Machisma/The Cinderella Complex/In The Running
Hendy, Valerie
Macha ado about something MACHISMA: WOMEN AMD DARING Grace Lichtenstein Doubleday, $14.95, 348 pp. THE CINDERELLA COMPLEX WOMEN'S HIDDEN FEAR OF INDEPENDENCE Colette Dowling Summit Books,...
...It is a sign of women's growing political savvy, however, that more arid more are running and winning at the grass-roots levels of government...
...FRANK McCONNELL, the author of The Science Fiction of H.G...
...In fact, she believes, they are no more desirous of scaling the Himalayas than having to make the monthly fuel payments with the labor of their own hands...
...In the Running is a political primer, a well-researched guide to the machinations and frustrations of being a woman running for office...
...Rather, she saw in her new, more peaceful life the symptoms of a slavish attachment to the idea of'' being taken care of,'' which she dubs "the Cinderella Complex...
...An automotive executive tells Dowling that women have to be pushed up the company ladder kicking and screaming...
...And she believes him...
...Colette Dowling thinks that deep down, women are not macha at all...
...Even so, Mandel notes, the changes are progressing "glacially...
...Dowling bases her theory on the scantiest of evidence...
...How does rhythm and blues singer Bonnie Raitt's between-song banter about male sex organs rate as "daring...
...Wells and Storytelling and Myth-making (Oxford), is presently working on a study of the fiction of Graham Greene...
...Why does skier Suzy Chaffee, who once sent the pope a pair of roller skates -and distinguishes herself chiefly in Lichtenstein's eyes not for performance on the slopes but between the sheets-rate inclusion in the book at all...
...We get the feeling reading through Women and Daring that when a flamboyant character was willing to grant Lichtenstein an interview, the former New York Times reporter felt impelled to fit her into the book somehow...
...She manages to let slip how many men she's dated in the past week . . . The macha woman 'goes for it.' Lichtenstein is unintentionally more to the point about macha when she describes a woman who treated her badly during a disillusioning trek in the Himalayas...
...Any woman who looks within knows that she was never trained to feel comfortable with the idea of taking care of herself, standing up for herself, asserting herself . . . ," she writes...
...A whiz kid who had blitzed through Catholic high school by sixteen and college by twenty, she got pregnant one month after meeting the emotional wreck of a man who was to become her husband...
...We are still a novelty act," laments Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder...
...But Dowling refused to see her later lapse into domestic bliss in the country as a reaction to her exhausting struggle as a wife and breadwinner...
...There's more to her theory...
...She struggled to make a living as a writer and to look after her husband, whose frequent hospitalizations forced her into single parenthood years before his death...
...It is in these portraits that the book is most successful, and a few of the women are truly fascinating individuals, like racing driver Janet Guthrie...
...Most of the others seem profoundly disturbed, immature, or merely marking time wrecklessly, until their death wishes are consummated...
...Why is a businesswoman, often mistaken for a prostitute by hotel clerks because of her penchant for picking up one-night stands in hotel lobbies, perceived as bold...
...In interviews with dozens of women who have run for local, state, and national office, Mandel finds that the quest for financial backing is one that inevitably preoccupies women candidates, in part because of a prevailing sentiment in the male-dominated world of politics that asking for money is not a ladylike thing to do...
...Women are at the bottom of the corporate heap, she maintains, not because of a long history of lack of opportunity and discrimination, but because the bottom is where women feel most secure...
...REVIEWERS WILLIAM B. HIXSON, JR., teaches recent American history at Michigan State University...
...She perceived the change in her own feelings about dependency as being typical of the universal female condition...
...But ask they must - sometimes more often than their male counterparts, and sometimes with less success...
...Perhaps the problem with this poorly first class to Hawaii for a weekend on a whim . . . She subscribes to Field and Stream and hides Vogue in the bathroom . . . She lets male campers know that her backpack is five pounds heavier than theirs...
...The author does, however, explore the lives of some women who regularly risk their lives for fun or as a means of making a living...
...Mandel skillfully examines the novelty, and in so doing contributes to our understanding of the newest group to enter the smoke-filled rooms...
...THE CINDERELLA COMPLEX WOMEN'S HIDDEN FEAR OF INDEPENDENCE Colette Dowling Summit Books, $12.95, 230 pp...
...Mandel, director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University, observes at close range the way the political fortunes of women candidates have risen and fallen over the past decade...
...Her behavior," she writes, "revealed the darker side of machisma, the strutting and showing off to accomplish small gains or to get an edge on people whom she felt were not her equals...
...Valerie Hendy GRACE LICHTENSTEIN's choice of women who strike her as daring and possessed of machisma is baffling indeed...
...Public vulgarity, promiscuity, and self-promotion apparently represent some sort of breakthrough for women by Lichtenstein's standards...
...These three women might have gone by a name other than "macha" in the eyes of an earlier generation...
...IN THE RUNNING THE NEW WOMAN CANDIDATE Ruth Mandel Ticknor & Fields, $12.95, 256 pp...
...VALERIE HENDY is a newspaper reporter living in New Jersey...
...DAVID T. OZAR, associate professor of philosophy at Loyola, Chicago, teaches and writes in social philosophy, law, and ethics, especially medical ethics...
...Mingling her own experience 'with a skewed sampling (women only), a dash of "feminine psychology" and selective interviewing (women only), Dowling concludes that women are their own worst enemy...
...Up to then, her life had not been easy...
...Dowling found that after supporting herself and her three children for years, her desire to do anything other than cook, clean, and tend her garden dissipated after moving to the country with a new lover...
...Ruth Mandel's In the Running is a fine and serious book that, unfortunately, may not find the mass market audience that Dowling's has already attracted...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 5
