Merlin Stone Remembered

A tribute to the life of one of the pre-eminent figures in the goddess worship cultural movement of the 1970s and 1980s, lovingly composed by her surviving life partner Lenny Schneir, has the expected features of a posthumous retrospective—family reminiscences, a little bit of scholarly contextualization, and the old photographs, fan letters, and unpublished writings that emerge when a loved one raids the files to find everything possible to share. Taken together, they offer a somewhat more complex view of a figure sometimes remembered mostly in short feminist sound bites from the 1980s. Schneir’s opening personal memoir, even with writing help from Carol Thomas, is bland and linear. An extended excerpt from When God Was a Woman offers nothing new to likely readers. Much more interesting are a miscellany of lecture notes and essays, in particular, one from a pamphlet on racism that highlights Stone’s broader interest in historically informed activism. Those who share Schneir’s idolization of Stone will find much to delight them, but this material adds little of actual significance to the understanding of her work. (Dec.)