Gender, Professions and Discourse: Early Twentieth-Century Women’s Autobiography.

By Christine Etherington-Wright.

London: Palgrave Macmillan, January 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-230-21992-2, $80.00. 248 pages.

Review by Suanna H. Davis, Lone Star College, Texas

Christine Etherington-Wright examines autobiographies of British women from the 1900s to the 1920s. The author also writes of her search for meaning within the texts she studied, and her exploration of the autobiographies becomes a narrative of her own evolving theories on cultural history. It is a relational articulation of knowledge, which helps make the book more approachable. The vacillation between the scholarly objectivity and personal impulses fits well with her discussion of different styles of writing appearing within the autobiographies, with the changes apparently based on the subject matter.

Gender, Professions and Discourse discusses the autobiographies in two ways, by profession and theme. The professions are headmistresses, doctors, nurses, artists and performers (dancers, actors), and writers. The book details significant aspects of the autobiographies for each group. For example, Etherington-Wright found that the autobiographies of headmistresses used religious metaphors, while those of the doctors used metaphors from fairytales. Each chapter weaves together various threads of theories, uniting disparate fields and approaches. Within the chapter on doctors, for example, she calls upon numerous disciplines for explication, from Zipes on fairytales to Dworkin on woman-hating, from the history of children’s literature to discussions of social semiotics.

In the theme section, Gender, Professions and Discourse develops theories on frontpiece images, beginning materials, silences, and questions of identity and memory. In the beginning discussion within theme, the author describes the photographs used by different autobiographers as frontpieces; these ranged from studio portraits in the “girl child as angel” genre to an amateur snapshot of the author with a tennis racket and a mantling pigeon. The discussion of silences integrates theories of autobiography, representation, language, reader response, and sexuality to argue persuasively that the textual gaps within the autobiographies offer additional insight into the women who wrote them and the contexts in which they were written.

Etherington-White suggests that the autobiographies of representative women who were resistant to the dominant patriarchal culture, but who were not extreme, offer a unique insight into the era. She presents the idea that the individual voices in the autobiographies can be united in styles of writing, approaches to various subjects, and how they deal with or ignore various topics. They can amplify the female voice and mentality of the era so that modern readers can hear and understand it.

The book is partially an attempt to fill in the gaps left by historians who examine cultural artifacts, such as newspaper articles, and focus on the exceptional rather than the more normal. The author says that autobiographies contribute to the histoire de mentalités. She also says that autobiographies, being a masculine mode created and dominated by men, created expectations that women both acceded to and rejected; clearly a study of the ways in which they did both would help scholars to understand the viewpoint being expressed from these choices. In this attempt she joins many others, more and less successful, who have sought to identify and isolate the feminine for intellectual inquiry.

A variety of theories and theorists are quilted together to inform an understanding of the texts Etherington-Wright examines. Previous exposure to the theories is useful, but not necessary. The unique application of pieces of theories may be problematic. How can a particular part of a theory be relevant while the rest is not? However, if she is putting together a new theory, based on working models, then this is a legitimate exercise.

Within the book, Etherington-Wright says that the autobiographies she has chosen are representative rather than extreme. However, the methodology and criteria for determining this are not included. A chapter detailing parts of the decision-making process would have been useful on two levels. First, it would have allowed the reader to determine whether or not those decisions were reasonable. The representativeness is part of the issue in identifying the works as the voice of a generation of forward-thinking women. Decisions were made in silence, leaving textual gaps in the work that force the reader to accept or reject the arguments in the book without understanding their genesis. Second, a heuristic of her process would allow her work to be more effectively followed up or expanded.

Two other significantly lesser problems are distractions within the work. First, the author uses [sic] frequently, even when there is nothing wrong with the quotation. This could be a result of modern editing which cleared up the errors through a word processing program without recognizing the quotations or it might be a result of different word choices in British English. Second, while Etherington-Wright limits her discussions, she sometimes limits them only partially. The first instance of this is in the chapter on women writers where she prepares to discuss four authors, organizing them through the type of publications they produced. However, within the discussion she actually examines five, without placing her work contextually. The second instance is in the explication of the frontpiece images. The book includes six photographs for discussion, but Etherington-Wright actually discusses seven. This seventh is an actress who is included within the index, but she is not, in fact, mentioned anywhere else in the book.

Etherington-Wright officially covers 24 autobiographies in 248 pages. The presentations are insightful and fascinating, leading readers to ponder questions outside the scope of the book. An example of this is that the actresses presented were all encouraged to the stage by their fathers, despite the fact that stage work was considered synonymous with loose morality. Were the non-representative actresses also supported by their families? What caused this? How might it be explained?

Scholars working in gender, autobiography, and history, particularly of World War I, will find this book helpful and engaging. Readers in other disciplines will be enchanted with the glimpse into the private worlds of unconventional women of the early twentieth century.

Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema

Edited by Santiago Fouz-Hernández. New York: I.B. Tauris, May 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-1845118310, $32.50. 272 pages.

Review by Nathan G. Tipton, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis

Ever since Laura Mulvey famously declared, in her groundbreaking 1975 Screen article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that in narrative film the woman is consistently represented as the passive object of the active male gaze, various critics have been quick to challenge the fixed male-female binarism inherent in Mulvey’s argument. Film theorists Richard Dyer, Corey Creekmur, Steve Neale, and Peter Lehman, for example, have demonstrated that masculinity cannot be equated uniformly with activity or dominance precisely because, in terms of cinema spectatorship, there are always multiple gazes in play including, importantly, males gazing at males and male bodies. However, the potential for the male body to become a “spectacle” for other men, even within the safe confines of simple curiosity ostensibly extant in the viewing mechanisms of heterosexual men, almost immediately provokes profound anxiety, repression and, oftentimes, outright homophobia. After all, the very act of males gazing at other males presents a constant threat to the secure, comfortable “norm” of masculinity.

In his edited collection Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema, Santiago Fouz-Hernández has gathered together a multinational array of contemporary film theorists who explore not only the complex mechanics of the male gaze, but also show how cinematic representations of the gazed-at male body communicate and engage with inbuilt national identity anxieties surrounding race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Although Fouz-Hernández notes that the collection makes “no claims to global coverage” (4), Mysterious Skin nonetheless has an impressive reach, with contributors presenting interpretations of male bodies that are variously (and literally) “put on display” in non-Westernized cinemas of Francophone Africa, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and India, as well as in films from Western countries such as Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, and Spain. This emphasis on the male body, along with Fouz-Hernández’s global disavowal, serves the collection well, as it effectively backgrounds the myriad cultural differences existing among these disparate countries in favor of emphasizing the more universalized “crisis of masculinity” and its attendant anxiety over the “looked at” male body.

Mysterious Skin is divided into three thematic sections: the body and ethnic/national identities; dissections/textures/close-ups (or what Fouz-Hernández eloquently calls “the body as cinematic canvas”); and sex/sexuality, which explores the vulnerability and versatility of gendered identities typically associated with masculinity. At first glance these groupings seem logical in terms of compartmentalizing the articles, but there is also considerable overlap that is perhaps unavoidable given the collection’s overarching (inter)national focus. For instance, Heidi Schlipphacke’s “Fragmented Bodies: Masculinity and Nation in Contemporary German Cinema,” which appears in the collection’s first section on national bodies/national identities, is concerned mainly with exploring contemporary German cinema’s linkage of masculinity to the formulation of a more average qua “normal” national identity. Schlipphacke explains that this “new normal” nationality was formulated as part of an overarching governmental mandate that sought to mitigate Germany’s tortured history, and especially its psychic connection to the fervent neoclassical nationalism and patriotism appropriated and perversely applied by the Nazis.

The author, however, dovetails from her discussion of this fundamentally redefined German normality (what Schlipphacke refers to as “Neue Unbefangenheit”/new unselfconsciousness) into a fascinating exploration of the almost schizophrenic fragmentation this normalization provoked among German males. As Schlipphacke notes, not only does this schizophrenic identity signify a psychic split between past and present conceptions of what it means to be German, but it also becomes the locus for a body undergoing literal fragmentation by way of dissection. This occurs particularly in the film Der freie Wille/The Free Will (2006) where Theo, the movie’s ostensible protagonist (ostensible because although he is a rapist, his overarching desire is simply to be normal), recognizes the futility of trying to reconcile his split selves and, ultimately, slits his wrists with a razor blade.

Indeed, the motif of fragmentation appears in various physical and/or psychical permutations throughout Mysterious Skin, thus providing a further commonality binding together the collection’s chapters. An outstanding example of this fragmentation occurring on both mental and bodily levels is highlighted in Aparna Sharma’s “The Square Circle: Problematising the National Masculine Body in Indian Cinema.” Sharma discusses the Indian film Daayara/The Square Circle (1996) by focusing on unpacking the shifting identities undergone by the film’s unnamed transvestite protagonist. What makes this chapter so successful is Sharma’s application of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as it relates to what Sharma calls the transvestite’s “prerogative for migration” (94). This migration is multi-faceted, as the transvestite—who is portrayed as a rural, nomadic figure wandering from village to village—not only crosses and re-crosses gender lines but also traverses class, religious, socio-historic, and regional boundaries. Sharma ultimately views the transvestite figure as a representative critique of India’s carefully constructed, if entirely imagined, traditional value system that overtly emphasizes heterosexuality (which is, by definition, indicative of modernity, technological/industrial mobility, and national superiority). Thus the transvestite, through “his” muddying of socio-sexual conventions and national norms, effectively confronts and de-legitimates the hegemonic frameworks set up to police and regulate any and all boundary crossings.

These affective, transgressive border crossings, both physical and psychical, are foregrounded in varying degrees in all the entries in Mysterious Skin, but some chapters succeed better than others at conveying how these crossings are deployed cinematically. D. Cuong O’Neill’s exploration of homosexual cruising in Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s film Bu san/Goodbye, Dragon Inn, for example, is strangely complex and disjointed. This is perhaps partly due to the disconnectedness inherent in the film Bu san, which utilizes a film-within-a-film approach in order to combine a cinematic homage to the martial arts genre (in this case, the martial arts classic Long men ke zhan/Dragon Gate Inn) with the concept of the “moving body” exemplified by the homosexual men who cruise the dilapidated theatre in which the film is being screened. Yet throughout his chapter, O’Neill never seems to be sure how or where to focus his discussion until he arrives, late in the entry, at what appears to be the argumentative crux. O’Neill notes that the moving bodies displayed both on-screen (in Dragon Gate Inn) and “on screen” (the men cruising the theatre) represent “a contested terrain of competing identities” and “a world shaped by another form of mobility… where sexuality becomes not a type of identity but a type of loss of identity” (203-204).

While O’Neill’s cogent observation occurs within the context of an otherwise cumbersome chapter, it nevertheless neatly encapsulates the larger theoretical ethos that informs the collection and makes Mysterious Skin a continual delight. Fouz-Hernández and his coterie of international film theorists have provided an important, fascinating, and welcome addition to studies of masculinity, gender, and extra-Hollywood cinema. Despite its limitations—including some overly complicated and heavily theoretical entries—Mysterious Skin ultimately proves successful at not only showcasing the various permutations of gazed-at male bodies deployed in contemporary films, but also exploring how these incarnations provoke and promote negotiations over how these bodies define or defy international conceptions of masculinity.

Southern Ute Women: Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation, 1887-1934

By Katherine Osburn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, January 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-0803220386, $18.95. 184 pages.

Review by Brad Montgomery-Anderson, Northeastern State University

Between the years 1887 and 1934, the U.S. government made a concentrated effort to assimilate American Indians into the dominant society. This assimilative agenda began with the 1887 Dawes Act and centered on breaking up communally-held land and redistributing it as private property. Some of the “civilizing” programs were aimed specifically at Native women, and Indian agents saw their transformation into middle-class homemakers as a crucial component of the process to remake the Native American family. Katherine Osburn’s book is a groundbreaking study of the reaction of the women of one tribe to this assimilative effort. Southern Ute Women is a republication of a title that originally appeared in 1998 through the University of New Mexico Press. The current publication from the University of Nebraska Press includes a new introduction that places this work in the context of recent scholarship on Native American women. An especially interesting portion of this introduction is Osburn’s description of three general categories of studies regarding women’s reactions to colonialism. One category of scholars see colonialism as having little impact on the power of women, while another group of scholars, following the “declension model,” see colonialism as producing a marked decline in the power and status of indigenous women. Osburn’s work falls into the category of scholars who “argue some decline but also document creative adaptation” (vii). The book’s original introduction is also included and provides a good theoretical context for the main thesis of the book: namely, that during the assimilative years of the Dawes Act, Ute women used strategies of adaptation and selective assimilation to deal with the changes that outside forces attempted to impose on them. In the first chapter, Osburn provides the historic events that led to the confinement of the Utes on their reservation in southwestern Colorado and initial attempts at assimilation. Osburn groups these areas of attempted assimilation into the following four chapters. In chapter 2, “Women and Public Leadership,” Osburn discusses how the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) ignored women when discussing policy matters with the tribe. Ute women, however, did not accept the passive role assigned them and refused to send their children to schools they deemed unsafe. While OIA policy continually relegated women to the private sphere by only dealing with the “head of the household,” women found ways to recover their traditional participation in the public realm. In the next chapter, “Women and Economics,” Osburn shows how women resisted being relegated to dependency on their husbands’ wages and engaged in economic activities that were crucial to the tribe’s survival. The OIA expected women to be homemakers and to create nuclear households that fit a Euro-American model of “civilized” domestic life. To achieve this goal, the OIA hired three matrons to train Ute women in a variety of domestic arts. Osburn outlines the successes and failures of this program in the fifth chapter. The response to the matron program was complex. Ute women eagerly adapted many innovations concerning sanitation and health care as well as homemaking technology. As a result of this program, infant deaths on the reservation declined significantly. At the same time, this program failed in its basic goal of replacing the extended family with a single nuclear family living in its own home. Part of the OIA’s initiatives included bringing Ute attitudes towards sex and marriage in line with Euro-American attitudes. These attempts are the focus of chapter five. Osburn speculates that the increase in marriage licenses probably indicates an outward conformity to assimilationist pressure; on the other hand, the persistence of “serial monogamy” showed that OIA attempts to increase the number of lifelong marriages were not successful. This strategy of “selective assimilation” is characteristic of the attitude of Ute women in general as they struggled to retain their autonomy. Despite being treated as second-class citizens by the OIA, Ute women found creative ways to continue to make important contributions to their family and tribe. In her conclusion, Osburn argues convincingly that “while the framework of women’s lives was radically altered on the reservation, Ute women did not suffer a serious decline in status and power among their people” (117). Osburn makes a strong case for this conclusion using the existing documentation from that time period. She could strengthen this argument, however, by more thoroughly explaining the role of women in traditional pre-reservation culture. Osburn has a few pages of such discussion at the beginning of chapter 2, which she summarizes by stating that “women were equal members of families and bands” and that “they participated in councils” (23). Traditional gender roles deserve greater explanation and exemplification; moreover, Osburn should address what appear to be situations of traditional gender inequality that are depicted in the literature. For example, in the recently re-released classic history The Last War Trail (University Press of Colorado, 2000), Chief Ouray declares that the Utes do not accept the testimony of women (269). Although Osburn’s book does focus on Southern Ute women, it does nevertheless feel that something is missing without a discussion of Chipeta, wife of Chief Ouray and perhaps the most famous Ute woman. Chipeta did not live on the Southern Ute reservation, but it seems that the available documentation on her life and the part she played in the transition to the reservation (Chipeta: Queen of the Utes by Becker and Smith appeared in 2003) could provide another perspective on the role of women in Ute culture. An expanded discussion of Ute women in general would allow the reader to better understand the contexts of the strategies of resistance and adaptation. These are minor absences, however, in a work that is well-researched and thought-provoking. Osburn’s book has been and remains an important contribution to the growing literature on women’s responses to colonialism, and this book will be of interest to readers interested in Native American history and women’s history.

The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference

Edited by Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron

London and New York: I. B. Tauris, June 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1845115203, $85; paper: ISBN 978-1845115210, $29.95. 320 pages.

Review by Gypsey Teague, Clemson University

The longer I teach Gender and Women’s Studies, the more I am made aware that there are two distinct types of books in the field. The first type is the fluffy book. This type of book says very little but has a glitzy cover, and blurb on the back promising the latest information, and usually a forward by someone you have never heard of but who has been changed forever because of the content of the material. The second type of book is the scholarly tome. This book has little more than a title and an author on the cover, is usually a single color, often very thick with small print and too many references and citations; as though the author had little original to say and backed up what he could think of with someone else’s ideas.

The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference, fortunately, is somewhere between these two polar extremes. Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron have edited a delightful book that takes into account both the heavily scholared essay and interspersed a few lighter, more easily read articles. True, this book is tightly packed with information, there are very few illustrations [Editor’s note: the cloth edition is more fully illustrated], and the citations are lengthy; however, the information is pertinent to the subject area, the illustrations are specific to the essay and are there as augmentation, not as filler, and the citations are essential as a jumping-off point to more research.

Turvey-Sauron is an art historian, and her work reflects that background. Pollock is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History at the University of Leeds. She brings to the table a “social criticism” that is found in few works currently published. Between them they have chosen 13 essays, each adding one to this Baker’s Dozen, and have emerged with 15 critical pieces on the world of feminism and how that feminism coexists, at times, with current thought and dogma. The authors do not take themselves or their subjects either lightly or frivolously, but rather, apply themselves to answering specific questions that they have found important to the feminist movement.

I recommend this book to professors and instructors of feminist theory, or to gender constructionists. This is not a book to pick up lightly. It demands and expects attention to detail and a background in at least a couple of the waves of feminism to fully grasp what is being presented; however, once those foundations are attained, this book will become essential to all feminists’ and genderists’ libraries.

Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century

By Laura Schapiro. Berkeley: University of California Press, rpt. October 2008 (originally published 1986). Paper: ISBN 978-0-520-25738-2, $16.95. 296 pages.

Review by Michelle Moravec, Rosemont College, Pennsylvania

Add one part food history to another part women’s history. Stir in a dash of feminism. The result is an intriguing concoction that uses middle-class women’s attitudes towards food as an entree (pun intended) into their changing status at the turn of the century. Journalist Laura Schapiro, the author of two previous works about women and cooking, brings a deft hand to what could easily have become a trivial subject in Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century.

While Schapiro’s focus on “scientific cookery” may seem insufficiently broad, she uses culinary oddities such as “marshmallows stuffed with raisins” as a jumping-off point to explore how middle-class women’s shifting status at the turn of the century led to both class and gender anxieties. This angst made a certain population of women particularly receptive to this new approach to housekeeping, although it ultimately proved to their detriment. As women’s historians have illustrated, domestic science may have been the thin edge of the wedge that got scientific studies into female curricula, but not without exacting a huge toll. Ultimately, cloaking science in the respectable mantle of domesticity served only to reinforce, rather than repudiate, a gendered division of labor and study.

As with cooking a fine meal, timing is everything, and women’s transformation of housewifery into domestic science unfortunately coincided with the risk of consumer food production in the United States. While these pre-packaged foods initially seemed to promise libration for women, Schapiro argues that they contributed to the degradation of women’s productive creative labor as cooks and reduced them to mere assemblers of prepared products. Furthermore, through the near dictatorial influence of the Boston Cooking School, the efforts to increase the scientific nature of cookery reflected a darker backlash by native-born women to the changing demographics of the United States. Literally, you were, or could be, what you ate. The bland blanket of “white sauce,” the virtues of which domestic scientists extolled, and for which Schapiro provides a brilliant genealogy, could coat even the most recalcitrant of foods. By implication, it blanched immigrants, labor radicals, and any other unruly force that threatened middle-class stability during those tumultuous days.

In eight chapters, Schapiro charts the rise and eventual demise of the promise of domestic cookery. Domestic science was a well-documented subject even two decades ago when Schapiro first penned Perfection Salad, and she draws on this literature extensively. The first chapter explores the “domestic drudgery” that dominated women’s lives in the United States until the Civil War. The second chapter focuses on the wealth of prescriptive women’s literature that emerged due to cheap printing processes in the post-bellum period. Chapter three analyzes the various institutions of the scientific cookery movement, most notably the famed Boston Cooking School. Chapter four traces the proliferation the ideals of scientific cookery through various cookbooks, magazines, and newspaper columns. The brief fifth chapter provides a biography of the highly influential Fannie Farmer, who brought a sophisticated zest to the highly scientific standards of the Boston Cooking School, and to women across America who attempted her elaborate recipes at home. Chapter six traces the efforts of domestic scientists to bring their ideas about cooking and nutrition into social reform movements. By chapter seven, some of the pioneers of the scientific cookery movement begin to express doubts about the wisdom of their strategies. These doubts are confirmed in the final chapter, which documents the conservative impact that the scientific cooking movement ultimately had for women once it was co-opted by food manufacturers. A brief conclusion discusses modern food mania, which is largely dominated by male chefs, with the exception of Julia Child, about whom the author has previously written. First published in 1986, then reprinted for famed Gourmet food editor Ruth Reichel’s Food series (1991), this current edition comes complete with a new afterword by the author. In a brief seven pages, Schapiro considers gender roles in the new millennium, the local food craze, as well as the fate of the ideals of domestic science in the 21st century.

Although Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century is now over twenty years old, it was extraordinarily well received at its initial publication and it has held up remarkably well. Despite further investigations into the fields of gender and food history, Schapiro’s work remains an intriguing and highly readable analysis and is still an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the field. As with all books that focus on the prescriptive, the reader is left wondering what actual women thought of these transformations. While their responses may be imputed or inferred, Schapiro makes little use of diaries or letters that might have revealed more nuanced aspects of women’s responses, but this quibble is minor compared to the wealth of detail Schapiro does offer.

Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of American Culture, 1800-1940. By Dianne Sachko Macleod. Berkeley: University of California Press, September 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-520-23729-2, $45.00. 328 pages.

Review by Stephanie Jacobe, American University

In her newest book, Dianne Sachko Macleod, Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of California, Davis, investigates the lives of American women art collectors from roughly 1800 through 1940. She argues that collecting art liberated women of the nineteenth century from the gilded cage of the home created by the cult of true womanhood. Macleod employs case studies of women collectors to support her arguments. She focuses her arguments not on the content of collections but more on how the acquisition of those objects and the need to share them with others brought women outside the home. She also demonstrates that within the language of collecting, gender became more fluid.
Macleod is very honest in her introduction, admitting that she specifically chose her examples because they best fit with her thesis. She discusses the lives and collecting habits of thirty-seven women through five chapters and an epilogue. Although each chapter includes anywhere from three to eleven women in its analysis, each chapter focuses on one women as the primary example, with the others holding secondary roles in the discourse.
The first chapter is the only one in which Antebellum America is discussed, and it is by far the weakest of the five. Macleod examines Eliza Bowen Jumel as her primary example. Eliza Bowen was born in Rhode Island. Her early life was characterized by turmoil and financial hardship. She worked as a prostitute and actress before her marriage to shipping magnet Stephen Jumel in 1804. Macleod argues that Jumel flaunted gender conventions through her involvement in her husband’s business as well as her art collecting. However, Macleod does not discuss the political ramifications of the Early National Period that pitted Francophiles like Eliza and Stephen Jumel against those who favored a more British influence. Macleod also did not deal with the correlation between Jumel’s lower-class upbringing and early life with her seeming rejection of upper-class feminine ideals. The relationship between class and the cult of true womanhood is not discussed. Considering Jumel’s early life, the independence of her later years is not as surprising as it otherwise might be.
The later four chapters and the epilogue showcase the women collectors of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Macleod begins her look at the later nineteenth century by focusing on well-known women collectors, such as those described by Earl Shinn, who produced the first history of collecting in America. Macleod argues that Shinn did not have any respect for the women whose collections he documented, but instead saw them as extensions of their husbands. Macleod also introduces the concept of collecting-as-play. Macleod shows that women used their collections as a basis for psychological escape from not only the domestic sphere but also the rapidity of the modern world. As described in this book, collecting-as-play is almost an extension of the type of play children engage in with toys. Macleod also makes a case for the blurring of gender lines: men sometimes had these same playful tendencies.
Macleod next turns her attention to women collectors who also became activists in the fields of education, art, and suffrage. She focuses her story on Phoebe Hearst, mother of William Randolph Hearst, who spearheaded the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition. Macleod goes to great pains to show how women’s involvement with the World’s Fairs, beginning in 1876 and culminating in 1915, provided an avenue to the world outside their traditional place in the home. Surprisingly, not all the women Macleod discusses were fully in favor of women’s suffrage. Instead they displayed a range of opinions, from being against the idea completely to women’s limited participation in local politics to full national suffrage.
In the fourth chapter Macleod turns her attention to the creation of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt, by women collectors. She demonstrates that women such as Abby Rockefeller and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had emerged from their domestic spaces but that the male-dominated world did not accept that change. In fact, by the beginning decades of the twentieth century, men were beginning to extend their sway over the arts and saw women’s influence as unhealthy.
Finally, Macleod focuses on Gertrude and Leo Stein and their circle in Paris and the United States. It is in this final chapter that Macleod’s arguments concerning the gender of collecting come to fruition. Gertrude and her brother lived a reversal of gender roles within their personal as well as their collecting lives. Though Macleod employs gendered language in discussing aspects of art collecting throughout the book, it is not until these later examples that those arguments become convincing.
In Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects, Dianne Sachko Macleod has opened the discussion about the influence of art on women’s independence from the domestic sphere. Her work is by no means the final word; instead, it can be hoped, it will spur new studies that explore women’s art collecting in greater detail.

Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s. By Susan K. Freeman. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, June 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-0-252-07531-5, $25.00. 220 pages.

Review by Jennifer Aerts Terry, California State University, Sacramento

In Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s, Susan K. Freeman explores the nature of sex education in post-World War II America. Freeman posits that the democratic impulse of American society in the 1940s and 1950s influenced the development of sex education curriculum by encouraging dialog-based courses. These courses solicited students’ input, which in turn contributed to the shaping of more liberal courses than what was offered either previously or in later decades. Further, she explains the pedagogical shift away from a purely biological approach to a psychological focus which encouraged introspective analysis. Though, she asserts, formal sex education during this era continued to reinforce heterosexual gender roles and relationships as normal social practices, these classes gave female adolescents the vocabulary and cognizance to challenge contradictory societal messages and confront male dominance, subsequently influencing women’s liberation in the 1960s.
Sex education programs were not new developments in the post-World War II era. They originated in the turn of the twentieth-century social hygiene and purity movements that sought to clean up cities, assimilate immigrants, and regulate Americans’ sexual behavior. The curriculum, medically grounded and morally rigid, took a clinical approach aimed mainly at combating venereal disease and premarital pregnancy. Freeman likens this approach to modern-day conservative curriculum that places topics regarding sexuality in essentially positive or negative categories. Yet, Freeman explains, in the years following the war and preceding the moral backlash against the sexual revolution, American attitudes and behaviors took a more liberal slant in that sex education programs promoted physical relationships between young men and women as normal and desirable. In fact, students were given the impression that a desire to do otherwise was unnatural and immature. In this regard, Freeman adds her voice to those of Stephanie Coontz and Joanne Meyerowitz in further complicating our understanding of post-World War II sexual behavior, challenging the notion that Americans were more conservative in their attitudes and behaviors than in later eras. This liberal attitude toward physical relationships led to frank and open classroom discussions that placed an emphasis on “emotional satisfaction” rather than physical pleasure (145). Though widely supported and welcomed in a number of communities, she also points to continued opposition from the Catholic Church.
It was within this liberal atmosphere that students (with the focus of this study primarily on teenage girls) participated in a variety of activities, discussions, and question and answer sessions. Freeman does not view students as “a submissive captive audience” controlled and indoctrinated by educators as in earlier decades (xi). Rather, the democratic, frank atmosphere of the classes welcomed adolescents’ questions, comments, and perspectives, thus shaping the curriculum as it went. On this point, Freeman emphasizes the importance of dissenting opinions, questions, and arguments made by students, since that is where one might truly see a deviation from the curriculum. Based on examples drawn from preserved student journals, assignments, and educators’ recollections, it does indeed appear that discussions were student-centered, and at times, diverged from planned curriculum, but Freeman provides little evidence of dissent or what would have been termed deviant inquiry. Unfortunately, without concrete evidence, comments such as, “Other questions were no doubt voiced, although teachers ignored or minimized them in promoting sex education,” and, “Inquiring students nevertheless posed questions that educators might have wished to avoid” (98), leave the reader wondering about the nature of those questions. Further, the bulk of examples support the notion that adolescent girls were indeed inquisitive but mostly compliant with educators’ principles.
Though a great deal of significance was placed on one’s conduct in dating situations and potential encounters with the opposite sex, sex education in the 1940s and 1950s was much broader than simple dos and don’ts of sexual relationships. The courses Freeman studied were relationship-centered and carried names such as Family Life Education, Human Science, and Human Relations. In addition to potential romantic relationships, these courses encouraged boys and girls to consider platonic interactions and personal decorum in a variety of social settings. The promotion of gender roles arises as a common theme among these courses. Here, Freeman connects sex education classes with the social construction of femininity versus masculinity. Boys and girls were conditioned, albeit in what was considered a progressive and enlightened manner, to accept and adopt gender roles and hierarchies as a means of conforming to proper society. As further evidence, Freeman highlights extracurricular activities such as dances, dating, and outlets of student expression such as high school yearbooks as places where societal constructs were reinforced by the students themselves. This, she suggests, was an extension of sex education. Yet it was also in these extracurricular activities that a degree of rebellion and dissent was evidenced through non-conformist behavior, as a variety of examples attest.
Freeman’s work differs from other scholarship on sex education in her bottom-up approach; she focuses on and draws attention to the students, rather than on the educators’ intent and curriculum development. Sex Goes to School is a valuable addition to scholarship on girls’ studies in that it highlights the role schools, and teenagers themselves, played in the enforcement of rigid social messages regarding gender roles and responsibilities that permeated post-World War II America. While Freeman’s assertion that this education somehow empowered girls and influenced them in the later women’s movement is intriguing, this is not made completely clear and could bear further investigation. Nonetheless, this is an interesting book that could prove useful in history and women’s studies courses.