23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Puritan Femininity, August 8, 2006
This review is from: Beyond Stateliest Marble: The Passionate Femininity of Anne Bradstreet (Leaders in Action) (Hardcover)
This book is part of the Leaders in Action series, which means it is not a typical biography. These books are usually written in three parts, each one focusing on the life, the character, and the legacy of the subject, in this case, Anne Bradstreet.
The book does describe her life, but more importantly, her views on life. Anne was a Puritan, through and through, and she was a beautiful woman in whose footsteps the women of today would do well to follow. She knew her place, and delighted in her role as a woman. She lived with passion, and the book describes those things, people, and ideas about which she was passionate. I look to Anne as an ideal of a Godly woman, a woman whose many virtues I would like to mirror.
Wilson makes the point that Anne was a typical Puritan in her beliefs and views. She does not conform to the Puritan stereotype, which is not Puritan at all, but more like a grim Victorian outlook. The Puritans were sober but not grim. They valued their women, and their education. They were passionate about life.
I recommend the book to those who want a better understanding of Anne's character, and that of her times, and those who want to see the life of an exemplary Christian woman.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Character Worth Emulating, January 1, 2012
Rather than a thoroughgoing chronological examination of Anne Bradstreet's life, this devotional biography delves deeply into her character. (This, by the way, is a perfectly valid way to write a biography and was the point of the Leaders in Action series. It's not the flaw other reviewers have made it out to be.) Anne Bradsreet proves an excellent subject for such an approach as her life provides ample illustration for a host of excellent attributes. Chapter after chapter I found myself convicted of my own shortcomings and called with clarity to greater virtue. It's remarkable how godly people can remain models of behavior across the centuries to people yet unborn. Anne Bradstreet continues to be an older woman (three hundred years older!) teaching us younger ones.
My only quibble with the book was the poor editing. I've read several other books and many articles by Mr. Wilson, I read his blog almost daily, and I've listened to hundreds of his sermons. He just doesn't produce phrasing and punctuation clunkers at this rate, so I must assume that those were a product of the editing process.
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9 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Where's Anne?, September 25, 2007
This review is from: Beyond Stateliest Marble: The Passionate Femininity of Anne Bradstreet (Leaders in Action) (Hardcover)
I originally thought this book was of Anne's poetry, with a mere introduction by Douglas Wilson. Instead, it is a study of her life by him. Unfortunetly, I must agree with the first reviewer: rather than making this a moving tribute, Douglas Wilson has merely attempted to turn it into a testimony of his own views of womanhood.
Apparently, there's some disagreement about how Anne viewed womanhood. Most readers believe she saw more of womanhood than many of her time, whereas people like Wilson prefer to see her as a woman who "knew her place." Wilson harps on and on about how Anne let the men rule like a good little girl and didn't try to compete with them. The book basically turns into an anti-feminist, pro-submissive book rather than an appreciation of a brilliant poet.
Wilson spends a good deal of time explaining how spiritually unhealthy feminists are and how lovely Anne Bradstreet was. He fills pages with how modern women today would be horrified by Anne's "true" leadership because we're too jaded by feminism and how Anne herself would be horrified by how women today are not complimenting manhood the way we should. The only thing I found more humorous than Wilson's thinly disguised anti-equality tirade is how grossly he and so many of his ilk simply don't get Biblical egalitarianism! Once again, his faulty understanding of equality keeps him from realizing what power Anne really had. Wilson claims that feminists today would see Anne's influential leadership as secondary and not good enough, but he couldn't be more wrong, at least as far as I'm concerned. I'm no feminist, but I am an egalitarian (which to Wilson is the same) and I greatly appreciate the tendency of historical women to lead by influence since there were few times that they could do anything else. Indeed, this has always been one of women's greatest strengths, today and back then! Many a historical woman held the upper hand because they led in such a way that men couldn't even tell the scope of their influence, or see the changes they were making and the power that they had. This is the sort of leader that Anne was, and I couldn't care less whether she did this as a warrior queen or a quietly instructional woman. To say that she didn't share egalitarian beliefs to ANY extent is as erroneous and ridiculous as claiming that Mark Twain didn't really believe in racial equality. As an advocate for gender equality, I very much admire Anne Bradstreet's power of leadership, as well as the men in her life who were gracious and secure enough to celebrate it.
At one point, Wilson attempts to prove that Anne Bradstreet was opposed to feminism by sharing a line of her poetry in which she spoke of a woman usurping her husband's place as king. She said this of the woman:
"like a brave virago she played the rex, and was both shame and glory of her sex."
(Lord, does that beautiful line give me chills!) Douglas Wilson apparently thinks this line alone proves that Anne would have hated feminism, and I had to wonder if he was serious. Anne admitted that the woman in question was shame AND glory of her sex; this sounds to me like Anne was referring to the fact that the woman merely shamed the stereotype of what her sex was supposed to be and, in so doing, broke free of the restrictions of her gender and became a glory unto herself even as she was considered a shame by other women. Indeed, I too would wish to be a shame to the narrow mold of womanhood that people of the time held and that people like Douglas Wilson still hold.
Even more amusingly, Wilson later says that Anne was a Christian and understood the "order of the world" (ie, men in charge) but she did understand that occasionally, sometimes, God could use a Deborah. And by realizing this RARE exception, Wilson said she wrote a poem saying Queen Elizabeth "cast aside the aspersions of her sex" and no people were ruled better than hers. And Wilson calls this an admittance that she knew ruling women were RARE? That's just cute. There was no such hint in her words; they made it remarkably plain she thought women more than capable of ruling, NO exception.
In fact, an unbiased critic of a body of Anne's work confirmed that she did, indeed, see her sex as something far greater than the narrow mold that the Douglas Wilsons of the time wished to put her in. She not only scorned those who told her that needlework was more suitable than writing, but "masked her true intentions" by appearing to flatter male writers and acknowledge them as superior! Apparently, Douglas Wilson bought her flattery hook, line and sinker just like some of the men of her time, because he actually claims in the book that she realized male writers were superior! I had to laugh at that.
If you're looking for a fine work dedicated to Anne Bradstreet, I suggest you look elsewhere. I myself plan to get Nichols' book, "Anne Bradstreet: A guided Tour". Nichols' book contains the lady's actual poetry and only brief outside notes.
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