Washington Post Book Reviews
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Saturday January 29, 2011
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PERILOUS FIGHT: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812-1815
Stephen Budiansky
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307270696
422 pages
$35
Reviewed by Evan Thomas
Reading Stephen Budiansky's rousing story of the naval War of 1812, it is hard not to hum a few bars of the old Aretha Franklin standby. Respect is what the Americans wanted from their former colonial masters, and respect is what they got.
Great Britain in the early 19th century ruled the waves. Her navy was 100 times the size of America's, and the British were arrogant, to say the least, about asserting their superiority from sea to shore. Routinely stopping American ships to "press" sailors into the Royal Navy, ever-hungry for manpower to fight the Napoleonic Wars, the British ignored American protests.
Budiansky, who writes with sure and vivid command, describes three British warships "carrying on their usual routine of lobbing cannonballs across the bows of merchantmen passing into New York" on the evening of April 25, 1806. One of the cannonballs decapitated the helmsman of a sloop, provoking angry mobs in New York, and some Americans began to talk of war. The rumblings grew to a roar in 1807, when a British warship, the Leopard, casually fired into an American frigate, the Chesapeake, off the Virginia coast, killing four men and seriously wounding seven others.
The fledgling American navy had a strict culture of honor in its officer corps. "One in twelve American navy officers who died on active duty before 1815 were killed in duels, eighteen in all," Budiansky writes; "easily twice that number had fought a duel, and every officer lived with the knowledge that his reputation for courage was always liable to be tested on the field of honor." After the ignominious surrender of the Chesapeake to the Leopard, American officers fought nine duels over who should be blamed for the humiliation.
By 1812, America was engaged in a hopelessly lopsided naval war with Great Britain. Though outgunned, the Americans were blessed with several well-built heavy frigates and some indomitable fighting captains. One of them, a short, pudgy man named Isaac Hull, was unusual in that he avoided duels and rarely ordered his men flogged. But in August 1812 off the Grand Banks, his ship, the Constitution, astounded the world by taking a British frigate, the Guerriere, in a brutal close-range gun battle.
When, after dark, the Americans boarded the wrecked British warship, they found a "slaughterhouse," Budiansky writes. "The men who were still sober were throwing the dead overboard, but many of the petty officers and crewmen had broken into the spirit locker and were screaming drunk."
That autumn, two more British ships fell in single-ship actions to the upstart Americans. After the Java succumbed to the Constitution off Brazil, the Naval Chronicle, a widely read official newspaper in London, cried, "Another frigate has fallen into the hands of the enemy! -- The subject is too painful for us to dwell on." The British complained that the Americans ("a navy so small we scarcely know where to find it") were playing a dastardly trick by pitting their heavy frigates against slightly less well-armed British ones. It was ungentlemanly to take such advantage.
To avenge British honor, Capt. Philip Broke of His Majesty's Frigate Shannon challenged the Chesapeake (rebuilt from her 1807 wounds) to a ship-to-ship duel off Boston harbor in June 1813. "Choose your terms," Broke wrote the Chesapeake's captain, James Lawrence, "but let us meet." Lawrence took up the gauntlet. The battle, which lasted all of 15 minutes, was a bloodbath.
Budiansky describes Capt. Broke "waving the heavy Scottish broadsword he favored in battle," clambering aboard the Chesapeake, dodging a pistol shot from the chaplain and hacking off his arm in return, while shouting for his men to follow him forward.
Afterward, in England, "the exultation was hyperbolic bordering on the manic," Budiansky writes. But the Admiralty sent a "secret & confidential" directive to all British captains forbidding any further ship-to-ship combat with those pesky, heavy American frigates.
In 1814, the British burned Washington. The terms of the eventual peace treaty gave the Americans at best a draw. But the British never again attempted to press an American seaman or hinder American trade on the high seas. American sovereignty was now unquestioned.
Dueling went on, however. In 1820, one of America's most glamorous captains, Stephen Decatur, was mortally wounded by another captain aggrieved over a long-ago perceived insult. John Quincy Adams wrote sadly that Decatur possessed "a sense of honor too disdainful of life." Such sentiment seems quaint, almost archaic now; but a sense of honor was useful to a rising nation in 1812.
Evan Thomas, the author of "The War Lovers"  and "John Paul Jones," is writing a biography of President Eisenhower.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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A STRANGE STIRRING: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
Stephanie Coontz
Basic
ISBN 978-0465002009
222 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Elaine Showalter
When our daughter was born in 1965, my husband sat by the hospital bed dutifully reading Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique"  (1963). In her first paragraph, Friedan famously describes "a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning" in the minds of middle-class American housewives. "The Feminine Mystique" was the right book at the right time; it jolted women readers, including myself, into an awareness of their need "to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings," along with men.
While Friedan didn't anticipate all the strategies of the women's liberation movement -- she would help invent them a few years later -- and didn't try to address all of women's problems, her message of self-development was very inspiring to me when I was in my 20s.
Although she is only a few years younger than I am, the eminent social historian Stephanie Coontz, whose books include "Marriage: a History" (2005), had not read "The Feminine Mystique" and grew up with the belief that Friedan was a great feminist pioneer for her mother's generation, not her own. When her editor suggested that she write about Friedan, Coontz was startled to discover that she found the book "repetitive and overblown," "boring and dated." She didn't like Friedan's egotism and simplifications of women's history in the 20th century either. No wonder, as she admits, "I wasn't sure of my ultimate focus."
This is not a very stirring declaration, and initially it seems that Coontz comes to bury Friedan rather than praise her.
The first half of "A Strange Stirring," incorporating statistics, interviews and details about American women in the mid-20th century, reads like a dutiful book report, rather than a labor of love. Coontz decided to focus on the women who read "The Feminine Mystique" when it came out, the wives and daughters of the World War II veterans immortalized as the "greatest generation," perhaps the "Gallup generation," because every aspect of their lives seemed to have been measured and ranked by the Gallup Polls. She studied the emotional and intimate letters to Friedan in the archive at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard and interviewed nearly 200 people who had read Friedan's book soon after its publication and vividly recalled it. She also immersed herself in the major women's magazines of the time, getting a sense of the expectations and advice directed to women readers.
Discovering the actual lives of Friedan's first readers gave her insight into the impact of the book, and, she says, "gradually my appreciation ... grew." Coontz's narrative catches fire when she tells the story of Anne Parsons, who wrote an eight-page letter to Friedan in 1963. The daughter of the famous Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, who had asserted the importance of traditional gender roles in the family, Anne resisted this parental and social message and became an anthropologist. Yet she felt marginalized by colleagues who regarded her as "aggressive, competitive, rejecting of femininity." In despair, later that year she committed herself to a mental institution, and in 1964 she committed suicide. Coontz is also impressed by Constance Ahrons, one of her academic heroines, who reveals in her interview that "The Feminine Mystique" had rescued her from the limbo of depression and boredom and encouraged her to pursue a Ph.D. Coontz understands the plight of these talented academic women, but sees them as figures of the distant past.
Coontz's penultimate chapter, "Demystifying The Feminine Mystique," protests that Friedan did not single-handedly awaken American women, that the women's liberation movement had many origins and "certainly would have taken off without Friedan's book."
She argues that Friedan built on the work of many unacknowledged precursors, including Mirra Komarovsky, Eve Merriam and Simone de Beauvoir. But Coontz concludes with a qualified defense: "It in no way disparages Friedan's accomplishments to point out that The Feminine Mystique was not ahead of its time," she writes. "Books don't became best-sellers because they are ahead of their time. They become best-sellers because they tap into concerns that people are already mulling over, pull together ideas and data that have not yet spread beyond specialists and experts, and bring these all together in a way that is easy to understand and explain to others." Coontz concedes that "The Feminine Mystique" was "powerful and moving" for its time, but she does not see it as relevant to the emerging young generation of the 1960s, to which both she and I belong. Her faint praise, I suspect, shows how rapidly and deeply Friedan's ideas have indeed changed the world our generation came to inhabit.
Elaine Showalter is professor emerita of English at Princeton University.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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