Review

Schipper, Mineke. 2006. Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women

in the Proverbs around the World. Amsterdam:

Amsterdam UP.

Mineke Schipper's Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet is a fascinating and painstaking examination of proverbs about women from various cultures and periods of history. In the process of researching her book, Schipper compiled a list of approximately sixteen thousand proverbs in two hundred and forty-five languages from over one hundred and fifty countries across the world. These statistics should indicate the ambitiousness of her research.

Schipper adopts a crosscultural, transhistorical approach to her subject, presenting the proverbs by their subject rather than by their origin. Her aim in doing so is to highlight the many commonalities between cultures that result from people having common needs and experiences, and thereby to break down the potentially dangerous divisions caused by viewing humankind as being made up of "us" and "them" (2006:13). Consequently, she has organised her study into categories such as the Female Body, the Phases of Life, the Basics of Life, and Female Power, each of which contains several subsections. The Basics of Life, for instance, is further divided into three groups of proverbs on love, sex, and fertility, pregnancy and childbirth.

This system of organisation is paradoxically both a strength and a weakness of the work. On the one hand, Schipper's approach serves to illustrate how little social attitudes towards women differ among cultures, regardless of how diverse they may be in other respects. In working through the lists of proverbs that she has compiled, the reader becomes aware of how the points of similarity between the items outweigh the points of difference. Even more interestingly, this approach reveals how different societies may employ similar or identical metaphors when talking about women, as is evident in this group likening a woman's tongue to a sword:

A woman's sword is her tongue and she does not let it rust. (Chinese/Hebrew)

A woman's tongue is a sword. (Portuguese)

A woman's tongue is a double-edged sword. (Romanian)

A woman's tongue is sharper than a double-edged sword. (English, USA)

(2006:210)

In this way, Schipper successfully demonstrates her thesis that humankind is a family sharing many common traits. At the same time, however, she depicts the human family as a dysfunctional one, since it fails to accord all of its members the same dignity and respect. Her study is instructive in reminding its reader that patriarchy is a powerful and pervasive force that has shaped women's history and continues to influence their lives across the globe.

On the other hand, Schipper's system of organisation means that the proverbs are not situated within the context from which they arose and which they continue to inform, and thus they lose some of their meaning. For instance, the study rarely indicates how these sayings inform the various cultures' treatment of women, or whether discrepancies exist between the societies' proverbs and their practices. This aspect of the study is unfortunate, as more specificity about the individual cultures would have grounded the proverbs in women's lived experiences and made them more persuasive as anthropological artefacts. Moreover, Schipper's approach tends to obscure the differences between the different cultures, as similar attitudes towards women do not necessarily result in the same kind or degree of oppression. It gives the impression of a level of homogeneity that may not exist in reality.

Despite these concerns, Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet is a valuable and compelling sourcebook for scholars interested in proverbs, women's issues, or simply the relationship between language and society. It is a useful study that makes a wealth of primary proverbial material available to critics for more in-depth and detailed analysis, and that should inspire further scholarship in an area that is increasingly gaining the attention of academics.