Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

By Michael P. Bibler
University of Virginia Press

As Michael Bibler mentions in the introduction to Cotton’s Queer Relations, it seems impossible that there could be enough material out there to serve as the basis for such depth of criticism on an incredibly narrow topic. There are a few notable classics that have homoerotic undertones and even some more overt mentions of homosexual encounters that are discussed in works like The Confessions of Nat Turner, but these queer moments seem like blips in what appears to be an otherwise overtly heterosexual literary scape. Is Bibler reading too much into plantation literature? Are his examples only the result of the passionate desire to find queer meaning in texts where none exists? The answer to both questions seems to be no.

Bibler’s arguments are focused and supported with strong evidence from the texts and the work of other critics. But the argument by Bibler is more complex than a simple acknowledgment of the existence of queerness in plantation literature; he argues that the queer subtexts in plantation literature expose wider social injustices in plantation life, and that queer relations also move racial inequality and sexism to the forefront.

Bibler wants to make it clear that same-sex relations here do not necessarily mean homosexual relations. I will allow the reader of Cotton’s Queer Relations to delve more deeply into the complex reasoning behind his assertion; but in a nutshell, he essentially pleads that the closeness of same-sex relations in the textual examples he uses stand in such conflict of the heterosexualized and paternalistic structure of the plantation that they can be defined as queer even if they are not directly homosexual. It is an interesting take, and one that may initially sound like a bit of a stretch.

Terminology notwithstanding, Bibler offers fresh readings of literary classics like Absalom, Absalom! and gives contemporary insight to controversial texts like Styron’s Nat Turner. He digs deep into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is able to juxtapose Big Daddy’s simultaneous tolerance of homosexuality with his unabashed lack of respect toward the black servants he employs, effectively layering new meaning on a well-worn text. He picks apart the relationships of white women and their black servants in the works of Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Margaret Walker, describing them as “romances”—and supports his logic—even though none of the women in the stories share an erotic lesbian moment, or even a kiss. While there are a few minor stretches here and there in Bibler’s text, he overall pleads his case. He certainly does not appear to be afraid of stirring controversy, and does a remarkable job of defending his arguments while he discusses each point.

Review by Emily S. Dunster

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Harvard University Press

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Review by Kari O’Driscoll

Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century

By Thaisa Way
University of Virginia Press

Female hands are all over America's landscape; you just need to know where to look for them. In Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century, author Thaisa Way can direct your eye.

Look to the Memorial Quadrangle at Yale, the grounds of Princeton, or a number of botanical gardens and astronomical observatories to see the legacy of Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872-1959). Recall a youthful American pilgrimage to Disneyland—if you are among the number who has made one—to know the work of Ruth Shellhorn (1909-2005). Stroll past any working or middle-class apartment complex designed with a central, neatly-gardened courtyard to see the lasting influence of Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891-1954), who designed such courtyards with the needs of family members—particularly mothers—in mind; not only can natural beauty be observed from every dwelling, but so can children at play.

Way's concern in Unbounded Practice is not just that significant contributions to landscape architecture have been made by women, but that these contributions have been largely forgotten by current practitioners and require a restorative historical account. An irony that emerges in Way's recounting of women's contribution to the formation of the discipline—critical in its early stages—is that the public conceptions of womanhood were both an inlet for women to practice the discipline and an impetus for them to be disassociated from it. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, pursuits associated with horticulture, such as gardening and botany, were considered appropriate for the sex viewed as intrinsically closer to the earth than its masculine counterpart. This allowed women to enter the discipline with minimal, or no public rebuke, pursuing architectural approaches to design as well as employing acquired botanical knowledge often superior to that of their male peers. As landscape architecture moved towards an alignment with architecture at the expense of being associated with the "craft" of gardening, women were marginalized in the discipline.

Way's history is both a history of women and a history of the formation of a discipline—the key of the book's strength—and her passion as a scholar is evident in the pains she takes in detailing both. A lay reader, or perhaps even a beginning student, may benefit from reading Way's conclusion before embarking on the book proper. There, Way's passion is evident in tone as well as content, and the relatively brief reflection on a hefty scholarly endeavor reads as an accessible orientation to the modern challenges the discipline has faced.

Ten color plates are featured in the book, as well as a wealth of illuminating photographs of work by women pioneering practitioners, slides from lectures delivered by women, period advertisements, and—thrillingly—meticulous plans and client sketches drafted by the women Way profiles. While Unbounded Practice could easily be sourced for perspective on American history, women's history, class structure, ecology, urban studies, fine arts, architecture, and education, one can't help but imagine Way writing this book thinking of the reader who would crack the spine at one such architectural-botanical plan, magnifying glass in hand, connecting back to one of the women who would draft herself a practice.

Review by Kaja Katamay

Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood

By Mark Garrett Cooper
University of Illinois Press

In Universal Women, Professor Cooper launches a multi-disciplinary investigation into the mystery of why it was that Universal Film Manufacturing Company broadly supported women directors during the 1910s before abruptly reversing the policy. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, historical and structuralist interpretations of gender, culture, power, and institutions, Cooper’s study is positioned to show the interrelationship between art and the development of social norms, aesthetics, and political upheaval, and culture and epistemology in the United States.

However, readers looking for a narrative account of women director’s success and subsequent exile from Universal should look elsewhere. Cooper sets up his project by describing a confluence of events and personalities, some of which appear to be only distantly related, that played varying roles in this drama of gender. Some of these are not clearly explained, as when Professor Cooper explains the etymology of a word but does not clearly tie his explanation to the relationship he is trying to describe and defend.

His definitions and explanations take the following pattern: first, Cooper defines a word like “institution” or “organization” with an appeal to the Oxford English Dictionary. He appeals to the historical use of words to explore the concepts that fall under the definition and to point to a kind of etymological necessity: the word organization brings with it an inheritance from biology and so organizations are implicitly naturalized. Then he describes the word in its social development and practical usage. In the case of “organization” Cooper describes different sociological invocations of the word-concept.

Although in the next section, Professor Cooper describes the bi-coastal organization of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, he does not tie this historical description to the linguistic, historical and sociological discussion that preceded it. It seems that the reader is meant to intuit his purposes in such places and to develop the claims herself. I am not opposed to writing styles that foster critical thinking. But Cooper doesn’t make clear his purposes in so defining and explaining (for example). That is to say, I can look up definitions. I have access to the OED. I can read Durkheim and Weber. But I can’t get inside Cooper’s head to figure out what it is he intends by these things.

Reading Cooper’s book is a bit like watching someone’s film depicting a movie being made: it is interesting to see all the “extras” around the set–the camera crew, the lighting, the onlookers, the caterers, the director and producers and the landscape behind the backdrops and facades–but it is difficult to follow the plot of the movie being made.

The book is directed toward an academic audience; readers should be advised to plant their pinkies in the endnotes for quick reference. It will be most intelligible to those trained in film studies or who are such avid consumers of early Hollywood films and trivia that the characters are familiar–I had a hard time keeping track of names. The study is an interesting one, stressing the role that Universal played in interpreting and then enforcing what it means to be gendered as a man or as a woman. It would be interesting to see a slightly more narrative treatment of the subject–even a narrative that made clear the difficulties of narrative for such a diffuse phenomenon as the shifting meanings of gender–in order to appeal to more non-specialists.

Review by kristina grob

Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

By Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck
Oxford University Press

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved people themselves is an urgently needed remedy.

Love of Freedom is grounded in two observations: that slavery was certainly not exclusively southern—that New England, too, had a terrible legacy of enslaving African people, although the circumstances of slavery in this region were distinctive in many respects. The second starting point is that while the people kidnapped and enslaved in New England were disproportionately male, African women’s experience of slavery and of the complicated legacies of African and colonial American patriarchy were similarly distinctive and should be studied independently.

Foremost, Love of Freedom is a thick description of the legal and social status of slavery in the northeastern American colonies and, as such, will serve as an important resource for anyone doing research in the field. The authors point out that the first kidnapped African people were taken to Boston only six years after its founding. Only five years later, in 1641, the Massachussetts Bay colony had the dubious distinction of becoming the first British colony to codify slavery legally. By 1700, the authors estimate a black population of one thousand, half living in Massachusetts. Fortunately for historians, the legal status of enslaved people, particularly women, seems to have been a source of continual legal challenge. The result is that we have a surprisingly rich record of direct testimony from enslaved women.

Directly from the voices of women such as Hagar Blackmore we get an account of being kidnapped away from her family in Angola, transported to Barbardos, and sold to a wealthy merchant in Cambridge. From this woman we learn of the vulnerability of enslaved women to rape, and we get some sense of what it meant to be a survivor. The authors point out that the principle of coverture, a convention of English common law in which women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands, further guaranteed the absence of any sort of reasonable legal protection for enslaved women—or even for free married black women.

As a part of laying to rest the myth of slavery in the north as a benign institution, the book illustrates one manifestation of the idea of coverture. A wife’s killing her husband was, because of established notions of hierarchy, worse than ordinary murder and was, in fact, given a special designation: “petit treason,” for which burning to death was the punishment. Killing a husband—or a master, in the case of enslaved people, was almost—if not quite—on the scale of regicide and was punished accordingly. The book lays out the grim details of human suffering: the archaeological evidence showing widespread malnutrition among black children in the region; the spinal deformations evident among women forced to do laundry, ironing, and household heavy lifting; the forced breeding.

Among the most important archival sources is the record of “freedom suits,” women “seeking possession of their liberty” through manumission or some sort of legal process. Through the testimony extant in these cases, the reader gets a powerful sense of exactly what freedom meant to these women—and what slavery meant. As the authors conclude from these records, “Being stolen from kin and homeland was the central wrong African men and women cited time and again.” And to rectify this crime entailed the re-possession of the self by its rightful owner.

Review by Rick Taylor