Abstracts of Books

Abstracts of Books General Mark S. Micale. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. 327 pp. ISBN 0-69103717 -5. In this interdisciplinary study on the history of hysteria the author looks at his subject in a twofold manner. The first part of the book is a historiography of hysteria as a medical disease. Drawing from a wealth of writings on hysteria from scholars from various fields (history of medicine , women's studies, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, Uterary criticism ), Mark S. Micale analyses these texts and orders them into interpretative traditions. In the second part the author discusses the cultural history of hysteria. He looks at the ways in which medical opinions have influenced cultural perceptions of hysteria as weU as of disease in general, and vice versa. He concludes that it is impossible to trace these lines of influence with any accuracy and instead suggests a circular model of influence that accounts for the exchange of ideas between the medical profession and the public in general. Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel, eds. London: MacmiUan, 1995, and New York and London: W. W Norton, 1994. Forward by Stanley Sadie. Preface by editors, xli + 548 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-333-515986; 0-393-03487-9. Approximately 300 contributors describe 785 women composers of western classical music born before 1955, from across the centuries and from around the world. Introductory material to the dictionary includes bibliographic studies of women in music before 1900 and in the twentieth century . A thirteen-page chronology ranges from seventh-century B.C. Greek choruses and ninth-century Armenian chants to 1990s opera productions and faculty appointments. The dictionary itself is arranged in alphabetical order in double column pages. Entries range in length from relatively short paragraphs to over two pages. Entries give background information: dates and places of birth and death, parents, husband, and chUdren; and musical and educational histories listing teachers, institutions, and awards. Descriptions in musical terminology and varying degrees of analysis of each woman's compositions figure into each entry. Often entries include lists of works © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 4 (Winter) 188 Journal of Women's History Winter and bibliographies, and less often are accompanied by Ulustrations or excerpts for significant musical scores. Shari L. Thurer. The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 381 pp. ISBN 0-39558415 -0 (cl). Thurer's psychohistory of motherhood in the West reverses centuries of cultural discourse on the subject by focusing on the mother rather than on the chUd. The author reviews motherhood from the Stone Age to the present , giving a sweeping overview that supports her claim that normative descriptions of motherhood dehistoricize and universalize mothering. The overview exposes the myth that has been hardest to shake—the claim that mothers make or break their children's destinies. ChUdren are hardy survivors who make the best of difficult situations. Indeed, misogyny has been most detrimental to chUdren, for they are abandoned when wives are, and female children are exposed or aborted when mothers are devalued . ChUdren suffer most when their mothers do; unless a society values women as people, rather than as wombs, good mothering remains out of reach. North America Rose Cohen. Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. Introduction by Thomas Dublin. New York: Doran, 1918. Documents in American Social History Series; Editor Nick Salvatore. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, reprint. 1995. xxi + 313 pp; ill. ISBN 0-8014-8268-2. Rahel GoUup, the subject of this narrative, came from a Jewish family in Russia to New York when only twelve and worked long hours as a seamstress to help her father earn the money to send for more of the famüy. Buying some books in Yiddish and attending some settlement house classes in English she became literate in two languages. But because of illness, economic difficulties, and unsatisfactory suitors she spent much of her later life in hospitals. The author, who summarizes some of her experiences in the book, was a resident of the MacDoweU Colony for writers...