Hitler and the Logic Of The Final Solution The Final Solution: A Genocide by Donald Bloxham Oxford University Press, 410 pp., $29.95 (paper); Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944 [German Occupation Policies in Lithuania, 1941–1944] by Christoph Dieckmann Göttingen: Wallstein, two volumes, 1,652 pp., €81.30; Jest taki piękny, słoneczny dzień: Losy Żydów szukających ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942–1945 [It Is Such a Beautiful, Sunny Day...The Fate of Jews Seeking Rescue in the Polish Countryside 1942–1945] by Barbara Engelking Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 292 pp., zł39.99; Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945. Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu [Hunt for the Jews 1942–1945: A Study of the History of a Certain County] by Jan Grabowski Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 262 pp., zł37.99; Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross with Irena Grudzińska Gross Oxford University Press, 135 pp., $16.95; Heydrich et la solution finale by Édouard Husson Paris: Perrin, 751 pp., €12.20 (paper); Juden in Krakau unter deutscher Besatzung 1939–1945 [Jews in Kraków under German Occupation 1939–1945] by Andrea Löw and Markus Roth Göttingen: Wallstein, 248 pp., €20.50;

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2. Popperfoto/Getty Images
   The offices of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmerin the Free City of Danzig, circa 1935. The anti-Semitic poster in the window reads ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück!’ (The Jews are our misfortune!).
   
   Jan Gross and Irena Grudzińska Gross conclude their account of grave robbery after the Holocaust with a story from the very recent past. A Polish businessman, returning from Berlin, narrowly escaped death in an automobile accident. The following night, a Jewish girl appeared to him in a dream, addressed him by his first name as if he were a friend or a child, and asked him to return her ring. The businessman did have a gold ring, given to him by his grandparents, who had lived near Bełżec, one of the major death factories built by the Germans in occupied Poland.
   
   Hoping to save themselves or their families, Polish Jews on the death transports of 1942 sometimes exchanged the valuable objects they had managed to take with them for water (or promises of water) with local Poles when the trains stopped short of their destination. Anything that remained was seized when the Jews had to undress before being led to the gas chambers. Gold teeth were removed from the corpses by Jewish slave laborers, and taken by the Germans. Some valuable objects were hidden by the Jewish laborers and were then exchanged with the camp guards, who were often Soviet citizens taken prisoner by the Germans. They exchanged the objects for food, alcohol, and sex in nearby Polish villages. Some of the valuables remained at the site of the gas chambers when the Germans retreated. After the war, the locals would dig up the corpses looking for gold.
   
   The businessman did return the ring, as best he could: he gave it, along with a note, to the museum at Bełżec. In some ways his gesture and his story reflect the realities of today’s Poland. Every detail of his account—the commercial relationship with Germans, the business trip by chauffeur-driven car, even the travel on good roads—bespeaks a Poland that is today more prosperous than ever in its history. Liberated in 1989 from the communism that followed German occupation, allied to the United States in NATO since 1999, linked to its neighbors in the European Union since 2004, Poland is a beneficiary of the globalization of the post-Communist years.
   
   As Donald Bloxham suggests in his Final Solution, the Holocaust can be seen, among many other things, as the final catastrophe accompanying the breakdown of what some historians call the first globalization, the expansions of world trade of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It collapsed in three stages: World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Its fatal flaw was its dependence upon European empire. The process of decolonization began within Europe itself, as the Balkan nation-states liberated themselves first from the Ottoman Empire and then from the dominance of their British, German, Austrian, or Russian imperial patrons. The leaders of these small, isolated, agrarian nation-states found a natural harmony between nationalist ideology and their own desperate economic situations: if only we liberate our fellow nationals beyond the next river or mountain range from foreign rule, we can expand our narrow tax base with their farmland.
   
   After a few false starts involving wars against one another, the Balkan nation-states turned against the Ottoman Empire itself in 1912 in the First Balkan War, effectively driving Ottoman power from Europe and dividing up the spoils (although not without a Second Balkan War, in 1913). The conflict that we remember as World War I can be seen as the Third Balkan War, as elements within the Serbian government tried to win territory from Austria just as they had recently done from the Ottomans. With the coming of World War I, the Balkan model of establishing nation-states spread to Turkey (which involved the mass murder of more than a million Armenians); afterward it was accepted in Central Europe. World War I also shattered a system of world trade, and inaugurated an era of European impoverishment that would last nearly half a century.
   
   Adolf Hitler was an Austrian soldier fighting in that war, though in the German army. His anti-Semitic response to the defeat of Germany and Austria, articulated in Mein Kampf in 1925, is interpreted by Bloxham in The Final Solution as an intellectually spurious but politically powerful attempt to extract Germany from its fate as a defeated nation-state by restoring its imperial goals. The war itself had harmed the German homeland itself relatively little, since the country was never occupied. But Germany, which lost nearly 2.5 million dead in the war, was defeated, a brute fact that Hitler found inexplicable. If a reason for Germany’s defeat could be identified, then the program for Germany’s return to the center of world history could be realized.
   
   Hitler falsely held the Jews responsible not only for the defeat of 1918, but for the postwar settlement. In the West, Jews were supposedly the principal source of the heartless finance capitalism of London and New York that permitted the painful food blockade of Germany in 1918 and the hyperinflation of the early 1920s. In the East, Jews were supposedly responsible for the communism (“Judeobolshevism”) of the Soviet Union. Jews around the world were responsible, argued Hitler, for the false universalisms of liberalism and socialism that prevent Germans from seeing their special destiny.
   
   
   
   
   Hitler’s program for German revival was, at one level, a simple reenactment of the Balkan combination of nationalism with agrarianism, which he had praised in Mein Kampf. Germany must fight with its neighbors for “living space” in the East to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency. Unlike the Balkan states, of course, Germany was a great power that could envision not just gains of territory but a new land empire, something it seemed to have achieved in Ukraine at the end of World War I. Hitler’s obsession with anti-Semitism made the vision global both in its symbolism and in its ambition: an invasion of the East would mean the occupation of the part of the world where most Jews lived, the destruction of the Soviet Union, and the achievement of world power.
   
   To attempt to realize the program of Mein Kampf, Hitler needed to win power in Germany, to destroy Germany as a republic, and to fight a war against the USSR. As Edouard Husson notes in his book on Heinrich Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, the Great Depression made it possible for Hitler to win elections and begin his transformation of Germany and the world. In Hitler’s Germany after 1933, the state was no longer a monopolist of violence, in Max Weber’s well-known definition. It became instead an entrepreneur of violence, using violence abroad—terror in the Soviet Union, assassinations of German officials by Jews—to justify the violence at home that was in fact organized by German institutions. Hitler then used the alleged threat of domestic instability to justify the creation of ever more repressive institutions.1
   
   For most of the 1930s Hitler maintained the pose that his foreign policy was nothing more than the classic Balkan one, the gathering in of fellow nationals along with their land. This was the justification given for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of Austria in 1938. But in fact, as Husson shows, the takeover of these countries and destruction of their governments was a trial run for a much larger program of racial colonization further east.
   
   Husson’s method is to follow the career of Heydrich, the director of the internal intelligence service of the SS, and the ideal statesman of this new kind of state.2 The SS, an organ of the Nazi party, was meant to alter the character of the state. It penetrated central institutions, such as the police, imposing a social worldview on their legal functions. The remaking of Germany from within took years. Heydrich understood, as Husson shows, that the destruction of neighboring states permitted a much more rapid transformation. If all political institutions were destroyed and the previous legal order simply obliterated, Heydrich’s organizations could operate much more effectively.
   
   In particular, the destruction of states permitted a much more radical approach to what the Nazis regarded as the Jewish “problem,” a policy that Heydrich was eager to claim as his own. In Germany, Jews were stripped of civil rights and put under pressure to emigrate. After Germany seized the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938, its Jews fled or were expelled. When Austria was incorporated into Germany, Heydrich’s subordinate Adolf Eichmann created there an office of “emigration” that quickly stripped Jews of their property as they fled anti-Semitic violence.
   
   Historians tend to see World War II from two perspectives: one as the battlefield history of the campaigns by, and against, Germany; the other as the destruction of European Jews. As Hannah Arendt suggested long ago, these two stories are in fact one. Part of Hitler’s success lay in denigrating international institutions such as the League of Nations and persuading the other powers to allow his aggression in Czechoslovakia and Austria. As Bloxham stresses, the weakness of the Western powers meant that the fate of citizens, above all Jewish citizens, depended upon the actions (and existence) of states. The Evian Conference of 1938 demonstrated that no important state wanted to take Europe’s Jews.
   
   Hitler, as Husson observes, apparently believed that, in the absence of American willingness to accept European Jews, European powers should ship them to Madagascar. The island was being considered as a place for Jews by Polish authorities at the time, though as a possible site for a voluntary rather than involuntary emigration. Husson writes that Hitler seemed to believe until early 1939 that Germany and Poland could cooperate in some sort of forced deportation to the island. Poland lay between Germany and the Soviet Union, and was home to three million Jews, more than ten times as many as Germany. Hitler, who wished to recruit Poland into a common anti-Communist crusade, presumably imagined that this deportation would take place during a joint German and Polish invasion of the Soviet Union.
   
   Because Poland refused any alliance with Nazi Germany in the spring of 1939, Hitler made a temporary alliance with the Soviet Union against Poland. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 sealed the fate of the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Polish nation-states, and it was particularly significant for their Jewish citizens. The joint invasion of Poland by both German and Soviet forces in September 1939 meant that Poland, rather than becoming some sort of junior partner to Nazi Germany, was destroyed as a political entity. Unlike Austria and Czechoslovakia, Poland fought the Germans, but it was defeated. Poland therefore offered a new opportunity for Heydrich, because its armed resistance created the possibility to initiate mass murder under cover of war.
   
   Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen were ordered to destroy the educated Polish population. Poland was now to be removed from the map, its society politically decapitated. The destruction of the Polish state and the murder of tens of thousands of Polish elites in 1939 did not destroy Polish political life or end Polish resistance. Auschwitz, established in 1940 as a concentration camp for Poles, also failed in this regard. The Germans murdered at least one million non-Jewish Poles during the occupation, but Polish resistance continued and in fact grew.
   
   Nor did the destruction of the Polish state provide an obvious way to resolve what Hitler and Heydrich saw as the Jewish “problem.” At first Heydrich wanted a “Jewish reservation” established in occupied Poland, but this would have done no more than move Jews from some parts of the German empire to others. In early 1940 Heydrich’s subordinate Eichmann asked the Soviets—still German allies—if they would take two million Polish Jews; this was predictably refused. In the summer of 1940, after Germany had defeated France, Hitler, the German Foreign Office, and Heydrich returned to the idea of a deportation to Madagascar, a French colonial possession. Hitler wrongly assumed that Great Britain would make peace, and allow the Germans to carry out maritime deportations of Jews.
   
   The Final Solution as applied to Poland’s Jews would thus take place in Poland, but it was still not clear, as 1940 came to an end, just what it would be. As Andrea Löw and Markus Roth remind us in their fine study of Jewish life and death in Kraków, Polish Jews were not simply impersonal objects of an evolving German policy of destruction. Kraków’s Jews, like those of Poland generally, had been organized under Polish law into a local commune (kehilla or gmina) that enjoyed collective rights. It was this institution that the Germans perverted by the establishment of the Judenräte, or Jewish councils responsible for carrying out German orders. Despite a few anti-Semitic laws in the late 1930s, Poland’s Jews were equal citizens of the republic.
   
   When the republic was destroyed, German anti-Semitic legislation could immediately be imposed. German expulsions of Jews from their homes, which would have been an unthinkable violation of property rights in Poland, demonstrated that Jewish property was for the taking. The Germans themselves seized bank accounts, automobiles, and even bicycles. Pending some future deportation, the Jews of Kraków were held in a ghetto where they suffered from lawlessness, exploitation, misery, and death from disease and hunger. But this was not yet a Holocaust.BPK, Berlin/Art Resource
   Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reich Protektor of Bohemia and Moravia, who was responsible, according to an order signed by Hermann Göring in July 1941, for organizing ‘a general solution of the Jewish question throughout the German sphere of influence in Europe’
   
   
   The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was meant to be the fulfillment of Hitler’s great imperial plans. In fact, German power reached far enough east to control the major lands of Jewish settlement in Europe, but not far enough to reach Moscow or destroy the Soviet Union. At the very beginning of the invasion, German forces conquered lands that had already been conquered by the Soviets during the same war, and drove out the Soviet occupation regime.
   
   It was in this zone of double destruction of the state that the Germans began, for the first time, to organize the killing of Jews in large numbers. In entering eastern Poland, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, the Germans encouraged local attacks on Jews by Poles. The most notorious example, in the town of Jedwabne, was described by Jan Gross in an earlier book.3 In the Baltics, where the Soviet Union had destroyed three independent states in 1940, local support for German policies was easier to organize. Lithuania was especially significant, since it was a state destroyed by the Soviets that was also home to a large number of Jews. In entering Lithuania in summer 1941, the Germans were destroying a Soviet political order that had itself just destroyed the Lithuanian state.
   
   In doubly-occupied Lithuania, German entrepreneurs of violence such as Heydrich had far greater resources and far greater room for maneuver than in Germany or even Poland. The Einsatzgruppen, which in occupied Poland had chiefly killed Poles, in occupied Lithuania chiefly killed Jews. A provisional Lithuanian government, composed of the Lithuanian extreme right, introduced its own anti-Semitic legislation and carried out its own policies of murdering Jews, explaining to Lithuanians that Bolshevik rule had been the fault of local Jews, and that destroying them would restore Lithuanian authority.
   
   This was a German policy implemented in considerable measure by Lithuanians, but it could not possibly have worked without the prior destruction, occupation, and annexation of the Lithuanian state by the invading Soviet Union. A considerable number of the Lithuanians who killed Jews had just been collaborating with the Soviet regime. After the Germans abolished the provisional Lithuanian government and imposed direct rule, the scale of the violence increased substantially, now with no central political Lithuanian authorities but with the cooperation of Lithuanian policemen and militiamen.
   
   As Christoph Dieckmann writes in his landmark study, the “Lithuanian countryside was transformed in the second half of 1941 into a giant graveyard of the Lithuanian Jews.” By his reckoning, some 150,000 Jews were murdered in Lithuania by November 1941. It is suggestive, as Husson notes, that both Heydrich and his immediate superior Heinrich Himmler visited the Baltics in September 1941, right before a series of meetings with Hitler. Bloxham agrees that for Hitler’s regime, early local collaboration in the mass murder of Jews “signaled what was possible.” Deporting Jews had proven to be impossible. What was possible was murdering them where they lived. This was a Holocaust.
   
   There can be no doubt that Hitler’s policy was to eliminate Jews from all lands under German control. But for most of his rule, from 1933 through 1941, he had no plausible way to remove them. It was only in the summer of 1941, eight years after seizing power, three years after his first territorial enlargement, two years after beginning a war, that Hitler could envision ways to carry out a Final Solution. The method that proved workable, mass murder, was developed in a zone where first the Soviets had destroyed independent states and then the Germans had destroyed Soviet institutions.
   
   Then the Holocaust spread quickly, and with almost equal force, into the places where the state was destroyed only once: eastward into the lands of the pre-war Soviet Union, where German power replaced Soviet power and Jews were killed by bullets, and westward into occupied Poland, where most of the killing was by gassing. Gassing facilities such as Bełżec were built, and gas chambers were added to the Auschwitz camp complex. In the Soviet Union non-Germans were needed to carry out the mass shooting, and Soviet citizens were willing to take part; in Poland the Jews killed in the gas chambers were those who had already been forced into ghettos, and could thus be killed more systematically.
   
   The Holocaust was less comprehensive where Hitler’s intentions encountered the rule of law, no matter how attenuated or perverted. The German ally Slovakia at first deported its Jews to Auschwitz, although it later reversed that policy. In the Netherlands, which were under German direct rule, three quarters of the Jews were murdered. Independent Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, and Romania, although German allies, generally did not follow German policy, and the Italian army saved a considerable number of Jews. Romania had its own policy of killing Jews, which it reversed in 1942. Hungary did not send its Jews to German death camps until invaded by Germany itself. In Nazi Germany itself about half of the Jews alive in 1933 died a natural death. The Germans almost never killed Jews who were British subjects or American citizens, even when they might easily have done so.
   
   Nazi Germany was a special kind of state, determined not to monopolize but to mobilize violence. The Holocaust was not only a result of the determined application of force but also of the deliberate and practiced manipulation of institutions severed from destroyed states and of social conflicts exacerbated by war. As Jan Gross is careful to stress, the deportation to the death facilities was the “main disaster” that befell Poland’s Jews, and it came “at the hands of the Germans.” But what of the quarter-million or so Polish Jews who somehow escaped the gassing, and who sought help among Poles in 1943, 1944, and 1945? Gross, along with Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, records the undeniable fact that most of these people were murdered as well, perhaps half of them by Poles (following German policy and law) rather than by Germans.
   
   Together, these Polish historians make two essential arguments that help us to understand the workings of deliberate Nazi persecution after the destruction of the Polish state. One is the continuity of personnel and of obedience. In general the Polish police continued to function, now taking orders from the Germans. Whereas in 1938 their job included preventing pogroms in independent Poland, in 1942 they were ordered to hunt down Jews. Second, local governments could be mobilized to capture Jews who had escaped the gas chambers. Poles in a given area were named as hostages, to be punished if a hunt for Jews failed. Local leaders were personally responsible for keeping their districts free of Jews, and could easily be denounced if they failed to do so. In the event of a successful hunt for Jews, local leaders were responsible for the distribution of Jewish property.4
   
   Peasants in the countryside, as Engelking and Grabowski demonstrate, were unconcerned with protecting the reputation of the Polish nation (with which they likely did not identify), but obsessed with their position relative to their neighbors.5 Peasants figure in all of these books as competitive, jealous, and concerned above all with property. Under German occupation, peasants regularly denounced one another to the Germans on all conceivable pretexts. This “epidemic of denunciations,” as Grabowski puts it, made the prospect of rescuing a Jew from the German policy of destruction extremely difficult. Peasants noticed when a neighboring family was collecting more food, keeping different hours, or even bringing home a newspaper. All of these were signs that a Jew was being hidden, and led to denunciations which had overlapping motives: desire for the property of the Jews and those hiding them, and fear of collective German reprisals.
   
   In this situation, as Engelking observes, it was highly irrational for Polish peasants to help Jews: “in the case of Jews seeking aid the costs of refusing them were zero, and the costs of helping them were enormous.” As she and Grabowski both show, very often Poles acted as if they were rescuers, took the Jews’ money, and then turned them in to the police. In Grabowski’s study of dozens of cases of rescue and betrayal, he found that the Jews who were rescued rather than betrayed were precisely those who found their way to people who were not thinking of personal gain. This also holds of course for Poles such as Jan Karski and Witold Pilecki who voluntarily entered, respectively, the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz.6 As Grabowski is careful to stress, there were such people in the county he investigates, and throughout occupied Poland. Engelking recalls Wacław Szpura, who baked bread three times every night for the thirty-two Jews he rescued.
   
   To be sure, Nazi official anti-Semitism created incentives in the regions in which this last painful episode of the Holocaust took place. Popular anti-Semitism made it less likely that Poles saw their Jewish neighbors as people about whom they should have concerns, and more likely that they would fear denunciation by their neighbors.7 The ethical obsession of all three Polish historians under review is the undeniable reality that Poles often brought about the death of Jews when they might instead have simply done nothing. But we have many reasons to doubt that only anti-Semites killed Jews.
   
   For one thing, action is no simple guide to ideology. Grabowski concludes, from careful study of individual cases in one region, that Poles who murdered Jews were more likely to join the communist party that ruled Poland after the war. This confirms a suggestion that Gross made more than a decade ago: that people who collaborate with one occupation are likely to collaborate with the next. The frequency of double collaboration, a natural corollary of double occupation, forces us to restrain our tendency to explain violence by ideological conviction. The Poles who appear on the cover photograph of Gross’s Golden Harvest, digging for gold at Treblinka, are continuing, as communism arrives, the theft that was endorsed by German policy. The Polish communist regime, on a far larger scale, also continued this process, nationalizing the formerly Jewish businesses and property that the German occupation regime had seized from Jews that it murdered.
   
   Poland’s communist regime, in power for more than forty years, concocted a myth of the Holocaust in two stages: first portraying (falsely) Poles and Jews as equal victims, then suggesting (anti-Semitically) that passive Jews should be grateful to the heroic Poles who tried to rescue them from their own helplessness. This line was taken in 1968, when the communist regime expelled several thousand of its citizens, among them Jan Gross and Irena Grudzińska, on the spurious charge of “Zionism.” The work of Gross, Grabowski, Engelking, and other Polish historians is, inevitably, a response to the myths of the Communist era, which are still convenient for some Polish nationalists of today, as well as an attempt to reestablish the Holocaust as a central part of Polish history.8
   
   In the last decade many pioneering studies of the Holocaust have appeared in the Polish language. This reflects a genuine and impressive attempt to address the real trauma in the Polish past. It is no denigration of the courage and intelligence of Polish historians to note that it also reflects the security of an independent Poland anchored in international institutions and prosperous within the global economy. If we understand the Holocaust as, among many other things, the worst consequence of the collapse of the first globalization, we might see its civil and considered discussion as one of the achievements of a second globalization, our own. In such a world a ring might be returned, but such a world is a fragile thing.
   
   
   1
   
   For the economic version of this argument, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Viking, 2007). ↩
   2
   
   For an excellent recent biography of Heydrich, see Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (Yale University Press, 2011), reviewed in these pages by Max Hastings (The New York Review, February 9, 2012). ↩
   3
   
   Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University Press, 2001); see also Wokół Jedwabnego, two volumes, edited by Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2002). ↩
   4
   
   These books complement Christopher Browning’s classic Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (HarperPerennial, 1998), which accurately portrays the German police as the guiding force in the hunts for Jews, but which does not consider local institutions in any detail. ↩
   5
   
   The sociology of betrayal and rescue in the cities was different: see Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (Yale University Press, 2002). ↩
   6
   
   Their reports are published: Karski’s Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World (London: Penguin, 2011); and Pilecki’s The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery, translated by Jarek Garliński (Aquila Polonica, 2012). ↩
   7
   
   Brian Porter-Szücs devotes an important chapter to this subject in his Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland (Oxford University Press, 2011). A recent profound study of the reorientation of Catholic theology regarding Jews is John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews (Harvard University Press, 2012). ↩
   8
   
   For an explicit attempt to address certain Communist-era myths, see Dariusz Libionka and Laurence Weinbaum, Bohaterowie, hochsztaplerzy, opisywacze: Wokól Zydowskiego Zwiazku Wojskowego (Heroes, swindlers, storytellers: On the Jewish Military Association) (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011); see also Mikołaj Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland(Ohio University Press, 2012). ↩

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins Little, Brown, 471 pp., $27.99

In When Everything Changed, Gail Collins picks up the saga of women and their role in the culture, economy, and political life of the United States where she left off in America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (2003). That exhilarating earlier volume began with the Mayflower and ended in the Seventies. Lively, always entertaining, and frequently enlightening, When Everything Changed is a worthy sequel. Its subtitle is “The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present,” and amazing it is. In half a century, Collins shows us, everything really has changed. And yet…

And yet, the basic conflict between motherhood and career, like some sort of blotchy chronic dermatitis, keeps erupting in new unexpected patches. It is a sign of just how intelligent and generous a writer Collins is that by the end of her book, the feminist dilemma seems less an incurable virus than a challenge, one that has already been met with so much energy, stubborn courage, and radical hope, not to mention desperation, drama, and, sometimes, in retrospect, downright silliness, that we feel we are all on a human adventure, and all on it together.

The former editorial page editor for The New York Times and now a columnist there, Collins is a serious and accomplished journalist who here regards the journalistic reports of her predecessors with wit, fascination, and skepticism. Some of the most enjoyable moments in the book come when Collins quotes newspapers like her own. In 1960, she notes, women had held the right to vote for forty years, and it was estimated that there would be more women voting for president than men. Indeed, women had even participated in the presidential nominating conventions the summer before the election. How did the press cover this infusion of female civic participation? With a quick nod to a rather insignificant news item, Collins puts it all in context:


The meal begins with “Swan Canterbury,” which consists of fresh pineapple on a bed of laurel leaves surrounded by swans’ heads in meringue,’ the New York Times reported in a story headlined “GOP Women Facing a Calorie-Packed Week.”

A skillfully constructed tale, When Everything Changed is not only a history of women; it is also, necessarily, a story of historical perception. So much of American women’s fate has been tangled up in the culture’s vision of a woman’s “role” that Collins is able to set the historical events and often nearsighted contemporary accounts side by side with great effect, sometimes comic, sometimes enraging.

She begins in the suburbs of the Sixties, a place that in the popular imagination of 2009 has taken on almost mythical status, like the dark forest of fairy tales, a place of little boxes housing quietly despairing adulterers in gray flannel suits and quietly despairing dipsomaniac housewives. The era’s own suburban myth was, of course, quite different:


By 1960 the United States was no longer a farming country—only 30 percent of families lived in rural areas. The nation was booming, and its prosperity reached farther down into the working class than ever before. Sixty percent of families lived in a home they owned, and 75 percent had a car. A quarter of all families were living in the suburbs, the much-exalted fulfillment of the American dream—to own a nice house on a plot of land, with healthy children going to good schools and destined for even higher levels of prosperity.

That prosperity looks quite modest from today’s suburban vantage point of a seven-thousand-square-foot McMansion:


In the beginning, the newly constructed dream houses were, by our current standards, very small. (In the famous Levittown development on Long Island, the basic house was a 750-square-foot, four-room Cape Cod with one bath and two bedrooms.)

But after squeezing in with their in-laws during the Depression or the war, the suburbs must have beckoned like a little bit of heaven.

For women, World War II had offered an opportunity, and often the necessity, to get out of the house to work. Just as postwar prosperity eliminated the need for many women to work outside the home, the new suburban life also removed the opportunity. “The early suburbs,” Collins writes, “were singularly unfriendly to the concept of a two-income family.” Day care was nonexistent. The mother or grandmother or aunt who might once have acted as a babysitter did not live nearby—they were back on the farm or in the cities the young suburbanites had fled. “Besides,” Collins notes, “many of the young couples setting up housekeeping were escaping hard times, and a stay-at-home wife was a kind of trophy—a sign that the family had made it to middle-class success and stability.”

If many women welcomed the role of full-time housekeeper and homemaker, it did not reflect, Collins points out, a “lack of enterprise” on their parts. Even with the economic boom that made staying home possible, the jobs available to women were limited in both kind and potential. And at least as housewives they were in charge. For black women, in particular, the chance to stay home and take care of their own children instead of someone else’s was welcome, as Ebony pointed out in an article titled “Good-bye Mammy, Hello Mom.” Automatic washers and driers, frozen dinners, A Campbell Cookbook: Cooking with Soup, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, steam irons, wash-and-wear, and, of course, Jell-O: for women who just a generation before might not have had running water, all these time-saving products ought to have saved time.




“Yet,” Collins notes, “the housewives did not seem to be working any less…. A methodical study by the sociologist Joann Vanek that used pretty much all the data available concluded that in the 1960s, the full-time homemaker spent fifty-five hours a week on her domestic chores,” which is a little more than was spent in the 1920s by all those women feeding each shirt into a clothes wringer.

Like the new highways that added more and more lanes, which simply filled with more and more cars, the empty hours became glutted with new chores. “In the 1950s the average household laundry soared from thirty-nine pounds to sixty-five pounds a week.” Women “took up gourmet cooking or interior decorating.” Collins interviews one woman who made her own diapers, another who vacuumed the entire house every day. It was a world of proto–Martha Stewart perfection and consumption encouraged by advertisers and the magazines they supported. Even the hallowed halls of Harvard paid tribute to the happy housewife: “The (male) president of all-female Radcliffe celebrated the beginning of every school year by telling freshmen that their college education would ‘prepare them to be splendid wives and mothers and their reward might be to marry Harvard men.'”

Of course, like any popular social trend celebrated in newspapers and magazines, this land of aproned domestic juggernauts was not an entirely accurate picture. Collins points out that even though the stay-at-home wife was the ideal, some 40 percent of married women with school-age children did in fact have jobs. According to other magazines, those not devoted to women and the appliances and soaps they might buy, “the prototypical suburban husband…was going off to work at a white-collar job that often entailed a great deal of psychological stress. And where did his salary go? To pay for more work-saving appliances for his nonworking wife!” At the same time, Redbookran an article in 1960 called “Why Young Mothers Feel Trapped.”

Anyone who has read a Trollope novel knows that women did not have to wait until 1960 to feel trapped. But


it surprised the nation—or at least the media—that the women who had acquired better homes and more conveniences than any previous generation should seem to be particularly miserable. “She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of,” said Newsweek.

And then came Betty Friedan. Her book, Collins writes, hit in 1963 “like an earthquake.” The shameful, confusing malaise felt by many women after the war now had a legitimate source, and the source had a name: The Feminine Mystique. Friedan busted the myth of the happy housewife so thoroughly that it took decades before women who were happy housewives dared to say anything about it. Women, Friedan said, “were being duped into believing homemaking was their natural destiny.” The dueling desires of motherhood and selfhood were articulated at last, and the feminist movement turned from the clear-cut demands of suffragism and equal pay to the less-defined realm of empowerment.

Collins follows the progress of the idea of feminism and the politically active women’s groups who drove it forward not only through influential and well-known feminists like Friedan, but also through the stories of aging but indomitable suffragettes like Alice Paul, and women unintentionally caught up in the argument like Lois Rabinowitz, who was fined for wearing pants to traffic court in 1960.

One of the things that is startlingly clear from the first chapter is how much women’s history has been bound up, sometimes literally, in women’s clothes, used symbolically by both sides: Hemlines, silk stockings (a sign of vanity in one era, of propriety in another), Bella Abzug and her hats (her mother told her they were “a surefire sign that she was not a secretary”), Gloria Steinem and her sunglasses, the hideous Eighties power suits with their floppy bows, the post-feminist stiletto heel. Decisions on how to dress were sometimes strategic, sometimes controversial, always significant. Collins quotes Muriel Fox, one of the founders of the National Organization of Women, saying, “I have pictures of the early NOW meetings. We wore hats.” During the heyday of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Collins writes, an earlier custom of wearing one’s Sunday best to sit-ins in order to be taken seriously had given way to jeans, a more practical outfit for being thrown in jail and a statement of solidarity with the working class. But, Collins notes,


Marian Wright Edelman said she would never forget “the disappointed looks” of rural black Mississippians “who heard there was a Black lady lawyer in town…and who came to look for and at me. When they saw me in blue jeans and an old sweatshirt, they were crestfallen. I never wore jeans in public again in Mississippi.”

Collins, whose prose is vigorous and direct, has an unflaggingly intelligent conversational style that gives this book a personal and authoritative tone all at once. Whether she writes about fashion or the great political and social events of the day, she observes the telling details that an academic writing in greater depth or a polemicist offering stronger theoretical arguments might pass over. With deadpan comic restraint Collins provides that unexpected detail or statement or observation that can put an entire episode into its legitimately absurd perspective. The Miss America pageant that inspired a radical feminist protest (organized by Robin Morgan and including a guerrilla sheep and the promise of bra-burning)? “It was the one program that President Nixon said he let his daughters, Julie and Trisha, stay up late to watch.” In 1984, when the honorific “Ms.” was considered by the late William Safire in The New York Times ? “To our ear,” he wrote in his “On Language” column, “it still sounds too contrived for newswriting.” To other ears at the Times as well apparently. In the same year, Collins says, the Times reported in a story about Gloria Steinem’s fiftieth birthday party that the dinner’s proceeds “will go to the Ms. Foundation…which publishes Ms. Magazine, where Miss Steinem works as an editor.”

Sometimes the absurdity Collins reveals is less humorous than it is grotesque. Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five who drove from Detroit to Selma in 1965 to join the civil rights protests, was shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan while giving a fellow marcher, a black man, a ride home. “FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, briefing the attorney general on Liuzzo’s death, told him ‘that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearances of a necking party.”

Collins writes extensively about the crucial and leading role of women in the civil rights movement. Women like Unita Blackwell, a sharecropper from Mississippi, were instrumental in local voter registration drives, while SNCC was based on the ideas of Ella Baker. Yet the official positions of power within the movement were held exclusively by men. Women were marginalized at the same time that the male leaders of the movement relied on the unthreatening decorum and perceived powerlessness of a lady for gaining white good will. Collins points out that almost all the victims of racism taken up as symbols of the cause were women: “When the Montgomery bus driver told [Rosa Parks] to give up her seat to a white man or be arrested, the petite, middle-aged seamstress calmly replied, ‘You may do that.'” She also notes that ladies like the “Women’s Political Caucus, a quiet organization of Montgomery’s middle-class black teachers and social workers,” were often far more radical than their male counterparts: “While the ministers pressed the bus company for a more orderly system of dividing the seats between the races and more courteous drivers, the women wanted total integration.”

A tale of women in the last fifty years is necessarily a tale of reform movements, and Collins takes us from the civil rights movement to the antiwar movement, a time when radical women were often relegated to making sandwiches for the men. At a 1968 New Politics conference in Chicago, when some of the women attending wanted to introduce a resolution on women’s rights, the men in charge refused. One of the women was literally patted on the head by the chairman. “‘Cool down, little girl,’ he said. ‘We have more important things to do here than talk about women’s problems.'” When a woman spoke at the Washington antiwar rally during Richard Nixon’s inauguration, some of the men in the crowd called out, “Take it off!” and “Take her off the stage and fuck her!” The free love movement, too, with its flower power and hippy communes, kept one traditional structure firmly in place—women performed the domestic duties.

Women who wanted to work were supposed to be single. This attitude informed even supposedly freethinking books like Helen Gurley-Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. The message of that volume is that single girls should busy themselves seducing their bosses while they bide their time and hone their seductive skills until Mr. Right finally shows up.

One group that was forced to remain single in order to continue at their jobs was stewardesses. Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women’s movement that liberated us, however. It should not be a surprise that members of one of the few professions that welcomed women, exclusively, would fight for women’s rights. And they did. Amelia Earhart notwithstanding, women were effectively barred from becoming pilots by the Commerce Department. They became stewardesses instead, a job that began with nurses and soon changed to attractive servers. For small-town girls it beckoned as a glamorous career, a way to travel, to see the world.

The pay, however, was low, and the job itself turned out to be far from glamorous. As late as the Sixties, “one regular run, the ‘Executive Flight’ from New York to Chicago, actually barred female passengers. The men got extralarge steaks, drinks, and cigars—which the stewardesses were supposed to bend over and light.” The women were monitored by “counselors” who weighed them and took their measurements regularly to make sure they kept their figures. “Besides limits in weight and height, stewardesses were required, according to one promotion, to have hands that were ‘soft and white’—a hint as to how welcome African-American women were at the time.” When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission convened, the flight attendants’ union was the very first in line. In a House subcommittee hearing in 1965,


Representative James Scheuer of New York jovially asked the flight attendants to “stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem.” The airline industry continued to argue with a straight face that businessmen would be discouraged from flying if the women handing them their coffee and checking their seat belts were not young and attractive.

To which Martha Griffiths, one of the few women representatives in Congress, replied, “What are you running, an airline or a whorehouse?”

Flight attendants were also among the first women to turn to the courts for equal rights. In addition to the requirements of appearance, stewardesses were not allowed to marry. Supervisors scanned wedding announcements looking for transgressors. When Eulalie Cooper was fired by Delta after six years for being secretly married,


a Louisiana judge agreed with the airline that serving food and ensuring safety on an airplane was a job that young single women were uniquely qualified to do, and therefore fell under the [Equal Employment Opportunity] law’s exemption for “bona fide occupational qualifications.”…

And yet with all of Collins’s examples of laws and ideas that have contributed to keeping women in their place, When Everything Changed is not simply a book about what the world of men has done to hold women back; nor is it a book about the worthy and courageous things women have somehow pulled off in a man’s world, though it certainly pays tribute to feminist heroes, both famous and uncelebrated. This is instead a narrative that has not yet reached its conclusion. The book recognizes and records an ongoing story that ought to be obvious but has so often been obscured in the last fifty years of change, upheaval, and polemics: simply that in the process of both shaping it or being shaped by it, women live in the world, and there’s just no getting around it.

This is an account of women crying out for change and coming to terms with the consequences of that change, and it is not always a pretty sight. Collins reminds us of the absurdity, the excess, on both sides. Some aspects of the women’s movement have come to seem almost as quaint as the early demonstrators in white gloves—the consciousness-raising groups, the calls to sexual warfare, the “freedom” names like Warrior and Sarahchild that women adopted to escape the taint of patriarchy. But Collins never loses sight of their importance as part of this modern epic. She shows women, like men, adapting as best they can. Some of those adaptations seem preposterous now, but without them, we could not have evolved to where we are.

And where exactly is that? There are now more working mothers than ever before. Women are in positions of power the most radical of activists could only dream of in 1960. Last February, The New York Times reported that with the loss to the recession of jobs in traditionally male fields like construction, working women were about to outnumber working men for the first time in American history. And yet…

Eleanor Roosevelt was able to talk wartime shipbuilders into creating innovative and comprehensive on-site day care for the children of thousands of working mothers. Her success in promoting the private sector’s responsibility for day care has never been repeated. Sufficient government-run day care is not available for most working mothers, either. At the same time, few employers are willing to create schedules friendly to working mothers. The “image” of women, too, has changed and changed back and twisted itself pretzel-like until we have drunken high school girls exposing themselves to the cameras of Girls Gone Wild in the name of freedom and liberation.

Collins ends her book with a look at three very current characters, three powerful mothers who have had to deal with the contradictions of careers and parenting, making it up as they went along: Hillary Clinton, who waited until she was in her thirties to get pregnant, facing her generation’s now familiar difficulties of fertility and child care; Michelle Obama, who has been able to recreate an earlier era of extended family members helping out by bringing her mother with the First Family to the White House; and Sarah Palin, who throws her various children over her shoulder and brings them along on the plane at taxpayers’ expense. None of these tough, successful women has discovered the perfect road.

Even so, we’ve obviously come a long way, baby, as the saying goes, and the effect of much of the earlier sections of the book is one of an uncomfortable jolt to memory, a snort of laughter and a grimace, which all add up to a mixed feeling of shame at our early follies and of smug satisfaction at how far we sophisticated Americans have come. If the book is less satisfying as it approaches the present day, perhaps it is because, without the perspective of time, we can’t predict exactly which of our notions and behavior will reveal themselves as ridiculous in twenty or thirty years’ time. The last few chapters of this “Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present” is intelligent and thorough, but it is also a little too close for either comfort or discomfort. It is what we know, it’s home, and home never really feels like it’s part of the journey at all.

What we do know for certain is that the difficulties of growing up female have not been weeded out—they continue to blossom, unexpected, inevitable, invasive plants—and if we’re lucky, Gail Collins will continue to comb through them, careful and hopeful, smelling the roses along with whatever else she digs up.

Gal Gadot , Wonder Woman the Movie and God's Gift To Men .....Wonder Woman: New edition with full color illustrations (Comics Culture)May 31, 2017 by Noah Berlatsky Paperback (Rutgers University Press)

The United Nations has ended a campaign featuring Wonder Woman as an ambassador for women and girls, two months after the announcement was met with protests and a petition complaining that the fictional superhero was an inappropriate choice to represent female empowerment…. “A large-breasted white woman of impossible proportions, scantily clad in a shimmery, thigh-baring body suit with an American flag motif and knee-high boots” is not an appropriate spokeswoman for gender equity at the United Nations, the petition said.


—The New York Times, December 13, 2016

Perhaps the greatest service that the director Patty Jenkins does her protagonist in Wonder Woman, the Warner Brothers blockbuster released this June, is to give her a new set of clothes. The female superhero has been charged with various ideological impurities over the years—jingoism, a too-cozy relationship with America’s military-industrial complex, an excessively heteronormative lifestyle—but by far the most frequent complaints have been about her man-pleasing, bondage-inflected get-up. Those go-go boots! Those bracelets of submission! That quivering embonpoint! It’s hard to be taken seriously as a feminist icon when the only thing you’ve got to wear to work is a star-spangled corset.

The costume worn by Wonder Woman’s star, the Israeli actress and former beauty queen Gal Gadot, is altogether more stern. The kinky boots have been replaced by a pair of gladiatorial thigh-highs; the body suit, constructed out of some cunning alloy of spandex and bronze, is, if not quite armor, at least armor-themed. The outfit isn’t much less revealing, and only marginally more practical, than the old one. (It’s still strapless and her legs must still get rather chilly when she’s stalking villains in cold climates.) But it does at least communicate some martial ferocity and menace. Thus attired, Wonder Woman might plausibly intimidate even her haters at the UN.

Sadly, whatever fresh potency she has acquired from the wardrobe department is offset by the film’s anxious insistence on demonstrating the femininity that lies beneath her breastplate. (Both Jenkins and Gadot have acknowledged that their great goal was to avoid making Wonder Woman look like “a ballbuster.”) Au fond, we are repeatedly assured, Wonder Woman is a very simple, soft, “relatable” lady. She adores babies and ice cream and snowflakes. She is sweetly oblivious to her own beauty and its devastating effects on those around her. She has absolutely no problem with men. She loves men! In fact, once she’s left her Amazon family behind, she barely bothers talking to another woman for the rest of the movie. Gadot has real presence and charm as an actress—one longs to see her in something worthier of her talent. But the imperative to eradicate any hint of bossiness or anger from her character weighs heavily on the film, threatening to turn it into one long, dispiriting exercise in allaying male fears about powerful women.

There are some pleasures to be found in its 141 minutes—most notably, in the opening depiction of Wonder Woman’s Amazon childhood. The scenes set on the Amazons’ island home of Themyscira—envisioned here as a sort of second-century Canyon Ranch for lesbian separatists—have the enjoyably campy feel of a 1960s sword-and-sandal epic. All of the Amazons are blessed with excellent bone structure and deportment, and speak in the solemn, “for tomorrow we rise at dawn” locutions of Hollywood-style antiquity. They have been entrusted by Zeus with the task of defending the world against his rebellious son, Ares, and they spend their days honing their military skills for this purpose. (Their proud and elegant form of female aggression requires a lot of leaping through the air in the postures of avenging angels and hanging at half-mast from galloping steeds.)

Wonder Woman—or Princess Diana, as she is known to her people—is the only child in this happy island gynocracy, and her protective mother, Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen), who claims to have created her by carving her out of clay and getting Zeus to breathe life into her, does not want her to become a warrior. Diana’s aunt, Antiope, played by Robin Wright and her phenomenal cheekbones, is tougher-minded: she knows that it is Diana’s unavoidable destiny to one day save the no-goodnik patriarchy from Ares. She has appointed herself Diana’s personal trainer and life coach, and is always exhorting her, in the manner of a Homeric-era Sheryl Sandberg, to aim higher and work harder:


You have greater powers than you know…. You expect the battle to be fair; the battle will never be fair…. Be careful in the world of men, Diana. They do not deserve you.

Alas, our sojourn with the fabulous ladies of Themyscira ends all too soon. One day, a World War I German fighter plane comes zooming through the magical force field that surrounds the island. The man in it, Steve Trevor (played by Chris Pine), isn’t really a German but an American spy who has just stolen a chemical weapon formula from an evil German scientist, and is now being pursued by a platoon of enemy soldiers. (Something incorrigibly twenty-first-century in Pine’s bearing keeps him from being entirely persuasive in this role; you can put this man in a foxhole on the Western Front and he still looks like someone on his way to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf for a mocha skim latte.) After a beachfront battle between the Amazons and the Germans (during which noble Antiope is fatally wounded), Diana uses her lasso of truth to find out Steve’s real identity and mission. On hearing his account of “the war to end all wars,” she becomes convinced that the time has come for her to go out and conquer Ares and, with Steve, she sets sail for England.




Our departure from Themyscira is sad for many reasons, not least because it marks the last time we will see any sun. Dominated by purplish-gray lighting, relentlessly louring skies, and lugubrious, CGI-enhanced battle scenes, the next two hours nicely simulate the experience of being trapped in a windowless video game arcade. “It’s hideous,” Diana says on first glimpsing the smoke-wreathed cityscape of London—a comment that might safely be applied to the rest of the movie.

Rumors of the heat and wit of the Diana–Steve partnership have been somewhat exaggerated. The comedy of their relationship is generated largely by her ignorance of early-twentieth-century manners, particularly as they pertain to relations between the sexes. Unlike the Diana of the comic book, who arrived in America already au fait with the social mores and politics of the place, this Diana is a stranger in a strange land, perpetually and adorably perplexed by the ways of men. (The film’s screenwriter, Allan Heinberg, apparently took his inspiration for her fish-out-of-water predicament from Disney’s Little Mermaid.) She doesn’t know that it is improper to ask a man questions about his anatomy while gazing coolly at his naked form in the bath; she is unaware that an invitation to sleep with someone means something more than sleeping next to them.

Diana is also oblivious to the fact that in the London of 1918, her sex radically limits her freedoms. She cannot see why she would be barred from attending an all-male parliamentary meeting, or why she would be expected to constrain her waist with a corset. (A bit rich, this, given that the Wonder Woman costume performs much the same function.) When Captain Steve’s secretary, Etta Candy, explains that her job involves doing whatever her boss asks her to, Diana frowns and remarks, “Where I come from, we would call that slavery.”

This—a sly reference to the ignominious moment in comic book history when Wonder Woman was relegated to being secretary of the Justice League—is a feminist joke of sorts. But it’s not a joke that Diana gets. Unlike the comic book Diana, who was always dashing about giving pep talks to abused wives (“Get strong! Earn your own living!”) and reporting back to her mother on the progress of women’s rights, Diana remains blissfully ignorant of the women’s cause. The male sidekicks who accompany her and Steve to the war in Europe teach her about racial prejudice, the plight of Native Americans, and even the horrors of PTSD, but somehow the news that women don’t have the vote evades her.

Maintaining her ignorance is of course a quite deliberate maneuver—part of the film’s scrupulous endeavor to keep any hint of ball busting at bay. (“It was important to me,” Gadot told Entertainment Weekly, “that my character would never come and preach about how men should treat women. Or how women should perceive themselves.”)

A similar effort to avoid having Diana become too domineering is evident in the careful way that she and Steve are presented as equal partners in their mission. One good man, apparently, is equal to an Amazon demigoddess. (Gadot: “We didn’t want to make Steve the damsel in distress.”) If Diana has the muscle, it’s Steve who has the tactical sense and the job of mansplaining the true nature of their mission. (She’s under the impression that if she manages to kill Ares, she will end war forever.)

Steve is also, it turns out, the person who gives her the correct moral position on man’s inhumanity to man. At the climax of her final, set-piece battle with Ares (who is not the German general she had initially fingered, but a British politician posing as her and Steve’s friend), Ares tries to persuade her that human beings are too corrupt and nasty to deserve her help—an idea initially proposed by Antiope. But Steve’s selfless actions and the power of their newly blossomed love have taught her to reject such cynicism. “It’s not about deserve, it’s about what you believe,” she says. “And I believe in love.”

The exact meaning of this homily is somewhat obscure. It has a Clintonian “Love Trumps Hate” ring to it, certainly. But why it compels her to take mercy, at the last minute, on Dr. Poison, the crazed German scientist who has been plotting to kill thousands with a lethal poison gas, is a mystery. What is the moral equation of ruthlessly dispatching hundreds of German grunts, only to spare the architect of the war’s most dastardly tactics? Never mind. The important thing is that it is Steve and the lightning strike of romantic love that has given her this wisdom.

An astonishing number of women critics have reported being moved to tears by Gadot’s performance. They have hailed Wonder Woman as an inspiring vision of female strength; a landmark in pop-cultural depictions of woman; an exultant portrait of pussy power in excelsis, perfectly timed to rouse our spirits in the dark era of Trump. But the film is far too cautious and focus group–tested an enterprise to be any of these things. Like so many recent girl-power extravaganzas that seek to celebrate what a long way we’ve come, baby, it ends up illustrating precisely the opposite.

Wonder Woman in the comics was famously enfeebled during the 1950s when a set of new writers took over and turned her into a fashion model, a babysitter, an agony aunt. Wonder Woman does nothing so crude. It allows its heroine all the trappings of free, courageous, independent womanhood. It even cheers her on when she bashes up men. It merely propagates the unhelpful myth that if a woman is nice enough, pretty enough, feminine enough, she can do such things without ever causing offense, or being called a bitch. Really, if you want feminist inspiration, you’re better off skipping Wonder Woman and going back to watch the wiseacre heroines of the 1940s: the ones played by Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Barbara Stanwyck. They were wittier and gutsier and not half as worried about busting

House of Fiction: From Pemberley to Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life by Phyllis Richardson is published by Unbound

Pemberley, Manderley and Howards End: the real buildings behind fictional houses

From Charlotte Brontë’s Norton Conyers to Alan Hollinghurst’s Canford Court – the little known locations that inspired the most famous homes in literature
Menabilly: Daphne du Maurier coveted the house for decades before she moved in and restored it


Howards End, Manderley, Brideshead – some fictional houses are as unforgettable as the characters who inhabit them. They can provide a sense of identity, as in the novels of Walter Scott, which were set in a time when a man was distinguished by the land and house from which he got his name. They can convey ideas of personality, as Charles Dickens’s living spacesreflect the quirks of his characters. They can offer us symbols of social status, as with Jane Austen’s Pemberley, or some tangible link to the past, as so ardently forged by writers such as Evelyn Waugh.

The house that commands the fictional centre of a story exerts a power over the characters: their behaviour, aspirations and fate. In my research into houses in British literature, I wanted to find out what drove authors, from Austen to Alan Hollinghurst, to home in on a particular house or type of house as the focus of their fictional worlds. The British may not have the monopoly on house-centred stories, but the literature is filled with thinking, writing, and imagining houses in ways that betray a particular consciousness of house and home. Some of the most celebrated novels, such as Howards End or Brideshead Revisited, signal this from the title, while others sneak us in through the back door, as it were, so that we understand the importance of the house only once we’re ambling along the passageways, scrutinising the furnishings. But once over the threshold, fictional houses have us in their spell. As Daphne du Maurier said of Menabilly, the house that inspired her characters’ devotion to Manderley, it possessed her “even as a mistress holds a lover”.
Shandy Hall, Yorkshire:


When a country parson published the first two volumes of the rollicking, digressive The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in 1759, it quickly became a publishing sensation. Sterne had the living at Coxwold, in the Vale of York, which included the tenancy of the cottage that became known as “Shandy Hall”. In such a house, whose close quarters give rise to interruptions – by a thumping across the floor overhead, for example, which disturbs Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby in the parlour, as the maid attends to Mrs Shandy in her struggle to give birth – digressions were inevitable. Sterne completed seven of the nine volumes of the book while in residence at Shandy Hall, and it is easy to see how the cramped conditions of his little home helped to set the stage for the accidents, intrusions, missteps and conversational meanderings of the story. In an age when authors like Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding were writing about grand country piles, Sterne brought readers directly into the rooms of the humble cottage, sat them by the fire and gave them a cracking good tale.
Strawberry Hill, London:Horace Walpole
FacebookTwitterPinterest Horace Walpole’s gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham. Photograph: Alamy

Walpole’s “little gothic castle” is seen by many as a folly created by a man with too much money and time on his hands. But Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham, played a key role in English literature in helping to inspire what is considered the first gothic novel in English, The Castle of Otranto (1764). At a time when most of the landed elite were still following the order and symmetry of Palladian architecture, Walpole embraced the ornament, the delicate tracery and heavy stonework, the darkened passages and what he called the “gloomth” (gloom plus warmth) of medieval gothic buildings. He drew on the designs of ancient churches and cathedrals, though the closest he came to worship was dressing up as a monk and play-acting around the house. His designs, too, were imitations of the real thing: wood dressed up as stone and papier-mache instead of plaster. Walpole claimed to have been driven to write the story of Otranto by a dream, but it was his own house that brought him the vision: “I had thought myself in an ancient castle, and on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.”
Godmersham Park, Kent:
Jane Austen


The daughter of a vicar, Jane Austen grew up in a household of more modest means than many in her circle. She attended parties, balls and other social gatherings at plenty of grand Hampshire country houses, writing to her sister Cassandra in 1800: “I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not else how to account for the shaking of my hand today.” But it was Godmersham, in Kent, and the smaller, less spectacular but still impressive Chawton House in Hampshire, two properties inherited by her brother Edward after he was adopted by childless relatives, that helped her to inhabit the world of her more privileged characters.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Godmersham, where Jane Austen spent long hours writing letters in the library. Photograph: Alamy

In Edward Austen’s day, Godmersham had 5,000 acres of land (today it still has 2,000). The house was built in 1732 by the Knight family, who added two wings in the 1780s before Edward inherited the property in 1797. It still has several wings and retains its elegant Italianate style. It is sometimes speculated that the more famous Chatsworth in the Peak District was the inspiration for Mr Darcy’s Pemberley, but it was at Godmersham that Austen experienced living in a large house, with many servants and entertainments. She spent long hours writing letters in the library, and the vicarage – still extant on the property – is thought to have inspired Mr Collins’s house in Pride and Prejudice. The place was luxurious to Austen: “I have no occasion to think of the price of Bread or of Meat where I am now; – let me shake off vulgar cares & conform to the happy Indifference of East Kent wealth.” By contrast, writing in 1798 from the rectory at Steventon in Hampshire, where she grew up, she complained: “People get so horridly poor & economical in this part of the World, that I have no patience with them. – Kent is the only place for happiness, Everybody is rich there.”
Norton Conyers, Yorkshire:
Charlotte Brontë
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Jane Eyre first describes Mr Rochester’s home, Thornfield Hall, as a “gentleman’s manor-house”. Its contradictory nature – it has both “a picturesque look” and “a chill and vaultlike air” – grew from the mixture of awe and social awkwardness of her visits to various real houses. North Lees Hall in the Peak District has the three floors she gives Thornfield, and came with a fittingly grim tale of a madwoman confined to the upper storey. But the house most likely to have inspired the look and atmosphere of Thornfield is Norton Conyers, near Ripon, which Brontë is said to have visited in 1839. A Jacobean manor house with a great hall dating to the 14th century, Norton Conyers had belonged to the Graham family since 1624. At the time of Brontë’s visit, the house had come down to Sir Bellingham Graham, the seventh baronet, who gambled, fathered several illegitimate children and ultimately lost his ancestral home. It is unlikely that Brontë would have met Bellingham himself, but his troubled, Byronic character may have been partly responsible for the scandalous past and proud bearing of Mr Rochester. There are a number of similarities between Norton Conyers and Thornfield, the most tantalising being the stairway concealed behind the panelling of the first floor gallery, uncovered in 2004, which would have allowed Mr Rochester to slip upstairs surreptitiously and deal with his raving wife.
Rooks Nest, Hertfordshire:
EM Forster

Few can read Howards End without longing for a golden afternoon in the garden of an English cottage. The house represents the England of the past, threatened by a modern world in motion where motorcars speed people through a landscape they have no time to appreciate. “Only connect” is the motto of the book, and conveys a possibility for spiritual fulfilment that Forster felt strongly could be imparted through the life of a house. He was very clear about the inspiration for the house of his eponymous novel – Rooks Nest, his childhood home. After his father died of tuberculosis, when Forster was not quite two, his mother decided it would be healthier to move to the country. In 1883 she took the lease on Rooks Nest, near Stevenage in Hertfordshire, where they lived for the next 10 years. The house had belonged to a family named Howard, who had farmed there for three centuries. Forster began memorialising it while still in his teens. “I took it to my heart,” he later wrote, “and hoped … that I should live and die there.”
Talland House, Cornwall:
Virginia Woolf

FacebookTwitterPinterest Talland House, St Ives, Cornwall, where Virginia Woolf spent childhood holidays. Photograph: Paul Fearn/Alamy

For Woolf, Talland House represented a childhood idyll that would inspire her throughout her life. In 1881 her father, the eminent critic and biographer Leslie Stephen, had discovered Talland House in St Ives on one of his many walking expeditions. It was a three-storey detached house on a hill overlooking Porthminster Beach, with Godrevy lighthouse visible in the distance. From July to September each year, Stephen installed his large family in it with an array of guests there. The children made a sport of looking out towards the railway station from the front garden, to spy their visitors arriving: anyone from Henry James to George Meredith, or the American poet James Russell Lowell, Virginia’s godfather, might be stepping down on to the platform and needing a lift up the steep hill.

The family stopped visiting Talland House after the sudden death of Woolf’s mother Julia in 1895. Her half-sister Stella Duckworth died in 1897 and her brother Thoby in 1906. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf made a lengthy imaginative visit to the Talland House of her childhood, where the ghosts of her parents and siblings reappear.
Menabilly House, Cornwall:
Daphne du Maurier

The inspiration for Manderley was an obsession born of frustration. Du Maurier had coveted Menabilly House in Cornwall for decades before she was able to live there. And it was in the years of pining for it that she created the enigmatic mansion at the centre of Rebecca (1938). The physical description of the De Winter seat was, in fact, drawn from Milton Hall, near Peterborough, which Du Maurier had visited as a child during the first world war. But in planning the story of Rebecca, Du Maurier said the house would be “empty, neglected, its owner absent, more like – yes, very like – the Menabilly near Fowey … where I had so often trespassed”.


The gardens were full of scarlet rhododendrons that symbolise Manderley’s secret passion and rage

The author first came across Menabilly during a family visit to the Cornish coastal town of Fowey in 1926. Menabilly had been owned by the Rashleigh family since 1573, and was largely transformed in the early 18th century. Like its fictional counterpart, the house is set well back into the woods. In Du Maurier’s time the gardens were full of those scarlet rhododendrons that symbolise Manderley’s secret passion and rage: “massive and high they reared above my head”. Her first attempt to visit the house was during an illicit ramble with her sister, Angela. The drive, as they had been warned, was “nearly three miles long, and overgrown”. As in the opening of the novel, the walk up that twisting path felt endless: the pair were forced to turn back by the onset of nightfall.

It took another year before Du Maurier made it through the woods and found the house abandoned, in a state of broken glory: “The windows were shuttered fast … Ivy covered the grey walls and threw tendrils round the windows.” Inside, “family portraits stared into the silence and the dust” and the library “had become a lumber place”. It wasn’t until 1943, five years after the publication of the novel that immortalised the house and its power to inspire obsession, that Du Maurier was finally granted a lease on the property and set to work repairing the “blitzed building”, as she called it, and making it into a family home.
Lawn Road flats, Hampstead, London:
Agatha Christie
FacebookTwitterPinterest Lawn Road flats, London, where Agatha Christie lived with her second husband. Photograph: Alamy

For all Christie’s care with naming houses, she gives us very little in the way of decorative detail, but her experiences of different houses come through her novels. Abney Hall in Cheshire was a special favourite of young Agatha: “a wonderful house to have Christmas in if you were a child”, she wrote, “an enormous Victorian Gothic, with quantities of rooms, passages, unexpected steps, back staircases, front staircases, alcoves, niches” and “three different pianos” to play. Christie wrote the novel After the Funeral and the short story “The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding” while staying there, and it featured as the Chimneys estate in two thrillers from the 1920s, The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery.
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But aficionados of television adaptations of stories such as “The King of Clubs”, “The Theft of the Royal Ruby” or The Murder of Roger Ackroydwill associate Christie with stylish modernism. On this note, Christie was also fairly vague. For example, Endless Night (1967) features a glamorous newly built house that fulfils the dreams of the low-born narrator. Yet there isn’t a lot of information about the design of this eventual home, apart from the description of it being “plain, very modern … with shape and light”. TV programme makers settled on the Homewood, Patrick Gwynne’s 1938 Surrey modernist gem, in the 2013 television version of a Miss Marple mystery. Christie would have had an awareness of avant-garde modernist design, particularly from the Lawn Road flats in Hampstead (now known as the Isokon building), where she and her second husband, Max Mallowan, went to live after their house at Sheffield Terrace was destroyed by bombing in 1940. The Lawn Road flats were built in 1934 by the architect Wells Coates, whose design echoes some of the new models for urban living espoused by Le Corbusier and other “utopian modernists”. Walter Gropius and László Maholy-Nagy of the influential Bauhaus school of art in Germany were residents, as was the designer Marcel Breuer. It is now a Grade I-listed building, having been completely refurbished in 2003, and is considered one of London’s important modernist landmarks.
Metroland:



Metroland embodies a significant cultural and social moment in postwar community development. Plans to extend the Metropolitan Railway to the new suburban areas had been in place nearly 70 years before Barnes’s novel was published in 1980. But his description of suburban life, delivered from the yawning lips of a middle-class teenager, captures the angst of outer city residential tracts. Even though I grew up in southern California, I could sense the familiar taste of the ennui unique to the suburban adolescent as I read of his narrator Christopher’s hatred of Sunday morning sounds – the lawn-mowing and car-washing – as well as the disappointment of returning to live, as an adult, in a suburb whose brown tones work like a sedative on ambition.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Sounds of the suburbs … ‘Metroland is about defeat”. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

“Metroland is about defeat,” the author said later. “I wanted to write about youthful aspiration coming to a compromised end.” The suburban setting provided “a background metaphor of disappointment” for the character, as it had for the larger aims of Metroland itself. “This London suburb where I grew up was conceived in the hope, the anticipation, of great horizons, great journeys. But in fact that never came to pass.”

This isn’t a story focusing on a house, so much as a chronicle a postwar change in living style. Amid the frenzy of urban building, people were leaching out into low-rise, low-density communities, if they can be called communities, since most lacked any unifying focal point, such as an easily accessible high street or existing village. Metroland doesn’t offer the country idyll or spiritual connection of Howards End, nor the excitement or anxiety of city dwelling. The book should come shrink-wrapped with a DVD of John Betjeman’s 1973 film documentary of the same title. As Betjeman intones over scenes of the car-washing and lawn-mowing that so pain Christopher Lloyd, Metroland was “the child of the First World War, forgotten in the second”.
Canford School, Dorset: Alan Hollinghurst

As the 20th century wore on, writers continued to be drawn to English country houses, but rather than oozing nostalgia for a golden era à la Brideshead, the books had a sharper edge that sliced at awkward angles into these monuments to the English class system. Novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day(1989), Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011) cast a dispirited glance backwards. The manor house and the class it represents are degenerating. The members of the elite cannot be depended on to look after their stately homes any more than they can be relied on for their moral judgment.


'I designed country houses when I went away to boarding school'

Along with becoming hotels and retirement homes, a number of large country estates have been saved from demolition or neglect by being taken over by private schools. Hollinghurst has quipped that he was “an architect from the age of six or so … I designed country houses when I went away to boarding school”. In creating the rooms and atmosphere of Corley Court in The Stranger’s Child, he drew on his former school, Canford in Dorset. Like Corley Court, Canford had been a manor house, with some elements dating from the 14th century, before becoming a school in 1923. “Being a beautiful and interesting old house, it made a profound impression on me from an early stage,” Hollinghurst has said. Far from abhorring the Victorian style that so offends the character Dudley Valance, Hollinghurst says that he was “defending Victorian buildings” in the novel, although “I tried to make this Victorian house heavier and fiercer than my old school.”

The destiny of Corley Court is foreshadowed in the first chapter, during pre-dinner drinks in the drawing room at Two Acres, the less imposing home of the Sawle family. In this scene, Hubert Sawle, the heir to Two Acres, remarks on the evolution of the nearby Priory, from its moment of grandeur when Queen Adelaide lived there. A guest comments that later on in its history, the Priory had been “a very excellent hotel”:

“And now a school,” said Hubert, with a bleak little snuffle.

“A sad fate!” said Daphne.

Sad, but necessary. The preservation of the English country house has always depended on its ability to adapt to new circumstances. And each iteration will no doubt offer new stories to tell.

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French-Language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration and ‘New Europe’. Michael Gott. Edinburgh University Press. 2016.

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With the collapse of communism, the expansion of the European Union leading to migrations from the East and the Schengen agreement that has opened European national borders, road movies have gained prevalence in European cinema. This well-researched and insightful book points out that road films have become venues for the exploration of contemporary European identity as a means of coming to terms with fluidity. An established scholar on the topic, Michael Gott has previously co-edited (with Thibaut Schilt) Open Roads, Closed Borders (Intellect, 2013), a collection that explores an internationally recognised corpus of European road films. In comparison, French-Language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration and ‘New Europe’ focuses on a less examined yet booming body of films from a larger geography, including French, Swiss and Belgian productions.

Road movies have often been associated with US cinema and US contexts. Rather than searching for the origins of road cinema, Gott pursues a more productive approach: exploring how the road movie format has travelled between Europe and the US to identify its narrative and technical wealth. French-Language Road Cinema shows that European travellers are not the rebels common to US road films; in European road movies, being lost on the road and travelling outside quotidian life become a metaphor for an identity search within and against clearly marked national or communitarian identities.

Informed by mobility studies and cultural geography, the book examines productions that delineate travelling identities that stand against Fortress Europe as well as ‘voyages that construct new, more flexible ways of thinking of home’ (6). Gott also pays attention to particular narrative and formal aspects of road cinema. For instance, European films have more female protagonists and/or directors as opposed to conventional male-driven US road films. They also show diverse forms of transportation (from cars and trains to horse-drawn carriages), displaying less interest in speed than the adventures and possibilities that the road offers.


The first chapter of the book maps out a history of European road cinema from the 1960s—when conceptions of mobility were changing thanks to the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC), the construction of Berlin Wall and the automobile industry boom—through to the 1990s. Gott detects that European films of the 1960s (for instance, the lesser-known Italian road movie Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962)) reflect the imbalance between newly-enabled mobility and speed versus ongoing social and economic immobility for certain classes. Especially interesting is the analysis of Les petit matins (Jacqueline Audry, 1962), shot by a woman director and showing the travels of a female protagonist for whom ‘being on the road equates to the opportunity to reinvent herself, to write her own story and to try at least to get outside of the traditional role of women in society’ (33). The chapter also discusses two prominent European directors known for their road films: Aki Kaurismäki and Wim Wenders. Gott argues that both envision identity on the road as a flexible construction; yet, while the former acknowledges the limits of open borders and the difficulties for foreign travellers, the latter fully embraces and celebrates the privileges of Western mobility.

The second chapter explores the characteristics of French-language road films produced in the 2000s. The collection of films analysed—including French production Le grand voyage (Ismael Ferroukhi, 2004), which depicts a father and son’s pilgrimage from a French banlieueto Mecca, and Swiss production La vraie vie est ailleurs (Frédéric Choffat, 2006), which shows encounters through three simultaneous journeys over Swiss borders—indicates that voyages are taken for a wide variety of reasons in French-language road cinema (religious pilgrimage, tourism, business) towards many destinations (Berlin, Portugal, Mecca). According to Gott, French-language travel cinema puts isolated characters in contact with places and people that they would otherwise carelessly pass by, breaks their habits and the personal and spatial boundaries of their quotidian lives, opens up new beginnings in characters’ lives and establishes new communities in ‘voyages towards togetherness, understanding and solidarity’ (84).

The third chapter explores an understudied body of road films by the post-Dardenne generation directors, a flourishing genre in Belgium. After providing insights into the linguistic and cultural issues involved and the complex relationship that the Belgium film industry has with France, Gott analyses five Belgian films of the 2000s. These depict travel towards a wide range of spaces and show many character types, including a woman who travels towards an iceberg to escape the restraints of her working-class life (L’Iceberg (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, 2005)) and two wheelchair users who hitchhike towards Finland in a journey that engenders stories from Belgium colonialism to French anarchism (Aaltra (Gustave de Kervern and Benoit Delépine, 2004)). According to Gott, what brings these Belgian films together beyond the unusual choices of places is the parody of oddball characters and ‘absurdist ‘‘abuses’’ of the American road genre’ (103).

The fourth chapter focuses on French productions that reflect the popularity of ‘return’ films, a prevalent subcategory in European road movies that often portray second-generation characters who ‘return’ to their family roots. Gott shows that ‘return’ films display the diversity of French-speaking European citizens. Two French productions that Gott examines —Voyage to Armenia (Robert Guédiguian, 2006) and Ten’ja (Hassan Legzouli, 2004) — show their second-generations subjects’ development of a deeper understanding of their origins, complicate simplistic notions of home, homeland and citizenship and portray diversity without communitarian attachments.

Gott is careful not to glorify the idea of mobility and fluid identity in association with European road films. He develops a useful distinction between two theoretical tangents in road films that explore borders: ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ road movies. The former ‘are more associated with mobility and extension of mobility’, while the latter ‘are primarily concerned with the implications of closed borders and institutionalized restrictions on movement’ (5). Films in the fifth chapter explore the ‘negative’ side of mobility: the mobility of clandestine voyagers. Two approaches make this chapter particularly notable. Firstly, Gott only chooses films with women protagonists (such as Hope tracing a Nigerian woman’s difficult journey towards Europe (Boris Lojkine, 2014) and Marussia portraying a Russian migrant and her daughter as flâneurs in Paris (Eva Pervolovici, 2013)) and manages to avoid films that show the stereotype of the trafficked migrant sex worker from Eastern Europe. Secondly, Gott inquires not only into trips towards European destinations, but also narratives that display the mobile lives of clandestine migrants in European cities as they have to move constantly in search of jobs, food and shelter. Hence, as opposed to other European road movies, Gott insightfully points out, motion in films with migrant protagonists often involves a search for stability rather than a desire to escape the bounds of quotidian lives.

French Language Road Cinema is a thoughtful, timely and exciting book. The wealth of European film analyses it offers is notable in its attention to underexplored women’s road cinema, Belgian and Swiss productions as well as in its care to delineate opposing meanings of mobility for different European residents. The book reveals a nuanced approach to road film as a form that makes its spectators consider the complexity of identity, mobility and borders in today’s Europe, offering an indispensable trans-disciplinary guide for researchers in European film and mobility studies.