The Dark Flood Rises

Drabble, Margaret

Last Updated: Apr-09-2018

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

This Side of Doctoring: Reflections from Women in Medicine

Chin, Eliza Lo

Last Updated: Nov-09-2017

Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

This Side of Doctoring is an anthology published in 2002 about the experiences of women in medicine. While the essays span multiple centuries, most are from the past 50 years. They reflect on a multitude of stages in the authors’ personal and professional lives. In 344 pages divided into twelve sections, including "Early Pioneers," "Life in the Trenches," and "Mothering and Doctoring," the 146 authors recount - in excerpts from published memoirs, previously published and unpublished essays, poems and other writings, many of them composed solely for this collection - what it was then and what it was in 2002 to be a woman becoming a doctor in the U.S.. All but a handful of the authors are physicians or surgeons. There is a heavy representation from institutions on both coasts, especially the Northeast. Four men were invited to reflect on being married to physician wives. There is one anonymous essay concerning sexual harassment and a final essay from a mother and daughter, both physicians. Beginning with the first American female physicians in the mid-19th century, like historic ground-breakers Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi, the anthology proceeds through the phases of medical school, residency, early and mid-careers, up to reflections from older physicians on a life spent in medicine. Many of the authors have names well known in the medical humanities, including Marcia Angell, Leon Eisenberg, Perri Klass, Danielle Ofri, Audrey Shafer, and Marjorie Spurrier Sirridge, to mention a few.

The essays and poems and letters have, as a partial listing, the following subjects: family influences in becoming a physician; professional friendships; marriage; children and their impact on a woman’s career in medicine; the decision not to have children; ill family members; illness as a physician; establishing one's sexuality as a physician; struggles with male physicians and their egos; mentors, both female and male; memorable patients (often terminal or dying); the life of a wife-physician, or mother-physician; the guilt and sacrifice that accompany such a dual life; the importance - and easy loss - of personal time or what internist Catherine Chang calls “self-care” (page 334). The anthology also touches on how women have changed the practice of medicine in various ways, prompted by the growing realization, as family practice physician Alison Moll puts it, "that I didn't have to practice in the traditional way" (page 185) The authors write about the wisdom of setting limits; training or working part-time or sharing a position with another woman; and the constant face-off with decisions, especially those not normally confronting an American man becoming a doctor.
One conclusion is evident before the reader is halfway through the book: there are many approaches to becoming a fulfilled female physician including finding one’s identity in the field. Implicit in most of the essays and writings is the lament from obstetrician-gynecologist Gayle Shore Mayer: "Where is the self ? There are pieces of me everywhere", (page 275) recalling a similar cry from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, another essentially female soul trying to find what Richard Selzer has called "The Exact Location of the Soul". Several authors discover that female physicians have unique gifts to offer their patients. As internist Rebekah Wang-Cheng writes, “I am a better physician because I am a mother, and I know because of my experiences as a physician that I am a better mother.” (page 151)

There are sections at the end devoted to a glossary for the lay reader, resources for women (as of 2002), and generous notes about the contributors (which section also serves as a useful index of each's contributions).

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Eros and Illness

Morris, David

Last Updated: Oct-31-2017

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Several threads tie together this ambitious, beautifully digressive reflection on eros and logos in the experience of illness and the conduct of medicine and health care, which takes into account what a complex striation of cultural legacies, social and political pressures, and beliefs go into both. Framing his reflections on the role of unknowing, altered states, inexplicable events, desire, hope, love, and mystery in illness and healing is a fragmented, poignant narrative of Morris’s own experience of watching his wife succumb to the ravages of early Alzheimer’s.

Her disease is one that leads both professional and intimate caregivers to the same question: what do you do when there’s nothing left for scientific medicine to do? Conversations about palliative care are broadening, he points out, and medical education is making more room for the kind of reflection the arts invite and for spirituality as a dimension of illness experience and caregiving. Guidance in such explorations can be found in ancient literature, especially in the archetypes provided by the Greek and Roman myths. Morris makes astute and helpful use of his own considerable training in literary studies to provide examples of how eros and logos—complementary contraries—have been conceived and embodied in a somewhat polarized culture and how incomplete health care is when it doesn’t foster the capacity to dwell in and with unknowing, possibility, indeterminacy, and mystery. Knowing the limits of scientific medicine may, paradoxically, make it better. Certainly it can help keep our engagements with illness—always relational, always disruptive, most often to some degree bewildering—humane.

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In-Between Days: A Memoir about Living with Cancer

Harrison, Teva

Last Updated: Jul-18-2017

Carter, III, Albert Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Graphic Memoir

Summary:

In-Between Days: A Memoir about Living with Cancer is an accurate and suggestive title. At 37, Teva Harrison was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer with metastases to her bones. She lives between hopes for new treatments allowing a useful life but also fears about debility—some already caused by her treatments—and death. An artist, she has created a hybrid of a graphic novel with comic-book style drawing on the left page and traditional prose facing on the right, with variations of this format now and then.

The imaginative world of the book ranges widely in mood, topic, and subject matter, and there is a helpful organization to group the material. Her Preface tells us how drawing helped her gain some power over “the bogeyman that is my cancer” (p. 1). In her Prologue, she tells of “living in the shadows,” or “liminal spaces,” but choosing to occupy these as best she can (p. 3).

Part One lays out the medical facts and dilemmas. The sections are Diagnosis, Treatment, and Side Effects. The author describes the turmoil of being sick with no clear cause, the emotional impact of the serious diagnosis on her and her family, also nausea, loss of fertility, dilemmas of pain management, and many side effects of treatment, including weight loss as well as sudden and torturous menopause.
Part Two explains her social status, her marriage, her “mixed-bag inheritance” (including high-risk Ashkenazi genes), and social aspects, including feeling invisible as a patient, accepting help from friends, being in a support group, and what does a likely “early demise” mean for her, an atheist?

Part Three explores the many emotions in sections for hope (using clinical trials, for example), gratitudes (“At least I’m wasting, not bloating”), wishes, fears, and “Managing Anxiety at Home” (pictures of yoga, gardening, long walks, house cleaning), self-blame, and—nonetheless—dreams. The final section “Incurable” names her current status: “In treatment for the rest of my life,” but the facing picture shows her as a large powerful bird flying among dramatic clouds with the words “I mean what do I have to lose?” Her prose affirms: “Live like a tornado, when I can.”

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Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

Brooks, Geraldine

Last Updated: May-15-2017

Saleh, Mona

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Ethnography

Summary:

Written by successful Australian journalist Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire recounts her experiences living among and working with Muslim women throughout her time as a correspondent in the Middle East. Brooks delves into topics as varied as non-marital sex, female genital mutilation, the different types of veiling (and the reasoning behind veiling at all), women’s participation in the Iranian military, the Qur’an, and the life and teachings of the Muslim Prophet, Muhammad. Brooks presents various perspectives and interpretations of certain Muslim practices, such as the wearing of the veil (hijab). She looks at the specific Qur’anic passage that prescribes the veil: “And when you [men] ask his [the Prophet’s] wives for anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain (hijab).” (p. 84) Brooks intelligently analyzes, “What is so puzzling is why the revelation of seclusion [veiling], so clearly packaged here with instructions that apply only to the prophet, should ever have come to be seen as a rule that should apply to all Muslim women.” (p. 84) It is often difficult to find alternative interpretations of Islamic requirements, but Brooks presents them here without filter and speculates why an apparently individually prescribed veil would become so widespread that it now practically symbolizes Islam.

Brooks recalls several encounters that she had with fellow Westerners living in the Middle East for various reasons, from work to having married a Middle Easterner and re-located there. Some of the most sympathy-inducing moments are in these situations where Westerners are forced to live under the rules of strict, conservative, Muslim societies. In one anecdote, Brooks relays the case of her friend, Margaret, an American woman who married an Iranian man. When Brooks asks Margaret why she does not go home to America to visit her family, Margaret replies, “My husband doesn’t want me to,” and Brooks then clarifies, “It was up to him to sign the papers that would allow her to leave the country.”
(p. 106) This situation shows that being an American woman or an educated woman does not prevent one from being held to the same standards as local women in certain Muslim societies.

The final chapter is entitled, “Conclusion: Beware the Dogma” and serves to share Brooks’s personal opinions on the lives and faith that she had so objectively presented in journalist fashion until this point. Her opinion is summarized:

“Today, the much more urgent and relevant task is to examine the way the faith [Islam] has proved such fertile ground for almost every antiwomen custom it encountered...When it found veils and seclusion in Persia, it absorbed them; when it found [female] genital mutilations in Egypt, it absorbed them; when it found societies in which women had never had a voice in public affairs, its own traditions of lively women’s participation withered.”
(p. 232)

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I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

Ali, Nujood; Minoui, Delphine

Last Updated: May-05-2017

Saleh, Mona

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

This memoir follows the journey of Nujood Ali, a young, Yemeni child bride from a rural village. She was later named Glamour's Woman of the Year in 2008.

The memoir begins with Nujood’s escape from her husband’s house and how she made her way—alone—to a courthouse in the country’s capital where she was determined to win a divorce.

Nujood’s father pulled her of school when she was in the second grade and forced her to marry a man much older than she. At this time, the minimum legal age of marriage for girls was 15, but many families—especially in rural areas—continued to engage in marrying off daughters much younger than this. Nujood’s father’s reasoning (which echoes the reasoning of many others who engage in this practice) included having one less child to feed, preventing Nujood from being raped by strangers, and protecting her from becoming the victim of “evil rumors.” (p. 54)

In a practice common in Yemen, her father moreover stipulated that Nujood’s husband would not have sex with her until she had begun to menstruate; the husband did not wait and instead raped Nujood after they were wed.

Throughout the book, Ali and French journalist Delphine Minoui skillfully explain how women are not given choices in Nujood's part of Yemen:

“In Khardji, the village where I [Nujood] was born, women are not taught how to make choices. When she was about sixteen, Shoya, my mother, married my father, Ali Mohammad al-Ahdel, without a word of protest. And when he decided four years later to enlarge his family by choosing a second wife, my mother obediently accepted his decision. It was with that same resignation that I at first agreed to my marriage, without realizing what was at stake. At my age, you don’t ask yourself many questions.”
(p. 23)

Ali was connected with her lawyer, Shada Nasser, at the courthouse, and her case garnered both international attention and outrage. After a hearing, Ali was granted her divorce and took trips out of Yemen, including to the United States, even meeting with then Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The memoir ends on a happy note, with Nujood starting her education again, at a new school, and definitively deciding to become a lawyer who is committed to raising the legal age of marriage in Yemen. The authors even discuss two cases of girls who were granted divorces in Yemen after Nujood and were able to use her case as legal precedence.

An article in the Huffington Post explains that while Nujood’s memoir ends on a happy and inspiring note, there is still much more work to be done. It points out that Nujood insisted on remaining in Yemen, while her American advocates believed it would be best for her and her future to remove her from her family. Nujood’s family put pressure on her to demand more and more financial compensation for her international fame. Even though her co-author and other advocates begged her to go to school, she did not complete her education. Her father used a (likely large) portion of her book proceedings to marry a third wife. The most recent update is that Nujood remarried (circumstances and consent unclear) and mothered two daughters of her own.

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The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World

El Saadawi, Nawal

Last Updated: Apr-27-2017

Saleh, Mona

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Dr. El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist activist and a psychiatrist who originally published this book in Arabic in 1977. She has had a tumultuous relationship with the Egyptian government and was imprisoned after criticizing former President Anwar Sadat. During her career she worked at several universities in the United States. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World has seamlessly incorporated elements of memoir and critical analysis of Arab culture and Islam. El Saadawi divides the book into four sections: The Mutilated Half, Women in History, The Arab Woman, and Breaking Through. The book opens with Dr. El Saadawi recounting in the first-person her harrowing experience with female genital mutilation (a very common practice in her home country of Egypt) when she was 6 years old. She uses very descriptive, perhaps even graphic language, to describe the experience in all its horror. This early childhood memory sets the stage for the audience to bear witness to all the various types of misogyny that many Egyptian and Arab women inevitably experience.

Dr. El Saadawi then skillfully relates memories of being told, for example, to not ask too many questions because she was a girl, and states that she has never heard the word “bint” (Arabic word for girl) used in a positive fashion. These nuggets of personal experiences are inserted into an overview of the complaints of stifled sexuality and associated sequelae with which her psychiatric patients struggled. She delves into the topics of Islam’s take on non-marital sex, illegitimate children, and prostitution thrown against the backdrop of her personal experiences seeing young, poor girls who work as maids being raped and impregnated by the men of the families who employ them and then being held as the sole accountable party.

After the first section, Dr. El Saadawi broadens her focus to include the status of women starting with Eve (whom the major monotheistic religions, including Islam, believe to be the first woman on Earth). Dr. El Saadawi investigates the historical designation of women as inferior in the Jewish faith and explains that as Christianity and Islam evolved against this backdrop, they also assigned women to a similar status. She insightfully points out how femininity did not evolve independently of society but rather that femininity and a woman’s place in society (all societies) are direct reflections of socioeconomic practices or goals of that society.

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Infidel

Hirsi, Ayaan

Last Updated: Apr-13-2017

Saleh, Mona

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Autobiography

Summary:

This is an autobiographical work that describes the remarkable life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The book begins in Somalia, where Hirsi Ali was born and spent the early part of her childhood. It is here that Hirsi Ali discusses the second-class status of girls and the harrowing practice of female genital cutting, which she describes as it happened to her and her younger sister. Although her parents were against the practice, Hirsi Ali undergoes female genital cutting by the arrangement of her maternal grandmother, who states that if the clitoris is not cut, it will grow and end up dangling between the knees of the girl. This situation speaks to the variety of immediate reasons why different cultures engage in female genital cutting. They all revolve, however, around the disempowerment of girls and women and denying their basic human right to bodily integrity and sexuality.

Due to civil unrest, Hirsi Ali and her family move around quite a bit while she is growing up, in places as distant as Saudi Arabia (where Hirsi Ali describes her childhood horror at seeing women clad in all black from head to toe), Ethiopia, and Kenya. Throughout her travels as a child and then a teenager, Hirsi Ali vacillates between being a staunch believer in Islam to questioning her faith, all while experiencing emotional, verbal, and savage physical abuse at the hands of her mother and, at one point, her Qur’an teacher.

The action quickens at an incredible pace when Hirsi Ali’s father and community arrange for her to marry a Somali man who lives in Canada, even though Hirsi Ali does not consent to the marriage. It is telling when, on the day of her wedding ceremony, Hirsi Ali has a normal day at home while her father, her new husband, and the other men in her community have a celebration without her. In the Islamic ceremony, the bride only needs to be represented by a male guardian (father, brother, uncle, grandfather, etc) and does not physically need to be present. Hirsi Ali’s husband goes back to Canada and sends for her to join him. Rather than meeting her husband in Canada, Hirsi Ali manages to make her way to Amsterdam and apply for asylum. It is here that the reader watches Hirsi Ali confront a great amount of cognitive dissonance between what her Islamic upbringing has taught her about right and wrong versus what she personally experiences in the Netherlands,

“The next morning, I decided to stage an experiment. I would walk out of the door without a headscarf. I was in my long green skirt and a long tunic, and I had my scarf in a bag with me in case of trouble, but I would not cover my hair. I planned to see what would happen...Absolutely nothing happened. The gardeners kept trimming the hedges. Nobody went into a fit...Nobody looked at me. If anything, I attracted less attention than when I was covering my head. Not one man went into a frenzy” (p. 195).

Hirsi Ali is forthcoming about having lied on her asylum application to make her more likely to be approved. In the Netherlands, Hirsi Ali works as a Somali interpreter and, against all odds, goes on to attend college and obtain a degree in political science. While all of this is happening, Hirsi Ali is repeatedly impressed by Dutch society in their social order and equality between the sexes. She sees a glaring contrast between Dutch society and the lives of immigrant and refugee communities in the Netherlands. The Dutch, in an effort to be tolerant of immigrants and engage in multiculturalism, allowed Islamic religious schools to be established. Hirsi Ali, however, sees this as a way to sanction the systematic oppression of women in a democratic country.

Hirsi Ali becomes politically active and becomes elected to the Dutch Parliament where she rails against this Dutch practice of allowing old-world religious edicts to coexist in a democratic land. As part of her fight against the sanctioning of hard-line Islam, Hirsi Ali writes a short film entitled Submission (which is the translation of the Arabic word “Islam”) that is produced by filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. The film speaks directly to the oppression of women in Islam. At what is the climax of an already exciting book, Van Gogh is killed by a Muslim man who is clearly insulted by the film. Now, a publicly recognizable figure, Hirsi Ali’s life is in grave and immediate danger, and the Dutch parliament moves her from secure location to secure location (at one point, even as far as Boston) to protect her life. She is temporarily stripped of her Dutch citizenship on the basis of having lied on her asylum application, which effectively ends her political career in the Netherlands. Hirsi Ali then re-locates to the United States.

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The Politics of Female Circumcision in Egypt: Gender, Sexuality, and the Construction of Identity

Malmström, Maria

Last Updated: Feb-24-2017

Saleh, Mona

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Ethnography

Summary:

This is an ethnographic work written by a Swedish anthropologist who has lived in Cairo, Egypt for several years curating the cultural tropes that are woven into the lives of her traditional Egyptian subjects. Malmström sets the scene for her work by describing a 1994 incident wherein CNN broadcast live the female genital cutting of a young girl in Egypt. A secret practice made public, Malmström uses this event to springboard her commentary on how female genital cutting is practiced, experienced, and viewed among Egyptians.

Female genital cutting is defined as the partial or total removal of external female genitalia for non-medical (i.e. cultural) reasons. This is largely a practice carried out in Africa and some parts of the Middle East. Egypt has one of the highest global rates of female genital cutting, and the cutting usually occurs at the age of 9 years. Many reasons are cited for the cutting, and in Egypt it is done to decrease a woman’s sex drive as well as to fit the standards of beauty (i.e. labia minora are considered unattractive). It had usually been performed by a traditional practitioner, but more recently, this human rights violation has been medicalized in Egypt and is often performed by doctors in an operating room using anesthesia. Even though Egyptian law and Muslim as well as Coptic Christian clerics have issued bans on female genital cutting, the practice continues in secrecy.

Malmström starts her book by saying that female genital cutting may actually be carried out in large part as Egyptian political protest against the West. She uses excerpts from interviews with women of different generations, social strata, and degree of devotion to Islam to describe their different experiences and opinions on topics that center around womanhood and the many components of womanhood in Egypt.

While the title suggests that Malmström will tackle female genital cutting head-on throughout this piece, she actually takes a more circuitous route. She spends several chapters describing other woman-centric issues to familiarize the reader with Egyptian culture. For instance, Malmström describes how sexuality is expected to be expressed at different points in life: in girlhood, adolescence, and after marriage. She focuses on how Egyptian women are expected to straddle many expectations regarding sexuality depending on the context: sexually receptive to the husband only, for instance, but not so much so that the husband struggles to satisfy her. One of the most telling quotes regarding the meaning of womanhood is,

“A woman should always be soft towards a man...She should never accuse her husband of anything or argue with him. A woman should be strong and never show her true feelings. A woman must be beautiful. A woman will win through beauty, softness, and through cooking....A woman should not show her sadness because of him [her husband], since she turns ugly, loses her health and eventually, her husband. She should be even softer towards him and give him everything in life” (p. 169).

Malmström delves into the centrality of cooking, pain, and endurance of suffering in the lives of traditional women and how these items, as well as being “cut” are seen as necessary to the satisfactory construction of Egyptian female identity. This exploration of many parts of womanhood in Egypt allows the reader to attempt to engage in a nuanced understanding of female genital cutting in the context of a broader, textured Egyptian culture.

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The Danish Girl

Coxon, Lucinda; Redmayne, Eddie; Vikander, Alicia; Hooper, Tom

Last Updated: Nov-17-2016

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

As the movie opens, the married artists Einar and Gerda Wegener are working out of their apartment in Copenhagen. The year is around 1908 and they have been married for just a few years. They do not have children as yet, but they have hopes that they would soon.

Einar is a painter of Scandinavian landscapes and Gerda is a figurative painter. When the model for a painting Gerda is working on fails to appear one day, she asks Einar to take the model’s place. Einar would need to pose with the model’s dress and assume a feminine posture. In posing as a woman, Einar's simmering desire to become a woman comes to a boil.

At first Gerda finds Einar’s interest in posing as a woman an interesting diversion and as a means to have some fun at various social events. But, Einar becomes more and more serious about his interest in transitioning to a woman in more than just wardrobe and affect. As an early step in that direction, he takes on the name Lili Elbe and the pronoun "she." She gives up painting and becomes Gerda’s primary model. Gerda’s paintings become highly sought after with her new model.

Lili’s quest to become a woman intensified over the subsequent years and extended to hoping to acquire a uterus so that she could give birth. With Gerda’s help, Lili eventually finds a surgeon in Germany who is willing to perform a series of risky procedures that will make her into a woman. After the operations, Lili was transformed into the woman she wanted to be, but without the availability of anti-rejection drugs and antibiotics, she died in the hospital with Gerda at her side.

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