White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness by Ruth Frankenberg (review)

Book Reviews 159 Chartres, which Stowe defines as Adams's "great commentary on faith, archi tecture, gender, and the shape of history" (206). Going Abroad distinguishes itself in its keen, penetrating analysis of the intersection of race, class, gender, and nation with travel and travel writing. Stowe's choice of four canonical male writers and only one canonical woman writer, however, partially weakens some of the book's accomplishments. If the first chapters implicitly served to challenge the traditional notion of European travel and travel writing as masculine enterprises, the last ones do little to continue supporting that. Moreover, readers will also note that in his chapters on major writers Stowe at certain points falls back into discussions of the American idea of Europe, one of the commonplaces of former critical studies from which he had promised to escape early in the book. One also wonders why the Europe that Going Abroad strives to construct is constituted by France, England, Germany, and Italy. To be sure, those were the destinations that the nineteenth-century travel ritual compelled most American tourists to visit, but it would have been interesting to see the cultural significance of deviating from the beaten track into such "byways of Europe" (to use the title of one of Bayard Taylor's travelogues) as Portugal, Spain, Greece, and so on. Such reservations aside, without striving to offer a definitive account of the correlations between travel, tourism, and writing in nineteenth-century America, Going Abroad remains nevertheless as one of the most acute overviews of the subject to have been published in recent years. We welcome this new contribution to the field of nineteenth-century American cultural criticism and also hope that it will help to attract a wider readership of scholars and students to the growing area of travel studies. Pere Gifra-Adroher Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) Ruth Frankenberg. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Pp. 289. Ruth Frankenberg's study, White Women, &lee Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, spans a decade in which white women have been 160 Canadian Review of American Studies attempting, without notable success, to meet the challenge that women of colour have been making, and appears at a time when racial issues are once again drawing the attention of American intellectuals and politicians. White Women, Race Matters intervenes in those ongoing, repetitious debates, asking in a sustained way, some crucial questions based on an underlying query: "(How) does racism shape white women's lives?" (5). Frankenberg points out that racism has been seen as a problem belonging to people of colour, and indeed that "race" is often not seen (by whites) as a white people's issue. Explicitly working against the 11 normalized 11 position that makes whiteness invisible, she examines the ways "whiteness refers to a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced" and moreover are "intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of dominance" (6). As the work of an activist socialist feminist, Frankenberg's study of social and self-perception of thirty white women about their understanding of what it means to be white is deeply informed by the ethical and emotional struggles of current feminism. She is not apart from the questions she raises: Frankenberg, with tact and forthrightness (and a refreshing lack of selfcastigation ), makes her own processes of thought, development, change, and methodology part of her analysis. Her intention is explicit: she wants to understand how racial identity is socially constructed for white Americans, and how their understanding of that identity is both a given and changeable. This reflects her desire to help construct a feminism that will be effectively antiracist. Through her interviews with and analysis of white women who are widely diverse in age, class, family situation, sexual orientation, political values and experiences, Frankenberg's study forms a complex treatment of a subject neglected by social scientists, and only recently addressed by white novelists, poets, and cultural critics. Emphasizing how delicately questions needed to be approached lest the interviewee get defensive, Frankenberg takes her subjects through family history, first consciousness of race, and the effects of racialized consciousness on the social and personal...