Full Circles: Geographies of Women over the Life Course // Review

Abstract

The original subject of Full Circles--the geography of women's life courses--makes this text a welcome addition to the growing (and exciting) sub-discipline of Feminist Geography. Geographers need to explore the diversity of women's experiences at all points from infant to the elderly. Feminists will be intrigued by Full Circles: on a theoretical level, the underlying tension throughout the book between essentialist and deconstructionist approaches to analyzing women is a tension also reflected in current debates in feminist theory.In the first chapter, the editors explore women's life courses in both "First World" and "Third World" countries. Some basic demographic statistics are presented as a starting point--such as access to schooling, infant mortality, the nature of women's work, women's access to contraception and abortion, the distribution of older women, and so on. As Janice Monk and Cindi Katz comment:Many of the strategies for confronting these enduring forms [of male control] are local and vary widely from place to place, as the chapters of this book attest, but analytically they represent women's engagements with similar social relations and political-economic structures. Though the strategies vary geographically, historically, by class, cohort, nationality or ethnic group or at the personal level, the different chapters reveal ways in which they are part of a single process."Unfortunately, the readers are left to speculate on the nature of this "single process."Similarly, in another passage, the editors comment on,the diversity in women's experiences across space, time, class and culture...[and] some of the structural similarities on which they pivot. Theorizing across these geographical settings may enable us to identify and examine some of the underlying processes within and against which women construct their lives" (p. 4).Unfortunately, these "structural similarities" and "underlying processes" which all women supposedly experience are never clearly defined. But Full Circles never claims to be a theory text--all of the middle chapters are empirically-based. To play devil's advocate, one could argue that the editors' structuralist conceptualization of theory as space-independent is anti-geographic.Further, the editors discuss how mid-1980s western feminist scholarship focussed on "the intersection of gender with other forms of difference, especially race, ethnicity, and class." By conceptualizing these static, clearly-defined categories as "difference" rather than fluid, discontinuous boundaries, this analysis again falls squarely into the modernist camp of dichotomies.In sharp contrast to the introduction, the following 12 chapters offer an implicit challenge to this essentialist and structuralist analysis of "Women." The essays written by Canadian, British, French and American feminist geographic scholars are tight, empirically-based analyses of particular groups of women in localized places, and make no reference to an all-encompassing theory of "Woman." In chapter 2, Geraldine Pratt and Susan Hanson plainly comment that, "the need to deconstruct the category woman is now widely acknowledged within feminist theory."The book moves more thematically than chronologically or geographically, resulting in cleverly crafted relationships among the chapters. …