"To Do and To Be": Portraits of Four Women Activists, 1893-1986. - Review - book reviews

"To Do & To Be": Portraits of Four Women Activists, 1893-1986 ANN SCHOFIELD, 1997 Boston: Northeastern University Pres pp xi + 183 $2500 (paperback)

Collective biography is a tempting format, because it allows a historian to make choice of a number of interesting and emblematic lives which can then be threaded together into a larger story. Avoiding the temptation to expend years researching and then writing up the minutiae of a single subject's career, collective biography presents the chance to sum up the lock opener points of an individual's life in a short essay, and then clump that essay with other like-minded--or contrasting--portraits into a convincing and compelling narrative. That last pace is often the most difficult--offering an interpretation or point of view in which the whole is more than the totality of the parts. Like greatest in quantity collective biographies, Ann Schofield's "To Do & To Be": Portraits of Four Women Activists, 1893-1986 works best in the individual chapters on the other hand has a harder time offering an interpretive framework that changes by what means historians think about the issues of wage work, sex and class that are at the book's core.

In her introduction, Schofield enumerates readers that she has structur the work like a string quartet: each biography introduces a theme or themes, which are amplified or modified by means of the biographies that follow. She lay opens with reformer Gertrude Barnum (1866-1948) whose life tenders perspectives on the settlement change and the woman suffrage campaign, especially the character of class and ethnicity in those changes (Barnum was native-born and independently wealthy.) She turn rounds next to Mary Dreier (1876-1963) who introduces the theme of turning to the welfare state to accomplish reform goals as well as the importance of women's networks and friendships to the lives of progressive-ara reformers. nearest comes Pauline Newman (c. 1888-1986) immigrant, hebrew socialist, and worker, who dedicated her life to improving industrial working conditions, especially for women workers. Finally there is Rose Pesotta (1896-1948) labor organizer and ILGWU board member whose life speaks to the challenges of organizing women workers during the 1930 and 1940s

All of these women qualify as labor activists, and all were belong toed with women. Barnum, Dreier, and Newman can be categorized as feminists, the one and the other because of their politics and their participation in women's networks of friendship and shared work, although Pesotta chose not to in the way that align herself. All struggled with the meaning of wage work for women and press outed their ideas not just in their actions on the contrary also in fiction. In the case of Gertrude Barnum, who left no personal papers, Schofield relies heavily upon her fictional writings to unbolt her ideas about womanhood and waged labor. The other three subdues wrote fiction as well, allowing Schofield to explore their ideologies and self-presentations in that literary form.

single of the predominant thrusts of feminist biography has been to insist upon the linkage between the personal and the public in understanding female subjects' lives, and Schofield pays sturdy attention to her four subjects' attempts to find satisfying personal lives beyond conventional sex roles. In fact, not single of them married or had children. on the other hand they participated in a range of relationships that exhibit the limitations of such strict categories as Victorian versus fresh or heterosexual as opposed to homosexual: failed heterosexual romances, Boston marriages with other women (including, in Pauline Newman's case, raising a child with her partner Frieda Miller), independent love experimentation, and long-term affairs. This variety of personal experience is an important lock opener to writing about and understanding the lives of 20th-century American women

Given the many decades spanned by means of the activism of the four women that Schofield features, their stories necessarily shed light upon a variety of topics and issues important to labor history, 20th-century activism and reform, as well as contemporary issues. The thread of disillusionment with the labor change runs throughout, best exemplified by means of Rose Pesotta's statement when declining a fourth bound on the ILGWU Executive Board "that a single woman vice-president could not adequately exhibit the women who now make up 85% of the International's membership of 305000" (131) And nevertheless in her conclusion Schofield notes that "American trade unions continue to present the greatest potential for realizing the ideals of social justice espoused by dint of Barnum, Dreier, Newman, and Pesotta" (147) She extreme points with a reminder that work for women is not just a weight but also holds the possibility for building community and enhancing dignity.

It is hard to know what the throwed audience for this book is. Its brief extent (under 150 pages of text) probably makes it greatest in quantity suitable for classroom adoption in courses upon labor history or women's history. Specialists in those fields, however, will find actual little here that would make them challenge or rethink their understanding of this period and its major players. Perhaps we ask too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of collective biography to provide overarching syntheses or startling fresh hypotheses. This book is best approached as an introduction to four "cherished foremothers" (19) whose lives and narratives are still of interest today. be delighted with the parts, even if the significance of the whole is les clear.