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TO BELIEVE IN WOMEN

WHAT LESBIANS HAVE DONE FOR AMERICA---A HISTORY

A comprehensive and convincing history of how lesbian women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pioneered the social reform and feminist movements of their time. Faderman (ed., Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, 1994, etc.) extends the mission of her previous works’showing how early women’s rights movements made intimate relationships between women viable—to illustrate the ways these women we would now call lesbians became influential leaders in democratizing America. Drawing upon written correspondence between female partners, Faderman illuminates the deep love and shared conviction between such pre-eminent leaders as Susan B. Anthony and her friend Emily Gross, suffragist Anna Howard Shaw and her life partner Lucy Anthony (Susan’s niece), Jane Addams and Ellen Starr (founders of the Hull House settlement), and other important figures in suffrage, education, medicine, theology, and law. Faderman is at her best as she brings these women to life through their letters and speeches, which will remind readers that the fight for women’s rights was not born in the 1960s. Faderman repeatedly and at times reductively argues that the only way these women could have affected change on such a large scale was via close relationships with other women. These women’s impressive accomplishments give credence to Faderman’s insight that “a woman without conventional domestic responsibilities had more time and energy to devote to causes—and if she lived with another woman who shared her interests and inclinations . . . the time and energy available for such work were expanded.” However, some of these domestic partnerships mirrored 19th-century heterosexual marriages where one woman kept the home fires burning while the other led a public life. This contradiction is not fully explored, nor are lesbians” alliances with heterosexual women working for social change. Overall, an essential and impassioned addition to American history by a notable lesbian scholar of our times. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)

Pub Date: June 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-395-85010-X

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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