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Shorter Book Reviews 381 Mary Emma Harris. The Arts at Black Mountain College. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. 315 pp. Illus. Black Mountain College, North Carolina, an experiment in unauthoritarian education, existed precariously from 1933to 1956. It began as a creative response to personal crises when the classicist John A. Rice lost tenure in 1933. Within months, he and two principled colleagues raised a shoe-string budget to found the College. In the first year, Joseph and Anni Albers, both gifted teachers formerly at the Bauhaus, joined the faculty. For over a decade, these and other academic outsiders and political refugees set the tone with their pioneering dedication and demanding standards. By the late 1940s, after the founders had moved on, communal spirit and self-discipline gradually gave way to parasitic self-seeking. When BMC closed in 1956 the faculty numbered two. Nearly thirteen hundred students had enrolled-at least briefly. Did any graduate? Harris has devoted years to collecting material and preparing this very handsome volume. It is complemented by many photographs, a roster of faculty, students, even staff, a huge bibliography and an index. The illustrations and half the text pages are not numbered, which is inconvenient in a standard reference work. Against the background of the College's organization, administration, curriculum and finances-all continuously in question-Harris chronicles lectures, readings, concerts, plays, ballets, debates, and scores of events at which visiting artists, faculty and students met the tiny community's interest in creative experimental expression and direct intense exchange. During the academic year at BMC, the few dozen students and faculty shared meals, housing, farm work, maintenance and construction labors, and above all, the turmoil of communal self-government. The curriculum, more improvised than planned, put practical experience before theory. Students were not to accumulate information, but to gain intellectual and emotional maturity and, most important, the will to judge. The arts were stressed, not to make artists, but to enlarge experience, foster a disciplined approach and hone the ability to discriminate. One wonders how often this high-minded goal was at risk when a forceful teacher confronted impressionable students. While the book's many pictures held to convey the atmosphere, BMC does not quite come to life. Snap-shots, studio projects, paintings, textiles, pottery, poems are preserved. But, alas, studio-critiques, concerts, plays, ballets, masquerades, the intellectual free-for-all of dining hall debates, leave only faint echoes. Unlike the idiosyncratic and compelling attempt by Dubennan (1972) to evoke life at BMC, Harris' comprehensive work is at times almost reduced to a mere listing of 382 Shorter Book Reviews events and names. Probably something of an "official" history can do no more, especially for an institution that disdained official norms. Harris suggests the legacy of BMC is not a style or orthodoxy, but wider acceptance of experimental creativeness, an attitude diffused by a network of sympathetic students and artists. The education of the individual for life was the College's goal, not the perpetuation of its own influence. Disdaining traditional academic forms and standards, it was clearly on the side of free process and against planning or institutional rationality. Thereby Black Mountain College forfeited the kind of enduring influencewhich more traditional institutions value. Erich Hahn Department of History University of Western Ontario Nancy F. Cott. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. xii + 382 pp. Illus. Historians attempting to accountfor the apparent demise of feminism in the years after women won the vote have erred, Nancy Cott maintains, in lumping together two different, although allied, social phenomena: the suffrage movement as the final manifestation of the nineteenth-century "woman" movement, and the feminist movement of the twentieth century. Only in the 1910s did ''Feminism'' come into the American voe:abulary,and those calling themselves "Feminists" did so to distinguish their broader and more sweeping demands from the more limited goals of the suffragists. "What historians have seen as the demise of feminism in the 1920s was, more accurately," Cott tells us, "the end of the suffrage movement and the early struggle of modem feminism" (10). Her persuasive interpretation will almostcertainly recast scholarship on the history of women in the l920s and beyond...

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