Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (review)

Abstract

340 biography Vol. 11, No. 4 them" (p. 94). "By the late twenties and thirties" of our century, women autobiographers are heralded as "less inhibited" and "less afraid to be introspective in public" (p. 129). The acme of this progress up to the present is located in Kate Millett's "attempt to clarify for herself and for her readers the complex issue of one's sexual identity" in Flying (p. 169). It is not hard to see that Jelinek's essentialism draws her to French feminist notions of "writing the body" and thereby creating an écriture féminine , which she here projects as an evolution toward post-Freudian freedoms of action, knowledge, and expression. I do not in the least underestimate the tremendous courage it took for Stein to evolve the oblique stylings of her lesbianism and for Milien to lyricize her love of women overtly. But are we to embrace the corollaries of Jelinek's myth of progress in thinking about women and women's autobiography in past periods? There is the question of silences, for a start. Is an unwritten life to be categorized as one taken less seriously by the woman who lived it? Does everything unuttered trace to inhibition? Is sexuality the sole and supreme means of self-validation and self-expression? I would answer no, and, in regard to the last question, invoke the great empowering force of Christianity in women's life-writing in past periods. Jelinek, however, is candid about how she views religion when she identifies a "secular " outlook with progress in life-writing (pp. 19, 25) as well as when she distinguishes what she means by "personal life" from "conversion experience" (p. 61) and finds "domestic" autobiography consistently "more appealing" than "spiritual" (p. 70; cf. pp. 46, 89). In the area of critical evaluation, Jelinek displays a fine capacity to integrate appreciation of popular with more standard literary life-writing by American women in particular . Chapter 7 is a specially welcome addition to feminist scholarship. My misgivings are aroused by the tendency in Jelinek's commentary to equate literary appeal with "spirited anecdotes" and "intimate revelation" and "personal reflection" (pp. 38, 41, 50) and then, by degrees, to convert these characteristics into norms for "the stature of a classic," "greatness," "exceptional literary merit" in women's life-writing (pp. 40, 90, 94). When I encounter a judgment on "a history, relentlessly chronological and ponderous . . . written in grand and undulating prose with reasonably spaced dialogue providing some relief (p. 99) or a generalization to the effect that "none of these works is very literary, even though most are well written, informative, and sometimes entertaining" (p. 107), I want to enter a plea on behalf of readers' responses and the domain of the literary that complements the one I made above for intellectual autobiographers like Martineau. It would be a devastating irony if Jelinek's essentialism provided old, circumscribed notions of women's place, women's writing, and women's reading with any new impetus. I know that nothing could be further from her own intentions, but the danger is there nonetheless. Janel M. Mueller The University of Chicago Ready From Within: Séptima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement. Edited and with an introduction by Cynthia Stokes Brown. Wild Trees Press. 134 pp. $8.95. That the Civil Rights movement of the sixties is less celebrated as a piece of American history (including its tragic implications) than the Vietnam war seems to verify its organic character, like that of any genuine revolution. Séptima Clark, in this attractive little book from Wild Trees Press, re-establishes herself as one of the Movement's REVIEWS 341 imaginative and tireless workers, as essential to the drama of her period as any of its male leaders. In her two searching introductory chapters and through her seamless editing of Clark's narrative, Cynthia Stokes Brown creates a solid work. Séptima Poinsette Clark was born to a former black slave father of the Poinsette plantation in South Carolina and a mother of mixed black and native American ancestry who grew up in Haiti. It is difficult to believe that the child of a slave still lives...