A rousing vision, though it’s hard to see where childless people fit into Kaufman’s otherwise inclusive and timely arguments.
A longtime gender equality activist and masculinity studies scholar argues that women are not the only victims of patriarchy.
Kaufman has written or edited numerous books on gender equality, including The Guy’s Guide to Feminism, co-authored with Michael Kimmel. Without denying the obvious privilege that men enjoy in a sexist world—e.g., as a man, Kaufman admits, he doesn’t have to worry that his boss will automatically assume he can’t go on a work trip because of family demands—Kaufman insists that ideals of masculinity present men with a script no one can follow and that “men pay a terrible price for the very ways we define manhood and construct men’s lives within societies where we have more power.” Therefore, men should take feminism and gender equity seriously: “It turns out that gender equality will mean that our lives as men will be changed for the better, too.” In particular, they should embrace caregiving for children, which would be positive for women, who, in a world where everyone was both an involved parent and a good worker, might not be viewed first as mothers by their bosses. Certainly, it would be good for children, who do better if they have involved fathers. Here, Kaufman takes pains to note that these benefits do not mean fathers are “necessarily unique or indispensable,” so that his arguments can’t be plucked up by those who would denounce single or lesbian mothers. Furthermore, writes the author, engaged fathers say they feel happier and more mature, complete, and secure than less-engaged fathers. More speculatively, Kaufman proposes that, because caregiving fosters empathy, it’s possible that men would become less violent. Achieving a co-parenting utopia is, of course, not just a matter of men deciding to read more bedtime stories to their children. Policy changes are crucial, and the author offers a few suggestions, including the introduction of flexible parental leave with “non-transferable daddy days.”
A rousing vision, though it’s hard to see where childless people fit into Kaufman’s otherwise inclusive and timely arguments.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-119-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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SEEN & HEARD
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