second wave

Taking Women in New Directions: Stories from the Second Wave of the Women's Movement

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Paula Kassell's Taking Women in New Directions is not what it sounds like. Rather than being stories about the women's movement in the '70s and '80s, it is primarily a collection of articles that Kassell wrote for the feminist newspaper, New Directions for Women (which she also co-founded and ran out of her own home for seven years). The newspaper was published from 1972-1993, and at its peak had a circulation of 65,000.

The articles themselves are in the form of newspaper clippings, one every page or two (for a total of sixty), and are accompanied by family and personal photos, all of which makes the ninety-seven-page book seem more like a scrapbook than a text. Other than the clippings and photos, there is an eight-page history of the newspaper, also written by Kassell; a couple of pieces about Kassell written by others, Kassell's feminist curriculum vita; and some correspondence between Kassell and an editor. The result is an odd mix of self-promotion and social history.

This doesn't mean that the book is without value. It functions well as a primary source of second wave feminist writing. Kassell always documented her sources and was careful to provide detailed information about the books and organizations she referred to. The articles, editorials, book reviews, and columns, which are presented chronologically, cover a wide range of feminist issues, from equal pay to reproductive rights. One thing that was interesting about reading the book was seeing how many of the issues Kassell wrote about are still not resolved today.

The publisher, Hudson House is a “vanity” press. I give Kassell credit for putting forth the effort to compile the contents, have the book published, and undertake book signings at the age of ninety-one. (The book was published in 2008.) The impression I got is that Kassell wanted to leave behind a testimonial to her work in the feminist movement, primarily, but not solely, in terms of her contributions to New Directions for Women. For example, one of the her accomplishments was to help persuade the New York Times to begin using the honorific “Ms.” (It was one of the last major newspapers to do so.) And she is justifiably proud of all the organizations she joined or helped to found over the years.

The strength of this book is that it shows how the personal life of one woman can contribute to the impact of an entire movement. It is a good answer to those who say that the feminist movement is no longer necessary because all of its goals have been met. And yet the things that have changed have been through the efforts of women like Paula Kassell.

Written by: Ellen Keim, June 1st 2010

The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys

admin — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:05:00 +0000

By Lilian Pizzichini

W.W. Norton

There’s no shortage of texts examining Jean Rhys, the woman whose writing is as highly regarded among second wave feminists as it is among literature professors. Rhys herself was at work on a memoir when she passed away in 1979, leaving behind the collection of pieces that became Smile Please. Drawing upon this incomplete autobiography, Carole Angier published Jean Rhys: Life and Work in 1991, a more definitive tome linking Rhys’s life events to the people and situations in her fiction. It is in the wake of these books that The Blue Hour, a new biography written by Lilian Pizzichini, is delivered, and Rhys aficionados will justifiably wonder what this work adds. Does Pizzichini intend to endear Rhys’s work to a new generation through electrifying accounts of her life? Does she have new insights into Rhys’s upbringing or a different angle through which to explore the novels?

Pizzichini herself may not know what role her book serves; the foreword is unhelpful at explaining the title. It has something to do with perfume and “dogs hunt[ing] best during twilight.” In another strange choice, each chapter is prefaced by a summary of that section’s highlights. It remains to be seen why someone would buy a 300-page book to obtain a Wikipedia understanding of Rhys’s life.

The author does a serviceable job of depicting the most notable occurrences of Rhys’s early years in the British colony of Dominica, where she was brought up by a disinterested mother in a land rife with racial tension. But Pizzichini is relatively artless in showing Rhys’s discomfort as a white woman among former slaves. Pizzichini refers to the island’s population as “swarthy” and rushes through Rhys’s feelings about Black people:

One the one hand she envied them, on the other she feared them. She was entrenched in stereotypes […] Yet she knew that they hated because they had been hated. Although they laughed loud and long, she noticed they seldom smiled.

This disjointed quality is characteristic of Pizzichini’s prose, which will offend grammar snobs with its syntactical slip-ups. (“Her father, apart from the nuns, had been forgotten.”)

The book report style persists as Pizzichini follows Rhys to London through her stint as a student and chorus girl, where she goes from penniless to courted by male admirers with clothes, flowers, and money. Although the novels and stories are only occasionally referenced in Pizzichini’s work, it’s clear that Rhys’s personal experiences seeped into every book– her fashion choices, unpleasant run-ins with other women, financial struggles, and affairs. Rhys may have been her own best biographer, not in her memoir but in her fiction, which captures the strange pains and joys of living a life largely dependent on male patronage. One of Pizzichini’s strengths is how she parallels the content of Rhys's narratives and life. But her depiction remains lifeless.

Ultimately, The Blue Hour’s downfall isn’t a lack of information or research; it’s the dullness with which they’re recounted. We’re given occasional asides about the prevailing styles or social codes of the day, but we never fully enter another place and time. We’re told how Rhys feels, but we don’t experience it ourselves or even sympathize with it. When Pizzichini writes “she often found that when she told people her story, they looked at her with disbelief in their eyes,” countless feminist readers will feel an instant kinship with Rhys. It’s a shame that the rest of the book will dismantle much of it.

Written by: Monica Shores, September 20th 2009

The Women's Room

admin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:17:00 +0000

By Marilyn French

Penguin

Marilyn French’s The Women's Room, first published in 1977 and republished this year (a re-release ironically in the works before French’s death last May), has been touted as one of the most influential novels of the second wave of feminism. The book reads like a combination of a personal journal and a traditional novel. It is the most intense, real, and painful story I have ever read—except maybe for Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, which I read when I was a clinically depressed teenager, and which made me feel a little better because I knew I wasn’t as crazy as Wurtzel. But the women in French’s novel are not crazy—they are “normal” (whatever that means) women struggling to exist with integrity in a world that systematically disparages and oppresses them—and this makes The Women's Room a lot more heartbreaking because there is no trace of an excuse to justify, so to speak, the suffering.

This is primarily the story of Mira’s life, from childhood through late adulthood between the 1950s and the 1970s, and that of her female friends. Mira is a white suburbanite in the U.S. who discovers early on the harrowing destiny she is up against simply because she is a woman—regardless of her racial and class privilege. Mira then chooses to do her best as she trudges through it, refusing to efface herself as much as she can in the process.

We think we—you and I reading this—have it hard. (And we do.) All the same, let’s remember this: we have access to the Internet, we are literate, we can easily find and contact fellow feminists for a sense of community, we are not always thought of as ridiculous and selfish for wanting to prioritize ourselves before (or refuse altogether) marriage and children, and we have the possibility to do this. This puts us ahead of, I don’t know, ninety-five percent of all women on Earth, and certainly ahead of even the most privileged, well-to-do, and educated white women in the U.S. just thirty years ago—women who were buried beneath so much systematic antagonism they had trouble breathing.

This book wounds the reader—or, it wounded me—in part because so much in it remains recognizable to even the most privileged of us today. Today. I know my mother went through comparable circumstances when she had me in Argentina in the 1980s, and even later, even in the U.S. Some of what Mira’s experiences during young adulthood happened to me too, and I remember having the very same reaction as she does despite her young adulthood and mine stretching a span of about forty years. I find this difficult to grasp and to accept: as a feminist during the third wave of feminism, I faced some things that ought to have been long gone. This makes The Women's Room relevant even today.

The intertwining stories encompass a staggering amount of women’s lives throughout numerous decades and vast territories. French also untangles precise impressions and sensations into expanded, detailed descriptions and dialogues that open the way for the reader to delve into the characters and feel for them and everyone like them. To understand intimately the minutiae of what it was like to be them, and especially Mira, in uncountable ways. French has a power few writers enjoy: she can capture half-thoughts and emotions and iron them out so that they are clear and communicable. She has amazingly put into words sensations I have had and found utterly ineffable. This book is full of little gifts like this.

The Chicago Tribune did not exaggerate when it wrote that The Women's Room is “a book you’d like to give to twenty women (and perhaps anonymously, twenty men).” I am not exaggerating either when I say that twenty or forty would be too few, and that I wish everyone I can think of at this moment would read this book with the consideration and mindfulness it completely deserves.

Written by: Natalia Real, September 9th 2009