Book Reviews 679

The case of the "Tasty Morsel" by Jennifer Mahon offers a useful general critique of sex discrimination leg- islation. However, some of this discussion is a little dated as Anti Discrimination Legislation had been intro- duced in Queensland by the time this book went to press. Statistical information on Queensland Police response to cases of sexual violence is worthy of further research and investigation. Such information may be useful com- parative data for analysing the efficacy of the Goss La- bor Government's reform initiatives in the area of vio- lence against women.

Ros Mills and Rob Duffield's discussion of rape crisis services in Queensland is well written and considered. It faithfully represents the tensions between the state and rape crisis services. The essay identifies the importance of regional variation in women's experiences of rape and points to the benefits of community-based responses to this most personal and political of issues for Queensland women.

Overall, this book will be appreciated by readers all over Australia, and Queensland in particular, given the paucity of material currently available. As a collection it offers an insight to the flavour of life in Queensland and a valuable record for future generations seeking a more inclnsionist view of regional herstory.

KATtI¥ MUNGO QUEENSLAND WOMEN'S POLICY UNIT

AND DF.AKIN UNIVERSITY GEELONG, AUSTRALIA

MOTHIgREIOOD AND MODERNITY: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE RATIONAL DIMENSION OF MOTHF.IIING, by Christine Everingham, 156 pages. Open University Press, Buckingham, 1994.

Christine Everingham's book is concerned with nurtur- i n g - that is, mothering-and its links with cultural indi- vidual autonomy. The book is topped and tailed, sub- stantially, with theoretical discussion of these issues. Sandwiched between is an empirical study focused on the action contexts of mothers in relation to their children and their production of nurturing and autonomy. The empirical is integral to the theoretical; as Everingham convincingly argues, there is a need to reconceptualise autonomy as concrete, particular, and relationally inter- pretive. However, her analysis seems to me not without an inherent paradox.

Everingham starts from her own identification of a paradox. Because she sees feminism's roots as located within the project of moderni ty-the emancipation of the individual from the traditional confines of ascriptive t i e s - a dilemma arises: How can women be emancipated within a project based on a liberatist and patriarchal dis- tinction between public and private spheres, in which in- dividualism is associated with the public sphere? The an- swer, for Everingham, is to reconceptualise autonomy and its nroduction to take account of mothers' contribu- tion to its creation and the contexts in which they con- tribute. She argues that critical theory's conception of the autonomous subject, and even many feminist re- workings of this, take the isolated and developing indi- vidual as a starting point. The latter, in particular, have extended the individuated logic of liberalism into the pri-

vate sphere, overlooking the interpretive and social di- mensions of mothering. She contends that mothers do not nurture their children in an isolated private sphere alone, but develop ties outside it both for practical assis- tance and, importantly, to mother within a common framework. Mother's assessments of their own and their children's needs are thus produced as members of groups of mothers as well as individually.

Everingham rejects social psychological and other socialisation models that present children's needs as bio- logical givens, and in which individual mothers are in- strumental objects, learning (or not) to respond to these needs. Rather, she argues strongly that they are critical agents, actively and relationally constructing their chil- dren's autonomous subjectivity and coordinating this with their own. She rejects postmodernism too, as also denying mothers' agency, and because its necessary attri- bution of power relations can only encompass a relativist notion of subject-object interactions. Rather, Evering- ham is concerned with shifts between subject-subject and subject-object in mothering, and which nurturing patterns and process constitute the production of an emancipated subjectivity. For her, most feminist politi- cal agenda has not addressed this issue; it is caught up in child care provision and conflates this with childrearing. She is thus concerned with developing a critical stand- po in t - which she calls an 'intersubjective perspective'- from which to view mothers' social childrearing acts. This critical, emancipatory standpoint is one that con- ceptualises the self as autonomous but also recognises and accommodates the autonomy of others.

Empirically, then, Everingham's view of nurturing as mothers' interpretive and contingent acts in everyday and particular social milieux leads her to study the work- ings of this in three playgroups in Newcastle, New South Wales. She observed at playgroup sessions, and carried out some semistructured interviews with mothers and a few fathers. Her study is focused around questions of: how maternal attitudes differ and are affected by group dynamics; how a mother comes to understand the needs of her child; and the outcome of mother-child conflict and its relation to the predominant maternal attitude?

Across the three playgroups, the social expectation that a mother is personally responsible for knowing and satisfying her child's needs provided a similar norma- t ive-moral -context . Each playgroup, however, dis- played different accepted peer group maternal attitudes as to how to carry this out. The 'suburban group,' con- sisting largely of mothers living in owner-occupied hous- ing, with employed husbands and working part-time themselves, had an overall orientation to 'understanding the child.' Children's needs were anticipated, so as to avoid confrontation, and where mother-child conflict (subject-obJect) did occur, a 'reparative cycle' operated to return mothers to 'taking the attitude of the child' but pragmatically negotiating this with their own interests (subject-subJect). The 'alternative group,' consisting of mothers and a few fathers sharing 'counter-cultural' ide- als but with diverse occupations and income levels, had a more intense child-centered orientation to 'taking the attitude of the child,' where the mother's own interests were seen as those of her child. The 'kinship group,' con- sisting of mothers with a lower socioeconomic prof'fle, had a reactive and coercive, rather than anticipatory, orientation toward children's needs (subject-object), in which 'taking the attitude of the child' was less evident.

680 Book Reviews

Thus, we are left to conclude that working-class mothers' nurturing, from Everingham's intersubjective perspec- tive, is not emancipatory; middle-class mothers' nurtur- ing, though, makes the 'critical standard.'

However, not all suburban mothers reach the stan- dard either. In a section on 'misunderstandings,' Evering- ham gives us three case study observations of suburban group mothers who did not quite fit the group's norms, unable to allow their children and themselves to be expe- rienced as separate selves. Of Catherine, for example, Everingham observes "she did not appear to understand that a child's perspective requires a different standpoint. Unlike mothers who take the attitude of the child by moving backwards and forwards from the child to the adult perspective, Catherine has only one vantage point and expected Nick (her son) to understand this as an adult might" (p. 114). The paradox here, is that, just as Everingham argues that mothers actively and rela- tionally interpret autonomy, she does not recognise her own active construction and interpretation of her obser- vations. Ultimately her own account renders her in a subject-object relationship with, especially, working- class mothers, as she herself interprets what children 'need.' (Moreover, curiously, given her feminist con- cerns, Everingham makes no distinction between nurtur- ing and the relationally produced autonomy of male and female children.) Doubtless, Everingham would respond that, rather than descending into relativity, feminism needs some critical and emancipatory s tandards-but don't we need to look again if these are resulting in the same judgmental and deficit model of working-class mothering produced by male psychologists and so on?

I found this book both exciting and disappointing. The theoretical discussion and approach is a fascinating and much-needed feminist reworking of the concept of autonomy. The empirical outcome, however, lacks both reflexivity and any analysis of inequalities that might tell us 'why' as well as 'how.' That mothers are active inter- preters and coordinators of their own and their chil- dren's autonomy is clear, but quite what this means in terms of strategies for social change is not.

ROSALIND EDWARDS SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY

LONDON, UK

GENDERING THE READER, edited by Sara Mills, 260 pages. Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1994. Soft cover, Br£11.95.

Gendering the Reader lures the reader with its title of de- ceptive succinctness and certainty. With hopes raised high, the reader embarks on a quest for the methodologi- cal grail which will at last provide all the necessary tools for analysing the text-reader relationship currently un- der debate. Polarized by various traditional binary op- positions into text versus reader, textual analysis versus cultural studies empiricism, implied reader versus real reader, the major issue now at stake is that of working

out the 'neglected middle,' the 'mutual embeddedness' of apparent opposites; in other words, to problematize the simplistic oppositional dichotomy which structures, and thereby works to pre-empt, this debate.

In this context, an important contribution of this vol- ume is that of problematization itself, and in particular of drawing attention to the multifarious permutations, in terms of gender, class, age, race, local context, state of mind, etc. of the reader, which help to constitute the overly facile text-reader formulation. Nine contributors provide an interdisciplinary range of chapters on texts from a variety of media, from different historical peri- ods, variously authored (female/male/feminist), vari- ously targeted in terms of audience (high/popular cul- ture) and grounded in a variety of feminist positions. The chapters divide into three parts approximating to three different but not mutually exclusive approaches: (I) ethnographic/empirical examination of reader reac- tion to a poem (Chapter 1), a television documentary (Chapter 2), and a pop song (Chapter 3); (If) linguistic analysis of the word-image link in advertising (Chapters 4 and 5); and (III) reception theory/reader response the- ory in relation to a painting (Chapter 6), a film (Chapter 7), and a short story (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 focusses on the high/popular literature distinction in the context of university courses on women's writing.

Part I theorizes on the relation between production- led and consumption-led meaning, on the textual posi- tioning of readership, and on empirical approaches. Part II uses linguistic theories, going beyond their confines to integrate gender, race, class, and sexual orientation into linguistic analysis. Part III examines a range of reader- ship positions in relation to education, class, and plea- sure, with particular attention to issues of resistance and appropriation.

Despite some basic unifying concerns, and a fair amount of cross-referencing between chapters, the sheer heterogeneity of the nine contributions in terms of meth- odological approach, genre of text under scrutiny, and the particular feminist viewpoint from which each analy- sis is undertaken, is somewhat overwhelming. One result is that the volume does not lead the reader all the way to the methodological grail (as does, for example, Jackie Stacey's cinematic monograph on this debate, Star Gaz- ing, 1994). Instead, it functions primarily as a map indi- cating a variety of possible future routes, depending on which combination of issues is chosen as a focus for a more prolonged, in-depth discussion. One fundamental issue which merits further thought, for instance, is that of the inevitable tension between the monolithic implied reader position of textual criticism and the endlessly multiple real reader positions of empirical reader re- search. Considered from another perspective, the heter- ogeneity and ultimate inconclusiveness of the volume in themselves serve to destabilize issues which have been deemed unproblematic. It is in reminding the reader of the complexities of the task, and in opening up the text- reader debate to apparently limitless possibilities, that the ultimate strength of this volume in fact lies.

MAGGIE GONSBERG UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

FALMER BRIGHTON, UK