“Not shaving was once important to me as an active statement of what I felt and believed,” explains Sheri Reda in Conscious Choice (May/June). “I declared my independence, asserted the natural beauty of the human form, and proclaimed that I was at once feminist, nonmaterialist, and brave….Keeping my leg and underarm hair made me feel very European, very sexy, very mysterious. (My parents thought it was gross, which was another plus.)…Now, on the verge of thirty-seven, surrounded by smooth, young, hairless fashion trees, I don’t feel mysterious and alluring anymore….I feel like the European peasant women I ride next to on the bus. They too are hairy, and unadorned, and wearing black. This is not the kind of European I meant to be.”
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Welcome to the Land of Lincoln, y’all. Joan Gittens in Poor Relations: The Children of the State in Illinois, 1818-1990: “Illinois, bustling and prosperous in economic terms, has always behaved less like its Progressive neighbors Wisconsin and Minnesota than a poor southern state in the care of its vulnerable people. Not only recently, but consistently throughout its history, the state has underfunded, underbuilt, and undertaxed in regard to children’s needs.”
Well, that’s a relief. Advance publicity for the new book Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure, by Hilary Radner of Notre Dame: “Women do not shop because they are shopping addicts narcotized by the media, or because they have the urge to challenge masculine hegemonic control.”
