An informative jumping-off point for further investigation.
An analysis of girls who identify as “tomboys” and how the designation has changed over time.
For decades, girls who had short hair, preferred to wear pants rather than dresses, and liked to do “boy” things like climb trees or play sports were often called “tomboys,” a term that disappeared once the girl reached puberty and “outgrew” it. Though the name is still widely used, journalist and essayist Davis, who has contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications, explores the (in)adequacy of the word to cover the spectrum of gender and sexual identities finding expression today. In this meandering journey through the history and current state of “tomboyism,” some of the author’s pressing concerns include the pinkification of everything remotely feminine and the extreme boy-girl separation of toys and children’s products based on algorithms that instantly promote specific items tailored by gender. Davis scrutinizes the area surrounding gender identity vs. sexuality, especially in the chapter titled “War of the Words: Tomboy or Trans Boy?” She also considers the role of socio-economic status in the application of many of these designations. In addition to citing research into a variety of relevant topics, Davis includes personal stories of women who were considered tomboys as children who have since been able to find a comfortable place on the wide spectrum that exists today. “I think it’s important for parents, and kids,” she writes, “to understand how sex, gender, and sexuality have been understood in different eras, to see that the way we are experiencing and understanding them now is part of the evolution, and that we’ve still got so much more to learn.” There is still much to learn, and though Davis could have gone more in-depth in some areas, readers will find this a good place to start their education.
An informative jumping-off point for further investigation.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-45831-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hachette Go
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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