Edited by Ellen C. DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, two respected historians, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women\u27s History is a welcome response to the call for a more complex approach to women\u27s history. Central to this approach are the integration of women of color into women\u27s history and a definition of community that reflects both conflict and concord

Friaz, Guadalupe

English

VCU Scholars Compass

but Davies does not include jokes that he interprets as purely religious. Likewise he discusses such pattern jokes as those about Aggies, aristocrats, or apparatchiks, only for purposes of comparing them to jokes that he views as unambiguously ethnic. Besides his chapter on "The Stupid and the Canny," he has chapters on "Who Gets Called Stupid?", "The Stupid and the Dirty," "Who Gets Called Canny?", "How Ethnic Jokes Change," "Militarists and Cowards," "Anglo­Saxon Attitudes," " Food for Thought," (jokes about high-class vs. low-class food), and a "Conclusion." "Sources and Bibliography," in fine print, takes up the final seventy-five pages. Although it was not Davies' goal, readers who have been insulted or angered by ethnic jokes about their own group may nevertheless come away feeling comforted. It's hard to read hundreds of carefully documented jokes-many of them variations on a theme-without gaining some per­spective and realizing that the particular joke that hurt you, or your child's or your friend's feelings, was not created especially for you, or your child or your friend. - Alleen Nilsen and Don Nilsen Arizona State University Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women 's History. (New York: Routledge, 1990) 473 pp., $18.95. Edited by Ellen C. DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, two respected historians, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women's History is a welcome response to the call for a more complex approach to women's history. Central to this approach are the integration of women of color into women's history and a definition of community that reflects both conflict and concord. At first sight one is struck with the book's organization-namely, the absence of section headings (such as family, work, or sexuality) to signal a shift in emphasis. This technique, while perhaps unfamiliar to the reader, symbolizes precisely what the multicultural framework of women's history proposes-that the history of women of color be seen as integral to women's history. Ruiz and DuBois's introduction is an excellent though brief summary of the long-held criticism of women's history, that women of color are generally absent or included only at the margin. The editors review three models of women's history, beginning with the "uniracial" framework that centers on white men. They explain that a "biracial" approach is a vast improvement over the uniracial model because of its ability to examine relations between different groups of women and thus to "shatter the notion of a universal female sisterhood." Noting the limits of a biracial framework-namely that it Explorations in Sights and Sounds No. 11 (Summer 1991) 15 reduces the analysis of race to a discussion of "black and white" -Ruiz and DuBois call instead for the development of a multicultural approach. The hallmark of the multicultural framework is an emphasis on race, class, and gender-not as separate variables, but intertwined and blended. True to this approach, over half of the thirty articles are about women of color-ChicanalLatina, black, Asian, and Native American women. Race is a variable responsive to and affected by regional location, generation, economic, and power relations. In reading the articles on women of color, we come face to face with age-old themes of manifest destiny and the settling of the west: economic and sexual exploitation and dominantlsubordinate relations between whites and people of color. However, this anthology permits us to see women of color, white working-class women, and lesbian women shaping their own responses and actively resisting oppression or at times colluding with the oppressors. Each of the articles on women of color has as its context a form of white domination specific to that particular race/ethnic group. Thus domination, a recurrent theme in U.S. history, is viewed as the inescapable context in which women of color existed. For example, Rayna Green's article on the Pocahontas Perplex is as much about the past as the present. Early American literature (folklore, poems, ballads and plays) sought to give Americans topics reflecting the U.S. experience. In doing so, writers devel­oped the metaphor of Pocahontas, the QueenlPrincess, and juxtaposed it with the negatively viewed image of the squaw. Rayna Green argues that Indian women must be allowed to define themselves in their own terms. Deena Gonzales writes about Spanish Mexican unmarried women (sepa­rated, divorced, widowed) in Santa Fe in the years following the Mexican American War of 1848. The period was characterized by unprecedented in­migration of Euro-American men (from the East Coast and Europe) into Santa Fe, a major city in the American West. Utilizing census bureau records and legal wills, Gonzales found that most of the unmarried women resisted impoverishment through work as laundresses, seamstresses, and domestics. They devised strategies to prevent further land loss in their attempt to create order out of the tremendous social and economic changes brought by the new immigrants. Such articles present a multidimensional vision of U.S. women's history. Many of the papers bridge various aspects of women's experience, i .e.  family, culture, community, violence, sexuality, and politics. All challenge the stereotypical image of women as passive. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's piece on "Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South" uses "narrative and analysis" to examine white working-class women's responses to the constraints imposed on them by economic and global forces. This article tells how women organized and led a walkout at a textile mill in Tennessee in 1929, yet it cannot be pigeon-holed as labor history because it also concerns women's family networks, women's culture, and women defining their sexuality, dress, and language. For example, 16 Explorations in Sights and Sounds No. 11 (Summer 1991) Hall describes the strategies used by women strikers to neutralize the National Guard, who were young men and often related to the women they were sent to teargas. Women mitigated the ideology of "good vs. bad women" in order to maintain a united front and to support those strikers who seemed to bridge the dichotomy between "lady" and "hussy." The emphasis on the interrelatedness as opposed to the separation of public and private spheres is a common theme throughout the volume. Joan Jensen's article on Native American women gives us a picture of Seneca women's vast knowledge of and expertise in agriculture and of the commu­nity power and status they derived through their control of land and agriculture. She describes how some Seneca women adopted and others resisted the dramatic changes advocated by government, the church, and social reformers. The volume addresses a multitude of themes including family life, forms of work, definitions of womanhood, sources of power, forms of white domina­tion, women's relationships-both conflictual and cooperative-and sexual­ity. The anthology's greatest contribution is the writers' insistence on the development of a multicultural framework in which race is "theorized not simply described." In this regard, the articles are uneven, with many provid­ing more description than analysis of race. Even so, this anthology fills an enormous void by bringing to the fore a truly multicultural women's history. The book can serve as a reader for women's history, or it can be used selectively for survey courses on ethnic studies or women's studies. The bibliographies at the end of the anthology are extremely helpful as a teaching resource. - Guadalupe Friaz University of Washington Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones. The Negro Cowboys. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) 278 pp., $7.95 paper. Except for books such as The Negro Cowboys, the African American West remains an enigma to most Americans. Popular media continue to perpetu­ate the stereotype of a white West, in spite of the fact that some of the earliest explorers accompanying the European invasion were of African descent. Beginning in 1501 with the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Africans were there. They were with Balboa when he "discovered" the Pacific, with Cortes in Mexico, with Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, and others. Estevanico (Little Stephen) first explored New Mexico and Arizona. When Lewis and Clark were dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Clark's slave, York, took a principal role in the success of that expedition. The fur trade which followed saw trappers plying their trade in the West, and a great many of these were black. Explorations in Sights and Sounds No. 11 (Summer 1991) 17 

[Review of] Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women\u27s History

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[Review of] Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U. S. Women\u27s History

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