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.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Sunday, June 07, 2009
397 Ways to Save Money
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
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
Saturday, May 30, 2009
L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement
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):
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:
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.
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.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Late Nights on Air
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
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
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Old Friend from Far Away, The Practice of Writing Memoir.
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
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/author-of-writing-down-bones-visits.html
Friday, March 27, 2009
S.K.I.R.T.S. in the Boardroom: A Woman's Survival Guide to Success in Business and Life
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)
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)
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Bad Chemistry
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.
-----------
*Kelly has a penchant for raunchy acronyms for feminist groups - there's another one in My Sister's Keeper.
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.
-----------
*Kelly has a penchant for raunchy acronyms for feminist groups - there's another one in My Sister's Keeper.
Friday, January 02, 2009
The Second Coming of Joan of Arc and Selected Plays
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
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
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975
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
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
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Last Stop Sunnyside (the first Dana Leoni mystery)
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
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
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Antigone Magazine Fundraising Calendar
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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Saturday, November 22, 2008
Giving for Giving - the video
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.
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
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
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Elephant Rocks, by Kay Ryan
(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.
---
* 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
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.
---
* 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
Friday, August 15, 2008
Century of Struggle
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:
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.
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.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Bodily Harm
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
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
Monday, April 07, 2008
Anne of Green Gables and other Morally Delicious Fiction
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.
---
If you like the concept of these books, you might also like to read my review of Gwethalyn Graham's Swiss Sonata
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.
---
If you like the concept of these books, you might also like to read my review of Gwethalyn Graham's Swiss Sonata
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Gone Quiet by Eleanor Taylor Bland
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
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
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Murder Off Mike
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable and Inspirational Political Change in America
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:
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:
(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
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
You can read the rest at:
http://internetreviewofbooks.com/nov07/taking_on_the_big_boys.html
====================================
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:
Read the rest at:
http://internetreviewofbooks.com/oct07/leading_ladies.html
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
====================================
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
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