Cross Sections:

...If Janeway had gone on to probe the meaning of these outbursts of coerced or narrowly defined gemeinschaft, she would find a reaction to change, to the losses she herself mentions in passing...

...At fleeting moments Janeway acknowledges irritants in her image of change, when she recognizes that change is not a one-way street towards unambi-valent gain...

...Hence we find pioneers and rebels, fighting for change, at odds with reactionaries and the passive who either fight change or are indifferent to it...

...Finally, the book fails to satisfy overall...

...Janeway here shows great range...

...Her surface is smooth, paved with clear prose, and sometimes lively...

...How does one account for the widespread, grass-roots effort on the part of thousands of women to defeat ERA...

...But this evades and falsifies recent history...

...Janeway criticizes a woman who said to her: "I don't want equality...

...The term "change" recurs again and again in this collection of essays and occasional pieces...

...Janeway speaks of recognizing the need for change, responding to change, realizing that something must change, even managing change...

...She evaluates individuals, groups, movements, even economic processes with reference to how they locate themselves, or can be located, on the change continuum...

...Though the essay is bland from time to time, lacking critical bite, it is an enormously helpful survey of a varied, rich scene...

...women but, importantly, a struggle between groups of women representing diverse social locations, self-understandings, and relationships towards the 'change' Janeway celebrates...

...Perhaps because she wants to embrace "the woman's movement" in its totality, not to highlight the many differences or explain sometimes bitter disputes, she veers off into a matter-of-factness that gives us no way to think through genuine political and theoretical dilemmas...

...For Janeway, 'change' becomes a somewhat magical invocation and gets presented as a nearly unalloyed good...

...change is what we are all about...

...Janeway doesn't give the reader many meaty bones to chew on...

...For Janeway, this woman "didn't know what she was talking about, which she can't be blamed for...

...Cults and Moral Majoritarians signify, in however distorted a'form, that perhaps we should re-think the fragmentation of the present moment, determining how we might reconnect people to familial and community ties without smothering the individual in the process...

...The problem, of course, is that 'change' settles nothing as an evaluative term...

...She is also strong in her section on "Literature...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain ELIZABETH JANEWAY's new book is aptly sub-titled "from a decade of change...

...Finally, however, the great gains in individual autonomy, achievement and free choice-especially for womenoutweigh the worlds we have lost...

...What role does individual action and agency have in this change or that or are we primarily reacting to forces outside our control...

...Other societies stay stuck in the cake of custom...

...So "The Thing" wiped out the ERA...

...Perhaps the woman who wanted to be cared for was speaking of a yearning for human interdependence , of a kind of caring nexus she saw as incompatible with "equality" defined as taking her place in the male world of competition and achievement...

...By "The Thing" Janeway means political sham, greed, and bureacratic rigidity, though she also uses it as a kind of shorthand for male chauvinism...

...The long essay, "Women's Literature," is loving and solid...

...Buoyant and optimistic, we Americans embraced a teleology of progress and saw unending change as the single constant in our world...

...Why have more men than women, from the beginning of polling data, favored ERA...

...The term lacks substantive criteria whereby we might assess the force and trajectory of change: to what ends and in the name of what principles...

...Why do many legislators claim that they were so heavily lobbied by women in their constituencies against ERA that they changed their votes...

...Janeway is most persuasive when she is least self-consciously theoretical and her observations flow from a rich confluence of personal experience and historic events...

...Too often Janeway skims the surface of complex events and ideas, sliding over or past the tough questions and dilemmas...

...The point here is that the ERA struggle was not a simple case of men vs...

...Even as I honor Janeway's personal quest for a world of action and achievement and her support of women's studies and feminist politics, I find her political and theoretical analysis of the present moment and past decade conceptually impoverished...

...Perhaps...

...But surely this off-handed comment is too simple...

...Unless she chooses to see in anti-ERA women simply female clones of The Thing, she must think more sympathetically than she has about the fears and beliefs that animated their efforts...

...The Janeway scenario isn't quite this tidy but her reflections and arguments tend towards such a bifurcation...

...One additional example of drawing a too-easy conclusion on the basis of unexamined evidence...

...The point is Janeway might have responded more sympathetically if she were not so convinced that women's central task, at present is to get in on the public world, to achieve, to prove themselves and yet, at the same time, to refuse cooptation by the existing system...

...For example, in her essay "The Women's Movement," she observes that the breakdown of ties of kinship, region, and community comprise a loss...

...This is an enormous leap of faith even within the terms of Janeway's own insistent recognition of how powerfully defined we are by the social locations in which we find ourselves...

...If one reflects on this brief vignette of an encournter between woman and woman, the following thoughts suggest themselves...

...We Americans have been high on change...

...I want to be taken care of...

...For example Janeway repeats the truism, challenged and, to my mind, disproved by political and social researchers, that the ERA was defeated when men came to recognize its significance...

...One is disappointed because Janeway is an intelligent observer...

...A few pages later she notes that such recent phenomena as cults and the Moral Majority "speak of an inarticulate need for change...

...We need categories and approaches that allow us to probe and re-cognize in ways that challenge our own understandings and put pressure on our commitments as well as those of others.those of others...

...But she sounded proud of her ignorance...

...In her scheme of things, men are defenders of "The Thing...