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Archive for the ‘Women’ Category
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Wednesday, October 26th, 2011Book Review: Revolutionary Road
Monday, September 26th, 2011Richard Yates in Revolutionary Road, published in 1961, examines the post war suburban life and its conformity. In particular, he focuses on marriage. His main character, April Wheeler is deeply ambivalent about motherhood. The novel takes place in 1955, and describes the lives of April and her husband Frank both before their marriage and after. She is pregnant three times and wishes to abort two of the pregnancies. This is, of course, when abortion is not legal and for dramatic purposes Yates has her rely only on advice from a friend rather than seek medical help. Middle and upper class women were able to access abortions despite its illegality.
Yates portrays April as someone who pregnancy traps. Her first pregnancy propels Frank into a job he hates and eventually they move to the suburbs of Connecticut. They have a second child without comment but a few years later April feels completely suffocated by her life and plans an escape. They will move to Paris and she will work while Frank decides what great thing he will do. April needs to feel there is a point to her life; working in a foreign country appears to fulfill that need. Frank is more ambivalent about this plan but they proceed.
Before they can bring the plan to fruition, April is pregnant again. This third unwanted pregnancy propels the story to a tragic denouement. Throughout the whole story it is clear that April desperately wanted to determine her own life and have autonomy over her decisions.
Although abortion was illegal in all states and only two states allowed therapeutic abortions in the interest of the women’s health, many women received abortions every year. The largest group of women who sought abortions were married and already had children. Thus, Yates’s portrayal of April Wheeler was a very representative one. One fifth of the women Alfred Kinsey interviewed for his study of sexual behavior had had abortions. Middle class women, in general, had access to services including abortion that poor women did not.
When April is pregnant for the third time and wishes, once again, to abort, Frank wages a fierce battle to prevent her from doing so. Eventually he persuades April that she needs psychological help. Although Yates has Frank somewhat cynically use this argument to prevent the abortion, the portrayal of a woman who did not wish to have another child as mentally ill was a very prevalent idea in the 1950’s. Popular psychology decreed that if a woman wanted to both work and be a mother she had to be in conflict. A woman who denied procreation was denying pleasure.
The book is very well written. It has many fans; one is Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. In2008 a movie version of it with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett opened. No one in the book is very likeable but he is trying to show you the trap that the characters are in. In the movie which must externalize much of the novel’s internal drama, April does become more sympathetic because Frank is such a dog.
A Time To Break Silence
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011I have been doing research on Anne Bennett, wife of John Bennett, president of Union Theological Seminary from 1963-1970. Anne was a committed anti-Vietnam War activist. Her husband was a founding member of Clergy and Laity Concerned. Martin Luther King, Jr. was also a founding member.
In 1967 he gave this speech to a meeting of the group at Riverside Church, New York City. The speech is amazing and makes me realize, once again, what a great man he was and what a loss his assassination was.
King showed tremendous courage in speaking out against the Vietnam War. I wonder where such a leader is today. We deeply need someone who can connect the issues of militarism and imperialism to issues of social justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Monologues
Monday, February 14th, 2011Last Thursday, at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, one of the associates, Christian McEwen presented a reading of her play, “Legal Tender: Women and the Secret Life of Money”. It’s form is similar to the Vagina Monologues. She interviewed over forty women and presented their stories under different themes, including, kindness, generosity, and “abundance”. One of the women interviewed said, “A little can be a lot, if it’s enough.” It is very interesting that for many of the women money is not something they have talked openly about.
The following night, I went to a production of the Vagina Monologues at Mount Holyoke College. I had never seen it before. The acting as very good and some of the stories were very moving. One of the most interesting things to me is that many women do not like the word vagina. I have no problem with it. To me it is just a word. It’s not as if penis is such a sexy or pretty word either.
These two plays are about revealing feelings that are usually hidden. I wonder if there could be a Penis Monologues. My son, Louis, who studied Cultural Studies at Hampshire College said he didn’t think so because “penises aren’t simultaneously valued and abhorred like vaginas”. He also feels that “people already talk about penises a lot so it’s not really taboo.”
Despite that, I think that men obviously have feelings about their sexuality and anatomy that are rarely discussed. Women are sexualized in ways that men are not so there is much more discussion about their beauty and appearance than there is for men.
Of course writing this makes me nervous that I will get a ton of pornographic spam. That’s another story.
Poster Session
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011I was part of the poster session at the recent American Historical Association (AHA). I had never done a poster before. I put in a poster proposal because you can do that on your own. The AHA doesn’t accept single paper proposals. I never thought it would be accepted; I was pleasantly surprised when it was.
Of course then I had to learn how to do it, The AHA has been doing poster sessions for six years but did not give any specific instructions or tips. I decided to use PowerPoint. It was a steep learning curve, but in the end I got it done.
The poster session was held on Saturday from 2 to 5. That time frame allowed people to come before or after a session. This was good planning but the location of the session was another story. It was in the Hynes Convention Center, Ballroom C. This was on the third floor while the book exhibit was on the first floor. It was about as far away from the rest of the AHA as you could get. This really cut down on walk-in traffic.
I really enjoyed doing it. I was able to talk to a lot more people than I would have if I gave a paper. It was very nice to present my work and get feedback. Doing a poster gives you an opportunity to think about conveying your work in a different manner.
Onto Next Year
Friday, December 31st, 2010I don’t usually make specific New Year’s resolutions. I do frequently make lists and sometimes they include more long-term goals or projects. Over a year ago, I started tweeting, which led to a chain reaction where I wound up blogging less. When I started using wordpress for my blog, I did less with my website. Each new technological advance means you use an older thing less.
I really like twitter. It enables you to be part of conversation in real time. During the recent blizzard, Keith Olbermann tweeted almost every hour on the progress of the storm and the lack of any cleanup. Apparently, people stuck at airports used twitter to try to get seats on flights.
I don’t want to stop blogging because I enjoy it and it helps my writing. I guess one of my goals for 2011 is to get back to blogging more frequently. I am playing around with some ideas but I haven’t made any firm plans yet.
When I think about my website and blog, I would like to find ways to make them both more current. As I move into writing about faculty wives, I don’t want to abandon beer and brewing. If I want to change how the blog looks, I will have to tackle wordpress, which I have found very difficult in the past.
One big goal I have for 2011 is to continue to make progress on my new book. I have one chapter written and would like to complete at least three more before my year at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center is up. I also want to try to get an agent and then a book contract. For Brewing Battles, I got the contract but no agent. This time I want to try to have the agent first. In some ways it feels more difficult. I will keep you posted on my progress.
Happy New Year!
Joy in the Morning: Book Review
Thursday, October 21st, 2010Betty Smith wrote Joy in the Morning in 1963. She was the author of the very well known, A Tree Grow in Brooklyn. Joy in the Morning is about Annie Brown and her first year of marriage. Only eighteen, she moves from Brooklyn to marry Carl Brown who is a law student at a midwestern state university.
The book is semi-autobiographical. As a newlywed, Betty Smith moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan where her new husband was studying law at the University of Michigan.
I was interested in Joy because the book I am working on looks at the wives of students, both graduate and undergraduate. The University Of Michigan had a National Association of University Dames (NAUD) chapter well as a Faculty Women’s Club, which still exists.
Annie does not belong to any of these groups but Smith movingly conveys her sense of being an outsider. Annie, like Smith, wants to write and eventually audits a playwriting class.
The book is lovely and very sweet in a non-sentimental way. Smith depicts the struggles that Annie and her husband Carl have, dealing with money, adjusting to marriage, and the birth of their son, honestly, in an authentic voice.
Carl eventually gets a job as a night watchman at a nearby factory. He is able to get this job because the previous guard died. Annie feels badly about their good fortune resting on the death of someone so she decides to write about it.“
Annie spent the night writing the story. She wrote under great compulsion. She couldn’t stand it that a human being had lived and died and that there was no record that he had ever been. She felt that writing about him she was establishing the fact that he had lived and walked the earth and had once been a man.”1
The women I am writing about had families and people who knew and now remember them, yet this sentiment spoke to me because I want to give then back their identity and humanity.
Betty Smith
- Betty Smith, Joy in the Morning, New York: Harper & Row, 216. [↩]
Beer Labels
Sunday, October 17th, 2010
I wrote this post in December of 2008 before I had this word press blog. It was part of a series of posts I did about the seventy-fifth anniversary of Repeal. I am reposting it because I just read a blog about the label on Lost Abbey’s Witch’s Wit. Tenured Radical is circulating another blogger’s concern about the graphic of a woman being burnt at the stake while a crowd of men watches with rapt attention. Of course, the picture on the label is very small but I am sure it looks worse when you actually see it. TR and others find it offensive.
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December 2 2008
The Road From Repeal: Labels and Advertising
I wanted to write about aspects of beer advertising in the seventy-five years since Repeal but I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to say. I also wanted to touch on labels since they became a regulatory issue in the late twentieth century. While thinking about the topic I came across an excellent article about beer labels in All About Beer (no link available). Dave Gausepohl, a breweriana collector, examines the history of labels and describes the information labels contain.
Currently all beer bottles and cans contain a government warning about the dangers of alcohol use and abuse. Post-Prohibition, as beer consumption shifted from on-premises to off-premises, primarily the home, the packaging of beer became more important. Ultimately what the container looked like was an integral part of the product’s advertising and marketing.
Beer labels have a UPC code, dating information, the government warning and in some cases, alcohol content, but they do not list ingredients. Brewers, unlike most other producers of edible, consumable products, do not have to disclose what they have used to make the beer. They also do not have to say anything about how many calories the beer has.
What the beer bottle or can looks like is part of advertising but since Prohibition the major emphasis for beer marketing has been radio and television. Brewers gained an immediate and lasting advantage over distillers who, until recently have lived under a voluntary ban against advertising on television. Despite this free gift, post-Prohibition brewers were circumspect in their marketing because they feared a return of Prohibition. This self-restraint lasted to a good degree until the 1970′s and the onset of the “beer wars”. The intense competition among the top tier brewers fueled by the influx of advertising dollars from Miller Brewing and its parent company Philip Morris led to a decrease in the propriety of beer television ads.
Prohibitionists never went away and one of their ongoing battles has been to limit brewers access to advertising. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a self-styled consumer and public health advocacy organization, has a Alcohol Priorities Project which seeks to “promote a comprehensive, prevention-oriented approach to the role of alcohol in society by addressing alcohol advertising, excise taxes, changes in product labeling, and other population-based policy reforms.” In August, the Center sent a petition “signed by 60 Division I presidents, 240 athletic directors and 101 football and basketball coaches” urging the NCAA to prohibit beer advertising during college games. The NCAA declined to change its policies. George Hacker, director of the Alcohol Policies Project, was extremely disappointed and commented, “In contrast, the NCAA rejects advertising for distilled spirits, most wine, sports wagering, gambling, nightclubs, firearms and weapons, and NC-17-rated motion pictures, among others.” Mr. Hacker also co-chairs the Coalition for the Prevention of Alcohol Problems, a coalition of temperance groups.
Sports Biz, a blog, noted “The Mountain West Conference does not carry beer commercials on its network, the mtn. (Mountain West Sports Network) It also doesn’t carry commercials for Viagra and similar products, which is a blessing for those few people who actually can receive the mtn. Declining Viagra and Cialis commercials would be a public service that I recommend that the Big Ten Network and the WWLS adopt immediately. Football and basketball fans would be forever grateful.”
It is doubtful that the labels at the top of this posting would have played a role in the ongoing controversy over beer advertising. The image at the bottom however is a different story.
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It’s Academic
Friday, September 24th, 2010Several of the associates at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center (FCWSRC) have decided to have a writing group. We met for the first time yesterday. Each person said what they would like to work on while at the center and what help they hoped to get from the group. I have to present a poster at the American Historical Association annual meeting in January. I have never even seen a poster at any conference so I definitely can use some help.
In a discussion of authenticity, which is a subject I wrote about in Brewing Battles, *(see excerpt at end of post) one of the associates said she would like to see my footnotes. I replied that the ideas mainly came from me. In other words, it was my original analysis. This exchange made me realize I have come a long way from my academic roots. Academic scholarship and writing often seeks legitimization by showing that an idea has prestigious pedigree. My current sense of accessible writing is to document the facts and the ideas and analysis are my own.
Another aspect of academe that seems to have changed is literature reviews. When I wrote my dissertation at Columbia University, you had to include a historiographical overview in your prospectus. A prospectus is akin to a book proposal. The actual dissertation did not contain a literature review. Two people in the group who have completed history PhD’s more recently both had to include literature reviews in their dissertations. This seems like a bad idea that will only make it harder to turn the theses into a book.
Before I became a nurse, I had a business, Academic Publicity. It provided promotional services and publicity to academic authors. It was a great idea with a fatal flaw. Most academics don’t think of themselves as writers or authors. Therefore, they do not want to pay to promote their books. By now, I really think of myself as a writer and author. I am writing Dames, Dishes and Degrees from that perspective.
* Brewing Battles: A History of American Beer (New York: Algora Press, 2007, 190.
The emergence of craft brewing highlights a battle within the brewing industry over authenticity and identity. Since World War II the national brewers have connected beer to all things American — baseball, barbeques, race cars, and pretty, sexy women.1 Yet the nationalizing of the beer industry removed one of the most potent aspects of beer’s identity — localism. The new generation of brewers emphasizes its connection to place and community even more than taste. They stake a claim to authenticity via their roots in a specific locale.
Craft brewers, whether or not they start as home brewers, are entrepreneurs. In this way they are similar to the many hundreds of people who start a business every day. What is interesting about the thousands of people who started breweries and brewpubs since the late 1970s is that they created these businesses in an industry dominated by some of America’s biggest companies.
Craft brewers have been able to exploit a hole, a gap, in the huge edifice of American brewing. Some three to fifteen percent of the American beer drinking population didn’t and still doesn’t like drinking Bud, Schlitz, Miller, or Pabst. In the nineteenth century ten percent of Pabst’s customers wanted pure malt beer; craft beer drinkers of the twenty-first century are their descendants.2
- For examples of these themes and their use in alcohol advertising and marketing see Lynn Walding, “Alcohol Marketing 2005,” (powerpoint presentation) Iowa Alcohol Beverages Division, http://www.iowaabd.com/index.jsp , accessed July 20, 2007.
[↩] - Thomas Childs Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company: The History of an American Business (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1948), 122. [↩]
Clubs
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010I am having a difficult day because an archive I visited did a terrible job of making copies and digitizing picture. It is a lot of work to make sure I have the right documents. It is important because I need then for a paper I am giving at the History Education Society annual meeting. I also need the pictures for a poster I will be presenting at the AHA.
While doing this work, I found a picture on my computer that I realized I had meant to write a post about. It is of the Ebell Club, Los Angeles and is from an August 9 New York Times article. The club has existed from 1897; its clubhouse is a beautiful Italian renaissance revival built-in 1927.
Ebell Club
Amey Wheeler, wife of Benjamin Ide Wheeler, president of the University of California, Berkeley was a member of the Ebell Club of Oakland. Both the Oakland and Los Angeles clubs were named after Adrian Bell who had organized classes for women. Many clubwomen belong to more than one club. Amey also founded the College Teas Association at Berkley. This was a faculty wives club.
Historians have studied the women’s club movement but usually end the story in 1920 when women got the vote. The fact that the Ebell Club still exists is testament to the power of ongoing connections between generations of women. However, it now faces what the article calls a 21st-century problem: “how to convince modern women that such a club has contemporary value to them.” Many faculty wives clubs still exist but face similar problems to those of the Ebell Club.
