Abstracts

Abstracts EUzabeth Ann Bartlett. Liberty, Equality, Sorority: The Origins and Interpretation of American Feminist Thought: Frances Wright, Sarah Grimké, and Margaret Fuller. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1994. xx + 184 pp. Bartlett analyzes the intellectual roots of three prominent nineteenth-century feminist theorists by focusing mainly on who and what influenced thefr thinking and how men and cultural traditions circumscribed and transformed these women's thoughts and ideas. This ambitious book begins with an examination of each woman's intellectual development and then moves to their feminist thought. Bartlett finds three main themes present in each woman's writings—tiberty, equaUty, and sorority—and explores them in relation to how each of these three feminists understood them. Louise Berliner. Texas Guiñan: Queen of the Nightclubs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. xiii + 221 pp.; ill., film listing. In this biography of New York City's "Queen of the Nightclubs," Berliner uses pubtic and private records to trace Guinan's life from her 1884 birth in Waco, Texas to her death in 1933. Berliner sketches both the past that Guiñan created about herself and the "real" life story, pointing out the myths and contradictions. Berliner situates Guiñan against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties in New York City, the era of early musical comedies , vaudeville, silent westerns, and the city's club life, all of which Guiñan participated in and promoted. Thus this work is as much a study in popular culture and the Jazz Age as a biography of an important early twentieth-century woman. Jeanne Boydston. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. vi + 222 pp. This is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civü War; or more precisely, "a history of women's unpaid domestic labor as a central force in the emergence of an industrialized society in the northeastern United States." Boydston begins with an examination of the early British and Dutch colonies in North America which recognized the economic importance of women's domestic labor. She then fraces the changes in social life that undercut the visibility of women's work by the middle of © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. ι (Spring) 1997 Abstracts 213 the eighteenth century. Chapters two and three focus on the transitions in work and men's roles between the Revolution and the War of 1812. Chapters four through six provide a detailed analysis of antebeUum housework and its relationship to the emergence of an industrial economy. Chapter seven explores the ideological history of housework. Numerous personal letters and memoirs, housekeeping advice literature, and newspaper articles inform this study. Prem Chowdhry. The Veiled Women: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural Haryana 1880-1990. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. 461 pp.; maps, glossary. Chowdhry draws from a wide range of sources including folk songs, oral traditions, interviews, and archival records to discuss the changing position of women in rural Haryana over this past century. She describes the sources of gender conditioning which have made possible women's continued marginatization behind the veil and explores women's complicity in thefr own exploitation by the patriarchal order. This study iUustrates how women have often reinforced their own social inferiority when adherence to patriarchal traditions represents thefr "best chance for survival ." Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, eds. Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture. New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. xvii + 254 pp.; ill. Dunn and Jones seek in their introduction to position this collection of essays at an intersection between feminist Uterary studies, lately interested in women's bodies and (via French feminist theory) women's voice, and a new feminist musical criticism. In fact most of the essayists deal only with literary representations of women's voices or vocalists. These contiibutions range widely, from the gorgon of Pindar to the sirens of Theodore Adorno, from Dante to Madonna. An opening section treats the sUencing of women's voices in texts by Pindar, Dante, Shakespeare, and WiUiam Wordsworth. A second section presents an essay on the seductive voices of Elizabethan boy actors, a...