Jones, Ann 1937–

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Jones, Ann 1937–

(Ann Maret Jones)

PERSONAL: Born September 3, 1937, in Eau Claire, WI; daughter of Oscar Trygve (an insurance broker) and Bernice (a musician) Slagsvol. Education: Attended University of Vienna, 1958; University of Wisconsin, B.S., 1960, Ph.D., 1970; University of Michigan, M.A., 1961.

ADDRESSES: Home—Northampton, MA. Agent—Ms. Ellen Geiger, Frances Goldin Literary Agency, 57 E. 11th St., #5B, New York, NY 10003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer, journalist, photographer, educator, women's rights advocate, and civil rights activist. City College of New York, assistant professor of English, 1970–73; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA, assistant professor of English and coordinator of women's studies, 1973–75; freelance writer, New York, NY, beginning 1975; Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, member of writing faculty, 1986–97. Human rights researcher, women's advocate, and English instructor in Afghanistan, 2002–. New York State Council for the Arts, literary panelist, 1982–86; Millay Colony for the Arts, board member, 1984–97; University of Southern Maine, visiting professor, 1985; Lake George Arts Council, writer-in-residence, 1986; distinguished visiting writer, Boise State University, 1997; Manhattanville College, Writers' Conference faculty, 1986, 1994, 1997, and 2000–02.

MEMBER: PEN, Authors Guild, National Writers Union, National Book Critics Circle.

AWARDS, HONORS: Author/Journalist of the Year, National Prisoner Rights Union, 1986; Society of American Travel Writers awards for feature writing, 1994 and 1996; Writing and Society Award, University of Massachusetts, 2006.

WRITINGS:

Uncle Tom's Campus, Praeger (New York, NY), 1973.

Women Who Kill, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (New York, NY), 1980, 2nd revised edition, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

Everyday Death: The Case of Bernadette Powell, Holt (New York, NY), 1985.

(With Susan Schechter) When Love Goes Wrong: What to Do When You Can't Do Anything Right, Harper-Collins (New York, NY), 1992.

Next Time, She'll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1994, revised and updated edition, 2000.

Guide to America's Outdoors: Middle-Atlantic, photography by Skip Brown, National Geographic Society (Washington, DC), 2001.

Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.

Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan, Metropolitan (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, Morrow (New York, NY), 1980; Women's Worlds: From the New Scholarship, Praeger (New York, NY), 1985; The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism, Pergamon, 1990; Living with the Enemy, Aperture, 1991; Censored, Shelburne Press, 1994; A Woman's World, Travelers Tales, 1995; Good Girls/Bad Girls, Rutgers University Press, 1996; Women: Images and Realities, Mayfield, 1998; Women in the Wild, Travelers Tales, 1998; Guns and Violence, Greenhaven, 1999; A Woman's Passion for Travel, Travelers Tales, 1999; Feminism, Greenhaven, 2000; 365 Days, Travelers Tales, 2001; Violence and Gender, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2003.

Contributor of articles and reviews to numerous periodicals, including Nation, Ms., New York Times, Newsday, Vogue, American Heritage, Mirabella, Women's Rights Law Reporter, Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Spur, Women's Sports, Women's Review of Books, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Lear's, Diversion, and Christian Science Monitor.

Jones's works have been translated into German, French, Dutch, Czech, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese.

SIDELIGHTS: Ann Jones has written about a wide variety of women's issues. Her first book, Uncle Tom's Campus, is based on her year-long experience teaching at an African-American college in the southern United States. The pseudonymous Thomas College of her book is part of the network of publicly and privately funded institutions that served to educate generations of African Americans when racist policies barred them from white universities. Colleges like Thomas provided an atmosphere conducive to achievement and could count among their graduates some of the most prominent leaders of the civil rights movement. Yet in her book, Jones charges that she encountered a misguided bureaucracy at the college whose primary aim was to keep as much money and power in its own hands as possible.

Uncle Tom's Campus recounts the old-fashioned academic procedures, outdated textbooks, and subtle racism that hindered Thomas's students from having solid academic experiences. Jones asserts that such colleges encourage separatist tendencies that might ultimately have unfortunate consequences when their students enter a more integrated society after graduation. New York Times contributor Fred M. Hechinger opined that Jones's book on the mismanagement of an unnamed college could reflect badly on the more than one hundred African-American colleges that the author does not consider. "The outright law-breaking and cruel deceptions that properly outraged Dr. Jones call for legal as well as academic measures," Hechinger wrote. "But these cannot be taken on the basis of pseudonyms that tend to make the expose generic, and thus unfair, rather than specific, and thereby effective."

Jones's background in women's issues led to her next book, Women Who Kill, an examination of murders committed by women throughout American history. Jones begins by recounting notorious cases from colonial times, when puritanical religious oppression often led to abominable conditions for women and a rash of infanticides. Indentured women were prohibited from marrying, and if they were raped by their employers and a pregnancy resulted, they faced public scorn and whippings for their "promiscuity." In addition, their resulting children were indentured. Consequently, many frightened women gave birth in secret and then killed their babies. Jones points out that what many may consider a heinous crime was the only rational solution in the eyes of the perpetrators.

Women Who Kill chronicles many types of murder. Some, like the eighteenth-century infanticide cases, seem justifiable, while others tread a thin line between a warranted reaction to societal oppression and outright criminal intent. For each of the incidents the author provides background that she considers essential to understanding the motives of the women murderers. Jones also discusses their subsequent punishment or acquittal and explains the ways in which the American legal system treats women murderers differently according to their race and class. For instance, the infamous ax murderer Lizzie Borden was acquitted in 1871 for slaying her father and stepmother because it seemed unthinkable that a woman of her social standing could commit such a terrible crime.

Another section of Women Who Kill involves cases of women who murdered their spouses after enduring years of physical abuse. Such incidents illustrate the author's thesis that women kill because the society in which they live, with its male-dominated institutions of church, civic leadership, and law enforcement, offers them little protection. Because women who kill their abusers must often plan some aspect of the crime, it has been difficult for them to be acquitted on grounds of self-defense. One woman who was acquitted, however, was Francine Hughes, who set fire to her abusive husband's bed while he slept. Jones also discusses similar cases in which the women perpetrators were judged more harshly by the legal system.

Critiquing Women Who Kill for the New York Times Book Review, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison faulted Jones's arguments for their denial of individual responsibility, and stated that "only a doctrinaire feminist who sees conspiracies everywhere is likely to accept unquestioningly all of Miss Jones's theories." Yet Harrison also acknowledged that "the implicit questions raised by this book are challenging and vexing; the questions that are raised explicitly are provocative and original," and noted that Women Who Kill "is not intended to soothe or to entertain but to stimulate rage." Village Voice contributor Wendy Kaminer described Jones's book as "an intelligent, scrupulously researched account," and observed that the author's "analysis is persuasive: She's smart, and her writing is clear, direct, and sharp enough to cut through a thicket of traditional criminological theories and cultural myths about women."

Jones's next work expanded upon one of the cases discussed in Women Who Kill. Everyday Death: The Case of Bernadette Powell relates the story of a New York woman who was serving a fifteen-year sentence for shooting a husband who had beaten her so severely on two occasions that she required hospitalization. As Jones notes, the man who prosecuted Bernadette Powell had also battered his own wife. Before the trial began, his estranged wife made public the years of physical abuse she had suffered at the hands of the respected public prosecutor.

In an interview with the Boston Globe at the time of the book's publication, Jones discussed her own childhood in a household dominated by an abusive father. Her own experiences drove her to write about violence against women and the case of Powell in particular. "I just get mad when I see bad things being done to people unable to stick up for themselves," Jones said. "I feel I have to stick up for them." The author also discussed the circumstances of the Powell case and Bernadette Powell's further victimization as a poor, uneducated African-American women at the hands of the legal system. "She was not a fully functional person at the time because of all she had been through," Jones explained in the Boston Globe interview. "People don't understand how psychologically devastating that is. My guess is that she was not competent to stand trial and assist in her own defense. Once she was caught up in a system as a poor black woman, it was all over."

Subsequent books by Jones further explore issues of violence against women, such as When Love Goes Wrong: What to Do When You Can't Do Anything Right, cowritten with Susan Schechter. The authors point out that even women who are married to men who do not physically abuse them may be at risk of future violence. According to Jones and Schechter, men may vent anger toward women in a variety of ways, and when the controls that have kept their rage in check are threatened, a woman may find herself in a potentially deadly situation. The first section of the book gives case histories and guidelines that help the reader determine whether she is in a potentially risky situation; the next part provides information on extracting oneself from an abusive relationship and lists organizations that provide shelter, counseling, and legal assistance. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that When Love Goes Wrong is "of great importance for abused women and professionals who counsel them."

Jones is also the author of Next Time, She'll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It, which details the abuse suffered by women within the legal system when they try to get help. She recounts statistics on domestic violence in America and relates instances of slipshod police procedures and legal maneuvering that hinder women from receiving assistance in the legal arena. In the final chapter Jones puts forth propositions to improve the current system.

Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa is a departure from Jones's previous works on domestic abuse and feminist themes. The book, which New York Times Book Review contributor Michael Upchurch considered "highly amusing," is an account of a trip Jones made with a companion, British photographer Kevin Muggleton, in search of the woman-ruled Lovedu tribe, who live in a remote mountain valley in a northern area of South Africa. The pair set out from London in a Land Rover, driving through Europe and entering Africa through Morocco. They made their way down the west coast of the continent and then across the Sahara and Congo, finally reaching Kenya before their personal differences caused them to split. As Jones explains, Muggleton's impatience to cover long distances as quickly as possible contrasted with her own desire to linger on the journey. Leaving Muggleton in Nairobi, she continued to South Africa with two new companions, both women, and succeeded in locating the Lovedu and their Rain Queen.

Critical opinion of Looking for Lovedu, though mixed, was generally positive. In the Washington Post Book World, Mark Hertsgaard observed that the book's "nifty premise" was compromised by its focus on the travelers' personality clashes. Upchurch, however, found this emphasis quite funny, noting that the book sometimes suggests a "hybrid of 'Out of Africa' and 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God'" with Muggleton as a "brilliant comic invention" who adds significant appeal to the narrative. Books & Culture reviewer Alexis Beggs Olsen, however, saw the book as the chronicle of an exotic adventure that ultimately "celebrates the willful self-indulgence of a glorified Tourist" rather than showing the lives of real Africans in any detail. Rebecca A Clay, in the Wilson Quarterly, expressed similar disappointment in Jones's reliance on generalizations, but found her descriptions of travel hardships "unforgettable"; at the same time, Clay noted that it was Muggleton's insistence on speed that prevented Jones from making the kind of connections that could have brought more intimacy to her portrait of Africa.

Other reviewers, however, found Looking for Lovedu an unqualified success. In Book, Elizabeth Kiem praised Jones's scholarship and descriptive prose, noting that the book "manages to be both contemporary and time-less." Booklist contributor Mary Carroll hailed it as a "vivid, appreciative survey" of the African continent and its peoples. A writer for Publishers Weekly, noting that the book "affords a startling glimpse of modern Africa," found both lightheartedness and "deeper significance" in Jones's account of her journey.

In her next book, Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan, Jones recounts disturbing tales from her foray as an aid worker in prisons and schools in Afghanistan in the post-Taliban era. Jones's report is a "chilling account," observed Allison Block in Booklist. She makes many cultural and social observations within the book, as in her examination of the peculiar Afghan sport of buzkashi, in which mounted horsemen vie against each other for physical possession of a dead calf. However, most of her commentary is reserved for the status of women in post-Taliban Afghanistan and Kabul. Tragically, what Jones saw most often was that the status of women had changed little following the removal of the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban from power. The overthrow of the Taliban had additionally created a new world of female outcasts in the form of war widows, fleeing child brides, and women forced into prostitution to survive. Searingly, she points out the glaring hypocrisy and untruths of U.S. declarations that Afghan women had been liberated from the tyranny of the Taliban and that infrastructure within Afghanistan had been restored. Jones's first-hand observations were that these claims simply were not true, that the shattered country remained in a shambles and that women were still oppressed, victimized, and brutalized by men and by a religious system that afforded them no rights. One sobering statistic that Jones relates is that ninety-five percent of Afghan women are victims of violence, yet have no means of recourse. Worse, many of the abuses and depredations are inflicted by the women's own closest relatives. Especially maddening is Jones's documentation of the situation of many women in prison who have been "imprisoned for the crime of having been abused in various ways by men," as when a woman forced into prostitution by her husband is convicted of adultery and imprisoned, noted Lisa Klopfer in the Library Journal. Gilbert Cruz, writing in Entertainment Weekly, called Kabul in Winter an "illuminating and complex book," while a Publishers Weekly contributor commented that Jones's "sharp eye and quick wit enable vivid writing" and lucid observations. "This achingly candid commentary brings the country's sobering truths to light," Block concluded.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Affilia Journal of Women and Social Work, spring, 1993, Bonnie L. Yegidis, review of When Love Goes Wrong: What to Do When You Can't Do Anything Right, p. 109.

Book, January, 2001, Elizabeth Kiem, review of Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa, p. 80.

Booklist, January 1, 2001, Mary Carroll, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 904; February 1, 2006, Allison Block, review of Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan, p. 18.

Books & Culture, November-December, 2001, Alexis Beggs Olsen, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 32.

Boston Globe, August 12, 1985, interview with Ann Jones.

California Lawyer, March, 1994, Chris Lehmann and Nina Schuyler, review of Next Time, She'll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It, p. 84.

Choice, May, 1994, Y. Peterson, review of Next Time, She'll Be Dead, p. 1509.

Entertainment Weekly, March 3, 2006, Gilbert Cruz, review of Kabul in Winter, p. 106.

Florida Bar Journal, June, 1981, Ruthann Robson, review of Women Who Kill, p. 436.

Glamour, January, 1994, Ann Jones, review of Next Time, She'll be Dead, p. 142.

Law & Society Review, May, 1995, Jo Dixon, review of Next Time, She'll Be Dead, pp. 359-376.

Library Journal, June 1, 1985, Gregor Preston, review of Everyday Death: The Case of Bernadette Powell, p. 138; August, 1994, Pamela A. Kress, review of When Love Goes Wrong and Next Time, She'll Be Dead, p. 107; December, 2000, Edward K. Owusu-Ansah, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 168; February 15, 2006, Lisa Klopfer, review of Kabul in Winter, p. 136.

Ms., October, 1985, Karen Lindsey, review of Everyday Death, p. 33; January-February, 1992, Susan Faludi, "Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women," p. 58; September-October, 1994, Gloria Jacobs, "Where Do We Go from Here?," interview with Ann Jones, p. 56.

New York Review of Books, June 21, 2001, Neal Ascherson, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 26.

New York Times, October 11, 1981, review of Women Who Kill, p. 47; January 26, 2001, Richard Bernstein, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. E44.

New York Times Book Review, October 26, 1980, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, review of Women Who Kill, p. 7; June 3, 2001, Michael Upchurch, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 6.

Publishers Weekly, January 6, 1992, review of When Loves Goes Wrong, p. 59; November 8, 1993, review of Next Time, She'll Be Dead, p. 62; November 20, 2000, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 55; January 9, 2006, review of Kabul in Winter, p. 45.

School Library Journal, July, 2001, Judy McAloon, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 137.

Village Voice, November 26, 1980, Wendy Kaminer, review of Women Who Kill, p. 41.

Washington Post Book World, May 20, 2001, Mark Hertsgaard, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. T6.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 2001, Rebecca A. Clay, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 119.

Women's Review of Books, March, 1994, Mimi Wesson, review of Next Time She'll Be Dead, p. 1; October, 2001, Cheryl Fish, review of Looking for Lovedu, p. 21.