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By Emily Toth for WOMEN = BOOKS

I still have my well-thumbed copy of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl—but my favorite good part wasn’t about sex, exactly.

It was about nipples.

Brown’s overriding message—a scandal when she wrote it—was about free sex. Have sex with any man you want to have sex with! (Girl-on-girl wasn’t talked about then, though apparently she wanted to.) Go after married men, because they have money to take you to nice places and buy you expensive gifts!

Those parts now seem insistent, overwrought, like the drumbeat of a political campaign. Do it now! Yes, you can!

The parts I took to heart were more about drive and ambition, seizing life and being independent. Brown brags that she, a “mouseburger” from Arkansas, became a dashing woman-about-town in Los Angeles largely through determination and thrift. She ate brown-bag lunches and bought classics, not flash-in-the-pan fashions. She figured out ways to make her surroundings—and herself—look plush and expensive. She paid cash for a Mercedes, rose from secretary to advertising copy writer, and at 37 married a movie producer, her only life partner, who spent the rest of his life promoting her.

Her book is full of money-saving tips, but this was my fave:

If your breasts are small, don’t bother with a bra. Cover your nipples with Bandaids.

This was long before bralessness was a fad. It was long before women supposedly burned bras (no one ever did). It was a simple, practical suggestion that would save a woman thousands of dollars over a lifetime. (Don’t ask.)

Brown also knew about creating an image if you needed to. “D,” an angular former student of mine, once found herself on the cover of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown’s magazine. “D” was all pushed and pulled and taped so that, she said, “For the first time in my life I had boobs.” She thought it was a hoot.

So is Helen Gurley Brown a feminist? Reviewers of the recent biography keep asking—as if we’re the mean girls deciding who can be in our clique and who can’t. I don’t think in those terms (I welcome almost anyone), but for those who do:

Well, Brown insists on women’s financial independence and career opportunities (check), supports women political candidates (check), speaks out for abortion rights (check), opposes violence against women (check), thinks women should make themselves attractive to men (probably not), thinks women should enjoy and demand good sex (probably)—so maybe she gets a B?

Well, I’d let her in my tent. I might even bring the Bandaids.

Emily Toth (rhymes with both) writes about women's lives, including biographies of Kate Chopin and Grace Metalious. She also gives advice as "Ms. Mentor" in a monthly online column for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Career Network. Her eleven books include two tomes of advice: Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia and Ms. Mentor's New and Ever More Impeccable Advice for Women and Men in Academia. She teaches at Louisiana State University and loves gossip.

Read Emily Toth’s review of Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown in the January/February 2010 issue of WRB.

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A Challenge to Take Our Work Seriously

By Susanna J. Sturgis for WOMEN = BOOKS

In April 1980, as a barely fledged feminist book reviewer, I reviewed a very bad Naiad Press science fiction novel for off our backs. My review relied heavily on extensive description of the plot, the first resort of novice and insecure reviewers.

Reading between the lines, one might surmise that the reviewer wasn't entirely happy with the book. "Likeable but very frustrating," she writes. "It almost seems as though the novelist completed her preliminary sketches, then was distracted and went on to something else." But one would be forgiven for inferring that the reviewer thought the book was worth reading, which she most certainly did not.

Joanna Russ reviewed the same novel in Sinister Wisdom 12 (Winter 1980), then still co-edited by its founders, Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines (Ellenberger)—who, by the way, took the journal's name from a phrase in Russ's The Female Man. Russ pulled no punches. She pronounced it "a heartbreaking non-book" and added that it "was written out of sheer starvation, published ditto (unless we're to believe that Naiad is simply being opportunistic), and will be read for no other reason, if it's read at all.”

With excruciating precision she performed her autopsy, exposing flaws in the book's science, plot, characterization, and use of language. In the process she exposed the chasm between what I thought of the book and what I had written about it.

Russ's review set off a heated discussion that went on for several issues of Sinister Wisdom. In SW 13 (Spring 1980), Naiad co-publisher Barbara Grier defended the press and its decision to publish the book. In SW 14 (Summer 1980), three writers responded to the original review.

One of those writers was me. After agreeing that Russ's review was accurate in every respect, I wrote that it was also "overkill on a grand scale." Then I tried to synthesize what Russ had done and what I hadn't done in our respective reviews. The writing of mine, I said, had "prompted some hard, overdue thinking about feminist criticism and my weaknesses as a feminist critic. What became especially obvious was that, somewhere along the way, I had lost the ability to write, 'This is a bad book.'"

I was feeling my way toward an ethic of reviewing that told the truth but eschewed the razzle-dazzle that showed off the reviewer's skill while humiliating the author of the reviewed work. Today I'm as proud of that response as I am embarrassed by my original review.

In SW 17 (Summer 1981), the first issue edited by the journal's new editors, Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff, Marge Piercy expanded the discussion to emphasize the importance of honest reviewing. "If we cannot tell the truth as we see it, if we cannot be honest in women's publications for our own audiences, when do we tell the truth? Never? Then let's cash it all in now."

Joanna Russ's "Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement" was published in Sinister Wisdom 18 (Fall 1981). This is an earlier draft of the powerhouse essay of the same name that appears in Russ's 1985 essay collection Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts. The "Feminine Imperative," Russ suggests, offers women two alternatives. "If you've been forbidden the use of your own power for your own self, you can give up your power or you can give up your self."

Magic Mommas do the latter: they're superwomen who never falter, never fail, and never, ever have needs of their own. Trembling Sisters can have needs and express feelings; what they can't do is be effective.

The essay's roots in the Sinister Wisdom exchange, explicit in the earlier draft, remain in the final book version, where Russ notes "the [Magic Momma]'s passionately angry disappointment when Unknown Woman A's work proves to be terrible, and the [Trembling Sister]'s conviction that the only way most women can ever have the pleasures of public success is for the few of us who have (in some magically mysterious way) gained access to the public world of culture and action to tell lies about the achievements of the others."

The dynamic Russ identified isn't limited to the women's movement, or even to women. A glance at the U.S. political scene reveals hundreds of thousands of Trembling Sisters and Brothers who expect Candidate X, Y, or Z to save them and the country, too, but when Candidate X, Y, or Z proves mortal—as any candidate who gets elected inevitably will—they are trashed as roundly as any Magic Momma or Poppa for falling short of our extravagant expectations.

"Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement" has been a touchstone for me since it first appeared—and it was inspired by a discussion about book reviewing. I'm pleased to have been part of the compost from which it grew.

Russ’s original review, which sparked the Sinister Wisdom exchange, is reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 2007), 181–185.

Susanna J. Sturgis has been writing about fantasy and science fiction for a long time, but her first novel, The Mud of the Place, is set on real-time Martha's Vineyard. Her website, www.susannajsturgis.com, features a bloggery, reprints of her feminist essays, and lots of horse and dog pictures. She's currently trying to make sense of her life in a personal/political memoir, To Be Rather Than to Seem. She makes her living as a freelance editor and copyeditor.

Read Susanna Sturgis’s review of On Joanna Russ in the January/February 2010 issue of WRB.

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By Kathleen Ochs for WOMEN = BOOKS

During my college years in the mid-1960s, the science-math types intrigued by Venn diagrams joked that one example of an empty set was “southern, black, jews.” I’d add that “women, scientists, engineers” is considered another empty set or close to it. Women scientists are still looked upon “as men, cast by the vengeance of the gods, into female gender,” as Ursula Franklin, Professor Emeritus in the School of Engineering, University of Toronto, said to me many years ago when reflecting on her research sabbatical at Cambridge.

But when women scientists win Nobel Prizes, our collective consciousness can be nudged into a better state. As many predicted, Elizabeth Blackburn won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak. One friend mine, Erica Golemis, a senior scientist who directs her own laboratory in molecular biology, said when the prize was announced: “Blackburn is wonderful and long overdue for a Nobel.”

According to the New York Times article about the prize-winners, Blackburn holds dual citizenship in Australia and the United States; she is also the first Australian woman Nobel laureate.

All three laureates contributed to identifying and characterizing telomeres, a structure at the end of chromosomes that stabilizes them—analogous to the plastic tip protecting the ends of shoelaces. When Greider worked in Blackburn’s lab, she identified the related enzyme telomerase. For those who enjoy biology and discussions of "big" science, here’s a YouTube clip of a press conference with Blackburn after the prize was announced, in which her happy surprise is evident as soon as she’s introduced:

In an interview with Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times, Greider talked about the pleasure of having her children included in the pictures taken when the award was announced, something male scientists rarely, if ever, have done. When Dreifus asked why there were so many women doing telomeres research, Greider said:

There’s nothing about the topic that attracts women. It’s probably more the founder effect. Women researchers were fostered early on by Joe Gall, and they got jobs around the country and they trained other women. I think there’s a slight bias of women to work for women because there’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men.

But Grieder also noted that “women do things differently, which is why I think it would be important if more women were at higher levels in academic medicine. I think people might work together more, things might be more collaborative.”

In Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, Catherine Brady identifies specific ways Blackburn has created a women-friendly workspace, such as offering flex-time for child and elder care and regularly scheduled, personal meetings. (See my review of Brady’s book in the November/December 2008 issue of WRB.)

Another example of women doing science differently is that Blackburn chose atypical subjects—women caring for disabled children—to investigate telomeres’s role in human health. The women were found to have shorter telomeres, which was linked to reduced health. Media often presents happy mothers caring for special children; Blackburn’s reveals the difficult reality behind that stereotype.

I asked a friend’s daughter, a post-doc in biological medicine about Blackburn and Greider’s award. Like many scientists, she found it difficult to talk about the context of science, and so I prodded: Does emphasizing the accomplishments of superstars—rather than the pleasures of doing everyday science—lead to fewer women scientists?

She thought the real problem was that American society is scientifically and technologically illiterate, undervaluing both. Therefore, bright, ambitious women—and men—fail to enter these fields.

True enough. But it’s also true that scientific literacy is inevitably tied to social change. As Ursula Franklin points out in The Real World of Technology (Anansi, 1999), worms, bacteria, and decaying matter must make fertile soil if a tree of change is to grow. Franklin calls this the “earthworm theory of change.” Great scientists, in addition to their talents, stand on the shoulders of many people. It would be good to find ways to honor all.

Blackburn’s award raises another issue about the context of science—that of women, science, and politics.

Politics have certainly played a role in Blackburn’s career. In 2004, the Bush administration dismissed Blackburn and another scientist from the President’s Council on Bioethics because they believed the administration’s policy contradicted scientific knowledge. By awarding Blackburn the honor this year, then, the Nobel commission reinforced its approval of the new directions set by fellow-Nobel laureate President Obama.

In hierarchical societies, those who win awards can influence their fields. Feminists can hope that the innovations Blackburn and Greider have developed—in their personal styles of doing science, in their workplaces, and in their research focus—will lead to more women and feminist men in science, and, one can hope, eventually, engineering and technology.

I wonder if the young post-doc I talked with had the current climate crisis in mind when she talked about American’s scientific and technological illiteracy. As an older woman, I worry there’s not enough time for society to change.

For a study of women Nobel laureates, see Hilary Rose, Love, Power, and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (University of Indiana Press, 1994).

Kathleen Ochs, Associate Professor Emeritus, Liberal Arts and International Studies, Colorado School of Mines, taught undergraduate engineering students from 1980 to 2007. Her research covered several areas: the Royal Society of London’s attempt to learn the secrets of artisans to help construct the new science (1640 to 1660), a quantitative study of mining engineers in the early twentieth century, and women in engineering and technology. Her current research focus is “big picture” history in science and technology. Professor Ochs is working on her post-retirement website.

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Column: Fiction from the Front Lines

By Rebecca Meacham for WOMEN = BOOKS

With this post, Rebecca kicks off her column for WRB, “Fiction from the Front Lines,” in which she reviews her own life and the literary world “from the perspective of a writer, mom, professor, Midwesterner, and fan of reading.”

“No, Mama,” said my three-year-old daughter as I held up a fire engine.  “That toy is for boys.”

It was the moment I’d dreaded, a moment perhaps common to the mothers of my generation— women born as the first issues of Ms. magazine hit newsstands, who watched Sally Ride blast-off, who got into the groove, boy, with Madonna. For my school projects, I wrote to NASA. My sixth birthday present was a real tool kit, complete with hammer and saw. 

My girlhood had been filled with a sense that I could do anything. Now, my first-born was shaking her head at a truck.

It was her first act of self-denial. But who had denied her first?

As usual, I blamed her peers at daycare, those ruffians. She often comes home with preferences that seem, well, socialized. “I want the pink one,” she asserts now, as never before.

I knew I hadn’t restricted my daughter’s choices. I try to offer many options and deny only those that endanger or offend. My own mother, one of those first subscribers to Ms., had done the same. Christmas would bring art kits along with a football. In this way, I developed an excellent spiral pass and crafted décor, including doughnuts on a plate (Cheerios on a quarter), for my dollhouse.

Years later, my husband and I would argue about the activities of our hypothetical daughters. 

“No cheerleading,” my husband declared, dreaming of soccer kicks.

“But I was a cheerleader,” I said.

Now, I know that sounds bad. But truthfully, what I liked most about cheerleading was not having to plan outfits or social events on game nights. Yet, because I had options and the freedom to pursue them, I wrote a book at age six (“All About Rocks”) and cheered throughout high school. To me, prohibiting daughters from traditionally “girly” activities seems as bad as steering them from traditionally “boy” ones.

So I couldn’t be blamed, right? Stories of saying good night to the moon—as well as landing on it—overspill my children’s bookshelves.

But, truthfully—and I shall be telling this with a sigh—there are also the princess books. There are the princess figures, princess castle, princess backpack, princess shoes, and princess movies. Yes, the fairy wings and tutus didn’t flutter into our home unaided. I opened both window and wallet.

And despite his cringing, my husband brings home the books, too. For two literature professors, this feels shameful. But for a woman raised on Free to Be…You and Me, it also feels dangerous—more like complicity.

For a while, watching my three-year-old throw parties in the castle confirmed my anxieties. She would sit in place, making the princesses talk, never taking them anywhere. Whenever we joined her, we’d create action: her father’s dragons would stomp and menace; my Cinderella got thrown in the dungeon.

Even my younger daughter wanted something to happen. She’d toddle over and pick up a castle bench. “Choo-choo,” she’d say, moving it around.

Then, just after Christmas, I began a tale of two princesses, sisters, who were about to have big adventures. My older daughter interrupted, “Where’s the prince?”

“This is a story about princesses,” I said. “Why do we need a prince?”

“We need a prince to rescue them,” she told me. Even at three, the “Duh, Mom” rang loud and clear.

Before I knew it, I’d found my original copy of Free to Be…You and Me from 1973. “This was Mama’s book when I was your age,” I said. My daughters could choose princess stories, but darn it, we’d put all the options on the table.

Together, we read of Atalanta, pictured first with a telescope, then running in a race. In a compromise with her marriage-focused father, Atalanta races against all her suitors. She ties with John, and in the end they decide to see the world, independently.

It was a moment I’d hoped for—passing down a lesson from my favorite book— and it seemed to go unnoticed.

But later, for the first time, the princesses left the castle. They lined up on the roof of the parking garage as cars zipped by. Then my older daughter held the newest princesses, bath toys with skirts, in each hand.

“They’re going to race now,” she said, placing them at a starting line. 

“Race?” I asked.   

“Yes,” she answered. “But they go fast. So first I need to take off their skirts.”

Rebecca Meacham, a regular reviewer of books for WRB, is the author of the award-winning story collection Let’s Do and an associate professor of English. She lives with her husband and two daughters in the woods of Wisconsin.

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By Elizabeth Gregory for WOMEN = BOOKS

Like quite a few people I know, I had my first child in my late thirties—39 to be exact. My maternal grandmother had a child at 39, too, but that girl was her eighth baby and her last.

This difference summed up for me the change that had occurred in two generations, when I started writing a book about the new later motherhood—its causes and effects, personal and social. Where 1 in 12 first babies these days is born to a mom 35 or over, it was 1 in 100 in 1970. Add in the adoptive moms, and you’ve got a big group.

Women today walk a very different road from all our ancestors in terms of education, work, and civic status. That’s in large part due to the arrival of hormonal birth control, which has enabled many to delay having kids, giving us time to finish our educations, establish at work, find the right partner, and just see the world a bit.

It's definitely the case that later mothers are largely educated women, often in well-paid or professional jobs—which means middle or upper middle class generally, though not always. The women I interviewed for my book Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood included middle-class black, white, and Hispanic women, but the large majority were white. The intersection of class, race, and motherhood is a complicated one. For a more detailed analysis, click here.

In any case, we’re not entirely off the old map of our grandmothers’ physical experience when we have kids in our late thirties and early forties (while most women can get pregnant through their late thirties, only about half can do so at 41, and for all but a very few, fertility ends at or before 43).

Eight years after my elder daughter arrived, my husband and I adopted a one-year-old, putting me at the far end of the usual mother/child generational divide but still within shouting distance of my anomalous great-grandmother (Ma Dear, in the family parlance), who had a baby at 46. This was so unusual that they thought at first that the child (my paternal grandma) was a tumor.

With our 47-year gap, my family is not quite in the realm of the “how late is too late” debate that shows up regularly in the tabloids, when someone in her sixties or seventies has a baby via egg donation, but we’re definitely part of a growing group that’s pushing the age envelope past the point where parenthood used to end—both via IVF and adoption.

“Not that you look old,” said my 44-year-old friend on the phone last year. She was explaining why she wouldn’t be implanting that frozen embryo, though she’d just said that her four-year-old would love a sib and that she and her husband would both love a second child.

“I just don’t want to be one of those strange old lady moms you see in the park,” she sighed.

“I look my age,” I replied, by way of communicating to her both that I didn’t feel insulted and that I also wasn’t under any misapprehension that I looked younger than I was. She was distinguishing between her new-mom-at-40 self (entirely normal for many now) and what she would be if she had a baby when she was over 45.

Of course, in spite of her reassurance, we both knew that I’m exactly the kind of strange old lady mom she had in mind, though hair dye cuts the estrangement factor slightly (on the Granny Clampett to Diane Sawyer spectrum of 65-year-old looks in my future, I aim for the middle). There’s a whole mess of confusion in her response that we all share about what age means these days.

So much has changed so fast—30 years added to the average lifespan within a century; birth control that’s decoupled sex from the inevitability of babies; fertility tech and adoption that’s expanded the family-timing options. All our assumptions about who will be doing what and when—and what they’re supposed to look like while they’re doing it—are in transit.

Or maybe my friend’s anxiety was really about work: She has a demanding, powerful job. In the absence of a national infrastructure to support families, delay has served many women as a form of shadow benefits system: giving them higher long-terms salaries and the clout to negotiate flexible schedules that younger workers cannot.

But where one child may be manageable for a two-career couple with demanding jobs, a second, no matter how much desired, might swamp their boat.

So far, I’m fine with phase-two later motherhood—or maybe just too busy to worry about it much. Occasionally it frightens me to think that I’ll be 65 when my youngest finishes high school. But then I remember that Ma Dear made it through, with a lot less technology to assist.

It’s possible my friend’s anxiety will fade in the coming years, and she’ll join the ranks of the even later moms. Or not—there are plenty of other ways to spend energy fruitfully. Among them, working to make the world better, and more manageable, for all families, at whatever point they arrive.

Elizabeth Gregory is the author of Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood (Basic Books, 2008) and the director of the University of Houston Women’s Studies Program. Her current project explores the politics and economics of women’s work, and she blogs about that at Domestic Product.

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By Ann Braude for WOMEN = BOOKS

Am I too old to blog? 

WRB’s recent book-review request—and the subsequent assignment for this blog—raised all sorts of questions for me about where I fit in the transmission of feminism. What does it mean to be part of a “wave” or a “generation”?

My review in the November/December 2009 issue of WRB considers four religious feminists born in four different decades: Nancy Mairs (1940s), Susan Campbell (1950s), Leora Tannenbaum (1960s), and Danya Ruttenberg (1970s, I think).

Does the fact that I had to ask my techy husband “exactly what is a blog?” brand me as incompetent to comment on the oeuvre of a gen-X feminist? Ruttenberg, for example, seems to incorporate what, as my husband patiently explained, blogs aim for: comments on current issues or events through first-hand reports of personal experience.

I’m a bit of a generation-smasher myself. Born in the fifties, I just missed the crest of the second wave, so that I’ve always identified with younger women who wanted to chart their own feminist paths. My miraculously late-born children keep me in constant company with parents half my age, and my job as a college professor makes my most frequent interlocutors students born in the eighties or (don’t gasp) the nineties.

Friends beam at how my adorable children keep me young, while I yearn for more sleep and fewer potlucks sitting on chairs designed for toddlers. I don’t carry a cell phone, I don’t “twitter,” and I’m not on Facebook. But feminism is and needs to be, and I’m invigorated by the opportunity to join the blogosphere with this post.

Feminism has questioned so many binaries, why do we cling to our generational tags?

For no particular reason, the last of the books I read was by Nancy Mairs, a seasoned voice reporting a spiritual quest from the vantage of decades of social activism, illness, self-discovery, and creativity. I felt safe with Mairs, secure that the author was not experimenting with me or with herself, that her views had been well-tested over a long and fruitful life providing fairly arduous laboratory conditions.

I teach a course centered on a series of Native American guest speakers in which one of the most challenging issues for students is grasping what it means to seek wisdom by listening to elders rather than through the newest, freshest revelation.

Can feminists honor and respect the wisdom of experience and benefit from fresh voices that find new media so congenial?

In religious feminism, a decade or two can make a world of difference. My five-year-old barely knows that men can be rabbis. Enthusiastic visions of an inclusive Catholic church propounded by feminist nuns in the 1960s fade from view for a generation chastened by clergy sexual abuse.

Feminists who struggled to escape the straightjacket of gender roles in the fifties and sixties now need to understand the faith of younger generations who seek moral and religious structures to counteract a surfeit of confusing choices.

Tides shift. But if religious traditions can help feminists gain perspective on anything, perhaps it is that we are all in this together, across centuries and millennia, as well as waves and decades. And if the blogosphere can help us learn about each other, I’m on board.

Ann Braude documented the lives of religious feminists at a 2002 conference, where she asked leaders in the movement to explain how religion and feminism came to intersect in their lives and activism. Click here to see 25 prominent women tell their stories. These became the basis of Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers (2004).  Braude is also author of Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in 19^th-century America (1989) and Sisters and Saints: Women and Religion in America (2007). She directs the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School

Read Ann Braude's review "Religious Feminists" in the November/December 2009 issue of WRB .

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By Shannon Boodram for WOMEN = BOOKS

Female sexual empowerment has no voice among the new generation. The media and the Internet encourage young girls to treat their sexuality like a grand piano—an instrument that performs only to please the pianist sitting on them.

I knew how to fake an orgasm before I knew what my clitoris was. I felt responsible for a guy’s physical pleasure and put little-to-no emphasis on my own. I even acted as though a boy grabbing at my body and clumsily poking at my crotch felt good because I wanted him to feel good.

This is not merely an isolated confession from one misguided girl. New sexual trends among teens such as sexting (sending naked pictures through cell phones); shag bracelets (thin plastic bracelets that indicate how far a girl is willing to go, with a gold bracelet signaling she’ll go all the way); rainbow groups (girls wearing different lipstick colors who all perform oral sex on boys, giving the recipient a “rainbow” penis); and girl-on-girl soft porn have only made things much worse.

By age 19, I’d had enough of being a pleaser at my own cost. My horrible teenage sex life drove me to begin writing pieces for and editing Laid: Young People’s Experience with Sex in an Easy-Access Culture (Seal Press, 2009). Once I began work on this anthology, I learned more in months than I had in my three years of being sexually active.

For instance, in “Popping,” Crystal Coburn talks about how after years of being sexually unsatisfied and disinterested in sex, she discovered the joy of her own body. She describes her loving sexual relationship with her fiance:

“I know what we’re making is more than love; it’s more raw, more human than that. This is what freedom feels like. It’s about feeding the appetite that’s discouraged in charm school etiquette by misguided mothers, fathers, teachers, and media. It’s about proudly breaking out of the “good girls don’t do that” mold and simply satisfying yourself and feeling good about it.”

Teachers: Encourage your students to know their body fully and to be proud of their parts. Mothers: Instill a sense of pride in your daughters. Show them that the female body is a precious gift and not a cheap toy. Girlfriends: Stop lying to each other about your true feelings on sex—and please, stop encouraging sexual trends that scar and reduce us.

Everyone: Check out Feministing.com and Scarleteen.com for female empowerment—not disempowerment and abuse—on the Internet. As Scarleteen puts it, here’s “Sex Ed for the Real World.”

I wonder what it will take for us to start teaching girls that pleasure is supposed to make you feel good about yourself? The best advice I can give to any young girl thinking about becoming sexually active would be “Get yours, girl!” Whether yours is a hug, a date, oral sex, or the works, put your needs ahead of anyone else’s—and before you even attempt to do that, learn what your needs are.

Shannon Boodram is a young journalist living in Toronto. She is the editor of and a contributor to Laid: Young People’s Experience with Sex in an Easy-Access Culture (Seal Press, 2009). She also blogs at LaidTheBook.com and ThoseGirlsAreWild.com.

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By Susan Feiner for WOMEN = BOOKS

A few years ago I learned that Frances Perkins’ family home is just an hour from Portland, Maine, in Newcastle. “The Brick House” is a lovely place, and the No Smoking sign just inside the door is emblematic of the impact of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911.

Fire escapes are familiar elements to anyone who has thought about workplace safety. Most Americans also realize that Social Security, the minimum wage, and limitations on child labor improve the quality of life in our society. But few know that the life's work of Frances Perkins—FDR's Secretary of Labor and the first woman to be appointed to a post in the federal government—is the thread connecting these key elements of economic safety and security. 

The back-story is important: Frances Perkins had first-hand knowledge of male hostility to women with powerful ideas, strong leadership skills, and connections to the nation's power elite. Hence, she cultivated a nondescript public presence, accentuating a matronly image and avoiding the limelight.

When I first discovered the willingness with which Perkins "repackaged" herself for success in the male-dominated world of national politics, I was surprised. Such repackaging is, as we know from far too many experiences, difficult to do without losing touch with the truth at the core. In the travails I’ve faced as a feminist economist, I have never considered this option.

Perkins’s story shows, at a minimum, that at least this much has changed for the better.

If historians were doing their job, our understanding of the New Deal would include her role in it. Instead the most respected historians of the New Deal—lazy and content with sexist views of women—still fail to recognize Perkins’s indispensable work.

That’s why a feminist biography like Kirstin Downey’s The Woman Behind the New Deal, which I review in the November/December 2009 issue of WRB, does so much to set the record straight about Madame Secretary.

Americans owe our small measure of economic security to the sensibility of a social worker, the political commitment of a suffragist, the courage of the nation's first factory investigator, and the moral outrage of a witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy. Progressives in the United States have much to learn from Frances Perkins.

Next year, 2010, is our opportunity to celebrate this wonderful woman. The Frances Perkins Center is organizing dozens of events to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of Social Security. The Center, located at the Brick House, is the first organization in the United States devoted to preserving and advancing the legacy of a woman who, more than any other, shaped the conditions of our work, the time available for leisure, and our ability to retire.

Please click here to visit the Frances Perkins Center online.

Susan F. Feiner is Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Professor of Economics at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine. Drucilla K. Barker and Feiner are co-authors of the award-winning book Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization (University of Michigan Press, 2004).

Read Susan Feiner’s review of The Woman Behind the New Deal in the November/December 2009 issue of WRB.

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By Amy Hoffman for WOMEN = BOOKS

By now it’s been widely reported that this year’s Publishers Weekly 2009 ten-best list, announced in PW’s November 2 issue, includes exactly zero books by women.

This in a year that saw the publication of books by Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Barbara Kingsolver, Lydia Davis, Yiyun Li, Marilyn Hacker, Alicia Ostriker—for a comprehensive list, and an infuriated press release on the subject headlined “Why Were No Women Invited to Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast?”, visit the website of WILLA, Women in Letters and Literary Arts.

Even PW itself realized something was amiss; in the lead-in to its list, Reviews Director Louisa Ermelino admitted, “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male” and mentioned that “a literary ghost story came so close, it squeaked.” I assume that was Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger.

When Women’s Review of Books was founded in 1983, it declared that its mission was “to give women’s writing the serious critical attention it does not get elsewhere in the media.” I became editor in 2003, and one of the first questions I asked myself was whether, after twenty additional years of the feminist movement, this mission was still relevant. Didn’t the title “Women’s Review of Books” lack depth and nuance? Wasn’t it about time for us to do like PW and “ignore gender and genre”?

Apparently not—although things have progressed far enough that the fact of an all-male list was noted with varying degrees of outrage all over the Internet, including internationally at the Guardian.

Criticism could even be found on the New York Times’s ArtsBeat blog—which is not without irony, given that the New York Times Book Review is a major player in the ignoring-and-belittling-books-by-women department. In 2004, “72 percent of all books reviewed in the NYTBR were written by men, and 66 percent of all reviews also carried a male byline,” according to a study by Paula Caplan and Mary Ann Palko (explicated in their November 2004 article in WRB, “The Times is Not A-Changin’”). The ratios have decidedly not improved under editor Sam Death-of-Conservatism Tanenhaus.

Nor are they much better in other magazines or mainstream review publications—those that are left, anyhow, as one newspaper after another shuts down its books section.

On PoliticsDaily.com, reviewer Lizzie Skurnick provided a glimpse into the decision-making process of an awards committee (unusual, since the members of such committees rarely expose themselves in this way). As the committee’s deliberations closed, she says, she burst out:

“We have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it’s disgusting.” (I wasn’t built for the boardroom.)

“But we can’t be doing it because we’re sexist,” an estimable colleague replied huffily. “After all, we’re both men and women here.”

“But that’s the problem with sexism,” Skurnick continues. “It doesn’t happen because people—male or female—think women suck.” Instead, she says, in these sorts of liberal-minded, bookish gatherings, sexism is the more or less conscious “default” setting.

I’m always surprised by how little overlap there is between the books we review in WRB and those that are covered in NYTRB or my local paper the Boston Globe or the New Yorker or even progressive publications like The Nation and In These Times.

As I sit in my office, I’m surrounded by tottering piles of worthy books by and about women—meditations on everything from Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (an edited collection, no less, which means that lots of scholars are investigating this area) to Domestic Secrets: Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857 to Freedom’s Teacher: A Biography of Septima Clark to The Fat Studies Reader, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, and Reading Women’s Poetry.

We probably receive an average of one novel and one poetry collection a day, although I’ve always been afraid to count. (You can see a sampling of the works we don’t have space to review in the “Books Received” section of the WRB website.)

So at least for now, I’ve concluded that our old mission, even ten years into the new millennium, is still relevant, especially since there’s almost no one else out there picking up the slack. Moreover, women writers are doing such varied and exciting work that confining ourselves to “women’s studies books and literary fiction, poetry, and memoir by women” (a phrase I end up saying over the phone about ten times a day and more often at conferences) is not confining ourselves at all.

P.S. The Literary Review recently announced its 2009 "Bad Sex in Fiction" award, and the shortlist of the ten worst offenders, including Philip Roth and this year's winner Jonathan Littell, has only one woman—one annual roundup we can feel good about! To see the Literary's Review's write-up and shortlist, click here. You can also read an entertaining Guardian piece about the award.

Amy Hoffman is Editor-in-Chief of Women’s Review of Books and author of An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News  (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007) .

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By Marianne Villanueva for WOMEN = BOOKS

Several years ago, I participated in a conference of Southeast Asian writers hosted by the House of World Culture in Berlin. The panel I was on consisted of a Vietnamese writer, a Cambodian writer, a Burmese writer, and myself. Until then, I knew precious little about Burma, although I had grown up in the Philippines, a Southeast Asian neighbor.

Even after the conference, I was still so ignorant that one day, when shopping in my neighborhood Costco and catching sight of a particular license plate, I very excitedly e-mailed the Burmese poet I had met in Berlin, Kyi May Kaung.

“Guess what!” I wrote. “I saw a black Escalade in the Costco parking lot today, and it had a license plate that said MYANMAR!”

Kyi’s response was tart: “If the plate said MYANMAR, then they are with the junta.  Only the junta refer to Burma as MYANMAR.”

In retrospect, I realize the arrogance of it: a black Escalade with tinted windows, its occupants shopping in Costco, proudly heralding their association with the Burmese junta, with the despotic rulers of a forgotten country, whose citizens are poor and who are trapped, as surely as Aung San Suu Kyi herself is trapped.

If only I had waited by that car, all those years ago! I should have waited to see who walked to the vehicle. I should have taken their picture with my cell phone and posted it all over the Internet.

I kept up the correspondence with Kyi. I was stung by my ignorance. I made it a point to educate myself. But an increasing number of Westerners seem to be looking the other way when it comes to the undeniably autocratic Burmese regime—a complacent avoidance of the bloody facts.

In May of last year, a horrible cyclone called Nargis made landfall in Burma. The consequences were dire. It has been called the worst natural disaster in Burmese recorded history. Such was the cynicism of the regime that even the dollars sent by humanitarian organizations went into the rulers’ private coffers. Kyi sent urgent e-mails: “Send to this organization, not that one. Please be careful where you send your aid!”

Yet I have heard friends and relatives rave about trips they’ve taken to Burma, about how beautiful and “unspoiled” the country is. Does the poverty and the fact that so many of the people in the countryside cannot afford vehicles of any sort amount to “unspoiled”? Does it call forth nostalgic images of Somerset Maugham novels? 

This year, in a May blog post, Arthur Frommer condemned travel to Burma, even for humanitarian reasons. In the September 2009 issue of Condé Nast Traveler, a reader’s letter was published stating that she was outraged by Frommer’s “strident opinion.” She herself had just traveled to Burma and had had “haunting experiences” of “a country defined by misery yet with the most gracious, resilient, and gentle people.” She wrote that her trip gave her the opportunity “to understand the tremendous hardships of day-to-day existence in Burma and what a difference one simple gesture can make in an individual life.”

Recently there have been a series of articles in the Economist that refer to the “icon” Aung San Suu Kyi as a possible “obstacle” to necessary political changes. One July 2009 article, “The Remarkable Aung San Suu Kyi,” presents the opinion of Burmese historian Thant Myint-U as follows:

“So Mr Thant says that development could bring about swift changes to the political landscape, as eventually happened in Indonesia. Development, in other words, could be the fastest path to democracy. Will the courageous Lady admit as much?”

Such an attitude infuriates me. This “courageous Lady,” who gave up her husband and children, who will ultimately give up her life, has never wavered. This, then, is her bitter reward for all those years of sacrifice and fortitude—being reduced to irrelevance by privileged Western writers.

The regime is clearly waiting for Aung San Suu Kyi to die. Already Western countries may be wavering in their support of sanctions; they’ve been watching China gain lucrative business contracts from the junta. A June article in the Wall Street Journal put it this way:

“The divide between Myanmar’s shining new capital, home to much of its military elite, and its commercial capital underscores the failure of a decade of U.S. and European sanctions, efforts to break the country’s military regime by cutting it off from doing business with much of the Western world. Instead, the country’s leaders and top businessmen have survived and even thrived by replacing Western buyers with Asian ones.”

Now there are signs that the Obama administration favors what Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell calls a policy of “pragmatic engagement.”

The ruling Burmese generals must be feeling very smug indeed.

Marianne Villanueva grew up in Manila and has since lived in New York and San Francisco. She has an MA in East Asian Studies, as well as an MA in Creative Writing, from Stanford University. She has three published collections of short fiction: Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Press), Mayor of the Roses (Miami University Press), and The Lost Language (Anvil Press of the Philippines).

Read Marianne Villanueva’s review of Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Prisoner of Conscience and No Time for Dreams: Living in Burma Under Military Rule in the November/December 2009 issue of WRB.

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