Expert's Picks
Women's Issues
We asked Deborah Tannen -- the author of "You Just Don't Understand," "Talking from 9 to 5" and, most recently, "You're Wearing That?" -- to gather a shelf of her favorite books on women's issues.
"Hmm, books on women's issues," I thought, and began listing in my mind classics like the late Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique . Then I reminded myself that I was supposed to name my favorite books, and instantly my mood changed from the somber tone of someone fulfilling an assignment to the buoyant spirit of someone eagerly anticipating a reunion with friends. As I scanned the "Women" section of my library, these books stood out. I took each one down and held it in my hands -- and re-experienced the excitement I'd felt when I first read it. These books helped me understand women's issues; they also are books I truly loved reading. Many are memoirs and personal stories: I find that issues relevant to women's lives are often best understood through the prism of individual life stories that are moving as well as enlightening.
A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science , by David F. Noble (Oxford Univ., 1992). When I first read this book, I could talk of little else for a long, long while. Noble shows that the exclusion of women from Western scientific and educational institutions was not the inevitable outgrowth of historical forces. Rather, it came about because early universities were seminaries and early scientists were either clergy or steeped in a Christian clerical culture. The Latin church, with its hierarchical structure, used the stigmatization of women in its power struggle to gain control of the monasteries in which women and men prayed and studied as equals in the first millennium of the Christian era.
Reflections on Gender and Science , by Evelyn Fox Keller (Yale Univ., 1985). Another author who changed forever my view of the academic world I inhabit, Keller shows that what we think of as rational, objective science actually reflects men's ways of approaching knowledge. In an example I particularly relish, Keller writes that biologists failed to identify the way that slime mold changes from single-cell organisms to multicellular aggregates because they stubbornly sought a nonexistent, boss-like "pacemaker" cell that orders the others to combine.
African Women: Three Generations , by Mark Mathabane (HarperCollins, 1994). Mathabane is the wonderful writer whose bestselling memoir Kaffir Boy recounted how he rose from the unimaginable poverty of Alexandra, an apartheid-era township in Johannesburg, and came to the United States on a tennis scholarship. Here he describes the lives of black women under South Africa's vicious form of white supremacy by telling the stories of three whom he loves: his grandmother, mother and sister.
Living a Political Life , by Madeleine Kunin (Knopf, 1994). The first female governor of Vermont, Kunin conveys what it means for women to enter politics -- what stands in their way, and how their participation changes politics and their lives. In an anecdote that lingers in my mind, she was driving to an important meeting when she realized that her child's favorite blanket was in her car. Would she drive home to return the blanket and be late for the meeting? You guessed right: She did.
Composing a Life , by Mary Catherine Bateson (Atlantic, 1989). By tracing the lives of five women, including herself, Bateson develops an ingenious and inspiring metaphor: Women are often placed in situations they didn't choose, as when they move to a city for a husband's job, yet they create fulfilling lives with the opportunities they find, much as they devise new recipes from what they find in the refrigerator and the cupboard -- and the results can be equally delicious and nourishing.
Language and Woman's Place , by Robin Lakoff (Harper & Row, 1975). Lakoff, the scholar who inspired me to pursue a career in linguistics, was the first to show that the language used by women (who is more likely -- or expected -- to say, "Oh dear" and "My goodness"?) and about women (men pass out, but women faint) reflects the way that women are treated and the real-world possibilities open to them. If they talk like women, they're seen as frivolous; if they talk like men, they're seen as too aggressive. The book was reissued in 2004 by Oxford University Press together with essays discussing its impact and import.
Gender Advertisements , by Erving Goffman (Harper & Row, 1979). This unique book does for nonverbal behavior what Lakoff does for language. Goffman, the late sociologist, gathered countless print advertisements to illustrate that women were depicted in ways that constituted "the ritualization of subordination." With his acute eye for the patterns of physical detail and placement, Goffman showed that aspects of women's behavior we take for granted (such as head tilts, smiling and knee-bends) make us likable -- and childlike.
Crossing: A Memoir , by Deirdre N. McCloskey (Univ. of Chicago, 1999). How much of our behavior as women results from genes and hormones, and how much from cultural influence? In pondering this (unanswerable) question, I treasure the experience of people who have lived both as women and as men, having altered their sex through surgery and hormones. The economist Deirdre (formerly Donald) McCloskey, whose academic writing I have long admired, provides a riveting account of what motivated and constituted his sex change and how her experience of the world -- and the way she was treated -- changed as a result.
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl , by John Colapinto (HarperCollins, 2000). I vividly recall the heady days when the widespread belief that women and men act differently because of how we are raised, not how we are made, was "proven" by the so-called John/Joan case: An identical twin boy whose penis was destroyed by a surgeon's error was raised as a girl. So I stopped short when I read, years later, a small newspaper item reporting that the "girl" had resumed life as a boy at the age of 15. I yearned to know the story behind this development and found it in this book: The experiment was not a success after all but a tragic failure whereby an innocent child and his family were sacrificed on the altar of gender ideology.
Fierce Attachments: A Memoir , by Vivian Gornick (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987). Of the many memoirs and essays I read while writing You're Wearing That? , about the conversations between mothers and daughters, this one stood out for the poignant, pitch-perfect way Gornick captured the evolution of her passionate, tempestuous relationship with her mother. ·
Deborah Tannen is University Professor and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.
