Thompson asserts her interest ‘‘in intervening with

language to see what possibilities for social change

might emerge’’ (p. 16). To that end, she interrogates

how we can expand our notions of parenting, of

family, and of the maternal. However, there is one

final question that her study potentially raises and that

could be addressed more consciously and more

fully—more could be said about how everyone will

gain from adopting a lesbian-affirmative rhetoric. In

adopting such a rhetoric, we are called upon to

question whether or not any individual, in spite of

his/her sexual identification, is suited to parenting.

Certainly, this study has wider applications in that all

of us could profit from asking ourselves why we want

to parent and from regarding parenting as a choice

rather than an a priori right.

Cayo Gamber

The Department of English

The George Washington University

6514 Fourth Avenue, Takoma ParkMD 20912, USA

doi 10.1016/S0277-5395(03)00023-2

COLD WAR WOMEN: THE INTERNATIONAL

ACTIV- ITIES OF AMERICAN WOMEN’S ORGAN-

IZATIONS, by Helen Laville, 220 pages. Manchester

University Press, Manchester and New York, 2002.

US$64.95 hardcover.

In this study, Helen Laville, a lecturer in American

History at the University of Birmingham (England),

describes how American women’s voluntary organ-

izations served as a vehicle for women’s activism in

Cold War America, an international role that histor-

ians have heretofore overlooked. Operating through

these organizations, American women retained their

commitment to women’s essential nature but never-

theless expanded their ambit to include international

affairs. American women’s internationalism, how-

ever, incorporated a notion of American superiority

and the organizations themselves replicated hierar-

chies of race and class, since the membership of most

organizations remained inhospitable to women of

color and to women not of their class—‘‘the well-

heeled leading the well-to-do’’ in Laville’s felicitous

phrasing (p. 24). Women’s organizations pursued

their international role unofficially but in collabora-

tion with the U.S. government ‘‘as representatives,

not of their gender but of their nation’’ (p. 36). In

international Cold War politics, nationalism trumped

sex.

In the Cold War era, policy makers believed that

voluntary organizations represented the best features

of American democracy, the expression of diversity

in viewpoint. Ironically, however, women’s organi-

zations permitted the U.S. government, usually via

the Women’s Bureau in the U.S. Department of

Labor, to offer guidance freely on the correct way

to view foreign policy questions. Thus, the US

benefited from both the appearance of independence

and the coherent delivery of a nationalist line.

Only certain organizations received the govern-

ment’s welcome to the international arena: the League

of Women Voters, the American Association of Uni-

versity Women, the Young Women’s Christian Asso-

ciation, the National Federation of Business and

Professional Women’s Clubs, and the National Coun-

cil of Negro Women became the main standard-

bearers. Happy to help women in other countries adopt

American models, American women leaders resisted

the notion that their goals were ‘‘feminist’’ or partic-

ularly devoted to women’s rights. Rather, American

women advised their foreign counterparts to advocate

in the areas of juvenile delinquency, housing, school

reform, and community welfare. Feminist organiza-

tions, such as the National Woman’s party, were there-

fore excluded. Laville focuses one chapter on

Germany during the U.S. occupation to demonstrate

the ways in which women’s voluntary organizations,

focusing on the German housewife, participated in the

American mission to transform Germans from fol-

lowers of tyrants to a truly democratic citizenry. But

in Germany, American women’s organizations found

themselves on the front line of the Cold War and they

thus took up the role of cold warriors.

They had to adjust to the role. Initially, American

women’s organizations strongly supported the United

Nations and international cooperation. As the US

adopted a more unilateral and belligerent stance,

women leaders faced a dilemma. For some, their

work in favor of peace and the protection of civil

liberties invited McCarthyite attacks and disrepute as

Communist sympathizers. In response, American

women’s organizations stepped up their opposition

to Communism abroad. As international communist

women’s organizations entered the fray, United

Nations’ agencies became battlegrounds, their poten-

tial for good vitiated by the struggle. The quest for

peace, with which many women’s organizations had

long been identified, now became the campaign for

‘‘peace with freedom’’ as opposed to ‘‘peace at any

price’’—i.e., capitulation to the Soviet Union to avoid

violence. An organization created in 1947 by the

journalist Dorothy Thompson, World Organization

of Mothers of All Nations or WOMAN, met with

Book reviews198

vehement U.S. government disapproval because it

called for peace and eschewed nationalism. WOM-

AN’s plan for a congregation of women in Berlin

alarmed U.S. government officials, who successfully

mobilized prominent women, including Eleanor Roo-

sevelt, to scuttle the proposal. WOMAN disintegrated

after a brief half-dozen years.

In its stead, American women’s organizations

received support for more orthodox strategies via

the CIA, which laundered funding through charitable

foundations. Women’s organizations would represent

to the world the benefits for women of living in free-

market democracies assisted by the Committee of

Correspondence, which received funding to print

materials and host conferences from 1953 to 1967.

The scandal that occurred when the CIA’s role was

revealed doomed the Committee, but Laville argues

that the government funds enabled willing collabo-

rators, not dupes. Although the disclosure embar-

rassed the participants, the problem for women’s

organizations lay in the deception, not in the message

they conveyed with the government’s assistance.

In sum, Laville states: ‘‘[American women] were

active participants in the projection of American

values to the world, and took seriously their role in

constructing and representing their version of Amer-

ican womanhood to the world’’ (p. 198). As cold

warriors, rather than behaving as part of the interna-

tional sisterhood they touted, American women were

Americans first. This experience in gendered inter-

nationalism, Laville observes, should warn us of its

fragility. Laville has produced a cogently written and

amply documented study that scholars and students

will find accessible and helpful.

Cynthia Harrison

History/Women’s Studies

The George Washington University

837 22nd Street

N.W., Washington, DC 20052, USA

doi 10.1016/S0277-5395(03)00025-6

WOMEN, BODY, ILLNESS: SPACE AND IDENTITY IN

THE LIVES OF EVERYDAY WOMEN WITH

CHRONIC ILLNESS, by Pamela Moss and Isabel

Dyck, 225 pages. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,

Inc., Lanham, MD, 2002. US $75.00 hardcover.

As I read Women, Body, Illness: Space and Identity

in the Lives of Everyday Women with Chronic

Illness by Pamela Moss and Isabel Dyck, I was

reminded of a doctor’s appointment that I had prior

to surgery a couple of years ago. The surgeon

declared, to his satisfaction, that I was healthy. I

felt like protesting, ‘‘If I were healthy, I wouldn’t be

having this surgery.’’ The difference between the

surgeon’s definition of health and my own exem-

plifies the thesis of this book, the in-between posi-

tion of women with chronic illness, in between

health and disease.

For the surgeon, health meant that I did not have

any heart, lung or neurological problems that would

cause surgical complications. For me, health meant

the absence of the pain and fatigue that I hoped the

surgery would alleviate. According to Moss and

Dyck, women with chronic illnesses are positioned

in between definitions of health as physical well-

being and health as the absence of life-threatening

disease.

As feminist geographers, Moss and Dyck argue

for a radical body politics that would describe the

material and discursive positioning of women with

chronic illnesses, a politics that emphasizes specific

bodies living in specific circumstances. They inter-

view 49 women with rheumatoid arthritis or myalgic

encephalomyelitis (ME), which has also been referred

to as chronic fatigue syndrome. In these interviews,

Moss and Dyck uncover the ways in which these

conditions constrain the daily lives of the women,

from their ability to work to their ability to interact

socially, or even their ability to travel from bedroom

to bathroom.

Moss and Dyck draw on several feminist and

post-structuralist theories in order to construct their

radical body politics, in particular the deconstruc-

tion of the binary oppositions of health and illness,

ability and disability. In so doing, they examine

work on body theory carried out in feminist theory,

queer theory, and disability studies, noting that

these theories’ emphases on sexuality and the social

construction of disability fail to address the material

conditions experienced by women with chronic

illnesses.

Using extensive excerpts from their interviews,

Moss and Dyck make clear just how limited their

participants’ lives have become as a result of pain and

fatigue. In so doing, they argue that theorizing

chronic illness requires theorists to work between

discursive and material theories of the body. On the

one hand, women with chronic illnesses are caught

within the discourses of medicine and welfare that

position them as invalid, but on the other, they are

limited by the physical changes that mark them as

invalids. Only theories that recognize both aspects of

existence are adequate for analyzing the experience

of chronic illness.

Book reviews 199