The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings, by Rela Mazali
reviewed by Leslie Cohen

Rela Mazali. Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings. Stanford Univ. Press, 2001. 382 pp. Paper: $24.95.

Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings is an in-depth examination of the metaphorical and literal meanings of “a woman’s place.” The author takes a strongly feminist position in delineating these concepts: she relates the restriction of women’s movements to their intellectual containment, due to cultural definitions of space. Mazali examines the processes of “footbinding and mindbinding” to demonstrate how women have been “kept in place” by their cultures. Through interviews with both real and imagined women, the book explores a number of societies, showing how in each one, starting in childhood, the woman “habituates the glass corridors through which she must learn to move.” The story travels in time as well as place, going back in history to the journal of a female Marco Polo, supposedly written in the thirteenth century. At the heart of the book lies the complex process of authenticating the manuscript, which requires scientific and linguistic investigations, and reveals the intense emotional involvement of the historian. What is strikingly original about Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings is its integration of fiction, scholarly research, and ethnographic interviewing. The interviews are transcribed with all the halts and hesitations of each individual speaker in an attempt to provide a faithful recording of authentic speech patterns. References to scholarly works are included within the body of the text, and a chapter called “Housekeys”—placed in the middle of the book, rather than at the end—gives bibliographic details. Mazali seems to have invented a feminist methodology, one in which scholarly references are abundant but easily accessible to the lay reader.