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=> Qasrani, I can't believe that you didn't like these reviews

Qasrani, I can't believe that you didn't like these reviews
Posted by Habibi (Guest) - Friday, July 9 2004, 22:36:02 (CEST)
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Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species Laura Flanders {verso}
According to journalist Laura Flanders, “George W. Bush might never have snagged the White House if one woman had been laughed at less.” That woman, of course, is Katherine Harris, the former Secretary of State of Florida and one of the most pivotal figures in the 2000 election. In the aftermath, however, the media focused not on her reputation for cutthroat ambition and campaign contribution violations, but on her hair and makeup. Harris herself encouraged this, knowing that it drew attention away from her abuse of power as Secretary of State to throw thousands of eligible African-Americans off the voter rolls. “Invaluable to the President, under-scrutinized in the press,” writes Flanders, this is what “qualifies Harris as an honorary Bushwoman.”

The actual Bushwomen, according to Flanders, are the six women of President Bush’s cabinet and subcabinet: National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Counselor to the President Karen Hughes, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency Christine Todd Whitman, and Secretary of the Interior Gale Ann Norton. “Cast in the public mind as maverick, or moderate, or irrelevant, laughable or benign,” Flanders argues, “their well-spun image taps into convenient stereotypes, while the reality remains out of sight.”

As Flanders’ portraits show, these women have a few things in common: They are all of a generation who directly benefited from the hard-won gains of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. However, each has devoted her career to weakening, if not outright eliminating, the laws and programs that have afforded those same opportunities to countless others. On a personal level, they employ an almost pathological denial of the benefits they have received as a result of their privileged backgrounds and the struggles of others. They insist that they are simply living proof of what individual resolve and hard work can achieve in this great land of equal opportunity, where race, gender, ethnicity, and class supposedly no longer matter. Together, they are the frighteningly powerful and effective vanguard in advancing the ultra-conservative Bush agenda to erode government regulations and protections to the benefit of the wealthy and big business and to the detriment of just about everyone else.

One of the book’s strongest chapters is on Condoleeza Rice. According to Flanders, the media’s treatment of Rice follows the Harris pattern:

Rice became George W. Bush’s national security advisor having directed an oil company, managed a multi-million-dollar university, and served as a Sovietologist in Washington during the collapse of the Soviet Union.… Nonetheless, when The New York Times ran a story on the forty-six-year-old professor, it didn’t discuss her views on national security until the twenty-seventh paragraph.

The previous 26 paragraphs covered such critical topics as “her dress-size, her hair, her hemline,” what she usually eats for breakfast, and the fact that she “keeps two mirrors on her desk, apparently to check the back as well as the front.” Like Harris, however, Rice has encouraged the focus on her personal history, making it the centerpiece of her speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention. She is less willing to discuss her former employer Chevron’s appalling human rights record in Nigeria, or why she is known among her erstwhile National Security Council coworkers from the first Bush administration for having been “doggedly, disastrously wrong on the most important development to take place on her watch, in her policy area”—the break-up of the Soviet Union (a piece of history that makes her rationalizations and denials before the 9/11 Commission seem like tragic déjà vu).

Like the recent refutations of the Bush administration’s “evidence” of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Flanders’ book outrages precisely because none of its material is new. It’s all been out there, hidden in plain sight for anyone who has bothered to look. Unlike Richard Clarke’s tell-all, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Bushwomen isn’t based on insider knowledge, nor is it based on privileged access like Bob Woodward’s recent spate of books. Rather, as the copious footnotes attest, it’s simply the product of exhaustive research, of gathering bits and pieces of public information and previously published articles and putting them together.

If there’s one book among the growing pile of volumes about the Bush administration that you should pick up, this is it. Flanders’ thorough examination provides an easy-to-read, comprehensive picture of the entire, terrifying scope of what Bush, Cheney, and the women behind them are trying to accomplish and how it directly affects nearly every facet our lives. —Susan Chenelle
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The Meaning of Wife Anne Kingston {harper canada}
Every book about relationships needs a gimmick to distinguish it from the mountain of other books on the subject. Canadian journalist Anne Kingston has invented the term “wife gap” to describe the vacuum of identity created by the social conditions that sent many wives into the workforce and now call them home again. Although the role of wife is constantly discussed in popular culture, it is rarely explored with any depth, at least outside of rarefied feminist circles. Kingston fills this void by scrutinizing wedding rituals, sexless marriages, domestic abuse, divorce laws, popular perceptions of single women, and the economic value of unpaid domestic labor. Novels, magazine articles, self-help books, television shows, surveys, statistics, and ad campaigns provide the raw material for her comprehensive history of wifely identity and its cultural context.

Kingston begins by examining the renewed enthusiasm for Cinderella brides, reality wedding shows, and books like The Rules. “Call it wifelust,” she writes, “as the traditional stay-at-home wife became the subject of a romantic revival.” Kingston’s sources show that more women are embracing so-called traditional values by choosing elaborate white weddings, expensive engagement rings, and their husband’s surname. Becoming a full-time wife has been sold as the antidote to the female career frustration caused by glass ceilings and the difficulty of balancing work and family. Unfortunately, Kingston often conflates the roles of wife and mother, making it difficult to tease out which issues are raised by marriage and which are functions of motherhood.

Less obvious but more compelling than the wife gap is Kingston’s notion of “mystique chic,” which calls wives back to the home through a glamorization of domesticity. “Call it the ultimate backlash to The Feminine Mystique,” she writes. “Whatever its title, cleaning toilets and mopping floors became the focus of Downy-soft-core porn targeted at women.” In the past five years, scented dish-soap has been elevated to makeup counters, housekeeping books like Home Comforts and Talking Dirty with the Queen of Clean have topped bestseller lists, and the British magazine Red even went so far as to declare housework to be the new sex. Kingston identifies an element of hysteria lurking beneath the house-proud surface and compares the blissed-out calm of stenciling placemats and weaving wreaths to the valium-induced tranquility of ’50s/’60s suburban housewives. It’s as good an explanation for Martha-mania as you’ll find. But despite the powerful allure of mystique chic, Kingston is right in stating that “the actual perception of the housewife has improved little since [Betty] Friedan’s day.”

Elsewhere, in examining violence in marriage, Kingston argues that a dangerous void remains at the center of cultural discourse on spousal abuse, an unwillingness to ask why marriage as institution seems to encourage violence. She also explores media portrayals of women who have screwed over their husbands financially (The First Wives Club) or physically (Lorena Bobbitt) and subsequently become positive role models; yet she fails to analyze what these examples of disharmony might mean for the future of marriage.

The main problem with Kingston’s approach is that she focuses exclusively on wives with professional jobs. These women may be most relevant to her argument, since they were arguably the most “liberated” by 1970s feminism, but Kingston doesn’t acknowledge her narrow outlook or explain why she’s chosen it. She does acknowledge that the wife construct is more limiting for middle-class couples, but has little to say about wives who cannot afford to stay home.

Despite these notable exceptions, the strength of The Meaning of Wife lies in Kingston’s strict attention to historical context and her interrogation of notions of tradition, removing wedding rituals and media crises about married sex from a vacuum to better understand changes in the identities of wives. While Kingston asserts that it’s impractical to abandon marriage altogether, she does believe that an institution founded on inequality needs a social and economic overhaul to stay meaningful. The solutions she proposes are plentiful—better childcare, removing the bias against working wives, equal division of domestic labor, acknowledging the value of wives’ work—but they are also things that feminists have been calling attention to, and working toward, for more than three decades. The strongest message to be found here is that the meaning of wife has become just another product for consumption, and that its true essence is buried deep beneath the Vera Wang dresses, perfumed ironing water, and De Beers diamond rings. —Kris Rothstein



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