Reading

Rosebud, PhD and her gang have been traveling East the last week or so. We left the Midwest as soon as possible with the completion of the Spring Semester. After packing the car to gills, dogs included, we set out for points east. In days past, we would read aloud as we drove (do not worry, the driver does not read). We have left that practice lag in recent trips, but I think we might pick it up again for our return voyage.

I, however, have not stopped reading on my own. Once we are on winter or summer break, I take the opportunity to read as much fiction as possible. Hence the new list of books added to the "Books We are Reading Lately." I managed to complete the Bruce Alexander Sr. John Fielding Mystery series. I thoroughly enjoy a good historical mystery. Historical fiction however, can be tricky for me (same can be said and more for historical movies.) I cringe, as I assume all good historians do, with "modern" interpretations of the past that are really inaccurate. After the Alexander books, I moved on to Jhumpa Lahiri's, Unaccustomed Earth. I enjoyed her previous books, both Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. (At some point, I would love to see the movie, too.) Maybe it was the shift from the late eighteenth century crime novels to contemporary stories of family, love, identity, and the immigration experience, but I struggled with this one. I enjoyed, but not enjoyed reading it. Lahiri is a wonderful storyteller. Her language carries the reader along; I was engrossed. I put the book down and was, well, not happy.

This tends to happen for me a lot in contemporary fiction. There is a preponderance of depressing events. While I commend someone like Oprah Whinfrey for encouraging reading, many of her books are about abuse and other depressing subjects, such as Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. I remember picking up this book in a store, reading the back cover, and putting it immediately down when I learned it began with the rape and murder of a child. Uh, seriously? Why do I need to read this? Because I apparently did. It was all the rage; the book to read. Of course, my failure to appreciate such examinations of contemporary life and culture is a failure of my intellect or something like that. This, I accept, because I have many intellectual limitations. graduate school taught me that. I think I started reading a Jane Austen novel instead. Ah, but that is where my heart lies.

This morning, I pulled out Madeleine L'Engle's Certain Women. I am eager to read this. It has a somewhat troublesome discription on the back of potentially sad story--death of a parent--but I feel more comfortable traversing this path with L'Engle than others. I devoured her books for young adults when I was younger. It is only recently that I started reading her fiction for adults. If I am lucky, I will get through this one and have time for another before we return to the Midwest and regularly scheduled programming.

Women's Nature

Yesterday I read this post about women bullying. While it is important to call attention to bullying, whether among school children or in the workplace, I find it interesting the shock or dismay expressed that women are bullies too. In this case, the original post suggests that there has to be a cause, and that it has something to do with women modeling male behavior in the workplace to be successful and accepted. This seems to the be the "classic" idea that women must act like men to be considered equal to them. This makes me think of the plethora of movies from the 1980s and early 1990s where female characters assumed male traits becoming the bitch or sexual predator, which is ultimate terrifying to men.

What is missing from this discussion, however, is the limiting characterization of women as better than men. Women's bad behavior is upsetting, because women are supposed to be better than that. They, if freed from the oppressive male-dominated atmosphere of work, would be kindlier, gentler bosses. They would help other women. It would be Utopia! Historically, society placed women* on pedestals in the nineteenth century, limiting their full equality in society. They had power, but it was in how they influenced men and their children. Ideal women created a safe haven for men within the home. Women began to participate in moral and public reform efforts because they were more pious, nurturing. They were the natural candidates to save sinful men. Jump ahead to the Woman Suffrage Movement and one rationale** for women getting the vote in 1920 was that women were morally superior to men. Their vote would make the world a better place. In this case and in the previous instance, men's morality was dependent upon the love of a good woman. Men, and their baser natures, will sink into Hell without the constant vigilance of women. The often mythologized 1950s in America reasserted the ideal womanhood of the nineteenth century. It was just dressed up in Donna Reed's pearls and high heels. Second-wave feminism was supposed to take care of all this cultural oppression which boxed women into limiting categories for family and work. Gender, feminists argued in the late 1960s and 1970s, was socially constructed. Biology did not, or should not, determine what men and women do, nor how we are valued in society.

Now, today, we have a different language to describe men and women's nature. Men and women are "equal." But, have things changed that much? About fifteen years ago, I was definitely of the opinion that gender was, except for a few outliers, a social construction. Today, how do I feel about it? Are men and women (and how we assign value to masculinity and femininity) different because of their nature, or because of nurture? I may give a bit more to biology, but not much. My intellect, my anger, my impatience, my bossiness, my desire to compete and win, my cruelty, my pettiness, my inability to sit like a lady at all times does not make me less of a woman (or fail to be a "good" woman). This list of poor qualities are supposedly more in keeping with men's nature, particularly in the workforce. I do not want to erase nature, but I do not want women (or men for that matter) to be excused from responsibility because of it.

*In this case, "women" means white, elite women. The nineteenth century cult of domesticity promoted an idealized view of womanhood centered around the white, Protestant, middle class woman. When we consider race, class, and religion in this context, this idealized view of womanhood is even more constricting.

**There were other reasons articulated as to why women should have the vote, the least of which was equality as citizens.

This Day in History: An Ill Wind that No Longer Blows No Good

On May 12, 1978, the US Department of Commerce, in their infinite wisdom, decided to stop naming hurricanes exclusively after women. One small step for feminism, one giant step for womankind...

Nearly Done

It has been a long couple of weeks. We are careening towards the finish line of the semester and, to be frank, I cannot wait. While I only teach one class, the work to prepare and the correcting that goes with it added to my full time job as a historian does not leave much time R and R. Or blogging. Hopefully I will post more once the semester is over.