Obama the (Im)perfect Feminist . . .

. . . Just like the rest of us!

I like this post by Jill over at Feministe discussing the Ms. magazine cover featuring Barack Obama in one of their "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirts, a graphic that has caused some controversy in the feminist blogsophere (then again, what doesn't cause controversy in the feminist blogosphere?) As Jill points out,

Obama has reportedly self-identified as a feminist, and has the legislative record to back it up. Is he a perfect feminist, or a perfect progressive? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Is he going to disappoint us over and over? Yeah, he’s already started. But he’s still pretty damned good, especially for a mainstream, center-left politician elected to the highest office, and I don’t really see the point in kicking him out of the club just yet.

Yup. I'm definitely looking forward to inauguration day!

UPDATE: There's also a nice post on this over at Bitch Magazine.

Looking Back/Looking Forward: History

As we enter 2009 -- and before I get lost once again in the maze of a busy academic schedule -- I thought I'd post a few items on the projects I completed this fall and the projects that are up for the spring semester.

As I wrote at the beginning of last semester, this past fall I took a history seminar in the "American Renaissance," the era of great political and social upheaval took place during the decades leading up to the Civil War. The paper that came out of that course was "Inspiring 'Right Feelings': Children and Childhood in Lydia Maria Child's The Mother's Book." Child was an author and activist whose parenting manual, The Mother's Book, published in 1831, incorporated many of the latest ideas about human nature, development, and education emerging from the Romantic movement and also the social justice movements she was involved in. I was principally interested in the way Child did, and did not, make connections between her political activism children's rights. As I wrote in my introduction:

I am interested in the central role of education as a means of both self-improvement and social control plays in the parenting model Child puts forward. Belief in education as a means of self-improvement and liberation from dependence was a common thread in many antebellum reform movements. Access to education, and the role of education in ending the intellectual and material dependence of blacks and women, was, for example, a central tenet of both the women’s rights and abolitionist movements—both of which Lydia Maria Child ardently supported. Yet within The Mother’s Book Child shies away from any radical challenge to parental authority, proscribing children’s moral and intellectual independence by casting adults—particularly mothers—in the role of vigilant guardians of their children’s innate good nature.

While I hesitate to say, at this point, whether the specific topic of this paper will be relevant to my thesis, the themes of political activism, education, and the position of children and youth in American culture are definitely recurring themes in my research and writing.

Up for next semester: I'm not sure what it says about me that my heart thrilled when I got the book list for my spring course in intellectual history and saw that we would be reading complete works by Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault -- as well as (I am sure) selections of many other influential thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries. I've encountered all of these crazy guys before and always walked away with something fascinating to ponder . . . even if Nietzsche makes me want to slap him and Freud did cause me to throw a book across . Hanna thinks I'm touched in the head for enjoying Foucault, but I've had a fondness for the man ever since using Discipline and Punish for my very first history/philosophy paper on children's rights.* And then there's the way he throws around words like panopticon with wild abandon . . . Stay tuned for what project emerges in May!

*Fall 2001, at the Oregon Extension program: "The Radical Belief that Children Are People." Did I mention something about a through-line in my research . . .?

Image of Lydia Maria Child borrowed from Flickr.

Monday Morning Melange

It's a snowy Monday morning in Boston and I'm sitting at the MHS enjoying my London Fog latte and checking out my iGoogle blog feeds. Here are some links of note.

Thanks Michigan for once again making me proud of my home state. Sigh.

Hanna has a new blog which I've added to my blogroll, and she's already put up a few fun links! If nothing else, you should go check out her beautiful design. The photograph is one of my favorites that she took last summer on a foggy day down in the North End.

I still remember vividly the first time I ever saw Christina Hoff Sommers interviewed on a documentary about contemporary feminism. I had no idea who she was, and my seventeen-year-old, newly-political feminist self was utterly taken aback by her anti-feminism-in-the-name-of-feminism outrage. Ten years later, she's still at it.

I see that over the weekend Kate Winslet won Golden Globes for Revolutionary Road (which I have neither seen nor read) and The Reader (which I have read but not seen). While checking out the news coverage over at The Guardian online, I stumbled into Ann Billson's joint review Films for people who don't really like films. I can't speak to the validity of her reviews, but I thought the overall point was an interesting one.

Finally, for those of you who wonder what this Dr. Who thing is I occasionally witter about on this blog, Wired magazine has put together a gallery of images following the many actors who have played the character over the years. I'm still working my way through the back catalog, so have only seen four of the eleven incarnations.* I told Hanna she needs to make me flash cards!

*For those of you who are/were fans of the BBC Chronicles of Narnia, Tom Baker (Dr. Who from 1974-1981) is also known for his turn as the Marshwiggle Puddleglum in Silver Chair.

Looking Back/Looking Forward: Teaching

As we enter 2009 -- and before I get lost once again in the maze of a busy academic schedule -- I thought I'd post a few items on the projects I completed this fall and the projects that are up for the spring semester.

Teaching [will] need to be more boldly political than now, not less. And more seriously historical: things used to be different. They will be different again. -- "Introduction Radical Teaching Now", Radical Teacher #83

As with my internship at Northeastern (see below), I will be continuing my work as a teaching assistant for Professor Stephen Ortega in the Simmons history department this spring. Steve teaches Middle Eastern, Islamic and World history; I will be helping with the second half of the World Civilizations course we began in the fall. The autumn class ran from hunter-gatherer societies to the age of exploration (15th century), and this second semester we will pick up in the 1400s and continue on to the present day.

It was timely, therefore, to receive my most recent issue of Radical Teacher in the mail this past week, and find Peter Vickery's essay "Progressive Pedagogy in the U.S. History Survey" inside. Vickery describes teaching a U.S. History survey course at a state college, to students for whom the class is a requirement, and many of whom are skeptical about the relevance of history -- not to mention their own ability to actively participate in its creation. He writes:

In addition to skepticism, my students encounter an ongoing tension, namely the apparent contradiction between a key goal (finding out what actually happened and why) and a key lesson (history is constructed by historians). Far from being a source of despair or frustration, in my own mind the tension is integral to the joy of history. Learning and re-learning on the one hand the boundaries of possibility that inhere in the study and production of history and, on the other, the power of narrative, keeps history a stimulating field of endeavor.

Yet it can be difficult to convey the joy of that contradiction to students who are distracted and suspicious of the worth of such an open-ended quest. We'll see what happens this spring!

My grandmother's library in the news!

via Hanna.

When my maternal grandparents retired to Bend, Oregon in the early 1980s, my grandmother, Marilyn, became a volunteer at the Deschutes Public Library. The library has a program to circulate books through the mail to house-bound and far-flung rural patrons, and for years Grandma was responsible for corresponding with, and selecting books for her own particular group of patrons.

Well, the library's just made news with rising circulation and patronage numbers, according to the Bend Bulletin:

People are flocking to Deschutes County libraries, and officials say the slumping economy may be bringing them business. From July through November, patrons checked out about 10 percent more books and other items compared with the same period last year.

. . . State Librarian Jim Scheppke said circulation increased by 2.5 percent between the budget cycle that ended in June and the previous budget cycle, and the state set a circulation record of 51.7 million items. Scheppke was impressed by the circulation growth described in Deschutes County.

“The Deschutes numbers sound pretty amazing,” Scheppke said. “It is something we’re hearing in all the public libraries right now. We’ve known ever since the Great Depression in the 1930s that library use pretty much tracks the economy. In bad times, library use has always gone up.”

Of course, there are a lot of obviously negative implications of a recession, but I can't think of any scenario where increase use of libraries is a bad thing!

Looking Back/Looking Forward: Internship

As we enter 2009 -- and before I get lost once again in the maze of a busy academic schedule -- I thought I'd post a few items on the projects I completed this fall and the projects that are up for the spring semester.

My tenure as an intern at Northeastern University's Archives will continue through the spring, this time as an official internship requirement for my second archives class at Simmons. Just today, I published the last finding aid for the small collections I processed this fall to make them available for research. In addition to my first, miniscule collection the Albert Hale Waite papers, I also processed the collection of Milburn Devenney, a social worker and AIDS/HIV activist from the Boston area, documents related to the history of Northeastern's Disability Resource Center and course notes from the history department's Western Civilization class.

Next week I will begin work on a much larger collection, the Carmen A. Pola papers. Ms. Pola is a Boston-area community activist who worked for a number of different social justice organizations such as Roxbury Unites for Families and Children and the Puerto Rican Festival. She served in the administration of Boston mayor Ray Flynn during the 1980s. We have over thirty boxes of unprocessed documents and photographs that I will be responsible for organizing so that researchers will have meaningful access to the contents of the collection. Wish me luck and watch for the results sometime this summer!

(Belated) Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! I'm back in Boston and catching up on everything that needs doing before the term starts up in a few weeks. This includes napping . . .



. . . and polishing off some of those winter break book reads . . .




As well as, of course, working our way through the local selection of xocolata calenta.*

*Catalan for hot chocolate (because why not?)