Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKS
Breast cancer was once the disease of silence. A Darker Ribbon, explores 100 years of changing relationships between women, their doctors and society. We've come a long way, but there is still much to be done.PHOTOGRAPHY
Walker Evans photographed the common man and woman with subtlety and elegance as can be seen in a retrospective of his work.
AND CONSIDER THIS
Leslie Stahl's memoir Reporting Live chronicles her life in the fishbowl of news; Edith's Story is a true and moving remembrance of one young woman coming of age during the Holocaust.
Whose Disease Is It Anyhow?
A Darker Ribbon by Ellen Leopold
(Beacon; 334 pages; $27.50; Amazon: $19.25)
"You are being a very silly and stubborn
woman. You ask too many questions. I could have performed the mastectomy
while you were under, and you would not have to go through this
trauma twice and everything would have been fine.'' The speaker
is a surgeon, and he is chiding a woman for refusing to sign a consent
form allowing an immediate radical mastectomy if a biopsy showed
a malignancy. The patient was Rosamund Campion, an editor at Seventeen
magazine, who wrote about her experience in McCall's. (She eventually
found a doctor who performed a simple mastectomy.)
The year was 1971, and though a great deal
has changed in the medical treatment of breast cancer, there
are still troubling economic, political, social and personal issues
surrounding the disease. Subtitled Breast Cancer, Women and Their
Doctors in the Twentieth Century, this history of the intersections
between the medical profession and the illness that for so long
dare not speak its name. The author, Ellen Leopold, has written
about her subject for ten years, and with A Darker Ribbon makes
a powerful argument for challenging the medical industries--and
women--to commit themselves to eradicating the disease.
Leopold traces the responses to the
illness from the late 19th century to our present day, examining
the role of science and the cultural views of the female breast.
A hundred years ago, a woman's suffering and death from breast cancer
was a family matter. The pain was concealed within the home or,
ultimately, within the bedroom of the dying woman. Very few of the
women who had breast cancer wrote about it, and health manuals barely
mentioned the disease. There was a general belief that the "female
malady'' was linked to a woman's nerves, and Leopold points out
that this early victim-blaming may be seen to have survived and
become even more prominent. Implicit in the self-help movement is
a sense of guilt when faced with failure.
Early on, breast cancer became the province
of the surgeon. The most famous practitioner was William Stewart
Halsted of Johns Hopkins Medical School. An innovative and careful
surgeon, he perfected the radical mastectomy that for 75 years remained
the "gold standard'' of treatment. The patient, the woman, put her
breast, her body, her life into the glove-sheathed hands of the
surgeon. To illustrate the relationship between the M.D. and his
female patient, Leopold includes excerpts from letters Rachel Carson
exchanged with her doctors. A careful observer and indefatigable
researcher, Carson was in a better position than most women to confer
with physicians and collaborate in her own care during the three
difficult years until her death in 1964. "Her very attentiveness
to her disease,'' writes Leopold,'' her flattering chronicle of
all its manifestations, were an implicit recognition of its awful
power.''
But still the individual experience was
private, even though more American women than ever were dying from
breast cancer. And here is the paradox. With the increased methods
of early detection, a woman had to take on the sole responsibility
for noticing a lump, a tumor or suspicious change. Yet
once a tumor--malignant or benign-- was detected, she ceased to
have any control over her body. In 1960, Carson had written to her
doctor: "I have a great deal more peace of mind when I feel I know
the facts, even though I might wish they were different.''
It wasn't until the '70s that women began to demand the facts about
their illness. Sadly, as Leopold makes plain, even today they still
do not always get them.
Public awareness grew
as Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan were candid about their mastectomies,
though Leopold notes that Reagan choose the "one-step'' procedure
and was willing to go straight from biopsy to mastectomy rather
than taking time to review test results. Breast cancer moved out
of the closet as brave first-person accounts began showing up in
women's magazines and on television. Admirable and emotionally moving
as they are, for the most part they are personal and turned inward,
holding the "world at bay, while exploring in minute detail the
emotional reverberations of a life-threatening illness.'' The future
looks gloomy, Leopold concludes, and may "be held hostage as much
by political and economic interests as by the continuing slow pace
of research.'' The book poses a troubling question: How should
women, government and society take on responsibility for stopping
this killer of women? It's something we should all be asking.
The People, Yes
The photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) celebrated the nobility
in America's places and in the everyday faces of its people.
A gas station on a lonely road, the quiet main street of a small
town, a tenant farmer's wife tight-lipped and worn by drudgery,
a white-painted country church in the South, a farmer standing in
the doorway of his cabin. Anyone with a Kodak could easily have
taken pictures of these subjects from the Depression era,
and certainly many did. What sets Evans' work apart is the uncompromising
clarity of the pictures, their classical composition and the humanity
and dignity with which he imbued the hard-scrabble rural life during
the Depression era. Most of the time Evans was working can be called
the age of the common man, and he suited the times as well as they
suited him.
These iconic images are among the 175 works on
view at a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum through
May 13. As well, the museum has collected some of his earlier experimental
photography, magazine photo essays from the '40s and '50s and the
color Polaroid prints Evans made in the 1970s. A tireless collector,
Evans had gathered a vast array of postcards and newspaper clippings,
and some of these are on exhibit as well. Together with the 1930s
pictures, they give a fully rounded view of this most democratic
of photographers.
One of his greatest failures became probably
his greatest success. With the writer James Agee, Evans went to
Hale County, Alabama to study three farming families. The result
was the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Less than
200 copies of the original were sold, but today it is considered
a masterpiece. The poignant photographs of the families, their meager
belongings and shabby cabins do not pander, they honor.
Everything and everybody was a potential
subject for Evans. He saw clearly, observed dispassionately, and
put everything on the record. Even today, one looks at the pictures
without a cheapening nostalgia for a vanished past, but with a respect
for the photographer's honesty. For Fortune magazine in 1955, Evans
shot black-and-white closeups of tools. Pliers, a trowel, a wrench,
a crate opener--these aren't normally the stuff of aesthetic admiration.
Evans shows that they can be. Light and shadow play across the cool,
smooth metal, and the curved shapes of handles, and strong angle
of a blade become pure form and design. The viewer can feel
what it is like to hold each implement in the hand, to put it to
the task.
In a brief commentary accompanying the
pictures, Evans wrote that these basic, common tools stand for "elegance,
candor, and purity.'' Much the same could be said for Evans.
Books:
Reporting Live by Lesley Stahl
(Touchstone; 444 pages; $14; Amazon: $11.20)
Leslie Stahl was one of the first women promoted to high-profile assignments in network news, and has stayed at the top of her profession for 25 years. A bestseller when it first appeared, her memoir is newly in paperback and it's a dandy read. When it comes to getting the story, Stahl is tough as they come, and she's just as tough when it comes to writing about herself as a woman with a career, a husband and a daughter. She has a good ear for the amusing anecdote and a sharp eye for the pretentious, and a commitment to getting at the truth. What emerges is a journalist's devotion to craft. She worked hard toget to the top of her profession. Once there, she worked even harder to get better. You go, girl.
Edith's Story by Edith Velmans
(Soho; 239 pages; $25; Amazon: $17.50)
The Van Hessen family knew time was running out for Jews in The
Netherlands. One son, Guus, had been sent to America, but parents,
a son and daughter and the grandmother were caught in the Nazi trap.
The daughter, Edith, was hidden away during the Occupation, but
unlike Anne Frank, she survived.
A psychologist who lives in Massachusetts,
Edith Velmans has written an affecting account of those terrible
days. Part of it is from her diary, faithfully kept until she went
into hiding and it was too dangerous. Protected by a Gentile family,
Edith assumed a new secret identity, but there was always the chance
and the fear of being discovered. Her only contact with her parents
was by letter, written in code as if by friends. In one of his last
letters, her father wrote, "Don't ever let hate, in whatever form,
overpower your soul, because nothing good has ever come of it.''
At the end of the war, Edith and Guus, now an American soldier,
are re-united, the only ones of the family who are alive.
Editor's Note. SeniorWomen.com recently featured a Sighting of Walker Evans photos; here are the links:
A new exhibit of Walker Evans (1903-1975) photos is at New York's Met Museum. It is for the Farm Security Admin (twelve in all at this site) photos that he may be best known as well as his work for the Agee book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. ©
