Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women's Stories (review)

Reviews 83 described in Ekaterina Slanskaia's (1853-ca. 1904) "House Calls: A Day in the Practice of a Woman Doctor in St. Petersburg." Her graphic depiction of the Ufe of her poverty-stricken patients is a tribute to the writing of the Natural School in the 1840s. Like Kashevarova-Rudneva and Slanskaia, EmiUia Pimenova attended medical courses, having escaped from her home through a fictitious marriage. Eventually, she became a weU-known journalist. Her autobiography is a vivid example of the sacrifices women made in order to achieve individual freedom and become socially useful. Natalia Grot's (1825-1899) memoir was written for her chUdren rather than for publication, and appeared in print only after her death. A gentry woman with traditional views that the wife should dedicate herseU to her husband and children, leaving the professional sphere to men, she expressed the conservative sentiment on the "Woman Question." Grot's views present a sharp contrast to the mostly progressive inclinations in the anthology's other selections. According to the editors, Praskovia Tatlina's (1808-1899) "Reminiscences " is a rare life account written by a member of the middle estate employed in the lower ranks of the bureaucracy. This is a story of a woman who tried to find her self-fulfillment through educating her children and developing in them a sense of independence and secular values. Russia Through Women's Eyes is a superb accomplishment in almost every way. It not only complements the existing Russian women's autobiographical literature in translation, but becomes a major contribution to the study of Russian autobiography in general and women's social history in particular. It highUghts women's relationships to their famiUes and society in the changing political, economic, social, and cultural climate of nineteenth-century Russia, and women's resistance to social suppression and male authority. Clyman's and Vowles' anthology emphasizes the plurality and richness of women's voices and the act of autobiography as a liberating gesture in the struggle for emancipation. Unquestionably, Russia Through Women's Eyes is an outstanding collaborative project of excellent scholars and translators dedicated to the study of women's autobiographies. Larissa Rudova Michael Gorkin and Rafiqa Othman, Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women's Stories. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 234 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-520-20329-1. At a time when there is Uttle to rejoice about in Israel and the Occupied Territories, it is encouraging to know that collaborations such as the one that produced this book are still possible. For several years, Michael Gorkin, an IsraeU clinical psychologist, worked with Rafiqa 84 Biography 21.1 (Winter 1998) Othman, a Palestinian teacher who was the first girl in her village inside Israel to go to college. She had first undertaken to teach Gorkin Arabic, and had then agreed, despite possible risks, to coUaborate first on a project about traditional healers in the West Bank, and later about Muslim Palestinian mothers and daughters in the Jerusalem region. The six oral histories that make up this book reflect the changes that have happened in education (the mothers are illiterate, the daughters educated to various degrees), marriage patterns, women's employment and politicization, and the reactions to such social transformations. The interviewees live close together but in three distinct locations: a viUage in the occupied territories to which the famUy had moved in 1948; a village inside Israel where the famUy had stayed; and a refugee camp. AU of the interviewees talk about the Intifada, or popular uprising of the late 1980s. The couple in Israel seem ambivalent if not opposed to it; the women in the West Bank credit it with changing women's lives, because men were compelled to recognize women's contributions to the struggle as they fought fearlessly against Israeli soldiers unable to retaliate conventionaUy against these unconventional combatants. The mother-daughter pairs selected demonstrate the diversity in life choices, but "what is striking is that not one of the six women in this study questions the right of women to be involved" (5). The first mother-daughter pair are from East Jerusalem. The mother had twelve children, and when she was pregnant for the thirteenth...