The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1994, Qupperneq 56

166
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
SPRING, 1994
men!
Quotations
to
about men,
by Women
By Betty Jane Wylie
Toronto: Key Porter Books,
1993. Pp. 192.
Reviewed by Anne Brydon
“Are men afraid we will mock them?”
Well might Rita Mae Brown ask, and
well might some men think when
first reading the title of Betty Jane
Wylie’s latest offering. Relax, fellows.
Wylie intends to entertain rather
than torment her readers (of both
genders) and, happily, she has
succeeded in this endeavour,
providing us with a source book
brimming with wit and insight.
Women will undoubtedly laugh with
recognition at many of these
observations, and men will laugh too
- although, perhaps, a little more
sheepishly.
While writing this review, I
couldn’t resist letting these diverse
women’s voices be heard: quoting
becomes infectious when the ex-
pressions are this delicious. A
quotable line can bestow immortality
on its author. Intriguingly, decades
or centuries do not much alter the
sentiments underscoring some of
these words, despite changes in the
vernacular. George Eliot once
described a man as “a cock who
thought the sun had risen to hear
him crow.” More recently, Zsa Zsa
Gabor derisively noted that “macho
does not prove mucho.”
Although ostensibly about men,
Wylie’s book also chronicles women’s
understandings of their own lives.
Some of those understandings are
tinged with anger, such as Lady
Nancy As tor’s comment that “women
have got to make the world safe for
men since men have made it so
darned unsafe for women.” Others,
like Gloria Steinem’s, are ironic:
“women age, but men mature” while
yet others, like Bella Abzug’s, are
blunt: “all the men on my staff can
type.” This book shows off women’s
accumulated life wisdom in a par-
ticularly female fashion. As Simone
de Beauvoir notes, “a man would
never get the notion of writing a book
on the peculiar situation of the
human male.”
Arranging the quotations under
general subject headings make
browsing in this book all the more
fun. Feeling resigned? Look under