The Women's Review of Books articles from February 1995

The Women's Review of Books archives from February 1995

Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter.
February 1, 1995... Marianna De Marco Torgovnick walked into an all-male Italian American club to buy a cremolata ice, and the men sitting around playing cards called her a "brazen whore" for doing it. By her own description, she was "thirty-eight, well dressed...

The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas.
February 1, 1995... As I write, I am drinking coffee from a thick white mug with "The Campaign for Bryn Mawr College" stamped on it in discreet green letters. Let me reassure you. I am not bingeing on autobiography. The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas is a...

Her Face in the Mirror: Jewish Women on Mothers and Daughters.
February 1, 1995... Her face in the mirror is about women who are mothers and women who become mothers. It is a book about love and good girls and good women. There are no lasting bad feelings here, no blind rages, productive or otherwise. If you're a Jewish woman...

Christina Stead: A Biography.
February 1, 1995... The magnificent work of Christina Stead is little known outside a circle of dedicated admirers. Stead was born in Australia in 1902, when our century was new; she died towards its horrifying close in 1983, once again in Sydney. She spent the...

Double Life.
February 1, 1995... Naturally, his inoperable brain tumor troubled her. So did the telephoned threats. Several matters disturb us even more: the lovers were married to other people; he himself was making the phone calls; he had invented the brain tumor; and - oh,...

Deeper Shades of Green: The Rise of Blue-Collar and Minority Environmentalism in America.
February 1, 1995... When my mother died I was very young/ And my father sold me while yet my tongue/ Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep/ So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep." So begins William Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweep," one of English...

What librarians read. ("Women Reviewing Reviewing Women")
February 1, 1995... Librarians play a crucial role as gatekeepers, shapers of canons and preservers of cultures. Not everyone understands the influence libraries have on readers, and there is definitely some confusion about what librarians actually do. At a...

Shedding and Literally Dreaming.
February 1, 1995... In 1975, Verena Stefan's semi-autobiographical first book Hautungen (Shedding) became an unprecedented sensation of feminist publishing in Germany. Shedding is the story of a young woman leftist in 1970s Berlin who, like many on either side of...

Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday.
February 1, 1995... The stories of all the great, rich, half-happy jazz singers are similar. It's Billie Holiday's miserable tale that is profoundly offbeat. For that reason, more than for her extraordinarily affecting sound and eccentric style, this beautiful,...

Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint.
February 1, 1995... The United Nation's Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo last September produced an accord that is, in my view, nothing less than historic because it affirms women's central role in promoting international economic and social...

A Walking Fire.
February 1, 1995... Periodically novels appear about the Vietnam War, but there's little about the anti-war. There's nothing about the divisions within families which made that slogan about the personal being political so real. I worked during the sixties in...

The theories behind the practice. (Women's Studies, Women Scientists)
February 1, 1995... Until recently, very little contact has taken place between the feminist and scientific communities. With recent funding provided by federal, foundation and corporate sources, many institutions have developed programs to attract and retain...

In the ant colony: a conversation with Deborah Gordon. (entomologist) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists)
February 1, 1995... An article in the November 1993 issue of Scientific American, "A Lab of Her Own," described Deborah Gordon, an assistant professor in the department of biological sciences at Stanford, as an entomologist: "Gordon, who does research on ants,...

Crucial experiments. (Rutgers University's Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Mathematics, Science and Engineering) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists)
February 1, 1995... In the following pages the Women's Review reports on one of the major experimental projects developed in recent years to counter the drop-out rate of women students in the sciences. The Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Mathematics,...

Educating for persistence. (interview with Ellen Mappen, director of Rutgers University's Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Mathematics, Science and Engineering) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists) (Interview)
February 1, 1995... The Women's Review discussed the Douglass Project with Director Ellen Mappen and participating student Frieda Lewis. We also talked with Rutgers Mathematics Professor Amy Cohen, who with Mappen conceived an advanced two-semester calculus...

Inside the Douglass Project. (interview with Frieda Lewis, a veteran of Rutgers University's Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Math, Science and Engineering) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists) (Interview)
February 1, 1995... Frieda Lewis from Hillside, New Jersey, is a Douglass College junior majoring in chemistry who hopes to go to medical school. She is a veteran of the Douglass Science Institute and feels the summer program gave her, a young African American...

Strategies for success. (interview with Amy Cohen, director of Rutgers University's Project Excel) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists) (Interview)
February 1, 1995... Rutgers mathematics professor Amy Cohen heads Project Excel, an intensive two-semester Calculus course available to any Rutgers student with a math placement at the Calculus I level and no remedial English problems. Excel, which was launched...

Stereotypes under the microscope. (Women's Studies, Women Scientists)
February 1, 1995... Like their sister critiques of other realms of knowledge, feminist critiques of the biological sciences are based on the argument that gender-the dichotomy of maleness and femaleness -- is a socially constructed concept (although it is...

Worlds in collision. (Betsy McGregor) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists)
February 1, 1995... Betsy McGregor's career has taken a colorful and circuitous route, from university in Canada to the world of women's politics in United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations. It all began with her work for a Master's degree in...

A speck in the ocean. (interview with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Penny Chisholm) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists) (Interview)
February 1, 1995... Penny Chisholm is a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has taught since 1976, with a joint appointment in the departments of Biology and Civil and Environmental Engineering. The January 11th edition of MIT...

From physicist to physician. (Judy Lieberman) (Women's Studies, Women Scientists) (Interview)
February 1, 1995... Judy Lieberman's work has taken her from high-energy physics to a joint position as researcher and physician at New England Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine. Like Penny Chisholm, she began her career before the impact of...

Like mother used to make. (milk production)
February 1, 1995... Food production has long been a source of power for women. Even before agriculture, we produced the first food by transforming materials from our own bodies into milk to provide all of a newborn's complex needs. In agrarian societies, women...

Thinking globally, acting locally. (Martha Crouch)
February 1, 1995... Martha Crouch is one of a small number of scientists who speak out about the politics of science; unusual even among that small group, she has actively renounced the research she was trained to do, and now spends much of her time educating...

Net gains, net losses. (legal issues concerning cyberspace)
February 1, 1995... Electronic communication at the moment exists almost completely outside our legal system. Users of computer telecommunications are encountering many new legal issues - issues such as electronic privacy, copyright practices, censorship and...