Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Closing the gaps in women’s history Talk to young women about the women’s movement, and their eyes glaze over. That’s ancient history. Women’s equality is a given, taken for granted by today’s college-aged women, who were born in the 1980s.

Historian Ruth Rosen discovered how little the younger generation knew about the topic when she stood before a classroom of college students and asked how the women’s movement had affected their lives. They couldn’t answer. The students stared in amazement as Rosen listed on the blackboard the myriad of indignities and roadblocks women had encountered before women’s liberation swept the nation in the 1960s and ’70s.

After her epiphany in the classroom, Rosen, professor of history at the University of California-Davis, decided to write a book that would document the origins and impact of the contemporary women’s movement.

The result is The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (Viking, $34.95, 0670814628), a comprehensive account of the personalities and issues that dominated the drive for women’s equality. This modern movement marks the third major era of women’s rights the first two being the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 and the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the one having the most profound impact on the lives of women. Rosen dates the beginning of the movement from the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan was among the first to notice that the Donna Reed persona of the 1950s housewife had left many women with deep feelings of frustration and boredom. Rosen shows how the frustrations of these women led to an eventual revolt by their daughters, the young women of the 1960s who were determined not to live under the same constraints. As an activist herself, Rosen is particularly adept at capturing the passion that motivated many participants in the movement. From consciousness-raising sessions to protest marches, the new feminist culture served to energize converts and shake the establishment to its core.

Although Rosen is a noted feminist academic, with two of her previous books on the standard Women’s Studies reading list, in The World Split Open, she creates an accessible narrative account that should appeal to non-academic readers as well.

One battle cry of the feminist movement was, The personal is political. By this, women meant that politics and power structures affected the everyday occurrences of private life, from the home to the workplace. A first-rate description of how the women’s movement affected the personal lives of women can be found in Elizabeth Fishel’s Reunion: The Girls We Used to Be, the Women We Became. Spurred by her 25th high school reunion, Fishel decided to trace the paths of ten classmates after their graduation in 1968 from the Brearley School, a girls’ school favored by New York City’s wealthiest families.

Fishel gives a fascinating account of how these young women were caught in the crossfire between the old world of wealth and privilege and the new world of social upheaval and changing roles for women. Women just a half generation older were secure in their lives as housewives and mothers, while women a few years younger aimed for careers as doctors, lawyers, and psychologists. The girls of the class of ’68 were left floundering, unsure which direction to take, as a social revolt erupted around them. Fishel follows them through suicide, divorce, drugs, alcohol, career changes, and spiritual seeking. Along the way, she points out broader generational patterns and statistical tidbits, such as this one: Women born in the 1950s have had fewer children than any other generation in U.

S. history. The women of the Brearley class conformed to this trend, with many remaining childless or choosing motherhood later in life.

Fishel’s book ends on an upbeat note when the class gathers in 1998 for its 30th reunion. Despite the anguish and confusion they have endured, many of these women reach a more peaceful plane as they approach their 50th birthdays. Although few have the lived the lives they dreamed of, most have come to terms with the choices they made.

Another good reading selection for Women’s History Month is Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95, 0679431063) which gives detailed and incisive portraits of 12 women writers who lived and wrote in the transitional era before the women’s movement leveled the playing field. Pierpont could have titled her book Hard-Headed Women, for if there is one quality these fiesty women writers have in common, it’s stubbornness. From Gertrude Stein to Eudora Welty, each woman stuck to the course she set, which was often outside the norm established for women of the day.

The 12 women profiled here are all what Pierpont considers literary women of influence (very different from women of literary influence). In other words, their writing changed the way people thought about race, about politics, and about sex.

Pierpont’s subjects include both the lesser known (19th century South African novelist Olive Schriner) and the wildly popular (Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell). One surprising inclusion is Mae West, who made her name as the Madonna of her era, more than willing to deny conventions of appropriate sexual behavior. It’s not nearly as well known that West was also a writer. As Pierpont notes, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. In 1926, West wrote a three-act play titled simply, Sex, which delighted its sold-out audiences, but appalled the critics. West went on to the movies, where she often punched up her own part in the script to add sizzle.

Pierpont gives sympathetic portrayals of these often outlandish and avant-garde women, with the curious exception of Eudora Welty. This Mississippi writer earns Pierpont’s criticism for failing to condemn the racial bigotry that existed in her home state. Only once, in a short story about the assassination of Medgar Evers, did Welty express anguish over racial discrimination. For Pierpont, this studied avoidance of social reality casts a pall over Welty’s work.

And finally, for the younger woman in your life, Penny Colman has written an excellent overview of a neglected topic, Girls: A History of Growing up Female in America (Scholastic, $18.95, 0590371290). Working from letters, diaries and other original sources, Colman pieces together a culturally diverse account of girls’ experiences throughout U.

S. history. Girls coming of age in the new millennium will find role models, encouragement, humor, and despair in the life stories presented here. From pioneer girls to future astronauts, each has a unique story to tell.

Closing the gaps in women's history Talk to young women about the women's movement, and their eyes glaze over. That's ancient history. Women's equality is a given, taken for granted by today's college-aged women, who were born in the 1980s.

Historian Ruth…

Review by

Closing the gaps in women’s history Talk to young women about the women’s movement, and their eyes glaze over. That’s ancient history. Women’s equality is a given, taken for granted by today’s college-aged women, who were born in the 1980s.

Historian Ruth Rosen discovered how little the younger generation knew about the topic when she stood before a classroom of college students and asked how the women’s movement had affected their lives. They couldn’t answer. The students stared in amazement as Rosen listed on the blackboard the myriad of indignities and roadblocks women had encountered before women’s liberation swept the nation in the 1960s and ’70s.

After her epiphany in the classroom, Rosen, professor of history at the University of California-Davis, decided to write a book that would document the origins and impact of the contemporary women’s movement.

The result is The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America, a comprehensive account of the personalities and issues that dominated the drive for women’s equality. This modern movement marks the third major era of women’s rights the first two being the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 and the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the one having the most profound impact on the lives of women. Rosen dates the beginning of the movement from the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan was among the first to notice that the Donna Reed persona of the 1950s housewife had left many women with deep feelings of frustration and boredom. Rosen shows how the frustrations of these women led to an eventual revolt by their daughters, the young women of the 1960s who were determined not to live under the same constraints. As an activist herself, Rosen is particularly adept at capturing the passion that motivated many participants in the movement. From consciousness-raising sessions to protest marches, the new feminist culture served to energize converts and shake the establishment to its core.

Although Rosen is a noted feminist academic, with two of her previous books on the standard Women’s Studies reading list, in The World Split Open, she creates an accessible narrative account that should appeal to non-academic readers as well.

One battle cry of the feminist movement was, The personal is political. By this, women meant that politics and power structures affected the everyday occurrences of private life, from the home to the workplace. A first-rate description of how the women’s movement affected the personal lives of women can be found in Elizabeth Fishel’s Reunion: The Girls We Used to Be, the Women We Became (Random House, $23.95, 0679449833). Spurred by her 25th high school reunion, Fishel decided to trace the paths of ten classmates after their graduation in 1968 from the Brearley School, a girls’ school favored by New York City’s wealthiest families.

Fishel gives a fascinating account of how these young women were caught in the crossfire between the old world of wealth and privilege and the new world of social upheaval and changing roles for women. Women just a half generation older were secure in their lives as housewives and mothers, while women a few years younger aimed for careers as doctors, lawyers, and psychologists. The girls of the class of ’68 were left floundering, unsure which direction to take, as a social revolt erupted around them. Fishel follows them through suicide, divorce, drugs, alcohol, career changes, and spiritual seeking. Along the way, she points out broader generational patterns and statistical tidbits, such as this one: Women born in the 1950s have had fewer children than any other generation in U.S. history. The women of the Brearley class conformed to this trend, with many remaining childless or choosing motherhood later in life.

Fishel’s book ends on an upbeat note when the class gathers in 1998 for its 30th reunion. Despite the anguish and confusion they have endured, many of these women reach a more peaceful plane as they approach their 50th birthdays. Although few have the lived the lives they dreamed of, most have come to terms with the choices they made.

Another good reading selection for Women’s History Month is Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95, 0679431063) which gives detailed and incisive portraits of 12 women writers who lived and wrote in the transitional era before the women’s movement leveled the playing field. Pierpont could have titled her book Hard-Headed Women, for if there is one quality these fiesty women writers have in common, it’s stubbornness. From Gertrude Stein to Eudora Welty, each woman stuck to the course she set, which was often outside the norm established for women of the day.

The 12 women profiled here are all what Pierpont considers literary women of influence (very different from women of literary influence). In other words, their writing changed the way people thought about race, about politics, and about sex.

Pierpont’s subjects include both the lesser known (19th century South African novelist Olive Schriner) and the wildly popular (Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell). One surprising inclusion is Mae West, who made her name as the Madonna of her era, more than willing to deny conventions of appropriate sexual behavior. It’s not nearly as well known that West was also a writer. As Pierpont notes, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. In 1926, West wrote a three-act play titled simply, Sex, which delighted its sold-out audiences, but appalled the critics. West went on to the movies, where she often punched up her own part in the script to add sizzle.

Pierpont gives sympathetic portrayals of these often outlandish and avant-garde women, with the curious exception of Eudora Welty. This Mississippi writer earns Pierpont’s criticism for failing to condemn the racial bigotry that existed in her home state. Only once, in a short story about the assassination of Medgar Evers, did Welty express anguish over racial discrimination. For Pierpont, this studied avoidance of social reality casts a pall over Welty’s work.

And finally, for the younger woman in your life, Penny Colman has written an excellent overview of a neglected topic, Girls: A History of Growing up Female in America (Scholastic, $18.95, 0590371290). Working from letters, diaries and other original sources, Colman pieces together a culturally diverse account of girls’ experiences throughout U.S. history. Girls coming of age in the new millennium will find role models, encouragement, humor, and despair in the life stories presented here. From pioneer girls to future astronauts, each has a unique story to tell.

Closing the gaps in women's history Talk to young women about the women's movement, and their eyes glaze over. That's ancient history. Women's equality is a given, taken for granted by today's college-aged women, who were born in the 1980s.

Historian Ruth Rosen…
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A talented new crop of memoirists explore the friction between their queer identities and their cultural and geographical surroundings.

Asylum

Jacket of Asylum by Edafe Okporo

Edafe Okporo’s aptly titled memoir, Asylum: A Memoir and a Manifesto, recounts his experience growing up gay in Nigeria, a place known for having harsh laws against “known homosexuals.” Okporo writes with sensitivity about the scenery that shaped his childhood, his powerful familial relationships and the friendships that formed his identity. One night in 2016, however, all of these things were threatened by a mob that gathered outside his home. Okporo tried to escape out a window, but before he could, they broke down his door and beat him until he was unconscious. It was his 26th birthday.

This event marked the beginning of Okporo’s one-way journey to America as a refugee. Once he arrived in New York City, there was a potent juxtaposition between his experiences as a Black gay man from a place of repression and the freedom he encountered as an asylum-seeker. Still, the cruelty of America’s immigration system and the overwhelming whiteness of New York’s gay community presented stark new forms of injustice. With clarity and grace, Okporo casts light on the racism and oppression he discovered lurking within communities that are themselves oppressed.

Okporo was able to explore new relationships in New York, sexual and otherwise, and ultimately found both professional and personal purpose in America as a global gay rights activist. Along the way, Asylum chronicles a range of hardships, from the severe laws of the author’s home country to the bitter realities of immigrating to the U.S. Throughout these difficulties, Okporo weaves a thread of hope that he will find freedom while remaining true to himself. If you are seeking a read that couches complex issues in a heartfelt personal narrative, Okporo’s memoir will surely delight.

★ Boys and Oil

Jacket of Boys and Oil by Taylor Brorby

In Boys and Oil, environmental activist Taylor Brorby masterfully recounts his upbringing in coal-fractured North Dakota. Growing up, Brorby was teased by his peers because he played with girls and didn’t gravitate toward sports. Like many queer boys, his sexuality was in conflict with traditional models of what men were meant to do and how they were supposed to act.

Brorby’s memoir opens with superbly detailed insight into North Dakota’s geography, which becomes a powerful symbol throughout Boys and Oil. This jagged imagery grounds the narrative and the author’s journey, and Brorby’s attention to it throughout the book feels nearly ekphrastic, with sweeping, alluring descriptions of a land that is at once beautiful and damaged.

It’s within the context of this landscape that Brorby’s life unfolds, from a taunted child whose grandmother lovingly painted his fingernails, to a young man being physically assaulted outside of a small-town bar, to an out poet and environmentalist. In many parts of the country (and world), defying your culture’s expectations comes with a price. Whether as a boy in love with books or as an adult fighting to protect the broken land of his youth, Brorby writes about the personal price he has paid with striking honesty.

Queer politics calls perceived norms to task, subverting the status quo and making it possible for new structures to emerge. In his unique and breathtaking memoir, Brorby does just this, creating wonderful new categories for rural communities and American masculinity, and for gay kids’ places within both.

★ Ma and Me

Jacket of Ma and Me by Putsata Reang

Putsata Reang was born in Cambodia amid civic turmoil and unrest. Her family fled in 1975, when she was only 11 months old, and her journey would become legend. Aboard the ship her family escaped on, the infant Reang was believed to be dead. A Navy captain suggested that she be thrown overboard, but her mother resisted. Upon arriving at a U.S. naval base in the Philippines, her mother handed Reang to the doctors, and under their treatment, she survived—accruing a lifelong debt to her mother in the process.

Reang’s relationship with her mother is a strong feature in Ma and Me as the author examines her past with a surgeon’s precision and artist’s view. Reang takes a kaleidoscope of influences into consideration—including cultural expectations for girls and women, the institution of marriage and trauma caused by war and flight—as she inspects her upbringing as an immigrant in Oregon, learning to balance her Cambodian identity with the pressure to assimilate. Up close, she handles these influences on her mother with grace and compassion, even when her mother severs their relationship because she can’t handle Reang’s engagement to a woman. Reang does an excellent job of portraying the permeability of accepting loved ones for who they are and finding the limits of that acceptance.

In the world of Ma and Me, stories grow larger than life and queer identity creates conflict as it becomes a part of the long-woven tapestry of family lore. With great care, Reang addresses the legacy of trauma—both as a child of war who is displaced geographically and as a gay woman who is estranged from her family. The layers stacked together in this memoir, and Reang’s treatment of their complexity, are simply brilliant.

Edafe Okporo, Taylor Brorby and Putsata Reang beautifully capture the places that shaped their queer identities.
Review by

On the couch with the bookish babes of Bibliotherapy You need therapy, sister Bibliotherapy to be exact. Subtitled The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives, this is one glorious and hilarious guide to a life’s worth of literature. From “When You’re Feeling Unnoticed and Unloved: Bad Hair Babe Books” to “When You Desperately Need to Believe That There’s a Purpose to It All: Embracing-Your-Inner-Light Books,” there are chapters for every occasion and stage of a woman’s life. Think about it the books we read really do show us where we’ve been and where we’re headed. We loved Eloise during those frisky days of childhood and Judy Bloom’s books during our angst-ridden adolescence. Then, in college, along came Gloria Steinem who taught us to wake up and smell the patriarchy. And here we are, years later, reaching desperately for a copy of Raising Your Spirited Child. Times have changed.

But how to begin the daunting task of compiling a guide that spans a lifetime? Authors Beverly West and Nancy Peske first cousins, dear friends, editors and authors of the sleeper hit Cinematherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Movies for Every Mood say it involved many hours of girl talk. Beverly says, “We sat down and said, OK, let’s think of every book we ever read.” Not a task for the faint of memory. “Nancy and I, both being readers, have turned to books in big moments in our lives, and even in smaller ones . . . [we] thought about what the landmark phases were in a woman’s life and thought about the books that have either had a big impact on the way women experience those stages as a population like menopause or puberty and also the stuff we turn to that helps us cope with loss, or divorce, or when we’ve suddenly gone deaf to our inner voice and need to reinvent ourselves.” Women may indeed use books differently than guys do, turning to them in times of need, but that doesn’t mean Bibliotherapy excludes books by that other gender. On the contrary, says Nancy, “we have books that are classic ‘guy’ literature but that speak to women.” Beverly points out, “we’ve not only looked at women’s literature but at all books that have influenced us as people, not just as women.” In other words, there’s some Bukowski in the mix, too.

Both West and Peske gained new insight by revisiting the books that influenced their lives. Beverly rediscovered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while Nancy read Rebecca with new eyes. “I had read Rebecca probably a half dozen times in my 20s, and when I went back to write about it, I started . . . discovering in the process of writing what that book was about, how I read it [at that time] . . . Those themes were very resonant for me in my 20s.” What do the authors have on their bedside tables at present? Nancy is leisurely leafing through the first Harry Potter adventure and is also “going through a big spirituality phase,” reading The Jesus Mysteries and books about the goddess tradition. She’s also working on a book by a wiccan high priestess who wrote Book of Shadows. Beverly just finished writing a book for Falcon Press on the remarkable women of New Mexico goddesses in their own right so she’s been immersed in reading a lot of biography. “I just finished an autobiography of Mable Dodge Louhan. She was like the madame de style of the Southwest . . . I’m hung up on unmanageable women at present, being one myself.” She may be unmanageable, but these two certainly manage to work well as a team, complementing each other at every turn. Beverly kids Nancy, “We can’t get out of this collaboration. She’s going to be staring at me over turkey at Thanksgiving.” Features of the book include Notes from Nancy’s and Bev’s Reading Journals; choice passages from each book followed by a digestible, witty discussion of it; “Points to Ponder” about each entry; “Can I get that printed on a coffee mug?” quotes from authors and nonauthors alike; and a laugh-out-loud “Books to Be Thrown with Great Force” section. So what’s next for Peske and West? Audiotherapy, perhaps? They’ve considered it they say, but next on their plate is the March 2002 release of Advanced Cinematherapy, the follow-up course for those who passed Cinematherapy 101. For now, however, we strongly recommend taking some time to get in touch with your inner bibliophile.

Katherine H. Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

On the couch with the bookish babes of Bibliotherapy You need therapy, sister Bibliotherapy to be exact. Subtitled The Girl's Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives, this is one glorious and hilarious guide to a life's worth of literature. From "When You're…

Review by

The conflict between fundamentalism and mainstream society is familiar across cultures and centuries. We’ve seen it emerge within religious faith, between faiths, and even wearing the mask of politics and human rights. Will the people that violate my beliefs ever give up? I can’t stand it anymore! It can make a person mad enough to be an extremist! Or an anti-extremist! In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong gives satisfying attention to this ever-frustrating, ever-enduring issue. She shows the tense relationship between mainstream society and fundamentalists to be the result of resistance to an aggressive move towards modernization. As a former Catholic nun turned Oxford scholar, Armstrong’s credibility is reinforced by her current position as professor of comparative religion at the Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism. She practices what she teaches: compassion and understanding between disagreeing traditions.

Western civilization has changed the world. Nothing including religion can ever be the same again. All over the world, people have been struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for an entirely different type of society. Armstrong develops an enlightening historical comparison between fundamentalist movements in the major monotheistic faiths: Sunni and Shii Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. By isolating the development of each in a clearly written historical context, she shows how vastly different religious traditions, often at odds with one another, actually share a crucial characteristic. Armstrong takes the reader back to 15th century Spain to make her point, which is that each embattled movement has sprung from a total dread of modernity. By showing how modernism and fundamentalism are fed and strengthened by each other in a symbiotic relationship, Armstrong encourages understanding between opposing sides instead of continually intensifying resistance. In fact, while Armstrong recognizes fundamentalism as truly modern, she notes that extremism can distort and thereby defeat the original beliefs it hopes to preserve, and that mainstream society’s suppression of fundamentalism avoids a core issue of cultural preservation. Amy Ryce is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee.

The conflict between fundamentalism and mainstream society is familiar across cultures and centuries. We've seen it emerge within religious faith, between faiths, and even wearing the mask of politics and human rights. Will the people that violate my beliefs ever give up? I can't stand…

Review by

It is often only after the death of a great author that the scope of his unpublished writings is appreciated. In the case of Robertson Davies, two new collections underscore his remarkable literary and artistic range. The Merry Heart illustrates Davies’s fascination with the writing and reading of literature, while Happy Alchemy brings to light his diverse musings on theater, opera, and music. Included in Happy Alchemy are speeches, diary entries, critical essays, interviews, and dramatic scenes. The collection’s title is a reference to a couplet by English poet Matthew Green and is best explained by Davies himself in the book’s opening essay on theater. “What alchemy really means is something which has attained to such excellence, such nearness to perfection, that it offers a glory, an expansion of life and understanding, to those who have been brought into contact with it.” The pieces in this collection are about that pursuit of artistic excellence not only in the theater and the opera house, but in the imagination of the dramatist and the workshop of the librettist. In 33 chapters, the writing included here covers a lot of ground. Whether discussing the virtues of a playwright, the strength of a particular production, or the skill of an actor, Davies writes with energy and enthusiasm.

As a commentator on the performing arts, Davies concerns himself with the creative process as well as the finished product. His love of opera is demonstrated in his thoughtful analysis of Hamlet. In one of the finer sections of Happy Alchemy, he explains why operatic composers repeatedly fail to render it successfully. “It is too complex; its mingling of political and dynastic arguments with the spiritual agonies of the deeply introverted, philosophical hero cannot be accommodated to the chief necessity of an opera libretto, which is simplicity.” In informal, light prose, the critical writing included here is generally appreciative and inquisitory, rarely caustic. In his theater notebook, excerpted here, Davies writes, “I sincerely believe that I have been a good playgoer, and that is something better, perhaps, than having been a well-known critic. Critics often do not like the theater; I have never liked anything better.” Reviewed by Jeremy Caplan.

It is often only after the death of a great author that the scope of his unpublished writings is appreciated. In the case of Robertson Davies, two new collections underscore his remarkable literary and artistic range. The Merry Heart illustrates Davies's fascination with the writing…

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