Abstracts of Books

Abstracts of Books General Rachel Bowlby. Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis . London and New York: Routledge, 1992. χ + 185 pp. ISBN 0-415-08639-6 (cl); ISBN 0-415-08640-x (pb). Bowlby moves from women writers of the turn of the century to contemporary feminist theory before coming home again to Freud. Her opening essays treat the variations on the flâneur and passante offered by Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. She passes the impasse of sodal (Foucaultian) and psychological (Lacanian) analysis in m/f, backs up to critique Friedan's construdion of femininity, pauses to note the rhetorical resemblance between theory and advertising, and moves on to treat in two essays the problematic dichotomization of French and Anglo-American feminist thought. These considerations lead her back to psychoanalysis: to the conjunctions and disjunctions between psychoanalysis and feminism, and to the more positive construction of femininity in Freud's 1907 account of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. Peter Burke. History and Social Theory. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1992. ix + 198 pp. ISBN 0-8014-2861-0 (cl); ISBN 0-8014-8100-7 (pb). Burke's guide, a substantial updating of his Sociology and History (1980), offers students an introduction to historians' conceptual borrowings from the sodal sciences and cultural studies (but largely ignores literary theory's contributions to cultural history). After an opening chapter sketching the history of relations between disciplines, Burke discusses basic methodologies (comparison, modeling, quantitative methods, and microhistory), weighing advantages and drawbacks of each method. His longest chapter presents the uses and problems of a range of central concepts (such as class, hegemony, ideology, and myth). He follows this with a discussion of broad concepts that have proven particularly problematic for historians, and closes by evaluating some basic models, centered on Spencerian (evolutionary ) and Marxist (conflict-based) formulations of change. While Burke notes the contributions of feminist scholarship (including "sex and gender" and "family and kinship" as key concepts), such work remains marginal in his presentation. © 1994 Journal of Women-s History, Vol 6 No. ι (Spring) 122 JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY SPRING Valerie Fildes, Lara Marks, and Hilary Marland, eds. Women and Children First: International Maternal and Infant Welfare, 1870-1945. Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine; W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, series editors. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. xxiii + 311 pp. ISBN 0-415-08090-8. The opening essay in this volume attempts to trace international patterns of infant mortality over three quarters of a century, from 1880 to 1950, concluding that hospital births only improved chances of infant survival after the 1930s. The remaining eleven essays offer individual case studies ranging across the world, although heavily favoring Britain and its imperial territories. While the studies range from individual hospital cases to histories of national welfare programs, and from surveys of developments over decades to studies of only a few years, a common thread unites them: a view of medical history in broader sodal contexts. Thus, relationships between hospitals and communities figure in both East London and Johannesburg . Nationalism influences health programs from Ontario to South Africa. Medical professionalization is a factor as much in Australia and Malaya as in the Netherlands. Local conditions and cultures hamper health delivery in Burma as well as in the United States. Stevi Jackson, ed. Women's Studies: Essential Readings. New York: New York University Press, 1993. xv + 525 pp. ISBN 0-8147-4214-9 (cl); ISBN 0-8147-4215-7 (pb). This anthology of brief excerpts divides women's studies into fourteen separately edited and introduced topical sections (variably represented with from six to fifteen readings). Chapter titles include: "Feminist Social Theory," "Woman's Mind," "Cross-Cultural Perspectives," "Historical Perspectives," "Women, Education, and Work," "Sexuality," "Women and the Law," "Public/Private," "Language and Gender," "Feminist Literary Critidsm," and "Representations of Women in the Media." Cindi Katz and Janice Monk, eds. Full Circles: Geographies of Women over the Life Course. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. International Studies of Women and Place series; Janet Momsen and Janice Monk, series editors, xiii + 317 pp.; ill. (tables and graphs). ISBN 0-415-075521 (cl); ISBN 0-415-07562-9 (pb). Focusing...