, neighbourhood support centres, and a heightened social empathy for the tasks of parenthood... less singling out of mothers when things go wrong.

If you want to know the history of the sexual equality clause in the Canadian constitution, you can find it in here, too. As all equality-seeking activity has just been removed by the Conservatives from the mandate of Status of Women Canada, this, too, is very current and may help us in winning the next round.

Bird-Eyes

2006-06-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

by Madelyn Arnold (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1988)

In 1964, when I was 17, I belonged to the Social Science Club at my high school. Our club had a field trip to the "State Hospital" in central North Carolina, and saw how humans were sequestered and / or warehoused because of emotional, mental, and also physical impairments. That's the same year, and the same country, the same kind of institution, as the setting of this book.

The reader of Bird-Eyes, however, is not looking through the eyes of a visitor. The portrait of the place, the people, and the mentality of both inmates and their keepers, is narrated from inside a very keen and mostly lucid 16-year-old female character, Latisha, who has been sentenced to confinement for incorrigibility. From her perspective, the humanity, ignorance and deficiencies of psychiatrist and staff are glaringly recorded with their effects, and the process of institutionalization of the residents is observed from the inside out. The level of insight is very very striking, and outshines even the characters and the plot.

The most interesting character aside from the narrator is a deaf woman admitted for depression after her husband's death. Unchecked institutional ignorance isolates her profoundly, and puts her under tremendous emotional pressure. Her friendship with Latisha and their guarded use of sign language is a major interest in the book.

Most of what happens in Bird-Eyes seems all too believable. People under institutional care are very varied, and their dynamics are hard to control, so a lot of drugs and crude behaviour modification get applied. The needs and personalities of the care-givers are also a wild card in the mix. Everyone is looking for and using loopholes in the system if they can. The wealthiest are the most likely to re-surface. The descriptions of the uses and results of shock treatment jibe all too well with what I have observed in the lives of friends who accepted this prescription, and with expert testimony like that of Dr. Bonnie Burstow [hear her talk on this at www.wings.org in the archives page]. While mental health institutions in the US and Canada have now divested themselves of most of their patients, and while there have been a few surprisingly good advances in drug treatment, notably for schizophrenia, for the most part, psychiatry and mental health care are still largely blundering and too available as careers for self-deceptive and abusive folks.

I am not certain if this book is autobiographical in its origins. It seems unlikely that one who had not been there could have written it, though, unless with the collaboration of someone who had been there at least. It comes across as a strong voice from the inside that should be heard.

I see that this book was a Lambda Award winner for best first novel. These prizes are for books about lesbians and gays, but the lesbian elements in this book are not dominant over the broader social insights.

Bird-Eyes is the first of two novels (and an essay collection) by Madelyn Arnold. She also seems to have a new novel in the works, Divided by One. And, she has a column called "Not Thinking Straight" in the Seattle Gay News, to which she has contributed since 1975. Some of her columns (complete with smiling photo) are online, including this one from last year, about suicide: http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews12/page44.cfm.

Sex Wars: A novel of the turbulent post - Civil War period

2006-05-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

by Marge Piercy (NY: HarperCollins, 2005)

This book is 411 pages long, but I wished it were longer.

Marge Piercy is perhaps best known for her 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time, which provided two alternate futures. She is an extremely prolific writer, with at least 15 published novels, plus poetry, essays, and a memoir called Sleeping with Cats. I see from a biography of her online that she was born in Detroit in 1936, and so on March 31 just past, she turned 70.

I've read several of her works and always admired her eye for the political and the feminist. She tended to long works, and some of them felt a bit hastily drawn, though satisfying nonetheless. But in this new book, she has really outdone herself, with the deft and practiced hand of a Julia Child of fiction, she has made the dialogue, the descriptions, the background information, the political and personal analysis all taste just right.

Sex Wars features a number of important historical characters. There is Susan B. Anthony, as seen through the eyes of her long-time feminist colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Through them we learn a great deal about splits and alliances in the women's rights movement and the former abolitionist movement. Perhaps the most dominant character is Victoria Woodhull, best known for running for President when women still didn't have the vote, and for advocating free love. The story of her rise from a family of rascals through spiritualism and wise investment, to become a stockbroker, publisher, and politico -- and then her fall -- is one I knew little about and found really fascinating. Another character, probably invented but emblematic of her class, is Freydeh, a widowed Jewish immigrant from the Pale, who goes into the business of making condoms at home to support herself and children she takes in, and to bring her family to America. Both Woodhull's and Freydeh's stories take the reader in and out of a variety of brothels, assignation houses, and an abortionist's home, and reveal sexual facts of the period. (In terms of birth control, Woodhull prefers the vinegar-soaked sea sponge.) And finally, we have the villain of the piece, though he is rather humanly portrayed, Joseph Comstock. It was Comstock, supported in large part by the YMCA, who gained vast political and personal power over others in the name of anti-vice -- closing bookstores, arresting sellers and makers of contraceptive devices, getting laws passed against both birth control and abortion. I'll certainly never feel the YMCA is an innocuous place to go swimming again! The descriptions of the prisons where the arrested and convicted were housed is fascinating and chilling. Through Woodhull, we also learn a great deal about the great investors of the day: Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Fisk, and Jay Gould; and about a few journalists including the detestable Horace Greeley. There is also a glimpse of ward politics.

I thank Marge Piercy for making this period of history so accessible, absorbing, and modern-feeling. I laugued out loud when I read that Rutherford B. Hayes stole the Presidential election through vote chicanery in Fl0rida, with the connivance of a Republican-packed Supreme Court. The war on contraception is also making a comeback (see the article "The War on Sex" by Cristina Page and tom Paine in Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/rights/36371 ).

I think I'll go back soon and read more of Piercy's works that I've missed, and definitely keep my eye out for her next one.

Whispering in Shadows

2006-05-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

by Jeannette Armstrong (Penticton, BC, Canada: Theytus Books, 2004)

Jeannette Armstrong is an artist, language teacher, and activist, from the Nsilx tribe of the Okanagan valley of British Columbia. I've had the pleasure of hearing her speak at the International Conference on the Gift Economy, in Las Vegas in 2004 (a speech that can be heard in full on the FIRE website: www.radiofeminista.net/nov04/notas/gifteconomy2.htm or in edited version on WINGS' web archive www.cas.usf.edu/womens_studies/wings.html ). But before that, I ran across her first novel, Slash, at my Vancouver library branch. It wasn't the sort of book I usually read -- male hero -- but for some reason it went home with me and I liked it very much. It was about a young native man from Canada who is looking for himself and first gets involved in drugs, then in politics, and finally reaches some level of comfort.

This second novel of Armstrong's (she has a number of other books) features a woman character, Penny, who grows up on a reservation with some traditional experience and a love of colour and painting, then becomes a teenage mom and soon a single mom of three, then attends college and then university, then becomes a successful artist, then gets politicized as an environmentalist, then becomes an internationalist visiting other indigenous peoples and relating their situation to her own, becomes ill from taking on so much of the pain of the world, and finally returns to help preserve and renew the traditions and solidarity of her own tribe.

The work moves quickly from one stage of Penny's life to the next, but I didn't have a sense that anything was rushed through. Because of the theme of the artist's affinity for colour and light, images are memorable throughout. There are a number of spiritual experiences described -- communication with a tree, for example -- but these are grounded in reality, not metaphysically mystical. One salient feature of the main character is her essential independence in sexual relationships, sharing sex and sometimes her artistic and political experiences with men, but not giving away her power of decision-making. In the end, she realizes that the essential relationship for her is really the tribe, rather than the heterosexual dyad. I think this is a deep insight, that western culture generally slides over: the desire to be in community and in relationship to land and the rest of nature, and to contribute to the common experience and the common good. In the above-mentioned speech at the Gift Economy conference, Armstrong speaks about indigenousness as a balanced and mutually perceptive relationship with all of nature. In this book, she ends with a hopeful sense that it is not too late for peoples of the land to preserve and reinvigorate this tradition.

Outside of BC, it will be hard to find this book, probably. The publisher, Theytus Books, is Aboriginal owned and operated. You can find their website at www.theytusbooks.ca .
For some reason, Jeannette Armstrong's name doesn't show up in their online authors list, but enter Armstrong in the Author search and you'll see five books of hers, including two children's books, and a book on The Native Creative Process.

Women as Lovers

2006-04-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Martin Chalmers (London: Serpent's Tail, 1994; original German language edition Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 1975)

Not a new book, but newly promoted in paperback because Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Suzette checked it out of the library and read it before I did. She said it reminded her of Gertrude Stein, and I think that very apt -- especially reminds me of Stein's early fiction, written when she was a medical student practicing on the poor. The resemblance is partly in the short sentences, partly in the way the author maintains detachment and yet depicts the ideation of her subjects in terms of a series of simple calculations. It is perhaps unfair to make too much of Jelinek's style, because it's been my experience that translators put a lot of their own spin on a book's style. I'd like to read more of her after recovering a bit from this one, and sampling one by a different translator might be useful. One of Jelinek's books, The Piano Teacher, seems to be the most famous.

Throughout the reading of this book, I was also much reminded of an anthropological or sociological case study. There is just enough of poetry and humour here and there to keep it from being clinical. But this is essentially a comparative study of two women who make different choices in terms of sexual partnering and then live with the economic effects on their lives. At one point, Jelinek pointedly says that one of these women is a country woman and one is a town woman -- they have different sets of options to work with. One has a job in a brassiere factory. One is plain and very young and sets her sights on becoming a seamstress but soon abandons the training. This woman, who gets the worst of it, is also depicted as rather unfortunately drawn off her economic course early in life by exposure to magazines -- the romanticized ideas of such writing are shown as worse than useless to women. The community and their views figure heavily in the story of the young woman from the country village, and she ultimately suffers a lot from getting caught using that form of capital that women have between their legs. The depiction of the men/husbands in the story is very stark, commodifying them as economic objects whose lovers struggle to wrest them from their parents' possession. A third woman who is middle class and has middle class choices is shown as having more freedom because of her family wealth and her education, but ultimately making a similar choice to have a husband of an appropriate class and have children. Her story is not pursued in depth for long, but she is clearly there to further illuminate class differences. Jelinek characterizes those who have nothing as being primarily concerned to get something -- compared to those who have something being primarily concerned with not losing what they have. When I read that it seemed to explain a lot.

Suzette's summation was that if this book had been longer, the style would have been annoying. Jelinek overtly states that she is not going to waste any time on talking about the scenery, and there is a repetitive feel to the language. But it wasn't longer -- it was only 192 small pages with nice big type and wide margins. Overall, I think Jelinek managed to make something new and fairly gripping out of a story -- two stories, that are nothing new at all, but are very bedrock stories of women in the modern (i.e., industrialized) world.

Get a Life

2006-02-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

by Nadine Gordimer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)

South African Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. It's surprising to me that I've never read anything of hers previously, except perhaps a short story or two. This book has certain qualities of mastery that a really mature and experienced writer can produce. It reminds me of the novels of Doris Lessing post-The Four Gated City. Towards the end of that novel, Lessing shifted her perspective unexpectedly from the personal to the global and began a new era for herself. An interview with Lessing I saw in the Vancouver Sun yesterday (12 March '06) had Lessing saying the books of hers she most wanted people to read were the Shikasta series. Of the Lessing works I've read, I'd say those are the most clearly didactic -- I hope that word is not too unpleasant, as the books are very good -- containing distilled analysis of human tendencies, patterns, and failings, couched in something ostensibly like science fiction tales.

In Get a Life, Gordimer starts off very personally and intimately, and dealing with a subject that is suddenly of interest to me as my friends and I age and decline or get ill. A youngish man who is a father of a young son has thyroid cancer and as the treatment has made him temporarily radioactive, his parents take him into their home and he resumes his relationship, especially with his mother, in a pattern that has parallels with his childhood. Gradually we learn he is an environmentalist and his wife is in advertising and promotion. The tale, which is fairly brief, races through permutations and ironies and big-picture and small-picture observations, including a substantial amount about a majestically self-renewing African river system that is about to be wrecked by dam-building projects. The mother and father's marriage also comes to represent a substantial amount of the plot. Overall, the plot is very unusually shaped and composed. The sentences are also unusual for our time, as they are long and contain unusual combinations of clauses. Occasionally I had to read one over a few times to figure out what it was really saying, what was the relationship of these clauses, but I never felt that the writer had made an error and did not convey what she must have meant. The language gave me a sense of beauty that more often comes from reading good poetry.

The high point of the story seems to me almost a throwaway, in which the author successfully manages to care intensely about the fate of the river and the hero's role in the movement trying to save it, yet be able to simultaneously hold a faith in the ability of nature to make itself work in some way despite all obstacles, and also the view that all of reality is fleeting and perhaps meaningless. The river seems paralleled by several other elements including the marriage of the parents, which decomposes in a complex and more or less organic way.

Finally, this book reminds me of a story told by the very great critic and fairly mediocre poet Richard Howard, in a course he taught at The University of Texas in the 1970s. The painter James Whistler, Howard told us, sued the critic John Ruskin in 1878 for libel, over an insulting review about Whistler's painting of a rocket falling at night. As I recall Howard's telling of the tale, in court the defendant's attorney asked: "Mr. Whistler, how long did it take you to paint this?" "Ten minutes," and as the lawyer began to smirk, "and a lifetime of experience."

Women's Review of Books

2006-01-28T02:32:00.000-08:00

Just a note to let readers know that the Women's Review of Books is back in publication after more than a year on hiatus. Published since 1983, and based out of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, it's a great source of information about books and their contents. In the last issue before hiatus, there was a much-appreciated article about the 2004 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Elfriede Jelinek from Austria. The article can be found online at www.wellesley.edu/womensreview/archive/2004/12/highlt.html#milkman .
Subscription information for the renascent WRB is at www.wcwonline.org/womensreview/

Swiss Sonata

2006-01-12T13:36:00.000-08:00

by Gwethalyn Graham (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2005)

The Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Program provided support for the re-publication of this work. It was first published in 1938, and won the Governor General's Award in that year, for its 25-year-old author. The revival of the book is due in large measure to Elspeth Cameron, who wrote its Introduction. Cameron is a well-known biographer of some male Canadian writers, and chronicles her growing interest in female writers in a memoir called No Previous Experience.

While I'm very grateful to Cameron for bringing this book back to readers, and for giving us some biographical and historical background, I have some disagreements with her assessment of the book, which I find unjustly critical. Cameron describes some of the discussions between the international residents of the Swiss girls' school as "forced," and "vehicles for [Graham's] strongly held views." She also finds the portrayal of the main character, Vicky Morrison, to be the book's "greatest flaw" -- the character "too good to be true." Maybe I should thank Cameron, actually, for lowering my expectations of the book up front, because perhaps in reaction I found it unusually good.

Swiss Sonata takes place during three days of January 1935, on the eve of the plebiscite in the Saar coal-mining region that returned this valuable resource to Germany ( and would give Germany fuel to make steel for the war). The politics of the moment contribute to stressful dynamics among the students -- students ranging in age from fifteen to 25 and coming from 14 countries. (I was very grateful for a list of dramatis personae that appeared in the front of the book, listing the names of the students and the staff and their countries -- it's rare to find a book with so many characters all having a share of the action.)

The staff of the school are a bit out of their depth both in controlling and helping their young charges, as is pretty typical of educational institutions. They also (and one teacher in particular) develop some animosity towards the 21-year-old Canadian Vicky Morrison, whose way of interacting with the others carries an authority of its own that shows them up. It has come to their attention that she is exercising what I like to call "leadership from below," as opposed to deferring to authority for leadership.

As the book begins, Vicky is a mystery figure to the reader, and the most visible characters are a sympathetic young sports teacher named Mary Ellerton, from London, and a friend of Vicky's named Theodora Cohen, a Jewish girl from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Ted is outspoken and raffish, and gives a lot of life to the tale.

One of the advantages of this book having been written in 1938 instead of today is that none of the characters is required to come out as a lesbian. Nor are there any heterosexual sex scenes. Instead, this is that rare thing, a very homosocial book. There are sympathetic friendships and also obsessive fixations on others, but the simplistic and dyadic (and one might even say the "exchange-oriented"*) motivation of sexual attraction is eschewed in favour of other focuses. There is a lot of dynamic around being accepted or rejected, and being accepting or rejecting, and also around conflicting loyalties. Life decisions on the table for the characters include choices between being married and having an education and a career in some cases, and in others between introversion and caring.

The portrayal of caring, including gratuitous (i.e., gift*) caring, was much more common in earlier eras' fiction it seems to me than it is in today's. Modern hedonism has probably shaped us much more than we realise. Swiss Sonata reminds me of Louisa May Alcott's book Little Men, which I enjoyed in my childhood -- also about a school and the work of molding youth into strong, caring and and self-realized adults. I'm also put in mind of the Canadian girls' classic Anne of Green Gables, in which a young girl also teaches life lessons to her elders. But Graham's book is an adult work, and about characters in the age range of from mid-teens to mid-fifties; the compromises, the paradoxes, and the failings of caring are much more in evidence.

To return to the character of Vicky Morrison and the question of whether she is believable or not: On one level, she turns out to be a bit of a Miranda, having been given a classical education in an isolated setting. I found that bit of her history somewhat unbelievable (my opinion is that home-schooling is more likely to make one narrow). However, the observation that she and a few of the other characters are intellectuals who apply their knowledge to understanding people, while other characters do not, I found realistic. Perhaps the fact that her leadership-from-below is noticed by the authorities and excites their jealousy is far-fetched -- it seems to me that this kind of leadership is very rarely observed by the authorities (but then, I've never gone to a girls' school). Her "saintly" nature may be carried a bit too far, but I liked the way she herself characterizes it -- that her persona takes on a meaning for others that hasn't too much relationship to how she feels inside. I think she is fairly portrayed as trying to feel her way with others and not always understanding or being able to help them. She herself says of her failed attempts that it's as if you were asking a medical student just graduated to perform brain surgery. In the end some of the authorities come to admire her people sense.

The line I liked best was one character's description that Vicky "has the gift of self-dismissal." This is a very real gift that some of us only learn to practice later in life. (There is in fact a school of study called "non-defensive communication" [ see www.pndc.com] that tries to help people acquire this way of interacting.) Apropos of the period in which Vicky was living, with national and political partisanship coming strongly to the fore, I'm also thinking of the ideas of Sisela Bok, contrasting the partisan and non-partisan ways of thinking. The partisan can think of only his own views and can't set them aside for the purpose of feeling, imagining or understanding the other's situation. Bok sees times of war bringing people more strongly into partisan relationship.

Today (Jan. 12, 2006), I was listening to CBC radio and heard an interview with a Canadian who has just written a book about values in the United States and Canada. He said he found more than half of those polled in the US were hedonists who didn't believe in empathizing with others. The proportion of people with those values in Canada is much lower.

Vicky Morrison is a character who has a very marked ability to set her own priorities aside and just listen to others, and then to think about the happiness and growth of the people she has heard. As Elspeth Cameron explains it, the characters in Swiss Sonata represent their own respective countries. I infer from this something about the persistence of Canadian values between 1938 and today, and I hope that they can survive the onslaught of American media and guns coming across the border and continue to set an example for the world.

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*For more about gift-giving and exchange, see Genevieve Vaughan's book For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange ( information and text online at www.for-giving.com )

Green River, Running Red: the real story of the Green River Killer - America's deadliest serial murderer

2005-11-06T21:29:00.001-08:00

by Ann Rule (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004)

I chose this book out of what was on offer in paperback in a small airport bookstore. Aside from the fact that there was little else in my price range, I chose it for two reasons. One was that I had recently read Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders [see my review in this blog] and I wanted to continue my education on femicide and compare the two books. The other reason was that I had heard about feminist protests around the Green River murders in the 1980s, but had not seen any details about the killer being caught. Rule only published this book in 2004, after his conviction, though she had been keeping notes for many years.

Rule is a writer who specializes in true crime stories. Unlike Truman Capote, she is not very literary. Her style is clear, but tends to be repetitive, and this book could have been edited somewhat for brevity. It weighs in at 661 pages, not including the acknowledgments. The only book this long I can remember reading all the way through was The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, which had the redeeming feature of being very funny. I'm not sure if I will ever finish this one, so I am writing it up though I'm only on page 383.

If I do finish reading it, it will be for the same reason she says she finished writing it at such a length -- i.e., because of her commitment to giving a human face and a personal story to most if not all of the women who were murdered by Gary Ridgway. There are 47 women's faces pictured at the front of the book. All of them are named during the course of it, and their situations described; and in many cases their friends' and families' reminiscences are included. Many of them were teenagers, and many but not all of them made money from street prostitution, a class of persons that Gary Ridgway both patronized and despised. Quite a few of the women had children. Some came from unhappy homes, others not. Many lived with their boyfriend/pimps; others with mothers, real boyfriends, husbands, or friends. Some were young and rebellious; some financially desperate; some were hitchhiking; some were only in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were white and many black. Some were pregnant. There's a feeling of the cautionary tale hovering about this story, but because Rule is scrupulous about including masses of detail, the cautionary aspect is not played up. True, you could get killed for being a teenager sexually out of control; or, you could be killed because you walked down the street to visit a relative.

As a crime writer, Rule works closely with the police, and she devotes a good part of the book to their work. During the course of the so-called Green River Killer's sequence of murders, Rule writes, the term "serial killer" was coined, the use of computers for police work was pioneered, the art of profiling suspects was further developed, and forensic science went through major changes. The amount of money and the numbers of people working full time on solving this long series of murders also grew vastly. There were several changes of command. According to Rule, the police withheld most of what they were doing from press and public in order to build a prosecutable case when the killer was found. They also had to wade through tens of thousands of leads and many false confessions, and eliminate many likely suspects. They did have police watching the area where women picking up johns were most frequently abducted, and they also had police decoys. Eventually, through reading this, I'm sure I'll find out what it was that worked for the police, how they caught the killer.

In taking the part of the police, Rule gives short shrift to the feminists, stopping just short of demonizing them for causing the police additional grief. If you want to find that section, turn in the paperback to page 281 ff, where Rule talks briefly about the Women's Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders and the U.S. Prostitutes Collective having a parade in March of 1984. I'll quote from page 282:

". . .Women's Libbers were often strident because they felt there was no other way. 'The issue is the killing of women,' [Melissa] Adams said. 'But we are showing unity with prostitutes who are the victims of this killer --and victims of a sexist society.
"'Violence against women is an all-American sport.'
"Perhaps it was. . . . But the coalition had chosen the wrong target, and it wasn't the Green River Task Force, whose members yearned to catch the man. . ."

Rule breaks up the story by jump-cutting back and forth among descriptions of the women and their lives at the time they disappeared; their families; a few people who interjected themselves into the case as psychics and police wannabes; the finding of bodies (mostly in clusters); the identification of the mostly skeletonized dead; stories by people who knew and interacted with the killer; and, the most imaginative part, a description of the life and state of mind of the killer himself, apparently boiled down from interviews with Ridgway. Her portrait of the murderer shows a not very smart child who was dissed by his family and found power in killing animals, went through a phase of religious fundamentalism, suffered some losses in divorce, and discovered prostitutes as both a source of pleasure and easy marks, whom he could rationalize killing. He was both a sex addict and a murder addict.

Most shocking from a female point of view is that Ridgway seems to have managed to appear like a reasonably nice guy and even a gentle lover or a normal husband to some women, while abducting and killing others. And he was good enough at dissembling that even though he'd been questioned by police, other people seemed more likely suspects.

The crux of this book seems to be that it's unlikely one can tell by looking whom to be afraid of, and it's unwise to trust your guts about whom to trust. I'm reminded of the credo of Vancouver Rape Relief: "Every man is a potential rapist." But shouldn't there be better ways to tell which ones are?

autobiography of a blue-eyed devil: my life and times in a racist, imperialist society

2005-10-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

by inga muscio (Emeryville CA: Seal Press, 2005)

Usually when I read books of personal essays, I don't start at the beginning and work straight through to the end, I skip around in them and dig out things I like. I did that with Inga Muscio's previous book, Cunt; but this book pulled me straight through very fast from beginning to end. It's well-written, fresh, full of different tales and varied approaches to telling the stories; yet there's a logic that builds from chapter to chapter and becomes very convincing. The theme is that a young woman from a not-terribly-privileged white background who is open to others and desires social change learns from both her experiences and her research, not only that there is racism in her society and that it is much deeper and more serious than she imagined, but also how it has put its tentacles into her own mind and behaviour. To me, this is a book about working to overthrow colonization of racist ideas in a person's own brain. Yet it's never too heavy, always giving you that breath of poetry or narration or whatever it takes to keep you hanging in. Very interesting and valuable and refreshing book.

Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002

2005-10-23T01:52:00.000-07:00

by Sharon Olds (NY: Knopf, 2004)

I was in a big argument once (it was 1985) with Saul Sosnowsky, a scholar of Latin American literature. He was chairing a panel of consultants deciding which authors should be included in a projected 13-part series profiling Latin American writers for radio; I was writing the grant. I proposed including Gabriela Mistral, whom I knew had won a Nobel Prize for literature. In refusing her, the professor accused that Mistral didn't write about "literary subjects. She just writes about things like motherhood." Everyone at the table, including him, flashed on the deeply sexist scholarly prejudice he had just pronounced.

Sharon Olds is such a good poet that I buy her books new even though I don't personally know her. This collection omits some of my favourite poems of hers but it includes wonderfully meaty poems about motherhood. I use meaty advisedly -- physical selves and bodily acts are very vivid in her work, and the physicality gives tremendous support to the emotional and imaginative aspects.

Olds writes so avidly about her enjoyment of heterosexual marriage and sex in marriage that it rehabilitates my image of that condition. And she managed to arrive at that pleasing state despite a sexually active and activist youth in a time when "sex was a crime." The poem about trying to insert a diaphragm that keeps springing and landing on the floor in a seedy hotel bathroom is so vivid and stunningly original it brings tears to my eyes, especially because of the way at the end she claims the power of this young self who was so determined to control her own life.

What drew me to this book most while I was considering it in the store were the poems about the aging and death of her father, and especially the one about a rat and a cockroach who appear to her after her father's death. Something similar happened to me.

If you don't read anything else in this book, find it in the store and turn to the short poem "The Pope's Penis." The patriarchy really does have no clothes.

Number Ten

2005-10-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

by Sue Townsend (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2002)

This is a bit of silly fiction with a few good laughs and tidbits of gratifying political fantasy. The premise is that the Prime Minister of England (Labour Party, but the leadership is looking for another name) skips out of Number Ten and goes about the countryside disguised as a woman, getting in touch with some repressed emotions and feminine parts his personality, while failing miserably in picking up on the political lessons he might have learned. Traveling with him is a policeman who has had to leave his elderly mother in not the best hands. One could wish there was a bit more substance to this story, but its political heart seems to be in the right place, there are occasional good insights, and any sort of laugh is awfully hard to find now, int it? Suzette checked this one out of the Vancouver Public Library. Townsend is also the author of the acclaimed Adrian Mole books, which I have not yet read.

Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders

2005-10-21T23:52:00.000-07:00

by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2005)

When I pick up a book from a small press I confess I often have doubts about how good it will be. All doubts were definitely allayed in this case.

Gaspar, who is an associate professor of Chicana/o Studies and English at UCLA, spent years doing research on and even holding a major conference about the large and horrifying number of vicious sex murders of women that continue to be perpetrated in and around Juarez, Mexico, the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The extensive acknowlegements section at the end gives some insights into that work.

But to go from research to a good work of fiction is not very easy. Most fiction "based on a true story" tends toward the wooden. I don't want to overpraise because discovering that you continue to like a book as it goes along is part of the suspense. But this holds up very well against all the genres it participates in: "true crime" as mentioned, the feminist mystery novel, the lesbian novel, and the bilingual chicana/o novel.

Things I like about this book include: The number of well-drawn and highly original characters; the tight and credible dialogue; the descriptions that carry their weight and don't go on for too long; the terse incorporation of information and ideas through the use of different characters' perspectives. I especially liked that Gaspar didn't try to perfect or apologize for any of her characters' behaviour or thinking or morals.

I found this book in a feminist bookstore (Bookwoman, in Austin, Texas http://ebookwoman.booksense.com ). I'm sure you can order it from them if you don't find it where you usually shop.

The G-String Murders

2005-10-21T23:33:00.000-07:00

by Gypsy Rose Lee, afterword by Rachel Shteir (NY: The Feminist Press, 2005).

This is part of a new series The Feminist Press is issuing called Femmes Fatales, reprinting popular pulp fiction written by women in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. The Publisher's Foreword makes a great defense of the importance of these writers, who were read by many more people than more literary types (say, Proust) were.

The G-String Murders is not all that well plotted (a few weeks after reading it I can no longer even remember whodunnit), but it is interesting in its depiction of the burlesque industry, a sort of transitional form between Vaudeville and the strip clubs of today. The book is full of particulars about costuming, dressing rooms, toilets, food and drink, stage cues, regulations and the violations of them, police raids, and the slang of the period (the book was first published in 1941, but probably written in the '30s).

The afterword with biographical and publishing details added a lot. As a special treat, there is GRL's correspondence with her publisher (or, perhaps a pseudo-correspondence written for publicity purposes). The point is made that Lee was a woman who was proud of her intellect and vocabulary, and enjoyed freaking people out by being an intellectual and a stripper at the same time.

It's One O'Clock and Here Is Mary Margaret McBride: A radio biography

2005-10-21T23:19:00.000-07:00

By Susan Ware (NY: NYU Press, 2005). Mary Margaret McBride is sometimes called the creator of the radio talk show. In the 1940s and 1950s she "regularly attracted six to eight million listeners." As a radio woman myself, I loved the descriptions of how she ran her program, getting into deep conversations with people and just throwing in the advertising endorsements when she could fit them into the conversations. She only endorsed products she herself approved of -- often foods. MMM was a great eater, as her pictures in the book definitely show. Ware says the secret of McBride's interviewing success was that she really and warmly listened to people. She also was very generous with her listeners and always wrote back and often mentioned them in her shows. Another secret of McBride's success was her longstanding relationship (likely lesbian at some point, and involving shared housing) with her manager and publicist Stella Karn. Stella is a great character and I wish there were even more of her in this book. Because Stella was in her youth an advance publicist for a circus, I have formed an hypothesis that Djuna Barnes may have known or known about Stella before she created the character in Nightwood known as Robin Vote. Barnes and Karn were not of the same generation, but they did overlap in their tenure in Greenwich Village.

Purpose

2005-10-21T23:15:00.000-07:00

I started this blog so my friends can see my thoughts about books I've been reading.