The Women's Review of Books articles from February 1999

The Women's Review of Books archives from February 1999

Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Pamela Neville-Sington. New York: Viking, 1998, 398 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Pamela Neville-Sington begins her biography of Frances Trollope with a quote from Anthony Trollope's "condescending portrait" of his mother, and comments that...

Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Lisa Maria Hogeland. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, 224 pp., $39.95 hardcover, $18.95 paper. Here is an excellent study of feminist novels of the 1970s that seems to this veteran to get it right. How refreshing...

24 Years of House Work ... and the Place is Still a Mess.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Pat Schroeder. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 1998, 244 pp., $24.95 hardcover. I miss Pat Schroeder. When she and other Congresswomen were photographed in profile, climbing the Capitol steps to demand that the Senate let Professor...

Representative Mom.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Susan Molinari with Elinor Burkett. New York: Doubleday, 1998, 291 pp., $23.95 hardcover. I miss Pat Schroeder. When she and other Congresswomen were photographed in profile, climbing the Capitol steps to demand that the Senate let...

Framing a Life: A Family Memoir.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Geraldine A. Ferraro with Catherine Whitney. New York: Scribner, 1998, 224 pp., $24.00 hardcover. I miss Pat Schroeder. When she and other Congresswomen were photographed in profile, climbing the Capitol steps to demand that the Senate...

Seasons of Her Life: A Biography of Madeline Korbel Albright.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Ann Blackman. New York: Scribner, 1998, 398 pp., $27.00 hardcover. I miss Pat Schroeder. When she and other Congresswomen were photographed in profile, climbing the Capitol steps to demand that the Senate let Professor Anita Hill...

Barbara Jordan: American Hero.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Mary Beth Rogers. New York: Bantam Books, 1998, 414 pp., $27.50 hardcover. I miss Pat Schroeder. When she and other Congresswomen were photographed in profile, climbing the Capitol steps to demand that the Senate let Professor Anita...

Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Erin G. Carlston. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 217 pp, $39.50 hardcover. One would think that it was already established, almost a commonplace, that literature offers no safe space, no place of grace, that modernist...

Herb's Pajamas.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Abigail Thomas. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1998, 199 pp., $17.95 hardcover. Abigail Thomas' third book of fiction plays with the social paradoxes of Manhattan life. Herb's Pajamas portrays individuals seeking both anonymity and...

Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.(Review)
February 1, 1999... y Marianne Hirsch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 336 pp., $45.00 hardcover, $22.00 paper. Family albums are A sociological treasure trove. There are the images themselves, of course - from Victorian death portraits to...

Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Andrea Liss. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 224 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper. Family albums are A sociological treasure trove. There are the images themselves, of course - from Victorian death portraits to...

Slaying the Mermaid: Women and the Culture of Sacrifice.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Stephanie Golden. New York: Harmony Books, 1998, 336 pp., $25.00 hardcover. A few years ago, I gave a talk at a meeting of women who, as unmarried mothers in the 1950s and 1960s, had been pressed hard to surrender their babies for...

Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights.(Review)
February 1, 1999... Edited by Ellen Carol DuBois. New York: New York University' Press, 1998, 304 pp., $55.00 hardcover, $18.50 paper. When historian Ellen Dubois first began her scholarly work on woman suffrage in the late 1960s, few in the developing field...

Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of the American Suffrage.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Ellen Carol DuBois. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997, 343 pp., $37.50 hardcover. When historian Ellen Dubois first began her scholarly work on woman suffrage in the late 1960s, few in the developing field of women's history...

Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty.(Review)
February 1, 1999... By Nancy A. Naples. New York: Routledge, 1998, 270 pp., $18.99 paper. Nina Reyes, the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, has been actively involved in her community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for thirty years. She remembers...

Eminent anti-Victorian.(19th century writer Fanny Trollope)
February 1, 1999... Pamela Neville-Sington begins her biography of Frances Trollope with a quote from Anthony Trollope's "condescending portrait" of his mother, and comments that "if Fanny is remembered at all today, it is as an admittedly courageous and...

The literature of liberation.(Lisa Marie Hogeland's examination of feminist novels in the 1970s)
February 1, 1999... Here is an excellent study of feminist novels of the 1970s that seems to this veteran to get it right. How refreshing to see this group of novels treated as seriously as any other. How different is Lisa Maria Hogeland's respectful yet critical...

When the house is not a home.(biographies and memoirs of women politicians)
February 1, 1999... I miss Pat Schroeder. When she and other Congresswomen were photographed in profile, climbing the Capitol steps to demand that the Senate let Professor Anita Hill testify about Clarence Thomas, the photo became my own Iwo Jima image. For a...

The complexity of complicity.(fascism in writings of women authors)
February 1, 1999... One would think that it was already established, almost a commonplace, that literature offers no safe space, no place of grace, that modernist claims to the contrary were attempts to cover a nakedness that can no longer be hidden. But it is not...

Neighborhood watcher.(Abigail Thomas' novel 'Herb's Pajamas')
February 1, 1999... Abigail Thomas' third book of fiction plays with the social paradoxes of Manhattan life. Herb's Pajamas portrays individuals seeking both anonymity and company in a city that can be at once impersonal and intimate. Each of Thomas' four loosely...

Wooden horse.(poem)
February 1, 1999... He was the nearest thing I had to a brother, his hair a bright carrot I would stagger after as far back as I can remember, his asthma a breath stifled between us in rooms where adults had voices not meant for us children. After an attack I read...

Black child.(poem)
February 1, 1999... The one you call your black child is mute, obedient, gives voice only at the approach of a stranger. She is sleek, steady, leads you along paths through sun and shadow not quite faultlessly. At the steps she forgets to stop, checked only by...

Parting shots.(memory and photographs of Holocaust in two books)
February 1, 1999... Family albums are A sociological treasure trove. There are the images themselves, of course - from Victorian death portraits to America's Funniest Home Videos. And then there is the complex infusing of meaning into the recording of private...

Women who give too much.(women's sacrifices analyzed in book)
February 1, 1999... A few years ago, I gave a talk at a meeting of women who, as unmarried mothers in the 1950s and 1960s, had been pressed hard to surrender their babies for adoption. They had been told that if they wanted to secure a husband in the future, a...

The last suffragist.(books by suffrage researcher Ellen DuBois)
February 1, 1999... When historian Ellen Dubois first began her scholarly work on woman suffrage in the late 1960s, few in the developing field of women's history shared her interest in the long struggle for the vote or her insistence on the primacy of formal...

Signing on for the duration.(book on women community workers)
February 1, 1999... Nina Reyes, the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, has been actively involved in her community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for thirty years. She remembers renting a truck and picking up garbage during the sanitation strike in 1963....

Liberation studies now.(Teaching for Change)(includes list of required reading)(combining gender, race, class and nation studies)
February 1, 1999... In two days I will attend a reunion of the Women's Caucus of the Comparative Literature Department of the University, of California at Berkeley. As graduate students during campus mobilization against the war in Vietnam, we joined together to...

From thought to action.(Teaching for Change)(includes copy of curriculum and required courses)(Florida Atlantic University's program for public intellectuals)
February 1, 1999... If thee is one significant gap in higher education, it is the lack of attention to public intellectual life. At Florida Atlantic University we are instituting the first PhD program with an emphasis on training public intellectuals. Florida...

Making sense of hatred.(Teaching for Change)(course on hate crimes at University of California at Irvine)
February 1, 1999... Valerie Jenness teaches a course on what may be one of the most volatile subjects around.' hate crimes. Early in 1999, she spoke to the Women's Review about the genesis, structure and goals of her course. The first time I taught a course...

Unholy trinity.(Teaching for Change)(includes course description)(course on gender, race and class at Barnard College)
February 1, 1999... The most popular course I teach in the Sociology Department at Barnard College is "Gender, Race and Class." Each spring for the last six years, enrollments have ranged from 130 to 200 Barnard, Columbia and General Studies students. Because...

Electronic education.(Teaching for Change)(online course Parenting for Progressives)
February 1, 1999... My class has no particular meeting time. Regularly participating students currently live in Colombia, Japan, Australia, Alaska, Wyoming and Massachusetts. Three quarters-men and one-quarter women, my students range in age from early twenties to...

The real and the virtual: a conversation with Zillah Eisenstein.(Teaching for Change)(professor)(Interview)
February 1, 1999... Zillah Eisenstein has been teaching, thinking and writing about gender and global politics throughout her academic career. Her course on "Gender in Cyberspace" may be the first of its kind, but it grows organically out of her scholarly and...

Survivors of the system.(Teaching for Change)(course on organizing for welfare and poverty issues)
February 1, 1999... The Dudley library is right in Roxbury's Dudley square, next to the police station, across the street from the Urban League of Boston - in the heart of Boston's black community. Once a week throughout the fall of 1997, the library's big meeting...

Close to home: a conversation with Rhonda Williams.(Teaching for Change)(includes course description for Public Policy and the Black Community)(teacher)(Interview)
February 1, 1999... Rhonda Williams is an economist who teaches at the University of Maryland College Park campus. Since 1997 she has been teaching "Public Policy and the Black Community," using a format that stresses student initiative, teamwork and research that...

Making sense of hatred (2).(Teaching for Change)(course on hate crimes at University of California at Irvine)
February 1, 1999