Occasionally the metaphor itself threatens to overwhelm the thought. Noting the impact of advertising upon the homemaker of the 1930s, Cott writes, "advertisers drew arms and ammunition of scientific credibility from the stockpiles provided by the social sciences, and the conflicted definition of the modem woman provided ample terrain for psychological battle." Her sense, however, of the importance of fact, of telling detail, more than compensates for an overblown metaphor. Recognizing that young women were particularly pressured to define their own place in society at the beginning of this century, she hits upon a convincing statistic: "more than a quarter of all the American women born in the first decade of the twentieth century, those who came of age in the 1920s, never bore children, despite the waxing marriage rate." Writing of those women who did bear children, but who were not employed outside the home, Cott registers the truth of the situation by letting a variety of women speak, each in her own style. She includes the Irish wife of a carpenter who begins "don't you think I'm not a-wanting to do my share...;" she registers the protests of a middle-aged woman with a college education behind her, and the wife of a teacher, each of whom recognizes that the 'price' of being provided for is self-respect.

The integrity of Cott' s study depends in large part on her holding to the terms of her thesis, on her respect for the individual voice, on her respect for difference in sameness. Summarizing twenty years of women's politics, Cott does not assert anything like solidarity, but rather affirms a "vital ambivalence." "Without coalescing into one movement, without mobilizing the mass, and often declining the label feminist, individual and group efforts nonetheless sparked again and again," Late twentieth-century feminists may do well to read by that flickering light.

BODY INVADERS: Panic Sex in America

Edited and introduced by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1987.

Lisa Moore

Body Invaders is a collection of loosely-linked essays that explores the reconstruction of the body in post-modern culture and/or the construction of the post-modern body. These latter terms are constantly renegotiated throughout the volume: the writers spar with easy definitions to produce an enriched, if uncomfortably bruised and bleeding, sense of what it is to live in a body in the post modem age. We live in a time when representations of the human body are more at active, more powerful than the human body itself. Indeed, with the advent of reproductive technology, the crusade for fetal rights, and the increased use of organ transplants from animals, it often impossible to tell just what constitutes "humanity." We who live in post modem bodies are disconnected from our own flesh and from the communities that might help define it by the exigencies of mass reproduction. We see too man: images of what we ought to be to be able to tell what we are.

Since the post-modern epoch is characterized by the domination of visual images produced by the media, the printed word is a somewhat anachronistic method of exploring it. The editors of Body invaders have attempted to account for this incongruity by including photo essays, stills from videos, and graphic designs throughout the volume, and by including essays that experiment with dream narratives and dialogues.

In the context of this postmodern multi-media play between fiction and fact, word and image, it is interesting that one of the most sophisticated and moving essays is Eileen Manion's "A Ms.-Managed Womb," a relatively straightforward analytic piece written in clear, vigorous : prose. Manion identifies a crucial contradiction in feminist responses to innovations in reproductive technology: that in rescuing women's individualism from coercive institutions like "the family," we distract attention from our efforts at community-building. The language of the abortion debate, with its emphasis on women's individual choice, is a good example of how feminist principles of community get muddied in discussions of reproductive issues. We have attempted to wrest control over our bodies from individual men and from the patriarchal church and state, but "this revolt against the notion of the body as male property has left us with the idea that the body is our property." This view, Manion claims, "leaves something to be desired - namely the element of the social." This fundamental contradiction has crippled feminist analysis of reproductive rights as a system, confining our politics to single-issue fights without an analytic context from which to establish priorities. Manion points out that feminists must become more involved with public policy-making on these issues because the rapid expansion of reproductive technologies could mean that we find our bodies spoken for before our politics can prevent it. Rather than either "perfecting" these technologies or outlawing them, Manion argues, "what we need is more creative thinking about social possibilities" they open up. Instead of using technology to produce the increasingly elusive fantasy TV family, we should use it as an occasion to ponder what kind of "families" feminists want, and whether we really need science to create them.

Another outstanding essay in this collection is also written from a feminist perspective. Kim Sawchuk's "A Tale of Inscription/Fashion Statements" is a beautifully-written and trenchant analysis of the contradictory possibilities the fashion industry poses for women. She rejects the prevailing view of feminist and Marxist cultural critics of fashion as "a reflection of the social onto the body, fashion as the repression of the natural body; fashion simply as a commodity to be resisted; fashion as substitute for the missing phallus." These claims rest on simple notions of a "natural" body that exists prior to its social construction, and that is deformed and rendered oppressed by that construction; if the oppressive social codes were removed, the "natural" body would be revealed and liberated. But Sawchuk argues that "an anti-fashion discourse cannot be assumed to be inherently feminist." Such discourses often depend upon misogynist views of women as too stupid to resist the blandishments of Madison Avenue, and/or have a hidden agenda in which women's potentially subversive sexuality, insisted upon by fashionable clothing, is to be denied. Sawchuk wants to insist on the pleasure that women get from clothing: