On My Nightstand and on the Floor

I have lots of books. In piles and stacks and scattered around the house, there is a mixture of what some people would consider trash, some better literary selections, solid non-fiction and science, and highbrow academic tomes with endnotes and bibliographies that exceed the length of the always-subtitled papers.

Here's what's I've been reading lately:

On This Hilltop, by Sue Hubbell

Friends and relatives think that it is great fun that we have a farm in the Ozarks. They conjure up pictures of husking bees, barefoot boys with cane fishing poles, and healthy outdoor work that tones the muscles and earns the right to enormous dinners composed entirely of apple pie (p. 3).

I picked up a copy of Hubbell's later essays about bee-keeping and living in the Ozarks - A Country Year - on a whim on paperbackswap.com, and now I'm hooked and working my way through all of her books. This one is a collection of essays that Hubbell wrote for a St. Louis newspaper in the mid 70's. Although some of it is definitely dated (but still fascinating, as when she describes the impact that local factories had on women's roles), most of the essays are timeless. These pieces aren't as deep or as detailed as those in A Country Year, but sometimes a light-hearted description of caffeine highs and truck gardening is just what you want to read.

___________

Digging to America, by Anne Tyler

No quote here, because I've already returned this to library. I should have written down some quotes, though, because I remember thinking that there were a lot of good ones. This was my book club's choice for this month, and another one that I thoroughly and unexpectedly enjoyed. It sounds damning with faint praise, but this was just a thoroughly nice book. The characters were interesting, complicated, and so real I had a hard time believing that they were fictional. The issues - adoption, immigration, exile, social class, parenting, generational conflict - were handled deftly and intelligently. I liked most of the characters, and I liked the book, and I loved the ending. I think I'll buy this one for my mom.

___________

Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan, by Bruce Feiler

Sakamoto-sensei believed that clothes were a good indicator of character. He regularly monitored the shoe racks in front of the school to see which students were stepping on the heels of their sneakers instead of slipping them on all the way. This behavior, he said, was an early sign of deliquency (p. 77).

This is the fascinating account of a middle school teacher who went to Japan to teach "English literature and American culture". It's next month's selection for my book club, and rather eye-opening in terms of cultural differences in gender roles, education and how schools work and what they teach.

___________

Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, by Ellen Meister

Maddie looked up and spotted a heavily made-up woman with an enormous mane of long, strawberry-red hair, bounding her way toward them, breasts bouncing chaotically from side to side. She wore a stylized sweat suit like Suzanne Podobinski, but instead of the intentionally sedate accessories the PTA president wore to suggest superior breeding, this woman was loudly accented with diamond jewelry, an oversized handbag, and some kind of hybrid footwear, part shoe and part sneaker, that Maddie thought looked like an experiment gone terribly wrong (p. 7-8).

I can't remember which blogger recommended this, but so far it is a satisfying look at suburban housewives. The characters are more likeable and probably more realistic than those in Tom Perrotta's Little Children, though they are also less memorable. Applewood PTA reminds me a lot of Jennifer Weiner's books about modern mothers (Little Earthquakes and Goodnight Nobody). But between these books and What Do You Do All Day? (and all of the non-fiction, like Judith Warner's Perfect Madness), I've had enough of east coast unhappy housewives. Let's have a little insight into how parents live in Texas, or Oregon, or Wisconsin next, ok?

___________

In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches, edited by Sarah Milledge Nelson and Myriam Rosen-Ayalon

I propose that the workload level for mothers that necessitated these changes in child labor and infant-feeding practices was present in Middle Woodland societies of the Midwest rather than the Late Woodland, as proposed by Buikstra et al. (1986:540). The evidence consists of the thinning of vessel walls that occurs in the fifth centry A.D., the population increase that begins in the Middle Woodland, the visible use of starchy supplemental food, the energy requirements necessary to establish and maintain the social network of Hopewell societies, and evidence of greater stress in the skeletons of at least some Middle Woodland skeletal populations (p. 233).

OK, so not every academic paper has a subtitle. Eleven of the nineteen papers in this book on prehistoric gender do have bipartate titles, but "Mothers' Workloads and Children's Labor during the Woodland Period", by Cheryl Claassen, quoted above, does not. Although I found several of the papers very interesting, a few years away from academic jargon really makes me appreciate writers like Robert Sapolsky.

___________

The Essential Rumi, translated by Colman Barks

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside!...

I saw this on the swap rack at my library this morning. Sometimes I love Saline. It's small enough to have a swap rack that works on an honor system, but large enough to have gems like this left in the rack along with the Harlequin romances.

___________

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks

...I want to have in my hand a little book so that I can say, read this book, and it will tell you what feminism is, what the movement is about. I want to be holding in my hand a concise, fairly easy to read and understand book; not a long book, not a book thick with hard to understand jargon and academic language, but a straightforward, clear book - easy to read with being simplistic (p. viii).

And I think that hooks has done just what she says she intended above, though I'm only a few chapters into it. I've been working on a blog post on the different types of feminism - from anarcho-feminism to post-structuralist feminism, and this is a refreshing change.

___________

Tags: book+reviews

Book Meme from Jennifer UtP*

*Under the Ponderosas

The rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next four sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

Edward Duensing's Talking to Fireflies, Shrinking the Moon: A Parent's Guide to Nature Activities was at the top of the stack next to the computer - though my husband's How to Survive a Robot Uprising by Daniel H. Wilson was perhaps equally close. What the heck, I'll give you a piece from both, since you never know when you'll need this information.

But before you leave, you can enjoy one more activity while watching drops of water plummet from a waterfall - an activity that will impress the children with the value of mathematics and science, and with your knowledge of the world. Using the head-rolling technique described above, focus your attention on a drop of water as it begins its descent, and count the number of seconds it takes for that drop to hit the botton (one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, splash). Multiply the number of seconds by itself, and multiply the answer by 16. What does all of this multiplication tell you?

This is from a chapter on how you can watch a single drop change shape and fall from above. It tells you the the height of the waterfall in feet, in case you were wondering. Too bad we don't have any waterfalls nearby. Though there are a couple of dams on the Huron & Saline Rivers. Hmm.

Watch for the following telltale signs in the days and weeks before your robots run amuck: Sudden lack of interest in menial labor. Unexplained disappearances. Unwillingness to be shut down. Repetitive "stabbing" movements.

- from the chapter entitled "How to Recognize a Rebellious Servant Robot". Do you know where your robot servant's manual kill switch is?

Two Weeks to Voting Day!

And I'm sure all of you are going to vote. If you live in Michigan, you might want to check out this helpful League of Women Voters Voter Guide. You can download and print out the whole thing as a pdf file (32 pages) to read at your leisure, or just look at the answers different candidates provided by going to a particular race or proposal (in either text form online or as a pdf file). The LWV Voter Guide doesn't endorse particular candidates, but strives to provide information so you can make your own informed choice. It even includes a little "clip and take to the polls" section, so you don't accidentally vote differently than you intended.

And unless you've been really busy and have read all about the different candidates for the State Board of Education, the various university governing boards, and county court of appeals judges - in addition to the statements by the governor and her opponent, and the US & state senate & house representatives and their opponents - well, you should look at this. Unless you just plan to vote on how the candidates names appear to you, or on what kind of pretty pattern the filled-in circles make on your ballot.

The Voter Guide also includes information and discussion on the five ballot proposals on the slate this year. Have you made up your mind about DNR funding, affirmative action, dove hunting, eminent domain, and school funding? I thought I knew how I was going to vote on most of these proposals, but the more I read, the more I realized how utterly misleading some of the campaign literature on these issues was. Which shouldn't have surprised me.

And if you don't live in Michigan (but are still in the US)? Go here to find a voter guide for your state (you'll have to find the state group, then find a voter guide on their web site). Or just google your state's name and "League of Women Voters" - even if you're not a woman. They really do provide useful non-partisan guides to the candidates and the issues.

Hmmm....tasty appetizer or symbol of peace?
(see Proposal 06-3)

It's Been a Year

...since the first Carnival of Feminists, so I think it is fitting that the 25th Carnival is up at Philobiblon, the host of the first Carnival and its organizer.

I've learned a huge amount from reading the diverse blogs that the Carnival brings together - and I'm looking forward to hosting it myself in December. This edition has topics ranging from women in the French revolution, the most recent winner of the Nobel Peace prize, feminism and fashionistas, the amazing bra dryer, modern witch killings in India, to the work done by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

Tags: feminism, carnival+feminist

Categorizing, Labels, and Indexing

I spent way too much time over the weekend looking at my old blog posts and labelling them into different categories. I also fixed a bunch of broken links. I think I like the new beta Blogger. I've been wanting categories for a long time, as you might guess from my cobbled together "Index of Books Reviewed Here" and "Feminist Ponderings" at the top of the right column of my blog. I'm not ready to get rid of those links yet, but the more encompassing organization of labelling posts was a lot more satisfying and thorough.

Is it weird that I really like indexing things? When I helped edit a book a few years ago, I was one of the people that poured over the annotated bibliography and thought of all the different key words that a reader would use to find each entry. And I loved doing it, just as I still love researching different topics.

Pissenlit and Dandelions

I was reading the names of crayon colors to my almost-five-year-old daughter the other night. Since starting the "early 5's" Kindergarten program (her birthday is two days before our state's K deadline), she has embraced coloring in a way my son never did. She even likes staying within the lines. But this time, she also wanted to know all of the names of the colors in Spanish and French, which Crayola thoughtfully puts on their crayons.

I was a little surprised to find that Dandelion was a crayon color apart from Yellow. It's a very pretty color, more golden and not as brash as yellow (and quite unlike the brilliant color of actual dandelions). The French name for Dandelion really surprised me, though: Pissenlit. How do you pronounce that? And how weird is it that the French word for dandelion sounds like "piss"?

Well, it's not so weird after all, since piss in French actually means pretty much the same as it does in English, and the whole word translates as "piss in bed". Turns out that an old English name for the dandelion was also "piss-a-bed." Both piss names come from its use as an herbal diuretic. Other more poetic old common names include blowball, peasant's clock, tell-time, lion's tooth, and swine's snout.

There's a lot of interesting folklore about dandelions (linked to many of the common names above). I haven't been able to convince my kids to eat the young leaves in a salad yet, but maybe next spring.

Meanwhile, if you ever want to know the word origins of pissant, piss elm (Chinese elm), and why it was ok for them to say "pisspot" but not "take a piss" on the Waltons, I recommend a search through the archives of the American Dialect Society's mailing list here. It's kind of cool that it is administered by the Linguist List of EMU and Wayne State. I had no idea such a thing existed.

Tags: dandelions, pissenlit

Another Feminist Carnival...

...this one is the 24th, and it's up at f-words, which has the intriguing subtitle "Feminism, Food, Fact and Fiction".

There are lots of interesting posts on American feminism and Muslim women, "choice feminism", make up, and access to Plan B. Go read and learn something. Debate. It's fun. A "fun feminist"* thing to do.

*You might also be interested in reading Confessions of a Fun Feminist and Why My Brand of Feminism is No Fun at All for some debate about some of the traditional (and not so traditional more recent) trappings of femininity.

Edited to add further responses to this - Fuck You and Your Feminist Beauty Standards from Feministing.com, Who I Am by Jill at Feministe, and My Feminism, by Shakespeare's Sister.

Tags: feminism, carnival+feminist

1491: Book Review

I started 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, over a year ago. Because I read it so slowly and critically, I had to return it to my library with a couple of chapters unread. Finally - and fittingly, I thought - I came back to 1491 (my own copy, this time), and finished it just before Columbus Day.

Part of the reason it took me so long to read Mann's book is because I know so much about its subject. Prehistoric ecology was my daily fare for fifteen years of work (in both academia and "cultural resource management") in North American archaeology. So I felt compelled to check pretty much every endnote (and there are forty pages of them), along with many of the bibliographic references (another forty-five pages) in 1491. I have to say that I am extremely impressed with how well Mann balances current scientific and historical research and the often arcane jargon of anthropological archaeology* with the remarkably readable popular history (and prehistory) presented in his book. Balancing the nuances and complexities of this research with stories that can keep general readers not only awake, but thoroughly engaged, is pretty damn hard. Mann makes it look effortless.

His well-researched book is basically an overview of several American Indian societies (and some of the archaeological and historic research regarding them in the last few decades), mostly in the period before Columbus's arrival 515 years ago. Of course, this is a huge span of both space and time, and a monstrous amount of research. There is simply too much North and South American prehistory and ethnohistory to fit into any book, even one the size of the Oxford English Dictionary.

So Mann picked some of the stories that he found most interesting to relate. He jumps from an account of John Billington's sons** and their adventures after they disembarked from the Mayflower, to Squanto (aka Tisquantum) and his political machinations, down to Lake Titicaca and the Inka empire before Pizarro, up to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, lingers a bit on the origins and importance of maize and cotton, then returns to the remarkable Mississippian chiefdom of Cahokia (near present day East St. Louis) from 800-1200 AD, then jumps down to the Amazon basin a thousand years ago, visiting Olmec, Oaxacan, and Mayan cultures along the way, and then finally comes back again to historic times and the Iroquois Nation. It is quite the whirlwind tour, but Mann ties it all together admirably.

Readers who think of prehistoric Native Americans as timeless inhabitants of a sylvan paradise who "lived lightly on the land" will find much of Mann's book eye-opening. Those who assume that these cultures were not very populous, don't appreciate their diversity, and have never heard of the devastating diseases that followed the "Columbian exchange" or encounter may find the historic accounts of epidemic death in the New World more shocking than those imagined by Stephen King in The Stand.

Since I am familiar with the literature and research behind the book, I was also more than a little dismayed by how many reviewers said they were just blown away by it. They were shocked not because the book is so well-done (although it is), but because that they had absolutely no idea how radically some Native societies altered their natural environment, or because they'd never heard of Cahokia, or they didn't know how egalitarian the Five Nations were, etc. This unfortunately shows just how poorly my former colleagues manage to share their work with the general public. Which is not good for either archaeologists (most of whom depend on government funding at some level), or for people who are reading ideas about American history and prehistory that were out-of-date a generation or two ago.

So - Mann's book is definitely long overdue. But there is still a lot of room left for popular yet not overly simplified works that could help fill the huge chasm between college archaeology textbooks, American Antiquity articles, and reworked dissertations (which leave a lot to be desired in terms of "readability"), and the brief, often inaccurate snippets on archaeology that appear in newspaper and magazine articles. A few years back, I did read and enjoy Sharman Apt Russell's When the Land Was Young: Reflections on American Archaeology, which presents some of the controversies and the colorful people engaged in archaeology (though in a highly "edited for prime time" fashion), and I recommend her book, too. But there's still so much interesting research being done out there -- there's room for a lot more books like 1491. Maybe someday I'll try my hand.

PS Mann's book has an excellent index. I thought I should mention that, since I've ranted here about a lot of recent books that don't include indices.


*Readers who would like an introduction to modern approaches to anthropological archaeology (and some of the language you need to understand the academic literature) may want to check out Adrian Praetzillis's Death by Theory: A Tale of Mystery and Archaeological Theory.

**Like Charles Mann, I'm also descended from Mayflower passenger John Billington, who was executed for murder in 1630 (the first person hung in the Plymouth colonies). I found Mann's endnotes on Billington particularly interesting, as I had previously heard the story that this non-religious "Pilgrim" was framed, but hadn't heard the arguments behind the Puritan conspiracy theory.

Tags: archaeology, prehistory, book+reviews, 1491, Cahokia

Check Out Nature Class at The GreenHouse

If you're interested in kids and nature education, I blogged about it over at The GreenHouse today - click over and check it out. And while you're there, read the previous posts by Jennifer and Andrea. But be careful if you head over to their personal sites - Under the Ponderosas and Beanie Baby. You may find that you've been sitting at your computer clicking away for hours and that the better part of the evening is totally gone.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a sunset over the field behind my house last week. I'm actually facing east, but it was so spectacular that it reflected all over the sky. My digital camera really can't do it justice.

Don't Send Twisty a Picture of Your Breasts...

when you go to I Blame the Patriarchy and read I Got Yer Boobython Right Here...and she'll send a dollar to Breast Cancer Action.

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors is doing a matching Anti-Boobie-Thon, too. So check it out. It's a lot easier than rinsing all those pink Yoplait yogurt lids and mailing them to Minnesota. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

On My Nightstand and Almost Due at the Library...

...are books I've just finished, or that I'm in the middle of, and many that I plan to read soon.

I still like doing the random quote thing that Mental Multivitamin did on her "On the Nightstand" entries, so I'm going to page 29 (or thereabouts) and taking the first complete sentence. Then I'll do a little blurb on each book to share what I think about it, why I'm reading it, etc. in lieu of a real review. Because if I did real reviews on every book I read I'd never have time to vacuum or mow the lawn or pick my frost-bitten tomatoes.

Song of the Water Boatman: & Other Poems, by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Beckie Prange

Sun
slants low,
chill seeps into black
water. No more days of bugs
and basking. Last breath, last sight
of light and down I go, into the mud. Every
year, here, I sink and settle, shuttered like a
shed. Inside, my eyes close, my heart slows...
(from Painted Turtle, the last fall poem in the book,
which doesn't have numbered pages.)

This is a gorgeous book and I am so grateful that Jennifer (Under the Ponderosas) recommended it. It has the most beautiful, strong, graceful woodcuts I've ever seen, and such lovely, whimsical poems and wonderfully descriptive blurbs on natural history for kids. I think I like this book more than my kids do, though.

The only problem with the book? It's too short. I want it to be about five times as long as it is. Do you hear that, Ms. Sidman and Ms. Prange? More, please.

Upside Down: Seasons among the Nunamiut, by Margaret B. Blackman

If not, then the CB radio has provided them a weekend of mental journeys to Qalutagiaq, Masu Creek, and Narvaksrauraq through other villagers' shared experiences.

I think I saw this advertised in a University of Nebraska book catalog, and I vaguely remember ethnographic articles by Blackman from an ethnohistory course. Upside Down makes a nice counterpoint to Ordinary Wolves - although Upside Down is not nearly as well-written nor as graphic as Kantner's novel (and really, how many books could be?). I'm sure this is at least partially because Upside Down is non-fiction. It is definitely much more engagingly written than most anthropological writing, and should interest those who like stories about the arctic. It also makes a nice follow-up to Jodi Picoult's The Tenth Circle, which was a fairly gripping fast read with a main character that is a lot like a combination of Cutuk from Ordinary Wolves and the cartoonist from Stephen King's Cell.

Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression, by Tracy Thompson

And so I retreat to the safety of what Cusk calls my "coven of co-mothers, " where we cackle at our private joke.

I have been on the waiting list at the Ann Arbor District Library for this book for months. Finally, it occurred to me that I could request that the Saline Library buy it - and within a week, it was bought, processed, and in my hands. I'm impressed - by both the book and my little local library.


The Lake, the River & the Other Lake, by Steve Amick

You live with two different parents, she figured, you can't expect the place to stay like a museum.

This is my book club's choice for October. I hope they like it as much as I did. I'm looking forward to re-reading it. The whole summer-place thing is so interesting - I loved Timothy Noah's "Summer-House Lit" articles in Slate. I really need cabin on a lake up north to be able to write more about this, I think.

Tags: book+reviews, children's+literature

Tra La La...Captain Underpants is Educational

My nine year old son still loves Captain Underpants. Though he is a fairly advanced reader (having already devoured the Lemony Snicket series, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and many of the Harry Potter books), he continues to look forward to each of George and Harold's epic adventures. He got Captain Underpants And The Preposterous Plight Of The Purple Potty People in his Scholastic book order* last week, and has already read it several times. And it really is educational - he asked me to define "anarchy" the first time he read it.

I blogged about Captain Underpants and Judy Blume last year for Banned Books Week (here it is if you want to read it) and it's that time again this week.

From the American Library Association's website:

Do you remember the first book you read that touched you, made you laugh, scared you silly or made you rethink the world? Chances are someone has tried to have that book removed from a U.S. school or public library somewhere nearby.

All kinds of books – from Scary Stories by Alvin Schwartz to Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – have been targeted for all kinds of reasons. Every year the American Library Association (ALA) learns of hundreds of book challenges – or formal attempts to have a book restricted or removed.

Please tell us a about YOUR favorite book from the list below. Each of the books listed has been challenged in schools and libraries in the 25 years since Banned Books Week started.

Here's the survey.

*I would now like to gripe about the all of the non-book items advertised in the Scholastic "Book" catalogs that come home every month (or temptingly shown in the book fairs at school): stuffed animals, small electronics, and Game Boy games all compete with the books - how many kids ignore the books for all of this other stuff?

It's the 23rd!

In addition to being the first day of autumn (or fall, if you prefer), it's also time for the 23rd Carnival of Feminists, now hosted by Lingual Tremors. The articles on health care are fascinating, but there's a lot more to read and digest - famous feminist bloggers answer your questions about feminism, Boob-gate 2006, and a very thought-provoking couple of posts on emergency contraception are just the beginning.

This is a good place to share the link to Our Bodies, Our Blog, a "daily dose of women's health news and analysis" by the people who brought you Our Bodies, Ourselves. Did you know there's a new edition (January 2005) of this classic? It would make a good "going to college" gift for someone who had "abstinence only" sex education in high school.

Clapperclaws, Cover-Sluts, and Shachled-Shoes (or The Word Museum: Book Review)

I ran across The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten, by Jeffrey Kacirk, in the free swap rack at my local library. I knew almost immediately that I would enjoy browsing this collection of words that the author says were partly chosen for their "Jabberwocky factor" -- basically, how they sound and the images they bring to mind.

As I read, though, it was the social and historical glimpses that many of the words provided that really struck me, and I did start wishing for a little more depth (like Michael Quinion provides in Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds). Quinion's site (oooh, and I see he has a new book - Gallimaufry - coming out soon!) really provide that in spades, which I appreciate. Kacirk's book is less research and more "check this fun stuff out", which is sometimes just what you want in a book, especially if you're reading it in the bathroom while your 4 year old splashes in the tub.

Anyway, in his introduction, Kacirk mentions that "teachers and historians, because of their socially prescribed curricular attention toward larger social concepts, often bypassed the smaller and more personal expressions of social custom and conduct" (p. 8). While I don't think that is a fair description of many good teachers or historians (or archaeologists, for that matter), it is undeniably true that the watered-down version of history that many grade school or high school students get fed in the US is de-personalized, over-generalized, and, well, boring. This book is not boring.

Since I've been reading a lot of women's history and feminist theory lately (not as boring as it sounds, dammit!), I took special notice of the words - especially the perjorative ones - in Kacirk's book that were historically applied to women. I thought it was interesting how most of these archaic terms described sexual behavior, uppity-ness, or laziness, which all come together in some feminine stereotypes. These words tell us a little bit about control (and the lack of control) that men had over women in England and Scotland in centuries past:

batterfanged - basically, to be beaten and scratched, and Kacirk adds as by "a termagant". Now there's an interesting word, too, right up there with virago. Check out the bizarre origin of termagant.

clapperclaw - to tongue-beat; to scold. To scratch, maul, fight in an unskillful manner; generally used of women. Hence, a clapperclaw is a noisy woman.

cover-slut - a long apron used to hide an untidy dress (or something in general that hides sluttishness).

curtain-lecture - A reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed. Yes, high-class beds used to have curtains around them.

fishfag - "any scolding, vixenish, foul-mouthed woman". Check out this blogger's description of Ann Coulter that uses fishfag along with many of this book's other entertaining words. It's an interesting twist on the more well-known "fishwife".

giggle-trot - a woman who marries late in life is said to "take the giggle-trot".

idle-worms - worms that breed in the fingers of lazy girls.

laced-mutton - a prostitute (as used in The Two Gentlemen of Verona). Also rigmutton. Some graduate student somewhere has probably written a paper on the symbolism of these comparisons with sheep.

married all over - used to describe women who "fall off in their appearance and become poor and miserable-looking" after marriage. The historic equivalent of "letting yourself go". Check out this Good Housekeeping quiz on how to discover if you're on "the fast track to Frumpville". There's a similar quiz on Oprah's site. Give me a break. Some things really haven't changed in centuries. Which leads us right to the last definition:

shachled-shoes - a no longer useful person, especially "a woman discarded by her lover". Shachled is an old Scottish term meaning distorted and no longer holding its shape. Ouch. So much for "the good old days".

Tags: history, feminism, words, book+reviews, Kacirk

Dinosaur-Like Swan Geese

Big birds really look like dinosaurs to me, especially when they come at you aggressively. We had a bit of a Jurassic Park scene at the Calder Dairy last weekend, with the geese looking at us with their reptilian eyes, greedy for corn and shoelaces.


Luckily, no children were pecked (despite the picture above, which includes my daughter's arm), though my husband did get a sharp nip in the rear. The most aggressive offenders were the swan geese (Anser cygnoides domesticus), these strange ones with the saurian bulges at the tops of their beaks.

Any locals interested in visiting the Calder Dairy (down in Monroe Co., halfway between Milan and Monroe) should definitely take a big cooler with ice packs when they go. I recommend the pound and half tub of butter, which is way, way better than the Land o' Lakes blocks from the grocery store, despite the whiff of cow barn that clings to the wax paper covering. And the chocolate ice cream. Or the vanilla ice cream.

I just wish they sold their own cheese curds, too. Why can't we get these around Ann Arbor? Or can we? Please, please leave a comment if you know of a local provider.

Tags: Michigan, family, food

Migrating Monarchs

I took this picture of a monarch caterpillar on my son's hand a couple of weeks ago - it looks like it was getting ready to pupate, since it was getting into a J shape. I didn't see where the chrysalis ended up, though, and according to this chart on Monarchwatch.org, "Toxy" (as my son named him, because he's toxic) may have already emerged and set off for Mexico. We haven't seen any monarchs in the last week or so, although it's been raining so much we haven't been out much.

Next year, we're definitely going to do some tagging. Check out the cool monarch tagging pictures at Burning Silo, which I just ran across when I discovered the third Festival of the Trees.

I love all the wildlife we've had this year associated with the swamp milkweed (which you see going to seed in my last post). If any locals want some seeds to start next spring (or a whole plant to transplant when they come again next spring) give me an e-mail. I'll mail you an envelope of milkweed fluff & seeds, or you can bring your trowel and dig yourself a shoot. We're going to be transplanting a lot of them next year anyway, and they are tough, these Asclepias incarnata plants.

Tags: swamp+milkweed, monarch+butterflies, nature+study

Seasonal Changes

I can tell that fall is here - and even if it isn't here chronologically, the transition's in the air, reflected by the fact that:

• - It's time to deflate the kiddie pool, although we're not ready for the flannel sheets
  
• - Geese are in the air and overnighting in the wheat stubble behind the house, though hummingbirds are still at our feeders
• - School has started (along with the first school-bourne virus - after just four days of classes!), though neither the MEAPs nor the first field trips are here yet
• - Ragweed is pollinating, and I wouldn't mind losing the rest of my basil if the first killing frost just gets rid of the ragweed

That night was the turning-point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some imaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.
~ Henry David Thoreau, from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), p. 356.

22nd Carnival of Feminists

..is now up at Redemption Blues. There are quite a few thought-provoking posts on feminism, fat, and body image in general. Faith and feminism is also featured, and the role that sexuality plays in both is prominent in several of the posts in this category. And my rant about Get to Work got linked and called "detailed, balanced, and thoughtful." But don't miss the other posts in the Rainbow section ("not explicitly related to the announced topics in all their colourful splendour") - there are some great posts by bloggers I've never read before. That's one of the things I like most about these carnivals - although at some point, I'm going to have to stop adding new "must read" blogs to my Blogarithm list.

Tags: carnival+feminist, feminism

Housekeeping Ain't No Joke

As the maid, Hannah, says in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (published in 1868). The illustration above is from the same era, from a magazine published in Melbourne, Australia - a bit of satire on the reformers' push for an eight hour work day.

Interestingly, Alcott's friend and neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson had this to say in 1870:

Housekeeping is not beautiful; it cheers and raises neither the husband, the wife, nor the child; neither the host nor the guest; it oppresses women. A house kept to the end of prudence is laborious without joy; a house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

An alternate title for this blog post could be "A Primer on Housework". My musings on this were prompted by a number of things - reading Hirshman's articles (not so much her book) and many thoughtful blog responses to the articles; reading Darla Shine's Happy Housewives and Caitlin Flanagan's To Hell with All That, and a bunch of research on 19th century housewives and prescriptive (or advice) literature that I did for a part-time job.

I am actually grateful that Linda Hirshman brought up housework again. Feminists seem to address it periodically, then forget about it until the next time a discussion of family responsibilities (especially child care) and the consequences of having a parent working full-time for household work comes up again. Arlie Russell Hochschild brought it to widespread (but not sustained) public attention in 1989, with the publication of The Second Shift, but in case you'd like to read more, check this other stuff out.

The following three fascinating blog discussions were prompted by Hirshman's "Homeward Bound" in the American Prospect (republished by AlterNet) last fall & winter, especially by Hirshman's discussion of the "domestic glass ceiling":

The Happy Feminist, On Valuing Housework

Be a Bitch about Housework - see many comments, by Bitch Ph.D.

The Domestic Glass Ceiling, by Half Changed World

____________________

Now going back in time, from before The Second Shift:

Life Sentence: The Politics of Housework, by Debbie Taylor, from a 1988 issue of The New Internationalist devoted to housework.

Ann Oakley's books on housework and housewives, published in 1974. Her website doesn't provide page links - go to Publications, then Non-fiction, and then you can click on extracts from Housewife and The Sociology of Housework.

The Politics of Housework, by Pat Mainardi, 1970 - classic feminist essay. And funny. Very funny.

Housework in Late 19th Century America, by Steven Mintz and the complementary More Work for Mother, by Ruth Schwartz Cowan

Although I enjoy living in clean, well-appointed surroundings, I like writing, reading, and even mowing the lawn (with our reel mower, no less!) a lot better. We don't live in squalor, and luckily I have a high tolerance for clutter and dog hair, and little interest in what anyone outside my family thinks about this. Interestingly, I don't mind cleaning other people's stuff nearly as much as our own -- I greatly enjoyed and recommend Other People's Dirt: A Housecleaner's Adventures from Cape Cod to Kyoto, by Louise Rafkin for a fun read on zen & housekeeping, what your house tells your cleaning service about your lifestyle and personality, and some of the bizarre standards some women feel compelled to uphold.

Tags: housework, gender, division of labor, feminism, marriage, hirshman, second+shift, hochschild, housekeeping, ann+oakley, mainardi

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!