Woman in the Year 2000 ed. by Maggie Tripp (review)

visitor was. In "The Horseman" one is made to feel the disappointment of die ranch family when the rider waters his horse, asks a direction, and hurries on : In the light 111 LIlC llglll We watch him ascending the height, More strange than the mountains and night. In die "Later Poems" there is greater freedom of form and a greater degree of universality of subject matter. In my opinion one of the best of these is "After Appomattox." It seems completely modern in its phrasing and in its use of implication rather than explication. The admonition in its last two lines has been and will be applicable to all those who after a war wait for the return of the survivors: Listen for a foot on the roadway, A voice at the wide door. In fact, the eleven poems in the section "Later Poems" are strong enough to make one wonder why there were not more poems later yet. One may simply conjecture that the experience of Mrs. Haste's later years did not demand expression in verse as did those that came to her in Billings, Montana. CLARICE SHORT Clarice Short (Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Utah) is author of The Old One and the Wind, a collection of her poems. WOMAN IN THE YEAR 2000 EDITED BY MAGGIE TRIPP (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1976. 340 pages. $2.25.) "Whatever will become of me?" is a question no longer being asked simply by heroines of melodrama, but by women generally, says Maggie Tripp in her introduction to Woman in the Year 2000. 48BOOK REVIEWS This paperback gives the reader twenty-one answers to that question, and while the number of different opinions is not quite twenty-one, nonetheless , these essays present considerable diversity, a diversity that is, in fact, one of the virtues of this book. Tripp makes her own optimism clear in her introduction, noting for example, that people may soon be able to choose the sex of their own children , a development that is part of the scientific revolution that has given women greater chance to be liberated from child-bearing and other biological burdens of the past. What she fails to note are the ominous possibilities this development has for women, if recent reports are correct in indicating that, given a choice, some two-thirds of Americans would choose male rather than female babies. In the first essay, Letty Pogrebin notes this preference, but assumes that it will be a thing of the past by the year 2000. If my own feeling about the state of the world on women's issues placed me in constant mental argument with the introduction and the first essay, I have, still, to admit that we pessimists get our turn — and then some — with the next essay, by Jane Trahey. Trahey, who heads an advertising agency, looks at the images of women projected on TV — "pert, well clad serfs" — and in film — "super whores, ball-breakers, hustler bait. . . ," and decides that we have come a very "short way, baby" with a long way to go. She adds that, considering the small number of women involved in deciding what goes on TV, in film, and into print, women have little to hope for in A.D. 2000. And so it goes throughout the book. Like the three bears' porridge , chairs, and beds, one essay is too optimistic, another too pessimistic, and a third just right. As one might expect in a collection from such a disparate group of writers, styles vary considerably. E.M. Esfandiary's "Transhumans— 2000" is, I hope, a parody of jargon, but I'm doubtful. Trahey's essay, on the other hand, reads like the best in modern advertising — lively and fast-paced; her arguments are developed by a wealth of specific details. Would that some of the others were the same! Which brings me to a second point. The essays need to be documented. Though this is not a "scholarly" text, but rather one intended for the general reader, citation of sources, at least for direct quotations, would be helpful. For example, in the Francouers' essay on sexuality, the authors cite various...