OF MEN AND WOMEN
Buck, Pearl S[ydenstricker].
New York: The John Day Company, (1941). Special edition, "published for the Committee on Economic and Legal Status of Women of the American Association of University Women". 8vo, 203pp; yellow cloth lettered in brown at front and spine; deckle edges; tan dust jacket printed in maroon. Offsetting to endpapers. Jacket chipped at spine ends and along jacket folds (at tips); spine darkened and shows some dampstaining; tape at reverse. About very good. With a Foreword by the writer. Nine essays on the relationship of men and women and, as a consequence, the place of women in American society. The essays: "The Discord", "The Home in China and America", "The American Man", "The American Woman", "Monogamy", "Woman as Angels", "Women and War", "The Education of Men and Woman for Each Other", and "Women and Freedom". Peter Conn's 1996 biography of Pearl Buck reminded a generation which associates the writer only with her novel THE GOOD EARTH of her many activist and humanitarian concerns. She founded the East and West Association to promote mutual understanding between the United States and China; she established Welcome House (as well as related charities) to smooth the adoption of Amer-Asian children by Americans; she regularly contributed to CRISIS, the magazine of the NAACP and OPPORTUNITY, the magazine of the Urban League and actively supported the civil rights movement throughout her career. A believer in birth control, she and Margaret Sanger became close friends and comrades. A staunch feminist, Buck also "spoke out repeatedly in support of an Equal Rights Amendment for women, at a time when opposition to it included the majority of organized women's groups". [Conn, p. xvi]. This 1941 collection represents "her most extended statement on the subject of gender in America". With World War II a grim shadow on the horizon, Buck points out that American democracy, if it is to survive, must have women as full and equal participants. The vote has given them nominal access to the political arena, but they still remain outside "the engine rooms" of society. She scorns the false sentiment which places women at the heart of the American home, more specifically in the midst of unending domestic duties. With thinking reminiscent of Margaret Fuller and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pearl Buck declares women can succeed at any profession: "A woman "may sit upon a throne and rule a nation, she may sit upon the bench and be a judge, she may be the foreman in a mill, she could if she would be a bridge builder or a machinist or anything else". The only barrier is tradition; "Break it" she urges. When OF MEN AND WOMEN appeared, the NEW YORK TIMES reviewer, for instance, noted the similarities between Pearl Buck's analysis of gender and that of Virginia Woolf. In 1971, eight years after the publication of THE FEMINIST MYSTIQUE which instigated the modern wave of feminism in the United States, OF MEN AND WOMEN was reprinted. Buck's biographer notes that Pearl Buck, as a writer and humanitarian, has virtually disappeared from the American cultural scene, despite some 70 books, despite having won the Nobel Prize in Literature (only one of two American women to do so), the Pulitzer, the Howells Medal, a dozen honorary degrees and despite her remarkable work with children, civil rights, East-West understanding. The biography has stimulated a reevaluation of Pearl Buck's significance in 20th-century feminist thought, a significance firmly established with the publication of OF MEN AND WOMEN. Conn, PEARL S. BUCK, A Cultural Biography, pp. xi- xiii, 246-248. OCLC locates 17 copies of the special edition. (Item ID: 14652a)
$200.00
