WCW Blogs

Column: Nothing but the Toth

By Emily Toth for WOMEN = BOOKS

With this post, Emily kicks off her column for WRB, “Nothing but the Toth,” in which she’ll “share with the world,” she says, her “many opinions and bons mots.” First up: a cornucopia of writing about food.

If you could eat anything right now, what would it be?

Would it be "a rare goat cheese: luscious, creamy, cloven-hoofed," as in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying? Would it be that ever-faithful treat, chocolate? Or are you inclined to the freaky, such as celery sticks or okra pods?

You are, of course, what you eat.

And who in the Western world today is not a foodie? as Vancouver novelist Timothy Taylor asks in The Cranky Connoisseur.

When Martha Nichols invited me to write this column on subjects literary and related, I poked around in my soul and my beloved Kindle reader—and yes! I am an obsessive food reader. In the months since I've had my Kindle, three-quarters of the books I've read have been about cuisines, cooking, traveling for food, preparing it, remembering it, wallowing in love for it.

Take, for instance, Julia and Paul Child's arrival in France in the late 1940s, and their first dish, an achingly tender and buttery sole meuniere. As shown in Julie and Julia (the film by Heartburn author and lifelong foodie Nora Ephron), the sole sizzles and beckons. Julia and Paul swoon, and she moans with hunger and yearning. And Paul simply says, "I know, I know."

That scene is also in Julia Child's exuberant memoir My Life in France (with Alex Prud'Homme), a foodie classic. I learned to cook artichokes from Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking—though I didn't cook much more from that book. It was too detailed, too hard.

But I still love reading it and saying, "Yum"—a no-no in the uptight Protestant home of Judith Jones, the editor who signed up Julia Child and whose memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, shows how Jones personally midwifed our cookbook craze. She's the one who gave us the doyennes of ethnic cuisine: Marcella Hazan (Italian cooking), Madhur Jeffrey (Indian), and Claudia Roden (Middle Eastern).

Oh, ye youngsters have no idea how bland American food used to be. I was born in New York City to a Jewish mother and Irish father, lefties who scoffed at religion and loved to dine out—and so the first temple of worship I remember is Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side. There we fed our souls with piled-high pastrami, spicy sour pickles, blintzes, knishes, and Dr. Brown's Celery Tonic—which didn't exist where we settled in Cleveland, when I was eight.

What a wasteland, my mother would kvetch and sigh. We'd take half-day safaris across town to the East Side, where there were delicatessens (Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is one of few pictures of Jewish Cleveland in the 1950s). My mother would always tell the owners that their stuff wasn't up to New York standards. But the West Side, where we lived, didn't get its first "exotic" (Cantonese) restaurant until I'd gone away to college.

Worst of all were the dishes we made in home ec class, especially "eggs a la goldenrod," an unspeakably horrendous concoction of bland on toast. No wonder Julia Child loathed the home economists, who were already trying to smother our taste buds. (They grew into those nutri-prudes who rail about calories and treat fat as a death-dealing horror—just like sex in the 1950s: "sinful" and "tempting" and "decadent" and "forbidden.")

Reading about sex used to feel naughty—but now it's food writing that fires my imagination. I love the joy of fooding in such books as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (in which she raves about real Italian pizza and gelato), or Calvin Trillin's Alice, Let's Eat (a hymn to Arthur Bryant's barbecue place in Kansas City, the Mecca for pork fans).

Laura Shapiro's Penguin Lives: Julia Child is zesty and flavorful. And Jennifer 8. Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is an amazing feat of reportage, starting with a huge national wave of Powerball winners (from number slips in fortune cookies) to the creation of fortune cookies by Japanese Americans who lost the franchise when they were interned during World War Two, to the Chinese food staples (lo mein, chop suey) which have become America's national food.

Of course, there's food and sex, especially in books by those lusty ladies Ruth Reichl (Comfort Me with Apples) and Gael Greene (Insatiable). Both judge people (as I do) by their attitudes toward food—and some, indeed, are found wanting.

Greene, as a young reporter, was once delivered to a young horny singer as his prize for the evening. They did what was expected, rather unmemorably she says now, but she recalls with horror and comedy what he (and, yes, of course it was Elvis Presley) did next.

He asked her to call room service and order him up a fried egg sandwich.

You, the readers of this my first column, should now go nosh. But go ye and eat better than the King did. Feed your soul. It's now or never.

Emily Toth (rhymes with both) has published eleven books, including academic advice from her alter ego "Ms. Mentor," the life story of Peyton Place author Grace Metalious, and two biographies of Kate Chopin, whose favorite word was "delicious."

Comment (0)

Column: Music of Fragments

By Carol Dorf for WOMEN = BOOKS

With this post, Carol kicks off her column for WRB, “Music of Fragments," in which she hopes "to look at the divergent musics of our poetry communities." The column title, Carol says, "originates with several poems by Muriel Rukeyser. In 'The Poem as Mask,' Orpheus speaks the line 'the fragments join in me with their own music.' In 'Akiba,' Rukeyser also uses the idea of different elements of the community carrying music through the world."

Let me put it out there, I'm a sucker for narrative, fragments of story. Maybe it is the experience of listening to my grandmother Elsie and one of her friends, Florence, talk through other people's lives and fragments of the news, war, the draft, social security—the experience of being a child sitting slightly out of their sight-line so I could keep listening.

Lately, I find myself being drawn to prose poems. Their narrative, more fragmentary than fiction, often blurs the distinction between dream and daily life. Here is one of Ana Maria Shua's Microfictions:

Misfortunes Hung Out to Dry

One night, poor thieves steal the clothes I've hung out to dry. The next night, I hang out my (well-wrung) misfortunes, made wet by grief. The next morning, I'm definitely happy.

In this short narrative, we are tricked by the straightforward syntax into believing that since one set of things that can be hung out to dry is stolen, so can another.

The Pleasure of the Line: Often when we define poetry, we think of experience broken into lines, perhaps metrical ones like Emily Dickinson's, or Aphra Behn's; or the short unrhymed line (often six to eight syllables) of many twentieth century poets such as the late Lucille Clifton or William Carlos Williams. In these poems, line breaks both propel us through the poems and allow for a doubleness of meaning.

Other ways of using the line include formal and invented structures such as Annie Finch's or Marilyn Hacker's frequent use of traditional forms, or Rusty Morrison's use of a very structured invented form in The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story, where every section consists of three three-line stanzas, always ending in the words "stop," "please," or "please advise." In these poems, form contains feeling or experience, structuring it both for reader and writer.

Dream and the Prose Poem: So why give up the line break and form? Holly Iglesias in her book Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry sees the box as a metaphor for gender roles that constrain and contain women. I think this is true for some women's prose poetry, such as Nin Andrew's "Adolescence":

The winter her body no longer fit, walking felt like swimming in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Everything stuck to her skin: gum wrappers, Band-Aids, leaves. How she envied the other girls, especially the kind who turned into birds. They were the ones boys hand-tamed, training them to eat crumbs from their palms or sing on cue. What she would have done for a red crest and a sharp beak, for a little square of blue sky to enter her like wings... if only her buttons were unfastened by the water she kept swimming through, and she could extract from the shadow of her breasts a soul as soft as a silk brassiere, beautiful and useless, like a castle at the bottom of the sea.

Andrew's narrator would like to join the other girls, but is unable to be "hand-tamed," perhaps because she retains a soul, which in the world she inhabits is "beautiful and useless."

Opening the Language of Poetry: One of the goals of women's writing in the last 45 years has been to open a wider variety of experience to poetry. Here’s a prose poem by Emily Galvin from Do the Math that deals with the issue of time:

When you count time, how fast do you count? One, two, three: how long are the breaths you breathe and how long is your voice speaking? I try to keep the numbers spaced out evenly but even so, my breathlessness overtakes me, and by inhalation I stretch time. This expansion like a massive object, this breath like gravity. As the clock leaves the world of its creation, it ticks faster, its tiny tachycardia a release. Somewhere, an event horizon counts down.

Galvin is concerned with the relationship of time seen in science and time as it is perceived. The poem has a mathematical title, the symbol omega lamda, which indicates the concentration of energy in the universe, not an expression most readers of poetry would be able to recall. Galvin seizes the language of science and returns it to a language of feeling.

First Definition: The prose poem is the philosopher in her conference suit, offering us a seat, but the three chairs in the room are full of papers, and we stand puzzled before such incomplete choices. Or maybe the prose poem is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of other people's stories, where we can allow the collision of dream, personal narratives, and our imagined facts.

Carol Dorf is a poet whose work appears in Moira, A Cappella Zoo, 13th Moon, Feminist Studies, Heresies, Fringe, The Midway, Poemeleon, New Verse News,  Mezzo Cammin, Runes, the Not a Muse, Boomer Girls anthologies and elsewhere. She is a former editor of Five Fingers Review and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Comment (0)

By Penny Farfan for WOMEN = BOOKS

Ellen Terry was a forerunner of today’s celebrities, living a glamorous life in the public eye. Inscribing a photograph of herself as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing with a favorite line from the play—“a star danced, & under that was I born”—she suggested through her character’s words the sparkle of her own stage presence and public personality.

 Ellen Terry as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (1880);
Tuck’s Celebrities of the Stage post card, postmarked 1905;
collection of the author.

Terry was born into a theatrical family and made her stage debut at the age of nine. When she was 16, she married the 46-year-old painter George Frederic Watts, who captured her image in ravishingly beautiful portraits, as did the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. The marriage between the youthful actress and the middle-aged painter lasted less than a year, but it inspired the comic imagination of Virginia Woolf, who wrote about the couple in her only play, Freshwater, performed by family and friends at a Bloomsbury party in 1935.

Following a brief return to the stage, Terry eloped to the country with her lover, the fashionable architect and designer Edward Godwin. They had two children, Edith and Edward Gordon Craig, who both became well-known theater artists in their own right.

 

Ellen Terry, C. W. Faulkner and Co. post card,
postmarked 1904; collection of the author.

After six years with Godwin, Terry returned once more to the stage—this time for good—and soon began her career-defining acting partnership with Henry Irving, whose celebrated productions at the Lyceum Theatre dominated the late-nineteenth-century London stage and toured extensively in North America.

At the height of her fame, Terry was again famously painted, this time by fashionable society artist John Singer Sargent, whose remarkable portrait of her as Lady Macbeth created a stir when it was first exhibited at the New Gallery in London in 1889.

  

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1888),
Beagles and Co. post card; collection of the author.

Despite the scandals of her early life with Watts and Godwin, her two children born outside of marriage, her ambiguous relationship with Irving, and her two later unsuccessful marriages, Terry remained a beloved public figure at the time of her 50-year stage jubilee in 1906,. She was admired not just by audiences but by leading actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse and by key modernists George Bernard Shaw and Isadora Duncan.

Terry’s international celebrity was enhanced by the fact that her career coincided with developments in the medium of photography, including the invention and popularization of cartes-de-visite and picture post cards that were collected, exchanged among friends, and sent through the mail.

  

A multi-view post card of Ellen Terry, Rotary Photographic Series; collection of the author.

 

Ellen Terry with her dog, Rotary Photographic Series post card,
sent to a Mrs. Sealy at Elham near Canterbury from “yours ever to be respected, Maurice,” postmarked London 1906; collection of the author.

As the post-card craze came to an end with the start of World War One, Terry’s long and distinguished career on the stage was winding down and the film industry was on the rise, along with a star system that had not existed during her prime as an actress. She appeared in a few unsuccessful films between 1916 and 1922 but did not have the same impact in this new medium.

She died in 1928, as silent film was giving way to the “talkies.” Still, behind the luminous beauty of the great stars of the classic cinema and the charisma and talent of the actresses that captivate us on screen today is the glimmer—like a more distant yet still “dancing” star—of one of the great figures in the history of acting and a forerunner of the phenomenon of modern media celebrity.

Penny Farfan is Professor of Drama and English at the University of Calgary in Canada. She is the author of Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as many articles on modernism and performance. She is also the co-editor of Theatre Journal.

Read Penny Farfan’s review of A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families in the January/February 2010 issue of WRB.

Comment (1)

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.

Comment (0)

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.

Comment (3)

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.

Comment (0)

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.

Comment (0)

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.

Comment (3)