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The temperance movement was the largest single organizing force for women in American history, uniting and empowering women seeking to enact social change. By the end of the century, more than two hundred thousand women had become members of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and numerous others belonged to smaller temperance organizations. Despite the impact of the movement, its literature has been largely neglected. In this collection of nineteen temperance tales, Carol Mattingly has recovered and revalued previously unavailable writing by women. Mattingly's introduction provides a context for these stories, locating the pieces within the temperance movement as well as within larger issues in women's studies. The temperance movement was essential to women's awareness of and efforts to change gender inequalities in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their fiction, temperance writers protested physical and emotional abuse at the hands of men, argued for women's rights, addressed legal concerns, such as divorce and child custody, and denounced gender-biased decisions affecting the care and rights of children. Temperance fiction by women broadens our understanding of the connections between women's rights and temperance, while shedding light on women's thinking and behavior in the nineteenth century. Temperance writers featured in this reader include Louisa May Alcott, Mary Dwinell Chellis, Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, Frances Dana Gage, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz, Marietta Holley, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Ward), Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Water Drops from Women Writers features biographical sketches of each writer as well as thirteen illustrations.

ror Has Two Faces-in class no less-with Jane Gallop's essay, Teacher's Breasts, and you find an apparent contradiction. The professor played by Barbra Streisand blithely lectures about sexuality and casually acknowledges students' awareness of her breasts, shown off in a low-cut black dress; Gallop, however, contends that teacher's create a conflict about the question of sex and, thus, the question of (84-85). In Gallop's view, teacher's display of authority makes male student more not less recalcitrant, and more not less in struggle for power (86). As usual, Gallop offers a startling interpretation: breast-singular, symbolic, and maternal-is precisely imaginary organ of nurturance, what good feminist teacher proffers to her daughterstudents. Refusing to nurture, . . . bad, sexual teacher brings into discourse of feminist pedagogy not breast, which is already appropriately there, but breasts (87). By mentioning her in plural, Streisand sexualizes literature classroom, exactly as camera does when it follows boys hurrying to class or pans intensely yearning students' faces. Streisand's movie demonstrates these cultural politics, showing how female teacher's sexuality has to be managed in order to avoid threat of sexual power struggle Gallop accurately predicts. What we see in Streisand is a version of Gallop's theory: maternal breast-safe and good-is opposed to more dangerous plural breasts, offered promiscuously to class's gaze. The erotics of literature classroom in Hollywood imagination comes as no surprise. Hollywood eventually misrepresents all professions, and all voca

Focuses on images of teachers (particularly English teachers) in films. Argues that understanding how society views teachers through the prism of cultural imagination can productively challenge the profession to create its own pedagogical images. Suggests that, although these films depict the teacher’s sexuality to define its proper limits, the drama of eroticized teaching obscures larger concerns over classroom politics.

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In just about half of a colleague's teaching evaluations (twelve of twenty-six evaluations) from two first-year composition and introduction to literature sections, she read objections to her feminist stance, especially her discussions of feminism and pedagogy. Most of the objections came from students who insisted that the classroom ought to be an ideologically neutral space free from the instructor's interests and concerns. The following samples, copied verbatim, suggest the drift of the students' complaints:

R.W.B. Lewis' biography of Edith Wharton mentions with her other late works the 1934 short story Fever as a masterpiece of rhetorical coherence, but insists that in writing the piece Wharton was unperturbed by news from Europe of a terrible ... at hand (Biography 527). He suggests that the pervading tone of calm and repose in the story underscores her virtual mastery of history, of the past-both Wharton's own past and, in particular, the question of her paternity-as as the past of the species represented by the Roman ruins. Yet her Fever questions origins, persecution, and sexual violence-Rome itself a powerful site of primal violence. Her story interrogates society's periodic demand for an ultimate return to origins: whether it be racial purification or sexual housekeeping. Lewis writes that the possibility of Wharton's illegitimacy must have edged its way into Mrs. Wharton's mind over the years that followed [1908-09: the years in which the rumor began]. . . . situation of Grace Ansley's whole lifetime is revealed in a single phrase, and just possibly, with all obliqueness, one phase of Edith Wharton's situation as well (Collected Stories xxv). question of race and origin, which is central to Fever, also centers the moment of history-the terrible revolution brewing in Europe. Many critics would agree with Lewis about Wharton's apolitical, serene, and new state of being in the thirties (Biography 524). Cynthia Griffin Wolff does not deal with Wharton's politics at all, while, at worst, other critics label Wharton an anti-Semite. Cynthia Ozick writes that Edith Wharton was compliant in the face of her friend Paul Bourget's openly-declared anti-Semitism (293). Sol Liptzin's in American Literature cites Wharton's caricature of the bounder Jew as an example of her anti-Semitism (154); Wharton's name also appears as evidence of a general cultural anti-Semitism in Florence Kiper Frank's 1930 Bookman essay, The Presentment of the in American Fiction (274; see Dobkowski 177-80). At best, Wharton is considered a social critic with her own ideological blindspots, racism and anti-Semitism among them. (She condemns Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, along with all nigger society in Harlem, in an April 1, 1927 letter to Gaillard Lapsley.)

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