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Rating: 
Summary: Important contribution to historical discourse...
Review: 'Landscape for a Good Woman' marks a turning point in how history is written. In the start of the book, Steedman acknowledges that she is not writing a history for everyone (she even denies that her book is a work of history). Instead, through what she says is an act of 'particularizing', Steedman has demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the individual histories of 'lower class' or 'working class' people and families that are often over looked due to an array of social, economic, political, and psychological confines that dominate discourse in each of these areas. Whether being read as a feminist critique of male dominated society, a working class critique of upper class dominated society, or a critique of the discipline of history, this book offers a world of information and ideas. It is short and very dense but excellently written. Each sentence is worth rereading as the reader will quickly discover that multiple lessons can be gleamed from each thought Steedman presents. Through being told from the perspective of Steedman as her mother's daughter, the book demonstrates how the past shapes the present and how the two seemingly separate regions are actually tangled and inseparable. This book is worth every second it takes to read, and the time you'll spend thinking it over well after it has found its place on your shelf.
Rating:
Summary: Important contribution to historical discourse...
Review: 'Landscape for a Good Woman' marks a turning point in how history is written. In the start of the book, Steedman acknowledges that she is not writing a history for everyone (she even denies that her book is a work of history). Instead, through what she says is an act of 'particularizing', Steedman has demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the individual histories of 'lower class' or 'working class' people and families that are often over looked due to an array of social, economic, political, and psychological confines that dominate discourse in each of these areas. Whether being read as a feminist critique of male dominated society, a working class critique of upper class dominated society, or a critique of the discipline of history, this book offers a world of information and ideas. It is short and very dense but excellently written. Each sentence is worth rereading as the reader will quickly discover that multiple lessons can be gleamed from each thought Steedman presents. Through being told from the perspective of Steedman as her mother's daughter, the book demonstrates how the past shapes the present and how the two seemingly separate regions are actually tangled and inseparable. This book is worth every second it takes to read, and the time you'll spend thinking it over well after it has found its place on your shelf.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating Psychoanalytical Personal History
Review: This book tells the story of Carolyn Steedman's childhood and her mother's refusal to mother. Taking as her starting off point three forms of narrative, the fairy tale, the psychoanalytical case study and the Working Class (auto)biography Steedman creates a narrative that is unlike any I have read. It is at time incredibly difficult and engaging. She challenges assumptions of class, especially the relationship between gender and class, throughout the text. Her childhood, and the childhoods she draws from other working class narratives are thrown into relief against Freud and Marxism. At the same time she uses these tools to examine herself and the world she grew up in.
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