A well-rendered who’s-who guide to the contemporary women’s movement.
Four decades after their influential book, The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar offer a comprehensive, evolutionary update.
In their latest illuminating collaboration, the authors seek to show “how generations of literary women tapped the enigmas of their own lives to shape visions of cultural transformation.” In the 1950s, young women experienced “extraordinary confusions,” as their “lives reflected but also rebelled against the conformity of the decade.” “Feminism incubated” in the lives and writings of Sylvia Plath, Diane di Prima (the “feminist beatnik”), Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde. It continued to erupt in the 1960s, especially with Adrienne Rich’s politically engaged poetry and Nina Simone’s “ribald jokes and daring garb,” which reflected “a shift in both racial and sexual attitudes.” The sexual revolution and the maelstrom created by the Vietnam War brought forceful voices to the forefront in the works of Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown. Susan Sontag welcomed the rise of new forms of female eroticism and leftist politics while Joan Didion “would deplore them.” Gilbert and Gubar call 1968 “feminism’s annus mirabilis” as protests sparked the women’s liberation movement, here and abroad. Denise Levertov’s activist poetry and clashes between feminism and the Black Power movement captured the public’s attention. The 1970s brought the publication of Kate Millett’s “landmark” book of feminist literary criticism, the controversial Sexual Politics, and bestselling feminist-infused novels by Toni Morrison, Erica Jong, and Rita Mae Brown. Ms. magazine and Judy Chicago’s “celebratory artwork,” The Dinner Party, were born. In the 1980s and ’90s, feminism would take hold in “parts of the entertainment world and in the academy.” Andrea Dworkin took on sexual violence, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler battled the “hetero-/homosexual divide.” More recently, Claudia Rankine, N.K. Jemisin, and others have worked to create alliances with the Black Lives Matter movement. Gilbert and Gubar deftly explore decades of political and cultural history to fashion this timely and valuable book.
A well-rendered who’s-who guide to the contemporary women’s movement.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-65171-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A powerful guide to national reconciliation.
In this nonfiction book, an activist and scholar shares strategies for peace and reconciliation based on her experiences in West Africa.
More than a decade ago, Hoffman listened to her internal “soul-whispers” calling her to help facilitate peace in civil war–torn Sierra Leone. Drawing from her successful collaboration with local activists, she not only provides a contemporary history of a successful West African peace movement, but also offers a tested strategy for national reconciliation. “The answers are there,” as the book’s title suggests, if only people heed the “larger whispering echoing through our world—a part of our collective, unconscious, awakening, wanting us to listen and receive.” Indeed, listening lies at the center of the volume’s strategy. Fifteen years ago, Hoffman co-founded the nongovernmental organization Fambul Tok with John Caulker, a human rights activist from Sierra Leone. Meaning Family Talk in Krio, Fambul Tok centered on the voices and perspectives of those directly impacted by the nation’s civil war. The organization facilitated more than 200 “tradition-based community bonfire ceremonies of truth-telling, apology, and forgiveness,” involving more than 2,500 villages, 4,500 speakers, and over 150,000 witnesses. Though these events required Sierra Leone to confront “difficult truths,” they became the “taproot…of community healing” and are featured not only in this book, but also in Hoffman’s award-winning 2011 documentary, Fambul Tok. To the author, a former political science professor, they also reveal an alternative solution to Western involvement in Africa, which has traditionally manifested as a top-down, money-centered approach that failed to tap into the “real reasons for peace—healthy and whole communities.” While the volume could have used visual aids like maps and photographs, its account carefully balances an astute scholarly analysis of African geopolitics and Western aid with an intimate portrayal of Sierra Leone’s citizenry. With forewords by the country’s current minister of state in the Office of Vice President and the British director of the Institute for State Effectiveness as well as an afterword by Caulker, this volume has much to teach about the ways in which Western organizations and activists can effect positive global change through humility, listening, and empowering local communities.
A powerful guide to national reconciliation.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9862030-1-0
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Blue Chair Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to...
An unvarnished account of one woman's painful “journey from victim to survivor,” as she came to understand the “dynamics of commercial sexual exploitation, especially child sex trafficking.”
In this debut, Smith, a public advocate for trafficking victims, begins in 1992 with her own experience. At the age of 14, she was briefly a prostitute before being rescued by the police. Since she was manipulated rather than subjected to violence, she was shamed by the false belief that she had chosen to be a prostitute. Only in 2009, three years after her marriage, did she feel able to reveal her story and give testimony before Congress. She blames the media for objectifying sexuality and creating an environment in which an estimated 100,000 in the U.S. are victimized annually. Smith describes how one afternoon, she was walking through the mall when a young man approached her. They flirted briefly, and he slipped her his phone number, asking her to get in touch. She describes her vulnerability to his approach. She was socially insecure. Both of her parents were alcoholics, and before the age of 10, she had been repeatedly abused sexually by a cousin. In her eagerness to have a boyfriend, she responded to his come-on and agreed to a meeting. As it turned out, he was profiling her for a pimp, and it was the pimp who met her—accompanied by a prostitute, there to show her the ropes. Their approach was nonthreatening, and they suggested that, in the future, she might have a career in modeling. Many unhappy children, writes the author, “are lured into trusting their traffickers” due to their lack of self-esteem. In the aftermath of the experience, although she finished college and had a successful career, Smith struggled with depression and substance abuse.
A powerful voice on behalf of young people who should not be stigmatized but need support from schools and communities to protect them from predators.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-137-27873-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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