This scholarly investigation of female antisuffragists offers a portrait more complex and more interesting than the reticent-lady image that was endorsed by the anti's themselves. Although, as Marshall (Sociology/Univ. of Texas, Austin) cautiously notes, her ideas on female antisuffrage are ``highly speculative,'' her speculations are convincing indeed. Beginning in the 1870s and continuing even after the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, antisuffrage served the ``gendered class interests'' of its members, notably the upper- class founders, who already possessed excellent, albeit informal, access to power via family connections. Not merely a front for men, it was a dynamic movement that changed its attitudes and tactics over time, and was effective enough that suffragists reformulated their own arguments to counter those of their opponents. Perhaps most remarkably, antisuffragists did all this while arguing the impropriety of women's participation in politics. (As Mary Kilbreth, one of the die-hard antisuffragists who hung on after 1920, said, she ``object[ed] to women in politics—and to myself as much as anyone else.'') Throughout, Marshall seems to be making an honest effort to have the information she has uncovered shape her conclusions, and not the other way around. For example, she explores the kinship patterns of some of the movement's founders to undermine ``the myth of the isolated antisuffragist.'' Examining the movement's rhetoric, she finds differences between men's and women's styles (generally, men were more threatening and women more deferential), and discovers that the rhetoric changed over time, gravitating toward new scientific arguments to support the old idea of separate spheres. Looking beyond the movement's leadership, she notes that ``an antisuffrage vote tended to be an antireform vote'' and suggests that different groups—say, urban elites and rural workers—may have had entirely different reasons for voting identically. Finally, she notes similarities between today's effective public antifeminists and their petticoated predecessors. A valuable addition to work in the areas of women's history, conservatism, and the Progressive Era.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-299-15460-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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