Women’s Studies Comes of Age

Women's Studies Comes of Age MARY VIPOND Peter Gabriel Filene. Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. 351pp. Annette Kolodny. The Lay of the Land:Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. 185pp. Signs: Journalof Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Volume I, Number 1 (Autumn , 1975). 275 pp. "Women's Studies" seems to be one of those flawed terms which are, ultimately, irreplaceable. What does it mean? That women are the objects of inquiry? That new models and theories are necessary to explain the experience of women? That research is to be coupled with action? The first type ofwomen's studies is almost as old as the various disciplines under which it has always been subsumed, and consists more of intellectual hodgepodge than sustained analysis. It is in the simultaneous accomplishing of the second and third that the "new" women's studies is engaged; modern feminist scholars are attempting to create new models to "explain women in society" and at the same time are striving to "improve their condition." 1 Three consequences follow, all of them well illustrated by the volumes here under review. The task of concurrent explanation and commitment to change necessarily explodes traditional disciplinary and methodological boundaries. Feminist scholars consider themselves, with some justification, to be in the methodological vanguard of their disciplines; they believe they are in a position to offer pointers (Signs) to new, more relevant theoretical models to all their colleagues. The new feminist scholars are also well aware that in order to understand, or to act upon, the position of women in society, it is necessary to study not only the female experience, but as much as possible of the total experience. Thus while the focus is on women, because the picture has been sadly lacking in that perspective, the new women's studies also goes beyond that to study women as an integral part of the social and historical whole. Finally, the new women's studies has lost some of the rhetorical flourishes of its early days. While the pioneering works of Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Shularnith Firestone were illuminating and provocative, they all, to a greater or lesser extent, fell from time to time into outraged polemics about "always all-powerful males and always enfeebled women." 2 As examples of what one may call the second generation of the THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 new scholars on women, the three volumes under consideration here indicate a healthy development from those early days. They are more rigorous, more dispassionate, and more aware of the need to convey the complexities and particularities of the position of women. They well realize that different ages, societies, classes and individuals have acted differently with respect to women. They recognize that the time has come to move away from "generalized analyses and solutions to very specific ones, applicable to a particular society and class."3 Peter Gabriel Filene's Him/Her/Self is a history of middle class sex-role behavior and attitudes in the United States from 1890 to 1970. Filene weaves an intricate tapestry as he endeavours to explain alterations in both attitudes and in realities, for both women and men, over a lengthy period characterized by considerable economic and social change. The study begins at a time when for women the role of "Victorian lady" was already besieged by pressures both internal and external. The middle class mothers of that generation were beset by boredom, "nervousness," and a feeling of parasitism as a result of their restricting roles; increasingly, their daughters attended college and then carved out careers as an alternative to their mothers' destinies. But the choice for the young women of the period from 1890to 1920was stark: either marriage or a career, almost never both. (Even the careers, of course, were in poorly paid "women's" fields, especially teaching.) Throughout the rest of his book, Filene returns again and again to this theme of the choice women were forced to make between careers and families. He argues...