Archive for the ‘Reference’ Category

The Brazilian Sphinx

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Lorrie Moore reviews Benjamin Moser’s, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, at the New York Review of Books.

Before beginning this review, I took a quick unscientific survey: Who had read the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector? When I consulted with Latin American scholars (well, only four of them) they grew breathless in their praise. She was a goddess; she was Brazilian literature’s greatest writer. Further inquiry revealed some misunderstandings about her life, a life that clearly had reached mythic proportions, with a myth’s errors and idiosyncratic details. Still, Lispector was held in reverent esteem by all four, though one believed she had died tragically in a fire (not so, although in her forties Lispector was burned on one side of her body, including her right hand, by a fire she accidentally started by smoking a cigarette in bed). Others were under the impression that she was a lifelong lesbian (also not so).

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Rebecca Donner reviews the novel, A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, at bookforum.com.

Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause.

Read the complete review.

Poems from the Women’s Movement

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Elizabeth Lund reviews Poems from the Women’s Movement by Honor Moore for the Christian Science Monitor.

This “landmark collection” is powerful precisely because it is not a manifesto. Instead, the power of these poems comes from the fact that one writer after another – from the 1960s to the 1980s – dared to say what hadn’t been voiced before. In doing so, they helped other women – from scholars to housewives and mothers – find the courage to challenge the status quo as well.

Read the complete review.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Gina Bellafante reviews Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere The Life of Helen Gurley Brown for the New York Times.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Brown, who had married at 37 and remained childless, advocated for the primacy of work in women’s lives, rejecting essentialist ideas about motherhood and believing women ought to delay marriage, or forgo it entirely, largely on the grounds that it made them less fun. Without sovereignty over her body, no woman, she felt, could achieve the erotic fantasia necessary for human fulfillment, and to that end, the ’70s would find her marching for Naral.

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Review of A Jury of Her Peers

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Katha Pollitt reviews Elaine Showalters, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

The 350-year span of A Jury of Her Peers takes in more than 250 writers and covers sweeping tides of history and social change. It’s a long book, but it doesn’t feel long at all because it is so full of information, ideas, stories, and characters. The celebrated get their due—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison—and so do the forgotten: Mercy Otis Warren, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mary Austin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Emma Lazarus, Anzia Yezierska, Nella Larsen, Meridel LeSueur, Ann Petry, and a host of others.

Sources for Bad News

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Sources for Bad News:

From Sue White, Princeton University Library

I suspect that Women’s Studies and other reference / research librarians will now be asked about economic matters, perhaps more-so than we have before.

Therefore, I thought it might be helpful to remind WSS readers of several sources which count women’s numbers on the raw side of the economy – as represented in Poverty and Unemployment

Gender specific counts for both Poverty and Unemployment in the U.S. can be found on the following pages: Both current figures – January for unemployment, for example, and some ten years or more in historical counts. Women are – I think the term is “over-represented” - having more than the overall percentages of females, in the poverty category, while a representing a smaller percentage than men in the unemployed.

Read on.

POVERTY :

From U.S. Census Bureau,

Current Population Survey

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty.html

“Poverty in the U.S.:”

UNEMPLOYMENT:

Overall from: U.S., Bureau of Labor Statistics

http://www.bls.gov/CPS/

“Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey”

Especially recent details

From Bureau of Labor Statistics,

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

NEWS Friday February 6, 2009

“The Unemployment Situation January 2009” :