booknotes: see me naked

One of the books I consulted for my thesis was Amy Frykholm's Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford U.P., 2004). In Rapture, Frykholm traveled around the nation interviewing readers of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series, exploring the effect of rapture narratives in Evangelical culture. Frykholm -- who grew up Evangelical and now attends an Episcopal church -- studies her former subculture with a keen and empathetic eye. In her latest book, See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity (Beacon Press, 2011), Frykholm turns to personal narratives of sexuality, embodiment, and Christian spirituality. The slim volume contains nine profiles of Protestant Christians struggling in various ways to integrate their physical, sexual selves with their concepts of Christian "purity" or righteousness.

As much as possible, Frykholm backs away from any larger-scale analysis in the interest of allowing her subjects to make meaning of their own lives. However, it seems clear that all of her interviewees have struggled to integrate their sexual selves with their theological beliefs. Some because they experience same-sex desires, some because they're struggling to live up to demanding Christian ideologies of chastity or modesty, some because anything associated with bodily desires became the enemy.

One of my favorite essays was less about sexual activity or relationships, per se, than it was about our sense of embodiment and the sensual experience of being and expressing oneself in flesh. "Monica" recounts her experience of attending a life-drawing class while studying abroad -- an experience that challenged her understanding of propriety and ultimately helped her re-evaluate her expectations of what beautiful bodies should look like and how women's bodies should behave. At first repulsed by the normal-looking nude model (to the point where she almost dropped the class), Monica perseveres and eventually exhibits her drawings in the college library upon returning to her home campus:

Monica heard two things in the comments [about her art show]. She heard the same fear and revulsion that she had experienced in herself when first encountering the model. It was a disgust that human beings exist in this form ... she also heard in the comments that Christianity and nakedness were incompatible -- that somehow being clothed and being Christian were necessary to each other (84).

At that point in her own journey, Monica has grown enough to be critical of these assumptions, and by the end of the piece has challenged herself to volunteer as a nude model for community life drawing classes -- an act of bravery that seems to be very intertwined with her developing sense of spiritual practice.

What I think may surprise non-Christian readers of these narratives is their familiarity: in many ways, the discomfort with embodiment is a malaise that is more American than Christian, though obviously practicing Christians will express their struggles in theological language. The individuals here struggle with unrealistic beauty standards, with the commercialization of sexuality, with questions of attraction and desire and what their bodies want versus what they're being taught they should want by their parents, youth leaders, peers. The process of coming into one's own bodily self and finding a voice for our desires is rarely an easy one, regardless of the faith tradition we're raised in.

On the other hand, See Me Naked does put those struggles in a particularly Christian theological and social context, and illuminate some of the ways Christian language -- particularly theology which seeks to construct rigid definitions of "right" and "wrong" sexual expression -- fails believers. Reading stories about young women starving themselves to the brink of death in the name of "modesty" and young men told their interest in pornography was sinful, brought to mind the recent post, How Modesty Made Me Fat, by Sierra of No Longer Quivering in which she writes:

Modesty made me “fat” because it defined my relationship with my body in terms of appearance. Not action. Not gratitude. Not the joy of movement. Just appearance. It also defined my relationship with men as one of predator and prey. It was my job to hide from men so that their sex drive would lie dormant, like a sleeping wolf. But if that wolf ever awakened, it was not because it had been sleeping for a long time and its circadian rhythm kicked in, or it was just naturally hungry. It was my fault because I had done something to “bait” the wolf. Just by being visibly female, or by moving in “unladylike” ways. You cannot consider women full human beings unless you recognize that their lives do not revolve around the male sex drive. Modesty is a philosophy that dehumanizes. It incites constant fear and vigilance in one sex while excusing the other of all responsibility. It’s immoral."

See Me Naked offers similar examples of the way in which our religious language falls perilously short in its ostensible effort to increase well-being for all. Naked tells stories of women starving themselves close to death for the sake of being pure, stories of women and men who feel lost when faced with the task of integrating queer attractions with their Christian faith, and stories of men who are taught to hate and fear their feelings of sexual desires as something inherently impure or incompatible with living a righteous life.

At the very end of See Me Naked, Frykholm does offer some reflections on an alternative ethic of sexuality, one that I think is worth contemplating whether or not you're interested in the explicitly Christian language in which she couches her suggestions. "True, deep, real pleasure is an avenue to the Holy," Frykholm writes. "Through discernment, wonder, and aliveness we will know what real pleasure is ... and when we sense true pleasure, we will trust it and be able to act bodily in it and with it." She recounts the counsel of a parent to her soon-to-be adolescent daughter, "Your body will know more pleasure than you can even now imagine. You are going through a period when your body is going to learn to feel pleasure, and you will be amazed" (176)  While I'd argue that children, too, have the bodily capacity to feel pleasure -- though of a different kind than adults -- I like this invitation to an emerging teenager to embrace that part of her growing-up. Too often, we're quick to associate teenage embodiment with danger, not pleasure. As Frykholm says, "We all know that puberty, adolescence, adulthood are not solely about pleasure ... But pain we know well. Pleasure we sometimes need help attending to" (177). Such an invitation crosses the boundaries of faith traditions and is a reminder to us all how much better we could be, as a culture, at living embodied and joyful lives.

Cross-posted at the oregon extension oral history project blog.

thank yous: thesis edition

Maggie + wood stove (October 2004)
photograph by Anna

One of the most enjoyable parts of writing my Master's thesis was pulling together the acknowledgments. Since it's unlikely everyone who appears therein will read the thesis in full [PDF], I'm reproducing the acknowledgments here. 

It should go without saying this is far from everything I have to be thankful for this year, but it's a damn good starting place. 

May your holiday weekend be peaceful and content, wherever and with whomever you may be.

As a reader, I often turn first to the acknowledgments when evaluating a book.  It is here that one gets a true sense of the solitary author working in a densely-woven web of social and intellectual relationships, one that often fades into the background with an author’s solitary byline.  For while it is accurate to say that I crafted this thesis myself, and that the analysis herein is my own, the thinking and writing I have done over the past three years would not have been possible without the myriad conversations, generous support, timely encouragement, articles and books shared by my friends, family, and colleagues. As my partner, Hanna, points out, “alone” is not the same as “lonely,” and although I have written this work alone, many, many people deserve the credit for making sure that I seldom felt lonely or worked in intellectual isolation.

O.E. class of  '75

Without my oral historical narrators, of course, I would have no primary source material to analyze and thus no story to tell.  My gratitude belongs first and foremost, then, to Sam and Pat Alvord, Randy Balmer, Doug and Marj Frank, Mark Evans, Anne Foley, Alison and Phil Kling, Rebecca McCurdy, Sogn Mill-Scout, Paul Norton, Jim Titus, and Randy Wright for sharing their memories of the Oregon Extension and the contents of their personal archives.  Particular thanks are due to the folks at Lincoln for hosting me during my research trip in March, 2010, when we recorded the majority of our oral history interviews. Thank you also to Doug Frank and Sam Alvord giving me access to administrative records and personal papers from the early years of the program; to alumni Phil Kling, for sharing notes, papers, and other ephemera from his student days; and to Alison Kling and Jim Titus for generously sharing their photographs from the early years.

My thesis advisers, Laura Prieto and Sarah Leonard, have been invaluable and professional support throughout the research and writing process. It was my [admissions] interview with Laura back in July 2006 that convinced me I would be able to complete the research I had in mind under the auspices of Simmons' History Department. She has been unfailingly supportive throughout my tenure at Simmons, giving my research notes and early drafts careful and insightful readings.  Any remaining weaknesses in my thinking and writing are, needless to say, my own responsibility. Sarah, meanwhile, deserves particular thanks for allowing me to hijack her seminar in Modern European History in order to write a paper on American psychologist Carl Rogers, one of the influential educational philosophers whose work inspired the Oregon Extension's founders.  Her passion for intellectual history and the dedication with which she approaches her vocation are almost enough to make me reconsider the teaching profession.

Boston skyline across the Fenway Gardens
(December 2007)

I would like to remember the late Allen Smith who developed and taught a course in oral history at Simmons Graduate School of Information and Library Science, and whom I was privileged to study under during his final semester of teaching. His work at Simmons College paved my way with the Institutional Review Board, whose familiarity with oral history research saved me the anxiety and frustration many oral historians face when applying to do human subject research. I also wish to thank Gail Matthews DeNatale, oral historian and former faculty member at Simmons, whose experience and advice helped to shape my thesis proposal in its early stages.

Reaching backward in time to my undergraduate years at Hope College, I wish to recognize my colleagues on the Aradia Research Project, as well as the Aradians themselves, who served as my hands-on introduction to feminist-minded oral history and ethnographic research and who encouraged my enduring interest in the experience of those who live in intentional community.

The outstanding faculty of my alma mater, Hope College, were in many ways responsible for taking the enthusiastic autodidact I was at age seventeen and encouraging me to direct and hone that passion into something I could honestly consider a craft and a vocation. Poet and creative writing teacher Jackie Bartley first opened the door to creative nonfiction to me, suggesting that dedicated research and analytical writing could use the power of the particular to connect us to the universal.  It was Jackie who first suggested I consider attending the Oregon Extension. Thanks is also due to Lynn Japinga for introducing me to oral history methods during a summer spent transcribing her oral history interviews with Reformed Church clergy, as well her determination to offer classes in feminist theology in an often-hostile academic environment. Without her introduction to religious history, I might not have paid such close attention to the nuances of
religious thought and practice at Lincoln. My undergraduate adviser, historian Jeanne Petit, taught my first history class (20th Century American Women’s History) and was the first to suggest I consider graduate school. She has since become a colleague and a friend. I must also extend my gratitude to Natalie Dykstra for her friendship and enthusiasm, for her love of Boston, and for teaching a course on autobiography that was – hands down – one of the most electrifying intellectual experiences of my college career. Her training in the interpretation of personal narratives has stood me in good stead throughout the research and writing of this thesis.

Former colleague Jeremy Dibbell
(December 2007)

I must recognize my colleagues at the Massachusetts Historical Society, particularly past and present members of the Library Reader Services department, who have been unblinking in their support of my research – including covering for me while I spent two weeks out West doing fieldwork. It is impossible to say how grateful I have been these past four years to work at an institution that recognizes my labor as an historian as well as a reference librarian.

I would like to thank colleague Aiden Graham for offering to loan me recording equipment, and for timely technical advice including helping me figure out how to wiretap my phone for long-distance interviews. Thanks, also, to Linnea Johnson and the GSLIS Tech Lab for the loan of a netbook that would otherwise have cost me hundreds of dollars this poor graduate student didn't have.  The Simmons College Student Research Fund, likewise, awarded me a travel grant that helped alleviate the financial burden of my fieldwork in Oregon. Valerie Beaudrault’s assistance in the Office of Sponsored Programs ensured that my application for funds was complete and submitted in a timely fashion.

My father and mapmaker extraordinaire, Mark Cook, is responsible for the beautiful customcreated maps that grace the pages of this thesis: without him, my visual representations of the Oregon Extension as a geographic place would have been awkward and, in all likelihood, inaccurate. My mother, too, has my undying gratitude for first introducing me to the work of John Holt, Ivan Illich, A.S. Neill, and other activists in the free school movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to the history of intentional communities and their intersection with child-rearing and educational practice. Moral and intellectual support and good-humored camaraderie came in full measure from two founding members of the Secret Feminist Cabal, Ashley Minerva LeClerc and Laura Cutter, and from fellow oral historian, kick-ass librarian Diana Wakimoto. Y’all rock.

A slightly different form of support came from Geraldine, the feline member of our household, who took a keen interest in my work and sat on my notes, on the keyboard, and occasionally on my hands in order to ensure that work never took precedence over chin-scratching and the dispensing of kitty treats.

Finally, a few words for Hanna, who stoically endures my mania for American countercultures, Christian subcultures, and the history of utopian thought. Thanks for flying solo for two weeks while I was off collecting interviews in Southern Oregon, for taping useful PBS documentaries, for forwarding promising book reviews, for teasing me about garish 1970s cover art. Thanks for the proof-reading, the cheer-leading, the bottomless supplies of tea, wine, and baked goods. Thank you for letting me cry on your shoulder and for pointing out (quite rightly) that if I didn’t finish this project I would always wonder.

Thanks for helping me keep it all in perspective.

I moved to Boston in 2007 to write this thesis, not fall in love. I found you here, sweetheart, so in the end I did both.

in which I'm unexpectedly proud...

... to receive this in today's post:

My work simply would not have been possible without the generosity of everyone who shared their oral histories and personal papers with me. Thank you, everyone! My work simply would not have been possible without the generosity of everyone who shared their oral histories and personal papers with me. Thank you, everyone! And I promise I will get over my bashfulness and post a link to the PDF of my thesis tomorrow over at the OE Oral History project blog.

UPDATE: Here is the post: how to live: the oregon extension as experiment in living, 1964--1980 [thesis]. A link to the PDF in DropBox can be found after the jump.

post-thesis thursday

So yesterday at 4:57pm Eastern Standard Time, I sent the following tweet to my twitter account:

And then Hanna and I put on our sneakers and sandals and walked out into the beautiful spring evening to visit our local Staples and print out two complete copies of my Master's thesis, "How to Live?: The Oregon Extension as Experiment in Living, 1964-1980."

I'll be presenting my work at the Simmons College History Department's graduate colloquium on May 9th. At some point shortly after that, I plan to post details over at my OE Oral History blog about acquiring a copy of the thesis and viewing the presentation online. I'll cross-post or link out from here, so those of you who are interested can stay tuned for further details.

Meanwhile, I offer this music video in self-congratulations for the past four years of work. I don't know why this was the song I found rattling around in my head during these final days of revision. I haven't listened to this album in ages -- not since shortly after I moved to Boston. Maybe it's my subconscious trying to come full circle. Anyhow. As someone who's always found her work to take longer than originally planned, and who has (as my mother wrote in a recent email) found myself living an "unexpected life," I like the underlying message of this song.

More soon!

off to maine (my thesis draft is complete)!

^{Kevin and Linda Clutterbuck's garden, Norridgewock, Maine
July, 2010; photograph by Anna Cook}

This week, right in the middle of a heat wave here in Boston and between a two-day migraine headache and the start of fall semester classes, I decided my first full draft was as done as it was going to be. I closed the files, saved them to my USB drive, and tomorrow morning will print two copies and drop them off in the mailboxes of my first and second readers.

The draft comprises an introduction (context and methods) and three chapters. It clocks in at 98 pages, which is longer than my adviser will like but shorter than the final draft is likely to be. I feel very proud to have written those 98 pages over the past twelve weeks, however rough they may be (and believe me, some sections are rough).

What happens from here? Well, first Hanna and I are going -- hurricane Earl permitting! -- to spend Labor Day weekend free of labor at her parents' home in central Maine (see above).

Then, my readers will look over and comment on the rough draft and my adviser and I will sit down and plan out the timetable for my final version. There are some constituents voting for a final draft to be submitted in September, and some in the May completion camp. I myself am divided, but leaning toward May for both personal and scholastic reasons. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I'm pleased that this phase of the project -- which at times felt endless verging on the hopeless (Hanna will testify to the tears involved) -- is over and the next phase can begin. I've always been a bigger fan of revision than I have of the initial, terrifying draft.

Cross-posted from my oregon extension oral history project blog.

evangelicals' "defining story" = divine child abuse?: some reflections

This is a rambling sort of post reflecting on Doug Frank's recently-released A Gentler God: Breaking Free of the Almighty in the Company of a Human Jesus. Doug is one of the founding faculty members at the Oregon Extension, the community I am researching and writing about for my thesis. I might write a proper book review / booknote about A Gentler God at some point, but for now I want to share a story from my own history of interactions with the church -- and Evangelicals particularly -- that reading this book reminded me of, and helped me understand in a new light.

Despite growing up in culturally and religiously conservative Western Michigan, I was largely what they call "unchurched" as a child. My paternal grandfather was an ordained minister and professor of New Testament theology at Western Theological Seminary which is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, a small but mainline protestant denomination. My father was, therefore, a preacher's kid; my mother -- raised by a lapsed Scotch Presbyterian and a Christian Scientist -- was sent to Congregational Sunday school as a child and attended confirmation classes but never joined. My parents didn't have us baptized and pretty much stopped attending church around the time my little brother was born (I was three) because the amount of nurturing they got out of church on Sunday wasn't worth trying to parent small beings in a child-unfriendly space.

We didn't return to Hope Church (my father's childhood RCA congregation) until I was a teenager. We had a few reasons for doing so, including the fact that several of my more conservative, evangelistic friends had attempted to convert me (them: "have you accepted Jesus into your heart?" me: "uh ... no.") and my mother was hoping to inoculate us against fundamentalist, evangelistic theology by giving us a chance to learn the language and messages of Christianity and a scholarly, fairly liberal environment. To give you an idea of what this meant: the congregation had recently gone against denominational practice by ordaining a gay member as a church elder, they had already had a series of women ministers, they had an active pacifist group, and my feminist theology professor at college was a member.

I offer all of this as a preface to the story-story I'm going to tell you, which is about the husband and wife who served as youth group leaders for several years while I was attending Hope Church. This couple were way more theologically fundamentalist-evangelical and socially conservative than the majority of the congregation, and I'm not exactly sure how they landed the position of youth leaders (likely because they volunteered). I did childcare for the family regularly, but used to find myself at loggerheads with them (also regularly) about a number of issues including parenting, feminism, human sexuality, and theology.

And one day at either a youth group meeting or in a Sunday school class they offered -- as if it were the best metaphor in the world for God's love and the power of atonement (Jesus dying for our sins) -- the following allegory (I'm paraphrasing from my own memory)

There's a train full of passengers hurtling down a railroad track toward a bridge that has washed out. God is at the switchboard about to switch the rails so that the train goes onto a side rail (thus saving the passengers). But then suddenly his toddler son (Jesus) wanders out onto the side rail. God has to decide -- train full of people or toddler son? And because God is so unselfish, he saves the train full of people rather than his own child.

What. The. Fuck.

That's what you're thinking, right? There are just so many things wrong with this story that it sort of stops you dead in your tracks.

This is the story that this couple -- with three small children of their own, remember -- told with passion and the clear expectation that we would be humbled by the boundless, sacrificial love of God. Whereas, of course, what character in this story is any human being (let alone a child!) going to identify with? The toddler! Whose own parent kills them in order to save a train full of unnamed, faceless persons. What child could possibly fail to be traumatized by a story that tells them the moral "right" is one in which their parent would not save them from death when they had the power to do so?

The take-away message regarding God and Jesus in this story is that God is a violent, murderous parent who has no overriding, irrational love for His own child. It's a story of divine child abuse. And to me it was absolute crazy-talk.

Well, according to Doug, who describes this very story -- or at least the collection of ideas embodied in this story -- in the first part of A Gentler God, this is the "defining story" of modern American evangelism. Evangelical Christians, Doug argues, grow up in such close proximity to this story that they have trouble seeing its internal contradictions: the way in which a story that is trotted out to signify God's boundless love for humanity actually tells a story about extremely conditional love and bloodlust. God demands bloodshed, which is why Jesus is required by God to die for our sins. How can we possibly square this with a God who cares for all of God's creation unconditionally?

Well, you can't, which is why Evangelicals (again, according to Doug and other scholars I've read) live on some level in perpetual fear of the wrath of an Almighty deity who -- but for His willingness to murder his own son -- would surely have come after you in vengance.

The story I heard in youth group displaces the personal wrath of God in favor of a fatalistic, mechanical failure -- God isn't causing the train to crash -- God simply has to decide between God's own child and the rest of humanity. But it still does no better at describing a loving, compassionate God -- in fact, in my personal opinion it actually reifies the wrongness of the defining narrative by turning Jesus (a full-grown adult who, the Bible if pretty clear, makes the decision to die as a consequence of his actions) into a child who in no way chooses his own death. Instead, this story takes God and shapes Him (definitely "Him"!) into a monstrous parent. This is, I'd argue, even a step beyond the traditional Evangelical God of atonement whose divine sense of justice impersonally demands blood. This isn't a God overly obsessed with justice at the expense of compassion -- but a God who is simply uncaring, sociopathic even.

It appalls me, even all these years later, that this was the narrative of Christianity meant to excite conversion.

A Gentler God gave me a new perspective on the way this story, and its sister-stories in the Evangelical theological landscape, shapes how conservative Christians view their God -- and how that view of the divine shapes their interaction with the world around them.

to be subjective and scholarly

Last Friday, I blogged about my frustration with finding balance between my academic research and writing, my wage-work, and my domestic life and loves. This Friday, I thought I would pick up where I left off, after a fashion, and write about the ways I try to balance the academic and the personal within my work as a scholar.

This post has gone through a number of different iterations in my head, but is taking this particular form because of a recent post by Kimberley @ 72-27 who this week wrote a long, reflective piece about her own return to academia and the limitations she sees in rigorous scholarship that neglects the relational in pursuit of the rational.

Before my current program, I came from a small school in Seattle that trained students to be therapists, and thus it placed primary value on inter-personal and intra-personal knowledge. My professors were psychoanalysts and therapists, and they asked their students to delve into the unconscious self and figure out what was there and why it was there. We did intense work understanding our own families of origin and personal narratives, and we received a great deal of feedback on how other people experienced us while in relationship with us. While the program lacked academic rigor in the traditional sense, it demanded a kind of inter-personal and intra-personal rigor that was invaluable.

While I love the rigor that is applied to critical thinking at Yale, I am left envisioning what Yale would be like if that same kind of rigor were applied to self- and inter-personal knowledge. For instance, in my U.S. religious history class, one of my professors shared with us that it took him quite a while in his career to realize that he hadn’t picked his research “objectively.” His research came out of deeply rooted questions based on very personal life experience. Yet, in his graduate training, he had not been encouraged to see the connections between his “objective” research and his own life story. This discussion in class came at the very end of the semester, and it was a relief to me. I had often felt as if historians maintained a pretense of objectivity. It was nice to finally hear that we can actually do better research if we are self-reflective in the process. Knowing ourselves better will also translate to being better collaborators.

Emphasis mine. You can read the whole post at 72-27.

How does this connect to my own work, beyond the skepticism toward an overly-depersonalized academia which I unabashedly share? To begin answering that question, I want to share another lengthy quotation -- this time from an email I wrote earlier this spring. When I was at the Oregon Extension in March, doing research for my thesis Doug Frank -- one of the faculty there, an historian and mentor of mine -- asked me whether my project was a chronicling of "what happened" or whether I was making a specific argument. I stumbled through an immediate response that, from what I remember, emphasized that I was gathering the oral histories as a type of chronicling, but that my thesis would itself have a specific argument to make about the place of the Oregon Extension in American cultural, educational, and religious histories.

Of course me being me, I left the conversation unsatisfied with my response and the following day wrote Doug a long email trying to explain my motivations for this research. I won't reproduce the email in full here, but I wanted to share two paragraphs that speak to the connections between my "objective" historical analysis of the Oregon Extension and my own life story.

On a more personal note, I will say that this project comes out of my own deep interest in history of non-mainstream education and my very personal quest to find a way to bring together my love of learning (the life of the mind) in some sort of structured environment with the quality of life I experienced as a child and young adult outside of institutional schooling. My original desire to attend the OE as a student (nearly a decade ago now!) was driven, in large part, by my desire to find a way to be a scholar without having to fit myself into the vision of education (the fear-based model you were talking about yesterday, which I believe is still deeply embedded in most schools) and of human nature that ran so counter to the understanding of human life that I had grown up with in my family (and elaborated on through my reading in theology, feminism, and educational theory). I am drawn to examples of intentional community and purposeful work life, in which folks have been able to step outside of the pressures of the mainstream and forge a life for themselves that isn't grounded in being "anti" (that still retains some sort of relationship with the dominant culture) but nevertheless has some autonomy when it comes to priorities and values -- the power to say "you have no power here" to things within the dominant culture which are inimical to human well-being.

When I went back to graduate school, I was taken aback by how much my soul rebelled against being back in an environment of institutional education, surrounded by folks who largely take those traditional frameworks for granted (at the very least) and often champion them (Boston's educational culture is incredibly status-conscious). I don't necessarily believe I made the wrong choice to return to school (the factors are myriad), but I do know that when it came time to choose a thesis topic, I intuitively knew I needed to spend my time with a topic that would help me retain critical distance on that culture, that vision of humanity, that understanding of the way human beings learn and what they need to thrive. And as of this writing, at least, I feel pretty proud of the way that this project has helped me to do just that, giving me a certain inner sense of distance from the expectations and values of the institutions within which I work as a student scholar, so that I am sharing these ideas with them (in a form they can accept for credit) but not writing my thesis for them.

As I wrote more concisely (though much more pedantically) in an early draft of my thesis introduction, "The scholarly task of historicizing the college classroom and the expectations of higher education were, in part, a method of coping with the alienation I often felt as a student whose experiences and vision of, not to mention goals for, learning were at odds with the majority of the people whom I encountered at school."

In other words, this topic matters to me, in a visceral, immediate way. The project of make sense of the history of competing educational theories and practices is as much about finding a place for myself within that world as it is about situating the Oregon Extension within its unique historical context. I am invested in doing my part to enter these folks into the historical record because I believe deeply in the value of what they do. It is important to me that their own unique experiment in living be acknowledged at some level as part of the history of education in the twentieth century -- a way of being that runs counter to the stories we tell ourselves about how life has to, or ought to, be.

And the world of academia is definitely divided as to whether this is or is not a good thing. Emotional proximity to one's subject-matter is often viewed with deep suspicion, as it is seen to cloud the mind, bias the historian whose job (as Kimberley notes about) is ostensibly to be "objective" about her subject. Distance from one's topic (in time as well as emotion) is supposed to provide you with the dispassionate objectivity to analyze and critique with greater clarity. Even if we recognize (as most scholars do today) that we are all inevitably subjective in our scholarship, the push has been to recognize and attempt to minimize or compensate for those biases, rather than to embrace and work with them as strengths.

I'm less certain that this is the only or the best approach to subjectivity within scholarship. Although I'm still searching for language to articulate it, I think that there are different qualities of emotional proximity or connectedness to one's research subject that can -- depending on how self-aware the researcher is and what their relationship to that connectedness is -- help or hinder scholarly analysis.

I am taking a meditation class with Hanna this month (my first ever!) and have been introduced to the practice of metta meditation, in which the quality of loving-kindness toward beings is distinguished from feelings of acquisitive desire for those beings. I've been thinking this week about how the same distinction might be made concerning one's affinity toward a research project: intense feelings of loving-kindness toward the subject and subjects -- relatedness that is not conditional upon a particular outcome -- could be separated from an emotional investment that was conditional, that required fidelity to a particular outcome, a particular historical narrative that fit pre-conceptions about what story these historical sources were going to tell.

Again, I'm not sure how practically this translates into a real-world relationship between the scholar and her sources, the scholar and her passionate involvement with the work of her subjects. But it is a beginning, a way to open (inside myself, at least) a conversation that values not only my intellectual work but also the personal, emotional, life-story reasons why the pursuit of this particular story is not only an academic exercise but also very much a matter of existential survival.

^{image credit: Barnard College, 1913 (LOC) made available by the Library of Congress @ Flickr.com.}

feeling guilty for wanting a balanced life

I've recently been making some decisions about how and when to complete my graduate education. Decisions which have left me feeling one part proud of myself for saying "nope, this isn't working" and making the necessary changes and one part small and ashamed of being slow and for, well, wanting a balanced life. It is always humiliating (or at least I find it so) to find one's self buying in, even a little bit, to the cultural pressures and voices in one's head that pass judgment on the personal life decisions. Decisions that I know, in my gut, are right for me but nevertheless run counter to the mainstream expectations of how we ought to live our lives.

And yet, despite knowing I'm right, I do feel that pressure, and I do hear those voices. As I was trying to make a decision about whether or not to revise my planned thesis-writing deadlines to give myself more time for writing I was acutely aware of those dynamics. And the dynamics of justifying whatever decision I made both to myself and to others (my advisers, my family and colleagues, etc.). So I have a few observations that I'd like to share with you.

As I sit here spelling them out, they all seem rather obvious -- but I think in part because of their very ubiquity they become invisible to us. So for that reason I'm going to the trouble of articulating them anyway.

The first observation is that it is really damn hard in our culture to feel comfortable making the argument that I am part of a family and that it is important for me to nurture the relationships that make up that family even while pursuing academic work and wage-work that I also care about. When justifying my thesis extension to my advisers, I emphasized my work schedule and the importance of having enough time for deliberation and revision while writing. I was up-front about the importance to me of having regular leisure time with Hanna during the week, but I was careful to name that desire as one of a number of factors, rather than foregrounding it as one of my primary concerns (which, in fact, it is). And part of me felt ashamed for naming it as a primary concern, even as I persisted in doing so.

A related reason that feels like an admission of failure is naming domestic responsibilities and the amount of time they take: quotidian tasks such as the morning and evening commute, physical exercise, dish-washing, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning one's kitchen and bathroom, attempting to impose some order on a very tiny apartment space in which two grown women, a cacophony of plants and myriad books are attempting to co-exist. As feminists have pointed out repeatedly for the past two hundred years (at least), domestic concerns are not taken care of by magic (sha-zing!), but rather through work, work that takes both time and energy on the part those whose duty it is to complete these tasks -- whether those persons are paid domestic servants, unpaid spouses, or (in the case of those with neither the economic resources to outsource or a "separate spheres" arrangement with their partner) someone who comes home from work to a second shift.

Yet, as feminists have also pointed out, our society is still organized on the underlying assumption that these tasks will be completed on an invisible level, but people whose labor doesn't officially count -- or possibly in some gap in the space/time continuum. So it feels shameful to acknowledge openly that these tasks do take time, my time and Hanna's time, and that these domestic responsibilities do not count as leisure activities. Rather, they too are un-fun duties that detract from rest and relaxation during the week.

Both of these facets of life -- time to enjoy relationships and time for domestic tasks -- fall under the broader umbrella of self-care, which is really the third life activity that is so very difficult to talk about, much less claim time for, in our culture (more about that in a forthcoming post next week). Despite all of the hue and cry that we are a narcissistic, self-obsessed culture very little in the structure of our society encourages care for, and love of, the self -- something that is foundational to being effective in any other aspect of life. Yet it is something that is supposed to happen around the edges of our other obligations -- shoved to the early mornings, late evenings, weekends, holidays. Rather than occupying its central place in the fabric of our daily lives.

My advisers were, I would like to be clear, not pressuring me to finish within the original time-frame, and were even supportive of my desire to have a life outside of school. But nonetheless, it was a difficult thing for me to ask for. One of them expressed confidence that I could finish writing in the time originally planned, and suggested that deadlines are important in curbing perfectionist tendencies. Which made the voices in my head start to wonder: was I really just panicking about writing a less-than-"perfect" thesis? Was requesting an extension just delaying the inevitable needlessly? But then I realized that these questions and doubts I was having focused the question back on the thesis itself, once again eliding the life I lead around the thesis project, and how that "extra-curricular" world has a place of equal importance in my life.

To be honest, when push comes to shove, it has a more important place in my life. By which I mean that caring for personal relationships and spending quality time with the people in my life will virtually always academic endeavors, unequivocally.

And that's what I have the hardest time admitting to myself and the world: that people will always, always come before ideas in terms of my priorities. Why is admitting this so difficult?

In part, at least, it's because I do, truly, feel passionate about ideas. As anyone who has lived in close proximity with me since I became verbal can attest: I am constantly thinking, processing, analyzing the world around me. It's something I find endlessly enjoyable, satisfying, meaningful. My thesis, in this particular instance, is a self-chosen research project on a topic that's been close to my heart for the past fifteen years; it has re-connected me to people for whom I care deeply, and whose own work in the world I admire. I will see this project through to the end, and I will be proud of having contributed my bit to the history of this particular time and place. I am good at what I do, and I believe in making use of my skills as a writer and thinker.

But as much as I love the world of ideas, I do not thrive in the world of academia, and I don't think I quite understand -- at least intuitively -- what it takes to be the type of person for whom scholarship is their passion, their lifeblood. And often I feel incredibly guilty about acknowledging this, since I live and work in a world surrounded by such scholars.

It makes me feel, in some obscure hard-to-put-my-finger-on sense, like I'm letting them down. That I'm failing to live up to their hopeful expectations that I become a driven, passionate scholar like them.

Finally, I also think that, as a woman and a feminist, I find it particularly fraught to speak about those instances in which I choose to prioritize personal relationships over what amounts to my professional identity. Part of me struggles with the realization that, in doing so, I am conforming to cultural expectations of what women "naturally" prefer: we're "naturally" more intuitive and relational, blah blah blah ("rubbish!" as Hanna would say). Another part of me is pissed that I feel ashamed of making those choices because I realize that, on some level, my feeling of shame means I have bought into the (profoundly anti-feminist) cultural idea that those "feminine" realms of being are somehow a lesser choice. And yet a third part of me is haunted by the women academics who have worked so hard to assert their right to be a part of the life of the mind, and I feel saddened by my acknowledgment that I have (more often than not) failed to feel at home in the space they were so triumphant, not so very long ago, to gain entrance to.

In the end, though, I don't think this is an issue of gender (though it has aspects specific to cultural expectations of women and men) so much as it is an issue of "work" and how we understand what counts as work and what the place of work should be in our society and in our individual lives and self-identities. If anything, I suspect men still have a more difficult time in our culture claiming time for non-work activities, particularly activities that involve relational intimacy and home-making.

Most of all, I think this is an issue of re-claiming the right to make space for things that are not-work in our lives, and make the (radical?) assertion that often these things are more important to us than those things which count as work.

This has been a long, rambling blog post for which I have no tidy concluding remarks. So I thought I would end with some open-ended questions. I hope some of you will take the time to respond to in comments! What things do you find yourself struggling to justify making time for, and why? What do you do when your personal priorities are at odds with society's priorities?

^{image credit: awkward by sketch | erase @ Flickr.com.}

small announcement: thesis blog goes live

For those of you who are involved with or otherwise interested in my thesis research, I have established a second blog through which to stay connected with my oral history narrators and keep folks updated on my research activities. The blog can be found at

oeoralhist.blogspot.com

Eventually, I hope the blog will become a gateway for access to the oral history interview recordings and transcripts that I plan to make available online through the Internet Archive. For right now, it's a bare-bones operation explaining the purpose of the project, how to participate, and where the project now stands.

I'll continue to post related booknotes and more personal observations here at the FFLA as well, but wanted to make all of you aware that this other resource is out there and that I will be using it down the road as the main portal for making my research available online.

multimedia monday: earth days

Back in April, Hanna was kind enough to set up the mystical VCR to tape the PBS American Experience documentary on Earth Day, eponymously titled Earth Days so I could watch it as sociopolitical background for my thesis.



You can watch the entire film online at the American Experience website, where they have also made a full transcript available.

I thought they did a particularly thoughtful job selecting the requisite talking heads, choosing a wide range of folks involve in environmental policy and activism from the 1960s through to the present. What I found most fascinating was the way in which environmental activism in the early days (prior to the Reagan administration) was not a strictly partisan issue -- controversial in some aspects, yes, but not seen as a Democratic cause (or a Republican cause for that matter).

The most striking part of the film, for me, was the section in which they discuss the commitment brought by the Carter administration to environmental sustainability in the late Seventies, galvanized in part by stagflation and the fuel crisis -- and then the Reagan administration's reversal of all, and more, of the previous decade's worth of progress toward a more environmentally-friendly America.

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: [Carter] had solar water heaters installed on the White House roof.

President Jimmy Carter (archival): A generation from now, this solar water heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest ventures ever undertaken by the American people.

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: He gave me the best job of my life running the Federal Solar Energy Research Institute and a budget that increased and doubled every year that I was there and the opportunity to really do some important things.

President Jimmy Carter (archival): The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly. It is a problem that we will not be able to solve in the next few years; it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century. We must not be selfish or timid, if we hope to have a decent world for our children and our grandchildren. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future rather than letting the future control us.

Hunter Lovins, The Motivator: Carter, I think, made a fundamental mistake, which was he saw the transition as one of constraint and of one of privation, and of giving up, and of lowered lifestyle.

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: In a period from 1973 to 1980 the price of oil went from $4 a barrel to $30 a barrel. And that clearly was enough to cause the public to support things like fuel efficiency standards for automobiles and other things that would have been inconceivable unless you’d had a crisis.

* * *

Ronald Reagan, Presidential Candidate (archival): They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been, that the America of the coming years will be a place where because of our past excesses, it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true. I don’t believe that and I don’t believe you do either. That’s why I am seeking the Presidency. I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts, who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, a result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance, which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity.

* * *

Denis Hayes, The Organizer: For reasons that I just cannot even begin to comprehend, Reagan did his very best to completely shut down the renewable energy effort. In the instance of the institute that I led, he reduced our budget by more the 80%, fired half of the staff and fired all of our contractors, two of whom subsequently went on to win Nobel Prizes. It was just devastating, but for one year we did have within an element a very good energy policy.

Ronald Reagan, Public Service Announcement (archival): It’s morning again in America. And under the leadership of President Reagan our country is prouder, and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to the way we were?

Reporter (voice over, archival): The Reagan White House has finally dismantled the last vestiges of the Carter Administration. Workmen have now taken down the solar water heating system installed on the White House roof in 1979.

I highly recommend watching some or all of Earth Days, since (at least for those of us who barely remember the Reagan era, let alone the 1960s and 70s) it gives us a chance to re-imagine the public discourse surrounding environmental issues in ways that don't lock us into partisan divides -- gives us a chance to imagine a time in the not so distant past (and hopefully in the not so distant future) when there was more emphasis on the fact that we're all in this together, as human beings on a living planet, and partisanship aside sustainability is really the only way forward if care to have a "forward" to be moving toward at all.

booknotes: so late, so soon

Immersed as I have been in thesis research, I haven't been doing so much actual book reading lately, at least of the kind that can be encapsulated in "booknotes" posts. But while I was on my travels out west in March, I read a couple of books I thought it would be worth mentioning here. And here's the first.

I found D'Arcy Fallon's memoir, So Late, So Soon when I did an internet search (yes, using Google) for information related to Lighthouse Ranch, a Christian commune in northern California that one of my oral history narrators mentioned visiting as part of an Oregon Extension field trip in the mid-1970s. Fallon joined the commune after arriving there as a hitch-hiking teenager in the early Seventies, drawn in by the commune's sense of order and purpose, eventually marrying a fellow communard and remaining with the community for three years, despite the increasing dissonance she felt between her own inclinations and the expectations of the commune's leaders about her role as a Christian, as a woman, and as a member of the community.

Now a professor of composition and creative nonfiction a the University of Colorado, Fallon tells her story with lyrical compassion; although the depression and oppression she felt in her latter days as part of Lighthouse Ranch is palpable, she also manages to convey a clear understanding of why her younger self might have sought out this type of community, at this point in her life, and the difficult of extricating herself once she had become immersed. The book has brevity (I read it on one leg of my flight from Boston to Portland, Oregon) and offers rich details that give us insight into a particular subculture within the counterculture: that of the Jesus Freaks who adopted much of the outward, material culture of the hippies and melded it with a sometimes dogmatic adherence to Christian doctrine, theology, and religious practice. Anyone with an interest in either the counterculture of the era or in the dynamics of religious communities (communal or otherwise) will likely find it an interesting read.

researcher @ work: pictures from Oregon

It's Friday afternoon at the end of week one and I've taken a break from the 1970s to drive three miles up the road to the Green Springs Inn, where the coffee is horrid and the marionberry pie is superb . . . and most importantly, where I can enjoy internet connectivity indoors instead of perched on a park bench in the snow outside the local one-room schoolhouse!



Here is one of the five cabins that house students during the fall, and visitors year round; this is the cabin I stayed in as a student (taken from the porch of the cabin I am renting on this trip); I was in the tiny room next to the woodshed that looks like a mudroom because it was until they modified it to house a fifth student! Everyone here is grateful for the snow because they've had such a dry winter thus far that there is talk of fire season starting in April -- months ahead of the expected timetable.

On Wednesday, I drove twenty-one miles down into the valley along Highway 66 (state highway, not the famous Route 66) to the town of Ashland, Oregon. How could you not love a town that proclaims "Libraries: The Heart of Our Community"? I was certainly smitten, which is why I stopped to take this photograph. I was on my way to the Ashland Public Library in any event, to see what they offer in terms of local history resources (not a lot in published form, it turns out). The reference desk was very courteous all the same, and the women staffing it were able to direct me to the Southern Oregon University's Hannon Library, wherein is housed a a card catalog index of the Ashland Daily Tidings (the local newspaper). Yet another helpful reference librarian (yay reference librarians!) ushered me into a dark corner (metaphorically speaking) wherein was located this wonderful analog card catalog -- yup, they really do still exist!

Sadly, the Daily Tidings (or whomever indexed it) did not see fit to print any stories about the Oregon Extension directly, but I did find a few stories from the late Sixties about the influx of hippies (yes, indexed under "hippies") from the Bay Area. The locals seemed mostly perplexed rather than truly offended; they must have grown inured soon enough since by 1970 all references to hippies per se vanished. I plan to go back armed with the names of particular local communes and investigate some more tomorrow.

The folks here have been warmly welcoming and generous with their time and their records. My historians heart warms with a frisson of excitement at being able to go through "unprocessed" (in archives-speak) materials related to the early years of the OE, but it's also a little terrifying to be entrusted with file boxes of other folks' papers like this.

John Linton, one of the professors here (who arrived in 1981 and is thus, for now, outside the scope of my oral history project...in the future that may change!) has wandered by a couple of times and on his way past exhorts me to "do good work!" I'll do my best, guys! You're definitely giving me lots of great stuff to work with. Now I just have to live up to it!

On to week #2...

blog hiatus: off to Oregon

As this post goes up, I'll be in the air somewhere between Boston's Logan Airport and PDX. I'm headed out to the West Coast on a two-week research visit to the Oregon Extension, the off-campus study program that is the focus of my history thesis. I'll be hunkered down with old curriculum notes from the 1970s and recording oral history interviews with the faculty who founded the program back in 1975 as well as several former students from the early years who work at the OE or live in the area. I am also lucky enough to be able to visit my brother and his girlfriend Renee, currently living in Portland, and my maternal grandparents who live in Bend. Since I'd like to take these two weeks to focus on my thesis research, I will be posting minimally or not at all (possibly some photos) until I return to Boston.

Please think warm thoughts toward Hanna, who is generously shouldering the burden of a solitary existance (hanna rightly points out that being alone is not a burden unless you're actually lonely) taking responsibility for our household in Boston until I return. If you're interested in keeping abreast of life in Boston, wander over to her blog at ...fly over me, evil angel...

booknotes: right (part two)

Part one of this review was posted last Wednesday.

Strictly speaking, this isn't so much a review as an extended quotation from one of the student interviews excerpted in Right and commentary on that particular quotation. Senior Jeremiah Loring, interviewed in March of 2007, was asked Do you think what you are doing is analogous to the counterculture, to what hippies were doing in the '60s, that it's a new revolution? Since I've been thinking a lot about the concept of "counterculture" (and how various scholars and lay folks define it) for my thesis, I was particularly intrigued by Loring's response.

I have always liked the idea of a counterculture. That's how Christianity should be. Not a subculture, because a subculture is something that, when a culture moves to the right or to the left, the subculture moves with it. However, a counterculture is everything that is outside of it, and we are solid. Regardless of where the culture goes, we are staying put. I think our society lacks that consistency. We have been blown by the wind of fashion. In this last election the nation had a left-leaning sweep, which was expressed in the polls. We tend to have a wishy-washy society. I think that's expressed in politics by the growing number of moderates who do not have a consistent voting pattern, and I think it shows that they have lost a sense of principle trying to base their votes and actions on something solid and concrete. Christianity provides us with an anchor: if the culture moves, we are going to be pro-life. We are not going to change. The whole culture can leave us, and we are still going to stand there and say that abortion is wrong. If the time comes when everyone is saying abortion is wrong, and it's outlawed, then we are fine. But, if it leaves us again, then we have to stand where we were before, because the Bible is eternal, and the word of God never fades.

Leaving aside the specific example of abortion, I was struck by two aspects of Loring's definition of "culture" and "counterculture." One was the way in which he describes counterculture as "everything that is outside" of culture. While I get the gist of his argument, I would argue this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the impetus for countercultural activity: that is, it is inherently oppositional. It is counter; it derives its purpose, at least in part, from offering a values system or worldview that is at odds from the dominant culture. The relationship between dominant culture and counterculture, then, is a dynamic one: as the dominant culture shifts, so too does the counterculture. This understanding of a counterculture is quite different from Loring's concept of a counterculture that exists eternally, unmoving, outside of "culture."

And that, indeed, is the second point of note in Loring's response: he fails to identify is own Christian worldview as a culture -- instead, it is outside of culture entirely. "The culture" and "the whole culture" are set up in opposition to his particular Christian evangelical, politically conservative understanding of the universe. I would argue that it is much more fruitful to understand cultures (sub, counter and otherwise identified) as cultures, your own or not. This is because cultures do actually change over time, and can be studied from an historical perspective -- and even if Loring's Christian counterculture holds eternal values (as he argues they do), from my perspective as an historian I would suggest that the way those values are expressed changes over time -- and that those changes are worth situating in a cultural context.

Finally, I do think that the interviewer's question is a valid one, and that there are legitimate, fruitful comparisons to be made between the type of resistance to modernity mounted by the 1960s counterculturalists and that articulated by the current fundegelicals (as my friend Amy used to call them). Indeed, I think it's a shame that folks within both countercultures (if you will) don't more often explore the values they have in common, as well as eying each other suspiciously from opposite ends of the "culture wars" spectrum. I'm not quite sure what would come of such a mutual assessment of shared values, but possibly it could help to clear up some of the confusion Rosin and others have over the nuances of home education, Christian fundamentalist-evangelicalism, and the struggle for political power.

multimedia monday: religion & politics

Welcome to the month of March! This month, I will be taking a two-week research trip to Lincoln, Oregon, in order to conduct oral history interviews with, and read through the personal archives of, faculty at the Oregon Extension. This work (fingers crossed) will provide the backbone of primary source material for my thesis on the early years of the program and its context in American countercultural, religious, and educational history.

Meanwhile, one of the alumni of the OE is a scholar of American religious history and author of numerous books on the subject of Evangelicalism in American life. One of his more recent books, God in the White House, charts the history of faith and the office of the Presidency during the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, you can listen to him discuss faith and politics with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air.

booknotes: "we'll want the breasts exposed, and yet covered."

I love the things I can pick up and read in the name of thesis research. Take, for example, Elizabeth Fraterrigo's Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford U.P., 2009). I saw the book by chance on the shelf at Borders a few weeks ago and while I would have read it eventually anyway (what's not to like? sex! gender! money! drama!), I realized after pondering for a day or two that I could consider it background research on American postwar culture. So off to the library I trundled. (Or rather, off to the online catalog I clicked, forthwith to inter-library loan a copy through the Brookline Public Library).

And Ms. Fraterrigo did not disappoint. This dissertation-turned-book is a richly researched yet highly readable account of Hugh Hefner's self-re-invention as the playboy of his dreams, a life he carved out for himself with relentless hard work and not a little luck after the dissolution of his youthful marriage and a series of unsatisfying desk jobs. Hefner, Fraterrigo convincingly argues, took various cultural elements in already in play (dissatisfaction with suburbia, anxiety about masculinity and women's increased visibility in previously male spaces, a rise in consumer spending, postwar debates about what constituted the "good life," and the scientific examination of human sexuality) and packaged them in a highly-successful formula that catapulted him to the top of a cultural and financial empire.

She draws two fascinating (if superficially unlikely) comparisons between Hefner and women writers of his day. First, she suggests a commonality in thought between Hefner and early feminist rhetorician Betty Friedan (author of The Feminine Mystique). Both Friedan and Hefner drew on their own personal experience to build a critique of the hegemonic postwar culture and its emphasis on the middle class, suburban nuclear family. In response to an unsatisfying homelife, both championed participation in the capitalist economy (as both worker and consumer) as a potential route to self-realization (see pp. 26-36).

Second, Fraterrigo points out the striking parallels between the ideal woman as articulated by Hefner in the page of Playboy (and in real life by the women who worked as Bunnies in the Playboy clubs) and Helen Gurley Brown's "Single Girl," found in the pages of Sex and the Single Girl first published in 1962. Both Hefner and Brown managed to carve out a place for singledom and pre-marital sex in culture dominated by the value of marriage and family. Yet they did so in ways that in no way challenged the status quo of inequitable gender relations or the notion of gender complimentarity (the idea that men and women "naturally" perform different, though complimentary, roles in society).

Brown's Single Girl fit easily into the harmonious system of gender roles supported by Hefner. She made few demands on the male pocketbook [unlike a wife], aside from accepting the occasional gift or evening on the town, and instead made her own way as a working girl. Like the playboy, she strove to work hard and play hard too; yet she had no pretensions about achieving much power or earning vast sums of money through her role in the workplace. Instead, she accepted her marginal economic position and limited job prospects with a smile on her well-made-up face. Though she may not have enjoyed the same degree of autonomy and plentitude as the playboy, the Single Girl shared his sensibilities . . . [she] was both a handmaiden in the liberalization of sexual attitudes in the 1960s and the ascent of a consumer-oriented singles culture (132-33).

As the Swinging Sixties gave way to the cultural and counter-cultural revolutions of the early 1970s, Hefner found his idealized Playboy -- once a symbol of avant garde youthful revolt against the status quo -- derided by both men and women of the Movement cultures who critiqued his unabashed materialism and stubborn support of strictly segregated gender roles. He was taken aback by the "aggressive chicks" of the women's liberation movement who pointed out that structural inequalities and oppositional gender typing (the strict separation of "masculine" and "feminine") left women in a systematic disadvantage. Despite Hefner's (and Playboy's) support of such feminist causes as women's right to sexual expression, sex outside of marriage, access to abortion, and women's participation in the workforce, he seems -- according to Fraterrigo at least -- to have balked at re-imagining a world in which the division of gender roles was less strictly dictated than it had been in the decades of his youth.

In this, Hefner is far from alone to judge by the continued popularity of "complementarian" arguments for "traditional" feminine and masculine roles among various conservative groups and even in some feminist circles -- yet I am perennially puzzled by the amount of fear and resistance appeals to loosen gender-based expectations routinely encounter. While beyond the scope of Fraterrigo's deftly-woven narrative about Playboy and the postwar culture of freewheeling consumerism it helped to legitimate, it is certainly a question which Playboy encourages us to ask: What, exactly, is at stake for individuals who defend complementary gender roles? The women's liberationists of the 1970s thought they had the answer: unfettered male access to women's bodies and the uncomplaining domestic support of housewives and secretaries. Fraterrigo's tale, however, suggests that the answer is -- while still containing those elements -- far more complex (and more interesting!) than it appears at first glance.

Wintersession: Digital Memorial and Cultural Archives

On a quick personal and professional note (for all of you who read this blog to find out What Anna Get's Up To When We Aren't There To Keep An Eye On Her):

I'm excited to report that I've been accepted to participate in a wintersession course (beginning this evening) on Development of Digital Memorial and Cultural Archives, taught by Kevin Glick, Electronic Records Archivist from Yale University. The class is being offered as a joint project between Southern Connecticut State University and the group Voices of September 11, which curates the 9/11 Living Memorial digital archive to commemorate the lives and stories of September 11, 2001 and the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

I'm really excited to be taking this class, since I am hoping to create a digital archive for the materials I collect as part of my oral history research. I am also looking forward to broadening my knowledge of New England a bit, since I have never been to Connecticut except passing through on the Amtrak on the way to New York City. Now I have a totally educational (read: legitimate) excuse to make the trip!

On the Syllabus: Man For Himself

This week for my independent study, I finally sat down and finished Erich Fromm's 1947 treatise on humanistic ethics: Man For Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. Erich Fromm, a prolific writer on psychology, philosophy, politics, and ethics, clearly can't be adequately represented by a small excerpt from one published work . . . but I thought I would, nevertheless, give you a flavor of his thinking by sharing a passage from Man for Himself in which he responds to one of the criticisms of his humanistic philosophy which foregrounds the capacity ("potentiality") of human beings: that is, "what about the problem of evil?"

"The opponents of humanistic ethics," he writes, "claim that man's [1] nature is such as to make him inclined to be hostile to his fellow man, to be envious and jealous, and to be lazy, unless he is curbed by fear. Many representatives of humanistic ethics [have] met this challenge by insisting that man is inherently good and that destructiveness is not an integral part of his nature" (213). As Fromm points out, this leaves us with the problem of what destructiveness and where it comes from, if we reject it as an inherent part of human nature (since, self-evidently, human beings demonstrate a capacity for violence).

Our first step in approaching the problem of destructiveness is to differentiate between two kinds of hate: rational, "reactive" and irrational "character-conditioned" hate [2]. Reactive, rational hate is a person's reaction to a threat to his own or another person's freedom, life, or ideas. Its premise is a respect for life . Rational hate has an important biological function: it is the affective equivalent of action serving the protection of life; it comes into existence as a reaction to vital threats, and it ceases to exist when the threat has been removed; it is not the opposite but the concomitant of the striving for life [which Fromm believes is the most fundamental human drive].

Character-conditioned hate is different in quality. It is a character trait, a continuous readiness to hate, lingering within the person who is hostile rather than reacting to a stimulus from without . . . [a phenomenon] of such magnitude that the dualistic theory of love and hate as the two fundamental forces [of human life] seems to fit the facts. (216-17, emphasis in the original).

Fromm asks then (somewhat rhetorically) whether, given the evidence, he is forced to concede that theories maintaining destructiveness is a fundamental part of human nature (he uses Freud's work as an example) are, indeed, correct. No, he responds to himself, he is not. He posits that both capacities (creativity and destruction) are present in human beings as potentialities which need certain conditions to manifest; furthermore, he argues that the capacity for productive, life-promoting creativity, is a primary capacity, whereas the capacity for destruction is secondary, realized only when the conditions for the primary are not met:

Both the primary and the secondary potentialities are part of the nature of an organism . . . the "secondary" potentiality comes into manifest existence only in the case of abnormal, pathogenic conditions. . . . man is not necessarily evil but becomes evil only if the proper conditions of his growth and development are lacking. The evil has no independent existence of its own, it is the absence of good, the result of the failure to realize life (219-20).

While I am skeptical about the division between rational/irrational used here, and find Fromm's reliance on psychoanalytic language frustrating at times, his basic concept of human beings has a lot of (ahem) potential for re-imagining our most basic assumptions concerning human nature.

In the wake of the Second World War, many people -- across diverse fields of inquiry -- were wrestling with the question of what "human nature" was -- and could be -- with a sense of great urgency. Fromm offers us one such example; I'll look forward to sharing more with you in the weeks to come.

~~~footnotes~~~

[1] after my post on Goodman last week, it is worth noting that Fromm specifically, in the introduction to Man for Himself, defines his use of the word "man" as a universal pronoun for "human being."

[2] Fromm uses "character" in a very specific sense, elaborated on elsewhere in the book and in his other work, and here is indicating a basic orientation toward life versus a reaction to a specific incident.

On the Syllabus: Growing Up Absurd

So I might not have a lot of time to post this year, but one thing it occured to me to do is post selections from some of my thesis-related reading for those of you who are interested in what I'm doing on the intellectual/history front. Since I'm enrolled in an independent study this semester, I have the luxury of designing my own schedule of reading in preparation for my oral history fieldwork. The reading I'll be doing this semester is in part theoretical/methodological (how I'll be doing my oral history collecting and thesis writing, and why I chose to do it that way) in part a review of the existing historical literature on the period and topics I am studying, and in part primary sources that help provide contemporary context for the beginnings of the Oregon Extension program.

One of the books I've been reading this week, Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in an Organized Society. The prolific Goodman wrote one of the earliest post-war critiques of 1950s American conformity, first published in 1957, which later became a "must read" for countercultural activists during the 1960s and 70s. The basic argument of Growing Up Absurd is that the post-war society is depriving youth (specifically boys, see below) of meaningful work opportunities -- leaving them with the option of unfullfilling factory of office jobs that do not contribute (in Goodman's view) to the betterment of society. While his argument has faults, he is also making key observations about the fault-lines in American society during the era of post-war conformity. The priceless bits, however, are the sections in which he defends his focus on "young men and boys" as a stand-in for "youth." When I began reading, I figured he was using masculine pronouns as a stand-in for humanity in general (it's the 1950s after all). Not so according to this parenthetical found at the end of his introduction:

(I say the "young men and boys" rather than "young people" because the problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boys: how to be useful and make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, "make something" of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act. With thie background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married. The quest for the glamour job is given at least a little substance by its relation to a "better" marriage. Correspondingly, our "youth troubles" are boys' troubles -- female delinquency is sexual: "incorrigibility" and unmarried pregnancy. Yet as every woman knows, these problems [I am writing about] are intensely interesting to women, for if the boys do not grow to be men, where shall the women find men? If the husband is running the rat race of the organized system, there is not much father for the children.) [13]

I would love to write an entire essay at some point unpacking the layers of cultural "common sense" packed into this one single paragraph of Goodman's polemic. He continues this way of raising the question of women in a tangential, completely un-analyzed way. In the section where he discusses the Beats, he critiques their cultural dissent at length and then eventually gets around to the question of "What is in it for the women who accompany the Beats?" (185)

There are several possible sexual bonds . . . Her relation to him is maternal: she devotes herself to helping him find himself and become a man, presumably so that he can then marry her. . . Another possible relation is Muse or Model: her Beat is her poet and artist and makes her feel important. This is a satisfaction of her feminine narcissism or penis envy.

So mother or virgin/whore: those are our options girls. But wait! There's more (185-187).

One sometimes sees a pathetic scene in a bar. Some decent square young workingmen are there, lonely, looking for girls or even for a friendly word. They feel they are "nobodies"; they are not Beats, they are not artists. They have nothing to "contribute" to the conversation. The girls, meantime, give their attention only to the Beats, who are sounding off so interestingly. But these Beats will not make any life for the girls, whereas the others might make husbands and fathers.

Amazing what a long history the Nice Guy (tm) vesus Bad Boy (tm) mythology has, isn't it? One might, of course, ask if there are any female Beats -- in spirit if not in historic fact (there were very few women who were part of the core movement). Goodman does actually mention such women, at the tail end of his analysis:

Finally, of course, there are the young women who are themselves Beats, disaffected from status standards. Perhaps they have left an unlucky marriage, have had an illegitimate child, have fallen in love with a Negro, and found little support or charity "in" society. They then choose a life among those more tolerant, and find meaning in it by posing for them or typing their manuscripts.

So even the women "Beats," who fit his earlier definition of "incorrigibility," end up being not so much artist-activists themselves, but rather a sub-species of the Muse and Model he defines earlier. As women artists and activists pointed out at the time -- most loudly and concertedly during the 1960s and 1970s -- this was in fact far from the truth of their own lived experience.

That's it for this week's "on the syllabus" dispatch . . . look for more next weekend!

on my plate: year three

Today is the first official day of classes for me at Simmons, where I am entering my third year as a dual-degree student in the History and Archives Management Master's program. So what does that mean in terms of the shape of my daily life?

Well, for starters, I continue to work four days a week at the Massachusetts Historical Society, with a great team of librarians and archivists who have been unfailingly supportive of my studies and given me the chance to learn the (shall we say) trade secrets of providing archival reference service. If you're interested in the work that goes on at a place like the MHS (oldest historical society in the Western Hemisphere), check out my colleague & friend Jeremy Dibbell's blog, the Beehive, hosted by the MHS website. I will also put in another plug for following John Quincy Adams on twitter, where he is tweeting posthumously his line-a-day diary entries from an 1809 voyage to Russia.

In addition, I have a very part-time job at Northeastern's Archives and Special Collections, where I spend four hours a week slowly constructing a database of images from the scrapbooks of Marjorie Bouve, the founder of Northeastern's Bouve School of Physical Education. Nothing has gone live online yet, but I can promise links when (fingers crossed!) the images are web-published. Lots of great early-twentieth-century snapshots of young women (and occasionally men) engaged in such activities as cycling, sailing, sight-seeing, and amateur theatricals.

As a graduate student, my work this year turns decisively toward my thesis research on the creation of the Oregon Extension program during the mid-1970s. I will be exploring the various cultural and educational threads that came together to shape the way in which the OE was developed as an educational program and a particular communal space. To that end, one of my two classes this fall is an independent study, which provides me with dedicated time to prepare logistically and theoretically for my oral history field work. If I can find ways to share this on-going project on the blog without a lot of additional time and mental strain, I will . . . if not, you should be seeing the fruits of my labors sometime in December of 2010 (again, fingers crossed!).

I am also in Archives, History, and Collective Memory, the dual-degree capstone course, of sorts. Since it focuses on "the relationship between historical events, the creation and maintenance of archival records, and the construction of collective memory" I look forward to applying the concepts we discuss in class to my own research: what is oral history, after all, but the creation of archival records and a collective construction of historically-minded personal narratives?

And finally, of course, come all of the continued pleasures and duties of domestic life: the morning and evening commute, leisure reading, movie watching, shopping and meal preparation, laundry, cleaning, weekend outings, keeping up with far-flung family members, and (above all) regularly-scheduled time with Hanna.

Given all of this real-world activity, I'm sure how much I'll be blogging during the coming months. Obviously, home life, work, and school commitments come first. For those of you who follow my blog as a way of keeping up long-distance with what's going on in my life, I'll definitely try to post pictures and piffle as the opportunity arises. For those of you who check in from elsewhere in the blogosphere, I'm still reading your blogs, even if I lack the time to join in the conversation!

As always, shoot me an email or (gasp) put pen to paper and write me a letter and I will respond, later if not sooner (but hopefully sooner). You know where to find me! In the meantime, I do think of you all and hope your fall projects are getting underway with creativity, productivity, and pleasure. Don't forget to enjoy the autumn weather, wherever you may be.

*photograph of the T crossing the intersection of Harvard and Beacon at Coolidge Corner by scleroplex @ Flickr.