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Off the Shelf—Summer 2009

 Words Worth a Second Look

Nonfiction

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience
By Kirstin Downey
(Nan A.Talese)
Before there was Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice there was Frances Perkins (MHC 1902), secretary of labor under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first woman to hold a cabinet position, Perkins initiated sweeping changes to labor laws including the eight-hour workday, Social Security, and child-labor laws. In this biography, new light is shed on a largely forgotten figure who was integral to the formation of theNew Deal.
Kirstin Downey is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist at the Washington Post.

Lessons From Freedom Summer: Ordinary PeopleBuilding Extraordinary Movements
By Kathy Emery, Linda Reid Gold, and Sylvia Braselmann
(Common Courage Press)
In this book, Emery outlines the impact of the 1964 “freedom schools” in Mississippi that opened on back porches and in churches in 1964 to teach confidence, voter literacy, and political organization to African American citizens long denied all three. It also serves as a case study illustrating thee lements crucial to the success of a social movement that can inform present-day activists.
Kathy Emery ’77 was a highschool teacher for sixteen years, coauthored Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Schools, and is executive director of the San Francisco Freedom School.

Moving Beyond Racism: Memories, Transformations, and the Start of NewConversations
Edited by Heather PowersAlbanesi and Carole AnnCamp
(White River Press)
Susan Daniels ’79 and Ivy Tillman ’83 are included in this collection of twenty-one personal essays regarding race relations and racism in the twenty-first century. In descriptions of events and memories, the authors provide personal accounts of their experiences with racism, and the realities that many Americans of color still face.
Susan Daniels ’79 is an executive recruiter for Deerfield Associates, an executive search firm in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Ivy Tillman FP ’83 is a technical support and repair consultant at the MHC library.

Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth
Edited by Lynne Zacek Bassett
(University Press of New England)
This treasury of Massachusetts’ historic quilts reveals both stitchers’ artistry and the times in which they lived. American history is revealed through quilting much earlier in Massachusetts than elsewhere, Bassett’s research shows. Photographs of nearly 200 quilts are enhanced by stories putting their makers into political, social, and economic context. The result combines extensive scholarship with celebration of ordinary people’s creativity. Among the quilts is one made to honor Emiline Cross’s 1854 graduation from MHC. (Read an excerpt below, reprinted with the permission of the publisher.)

Lynne Zacek Bassett ’83 is an independent scholar specializing in New England's historic costume and textiles.

EMILINE CROSS QUILT
On November 8, 1837, when Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley opened, students arrived to find many chambers yet unfurnished. Supporters of the school nailed down carpet, begged and borrowed spoons and bedsteads, stuffed pillows, and stitched quilts in the last rush of the long, hard-fought battle to establish this institution of higher learning for women—the first permanent, college-level school for women in the nation. Inspired or cajoled by founder Mary Lyon (1797–1849), rich and poor alike across New England gave what they could toward her cause, despite a terrible economic depression and the diatribes of those who believed that educating women was a waste of time and even dangerous to society.

A more determined woman than Mary Lyon perhaps never lived. Growing up in a poor and fatherless family in the Massachusetts hilltown of Buckland, Mary struggled to gain an education. Recognized early on for her exceptional intelligence, she taught at a number of schools and eventually became associated with other women who were committed to educating girls and women, including Zilpah Grant, Emma Willard, and Catherine Beecher. But it was Mary Lyon’s vision to establish a college for women that was financially endowed and not dependent on a single, dynamic personality for its success, a revolutionary idea in the early nineteenth century.

In 1854, Emiline Cross graduated from Mount Holyoke, and friends from school and from her home in Blandford made this friendship quilt to honor her accomplishment. Penned on the block of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Hanmer, the phrase “Sharer in all the joys and sorrows of Holyoke life” hints at the fond friendships, academic challenge, religious devotion, homesickness, and hard physical labor experienced by the early students at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The school consisted of a one-hundred-room building housing both classroom and dormitory space for approximately three hundred students and teachers. To convince nonbelievers that women could handle both scholarly pursuits and traditional housekeeping duties—as well as to save money and keep tuition costs down—the students did all the cleaning and cooking at the school.

Letters in the Mount Holyoke College archives written by students in this period reveal their appreciation for the opportunity to receive an excellent education, which included courses in astronomy, botany, chemistry, philosophy, rhetoric, history, algebra, geometry, and Latin. As has been true for students throughout history, the academic demands caused great anxiety, but comfort was found in food: “Tell Mother she does not make her Peach pies right, she must come here if she wants to eat a peach pie; the crust is put into a deep plate and the peaches wiped and put in whole so that it makes a delightful pie,” Anna Walker (Class of 1852) wrote to her brother. One hopes he had enough tact not to pass along the message.

The girls who lived in proximity to each other called themselves a “family.” Frances Tower wrote on Emiline’s quilt that she was “A much loved member of ‘our family circle’ / Consisting of the N. H. [New Hampshire] girls & the Blandford girls.” Another member of the family circle, Mary Ellen Wilder, penned her block with a reminder of “The fine times in the No. 94 / When ‘the whole family’ was together.” Lizzie Hanmer, “sharer in all the joys and sorrows of Holyoke life,” may well have been Emiline’s roommate. Roommates particularly developed a close bond. As was common practice in earlier centuries, they shared a bed as well as a room. Anna Walker noted in a letter home that roommates walked “with their arms around each other (that is the way you always see them walk no matter where).”

Student letters also reveal the sorrows of seminary life, often with a wry sense of humor. Not every student appreciated the requirement to attend church on Sunday and to spend an hour every day in private devotions. Charlotte B. Mead of the Class of 1853 noted that with such spiritual attentiveness, “. . . truly one ought to be holy here.” In addition to their rigorous academic course and daily worship, students were expected to attend to their housekeeping duties for about seventy minutes every day. Some students did the baking and cooking, while others scoured knives, wiped crockery, swept the classrooms, or even scrubbed the toilet seats. Every student hauled firewood daily from the basement up to the little Franklin stoves in their rooms, which may have been as far up as the third floor. Anna Benton (Class of 1850) noted that it was “90 stairs” from her room to one area of her work duties.

Required daily calisthenics and frequent outdoor walks proved that women’s bodies were capable of enduring protracted physical exertion, just as their minds could withstand protracted study. Hikes up to the top of Mount Holyoke, for which the school was named, were more pleasant—the beautiful view of the Connecticut River Valley was popular with tourists and artists, as well as students.
So regimented and full were the hours of each day that Anna Benton wrote to her aunt: “I never lived in such a hurry in my life. . . . it seems some days as if I should go crazy.” Many students wrote of the lack of time to get all their chores and studying done. Mary Elizabeth Dewell (Class of 1850) went so far as to write a lament, “I have no time,” to fulfill her weekly composition requirement. Her wish for more hours in the day belies the notion of a slower-moving lifestyle in the past: “Where is time! Oh could I but meet with some one, that would tell me where it might be found, how quick would I avail myself of the opportunity.”

Bells signaled the shift from one activity to another. Josephine Kingsley wrote on her block for Emiline’s quilt, “These Holyoke bells! These Holyoke bells! / How many a tale their music tells!” However, the ringing of the bells was decidedly not music to most students’ ears. The bells signaling “retiring” (9:45) and especially the time to get out of bed in the morning caused particular anguish. Frances Harback of the class of 1854 moaned in her letter to a friend, “. . . it is but half past five in the morning— now don’t you think that it is too bad to rouse a poor body out of bed so early?” She also felt terribly constrained by the innumerable rules: “. . . and oh the rules that we have it is enough to kill any one. . . .”

Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meaning of Madness
By Gail A. Hornstein
(Rodale Books)
There’s a wide gulf between the way medicine explains psychiatric illness and the experiences of those who suffer it. Hornstein helps bridge the gulf by showing us the inner lives of people diagnosed with serious mental illness and sketching a new treatment model of patients supporting patients that is courageous, optimistic, and surprising.
Gail Hornstein is professor of psychology and education at MHC and the author of To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda From-Reichmann.

Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson
By Marcia Brennan
(Rice University Press)
Brennan traces the evolution of leading Jewish mysticism scholar Elliot Wolfson’s painting and poetry and examines it in the context of his scholarship, creating a new genre of critical work.

Marcia Gagliardi Brennan ’88 is associate professor of art history at Rice University. She is also the author of Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics.

Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success
By Wendy Laura Belcher
(Sage Publications)
In the only guide that focuses specifically on publishing humanities and social science articles, Belcher provides week-by-week tips and exercises that aid in constructing a stronger article. The workbook is based on faculty productivity and peer-review research and has a high rate of success for graduate students and academic professionals alike.
Wendy Laura Belcher ’84 is assistant professor of African literature at Princeton University and has taught article-writing workshops around the world.

Fiction



The Folded World
By Amity Gaige
(RandomHouse)
Social worker Charlie Shade is dogged by a sense of injustice and drawn into the lives of his mentally ill clients. Wife Alice, a soulful young woman, feels hemmed in by the demands of newborn daughters. Temptation and physical danger figure into this poetic chronicle of complex personalities and the fragility of love and marriage.
Amity Gaige is a visiting assistant professor of English at MHC. Her first novel was Oh My Darling.

Harmattan Rain
By Ayesha Harruna Attah
(Per Ankh Publishers)
Three generations of African women struggle with family, matters of the heart, and life in an African nation rocked by political struggleand division. Among the characters are Lizzie-Achiaa, who runs away from home to find her missing lover; her first daughter, Akua Afriyie, who strikes out on her own as a single parent; and Sugri, Lizzie-Achiaa’s grand daughter, who goes to college in New York and learns about the real challenges of freedom.
Ayesha Harruna Attah ’05 is a writer and journalist and has worked for the Accra Daily Mail, African Magazine, and Yachting Magazine.

The Rivers Run Dry
By Sibella Giorello
(Thomas Nelson)
This novel about forensic geologist Raleigh Harmon finds the special agent in Seattle during the dry season. Harmon must use her forensic skills to find a missing hiker, all the while trying to protect her own job.

Sibella Connor Giorello’85 is also the author of The Stones Cry Out,which won a Christy Award. (Read an excerpt below, reprinted with permission from the publisher.)

Driving away from the VanAlstyne estate, I followed the narrow twists of island road, passing through a phalanx of mansions, each positioned for a commanding view of the water that mirrored city lights and all the bright skyscrapers shaped like crystals of smoky quartz.

In my hometown of Richmond, new money was relatively unknown. As in most of the old South, an ingrained caste system still played itself out among the tobacco and aluminum dynasties and the vast plantations that passed like an open secret from generation to generation. But during my years away from home, I had met new money similar to the VanAlstynes. One of the most memorable introductions came on my first day at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, after I found a new cell phone on my dorm room desk. By today’s standards, the phone was enormous, but back in the 1990s it seemed as sleek and exotic as a python. The phone contained five hundred free minutes, part of the gift for every girl in the North Mandelle dormitory, courtesy of Mark Tomlinson.

Mr. Tomlinson’s daughter Ashton was in my freshman class, and her father held the patent for a particular mechanism used on every cell phone. At the parents’ reception that day, I went to thank Mr. Tomlinson for his generosity. He was a diminutive man who wore a baseball hat and torn tennis shoes to a formal gathering, and later that day his bright red Ferrari sped away from the dormitory, never to return. In the spring, after report cards had gone home to parents, I was walking down the dormitory hallway when I heard a keening sound, like the wail of some small animal caught in the teeth of a metal trap. It was coming from the showers. Ashton Tomlinson was crouched on the floor, her sobs echoing off the white subway tiles. She had been caught breaking the college’s honor code, all of her term papers a plagiarized mess of aspirations. The next day Ashton Tomlinson took the bus home to Greenwich, to stay.

Shackles
By Marjory Heath Wentworth
(Legacy Publications)
When a group of little boys searches for buried treasurein their backyard on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina,they stumble across a piece of history—a set of centurie sold shackles used on theslaves who were held on the island. Based on a true story, the book is written in lyric prose and was released in time for Black History Month ’09.
Marjory Heath Wentworth’80 is the poet laureate of South Carolina and author of two collections of poetry, Noticing Eden and Despite Gravity

Death at Hilliard High
By Carole Shmurak
(SterlingHouse Publisher)
This third novel in a series about fictional professor/sleuth Susan Lombardi finds the heroine searching for a missing high school teacher after his wife is found dead in the basement of their home.
Carole Bernstein Shmurak ’65 is professor emeritus at Central Connecticut State University and coauthor of Ring Out Wild Bells.

In the Disappearing Water
By Caroline Sulzer
(PlainView Press)
Sulzer’s first novel approaches themes of violence, loss, and love in a candid way as it follows two women through what could be the most difficult year of their lives. Reminiscent of her poetry, Sulzer’s novel includes the reader in a fascinating examination of the endurance of friendship in the face of great adversity.
Caroline Sulzer ’81 has published poetry in Calyx, Delaware Valley Poets Anthology, and Puckerbrush Review.

Poetry

12 x 12: Conversations in 21st-Century Poetry and Poetics
Edited by Christina Mengert and Joshua Marie Wilkinson
(University of Iowa Press)
This anthology includes work from twelve up-and-coming poets, including Jennifer K. Dick ’93. Using a format that facilitates conversation and collaboration among writers of different generations, 12 x 12 provides a critical examination of the creation and value of poetry in the twenty-first century.
Jennifer K. Dick ’93 has published poetry in six anthologies and is the author of Fluorescence. Visit her blog at http://jenniferkdick.blogspot.com.

A Closer Look

Seeing in 3-D… at Last

Sue Barry remembers the first time she saw the world in three dimensions. She had just come out of her optometrist’s office, which she visited weekly for therapy to correct her impaired vision from crossed eyes, and was in her car. But something had changed. The steering wheel seemed to be floating in air and there was a real volume ofspace between it and the dashboard.

An eye-opening experience, literally, she nevertheless paid it little heed. The MHC neurobiologist thought her changed perception “was because of the fading daylight.” But Barry’s stereo vision was not a fluke and instead part of an extraordinary personal and scientific journey into the plasticity of the adult brain and the importance of considering the whole person in brain science and rehabilitation.

Barry was a college student before she realized that she lacked three-dimensional vision. Despite repeated surgeries as a child to help straighten her eyes, they were never fully aligned. As author and neurologist Oliver Sacks explains in the foreword to Barry’s recent book, Fixing My Gaze, by suppressing the image from one or the other eye in order to avoid double vision, she effectively nixed her brain’s ability to see in 3-D. Letters on the page jumped around; her eyes were easily fatigued, and driving was a nightmare.

Barry’s first-person chronicle of having her sight improved is not only a deeply poetic narrative but also a scientifichistory of her own and others’ vision problems. She pointsout that our educational system rarely makes a connection between children who have difficulty learning to read and vision problems. She was labeled a “slow learner” as a childand struggled for years to compensate for her incorrectly diagnosed disability.

When she did learn that her reading problems werephysiologically related, it would take another twenty years until she discovered her brain was capable of beingrewired to see the world in three dimensions. But it wasn’tgoing to be easy.

Referred to developmental optometrist Dr. Theresa Ruggiero, in Northampton, Barry at age forty-eight began seeing in 3-D… at Last a year-and-a-half-long series of daily exercises and weekly vision therapy to learn how to aim her two eyes at the same place in space at the same time, fusing the imagesto be able to see in stereo. “It’s humbling,” Barry says. “You have to begin at the beginning. I learned skills that most people learn during the first six months of life.”

But the benefits were astonishing. She now sees what she calls “the space between” objects—and not just in her car. For the first time, she has a sense of horizontal distance. And she finally understands the modern artist’s use of negative space.

Barry’s view of science has also changed. Once a reductionist who looked at individual pieces of evidence and then constructed a whole, she now understands that “a person is more than their circuit of neurons.” She has also become interested in the whole concept of rehabilitation.

“You really have to understand the person in the contextof their whole life,” she says. “I didn’t say I wanted stereovision—I didn’t know what that was, necessarily. But I had day-to-day issues that could be improved.” Like reading road signs.—M.H.B.