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Balancing Acts, Eggs and Others
- NWSA Journal
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2002
- pp. viii-ix
- 10.1353/nwsa.2002.0041
- Review
- Additional Information
NWSA Journal 14.2 (2002) viii-ix
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Balancing Acts, Eggs and Others
Maggie McFadden
Boone, North Carolina
11 April 2002
Balancing acts: we engage in them most of the time. And this year the symbolism of balancing raw eggs on end at the vernal equinox, when light and dark are equal, seems particularly appropriate to our fragmented lives. Balancing is difficult when we wear so many hats—research, teaching, mentoring, editing, advising, activism, being present to family and friends, dealing with our own personal crises. If we are lucky, the balancing "works," whatever time of year. But the balance is precarious: our personal lives impinge on our work lives, our grant deadlines trump the necessity to prepare for class; we need to proofread when we have an appointment with an attorney; we want to attend a peace rally but we have a sick child. Of course, the recurrent difficulty is that we cannot always compartmentalize because we are whole bodily beings; ultimately we must find ways to "put all [our]self in one book," as Doris Lessing's character Anna says about the golden notebook, finally chosen over the fragmentation of her red, blue, black, and yellow notebooks (1962, 607).
The women featured in our new section, "Women Recollected," have both been caught in this bind of balancing—research, motherhood, art, work—and part of the reason we know so little about them has to do with the multiple hats that women usually wear. One, Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley, did significant psychological work on child development, which would be more widely known had she been male and unencumbered with family. The other, Alice Neel, is better known, but usually for her portraits of celebrities, not for her work with mothers and children. We inaugurate this new feature more than thirty years after the second wave began resurrecting "lost women," knowing that there is much more to be done on this excavation project, that Gerda Lerner's "Questions to Bring Women into View" are still not being asked in many parts of the academy (1981).
This general issue balances social science and the humanities, textual criticism and oral history, art and media, modernist and traditional language, showing just how interdisciplinary is the discipline of Women's Studies. The lead article is Brenda Foley's argument that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Pennsylvania local ordinance against exotic dancers illustrates society's "efforts to regulate the theatrical display of women's bodies" through sexual control. Robyn Weigman's prescient postmodernist dissection of the changing nature of Women's Studies in the academy uses a different language, and Mary Dockray-Miller's feminist discussion of an Anglo-Saxon poem (Advent) brings scholars to Old English (for the first time in this journal). Additionally, Carolyn Cocca's article on how welfare rhetoric and statutory rape prosecutions have shifted in the past decade and Anne McLeer's study of the image of the nanny in Mary Poppins and TheSound of Music complete the picture [End Page viii] of "something for everyone." Finally, we have a series of reports on the International Network of Women's Studies Journals meetings at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Canada, during the September 11 crisis, and Bonnie Morris's first-person account of a foremother's introduction to feminist activism.
As spring begins to burst the buds on the gnarled apple branches brought inside to bloom, even as cold and sleet rage outside, as budget woes in North Carolina and across the United States show another side to the militaristic result of September 11, as we look forward to more international feminist cooperation at the Women's Worlds 8th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda, July 2002, we try again to balance our lives with the daily demands, rewards, and challenges we face. May all your balancing acts be as blessed as our successful egg-balancing on March 20.
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Dr. Kathryn Kirkpatrick, Associate Professor of English, has joined the NWSA Journal staff as Associate Editor, replacing Dr. Marilyn Smith, who was needed back in the Department of...