Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

Durisin, Elya M.

Van Der Meulen, Emily

VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 189
Awfully Devoted Women examines 
lesbian history in Canada from 
1900-1965. The book is neatly di-
vided between two distinct temporal 
periods, with an underlying goal to 
render visible previously ignored 
groups of same-sex desiring women. 
The first part, “Awfully Devoted Odd 
Women,” focuses on upper-middle 
class women in the early twentieth 
century. Drawing from five col-
lections of personal papers, Duder 
examines how women who desired 
other women located others like 
themselves in an era prior to lesbian 
visibility. Duder convincingly argues 
that these relationships are locat-
able within the history of same-sex 
relationships because: they existed 
outside of heteronormative bounds, 
had erotic undertones, and repre-
sented long-lasting partnerships. 
His choice to devote considerable 
content to “physical sexuality” as a 
way to move beyond tired debates 
about proving “genital sexuality” 
is particularly provocative. Duder 
also effectively situates his research 
within the larger debate surrounding 
romantic friendship. Most notably, 
his source material suggests that 
romantic friendship underwent a 
period of transition, but still persisted 
into the twentieth century, incorpo-
rating distinctly erotic subject matter 
and the newer medicalized discourse 
on sexuality.
The second part, “Lesbian Lives 
After the Second World War,” draws 
on 32 semi-structured interviews of 
women who experienced same-sex 
desire between 1950 and 1965. 
This section’s focus is a deliberate 
departure from the emphasis on 
working class butch/femme bar cul-
AWFULLY DEVOTED 
WOMEN
Cameron Duder
Vancouver: ubc Press, 2010
reviewed by danielle 
cooper
ture and the homophile movement 
that dominates mid-twentieth-cen-
tury lesbian histories. In order to so, 
Duder draws on interviews of lower 
middle-class women from the peri-
od just prior to homophile organiz-
ing in Canada. Due to their lower 
middle-class status, these women 
were either unaware or unwilling 
to participate in working class bar 
culture. Themes addressed include: 
childhood experiences, informa-
tion about sexuality imparted as 
children and young adults, same-
sex sexual practices and relation-
ships, and community. In doing so, 
Duder not only addresses a previ-
ously underrepresented group of 
same-sex desiring women, but also 
challenges common conceptions 
that this generation was more sex-
ually aware than their predecessors. 
Duder’s informants reveal that for 
lower middle-class women in the 
mid-twentieth century, same-sex 
desire remained a largely unknown 
topic with experience acquired 
primarily through personal experi-
mentation.
Awfully Devoted Women includes 
discussion from two distinct class 
groups and time periods while 
operating under the premise that 
these discussions share the un-
derlying argument that women’s 
same-sex desire included erotic and 
physical elements in eras lacking 
lesbian identity and an accessible 
lesbian community. Although this 
argument is dutifully addressed 
throughout book, it remains an in-
sufficient justification for the book’s 
sharply divided focus. The book’s 
artificial division is exacerbated by 
the differences in source material 
drawn upon in each section (archi-
val documents versus interviews), 
which results in distinctly different 
narrative structures and topics ad-
dressed.
Awfully Devoted Women’s appeal 
ultimately remains in the details: a 
reader can easily get lost in the first-
hand accounts, the tender excerpts 
from love letters and twentieth-cen-
tury photographs (particularly of 
the dreamy Dr. Freida Fraser). Un-
fortunately, these details do not add 
up because Duder situates the book 
within a number of the major de-
bates within lesbian historiography 
with mixed success. For example, 
he argues against lesbian history’s 
tendency to be too abstract, and by 
extension, that focusing on bodily 
contact is important because “lesbi-
an history is about real people with 
real bodies and real desires.” Yet, his 
explicit refusal to engage with les-
bian identity debates significantly 
weakens his choice to use the term 
“lesbian” to describe women who 
did not self-identify as such.
Danielle Cooper is a doctoral student 
at the School of Gender, Feminist, and 
Women’s Studies at York University. Her 
research focuses on lgbtq grassroots 
information organization and the 
queer activities found therein.
“What is trafficking in women?” 
asks Jo Doezema in the opening 
line of her new book, Sex Slaves and 
Discourse Masters: The Construction of 
Trafficking, a question that becomes 
the central thesis of her pioneering 
new text. In it, Doezema proceeds 
to challenge much of what we have 
been told about trafficking in women. 
With an analysis that employs the 
concepts of myth and consent, her 
text draws a genealogical relationship 
between historical debates on white 
slavery and what she argues is its 
SEx SLAVES AND 
DISCOURSE MASTERS: 
THE CONSTRUCTION 
OF TRAFFICKING
Jo Doezema
New York: Zed Books, 2010
reviewed by elya m. 
durisin and emily van 
der meulen
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME190
contemporary incarnation, traffick-
ing in women.
What makes her text and her argu-
ments so compelling is the innovative 
and multifaceted methodology she 
utilizes to unearth the production 
and construction of the “trafficked 
woman.” Doezema explains that the 
majority of research on trafficking 
has made attempts at description or 
quantification; however, the results of 
such research indicate that trafficking 
is a phenomenon resistant to both 
definition and measurement. Most 
often, studies on trafficking pose the 
questions: who is being trafficked, 
by whom, to where, and for what 
purpose? Rarely has research sought 
to uncover the ways in which the 
answers to these questions become 
interpreted as “legitimate knowl-
edge.” It is precisely this discursive 
process that is examined in Sex 
Slaves and Discourse Masters. By 
locating “trafficking” as a particular 
discourse, Doezema centers her 
analysis on “how certain definitions 
of the problem become dominant, 
…whose knowledge is accepted and 
whose sidelined, and … the social 
practices involved in constructing 
and legitimating knowledge.”
In the opening chapter, Doezema 
situates her analysis of “trafficked 
women” in relation to myth and 
ideology, concepts that she uses to 
interrogate knowledge produced 
about white slavery and trafficking 
in women. Chapters two and three 
contain a historical exploration of 
the myth of white slavery in Britain 
and the United States, which lays the 
groundwork for the parallels drawn 
in the upcoming chapters. Chapter 
four examines early international 
agreements on white slavery, the 
first of which was signed in 1904, 
to be followed by further agreements 
throughout the first half of the twen-
tieth century up until 1949, when the 
abolitionist position on prostitution 
was fully embraced in international 
law. Doezema explores how these 
agreements established a discursive 
dualism between the suffering body 
of the “forced” prostitute and the 
threatening body of the willing 
prostitute who is a bearer of disorder 
to the nation, one that continues 
to be evident in the contemporary 
agreement. Chapter five contains an 
in-depth analysis of the protracted 
process of negotiations that led to 
the United Nations Protocol on 
trafficking, focusing on the rela-
tionships between sex workers and 
anti-trafficking activists. 
Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters 
advances new conceptualizations 
of transnational migration, sexual 
labour, and consent through drawing 
parallels between “white slavery” 
and “human trafficking.” Doezema 
demonstrates that narratives about 
white slavery and the concept it is 
grounded in—prostitution—rely 
on ideologies surrounding sexuality, 
race, and gender for their significance. 
The text draws out the critical insight 
that debate around white slavery was 
formulated in the context of empire 
and concerns about supposed threats 
to the nation posed by immigrants—
insights overlooked in the dominant 
discussions surrounding “trafficking” 
today. This oversight has resulted 
in an under-appreciation of the 
ways in which governments can use 
“trafficking” as a vehicle to advance 
unrelated policy goals, for example 
the criminalization of consensual 
adult sex for pay, the cessations of 
funding for health and human rights 
programs targeting hiv/aids, or the 
increased securitization of borders. 
Dozema also illuminates the ways 
in which anti-trafficking policies 
adopted with expressed intention of 
“helping” sex workers often end up 
(re)producing repressive and harmful 
consequences. 
Accessible to a diverse audience 
of laypersons, students, researchers, 
and policymakers, Sex Slaves and 
Discourse Masters is a significant and 
groundbreaking addition to the field 
of research on trafficking in persons 
and to the international literature 
on the topic. This text comes highly 
recommended.
Elya M. Durisin is a Ph.D. candidate 
in Political Science at York Univer-
sity, Toronto. Her research focuses on 
Canadian anti-trafficking policy and 
practice. Elya is a board member at 
Canada’s oldest sex worker-run orga-
nization, Maggie’s: The Toronto Sex 
Workers Action Project.
Emily van der Meulen is a Post-Doc-
toral Fellow at the Centre for Research 
on Inner City Health, St. Michael’s 
Hospital, Toronto. She holds a sup-
plementary Post-Doctoral Fellowship 
with the Comparative Program on 
Health and Society at the University of 
Toronto. She is also a board member of 
Maggie’s. Her research interests include 
international and Canadian sex work 
policies, sex industry labour organizing, 
and decriminalization.
Sex Work Matters aims to bridge some 
of the current divides in scholarship 
on sex work/ers, which, according to 
the editors, revolve around divisions 
within feminism, across disciplines, 
and between academics and activists. 
Largely influenced by U.S. policy 
that demarcates “sex trafficking” as 
the most pressing aspect of the sex 
industry, Sex Work Matters challenges 
dominant narratives that focus on 
violence, abuse, and coercion. It offers 
alternatives to standard “mainstream” 
research projects that all too often 
frame sex workers as women who have 
sacrificed their good moral standing 
or as agentless victims and dupes of 
exploitative systems. 
Not only do such existing accounts 
erase the myriad of choices people (of 
any and all genders) make to engage in 
sex work, but moralistic frameworks 
SEx WORK MATTERS: 
ExPLORING MONEY, 
POWER AND INTIMACY 
IN THE SEx INDUSTRY
Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy 
and Alys Willman, Eds.
New York: Zed Books, 2010
reviewed by naomi de 
szegheo-lang


Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking

de Szegheo-Lang, Naomi

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME190
contemporary incarnation, traffick-
ing in women.
What makes her text and her argu-
ments so compelling is the innovative 
and multifaceted methodology she 
utilizes to unearth the production 
and construction of the “trafficked 
woman.” Doezema explains that the 
majority of research on trafficking 
has made attempts at description or 
quantification; however, the results of 
such research indicate that trafficking 
is a phenomenon resistant to both 
definition and measurement. Most 
often, studies on trafficking pose the 
questions: who is being trafficked, 
by whom, to where, and for what 
purpose? Rarely has research sought 
to uncover the ways in which the 
answers to these questions become 
interpreted as “legitimate knowl-
edge.” It is precisely this discursive 
process that is examined in Sex 
Slaves and Discourse Masters. By 
locating “trafficking” as a particular 
discourse, Doezema centers her 
analysis on “how certain definitions 
of the problem become dominant, 
…whose knowledge is accepted and 
whose sidelined, and … the social 
practices involved in constructing 
and legitimating knowledge.”
In the opening chapter, Doezema 
situates her analysis of “trafficked 
women” in relation to myth and 
ideology, concepts that she uses to 
interrogate knowledge produced 
about white slavery and trafficking 
in women. Chapters two and three 
contain a historical exploration of 
the myth of white slavery in Britain 
and the United States, which lays the 
groundwork for the parallels drawn 
in the upcoming chapters. Chapter 
four examines early international 
agreements on white slavery, the 
first of which was signed in 1904, 
to be followed by further agreements 
throughout the first half of the twen-
tieth century up until 1949, when the 
abolitionist position on prostitution 
was fully embraced in international 
law. Doezema explores how these 
agreements established a discursive 
dualism between the suffering body 
of the “forced” prostitute and the 
threatening body of the willing 
prostitute who is a bearer of disorder 
to the nation, one that continues 
to be evident in the contemporary 
agreement. Chapter five contains an 
in-depth analysis of the protracted 
process of negotiations that led to 
the United Nations Protocol on 
trafficking, focusing on the rela-
tionships between sex workers and 
anti-trafficking activists. 
Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters 
advances new conceptualizations 
of transnational migration, sexual 
labour, and consent through drawing 
parallels between “white slavery” 
and “human trafficking.” Doezema 
demonstrates that narratives about 
white slavery and the concept it is 
grounded in—prostitution—rely 
on ideologies surrounding sexuality, 
race, and gender for their significance. 
The text draws out the critical insight 
that debate around white slavery was 
formulated in the context of empire 
and concerns about supposed threats 
to the nation posed by immigrants—
insights overlooked in the dominant 
discussions surrounding “trafficking” 
today. This oversight has resulted 
in an under-appreciation of the 
ways in which governments can use 
“trafficking” as a vehicle to advance 
unrelated policy goals, for example 
the criminalization of consensual 
adult sex for pay, the cessations of 
funding for health and human rights 
programs targeting hiv/aids, or the 
increased securitization of borders. 
Dozema also illuminates the ways 
in which anti-trafficking policies 
adopted with expressed intention of 
“helping” sex workers often end up 
(re)producing repressive and harmful 
consequences. 
Accessible to a diverse audience 
of laypersons, students, researchers, 
and policymakers, Sex Slaves and 
Discourse Masters is a significant and 
groundbreaking addition to the field 
of research on trafficking in persons 
and to the international literature 
on the topic. This text comes highly 
recommended.
Elya M. Durisin is a Ph.D. candidate 
in Political Science at York Univer-
sity, Toronto. Her research focuses on 
Canadian anti-trafficking policy and 
practice. Elya is a board member at 
Canada’s oldest sex worker-run orga-
nization, Maggie’s: The Toronto Sex 
Workers Action Project.
Emily van der Meulen is a Post-Doc-
toral Fellow at the Centre for Research 
on Inner City Health, St. Michael’s 
Hospital, Toronto. She holds a sup-
plementary Post-Doctoral Fellowship 
with the Comparative Program on 
Health and Society at the University of 
Toronto. She is also a board member of 
Maggie’s. Her research interests include 
international and Canadian sex work 
policies, sex industry labour organizing, 
and decriminalization.
Sex Work Matters aims to bridge some 
of the current divides in scholarship 
on sex work/ers, which, according to 
the editors, revolve around divisions 
within feminism, across disciplines, 
and between academics and activists. 
Largely influenced by U.S. policy 
that demarcates “sex trafficking” as 
the most pressing aspect of the sex 
industry, Sex Work Matters challenges 
dominant narratives that focus on 
violence, abuse, and coercion. It offers 
alternatives to standard “mainstream” 
research projects that all too often 
frame sex workers as women who have 
sacrificed their good moral standing 
or as agentless victims and dupes of 
exploitative systems. 
Not only do such existing accounts 
erase the myriad of choices people (of 
any and all genders) make to engage in 
sex work, but moralistic frameworks 
SEx WORK MATTERS: 
ExPLORING MONEY, 
POWER AND INTIMACY 
IN THE SEx INDUSTRY
Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy 
and Alys Willman, Eds.
New York: Zed Books, 2010
reviewed by naomi de 
szegheo-lang
VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 191
also inherently assume all workers 
begin from a privileged position 
of having their perceived ‘moral 
worth’ intact and unquestioned. 
The reality is that many people 
who occupy marginalized positions 
do not have this luxury as a starting 
point—racialized people, indigenous 
populations, queer people, and those 
with chronic mental health concerns 
and physical disabilities have all 
historically, though differently, had 
their morality treated as suspect. This 
recognition, acknowledged but not 
elaborated upon by the book, further 
complicates debates around previous 
constructions of sex workers.
Given these considerations, the 
reframing called for by Sex Work 
Matters is much needed, and the 
intervention is an important one. 
Although many scholars and activists 
have been contributing to anti-moral-
ity and anti-trafficking discourses for 
some time, there is still a shortage of 
contemporary academic collections 
that reflect current research across a 
variety of disciplines. However, while 
the intent of Sex Work Matters is clear, 
the execution is inconsistent. 
Several pieces in this collection 
build strong foundations from which 
to reimagine scholarly engagement 
with sex work/ers—notably, chapters 
by Laura Augustín, Jo Weldon, and 
Maggie O’Neill and Jane Pitcher 
map out potential alternative frame-
works and methodologies in order 
to ground both the research process 
and results, and engage the lived 
experiences of sex workers in more 
reflective ways. Though each case pre-
sented in this book strives to challenge 
dominant paradigms (disciplinary, 
socio-cultural, legal, discursive), 
some do so only while continuing to 
uphold familiar tropes of sex workers, 
and/or to reinforce hierarchies of the 
nonparticipant researcher and the 
participant researched. 
With the goals of Sex Work Matters 
including a creation of more dialogue 
across research/ers, it seems logical— 
indeed, perhaps imperative—that an 
intersectional approach be fostered. 
Here, a nuanced intersectional ap-
proach must mean more than simply 
looking at interrelating factors of 
race-class-ability-gender-age-sexual-
ity (an equation that is challenging 
enough for some). Intersectionality 
in this case should also encompass 
awareness and understanding of 
various forms of sex work and the 
relationships between and among 
them. While some chapters elucidate 
these linkages, others stay firmly 
rooted in their own cases and do 
not explore broader connections to 
other employment in the sex industry. 
Rather than undermine the collec-
tion, however, these shortfalls actually 
serve to support the editors’ call for 
more dialogue between researchers 
and activists alike. 
Reading from a sex-positive and sex 
work-positive feminist framework, 
Sex Work Matters ultimately leaves 
something to be desired. The analysis 
across chapters is inconsistent, and 
should be pushed further in order to 
better reflect debates and activisms 
that have been occurring outside of 
the mainstream academy for some 
time now. While including different 
viewpoints is important in furthering 
dialogue, editors must pay careful 
attention to the ways in which they 
place differing approaches in conver-
sation with one another. Ditmore, 
Levy and Willman tend to fall back 
onto a human rights discourse that 
glosses over differences in geopolitical 
location in favour of advocating for 
sex workers to “enjoy the same rights 
and conditions as anyone else.” They 
fail to substantially ask the question, 
however, who is this ‘anyone else’? This 
is left as an unmarked (highly priv-
ileged) group that has full access to 
legal, state-sanctioned support—one 
that is, indeed, elusive. 
With that being said, the collection 
offers an important step in the right 
direction, and begins to reframe the 
terms for engaging research on and 
with sex work/ers. It is a good resource 
for those seeking an initial sampling 
of contemporary research on sex work 
that does not rely on narrowed visions 
of trafficking and calls for abolition. 
Readers should bring an open mind to 
alternative methodologies and lines 
of inquiry while keeping a critical eye 
to potential reproduction of research 
inequalities. Ideally, the contribu-
tions made by Sex Work Matters will 
encourage more publications of this 
kind, and will continue to expand 
the field of sex work studies in ways 
that are useful to, and inclusive of, 
sex workers and their demands.
Naomi de Szegheo-Lang is a doctoral 
student in Gender, Feminist, and 
Women’s Studies at York University. 
Her research areas include feminist 
cultural studies, queer theory, sexuality 
studies, and queer cultural production. 
Her current work takes up productive 
tensions between sexual citizenship, 
homonationalisms, affect, and femi-
nist porn.
 
The Women’s Movement: Inside and 
Outside the State analyses the intersec-
tion between social movements and 
states. Exploring the role of feminist 
activists located within the state 
bureaucracy, Lee Ann Banaszak con-
siders the important contributions 
that feminist insiders made to the 
American women’s movement from 
1960-2000. Although she notes the 
relative weakness of the U.S. women’s 
policy machinery in comparison with 
other liberal democracies, Banaszak 
argues that feminist insiders were 
dispersed across the bureaucracy and 
were often able to develop policies 
and create political opportunities 
which were consistent with move-
ment goals. Critical of scholars who 
argue that insiders are inevitably 
co-opted and committed to limited 
THE WOMEN’S 
MOVEMENT: INSIDE 
AND OUTSIDE THE 
STATE
Lee Ann Banaszak
New York: Cambridge University 
Press, 2010
reviewed by lisa mae 
boucher


English

Sex Work Matters: Exploring Money, Power and Intimacy in the Sex Industry

Daly, Tamara

The Politics of Women’s Health Equity: Through the Looking Glass

Michaud, Jacinthe

French

Au Temps Fou de La Vie en Rose: Deux visions féministes des rapports amoureux et du changement social

Argyle, Gisela

Daughters and Mothers in Alice Munro’s Later Stories

Swiss, Margo

32 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME
MARGO SWISS
Light Delivery
for Dr. Melanie Caetano 
(Obstetrics & Gynaecology)
Pregnant with worry these many months
I’ve grown gut-heavy with gloom
though friends have prayed
nay-sayed with conviction
all shall be well.
And to meet at last this brave slip of a girl
who, welcomes first, then hands me over
inside and out with her true-touch fingering! 
How cheerfully 
she probes away my morning dark, invites 
instead 
this tongue-tied heart to bear down and express
its full-term delivery of grief.
I marvel in the light
of her expert articulation of this quick benediction
summoning, with such ease, tears of simple joy
from these bone-dry eyes.
Outside after
high over everything I see
that rain has cleared
that sun, drawing back curtains of cloud,
has finally broken through
swabbing streets clean
awash in noonday light.
Margo Swiss has published poems in Quarry, Fiddlehead, 
Antigonish Review, and several Canadian anthologies. 
Her monograph, Crossword: A Woman’s Narrative, and 
anthology, Poetry as Liturgy: An Anthology of Canadian 
Poets, were published in the St. Thomas Poetry Series. 
She has a recent chapbook, Here Now (Arkwark Press), 
and her work will appear in a forthcoming anthology, The 
Poet’s Quest for God, published in England and edited by 
Todd Swift. She teaches English and Creative Writing at 
York University, and tutors in the Writing Department.
ILONA MARTONFI
The Woman by the River
Surrounded by fields
purple lilac, sycamore,
on the other side of the road
on orchard slopes down to the St. Lawrence.
The walled garden.
Red brick bungalow.
Moved to Anjou 1971 – 
with your three daughters.
Spade and bucket of cold water
burlap covering roots – 
Two five-year-old saplings
McIntosh apple trees
delivered by red pickup
Pépinière Jasmin.
For that moment,
you forgot you were a battered wife.
Ilona Martonfi is the author of two poetry books, Blue 
Poppy (2009), and Black Grass (2012). Ilona has 
published in Vallum, Accenti, The Fiddlhead, and 
Serai. She is the founder/producer of The Yellow Door 
and Visual Arts Centre Readings, and the co-founder of 
Lovers and Others. She is also the recipient of the qwf 
2010 Community Award.


Light Delivery

Philips, M. Ann

Classical Martial Arts Training: A Zen Approach to Health, Wellness and Empowerment for Women

VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 193
regimes and categories of illegality 
dispose disabled persons, racialized 
Others, and women as people outside 
the borders of belonging. The third 
and final chapter discusses the means 
by which individuals challenge and 
resist these borders, and how those 
sanctioned under law attempt to de-
fend them. What is striking here are 
the similarities between contestations 
and defenses. Welke points out, for 
instance, that like those challenging 
oppressive legal structures, those 
who defend them rely on a similar 
language of inclusion in order to mask 
privilege and make it less accessible to 
those subordinated under law.
Encompassing legal precedents 
and court cases, social histories, and 
published letters and memoirs, Wel-
ke’s research is expansive and varied. 
At times, however, Welke relies on a 
somewhat evidentiary listing of cases 
for her argument. This is understand-
able given the technique of legal 
writing and defense, yet a sustained 
discussion of select legal cases or ex-
amples—many only alluded to in the 
chapters or their epigraphs—could 
add a more rigorous and nuanced 
means of exploring the discrepancies 
between legal language and practice.
One possibility for expansion on 
Welke’s arguments is a more intricate 
elaboration on collective social or 
legal action and its role in contesting 
the limits of “belonging.” Certainly, 
Welke’s principle focus is individual 
rights, yet she contends that prac-
tices of exclusion also work to create 
community. Thus, collectivity lies 
at the heart of “belonging,” and we 
can consider this, along with the 
questions that Welke raises, when 
thinking about emergent claims to 
legal rights in the twenty-first century.
Katharine Wrobel is a Ph.D. Can-
didate in English at York University. 
Her current research explores nine-
teenth-century political radicalism and 
representations of anger in the British 
novel during the Reform Acts.
scope beyond the strictly historical 
borders of the nineteenth century 
to include the adoption of the Con-
stitution in the eighteenth century 
and the subsequent amendments that 
followed. In this way, she considers 
the various challenges to the notions 
of personhood and citizenship that 
came with the abolition of slavery, 
with calls for suffrage, with property 
reform, and with the Immigration 
Acts of the 1920s.
This book asks a series of questions 
that demonstrate the complexity of 
the concept of “belonging.” Welke 
provides examples of the ways in 
which personhood and citizenship, 
while interrelated, are somewhat 
distinct considerations: personhood 
being the recognition of the indi-
vidual specifically under law, the 
practices that constitute the rights of 
individual security and well-being, as 
well as self-ownership and mobility; 
and citizenship being the recognized 
set of formal practices and obligations 
to the law.
By acknowledging how white, 
able manhood was invested with 
full personhood, thus providing the 
framework for claims to land, liberty 
and law, Welke explores the ways that 
an individual may have the rights of 
citizenship, but be bereft of the rights 
of personhood. This understanding 
of personhood and citizenship illu-
minates how legal practices shape 
personal identity—with all its 
possibilities under law—but simul-
taneously thwart the exercise of an 
individual under that law.
The major assertion is that “the 
borders of belonging,” built on legal 
practices of subordination and exclu-
sion, are ultimately fragile; they must 
be constantly reaffirmed and redrawn 
in order to maintain their authority, 
and in this sense, the organization of 
the book follows this contention. The 
first chapter discusses the legal means 
and claims that construct the univer-
sal legal subject as able, white, and 
male. The second chapter considers 
the consequences of conceptualizing 
this universal subject for those not 
included in its definition. Particular-
ly, it highlights how administrative 
Elizabeth Eger’s group biography 
builds on and expands the focus of 
Sylvia Myers’s study The Bluestocking 
Circle: Women, Friendship, and the 
Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century 
England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 
1990). Myers used Carol Gilligan’s 
analysis of female experience as 
typically structured like a web, 
rather than the male hierarchical 
structure, in order to demonstrate, 
with a series of case studies, that the 
guidance and support of female and 
male mentors and friends helped the 
original “bluestocking” women gain 
confidence and achieve autonomy as 
intellectuals. Myers counted three 
strands in the circle’s preoccupa-
tions: female advocacy, wider social 
opportunities, and aspirations to the 
life of the mind. In chapters on the 
bluestockings’ mentors, families, and 
friends, their choices and changing 
views of marriage, and their role as 
women writers, she provided a thor-
ough and detailed social context for 
the bluestockings’ pursuit of learning 
and virtue.
Eger relies on the reader’s famil-
iarity with Myers’s portrait and 
concentrates on her own thesis 
that better recognition of the blue-
stockings’ intellectual work across 
genres complicates the common 
dichotomies for eighteenth-century 
culture: “the public and the private; 
reason and feeling; masculine and 
feminine; local and national; the do-
mestic and the civic; Enlightenment 
and Romanticism.” Eger initiated 
an exhibition, “Brilliant Women: 
18th-Century Bluestockings,” in the 
BLUESTOCKINGS: 
WOMEN OF 
REASON FROM 
ENLIGHTENMENT TO 
ROMANTICISM
Elizabeth Eger
Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2010
reviewed by gisela 
argyle
CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME194
National Portrait Gallery, London, 
2008; she organized it with the help 
of Lucy Peltz, with whom she also 
co-authored the accompanying book 
of essays of the same title. She frames 
her present study with two visual 
representations: Richard Samuel’s 
idealizing group portrait, The Nine 
Living Muses of Great Britain, and 
Thomas Rowlandson’s caricature, 
Breaking Up of the Bluestocking 
Club. The first, exhibited at the 
Royal Academy in 1779, groups nine 
major contemporary women writers 
and artists in an idealized, classicist 
style below a statue of Apollo, god 
of the arts, as proof of Great Britain’s 
glory, whereas the second, a print of 
1815, satirizes the bluestockings as 
“unsex’d” brawling slatterns. This 
historical trajectory parallels the 
changing meaning of their moni-
ker: “bluestocking” (which denotes 
working men’s worsted hose and had 
formerly been a derogatory name 
for Cromwell’s Little Parliament), 
was first applied to the casual dress 
permitted to male guests at Lady 
Montagu’s assemblies, after which 
it came to designate, positively, the 
women there who sought intellectual 
company. As their cultural work 
prospered and provoked male anxiety, 
the name took on negative connota-
tions, as in Byron’s satire The Blues: 
A Literary Eclogue (1821). 
In her first chapter, “Living Muses: 
The Female Icon,” Eger discusses the 
intersecting of the allegorical and 
symbolic representation of the liberal 
arts as women with the view of his-
torical women as muses. She argues 
that like the classical Muses and un-
like twentieth-century conceptions 
of them as passive and sexualized, 
the British “muses” were active and 
creative participants in “a demotic 
and diffuse Enlightenment, which 
incorporated journalists, Johnsonian 
coffee-house philosophers, writers of 
the bluestocking circle, Unitarian 
ministers, collectors and connois-
seurs, scientists and educators, as 
well as moral philosophers such as 
Shaftesbury and Adam Smith.” Her 
case studies illustrate the “’femi-
nist’ dimension of Enlightenment 
culture.” For an example, she cites 
Angelica Kauffmann’s historical 
paintings, typically a masculine 
genre, and her self-portraits as a 
professional painter. She organizes 
her case studies in three chapters, 
focusing on six women selected from 
the “nine living muses”: Elizabeth 
Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Elizabeth 
Griffith, Charlotte Lennox, Anna 
Barbauld, and Lucy Aiken. The first 
chapter, entitled “The Bluestocking 
Salon: Patronage, Correspondence 
and Conversation,” establishes 
these three activities as fulfilling the 
moral philosophers’ prescription of 
sociability and sympathy as requisite 
for the new commercial society. All 
three activities “occupy a space be-
tween public and private spheres of 
discourse,” which may explain their 
neglect by literary historians and crit-
ic. They expand Jürgen Habermas’s 
definition of the public sphere in 
terms of print culture alone. 
Practicing what was called the 
“bluestocking philosophy,” Lady 
Montagu used the wealth derived 
from her husband’s coal mines and 
ably administered by her when 
widowed to fulfill her social duty 
through the patronage of literature 
and culture. Her patronage included 
architecture, in the building of her 
new, second London mansion, de-
signed to accommodate the growing 
bluestocking circle (c. 1756-75). 
Bringing the informal sociability of 
country houses and spas to town and 
cutting across boundaries of social 
rank, political affiliation, vocation, 
and gender, her inclusive salon united 
the guests in the life of the mind. 
Among prominent male guests were 
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, 
Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Sir 
Joshua Reynolds, and Horace Walpo-
le. From the correspondence between 
Montagu and her intimate friend, 
Elizabeth Carter, Eger concludes 
that the genre of letters transcends 
the boundary between private and 
public. Their correspondence “cel-
ebrated a friendship of profound 
spiritual and intellectual importance, 
which fed into, and helped define, 
their broader sense of female literary 
community.” Lastly, Eger argues that 
for the bluestockings conversation 
on the model of Socratic dialogue 
served women’s education and was 
a substitute for men’s training in 
oratory. (Margaret Fuller would call 
her extra-mural course of studies 
for women in Boston from 1839 to 
1844, “Conversations.”)
Besides her role as hostess—“Queen 
of the Blues,” in the words of Dr. 
Johnson—Montagu distinguished 
herself through an essay on Shake-
speare. In the second chapter, “Fe-
male Champions: Women Critics of 
Shakespeare,” Eger gathers together 
Montagu, Charlotte Lennox, actress, 
playwright, translator, and editor, 
and Elizabeth Griffith, author of 
epistolary novels, who each con-
tributed a distinct perspective to the 
emerging, and decidedly masculine, 
field of Shakespeare criticism. Mon-
tagu defended Shakespeare’s genius, 
especially in the tragedies, in reply to 
Voltaire’s negative comparison with 
French drama. Her essay was very 
well-received in England, as well as 
in Germany and in France, where 
she was invited to the Académie 
française. Griffith praised especially 
the moral philosophy that informed 
Shakespeare’s female characters. 
Differing from both Montagu’s and 
Griffith’s approach, Lennox critiqued 
the hierarchy of genres by promot-
ing romance as defining national 
literature. Unlike classical literature, 
Shakespeare’s plays, in the “mother 
tongue,” were readily accessible to 
women, and their critical studies 
were consequently not received as 
threatening to male prerogative. By 
Eger’s account, these women’s role in 
English canon formation still needs 
studying.
The last chapter, “The Blue-
stocking Legacy in the Romantic 
Era,” re-examines the notion of a 
“lost generation” of women poets 
purveyed by recent anthologies. In 
fact, women dominated the field 
in the late eighteenth century. Eger 
attributes the long-term loss of their 
names to the new conservatism and 
cultural anxiety produced by the 
French Revolution, and the conse-
VOLUME 29,  NUMBER 3 195
Because I am a Girl is an anthology of 
work by various authors enlisted by 
Plan International, a child-centered 
development organization, in order 
to convey the difficulties young 
girls experience around the world. 
Each of the seven stories is written 
by a different author and expresses 
their impressions and interpretations 
of the lives and struggles faced by 
young women in Togo, Sierra Leone, 
Ghana, Brazil, Cambodia, Uganda, 
and the Dominican Republic. The 
collection as a whole is a hit and miss 
as far as accomplishing the intended 
quent sexist attitudes to intellectual 
women that, for instance, Byron, 
Wordsworth, and Hazlitt exhibit. She 
also blames common but simplistic 
scholarly dichotomies that oppose 
the Enlightenment to Romanticism 
in alignment with reason versus imag-
ination and feeling, and therefore 
exclude women from Romanticism. 
The subjects of her case study are 
Anna Barbauld, a sometime member 
of the original bluestocking circle, 
and her niece and pupil Lucy Aikin, 
both of whom combined reason and 
sympathetic imagination in their 
educational writings. Eger argues 
that Barbauld’s books for children 
nurtured the mass readership for 
Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. In her 
Epistles on Women (1810), on the four 
stages of civilization, Aikin proposed 
continued progress for women, but 
circumscribed and dependent on 
men’s help. In contrast, Barbauld 
imagined a dystopian future for 
British culture, where London has 
become a mere tourist attraction, 
like the ruins of classical antiquity. As 
though to prove her point, savage mi-
sogynist attacks were directed against 
her. Eger concludes her book with the 
reaction, illustrated by Rowlandson’s 
caricature, to the bluestockings’ eco-
nomic success and cultural visibility. 
She remarks that feminist history is 
divided in its impulse both to cele-
brate exceptional role models and to 
deplore the political status of women 
qua class. In support, she quotes Mary 
Wollstonecraft’s much-cited dictum: 
“I wish to see women neither heroines 
nor brutes; but reasonable creatures.”
When Eger suggests that the sev-
eral bluestockings who were named 
Elizabeth—Montagu, Carter, and 
Griffith—would have connected 
their aspirations with their royal 
namesake, she is silent on her own 
connection, a further link in the 
“mutual relationship between writ-
ing about women and writing by 
women.” Her book complements her 
predecessor Myers’s group biography. 
Eger adds a substantial use of Mon-
tagu’s unpublished letters, especially 
for her account of the friendship 
between Montagu and Carter. She 
also adds contemporary literary and 
visual material to illustrate the chang-
ing reception of the bluestockings. 
Her book is more thesis-driven than 
Myers’s, which results in redundant 
repetition of her main arguments 
with every new aspect of bluestocking 
activities. Overly anxious citation of 
other critics clutters the text (instead 
of notes), and quotations tend to be 
followed by unnecessary and some-
times flat explications. However, her 
concluding point is well earned and 
well taken: “One of the costs of rec-
ognizing the bluestockings’ success is 
to lose any simple sense of the history 
of feminism as a story of progress.”
Gisela Argyle, Senior Scholar of Hu-
manities at York University in Toronto, 
has published Germany as Model 
and Monster: Allusions in English 
Fiction, 1830s-1930s (Montreal: Mc-
Gill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 
another book and articles on Victorian 
literature and comparative literature, 
as well as literary translations from 
German into English and the converse.
BECAUSE I AM A GIRL
Tim Butcher, Joanne Harris, Xiaolu 
Guo, Kathy Lette, Deborah Mog-
gach, Marie Phillips, Irvine Welsh
London: Vintage, 2010
reviewed by ifrah 
abdillahi
objective stated by Marie Staunton, 
Chief Executive of Plan UK to “make 
girls visible in a way that reports and 
statistics cannot.” Some stories such 
as the one by acclaimed writer Kathy 
Lette on her visit to Brazil come across 
as offensive and insulting in their 
criticism of the country and its inhab-
itants. Lette, in an overly simplistic 
analysis, describes the young girls she 
encounters as “little more than a life 
support to their ovaries—reduced, 
by lack of contraception and lack 
of access to abortion, into breeding 
cows.” In a country gripped by ex-
treme poverty and a fierce doctrine 
of Catholic values, in which abortion 
is illegal but paedophile tourism is 
endemic, this contributor’s chapter, 
entitled Ovarian Roulette, is at times 
difficult to read due to a narrative 
steeped in condescension. Other 
chapters, such as the one offered by 
filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo, 
are of a fictional nature, this one in 
particular accounting the life of a 
Cambodian police officer who grew 
up as an orphan and soldier. Her 
story of a man who later in life gets 
married and has a daughter whom 
he loves but goes missing, while 
interesting, is somewhat difficult 
to understand and leaves the reader 
puzzled us to how young girls factor 
into the story or what the overall 
message regarding their circumstance 
is. Still, others such as the piece by 
Irvine Welsh, broach the theme of mi-
gration and prostitution in a unique 
and insightful manner. His chapter 
“Remittances” is through a narration 
by two sisters whose opportunities 
and outcomes in life vary drastically 
despite having been raised within 
the same household. His protagonist 
offers a nuanced account and insight 
into the complexities of women’s lives 
in the Dominican Republic, and the 
negotiations necessary in their roles 
as mothers, daughters, providers, 
and prostitutes. By far, however, the 
most impactful and moving account 
is offered by literary newcomer Marie 
Phillips. Phillips travels to Uganda for 
six days on a visit to the Plan regional 
offices and tours their programs 
within the country. Having been 


Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism

VOLUME 29, NUMBER 3 181
MARGO SWISS
Maternal Eros
For Jonathan
Before you entered the world
God knew you perfectly;
you were to Him
as though his only one.
Yet loving 
(in His way) unjealously,
He gave you to me
to harbour wholly
unseen.
Bathed in dark,
you grew, in time to pursue
your gallant path to light:
infant, boy, adolescent and
before me now—
        a man
        standing fast
        in God’s footsteps.
           I faint for
        love of
        you!
Margo Swiss’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.
JOANNA M. WESTON 
Looking Forward
this new language
foreign to childhood
teen years   twenties
The language of aging
I have been young
been at play   at work
raised children   farmed
no need to struggle
with the angst of youth
as I accommodate myself
to the vocabulary 
of memory
Joanna Weston’s poetry appears earlier in this volume.
Inanna Publications
Fall 2012
Smart books for people who want to read 
and think about real women’s lives.
www.inanna.ca
inanna.publications@inanna.ca


Maternal Eros

Lee, Becky R.

Sex, Gender and Episcopal Authority in an Age of Reform, 1000-1122

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