Minding the Body

Growing up in the Deep South in the late 1950s, writer Patricia Foster was taught that a woman's body was her way of speaking her worth: restricted linguistically and sexually, women were to dress appropriately and decoratively and act like ladies at all times. When, in 1986, Foster returned to the South to teach a course in women's literature at a state university, she was amazed at the dissatisfaction young women felt about their bodies - even after the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s turned gender expectations upside down. "I'd rather have five pounds off my thighs than an A in this class," one woman confessed, and others agreed. Given the choice between mental stimulus and physical perfection, most students said they would choose the latter. How and why, Foster wondered, had women returned to such a fragile status? Minding the Body, a provocative collection of fiction and nonfiction by acclaimed women writers, addresses this question and others stemming from the complex and peculiar relationship women have with their bodies. The narratives in this anthology - from writers as diverse as Naomi Wolf, Rosemary Bray, Margaret Atwood, Hanan al-Shaykh, and Kathryn Harrison - a