Ames Library News

Want to learn all about the first African-American woman to graduate from IWU? Check out The Ames Library Archives and Special Collections blog post on Jospehine M. Jackson.

“The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.”

– Zora Neale Hurston

This Theme Thursday celebrates the accomplishements and life of civil rights activist Zora Neale Hurston. Zora Neale Hurston was an American novelist, short story write, folklorist, and anthropologist. Of her novels and published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

Her works remained rather obscure during her life and for several years after her death, for a number of cultural and political reasons. Many early readers and critics objected to Hurston’s use of dialect, but more recently critics have praised her use of idiomatic speech.

From the book cover: “One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.”

Fifty years after women like Dame Jane Goodall and Gloria Steinem started chipping away at the glass ceiling, their influence remains palpable, especially in a world where we still debate women’s rights. This Theme Thursday celebrates the work of Jane Goodall, a famous primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and all-around awesome woman. Dame Goodall continues to study and write about primate behavior. She founded the Gombe Stream Research Center in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, and the Jane Goodall Institute for Wild Life Research, Education, and Conservation to provide ongoing support for field research on wild chimpanzees. She is the author of many books, including two autobiographies in letters, Africa in My Blood and Beyond Innocence. Today Dr. Goodall spends much of her time lecturing, sharing her message of hope for the future, and encouraging young people to make a difference in their world.

In the Shadow of Man is one of Goodall’s early books. From the book cover: “World-renowned primatologist, conservationist, and humanitarian Dr. Jane Goodall’s account of her life among the wild chimpanzees of Gombe is one of the most enthralling stories of animal behavior ever written. Her adventure began when the famous anthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey suggested that a long-term study of chimpanzees in the wild might shed light on the behavior of our closest living relatives. Accompanied by only her mother and her African assistants, she set up camp in the remote Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania. For months the project seemed hopeless; out in the forest from dawn until dark, she had but fleeting glimpses of frightened animals. But gradually she won their trust and was able to record previously unknown behavior, such as the use—and even the making— of tools, until then believed to be an exclusive skill of man. As she came to know the chimps as individuals, she began to understand their complicated social hierarchy and observed many extraordinary behaviors, which have forever changed our understanding of the profound connection between humans and chimpanzees.

This week’s Theme Thursday features the works of Kara Walker, whose works explore race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes.

Narratives of a Negress, “accompanied an exhibition organized by the Tang Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art, presents a comprehensive overview of Walker’s work, beginning with her first cut-paper wall installation, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994). Other highlights include the 1996 series of twenty-four watercolor drawings, Brown Follies, which is reproduced in full as an artist’s book within the book, and installation views of many of Walker’s exhibitions. Recent drawings and projections are also featured. Throughout the book are a selection of the Walker’s writings reproduced as they were created typed on index cards. These writings reveal a rarely seen side of the artist, whose words are as provocative as her installations and drawings. The essays discuss Walker’s place in art history, formal and narrative readings of her work, her relation to culture at large, and issues of race, sexuality, and representation addressed in her work.”

Originally published in 1991, Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women rings just as true 25 years later. From the book cover: ““Opting-out,” “security moms,” “desperate housewives,” “the new baby fever”—the trend stories of today leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations. Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author that brings backlash consciousness up to date.

When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths as the “infertility epidemic” and the “man shortage,” myths that defied statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to an antifeminist backlash. Whatever progress feminism has recently made, Faludi’s words today seem prophetic. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and the “dangers” of women’s career ambitions; the glass ceiling is still low; women are still punished for wanting to succeed; basic reproductive rights are still hanging by a thread. The backlash clearly exists.

With passion and precision, Faludi shows in her new preface how the creators of commercial culture distort feminist concepts to sell products while selling women downstream, how the feminist ethic of economic independence is twisted into the consumer ethic of buying power, and how the feminist quest for self-determination is warped into a self-centered quest for self-improvement. Backlash is a classic of feminism, an alarm bell for women of every generation, reminding us of the dangers that we still face.”