April/May 1983 RAIN Page 11 ACCESS: INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Fragment From A Lost Diary: Women ofAsia, Africa, and Latin America Naomi Katz and Nancy Milton, Editors Beacon Press 25 Beacon St. Boston, MA 02108 $4.95, 1973, 318 pp. Western feminist scholars have filled many of the gaps in our knowledge of our ancestral sisters’ history. However, a similar body of information about women of the Third World is not readily available to us. Where recorded history neglects to document the experiences and significance of women in a culture or society, we must rely on liter- atme to expand our understanding. Fragment From a Lost Diary is an an-; thology of stories about the lives of Asian, African, and Latin American women by Third World women and men. Although many of the authors were educated in Western universities and belong to an intellectual class, they write with the cultural and social perceptions of insiders. The first part of the anthology focuses on stories about women who suffer a cultural oppression over which they have no control, save escape by suicide or exile. The underlying force in these stories, as in most Third World literature, is poverty. In these conditions, the value of the daughter is reduced to her bride price; the mother to provide wageearning offspring. These tragic stories are particularly poignant becase they are written about and through the eyes of girls who are so young that they are innocent of sexual double standards, the social effects of poverty, and women’s expected roles. The second part of the collection deals with the transition in women’s lives that arises from changing social values, and the external forces of war and colonization. The final section of stories is concerned with women’s lives outside the traditional private realm. For these women of colonized Africa and Latin America, marital and familial oppression is incidental to the larger social forces of racism and class prejudice. Fragment From a Lost Diary offers us the opportunity to define our feminism from an international, intercultural perspective, helping us understand the struggles of all women—a goal to strive toward. „ —Penny Fearon Development as if Women Mattered: An Annotated Bibliography With a Third World Focus May Rihani Overseas Development Council 1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20036 $3.00, 1978 This is an excellent reference book for finding the key writers and thinkers about the issues of women and development. Development As If Women Mattered includes 287 studies with clear, concise summaries. Also, for articles that are not readily accessible, addresses are included for ordering by mail. The studies are collected under subject headings (such as agriculture, industry, health) as well as geographical categories. For the people who are new to the ideas of women in development, this is an invaluable guide for exploring areas of interest. For those who are already familiar with the literature in specific areas, this handbook can easily fill in the gaps. —Rosalind Grigsby Riser WOMEN AND SPIRITUALITY By Margaret McCrea Questions, reservations, and ruminations about women’s spirituality reveled within me. I had thought much about the subject, struggling to formulate my thoughts into words. With a sense of quest and thirst, I pursued the path of exploring the thinking and developments about women’s spirituality. My search continued through several dozen books and periodicals. The highlights of this journey, I would like to share with you. Naomi Goldenberg’s The Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions is a good place to start reading. This book does an excellent job, in a few words and pages, of stating the position of the women s spirituality movement in Western tradition as it now stands. Beginning with the statement that God the Father- Lawgiver is dead, dead, dead, Goldenberg goes on to say that, as when real fathers die, we lose a sense of an outer authority governing our lives and we are called upon to look inwards for spiritual guidance and understanding, which we gain from our own inner and outer experiences. The strength of this book is twofold; it is written in clear language — you won’t find words like "ontological” and "patristic” here — and it introduces the reader to all the major current thinkers on women and religion — Carol Christ, Judith Plaskow, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Rita M. Gross, and many others. After reading this book I returned the others I had borrowed to the library, as I felt that they were peripheral or that I/we had gone beyond them. The weakness of this book is that Goldenberg de- dares that not only is god dead, but so is religion. If religion has served the place of psychology for thousands of years, she reasons, then psychology will in the future serve the place of religion. That’s all very well for a Jungian psychologist to say, and she’s right as long as she s talking about personal exploration, but it leaves me feeling a little cold. Where do we put our need for celebration, for worship and ritual into this scheme? Somehow personal dream- analysis wouldn’t seem to be the impulse that leads to the building of a cathedral to Notre Dame, or that would cause 600 people to stand up and sing an Hallelujah Chorus. From Goldenberg I went to Womanspirit Rising, edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow. This book is the basic textbook for women’s philosophy/theology containing all ^ the "must-read” essays that are the foundation of women s thinking in these areas. It is written almost entirely by women theologians. In spite of-—or because of-—that fact, these articles are courageous and radical. Stating that we have nothing to loose by abandoning men’s religion and everything to gain by exploring our own, these women have
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