Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)

Dunlop, Rishma

 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          337 
At death, two angels stand on either side of you, recording good
and bad deeds. You should acknowledge them.
In gunfire streets children are burned instead of fuel. She recites
their names. Children of Sharpeville, Sarajevo, Kigali, Beslan,
infinite list of cities.
Something turned loose in a child’s sorrow. November with graves.
Infancy white turns to roan and black. Her words hold the scent of
madness as her daughter disappears into a woman. Eyes peer 
through the windows of ruined houses. Visions of apothecary glass,
christening gowns in armoires.
Necropolis. Burnt sorrow in tank-rutted fields. Gangrenous stench.
Bed soaked with music.
Scorched we are cherrying the brain.
Gothaming the mind.
At the city’s edge    cooling towers.
Metropolis (excerpt)
Rishma Dunlop
338            Volume 11, Number 1


English

Metropolis (excerpt)

L. Gustafson, reviewed by Diana

A Mother Apart: How to Let Go of Guilt and Find Happiness Living Apart from your Child

Byrd, Deborah

Gallagher, Rachel

Avoiding the "Doomed to Poverty" Narrative : Words of Wisdom from Teenage Single Mothers

Reading Amy Lowell

L. Vancour, Michele

Motherhood, Balance, and Health Behaviours of Academic Women

Chaze, Ferzana

Child Welfare Intervention in Visible Minority Immigrant Families : The Role of Poverty and the Mothering Discourse

Contributor Notes

Knaak, reviewed by Stephanie

358        Volume 11, Number 1
Book Reviews
Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice
Jack Holland 
New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006
Reviewed by Stephanie Knaak
Jack Holland’s Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice is a well-written historical 
roadmap of the various forms of female oppression evident in western civiliza-
tions over the millennia. The book “sets out to answer a daunting question: how 
do you explain the oppression and brutalization of half the world’s population 
by the other half, throughout history?” In fact, the key strength of this book is 
its ability to describe rather than explain the history of women’s oppression.
For Holland, misogyny—the contempt or hatred of women—is neither 
simple nor straightforward. His central argument is that misogyny both de-
grades and exalts women. He believes that the end result of misogyny, whether 
it shuns or celebrates women, “is the same: woman dehumanized” (6). 
Holland takes readers on an eight-chapter historical journey, beginning 
with the Greeks of classical antiquity and ending with the Taliban regime 
of Afghanistan (including a brief discussion of American rap culture in 
the concluding chapter). Each chapter discusses the key political, religious, 
philosophical, and literary influences that shaped and reflected that period’s 
prevailing ideas, practices, and cultural attitudes towards women. It is worth 
pointing out—principally for readers of this journal—that Holland pays scant 
attention to the subject of motherhood. Although he attends to how women’s 
sexuality and reproductive capacities have been historically understood, orga-
nized, and controlled, he provides too little history of women’s roles as mothers, 
the institution of motherhood, or cultural attitudes towards mothering and 
motherhood.
In the concluding chapter, Holland attempts to explain the “pervasive, 
persistent, pernicious and protean” (270) character of misogyny itself. Here, 
he emphasizes the significance of the rise of dualistic thought and its histori-
cal entrenchment in religion, politics, and the social organization of gender 
across time and place. While his explanation is little more than a reiteration of 
some of feminist theory’s foundational arguments, his provocative statement, 
“it is probably a safe generalization that philosophers and priests have done 
more to harm women than pornographers” (164), could be used as a topic for 
classroom debate, or as a springboard for further theoretical elaboration and 
investigation. 
Misogyny is a valuable reference work and instructional resource – well suited 
to the undergraduate classroom—an informative and interesting book. 


Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

Rosenzweig, Rosie

Satterfield, Jane

306            Volume 11, Number 1
Editor’s Notes
It is a great pleasure to introduce Rishma Dunlop, award-winning poet, 
playwright, essayist, editor, and translator—bright star in Canada’s literary 
firmament. In reading poems from Dunlop’s four acclaimed books—White 
Album, Metropolis, Reading Like a Girl, and The Body of My Garden—we 
encounter a lyric exploration of contemporary women’s lives: the varied roles 
that we inhabit as daughters, mothers, lovers, wives, friends, and committed 
professionals who seek to balance a quest for individual fulfillment against the 
demands of gender-specific responsibilities.  
A poet who writes “through the taste of fear/and rage and fury” with 
“milk and blood” and “ink fierce and iridescent,” Dunlop possesses a mem-
oirist’s eye for telling detail. And like the best memoirists, Dunlop ranges 
beyond nostalgic recollection of the past to plunge headlong into the deepest 
ontological layers of human experience.  Whether she is writing about first 
love, a father’s death and a mother’s grief, the passions of young motherhood, 
the interplay of eros and caritas, or the violence of city streets across the globe, 
Dunlop’s is a poetic that deftly connects the literal and autobiographical to 
the larger currents of history.  
In “Primer,” we encounter a young child learning to read, poised over 
a text with cheerful pictures, its “garden of verses” and neighbourhood of 
“houses lit with yellow sunshine.” Too young to know that the future will 
hold “pages for consequence, coercion, fraudulence,” she knows only this book’s 
“lovely language/that has no word for harm.” The world, too, is a text we 
learn to read, and Dunlop draws our attention to the particulars of female 
identity formation within western culture. In “The Education of Girls,” the 
poet recalls her Girl Guide days, wryly revealing the unspoken agreements 
of suburban life where girls, taught practical skills to make them “capable,” 
also swear to uphold official commands:  “look for/what is beautiful and good 
in everything, and try to become strong/enough to discard the ugly and unpleas-
ant.”  How compelling, therefore, this artist’s studied embrace of beauty: from 
gardens with their “wild strew of roses,” to “flocks of crows/singing a crude 
chorale,” or the “whir of monarch butterflies, orange-gold dust of thousands 
of wings,” Dunlop’s lush imagery pays tribute to the radiance of our often 
troubled tenancy on this earth.
 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering          307 
For Dunlop, even the smallest domestic details may reveal our connect-
edness to social and political spheres: perfume dabbed on a strap line “that cut 
across my brown skin” comes to resemble “trails of fighters” firebombing Viet 
Nam on the family tv. “History,” she observes, “threatens to swallow us//year 
after year.” Yet art and language countermand this destruction:  they elegize, 
humanize, make something happen—“the right word,” this poet tells us, “can 
send you breathless.” 
Dunlop’s sweeping lines have a cinematic force, moving dramatically 
between time and place to forge connections across continents and genera-
tions.  Yet she is equally capable of a lyrical delicacy that enriches this broader 
vision.  As she holds a student’s newborn, a professor is transported back to 
early motherhood, pleased that despite “this hard season,” she can “still find 
redemption” in a lover’s body, in “lovemaking that is a form of prayer.” While 
a mother grieves her husband’s loss, a daughter finds comfort in her father’s 
garden, yet half a world away, “in the rubble/of the burned library in Sarajevo” 
a cellist plays an adagio for victims killed in a breadline, and the poet closes 
in on this defiant gesture—how the “scroll of his cello/is a fist shaken in the 
face/of death.” 
Taken together, the poetry in this Folio holds both defiance and re-
demption, providing an apt showcase for a rich and complex body of work. 
Here, too, the urban scenes and domestic tableaux of photographs offer a 
perfect counterpoint to Dunlop’s poems. The powerful scrollwork of light 
and script—on walls, doors, pages, clothing, bodies—is testament to one of 
Dunlop’s defining insights:  “The heart is literate./It wants to read the pages 
it has unfurled.” 
             —Jane Satterfield
308            Volume 11, Number 1


Editor's Notes