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remarkable about
all
this is just how difficult such a discussion would be within
academic feminist circles in the United States because the tradition of social
thought shared by this group ofGerman feminists and, in large part, by Wo–
jtyla, is not dominated by the categories and assumptions of liberal discourse.
Anyone interested in culture, politics, history, and literature will profit
from reading the remaining four books under review. First, the collection
edited by Higgonet, Jenson, Michel, and Weitz,
Behind the Lines. Gender and
the Two World Wars,
is a vital entry in the new feminist scholarship on war
and war-making, on the construction of motherhood as a feature of national
security, for example, and whether and,
if
so, how nations traffic in gendered
representations in their war/peace politics. The multiple authors of this text
refuse to traffic in banalities and overwrought analogies. They teach us much
that we might not even want to know. For example, Sandra Gilbert's path–
breaking essay, "Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the
Great War," supplies us with startling examples of the upbeat prowar litera–
ture of many women writers and feminist activists in the World War One
period. My favorite is Rose Macaulay who, in her poem, "Many Sisters to
Many Brothers," expressed envy of the soldier's liberation from the dreari–
ness of the home front in these words: "Oh it's you that have the luck, out
there in blood and muck." Concludes Gilbert: "In the words of women pro–
pagandists as well as in the deeds of feather-carrying girls, the classical Ro–
man's noble
patria
seemed to have become a sinister, death-dealing
matria."
Second, Joan Scott's essays in
Gender and the Politics ofHistory
compel
us to recognize that any "unitary concept," including, of course, male, female,
power, oppression, equality, "rests on - contains - repressed or negated ma–
terial and so is unstable, not unified." She offers, among her many insights, a
sophisticated discussion of the "difference" question. Scott rejects the idea,
following Martha Minow, that equality versus difference constitutes an
opposition. "Instead of framing analyses and strategies as
if
such binary pairs
were timeless and true, we need to ask how the dichotomous pairing of
equality and difference itself works. Instead of remaining within the terms of
existing political discourse, we need to subject those terms to critical
examination." Within their very different frameworks and projects, and
without heavy theoretical thematizing of the issues at stake, Loraux's
Tragic
Ways of Killing a Woman
and Banta's
Imaging American Women
carry out
Scott's
call
to subject existing terms to critical examination.
Third, Loraux's ninety pages are a marvel of condensation. Homing in
on one question - how women in the tragedies are done to death - she
shows us that Greek tragedy "as a civic institution, delighted in blurring the
formal frontier between masculine and feminine and freed women's deaths
from the banalities to which they were restricted by private mourning." The
suicide of wives and the sacrifices of virgins are, of course, most important.
Suicide is the "woman's solution." A man "worthy of the name could die only
