Posted by: WRB Blog
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Aug 30, 2010
By Marilyn Booth for WOMEN = BOOKS
When I first translated Nawal El Saadawi—the first full-length translation I ever did was her Memoirs from the Women’s Prison—there were very few Arab female authors translated into English.
Even in the mid 1980s, there were not many works of Arabic fiction by writers of either gender available in translation. Those of us who read, teach, translate, and write about Arabic fiction and Arab culture production in general still bemoan the relative lack of fiction from Arab countries available in translation, but there’s a lot more out there now, and that certainly includes work by women writers.
In fact, some of my writer friends who happen to be men complain at times that they’ve been left behind.
Posted by: WRB Blog
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Aug 16, 2010
By Lori D. Ginzberg for WOMEN = BOOKS
Recently, someone asked me what surprised me the most in writing a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Here it is: I foolishly imagined that she is still, as she was in her own time, a household name.
Yet even before my book came out, and many times in the months since, the most common question I've heard has been "who was she?"—and this from educated Americans, people of all ages whom one might assume could identify the preeminent activist-intellectual of the nineteenth-century movement for women's rights. People have heard of Stanton's friend Susan B. Anthony ("She's the one on the dollar, right?"). But they seem not to have known that the very air we breathe was transformed by Stanton's analysis of women's right to be viewed, within law, marriage, politics, and religion, as individuals equal to men.
Posted by: WRB Blog
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Aug 02, 2010
By Sandra F. VanBurkleo for WOMEN = BOOKS
On July 23, 2010, Peggy Ann Pascoe died in Eugene, Oregon, of ovarian cancer, the pernicious disease that she had battled for years, and against which she had struggled valiantly while finishing What Comes Naturally and many other significant works of history and political commentary. She was only 55 years old.
Both the academy and the human community have lost one of its gentle giants. Peggy will be remembered, not simply for what she wrote, but also for what she was, what she gave daily to students, friends, and compatriots, and what she leaves for us to finish. She might say—her modesty was never an affectation—that the last is by far the most important. She left as many questions as she managed to answer; it's now up to younger scholars and activists to follow her lead, to pick up the reins. Western allusions are deliberate: Peggy was an historian of the west, where it's sometimes said that the sky's the limit.
Those who knew her better than I did will be inconsolable. But she did have faith in the integrity of younger scholars, in their good sense and breadth of vision. Who can say that she was wrong? And so the work will move forward. We nevertheless are diminished by her death. This is an indescribably sad moment.
I wrote the post that follows before Peggy’s death. I prefer to leave it as it is, noting that she is “very ill” but still working—to honor what she’s done and, perhaps, to spark others to follow in Peggy’s path.
Posted by: WRB Blog
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Jul 25, 2010
By Kerryn Higgs for WOMEN = BOOKS
At a conference in Melbourne last year, where British sustainability theorist Tim Jackson spoke about his book Prosperity Without Growth, I met a feminist critic who railed against the power and limitations of “men in suits.”
It is, of course, men in suits who have led the push for endless economic expansion over several centuries. Men have directed virtually every aspect of the fossil fuel industry on which it rests. It is undeniably men who have conducted the conquest of nature.
But man or woman, everyone who shops—and especially those who shop obsessively—consents to the fossil fuel-based economy which is currently drilling closer and closer to the edge of catastrophe—for both people and pelicans. The Deepwater Horizon rig was just one of these operations.
Posted by: WRB Blog
on
Jul 18, 2010
Column: Nothing But the Toth
By Emily Toth for WOMEN = BOOKS
