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woman
American History of an Idea
by Lillian Faderman
illustrated. 571 pages. Yale University Press. $32.50.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
Maybe?
This is the general sentiment evoked in Lillian Faderman’s “Woman: An American History of an Idea,” an ambitious attempt to describe the changing state of being a woman in this country over the past four centuries. “Woman” is extensively researched and gracefully written with over 100 pages of endnotes. His bold red-orange spine would have looked handsome placed next to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. TED talkBestsellers are “We Should Be Feminist” and Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me” or, for that matter, “Woman: An Intimate Geography” by Natalie Angier.
Filled with people and events, this “Woman” covers everything from Puritan poets to pills and more. Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head; It features reformers, revolutionaries and reactionaries, both famous and unknown. However, he doesn’t really sink into the psyche as might be expected, given that Faderman is one of the leading LGBTQ scholars of our time – acknowledging that many were not allowed to exist in previous times. This is a kind of Gyncyclopedia Britannica on a Wiki, the hard world of identity politics: fascinating but not necessary.
Faderman’s most heralded works, “Overcoming Men’s Love” (1981) and (1999) are cornerstones of lesbian history. He has written several other books as professor emeritus at California State University in Fresno, most recently a fine biography of the gay rights leader harvey milk. The memoir “Naked in the Promised Land” (2003), republished two years ago with a foreword by Carmen Maria Machado, is fascinating. Even Faderman wrote memoir about his mother. some of us need to be reminded to call our mothers.
“Woman” begins strongly with the narrative of “pachucas,” Faderman’s middle-school classmates in the 1950s, the unruly and daringly dressed Mexican-American girls he works with, often forced to attend glamor school or “juvi.” He was sympathetic, aware that his own sexuality had made him an “escape from the ideal.” The Pachucas return in a later chapter as one of many disregarding groups of established norms, including skaters, flappers, rebels, ax-wielding temperance activists, Chinese-American suffragists with three-cornered feathered hats, and, to my surprise, hobos. , “mooching” in army pants. “For thousands of women, the Depression was strangely liberating,” Faderman writes. “They were poor and limp and found a new way to despise conventions about how a woman should live.” However, given the scope of his project, we only visit each of these fascinating subcultures for a short time.
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