Book Reviews by Sam

Through the Wardrobe: Women Relationships with their Clothes.

Ali Guy, Eileen Green and Maura Banim, editors.

Berg Books, 2001. 

This book examines the concerns and pleasures women find in their clothes – choices, worries, habits, shopping, storage. It looks at how fashion and/or clothes are said to link us to gender yet clothes are often a powerful way to resist ideas about traditional femininity.

This book covers topics like the wedding dress; tattoos & piercings; how/why teens choose clothes; the problems of finding clothes or feeling confident when you have had to have a breast removed; and how/why to dress-for-success. 

In Chapter 3, Alison Adam examines how difficult it is to find attractive, sexy clothes if you are ‘big girl’ and how often the clothes for big women are often horrible polyester tents. With 2 big ‘virtual’ companions she sets out to test high street and online shops for what’s available (answer: not enough), and asks ‘why are big women such a threat?’.

Chapter 5, by Kate Gillen, talks about the personal shopper and how these women often tend to collude with the woman they are shopping for in that they maintain the deceit that the woman is a size 10 rather than a size 14. This has its basis in society’s insistence on ‘child-women’; i.e. women try to achieve a very tiny body to gain masculine approval (if you doubt this, think about the rapidly disappearing women on ‘Friends’ and the pressure women are under to lose weight AND have big tits, which is just not natural for most women). 

Chapter 12, Maura Banim & Ali Guy, looks at the clothes women wear & finds there are 3 types: those we wear, those we used to wear, and those we think we might wear in the future. This translates into 3 levels of identity attached to the different sets of clothes: continuing identities (the woman I am), discontinued identities (the woman I was or fear I could be) & transitional identities (the woman I want to be).

An interesting thing was that the clothes for discontinued identities often have their own place; a box under the bed or special bag or cupboard because whilst they are an important reminder of the old identity they also need to be HIDDEN as they no longer represent the new/better/current self. This is very common, they say,(I do it and Planetgrrl Jules does it too). 

This book is written by female academics but this isn’t the usual field of research for any of them so they write personally and in a really nice, interesting way. It may not be the book you take to bed (it will make you THINK) but it is worth reading, is easy to read without being dumb, and is about a fascinating area that doesn’t often get attention. 

Book Reviews by Jules

The Frailty Myth : Women Approaching Physical Equality by Colette Dowling

Colette Dowling, best-selling author of The Cinderella Complex declares physical equality to be the final goal of womens liberation and turn upside down the belief that men are 'naturally' more stronger than women.

Until now, the relationships of mens greater physical strength to womens equality has never been fully examined. Can women be equal so long as men are stronger ? Are men, in fact, stronger ? These are the key questions that Dowling raises in her provocative new book, published to coincide with the 2000 Summer Olympics.

According to Dowling, the concept of female physical inferiority has had long-term, damaging effects on womens health and social and professional status. Drawing on the latest research, Dowling challenges the truism of men as 'the stronger sex'. She shows that when women and men are matched in size and level of training, the strength gap actually closes. Dowling calls for new ways of viewing strength, feminity and power in women.

The Frailty Myth, Random House, £15.73 / $24.95

Toni Morrison Explained : A Reader's Road Map to the Novels - by Ron David

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison is a much-read and much-loved author. Toni Morrison Explained is an exploration of the twists and turns that take us from the beginning to the end of her books. All of her novels are examined from the perspectives of what Toni Morrison has said about them, what the critics have said, and what the author, Ron David, says about them.

Toni Morrison Explained, Random House, £9.42 / $14.94

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the title chosen by the author, both for the collection, and for one of the essays in it, comes from a poem by W. B. Yeats, which, the author says in the Preface, had a special resonance for her. Didion's descriptions of the Haight-Asbury district of San Francisco in the late spring of 1967 were written at a time in her own life when she felt that "writing was an irrelevant act". The author felt it was necessary for her to come to terms with disorder, and, after the essay was first printed, felt that she had failed to convey "something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads". 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Random House, £12.57 / $15.96

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

The Voyage Out was originally published in 1915, when the author had just turned thirty-three. It was Virginia Woolfs first novel, and took her nine years to complete. None of her later books would take half that time, nor go thru so many drafts. Her first novel seems, on the surface at least to be a conventional novel, and an early experiment with the style that would define her later novels: Jacobs Room, Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves. The Voyage Out uses the traditional narrative device of the journey, in this case, a journey by sea, from England to South America. Among those on board are twenty-four year old Rachel Vinrace, and her forty-something aunt, Helen Ambrose, who became involved in romances with two young men, Terence Hewet and St. John Hirst, upon disembarkation. Their second voyage, up the Amazon, is what changes all their lives.

The Voyage Out, Random House, £11.31 / $14.36

Out Of Her Mind - Rebecca Shannonhouse

Films like Girl, Interrupted are bringing the issue of depression and other mental illnesses to a wider population.

 In out Of Her Mind Rebecca Shannonhouse compiles the first anthology devoted to the topic of mental illness and women. 

It includes Zelda Fitzgeralds newly-discovered letters written during her hospitalisation, which are being published for the first time.

Out Of Her Mind, Modern Library, $21.95

Reunion - The Girls We Used to Be, The Women We Became - Elizabeth Fishel

1968 was a pivotal year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.

 In Reunion, author Elizabeth Fishel traces the lives of ten of her classmates who graduated in 1968 from the Brearley School, on of USAs oldest and most renowned girls schools.

Reunion looks at the contradictions in the lives of young women born into a traditional world of nonworking mothers and propelled into an environment of feminism, sexual liberation and political radicalism.

Reunion, Random House, $24.95

Without Reservations - Alice Steinbach

What if.... you were able to leave your job, your family, and your friends to spend a year traveling abroad ? 

Almost everyone has had this fantasy at one time or another, and Alice Steinbach, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and single mother with grown children, actually went ahead and did it. She recorded her journey .. long with the beautifully illustrated postcards she sent home to herself to preserve her spontaneous impressions.

Without Reservations, The Travels of an Independant Woman, Random House, $23.95

This is Not your Mothers Menopause - Trisha Posner

"Women are certain to have one thing in common: menopause. "

Not even childbirth can compete, because some women will never have children. But all of us - no matter our race, religion or social standing -- will, if we live long enough, be confronted with that inevitable midlife passage". Thus states Trishas Posner in This is Not Your Mothers Menopause.

This Is Not Your Mothers Menopause, Villard Books, $21

White Teeth - Zadie Smith

Zadie Smiths debut novel is garnering more attention than is usual for a first novel, but deservedly so. 

Here is a first-time author, not writing autobiographically, but confronting huge serious issues and ideas such as race, religion, multiculturalism, history, gender, eugenics, and genetics, and in a very funny, yet radical way. White Teeth is a satire of the extremism, the fear and lack of identity that is, these days, seemingly universal.

White Teeth, Random House, $24.95