A feminist guide to good reading (original) (raw)

Highlights from this issue.. .

Home cooking
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances by Laura Schenone. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 412 pp., $35.00 hardcover.
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro. New York: The Viking Press, 2004, 306 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Jan Zita Grover

Grinding corn for tortillas, circa 1920. From
A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove.

AS LAURA SHAPIRO WISELY NOTES in the acknowledgments to Something from the Oven, "everybody has a '50s, even those who experienced the decade only through their parents." True to this observation, the '50s that Shapiro constructs are different from those in Laura Schenone's A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove. They're different from mine.

Shapiro, author of the admirable Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986), has again focused on the influences of America's food industry on home cooking. In her earlier book, Shapiro traced the rationalization of cooking through the rise of cooking schools, laboratory nutrition studies, academic home economics/domestic science, and standard measurements for ingredients--the many ways in which food production became more consistent and scientific: "What gave scientific cookery its staying power," Shapiro explains in her new book, "was its partnership with the food industry, which was becoming an ambitious new player in the American kitchen." Something from the Oven picks up Shapiro's narrative in the post-World War II era, which, despite her book's title, Shapiro does not confine to the decade 1950-1960 but rather expands toward that portentous landmark, the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

In the immediate postwar period, Shapiro writes, America's food industry faced its greatest challenge yet: to convert its immense wartime capacity for production to domestic use. This would be done by creating "a peacetime market for wartime foods.... factories were ready to keep right on canning, freezing, and dehydrating food as if the nation's life still depended on it." Baldly put, "What the industry had to do was persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations."

Spam and Treat (fatty canned pork that had been used in C rations), frozen vegetables and fruit (not part of domestic rationing during the war), instant mashed potatoes, frozen ("TV") dinners, and foods subjected to vacuum processing ("originally developed to make penicillin and blood plasma") were war products that made their way onto post-war grocery shelves and into newly installed grocery-store freezers. That, however, was only half the manufacturers' battle: How were they to persuade home cooks to use these foods?

Food historian Harvey Levenstein, in his Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (1992), noted another battlefront that Shapiro does not mention: what a February 2, 1956, New York Times story termed the problem of "the fixed stomach." "Americans could not be persuaded to eat more food," wrote Levenstein. As we now know, the fixed stomach has expanded considerably since 1956, but that's another story--one recounted acerbically by Marion Nestle in Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002). On the way to supersizing fast food and thaw-and-serve restaurant meals, the food industry made considerable inroads via the home kitchen, and it is to it that Shapiro mostly turns. (I say mostly because she has uncovered some cracking good stories about food celebrities of the 1950s-1960s, and she lays down her main story of home cooks almost too readily to recount theirs.) "That moment when the burgeoning food industry confronted millions of American women and tried to refashion them in its own image is the one I explore in this book," she writes.

The efforts of Kraft, Hormel, Swanson's, and other big food manufacturers to remake Americans' home cooking in their own image have already been capably described by Harvey Levenstein. Shapiro is after more elusive prey. She wants to understand how the industrial siege was met by those under attack: American homemakers. This is not so easy to find out as it might seem; how should a historian go about determining the ways that home cooks prepared meals for their families 50 years ago? Few wrote about it. The magazines that many of them picked up in grocery stories--the famous Seven Sisters (Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Women's Day, Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, and Women's Home Companion)--reflected their advertisers' priorities, not their readers'. Other magazines, like Gourmet, Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Town and Country, emphasized more fashionable cooking, yet their recipes' and columns' relationship to what readers actually cooked is unclear.

Brownie Wise, inventor of the Tupperware party, demonstrating
a product. From A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove.

SHAPIRO'S APPROACH TO FINDING home cooks' voices is threefold: she turns to newspaper food columns, like The Boston Globe's "Confidential Chat," a long-running recipe-and-advice swap among readers; community cookbooks; and "hardworking classics [like] Joy of Cooking or the Betty Crocker cookbooks." She also makes use of food industry, government, and advertising market research, which provides some of the book's most interesting data: For example, as late as 1960, a US Department of Agriculture study found that "popular convenience foods--everything from canned spaghetti and frozen orange juice to devil's food cake...accounted for no more than 14 cents of every dollar spent on food." Similarly, a 1960 Parents Magazine reader survey found that "more than half of the subscribers...still baked pies, cakes, and cookies from scratch every week."

Eventually, however, according to Shapiro, industrial food won its battle with American home cooks. Something from the Oven doesn't have a lot to say about this purported victory, perhaps in part because much of the book is given over to Shapiro's discussion of high profile women cookbook writers, real and imaginary: Betty Crocker (Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book [1950]), Poppy Cannon (The Can-Opener Cookbook [1952]), Peg Bracken (The I Hate to Cook Book [1960]), and Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking [1961]). Interesting as this material is, it constitutes a diversion from the story Shapiro promises in her introduction--it explains little about "the question that drove my research...how...women began to renegotiate the terms of domestic life in the context of [paid] work." Unless readers are to assume that the writing careers of Cannon, Bracken, et al. are object lessons in this renegotiation, the unfolding of their paid work says little about how "middle-class women" (Shapiro does not define this term) cooked before, during, and after the postwar era. Poppy Cannon's and Julia Child's grasp of the women they wrote for presented the same conceptual problems that Shapiro faces in her research.

Oddly enough, if anyone seemed to have a grounded, lively, and informed sense of who America's home cooks were, it was that serene specter, Betty Crocker. Like God, Betty Crocker seemed omniscient. And with good reason: General Mills' popular Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book was based on extensive correspondence, interviews, and field observations among home cooks and members of General Mills' staff of home economists.

By the close of Something from the Oven, the rout of home cooking seems assured, writ by Betty Friedan: Apr�s moi, le Hamburger Helper. Shapiro doesn't hint much at the nationwide shift back toward more natural foods and immigrant cuisines, but this is by no means the inevitable result of her research. Shapiro's view of the US seems similar to the view cartoonist Saul Steinberg satirized in his well-known March 29, 1976, New Yorker cover, "View of the World from 9th Avenue." Shapiro ignores the population shift toward the West that began occurring in the 1930s and that by 1960 made California almost as populous as New York State. California's foodways barely figure in Something from the Oven. Had Shapiro looked at what was occurring in home cooking in the West during the postwar years, she would have found, for example, that _Sunset Magazine_--begun early in the 20th century by the Southern Pacific Railroad, then sold to the Lane brothers, who turned it into a visionary testament to western food and gardening--greatly exceeded Gourmet's circulation, promoted the use of a vast number of fruits and vegetables unused elsewhere in the US, and emphasized cooking that was simple (lots of grilling, lots of salad) and based on the freshest ingredients. As far back as the 1933 Sunset All-Western Cook Book, the magazine's food writers had touted regional specialties, farmers' market fruits and vegetables, and recipes for the Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and Japanese foods popular in the West. If the culinary 1950s and 1960s look bleak to Shapiro, in part that's because she does not look much farther west than 9th Avenue.

LAURA SCHENONE'S FIRST BOOK, A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove, also uses recent studies in social and cultural history, recipes, and excerpts from popular magazines and cookbooks to tell its story. Along with her considerable library research, Schenone apparently spent a great deal of time visiting home cooks in every corner of America and cooking alongside them. Most of her informants seem to cook outside the pale of advertising-driven women's magazines; they don't measure their ingredients, and they don't write them down, either: they exude them. Many are country women or women from American subcultures that retain traditional foodways, at least for ceremonial occasions: Nez Perce, Navajo, Creole, Low Country, Japanese, Ashkenazic Jewish, Italian.

One of A Thousand Years' finest achievements is its selection of illustrations, about which I wish Schenone had written. These range from photographs in the Library of Congress' WPA collection to ones from small historical societies to engravings and woodcuts from old cookbooks to reproductions of holographic recipes.

Like Shapiro, Schenone addresses the gains and losses in American kitchens of the 1950s and 1960s. Because she paints with a far broader brush--her book attempts to touch on women's cooking from the close of the last North American ice age to the present--Schenone offers only generalizations about the post-war period, along with her mother's recipe for--a dessert? a salad? maybe both?--Blueberry Cream Salad (lemon gelatin, blueberry pie filling, sour cream, sugar, lemon juice).

Useful parts of a calf's
head. From A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove.

I'm struck by how little either writer has to say about the recipes she mentions or reproduces. In Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America The Joy of Cooking (1996), Anne Mendelson provided an admirable demonstration of the social and cultural history that can be teased out of attentive recipe reading. Applying her method to, say, Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book and the other familiar cookbooks Shapiro cites reveals a great deal about the perceived competencies of their audiences. A close reading of Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Book could have saved Schenone from quoting Bracken's book as if it were an anti-cookbook. Bracken, as Shapiro's careful reading of her recipes and advice reveals, was clearly an accomplished cook adopting the conventions of what Shapiro shrewdly terms "the literature of domestic chaos."

The view from 9th Avenue is a partial one. Besides leaving out the West and the kind of cooking that Easterners would get around to terming California cooking only in the 1980s--better late than never, I guess--it delves insufficiently into the effects of postwar suburban housing and suburban supermarketing on domestic cooking: It wasn't only food manufacturers who reshaped how American women shopped and cooked. But as Laura Shapiro writes, everyone has her '50s. If yours was suburban, southern, or western, I hope to read about it one day.

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Good hair days
Styling Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation by Julia Kirk Blackwelder. College Station, TX: Texas A&M; University Press, 2003, 183 pp., $29.95 hardcover.
Rapunzel's Daughters: What Women's Hair Tells Us About Women's Lives by Rose Weitz. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, 266 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Kathy Davis

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, a white teacher in a predominantly black public school in Brooklyn assigned the children's book Nappy Hair (1997) by African-American author Carolivia Herron to her third-grade class. This well-intentioned attempt to encourage self-esteem among young black girls by celebrating "natural" hair backfired when a parent complained that the images of kinky hair in the book were derogatory and offensive and did not make her daughter feel good about herself. A heated discussion ensued among parents and teachers, with some arguing that the assignment was empowering (in the spirit of "black is beautiful") while others felt it was patronizing and racist (why is a white teacher teaching black children about self-love anyway?). The incident eventually reached the pages of The New York Times, where columnist Clyde Haberman denounced the debate as "an ignorant cry of racism (that) makes all knees jerk." Dismayed at the angry reactions from parents, the teacher asked to be reassigned to another school.

In the college classes I teach, I have used the furor around Nappy Hair as an example of body politics. It illustrates why appearance is never simply an innocuous vehicle for each individual to express her or his identity. Hair is ideally suited to exploring the constraints of femininity, since it often represents power hierarchies among women based on class, race, and ethnicity. As Patricia Hill Collins pointed out in Black Feminist Thought (1990), blue-eyed, blonde, thin, white women can't be considered beautiful without the Other--black women with classical African features, dark skin, and kinky hair. Given that two-thirds of African-American women today straighten their hair, any book celebrating nappy hair is bound to cause a stir. The slogan "black is beautiful" may have gained general acceptance across the color line, but the historical legacy of slavery and racism continues to make hair a source of contention, with different meanings for white people than for people of color.

It was against this backdrop that I read these two new books about hair. Styling Jim Crow is by a historian and documents the development of an African-American beauty culture. Rapunzel's Daughters is by a sociologist and concerns the importance of hair to all women regardless of their class, racial or ethnic background, or sexual orientation. The first book shows how US women's hair and hairstyling practices were strictly segregated along racial lines; the second argues that preoccupation with hair is something all women share.

Three women on the way to their
cosmetology licensing examina-
tion, Austin, Texas, 1940.
From Styling Jim Crow.

In Styling Jim Crow, Julia Kirk Blackwelder traces the evolution of African-American hairstyling techniques, beginning with methods of hair wrapping and braiding that traveled west on slave vessels and were then passed on from mothers to daughters. Throughout the antebellum years, African-American women experimented with recipes for hair care, looking for ways to stimulate hair growth, cure scalp ailments, or tame curly hair. While hair care began as something women did among themselves, it gradually developed into a home industry that operated outside the white-dominated beauty industry. Pioneers like Annie Turnbo Malone and Sarah Breedlove Walker (Madame C. J. Walker) manufactured their own hair care products and built pyramid sales organizations in which representatives were trained to sell products door to door within the black community. These organizations expanded, unencumbered by licensing standards or external controls. By the 1920s, the black beauty industry had entered its "golden age" as a leading sector of African-American business. Beauty salons sprung up in black communities and institutions for educating beauticians who could meet the hair-grooming needs of women of color emerged. In the era of racial segregation, says Blackwelder, hair styling provided one of the only occupations for African-American women outside "field, factory, and kitchen."

BLACKWELDER'S HISTORY of the African-American beauty industry centers around two stories. The first is that of Marjorie Stewart Joyner, one of the first sales representatives for the Madame C. J. Walker Company, whose advertising strategies are the subject of Noliwe Rooks' delightful 1996 book, Hair Raising. In true rags-to-riches fashion, Joyner worked her way up through the ranks, promoting hair care products and demonstrating techniques in hair straightening and styling throughout the US. She later became one of the primary recruiters for students for the Walker School of Beauty and helped set up the first national organization for cosmetology teachers. Well-traveled and with seemingly boundless energy, she became a respected civic leader both within and outside the African-American community, using her position in the beauty culture as well as her friendships with Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt to advance the welfare of African-American women.

The second story is that of the Jemison family, who built the enormously successful Franklin Beauty School in Houston, Texas. Thanks to the sound business instincts of James Jemison, the school thrived in one of the most segregated cities in the US, attracting hundreds of poor young women from rural towns, many of whom had never gotten beyond the 7th grade and had few prospects. Jemision, together with his wife and extended family, taught them a profession that earned them the respect of their community as well as a secure future.

At times, these two case studies were a bit heavy on historical detail for my taste: Blackwelder includes endless lists of hair preparations as well as course plans and letters from family members full of everyday minutiae like "Anita is fine" and "Jim J. is in a mood." But there were also many interesting tidbits that I wouldn't have wanted to miss. I loved the letters that parents wrote to the Jemisons thanking them for taking such good care of their daughters and those from students describing their struggles to finish the training program and their plans and hopes for the future.

Blackwelder demonstrates that segregation, paradoxically, provided space for the black beauty culture to grow. Racial discrimination defined the organization of the beauty industry, barring African-American women from white-owned beauty schools, which did not teach the styling of black hair. However, it also enabled the development of a particular market sector for African-American women, who developed their own techniques and products. The black beauty industry continued to thrive even during the Depression. It wasn't until the 1960s that it hit upon hard times, as integration brought about more stringent licensing laws, the range of professional options for women of color expanded, and, last but not least, a shift in racialized beauty norms brought about an appreciation for "natural" hair styles.

More problematic is Blackwelder's reluctance to examine some of the assumptions behind the mission of "racial uplift." Practitioners in the beauty industry promoted their services and hair care products as a way to "glorify the womanhood of our Race." Blackwelder adopts without question the idea that "carefully groomed hair and immaculate dress armed women against the arrows of racial insults," embodying black women's sense of identity and what they could accomplish in their lives. While she acknowledges that techniques like hair straightening also reflect racialized beauty norms and the historical white devaluation of African women, she is somewhat cavalier about their negative effects.

Nevertheless, her book remains an important contribution to understanding how African-American women (and men), often with great resourcefulness and stamina, negotiated the constraints imposed by Jim Crow and built lives for themselves. She also demonstrates convincingly why no account of beauty culture in the US can be complete unless it confronts the history of racism and racial segregation.

UNLIKE HER EARLIER SCHOLARLY WORKS on women's bodies and health, in Rapunzel's Daughters, Rose Weitz addresses a broad audience on the subject of women's hair. Beginning with her own desire as a child to possess blonde ringlets ("like Shirley Temple") and ending with her dilemma of whether or not to dye her graying hair, she makes it clear that this book is a personal story. But every woman has a hair history that "reflects internal struggles and external pressures." Weitz's book combines her own experiences and informal conversations with interviews with 74 women of different ages, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and class backgrounds. The result is an engaging account of how women feel about their hair, how their feelings have changed over time, and more generally, how their hair has shaped their sense of self.

Weitz situates these "hair histories" in a historical sketch that begins with Greek philosophy and ends with '60s counterculture. In a dizzying series of short leaps, she moves from Jewish veiling practices to the elaborate wigs of 17th-century French aristocrats to the flappers of the 1920s with their bobbed hair. Although she asserts that "ideas about women's hair were divided along racial lines," in the final analysis, she believes that women's preoccupation with hair is about the "the constant struggle to attain an ideal body," which she calls the "central project" in the lives of most American girls and women.

Weitz believes hair is central to every woman's identity, regardless of class, ethnicity or race, sexual orientation, or age. From the woman who cuts her hair after a divorce (in the fashion of "I'm gonna wash that man right outta my hair") to the lesbian with an attitude who shaves her head, women are obsessed with their hair and go to great lengths to tame, curl, dye, style, or remove it. Changing a hairstyle is a way to mark a life transition or to make a statement about wanting to change. As one of Weitz's informants put it: "There were things in my life I couldn't change� and for some reason it was real important for me to change something... So I got my hair cut."

Class photograph, 1937. From Styling Jim Crow.

Weitz is at her best when she gives space to women's stories: the undergraduate who describes in minute detail how she has perfected the "hair flip" in order to "catch a guy's eye"; the migrant woman who gets up early every morning so that she can fix her daughters' hair before going into the fields; the business woman who manipulates her hair to meet the demands of her career ("not too cute, too sexy, too young, too severe, too dated, or too disheveled"); the woman with alopecia (an autoimmune condition resulting in baldness) who laments her "constant paranoia" that her wig might blow off or be on crooked ("You feel like you're living with some dark secret"); and many more. Weitz provides myriad instances of how women can laugh at their "hair problems" and their everyday struggles to make the best of a bad hair day. While she provides examples of women who use hair as part of their rebellion against the traditional norms of heterosexual femininity, she indicates that they do so at their own peril, saying they will be forced to "leave behind not only social approval from men, employers, families, and others, but also the many personal pleasures of hair."

This seems like a high price to pay, but what are those "many personal pleasures of hair"? Weitz is noticeably silent on this subject with the exception of a wonderful chapter entitled "At the Salon." Here she describes in detail the sensual pleasures of having one's hair washed, the comforts of a women-only space, the intimacy of conversations, and even the occasional flirtations with a hairdresser. Beauty salons are--at least for the client--a space where women are cared for.

While I found many of the hair histories in Rapunzel's Daughters familiar, amusing, or touching, I was also irritated by Weitz's constant use of "we," which seemed preachy ("who are you to tell me what I think/feel/should do!") and left me wondering who exactly "we" is. Although she frequently acknowledges that women's hair experiences are shaped by differences in class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, she does this in a way that effaces these differences. A statement like, "While black mothers expect their daughters to suffer for straightened hair, white mothers sometimes expect their daughters to suffer for curly hair" erases the historical context of racism and a racialized beauty ideal, which gives hair-straightening for black women a different meaning and political valence from permanents for white women. She asserts that salons catering to white women specialize in personalized interaction between hairdressers and their clients, while community-style black salons "feel like a family space�and less like a woman's space," but she doesn't elaborate.

Such differences, however, make all the difference in understanding what hair means to different women in different contexts. Although I sometimes wished that Blackwelder had been a little less the historian and elaborated on some of the contradictions within black beauty culture, I would have liked to see Weitz be more the sociologist. When Weitz concludes her book with a reference to Nappy Hair, praising it as an alternative way to think about appearance that will "teach young black girls to take pride in their natural hair," I couldn't help remembering its contested reception in Brooklyn. A sociological analysis could have helped us understand why--at least in the US--a concern for hair does not just unite us; it also divides us.

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"Too Chinese to play a Chinese"
Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905-1961) by Anthony B. Chan. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press/Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 312 pp., $45.00 hardcover.
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russell Gao Hodges. New York: Palgrave, 2004, 284 pp., $27.95 hardcover.
Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work by Philip Liebfried and Chei Mi Lane. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004, 179 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Eithne Johnson

Viennese poster for
Piccadilly. From Anna May Wong (Hodges)

A MOVIE STAR'S LIFE leaves a wake of film performances, publicity materials, fashion photos, and juicy gossip. For biographers, this makes movie stars tempting subjects. However, when there's so much evidence about a life, the biographer has to sift through an enormous amount of material. Anna May Wong appeared in over 60 films and performed onstage all over the world, so tracking the evidence of her life requires travel and translation. As Philip Liebfried and Chei Mi Lane discovered, many of the B movies in which she appeared no longer exist, deemed unworthy of preservation. Thus, these authors relied on other sorts of archival data to support their Wong projects: movie reviews, plot synopses, film studio records, publicity materials, and personal correspondence. Graham Russell Gao Hodges even enlisted a Chinese palm reader to help him understand Anna May Wong.

Why go to the trouble for a minor character actress from the silent-film era who died in 1961? According to Hodges, Wong was, in her time, "one of the most sophisticated women in the world." By bringing Wong back from the margins of the Hollywood star system, these books add to the scholarship that has emerged around minority actors who were cast in stereotypical roles that reflected the racist majority perspectives of the time.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence of a person's existence is the image of her face. These books reprint many photos of Wong: in family portraits, wearing traditional Chinese dress; in glamorous headshots; in film and publicity stills as her characters. These photos seem to tell an American success story: Through luck and pluck, she rose from "laundryman's daughter" to international movie star. Growing up in the film industry's boomtown, she played hooky to attend matinees and to watch movies being made. She once told an interviewer that she was so familiar around movie sets that she was dubbed the "curious Chinese child." After landing her first role as an extra at age 14, she launched herself on a path that was unconventional not only in her Chinese-American family but also for most Americans, since movie work was a new and controversial type of labor, especially for women.

As an Asian character actress, she had to work harder for less than white actors. Irony of ironies, this Chinese-American woman had to watch while her white peers imprinted their hands on the sidewalk outside Grauman's "Chinese Theater" at its opening ceremony. However, as Hodges notes, "If her handprints were not in the cement sidewalk in front of Grauman's, her face was everywhere. Quality photographers lined up to shoot her portrait."

Wong's charisma captivated each of these biographers. A professor of African-American history, Hodges was unfamiliar with Wong until he glimpsed a photo of her in an English bookstore and was mesmerized by "the mystique of Wong." Communications professor Anthony B. Chan repeatedly refers to her as "hip" and "cool," as if inviting his students to join a Wong fan club. He grew up in one himself, since his Chinese-Canadian parents adored her film work. And in their "complete guide" to Wong's performances, Liebfried and Lane gush over her. Their work is a labor of love, providing plot synopses of all the productions--film, radio, stage, and television--in which she is known to have appeared.

Wong appeared in several critically acclaimed films: The Thief of Bagdad with Douglas Fairbanks (1924); Daughter of the Dragon with Warner Oland, best known for playing Charlie Chan (1931); and Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich (1932). Describing her performance in Shanghai Express, Liebfried and Lane remark that if "the Best Supporting Actress Award existed then (it began in 1936), many feel that Anna May Wong would certainly have had a nomination." Their book will be helpful to fans and scholars interested in the breadth of her acting career and in the details of each production.

In addition to film notes and plot synopses, Liebfried and Lane include sample reviews to give the reader a sense of how the critics of the day assessed her performances. Concerned not to repeat the "derogatory terminology" used in the press when referring to Asian actors, Liebfried and Lane censored the reviews, reproducing mostly positive or elided comments. Unfortunately, this editorial decision distorts the evidence. In full, the reviews might have shed more light on her acting abilities and on the variety of opinions about them. The original reviews would also have provided evidence of racism, and they would have shown the kind of language that was used to represent or characterize other races.

CHAN'S AND HODGES' BIOGRAPHIES also recount many of the difficulties racism posed for Wong, as well as her attempts to resist or speak out against prejudice and ignorance. Chan argues that by identifying Wong consistently as "little," critics and industry types were keeping her in her place, since at 5'7" she was as tall or taller than many of her costars, including Douglas Fairbanks. He also quotes from reviews of Piccadilly (1929) in which she was referred to as a "chink" and said to have "reposeful body movements that are certainly her Oriental heritage." As if that's not bad enough, these biographies remind us that white actors were chosen to play lead Asian roles in "yellowface," with their eyes taped back, while Asian actors were relegated to minor parts. Wong was painfully aware of her position in the film industry. Hodges quotes from a letter she wrote to a lifelong friend explaining that she had heard that MGM considered her "too Chinese to play a Chinese," turning her down for a lead role she very much wanted in the 1932 film, The Son-Daughter. Helen Hayes was cast instead, turning in what critic Leonard Maltin calls "one of her most embarrassing performances."

Both Chan and Hodges devote much attention to what they identify as Wong's "erotic" screen appeal. Chan says that she had the "capacity to exude a feverish sexuality," at the same time that he claims she was made to play the erotic-exotic "Oriental" for an implicitly white audience. As an Asian woman, Wong was frequently cast as a "nautch dancer," a term that refers to a dance style drawn from Asian traditions that was meant to titillate westerners. Hodges' book illustrates this point with a photo of a Viennese poster for Piccadilly that features a drawing of a topless Anna May Wong. It may have increased ticket sales, but it was false advertising, since she retains her top in the movie. Like many young women eager for screen time in the 1920s, Wong learned to perform in a spectacularly theatrical way and wore revealing costumes that pushed the boundaries of acceptability. Moreover, she was routinely cast in roles--prostitute and dancer--designed to bring a touch of scandal and sex to the screen. Referring to The Devil Dancer (1927), Hodges notes that the "dancing...of Anna May and the other nautch girls, was enough to make New York State's censorship board require heavy cuts of close-ups of the half-clad women." (In 1934, the industry's Production Code set standards for films in an attempt to keep state censors from cutting up prints.) Given Wong's ambition--she dropped out of high school to act in pictures--she probably recognized an angle as a performer and tried to work it as long as she could. For typed characters like prostitutes and dancers, the final reel usually meant exile or death. Later, Wong found it difficult to get cast for parts that were not of these types. This still happens to genre and character actors. But as Hodges and Chan observe, the fate of Wong's characters may also have been determined by the impossibility of a happy ending for an interracial relationship in western cinema at that time. She was never shown kissing her white male co-stars on screen.

Studying Wong's acting, dancing, gestures, make-up, hair styles, clothing choices, and personal correspondence, Hodges argues that Wong deliberately created a "Chinese persona." That persona also appealed to non-Chinese audiences' fascinated notions of the "Orient": "English girls tinted their faces ivory with ochre color to the 'Wong complexion.' They cut their hair with bangs in the front to achieve the 'Wong haircut.'" In the US, Paramount even advised theaters to "use publicity stunts to make Euro-American girls look Chinese." Early in Wong's career, she reportedly switched from styling herself as a flapper, a style that made her film peers Clara Bow and Louise Brooks famous, to making herself appear more Chinese. In interviews, she said she was proud to be Chinese and deeply influenced by her family's Cantonese traditions. By downplaying her American identity, she may also have sought to capitalize on the ways in which she was already perceived as Other in the western world.

A still from The Thief of Bagdad. From Anna May Wong (Hodges)

FROM THE START, Chan distinguishes his book as the only one "written from a uniquely Asian-American perspective." He certainly is the most qualified to explain many aspects of Chinese and Chinese-American history, areas in which he has expertise. More problematically, he portrays Wong as a positive role model. Indeed, he dedicates his book to potential future readers--"all those Chinese girls adopted by non-Chinese families"--on the assumption that they will learn from her example. Perhaps as a consequence of his positive role-model agenda, he repeatedly fails to examine the provocative questions about race, culture, and environment that he raises. Supporting his thesis causes him to veer away from the task of the biographer--to write a life story. Instead, Wong becomes a construct in his argument: She appears as a naturally superior actor who favored positive roles on screen and lived a model life offscreen in accordance with Chinese-American values. Contradictions abound, especially when Chan tries to position Wong within Confucian and Daoist philosophies: Practically putting ancient quotes in her mouth, he claims she valued education, family, and traditional Chinese culture. Yet she dropped out of high school, moved away from family, and, as Chan himself states, "liberated herself from ethnicity, nationality, and race."

What does it mean to say that Wong "liberated" herself from her race? Some Chinese-American and Chinese critics faulted Wong for "degrading" portrayals of Asians, and they appeared to hold her, not the film industry, responsible for the limited roles she landed. Despite the enormous efforts she made for the China Relief effort in the US, she was snubbed by members of the Chinese-American elite as well as by distinguished Chinese visitors such as Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, who reportedly looked down on her as both American and of Cantonese peasant stock. Wong lived mostly alone or near her youngest brother, Richard. In leaving her ethnic community for an international career, she became marginal to it, removed from the interests and concerns of its people.

Still from Shanghai Express:
Wong's hands were considered
the most beautiful of all Holly-
wood actresses'. From Anna May Wong (Hodges)

While Chan wants Wong to appear noble and chaste offscreen, Hodges explains that Wong's life was full of parties, love affairs, and drinking (which contributed to her early death). According to Hodges, Wong usually became involved with older, married white men such as directors Tod Browning and Richard Eichberg and radio producer Eric Maschwitz. She never married, and Hodges implies that she was a tragic figure, much like the ill-fated women she played on screen, who died over forbidden interracial love.

But perhaps this is too operatic a conclusion for a complex life, even for someone who performed "Madame Butterfly" roles. As both biographers acknowledge, Wong was ambivalent about marriage, especially to an Asian American: If she married, she feared she would be bound by the expectation that a wife would give up her career and independence. Of course, marrying a non-Asian would also have been a problem, because there were laws against miscegenation until 1967. Questions left unexplained are why she chose older married men, and what her alleged affair with Marlene Dietrich meant to her. Chan argues that Wong's lifestyle "predated the idea of the independent European American woman of the late 1950s."

However, both biographers miss a more specific context for understanding Wong's personal life: She lived like other screen actresses. Brooks was promiscuous. Dietrich was bisexual. Greta Garbo was a recluse. Katharine Hepburn carried on a long, open affair with the married Spencer Tracy, yet remained on her own. Wong's biographers fail to consider that she was like other independent-minded women of her generation, who grew up in the heady modern times of the early 20th century but did not fit comfortably into the norm.

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No more shayne maideles
Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories edited by Sandra Bark. New York: Warner Books, 2003, 336 pp., $14.95 paper.

Reviewed by Debra Spark

A flyer advertising Madame Bertha
Kalish as Hamlet. From Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars.

IF A GENDER CAN OWN A LANGUAGE, then women own Yiddish. Or they once did. "Before modern Yiddish culture and literature began to flourish in the later nineteenth century," writes Sandra Bark in the preface to her anthology Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars, "Yiddish was the voice of grandmothers, aunts, and daughters. While men conducted their religious and literary affairs in the holy Hebrew, women lived their lives in Yiddish, raising their children, running their businesses, and bargaining with God in that language." Though the gender divide was never all that neat--many men, including rabbis, spoke Yiddish; a few women, like the rebbitsin (rabbi's wife) or the zogerin (woman prayer leader), knew Hebrew--the basic gender associations were in place until the end of the 19th century, when Yiddish had a sex change. Or, if that's too much to claim, when the language was (in the words of the scholar Irena Klepfisz) "de-feminized." The reasons for the "de-feminization" were complex, related to radical socialism and the Jewish enlightenment, as well as the lingering influence of the 18th-century Chasidic movement, which emphasized an individual's direct relationship with God and ecstatic spirituality. Not surprisingly, "de-feminization" meant "legitimization." In the wake of the re-valuation of the language, Yiddish literature began to flourish--first, during what is called the "classical period," when Mendele Mokher Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem wrote (Aleichem is the creator of Tevye of Fiddler on the Roof); and second, in the post-classical period, when writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, his brother I. J. Singer, and David Bergelson were at work.

And what of women? There were Yiddish women writers--and they published in the same publications as their male counterparts--but they've largely been overlooked in literary histories, and little has found its way into English translation. Ten years ago, a study group in Toronto began to correct this imbalance by publishing Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers (1994). That collection--with its comprehensive feminist introduction to Yiddish literature by Irena Klepfisz and its detailed biographical and bibliographical material--was a first important step in restoring Yiddish women to their place in literary history. Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars is an additional step, offering up, as it does, portraits of women in Yiddish literature. Or perhaps that's not entirely accurate, for if the book showed Jewish women in Yiddish literature, it would have to be more comprehensive, including stereotypical views of women as scolds, helpmeets, and chatterers. There's little of that here. Instead, there are 22 stories--18 by women, six by men--about women who (in the words of editor Sandra Bark) "reach beyond the limits imposed on them by their families, societies, and religion, yet feel bound to their communities."

Since the stories largely portray women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were plenty of limits to overcome. The one that looms largest in the pages of Bark's anthology is the proscription against education. "A girl only needs to learn how to read her prayers and sign her name," says the grandmother in Rachel Korn's memoir, "The Sack with Pink Stripes." Certain prayers are forbidden for girls, as the narrator of Dvora Baron's "Kaddish" discovers. She is not a boy and thus cannot learn the prayer that should be said over the dead. She can't learn it even though her dying grandfather has no male heir who can say the prayer in her place. (And this is a tragedy, for who then will speed his soul along its way in the afterlife?) As for secular education, the mother in the memoir "The Four Ruble War" declares, "A young girl should not study too much. The more she learns, the less she is worth. And the more likely she will become a gray-braided old maid."

The proscription against education points directly to the problem of being born a girl in a culture that valued women primarily as keepers of the home. And yet the pieces in Bark's anthology--some fiction, some nonfiction, which can make for confusion at times--don't read as complaints. Despite everything, the girls and women of this collection are resourceful.

This is most obvious in Isaac Bashevis Singer's well-known story "Yentl," in which a young woman disguises herself as a boy, hiding her identity even from the woman she eventually marries. As Francine Prose writes in her introduction to Beautiful as the Moon,

Read in the context of this anthology, 'Yentl the Yeshiva Boy' seems even more delightful and meaningful than we may have remembered. For the sense of these women's lives that Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars provides makes us realize that Yentl would have had very cogent, very strong reasons--apart from her more inchoate and irrational psychosexual urges and promptings--for wanting to lead the life of a man instead of the much more limited, restricted destiny of a woman. (p. xix)

Other girls make less radical changes to get what they want. When her father won't give her money for her education, the narrator of Helen Lodonyski's "The Four Ruble War" manages to scrounge it herself. The narrator of "Kaddish" learns the kaddish prayer on the sly.

Being denied an education is part and parcel of other denials. When one can't educate oneself, one's purpose in life is circumscribed, as is one's access to various pleasures. This is all the more true in a time when marriages are arranged. Perhaps for this reason, many of the young women in this collection dream not only of education but of romance. Invariably, these stories tell of conflicts between a parent who wants an arranged marriage and a child who wants a marriage of the heart. What's surprising--and what perhaps distinguishes this anthology from _Found Treasures_--is that the women of Beautiful as the Moon sometimes win; they sometimes convince their elders of their needs. This is most striking in Ester Singer Kreitman's "A Satin Coat," in which a daughter prevents a contracted marriage from taking place. Her mother, Rochel, similarly ignores convention by starting "her own dairy as an outlet for her energies." Rochel's work empowers her. It also gives her the physical pleasures that are in such short supply in many of the other stories in Beautiful as the Moon. Kreitman writes, "The cows would express their thanks by licking her hands with their wet tongues. The warm milk in the buckets and the smell of manure in the stable awakened all of Rochel's powers. At such times, she felt she could bend iron with her bare hands."

WHEN THE GIRLS IN THESE STORIES have an opportunity for pleasure--a chance to bathe by a mill, or eat juicy forbidden berries, or pursue an erotic experience--they do so with intense delight. And with fear, for so often their desires and duties conflict. In "The Four Ruble War," the narrator acknowledges, "I walk on new roads toward the future--even though my heart is in pain because my parents' blessings will never accompany me." The pain of such a conflict is clearest in stories that attempt to articulate a character's inchoate longings. In "At the Mill," as Ruchtsi approaches a noisy mill with water running under it, "she felt a slight tug at her heart, as if someone were leaving for some unknown place, the kind of tug--who knows what it wants from you."

The arc of Beautiful as the Moon loosely follows the arc of a woman's life. It starts with stories about young girls then moves to consider women just starting an independent life. In Sholom Aleichem's "Hodel," a daughter eludes the marriage broker, chooses her own husband, and joins him in political exile. In David Bergelson's "Spring," a young woman studying for her examination in the Faculty of Medicine is sidetracked by a trip to see her younger sister's lover. Later in the collection, there are stories about middle-aged women feeling lonely and disconnected in the United States. Finally, there are stories of old women, the most striking of which is Dvora Baron's magical story of "Bubbe Henya," a miracle worker who helps her community avert tragedy. The anthology's stories also loosely follow the life of an Eastern European woman in another way. The stories start in the shtetl and take a detour into Eastern European cities before migrating to the United States and/or Israel.

In the book's preface, Bark writes, "I hope you will read this book as both an engaging piece of literature and an exciting piece of culture." Read purely on literary terms, the anthology is largely strong, though there are some stories--like Yente Serdatzky's "Two Heads" and Blume Lempel's "Scenes on a Bare Canvas"--that seem a bit maudlin (in the case of the former) or poorly constructed (in the case of the latter). With literature in translation, however, it's always unclear whether it's the story or the translation that is to blame for a passage that might strike contemporary readers as weak. A few of these stories are, in moments, overwrought. But on balance the writing in the volume is tight, and the anthology is most certainly a valuable culture experience--and not just because it gives us insight to the lives of our foremothers. If Yiddish literature flourished in the classical and post-classical period, it died during the Holocaust. For a people who didn't have a geographical homeland, Yiddish was, for years, a place to be. And then it was destroyed. Few people speak Yiddish anymore. Beautiful as the Moon doesn't just give voice to unheard women--and it should be noted that some of the volume's pieces have never been published before in English--it exhibits a culture and a literary sensibility that was destroyed. Among the strengths of the collection are the endnotes that accompany each story, providing a bit of information about the author. And what does one learn? That David Bergelson was killed, with many others, in the 1952 Stalinist purge of Yiddish writers. That Dvora Baron spent the end of her life as a shut-in. That no one knows what happened to Fradel Schtok; she may have died in a psychiatric institution. Even if Beautiful as the Moon weren't the interesting read that it is, one would admire it nonetheless for honoring and valuing the lost.

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