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._) LUNA PRESS V -* PO BOX 5 II.Kenmore Station* > Boston. MA 02215 USA C tm (6171427 9646 | THE LUNAR CALENDAR: Dedicated to the Goddess in Her Many Guises $ 17.70 postpaid We ship gifts everywhere GODDESSES Explore 25,000 years of the shifting images of woman as revealed in our recreation of the Goddess from around the world. Handmade of artstone, each one is carefully finished to resemble the museum originals. Catalog $1 from: Qrand Adventure RD6 Box 6198A, Stroudsburg, PA 18360 lA)omtn M/uxing. For a change in your life, we invite you to try: THE WISHING WELL Features current members' self-descriptions (listed'by code), letters, photos, resources, reviews, and more. Introductory copy $5.00 ppd. (discreet first class). A beautiful, tender, loving alternative to "The Well of Loneliness.' Confidential, sensitive, supportive, dignified. Very personal. Reliable reputation, established 1974. Free, prompt information. Women are writing and meeting each other EVERYWHERE through: CJke TOukinn TOetl P.O. Box 713090 Santee, CA 92072-3090 (619)443-4818 by life experiences, not feminist ideology. Yet when they were in position to make a real difference in other women's lives, they were ready. Lindy Boggs adds a wonderful dimension to the concept of "transitional" women leaders. Her two daughters, who inherited a zest for politics and public policy from both sets of genes, have fulfilled the sometimes shakyseeming promise that all this rolemodel stuff will pay off someday with women who feel entitled to achievement, power, and glory. One daughter is the nationally-respected broadcast journalist, Cokie Roberts. Cokie's older sister, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, became the mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. In the 1980s, I was once on a Mother's Day television talk show with Barbara, who was wearing a black eyepatch because of the cancer that ultimately took her life. She had a picture of her mother and grandmother together, and when she spoke of what she learned from these fine women, she made it seem that the transition in just three generations from, say, Scarlett O'Hara through the Little Colonel-in- Congress to the first woman mayor of Princeton was the most logical progression in the world. And of course, I like to think it is. Book still to be written: From Governor's Mansion to White House by EMILY's List. I can't wait to read that one. • UNDER MY SKIM: VOLUME ONE OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TO 1949 by Doris Lessing, (HarperCollins, N.Y.; $25 hardcover) By Jeanne Schinto Until she was 30, her nickname was Tigger, after the character in Winnie the Pooh. It stuck through two marriages, so she was not only Tigger Tayler but Tigger Wisdom and Tigger Lessing. While a Communist Party member in the 1940s, she was known, preposterously, as Comrade Tigger—"the last fitting me even less than the others," writes Doris Lessing in her autobiography, the first installment of a two-volume retrospective called Under My Skin. This "Tigger" personality was "expected to be brash, jokey, clumsy, and always ready to be a good sport, that is, to laugh at herself, apologize, clown, confess inability. An extrovert. In that Anne Mollegen Smith, a co-founder of Theit was a protection for the person I really was...." Getting-It Gazette, the hot-pink feminist tipsheet launched during the 1992 Democratic Convention, has also been editor-in- already have a clear idea of Lessing's Why an autobiography Don't we chief of Redbook, Working Woman, character and moral commitments McCall's, and the short-lived tabloid newspaper, HER New York. a shelf's worth of extraordinary from her 37 other books—more than rich- FOR THE YEAR OF THE WOMAN & POLITICS BOOKSHELF: Barbara Boxer, with Nicole Boxer Strangerd in the Senate: Politic*) ant) the New Revolution of Women in America (National Press Books, Bethesda, AID; $25.95 hardcover) Doris Kearns Goodwin No Ordinary Time:Franklin eSEleanorRoodevelt: TheHomefrontin World MarII (Simon & Schuster, NY; $30 hardcover) Celia Morris Storming the Statehouae: Running for Governor with Ann Ricbanb andDianne Feuutein (Charles Scribner's Sons, NY; $25 hardcover) Madeleine Kunin Living a Political Life (Knopf, NY; $25 hardcover) 54 ON THE ISSUES WINTER 1995
ness and range, including The Golden Notebook (1962), the early feminist manifesto (though it was never intended as such); the semi-autobiographical quintet, Children of Violence; and the five volumes of futuristic space fiction, Canopus in Argos: Archives' Lessing anticipates the question. Her reply: "Self-defense." In other words, "Biographies are being written." Now, at age 75, she wants to put forward her own record of her past. Curiously, though, she provides little guidance to those she says are trying to match up elements and themes in her fiction with scenes from her "real" life. Besides, she writes, "It was with Landlocked [1970] that I left [autobiographical fiction] behind." Instead, she offers a recreation of her early life in "an Africa that no longer exists." Lessing's account begins with her birth in 1919 to British parents living in Persia, continues through her childhood and young adulthood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and ends in her thirtieth year, just after she sells The Grass Is Singing to a London publisher and departs for England. By relying on what she describes as "the strict use of memory," Lessing makes amply clear that she is no more beholden to the factual, empirical approach now than she was as a girl who instinctively "knew the [racial] colour bar was wrong but had no facts or figures to back it up." Under My Skin is less an introspective foray into the author's youth than a moving and imaginative chronicle of childhood—that lengthy "tactile and sensuous subjective experience," as Lessing calls it. So how did Tigger evolve into "Doris Lessing" How did the "busy hardworking girl, ready to conform, anxious to be liked, wanting a best friend," become a visionary writer A partial answer may lie in the enthusiasms that seem to lift off the pages of this memoir: the "dreamy repetitive reading" and other intellectual excursions that are as compelling and vibrant now as they must have been some 50 years ago. Reading Tales From Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, biographies, and children's classics is likened to "sucking toffee." What surprises in this memoir is the loathing and pity she felt for the person who presided over this largely home-based educa- ONTHE ISSUES WINTER 1995 tion, and who regularly mail-ordered boxes of books from London: her mother. Though Lessing acknowledges her mother's "genius for teaching small children," she repeatedly shows her contempt for this sadly constrained, frustrated woman "whose life did not permit her to use her talents." This unresolved relationship may offer some insight into why Lessing became socially engaged at such an early age, and why she was able to abandon her husband and two toddlers when she joined the Communists in her early 20s. About this breach, she isn't too forthcoming, though perhaps a more generous account will follow in volume two. Nonetheless, she does say she believed "one day [my children] would thank me for it." She and her fellow Communists, after all, would eventually save the world: "There would be no race prejudice, oppression of women, exploitation of labour—no snobbishness or contempt for others... Paradise, then, was on the world's agenda... [We had] the same mind-set as my parents, who believed they represented God's will, working by agency of the British Empire, for the good of the world." Joan Didion once characterized Lessing as a writer "with an arrogantly bad ear for dialogue" and a "leaden disregard for even the simplest rhythms of language." The stylist exemplaire may well have spoken the truth—one that won't be challenged by Under My Skin. Solely "writing well" has never been Lessing's point. As a visionary, moral writer, she has dazzled readers for decades not with elegant prose and pyrotechnical language but by "objectifying [her] mental battles, embodying ideas in people." In this memoir, she refers to physicists as "the adventurers of our time," and wistfully wonders how she might have fared had she become a scientist.Yet she has been on an equally courageous quest to understand the world into which she was born. With the evidence of this latest book, she hasn't given up her search nor stopped taking grateful readers with her. • Jeanne Schinto is the author of a collection of stories and a novel. Her latest work, a nonfiction book about life and work in the old textile mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, will be published by Knopf in 1995. Athene Series A CLASSIC IN WOMEN'S HEALTH— Reissued with a New Foreword and Introduction MEN WHO CONTROL WOMEN'S HEALTH The Miseducation of Obstetrician-Gynecologists Diana Scully "Diana Scully's intimate look at the apprenticeship ofob/gyns—an apprenticeship during which women must often sacrifice parts of their bodies to the doctor's training needs—will shock and infuriate women and dismay the physicians whose secrets now are revealed. (Scully's] gripping, devastating book will swell the ranks of the Women's Health Movement." —Gena Corea, Author, The Hidden Malpractice 1994 / 304 pp. / Paper, $18.95 A CLASSIC IN FEMINIST THEORY— Reissued with a New Introduction on Transgender THE TRANSSEXUAL EMPIRE The Making of the She-Male Janice G. Raymond "Ostensibly, the'transexors'. .. are curing a disease... actually they engage in the... shaping and controlling of 'masculine' and feminine' behavior. Raymond's development and documentation of this thesis is flawless. Her book is an important achievement." —Thomas Szasz, NY limes Book Review 1994 / 264 pp. / Paper, $17.95 SURVIVING THE DALKON SHIELD IUD Women v. the Pharmaceutical Industry Karen M. Hicks In 1985, the A. H. Robins Co. filed for bankruptcy protection from the growing number of lawsuits involving the Damon Shield IUD it had manufactured in the early 1970s. Thus book chronicles the development of a contemporary women's social protest movement that arose in response to Robins' legal efforts to minimize its financial accountability to the women injured by its product. 1994 / 208 pp. / Paper, $16.95 / Cloth, $37.00 MAKING VIOLENCE SEXY Feminist Views on Pornography Diana E. H. Russell, Editor This is a collection of feminist articles, including testimonies by survivors of pornography, that together make a convincing case for the view that pornography (as distinct from erotica) causes harm to women, including acts of violence. 1993 / 320 pp. / Paper, $19.95 / Cloth, $46.00 1K4CHEPS Teachers College fT"\\if B^F Columbia University mivjrec ' 234 Amsterdam Ave - New York, NY 10027 55
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