Exploring 4 centuries of being female

Inoffensive `Woman' covers much, but it could be angrier

We've come a long way, baby.

Maybe?

That's the general sentiment evoked by “Woman:

The American History of an Idea” (571 pages, Yale University Press, $32.50) by Lillian Faderman, an ambitious attempt to delineate nothing less than the changing state of being female in this country over the past four centuries. “Woman” is exhaustively researched and finely written, with more than 100 pages of endnotes. Its bold red-orange spine would look handsome nestled next to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED Talk-turned-bestseller “We Should All Be Feminists” and Rebecca Solnit's “Men Explain Things to Me,” or for that matter “Woman: An Intimate Geography,” by Natalie Angier.

This “Woman” is dense with people and events, covering everything from Puritan poets to the pill to Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, and features reformers, revolutionaries and reactionaries both famous and obscure. But it doesn't really sink into the psyche as one might expect, given that Faderman is one of the preeminent LGBTQ scholars of our time — recognizing that not many were permitted to exist in previous times. It's kind of a Gyncyclopedia Britannica in a wiki, tricky world of identity politics: impressive but not essential.

Faderman's most heralded works, “Surpassing the Love of Men” (1981) and (1999), are bedrocks of lesbian history. A professor emerita at California State University, Fresno, she has written many other books, most recently a slender biography of gay rights leader Harvey Milk. Her memoir “Naked in the Promised Land” (2003), reissued two years ago with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado, is captivating. Faderman even wrote a memoir about her mother. Some of us have to be reminded to call our mothers.

“Woman” starts strong, with an account of “pachucas,” the rebellious and daringly dressed Mexican American girls who were Faderman's junior high school classmates in the 1950s, often forced to go to charm school or “juvi,” and with whom she sympathized, aware that her own sexuality made her outré: “a fugitive from the ideal.” The pachucas return in a later chapter, as one of many groups to flout the established norm, including roller derby skaters, flappers, riot grrrls, temperance activists wielding hatchets, Chinese American suffragists in three-cornered feathered hats and, to my surprise, hoboes, “mooching” in army breeches.

`Liberating Depression

“For thousands of women, the Depression was oddly liberating,” Faderman writes. “They were poor and footloose, and they found a fresh way to snub conventions about how a woman ought to live.” Given the scope of her project, however, we only visit each of these fascinating subcultures for a short time.

Describing the various horrors visited upon the women of America, particularly Indigenous and enslaved ones, Faderman doesn't flinch. She tells of matrilineal tribes, like the Iroquois and the Cherokee, baffling and enraging male colonists, who refused to honor “petticoat government.” A Ponkapoag wife who converted to Christianity was accused of adultery, narrowly escaped being hanged and was condemned to 30 lashes. Plantation overseers were known to dig holes in the ground so that they could whip the backs of pregnant enslaved women while protecting their “property”: the unborn children. Witch hysteria — an infelicitous term, considering that so much of it afflicted men — swept through the Massachusetts Bay Colony, subjecting women who displayed suspicious behaviors, like arguing with a carpenter, to invasive physical examinations and death sentences.

Describing the various horrors visited upon the women of America, particularly Indigenous and enslaved ones, Faderman doesn't flinch.

Understated levity

Trying to pass as the opposite sex, even in the name of patriotism, could also be tremendously risky: One sailor concealing her anatomy was dropped from a yardarm, stripped to the waist, made to run the gantlet, and tarred and feathered. An undercover soldier, hearing of an imminent investigation to find the

rogue female, took out her revolver and killed herself on the spot.

There are many moments of understated levity, though, from history's lesser insults. Faderman traces the rise and fall of the “lady,” a concept reclaimed with irony by postfeminists. (Parents might enjoy the schedule of drawing and dancing that Thomas Jefferson established for his 11-year-old daughter.) “Your printing of a book, beyond the custom of your sex, doth rankly smell,” one pastor wrote to his sister, a burn sick enough for Twitter.

Reading about one young lady sent to finishing school, to be “finished,” I was reminded of the Germaine Greer quote: “If a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got?”

Faderman also has great fun with newspaper editor William Marion Reedy's anxious 1913 catchphrase “it's sex o'clock in America,” regarding the loosening of morals and corset stays.

Any newspaper editor in 2022 could tell you that it's gender o'clock in America, and yet Faderman seems to muffle her ears, partly, to this loud ticking. She is hip to modern phrases like “assigned female at birth,” to Generation Z's increasing acceptance of nonbinary identities and Facebook's 56 gender options and men's diminishing sperm counts. But the parameters of her book stay, mostly, safely in the past.

“What is clear is that today one can choose whether or not to call oneself a woman,” she writes. “What is more complicated is the meaning that the term `woman' has to those who use it to describe themselves.”

`Lavendar menace'

For Faderman, who writes about Betty Friedan having called proud lesbians the “lavender menace,” to omit a discussion of “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” — an insult lobbed at J.K. Rowling, among others — seems notable, if understandable. That conversation can get very, very heated. Perhaps Faderman is simply waiting, and watching, for time to cool things off. Still, she'll likely be asked about it if discussing this book in public forums.

Women's History Week was designated by Congress in 1981. We got a month six years later, and this is it. Few pay it mind anymore (this is progress), but publishers still do. Lots of books by and about women will be released in March, and this one doesn't rankly smell, not remotely. Its bouquet is carefully gathered, wide-ranging, inoffensive, in a field that could actually use some stink bombs.