Gillian Beer

Desert Island Texts

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen ...

Woolf in Wartime, and Townsend Warner Too

Sometimes, looking back from this distance, it seems as if Woolf and her contemporaries were always ‘in wartime’, from the moment the First World War started in 1914 until — and beyond — her death in 1941. Long before and up to the onset of the 1939–45 war, warfare set Italy against Abyssinia, Japan against China, Franco against the elected Government in Spain, to name only some of the major conflicts. And brooding over the whole period was the hope and then the failure of the League of Nations, and the USA’s refusal to join it. Writing to Shena, Lady Simon, in 1940 Woolf remarks: ‘What the Americans want from me is views on peace. Well, these spring from views on war’ (L6, p. 379).

The Observers Observed

Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge, 1989), £40 hardback. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (Routledge, 1990), £35.00. Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), £21.25 hardback, £12.95 paperback Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modem Science (Harvard University Press, 1989), £23.50.