Get to Work: Book Review

Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, by Linda R. Hirshman, starts out well enough:

If Betty Friedan had lived just a little longer. We are about to restart the revolution. But now we have to do it without her. (From the first sentences of Get to Work - henceforth abbreviated as GTW, which is dedicated "In memory of Betty Friedan, Author, in 1963, of The Feminine Mystique".)

I've already written at length about Hirshman's articles (see Over-Educated Stay-at-Home Moms Made Feminism Fail, Hirshman and Feminism Again, Addressing the Issues, and Civil Discourse or Refreshing Honesty?), so I was prepared to be irritated by some portions of her book. I didn't expect to find a bunch of shoddy mistakes in it, though. Frankly, I expected better from a retired university professor and lawyer. I'm guessing that the speed with which GTW was written and published may account for some of its flaws.

Get to Work was a book of sound bites, with some good ideas buried underneath, well larded with a mishmash of personal opinion. As I said in my last "On My Nightstand" post, for a hardcover costing $19.95, it's pretty slim - including the seven pages of "Sources", GTW totals only 101 pages. This does make for quick reading, however. And I do like the cover a lot, which is rather classy, with its dark red background (which goes well with manifesto, though I don't see every woman in the US ever having this little red book in her bag) and its no nonsense design.

Hirshman's first thesis is that "For all its achievements, feminism cannot make more progress, private or public, until it turns its spotlight on the family" (GTW, p. 2).

Now this is something with which I wholeheartedly agree (see my review of Friedan's The Second Stage, Motherhood Discrimination or Special Privileges for Breeders?, and Crystal Eastman's wonderful article, written in 1920 after women in the US won the right to vote).

How exactly feminists should turn their spotlight on the family - and how and where we should fight to change things, in both the public & private spheres - well, this is where Hirshman differs from me, and from many other feminists - so radically, and yet so paradoxically conservatively. But more on this later.

Hirshman's problems with educated women "opting out" of the paying workforce include the following points (summarized in my own words):

• - Women at home don't (and cannot) fully use their capabilities (i.e., they are "unfulfilled")
• - This at-home status makes them dependent on their husbands - especially economically, but also socially and in terms in decision-making and bargaining power
• - Female talent is lost from the public world ("to the private world of laundry and kissing boo-boos" as Hirshman puts it)
• - The ruling class (sociopolitical movers & shakers) continues to be overwhelmingly male
• - All of the above sends the US in the wrong direction, or generally does more harm than good to our society

Hirshman's prescription for the above are her rules, or her "Strategic Plan to Get to Work" (summarized, as with the above points, with my own comments):

• - Don't study art (or anything else where you can't make enough money to live on)
• - Never quit a job unless you have another one (don't be unemployed!)
• - Never know when you're out of milk (i.e., don't take charge of household tasks)
• - Consider a "reproductive strike" (just have one kid, maybe, definitely no more)
• - Get the government you deserve (vote, dammit, and vote appropriately)

Interestingly, "marry down" isn't listed in the prescriptive rules here, as it was in Hirshman's earlier articles. I see on her blog she has altered this rule to "don't marry a jerk", which is advice that’s hard to dispute.

It is unfortunate that so much of the internet reaction to Hirshman's ideas has been in the form of knee-jerk reactions and/or personal slander. Both Hirshman and some of her critics have armored themselves in impregnable (no pun intended!) self-righteousness, from whence they fire off personal potshots - completely irrelevant to the issues above – with sneering abandon. Of course some tired conservative critics yet again pulled "feminazi" out, but I was also dismayed to see that Hirshman wasn't above throwing a reference to "Mommy nazis" (p. 29, GTW) into her book.

Judith Stadtman Tucker's article, entitled Everybody Hates Linda, and a more recent review of GTW, Reviving the Feminist Mystique, stand in marked contrast to the unthinking reactions, along with most of the blogs that I linked to in my previous posts about Hirshman. Some of Hirshman's points and some of her strategic rules are genuinely worthy of thought and further discussion, and I've seen a lot of this recently at places like MomsRising and the Mothers Movement Online (although Hirshman dismisses the latter as "a good source for what passes for feminist activism on the family", p. 97, GTW).

But back to the book. Hirshman has decided than the ideology celebrating personal choice is a major player in modern feminism's failures, and she describes it at some length:

"Choice feminism", the shadowy remnant of the original movement, tells women that their choices, everyone's choices, the incredibly constrained "choices" they made, are good choices. Everyone says if feminism failed it was because it was too radical. But we know - and surely the real radical, Betty Friedan, knew - that it wasn't because feminism was too radical. It was because feminism was not radical enough (pp. 1-2 GTW, bold emphasis mine).

"Choice" is the weasel word, and it is legitimated, especially for women who consider themselves liberals, because it's been adopted by the feminist movement. Even the most empowered women do not see how narrow their options are at the moment of "choice" (p. 16, GTW, bold emphasis mine again).

"...feminism has actively encouraged women to run from a fight by embracing any decision a woman makes as a feminist act. I have dubbed this watered-down version of feminism choice feminism" (pp. 17-18, GTW).

"The choice is a false one, based on the realities of a half-revolutionized society. Once we recognize that, we can admit that the tools feminism offered women to escape the dilemma have failed. The book is an effort to try a different approach. It is time for a new radicalism (p. 25, GTW, bold emphasis mine).

Now on the one hand (as in the emphasized passages above), Hirshman acknowledges that women's choices about working and staying home with children are incredibly constrained. Or false, even. She acknowledges that the high cost of daycare (and I would add that high quality daycare or daycare for any kind of special needs costs even more) plays a role in many middle class mothers' decisions to stay home. Yet instead of promoting real choice, Hirshman opts for staying with the WOH/SAH dichotomy that our economy presently dictates, passing off current feminist calls (and Friedan's passionate arguments in The Second Stage) to "restructure the architecture of the workplace" as the "same old public day-care business that has gone nowhere since 1972", which she argues is merely a ruse to "accommodate women in their role as caretaker of the patriarchal family" (p. 6, GTW). Hirshman goes on to state that "Even in 2006, NOW's “family” initiative is all about building caring coalitions and funding child care and family leave in the public sphere rather than taking on the inequality where it lives" (pp. 22-23, GTW).

Personally, I think that restructuring both the family (dividing household and childcare tasks more evenly) and the workplace (to be more "family- friendly") is much more radical than Hirshman's suggestions, which leave the corporate underpinnings that devalue the private sphere totally unchanged. In fact, encouraging upper-class parents to employ lower-class women to care for their children and clean their houses strikes me as downright conservative.

When challenged by many who say that work in the public sphere is overrated (especially if it is not an economic necessity), Hirshman huffs that "just because work isn't as wonderful as people fantasized does not mean it isn't usually the best alternative available" (p. 15, GTW), and that "Working in the market economy has many rewards - of power, honor, money, exercise of capacities, and so on (p. 16, GTW). She adds that "it seems extremely unlikely that all the jobs in the public world are soul-destroying tyrannies or that all home life is a bucolic paradise" (p. 79, GTW), which is undeniable. But the reverse appears equally undeniable to me.

And what about all of the mothers who sequence (move in and out of the workforce), or work part-time, you ask? Well, you'd have to consult one of the books in my footnote for that kind of subtlety or real analysis. What about the influence of the media on how we perceive mothers? Hirshman mentions "the new momism", but apparently she didn't think that The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women, by Susan Douglas and Meredith Williams, deserved the same kind of acknowledgement that Nora Ephron's Heartburn ("Where's the butter?") did in her sources.

Although Hirshman does encourage women to demand gender equality at home, her opinion of anyone - male or female - who chooses to engage in childcare, housework, or any other unpaid labor at the expense of paid employment is very clear. It taints the book with an elitism that overshadows the real and important issues of gender inequality that she raises. Stay-at-home dads, whom she discounts as a minor statistical blip (instead of a genuine trend linked to greater male participation in housework and childcare) are denigrated as "Mr. Mom", which is a label that I thought went out with the 80's.

It is Hirshman's characterization of stay-at-home mothers, of course, that raised the most ire on the internet, and that was probably the deciding factor in bringing Hirshman's work to popular media attention (and a book contract). Not only does Hirshman continue to perpetuate a rigid and demonstrably false* dichotomy between SAH/WOH mothers in GTW, but she goes to great lengths to belittle mothers who "choose" to stay home. These women are never referred to as mothers or even as women in GTW, but are consistently labeled "moms", "the mommy bunch", "homebodies", and once, memorably, as "a kind of miniaturist in the business of life" (p. 17, GTW). In contrast, women with paying jobs are usually lauded as "workingwomen".

Not content with merely labeling, Hirshman goes on to caricature and objectify stay-at-home mothers in manner that only Michael Noer could come close to approximating:

By any measure, a life of housework and child care does not meet these standards for a good human life (p. 33, GTW).

Both my interviews and the public debate reflect that women who drop out of the public world demonstrate a singular indifference to the larger society (p. 38, GTW).

When they write to me, the homebodies, like the merry maid in the treetops with NPR on her Ipod and a letter to her congressman in her overalls, paint a romantic picture of flourishing in the domestic sphere (p. 78, GTW).

...is not all this biking and tree climbing a bit too much of the inner child for any normal adult? (p. 34, GTW).

[in reference to traditional gender roles vs. modern sah-moms' choices]...The chains just transmuted from golden links into the bonds of the invisible fence, like the one that people use to confine their dogs to the yard. (p. 43, GTW)

Hirshman's descriptions of stay-at-home mothers appear to come from a variety of media accounts: Judith Warner's Perfect Madness, her sampling of blogs and message boards, her survey of the New York Times' Style section brides, and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. It is hardly surprising that such cherry-picking produces a decidedly skewed result that does little to inform us about how fulfilling women that are not officially employed find their lives, their use of their education or talents, and their personal power, freedom, or economic dependence. But from the way Hirshman talks about these women, it doesn't appear that she believes that they deserve feminism's rewards, anyway.

As I read GTW, I couldn't help thinking of Betty Friedan's description of "the feminist mystique" (as opposed to the "the feminine mystique") in The Second Stage. Friedan describes "the feminist mystique" as some feminists' misguided and extreme attempts to be as different from the idealized housewives of the 50's and 60's (and often, their own mothers' life experiences) as possible, which she saw as ultimately damaging to feminism. No wonder that despite dedicating GTW to Friedan, Hirshman gripes that The Second Stage is both "dispirited" and "full of useless, grandiose, and wishful rhetoric" (p. 21, GTW). I guess it won't come as a great surprise to many readers that I found The Second Stage inspiring and surprisingly relevant today. I also thought The Second Stage was a great deal less pretentious than Get to Work, which included an unfortunate soupçon of philosophy and Plato in support of Hirshman's opinions about moral relativism, the right kind of values, and what constitutes a good life.

A few final irritating details that Hirshman and/or an editor should have caught: “The wonderful description of managing your husband’s housekeeping comes from the Blog Bitch PhD:” (p. 97, GTW) has the wrong hyperlink. The link should take you to My Radical Married Feminist Manifesto, not a discussion of South Dakota's abortion ban (and in case you’re confused, the blog’s title is actually Bitch PhD).

"There’s even a communal, bisexual, universally faithless monkey, the bonobo. Female bonobo polygamous” (p. 77, GTW). Bonobos are chimpanzees. Not monkeys. Yes, there is a difference, and it is not a minor one. And it is just weird to talk about bonobo fidelity in this context. The whole part on Evolutionary Psychology in GTW is just weird and an over simplified "strawmonkey". For a serious look at primate “fidelity” and evolutionary biology, check out Barbara Smuts' books or Frans de Waals' essays on bonobos.

And what is it with these non-fiction, supposedly serious books without indices? Are publishers trying to make it harder for readers to find the sections or quotes that interest them? Or do the authors and publishers just assume that once a book has been read, it’s immediately forgotten, never to be referred to again?

A lot of people have compared Linda Hirshman to Caitlin Flanagan (most notably Katha Pollitt), mainly because of their extremist views and propensity for snide remarks. When it comes to the books themselves, I actually found To Hell With All That rather enjoyable (see here), although I disagreed with Flanagan on many issues. If I owned Get to Work, on the other hand, I'd have to file it next to Darla Shine's Happy Housewives on my bookshelf, as another catchpenny classic in the sad tradition of self-serving, grandiose advice literature that purports to empower women and improve their lives.

*see Miriam Pesowitz's well-researched book, The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars. Strangely, Hirshman frequently denigrates Peskowitz personally, while totally ignoring her book, which addresses these topics in great detail. Peskowitz does not appear in Hirshman's list of "Sources" - nor do Ann Crittenden and Arlie Russell Hoschschild, whom have also written thoughtfully (and done much better research) concerning work-family balance and the processes of decision making on these issues.

Tags:friedan, mommy+blogger, book+reviews, books, hirshman, feminism, stay-at-home+moms, SAH-moms, opt-out, mommy+wars

Nature Books for Kids

I enjoy being outside, whether doing archaeology, studying natural history and ecological relationships, or just looking at plants and animals. I also read a lot, and have two children (ages 4 and 9), so it isn't too surprising that I try to combine all of these pastimes by finding books on nature that I can share with my kids.


John Himmelman is the simply the best author and illustrator of kid's books on the natural world that I've seen. We have A Pill Bug's Life, A Slug's Life, An Earthworm's Life, and A Hummingbird's Life, and I wish we had all of the others in the Nature Upclose series (monarch butterfly, Luna moth, woodfrog, dandelion, mouse, salamander, house spider, ladybug, and mealworm).

His stories (aimed at ages 4-8, but appropriate for much younger children, and yet still interesting for older kids and adults) all feature exquisite and environmentally accurate illustrations of a creature, its life cycle, and its interactions with its world - which include children. This not only makes the books more interesting to kids, but it reminds them (or shows them) how they influence nature, and that ecosystems aren't something confined to rainforests half a world away or an Animal Planet documentary. And unlike Eric Carle's books (as much my kids love The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Very Quiet Cricket, with its battery operated chirper), there's little anthropomorphizing in Himmelman's books. The pillbug* doesn't get grouchy (or talk), it just finds a place to sleep for the winter.

I wish we lived near Connecticut, because I see from his website (linked above) that Himmelman does school programs, and I'll bet they are wonderful.

Another couple of kid's books that my family enjoys are The Salamander Room, by Anne Mazur, and Where Do You Live?, by Eva Knox Evans - an old out-of-print Golden book (published in 1960) that survived my parents' garage sale culling to get handed down to the next generation.

Both of my kids also spend an inordinate amount of time just paging through the Audubon Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders and the Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds - Eastern Region - my daughter has her little plastic tiger "looking at the bug book" as I write. And while getting the links for the Audubon guides, I found that Robert Michael Pyle (see The Thunder Tree review) did the Audubon field guide for butterflies! We must have that book before the summer is over. Just this morning we tried to identify a strange caterpillar (ewww, some big grey hornwormish thing), and didn't find it in the regular bug book.

Here are some nice online lists of nature books for kids for you to browse:

Outstanding Science Books for Kids K-12 from the National Science Teachers Association

Growing Good Kids Book Awards from the Junior Master Gardener program

Nature Books from the Center for Children's Books at the University of Illinois

The Nature Section at Embracing the Child - a nice list organized by author with many links to author websites and an illustrated descriptions of many of the books.

We found a couple of new favorites from the last list - Eliza and the Dragonfly, by Susie Caldwell Rinehart, and My Favorite Tree: Terrific Trees of North America, by Diane Iverson. And we also have an abundance of non-fiction books on starfish, bats, animal tracks, how tadpoles turn into frogs, etc., mostly picked up for a quarter each at local library book sales.

We also have a few books that drive me crazy with their flowers blooming out of season, or in the wrong ecozone. That's why I love John Himmelman's books so much - he gets absolutely everything right.

And speaking of getting it right - there's one "nature book" I can't endorse: Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, by Susan Jeffers. When I taught a course titled Archaeology & Environment, I started the course with a little background on American archaeology and Native peoples, history, and stereotypes - and Brother Eagle, Sister Sky was one of the bad examples of stereotyping and poorly researched history. As much as I like the environmental ethic in the book, the use of Plains Indian costume and the totally fabricated speech by Chief Seattle is just too appalling to ignore.

Furthermore, it was one of the stars of Oyate's List of Books to Avoid on Native peoples - read the review by Doris Seale for some specifics, and for some of the Suquamish leader's eloquent but decidedly not picture-book-material words. Oyate (a Native organization promoting more honest portrayals of American Indians) also has a wonderful catalogue of good books, by the way.

While googling, I ran across The World of Chief Seattle, by Warren Jefferson - I haven't seen it (my Michigan library doesn't stock too many kid's books on the Pacific Northwest), but the cover looks promising. Sorry, Jennifer from Under the Ponderosas, I just don't have much on your neck of the woods. Let me know what you discover, ok?

*aka wood louse or roly-poly bug. One of the only terrestial crustaceans, as we learned from John Himmelman, which once led my "everyone must always have facts correct" son with OCD into an argument with a school librarian who repeatedly insisted it was an insect.

Tags: children's+books, natural+history, ethnobotany, children's+literature

Virginity or Death! Book Review

Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, by Katha Pollitt, is a collection of short essays - almost 90 of them - originally published in The Nation, spanning the years from 2001 to early 2006. While waiting my turn for my library's copy of Virginity or Death!, I went ahead and checked out an earlier collection - Reasonable Creatures (it didn't have a waiting list) - which I enjoyed so much that I thought it was pretty unlikely that I wouldn't like Virginity or Death!. And I was right.

The essays are intelligent, sharp, insightful and timely. Furthermore, Pollitt exhibits something that not all feminist ideologues manage to manifest - an abundance of common sense, and a wicked sense of humor.

Soon after I heard about the publication of Virginity or Death! and put it on my library request list, I saw the feminist blogosphere erupt over Anna Marie Cox's New York Times review, Woman of the Nation. And although I thought some of the reaction to the review was a bit overblown (I didn't see Cox as totally panning the book, although she didn't say much positive, either), after reading Virginity or Death!, I just found Cox's review weirdly off the mark and unsatisfying. Here are some of Wonkette's (i.e. Cox's) criticisms:

[Pollitt is] "stubbornly unapologetic in championing access to abortion and fixated on the depressingly slow evolution of women's rights in the Middle East."

"There's a certain preserved-in-amber quality to some of the thinking here."

"But when feminists start lecturing about wrong choices, it lessens their numbers. I wish I had an easy answer about how to navigate between stridency and submission. Then again, I wish Katha Pollitt did too."

Pollitt is pretty stubbornly unapologetic about championing access to abortion - in one essay ("If Not Miers, Who?"), she even makes a joke about her views as "a matter of endless, possibly even tedious, record". But at least 80% of the essays make no mention of abortion at all. And as for the essays on the Middle East (which were definitely not all on women's rights) - well, she writes about Abu Ghraib and cluster bombs and.... Damn, there just weren't that many essays on the Middle East to complain about. And that part of the world is rather relevant to "current political issues of our time", so shouldn't Pollitt write about it?

I couldn't see any "preserved-in-amber" qualities that really date Pollitt's work, either. I'm 43, though, so maybe my (liberal feminist) cataracts are interfering with my views of fossilization.

And strident? Not "that old chestnut", as my nine year old says when my husband makes a particularly bad pun. Sometimes Pollitt is assertive, but compared to many of the socio-political essayists I've read, she hardly qualifies as overwrought. She isn't obnoxious, she is often gently self-deprecating, and she never patronizes her readers, which I appreciate.

Now choice. That's the buzzword in feminism these days, isn't it? What Pollitt actually says is that "Women have learned to describe everything they do, no matter how apparently conformist, submissive, self-destructive or humiliating, as a personal choice that cannot be criticized because personal choice is what feminism is all about." As much as I support personal choice, I have to agree with Pollitt that not all choices are equally good. That kind of extreme relativism is just ridiculous, and I thought that Pollitt balanced choice vs. absolutes (not exactly the same as submission vs. stridency, forgodsakes) fairly well. Unlike Linda R. Hirshman, to pick another feminist I'm reading right now.

Pollitt's response to the Cox review was highly entertaining and right on the mark (and unfortunately no longer free online unless you're an NYT subscriber): Thank You for Hating My Book.

Now for a bit of criticism, since I don't just want to be a fawning fan here. To my surprise, I didn't enjoy Virginity or Death! quite as much as I did Reasonable Creatures. Partially because many of the pieces in V or D! were less timeless and eye-opening for me than those in Pollitt's earlier work (just her essays on literature reading lists in college and "difference feminism" in Reasonable Creatures made me vow to buy a copy for myself soon).

The essays in V or D! were also usually much shorter. Plus, her chronicles of the last five years' politics - well, let's just say reviewing the screw-ups and creeping disintegration of civil rights perpetuated by the right wing, not to mention the war - isn't always a huge barrel of laughs. Though to give her credit, Pollitt does manage to find the (sometimes dark) humor where she can.

I managed to snag a virtually free copy of Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture on paperbackswap.com, so I'll have to see if reading Pollitt's take on the late 90's is any more fun than the first part of the 21st century. I'll let you know.

Tags: pollitt, book+review, feminism

On My Nightstand and In My Bookbags

Inspired by a series of posts by my favorite autodidact, here's a look at what I'm reading or just read or want to read soon. I went to page 18 of each book and picked the first complete sentence for a quote.

Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, by Katha Pollitt

A major studio is ready to greenlight the minute your offices comes through with co-financing.

The quote's from a snarky and insightful essay on faith-based initiatives. A big thank-you to Caitlin Flanagan and Linda R. Hirshman for indirectly leading me to this sharp, intelligent writer through Pollitt's funny essay on them (Mommy Wars, Round 587). While on the library request list for Virginity or Death!, I went ahead and read Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, which was published in 1995. How come I've never heard of this before? It's funny, it's smart, and a couple of the pieces are so wonderful that I want to buy the book so I can read them again. Amazingly, many of Pollitt's essays are also available for free online,
at The Nation.

Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, by Linda R. Hirshman

I have dubbed this watered-down version of feminism choice feminism.

This came up on my request list at the same time as Virginity or Death!, and I find Pollitt a much better writer and thinker, so despite the fact that I want to do a blog review of Hirshman's book, I've put it on the back burner (hmm, Hirshman would no doubt sneer at such a housewifely metaphor). I will note that for a $19.95 hardcover book (which my library bought with my taxes), I expected more than 94 pages of text. And I'm not buying the quality vs. quantity argument here, either: what I've read just isn't that good, or that different from what Hirshman's written online.

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova

Of course, the basic story of of Dracula has been hashed over many times and doesn't yield much to explanation.

This was my book club's summer selection - we didn't meet in July and so we had two months (which we needed) to devour Kostova's 642 page opus on Vlad the Impaler and Romanian history and modern libraries and historians. I liked The Historian a lot, even as I was seriously annoyed by some of it. One of the best reviews I ran across was here, by the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, though one of the things that made this book such a literary bestseller last summer was its deliberate lack of trashiness. It was also fascinating to us Ann Arbor-Dexter-Saline-and -assorted township inhabitants, because Kostova is a local author who made the bigtime after years of obscurity. She mentioned in one interview that her favorite at Zingerman's was macaroni and cheese, which made us want to go there and sample it. It may be overpriced (would you pay $47 for a coffee cake, no matter how good?), but I have a feeling it's a lot better than Kraft dinner.

Sing a Song of Tuna Fish: Hard-To-Swallow Stories from Fifth Grade, by Esmé Raji Codell

The toys they sold were pretty good: bubbles, dolls as tall as I was, toy cash registers, doctor's kits with candy pills, and bags of little plastic dinosaurs that my brother liked (you could also get army guys or farm animals if you preferred).

I got this partially for myself, and partially to check out for my soon-to-be fourth grader. It is a memoir of Chicago circa 1979, and the sentence above is about Woolworth's, an old-fashioned five-and-dime that has largely been replaced by a combination of Target and dollar stores. It looks like an absolutely delightful read.

Nature in the Neighborhood, by Gordon Morrison

On a flat gravel rooftop, near the ball field, the nighthawks are raising two chicks.

I've been checking out children's nature books for an article I'm writing, and this was highly recommended. And rightly so, as it is exquisitely illustrated and a perfect antidote to the "nature only occurs in exotic, unspoiled places" theme that is so prevalent in both juvenile and adult books and videos. How often have you seen trash on a curb next to melting snow in a nature book? Or milkweeds growing in abandoned lot, sheltering cottontails and providing food for monarchs? It made me think of nuthatch's remarkable posts - with incredible photographs - of Detroit's urban prairies (here and here).

Coffee Crisp in the US!

How did I miss the news that Coffee Crisp is now available in the US? Around here, they are supposed to be at Meijer's, CostPlus World Market, and Dollar Tree stores. I should have dragged the kids to Meijer instead of Target this afternoon. I could be eating one right now, instead of that half-melted Reese's peanutbutter cup that looked like it was in my husband's pocket a bit too long.

Class in Mommy Wars and Feminist Carnival XXI

Journalist Susan Nielson has a refreshing take on the mommy wars, highlighted here in Salon's Broadsheet, along with an interesting paper by Michael Selmi and Naomi Cahn in Duke University's Journal of Gender Law & Policy.

Also, the 21st Carnival of Feminists is now up at Being Amber Rhea. Women and technology, sex positive feminism and defining feminism, male feminists and allies, and body image are featured topics. And there's a podcast!

Old Houses

We spent the weekend in north-central Illinois visiting my parents. I wish I'd had time to take more pictures of this old house. My grandfather grew up there in the early part of the 1900's, when there was a patchwork of thriving family farms in these rural townships. Now this house (and many others) are magnets for vandals in their isolation in the corn and soybean fields. Next week the volunteer fire department is going to burn it down to practice their firefighting skills.


My kids did get a chance to sleep on my parent's sleeping porch (above), which I see has only eight double windows, not the twelve I remembered. This does make a total of sixteen handles to crank when a storm blows up, however, as it did at sunrise Sunday morning, so my kids got to experience that part of my childhood.

The Happy Feminist has an interesting post on Home and Rootlessness. I grew up in the same house my that father did (the one pictured above that his father built), went to the same grade school a block and a half away, and even had the same third grade teacher, who retired the year after I had her. I grew up hearing stories about my ancestors in the area (see Captivity of Sylvia and Rachel Hall), with grandmothers who were interested in genealogy. I think this "sense of place" probably contributed a lot to my adult interests in archaeology, history, and environment. And though it's hard to imagine living in my hometown again, I know I would feel a great sense of loss if it vanished or was bombed out of existence - and not just because of all of the family members that still live there.

Zoom Clouds

In Praise of Porches

The heat wave has finally broken, and because we have a good sized front porch, we can keep the front windows wide open with the curtains billowing in, even with a real downpour coming from that direction. This is much better than yesterday's hermetically sealed situation, though everything feels a little damp. Earlier, we had fun sitting on the porch swing watching the streets and sidewalks flood.



NPR had a couple of good stories on front porches and their come back this week: Sitting on the Porch: Not a Place, But a State of Mind and Porches Knit Together New Urbanist Communities.

I love porches in all their variety. My parents (who still live in the house that I grew up in, which my grandfather built in the late 1920's) have three porches: a front porch, with chairs and ferns, where my father used to smoke cigars and watch the neighbors; a screened-in back porch, where we used to eat dinner on hot summer evenings; and above the back porch, the sleeping porch, a wonderful room with knee-to-ceiling windows on three sides, surrounded by trees. I remember being excited when my brother went to college, because then I got the sleeping porch all to myself. Waking up on the sleeping porch as a storm blew in was particularly exciting - cranking twelve old casement windows closed as lightning flashed and rain blew at you really got the adrenaline going.

John Richard Lindermuth blames the loss of porches on the advent of tv and air conditioning. I think that a preference for decks (mostly in the back of the house) might also have something to do with it. Anyway, here's a neat photo essay: The Evolution of the American Front Porch.

Edited on 4 Aug 2006 to add another cool link: The Rise and Decline of the American Front Porch, from the Montana Heritage Project. This author ties the rise to transcendentalism and increased interaction with nature (along with architectural pattern books), and the decline to a loss of community and car exhaust. Maybe.

Tags: porches, history

Dog Days

We're there. The doldrums, the dog days, the days when the humidity is so high that my 9 year old's glasses get steamed up the minute he goes outside. Usually when we're home in the summer, we have the sliding glass doors and windows wide open, and the kids and the bugs (bugs usually in containers) and the dog are in and out constantly. Last week we even went out during a couple of downpours.


This week, with a heat index of 104 and above, I turned the central AC on. We might as well be on another planet, or trapped by a blizzard, but at least I'm not sweating just sitting here, getting increasingly and irrationally irritable.

Cool Comfort: America's Romance with Air-Conditioning is an entertaining read on the history of AC, if you don't try to take it too seriously and you have a tolerance for academic jargon. As much as I agree that porches, sleeping porches, and big windows are wonderful, on days like this I am happy to press a button to cool most of the house down.

Poverty, Class, and Lebanon

..are featured in the 20th Carnival of Feminists at Super Babymama. Go and read it.

The Thunder Tree: Book Review

The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, by Robert Michael Pyle, is a hard book to summarize. I think the different chapters work better as free-standing essays. Some of them waxed so eloquent I was in tears (and I’m not even pregnant, so I don’t cry at the drop of a hat anymore), and a few others I had to struggle to finish because I got mired in the plants, ecological relationships, and butterfly species Pyle describes. If you are acquainted with Denver and the history of its suburbs, or the history of water use in the western US, you’ll also like The Thunder Tree, but I imagine that this isn’t a huge group of readers.

It is probably more interesting to most as an autobiographical work that combines personal stories about growing up in Aurora, Colorado in the 50’s & 60’s with a look at the importance of “wasteland” (specifically, the High Line Canal) to both children and local ecology. If you want to learn more about how kids interact with nature, you have to read the chapter
“The Extinction of Experience” – it is one of the best things on this I’ve ever read. It deserves to be reprinted somewhere with a much larger audience. So check this out of your library, order it on amazon or half.com (seventy-five cents for hardcover! Unbelievable), put it on your paperbackswap.com wish list, and then skim through the parts that don’t grab you and read the rest when you need to learn something profound about the importance of place, parks, vacant lots, creeks and ditches, children’s play, and bugs.

Here's some interesting biographical information on Pyle and his work, including a link to an online story called The Way of the Monarch that illustrates why I like his writing so much - it combines people and place in such a compelling way.

Hummingbird Moths and Other Insects

I guess blogging about my arthropod-filled composter, my hidous cache of compost on the kitchen counter, and the bugs on our swamp milkweed brought a whole new genre of Google searchers to my blog. "Bagworm and revolution", "found earwigs in my kitchen", and "tiny maggots" have replaced "fat housewife blogger" and "housewife 1 on 1" as the most recent keywords that Google has directed here. Maybe that's an improvement, although I'm really wondering about bagworms and their revolution. Evolution, yes, but revolution? I don't even want to think about the bagworm revolution. And except for a few earwigs that came in nestled into some flowers (quickly removed), we don't have earwigs in our kitchen.

Meanwhile, our swamp milkweed (aka rose silkweed, flesh-colored milkweed, rabbit milk, rose milkweed, silkplant, swamp silkweed, water nerve root, and white Indian hemp - so called because its fiber was used by several Native American groups - check out Dan Moerman's wonderful database here) is attracting hordes of butterflies: monarchs every time I look, tiger swallowtails, some giant black butterfly with orange and blue on the outside of its wing that may be a black swallowtail. The most interesting nectar-sipper we've noticed in the last few days has been a giant hummingbird moth. It is almost as large as a hummingbird (which we also have, but they seem to prefer the jewelweed and the hummingbird feeders).

It looks like ours is the hummingbird clearwing moth, or Hemaris thysbe, which is a type of sphinx or hawkmoth. I had no idea that this is the kind of creature that comes from those disgusting hornworms.

The Second Stage: Book Review

The future of the family is

an overriding feminist issue.
~ Betty Friedan, on page 73
of The Second Stage

The Second Stage, written by Betty Friedan, was first published in 1981 - twenty-five years ago. This was the year after Reagan was elected. I was 18 and had just voted for the first time (and not for Reagan). This was also the beginning of the end of the fight for the ERA, as Friedan laments in her often overlooked and occasionally vilified book on what she perceived as the next stage of feminist "evolution", or the most important issues facing the women's movement that she helped found in the 60's with her publication of The Feminine Mystique.

Reading this in 2006 gave me a big dose of that "history repeats itself" feeling. In addition to critiquing what she saw as some of the excesses of feminism (which she called "the feminist mystique", as opposed to the "feminine mystique"), Friedan also examined Reagan-era politics and their relationship to women's emerging roles and issues. The similarities to the last six years of Bush politics are striking.

And Friedan seems positively prescient when she looks at what is now termed "work-life balance", child care, flexible work, maternity and paternity leave, and the danger that the right wing would claim "the family" and "family values" if feminists didn't address the problems engendered by their own revolution:

But what about the family work? The responsibility that used to be the woman's, in the home and family, as the man's duty was earning the money, out in the real world? How are we to put a value on family work? What is it really worth, compared to that other money-earning kind of work? How long will she keep doing it, by herself, if it's not valued, or shared?

....Still, the sophisticates who shrug off all this hysteria about the family as sentimental cant betray their own blind spot. We have to break through the cant and the blind spot and deal with the problems of the family now, which neither feminists nor antifeminists can avoid in real life (p. 70).

Why, with the majority of mothers now working, haven't feminists put as much energy into the battle for a multifaceted approach to child care - developing new options, using services and funds from a variety of sources...demanding tax incentives and innovations like a voucher system - as they have put into the battles against sex discrimination or for abortion?....There was, in fact, cold silence, or even open annoyance, in various feminist ranks in response to our appeal, in the fall of '79, that the women's movement come to grips with the practical problems of the family which our move to equality entails (p. 73).

It seems like it has only been in the last ten years (or less) that most feminists have really taken motherhood and its problems seriously again - as shown by the many websites and books discussing the two and how they've proliferated in the last decade.

Note the new page on Mothers and Caregivers Economic Rights on NOW's website, for instance, and the founding of the Mothers Movement Online in 2003. Then there's this year's Momsrising.org and the publication of The Motherhood Manifesto, by Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner. The recent frenzy of discussion on "the mommy wars" can even be seen as evidence of increased attention on what Friedan characterized as feminism's failure and blind-spot:

To the degree that feminists collude in assuming an inevitable, unbridgeable antagonism between women's equality and the family, they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy (p. 74).

Equality in jobs, without taking into account family, leaves women doubly burdened. And equality in the family isn't real for women if it is isolated from economic measures of worth and survival in the world....Part of the problem comes from the lack of real economic measures or political attention to the previously private woman's work, in home and family, an irreducible minimum of which is necessary for human and society's survival...(p. 80)


The women's movement did not fail in the battle for equality. Our failure was our blind spot about the family. It was our own extreme of reaction against that wife-mother role: that devotional dependence on men and nurture of children and housewife service which has been and still is the source of power and status and identity, purpose and self-worth and economic security for so many women - even if it is not all that secure any more (p. 156).

There were some passages that I didn't find particularly enlightening or interesting (such as Friedan's discussion of Alpha vs. Beta politics, and the look at cadets in the newly integrated West Point), but overall I found
The Second Stage a surprisingly timely and interesting work. I was a bit uncomfortable with her continued use of "evolution" (with its connotation of directed evolution towards progressive ends, as opposed to the more biological or modern anthropological use of the term), but that's minor in the scheme of things.

The parts of the book for which some feminists scorned Friedan for betraying feminism, I saw as again, relatively minor asides. She basically quibbled with the second wave feminists' focus on sexual identity, sexual discrimination, "rape culture", and abortion at the expense of economic inequality for women in families. Friedan never actually comes out and says the former are not important, but she does repeatedly argue against the polarization of politics that emphasizing these issues may incur. I'm not sure if that's a good or complete explanation for changes in feminism and national politics in the last 25 years, but it's interesting to ponder. Friedan herself sees this polarization at least partially as an over-reaction to the "feminine mystique", where the feminists wanted to get as far away from their housewife roots as possible.

While reading more about the transition from second wave to third wave (but "second stage"?) feminism, I ran across this interesting article & interview - The End of Herstory, by Kay S. Hymowitz - published in 2002, that explores some of the generational differences (in feminism, and popular culture as a whole) that I straddle. Although Hirshman is mentioned (as one of the old-style "radical" feminists), I thought it was interesting that Friedan's Second Stage was not - although Hymowitz does describe a "Feminist mystique" and "feminist career mystique". I don't think Hymowitz could still say that "Motherhood too interests orthodox Feminists only insofar as it overturns bourgeois norms."

19th Carnival of Feminists

...is up at Figure: Demystifying the Feminist Mystique. It's got borgs, and snowflakes, and lots on careers and feminism, and Frida Kahlo, Rwanda, the gendering of housework, and quite a lot more on the intersection of race, class, and gender. If this Carnival were a magazine I'd be so impressed with its quality and its ever-changing (but related) subjects, and willing to pay for it. But it's free, and it doesn't have advertising. Amazing, go and read.

Now We Can Begin...Eighty-Six Years Later

It never ceases to amaze me when something written generations ago seems as fresh and relevant today as it was for our grandmothers. I've added the bold emphasis, for passages I think are relevant to current debates.

What, then, is "the matter with women"? What is the problem of women's freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity - housework and child-raising.

And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising, to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.

...It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself in the ordinary exigencies of life. I need not add that the second part of this revolution will be more passionately resisted than the first. Men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle. The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters -- from what to do with the crumbs to the grocer's telephone number -- a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him better than the reputation for having a violent temper. It was his mother's fault in the beginning, but even as a boy he was quick to see how a general reputation for being "no good around the house" would serve him throughout life, and half-consciously he began to cultivate that helplessness until today it is the despair of feminist wives.

...Cooperative schemes and electrical devices will simplify the business of homemaking, but they will not get rid of it entirely. As far as we can see ahead people will always want homes, and a happy home cannot be had without a certain amount of rather monotonous work and responsibility. How can we change the nature of man so that he will honorably share that work and responsibility and thus make the homemaking enterprise a song instead of a burden? Most assuredly not by laws or revolutionary decrees. Perhaps we must cultivate or simulate a little of that highly prized helplessness ourselves. But fundamentally it is a problem of education, of early training -- we must bring up feminist sons.

...If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless. For ninety-nine out of every hundred women want children, and seventy-five out of every hundred want to take care of their own children, or at any rate so closely superintend their care as to make any other full-time occupation impossible for at least ten or fifteen years. Is there any such thing then as freedom of choice in occupation for women? And is not the family the inevitable economic unit and woman's individual economic independence, at least during that period, out of the question?

...But is there any way of insuring a woman's economic independence while child-raising is her chosen occupation? Or must she sink into that dependent state from which, as we all know, it is so hard to rise again? That brings us to the fourth feature of our program -- motherhood endowment. It seems that the only way we can keep mothers free, at least in a capitalist society, is by the establishment of a principle that the occupation of raising children is peculiarly and directly a service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government. It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women unless this principle is accepted. But with a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed*, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing.
~ Crystal Eastman, shown above, writing in 1920, in The Liberator, (read the complete text of "Now We Can Begin" here).

The second wave of feminism made some amazing progress in the 60's and the 70's, but it is also more than a little shocking to realize how clearly some of feminism's basic challenges were articulated long before that, and how little real progress has been made in these areas.

*when she speaks of "voluntary motherhood and education in its method", Eastman is referring to birth control - involuntary motherhood being what happens without access or educated use of contraception. Considering that I recently read that about a quarter of all pregnancies are unplanned, we haven't come such a long way here, either.

Civil Discourse or Refreshing Honesty?

Clearly, a lot of the people who take issue with Linda Hirshman (see previous two posts) object to her tone and style as much as to the content of her arguments. As I was thinking about this (and the difference between blog commentary and letters to the editor, or face to face debate), I got around to reading the rest of the 18th Carnival of Feminists, particularly this interesting post: Thoughts on blogging, hostility and feminist dialogue, by Winter at Mind the Gap!

Although I'm sure a lot of the vitriolic commentary left on blogs (or online articles, like Salon or many online newspapers) is not particularly productive, I usually find it some of it entertaining, and I guess I'd rather have trolls than censorship. It is ironic that Linda Hirshman decries all the pejorative e-mails her public pieces have attracted at the same time that she celebrates her own caustic approach, mocking those that plaintively ask if we can't just support each other as mothers making choices. Or "choices", as Ampersand might put it.

Addressing the @#%!& Issues

And yes, I do realize that my last post on Hirshman doesn't actually address any of the important issues that her original article and her book (presumably) address. I wanted to look at her Washington Post article in and of itself, because I found it fascinating, in much the same way that I found Caitlin Flanagan's trainwreck interviews compelling. I'm hoping that the article actually holds as little relation to Get to Work as Flanagan's interviews did to To Hell with All That, especially since I see that I'm next on the (pretty small - 1 of 2) library request list.

Is this a new phenomenon, this thing where authors make petty
ad hominem attacks or other outrageous statements badmouthing large groups of people in an attempt to publicize their books? Probably not, since I'm sure everything under the sun has already been done in publishing, but the internet and blogs certainly add a new element to it. Perhaps some of the author invective I've seen is a response to the immediacy, the crudeness, and the anonymity that e-mail commentary and criticism allows, if not actively encourages. Hirshman certainly implies this in her Post article, where she mentions the good old days, when only a few hardy (and presumably well-educated) souls wrote letters to authors or newspaper editors, and "iron-fisted editors" kept the riff raff out of the discussion (and perhaps back in the kitchen, where they belong if they sell out to the patriarchy). But wait -- isn't that exactly what Linda is supposed to be protesting?

Katha Pollitt adds a pretty funny essay to the whole "no such thing as bad publicity" idea with yesterday's article on "Thank You for Hating My Book". It's a much more reasonable response than I've seen from the other authors - or should I say from their public relations advisors?

Hirshman and Feminism Again

Well, I still haven't read Linda Hirshman's Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, so I really can't blog about it. I'm on the library waiting list for it (and I didn't even request that they buy it, as I prefer to only do that for books I really think are useful to more people, such as Miriam Peskowitz's The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars), so I don't have to give Hirshman any of my money to read it.

The latest round of articles (both on the web and in the print media) on Hirshman is basically a reaction to her inflammatory, self-promoting article "Unleashing the Wrath of Stay-at-Home Moms" in last month's Washington Post. As you might expect (see my response to her American Prospect article here), she made some statements with which I vehemently disagreed. And although I learned my lesson about blogging about a book before reading it with To Hell with All That, this doesn't mean that I can't comment on Hirshman's Opinion piece. So let the fisking begin:

The mommyblogs vilified me as a single, childless, bitter loser; the feminists claimed women weren't quitting; and a chorus of other voices didn't care what I said -- criticizing women just wasn't allowed. A handful of political thinkers did concede that I had raised the biggest issue left for feminism -- justice in the family -- but it was definitely a minority report.

Talk about a gross exaggeration. Some commenters on some blogs certainly speculated that someone who used such vituperative language about mothers must not be one herself, but none of the other bloggers that I read (see the many listed in my previous blog post on Hirshman) said anything like that. Note Hirshman's use of "mommyblogs" here - she might as well say, "Now, now, little mommies, you just leave this heavy thinking to the philosopher here." Please also note that the article that she touts as evidence of how maligned she has been - Everybody Hates Linda - is actually a pretty thoughtful piece that "positively applauds" some of Hirshman's ideas - while not shirking from a dispassionate analysis of its flaws.

The aggressive domesticity is not coming only from a bunch of women who can't manage all the demands on their time. Time and again, when I could identify the sources of the most rabid criticism and Google them, male and female, they had fundamentalist religious stuff on their Web sites or in the involuntary biographies that Google makes possible.

Once again, a ridiculous exaggeration. Very few of the many blogs that I read had religious ties, let alone fundamentalist ones. On the contrary, most of the blog criticism that I read (and enjoyed) came from overtly liberal and very a-religious sites. Well, maybe Linda found some secret cache of rabid bloggers that neither Technorati nor Google Blog could uncover.

Much worse than the roofing-and-barfing and salvation crowds, though, were the relativists, who criticized me for trying to give feminism some context and boundaries.

Well, since Linda has effectively discounted anyone who has written about the mundane aspects of life, and anyone who admits to any religious affiliation (please note that the latter does not include me), now she goes after the relativists. Damn all you compromisers, anyway! Remember, only Linda is qualified to provide the (ridiculously exaggerated) context for feminism, and its new more stringent boundaries.

These so-called liberals and feminists, who were once in the forefront of making social change, declared that people could no longer suggest that women should change their lives. A generation ago, such liberals included Betty Friedan, who called staying at home "the problem that has no name," and Alix Kates Shulman, who suggested that women should take on the problem by refusing to do 70 percent of the housework.

Apparently, Linda hasn't read anything that Betty Friedan or Alix Kates Shulman wrote after the 1970's. I suggest that she read Friedan's The Second Stage or Shulman's Drinking the Rain to see how more thoughtful second wave feminists matured. Wait, though - I have to warn you, Shulman talks about her roof and domestic pleasures at great length. Mind you, I am not a supporter of a domestic glass ceiling, I just don't think that Hirshman's solutions are workable or even reasonable.

Well. There was no chance that I was going to shut up. I'm retired. If I'm not going to raise hard questions for women, who will?

Why, Linda? Why? Why on earth did you retire if working at a law firm or as a philosophy professor was for the greater good?

And Katha Pollitt, Joan Blades, and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner are my latest choices for people raising hard questions for women. Or the (yeah, I know, those democratic unwashed masses from the internet again) feminist and "mommy" bloggers out there (see blog roll on right side of screen). Which reminds me, I forgot to link to the 18th Carnival of Feminists. Don't forget to check out Redneck Mother's post in there.

I guess working women are too busy at work to blog about their lives and are already on their way to their jobs when "Good Morning America" puts me on at 8 a.m. Maybe a little scared? They're doing what beleaguered, overworked people do. They're publishing a manifesto.

Gee, a lot of the women I know with jobs outside the house have a lot more time to blog than those at home. Maybe the reason that they aren't showering Linda with praise is because they don't like her argument? Maybe they resent not having more choices and flexibility?

And Linda - we already have a manifesto. Check out The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want - and What to Do About It and momsrising.org. I think there's a lot there that many corporate workers (not just parents) can appreciate. Yeah, it's got choice, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also have boundaries.

_________________________________________

Some more responses: Taking the Political Personally, from Crooked Timber - note many fascinating responses to his question of "why it is that this is such an emotive topic?"

The Personal Is (Still) Political, at Half Changed World - on how our personal choices (about feminism, in particular) can change the world

A Working Girl Can Win, in Slate, by Meghan O'Rourke - on some of the points that Hirshman makes that may be overlooked in the brouhaha

Understanding Betty Friedan: Why Linda Hirshman Doesn't, in Slate, by Emily Bazelon - on some of Hirshman's mistakes and the mis-charaterization of an important second wave feminist

Do We Trust Mothers? and Spreadin Love - and well, many other cogent posts by 11D. Just read all of her blog, it's worth it.

One of my favorite articles is Mommy Wars, Round 587, by Katha Pollitt in The Nation - it compares Hirshman and Caitlin Flanagan, who are so similar in their obnoxious self-promotion and self-righteousness. I think I'll be buying Pollitt's new book, Virginity or Death!

Katha Pollitt on Flanagan and Hirshman, on Alas (A Blog) - wonderful comments, including some from Pollitt.

and Echidne of the Snakes - again, check out the comments. Certainly not from a bunch of religious wingnuts.

and edited on 7/14 to add: Hirshman and the Value of Working, Round Two, by Leslie Morgan Steiner - many comments, but I didn't see anything really new jump out.

Swamp Milkweed

One of the more successful perennials in our yard. They attract a lot of insects, including this tiny praying mantis. Insects provide a lot of entertainment for my kids.

My Hideous (But Virtuous) Cache of Compost

Perhaps prompted by my recent reading of Caitlin Flanagan's critique of compost ("compost heaps in the backyard: moldering heaps of garbage, rich with worms and loamy rot...hideous caches of broken eggshells and wet coffee grounds squirreled away on kitchen counters" p. 143, To Hell with All That), I've been thinking about our compost. The black container out behind the fence is at the height of decomposition right now. It is full of rotting banana peels, watermelon mush, fuzzy green strawberries, and a couple of buckets of grass and dirt from our painstakingly edged sidewalks. It is seething with fruit flies, earwigs, pillbugs, and many other invertebrates, which I always hope don't erupt out of the top at my face when I pull the lid off to dump more wet coffee grounds and broken eggshells.

I think our compost's main benefit is how it allows my husband and I to feel a little less guilty about wasting food. When I put strawberry stems and green onion leaves and potato peels into my hideous kitchen counter cache (actually a large rubbermaid container), I get a slight "I'm so frugal" organic gardening buzz. When my husband sliced open a honeydew melon last weekend - one that we'd let sit on the counter for too many hot days - and we found it was too slimy to eat, my first thought was that at least it would contribute to next year's tomatoes and zinnias. At $3.29 (unlike Caitlin, I'm acutely aware of what most of the things on my counter and in my refrigerator cost), a honeydew melon makes pricey compost material, but at least I'm not adding to the putrescibles* that my garbage collectors have to haul.

Michael Pollan has a wonderful chapter entitled "Compost and Its Moral Imperatives" in Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, which is one of the most enjoyable gardening books I've ever read (and I've read a lot of them, I should blog about them sometime). Pollan really nails it when he talks about "the successful compost pile" as a sign of "horticultural grace", inferring virtue on its thrifty, ecologically conscious practitioners. But he doesn't also note how the composter redeems you a bit when your vegetable cooking plans exceed reality and you have to clean out the crisper drawer.

Don't get me wrong - I do appreciate the black loamy humus (partially composed of rotten hummus! ha) that we spread on our garden areas, though it is no longer true, as Eleanor Perényi said a few decades ago, that "You can't buy compost." But real (virtuous American) gardeners certainly don't buy compost.

Walt Whitman even wrote an ode to compost over 150 years ago. It's not too often you see naked body licking paired with "blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain" and "distemper'd corpses":

Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd...

Behold this compost! behold it well!

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.
What chemistry!

That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which
is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its
tongues...

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last.

- Walt Whitman, This Compost (read the whole poem here).

*see my review of Garbage Land (or better yet, read Elizabeth Royte's book yourself) for more on putrescibles and composting

To Hell with All That: Book Review

Alternate blog post title: Seduced by Caitlin Flanagan

To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, by Caitlin Flanagan, has already been reviewed so many times - and the author has given so many interviews, some of them (like the Colbert Report) so outrageous - that I hardly thought it was necessary to read the actual book.

That'll teach me to judge a book by its press:
To Hell with All That was not at all what I expected.

(Next thing you know I'll read Linda R. Hirshman's Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World and learn that Linda really loves scrubbing toilets and changing diapers).

I expected an anti-feminist diatribe against working mothers. Perhaps a more eloquent version of Kate O'Beirne's Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports, which I was embarrassed to be seen checking out of the library, and returned in disgust after reading a few ridiculous chapters.

What I found was a collection of essays - some autobiographical, some on current social mores (Martha Stewart and modern weddings) that I genuinely enjoyed. It is true that a few sentences made me choke on my coffee, provoking the same WTF? response that I had when I saw the infamous Colbert Report clip, but there were many passages where I nodded my head in agreement or wrote "true" in the margins. As I write this, I realize that I'm saying much of what Jen Lawrence said in her review in LiteraryMama - but that's pretty much how it happened, and I am going to go on and fisk a few things I haven't seen in the other reviews.

from the Preface: Writing honestly about these issues in the national press has been difficult because it required challenging certain articles of faith that comprise what the current American feminist agenda requires us to believe about womanhood. (p. xviii)

I've considered myself a feminist for at least the last 25 years, so I'm not sure how I completely missed the required "articles of faith". I thought that it was fairly impossible to get a group of feminists to agree on much, let alone an American agenda that includes all of the points that Flanagan lists. Her points are a caricature of some radical feminist ideas. All that's missing is a reference to bra burning. Linda R. Hirshman, now, probably agrees with many of the points, but she's not exactly a mainstream feminist.

The first article of faith: Girls do not have a natural interest in homemaking. (p. xviii)

Since I've never had much of an interest in homemaking, my first reaction was "Am I not a woman?" And what does she mean by "natural"? That there's a biological basis for females doing housework? Then why is it so easily overcome by messy housewives? Women wouldn't ever hire housekeepers like Caitlin does if it was in our genes, they'd have to do themselves. Meh, I'm just suspicious of how many cultural things are attributed to nature. But onward to the rest of the book.

from The Wifely Duty (which I think could also be called Sex Is an Obligation Once You're Married): The reason abortion rights hold such a sanctified position in American political life is that they are a critical component of the yuppie program for maximum personal sexual pleasure. (p. 22)

This was one of those sentences that made me choke. Maybe this would be true if contraceptives were not available, but today? Nah, can't see it. And personally, I don't see the overwhelming lack of sex within marriage that Caitlin does. Maybe it has something to do with our different circles of friends. She does note that "Nowadays American parents of a certain social class seem squeaky-clean, high-achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow - how to pinpoint this? - undersexed." (p. 33). It certainly seems like Caitlin Flanagan is in the same neurotic social circles that Judith Warner is. I guess that explains a lot.

I did enjoy her discussion of Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman, which I read myself right after reading Darla Shine's Happy Housewives, and I was happy to hear that Caitlin was "not entirely incapable of good old-fashioned feminist rage" about "The notion that even educated middle-class American women had to put out in order to get a damn refrigerator" (p. 29).

from Housewife Confidential: The notion of a domestic life that purrs along, with routines and order and carefully delineated standards, is endlessly appealing to me. It is also quite foreign, because I am not a housewife. I am an "at-home mother," and the difference between the two is vast. (p. 38)

Now I was very interested to see this, because a while back I pondered the difference between the two here in my blog. Apparently, in Caitlin's world, the major difference is economic: if you can afford to hire housekeeping help (or you just don't care about clean floors?), you get to be an "at-home mother" without the drudgery of housework.

I was fascinated by her paean to the Midwest (having lived in this part of the country for most of my life), but I have to say that her fantasy of a place where "most of life's difficulties could be handled with a combination of good humor and endurance" (p. 55) is just as much a myth as her characterization of growing up in the 60's:

...a bygone age, as remote and unrecoverable as Camelot: a world of good meals turned out in orderly fashion, of fevers cooled without a single frantic call to the pediatrician, of clothes mended and repaired and pressed back into useful service rather than discarded to the rag heap as soon as a button pops or a sleeve unravels. (p. 167-8).

Well, Camelot was pretty much a complete fantasy, wasn't it? But how hard is it really to learn to sew a button on, Caitlin? My husband does it occasionally, as do I. Maybe our skill is linked to our hardy Midwestern upbringing in the 60's, but I do think that someone whom is obviously intelligent and watches so much Martha Stewart could switch off the TV and take ten minutes figure this button thing out.

from A Necessary Person: Children love the person who provides daily physical care to them in a singular and primal way - a way obviously designed by Nature herself to cleave child to mother and vice versa. (p. 65)

I've already commented on her use of natural with a small "n". Forgive me if I'm not impressed by Nature with a large "N" either. I think reading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species provides a more realistic idea of the blood and gore and ambition and love and other emotions that characterize all mothers, from Susan Smith to Phyllis Schlafly.

from Drudges and Celebrities: The New Housekeeping: I remember, during that time, knowing many girls whose mothers had discarded many things, giving up decent housekeeping, turfing out husbands, taking up weird pastimes....They were starting compost heaps in the backyard: moldering heaps of garbage, rich with worms and loamy rot....They would have hideous caches of broken eggshells and wet coffee grounds squirreled away on kitchen counters, waiting to be delivered to the compost heaps. (p. 143)

Oooh, she's got me there. Too bad Caitlin wasn't here two summers ago to see our experiment with vermiculture in the basement. However, despite my hideous cache on the kitchen counter (which I'll have to ask my friends if they've noticed, now), I do manage to comb my daughter's hair, and I don't wear batik. I absolutely hate twinsets, though, which Caitlin seems to favor. I do rather like tie-dye, but I still manage to shave my legs. Sometimes. Oh, and I haven't turfed out my husband, whom I've lived with for 23 years now.

from Clutter Warriors: And so began one of the most important relationships in my life. My organizer, let us call her Sarah...(p. 163)

Give me a break. Your household organizer is one of the most important people in your life? Gah.

Something that I found endlessly interesting throughout this book is that Caitlin is (give a take a few months) the same age that I am - and my mother also returned to work full-time when I was 13 (Caitlin was 12 when her mother got a job after being home with her previously).

"Being home alone is stressful for a child," psychologist David Elkind has written and he's dead right. Just walking through the front door each afternoon to be met by the quiet gloom of the empty living room was depressing.... Afternoons alone in the house were often frightening. It did not help that I am a hysteric by nature.

Now maybe it was the result of living in a bucolic small town in Illinois, but I didn't find being home alone after school particularly stressful at that point. In fact, I reveled in the freedom to do whatever I wanted. The only time I was ever scared was while reading The Amityville Horror (and I'm fairly certain I would have been scared even if my parents had both been home while I was reading that).

from To Hell with All That: And when I couldn't walk from the car to the doctor's office, he carried me. And if that's a traditional marriage, I'll take it. (p. 195)

This is a famous line that has already drawn scores of comments. My only comment: that's not traditional marriage, that's commitment, and the two are not necessarily the same.

So these are the kind of things that bugged me in To Hell with All That. I haven't really praised the parts that I liked much, although there were many. Several passages had me howling with laughter, and I chuckled at quite a few more. Her passages about cleaning out her parents' house were beautiful. They made me think about my parents' house (which I haven't had to clear yet, thank goodness), and my great-grandmother's kitchen tools, which I use fairly often, thinking of her. And how can I loathe a woman who uses the word elegiac so elegantly, no matter how misguided she is sometimes?

As I described the book to my husband (describing what little I knew about the author's personal life), however, I realized something interesting. Why didn't Caitlin change her name when she got married if she's such an ardent anti-feminist?

Read the Latest Sex-Filled Carnival of Feminists..

...over at Bitch Lab. Because I don't have time to blog this week, even though I have loads of things I wish I could talk about. Tune in next week for some more on Linda Hirshman and Caitlin Flanagan.

June 1938, June 2006

It's kind of cool that calendars from 1938 work this year, too. Here's June from the Posters from the WPA collection at the Library of Congress.

I liked this poster, too, since I just finished that book on the "Social History of the Bathroom" a while back:

Clematis

It's been a good year for our clematis.

Motherhood Discrimination or Special Privileges for Breeders?

For every dollar a man makes, most women make about 90 cents...but women who are also mothers working outside their homes average 73 cents. Single mothers who are employed only make about 55-66 cents for every man's dollar. Stay-at-home mothers, of course, earn nothing, and get no social security credit (and little or no respect?) independent of their husbands. If they had a career before having a baby (or two) and "opting out", they are likely to lose ground in it, perhaps irredeemably.

You can probably guess how I feel about these issues. Read Motherhood Discrimination on AlterNet, by Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner (the authors of The Motherhood Manifesto) if you're interested. The "Special Privileges for Breeders" phrase came from the mostly inane comments posted on the AlterNet article.

Although I disagreed with several of the points in Mary Riddell's Let's Celebrate. There's Never Been a Better Time for Mothers article (which also provides an interesting British perspective on some of the same issues), I think she's right on the money when she notes that the value of children has been downgraded in modern society. I think she's right when she says that children "recalibrate adults' soured outlook and remake their world", too.

The Bowl Is Already Broken: Book Review

I've been neglecting my blog lately. My part-time writing job takes some of my creative energy, though I do love the work, and have gotten to read fascinating things* in the course of it. The recent pattern of rain-heat-sun-and more rain in southeastern Michigan is doing its best to turn our yard into a weedy meadow, which we fight twice a week with our beautifully quiet and ecologically sound but not terribly efficient reel mower. This combined with energetic children is enough to cause us to spend what free time we do have in a stupor on the couch or on the back deck, swatting at mosquitoes, watching the wind blow twigs off the dead elm tree and making the green-turning yellow wheat field behind our house ripple.

However. An abrupt cancellation of one writing project on railroad expansion in Philadelphia in 1839, followed by a short bout with the stomach flu, gave me the opportunity to lie in bed and read for a day and a half. Luckily I had a wonderfully engrossing novel to distract myself from nausea and stomach cramps: The Bowl is Already Broken, by Mary Kay Zuravleff.

I had already read a couple of great reviews praising it (and describing the plot in some detail) by two bloggers whose work I admire, flea (note that her copy has a more elegant cover design - but since my library copy had the cover shown here, I felt I had to use it), and the mama from mamarant.

At the beginning, I was a bit suspicious of the novel and its characters, probably because I spent ten years on and off working in a museum, and another nearly ten years as a mother - and these are the two inextricably bound themes that wind through Zuravleff's book. The more I read, though, the more I enjoyed the characters' complexities, their devotion to their work, and Zuravleff's descriptions of the Asian art and poetry at the center of the story. My museum experiences were different from those at Zuravleff's "Institution" in many ways -- for one thing, most archaeological artifacts are not nearly as awe-inspiring as porcelain bowls and illuminated manuscripts. Much of the rest of it, though -- the group lunches (unfortunately not the gourmet meals described at her museum!), the politics, the dance between administration and research, the incredible range of research and experience, and the gossip and the sexual drama - oh, she got that, she really got it down, and so very well.

And I have to say that Zuravleff really captures the essence of family life -- the worries, the kids' quirks, the unending domestic work, the day to day chaos -- very well also. In fact, her entertaining descriptions remind me of Anne Lamott, who captures motherhood in a way few other writers do...except there's not much Jesus in The Bowl Is Already Broken. But there's plenty of Rumi (whom I keep running up against in books, I think most recently in The Bookseller of Kabul and The Kite Runner). One featured poem, written in Persian by the Afghan poet and mystic more than seven hundred years ago:

Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.

There is no "other world."
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating.

So - go and read this book. It's the perfect summer read, engrossing yet light, but not so fluffy that you feel unfulfilled afterwards. My only quibble with it? The archaeological project that Zuravleff describes is a little sketchy...it doesn't really give you a good idea of how that kind of fieldwork feels or actually works, which is in marked contrast to the other parts of the book. But this is basically criticizing the background scenery from a couple passages. The descriptions of the other parts of the Middle Eastern landscape are wonderful, as are those of the different parts of the Washington DC setting. Just go and read it and enjoy it, really.

*Recent topics include Ida B. Wells and lynching, Frederick Douglass and Jim Crow railroad cars in 1840's Massachusetts (and you thought Jim Crow was just in the South after Reconstruction!), and the feminist protest at the 1968 Miss America pageant (no bras were ever burned, contrary to popular belief).