Book Notes
Monaco, J.
FROM LADIES TO WOMEN: THE ORGANIZED STRUGGLE FOR WOMAN'S RIGHTS IN THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA, by Israel Kugler. New York: Greenwood Press. 221 pp. L the era of U.S. history that began...
...Might there be a slim possibility that a grass-roots movement for political and economic democracy will develop...
...The skepticism about Gorbachev provided by Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher in their essay is a reaction to excessive hopes...
...Cloth, $22.95...
...Kugler's account of the debates in the Reconstruction-Era women's rights movement shows how the alliance was shattered...
...Kugler's book relates this important part of U.S...
...history that began with abolitionism and ended with the defeat of radical Reconstruction, a tenuous alliance developed among movements for the rights of women, African Americans, and workers...
...234 pp...
...A MIRACLE, A UNIVERSE: SETTLING ACCOUNTS WITH TORTURERS, by Lawrence Weschler...
...history mainly through the words of the participants themselves, a method that works because they spoke and wrote in a clear nineteenth-century style...
...Frederick Douglass, a strong supporter of women's suffrage, couldn't understand how leaders of the women's movement could fail to give priority to fighting the terror campaign against blacks in the South...
...And what of the victims of torture...
...His sympathies are with the victims who want to bring their torturers to justice, but he also pays attention to the arguments of the other side...
...Castoriadis writes that Gorbachev will be overthrown by an inner-party coup, that he will himself water down his own reforms, or that the Soviet military will intervene in response to popular discontent...
...Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press...
...Peter Hauslohner provides an informative analysis of Gorbachev's attempt to create a new social contract to replace the Brezhnevian exchange of basic economic security for the bureaucracy's political dominance...
...He does not ignore the United States's role in instituting and financing these terror regimes...
...540 • DISSENT...
...One problem with this collection is exemplified by Cornelius Castoriadis's conclusion to his essay...
...With the care of a good listener, Weschler brings us the voices of those who resisted the torturers...
...293 pp...
...Lawrence Weschler's important book is a case study of how these questions were debated in Brazil and Uruguay...
...Pantheon Books...
...Or would such a course be too risky for a fragile civilian government still threatened by the possibility of a military coup...
...New York: Greenwood Press...
...Alec Nove's detailed look at Soviet agriculture is brilliant, though heavy going for those who have little familiarity with the territory...
...In the course of his essay he touches on many other problems of democratic transformation in these and other countries...
...The mass of war-weary people looked upon these debates as irrelevant to the true work of the country—territorial expansion and money making...
...GORBACHEV: THE DEBATE, edited by Ferenc Feller and Andrew Arato...
...The question is even harder to answer if the old leaders still control the military...
...Should they be brought to trial for their crimes...
...When a regime based on the rule of terror is supplanted by a regime with some respect for human rights, the new government must confront the question of what should be done with the previous regime's leaders...
...Should they be forced to hide their wounds and not seek justice...
...Much has changed since these theoretically informed studies of the Soviet Union were written, but they are still worth reading...
...Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone Blackwell, and Elizabeth Cody Stanton argued that a woman's right to vote was just as urgent as full citizenship for blacks...
Vol. 37 • September 1990 • No. 4
