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Women's Voices in a Man's World
Book Reviews
and therefore disproportionately likely to take to prostitution. They were also considered to be highly fertile and likely to pass on their condition to their offspring. In fact, Bartley’s book is about rather more than prostitution. It considers the management and regimes of Ladies Association training homes for wayward girls, homes for unmarried mothers or institutions for the feeble-minded as well as reformatories for “reclaimed” prostitutes, and in many ways the institutional continuities are striking. Middle- and upper-class anxieties certainly included working-class disorder in general and found that disorder to be differentiated by gender, with women’s delinquency being repeatedly sexualised. Disorderly feminine sexuality was certainly a matter of grave symbolic concern, because it threatened the social stability that was ideologically grounded in the (bourgeois) family. However, whether prostitution was perceived as the core of working-class female delinquency or as one important component of a range of related concerns, for example, “inadequate” mothering, might be debated. Recent literature on the complex constructions of respectability and the late-nineteenthcentury working-class might also nuance the assumptions Bartley makes about the internalisation of the remoralisation messages that preventative organisations such as the Snowdrop Band delivered to working women and girls. It is also difficult to distinguish from the institutional records Bartley uses how far the construct of “feeble-mindedness” disciplined women who were responding to poverty through sexual behaviour that offended dominant norms, as opposed to those who really were intellectually unable to maintain themselves. However, once the “feeble-minded” prostitute (incurable and only partially culpable) had been consigned to institutional seclusion, the social purity movement could feel the more justified in its more punitive measures against the “impenitent” prostitutes it encountered in brothels and on the streets. Overall this is a very useful study that brings together literature on a number of related topics together with the added insights of some detailed empirical research. It will be welcomed by students as well as academics. Shani D’Cruze Department of Humanities and Applied Social Studies Manchester Metropolitan University Cheshire United Kingdom PII S0277-5395(00)00112-6
WOMEN’S VOICES IN A MAN’S WORLD, by Lidwien Kapteijns and Maryan Omar Ali, 224 pages. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Heinemann, 1999. Kapteijns and Ali’s Women’s Voices in a Man’s World is a valuable resource and contribution to the study of gender histories and culture. Moshi (1997) notes that it is by cultural and social design that men are granted a superior status in society and given a voice of authority that is often denied to women. Thus, when the concept of “voice” or “voice of authority” is discussed in the literature it is in relation to “silencing” and is defined as overt or covert prohibition, self-exercised or imposed upon an individual through a limitation or inhibition of voice in the presence of superordinates. The book also
519
adds to discussion on language and gender. Writing on “the silencing of women,” Lakoff (1975) links power with silencing and notes that it is a way of appropriating a quintessential human property: the ability to name and define self and interpretation. She contends that to lack this power is to exist in chaos, with “sense” made of one by someone else, according to their pleasure. In other words, the one who names you usurps your selfdefinition, independence, and coherence. Similarly, Gal (1991) notes that the meaning of “silence” is more complicated than the simple equation of it with powerlessness. It can be used as a strategy to resist an oppressive power (passive resistance) or as a weapon of the powerful to dominate. By using written and oral Somali texts, Kapteijns and Ali explore northern Somali orature between 1899–1980 to discuss the relationship between power and the voice of authority in Somali culture, which is male dominated. Their main aim is to show that though Somali women’s voices may appear muzzled, they can be found in orature (work songs and songs of personal and emotional experiences). They contend that it is often not easy for women to find a voice in the male-dominated superstructure of the society, which is bound by literary canon and social rules and roles. The muted woman’s voice, assigned a passive role in authoring, is exemplified by the limited literary works by Somali women whose orature and songs are authored not by women but by men, who actually compose and sing these songs and poems. This lack of literary power is mirrored in their lack of political power, with rights and responsibilities often mediated by a closest male kin. This book will appeal to researchers of gender issues, specifically in relation to power and voice. In the west, the discussion will obviously focus on how women in the third world have suffered and continue to suffer due to exploitation or subjugation by men. What will be missed and what may emerge in discussion in Africa is whether the voice described here is primary and whether the interpretations may have missed crucial aspects that are not made privy to an outsider. In the case of Somali this would have been taken care of by the expertise of a native speaker whose participatory role is not reduced only to transcribing and translating the texts. It would also have been prudent for the author to indicate that the interpretations, as posited, from Somali women’s narratives, songs, and poems and their relationships with men are not unique to Somalia but exemplify existing power structures that transcend gender and ethnicity. This is even evident in the status of authorship of this book (cf. cover display: LIDWIEN KAPTEIJNS with Maryan Omar Ali) and the disclaimer in the Preface, p. ix–x: “. . . Maryan is therefore a co-author of the transcripts and translations presented in this book [emphasis my own]; the responsibility for the historical analyses and conclusions is exclusively mine.” Needless to say, while “the primary author” is further identified as a professor of History, “the lesser author” remains largely unknown. Considering that the interpretation and final analysis depended on accurate transcriptions and translations of the texts, it is hard to believe that the final analysis and conclusion was not influenced by those first and crucial steps, which included the interpretational judgements of the native speaker, scholar, and co-author. It should
520
Book Reviews
be emphasized that opportunities, responsibilities, and power are taken based on the superstructures already in place; color, ethnicity, and gender play a very small role. Nevertheless, this minor criticism does not take away the valuable knowledge the reader will gain from the interpretation of the texts and their authentic cultural concepts, for which we credit both authors. In sum, this is a far-ranging book whose content is not contained by its title, a volume that stimulates thought as much as it presents historical facts. It will make a good secondary text in a variety of courses across disciplines, particularly in African History, anthropology, and general African Studies.
REFERENCES Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Women’s Place. Harper & Row, New York. Gal, S. 1991. Speech and Silence: the Problematics of Research on Language and Gender. In M. di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Moshi, Lioba. 1997. The Manifestation of Gender in African Languages. In McCaskill (ed.): The Womanist: Theory and Research, 2.1, 11–20. Lioba Moshi University of Georgia Athens, Georgia United States PII S0277-5395(00)00113-8
RIGHTS OF WOMEN: A GUIDE TO THE MOST IMPORTANT UNITED NATIONS TREATIES ON WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS, edited by Vicki J. Semler, Anne S. Walker, Leonora Wiener, Tina Johnson, and Jane Garland Katz, 148 pages. International Women’s Tribune Centre, New York City, 1998. US $15.95 paper. Rights of Women provides general readers who are interested in women’s rights, activists, and academics alike with a coherent and thorough accounting of the international treaties that focus on protection of women’s human rights. The book offers simple and clearly stated means to understand the status and the relevance of human rights treaties within specific cultural settings. It provides a much-needed bridge between theories of women’s rights and practical application of those rights. Too often, despite states’ willingness to ratify conventions and covenants, governments fail to implement. The lack of political will at the national level in most countries forces women into the position of pressuring their governments to adhere to the treaties they have ratified. It invariably falls to women themselves to determine how each of the protections pertains to them. Rights of Women outlines the most salient of the obstructions with regard to implementation, identifies resources for education, and suggests structures for organizing. There are several reasons that this type of resource is particularly valuable to women. First, the divide between international and domestic organizations’ areas of expertise has been virtually absolute in most coun-
tries. In the United States, for example, until the relatively recent past, women’s organizations have defined their areas of competence as either international or domestic. The possibility of ratification and implementation of international protections, if considered at all by domestic women’s organizations, has been viewed as so remote that it offers no reasonable, much less reliable, alternative. This text eliminates much of the mystery surrounding international protections. Second, international human rights treaties protect citizens against violations by their own states; thus, the claims are extra-legal. These extra-legal protections have posed a challenge to traditional international law, which recognized the state as virtually inviolable with regard to its behavior within its own borders. Just so, treaties that protect women’s human rights have, in a number of ways, constituted a challenge to mainstream human rights law. Women are, in effect, “twice removed” from international protections. Women’s freedom is a highly sensitive issue primarily because of the very central and very private role they play in sustaining the social structure. Also, because human rights law is a new and contentious area, international scholars have understandably recognized the need to tread slowly, though resolutely, toward positive integration of all human rights protections. Activists, on the other hand, have worked diligently to provide basic tools for integration such as this text. Third, until the Beijing Conference in 1995, there was little real assurance that women’s rights would, in fact, ever be considered a critical issue within international fora. Subsequent to the Beijing Conference, activity around women’s rights has increased. Yet, sustaining the ground won by dedicated nongovernmental organizations, activists, and scholars over the last several decades will mean continued grassroots effort toward raising awareness among women. Finally, raising awareness is not enough. Women’s voices cannot be heard internationally unless they are informed and unified internationally. Yet, at the same time, their demands must target specific violations within each particular cultural milieu. This text takes seriously the idea that women must educate themselves about their rights relative to their own governments, develop the confidence to argue for implementation of their rights within their own political environment, and formulate strategies to institutionalize their rights given their own unique bureaucratic structures. Rights of Women provides a sound and coherent agenda for meeting those challenges. Rights of Women: A Guide to the Most Important United Nations Treaties on Women’s Human Rights is an invaluable resource written in very clear and uncomplicated language. It is a coherent and accessible text for educating women about the tools available to them and the resources necessary to make use of those tools. It may also be useful as a basic text for introducing the idea of women’s human rights to undergraduate students. Diana G. Zoelle Political Science Department Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Bloomsburg, Pa United States PII S0277-5395(00)00120-5
and therefore disproportionately likely to take to prostitution. They were also considered to be highly fertile and likely to pass on their condition to their offspring. In fact, Bartley’s book is about rather more than prostitution. It considers the management and regimes of Ladies Association training homes for wayward girls, homes for unmarried mothers or institutions for the feeble-minded as well as reformatories for “reclaimed” prostitutes, and in many ways the institutional continuities are striking. Middle- and upper-class anxieties certainly included working-class disorder in general and found that disorder to be differentiated by gender, with women’s delinquency being repeatedly sexualised. Disorderly feminine sexuality was certainly a matter of grave symbolic concern, because it threatened the social stability that was ideologically grounded in the (bourgeois) family. However, whether prostitution was perceived as the core of working-class female delinquency or as one important component of a range of related concerns, for example, “inadequate” mothering, might be debated. Recent literature on the complex constructions of respectability and the late-nineteenthcentury working-class might also nuance the assumptions Bartley makes about the internalisation of the remoralisation messages that preventative organisations such as the Snowdrop Band delivered to working women and girls. It is also difficult to distinguish from the institutional records Bartley uses how far the construct of “feeble-mindedness” disciplined women who were responding to poverty through sexual behaviour that offended dominant norms, as opposed to those who really were intellectually unable to maintain themselves. However, once the “feeble-minded” prostitute (incurable and only partially culpable) had been consigned to institutional seclusion, the social purity movement could feel the more justified in its more punitive measures against the “impenitent” prostitutes it encountered in brothels and on the streets. Overall this is a very useful study that brings together literature on a number of related topics together with the added insights of some detailed empirical research. It will be welcomed by students as well as academics. Shani D’Cruze Department of Humanities and Applied Social Studies Manchester Metropolitan University Cheshire United Kingdom PII S0277-5395(00)00112-6
WOMEN’S VOICES IN A MAN’S WORLD, by Lidwien Kapteijns and Maryan Omar Ali, 224 pages. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Heinemann, 1999. Kapteijns and Ali’s Women’s Voices in a Man’s World is a valuable resource and contribution to the study of gender histories and culture. Moshi (1997) notes that it is by cultural and social design that men are granted a superior status in society and given a voice of authority that is often denied to women. Thus, when the concept of “voice” or “voice of authority” is discussed in the literature it is in relation to “silencing” and is defined as overt or covert prohibition, self-exercised or imposed upon an individual through a limitation or inhibition of voice in the presence of superordinates. The book also
519
adds to discussion on language and gender. Writing on “the silencing of women,” Lakoff (1975) links power with silencing and notes that it is a way of appropriating a quintessential human property: the ability to name and define self and interpretation. She contends that to lack this power is to exist in chaos, with “sense” made of one by someone else, according to their pleasure. In other words, the one who names you usurps your selfdefinition, independence, and coherence. Similarly, Gal (1991) notes that the meaning of “silence” is more complicated than the simple equation of it with powerlessness. It can be used as a strategy to resist an oppressive power (passive resistance) or as a weapon of the powerful to dominate. By using written and oral Somali texts, Kapteijns and Ali explore northern Somali orature between 1899–1980 to discuss the relationship between power and the voice of authority in Somali culture, which is male dominated. Their main aim is to show that though Somali women’s voices may appear muzzled, they can be found in orature (work songs and songs of personal and emotional experiences). They contend that it is often not easy for women to find a voice in the male-dominated superstructure of the society, which is bound by literary canon and social rules and roles. The muted woman’s voice, assigned a passive role in authoring, is exemplified by the limited literary works by Somali women whose orature and songs are authored not by women but by men, who actually compose and sing these songs and poems. This lack of literary power is mirrored in their lack of political power, with rights and responsibilities often mediated by a closest male kin. This book will appeal to researchers of gender issues, specifically in relation to power and voice. In the west, the discussion will obviously focus on how women in the third world have suffered and continue to suffer due to exploitation or subjugation by men. What will be missed and what may emerge in discussion in Africa is whether the voice described here is primary and whether the interpretations may have missed crucial aspects that are not made privy to an outsider. In the case of Somali this would have been taken care of by the expertise of a native speaker whose participatory role is not reduced only to transcribing and translating the texts. It would also have been prudent for the author to indicate that the interpretations, as posited, from Somali women’s narratives, songs, and poems and their relationships with men are not unique to Somalia but exemplify existing power structures that transcend gender and ethnicity. This is even evident in the status of authorship of this book (cf. cover display: LIDWIEN KAPTEIJNS with Maryan Omar Ali) and the disclaimer in the Preface, p. ix–x: “. . . Maryan is therefore a co-author of the transcripts and translations presented in this book [emphasis my own]; the responsibility for the historical analyses and conclusions is exclusively mine.” Needless to say, while “the primary author” is further identified as a professor of History, “the lesser author” remains largely unknown. Considering that the interpretation and final analysis depended on accurate transcriptions and translations of the texts, it is hard to believe that the final analysis and conclusion was not influenced by those first and crucial steps, which included the interpretational judgements of the native speaker, scholar, and co-author. It should
520
Book Reviews
be emphasized that opportunities, responsibilities, and power are taken based on the superstructures already in place; color, ethnicity, and gender play a very small role. Nevertheless, this minor criticism does not take away the valuable knowledge the reader will gain from the interpretation of the texts and their authentic cultural concepts, for which we credit both authors. In sum, this is a far-ranging book whose content is not contained by its title, a volume that stimulates thought as much as it presents historical facts. It will make a good secondary text in a variety of courses across disciplines, particularly in African History, anthropology, and general African Studies.
REFERENCES Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and Women’s Place. Harper & Row, New York. Gal, S. 1991. Speech and Silence: the Problematics of Research on Language and Gender. In M. di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge, Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Moshi, Lioba. 1997. The Manifestation of Gender in African Languages. In McCaskill (ed.): The Womanist: Theory and Research, 2.1, 11–20. Lioba Moshi University of Georgia Athens, Georgia United States PII S0277-5395(00)00113-8
RIGHTS OF WOMEN: A GUIDE TO THE MOST IMPORTANT UNITED NATIONS TREATIES ON WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS, edited by Vicki J. Semler, Anne S. Walker, Leonora Wiener, Tina Johnson, and Jane Garland Katz, 148 pages. International Women’s Tribune Centre, New York City, 1998. US $15.95 paper. Rights of Women provides general readers who are interested in women’s rights, activists, and academics alike with a coherent and thorough accounting of the international treaties that focus on protection of women’s human rights. The book offers simple and clearly stated means to understand the status and the relevance of human rights treaties within specific cultural settings. It provides a much-needed bridge between theories of women’s rights and practical application of those rights. Too often, despite states’ willingness to ratify conventions and covenants, governments fail to implement. The lack of political will at the national level in most countries forces women into the position of pressuring their governments to adhere to the treaties they have ratified. It invariably falls to women themselves to determine how each of the protections pertains to them. Rights of Women outlines the most salient of the obstructions with regard to implementation, identifies resources for education, and suggests structures for organizing. There are several reasons that this type of resource is particularly valuable to women. First, the divide between international and domestic organizations’ areas of expertise has been virtually absolute in most coun-
tries. In the United States, for example, until the relatively recent past, women’s organizations have defined their areas of competence as either international or domestic. The possibility of ratification and implementation of international protections, if considered at all by domestic women’s organizations, has been viewed as so remote that it offers no reasonable, much less reliable, alternative. This text eliminates much of the mystery surrounding international protections. Second, international human rights treaties protect citizens against violations by their own states; thus, the claims are extra-legal. These extra-legal protections have posed a challenge to traditional international law, which recognized the state as virtually inviolable with regard to its behavior within its own borders. Just so, treaties that protect women’s human rights have, in a number of ways, constituted a challenge to mainstream human rights law. Women are, in effect, “twice removed” from international protections. Women’s freedom is a highly sensitive issue primarily because of the very central and very private role they play in sustaining the social structure. Also, because human rights law is a new and contentious area, international scholars have understandably recognized the need to tread slowly, though resolutely, toward positive integration of all human rights protections. Activists, on the other hand, have worked diligently to provide basic tools for integration such as this text. Third, until the Beijing Conference in 1995, there was little real assurance that women’s rights would, in fact, ever be considered a critical issue within international fora. Subsequent to the Beijing Conference, activity around women’s rights has increased. Yet, sustaining the ground won by dedicated nongovernmental organizations, activists, and scholars over the last several decades will mean continued grassroots effort toward raising awareness among women. Finally, raising awareness is not enough. Women’s voices cannot be heard internationally unless they are informed and unified internationally. Yet, at the same time, their demands must target specific violations within each particular cultural milieu. This text takes seriously the idea that women must educate themselves about their rights relative to their own governments, develop the confidence to argue for implementation of their rights within their own political environment, and formulate strategies to institutionalize their rights given their own unique bureaucratic structures. Rights of Women provides a sound and coherent agenda for meeting those challenges. Rights of Women: A Guide to the Most Important United Nations Treaties on Women’s Human Rights is an invaluable resource written in very clear and uncomplicated language. It is a coherent and accessible text for educating women about the tools available to them and the resources necessary to make use of those tools. It may also be useful as a basic text for introducing the idea of women’s human rights to undergraduate students. Diana G. Zoelle Political Science Department Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Bloomsburg, Pa United States PII S0277-5395(00)00120-5