The Herald-Sun from Durham, North Carolina • 67

9 9 inninnnffyyrrrrynT7iyryryinrrrrfTw ywrpi on 4 if sf "4 I SUNDAY JANUARY 25 1 987 DURHAM MORNING HERALD 1 PAGE 3E I China Visit Offers Good On The Social Place Of Asian Women Betty Hodges Book Columnist Jamio Franc Charlotte Furth Looks To China For Answers When Chapel Hill native Charlotte Furth went to live in California almost two decades ago she was headed for a change in her orientation as real as the geographical change the move represented Ms Furth who is the daughter of Lambert and Isabella Davis based her earliest scholarship in French literature and her horizons as she put it were focused on Europe But when she and her philosophy professor husband Montgomery Furth moved to California in the late she took the opportunity to re-orient herself to Asia and earn a doctorate in Chinese history from Stanford University Now immersed in a book she has tentatively titled Medicine Gender and the Status of Women in Late Traditional China So immersed is she that she does not even flinch as she steadily reels it off Combining the history of women with medicine provides she said in an interview last week in her Greenwood Road home very good window on the social position of Ms Furth first went to China in 1982 as a Ful-b right Scholar to teach at Peking University with hopes of studying parent-child relationships a topic that proved unacceptable to her Chinese hosts hard to study women is the way she puts it But in the process of preparing for her original study she came to realize that Chinese women talked about themselves with a sense of biological inf erority that was new to her She heard things like "After had babies your not so And she discovered things like the quotas on females taking college entrance examinations and female acceptance of the view that after all women as capable of men Chinese women she came to believe see themselves as biologically inferior to men a view apparently untouched by the revolution in that country and its supposed goal of equality Ms reaction was to look at the health system and she discovered an enormous literature on health care that had not been studied from the point of view of women The long-term result will be the book the shortterm several articles she has just published one on concepts of pregnancy childbirth and industry in 17th and 18th Century China and another on medi- Historian Takes Look At Course Of America cal images of the female condition in China from the 17th Century to the 20th Century Right now working on the book on the strength of "a couple of grants" one from the American Council of Learned Societies and another from the National Institute of Health That coupled with her husband's fellowship at the National Humanities Center has given them year in the as she put it Furth is working on a book on the Pre-Socratics The Furths have two children a daughter who is a senior at Yale and a son who practices law in San Francisco Ms Furth says China to her is "a fascinating part of the entering into the era of the global she said this is the global Her work she said gave her sense of and she felt always that she was working in a pioneer field dealing with Chinese documents no one else had bothered to disturb She speaks and reads Chinese of course but reports that she is continually working on the complex language As committed as she is to her scholarship and her teaching career at California State University at Long Beach she says if she had another life to live it would be as a you only get one you As a University of North Carolina undergraduate she edited the prestigious Carolina Quarterly her senior year ana worked summers for the legendary editor Louis Graves on the old Chapel Hill Weekly let me do she said smiling thesis backed by well-marshaled evidence that for at least a century America has gone through cycles of and moving between a dedication to and a withdrawal to With due credit to the work of his father no mean historian the junior Schlesinger discerns a burst of governmental energy every 30 years or so Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 Franklin velt in 1933 Kennedy in 1961 alternating with the conservative restorations of the 1920s the 1950s and the 1980s If the cycle holds he writes a bit wishfully 1980's will witness the burnout of the most recent conservative He finds a cyclical pattern too in attitude toward the rest of the world a recurrent competition realism 1 and WALTER GOODMAN 1987 NY Times he writes quite as authentically American quite as deeply ingrained in our national history quite as strongly identified with our greatest statesmen quite as expressive of American ideas and character as the competing tradition of self-interest and scrambling private It comes as no shock that Schlesinger who was associated with the presidency of John Kennedy and the presidential ambitions of Sen Robert Kennedy should find fault with the Reagan conduct of both domestic and foreign affairs But he is just as wary of abrupt advanced on the left that would upset estab- lished political and economic arrangements and jeopardize an at ways vulnerable yet invaluable system Nor does he spare much admiration for revisionist historians who pin responsibility on the United States for most of the ills The title refers to THE CYCLES OF AMERICAN HISTORY By Arthur Schlesinger Jr 498 pages Houghton Mifflin 82295 be put off by the fact that The Cycles of American History is a collection of essays Arthur Schlesinger new book is not one of those exercises in self-regard and drawercleansing in which writers of note have been known to indulge Schlesinger has a thesis or two or 20 about the nature and workings of the American polity that link these eloquent pieces and give them historical weight and contemporary urgency His pattern here is to take an enduring issue say the tension between the principles of and put it in historical perspective and then offer his analysis of where we are today and his opinions on where we ought to be His sympathies remain mainstream liberal tradition of affirmative 'Fresh Look At Whole Offers New View Of History How Sylvan can help yougettothe college oi your choice Anddobetter while there lished earlier this year Bailyn made out a forceful case for the timeliness of such an undertaking In recent years he argued previous interpretations of the subject have broken down under the accumulation of new material consequently what is most urgently needed is not at the moment more technical studies but a fresh look at the whole After this it may come as rather a surprise that in Voyagers to the West Bailyn concentrates on a relatively narrow swath of time But if he has chosen to do so it is because it enables him to take advantage of a unique source of information demographic gain was loss at any rate British landlords and officials became increasingly concerned during the about the consequences of depopulation By 1773 there were rumors of an impending ban on all emigration to North America but the outcry that they provoked persuaded the government to defer any action until more facts were available It was decided that in the first instance customs officers in England and Scotland should keep a record of everyone embarking for the Colonies including details about place of origin occupation reasons for leaving and intended destination VOYAGERS TO THE WEST A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution By Bernard Bai- lyn with the assistance of Barbara DeWolfe Illustrated 668 pages Alfred A Knopf 830 At the time of the Declaration of Independence nearly one American in 10 had arrived in British North America within the previous 15 years After the war of 1756-60 with French rivalry no longer a threat there had been a sharp increase in the rate of immigration to the American Colonies: the figure of some 221500 new arrivals for the period 1760-75 compares with an estimated 700000 for the entire century and a half before 1760 This flow of population was a historical fact of major importance As Bernard Bailyn observes in Voyagers to the West it has been overshadowed by the political struggle of the same period leading up to the American Revolution but even without that struggle it would inevitably have altered the relationship between Britain and America Voyagers to the West is the first installment of a multivolume work entitled The Peopling of British North America In a brief introductory volume pub These procedures were introduced in December 1773 and remained in force until March 1776 (though there were only a handful of departures from Britain for America after September 1775) The results were tabulated in a register which has been preserved in the Public Record Office in London listing nearly 10000 migrants according to Bailyn is no other body of immigration data comparable in detail and comprehensiveness for the entire first two centuries of American Although Bailyn makes no claim to have discovered the register he is the first historian to have analyzed it systematically taking into account its defects making use of a computer and drawing on a wide range of secondary sources to amplify his findings He begins with a quantitative analysis from which two conclusions emerge with particular clarity In the first place the register records two distinct types of emigration one drawn mainly from London and its environs and the other from the north of England (notably Yorkshire) and Scotland The typical metropolitan emigrant was a young man without family ties usually an artisan or craftsman The northern exodus by contrast generally involved the departure of entire families farming families for the most part with large numbers of women and children At the same time neither migration seems to have been the product of despair While the records testify to pressing problems and anxieties (in particular those caused by the often savage rise in agricultural rents) Bailyn concludes that "nowhere does one find signs of the mass evacuation of a rootless rural proletariat or of an untrained urban slum -JOHN GROSS 1987 NY Timet Put us to the test Get started on the road to the college of your choice Call today -Best Sellers- ADDITIONAL SUBJECTS Basic Reading Math Reading Enrichment Agebra Special Programs 1987 NY Times Suite 201 Forum 1 1777 Durfaam-Chapd Hill Blvd Chapel Hill NC 27514 Phone: 968-1777 929-3682 improve your scores by using analogies and logical reasoning to come up with the right answers Then with the help of computers get to try your new skills on for size tackling questions similar to thoseontheACT and SAT tests Ifyou're already an exceptional student we can help you boost your performanceon the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Tfest opening the door to success recognition and welcome financial aid Throughout the program youll never share an instructor with more than two other students at a time so you're guaranteed personal attention and guidance Learning skills you'll acquire for life Once you've 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Life In The universe Jane Wagner Acerb observations on life today script of the show starring Lily Tomlin 6 McMahon! Jim McMahon with Bob Verdi The autobiography of the quarterback for the Chicago Bears 7 Only Old Once! Dr Seuss A checkup at the Golden Years Clinic in pictures and rhyme the first Dr Seuss book for adults 8 Word For Word Andrew A Rooney A new collection of columns by the journalist and TV personality 9 James Herriofs Dog Stories James Herriot Fifty tales by a Yorkshire veterinanian about his favorite animal 10 Dancing On My Grave Gel-sey Kirkland with Greg Lawrence The ballerina recalls her checkered career FICTION 1 Red Storm Rising Tom Clancy Without using nuclear weapons the West staves off the Russians in World War III 2 It Stephen King Childhood horrors haunt six men and a woman who grew up in a small Maine town 3 Whirlwind James Clavell Iran during the month following the departure 4 Bandits Elmore Leonard A of three plots to heist mil-ions being sent to the contras in Nicaragua 5 The Prince Of Tides Pat Conroy The complex relationships of a family in New York City and South low country 6 A Taste For Death PD James Inspector Adam Dal- -gliesh investigates a brutal double murder 7 Flight Of The Intruder Stephen Coonts Navy aviators at war over Vietnam 8 Night Of The Fox Jack Higgins A mission to keep D-Day plans from being discovered by the Germans 9 Hollywood Husbands Jackie Collins A top New York model encounters three of Los most dynamic men 10 Foundation And Earth Isaac Asimov The hero searches for the lost planet Earth NON-FICTION 1 Fatherhood Bill Cosby Meet The Author CHAPEL HILL Durham writer Mena Webb will speak at a Meet the Author Tea Friday in the Chapel Hill Public Library Her biography Jule Carr General Without An Army has just been published by the University of North Carolina Press She is also the author of a novel Curious Wine Tea and coffee will be served at 4 pm and the author will speak at 4:30 ra Sylvan Learning Center5 Because success begins with the basics Flexible Payment Plans Available EVERYTHING IN ROOKS THE BOOK EXCHANGi AT nVI POINTS DUtMAM NC The South's Largest and Most Complete Book Elaine Russell Donna Laine Directors ieCe 4 sitfeetTm-ertK i u-.