Thursday, March 25, 2021

Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman - REVIEW


     This is the first biography of Margaret Murray Washington. Outside of the occasional mentions when discussing club work or Booker T. Washington, there is not a single monograph on her life. More specifically, scholars Jacqueline Anne Rouse and Linda Rochell Lane have written brilliant works on Washington. In Rouse’s 1996 article “Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee,” she positioned Washington as a leader who stood independent of her husband Booker T. Washington. Historian Linda Rochell Lane in 2001 adds an invaluable compilation of Washington’s primary documents in A Documentary of Mrs. Booker T. Washington. These studies help us to better understand the need for a complete biography on her legacy. To be sure, the life of Washington is an American saga and broadens our understanding of race in America, higher education, black organizations and the larger Civil Rights Movement.

     Drawing upon black feminist theoretical frameworks and performance theory this book analyzes Washington’s transgressive behavior, particularly with regard to her public activism, which helped construct her personified, gendered identity. At first glance, Washington’s public life consumed her private affairs. However, through a rereading of personal letters and diaries, her most intimate self is revealed. Washington led a rather conservative life, using the tools of positive propaganda to help reshape her own narrative, often sharing just enough to give the illusion of transparency. Similar to other race women, she carried the burden of leadership in silence, oftentimes in direct contradiction to her own needs and desires as a woman.

     Befitting the spouse of a race leader, most of Washington’s social reforms fit into the Tuskegee models of industrial education and self-help. Yet, the public knows very little about the woman behind the man and Institute. For many black feminist historians, a lack of traditional resources has made it difficult to resurrect and retell the important histories of both familiar and obscure black women. In the case of prominent black male leaders, too often the historical impact their wives had on their philosophy of activism is diminished, as was the case with Amy Jacques Garvey. However, her story of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism was contextualized by historian Ula Yvette Taylor. Through a close reading of Amy Garvey’s diaries and personal papers, Taylor told the broader story of Marcus Garvey and Garveyism. What I find particularly engaging and which forms a crucial component of this work, are the ways in which Washington and other black women publicly engaged in this performance of secrecy, and yet worked publicly to broaden our understanding of the intersectionality of what it meant to be black, a woman, a southerner, a wife, a leader and a caregiver, in an often violent and deadly society.

     In the midst of protecting her personal space, Margaret Washington used her platform of leadership to extend the efforts and agenda of Booker T. Washington onto females and children of the race. She expanded the Girls’ curriculum at the Institute, organized Tuskegee’s local women, introduced Mothers’ Meetings into her community and worked with clubwomen across the nation. Washington embodied service leadership and empowered generations of women to do the same.

     The consequences of this new social order proved dire for many African Americans. As a black woman living during the nadir, Lucy Murray understood the limitations that quasi-freedom placed on black bodies. In addition to the legal system, Lucy Murray also had little power to exert her full humanity or femininity due to the racial hierarchy, toxic masculinity and overt poverty, all of which in turn added to her declining health. Yet, her intuitive foresight laid an important foundation for Washington’s activism, as she believed in her ability to exercise power through education. Immediately following emancipation, Lucy Murray ensured her daughters were educated. She used her limited power to provide a better future for her offspring, a privilege not afforded to her mother and countless other mothers during slavery. However, despite her efforts, blacks faced numerous challenges to their freedom.

     The burden of poverty in Mississippi during Reconstruction was debilitating. We learn that a Quaker brother and sister, the Saunders, informally adopted Maggie at the age of seven. While a resident in their home she practiced a strict moral code, strong work ethic, and upheld concepts of thrift. Her exposure to these principals influenced her move to Nashville, Tennessee, where she began her lifelong career as a journalist, orator, educator, and clubwoman.

     Margaret’s rising influence impacted her personal life. Soon after arriving to the campus she began a public relationship with Booker. As the founding Principal of Tuskegee Institute, it was well-known that he was a potential suitor, following the death of his second wife, Olivia America Davidson. Olivia died shortly after giving birth to their second son, Ernest. Booker’s first wife Fannie Smith, also deceased, had given birth to their only daughter Portia. With less than three years at the Institute, Margaret married Booker. Their union was one of service to the greater community. In 1895 Booker gave his famous ”cast down your bucket where you are” speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. He urged both races to work together towards a common good. Following the 1895 death of abolitionist Fredrick Douglass, Booker became the new leader of the race. This placed his marriage to Margaret at the forefront of the larger movement of racial equality. An investigation into their partnership helps to unravel who Margaret Washington became as a woman, a wife, a clubwoman and an educator, while also to better understand the influence of class. The new black elite helped to lay important foundations and perspectives within which Washington and other clubwomen of the nineteenth century saw themselves, allowing Washington and others to check the proverbial boxes of respectability and social acceptability. In essence, the class status afforded her the privilege of reflection.

     As an adult, well into her thirties Washington used lessons from her youth to guide her future aspirations. She often talked about her mother’s insistence on education, the ties to a Quaker upbringing, her college education at Fisk University and her early work in the community. In addition, her marriage to a recognized leader and involvement with black women leaders in the North and South helped to reinforce Washington’s status within the nation and among the black elite. However, her social class did little to mute the violent society in which many blacks found themselves at the turn of the century.

     The impact of racial uplift on black women’s public and private lives cannot be overestimated. Race leaders lacked the social, political, and economic means to change the dominant ideologies of white America. This forced them to create alternative images in order to combat vicious attacks against their womanhood and humanity. The advancement of the race depended on it. This psychological form of protection has been documented by psychologists and historians alike. Black feminist historian Darlene Clarke Hine refers to this practice as dissemblance: “the behavior and attitudes of black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from the oppressors,” and arguably the race. Washington and other intellectual elites worked against the system that attempted to define them solely on their race and sex, in effect creating spaces that protected their womanhood.

     Washington’s activism in the pursuit of racial and economic uplift, and cutting-edge educational philosophies at HBCUs during the Progressive era, were important to her identity. She concerned herself with the development and education of blacks. Historian Audrey Thomas McCluskey reminds us of the long history of black female educators laboring in the Jim Crow South to form HBCUs, such as Lucy Laney’s Haines Institute, Mary McLeod Bethune and the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s Memorial Palmer Institute. These HBCU administrators were collectively committed to education as a means to full citizenship rights, similar to the efforts being carried out by Margaret Washington at Tuskegee Institute. Studies also highlight the transitions made by model schools, initially part of the normal school curriculum, in their evolution into HBCUs. Stressing the importance of experimental learning at these educational centers, Washington saw her work in the community as an extension of her work on campus.

     Thus, Washington’s intellectual and professional work reveals the extent to which black women were deeply influential in the betterment of their community and education of the race. It provides a lens into the internal workings of the black elite, while also complicating the narrative of the woman’s sphere. This study broadens our understanding of race and education in America, revealing how far we have come in terms of race and gender while also challenging us to continue in the pursuits of freedom and diversity of narrative.

     Washington’s social work also provides insight into her deep-seated belief that education started in the home. Due to poverty in her formative years and her mother’s insistence that her daughters become educated, Washington better understood the significance of the professionalization of domesticity. She created advanced curricular programs to meet the needs of her students and community. She knew that in order to be useful citizens, the race needed to understand English and thrift, how to save money, math and gardening, politics and good nutrition. The development of the nation depended on stable homes and the implementation of women’s clubs. She challenged the ways in which curriculum was approached in the twentieth century, laboring in both the classroom and community. Whether she served as president or participated in other positions within the black Women’s Club Movement, her expertise and influence were often solicited and emulated.

Her work with the local chapter of Mothers’ Meetings in Tuskegee, Alabama, and the creation of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club (TWC) are arguably the foundations of her professional career. She used her experience in Tuskegee to expand the Tuskegee Machine through local partnerships. With the collaboration of local Tuskegee women like Cornelia Bowen, Bess Bolden Walcott, and Josephine Washington, the clubwomen created the Mt. Meigs Reformatory for Boys, placed bibles in prisons, championed health awareness throughout the South and established a Red Cross chapter in Tuskegee, among other initiatives. The TWC alone qualified Washington as an intellectual force and community builder. Deplorable conditions in Alabama made it essential for Washington to prioritize the black home. Waiting for the state to honor its post-reconstruction promises proved all too daunting. Washington’s instrumental role in the Tuskegee Machine fills a long-existing gap about her life, especially her work with the Tuskegee Woman’s Club. Through her leadership we learn of the intersectionality of education and home life as measures blacks could implement to advance their own plight within a racist society.

     By the turn of the century, the Tuskegee Machine had a lasting impact on women of the race. Washington worked on local, national, and international platforms to garner support for her educational campaigns, as well as to chastise the race for behaviors she deemed uncivilized, all the while promoting ideas of race progress. The TWC critically reshapes our understanding of Washington’s achievements. She was a stern disciplinarian and a frequently called-upon mentor and organizer. She redefined club work and female activism, through her influence on the campus of Tuskegee and within the community, by ensuring the women were themselves educated in all matters concerning the race.

     There has not been extensive research on her life as it pertains to her presidency of the first national organization of black clubwomen, the National Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, which Washington co-founded in 1895. A number of sources have been written that include information about black Women’s Clubs, particularly the NACW. However, none have placed Washington’s work with this organization at the center of their research. Margaret Washington, like other clubwomen, had the obligation to create sustainable institutions in the midst of hostility and rejection from both whites and blacks. However, because she willingly took leadership positions, she was elected chairwoman, vice-president and the fifth president of the NACW. Under that umbrella, Washington initiated such groups as the Alabama Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1898 and the Southern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1899. Her efforts within the NACW solidified her position as a national leader.

     Paying homage to her journalistic work with the Fisk Herald, Washington established the official publication of the NACW, The National Notes, printed at Tuskegee Institute. As editor of the Notes, Washington encouraged women to establish local clubs of their own. Despite her expertise, she still faced challenges from within. A few clubwomen found her oversight to be too great and mirrored the control her husband had over the race. Washington also faced stiff opposition to the editing and printing of the National Notes at Tuskegee Institute. Numerous attempts were made by clubwomen such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett to relocate the Notes. Despite the protest, the organization’s official organ continued to be printed at Tuskegee until 1922.

     Washington’s international influence and her ideas of Pan-Africanism were only heightened after the 1915 death of her husband. With the onset of America’s involvement in World War I, black soldiers were in direct contact with cultures from around the world. Fully aware of these changes taking place among military men, Washington believed female students deserved a global education as well. She wanted girls to be informed in all matters of society. She promoted ideas of a New Negro woman: a race woman who may not have had the experience of physical travel, but who was well versed in world affairs and in her responsibility to the uplift of the race. This mission became further realized through her club work. Washington created the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR) in 1922, to continue her efforts of community improvement. The organization laid an important context to international partnerships, and the development of Washington’s perspective on issues of race and racism across the globe. Through the ICWDR, she established an agenda that promoted the education of African Americans the world over. She also led initiatives into Haiti that assisted in the education of school age girls.

Sheena Davis is an associate professor of history at Tuskegee University. Her articles have been published in the Alabama Review and the Journal of Southern History.

Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman by Sheena Harris
University of Tennessee Press | ISBN: 978-1-62190-619-3

Friday, March 19, 2021

Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair: REVIEW


Textures
synthesizes research in history, fashion, art, and visual culture to reassess the “hair story” of peoples of African descent. Long a fraught topic for African Americans and others in the diaspora, Black hair is here addressed by artists, barbers, and activists in both its historical perceptions and its ramifications for self and society today. Combs, products, and implements from the collection of hair pioneer Willie Morrow are paired here with masterworks from artists like Sonya Clark, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Alison Saar. Exploring topics such as the preferential treatment of straight hair, the social hierarchies of skin, and the power and politics of display, Textures is a landmark exploration of Black hair and its important, complicated place in the history of African American life and culture.

Sarah J. Rogers, Director of the Kent State University Museum, has over twenty-five years of curatorial and museum management experience in the visual arts, performing arts, and science center arenas. Her curatorial work focuses on contemporary artists, while her management skills have included strategic planning, capital campaigns, and community partnerships.

Textures edited by Tameka Ellington, Joseph L. Underwood, Sarah J. Rogers
Hirmer Publishers | ISBN: 978-3-777-4355-41

Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels: REVIEW


The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central’s shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community and exploring how they help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice. Prickett’s engaging ethnography relates how believers in this longstanding religious community see Islam as a way of life, a comprehensive blueprint for individual and collective action, guiding how to interact with others, conduct business, strive for progress, and cultivate faith.

Prickett offers deep insights into the day-to-day lived religion of the Muslims who call this community home, showing how the mosque provides a system of social support and how believers deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty. Prickett breaks past the stigmas of urban poverty, revealing a complex and vibrant community by telling the stories of longstanding residents of South Central—like Sister Ava, who offers food to the local unhoused people and finds the sacred in her extensive DVD collection. In addition to her portraits of everyday life among Muslims in South Central, Prickett also provides vivid and accessible descriptions of Ramadan and histories of the mosque, situates this community within the larger story of the Nation of Islam, explores gender issues, and unpacks the interaction between African American Muslims and South Asian and Arab American Muslims, revealing both the global and local significance of this religious tradition.

Pamela J. Prickett is an urban ethnographer and assistant professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam

Believing in South Central by Pamela J. Prickett
University of Chicago Press | ISBN: 978-0-226-74728-6

Thursday, March 11, 2021

William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia - REVIEW


      The first full-length biography of William Still, one of the most important leaders of the Underground Railroad.

     William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia is the first major biography of the free black abolitionist William Still, who coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad and was a pillar of the Railroad as a whole. Based in Philadelphia, Still built a reputation as a courageous leader, writer, philanthropist, and guide for fugitive slaves. This monumental work details Still’s life story beginning with his parents’ escape from bondage in the early nineteenth century and continuing through his youth and adulthood as one of the nation’s most important Underground Railroad agents and, later, as an early civil rights pioneer. Still worked personally with Harriet Tubman, assisted the family of John Brown, helped Brown’s associates escape from Harper’s Ferry after their famous raid, and was a rival to Frederick Douglass among nationally prominent African American abolitionists. Still’s life story is told in the broader context of the anti-slavery movement, Philadelphia Quaker and free black history, and the generational conflict that occurred between Still and a younger group of free black activists led by Octavius Catto.

     Unique to this book is an accessible and detailed database of the 995 fugitives Still helped escape from the South to the North and Canada between 1853 and 1861. The database contains twenty different fields―including name, age, gender, skin color, date of escape, place of origin, mode of transportation, and literacy―and serves as a valuable aid for scholars by offering the opportunity to find new information, and therefore a new perspective, on runaway slaves who escaped on the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad. Based on Still’s own writings and a multivariate statistical analysis of the database of the runaways he assisted on their escape to freedom, the book challenges previously accepted interpretations of the Underground Railroad. The audience for William Still is a diverse one, including scholars and general readers interested in the history of the anti-slavery movement and the operation of the Underground Railroad, as well as genealogists tracing African American ancestors.

     William C. Kashatus holds a doctorate in history education from the University of Pennsylvanie. He curated Just Over the Line: Chester County and the Underground Railroad, recognized by The Journal of American History as a "first rate exhibit and model of outrerach to the local community" and winner of the American Association of Historical Societies and Museums Award of Merit. He is the author or co-author of thirty books, including Harriet Tubman: A Biography and In Pursuit of Freedom: Teaching the Underground Railroad.

William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia
 by William C. Kashatus
University of Notre Dame Press | ISBN: 978-0268-200-367

Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism - REVIEW


     Josephine Baker, the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, was both liberated and delightfully undignified, playfully vacillating between allure and colonialist stereotyping. 

     Nicknamed the "Black Venus," "Black Pearl," and "Creole Goddess," Baker blended the sensual and the comedic when taking 1920s Europe by storm. Back home in the United States, Baker's film career brought hope to the Black press that a new cinema centered on Black glamour would come to fruition. In Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism, Terri Simone Francis examines how Baker fashioned her celebrity through cinematic reflexivity, an authorial strategy in which she placed herself, her persona, and her character into visual dialogue. Francis contends that though Baker was an African American actress who lived and worked in France exclusively with a white film company, white costars, white writers, and white directors, she holds monumental significance for African American cinema as the first truly global Black woman film star. Francis also examines the double-talk between Baker and her characters in Le Pompier de Folies Bergère, La Sirène des Tropiques, Zou Zou, Princesse Tam Tam, and The French Way, whose narratives seem to undermine the very stardom they offered. In doing so, Francis artfully illuminates the most resonant links between emergent African American cinephilia, the diverse opinions of Baker in the popular press, and African Americans' broader aspirations for progress toward racial equality. 

     Examining an unexplored aspect of Baker's career, Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism deepens the ongoing conversation about race, gender, and performance in the African diaspora.

     Terri Simone Francis is Associate Professor and Director of the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University

Josephine Baker's Cinematic Prism by Terri Simone Francis
Indiana University Press | ISBN: 978-025322-3388

The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar - REVIEW



     These 250 transcribed and annotated letters reveal the personal and literary life of one of the most highly regarded African American writers and intellectuals

     Paul Laurence Dunbar (1873–1906) was arguably the most famous African American poet, novelist, and dramatist at the turn of the twentieth century and one of the earliest African American writers to receive national recognition and appreciation. Scholars have taken a renewed interest in Dunbar but much is still unknown about this once-famous African American author’s life and literary efforts. Dunbar’s letters to various editors, friends, benefactors, scholars, and family members are crucial to any critical or theoretical understanding of his journey as a writer. His literary correspondence, in particular, records the development of an extraordinary figure whose work reached a broad readership in his lifetime, but not without considerable cost.

     The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar is a collection of 250 letters, transcribed and annotated, that reveal the personal and literary life of one of the most highly regarded African American writers and intellectuals. Editors Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader highlight Dunbar not just as a determined author and master of rhetoric, but also as a young, sensitive, thoughtful, keenly intelligent, and talented writer who battled depression, alcoholism, and tuberculosis as well as rejection and racism. Despite Dunbar’s personal struggles, his literary letters disclose that he was full of hopes and dreams coupled with the resolve to flourish as a writer—at almost any cost, even when it caused controversy.

     Taken together, Dunbar’s letters depict his concerted effort to succeed as an author within an overtly racist literary culture, among sharp divides within the African American intellectual community, and in opposition to the demands of popular public tastes—often dictated by the demands of publishers. This wide-ranging selection of Dunbar’s most relevant literary letters will serve to correct many matters of conjecture about Dunbar’s life, writing, and choices by supplying factual evidence to counter speculation, assumption, and incomplete information.

     Cynathia C. Murillo is instructor in the College of Liberal Arts at Colorado State University where she teaches courses on world literature and interdisciplinary liberal arts.

     Jennifer M. Nader is visiting instructor in the Department of Humanitites and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University where she teaches courses in college writing, literature, technical writing, and business communication.

The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar
 edited by Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader
University of Alabama Press | ISBN: 978-0-8173-2078-2

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood - REVIEW


It is impossible to imagine New Orleans, and by extension American history, without the vibrant and singular Creole culture. In the face of an oppressive white society, members of the Société d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle built a community and held it together through the era of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow terrorism. Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood follows Ludger Boguille, his family, and friends through landmark events from the Haitian Revolution to the birth of jazz that shaped New Orleans and the United States.

The story begins with the author's father rescuing a century's worth of handwritten journals, in French, from a trash hauler's pickup truck. From the journals' pages emerged one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets. Although Louisiana law classified them as men of color, Negroes, and Blacks, the Economie brothers rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all.

A descendant of the Economie's community, author Fatima Shaik has constructed a meticulously detailed nonfiction narrative that reads like an epic novel.

Fatima Shaik was born in the historic Seventh Ward of New Orleans and bred on the oral histories told by her Creole family and neighbors. A former assistant professor at Saint Peter's University (NJ), she worked for more than a decade as a reporter and editor for daily news outlets. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Root, and In These Times. Shaik is a trustee of PEN America and former board member of The Writers Room in New York City. She is the author of six books of fiction. Economy Hall is her first nonfiction work.

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood
 by Fatima Shaik
The Historical New Orleans Collection | ISBN: 978-0-917860-80-5

The Time of Illusion - REVIEW


An analytical account of the nation's political life and key related events and presidential activities during the Nixon years, ascribing to them a logic, coherence, and meaning not discernable at the time.

"By persuasively connecting the Nixon years to the larger dilemmas of our time, Mr. Schell has elevated a shabby political story to the level of tragedy. And one closes his deeply intelligent book not with feelings of vindication or outrage, but with a sense of understanding and equanimity that only tragedy can evoke."
- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times


The Things They Carried - REVIEW


     A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

     Tim O’Brien was already an established writer when he penned The Things They Carried. He had won the National Book Award in 1979 for Going After Cacciato, and subsequent works such as The Nuclear Age were met with much acclaim. The Things They Carried, classified as fiction, recalls many of the incidents O’ Brien witnessed as a soldier in the Vietnam War. In his novel, he names the protagonist after himself and believes the best way to convey the horrific effect of war is to blend elements of fiction and nonfiction. O’Brien uses the words “things” soldiers “carry” as more of an emotional than physical metaphor. The author has been called one of the finest writers ever to focus on the Vietnam War. 

     The Library of Congress 2016 exhibit "America Reads" considers The Things They Carried one of "the most influential books written and read in America and their impact on our lives".

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Mariner | ISBN: 978-0-618-70641-9


Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can - REVIEW


     Two pioneering feminists present a groundbreaking collection recovering a generation's revolutionary insights for today.

     When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women’s consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women’s civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This was the women’s liberation movement, and writing—powerful, personal, and prophetic—was its beating heart. 

     Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works—many long out-of-print and hard to find—that catalyzed and propelled the women’s liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi’s Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life—changes too often taken for granted today—but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved.

     Alix Kates Shulman's 1972 debut novel, the million-copy best seller Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is now a feminist classic. Hailed by The New York Times as: the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society," she has written five novels, three memoirs, a biography of anarchist feminist Emma Goldman, and the collection A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays. Her memoir Drinking the Rain was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and in 2018 she received a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism.

     Honor Moore is the author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury; The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent; The Bishop's Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Award; and three collections of poems. For Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women's Movement. She is on the faculty of the graduate writing program at the New School, where she heads nonfiction.

Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can edited by Alix Kates Shulman & Honor Moore
Library of America | ISBN: 978-1-59853-678-2

Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change - REVIEW


     In 2015, Ellen K. Pao sued a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm, calling out workplace discrimination and retaliation against women and other underrepresented groups. Her suit rocked the tech world—and exposed its toxic culture and its homogeneity. Her message overcame negative PR attacks that took aim at her professional conduct and her personal life, and she won widespread public support—Time hailed her as “the face of change.” Though Pao lost her suit, she revolutionized the conversation at tech offices, in the media, and around the world. In Reset, she tells her full story for the first time.

     The daughter of immigrants, Pao was taught that through hard work she could achieve her dreams. She earned multiple Ivy League degrees, worked at top startups, and in 2005 was recruited by Kleiner Perkins, arguably the world’s leading venture capital firm at the time. In many ways, she did everything right, and yet she and other women and people of color were excluded from success—cut out of decisive meetings and email discussions, uninvited to CEO dinners and lavish networking trips, and had their work undercut or appropriated by male executives. It was time for a system reset.

     After Kleiner, Pao became CEO of reddit, where she took forceful action to change the status quo for the company and its product. She banned revenge porn and unauthorized nude photos—an action other large media sites later followed—and shut down parts of reddit over online harassment. She and seven other women tech leaders formed Project Include, an award-winning nonprofit for accelerating diversity and inclusion in tech. In her book, Pao shines a light on troubling issues that plague today’s workplace and lays out practical, inspiring, and achievable goals for a better future.

     Ellen K. Pao’s Reset is a rallying cry—the story of a whistleblower who aims to empower everyone struggling to be heard, in Silicon Valley and beyond.

     Ellen K. Pao is a tech investor, a diversity and inclusion activist at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, the former CEO of reddit, and a cofounder of the award-winning diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Time, Lenny, and Recode. She has earned an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and law and business degrees from Harvard.

Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change by Ellen K. Pao
Random House Books | ISBN: 978-0-399-59101-3

Wednesday, March 03, 2021

The Great Influenza - REVIEW


 In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide.  It killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision between modern science and epidemic disease.  Magisterial in its breath of perspective and depth of research, The Great Influenza weaves together multiple narratives, with characters ranging from William Welch, founder of Johns Hopkins Medical School, to John D. Rockefeller and Woodrow Wilson. Ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, this crisis provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry (2005)
ISBN 978-0-14-303649-4