BOOKS

...The driving imperative of the information companies—backed by the U.S...

...Despite setbacks in the Reagan years, Evans-author of Personal Politics and history professor at the University of Minnesota, where she directs the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies—ends by asserting that women of all levels and backgrounds are redefining our common life...

...Every minute, while governments spend $1.9 million on arms, fifteen children die for lack of food and medicine—one of the telling comparisons that fill this valuable book...

...Limited as we are by lack of written records, much of their history has had to be inferred...

...Where the Money Goes WORLD MILITARY AND SOCIAL EXPENDITURES 1989 by Ruth Leger Sivard World Priorities, Inc., P.O...

...Marilyn Waring's // Women Counted demonstrates how far most women have yet to go...

...Men engaged in military production and activities add nothing to human welfare, and in wartime directly destroy it, yet their work is given high priority and market value...

...The fact that so many Western women are now part of the paid labor force still does not account for the unpaid work that they and other women throughout the world do, particularly women in the Third World...

...Schiller's book offers a model of astute analysis as well as an example of responsible scholarship, which forces the reader to think beyond the subject and about politics as social responsibility...

...Her chairing of the parliament's Public Expenditure Committee provided impetus for // Women Counted, an impassioned but extensively researched account of the way traditional patriarchal economic systems discount the work and needs of women—to the detriment of all...

...Marilyn Waring, looking at women around the world, gives a dimmer view of women's progress...

...choice meant freedom to select between brands, not significant political options...

...The corporate takeover of culture, Schiller indicates, is based on capital's critical need for ever-increasing accumulation and is also a statement of corporate weakness...

...She points out, however, that the treatment of the environment and of women in national accounts—and therefore in public policy— "reproduces the arrogant ideology that only money is of value, that the market is the only source of knowledge . . . that all life can be condensed to this narrow and soulless view, which precipitates us, at an ever-increasing pace, towards the destruction of all forms of life on the planet...

...6.50...

...Evans describes—as most histories do not—how African women brought against their will to America were mistreated over centuries of white domination that did not end with emancipation...

...In the late 1980s, "corporate funding is the basic legitimizer in the contemporary electoral process," Schiller writes...

...137 pp...

...He examines the consequences of the almost total privatization of outdoor and indoor public space...

...We've had a profusion of books by and about women in recent decades: feminist analyses, novels, biographies, and histories...

...When corporate executives "discovered that communication and culture were profitable as well as politically expedient," the new era of cultural absorption began...

...Corporate power grew in the 1980s in part because traditional democratic sources of strength declined, Schiller argues...

...As tribes were decimated by disease, war, and alcohol, and pushed farther West, Native American women had to adapt to other ways of surviving...

...goes beyond C. Wright Mills's classic work of the 1950s and analyzes that stage of modern capitalist accumulation where every issuance from a cultural institution is designed to promote corporate profits and to reproduce the social system...

...Destruction of rain forests, of vital small-scale food production to be replaced by cash crops, of wildlife and ecosystems—all these are not subtracted as deficits, but are added into the GNP when they involve the exchange of money...

...He examines how the corporate information order seeks international monopoly in order to encode all communication to "carry the messages of the dominant class...

...An eloquent plea for cultural justice...

...Women's increased public activities posed a dilemma for the new patriarchal nation in which "all men are created equal...

...IF WOMEN COUNTED: A New Feminist Economics by Marilyn Waring Harper & Row...

...The idea of educating girls as well as boys began to grow—despite male opposition...

...Where equal sharing or balance of roles may have existed, the European patriarchal system came to prevail...

...19.95...

...He wanted them to decorate his Scottish castle, but straitened circumstances led him to sell them to Parliament, which ensconced them in the British Museum—where they remain, despite anguished pleas from the Greeks to give them back...

...Some slave women also found the war an opportunity to escape with their children to Canada, Britain, or Africa...

...Modern corporate language has little to do with common word association...

...But it is also precious to those who see it, as many have, as "the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right...

...Alarmingly, fewer than twenty-five corporations control more than 50 per cent of the media business, and as one corporate executive in college textbook publishing said, "We want control over the vocabulary...

...In the Revolution, women organized to boycott British goods...

...The dynamism of the corporate thrust cannot be maintained indefinitely," Schiller assures readers...

...Millions apparently take drugs just to fall asleep...

...If this sounds pessimistic in terms of the future of human creativity, the reader will also find a glimmer of optimism, based on Schiller's dialectical understanding...

...386 pp...

...At home, they found new skills in handling affairs beyond the domestic...

...Christopher Hitchens has written an elegant essay that demolishes every argument made over nearly two centuries for keeping them in England...

...When public protests arose over the nature of children's programming or the immense waste created by modern advertising and packaging, they were met with "the standard corporate response for all social problems—assign responsibility to individuals and families to meet the social disorders produced largely by out-of-control corporate enterprise," Schiller writes...

...Unlike its predecessors, it displays at least a modicum of optimism: Sivard notes better relations between the superpowers, an easing of some regional tensions, and a worldwide move toward rejecting war...

...Six times as much public research money now goes for research on weapons as for research on health protection...

...The political consequences of the privatization and commercialization of the "information structure" is seen in "the new techniques" of modern campaigns...

...24.95...

...Evans's comprehensive study traces women's history in America over the past 400 years and, in its specifics, is unique to this time period and geographical location...

...by Saul Landau How many Americans retire at night with the feeling that a cheap hustler (he sells us things between Ted Koppel's interviews and Johnny Carson's gags) has invaded their bedroom...

...democracy, as used by President Reagan and chief executive officers, never included participaSaul Landau is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...

...Like its predecessors, this volume is fact-filled, authoritative, concise, but comprehensive...

...Put briefly, Sara Evans's Born for Liberty depicts how far some women have come...

...Inevitably, however, Evans's main focus is on those women who became the dominant majority by way of the European settlers who were their fathers and husbands...

...With these two books added to feminist artillery, women—and enlightened men—will certainly be better equipped to give it a last-ditch try...

...Middle-class women led in forming societies for peace, the abolition of slavery and alcoholism, woman suffrage, and improving the lives of the increasing number of women destitute or working in factories (some of whom began organizing themselves to better their own conditions...

...The shopping-mall culture, the capture of sports, museums, and entertainment, the appropriation of libraries to provide "free" commercial information instead of meaningful material for public discourse, the alterations in law protecting the corporate structure—these are ways that capital has repossessed power that was taken away from it during the reforms of the 1930s and 1960s...

...As the embodiment of ancient classical ideals, it is precious to the Greeks...

...Schiller, a professor of communications at the University of California, argues that a few monster-sized corporate entities have, over the last four decades, seized control not just of world production, finance, and distribution, but of the sources of information, the manipulation of symbols, the use of language, law, and values...

...386 pp...

...Waring graphically illustrates how the environment, too, is affected by the patriarchal system which counts as "productive" many activities that damage and pollute the earth, water, and air...

...From being passive "helpmeets," more white women began to be forces in religion and in voluntary associations beyond the home...

...This is the thirteenth edition of Ruth Leger Sivard's annual compendium, which has become the indispensable guide to military and social spending...

...Evans writes that this "problem of female citizenship was solved by endowing domesticity itself with political meaning...

...Neither of these books suggests that merely moving more women into the market labor force or devising some system of accounting for their unpaid labor in the market economy will solve the world's problems...

...Women who produce and raise children, provide numerous domestic services, and raise crops and animals for family consumption, are not visible in the GNP of most countries...

...She traces the growth of women's associations throughout the Nineteenth Century, bringing the nurturing and caretaking concerns of the home into the public sphere...

...This quest for accumulation has led not only to vast cultural destruction, but, more important, to the erasure of organic roots, the distortion of epistemology, and the dissolution of relationships, both among humans and to nature in its larger realm...

...Evans's comprehensive chronicle provides the kind of thorough overview and unobtrusive feminist analysis that still need to be incorporated into (or replace) the male-oriented histories of wars, conquests, and industrial development most of us grew up with...

...His newest film, "The Uncompromising Revolution," is about Castro and Cuba in crisis...

...Part of corporate speech in America systematically envelops the consciousness of Americans, Herbert Schiller suggests in his latest book...

...His work is nicely sandwiched between two companion pieces, in which classicist Robert Browning assesses the Parthenon's place in history and Graham Binn, a British advocate of return, describes the current work of restoring the Acropolis...

...Waring's main thesis is that value, traditionally defined, means market or money value—eliminating the real economic value of most women's productive and reproductive functions, and perverting public policy...

...This was perhaps the crack in the dam...

...The Civil War, both world wars, and the Vietnam war all served as inadvertent catalysts for the "new woman," through the seemingly quiescent 1950s, the resurgent feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, up to the current divisions and conservative backlashes of the 1980s...

...The engine of resistance, the finite nature of the world market, and the vulnerability of the global village economic system will offer fertility for new political movements to form...

...The result was the idea and image of the republican mother" who would "educate her sons to be moral and virtuous citizens...

...Transforming information into a salable good," says Schiller, damages "the essential underpinning of a democratic order...

...In some Native American societies, women had power and status through their pivotal roles in agriculture, trade, religion...

...but Evans does not lump all Indian women into one mythical silent-squaw category...

...Box 25140, Washington, DC 20007...

...But Indian women, who lost husbands and sons on either side their tribes aligned with, lost their traditions and homes as well...

...Evans describes how the middle class grew, along with the market economy and industry outside the home, and how homes evolved from work sites to places of entertainment and leisure...

...Changing Roles BORN FOR LIBERTY: A History of Women in America by Sara M. Evans Free Press...

...19.95...

...Although it directed women's activities back to the home, how could women raise their sons to be good citizens without having some education themselves...

...In terms of women's "progress," however, these two remarkable books nearly say it all...

...Or, it would be absolutely right if only Lord Elgin hadn't stolen its marble sculptures at the turn of the Nineteenth Century...

...In her opening chapter, Evans describes the lives of women of various Native American nations, and throughout her book she interweaves their stories—and oppressions...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrisset Davidon is a free-lance writer and peace activist...

...Author of Women, Politics, and Power, with a degree in political economy, Waring was largely responsible as a member of the New Zealand parliament for that country's defiant antinuclear stand...

...tion...

...Waring is not arguing simply for a method of accounting that will give money value to women's unpaid work and environmental conservation...

...Within two centuries after the settlements of the 1600s, the face of America had greatly changed, and women's roles with it...

...they raised money and provided auxiliary support for rebel troops—sewing, nursing, some even serving in the Army...

...Government—has led the new information magnates to seek to transform even the poorest of Third World countries into a consumer mode...

...This global concentration of power in the hands of irresponsible and often invisible corporate executives has permeated public space and invaded our traditional ways of knowing...

...But the overall trend that emerges also applies to Western women generally, a trend now affecting women in many parts of the world...

...60 pp...

...Independent labor, populist farmers, and old-style immigrant political power suffered drastic losses to the oligarchy of corporate wealth...

...Culture Inc...

...Nonetheless, she reports, military spending continued to rise last year, approaching a global total of $1 trillion...

...And Schiller explores the avenues and, indeed, imperatives that exist to resist this encroachment on the human brain and soul and to replace it with one compatible with the best side of human nature...

...The Right cannot provide an enduring culture or a meaningful political grammar, he says...

...As Schiller keenly observes, the roots of resistance survive and emanate, from the American Catholic Bishops' cry against inequality and from the myriad of lesser-known groups that challenge the new culture in the name of democracy and equity...

...The courage and articulate leadership of African-American women like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ida B. Wells, and others up to their present-day descendants can hardly be dealt with adequately even in such an ambitious book as this, but Evans makes an excellent effort...

...Free market" in the late 1980s, for example, had no relation to freedom in any of its meaningful expressions...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Return of the Marbles IMPERIAL SPOILS: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles by Christopher Hitchens Hill and Wang...

...They do strongly suggest that transferring women's traditional domestic perspectives and concerns for human welfare into the political realm, translating these more urgently and effectively into public policy, may yet save us all...

...As pioneer women, too, went West with their husbands, Evans says, "mobility, desired and undesired, became the experience of many women...

...More than two millennia after its creation, after use as a shrine to Greek gods, a Christian church, a mosque, a Turkish arms dump, and even a Nazi monument, the Parthenon still evokes deep feelings, both cultural and political...