Feminine Form Research Articles

Floral Resource Utilization by Solitary Bees and Exploitation of Their Stored Foods by Natural Enemies

Bees are phytophagous insects that exhibit recurrent ecological specializations related to factors generally different from those discussed for other phytophagous insects. Pollen specialists have undergone extensive radiations, and specialization is not a always a derived state. Floral host associations are conserved in some bee lineages. In others, various species specialize on different host plants that are phenotypically similar in presenting predictably abundant floral resources. The nesting of solitary bees in localized areas influences the intensity of interactions with enemies and competitors. Abiotic factors do not always explain the intraspecific variation in the spatial distribution of solitary bees. Foods stored by bees attract many natural enemies, which may shape diverse facets of nesting and foraging behavior. Parasitism has evolved repeatedly in some, but not all, bee lineages. Available evidence suggests that cleptoparasitic lineages are most speciose in temperate zones. Female parasites frequently have a suite of characters that can be described as a masculinized feminine form. The evolution of resource specialization (including parasitism) in bees presents excellent opportunities to investigate phenotypic mechanisms responsible for evolutionary change.

Marguerite Duras: Marxism, Feminism, Writing

American theatre critics have joined the debate over Marguerite Duras's textual politics. To this point, feminist theatre critics, like their literary counterparts, have tended to look for Duras's textual politics in her purported partisanship of French feminist thought.2 In this view, Duras's textual politics are gender politics, comparable to those of He1lne Cixous, for instance, or Luce Irigaray. Because her politics are seen to take a textually feminine form, critics looking to understand them focus rather exclusively (and logically) on the feminine in Duras-her exploration of feminine desire, discursive holes, gaps, and silences, and so on. My problem with this trend is not that it does not yield important insights into Duras, for it clearly does and has. It is rather that reading Duras for the French feministfeminine completely fails to engage with her considerable cultural and political differences vis-a-vis French feminists. As they have been reminded often recently, neo-lacanian feminists are white European bourgeoises (Cixous is the exception here). Duras was brought up in a lower class French colonial family in Asia and is, in her words, a cultural and linguistic creole.3

Writing love: letters, women, and the novel in France, 1605-1776

In this compelling new addition to Sandra M. Gilbert s Ad Feminam: Women Literature series, Katharine Ann Jensen examines the cultural form of the love letter its intersection with the novel in the works of seventeenth- eighteenth-century French women writers. Traditionally, French history has focused on eighteenth-century male writers Rousseau Laclos as the master artists of the epistolary novel. That emphasis on one century, one gender, one epistolary formthe novelobscures the history of women s writing in France.In the seventeenth century, the love letter was viewed as a feminine form in which a woman s passionate emotional nature found its logical expression. Such emotional writing was criticized for its structural grammatical imperfections, rendering itin the eyes of meninvalid as true literary material. However, men often wrote under female pseudonyms, composing letters of seduction betrayal that were published as true accounts. Jensen contends that men disguised their words as women s words because writing as women allowed them to experiment with narrative fiction at a time when men s writing was rigidly defined by classical rhetoric. She further argues that men were able to moderate women s linguistic strengths by limiting their epistolary expertise to a social, rather than literary, practice, thereby maintaining literature as an almost exclusively male province.Jensen argues for a tradition of women s writing by examining both the love letters novels of such writers as Desjardins, Ferrand, Graffigny, Riccoboni, Lespinasse. In her novel Les Desordres de l amour, (Madame de Villedieu) creates an ambitious, letter-writing heroine. Through an analysis of the textual similarities between the heroine s letters Desjardins s personal love letters to her unfaithful lover, Jensen concludes that Desjardins rewrites her own unfortunate epistolary relationship. Jensen draws similar conclusions from an examination of the personal letters of Ferrand in relation to her novel Histoire des amours de Cleante et de Belise.In order to chart the legacy of seventeenth-century feminine epistolarity, Jensen goes on to consider the works of eighteenth-century French women writers. Like Desjardins s novel, Graffigny s Lettres d une Peruvienne and Riccoboni s Lettres de Mistress Fanni Butlerd present letter-writing heroines who overturn the conventions of seduction betrayal in order to claim their independence desire to write. This desire correlates to Graffigny s Riccoboni s own writing ambitions, thereby asserting the ability of women to write self-consciously, rather than emotionally, to create narrative fiction rather than cyclical letters of love suffering. Jensen demonstrates that these assertions constitute a significant break with seventeenth-century ideas about feminine letter writing that inextricably bind women to a supposedly natural language of sexual disempowerment.This important insightful book will prove a valuable addition to the libraries of scholars in French seventeenth- eighteenth-century studies, feminist studies, epistolary fiction, novel narrative studies.

Shifting Sexes, Moving Stories: Feminist/Constructivist Dialogues

How can constructivism and feminism inform and strengthen one another? The author of this text is a constructivist-feminist hermaphrodite, and so s/he addresses this question in the form of an inner dialogue. Instead of taking sex as a characteristic of individuals, s/he analyzes it as something performed locally in ways that vary from one situation to another. Investigating these performances offers constructivism an interesting theoretical opportunity and a chance to turn away from a sterile anti-epistemological stance. For feminism, a radicalized notion of the construction of sexes opens up new political spaces and strategies. Constructivist texts, moreover, have the potential to "do" both the contingency and the necessity of our forms of life in their very style.

The Objects of History: A Reply to Philip StewartEngraven Desire: Eros, Image, and text in the French Eighteenth Century. Philip Stewart

nouns in Latin. In many ways, this is the standard argument and seems commonsensical. What it ignores, however, are the fascinating changes that could be introduced in a period of crisis, such as the French Revolution. I argued in an earlier work that the revolutionaries were not altogether content with the dominance of Libert6 as a republican symbol. As the Revolution moved in a more radical direction during the Terror, the artist and Jacobin deputy Jacques-Louis David made Hercules, refigured as icon of Le Peuple, a centerpiece of his propaganda efforts.5 This entailed no direct challenge to the iconographical tradition, however-only a shift in emphasis. Later efforts proved even more thoroughgoing, I have discovered. The vignettes of the Manuel des autorites constituees de la Republique franCaise of 1797 are an especially telling case in point. In this work, designed for a wide official audience, the artist seemed intent on defeminizing as much as possible the standard repertory of republican allegory. Alongside the Liberties and Truths that maintained their traditional feminine form and the French People as the masculine Hercules, installed Love of the Fatherland, Our Ancestors, Courage, Disinterestedness, Virility, Happiness, Old Age, and Hatred of Tyrants and Traitors, all of them represented by masculine figures (including the feminine nouns la virilite, la vieillesse, and la haine). Among thirty-six engravings, no less than nineteen were masculine allegories, sixteen were feminine, and Humankind alone showed a couple.6 The balance had been tipped away from the feminine allegory, supposedly fixed in traditional allegorical usage. It appears then that the republican authorities were encouraging a deliberate recasting of the iconographic repertory; they consciously sought masculine replacements for some of the traditional feminine allegories. They did this either by choosing to emphasize previously underutilized masculine nouns such as stoicism and disinterestedness or by representing feminine nouns with masculine allegories, as in the case of la Post&rite, represented by a male figure. Thus the nearly perfect correlation between the gendering of nouns and allegorical figurations of the Old Regime and early Revolution could come at least partially undone. It may be true that Libert6 could not be represented as anything but a woman, but this may be for at least partly historical and political reasons (it was used so much and thus was hard to refigure) and not entirely for linguistic reasons. La Haine, la Posterite, and la Virilit6 could in fact change sex, in terms of their allegorical representation. Thus, even staid and stolid iconography, when pressed, is very much related to social facts. History has a way of undoing all efforts to stabilize or fix usage. Meanings cannot be divorced from social and political processes. It is our task-in both history and art history, in this case-to unravel 5 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 87-119. 6 Manuel des autorite's constitue'es de la Re'publique fran,aise (Paris, 1797). The engravings illustrated each decadi of the calendar. The frontispiece reads, drawn by Queverdo, engraved by Blanchard, but the engravings in the text read only Queverdo fecit. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:09:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

A Glossary of Greek Romany as Spoken in Agia Varvara (Athens) (review)

Reviews Gordon M. Messing, A Glossary of Greek Romany as Spoken in Agia Varvara (Athens). Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers. 1988. Pp. 175. $15.95. The Gypsies, descendants of a group of people that left India in roughly the ninth century a.d. and made their way westward through the Middle East and Turkey to Greece and thence northward, have been a presence in Greece in one form or another for possibly as long as 700 years. They refer to themselves natively as roma (plural of rom, the word for 'man; husband', with feminine form romni 'woman; wife') and their language is generally referred to by outsiders (gadie 'non-Gypsies') as Romani (also Romany, in the older spelling Messing adopts), and by the roma themselves as romani (tjip), literally "(the) roms' language". After the Gypsies passed through the Balkans, great numbers of them moved on to other parts of Europe and elsewhere, but a significant number remained in or returned to Greece. A recent European Community report by M. Siguan concerning minority populations in Spain, Portugal, and Greece (Les minorités linguütiques dans la communauté économique européenne: Espagne, Portugal, Grèce [Luxemburg 1990]) places the number of roma now living in Thrace alone at 22,000. Throughout this time, the roma have almost always been relegated to a low and somewhat marginal social standing within Greece and elsewhere (for a view of the Balkans, see Hugh Poulton's Minorities in the Balkans [Minority Rights Group Report 82,1989] and for a perceptive, sensitive, and occasionally chilling essay on the treatment of Gypsies in Western societies, see Ian Hancock 's The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution [Karoma Publishers, 1987]). As a result, the Greek Gypsies as a group have not attracted much attention among scholars interested in Greece, although there is in general a healthy interest in Gypsy studies focusing on other groups of Gypsies, as evidenced, for example, by the long publication history of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Sockty. The tradition of a closed and tighdy knit social group somewhat alienated from mainstream Greek culture makes field work among the Gypsies in general rather difficult. Nonetheless, Gordon Messing managed to gain entry amongst the sedentary Gypsies of Agia Varvara, a suburb of Athens, and over a period of some 15 years beginning in 1973 collected an enormous amount of information about the particular form of Romani spoken in this Gypsy community. (Another source is Birgit Igla's Grammatik der Kalderash, an unpublished 1989 dissertation done at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. Thanks to Professor Ian Hancock of the University of Texas for this inforJoumal of Modem Greek Studies, Volume 9, 1991. 249 250 Reviews mation and also for reading and commenting upon an early draft of this review.) Interestingly, as Messing points out (p. 11), it is likely that "the immediate ancestors of these Gypsies came to Greece from Turkey perhaps not much earlier than die last part of the nineteendi century," for Agia Varvara Romani "bears a markedly close relationship to the Turkish Romani so ably described by Paspati in his magnificent account of 1870." Messing's contribution to Gypsy linguistic and cultural studies is selfevident : in this book are to be found not only a brief grammatical sketch of this dialect of Greek Romani but also some sample texts, an extensive RomaniEnglish glossary covering more than 1200 lexical items, complete with examples of use taken from texts and interviews, and an English-Romani wordlist that can be used as an index to the Romani-English lemmata. Given the significant contribution of this work to Gypsy studies, one might well ask whether it has any relevance for Modern Greek studies. The answer is clearly yes, for at least two reasons. First, while the field of Modern Greek studies has generally concerned itself only with matters Greek, it is possible instead to view the field as including the study of all aspects of modern Greece, and not just the language of the Greeks, the literature of the Greeks, the architecture of the Greeks, the social organization of the Greeks, etc. Under such a view, the non-Greek minority speech communities living in Greece would...

A Graeco-Roman group statue of unusual character from Dendera

Publication of a small sandstone statue of the Roman period from Dendera (Cairo JE 46278). It depicts two naked children of identical size, one male and one female, standing within the coils of two serpents. They are the twin figures of two deities, whose exact identity is not certain. They might be seen as Shu and Tefnut, or as Harpocrates and his twin sister. This latter might be either a form of Isis, which was paired with Harpocrates in the Graeco-Roman period, or simply a feminine form of the god Harpocrates. The snakes seem to be Isis Thermouthis and Serapis-Agathos Daimon. This statue is of a votive or dedicatory nature, perhaps from a shrine to Isis-Thermouthis just outside the enclosure of the great temple of Hathor of Dendera.

Engendered autobiographies: The diary as a feminine form

Engendered autobiographies: The diary as a feminine form

Aggression, sex role measures, and Kohut's psychology of the self

Recent controversies concerning the relationship between aggression and sex role development were evaluated in light of Heinz Kohut's psychoanalytic psychology of the self. Masculinity roughly corresponded to grandiose elements of Kohut's bipolar self while femininity was linked to its idealizing sector. As predicted, self-reported aggressiveness reflected an immature grandiosity; and associations of assertiveness with both masculine and grandiose personality styles supported Kohut's claim that adjustment can evolve out of more aggressive forms of self-functioning. Socially desirable forms of femininity had the advantage of being incompatible with aggressiveness, but they also failed to promote assertiveness. Androgynous, masculine, feminine, and undifferentiated sex roles displayed largely predictable parallels with synthetic, internal, external, and archaic narcissistic styles. As in previous research, therefore, Kohut's theory proved useful in examining the mental health implications of traditional sex roles.

The Birth of American Tragedy by Peter Egri

Reviews401 does allow a viable humanitarian solution where others see only paralysis and unresolved paradox. Occasionally, however, he is overly cautious. In his discussion of Emilia Galotti Lamport takes at face value Lessing's famous assertion that he based the play on the ancient Livy story stripped of its political element. Yet anyone who has taught the play to undergraduates knows that even the least sophisticated readers are immediately struck by the obvious and powerful political implications of the play. One can reasonably speculate that because Prussian authorities had tried earlier to prevent the first performance of the comparatively innocuous Minna von Barnhelm in the Free Imperial City of Hamburg (that is, far outside Prussian legal jurisdiction), Lessing could well have feared a much more forceful response from the nobility to the blatantly offensive Emilia Galotti. Hence the dramatist's attempt to play down the political component . But Lamport, perhaps admirably attending to his mission, is disinclined to entertain even well-founded speculation. Lamport makes his well-written, engaging, and insightful study additionally accessible to specialist and non-specialist alike by giving all primary quotations in German and English translation, by providing a carefully assembled bibliography that pays particular attention to recent Anglo-American criticism, and by at times going out of his way to enlighten the neophyte: e.g., in a parenthetical reference to the heroine's name in Kabale und Liebe he explains, "Millerin is an archaic feminine form of the name" (p. 62). Finally, the value of this work lies not least of all in the strange fact that, while there already exist numerous volumes treating individual authors of the period and other studies—for example, T. J. Reed's useful The Classical Centre (1980) —concerned with German classicism in general, Lamport's is presently the only English literary-historical critical survey devoted exclusively to German drama of the classical era. Despite its shameless price, German Classical Drama will necessarily find an indispensable and much deserved place in graduate and undergraduate library collections. STEVEN R. HUFF Oberlin College Peter Egri. The Birth of American Tragedy. Budapest: Tankönyvkiado, 1988. Pp. 227. While it focuses almost exclusively on Eugene O'Neill, the aim of this cumbersome (though in some respects excellent) book by a distinguished Hungarian scholar is "to analyze the genetic and generic conditions of the birth of American tragedy from an axiological point of view" (p. 7). More than once Professor Egri nods dutifully in the direction of his eminent countryman George Lukics as he labors to explain how developments in modern American drama mirror the crises of world capitalism in the decades coinciding with O'Neill's career. Were this study to be written today, after the 1989 upheavals in Eastern Europe, it might carry lighter ideological baggage; for inside this groaning crate is a muscular book struggling to get out. That other narrative 402Comparative Drama is a highly original account of how O'Neill adapted novelistic techniques to suit his dramatic needs. Why, Professor Egri asks at the beginning, did dramatic tragedy develop at a relatively late date in American literature, and then only with O'Neill? He answers that while isolated American novelists did embrace a tragic vision in the nineteenth century (e.g., Melville), it was not until World War I that contradictions in American social values became sufficiently public and intense to provide material for objectified conflict on the stage. We must "connect the birth of American tragedy to the phenomenon of alienation" (p. 36); all other explanations of the rise of American drama fall short. By temperament Eugene O'Neill was ideally suited to dramatize the social alienation felt by large numbers of Americans in the 1920's. Whatever his intentions, he spoke for many in The Hairy Ape, whose protagonist, Yank, protests repeatedly that he does not "belong." In The Hairy Ape dramatic form itself is alienated: "the short units of the dramatic structure cannot join in larger sections" (p. 69). Not only is the fragmentation of the American Dream the reality that gave resonance to O'Neill's tragic vision, it is also the agent that caused the artist to break down his plot into episodic scenes. This...

Dimensions of Masculinity and Femininity: A Self-Report Inventory

A self-report inventory was designed to assess a wide assortment of traits alleged to be components of masculinity or femininity and traits in which sex differences have been found. Factor analyses of data from men, women, and a combined sample revealed 12 recurring factors. Four of the factors reprint aspects of femininity, and six represent aspects of masculinity. Of the remaining two factors one is a bipolar factor contrasting a feminine quality with a masculine one, and the other represents a trait that can assume tither a masculine or a feminine form. Subsequent factor analyses of data from a shortened questionnaire showed the factors to be reasonably replicable. This research underscores the multidimensionality of masculinity and femininity.

The Chief Baker

The previously misunderstood titles of the man Pepy on stele CG 20683 = ANOC 1:5 provide the earliest attestation for the word 'mr (Wb. 1, 187, 2), ‘bakery’ (cf. demotic 'mre and Coptic αMPε, ‘baker’). The titles also yield a Middle Kingdom example of the feminine form of šn' (Wb. iv, 507, 12–508, 25), ‘Workhouse’; a second Middle Kingdom survival of the Old Kingdom title imy-r 'bw-rȝ nsw.t, ‘Overseer of the Royal Repast’, is found among the titles of Iykhernofret on the stele.

On the Meaning of the Term “Jew” in Greco-Roman Inscriptions

The Greek terms Ἰουδαῖος/Ἰουδαία and their Latin equivalents Iudaeus/Iudaea have rarely posed serious translation problems for scholars. Whether in masculine or feminine form, singular or plural, regardless of declension, these terms have usually been taken as straightforward indicators of Jews, at least when applied to individual persons. Only recently A. T. Kraabel has suggested that these terms, uniformly translated “Jew” or “Jews,” might have other significance, in particular as indicators of geographic origin, that is, “Judaean(s).”

Dissociation of inflectional and derivational morphology

A patient is described who makes morphological errors in spontaneous sentence production and in repetition of single words. The great majority of these errors were substitutions of inflectional affixes. The patient did make some derivational errors in repeating derived words but almost never made such errors for nonderived words. The inflectional errors for adjectives and nouns occurred mostly on the plural forms for nouns and adjectives and on the feminine form for adjectives. For verbs, inflectional errors were produced for all tense, aspect, and mood forms. There were no indications that these latter verb features constrained the form of inflectional errors produced. The results are interpreted as support for the thesis that morphological processes are located in the lexicon but that inflectional and derivational processes constitute autonomous subcomponents of the lexicon.

Is ‘Righteous’ Right?

The root ts-d-q found in the Old Testament has always presented its interpreters with a challenge. It is the root from which modern versions usually offer us the word ‘righteous’. Actually two problems arise over it, for from this root we have both a verb and a noun. So we must discover in the case of the noun, what the feminine form tsedaqah actually means and how it differs from its masculine counterpart, tsedeq, if at all; and, in the case of the verb, what tsedeq means in the Qal as well as in the Hiphil, as hitsdiq.

Plural Formation in Egyptian

Previous articleNext article No AccessPlural Formation in EgyptianJohn Bryan CallenderJohn Bryan Callender Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 46, Number 1Jan., 1987 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/373214 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1987 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Subjunctive as the Marker of Subordination

For half a century Professor Ronald Hilton of Stanford University has been collecting double-gender nouns in Spanish and Portuguese. He now has a card-index of some 2,000 examples. This peculiarly Spanish phenomenon is much more widespread than generally realized. The differences in meaning between the masculine and feminine forms (el manzano-la manzana; orden-la orden, etc.) reflect a complex of basic principles which will be analyzed in the introduction to the proposed dictionary. Sometimes the difference is simply geographical, as in el boleto-la boleta. The proposed dictionary should include, where relevant, indications of the geographical range of each entry. Because of the heavy burden of editing the World Affairs Report, Professor Hilton will be unable to bring the project to fruition himself, and he has asked Hispania associate editor John P. Wonder, in cooperation with his Hispania colleague Richard Teschner, to study the means of completing the project. A first step would be to find out which scholars have done

The Elsewhere Condition and h-aspiré

The phonology of French continues to command widespread attention in the development of linguistic theory. The most recent, and most novel, contribution to the explicit description of sound patterns in this language is Anderson (1982), who demonstrates the central rôle played by syllabic structure in alternations obtaining between null and ‘e-instable’, or schwa. In expected contrast to the natural generative phonology approach advocated, for example, by Klausenburger (1978), Anderson advances the more orthodox generative position (cf. Schane, 1968; Dell, 1973) that characterizes such alternations as petit m. ‘pəti]/petite f. [pətit] ‘small’ in terms of the phonological deletion of basic word-final consonants (masculine forms) and final ‘protective’ schwas (feminine forms). This familiar, ‘abstract’ kind of account has been challenged most comprehensively by Tranel (1981), but it still represents the standard alternative within more or less traditional generative phonology, which, without further elaboration, Anderson and the comments that follow here share as a point of departure.

Hesiod's Ambiguous View of Woman

A S HESIOD contemplates the nature of love and the sexual sphere, he is beset with anxiety. Ambivalence characterizes Hesiod's view of femininity, on both a divine and human level, as he explores the theme of love in all its complexity through his portrayal of Aphrodite and Pandora. From the first, deception (4a1Tr6rq) appears among Aphrodite's attributes (Theog. 203-6), adjoining her smiles (get8gara) and erotic delight (ikpqjtq). Aphrodite is the irresistibly attractive embodiment of the sexual urge, and even when she seems an obvious good she retains a destructive potential. Hesiod, in fact, associates the sexual act with pain and a certain loss of control; love and its cares are said to be limbgnawing (Op. 66 yvto,36pos) and limb-unnerving (Theog. 121, 911 Xvo-L/8,XqA), physiological reactions which in Homer accompany sleep and death. I The irrational procreative urge is present from the beginning of creation in the vague figure of Eros (Theog. 120-22). In the feminine form of alluring Aphrodite, however, this fundamental urge is explicitly connected with notions of seduction and deception and becomes distinctly threatening. Although Hesiod names Eros among the first deities in the cosmos, he clearly prefers to treat of love in a feminine context, for Aphrodite, as a more striking symbol of love's ambivalence, virtually eclipses Eros in the Theogony and Eros is relegated to a position as one of her attendants (201). The complexity of the sexual sphere is mirrored in Aphrodite's nature. From the first, she is physical love incarnate and, like Eros, she affects gods and men, but there is always a disturbing, sensual concreteness about her. In fact, her very name is synonymous with the sexual act (e.g. Theog. 822, 962, 1005). As in the longer Hymn to Aphrodite where the goddess herself is a victim of the sexual drive she embodies, Aphrodite also appears in the Theogony as an active participant in the sexual union, bearing offspring to Ares (933-34) and Anchises (1008-9). The ambivalence of Aphrodite is further emphasized by her proximity to the goddess Night in the Theogony. The statement of Aphrodite's sexual domain (205-6) is followed closely by the enumeration of Night's offspring (211-25), figures such as Doom (Mopos), Death (0cvaros), Blame (M6toq),

Textbooks and (In-)Equality: A Survey of Literary Readers for Elementary and Intermediate German

Increased public awareness of issues relating to equality has begun to have an effect on our profession, as can be seen by the regular appearance since the mid-seventies of conference programs, workshops, and journal articles on teaching German women's writing, overcoming sex-stereotyping in teaching materials, integrating information about women into the teaching of culture, and so on. Some authors and publishers have made efforts to reduce the most obvious and offensive forms of sex-stereotyping in introductory language textbooks by inserting drills which teach the feminine forms of nouns and pronouns as well as the masculine, adding a (token) reading piece on women's role, and presenting fewer negative stereotypes of female characters in dialogues and readings. Few available textbooks do this with any degree of consistency, however, and traditional attitudes and assumptions are still very much apparent.' I have chosen to demonstrate some of the problems by a survey of literary readers for the elementary and intermediate levels. Many of the points made here are relevant to other kinds of textbooks as well.