11.06.2016
Gratitude
99 years ago today, on November 6, 1917, all of the women of New York State won the right to vote.
It would be another almost-three years before all adult women in the United States won the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th amendment on August 18, 1920.
In the lead-up to the 1917 vote, lots of women participated in lots of parades to drum up support for woman suffrage.
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| Fall of 1917 |
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| May 4, 1912 |
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| From The World's Work, 1912. Parade took place on May 4, 1912. |
See this, this, and this for more information about these three parade images. The full page from The World's Work includes a caption that reports that in the six states in which women had state-wide suffrage by 1912, 85% of women voted! That's amazing and it's sad that it's not that high today. (This fun graphic lets you see how changing turnout for various demographic groups affects the outcome of our upcoming presidential election.)
I won't take my vote on Tuesday for granted; you shouldn't, either!
Labels: gender, history, New York
2.05.2012
"What It Is To Be A Jew," by Mrs. Minnie D. Louis (1895)
Read more about Minnie D. Louis here, in the Jewish Women's Archive encyclopedia entry.
Also, here is a line drawing of her from a New York Times article:
Do you know what's not awesome about being in graduate school? No time to blog!
Also, I may have lost the ability to write coherently. Or maybe that's just exhaustion speaking.
Labels: history, Jewish community
1.12.2011
Awkward
6.26.2009
The serious drinking problem of our generation
Labels: fun 'n games, history, science/health/environment
5.12.2008
REFUSENIK
My earliest political memory is of the 1984 election season. I remember being driven home from school by another mom (remember carpooling?), and asking her why there were signs in everyone's lawns. She explained about the upcoming presidential election.
My second earliest political memory is of the Geneva Summit between Gorbachev and Reagan in November 1985. I remember reading about it in the Weekly Reader. I was in the first grade.
The truth is, though, that at around this same time, I was partaking in politics much more directly by sending drawings to refusenik Ida Nudel when she was in exile in Siberia for requesting an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union.1
I think the only reason that I remember sending drawings to Ida Nudel2 is because my father once commented admiringly on the perspective in my drawing. In a Purim letter to her in 1985, I drew a picture of a clown in shul, with the benches that were further away smaller than the ones that were closer to my point of view as the artist.3 I must have written to her or others more than once, but that's the only time I remember writing. When I was a little bit older, I remember not going to the big Soviet Jewry rally in Washington, DC (although I knew it was taking place), and going to a much smaller rally on behalf of Soviet Jewry in front of the Massachusetts State House. I also remember going on the Walk for Soviet Jewry, right before going to the birthday party of a classmate, during which we all put on makeup, I think under the direction of a Mary Kay woman. I missed the beginning of the party because of the walk, and I remember thinking, even then, that makeup was kind of stupid. I wonder if it's because I was coming from the Walk for Soviet Jewry. I think that both the Boston rally and walk took place in the fall of 1988.
I knew, when I was a kid, that I was doing these things on behalf of Soviet Jews who were being persecuted. Until I saw REFUSENIK at the Quad Cinema last night, though, I didn't really understand what that meant. It's interesting, when you know something as a child, and then don't think about it for twenty years, and then return to it as an adult. It's a bit eery, actually, but also very cool. What I knew as a kid, I now know entirely differently as an adult, and this film deserves 100% of the credit for that.
For example, I had no idea--I'm not sure how I missed this--that Soviet Jews were refused entrance to universities and were denied jobs. I think I had a vague idea, when I was a kid, that Jews who asked to leave the Soviet Union to go to Israel were fired from the jobs they already had. However, as a kid, I had no notion of what that meant.4 I also did not understand, as a kid, about the Cold War5 and the interplay between that Geneva Summit, the earlier Helsinki Accords, and the plight of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. Watching this movie was like one big "Oh....!" It was very informative in that way. I understood how a coalition of Jews and others were able to put pressure on the American government to tie incipient trade agreements with the USSR to the signing of human rights accords, which were then used to hold the USSR accountable for human rights violations.
I also understood how none of this would have been possible without letter-writing campaigns organized by college students and housewives, as well as some others, all across America. It was incredibly inspiring. All of these people putting pressure on their congresspeople, as well as pressure on the Soviet government by sending letters to refuseniks, along with "ordinary" women and men smuggling bits of film and pieces of cameras into and out of the USSR, is what did this. It directly saved lives. That's crazy! In a good way!
What was most inspiring, of course, were the interviews with the refuseniks themselves, both contemporary and original footage from the 1970s and 1980s. The resilience of the human spirit in incredible, and it shines through this film.
The film also showed a great exchange with Mikhail Gorbachev, which, alone, is worth the price of admission. I don't want to give away what he says, but, well, just go see it. I guess it's not surprising, but with skillful editing, it packs quite a punch.
My only critiques are that, at two full hours, it was a bit long and I thought it could have been edited down by about 20 minutes, albeit with some loss of content. Isn't that what the DVD is for? Secondly, there are a lot of subtitles of both Russian and Hebrew interviews. That's not really a critique as much as a warning. So if you're short, or even if you aren't, get there early and get an aisle or otherwise-guaranteed-to-be-unobstructed seat. I got there late and was sitting behind a tall man who was wearing a hat! Tall dudes, take your hat off in the theater!
One of the best parts of the screening that I attended yesterday was that Laura Gialis, the director, and Natan Sharansky, one of the most famous refuseniks, were also in attendance and took questions afterwards. (I read his book a long time ago--when I was in high school--and it's possible that if I had a better memory, the film would have been less revelatory to me. All I remember from the book is the chess.) It took Laura five years to make this film.
I asked MK Sharansky (does he still get that title now that's retired from the Israeli government?) two questions. The first was about whether he got the letters that I and other sent him when we were kids. His response was great and quite moving. It was that it didn't matter whether he got letters--the KGB always got them, and that saved his life. He could tell, based on how they were treating him, whether letters were flooding in or not. They would not kill him as long as the eyes of the world were upon him, and the letters were direct proof of those eyes. After his longest hunger strike of 110 days, they gave in to all of his demands and he attributes that to the letters. Without the letters, he would have died. Others who were incarcerated with him, but who were Ukrainian or Armenian dissidents, did not have letters sent to him and one of them, a friend, went on a hunger strike and was allowed to just die, rather than the KGB ceding to his demands.
The second question I asked was about whether we could learn anything from the ultimately successful struggle for Soviet Jewry in terms of what's now going on in Darfur, Tibet, China, etc. First, Sharansky disparaged those "so-called liberals" (his words) who talk about Darfur because it makes them feel good about himself. Then he said that he feels very lucky that he was a Jew in the Soviet Union and not a Ukrainian or Armenian, because similar atrocities were perpetrated against Ukrainians and Armenians, and there is a significant Armenian diaspora, but they didn't organize protests and put pressure on various governments the way the Jewish diaspora did. He mentioned that his wife, Avital, tried to get the Armenian community in Israel involved on behalf of the Armenians stuck in jail in the USSR, but she was unsuccessful. Then he said that the talk was silly--the only way to prevent these human rights abuses it to put pressure on all of the governments that deal with and help them. In the case of Darfur, he said that it was the Arab countries in the Middle East that support them. He said that the only way to solve this is for the US should not have dealings with any country that supports what's going on in Darfur, but that everyone (including "so-called liberals") is in favor of appeasement these days, not the absolutes that ended up working in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. If we would refuse to trade with China, they were clean up their human rights act.
Mr. Sharansky was also quite funny. Someone in the audience asked, in a sort of accusatory tone, what he was doing for the State of Israel, now that he was free. (Was this person living under a rock for the past ten years?) He made a few jokes about how his ten years working in the Israeli government were worse than his nine years in prison. When someone asked him how he managed to survive for so long, he said, "Where--prison or the Knesset?" When someone said something about how amazing his wife was in her tireless efforts to get him freed, he acknowledged that the smartest thing you can do before going to prison for nine years is to marry someone who will work tirelessly on your behalf.
So, go see this movie. And then go work tirelessly on behalf of someone else who is stuck where they shouldn't be.
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1. For that, I thank my parents, especially my father. I don't think that most kids grow up in such a strong culture of "You can help me save lives" as I did. I don't think you have to do it that often for it to make a strong impression on kids or create in them a sense of "can do" and global responsibility. I am only afraid that I have totally failed to live up to these childhood sentiments in my adult life.
2. who was freed in October 1987, when I was eight years old
3. I remember thinking that it was funny that my father was surprised--duh! Of course things that were further away looked smaller. Wasn't that just how it was when you looked around a room? Why should a drawing be any different? Only I didn't know the word "duh!" then because it hadn't been invented.<--- This is it! A small reproduction of the actual drawing from Purim 1985 that I sent to Ida Nudel! It's a GIF made from a PDF of a scan of a photocopy, but there she is. I have not seen this since 1985. Weird.
4. I learned, from this film, that many Jewish scientists and engineers who were fired from their jobs got new jobs as elevator operators in hospitals. Every elevator operator had at least one PhD at once point!
5. I remember the day the Soviet Union collapsed, but I also remember not understanding, really, what the big deal was and why my grandmother was basically crying with joy. Part of the problem was that it happened in August, when I wasn't in school. I felt similarly about the collapse of the Berlin Wall almost two years earlier, but at least with that, we spoke about it during the Current Events part of our school day. I remember when it happened, and by then, I had a slightly better understanding of why it was a big deal, but I didn't really understand until much later. And, heck, I probably still don't really understand any of this stuff.
Labels: childhood, history, New York
2.20.2008
Wiki of obsolete technical skills
11.26.2007
A cause I could get behind: Staying in bed longer during the winter to conserve energy.
But to accept the life described in this op-ed, you'd have to accept a life with five months of working much, much harder than I ever have, and seven months of monotony. Also, in general, a life with a much narrower range of experiences. I'm thinking in terms of food--you would eat just what you grew or your neighbors grew, travel (no money economy = no travel, I think), and leisure (no taking out books from the public library). These are all things that I take for granted and would be very sad without, even if it meant that I could spend seven months of the year sleeping.
8.29.2007
Schizophrenic law professor, paleolithic diets, and loss of faith
- Schizophrenic law professor: Fascinating, scary, and inspiring. Read it here.
- Paleolithic diets: This post by Jo, but even more so, the ensuing comments, especially Jody's, fascinated me. Really, Jody's comments almost made me want to go back to school. So, leaving aside PCOS/insulin-resistant people, are carbs like poison for us because paleolithic people didn't have access to a lot of them? Or have our digestive tracts evolved to be carb-happy in the past 10,000 years, since agriculture began?
- Loss of faith: Cecily's post is beautiful, and who among us can't identify with it? What I identified with most strongly is jealousy towards people who have faith. Cecily writes: "And I realized that I envied them all that simple trust and faith--I miss it." Emuna peshuta--simple faith. I don't know if I ever had that kind of faith--I remember always having questions. But sometimes, it would be nice to believe that we are cradled in God's hands, wouldn't it? I really loved this paragraph, also:
I don't like feeling this way; I was much happier when I really felt like I was cradled in God's hand, safe and cared for. Shit, who wouldn't? But I feel now that if there is a personal God (personal to me, that is) he or she is kind of an asshole, and full of arbitrary moods and inclinations. A God like that is impossible to trust. It's like trusting an abusive parent. Seductive, compelling, and impossible.
I also identify with Cecily's writing about acting as if one has faith.
* * * * *
I realize that I never updated my reading public about the apartment situation.
So, I moved in last Wednesday, August 22! It was exhausting, even though I didn't lift a thing. (Well, I rearranged boxes and furniture after the movers had gone, but they put most of it where it belonged.)
There is so much to do in a new apartment, as opposed to someone else's pre-existing apartment that's already all set up. The last time I moved into a previously-vacant apartment was August 2002. A week later, I'm still eating off of paper and living out of suitcases, which sucks. But I do have: window shades (well, one didn't fit and the other is falling down and both need some modification, but at least no one can see in at night), a working toilet-paper-roll-holder, a properly-tipped super and super's brother, a place to put my shampoo in the shower, a brand new dead bolt lock for the front door, healthy food (yogurt, cheese, fruit, milk, hummus) in the fridge, and a thoroughly cleaned-out closet with clothes hanging up in it. I also have a kitchen sink that leaks a medium amount and a bathroom sink that leaks a small amount, which have taken up an extraordinary amount of my time.
Question: Is it possible, from the third floor, that I hear/feel the subway moving? I think I can hear the subway from my bathroom. It's kind of weird.
It may be a little bit longer before substantive posts resume. Enjoy these links in the meantime!
Labels: history, links, mental health, science/health/environment
2.21.2007
Historical perspective on Upper West Side rents...and more!
I think the New York City housing market has outpaced inflation by quite a bit over the past twenty years, so the 39% increase since 1986 might be in line with rent increases elsewhere in the city over the past 20 years. Something tells me that they are not, though. It would really be interesting to figure that out, though, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, I am too lazy (or busy, depending on how you look at it), to compare rent to salaries in 1986, rent to salaries now, and Westmont rent to salaries now, and to compare the Westmont rent to other buildings both in the area and elsewhere in NYC.
Luckily, some hard-working people at the New York City Rent Guidelines Board have done some of that rent:salary calculating and surveying rents across the city legwork for me. In their publication titled "2006 Income and Affordability Study" [PDF], on pages 54-55, they report:
Affordability of Rental HousingI didn't realize that HUD determined Fair Market Rent. I was under the impression that Fair Market Rent is "whatever people are willing to afford," which, at least in my neck of the woods, seems to be heading towards "a helluva lot of money and much more than I could ever afford." These are HUD's Fair Market Rent data sets. I don't know what one does with such data other than bemoan one's overpriced apartment. Oh. Never mind. Based on what little I've read online in the past, um, five minutes, I think that they are used to figure out some housing assistance programs (Section 8?), but I'm not sure of the details. This [PDF] explains more. In any case, FMR it seems to be correlated to city-wide rental prices, so if it's grown faster than average city salaries, that indicates something about rent:salaries in general. FMR clearly has almost nothing to do with rents in one small part of Manhattan, which must be the most expensive borough.
Examining affordability of rental housing, the 2005 HVS reported that the median gross rent-to-income ratio for all renters was 31.2%, meaning that half of all households residing in rental housing pay more than 31.2% of their income in gross rent, and half pay less. Furthermore, more than a quarter (28.8%) of rental households pay more than 50% of their household income in gross rent. Generally, housing is considered affordable when a household pays no more than 30% of their income in rent.15 Both the overall gross rent-to-income ratio and the proportion of households paying more than 50% of income towards rent increased from the 2002 HVS, which reported proportions of 28.6% and 25.5% respectively....
Despite ongoing efforts by a number of government agencies and non-profit groups, housing affordability remains an issue in a city ranked 11th highest in a nationwide survey of monthly rental costs ($856), but only 27th highest in median household income ($41,509).16
A number of studies have chronicled the difficulty New Yorkers face in finding affordable housing, including an annual study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition that found NYC housing to be unaffordable to the poorest working New Yorkers. In order to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the City’s Fair Market Rent ($1,133 a month), as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a full-time worker must earn $21.79 per hour, or $45,320 a year. Alternately, those who earn minimum wage would have to work the equivalent of 145 hours a week (or two people residing together would each have to work 72.5 hours a week) to be able to afford a two bedroom unit priced at Fair Market Rent.17
And here, they discuss the increase in salaries vs. housing costs over the past 20-25 years, since that article was written about the construction of the Westmont and Key West. This is what really interested me.
A report released in January 2006, “Pulling Apart in New York,” documents income trends for both New York State and New York City from the early 1980s through the early 2000s.19 The study found that New York State has the widest income gap between rich and poor of all fifty states, and the gap grew over the past twenty years, with only income disparity in Arizona growing at a faster rate. While nationwide the income of the rich grew at three times the pace of the poor, in New York State it grew at five times the rate.
Other items related to that last post, but not about a historical perspective on rents...
Someone from the State Insurance Fund Of New York saw the previous post at 10 am yesterday. They got to it by Googling "fake wall New York." Should I be concerned? Is there a worker's comp issue here? Are lots of people getting injured on the job putting up fake walls? And do you know how many other people have gotten to my blog since Friday by Googling "fake wall" or "turn one bedroom into two"? Several! This is clearly a hot topic.
How about the fact that someone from Archstone-Smith headquarters, in Denver, CO, was reading the post at home at 8 pm on Monday night? They were reading it because someone (possibly an electronic clipping service?) e-mailed it to them. Do you think corporate read my post and issued a directive: "Take her down!" Or maybe they'll read it and decide, "You know what? ALG is right (as usual). These new higher rents are ridiculous!"
Also, read EAR's first comment on the last post if you haven't yet. It has some suggestions of actual steps you can take if you find yourself in a similar situation. Feel free to respond to her comment with more suggestions.
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15. The HUD benchmark for housing affordability is a 30% rent-to-income ratio. Source: Basic Laws on Housing and Community Development, Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking Finance and Urban Affairs, revised through December 31, 1994, Section 3.(a)(2).
16. 2004 American Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau. http://www.census.gov/acs/www/index.html
17. National Low Income Housing Coalition report,"Out of Reach 2005."
19. "Pulling Apart in New York: An Analysis of Income Trends in New York State," Fiscal Policy Institute. January 26, 2006. [You can find some of the Fiscal Policy Institute's material here, but it looks like they haven't put this paper from 2006 online yet.]
Labels: history, New York, real estate
2.14.2007
Is Valentine's Day for the Jews?
I always assumed that Valentine's Day was one of those things that observant Jews got a pass on, like Halloween. What I mean by that is that I can safely escape the craziness of it all without feeling guilty. It's just not my holiday, so I don't need to deal with it or feel bad about not having someone to observe it with (with whom to observe it, whatever). I don't need to dress up on Halloween or give out candy and I don't need to feel sad on Valentine's Day if nobody tells me that they love me or if nobody buys me chocolate or flowers. Because, you know, since I'm Jewish, it's just like any other day when nobody does those things! Furthermore, I already know I'm loved and who needs a special day just to find that out? And isn't that what birthdays are for?
But then I read JT's post (of DaBoysof905) and that got me wondering what the deal is with Valentine's Day, anyway. Like Halloween, I feel fairly secure in the knowledge that I am better off not observing it, but what if I actually wanted to for some reason? Could I?
A-googling I went!
WhyDateJewish.com, a project of NCSY, a division of the Orthodox Union, claims that Valentine's Day is:
- Catholic (despite the fact that it was removed from the Catholic calendar in 1969)
- pagan (says that the Church got it from Lupercalia, "a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture.")
- assur [forbidden]
- and, anyway, we have Tu B'Av instead!
In later posts on mail-Jewish, many people vehemently disagree with Rabbi Broyde and call celebrating Valentine's Day "the worst kind of avodah zara [idol worship]." A few people agree with Rabbi Broyde or at least disagree about Valentine's Day being "the worst kind of avodah zara" (say, worse than passing your children through fire to worship molech). One even thought that even "ba'alei nefesh" (pious folks) could happily celebrate Valentine's Day.I think it is the conduct of the pious to avoid explicitly celebrating
Valentine's day with a Valentine's day card, although bringing home
chocolate, flowers or even jewelry to one's beloved is always a nice
idea all year around, including on February 14.
This comment on Daniel Pipes' blog points out that "In 1349, one of the largest single pre-Holocaust massacres of Jews took place on Valentine's Day in Strasbourg, France, where Jews, blamed for the spread of the plague, were burned alive en masse by the citizenry: 2,000 men, women, and children died on the feast of love." This is given as a reason (among others) for Jews not celebrating Valentine's Day. I sort of think that's neither here nor there. Not very convincing, although it is, of course, sad. It's not really nice to purposely go out and celebrate on a day when 2,000 Jews were burned, but, really, are there any days that many Jews have not died? (The page I just linked to is terribly sad.) There must be a lot of days between, I dunno, 1939 and 1945 when 2,000 Jews died in one day. Is that any less sad because we don't know who they were or when they died?
Arthur Magida from Beliefnet also weighs in when someone asks him an etiquette question about celebrating Valentine's Day in a Jewish nursing home. He also mentions the 1349 Strasbourg massacre, which I had never heard of. Now I'm beginning to be more convinced.
The upshot? It looks like I can keep feeling great about not caring about Valentine's Day and not feel like I should be doing something special tonight. (So far, tonight, I mopped one wet floor at work to prevent some people from slipping. Honestly, I feel pretty good about that.)
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Bonus link! On IslamWeb.net, there is an article warning Muslim youths, in particular, against celebrating Valentine's Day. And Fatwa #627, from this past January, forbids the same thing. Here's another note about that, this time from a Jewish source.
Bonus link #2! This church warns "true Christians" against observing Valentine's Day, because it is pagan. (The church says that it is the successor to the Worldwide Church of God, which, well, you can read about it here. I once worked with someone who had been raised in the church, and he had less-than-kind words to say about it.)
Labels: history, Torah (broadly defined)
2.13.2007
Why educate women? Why not educate women?
I have, in my possession, a book called The Vocation of Woman, by Mrs. Archibald Colquhoun, an anti-woman-suffragist. (Google tells me that her first name was Ethel and that her first husband was Archibald Ross Colquhoun.) It was published by MacMillan and Co. in London in 1913, was given as a gift to the Episcopal Divinity School Library in Cambridge, MA by one "Very Reverend E.S. Rousmaniere,2 was withdrawn from the library at an unknown date, and I purchased it at some point.
Some choice bits include Chapter 10, "Education of the Unmarried Woman." Anything in brackets was added by me.
It has been said, earlier in this book, that matters would be immediately simplified if one knew beforehand which girls would marry and which would not--if, in short, they came into the world labelled. The uncertainty of their destination complicates the question of education and training in what may appear to be a hopeless manner. After all that has been said as to the main womanly function and its social and psychical significance it is hardly necessary to reiterate [yet, of course she does!] that the woman who does not marry misses the highest possibilities of her sex, and the vast majority of mothers, even if their own matrimonial experience has been unfortunate, instinctively hope for their girls a happy marriage as the crown of a successful life. Yet, in obedience to the modern theory of female education, these mothers permit their daughters to be trained for everything but matrimony.Really, you should just read the whole book for the full effect. Mrs. Archibald Colquhoun then goes on to quote, at great length, one Walter Heape, who, in an essay titled "Sex Antagonism,"3 explains that "if a woman is to have a fair chance of physical health, whether as married or single, she must not be treated like a boy, whose organs are differently constituted, or permitted overstrain of mind or body during the critical period of womanly development." Mrs. Colquhoun felt that she must not be treated as a boy in really any respect, but including education. Studying hard and taking many tests were downright dangerous for the physical health of an adolescent woman.
In preparing these young runners for the race that is set before them, moreover, let us remember the Nemesis which overtakes those who train too long or too hard. In the attempt to equip them we may actually snatch the prize from their hands....[T]he great harm that has been done to girls is that in the revolt from one dogma we have gone to the extreme of another. From conceiving wifehood and maternity as the only vocations for women we are swinging over to the theory that they are not vocations at all--merely "incidents." It is said that the aim of female education formerly was to enable girls to achieve matrimony. Nowadays it seems as if the whole aim is to prevent them from achieving it successfully. [Recent studies show that the falling marriage rate in the United States is almost exclusively among women who don't get a higher education. College-educated women are actually more likely to marry than other women.] This book is a plea for the setting on one side of all such notions.
...The merits and de-merits of co-education are far too controversial to be discussed here, although the writer has been interested in the question for many years and has made some study of it in the United States and elsewhere. Up to the age of ten it appears to have many advantages; after that certain disadvantages intervene....Evidence gathered in the United States points to the conclusion that, far from reducing sex-consciousness or putting of the age of sex attraction, boys and girls educated together show great precocity in their love affairs, though the temperamental sexual frigidity of a large number of American women (a curious phenomenon which cannot be discussed here) probably prevents much immediate harm coming from these boy and girl flirtations.
At present, however, we are dealing chiefly with principles--the principles which should underlie the education of a girl who may not marry, and may be destined to be a single, self supporting unit of society....[S]he should be given every change of having a healthy body throughout life. No intellectual gift can compensate for the ruin of her health, and yet it is no exaggeration to say that the path of modern education is strewn with the dead, mutilated or devitalised bodies of women whose physical well-being has been sacrificed before the Moloch of competitive examinations. [I love this sentence! Wow. It sounds like it was really bad, eh? I especially love the "it is no exaggeration."]
During the period of adolescence physiological changes are taking place in a girl which make a heavy demand on her nervous energy. In many cases she may need a great deal of quiet and repose, and under no circumstances should she be encouraged to fight against the lassitude which is nature's own protective weapon--yet at this critical period the vast majority of girls are in the thick of school life. The demands upon them are incessant, the pressure is insistent and their own conscientious nature impels them to respond far behond their real strength. In the intervals of brain work they are encouraged or even compelled to take various forms of severe physical exercise, such as hockey or cricket. After they are seventeen, if they are destined for "a career," the tension tightens, and it does not release them until at twenty-two or twenty-three they "finish" their professional training and start on their life work. Of course in the medical profession, or if they take up some specialised branch of science, the training will be longer and the examinations more severe, but these come at a less critical period, although the cumulative effect of previous overstrain may help to make them severely felt.
The Vocation of Woman is a good snapshot of a particular form of opposition to higher education for women that was popular around the turn of the last century. This opposition was based on the idea that thinking too much diverts "nervous energy" from a woman's reproductive system to her brain, and makes her less fit as a mother. It was an argument against higher education for physical reasons. If, for some reason, a woman were never to get married, her education would be more understandable, although Mrs. Colquhoun still felt that it would make her more prone to the "nervous ailments" that plagued middle class women of her generation. If, however, she was going to end up married (i.e., a child bearer), it was imperative that she not tax her system during adolescence with schoolwork and sports.
All of this was tied to fears that non-white peoples (including people from various non-Northern European countries whom we would now consider quite white), with their higher birthrate, would take over Western civilization. It was already clear that women who were more educated had fewer children, on average, and Colquhoun and others thought that it was because their education ruined their reproductive systems. Nowadays, a lower birthrate is often tied to economic prosperity and seen as a good thing. Then, it stirred fears of being overtaken by the non-white peoples of the world.
There is a lot of secondary literature about the role that racial fears played in the fight for woman suffrage. In 1867, the 15th amendment to the Constitution gave African-Americans the right to vote but, more than that, a large number of Irish Catholic, Italians, Eastern Europeans in general (including Jews) emigrated to the United States between 1840 and 1924, when strict immigration quotas were set. Around 1910, the Dillingham Commission reported that emigration patterns to the US has shifted dramatically in the preceding decades, such that a much higher percentage of immigrants were from Southern and Eastern Europe than from Northern Europe. So people were very afraid of the "unwashed masses" whose men had the right to vote, as opposed to the white, native-born American women who could not vote.4 Some people played on this fear to push for woman suffrage; others used this same fear to try to encourage women to marry young and have many children.
Lest you think that we, with our modern sensibilities, have put this all behind us, I shall point you to this post and then this post by Ariella from the Kallah Magazine blog. Another example of this phenomenon is the announcement in early January of education restrictions for hareidi women in Israel--again, clearly a pronouncement made from a deep pit of fear. The question of "Why educate women?" or "Should we educate our daughters?" seems to be one that is deeply connected to fear, to some version of "What will happen to us or to them if we educate them?" The implied answer is "something very scary indeed." Higher education for women is a threat to the status quo of society. The more things change...
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1. For more on President Eliot and his relationship to the founders of Radcliffe, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, "The Great Debate: Charles W. Eliot and M. Carey Thomas," in Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History (NY: Palgrave, 2004).
2. According to http://www.warwickri.gov/heritage/damatoshistory/pontiac4.html, the Very Reverend Edmund S. Rousmaniere was "an excellent historian" and the rector when the new All Saint's Church was built in Warwick, RI, in 1888.
3. Elsewhere on the internet I found sources that point to this as a book titled Feminism and Sex Antagonism, by Walter Heape, F.R.S. F.Z.S., London, Constable, 1913 or as a book titled Sex Antagonism, by Walter Heape, New York, G.P. Putnam's sons, 1913. I think it's available through JSTOR, or maybe just reviews of it are. He was a biologist who wrote a lot about the fertility of people and other primates, as well as that of rabbits and sheep. He also seemed interested in race and sex. Other works of his include: "The Proportion of the Sexes Produced by Whites and Coloured Peoples in Cuba," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character, Vol. 200, 1909 (1909), pp. 271-330.
4. I first learned of the connection between woman suffrage and fears about race from Scott, Anne Firor, and Andrew MacKay Scott, One Half the People: The Fight for Woman Suffrage (1975; reprint, Univ. of Ill. Press 1982).
2.09.2007
Drew Gilpin Faust presumed president of Harvard; Charles W. Eliot rolls over in grave
Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust is expected to be named the 28th president of Harvard University this weekend. [Hat tip to my mother, who e-mailed me the news from Israel this morning!]I am excited about this for two reasons. Firstly, she's the first woman president of Harvard and secondly, she was one of my senior thesis readers, so I actually "know" her (in the sense that she read 100+ type-written pages that I wrote and then asked me about them). Furthermore, she's a history professor, and well, go history!
I think the reason that I'm excited that Harvard is getting a female president is because Harvard always felt like such a male-dominated place to me. There was some respite from the pervading maleness of the institution in the community room at Radcliffe, but after Radcliffe College became the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 1999, that room disappeared (or became cubicled offices).
Note: I'm going to post this on Friday afternoon due to the timeliness of the first part, but hope to go back to expand on and revise the second part sometime early next week.
As to the second part of this post's title, in 1899, at the inauguration of a new president at Wellesley College, Harvard president Charles William Eliot said:
Women’s colleges should concentrate on an education that will not injure women’s bodily powers and functions. It remains to demonstrate what are the most appropriate, pleasing, and profitable studies for women, both from the point of view of the individual and the point of view of society; and this demonstration must be entirely freed from the influence of comparisons with the intellectual capacities and tastes of men. It would be a wonder, indeed, if the intellectual capacities of women were not at least as unlike those of men as their bodily capacities are.1In 1892, President Eliot asked a group of women who were clamoring for the creation of a women's college within Harvard University to raise $250,000 for the university as a condition for the creation of the college. After they did so, the Harvard Corporation refused the money and the request for a women's college at Harvard or the admission of women to Harvard College. Still, in 1894, Radcliffe College was chartered as an independent degree-granting institution whose faculty all taught at Harvard before walking down the road to teach at Radcliffe and whose graduates received diplomas countersigned by Harvard's president. Radcliffe graduates weren't given Harvard ABs until 1965.2
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1. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. "The 'Hateful' Wellesley Inaugural Address." Wellesley. Winter 1995, p. 31. See http://www.ed.gov/offices/OERI/PLLI/webreprt.html for more.
2. Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, p. 55.
11.02.2006
Tribute to Napping
We are a culture that celebrates action, doing, achieving, an attitude that leads to a disdain for sleep in general. We stay up late and get up early. We pull all-nighters. We'll sleep when we're dead, and in the meantime there's always a Starbucks on the corner.This is sort of how I feel about Shabbat, but it applies equally to naps.
It's a misguided attitude. A good nap is one of life's great pleasures, and the ability to nap is the sign of a well-balanced life. When we nap we snatch back control of our day from a mechanized, clock-driven society. We set aside the urgency imposed on us by the external world and get in touch with an internal rhythm that is millions of years old.
Kurt Kleiner (the author of this piece) and I are apparently not alone in our love of naps:
There's no shortage of important historical nappers, many of them men of industry and action. Napoleon Bonaparte, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, and Winston Churchill were nappers in the heroic vein.Why our employers should give us nap time:
But sleep experts say a lot of us really could use that nap. James B. Maas, the Cornell University sleep expert, says most people don't get enough sleep and that an afternoon nap can help. In fact, Maas coined the term "power nap" to emphasize that a nap can make a person more productive and energetic.Eh, just go read the article yourself. And then go take a nap.
Labels: history
3.08.2006
Happy International Women's Day!
Today is International Women's Day. When I first found out about this day (probably in college), I kind of thought it was somewhat silly, assuming that it was some new-fangled, post-Second Wave feminism thing. I liked it about as much as I liked Women's History Month, Black History Month, LGBT History Month, American Jewish History Month, National American Indian Heritage Month, etc., or, for that matter, National Book Month or Older Americans Month. That is, I recognize that it is sometimes necessary to highlight certain under-studied parts of our national history, heritage, or hobbies, but in an ideal world, all of these things would happen all the time. Any general study of American history or world history should include a fully-integrated account of the lives, accomplishments, trials, and tribulations of women and men, black people, white people, gay people, straight people, transgendered people, Native Americans, colonizers, and anyone else who ever did anything deemed important. (What do we deem important? Up for discussion. Preferably over tea and scones.)These specially-designated months are only good for highlighting how far we still have to go towards a more inclusive view of history, culture, and literature. It's like my mother's oft-expressed anti-Mother's Day sentiment: We do we set aside one day a year to be nice to our mothers and to tell them how much we appreciate them? Why don't we do that every day? If we treated our mothers as we should every day of the year, there would be no need for Mother's Day.
I wrote, "When I first found out about this day (probably in college), I kind of thought it was somewhat silly" implying that I now have a different opinion. Indeed, I do! Inetnerational Women's Day is not some new-fangled, post-Second Wave feminism thing, and now I like it more. It was first established in 1909 by my good friends at the Socialist Party of America. Here is a short history of the origins of International Women's Day. (I wrote my senior thesis about female college students' activism before and during World War I, so I became quite familiar with the Socialist Party of America and its undergraduate affiliates. I was happy to see them referenced.) In general, I have a soft place in my heart for anything having to do with American women between 1850 and 1950, as that was the focus of my undergraduate studies.
Things were quite different for American women in 1909, and we often forget that. I want you all to reflect for a moment--or longer!--on what life what like before the following advances were made. (Some parts of the table are coming out funny and I can't deal with going into the HTML and fixing it now. Sorry!) I've highlighted the ones that I found particularly astonishing either because I can't believe things were ever this bad or because I can't believe it took until 19XX to fix it.
| 1916 | Margaret Sanger tests the validity of |
| 1918 | |
| 1919 | The federal woman suffrage amendment, originally written by Susan B. Anthony and introduced in Congress in 1878, is passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is then sent to the states for ratification. |
| 1920 | The Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor is formed to collect information about women in the workforce and safeguard good working conditions for women. |
| 1920 | The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified and signed into law by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. It declares: “The right of citizens of the |
| 1923 | National Woman’s Party first proposes Constitutional Equal Rights Amendment: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the |
| 1932 | The National Recovery Act forbids more than one family member from holding a government job, resulting in many women losing their jobs. |
| 1936 | The federal law prohibiting the dissemination of contraceptive information through the mail is modified and birth control information is no longer classified as obscene. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, birth control advocates are engaged in numerous legal suits. |
| 1936 | |
| 1937 | The U.S. Supreme Court upholds |
| 1938 | The Fair Labor Standards Act establishes minimum wage without regard to sex. |
| 1947 | Fay v. |
| 1960 | The Food and Drug Administration approves birth control pills. |
| 1961 | President John Kennedy establishes the President's Commission on the Status of Women and appoints Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman. The report issued by the Commission in 1963 documents substantial discrimination against women in the workplace and makes specific recommendations for improvement, including fair hiring practices, paid maternity leave, and affordable child care. |
| 1963 | Betty Friedan publishes her highly influential book The Feminine Mystique, which describes the dissatisfaction felt by middle-class American housewives with the narrow role imposed on them by society. The book becomes a best-seller and galvanizes the modern women's rights movement. |
| 1963 | The Equal Pay Act is passed by Congress, promising equitable wages for the same work, regardless of the race, color, religion, national origin or sex of the worker. Between June 1964 and Jan. 1971, back wages totaling more than $26 million were paid to 71,000 women. |
| 1964 | Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars discrimination in employment on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin. At the same time it establishes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate complaints and impose penalties. |
| 1965 | Weeks v. |
| 1965 | Griswold v. |
| 1966 | The National Organization for Women (NOW) is founded by a group of feminists including Betty Friedan. The largest women's rights group in the |
| 1967 | Executive Order 11375 expands President Lyndon Johnson's affirmative action policy of 1965 to cover discrimination based on gender. As a result, federal agencies and contractors must take active measures to ensure that women as well as minorities enjoy the same educational and employment opportunities as white males. |
| 1968 | The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men. |
| 1968 | Executive Order 11246 prohibits sex discrimination by government contractors and requires affirmative action plans for hiring women. |
| 1969 | In Bowe v. Colgate-Palmolive Company, 416 F. 2d 711 (7th Cir.1969), the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals rules that women meeting the physical requirements can work in many jobs that had been for men only. |
| 1970 | In Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co., a U.S. Court of Appeals rules that jobs held by men and women need to be "substantially equal" but not "identical" to fall under the protection of the Equal Pay Act. An employer cannot, for example, change the job titles of women workers in order to pay them less than men. |
| 1971 | Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation, 400 U.S. 542 (1971): The U.S. Supreme Court outlaws the practice of private employers refusing to hire women with pre-school-age children. |
| 1971 | Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971): The U.S. Supreme Court holds unconstitutional a state law ( |
| 1972 | The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. Originally drafted by Alice Paul in 1923, the amendment reads: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the |
| 1972 | Title IX of the Education Amendments bans sex discrimination in schools that receive any federal funding. It states: "No person in the |
| 1972 | In Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972), the Supreme Court rules that the right to privacy encompasses an unmarried person's right to use contraceptives. |
| 1973 | Pittsburgh Press v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, 413 U.S. 376 (1973): The U.S. Supreme Court bans sex-segregated “help wanted” advertising as a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as amended. |
| 1973 | Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) and Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973): The U.S. Supreme Court declares that the Constitution protects women’s right to terminate an early pregnancy, thus making abortion legal in the U.S. and overriding the anti-abortion laws of many states. |
| 1974 | Housing discrimination on the basis of sex and credit discrimination against women are outlawed by Congress. |
| 1974 | Corning Glass Works v. Brennan (1974), U.S. Supreme Court ruled that employers cannot justify paying women lower wages because that is what they traditionally received under the "going market rate." A wage differential occurring "simply because men would not work at the low rates paid women" was unacceptable. |
| 1974 | Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414 U.S. 632 (1974), determines it is illegal to force pregnant women to take maternity leave on the assumption they are incapable of working in their physical condition. |
| 1974 | The Women’s Educational Equity Act, drafted by Arlene Horowitz and introduced by Representative Patsy Mink (D-HI), funds the development of nonsexist teaching materials and model programs that encourage full educational opportunities for girls and women. |
| 1975 | |
| 1976 | General Elec. Co v. Gilbert, 429 |
| 1976 | Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976): The U.S. Supreme Court declares unconstitutional a state law permitting 18 to 20-year-old females to drink beer while denying the rights to men of the same age. The Court establishes new set of standards for reviewing laws that treat men and women differently—an “intermediate” test stricter than the “reasonableness” test for constitutionality in sex discrimination cases. |
| 1976 | |
| 1977 | |
| 1978 | The Pregnancy Discrimination Act bans employment discrimination against pregnant women. |
| 1981 | Kirchberg v. Feenstra, 450 |
| 1984 | In Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees, 468 U.S. 609 (1984), sex discrimination in membership policies of organizations, such as the Jaycees, is forbidden by the Supreme Court, opening many previously all-male organizations (Jaycees, Kiwanis, Rotary, Lions) to women. |
| 1984 | The state of |
| 1984 | Hishon v. King and Spaulding, 467 U.S. 69 (1984): The U.S. Supreme Court rules that law firms may not discriminate on the basis of sex in promoting lawyers to partnership positions. |
| 1986 | In Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a hostile or abusive work environment can prove discrimination based on sex. |
| 1992 | According to the Current Population Survey, the female-to-male earnings ratio at the median for year-round, full-time workers was 77 percent in 2002, an increase of 5 percentage points since 1999. (See this for details. In general this is a very interesting study if you’re curious about the male-female wage gap that still exists in the |
| 1993 | The Family and Medical Leave Act goes into effect. |
| 1994 | The Violence Against Women Act funds services for victims of rape and domestic violence, allows women to seek civil rights remedies for gender-related crimes, and provides training to increase police and court officials’ sensitivity and a national 24-hour hotline for battered women. |
| 1995 | Beijing Declaration at the World Conference on Women declares "Women’s rights are human rights." The Platform for Action designed at the conference contains dozens of references to human rights pertaining to women. |
| 2006 | US Census Bureau reports that the number of women-owned businesses grew 20 percent between 1997 and 2002, twice the national average for all businesses. Women owned nearly 30 percent of nonfarm businesses in the |
I don't have time to find links for these things now (or anytime soon), but if you want to know more, buy yourself a good book on the subject or go forth and Google.
When I was working at the Schlesinger Library Archives (far and away the best student job I had), one of the things that I did was photocopy archival manuscripts for patrons. I photocopied some very interesting old EEOC documents, including one with a case of a schoolteacher in Ohio who was fired when she became pregnant. I don't remember exactly, but I think they fired her very early in the pregnancy, before she was even showing, on the grounds that it was "unseemly" to teach children while pregnant. I think it was in the early 1970s, and I remember being shocked that it was still legal to treat women this way so recently. I guess firing women for being pregnant was legal until 1974 (Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur--maybe the EEOC case that I photocopied was LaFleur) or 1978, when the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed.
I think about abortion and a woman's right to choose to save her life over the life of her unborn fetus, but I don't often think of a time when contraception was illegal for married couples. I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like to live in such a time, to be pregnant for so many years, and, depending on the setting, often to lose multiple children in infancy. I actually realized some of this a few years ago, when I saw the PBS special on the pill. It still feels surprising to me, though.
I also have to admit that I am sad that I could not find anything noteworthy between 1995 and 2006. Perhaps I didn't look hard enough--let me know if you're aware of something big that I missed. Unfortunately, I don't think this lack of recent advances is evidence that there is no work left to be done. For example:
| 2005 | In |
| 2006 | Although women make up almost half of |
| 2006 | There are 14 female senators in that 100-person body (14%). There are 70 female representatives in the 435-person House of Representatives (16%). |
Happy International Women's Day!
