Book Reviews 573

L. Van Den Bosch, 257 pages. Routledge, London and New York, 1995.

Though the social formations within which the contributors analyse the representations and material lives of widows are diverse, the theme that unites their analyses is the dis- junction between scriptural-legal injunctions of each politi- cal and cultural regime, and lived realities.

Marjo Buitelaar begins by trying to resolve one of the central quests of such a project: Who or what is a widow? The term applies not just to any woman who has outlived her husband but specifically to the "formerly married woman who had neither male protection nor means of financial support." Therein lay the presumption of asym- metry in gender relations in most of the societies studied. The fact ~that the masculine equivalent of the widow is absent in most classical languages like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and that this absence is corroborated by the statis- tics of most countries in turn suggests that female identities were much more affected by marital status than male iden- tities were. Going by the evidence of Jan Bremmer's essay on the pronunciations and strategies of the Early Christian Church, Rolf H. B remmer ' s analyses of Anglo-Saxon England, and Heleen C. Gall's piece on "European" wid- ows in the Dutch East Indies, most societies appeared to have taken a far keener interest in keeping women married, and thus devised remarriage for widows, than in letting women live autonomous, unmarried lives. The crux of the issue, it is suggested by the individual authors, lay not in the management of the widows' sexuality by itself, but in the property resources she commanded or inherited author- ity over. While matrimonial property systems were in turn inflected by issues of class - - on which D. Hempenius-van Dijk's essay on the legal position of widows in the Dutch Republic is informative - - most states and churches had to contend with women-as-widows particularly in the role of claimants (upon charity) or as contestants. This problemat- ic is again sugges ted in Olwen Huf t on ' s article that explores the larger cluster of women without men - - both widows and spinsters - - in the different sectors of the economies of France and England, and the more general processes by which their economic and social behaviour could be regulated.

Though most of the authors historicise the complex of church and state in Europe, some are inadequate on this score. Willy Jansen 's work is not about Islam but about Algerian widows. L. Van den Boseh ' s work on sati in India, largely based on secondary literature and European accounts, fails to distinguish the processes of political and judicial contests within each household where "widows" were burnt.

The larger question raised by these articles is really not who is a widow, but what counts as marriage in each of the societies concerned. In virtually all the societies of the classical and premodero world with which the articles in this volume are concerned, there were different forms of cohabitation, with differing legal and social consequences. Equally, the institution of slavery revolved around the household and helped to form the "family." Did the unions of such women with their male owners also qualify in the eyes of the Church and the State as marriage? When their masters died, were such women also subsumed under the terms used for widows in those specific languages? Some of the answers might help to explain the process noted by Buitelaar with reference to Ch' ing China: Just when chaste widowhood becomes an attainable ideal for servile and

lower classes, the elite become disdainful of it. Such ques- tions, it is obvious, can only arise when a volume is thought-provoking. Between Poverty and the Pyre fulfils that task admirably.

INDRANI CHA2"rERJEE SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON UNITED KINGDOM

WOMEN AGAINST SLAVERY: THE BRITISH CAMPAIGNS, 1780--1870, by Clare Midgley. Routledge, London, 1995. UKE37.50 hard cover, £12.99 soft cover.

Students of American abolitionism have for many years discussed the direct and clear line of development from antislavery activism to feminism in the United States. In Britain, where no such transparent influence existed, and where women had far less formal power within the move- ment, studies of gender and antislavery have been much slower to appear. Along with studies of women's literature by Moira Ferguson, Clare Midg ley ' s Women Against Slavery, now published in paperback (hard cover was first available in 1992), is a major step toward rectifying this. Midgley provides a detailed account of women's antislav- ery activism from the late-eighteenth-century campaign against the slave trade to the "Freedmen's Aid" movement of the 1860s. Midgley's work is more than simply compen- satory, however. The most important contribution of this book is its analysis of the way expectations about normal gender relations informed the ideology and strategy of the antislavery movement as a whole.

Midgley demonst ra tes convincingly that concerns about gende r were cent ra l to an t i s l ave ry ideology. Abolitionists of both sexes were particularly moved by images of suffering women, and believed that one of slav- ery's worst horrors was its disruption of "proper" gender relations. This gendered concern, Midgley argues, was itself a gendered phenomenon: male and female abolition- ists related to and made use of gnndered images and argu- ments in different ways. British women believed they had a particular responsibility to those of their own sex. This deeply-felt sense of duty provided women with a justifica- tion for participating in activities normally barred to them, such as petitioning parliament. Thus, because of gender inequality within British society, women found it more necessary to make a gendered argument than did men. However, despite facing discrimination in the political sphere, British women antislavery campaigners were most- ly active partisans of the gender order under which they lived. They tended to emphasize the contrast between their own lives and those of the women they sought to represent, rather than drawing parallels between the situation of free White women and slaves, as did American feminist-aboli- tionists, and some British radicals.

Of course, not all women abolitionists could put such distance between themselves and the experience of en- slaved women. An important contribution of this book is its integration of the history of Black antislavery cam- paigners in Britain, including many who were former slaves themselves, into the general history of the antislav- ery movement . Thus Midgley demons t ra tes how the Antiguan-bom slave Mary Prince's petition to parliament was both an effort to secure her own freedom and an integral part of the British antislavery campaigns. She also shows how White abolitionists' suspicion of Black abolitionists'

574 Book Reviews

self-representations circumscribed the efforts of women such as Prince to become fully part of the movement.

The nonspeeialist reader may find herself bogged down in the very extensive biographical and organizational detail provided. This is especially true of the later sections of the book, when the analysis of the gendered meanings of strategic choices and ideological orientations fades in the background in favour of an emphasis on the American- influenced splits in British abolitionism. Nevertheless, Women Against Slavery succeeds in its goal of establishing a "new picture" of the abolitionist movement, in which women occupy the foreground. Most importantly, it does so without romanticizing the women invovled, or down- playing the complexities of their identities and ideologies.

DIANA PATON HISTORY DEPARTMENT

YALE UNIVERSITY UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE WOMAN OF ~ , by Karen Green, 211 pages. Polity Press, Oxford, 1995. UK£39.50 hard cover, £11.95 soft cover.

In this spirited defence of "feminist humanism" (p. 2), Karen Green emphasises the importance of reason and the development of a liberal ethic. The crux of her thesis is the advocacy of a "feminine conception of rationality and objectivity" (p. 3). Her aim is to illustrate the way in which feminism arises from humanism, and she does this by reflecting upon writers as diverse as de Pisan, Hobbes, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and de Beauvoir.

Unfortunately, the choice of writers complicates the task she has set herself. The discussion of Christine de Pisan illustrates this. According to Green, de Pisan's work exemplifies how humanist ideals, if pursued by women, take on a feminist perspective. Yet to categorise de Pisan's work as straightforwardly "feminist" is problematic when considering Sheila Delany's account of her social conser- vatism (cf. p. 38). Green rejects such objections on the grounds that they wed "feminism to current socialist theo- ry" (p. 39). Likewise, she refuses to see de Pisan's support for the institution of marriage as problematic; rather, de Pisan's pragmatism corresponds with Green's belief that marriage has survived because in its structures "woman's desire for the security of her offspring and man's desire to have offspring that he knows are his own, converge" (p. 40). The reluctance to connect the oppression of women with the social structures of a male-dominated society makes for an unconvincing and limited conclusion.

Indeed, using as complex a figure as de Pisan to estab- lish an argument for the humanist basis of feminism almost underlines the problems of any liberal feminist account. To radical feminist ears, there is a certain naivety behind the claim that the greater representation of women in the politi- cal structures of society would lead to the distinctive voices of women being heard (p. 146). Moreover, Green's critique of Rousseau suggests an almost condescending approach to the difficulties that women face in being defined by and for men in a patriarchal society. Whilst recognising the com- plex nature of his work and the feminist response to it, she is reluctant to dismiss Rousseau entirely: "For although he believes that women should be different from men and should not aspire to 'masculine' virtues, he also ascribes a very important place to them in society" (p. 70).

Green does not appear to accept the dangers which lie behind accepting notions of "masculine" and "feminine" as

complementary roles. An analysis of the work of philoso- phers like Rousseau and Kant suggest that such notions often deteriorate into acceptance of an implicit hierarchy in which "masculine" values are paramount, and "feminine" values are denigrated.

For all this, the book offers an important addition to works in the area of feminist philosophy. In reasserting what she sees as the humanist roots of feminist thinking, Green demands a reappraisal of the patriarchal "past," reminding us that women living in male-dominated society have found a voice through the structures of humanism. It remains to be seen whether the difficulties facing a liberal feminist position, grounded in the ideals of humanism, can be overcome.

BEVERLEY CLACK ROEHAMPTON INSTITUTE - - LONDON

UNITED KINGDOM

FEMINIST SUBJECTS, MULTI-MEDIA: CULTURAL METHO- BOLOGIES, edited by Penny Florence and Dee Reynolds. Manchester University Press, 1995. UK£40 hardcover, £14.99 softcover.

The reference to "multi-media" in the title, and the editors' stress in their introduction on their aim of bringing together diverse innovative feminist research, might lead one to expect something different of this book: a consideration of the femi- nist response to new technological developments in the arts and the potential for creative feminist interventions within that field, for example. However, this is not the case. In~ead~ what we get is something more traditional, although nonethe- less stimulating; a collection of essays exploring feminist per- spectives in a limited range of media, with a bias toward painting and film/video, rather than anything that could really be termed mu/t/med/a in the sense in which it is now used.

The feminist rhetoric of the editors sounds familiar: "de-hierarchisation" of all kinds is one of their rallying cries. Hence the essays cover both high and low culture forms, from painting and opera to film and TV; contribu- tions come from both academics and cultural practitioners, writing in a range of perhaps unexpected "voices." So, for example, there is poetry on surrealism from Frances Presley and the text of Penny Florence's own "video poem," based on an actual historical incident in which Edouard Manet painted over the figure of the mother in a Berthe Morisot picture. Griselda Pollock's excellent contribution, "The view from elsewhere," which analyses and relates Manet's A Bar at the Folies Bergere and Cassatt's Woman in Black at the Opera, eschews "straight" art history for the episto- lary form, in which she addresses a "famous professor," a feminist friend, and Mary Cassatt in turn as she explores the meanings of feminist spectatorship. Annette Kuhn con- tributes an, at times, moving and personal meditation on the meanings of parental photography of children, starting from images of herself as a small child. Elizabeth Grosz writes in a more traditionally academic way about the body in psy- choanalytic theory. Whilst this combination and diversity is engaging, whether it is quite as distinctive and unique as claimed is debatable.

As it stands, however, it is both fascinating and highly readable. Many of the essays would provide good starting points for undergraduates or women's studies students at many levels looking to gain a sense of feminist scholarship in the different disciplines in which it deals. Overall, the volume succeeds in providing what Griselda Pollock's arti-