Jo's Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit, and Real Life - Softcover

Christian McEwen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807062111 ISBN 13: 9780807062111

Publisher: Beacon Press, 1997

Synopsis

Louisa May Alcott's energetic, ambitious, and androgynous Jo March has inspired generations of tomboys. But at the close of Little Women even Jo's valiant tomboy spirit has been subordinated to her role as wife and mother. For Jo's Girls, editor Christian McEwen has assembled a collection of fiction and memoir that looks at what it has really meant to be a tomboy from the nineteenth century to the present-and at what the refusal to turn into a "young lady" has implied.

Contributors include: Toni Cade Bambara, Willa Cather, Sandra Cisneros, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Alexis De Veaux, Annie Dillard, Nadezhda Durova, Leslie Feinberg, Emily Hiestand, Maria Hinojosa, Teresa Jordan, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne LaBastille, Ursula K. Le Guin, Bia Lowe, Carson McCullers, Susan Moon, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rose Tremain, Frances Willard, Opal Whiteley, Virginia Woolf

About this title

Review:

Christian McEwen's introduction to this anthology examines the different origins of the word "tomboy," from a "high spirited romping girl" to a "bold or immodest" woman or prostitute. Only in the 19th century did the word take on the positive connotations of a girl who took "a wholesome delight in...playing at active games..." and could thus be applied to a girl like Jo March of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. In celebration of Jo-like girls, this anthology gathers more than 30 stories, essays, and prose poems from writers as diverse as Colette and Leslie Feinberg, Virginia Woolf and Linda Smukler, that describe the sometimes pre-dyke state of being a tree climber, a boat rower, a happy ruffian. This wide-ranging collection makes a strong case for the historical longevity of boyish, lesbian-in- the-making girls.

About the Author:

Christian McEwen's reviews and essays have appeared in Granta, The Village Voice, and The Nation. She has edited two previous anthologies, Naming the Waves and Out the Other Side.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0807062111
• ISBN 13: 9780807062111
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368