Book Review: To Be Real

Title: To Be Real

Editor: Rebecca Walker

Date: 1995

Publisher: Anchor / Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385-47262-5

Length: 290 pages text, 40 pages introduction

Quote: “The greatest gift we can give one another is the power to make a choice.”

Rebecca Walker’s first contribution to American feminist thought was this collection of essays by young people who are still concerned about gender parity, but don’t fit the stereotype of the yuppie feminists of the 1980s. One reason they don’t fit the stereotype is that they came along too late to be yuppies. A few ambitious teachers and lawyers contributed essays to this book, but there’s also a model, a stripper, a rodeo showgirl.

There are also some men and some lesbians. Too many to suit me. Gloria Steinem used to cite a dictionary definition of “feminist” as meaning “anyone who thinks women are equally as valuable as men.” By that definition, these days, anyone who is reasonably in touch with reality qualifies as a feminist. If I were collecting a book about the female experience, however, I’d select writing by people who were unequivocally female and had lived an unequivocally female experience. Jeannine Delombard’s explanation of how her ambition to be as totally feminine as possible, too different from the boys even to want to kiss one, shaped her life of lesbian “Femmenism,” is an interesting story but not one the majority of women can really identify with.

I’d also try to include some viewpoints that are conspicuously missing from To Be Real. This book is supposed to be about the diversity of contemporary feminism but all the writers, without exception, are pretty far out on the left wing of twentieth-century politics. As Eleanor Burkitt observed, this is not an accurate representation of feminist thinking and action in the 1990s, which were also the decade when Republicans were begging Elizabeth Hanford Dole to run for President, when Laura Ingraham and Laura Schlessinger became media stars. Any historical study of the 1990s will need to balance this book with Burkitt’s book, The Right Women, a study of the diverse and sometimes baffling manifestations of right-wing feminism.

It might have been hard to persuade Laura Ingraham to write anything that would appear in an anthology along with a piece by Angela Davis, or vice versa, but that would have been the sort of anthology of 1990s feminist diversity that I would have accepted as “being real.”

Most of the contributors to To Be Real were not, and have not become, celebrity authors, although the book opens with Steinem and closes with Davis and includes pieces by Bell Hooks and Naomi Wolf. Most of them were in their early twenties when they wrote these essays, and it shows. The only way to describe the topics some of these writers chose, and the passionate intensity with which they made points they probably prefer to forget having argued now, is to say—as one had to say to some of what was collected in Sisterhood Is Powerful, years ago—“They are so young.” Anna Bondoc writes about being estranged from her conservative Catholic family by her activism on behalf of a left-wing group, or groups, that certainly don’t seem to have filled her life with joy. When she shares with a left-wing group the very personal story of how she’s given up her home and allowance to fight for their cause, a slightly older woman rejects her display of self-abnegation, complaining that Bondoc seems to have cut herself off from her roots...and Bondoc is so upset, you’d think she’d never even heard of the Queen Bee Syndrome. This is a teenage experience, even if Bondoc managed to postpone it into her twenties.

Then there’s Wolf’s essay, “Brideland,” which is remarkably revealing if you (a) are conversant with historical costumes and (b) have already read Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. Wolf has absorbed a feeling that a wedding gown ought to resemble a “milkmaid” dress with “an eigh­teenth-century bodice, three-quarter-length sleeves, and an an­kle-length skirt with voluminous panniers.” (If you’ve never studied period costumes these descriptive words may not mean much, but you’ve seen the style—it’s in all the color illustrations of all the Mother Goose books.) Wolf has also absorbed the belief that a woman who wears this type of dress “is essen­tially dressing up like Queen Victoria.” In historical fact, Queen Victoria approved, more than created, several different fashion looks, but the “milkmaid” dress wasn’t one of them; the “milkmaid” dress was a late eighteenth century style, fondly recalled but not really repeated in nineteenth century fashions. There was a high fashion version of the “milkmaid” look, affected by Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette, and then there was the downscale version real milkmaids might have worn. The downscale version was preserved in many parts of Europe during the nineteenth century’s craze for distinctive “local costumes,” like the Austrian costumes in The Sound of Music. So is the modern woman who wants to put on a pouffy dress trying to feel like Queen Victoria, or like a European peasant...or is she just discovering that the basic idea of the pouffy dress, the fitted waist and full skirt, is remarkably comfortable and flattering to women who don’t fit so well into styles designed for men or children? Regardless of which historical period or village “uniform” might have inspired the details?

Bell Hooks had written several books before To Be Real. She’d even raised a point I consider very important—the need for women to raise our consciousness of the way some of us displace anger at “societal oppression” onto our children and students. Her contribution to To Be Real, however, will probably strike moderate to right-wing readers as surreal. In “Beauty Laid Bare,” Hooks addresses the Far Left: “Militant black power movement...did not encourage a reclamation of atti­tudes about beauty common in traditional black folk culture,” she complains. “All too often...living simply was made synonymous with...living without attention to beauty.” Her solution: “[W]e need to be vigilant in creating an ethical approach to consumerism that sustains and affirms radical agendas for social change. Rather than surrendering our passion for the beautiful, for luxury, we need to envision ways those passions can be fulfilled that do not reinforce the structures of domination we seek to change.” For middle-of-the-road feminists who were and still are likely to connect with each other mainly at arts, crafts, and music festivals, Hooks is probably preaching to the choir, but she is preaching to an “English Only” choir in Sanskrit.

Then there’s the weird effect created by placing Veena Cabreros-Sud’s call for toughness (“don’t ever not fight”) immediately before Elizabeth Mitchell’s whimper of tenderness (“It’s not that I did my dolls wrong,but that I secretly resented them. They made me a mother too soon...Through dolls, the heart muscles of females are strengthened, ensuring that they will be ruled by compassion and, trough that compassion, by others, for the rest of their lives”). Both of these young women have, it seems, been exposed to yuppie feminists who still think altruism is a good thing, who don’t want to hit a mugger because that would lower them to his level. Neither of them has thought seriously about the very radical Christian idea that “God’s will,” or the Highest Good, for two or more seemingly opposed people may be different from and better than either having their own way or giving up their own way. One in an aggressive way (Cabreros-Sud suggests that every undesirable thing in life be seen as “violence” not “limited to the physical” plane, and fought against with “ugly, angry, cuss-ridden mouths”) and one in a passive way (Mitchell talks about the healing benefit of selfishness, but what she seems to mean is that she wants to travel more before she has a baby), they’re still speaking the truth of early adolescence. Neither seems to have thought much about the empowering benefits of responsibility or of genuine, rather than altruistic, love.

For whom was this book written? Who could have learned something from it? I’m not sure. If To Be Real was meant to encourage more young people to think of themselves as feminists, I’ve seen little evidence that it succeeded. Of course, this cannot be attributed entirely to the book’s merits; pressure on public libraries to discard even excellent books to make room for ephemeral electronic junk kept practically any book that wasn’t a computer manual and didn’t feature Harry Potter from being as successful as it would have been ten years earlier, and then the mass media decided to publicize war, foreign policy, and the continuous fall of “the economy” to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t know of any feminists who’ve either abandoned our goals or seriously decided that we’ve met them, but I do know that not nearly as much is being published about feminists as was being published ten years ago.

If To Be Real was meant to persuade people like Alice Walker that people like Rebecca Walker were Real Feminists too, I’m not sure how well it succeeded in that goal either. It does conclusively prove that, although even China had admitted that Marxism or Maoism couldn’t work in the real world, the people for whom left-wing ideology had been a substitute for religious faith were still clinging to their faith in 1995. At the time one could hope that they’d outgrow it. The behavior of some people in the current administration suggests otherwise. The authors in this book were still left-wingers, and probably several of them still are. But “left-wing” and “feminist” are entirely different things.

For whom could this book be useful today? Future historians may want it as a study of the 1990s, but is anyone writing a book or even a paper about the 1990s yet? Well...in the meantime, this is a book of short stories about young people coming of age. Each contributor was asked to write about her or his personal growth through a personal experience of feminism, so although the stories are memoirs rather than polished pieces of literary symbolism, each story can still be enjoyed for its plot and characters. If, like me, you find fact-based short stories more interesting than the ones that are altogether fictional, you will enjoy reading the stories of 21 twenty-somethings.