Beacons

...The voices in which they present their views and lives (their collections are essentially autobiographical) are distinctive and complementary...

...Walker and Steinem have emerged in the past two decades as brilliant beacons for the women's movement, demonstrating that feminism itself will persist, returning like the tides until inequities have worn away and the world has been transformed into a more life-enhancing place for us all...

...It is tempting to go on juxtaposing the two books, since I was fortunate enough to read them in tandem and encourage others to do so...

...14.95 Aserendipitous twinning that these books by Gloria Steinem and Alice Walker come out about the same time...

...In other parts, Walker reflects on the civil rights movement, on sexist and racist attitudes, on children (including her own childhood and her daughter's), and on the future, threatened by possible nuclear doom...

...When one looks at the apparent success, talents, and honors with which these two women have been bestowed, it is hard to imagine them as ever having been desperate, self-doubting, or suicidal...

...Her discovery of Zora Neale Hurston led her to seek out the black writer's Florida home and grave and to edit a book of her writings...

...The "choice" with which so many middle-class women, but not men, have been faced— children vs...

...from her mother's determined defiance of all the odds, Walker drew hers...

...Her collection of varied articles on politics includes her reflections on everything from George McGovern to the first national women's conference in Houston in 1977 to the amusing ironies of her 1978 essay, "If Men Could Menstruate...

...Neither Steinem nor Walker categorically denounces all use of violence, but both clearly support a wide range of actions for nonviolent resistance to injustice...

...Steinem's book opens with an amusing account of her few days as a Playboy bunny in 1963 and ends with "Ruth's Song," written in 1983...

...Steinem, reflecting on why she had never written a book, says in her introduction, "Before feminism, I told myself that my work couldn't possibly be good enough...

...363 pp...

...What binds all the material together is Steinem's straightforward depictions of the follies that divide us, whether based on sex, race, class, age, or physical and economic conditions, and her clear vision of the kind of world in which all of us might not only survive but live freely and fully...

...Despite the genteel urban penny-pinching of Steinem's Ohio background and the rural poverty of Walker's sharecropping Georgia family, both women managed to escape and to pursue higher educations at women's colleges...

...She has two teen-age daughters...

...That excuse concealed the fact that I was still assuming my real identity would come from the man I married, not the work I did...

...Steinem has no children and chose not to marry...

...One section includes cogent observations on sexism in language, male-female relationships, and attitudes toward time and sexuality...

...It is also tempting to quote from each at length...

...If the second wave of feminism, now slightly receding, had left on the shifting sands only these two writing women, the feminist cause would still have been powerfully well served...

...From caring for her mother in her state of debilitating defeat, Steinem was able to develop her own strength...

...Save a copy of each for yourself, to reread at odd moments and be reminded of the strengths of the new pioneering women whose concern has now gone beyond the survival of the individual family to the survival, in dignity and equality, of the human family...

...Walker has one daughter and is now divorced...

...The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, yet the touching prose of Steinem's "Ruth's Song" goes well beyond factual description and analysis, and Walker's rich personal essays add anecdotal eloquence...

...Only much later," she writes, "did I realize that my resistance to undertaking a long piece of work— or planning far into the future for any goal—was another common symptom of powerless-ness...

...They are friends and colleagues who admire and support each other's work...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon, a writer long involved in peace and social justice movements, has written on feminist issues and helped to start several women's support groups...

...I needed the reinforcement that comes from short articles frequently published...

...Walker is more than a decade younger...

...Ruth's Song," Steinem's moving essay about her mother, and Walker's title essay, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," are tributes to the women who bore them and coped in their own ways with limiting and stunting situations...

...career—was made differently by each...

...Her portraits of women record her impressions of Marilyn Monroe, Pat Nixon, Linda Lovelace, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and—most lovingly—Alice Walker...

...Steinem is an essayist, Walker is a poet and novelist...

...Women's labor, at home and in the marketplace, has been and still is the most undervalued and overexploited in every society—and, as Walker makes poignantly clear, it is above all women of color who have been the "mules of the world...

...Yet both suffered lonely, unwanted pregnancies and abortions when they were just out of their teens, which clearly contributed to their strong convictions about the necessity for women to have reproductive choice...

...Walker and Steinem are unflinchingly honest writers, both formed by painful and strengthening childhood experiences...

...A system that rests on cheap labor and allows unearned wealth to accumulate," she writes in the final essay, "deserves to be transformed by pressures of the many on the few...

...Walker's outrage and anger at the world's injustices are dramatized by her poetic powers...

...That is the essential message of these two articulate women, whose persistence and passion for justice have probably done more for women's consciousness than all the accumulations of scholarly tomes...

...Outrageous Acts and In Search are compilations of Steinem's and Walker's nonaction writing over twenty years (Steinem has just reached fifty...

...Steinem often makes her points with low-keyed description and irony...

...Heeding Joe Hill's advice not to mourn but to organize, I urge you to go in droves to the bookstores, buy these books, and give them as loving gifts to your friends and enemies, uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers...

...It also kept me from admitting that I was too insecure to attempt a long and lonely piece of work...

...And it is tempting to bemoan the fact that mainly women will be reading these books, when their perspectives and perceptions are so desperately needed by the world as a whole...

...Walker's book is divided into four parts, and in the first section she deals mainly with other writers...

...She began to notice that many male contemporaries, who wrote no better than she did, were "felling forests and filling bookstores"—and also had wives, secretaries, and girl friends who researched, typed, edited, and kept them undisturbed...