Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (review)

1991 Abstracts and Documents 139 oirs An Unveiled Voice (1988), the Algerian Assia Djebar's "Introduction to Nawal al-Saadawi's Ferdaous" (1983), an interview with the Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, and AUen Douglas's "Reflections of a Feminist" (1986). Many of the authors are not yet known. Many of the excerpts were translated from Arabic or French into English. The anthology presents women of the nineteenth and twentieth century from a geographical area that stretches from Morocco in the West to Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula in the East. The broad range of authors and voices offers a unique opportunity to learn more about the complexity of Arab women's writing styles and themes. "An analysis of Arab women's discourse aUows us to see feminism where we had not previously thought to look." This remarkable coUection of short stories, essays, poems, speeches, interviews, excerpts from novels, etc., gives us an understanding of the Arab world from the women's points of view, an aspert often occulted by the more dominant male discourses. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. New York: Routledge, 1990, 473 pages. This is a valuable coUection for teaching purposes because it brings together otherwise disparate artides on women of color and multicultural aspects of female Ufe in the United States. Of a total of tMrty articles, three focus on native American Indian women; four on Asian American women; five on African American women; and five on Latinas. The rest (13) are on specific topics reflecting the experiences of largely white women across class, cultural, political, or theoretical lines. The majority (dght) in this last category deal primarily with white, working-class women. The remaining discuss the reform activity of middle-class women (three), lesbianism (one), or theory (one). This breakdown generaUy reflects the state of historical research on the four major groups of women of color in the United States. The articles, arranged in a rough chronological order, could be assigned by racial grouping. Of the four sets of women of color, the two largest (with five essays each) on African American women and Latinas form the most coherent segments—again reflecting the greater amount of research that has been done on these women to date. There is a bibfiography for these same four groups of women of color at the end of the volume compüed by Chana Kai Lee and Vicki L. Ruiz. Whüe helpful, instructors should be aware that these bibliographies con- 140 Journal of Women's History Spring tain a number of typographical errors with respert to dates and other publication or author information. The fifth and longest bibliography in the book is not cited in the Table of Contents and so might be missed by casual readers. It is entitled "Additional References for 'Beyond the Search for Sisterhood/ " This bibfiography was compUed by Nancy A. Hewitt and it originaUy foUowed the notes to her artide. In this work it is separated from the artide and readers who encounter it at the end of this work may be confused by its placement. AU of these references were written before the 1985 Hewitt artide and in general seem randomly diosen and hence possibly less valuable for instructional purposes than the other four bibUographies . In their introduction, EUen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz stress "difference—the diversity of women's experiences" (p. xi), arguing that women's history has no choice from this point forward except to offer multifaceted or multicultural perspectives. AdditionaUy, they maintain that this means focusing on "power relations between women of different races, classes and cultures" (p. xii). They prefer the term "multicultural" to "biracial" or "multiradal" because the former impfies that "white history [is] always center stage," whüe the latter more accurately reflects the emphasis of the coUection; that is, the "interplay of many races and cultures ... [and the] suggestion] that 'race' needs to be theorized rather than assumed" (p. xii). According to DuBois and Ruiz, "the multicultural framework for an analysis . .. takes class into account, not as a separate variable, but as an intertwined component of...