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Moving Beyond Words

Name: Moving Beyond Words
Author: Gloria Steinem
ISBN: 9780671649722

by Gloria Steinem

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Overview

Gloria Steinem is one of the country's most influential and innovative writers and activists. In Revolution from Within, Marilyn: Norma Jean, and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, she created a dialogue with her readers that shapes the way we think about human possibilities. In this newest six-part adventure of essays that "begin in a personal place, and arrive at a larger point," she offers more revolutionary ideas, compassionate insights, and one truly over-the-top fantasy. Three of its six parts appear here for the first time. Three of them have a seed, seedling, or partly grown plant in a previously published article. As Steinem writes in the Preface, "Each of these six parts is rather like a condensed book....Since there seems to be no genre for this, I've found myself explaining it this way: If you added water to any of these parts, it would become a book." What If Freud Were Phyllis is the ultimate send-up - with footnotes. By gender-reversing Sigmund's world and work, and drawing on new scholarship that shocks, Steinem creates a hilarious and chilling portrait of the most haunting father-figure of them all - and raises questions about what might have been haunting him, and why he is still haunting us. The Strongest Woman in the World is the story of one woman whose courage in testing her own limits broke the boundaries of gender and gave Steinem insights into the politics of muscle - and into herself. Sex, Lies and Advertising updates and greatly expands Steinem's famous expose of advertising's stranglehold on women's magazines and its control over much of what we see and read - with a new and urgent call to action. The Masculinization of Wealth shows us the ways class works in reverse for women in families of inherited wealth, because "the closer we are to power, the more passive we have to be kept." It reshapes our understanding of class, and exposes the other end of the feminization of poverty. Revaluing Economics demystifies budgets, from our

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Steinem is at her polemical best in these six compelling essays--three of which are new, three revised from Ms. articles. She invents ``Dr. Phyllis Freud,'' founder of psychoanalysis, who proved that men's lack of wombs make them terminally envious and whose theories serve as a semi-scientific rationale for men's lower status in a matriarchal society. An interview with women's weightlifting world champ Bev Francis leads Steinem to question assumptions of female weakness and male strength. Another piece demystifies economics by interpreting it as a system of human values, with special reference to women's unpaid or underrated work. Elsewhere Steinem analyzes the growing feminization of poverty and masculinization of wealth, exposes advertisers' restrictive control over the editorial content of women's magazines and reflects on turning 60, an age, she finds, when women grow more radical and rebellious. Each essay is prefaced by an extensive introduction which Steinem uses as a platform to discuss sexual politics. First serial to Ms. (May)

Library Journal

"If you added water to any of these parts," Steinem says, each segment could become a book. While some of the articles have been previously published, or are "re-rites" of others, there is some new work presented here. "What If Freud Were Phyllis?" was recently published in Ms. magazine after initially being presented to the American Psychiatric Association. The piece is comparatively lengthy (comprising two of the four cassettes) but well worth the space accorded it. Perhaps the best in the collection is "Doing Sixty." The woman who once answered a reporter's remark that she didn't look 40 with "This is what 40 looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?" has plenty of insights on women in the last third of life. For all libraries.-Reilly Reagan, Putnam Cty. Lib., Cookeville, Tenn.

Mary Carroll

Readers fascinated by Steinem's exploration of self-esteem in the best-selling "Revolution from Within" (1991) as well as those who consider that book an unproductive digression are likely to be curious about this collection of new and revised essays. The longest piece, a "reversal" that defends the psychoanalytic theories of "Phyllis" Freud, is demanding (you "do" need to read those long, chatty footnotes!) but will be instructive for readers who have not followed the latest scholarship on Sigmund and his ideas. Three pieces update articles published in "Ms.": "The Strongest Woman in the World" (on Australian athlete and bodybuilder Bev Francis); "Sex, Lies and Advertising" (on "Ms." magazine's long struggle with advertisers and ad agencies); and "The Masculinization of Wealth" (which posits that, in terms of allocating power, gender is a more fundamental distinction than class). In "Revaluing Economics," Steinem humanizes the dismal science by displaying the value judgments it obfuscates, while "Doing Sixty" offers her reflections on the past, rejection of nostalgia, and celebration of the present as she enters her seventh decade.