Hypatia

Hypatia 17.3 (2002) 265-267

Book Review

Fire with Water:
Generations and Genders of Western Political Thought

Fire with Water: Generations and Genders of Western Political Thought. By Allison Dube. Calgary, Canada: Parhelion Press, 1998.

Is there a feminine way of thinking and being? This century-long debate has currently two sides: one classical-liberal, and in its extremes, neoconservative; the other essentialist, more radical, and in its extremes, semi-mystical. Fire with Water is located on the radical-essentialist side of this debate, offering a contemporary (or "third age" as Dube prefers) understanding of the unique strengths of women.

The faithful audience of the New Age approach to discussing women's strengths and abilities, and to analyzing their (our) position in the social world, has been expanding in the past decade. The general conception of this approach, marked by the famous and widely criticized book, Women Who Run with the Wolves (Estes 1990), also criticized in the book under discussion here, is that women have preserved something that men, and hence humankind, seem to have lost. To salvage humanity, or merely to improve its condition, we are to turn to women's experiences and tendencies, and rely on them as guidance to a better future.

Fire with Water is an academic book that proclaims an ambitious task: the presentation of "generations and genders of Western political thought," in the words of its subtitle. The straightforwardness of the New Age premises is not part of its framework of thought. However, Dube's choice of references, as well as the basic presupposition she strives to demonstrate and affirm throughout the book, form a close connection between her book and the trend of semi-mystical writings.

Fire with Water is divided into two parts. In the first part Dube illustrates her general claim about the special strengths of women (and, to some extent, those of young people of both genders). The suggestion that women "know better" is illustrated through a careful examination of Isabel Colgate's The Shooting Party (1990). Dube explores The Shooting Party, presenting the differences between the men and women of the three generations represented in this story (hence the "generations and genders" in the book's subtitle). She summarizes Colgate's position as stating that women, due to both natural and sociohistorical reasons, are carriers of four "genres of traits": the "acceptance of the basic facts of human biology," and of "weakness and vulnerability as natural" ; "women's [End Page 265] conversance with the emotional realm"; and "women's capacities to base personal fulfillment on connections to others" (308). All these traits are opposed to antithetical masculine characteristics.

Along with Colgate, Dube relies on Jean Baker Miller's Towards a New Psychology of Women as another justification of her basic claim. Baker Miller's psychological understanding is described as supportive of Dube's view of feminine merit.

The first part of the book also presents two authors who are not as close to Dube's views; namely, Simone de Beauvoir and Camille Paglia. The surprising reference to this pair is presented as an understanding of the social and political world similar to that of Dube, a realization of the reasons for women's subordination as an outcome of certain historical contingencies. However, both their recommendations for action are presented as utterly mistaken, for they both advocate methods of incorporating women into the masculine world, instead of—as Dube would have it—altering it by "coming as we are" (129-36).

Part II of the book is as eclectic in the literature it is based upon as Part I; however, it is far more reader-friendly, and the author herself suggests that her readers should consider reading the second part first. In it she concentrates on criticizing one line of thought presented through the writings of three authors: Niccolo Machiavelli, Naomi Wolf, and Stephen Covey. Again the assortment of authors is intriguing, sometimes puzzling; Dube, however, seems to read into the three of them one fundamental assumption. This assumption, which she takes great pains to prove wrong...