The Women's Review of Books articles from January 1995

The Women's Review of Books archives from January 1995

The Abortionist: A Woman Against the Law.
January 1, 1995... On July 6, 1951, when more than a dozen police officers and reporters broke into the Stewart Clinic, Portland's largest abortion clinic, they were not responding to a tip on a previously hidden operation. The authorities had known about the...

A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England.
January 1, 1995... SOMETIMES YOU CAN TELL a book by its cover. The colorful dust-jacket of sociologist Karen Hansen's A Very Social Time reproduces Jerome Thompson's 1850 oil painting, "A 'Pic Nick,'" which portrays the tipsy aftermath of an al fresco meal in...

Another Wilderness: New Outdoor Writing by Women.
January 1, 1995... HOW MANY TIMES have I seen the same magazine photo selling outdoor adventure: orange lifejackets, drops of water on tanned skin, perfect teeth in young faces, giddy hysteria as the raft bucks through whitewater. Yee-ha! Going for the gusto. And...

Nature: Poems Old and New.
January 1, 1995... MAY SWENSON WAS A visionary poet, a prodigious observer of the fragile and miraculous natural world, a poet who brought our deepest questions to the center of her work. By the time she died in 1989 at 76 she had published some 450 poems in ten...

Color is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir.
January 1, 1995... MEMOIR" SEEMS TOO TAME and limited a word to describe Color is the Suffering of Light. In relating her brutal childhood growing up on a small chicken farm in rural Massachusetts, Melissa Green is writing not so much to recall and record as to...

Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution.
January 1, 1995... IS A PAYCHECK A prescription for personal fulfillment? This question has engaged women of Western capitalism since modern industry began to generate wider opportunities for female employment. Women wage-earners appear to have access to freedom,...

Battling Bias: The Struggle for Identity and Community on College Campuses.
January 1, 1995... NOTHING HAS DISTINGUISHED the controversy over political correctness on college campuses more than its absolute lack of insight into the lives and experiences of real undergraduates. Without an offer of hard cash, I doubt that I would have ever...

A Patchwork of Pieces: An Anthology of Early Quilt Stories, 1845-1940.
January 1, 1995... FEMINIST FASCINATION with quilts, which began among women artists and historians in the 1970s, has by now spread to literary critics and scholars who for the last ten years or so have been pursuing the analogies between textiles and texts....

Quilt Stories: A Collection of Short Stories, Poems and Plays.
January 1, 1995... FEMINIST FASCINATION with quilts, which began among women artists and historians in the 1970s, has by now spread to literary critics and scholars who for the last ten years or so have been pursuing the analogies between textiles and texts....

Quilt Culture: Tracing the Pattern.
January 1, 1995... FEMINIST FASCINATION with quilts, which began among women artists and historians in the 1970s, has by now spread to literary critics and scholars who for the last ten years or so have been pursuing the analogies between textiles and texts. From...

We're in This War, Too: World War II Letters from American Women in Uniform.
January 1, 1995... EACH TIME I REREAD the Iliad, I'm struck anew by women's complex understanding of war. In the midst of the mindless tumult of Achaians and Trojans, there's one quiet moment when--knowing her husband Hektor will be killed if he reenters the...

Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space.
January 1, 1995... IT IS ONE OF THE GREAT ADVANTAGES of being a woman writer that one can discover even a very fine feminist critic without wanting to turn her into a character in a novel. The reverse is by no means true. Indeed it strikes me, after reading this...

Reviews and their afterlife.
January 1, 1995... I'M HERE TODAY WEARING several hats--as reference librarian, as reviewer of women's studies reference books, and as the current publisher of Feminist Collections, which contains a variety of reviews of new books on women. I've been wearing...

The Middle Children.
January 1, 1995... THE TRAGEDY OF APARTHEID lay not so much in the stark material deprivations as in its deep, searing assault on the psyche. The daily humiliations that gnawed at people's sense of self-worth, the difficult compromises, the desperate measures...

Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography.
January 1, 1995... The epigraph to Telling Women's Lives, a poem by Lisel Mueller, states the premise of both these books, that "the story of our life/becomes our life"; telling a life creates it, and telling it differently creates it differently, so that a...

Women Creating Lives: Identities, Resilience, and Resistance.
January 1, 1995... THE EPIGRAPH TO Telling Women's Lives, a poem by Lisel Mueller, states the premise of both these books, that "the story of our life/becomes our life": telling a life creates it, and telling it differently creates it differently, so that a woman...

Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond.
January 1, 1995... THROUGH HER CRITICISMS and reconstructions of Freud, Nancy Chodorow has become one of his true inheritors. She has already displayed her ability to create, out of problematic gaps and flaws in Freud's writings, psychoanalytic narratives that...

The Dog Collar Murders.
January 1, 1995... Crime fiction has had its female protagonists for many years like other women of my generation, I can recall spending hours of my childhood reading Nancy Drew books with a flashlight under the blankets. But until the 1980s, most were...

Blanche on the Lam.
January 1, 1995... Crime fiction has had its female protagonists for many years like other women of my generation, I can recall spending hours of my childhood reading Nancy Drew books with a flashlight under the blankets. But until the 1980s, most were...

The Best Defense.
January 1, 1995... Crime fiction has had its female protagonists for many years like other women of my generation, I can recall spending hours of my childhood reading Nancy Drew books with a flashlight under the blankets. But until the 1980s, most were...

Track of the Cat.
January 1, 1995... CRIME FICTION HAS HAD its female protagonists for many years: like other women of my generation, I can recall spending hours of my childhood reading Nancy Drew books with a flashlight under the blankets. But until the 1980s, most were...

The Grass Dancer.
January 1, 1995... THE GRASS DANCER flows along the page with the grace of its title character, a Menominee woman named Pumpkin who dances what is traditionally the male role of the grass dancer in powwows. The book as a whole becomes a place--the reservation...

Eve's Rib: Searching for the Biological Roots of Sex Differences.
January 1, 1995... I admit, I'm frustrated that we keep having to challenge biological determinism. Despite decades of feminist criticism, nothing seems to change and I can almost rehearse the arguments against it in my sleep. Unfortunately, biological...

Challenging Racism and Sexism: Alternatives to Genetic Explanations.
January 1, 1995... I ADMIT, I'M FRUSTRATED that we keep having to challenge biological determinism. Despite decades of feminist criticism, nothing seems to change and I can almost rehearse the arguments against it in my sleep. Unfortunately, biological...