Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America

By Lyn C. Macgregor
Cornell University Press

I am really worried about Viroqua, Wisconsin. Not because Lyn C. Macgregor made it the subject of a two-year community study, which she writes about in Habits of the Heartland, but because in a footnote on page forty-eight she mentions that the Utne Reader had an article about the town as a good place to live. In the age of the Internet, attractive places to live do not stay secret long. Combined with the commodification of lifestyle, the publicity can change the character of a locality. I date the demise of my own Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, to gentrification from a recommendation of that same publication that it was a hip place to live. Good luck, Viroqua!

Like the majority of United States residents, I do not live in the country or a small rural town—and my experience with small towns was the romance of “going to town” while vacationing on my grandparents' farm in Jasper County, Illinois. The names of nearby towns—Oblong, Robinson, Paris—recall adventure and mysteries of the beyond—that famous cities do not conjure up.

In Habits of the Heartland, Macgregor jumps right in to address a common claim about small town life, that everyone knows your business. Well, she says, it's true. The clerk at the optician's knew that she had been pulled over for not having a current registration ticket on her plate. It turned out that the clerk was also a member of the ambulance squad and had heard about the incident on the police scanner.

Macgregor reveals her sociological findings right away. She sees not just one but three social groups in Viroqua: the Alternatives, anchored by a Waldorf school; the Main Streeters, active in preservation of the buildings on Main Street and in mitigating the effects of a Wal-Mart on its businesses; and the Regulars, who just want to live there. She introduces these subgroups by recounting how each of them celebrate Halloween, a vibrant explication of their different folkways and values. She then devotes a chapter to each of these groups and concludes Part I with her view of their interactions. In Part II, she slices her research a different way, in terms of civic engagement, retailing, and consumption. Esoteric but still readable comments about her methodology and the place of her study in the sociology of small towns are relegated to an appendix at the end of the book.

Why does an ordinary reader crack open a sociology book? For me, sociology casts a cool eye on one's life lived with others. Macgregor's glance is kind and her accounts gleam with lived experience. She refers to Herbert Gans's Urban Villagers in her appendix. Reading Gans as a young woman, I discovered some of my Italian-American father's quirks were not unique to him but were common in the immigrant Italian communities who settled in the United States.

Macgregor's work, too, gave me an insight about my own counterculture politics. Her argument that people think very differently about community and whether and how it can be made. The vulnerability in this alternative, outside-the-system politics is the potential for isolation from the larger society. Active in a community-supported agriculture group—Viroqua, like Brooklyn, has a lot of them—I bristle when people call this foods movement elitist. Macgregor’s comment, “The Alternatives were proud of all they had accomplished in Viroqua, and this pride made them feel that their deliberately made community was distinctly superior to other organizations and people in town,” stopped me cold. Even alternative communities become just another “gated community” unless they are open to the outside world. Not bad for a book about one small town.

Review by Frances Chapman

The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere

By Pablo Piccato
Duke University Press

A coworker who saw this book sitting on my desk commented, “The tyranny of opinion? Isn’t the whole point of an opinion that it’s free from tyranny?” Not quite. Even today, public opinion can make or break a celebrity’s or politician’s career. In The Tyranny of Opinion, Pablo Piccato weaves an intricate web connecting a variety of aspects of nineteenth century Mexican society, examining the notion of how honor was closely tied to one’s place in society and how public opinion affected people’s public and private lives.

Since honor was one of the most important—if not the most important—form of social capital one could have, people went to great lengths to maintain (or attain) it. Journalists at the time, for example, had a dualistic connection to public opinion. On one hand, they were responsible for publishing the material that helped create it. On the other, many journalists were underpaid and worked in poor conditions, and their upward mobility in society was closely tied to their success as writers. As such, establishing one’s reputation sometimes took precedence over objective reporting, which in turn had an impact on how public opinion was shaped.

Love affairs, student protests, public riots, and duels are also subjects of analysis in the book. Lest one think that he focused solely on the honor of the upper class, Piccato actually covers a broad spectrum of race and class. He is also careful to include a gender-based component in his analysis. Although the book focuses largely on the honor of men, Piccato examines the reasons why women—especially “respectable” women—were largely excluded from public life. In his conclusion, he notes how his analysis regarding women, domesticity, political narratives, and moral economy serve to contribute to a larger academic conversation about these subjects.

Piccato grounds his work in close readings of primary sources, interpreting everything from published newspaper stories to court documents. His knowledge of the historiography on the subject is evident, as is his knowledge of Mexican culture during the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The strength of the book lies in Piccato’s ability to convey the context of his analysis. The Tyranny of Opinion will surely serve as an excellence resource for Mexican history scholars.

Review by Melissa Arjona

The Uterine Health Companion: A Holistic Guide to Lifelong Wellness

By Eve Agee, Ph.D.
Celestial Arts

In The Uterine Health Companion, Dr. Eve Agee brings her training as a medical anthropologist and as a holistic healer to bear on the subject of life-long uterine health. She begins the book by explaining both holistic health and the structure and function of the uterus to her readers. Then she outlines a plan for optimal uterine health, with chapters on emotional/spiritual and mental health, the power of nutrition and the importance of a strong body. In part three, Dr. Agee discusses what she calls “Uterine Health Conditions” and these span from menarche to menopause and beyond. This is a book for women at every stage of re/productive life.

This is also a book for western women specifically. Dr. Agee’s training in Africa has led her to question the disproportionate distribution of uterine maladies from a global perspective. Without ever insinuating that western women have their menstrual woes all in our heads (so common to masculinist approaches to women’s reproductive health, as I’m sure most of you are aware), Agee asks why it is that PMS, endometriosis and hot flashes (to name some examples) are so prevalent in the west but comparatively minimal in the non-western world. Agee indicates that dominant western attitudes about women’s bodies and women’s reproductive systems and abilities have actually contributed to menstrual, reproductive and menopausal illness in the western world. I found that to be the most interesting thing about her book.

I can’t say I learned much about the nature of uterine health conditions or about things to do for optimal uterine health, but I’m a reproductive health geek, so I came to the book with a fair amount of knowledge. Still, the reminder to eat my orange and red veggies was a good one and encouragement to keep up on exercise is always appreciated. The part I just couldn’t do was the holistic bit: I just couldn’t bring myself to do the guided visualizations. Certainly, that had more to do with my own comfort zones. Still, I just wasn’t prepared to enter my uterus and talk to the people/things I met there (though it was fun to tell my mother do to so).

Agee’s style is engaging and easy without being over-simple. A quick read, enjoyable and timely.

Review by kristina grob

Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World

By Hester Eisenstein
Paradigm Publishers

I have been waiting for a book to tell me how things went wrong, how we ended up with lady cops and mothers in combat zones, how “feminist” became an insult. Did we women do it to ourselves, or were we pushed? Hester Eisenstein, professor of sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, has offered Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, which, as promised and despite its flaws, does map elements of the neoliberal project to some “feminist” initiatives, but it is not the book I have been wanting, the one that explains, not so much the academically popular theory of “recuperation,” but how the radical women might have kept the momentum of the women’s movement going and in the right direction.

Let’s get the most obvious major flaw of the book out of the way: the near total omission of lesbian-feminism, a powerful influence in the radical wing of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Though it is like blaming a reporter for the headline on her story to blame Eisenstein for the judgments of her indexer, the lack of an index entry for lesbianism reflects the extreme once-over-lightly she gives to the historical role of this feminist tendency, which cannot be subsumed under “queer theory” or dismissed with “conflicts over suppression of lesbian influence... eventually faded.”

Eisenstein’s nuanced concern about the limitations of the “women of color” construct apparently does not extend to the inability of the category “GLBT” to comfortably incorporate Rita Mae Brown’s “woman-identified woman.” This is a glaring oversight from an author who rightfully chastises a movement which often alienated women of color and working-class women.

Eisenstein’s argument or rather arguments are directed, she insists, mostly at hegemonic, state feminism (an approved version of reform feminism). She views feminism as driving out what she calls “labor feminism,” the initiatives for women within the labor movement that resulted in laws protecting women. Essentially she argues that women’s demands for wage equality, while benefiting professional women, put working- and lower-middle class women into poorly paid service jobs and undermined the expectation of a “family wage.” These feminist demands served to facilitate more direct anti-union activities begun by big business at the same time. (She seems less interested in the exclusion of women from trade unions in the higher paying blue-collar occupations like plumbing and carpentry.) Moreover, feminist emphasis on paid labor undermined women’s work in the home and thus “welfare” programs. On a global level, feminism linked with modernity destroyed traditional societies and allowed access to markets to the forces of globalization, by focusing on such issues as “genital cutting,” which Eisenstein comes close to defending. She charges that the empowerment of individual Third World women through measures such as microfinance has taken the place of state-led development. She then recounts the use of feminist ideology in the promotion of imperialist initiatives, such as President George W. Bush crowing about liberating the women of Afghanistan from Taliban oppression, and in encouragement of Islamophobia.

The author presents a not entirely trustworthy account of feminist history and its continuance in women’s studies and a fairly standard leftist rendition of the neoliberal project—a lot of ground to cover. The reader is left to piece together her thesis from topic-based chapters that operate as silos, disrupting both the narrative history and the argument—without the aid of a Venn diagram.

In the end, she presents a post hoc analysis that stops short of proving her case against even mainstream feminism. Her solutions—maternalism, a socialist state, ACORN, and the California Nurses Association—seem neither particularly feminist nor radical. Perhaps that feminism is best that doesn’t take a gendered view of all the evils of the world but rather gives women the power of agency to uproot them.

Review by Frances Chapman