Jewett, Kelleher Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and ...



Jewett, Kelleher Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition. Nation 263:1 (July 1, 1996):27 (3 pages).

COPYRIGHT The Nation Company Inc. 1996

By Estelle B. Freedman. Chicago. 458 pp. $34.95.

Motherhood has a bad name in the media these days. Not a day goes by without another story about a mother accused of neglecting or beating or killing her child. You can turn on the TV any afternoon to watch mothers and children (usually daughters) lash out at one another, baring the messy tangle of their lives before a studio audience only to6 eager to offer advice and judgment. In such a world the title of this book, Maternal Justice, may seem puzzling if not downright oxymoronic, but its double meaning--justice for mothers and a model of justice based on maternal love--is both timely and nostalgic. Although Estelle Freedman's engrossing biography probably won't make its subject, Miriam Van Waters, a household name (as she was when she made the front pages of the Boston papers during a dramatic and highly public series of hearings in 1949), it adds to our understanding of how women forged public careers and private lives in the first half of the twentieth century.

Miriam Van Waters spent forty years trying to change the way prisons treated women and children, first in California and then in Massachusetts, where she was the superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in Framingham for twenty-five years. Born in 1887, two years before Jane Addams founded Hull House, Van Waters came of age, professionally and intellectually at any rate, in the era of progressivism. Her career as a prison reformer is emblematic of the shift from nineteenth-century volunteerism to twentieth-century professionalism. A "highly educated, professional, and politically active career woman who devoted her life to social service," Van Waters typified the "new woman" of the 1890s. Although her career lasted well past World War II (she retired from Framingham in 1957), she seems typical of an earlier, more optimistic world. Hers is a fascinating story because of what it reveals about changes in the female reform tradition and about emerging ideas on female sexuality in general, and deviance and homosexuality in particular.

Van Waters's commitment to social reform and public service was rooted in a childhood dominated by religion and maternal neglect. An evangelical Episcopalian clergyman driven by a passion for social justice, her father instilled in Van Waters a belief in the possibility of individual regeneration and a lifelong commitment to liberal Christianity and the Social Gospel. As the oldest surviving child of a mother weakened by childbearing and the demands of being a minister's wife, Miriam became a mother to her four siblings. Her lifelong efforts to "rescue, improve and transform" members of her family, first her siblings and later her adopted daughter, provided both the model and rhetoric for her work with incarcerated women and children. She was "the mother of us all," her father said. Van Waters grew up to become a sort of "professional mother," and her self-sacrificing version of maternal love shaped her sense of herself and her role as reformer.

Her career began in Los Angeles in 1917, where she served as a superintendent of a juvenile hall and a referee at juvenile court and founded the El Retiro School for Girls. By the time she was named to her post at Framinghain in 1931, she had developed an approach to prison management that was shaped by both theory (developed during her doctoral work at Clark University) and experience. As she wrote in her journal, Framingham was to be a "Symphony... a way of life, a monastery, a prison--farm--factory--workshop--laboratory --studio--chapel--nursery--hospital--a place where books are written, pictures made, prayers said, lives are begun and ended." As conductor of this "symphony," she drew on the "maternalistic rhetoric" of the female reform "Ation, determined to offer social service rather than punishment to the women in her care. She called the inmates "students" and, as she explained to a reporter from The Boston Globe, aimed to make "institutional life approximate outside normal life as nearly as it can." (The reporter thought Van Waters seemed more like a college president than a prison warden.) As she wrote to her parents, "Bars off... curtains in ... Will bring the outside world in." Many of her reforms focused on preparing the women for their return to the world, and nowhere was this more true than in her work with mothers. Many of the women incarcerated at Framingham were unwed mothers often this was their only crime"), and Van Waters struggled to remove the stigma attached to their position. She met weekly with a Mothers' Club and held classes in "mothercraft." Since inmates were allowed to keep their children until they were 3, Van Waters built a model nursery, aiming to make Framingham a "child-centered institution."

Van Waters's success at Framingham was due in no small part to her charismatic personality and her ability to instill loyalty and love in those who worked with her--one local minister claimed that Framingham was the center for a new religion "where everyone worshiped Miriam Van Waters"--but her work was sustained by a network of supportive relationships with friends, colleagues and patrons who shared her commitment to reform. Financial and political help from wealthy and influential women (including Eleanor Roosevelt) paid for innovative programs at Framingham and helped Van Waters weather political challenges to her authority and ideas. The strength of this network of female friendships points to the persistence of female bonding and mutual support in the arena of women's reform work, a tradition that reaches back into the nineteenth century.

These relationships were as essential to her personal life as to her professional achievements, and no one played a larger role in her life than Geraldine Thompson. The wife of a wealthy man and a philanthropist in her own right, Thompson "bridged the eras of the lady bountiful and the woman politician"; a force in Republican politics in New Jersey, she had already demonstrated her commitment to social reform when she met Van Waters in the mid-1920s. The two women built "an intense, compatible, and largely clandestine partnership" in which Thompson's financial assistance, political connections and emotional support served as critical underpinnings for Van Waters's career. They shared a profound and loving relationship for more than thirty years, speaking on the telephone and corresponding almost daily for most of those years. They were never together for more than a few weeks at a time, however, partly because Van Waters guarded her independence as fiercely as she worried about what people would think.

Theirs was, Freedman writes, a "public collaboration [that] rested upon a private, romantic foundation." That it remained private had to do in part with Van Waters's highly visible position and in part with her complex feelings about homosexuality. She accepted the medical model of homosexuality as psychopathology and struggled to reconcile her attachments to other women with her belief that homosexuals were sick (but not criminal). Her reading of The Well of loneliness, published in 1928, is revealing; with a different childhood, she felt, Stephen Gordon, the heroine of Radclyffe Hall's novel, could have grown up to run a girls' camp or supervise a juvenile protection agency (career paths similar, of course, to Van Waters's own). Freedman's perceptive reading of Van Waters's journals and the surviving letters between Thompson and Van Waters charts Van Waters's efforts to find a way to express and enjoy her love for Thompson while avoiding the stigma of lesbianism. Class status and age Van Waters was 41 in 1928 and Thompson 56) spared them public scrutiny most of the time, enabling them to maintain a relationship that, while not unprecedented, was both unconventional and successful.

Given Van Waters's ideas on homosexuality, it is ironic that her greatest professional crisis should grow out of her leniency in dealing with the same issue at Framingham. She had often found herself in conflict with the political machine, and her relationship with the political appointees who ran the Department of Corrections deteriorated as World War II brought new problems to Framingham. With the war came overcrowding, changes in the prison population and a growing awareness of same-sex relationships among inmates. Critics charged that Framingham was a "dangerous source of lesbian relationships," and in 1949 Van Waters was dismissed as superintendent and forced, at age 61, to defend both her beliefs and her record. She challenged her dismissal and demanded a public hearing. The first was held before the Commissioner of Corrections, who upheld his decision to fire her. She appealed to the governor, and a second hearing before a commission he appointed resulted in victory. Multiple charges of bureaucratic infractions had been brought against her, but the hearings focused largely on homosexual relations among both staff and inmates. The left press (including The Nation; see Edwin J. Lukas, "Bridewell Revisited," February 12, 1949) drew comparisons with Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scopes trial and "witch hunts" directed against suspected Communists. While Van Waters's reinstatement enabled her to return to Framingham (partly because of her political connections), the transcripts illustrate the "power of deviant labels to control women's lives." The attacks on her were personal as well as professional; when she was pilloried in the Hearst newspapers and rumors about her relationship with Geraldine Thompson began to surface, she burned more than twenty-two years of daily correspondence in order to protect their privacy and her reputation.

As is true with the best biographies, one comes away from this book with the feeling of a kind of collaboration between writer and subject. Given her previous books on the origins of women's prisons (Their Sisters' Keepers) and the history of sexuality in America (Intimate Matters) and her own experience, as a feminist historian, of waging a public battle for tenure at Stanford, Freedman's interest in Van Waters is not hard to understand. Maternal Justice is as much a work of history as it is biography, bringing to life not only a remarkable woman but also the complex political and social milieu within which she worked and lived.

Brown, Victoria Bissell Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition. Journal of Women's History v10, n2 (Summer, 1998):198 (9 pages).

COPYRIGHT 1998 Indiana University Press

Estelle B. Freedman. Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. xvii + 458 pp. ISBN 0-226-26149-2 (cl).

Just over a decade ago, Ursula K. LeGuin spoke to graduating seniors at Bryn Mawr College about the "mother tongue" and the "father tongue." The mother tongue, said LeGuin, is language not as mere communication, but as relation, relationship." The mother tongue "expects an answer." Its essence is "conversation, a word the root of which means `turning together.'" By contrast, the father tongue is a language bent on "distancing-making a gap, a space, between the subject or self and the object or other." Because of its claim to a "privileged relationship with reality," LeGuin argued, "the father tongue is spoken from above. It goes one way. No answer is expected, or heard." LeGuin roots the mother tongue in private life, in the kitchen and the bedroom, those messy places where we learn to construct ourselves and our stories about each other, those places through which much of life flows without any illusion of objectivity. The language she described is porous and accessible; "it connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing, but in binding, not in distancing, but in uniting."(1)

LeGuin's charge to the Bryn Mawr Class of 1986 was to import the mother tongue into their public discourse, to expect relationship and connectedness in all of their communications. This is a worthy goal for all of us who teach, but it is an equally worthy goal for those of us who write--and especially for those of us who write biography. For LeGuin's praise of a language that does not claim a "privileged relationship with reality" reflects the contemporary embrace of subjectivity which has utterly revolutionized biography as a genre.

The biographer writing in the mother tongue does not speak in distant, omniscient tones about some unbiased "truth" that has been erected from some objective, seamless body of evidence on the subject's life. The biographer writing in the mother tongue is more honest and more messy. While she is certainly willing to make an argument about the subject's life, to figuratively stand in her scholarly kitchen, swing her wooden spoon, put her hand on her hip, and tell the story her way, the biographer writing in the mother tongue knows she is telling the story her way, knows why, and says so.

That contemporary biographer, speaking in the mother tongue, is part of an epistemological revolution of which feminism is a vital part. This is a revolution that recognizes every biography as a subjective interpretation of a subjective body of evidence. It acknowledges that public and private constructions of the self produce multiple identities and necessitate simultaneous readings of those identities. And it respects the fact that the surviving evidence about anyone's life is a construction that must be noticed and examined.(2)

When I read biographies I listen for the mother tongue. I attend to signs that the biographer is aware of the subjectivity, constructions, and connections implicit in the enterprise. Theoretical developments over the past two decades about biographical writing have persuaded me of the `benefits to be realized when the biographer is conscious of the complexities involved in both the subject's construction of the self and the biographer's construction of that self--and uses a voice about those complexities. LeGuin describes it as a conversant voice which "goes two ways, many ways," which creates "an exchange, a network." I want to hear assurances, from the page, that the biographer is willing to climb down off the podium of objectivity, relinquish the privilege of the father tongue, and engage in a conversation--a turning together--with me about both the subject and the evidence. This means that I pay attention to the biographer's creation of three relationships: her relationship with her subject, her relationship with her evidence, and her relationship with me, her reader. In all three relationships, I hope to hear some candid language about the messy flow of life.

Read with an ear for the mother tongue, the three biographies under review here are not uniformly satisfying. Estelle Freedman's biography of Miriam Van Waters is the only one that communicates both a strong argument and a contemporary sensibility about her own (and Van Waters's) subjectivity. Freedman alone converses with her readers about the evidence in a way that makes accessible the connections between her data, her logic, and her subject. And only Freedman is willing to speak frankly about the complex, multiple, even contradictory identities she encountered in the evidence on Van Waters and to engage in the constructive act of folding those contradictions into a whole personality. Freedman's achievement, as LeGuin would say, lies "not in dividing, but in binding, not in distancing, but in uniting." By contrast, Barbara Winslow is such an advocate for the objective worth of Sylvia Pankhurst's politics that she cannot let down her guard enough to talk with her reader about complexities and contradictions in both Pankhurst's life and in the evidence about her. Winslow tells her story "from above. No answer is expected, or heard." And Cynthia Nelson is so enamored of her subject, Doria Shafik, that she completely abandons the contemporary effort to problematize subjectivity, choosing instead to adopt what Ursula LeGuin would call Shafik's "privileged relationship with reality."

Doria Shafik's life as an Egyptian feminist in the 1940s and 1950s is the least well known to American audiences of the three stories considered here. Cynthia Nelson's biography, the first on her subject, spans the sixty-seven years between Shafik's 1908 birth into a middle-class family in the Gharbiya province of Egypt and her suicidal leap from a sixth-floor balcony in Cairo in 1975. In the catalogue of triumphs that Nelson offers about the intervening years, Shafik catapults from a lonely childhood to a doctoral degree in Paris to a career in Cairo as a magazine publisher, philanthropist, and self-appointed president of the pro-women's rights Bint al-Nil Union. Threaded through these achievements is a continued conflict between Shafik's personal ambition and Westernized concepts of individual rights on the one hand, and her commitment to Egyptian nationalism and Islam on the other. Nelson tells us that Shafik's "feminist consciousness" was shaped by her own "strategy of confrontation" with conservative forces in Islam, Egyptian politics, and the separate women's community (xii). Ultimately, that strategy led Shafik to engage in two hunger strikes: one in 1954, which demanded constitutional rights for women in newly-independent Egypt, and one in 1957, demanding the end of Nasser's undemocratic rule of Egypt. Nasser's government punished Shafik's second hunger strike by placing her under house arrest for three years, but from 1960 until her death in 1975 Shafik lived in self-imposed exile, writing poetry and memoirs, and seldom left her apartment.

Sylvia Pankhurst, the subject of Barbara Winslow's biographical work, is well-known as a member of Britain's prosuffrage Pankhurst family. In Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism, Winslow moves Pankhurst out from under the shadow of her suffragist mother, Emmeline, and sister, Cristabel, and seeks to establish Sylvia's independent significance both within and beyond the British suffrage movement. Winslow focuses on Pankhurst as a community organizer in London's East End between 1912 and 1915, as a peace activist and social service provider during World War I, and as a prominent voice in the British debate over revolutionary socialism in the years immediately after the war. Winslow's is not a full-life biography; she deals with the first thirty years of Pankhurst's life in a cursory gloss at the start and sketches the last thirty-six years of her life in three pages at the end. The core of the book is devoted to the years between 1912 and 1924, when Pankhurst was in her early thirties. The argument in these pages is that Pankhurst's commitment to suffrage for Britain's working-class women and men, as well as its middle-class women, transformed her into an "organizational innovator who created political connections between gender and class and struggled to foster the grass roots of socialist democracy" (xx).

In Maternal Justice: Miriam Van Waters and the Female Reform Tradition, Estelle Freedman provides the first biography of this twentieth-century American prison reformer. While tracing Van Waters's professional work with juvenile delinquents in Los Angeles in the 1920s and as head of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in Framingham from 1932 to 1957, Freedman also tells the story of Van Waters's life as the charismatic center of a circle of loving female friends and extended family. In the course of the narrative, Freedman makes three arguments: first, that Van Waters's life demonstrates the vitality of postsuffrage female reform networks; second, that there is a fit between Van Waters's temperament and the times, which is reflected in her shift from a Progressive Era focus on social and economic reorganization to a Twenties-style emphasis on individual redemption through psychological insight; third, that the political and psychological climate between 1920 and 1970 led American lesbians like Van Waters into complex self-definitions and muted understandings which could deny, but not escape, the taint of scandal. Throughout, Freedman argues that Van Waters was guided by an ideological and spiritual commitment to the saving grace of unconditional maternal love and to the rights of women to motherhood in all its varieties. It was the solace and the dignity she drew from this conviction that allowed Van Waters to stand up to brutal attack in the reactionary 1950s and protect her public career as well as her private life.

Freedman's title, Maternal Justice, works on three levels that Freedman must have intended, as well as on a fourth level which is audible to anyone listening for the mother tongue. At the first two levels of private life and professional life, "maternal justice" captures Van Waters's lifelong struggle to strike a just balance between her impulse to nurture by controlling and her belief in nurture by empowering. Freedman constructs that tension in the title and then artfully--and openly--weaves it throughout the narrative on Van Waters's relationships with her adopted daughter, numerous friends, and the delinquent women she sought to rehabilitate. On the third level of public life, "maternal justice" evokes the silent bargain Van Waters struck with the state of Massachusetts in the treacherous 1950s: she protected herself from exposure and persecution as a lesbian by conceding to pathology in the inmates she devotedly mothered.

Freedman's research and arguments at each of these levels of Maternal Justice deserve all the ovations they will undoubtedly receive. It would be a shame, however, if the din of applause for her content prevented us from hearing the fourth level at which Freedman creates maternal justice-her use of the mother tongue. Freedman does not use the first person in this book, except in the (moving) Preface and the (even more moving) Epilogue. Nor does she use chatty, colloquial speech--devices that are not salient to the mother tongue. What is striking is a voice that invites conversation with the reader and is open about its own posturing. This voice evokes fairness and caring, a willingness to turn together, and its own commitment to "maternal justice."

Freedman's achievement in mounting her argument about Van Waters's complex tensions and complicated bargains derives from her use of language that does not presume a "privileged relationship with reality." For example, Freedman conducts a continuous conversation with her readers about her evidence. It is a side conversation, to be sure, conducted in an audible stage whisper. But by gently coaching us through what she calls her "clues" to Van Waters's choices and motives, Freedman makes clear the constructive nature of her work while also illustrating the logic that led her to her interpretations. When Freedman reveals to us that Van Waters destroyed most of her letters from Geraldine Thompson, her intimate partner for fifty years, Freedman simultaneously explains her occasional need to speculate on the relationship and underscores her argument about lesbians' need for great caution amid the prying dangers of the 1950s.

By speaking in the mother tongue, a language that "expects an answer," Freedman creates a climate of trust that counsels patience for complexity. It is a climate in which Freedman can talk about the messy flow of life, create a nuanced portrait of a public reformer and closeted lesbian, be as critical of Van Waters's elitism and emotional reserve as she is praising of her generosity and reform vision, and never sound inconsistent. Throughout the book, Freedman captures, often in one breath, Van Waters's humanism and her arrogance, her public posturing and her inner turmoil; we do not get the heroine with a few faults tacked on or a villain with a couple of virtues. Freedman stands in her scholar's kitchen and candidly serves up a whole person; Van Waters's strengths and limitations are united in one soul. At the conclusion of a painful and sympathy-provoking chapter on Van Waters's struggles as a mother, Freedman levels with us and says, without a hint of meanness, "maternalism ... had its perils, among them the expectation that sacrifice would be rewarded by gratitude or by the creation of an idealized version of oneself. It also carried a false sense of omnipotence" (233). Ironically, by speaking in the mother tongue, Freedman herself avoids a posture of omnipotence in her biography of Van Waters. The result is that Freedman's considerable persuasive power lies as much in her voice as in her argument.

Sylvia Pankhurst is such a fascinating subject that one longs for this sort of treatment of her life. Barbara Winslow's Sylvia Pankhurst disappoints because Winslow is so dedicated to carving out an esteemed place for Pankhurst in the history of the British Left that she adopts an adversarial voice which puts tremendous distance between herself and her readers. The book, which Winslow tells us she began working on twenty-five years ago, is written in the regrettably old-fashioned, combative tone of the father tongue. The author is so focused on arguing with those who would cut Pankhurst out of either the British suffrage story or the British socialist story that she allows no discussion about her own interaction with the evidence, much less a conversation about the messiness of Pankhurst's life. Winslow's is a socialist-feminist heroine in service to an ideological argument; she is not a fully-realized human being.

The irony is that Winslow's stiff, adversarial voice undermines the persuasive power of her argument because it fails to make a real connection with the reader or the subject. For example, I do not doubt Winslow's point that Pankhurst's break with her mother and sister and their suffrage organization, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), derived from Pankhurst's commitment to working-class suffrage. But I find myself suspicious of the argument here because it so doggedly avoids human or political complexity. Why no "turning together" here about Pankhurst's resistance to expulsion from the WSPU? Why no conversation here about the intriguing fact that in 1911 Pankhurst wrote The Suffragette, a laudatory book about the WSPU, just one year before the expulsion? Winslow's explanation that Sylvia Pankhurst was just "not a quitter" seems designed to skirt rather than confront real life (67).

A more important omission, in terms of Winslow's argument, has to do with Pankhurst's experience with the labor movement. Here, it seems, Winslow's partisan voice prevents her from admitting or even discussing any bad news, such as the very real possibility that the male labor movement was half-hearted in its support of woman suffrage. Her own data hints at this, but Winslow closes off that conversation. In my disappointment, I can hear LeGuin admonishing the Bryn Mawr graduates to use the mother tongue, to "come out and tell us what time of night it is. Don't let us sink back into silence. If we don't tell our truth who will?"(3)

Sylvia Pankhurst's career as a feminist in male-dominated movements invites candid conversation about "what time of night it is." In fact, in 1981, Linda Edmondson wrote a poignant article that made the same point Winslow makes about Pankhurst's dual devotion to both feminism and British working-class movements. Edmondson made clear the potential for a Pankhurst biography that honestly explores the vexations attendant upon such dual loyalties, but Winslow's book does not realize that potential. Winslow does not even speak as frankly as Edmondson did about the evidence of Pankhurst's elitism. We are given an occasional throwaway line about Sylvia being "as autocratic" (80) as her mother and sister, but Winslow refuses to pause to talk with us about the occasional bits of evidence on Pankhurst's elitism that emerge in the text and falls far short of Edmondson at integrating this human wrinkle into the overall analysis.(4)

The aspect of the mother tongue that I missed most in Sylvia Pankhurst was its ability to go "two ways, many ways"--its capacity to evoke "an exchange, a network." Evoking networks would seem important here since a central purpose of Winslow's book is to establish Pankhurst's active involvement in working-class politics in London's East End. But because Winslow writes in the father tongue, she is too intent on her heroine to flesh out Pankhurst's relationships and communities. In contrast to Freedman's stunning achievement in embedding Van Waters in a three-dimensional human community, Winslow provides lots of names but very few personalities. And despite her ideological commitment to the history of the working class, Winslow draws on none of the social history available about the East End to situate Pankhurst in this culture or problematize the life of a genteel Englishwoman trying to work among the poor.(5) In the end, this self-described "feminist" biography seems remarkably untouched by concerns with subjectivity and social construction that have been so important to recent feminist epistemology.

Doria Shafik has the superficial appearance of a book written in the mother tongue. Cynthia Nelson seems to talk about relationships and emotions and discuss private as well as public life. In fact, however, Nelson's style of discourse completely violates LeGuin's call for relationship and connection in communication. She so privileges Doria Shafik's subjective view of reality that she cuts off any opportunity for conversation with her readers about that subjectivity, thereby undermining the potential for reader trust in Nelson as an accessible authority.

On the last page of her book, Nelson gives a nod to Phyllis Rose's observation that life stories become a "blur" without some "structure of meaning" (284). But Nelson consciously chooses to present the meaning Shafik herself constructed for her life rather than perform the biographer's task of creating her own. Indeed, she tells us that she does "not presume to explain" her subject (284). Innocent as she is of such presumption, Nelson becomes the press agent that one suspects Shafik always wanted, and the reader is left with the distinct impression that Nelson's loyalty to Shafik's memory far outweighs her loyalty to building relationships with her readers.

The heart of the book, and the heart of the problem with the book, lies in Nelson's engagement with the evidence and her conversation with us about that evidence. Her main sources are three incomplete memoirs by Shafik, one written for an American magazine in 1956 (but rejected as "too self-centered" [xvii]), one written in 1960, her third year under house arrest, and one written at the end of thirteen years of self-imposed exile while she slipped into a suicidal depression. Nelson provides no footnotes for any material quoted from the memoirs, leaving the reader with no way of knowing which retrospective words derive from which moment in her life. In addition, Nelson chooses to quote entire pages from the memoirs and to allow Shafik's words to stand on their own, without any conversation with us about what is happening in Shafik's texts. She is similarly laissez-faire about lengthy quotations from those who knew Shafik. This handling of the data is consistent with Nelson's desire to avoid the presumption inherent in explanation, but as a reader I felt abandoned by Nelson's unreflective approach.

The romanticized, self-serving story that Nelson lets Shafik tell is one of a brilliant, beautiful heroine. She triumphs over all--even her enemies in the Egyptian feminist movement--until she runs into Nasser. But why the triumphs? And why the enemies? Why did the Egyptian government pay for her undergraduate and graduate education in Paris in the 1930s? Why did her family allow her to break off two engagements and get a divorce? Why did Egypt's leading feminists, who had sent Shafik off to Paris with such high hopes, turn against her when she returned? And why can Nelson ignore the possibility that Shafik's personal ambition and sense of entitlement were as important as ideology in driving her feminist efforts? Why does Nelson refuse to talk to her readers about these issues? The questions pile up with each chapter in the book. Shafik's eccentricities and egotisms beg for analysis and context, but Nelson is deaf to her readers' potential pleas for guidance. "No answer is expected," said LeGuin of the father tongue, "or heard."

To speak in the mother tongue is not necessarily to offer comfort. It is, rather, to offer frank exchange about "what time of night it is." In the case of biography, the mother tongue can talk about the humbling difficulty of the enterprise, while at the same time offer a means for handling that difficulty. As the books by Winslow and Nelson demonstrate, there is no way to avoid issues of subjectivity or multiple constructions of identity. Silence on these matters is a form of neglect that damages the biographer's relationships with her subject and her reader. The mother tongue tells us we must talk about these messy matters--and tells us how to do it. In Maternal Justice, Estelle Freedman provides a model of biography by inviting us into her relationship with Miriam Van Waters and guiding us, with gentle honesty, through all the dimensions of that relationship. Freedman realizes the promise of the mother tongue in biographical writing: to provide candid authority without claiming false omniscience. It is a welcomed voice.

NOTES

(1) Ursula K. LeGuin, "Bryn Mawr Commencement Address," in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 147-60, quotations on 148-49.

(2) Liz Stanley, "Moments of Writing: Is There a Feminist Auto/biography?" Gender and History 2 (Spring 1990): 58-65.

(3) LeGuin, "Bryn Mawr Commencement Address," 160.

(4) Linda Edmondson, "Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragist, Feminist, or Socialist?" in European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present, ed. Jane Slaughter and Robert Kern (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 75-100.

(5) See, for example, Standish Meacham, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977); and Gareth Stedman-Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationships between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download