A thoughtful and engaging history lesson.
A history professor examines a woman’s court fight to restore her violated sexual honor in 1790s America.
In 1793, a seamstress named Lanah Sawyer was raped by Harry Bedlow, “an elite sexual predator” who posed as a lawyer to gain her trust. In this incisive historical investigation, Sweet, a history professor at the University of North Carolina and former director of its program in sexuality studies, reconstructs a memorable story that reveals the virulent anti-feminism embedded in American democracy. Sawyer had the spotless reputation society required of all “decent” women; Sweet notes that any fall from grace would plunge her into “a world of scandal and shame from which she might never emerge.” Despite her lower status as a working-class woman, Sawyer sought legal reparations. “Even if others couldn’t see past her social station, her work as a sewing girl, Lanah Sawyer could,” writes Sweet. “She felt she had a right to a revolutionary dream of human equality. Other dreamers, too, were crushed in these years. Some of them, like her, had the courage to fight back.” In the contentious trial that followed, Bedlow was cast as the victim of Sawyer’s wiles. Newspapers debates begun by elite women emphasized the sexual double standard, but a male backlash against “disorderly women”—e.g., the owner of the bawdy house where Bedlow raped Sawyer—overwhelmed those voices. Ultimately, Sawyer’s stepfather successfully sued Bedlow for seduction—i.e., for breaching his right to give consent to intercourse with his daughter. “In seduction suits,” writes Sweet, “the question of consent was hardly mentioned, much less disputed. Jurors—and everyone else involved—generally took the woman’s father at his word.” This carefully researched book will appeal to historians, feminist scholars, and anyone with an interest in narratives that chronicle female erasure in a social system created by and for the benefit of (White) men.
A thoughtful and engaging history lesson.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-76196-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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