Latin Women of the Americas

220 Journal of Women's History Spring Latin Women of the Americas K. Lynn Stoner. Latinas of the Americas: A Source Book. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989. Elsa M. Chaney Catherine Lundoff K. Lynn Stoner's bibliography on Latin women of the Americas (including Hispanic women in the United States) is a timely and impressive volume. The bibliography covers the decade 1976-86 and includes works published since the first such bibliography appeared (Women in Spanish America authored by Meri Knaster) plus some earlier, seminal works that have influenced contemporary research. Stoner's volume focusses on both books and periodical articles, as well as unpublished research, on women in Spanish-, Portuguese- and French-speaking Latin America. Stoner's Latinas of the Americas fills a critical need, published at just the time when those wishing recent information on topics related to women in the region had no bibliographical assistance aside from scattered journal articles. The Stoner bibliography has an innovative feature that the Knaster volume lacked: each topical section is preceded by a substantial essay by a specialist in that field that places many of the bibliographical selections in an overall context, showing where the field is now, how it has developed, and suggesting directions for future research. (In Knaster, the lack is partially addressed by the fact that hers is an annotated bibliography, and Stoner's is not.) Some comparison between the Stoner and Knaster works is inevitable. For starters, the Stoner volume lists a truly astounding 3,071 citations; when one considers that the Knaster volume had only 2,534 entries covering works on women appearing since the dawn of the colonial period, and that Stoner's covers (mainly) only one decade, the numbers are even more striking. Even while making allowances for variation because of different parameters for compilation, one must conclude that the large number of entries in Stoner also reflects the explosion of research and writing on Latin women during the decade after Knaster published her book. One example of how research, in certain categories at least, has burgeoned : the Knaster volume lists only 73 references (from 1899 through 1976) under the section "Perspectives on Women's Liberation," and 60 percent of these were published after 1970. In contrast, Stoner lists 213 entries under "Feminist Studies" for the subsequent decade alone. © 1990 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 2 No. ι (Spring) 1990 Book Reviews 221 In her introduction, Stoner maintains that her volume "expands the references beyond the regional and topical scope" used by Knaster. While the coverage in Stoner is excellent, and indeed, she has two additional categories not covered explicitly by Knaster ("Anthologies" and "Demography"), Knaster, nevertheless, has sections on the "Arts," "Ethnological and Community Studies," and "Psychology" that in Stoner are subsumed under other sections. On the plus side, the Stoner volume has added abundant references on Brazil and Haiti, two countries that Knaster did not include. Surprisingly, because the author does not allude to this fact either in her title or her introduction, the Stoner bibliography also has many entries on the English-speaking Caribbean. This "slighting" of the West Indies is compounded by the fact that the country and regional index subsumes all the countries under one rubric, "Caribbean Basin," rather than listing the selections by individual countries. Thus, when I look up the reference, I still do not know whether the country is Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, and so on unless it is mentioned in the title. One final comparison between the two works: entries in the Stoner volume are not annotated, in contrast to Knaster. This is a serious drawback , indeed, in the utility of the bibliography in that titles alone often are deficient in indicating content. For example, we are hard put to understand —without an annotation—why such entries (all under "Household and Family Studies") as Michael Anderson's Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire, Basil Davidson's A History of West Africa or Eugene Genovese's RoIi, Jordan, Roll are included. In fact, these are studies mentioned in the introductory essay, but if one has not consulted it, such entries are simply mystifying. The lack of annotation also prevents the subject index in the...