Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKSWomen's lives are expertly and revealingly chronicled in Rebels in White Gloves by journalist Miriam Horn. The fortunes and misfortunes of the 1969 graduating class of Wellesley College are set against the changing times, and though Hillary Rodham is the best-known of the group, she's not the focus.
BOOKS
Germaine Greer won't go quietly, and why should she? Outrageous and
outspoken, Greer has waited 30 years to come up with a sequel to The
Female Eunuch, and it's The Whole Woman. Nothing has gotten
better, she declares, only worse. Like her or not, agree with her or not,
Greer is impossible to ignore.
FILM
Sentiment is laid on with a trowel, and the direction by Franco Zeffirelli,
whose autobiography this is, abruptly fast-forwards in time. But there
are performances to savor as three British actresses and Cher take the
cake in Tea with Mussolini.
AND CONSIDER THIS
Make no mistake, Chris Connor is one of the best jazz singers ever,
and Warm Cool: The Atlantic Years has 20 numbers from 1956 to 1962
that prove it. Single No More by Ellen Kreidman is a road map for
finding love and commitment. They aren't necessarily the same.
Senior Class Picture
Rebels in White Gloves by Miriam Horn (Times Books; 328 pages; $24)
While the young women
of the 1969 senior class of Wellesley were taking final exams and getting
ready to don their graduation caps and gowns, the world they knew
was turning upside down. The war in Vietnam was escalating, and
so were the protests. It was the year of Woodstock, man's first walk on
the moon, and the Stonewall riots that triggered the gay rights movement.
The first issue of Penthouse magazine hit newsstands in September,
and that same month, a California supreme court would struck down the state's
anti-abortion law.
After four years of
an expensive education at an elite women's college, the 420 graduates with
families and friends around them listened on a sunny June afternoon to
their class speaker question "inauthentic reality." The earnest young woman
announced a goal of her generation: "We're searching for more immediate,
ecstatic and penetrating modes of living." At the end of the ceremony,
one classmate told her mother, "Take a good look at her.
She will probably be the President of the United
States some day." The speaker was Hillary Rodham, and she hasn't become
President--yet--though by marrying she's come as close to the office as
a woman can.
A senior writer for
U.S.
News and World Report, Horn traces the past and present of Hillary's
classmates and sets their stories against the changing currents of the
times. The class of '69 exemplified many of the expectations of women of
their generation. They were a gifted group, and, for the most part, were
the most privileged of females: white, well-to-do and cushioned by money
and family position. Many hoped for the 'ring before spring', and anticipated
having a life not much different from that of their mothers. They
altered--and were altered by--shifting attitudes about sex and marriage,
power and politics, race and gender. The girls who wore demure white
gloves at college, tore them off with a vengeance after graduation.
Rebels in White
Gloves is a revealing portrait of three decades in America, and rest assured,
it is not another tiresome look at Hillary and her questionable journey
to the White House via Arkansas. As author Miriam Horn notes, "She is,
even by her classmates, pitied as much as admired. But what of the others?
In breaching the domestic wall, have her closest
peers mostly enjoyed, or mostly suffered, the
new possibilities their generation created for women?" They have
done both, and Horn has many inspiring and poignant examples. Janet McDonald
Hill, one of the few African-Americans in the class, has shown that it
is possible to balance family and career. Her husband Calvin was a professional
football star and their son, Grant, is not only an esteemed former Olympian
and pro basketball player, but is acknowledged as the sport's Mr. Nice
Guy. Janet started working while he was young, and today is a successful
businesswoman, heading her own consulting firm and sitting on many corporate
boards. "I'm proud of Cal and Grant's careers," she says. "I'm also proud
of my own."
By contrast, Kathy Smith
Ruckman elected to remain at home with her four children as a full-time
mom, a choice made by fewer than 10% of her classmates. "Who knows what
I could have done?" she told Horn. "I never experienced that other world...so
I've never really known what I missed." Her eldest son comments that his
mother "made her decisions and stuck with them. Whether they've made her
happy is another question."
Thirty years on, the
Class of '69 has its share of lawyers, teachers, mothers, doctors and teachers.
Somewhere among the group can be found women who have made and lost fortunes,
dropped acid, cheated on their husbands, found love as a lesbian, had an
abortion, struggled to get pregnant, run away to be a Buddhist nun or become
a Pentecostal Christian doctor, and one First Lady who has blurred
the divisions between the political and the personal. Admirably, Horn proffers
no judgments on any of them, but lets them emerge through life stories
that reveal women's infinite possibilities.
Look Back in Anger
The Whole Woman By Germaine Greer (Knopf; 384 pages $25)
If there were no Germaine
Greer, we would have had to invent her. Annoying, irritating, sometimes
murky in her reasoning, Greer is uncommon and absolutely necessary. At
a time when Hillary Rodham and her Wellesley class were taking their first
tentative steps outside the ivory tower and looking to see if there really
was life after college, Greer was already swinging a bludgeon against the
male-dominated world in The Female Eunuch. Though Greer vowed she
would never write a sequel, she has broken that promise, and let's be thankful
she has. Even the most ardent revolutionary mellows over the years, but
Greer remains a flame-thrower.
In The Whole Woman, she fires away
at some familiar targets-- men, among them--and sets up some new ones including
the callous merchandisers of bad-girl culture pandering to pre-teens and
British magazines of a press that "trumpets the triumph of misogyny and
the hopelessness of the cause of female pride."
In the book's
introduction, Greer is at the barricades once more, declaring, "It's
time to get angry again." She directs some of her fury at the "lie of the
sexual revolution, " arguing that the sexuality that has been freed is
male, not female sexuality. More in rage than in sorrow, she finds that
today's culture is even more masculine than it was in 1970, citing
video games and women-hating rock music as well as the glut of movies that
deal in gore and violence and men's obsessions. Those are men's realities.
"The reality of women's lives," she writes, "is work, most of it unpaid
and, what is worse, unappreciated.
To the self-satisfied
who say that feminism has accomplished its goals and that "you've come
a long way, baby," Greer shouts, "No!" Look at the world beyond your
own, she insists, where women still bear the hardest burdens of labor in
and out of the home, where they are abused and trapped in poverty and despair.
Their plight "mocks the headlined success of the few." The life-style feminists
who see the cause of liberation--if they see it at all--as personal and
not political, are dismissed entirely by Greer. She deplores women who
celebrate the right "to be pretty in an array of floaty dresses and little
suits put together for starvation wages by adolescent girls in Asian sweat-shops."
Ever plainspoken,
Greer gives blunt titles to her chapters: "Breasts," "Womb," "Sex," "Mutilation."
In the name of freedom for women, she takes an astonishing, contrarian
view of female genital mutilation as it is practiced in Africa and condemned
by international tribunals like the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
Looked at in its full context, she declares, criminalizing female circumcision
is "an attack on cultural identity" and likens it to the current craze
for tattoos and piercings. This sort of stubborn stance makes people regard
Greer as idiosyncratic or, worse, completely crazy. Her troubling stance
on regular, instituted breast-cancer screening goes against the conventional
medical thought, as she declares that "men have the right to take care
of themselves, or not, as they see fit, but women are to be taken care
of whether they like it or not. Screening is many more times more likely
to destroy a woman's peace of mind than it is to save her life." Despite
such questionable conclusions, Greer is too valuable a social critic to
be ignored altogether and attention must be paid.
Her principal theme--work--threads
throughout the book, and on that subject Greer is at her best. Noting that
as soon as something is found to make work easier, men appropriate it,
she writes that "when cultivation is done with mattocks" and hoes, women
do it; when a tractor comes along men take it over." By some peculiar universal
law, housework, as any woman who has ever done it knows, "expands to fill
the time available." True liberation and female power, if it is to come,
may one day emerge, she predicts, and it will come not from universities
but from places like China, Iran, Thailand or any place where women have
nothing to lose. "The women of the rich world had better hope that when
female energy ignites they do not find themselves on the wrong side." It
is a provocative statement that challenges and disturbs the reader. Like
Greer herself.
Tea With Mussolini Directed by Franco Zeffirelli
Once an old-fashioned
genre, movies about World War II are fashionable all over again.
Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and Roberto Benigni's Life
Is Beautiful vied for Oscars this year. Now Franco Zeffirelli takes
a turn. Known for putting opera and Shakespeare on the screen, the Italian
director fashions an autobiographical film about his earliest years. It's
hardly the Bard, but the coming-of-age film does have elements of opera.
Soap opera, that is.
Rejected by his
prosperous father as a bastard, the motherless boy Luca--Zeffirelli as
a boy--is left to be educated by a band of elderly British expatriate women
who have claimed Florence as their spiritual home. Called the 'Scorpioni',
they live in Italy with all the airs and graces of home as if occupying
an outpost of the Empire. They open Luca's eyes to the art around him while
teaching him about civility and manners and other British virtues.
When he grows to young
manhood, he returns their kindness and learns new lessons about love, betrayal
and courage. Under Zeffirelli's hand, a lot of years get covered, too many
plot lines get braided together, and the brutality of Il Duce's fascism
is submerged. Still, his beloved Florence is beautiful, and the performances
by a trio of Britain's leading actresses are worth seeing. Joan Plowright
is warmly wise and motherly as Luca's gentle guide, Maggie Smith brings
her patented tight-lipped haughtiness to the role of an ambassador's widow,
and Judi Dench is cheerfully batty and sentimental by turns.
Zeffirelli has always
admired the diva, and he puts Cher in the spotlight as a wealthy
Jewish art collector from America. Her long pale face is without line--or
much mobility, it must be admitted--and she gleams with grand style. She's
best in a scene when she's desperate about her life, and huddles forlornly
in a lonely room. She's got the trimmest figure and the snazziest
costumes, but Plowright, Dench and Smith steal the show. The movie is their
cup of tea.
And Consider This
MusicWarm Cool: The Atlantic Years (32 Jazz Records; $25)
Her voice could be both whisper soft and darkly seductive, and Chris Connor has a jazz singer's impeccable sense of that magical instant before the beat. This two-disc album is the first compilation ever made of numbers the jazz singer recorded with Atlantic between 1956 and 1962. Connor let her lyrics just float on the music, voicing the song line as though in a reverie and bringing the listener into her private world.
Books
Single No More by Ellen Kreidman (Renaissance
Books; 296 pages; $22.95)
