The editors of this encyclopedia have no need for a fawning blurb on the back cover because they congratulate themselves in the preface for producing a “pioneering work of scholarship” (xvii). They proclaim that their encyclopedia is “the discipline of Folklore’s first concerted attempt to bring its attention fully to bear on those collective folkways, engagements, attitudes, and preoccupations specific to the lives of women and girls, and on the contributions by women folklorists to the scholarship thereof” (xvii). The editors announce that each entry meets “the highest academic standards of scholarship and analysis.” As a reference work on women’s folklore by and for folklorists, it does stand alone at present, but the question left for review is whether it is worthy of the attention or standards it claims. After all, it is not pioneering for being a folklore reference, because there has been no shortage of folklore encyclopedias lately. One caution for such a review is the need to judge by standards that are different from the monograph or edited volume. If one has not edited such a work, he or she may not appreciate the editorial challenge of balancing the breadth of material that lends credence to the claim of comprehensiveness with sufficient depth within entries to give insight as well as summarize knowledge. Editing the writing can be tricky, too, because encyclopedic style calls not only for succinctness often alien to academic training, but also an objective, rather than polemical, voice. Encyclopedias are expected, above all, to be factual. Even if editors orchestrate the slew of encyclopedia contributors, they still need to find connection for their entries—by theme, structure, and style. Encyclopedias of folklore and folklife present an additional problem for editors: being selective about examples and making sure that summative statements are made because of the empirical tendency of the discipline’s practitioners to avoid generalization in favor of identifying the specific tradition or practice. The editors in the introduction mention their concern for “performance” as an approach, but that hardly distinguishes the work or characterizes the entries overall.
The editors of this reference work risk losing focus by including the subject and its study in their purview. Setting the stage for the rest of the work are overview essays for “women’s folklore,” “folklore about women,” “folklore of subversion,” and “women folklorists.” Most users would probably prefer a summative overview that addresses “women’s folklore,” the topic of the reference work, but it appears that the editors wanted to make a point about the political usage of folklore in the section on “subversion” even though this is not a theme picked up consistently in the entries. Readers in that particular section are scolded that “gender relations are always complex,” but nonetheless it offers the reductionist argument that all of society’s ills derive from patriarchy. The familiar distinction is made in the first two essays between esoteric and exoteric traditions, but that discussion, which does run through many entries, could have been combined into a single introduction. The essay for women folklorists to its credit raises the question of whether one has to be a woman to work in “women’s folklore,” but that is not an issue for this reference work (men are contributors) and might be better incorporated into an introduction. Besides, the definition of women folklorists is debatable: “female persons” who “feel for the organism,” readers are cloudily told. Rather than issue a focus, the editors in the introduction offer this about their organization: “it is organized so that it can be used in a variety of ways.” That tack might have been license to throw everything the editors had on hand into the mix. One can certainly appreciate the enthusiasm of the editors brandishing folkloristic credentials born of the post-FFC (Folklore Feminist Communication) generation to show the field’s arrival with an encyclopedic reference. But this encyclopedia could have been more useful with tighter control and less bulk. That is not to say it is comprehensive, because as I will highlight, it has some glaring omissions and there are questions about repetitive material.
After the overview essays comes the standard A–Z list of entries. But do not expect consistency, or much relation to the dozens of encyclopedias of folklore now on the market, not to mention other encyclopedias of women’s culture. What you get is a hodgepodge of “large topics” and selected “smaller, more specific topics of interest to both professional and general readers,” according to the editors (xvii–xviii). There are just enough mistakes and omissions, especially about the history of the “discipline of Folklore” (I prefer the terminology of “folklore studies” or “folkloristics”) to cast doubt on many other facts one expects from an encyclopedia. Further, it suggests the contemporary parochialism (is the mention of “performance” in the preface coding for ahistorical?). For example, it was the Pennsylvania Folklore Society that was formed in 1924, not the Pennsylvania Folklife Society, which was organized during the 1950s (395). If that error seems minor, consider that it is used to make the point that men dominated material culture work, although no mention is made of Fanny Bergen, a mainstay of the American Folklore Society’s early years, who was probably the first folklorist to discuss quilts as a woman’s folk genre. Martha Beckwith’s use of folklife as term and concept somehow is also absent from discussion. She is hardly a minor figure as the first chair of folklore in North America and president of the American Folklore Society; besides publishing the first handbook to folklore research in the United States, she penned an important contribution to women’s studies and the “modern” idea of literate folk groups in social interaction with her collection of beliefs among Vassar College women. Rather than rehashing the roles of Don Yoder and Alfred Shoemaker in the renewed folklife movement after World War II, the news of the “folklife” essay for an encyclopedia of women’s folklore that includes surveys of pioneering women folklorists could have been in drawing attention to Florence Baver, who established the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Culture Society and Museum during the 1950s. She deserves credit for introducing a “junior folklorists” program to involve K–12 students in fieldwork well before Eliot Wigginton’s Foxfire program came on the scene.
The narrow historical overview of women folklorists totally misses the landmark ascendancy of Charlotte Burne (1850–1923) to president of the Folklore Society in England, where Burne declared that she was the first female president of a learned society in Britain (1909–1910; five years earlier Alice Fletcher became the first woman president of the American Folklore Society, another important milestone missed in the overview) and first woman editor of a folklore journal (1900–1908). She also could be used to make the point about a woman’s perspective in material culture affecting a conceptualization of folklore because she made an argument during the great definitional debates of the “Great Team” of British folklorists for including handicrafts in an expanded notion of folklore as learning of the people. She is also cited as a precursor to contextual/performance approaches to folklore so important to the editors, but her omission is a reminder that the editors’ frame of reference is to a recent movement within the American Folklore Society traced to a special issue of the society’s journal entitled “Women and Folklore” (1975) and the formation of the Women’s Section of the American Folklore Society (hence the reference to its original publication of Folklore Feminists Communication). Maybe the point is that these historiographical issues deserve a separate volume or guidance of scholars with a broader historical vision.
Although the editors want to be global and historical in the encyclopedia’s grand claim to be a reference for all women, the contents are primarily, or provincially, American for coverage of culture and dominantly, or parochially, contemporary. The editors admit in the preface that the global coverage is inadequate but go ahead anyway to provide frustratingly overgeneralized “regional” entries for parts of the world. If the traditions of the Americas are a topical strength of the contributors, focusing on these areas would have made a better, tighter work. This is all the more true considering the pioneering achievement of global coverage in the Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Men and Women in the World’s Cultures (2003) edited by Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember. Or if you want a nice example of what focus can bring to a culturally oriented reference work, see the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (2006) edited by Suad Joseph. Another embellishment to the Encyclopedia of Women’s Folklore and Folklife might have been illustrations, especially for entries on festive, artistic, and ritual genres.
As for tone, the editors declare the perspective of the Encyclopedia to be “unabashedly feminist,” but that is hardly startling news today. They elaborate by stating, “Feminist scholarship has enriched the entire field of Folklore, not only in those areas pertaining to women, and it was feminist scholars who first made a concerted effort to turn the field’s attention to women’s concerns” (xix; yes, “concerted” comes up a lot). Actually, I do not have a problem with that thesis (well, maybe about the claim of “first”), but users do need clarification on the use of “feminism,” particularly in folklore studies. A quick turn of some pages to the entry on “Feminisms” written by two of the editors will not help much, because the entry has to rank as one of the muddier (and markedly brief, considering its importance to the encyclopedia’s approach) descriptions of feminism around. Take a look at the clearer, and conceptually relationist, entries especially focused on the “feminist perspective” written by Cathy Lynn Preston in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (1996), edited by Jan Harold Brunvand, and by M. Jane Young in Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art (1997), edited by Thomas A. Green (and you can judge for yourself the succinct coverage of feminism by Polly Stewart in my own Encyclopedia of American Folklife [2006]). Rhetoricians will have a field day parsing the tautological definition of the “feminisms” entry, since the copyeditor obviously did not catch it: “Folklore about feminism includes all discourses about feminism and feminists,” and if you like your platitudes heaped on in quick succession, read on after the colon: “the individuals and movements struggling against White capitalist heteropatriarchy at all levels—personal, institutional, and global” (170). The conclusion of the “feminisms” entry is also one to assault in composition (or folklore!) class: “Feminism is a philosophy, a method, a politics, a worldview, and a way of life by no means limited to women, the academy, or a particular people, place, or time; nor does it lack in action or practical concepts for change—what is lacking is mainstream reports and support of those alternatives” (175). Is that a polemic or an encyclopedia entry?
If these first-time reference editors do not seem up to the task of the encyclopedia, and a daunting one it is, then I should point out that the volumes are not without virtue. Readers will find pearls of wisdom scattered throughout the text, although sometimes it may appear as if one is indeed diving into murky waters to come up with a lustrous find. The list of contributors includes a number of senior leading lights from folklore studies: Cristina Bacchilega, Norma E. Cantú, Elissa R. Henken, Marsha MacDowell, Joan Newlon Radner, Rachelle Saltzman, Sharon Sherman, Jeannie Banks Thomas, Elizabeth Tucker, Kay Turner, Marta Weigle (occasionally misspelled as Martha), and Margaret R. Yocom. They appropriately appear on the encyclopedic stage with erudite scripts and seem to have been given great latitude in their content. Radner well summarizes ideas about “coding” she helped conceptualize in Feminist Messages (1993), for instance, and Sharon Sherman, author of Documenting Ourselves (1997), aims her mighty scholarly lens in her entry on “film” at feminist documentaries with attention to the important relational issue of “gaze.” Cristina Bacchilega offers a meaty entry on “folktale” covering women tellers as well as widely told folktales about women. Yet the entry on “gender” by Erin Clair is strangely brief and obtuse. The entry on “race” leads with a rhyme reported as a “civil rights era girls’ jump-rope rhyme,” although folk music fans will instantly recognize it as a commercially recorded song by Big Bill Broonzy (1951) that took an old intraracial reference and turned it into a inter-caste one. The entry on “initiation” reads as if it was torn from the author’s dissertation abstract rather than an encyclopedia entry.
Coverage of religion, obviously an area replete with women’s issues, is disappointingly spotty in the encyclopedia. Jewish and Muslim women are given separate entries whereas references to Christian material are diffused through a number of essays. Without explanation, Gullah women as a racial-ethnic group are given a separate entry along with a broad essay on “First Nations of North America,” but other ethnic groups are given short shrift; you should look for material on Amish, Mennonite, Mexican, and Italian women elsewhere, even though scholarship abounds on these groups. I was happy to see some age groups featured such as “girls’ folklore” and “elder care,” although the storied periods of adolescence and midlife are not covered. Overall, occupational entries are under-represented, although the entries on the few categories included are worth a look: “farm women’s folklore,” “housekeeping,” “military women’s folklore,” “mothers’ folklore,” “midwifery,” “sex work.” Coverage of sexuality and bodylore appears to be a strength of the encyclopedia with a good assortment of essays on “androgyny,” “beauty,” “chastity,” “cross-dressing,” “infertility,” “lesbian folklore,” “menopause,” “menstruation,” “prostitution,” “rape,” “transgender folklore,” and “virginity.” But that decided strength will probably be lost in the tangle of different threads running through the volumes.
To get at the heart of standards for evaluating a reference work, we should ask what distinguishes the content of this encyclopedia from other reference works, since many folklore encyclopedias now include a raft of women’s materials. The potential value of this reference work is in providing definitive explorations of women’s genres, groups, and processes. Although much of the content overlaps with other reference works, I maintain that the identification of distinctive women’s genres and processes is potentially the best use of this encyclopedia, but a good deal of sifting is necessary to find the textual gems. In material culture, one can contemplate the “birth chair,” which is not likely to be in a furniture reference work, or “altar, home,” “fans, language of,” “henna art/Mehndi,” “jingle dress,” “recipe books,” and “scrapbooks.” Under custom and ritual are the compelling entries of “croning,” “mock wedding,” “veiling,” “cult of the virgin,” and “wife sales” that probably one will not find covered either in many reference works or Wikipedia (I checked). Oral tradition receives more than its share of summative essays, such as “ballad,” “folk poetry,” “folktale,” “joke,” “lament,” “myth studies,” “proverb,” “recitation,” “rhymes,” “riddle,” “rumor,” and “storytelling.” The editors must have thought a lot of legend, because it is subdivided into four survey entries: local, religious, supernatural, and urban/contemporary. They profile a few characters, although they could have expanded this line of inquiry much further: “Bloody Mary,” “Lizzie Borden,” “Calamity Jane,” “Cinderella,” “La Llorona,” “Lilith” (but where’s “Eve” or “Ruth?”), “Mother Goose,” “Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Stepmother,” “Walled-up Wife,” and “Yellow Woman.” Credit should be given to the editors for inclusion of some genres and themes of verbal art that do not typically get encyclopedic coverage: “gossip,” “cursing,” “menarche stories,” “naming practices,” “‘old wives’ tales,’” “recitation,” “vagina dentata,” and “vaginal serpent.” One gets body piercing and tattoos under “body modification,” but nothing about nails, and an amazing absence of entries for “dress,” “clothing,” and “shoes” (although “hair” is given an entry). And where are significant social psychological concepts of “mammismo,” “breast (or body) obsession/taboo,” and “womb envy?”
To help readers sift through the contents, a single general index is provided at the end of the second volume. Perhaps most useful is the “Guide to Related Topics” at the front of the first volume. Its headings order some of the topical array in the encyclopedia. A sizeable list comes under “Domestic Life,” “Life Cycle,” and “Feminism,” as one would expect; heartening is the special heading for “Folklore as a Profession” with coverage of “American Folklore Society—Women’s Section,” “Folklore Feminists Communication,” “Folklore Studies Association of Canada,” “fieldwork,” and “public folklore.” If this encyclopedia does not stand up as a tight, polished—or pioneering—work, at least here and there it serves as a reminder that folklorists have something significant to say about women, gender, and sexuality.
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[Review length: 2820 words • Review posted on August 20, 2009]