The Women's Review of Books articles from February 2000

The Women's Review of Books archives from February 2000

Ripple effect.(women's history)
February 1, 2000... WHEN I WAS IN GRADUATE SCHOOL in the 1960s, no lecture that I remember focused clearly on women's historical experience as workers, politicians, criminals, educators. None of the books that I was expected to read in preparation for examinations...

Making change.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Walking Back Up Depot Street, by Minnie Bruce Pratt. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999, 117 pp., $25.00 hardcover, $12.95 paper. Minnie Bruce Pratt was raised in the middle class, a member of a family that once owned...

LETTERS.
February 1, 2000... Letter to the Editor: To Elaine Marks' review of Janet Thurman's brilliant biography of Colette [December 1999], I would like to add a footnote, one that in no way detracts from my great admiration for Thurman's achievement. Thurman...

CORRECTION.(correction to review of 'A Darker Ribbon' in the Jan. 2000 issue)(Correction Notice)
February 1, 2000... An editing error occurred in the review by Regina Morantz-Sanchez of A Darker Ribbon by Ellen Leopold, published in our January 2000 issue, with the result that the two surgeons who treated Rachel Carson for breast cancer were conflated. The...

Consuming desires.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Still Waters in Niger, by Kathleen Hill. Evanston, IL: Triquarterly Books, 1999,2 16 pp., $24.95 hardcover. FAMINE IS A GEOGRAPHY of haunted places. In Kathleen Hill's luminous novel about hunger, Still Waters in Niger, the heart too is a...

A living monument.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life, by Thalia Gouma-Peterson, with a foreword by Linda Nochlin. New York: Harry N. Abrams, in association with the Polk Museum of Art, 1999, 160 pp., $45.00 hardcover. MY FIRST LOOK at a...

From bad to worse.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Harsh Punishment: International Experiences of Women's Imprisonment, edited by Sandy Cook and Susanne Davies. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999, 319 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $22.50 paper. THE NUMBER OF WOMEN in US prisons has...

New frontiers.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women's Writing, by Krista Comer. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999: 288 PP., $45.00 hardcover, $18.95 paper. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity,...

Bread and roses.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, by Nan Enstad. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, 207 pp., $49.50 hardcover, $17.50 paper. A SIMPLE BUT...

Witness to her age.(Review)
February 1, 2000... "How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet?" The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Anne F. Herzog and Janet E. Kaufman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, 326 pp. $45.00 hardcover. MURIEL RUKEYSER'S life and works have the...

Taking the road to ruin.(Review)
February 1, 2000... Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999, 472 pp., $29.95 hardcover. IN A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN, Virginia Woolf invoked the enduring feminist fantasy of Shakespeare's sister--one who would have possessed her...

Transformation scene.(women's history)
February 1, 2000... THERE'S NO DOUBT that the historical profession has changed dramatically during the past thirty years and that feminism has been a potent agent of change. Yet how and when feminism worked its magic on this hidebound group is less clear. Did the...

Decolonizing Chicana history.
February 1, 2000... "THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT and demands for economic independence have left her [the Mexican woman] untouched. Uncomplainingly, she labors in the field for months at a time.... The supremacy of the male is seldom disputed." So wrote Ruth Allen...

Too soon to celebrate?(women's history)
February 1, 2000... RECENTLY I WAS TALKING to a colleague about the state of American women's history. The two of us noted with some satisfaction that the field is now integrated into the larger historical profession. Women historians are well represented on the...

From parts to whole.(women's/gender history)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2000... WHEN THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY history department hired me to teach courses on the American Revolution in 1971, I had never studied or even thought systematically about women's past, and I was the first and only woman in the department. Today,...

History's hybrids.
February 1, 2000... MY TRANSATLANTIC JOURNEYINGS over the last twenty years and my reflections upon the political ambiguities of being a black European with American citizenship influence my responses to work in black studies and women's studies about questions of...

Editorial imperatives.
February 1, 2000... Although some of the best-known works by women historians have been published by commercial presses, the university presses form the backbone of publishing in this field. How do university press editors see the past, present and future of...

Digging women.
February 1, 2000... THE THEORY AND PRACTICE of archaeology vary widely. Each field--for example, Egyptological, classical, or art-historical archaeology--focuses on a segment of the past, utilizing forms of evidence specific to a time and place. My own...

The longest revolution.
February 1, 2000... "IF ANYTHING REMAINS more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women," wrote Harvard sociologist David Riesman in Time magazine on July 21, 1967. "If we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private...

Optical illusions.(women's history)
February 1, 2000... IF YOU WERE TO DO AN ETHNOGRAPHY of the first textbooks and monographs in women's history (and I speak here primarily of the Anglo-American tradition), one of the major organizing practices to emerge would be--not surprisingly-that of...

Essential reading.(Bibliography)
February 1, 2000... What books have most inspired or excited you, what books do you most want your students to read? We posed these questions to a group of scholars who work at the intersection of history, politics and women's studies. While objecting that the...

Color coded.(Excerpt)
February 1, 2000... AT LAST SPRING'S BERKSHIRE CONFERENCE on the History of Women, held at the University of Rochester, the keynote address was given by Vicki Ruiz of Arizona State University. In "What's color got to do with it?" excerpted here, Ruiz offered a...

Redrawing the map of history.
February 1, 2000... IN THE EARLY 1980S, the journal Reviews in American History invited me to submit an essay for its tenth anniversary issue, evaluating the scholarship to date in the field of women's history. The fact that I was one of several historians invited...

Forgotten forerunners.(Excerpt)
February 1, 2000... LATER THIS SPRING, Stanford University Press will publish European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History. In the Prologue to the book, from which this essay is excerpted, author Karen Offen describes how she came to uncover an almost...

Actors and analysts.
February 1, 2000... "HISTORY" HAS MANY MEANINGS TO ME. When I became a feminist, perhaps even before, writing history and making history became closely related passions. If "history" were a verb, I would use it to mean both writing about the past and making social...