"Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist:"

The action lies between the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his disillusion. (176)

Naomi Wolf (1962-) is leading spokeswoman of the Third Wave feminist movement. In addition to her work as a political consultant, she is also the author of several books, including The Beauty Myth, Promiscuities, Misconception, The End of America, and Give Me Liberty.

The Beauty Myth (1991) argues that the titular myth developed in the 1970s as a backlash against the Second Wave feminist movement. It is not a deliberate conspiracy engineered by a shadowy cabal but a collective impulse to control women when the grip of other myths – such as domesticity and sexual purity – has been loosened. Fueled by advertising and mass media, the Beauty Myth conditions women to believe that their physical appearance is paramount above all else, including autonomy, authenticity, and personal identity. Adopting the metaphor of the Iron Maiden - an archaic torture device in which the victim was sealed in a coffin shaped like a smiling woman - Wolf articulates a kind of neo-Platonic ideal that coalesced out of the constant bombardment of advertising and mass media. The Iron Maiden represents a marriage between misogyny and consumer capitalism in which women are driven to spend and spend in pursuit of perfection that never comes, at the expense of their own well-being and place in society. Woman's pursuit of beauty is not frivolous but literally a matter of survival.

Wolf's words are vivid and violent, giving a work of cultural theory the feel of a twisted fairy tale. She likens the department store makeup counter to the born-again experience of a cult conversion, mixing the desire for redemption with spiritual destruction. A thousand different emotions pour through her writing, ranging from slow suffocation to intoxicating freedom, from the college girls in a self-imposed famine to a vision of youthful health who "might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn. . ." (217). She goes deep into the trenches of our shared subconscious, a dystopic place akin to Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, where the human body can actually be mass-produced as a prosthetic "shell." His work introduced the old Greek paradox of the Ship of Theseus, in which the effort to preserve a famous war vessel results in it being gradually rebuilt as board by board requires replacement. Is it still the same ship in the long run? What becomes of woman-made woman when there is man-made woman? Likewise, what Wolf describes is no less than a tug-of-war between women as humans and women as disposable blow-up dolls who signify sex, submission, and interchangeability. Barbies who can be played with, pulled apart, and thrown out. Not surprisingly, the Beauty Myth can also be linked to a rise of violent sexual imagery directed at women, and a dangerous shift in cultural attitudes toward sexual assault. According to a 1988 report from Ms. magazine, only 27% of women who experienced coerced sex at the hands of an acquaintance could even identify their experience as rape, possibly due to the normalization of sexual violence against women in movies and music videos.

While her gaze into deadly cultural undercurrents is piercing and critical to a fine-tuned point, Wolf, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman before her, falls short in one crucial area. Her relentless focus on gender oppression ultimately precludes her from recognizing where she does have privilege in our hierarchical society, and herein lies an enormous oversight in an otherwise gripping book. For all her contributions to Third Wave feminism, Wolf seems to have adopted little of its intersectionality. The Beauty Myth purports to be about Western women, particularly those living in Britain and the United States. Unfortunately, this "Western woman" Wolf so frequently refers to is a monolith coded as white.

When tracing the history of Western misogyny, for instance, Wolf describes the older myths of female invalidism ("Victorian Novel Disease") and the Angel of the House as though they were universal to all women and not just middle-class white housewives. While I understand that she is speaking of collective ideals propagated by the ones with the power, rarely does she address the situation of women completely outside of the Beauty Myth and its previous incarnations: women of color, disabled women, and lesbian/bisexual and trans women.. How do these myths impact women who must negotiate other sites of oppression? In the section on "Work," Wolf argues that

Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete. We can better understand how insidious this development is if we try to imagine a racial discrimination suit brought in the face of a powerful technology that processes, with great pain, nonwhite people to look more white. A black employee can now charge, sympathetically, that he [emphasis mine] doesn't want. to look more white, and should not have to look more white in order to keep his [emphasis mine] job. We have not yet begun the push toward civil rights for women that will entitle a woman to say she'd rather look like herself than some "beautiful" young stranger. (55)

This passage is problematic because she is basically saying that misogyny and racism are two separate issues. Note Wolf's use of the male pronoun to refer to the hypothetical black employee. In a book of over 300 pages she scarcely addresses the intersection of white and male supremacy that spawns an Iron Maiden far more oppressive than one that merely demands youth and thinness. Reality is -

The Iron Maiden is a white woman.







In the section "Eugenics" in the chapter "Violence," Wolf makes an intriguing connection between cosmetic surgery to correct female "deformities" (fat, wrinkles, small/sagging breasts) and the attacks made by the medical community on other historically marginalized groups. The white male is standard and anything that deviates from him ugly, useless, and essentially inhuman.

Women are surgical candidates because we are considered inferior, an evaluation women share with other marginalized groups. Nonwhite features are "deformities" too: The Poutney Clinic's brochure offers "a Western appearance to the eyes" to the "Oriental Eyelid," which "lacks a well-defined supratarsal fold." It admires "the Caucasian or 'Western' nose," ridicules "Asian Noses," "Afro-Caribbean Noses ('a fat and rounded tip which needs correction'), and "Oriental Noses" ('the tip . . . too close to the face')." And "the Western nose that requires alteration invariably exhibits some of the characteristics of (nonwhite) noses . . . although the improvement needed is more subtle." White women, together with black and Asian women, undergo surgery not as a consequence of selfish vanity, but in reasonable reaction to physical discrimination. (264-265)

Unfortunately, she only carries this premise for two pages and then abandons it, despite the fact that white people are a worldwide minority with an overwhelmingly dominant media presence. The concerns of women of color are not a mere axillary issue to those of white women. Skin lightening creams, for example, are widely used in India and parts of Africa and Latin America. Colorism is entrenched in the African-American community, a legacy of white racism reinforced today by the black Beauty Myth. Hip-hop videos feature predominantly light-skinned models, a preference expressed by several rappers including Lil Wayne and Kanye West. ("If it wasn't for race mixing, there would be no video girls.") According to this article, skin lightening creams may contain high levels of the steroid corticosteroid (typically used to treat eczema and psoriasis and can only be safely used for up to two weeks), the steroid hydroquinone (banned in the EU for potential to cause skin cancer), and even mercury.

For years, Allison Ross rubbed in skin-lightening creams with names like Hyprogel and Fair & White. She said she wanted to even out and brighten the tone of her face, neck and hands. Mrs. Ross, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, also said that she used the lightening creams “to be more accepted in society.”

After months of twice-a-day applications, her skin was not only fairer, it had become so thin that a touch would bruise her face. Her capillaries became visible, and she developed stubborn acne. A doctor told her that all three were side effects of prescription-strength steroids in some of the creams, which she had bought over the counter in beauty supply stores. . .

Users are not necessarily immigrants, said Dr. Eliot F. Battle Jr., who has a dermatology practice in Washington, where he treats side effects from lightening creams “not only containing corticosteroids, but mercury,” a poison that can damage the nervous system. The patients are “Ph.D.’s to women from corporate America, teachers to engineers — the entire broad spectrum of women of color,” Dr. Battle said. (New York Times)

While Wolf rightfully points to the use of computer manipulation to alter women's bodies to a surreal extent, never does she mention what can be done to redesign and erase an individual's racial and cultural identity.


Via Womanist Musings
Wolf points to the economic costs of the Beauty Myth as additional money drained from women for extra maintenance to appear socially and professionally presentable. Apparently she hasn't noticed that black women worldwide – who on average earn even less than their white counterparts – are all but required to spend hundreds of dollars over a lifetime on heat styling and chemicals to alter their hair. These processes can burn the scalp and lead to permanent hair loss in the long term, leaving many black women in a "damned if you do damned if you don't" position. From the blog What Tami Said:

My beautiful, straightened hair came at a price. It meant ears burned by slipped hot combs and scars from harsh chemicals. It meant avoiding active play and swimming pools, lest dreaded moisture make my hair "go back." It meant having a relaxer eat away at the back of my long hair until barely an inch was left. It meant subtly learning that my natural physical attributes were unacceptable.

If beauty is a prerequisite for employment, it would be pertinent to bring up the historical controversy surrounding natural black hair – a controversy that affects black women primarily because it is they who usually wear their hair long. Natural black hairstyles, such as dreadlocks and the Afro, are seen as messy, "savage," or overtly political and therefore unsuitable for a professional setting.

Asian women, meanwhile, are more likely to have cosmetic surgery than any other group.

We’ve all had those awful moments of realization: We have our mother’s moon face. A third-world flat nose. Our dad’s beady-little almond eyes. Sausage knees. A flat ass. Non-existent cheekbones. Five feet of tiny height. Or whatever else is wrong with us, that can be magically assessed in a highly unforgiving full-length mirror.

If you want to discuss the dehumanization of women into living Barbie dolls - mass-produced and commercialized - you would do well to bring up the fetishization of Asian women as geisha dolls and inscrutably exotic Dragon Ladies that persists to this day.



Looking back, I think Naomi Wolf laid the groundwork for other women to build upon. She erases and oversimplifies (she exaggerates at times and some of her eating disorder statistics are obviously inflated) but the foundation is there. The Beauty Myth angers and inspires but is by no means anti-beauty: on the contrary, she celebrates the innate drive in all of us to adorn, take pride in our appearance, and own our sexuality. Unfortunately, she does go deep enough and The Beauty Myth is best read alongside other, similar, later works. Feminist/womanist blogs are a great place to start. Any other recommendations?

---

A Year of Feminist Classics is a project started by Amy, Ana, Emily Jane and Iris, four book bloggers who share an interest in the feminist movement and its history. The project will work a little like an informal reading group: for all of 2011, we will each month read what we consider to be a central feminist text, with one of us being in charge of the discussion. . . What we hope to achieve is to gain a better historical understanding of the struggle for gender equality, as well as a better awareness of how the issues discussed in these now classic texts are still relevant in our times. We welcome all voices and perspectives, and we would love it if you joined in and added your own.

"The modern waste land,"

. . . as Eliot describes it, is a place where thought and naked desire have taken the place of feeling and comprehension, which have almost completely atrophied. This situation, as we have already seen, is difficult to grasp precisely because to 'grasp' it is to already have lost it, to have become like the characters in all of Eliot's early poems who can only think, not feel, who know too much but understand nothing. (107)

Gabriel Josipovici is an author, literary critic, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and Weidenfield Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford. His novel Moo Pak was The Wolves' selection for the month of July 2010.

Josipovici's 2009 non-fiction work, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, at times reiterates what has been said about Modernism already: namely, that it is art produced in reaction to a disillusionment with old forms arising from a disillusionment with the natural order of things. This creative weariness is said to have originated with the Industrial Revolution and crystallized with the discoveries of Darwin and Einstein which effectively demolished the old humanocentric universe. As H.P. Lovecraft memorably said, the consolidation of this new knowledge "will one day open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." He was also famously overwrought and possessed of a fantastic imagination, but his perception of a vast universe beyond human comprehension was shared by many in the early twentieth century.

I did a post awhile back comparing Lovecraft's cosmic outlook to that of Dante, having been impressed by the exquisite orderliness of The Divine Comedy compared to what I was used to in more recent literature. (With the exception of fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings which are also strictly fictional.) Dante's Christian/neo-Classical vision was a comforting one in which divine justice prevailed and eternal reward or punishment was bestowed upon all those deserving. It was in reading Paradiso that I began to feel a sense of loss or nostalgia that such a worldview was no longer possible except as rigid adherence to archaic dogma. To Josipovici, this is precisely the paradox at the heart of Modernism: both the longing for what is lost and the freedom that said loss enables.

Dante, working in an age when an ordered universe was taken for granted, could build his poem out of a hundred cantos precisely (three canticles of thirty-three cantos plus a prologue) and place his sinners and saints in carefully guarded positions in both Heaven and Hell, while drawing on a rich tradition to bring home to the reader how each of us can be saved and what steps need to be taken. By 1840 all that has long gone. All [Søren] Kierkegaard can do is to try and explore in every way imaginable the troubled heart and soul of the nineteenth-century man, one who has been given his freedom twice over, first by God and then by the French Revolution, but who does not know what to do with it except torment himself with the sense that he is wasting his life. (43)

Another example from music would be Haydn and Beethoven. The former was able to churn out hundreds of compositions since he was working within an established tradition that required obedience to prescribed forms. Beethoven, by contrast, started from scratch each time and for that reason produced only a few symphonies.

Although Kierkegaard and Beethoven are denizens of the nineteenth century, Josipovici differs from other critics by locating of the origins of Modernist thought much further back than is conventional. Certainly its manifestations were most prominent between about 1850 and 1950, Josipovici observes, but to limit Modernism to a single era is to risk turning it into just another movement or period in intellectual history. Modernism is a state of being: "the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore something that will, from now on, always be with us" (11). The accepted story is that the rise of Protestantism and Humanism in the sixteenth century liberated Western civilization from the superstition and authority of the Middle Ages, thus paving the way for the Scientific Revolution and eventually the Industrial Revolution and the Modernism that developed as reaction to it. Josipovici argues instead that Protestantism and the Renaissance were symptoms of a shifting cultural landscape to which Martin Luther merely provided a focal point. He discusses a pair of engravings by Albrecht Dürer called Melencolia I and St. Jerome in his Study, both completed in 1514. The former seems to already depict that "disenchantment with the world" so closely identified with Modernism, especially as contrasted to the latter, which evokes a sense of peace and order, of the saint at one with God.

This cosmic/artistic assurance is one of Josipovici's primary themes, appearing as a characteristic of "old-fashioned" art, regardless of the era in which it was actually produced. In fact, Josipovici attributes it to many living writers, composers, and painters whose art is, well, artificial: self-contained and dead. The very foundation of Modernism is art's interrogation of its own purpose in the absence of an established tradition. The "dreariness of 'the marquis went out at five'" is scorned by writers who "hunger for that 'relentless contact"' and a "form of fiction which transcends the anecdotal" (166). Josipovici relies mostly on case studies here, such as that of Cézanne, who was an enormous influence on ensuing generations of avant-garde painters.
According to art critic Maurice Merleau-Ponty, landscape painting before Cézanne consisted of flat representation that effectively steamrolled multiple visual impressions into a unified whole.

Landscapes painted in this way have a peaceful look, an air of respectable decency, which comes of their being held beneath a gaze fixed at infinity. They remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer. They are polite company: the gaze passes without hindrance over a landscape which offers no resistance to this supremely easy movement. (93)

Josipovici links this to the use of the passé simple (or récit) in the traditional novel which implies, according to critic Roland Barthes, a hidden storyteller or chronicler and places the verb "in a casual chain, [that] participates in a group of actions which are of a piece and forward driven, it functions as the algebraic sign of an intention" (80). Such novels are neatly packaged, episodic, and bear no resemblance to real world's spontaneity and uncertainty.

To reduce our visual impressions to a singular view "kills their trembling life," says Merleau-Ponty (94). It was Cézanne who first realized that nature does not conform to the guidelines laid out in "how to paint" manuals and sought to portray on canvas how the mountain actually was and not how he, the painter, simply saw it. There is no such thing as background or foreground; these are narrative forms imposed upon nature to render it coherent to the human eye, just as the Right Hegelians used to whittle history down to a convenient tale to assert the historical inevitability of existing institutions (to give another instance of an artificial construct made to represent reality). While the struggle against the dead hand of contingency may be a futile one, Cézanne, according to Merleau-Ponty, was a successful genius whose landscapes depict an "emerging order" when the myriad "perspectival distortions" are viewed globally (95). As far as literature goes in this vein, Josipovici sees T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as the momentary vision of an Everyman reflecting on his life in opposition to the ongoing enterprise of art itself: "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo" goes the refrain. He rolls the bottoms of his flannel trousers and walks upon the beach, hearing the mermaids singing to each other but not to him, leaving Prufrock in the tenuous position of knowing what will give his life meaning but finding it just out of reach. The endcap "each to each," Josipovici observes, is circular and "turns in on itself" (126). The poem seems to disintegrate with the closing verses, reminding us that it only exists as long as we read it.

While again, Modernism may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, Josipovici argues convincingly that it is not. Nor is it necessarily the future of art that has rendered all conventional forms obsolete. As in Moo Pak, Josipovici takes aim at the current state of literary affairs by decrying Oprah-esque sob stories, Big Important Tomes about Bosnia and Rwanda, and the emptiness of contemporary British literature as a bunch of prep boys showing off their shock value. A particular offender is Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, written in 1941 during the invasion of France, and then forgotten at the bottom of a suitcase after Némirovsky, a Russian Jew who had converted to Catholicism, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. The novel's backstory is very interesting and tragic and all, Josipovici admits, but that hardly makes it a Great Book thanks to the "clichés of the middlebrow novel [used] without embarrassment, quickly filling in the background and sketching in her chosen representative family with the minimum of fuss, then cutting to the cat so as to convey the sense of ordinary life going on regardless of the great events that are unfolding" (168). The second passage he quotes demonstrates his point much better, as the "cadenced phrases," tidy description, and blatant symbolism jar badly with the chaos of battle. Josipovici contrasts Némirovsky to a WWI novel by Claude Simon, but I thought the stream-of-conscious ramblings of Mathias Énard's Zone would be another great illustration of his point.

Still, as with Moo Pak, I cannot help but to feel that there is silencing at work here – that Josipovici is telling survivors to go Modernist or shut up. It's quite contradictory that he feels Modernist literature to be closer to life yet is willing to dismiss authors with actual life experience that needs to be heard. And while I prefer more experimental literature myself and am especially partial to Modernist writers, I think it is a mistake to dismiss the traditional novel as somehow out of touch. Zone features a novel-in-a-novel told using conventional forms (passé simple, omniscient third person narration) that would be quite powerful and illuminating on its own. In fact, Énard's narrator identifies with it quite strongly, and there seems to be a strong case here for a diversity of voices and the legitimacy of traditional formats. By his own admission in the beginning, much of what Josipovici says here is subjective and a difference of opinion is encouraged. While I find his conclusions on the contemporary state of Modernism problematic, What Ever Happened to Modernism? is overall an enjoyable read that is scholarly yet never academic. Its case for Modernism's longer reach is a compelling one and quite accessible to a broad audience.

---

Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? was The Wolves' reading selection for May. Please feel free to join us for the rest! You can find the complete book list here.

Gender, Subjection, and Hegemony OH MY

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher in the fields of social theory, political theory, and political economy. The eldest son of James Mill, John Mill was an extremely precocious child with an intellectually rigorous upbringing. As an adult, he was a longtime pen-pale of August Comte, founder of positivism and sociology, and a member of Parliament for City and Westminster. In 1866 he became the first MP to call for women's suffrage.


Wife Harriet Taylor Mill (1807-1858) was also notable for her work in women's rights. John Mill was the first man to treat her as an intellectual equal, and they maintained a friendship for twenty-one years before marrying. Although they exchanged numerous essays, Harriet's surviving body of work is very small and she is remembered largely for her influence on her husband. This is especially evident in The Subjection of Women, published eleven years after her death.

The more I read The Subjection of Women, the more it seemed that Mill had anticipated the field of Gender History, particularly Joan Scott's seminal essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." Scott opens up with a discussion on the then-recent distinctions made between gender and sex in order to "[denote] a rejection of the biological determinism implicit in the use of such terms as 'sex' or 'sexual difference.'" "Gender" also refers to normative femininity in the holistic, social sense, as an attribute defined by its opposition to normative masculinity. In short, Scott argues that you cannot understand history without taking into account the presence of women. Gender is both "a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes" and "a primary way of signifying relationships of power." Even male-dominated areas are informed by gender as an abstract category and the basis of various cultural tropes and symbols.

Both Joan Scott and John Stuart Mill are interested in the relationship between gender and political history. Mill's analysis in The Subjection of Women begins with the Enlightenment precept that humanity is ever-progressing toward a state of greater liberty and rationalism. People are ultimately the products of their society, Mill argues, and most societies are founded on force, be it of master over slave, lord over serf, monarch over subjects, and so forth. At the time of his writing (1869), England, he felt, was the most advanced nation on Earth with the "the law of the strongest" having been supplanted by the individualistic rule of law, which recognizes all (male) citizens as equals. The subordination of women, another universal institution, is one of the last remaining vestiges of that old primitive order, which is hardly surprising even in "developed" countries, as human sentiments tend toward the past. "Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals," Mill asserts. "They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right." At one time most males and all females were slaves, yet the gradual evolution of Europe saw men emancipated into free agents in charge of their own destinies, while women's condition has been ameliorated to a milder form of dependence. Mill goes on,

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the effect of mere usurpation, while on the contrary it is natural. But was there every any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect . . . than Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and it rested on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the dominion of med over women is usually based, namely, that there are different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures; . . . But why need I go back to Aristotle? Did not the slave-owners of the Southern United States maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal interests? . . . Again, the theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal, which was framed on the model of the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they contend, the most natural authority of all. (Chapter 1)

Marriage is particularly problematic. Until recently, women could be forcefully "sold" by their fathers to another master, the husband, whose authority they would remain under as long as he lived. Even under current English law, the two are "one person," inferring that whatever is hers is his but not the other way around, except insofar as he is responsible for her actions just as a farmer is responsible for his cattle. And, just like the worst of the American slaveholders, an especially base husband has the right to physically, emotionally, and sexually mistreat his subordinate. "Not a word can be said for despotism in the family which cannot be said of political despotism," Mill argues. Whether the issue is slavery, political tyranny, or familial tyranny, "we are always expected to judge of [it] from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other - superior wisdom ordering all things for the greater good of the dependents, and surrounded by their smiles and benediction." The only way to guarantee equal protection and the preservation of individual rights is for the law to account for the worst possible abuse. For every benevolent dictator there is a monster drunk on power.

But, some may ask, why do women not protest then? In fact, it seems to me that they are quite content with their lot.

The ideas Mill articulates in response to such criticisms have since been established by Marxist historians as the theory of hegemony, which refers to the process by which a dominant group maintains its superior position with the consent of the dominated. Although the Marxists spoke of social class, the concept of hegemony is also highly useful in the discussion of gender, as demonstrated, retroactively, by The Subjection of Women:

Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear, - either fear of themselves or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. (Chapter 1)

Mill's thoughts on gender are far, far ahead of his time, although today's definition of the word did not exist then. He argues very strongly that what is commonly perceived as women's character is almost entirely the result of social conditioning in favor of marriage, motherhood, and servitude as the greatest and only goals in life. "It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters; . . . in the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters." He agrees with Mary Wollstonecraft that arguments against women's capabilities based on experience and observation are null and void: if you think women cannot do something, it is because society does not permit them to do it, and furthermore, if you believe women have a certain traits, it is because society has molded them. In a nutshell: biology does not and should not equal destiny.

It is here that I believe Mill slips up. His position allows little room for individual female agency and can even be turned around in favor of patriarchy. It may naturally follow that, if women are collectively warped, then they must not be in their right minds and are therefore suspect. Still, his strident advocacy for women's emancipation is startling, coming as it does from a male Victorian. Are talented men in such abundance, he demands, that the fields of business and politics cannot be opened up to women? How can we justify excluding a capable woman from birth when we give complete freedom to the stupidest of men? But overall, I believe the greatest strength of The Subjection of Women is that Mill places women's oppression and liberation in the context of a global, historical movement from tyranny to freedom and boldly lays out the contradictions inherent in Liberté, égalité, fraternité when only certain groups are allowed to benefit. Not only does he make strong cases for women's rights on both moral and practical grounds, he is also laying a framework for future historians, sociologists, philosophers, and activists to move the feminist cause forward. Does society really progress or was that just an Enlightenment dream? While I'm not sure we can assign human values to the force that is history, given how much has improved since John Stuart Mill's time, I have to believe we are headed in the right direction.

---

A Year of Feminist Classics is a project started by Amy, Ana, Emily Jane and Iris, four book bloggers who share an interest in the feminist movement and its history. The project will work a little like an informal reading group: for all of 2011, we will each month read what we consider to be a central feminist text, with one of us being in charge of the discussion. . .

What we hope to achieve is to gain a better historical understanding of the struggle for gender equality, as well as a better awareness of how the issues discussed in these now classic texts are still relevant in our times. We welcome all voices and perspectives, and we would love it if you joined in and added your own.

Global Vegetarian Cooking

When I first moved out on my own last August, I relied primarily on frozen meals. Granted, everything was organic (thanks, Amy's!) but after awhile it started to get old. Problem is, I can barely cook and generally don't like to. What was I to do?

I was browsing my local fair trade store a couple months ago when I found a small paperback cookbook by Troth Wells called Global Vegetarian Cooking: Quick & Easy Recipes from Around the World. Published by Interlink Books, Global Vegetarian Cooking is fourth in their New Internationalist food series, which has been translated and published in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and North America.

Turns out I'm hardly alone in my cooking issues. According the Wells's intro, a British National Opinion Poll revealed that most people in the 1980s spent about an hour a day on food preparation. Today, this figure has dropped to less than 30 minutes, and it is predicted that it will fall even further, to only 11 minutes, in the twenty-first century. (Global Vegetarian Cooking was published in 2001.) Since Americans have taken to eating out most of the time, your kitchen can be pretty much limited to a microwave and a refrigerator.

The problem with this is that over 60% of processed foods contain not only artificial ingredients and preservatives but genetically-modified (GM) fruits and vegetables as well. GM plants have had their genetic makeup altered to produce a desired trait, such as resistance to insects or pesticide. The result is called "recombinant DNA," which is achieved by lifting a desired gene sequence from one species and inserting it into the DNA of another. For example, you can take the anti-freeze genes from Arctic fish and introduce them to tomatoes to combat frost. The long-term health effects on human consumers are unknown, although biotech advocates claim their produce is perfectly safe. Still, unanswered questions remain. One concern is the practice of linking the transplanted genes to a "marker" gene for identification purposes. A favorite marker is the ampicillin-resistant gene, which may promote resistance in humans and animals to an important antibiotic.

Troth Wells also brings up several social justice issues involved. In the coming years, many peasants in the Majority ("Third") World will see their livelihoods ruined by their nations' importation of GM seeds and crops. Furthermore, there is a "new nasty on the horizon," nicknamed The Terminator by the Rural Advancement Foundation International. This seed is supposed to be genetically altered so that it cannot reproduce - a "suicide seed" - which threatens both biodiversity and the food security of 1.4 billion rural people. Thanks to the biotech industry's international influence, the ancient practice of saving seeds for reuse and exchanging them with neighbors could actually be outlawed. As of 2001, two top companies, Monsanto and AstraZeneca, have applied for patents for this technique in 89 to 77 countries.

Hello Oryx and Crake.

Fortunately, most GM produce is found in non-organic processed foods - precisely the foods that more and more consumers are relying upon for their speed and convenience. (Just a few minutes in the microwave!) The best solution to the GM issue is to simply eat less of the stuff. What is then needed are quick and easy recipes to make the transition easier for the cook-challenged like me. "The aim of this collection," says Wells's Introduction, "is to provide tasty recipes that are simple to prepare and cook, drawing on dishes found in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America." Global Vegetarian Cooking is a little under 200 pages and divided into "Starters, Snacks & Soups," "Main Dishes," "Salads & Side Dishes," and "Desserts & Drinks." There is also an Ingredients Gallery and a glossary.

My experience with this book has been limited to the first two sections. I usually make one meal a week, which lasts me two days. Although I had never heard of any of the dishes I've prepared, they were, as promised, generally quick and of beginner-level difficulty. ("Kid-friendly," according to one Amazon review.) Required appliances are nothing more than a knife, a stove, a pot, a frying pan, a hand-held garlic press, and a blender, although I found that my coffee bean grinder made an effective substitute when my secondhand blender broke and I had to blend chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, cumin, and chili powder to make felafel. I'd also never had anything with cumin before, or tumeric or cardamom for that matter, but found that many of the recipes called for the same spices, which meant those were only a one-time expense. The remainder of the ingredients are primarily vegetables, particularly onions, celery, carrots, peas, beans, and potatoes. Some also require eggs and/or cheese, but several vegan recipes are clearly labeled.

My only complaint at this point is that Global Vegetarian Cooking doesn't include any pictures of what the finished product is supposed to look like. But everything I've made has been very tasty so I'm pretty sure I did it right. Overall, I have found this book to be a great introduction to healthy, unique, and budget-friendly home cooking. I just finished the Congolese "vegetables in coconut milk," but my favorite thing to make are the very simple spinach patties from East Africa. The recipe is as follows:

Ingredients

1/2 lb (225 g) frozen pastry, thawed
2 lbs (900 g) fresh spinach (dry), finely chopped
1 onion, grated*
1/2 lb (225 g) feta, crumbled, or cottage cheese **
1 tsp nutmeg ***
2 eggs, beaten

* A cheese grater works.
** I've used feta.

*** I would say this is optional. If you use it, go easy.

Directions

Heat oven to 400°F (200°C or Gas 6) *

Roll the pastry to 1/2 (0.5 cm) thick and cut into circles.

Mix the spinach with the other ingredients to make a stiff consistency.

Spoon some of the mixture on one half of the patty circle, fold over the other half, and press down with a fork. Repeat until all the mix is used up. **

Place the patties on a baking sheet in the oven and cook for 10-15 or until golden brown. Serve with salad.

* May vary depending on the pastry. I used frozen bread dough, which called for a lower temperature and a longer cook time.
** I just scooped some of the mixture on top and left it.

---

Troth Wells's Introduction doesn't mention it, but there are organic options for those of us who still like a ready-made meal every now and then. From Amy's, I recommend the frozen pizzas (voted best by Consumer Reports) and the frozen teriyaki and "brown rice and vegetables" bowls. Also, Annie's macaroni and cheese totally rules. (Kraft's tastes like plastic in comparison.)

Learn more about Fair Trade here.

The London Gazette, September 1666

I came across a small collection labeled "fictional English newspapers" donated to us in the 1960s. My initial thought was that they must be satirical publications similar to The Onion, but further investigation revealed that they are apparently reprints done by Head & Meek (of 15 Wine Office Court, Fleet Street) circa the 1870s of real newspapers. I found them very interesting and decided to post a couple of excerpts from the London Gazette's coverage of the Great Fire in 1666.

The ordinary course of this paper having been interuppted by a sad and lamentable accident of Fire lately happened in the City of London : it hath been thought fit for satisfying the minds of so many of His Majesties good Subjects who must needs be concerned for the Issue of so great an accident, to give this short, but true Account of it.

On the second instant, at one of the clock in the Morning, there happened to break out, a sad in deplorable Fire in the Pudding-lane, neer New Fish-street, which falling out at that hour of the night, and in a quarter of the Town so close built with wooden pitched houses spread itself so far before day, and with such distraction to the inhabitants and Neighbours, that care was taken for the timely preventing the further diffusion of it, by pulling down houses, as ought to have been ; so that this lamentable Fire in a short time became so big to be mastred by any Engines or working neer it. It fell most unhappily too, That a violent Easterly wind fomented it, and kept it burning all that day, and the night following spreading itself up to Grace-church-street and downwards from Cannon-street to the Water-side, as far as the Three Cranes in the Vintrey.

The people in all parts about it, distracted by the vastness of it, and their particular care to carry away their Goods, many attempts were made to prevent the spreading of it by pulling down Houses, and making great Intervals, but all in vain, the Fire seizing upon the Timber and Rubbish, and so continuing it set even through those spaces, and raging in a bright flame all Monday and Teusday, notwithstanding His Majesties own, and His Royal Highness's indefatigable and personal pains to apply all possible remedies to prevent it, calling upon and helping the people with their Guards ; and a great number of Nobility and Gentry unwearidly assisting therein, for which they were requited with a thousand blessings from the poor distressed people. By the favour of God the Wind slackened a little on Teusday night & the Flames meeting with brick buildings at the Temple, by little and little it was observed to lose its force on that side, so that on Wednesday morning we began to hope well, and his Royal Highness never despairing or slackening his personal care wrought so well that day assisted in some parts by the Lords of the Council before and behind it that a stop was put to it at the Temple Church, neer Holburn-bridge, Pie-corner, Aldersgate, Cripple-gate, neer the lower end of Coleman-street, at the end of Basin-hall-street and Leadenhall-street, at the Standard in Cornhill at the chuch in Fenchurch street, neer Cloth-workers Hall in Mineing-lane, at the middle of Murk-lane, at the Tower-dock. . .

A FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THIS LAMENTABLE FIRE
This dismal fire broke out at a baker's shop in Pudding-lane, by Fish-street, in the lower part of the city, near Thames-street (among wooden houses ready to take fire & full of combustible goods) in Billinsgate-ward ; which ward in a few hours was laid to ashes. As it began in the dead of night when everybody was asleep, the darkness greatly increased the horror of the calamity ; it rapidly rushed down the hill to the bridge ; crossed Thames-street to St. Magnus church at the foot of the bridge ; but having scaled and captured its fort, shot large volumes of flames into every place about it. The fire drifted back to the city again & roared with such great violence through Thames-street aided with combustible matter deposited there with such a fierce wind at its back as to strike with horror its beholders.

Fire ! Fire ! Fire ! doth resound in every street, some starting out of their sleep & peeping through the windows half-dressed. Some in night dresses rushing wildly about the streets crying piteously & praying to God for assistance, women carrying children in their arms & the men looking quite bewildered. Many cripples were also seen hobbling about not knowing which way to go to get free from the flames which were raging all around them. No man that hand the sence of human miseries could unconcertedly behold the frightful destruction made in one of the noblest Cities in the world.

What a confusion ! the Lord Mayor of the city came with his officers, & London so famous for its wisdom can find neither hands nor brains to prevent its utter ruin. London must fall to the ground in ashes & who can prevent it? The fire raged mastery, & burnt dreadfully; by the fierce Easterly wind it spread quickly in all directions, overturning all so furiously that the whole city is brought into a desolation. That night most of the citizens had taken their last sleep; & when they went to sleep they little thought that when their ears were unlocked that such an enemy had invaded their City, & that they should see him with such fury break through their doors, & enter their rooms with such threatening countenance. . .

24-Hour Read-a-Thon: 5:00 p.m. (Update #3)

I've gotten 84 pages into Tocqueville's Democracy in America in the three hours since my last update. Of course, I didn't spend that entire time reading. I also ran to the store and made spaghetti.

Plus, the book got really boring and I kept getting distracted.

It started out quite interesting. According to Tocqueville, America is unique in that it has definite beginning and we can easily trace its origins. Not so with the nations of Europe. Tocqueville focuses on the Puritans, particularly their seemingly contradictory blend of religious fervor and love of liberty. In reality, he says, their strong intellectual background allowed them to put into place revolutionary forms of democratic government, which in Europe at the time were found only in theory. Furthermore, they left England not because they had to but because they wanted to. They came with a drive and an ambition, knowing that they had to create their own civilization for themselves, and they launched that task with faith-fueled vigor.

Of the colony of Virginia, Tocqueville has little to say beyond that it was founded largely by single, lower-class male adventurers who lacked the civilizing effect of women and learning. Unlike New England, it did have something of a landed aristocracy, albeit one that lacked the power of its English counterpart. This was partially due to slavery - no tenant farmers meant no patronage.

In his introduction, Tocqueville asserted that one of the difficulties facing Europe's transition to democracy was the hatred of the common people toward the nobility. Whereas before they existed in an ignorant contentment, knowledge of injustice has made them angry. In the United States, by contrast, not only do inheritance laws that divide property equally preclude the formation of permanent wealth (America was still very Jeffersonian at this time), but the aristocracy that did exist at the time of independence avoided the people's antagonism by providing much of the rhetoric and writing supporting the Revolution.

All very fascinating stuff, but then Tocqueville lost me. He started going on and on about the minute workings of the American municipal system. I can see his point about the autonomy of the American town that has no equivalent in Europe and how it empowers the individual citizen, but then he went on and on. . . It got so dull I couldn't concentrate and kept getting up. So for now I'll abandon Tocqueville and move onto some Thomas Mann and more poetry.

Read-a-Thon: 2:00 p.m. (Update #2)

The introduction to Alex de Tocqueville's Democracy in America was a breath of fresh air after the convoluted Renaissance English of Thomas Nashe.

According to Tocqueville, all of Western history has been progressing steadily towards greater social and political equality. Once that spark was ignited, all advances in the arts, literature, science, and politics have further impelled its momentum. It is the great wave of history, frightening in its force and unpredictability. Though disheartened by what he perceives to be intellectual confusion around him in Europe, as no one seems to know what to make of democracy's ongoing march, Tocqueville trusts God's plan and is assured of its outcome. He foresees a society with less drama but with more contentment. Less highs and lows and more happy mediums. But for now, Europe is in painful flux and everything is up in the air. "Positioned as we are in the middle of a rapid stream, we stare fixedly at a few ruins we can still see on the shore as the current drags us away backwards to the abyss." A new age, he concludes, desperately needs "a new political science," since the old ways of thought no longer fit.

Tocqueville does not want to praise the new United States as the perfect society or perfect government. The purpose of Democracy in America is to explore how American democracy functions, its cultural effects, and what Europeans can learn from it.

Hasidic Rebels and Christian Reactionaries

This post is Part II in a miniseries that began with Wednesday's Hasidic Rebels. (Yeah, I know this post took too long to write - but I got busy! Yay, new full-time job! Plus, this was hard to write in a way that made sense and wasn't overreaching. Oh well, it's very meandering. I really didn't plan it out as much as I should have.)

In Hella Winston's Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels, Winston, a doctoral student in sociology, tells the story of "Yitzchak," an Hasidic scholar and lecturer whose doubts began when he studied in Israel as a young man. There, he encountered for the first time liberal Jews who were nevertheless deeply knowledgeable about Jewish law, in addition to secular subjects such as history and comparative religion. In fact, says Winston,

[Yitzchak] vividly recalls reading one article in which the writer demonstrated how a particular Jewish ritual practice had parallels in other religious traditions. Suddenly he realized that what he thought was unique to "beautiful Judaism" often derived from pagan rites that had influenced not only Jewish practice, but that of other religious traditions as well. Suddenly, it became very hard for Yitzchak to see the same degree of meaning in the rituals he had practiced all his life; in fact, it became hard to see in them any meaning at all. For, if the very things his community claimed to be revealed truth were really no more than social practices reflecting a particular historical context, then, far from being sacred, they could only be seen as really quite mundane.

Also intriguing is the example of Dani the restless housewife, who became friendly with teenaged Muslim girls online after discovering a shared conflict over cultural/religious standards of female modesty and behavior.

Despite this, Winston never develops what could have been a fascinating discussion: a comparison between the lifestyle practices of different religious groups who may be theologically distant. For example, I found the social isolationism and deliberate lack of (secular) education among the Hasidism to be quite reminiscent of Amish practice. It's been awhile since I read Ruth Irene Garrett's Crossing Over: One Woman's Exodus from Amish Life, but Unchosen really brought some of it back for me. In an article for the UK magazine Sun, Garrett recalls Amish life as a "prison with rules based on fear," an assertion not unlike Winston's (debatable) conclusion that Hasidic communities are also ruled by perpetual, deeply ingrained fear, suspicion, and aversion.

But ultimately, it was not this focus on the primacy of the group over the individual that was troubling to me, but rather the extent to which fear seemed to regulate behavior and maintain conformity in these communities, ultimately reproducing their way of life, one generation after the next. In some cases, it was the fear of God's wrath, or of ending up in hell - something not limited, of course, to Orthodox Jewish theology [emphasis mine] - that drove people to conform, even against their will. In many cases, it was the fear of the community that motivated behavior. In fact, there were several people who agreed to participate in this research, only to call me at some later point - sometimes in the middle of the night - to express their concerns about their participation.

You will recall from my last post that one of the issues I had with Unchosen was her seeming lack of interdisciplinary research, especially given the lack of work done on Hasidic sects other than the Lubavitchers, whose extensive PR machine is potentially misleading to anyone seeking serious inquiry into the "dark" side of things. Obviously, the focus of Unchosen is Hasidic dissenters, some of whom even end up leaving. And clearly, this is a work of sociology, so an entire digression into comparative religion would be potentially more distracting than illuminating. But still, since people are people regardless of cultural background, I wonder if it would have been helpful to introduce similar case studies from other fundamentalist religious groups and extrapolate from there. To me, the interplay between religions is definitely a compelling subject, and one that is always relevant.

(Note: I am aware that the label "fundamentalist" in this context may be misleading. A fundamentalist, strictly speaking, is one who "reduces religion to a strict interpretation of core or original sense" or a member of a specific movement in American Christianity "that began as a response to the rejection of the accuracy of the Bible, the alleged deity of Christ, Christ's atonement for humanity, the virgin birth, and miracles." However, the word is popularly used to refer to any zealous practitioner of any religion, and that is how I will use it here.)

At times it is fun to see the parallels between different faiths. C.L. Hanson, a former Mormon turned atheist, wrote an eye-opening guest post for the now-defunct skeptical Jewish blog Lubab No More, in which she argued Mormons often feel that they have a special affinity with Jews as members of an alleged "lost tribe of Israel" (a belief that has them referring to non-Mormons as "gentiles"). (You can read the whole thing here in the comments section of one of the recent posts on her blog Letters from a Broad. Scroll down to the bottom.) They also see a connection between the Israelites' exodus from Egypt in the Old Testament and their own persecution and subsequent exile to the untamed American West. Furthermore, says Hanson, there "are also practical similarities in religious observance department: strict gender roles, a modesty code for women, rules about what one can/can't do on the Sabbath, requirements of wearing certain articles of clothing, and a strict dietary code." And above all, she concludes, as another minority everywhere in the world except for a tiny homeland (Utah), Mormons frequently look to the Jews as examples in forming an ethnic/religious identity. Hanson notes the popularity of Fiddler on the Roof in LDS culture and a consequent "Fiddler envy." A friend of mine who taught in a heavily Mormon section of Idaho and still frequents Mormon blogs actually claims that Chaim Potok's The Gift of Asher Lev is an especially beloved novel among LDS artists and writers because it offers the hope of free expression within a strict religious environment.

At other times, however, the ties between religions can be disturbing or even frightening, as an alarming phenomenon occurring in one faith reveals disquieting similarities to what has happened or is happening in another one. Taliban Rising, a blog run by one Jeanette, concerns the rise of "patriocentricity" in Catholicism and compares it to both movements within Protestantism and Islam (hence the title) and to National Socialism (which may have been a technically secular ideology, but I believe it was prominent atheist Richard Dawkins who admitted that sometimes followers of non-religious organizations can nevertheless act like religious zealots.)

What is patriocentricity? In my wanderings on the Net, I become morbidly intrigued by a particular website called Ladies Against Feminism, which I discussed in this post a few months ago. It is a website run by fundamentalist Dominionist Protestants who, in my view, seek a return to the glorious bygone days of the nineteenth century. Karen Campbell, a homeschooling mother and prominent opponent of this movement, briefly sums it up as the following: "The term [patriocentricity] was specifically coined to describe the philosophy of family life promoted within some extreme Christian and Reformed homeschooling communities that teaches that God gives a 'calling' in life to only men, specifically fathers, and that the purpose of the wife and children is to fulfill the father's calling." Though ostensibly complementarian (men and women are expected to fulfill different but equally divine roles), what patriocentricity actually preaches is that the father is the "prophet, priest, and king" of his family. (I've heard it allegorized as the father being the sun that the other family members "revolve" around.) In addition to LAF, here are other sites where you can find more information (kooky content warning): Home Living (blog), The "Prairie Muffin Manifesto," the Vision Forum, Your Sacred Calling (blog). In my LAF post I noted the clear influence of American "Republican Motherhood," but Cindy K. of the critical blog Under Much Grace identifies a multitude of other, decidedly non-biblical foundations of patriocentricity, including agrarianism, American nationalism, feudalism, homeschooling, neo-Confederacy thought, right-wing populism, and the Victorian cult of domesticity (the blatantly bourgeoisie ideal, unattainable by large segments of the population, that Republican Motherhood eventually evolved into).

So obviously, for all the impact of secular thought on patriocentricity, it is undeniably a Christian lifestyle thoroughly grounded in a largely Christian society (the United States, where it originated - for all its proponents' claims to be wholly biblical, it's actually quite American - you can read my overview of The Democratization of American Christianity for more insight). You can't imagine them as remotely open-minded, tolerant of other viewpoints, or even willing to associate with anyone outside their frilly, lace-covered, very narrow box. In their minds, it's a black-and-white world out there. And then there's this article on the LAF site, authored by one Anna S. "My Modest Clothes, My Armour" is standard fundie fare: as long as a woman dresses modestly, she can avoid being used and abused. If she shows off her "legs, shoulders, midriff" she can expect only pain. Personal experience is painted as universal experience. Implication: if a girl dresses "provocatively" she is a lost soul deserving of pity. I think we've all heard it before.

Anna S. also has a blog called Domestic Felicity (recently married, she is now known as Anna T.). At the very top of her sidebar are the following words:

I'm a Jewish woman, delighted in being the wife of a dearest, most wonderful man, and mother to a sweet and precious baby girl. We live in Israel, where my husband was born and where I grew up.

MJCDESRTYUJINJMKJIUYTGFDCDX *facepalm*

It is now that I must confess, in all honesty, to being an anonymous follower of Domestic Felicity. For all our many disagreements, Anna (who is exactly my age) is an incredibly sweet woman who comes across as one of the nicest people you'd probably ever meet. (And no, she is not originally from the United States. She was born in Russia when it was still the Soviet Union.) Everyone in her blogroll and "Delightful Websites" list, however, is an American patriocentric Christian. (And no, she is not a Messianic Jew. She is regular Modern Orthodox.) Nevertheless, it LAF that she credits with influencing her decision to become an observant Jew.

I don't remember how I got home that night. But when I got up next morning, my head buzzing with hangover, blurry images of the previous night flashing through my brain, I crawled out of bed and washed my face and told myself it was the last time I allow something like this to happen. Never again. I want to do what God wants me to do, I want to follow His plan, as a young woman in the beginning of her journey of adult life, and I want to be a lady. I sat down in front of my computer, and absent-mindedly, still immersed in thought, my fingers typed in Google the following words: 'how do I become a lady?'

Can you guess which site I came across? That's right! Ladies against Feminism. With a mixture of fascination and disbelief, I started reading, first the new articles, then the archives, and couldn't stop for a long time.

Needless to say, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I felt this is the model of femininity I have been looking for in my heart, during all those long and painful months. It felt like home. Heavily influenced by feminism, I never dared to articulate the thoughts LAF authors worded so boldly, but they sounded familiar, reflecting my heart's deepest desires. On the other hand, there were things I read with an expression of incredulity on my face: 'I'd love to do this, but how can it work? Can I ever really become a keeper at home? And what's all this talk on the father's authority? I don't have a father, so how do I fit into this picture?'

You know, it's like Glenn Beck and Mormonism, Tom Cruise and Scientology. You don't quite approve of the solution, and yet you cannot help but be glad that someone has found an answer to their troubles and peace in their lives. For all the theological differences between Orthodox Judaism and patriocentric Christianity, I would venture to say that, in many respects, Anna has far more in common with the latter group than she does with secular Jews who go to synagogue about as often as I go to church. Which is to say, rarely.

Confined, narrow-minded, and reactionary as it may seem to most of us, however, I think it's safe to say that there are women who do find peace and contentment as wives and mothers submitting to God and their husbands. An intelligent, articulate Hasidic woman who calls herself "Totally Content" makes it quite clear in her blog Rechosen that she enjoys her life as a Satmar housewife in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and that she is proud of her culture and religion. In "A Satmar Ladies' Event" she writes that:

I have a classmate that has 5 sons. FIVE! She is 26 years old and she has 5 kids! I was about to get mad. Seriously mad. No woman should be subjected to that kind of life! When it suddenly dawned on me... She wanted it. Every woman at the table was discussing the pros and cons and above all the 'Why did she?'. Yes, every woman at the table was aware that they have a choice in the matter. But the woman in question - who is said to be one of the most relaxed mothers there is - actually commented that she would have no problem having five more sons. Foolish? maybe. Forced into anything? not at all. Many of my friends are relating that their husbands are the ones suggesting that they've done their duty (at least for the time being) in 'being fruitful' - but THEY are the ones who want another baby to hold... to cuddle. There are some who love motherhood - not because they were raised to admire it, but because it truly gives them satisfaction. Just like there are those who do not have the patience for it.

There are women in the Christian patriocentric circles who feel similarly. "I praise God for taking me in at my lowest," says one. "Imagine, if you will, a woman at her worst. Things that you would not ever think I was capable of...having done. The deepest darkest parts to me, only He knew----- and He still accepted me with the widest, most forgiving open arms that were full of the most merciful love I had ever seen and made me a new creation in Him." Again, as much as we may disapprove . . . if they're really happy, who are we to judge? If we do judge, how are we any different?

Still, as Hella Winston noted at the very beginning of Unchosen, not all is necessarily as it seems. When you have a walled-off, isolationist religious culture, there are inevitably those who will feel crushed under the weight of conformity; rules, rules, rules; undying tradition, refusal to change, the pre-modern worldview in a postmodern world; the "our way or Satan's way" moral absolutism; the maddening glimpses of a global society full of people who do not live like you do and seem all the happier for it because they can travel the globe, have myriad opportunities for personal fulfillment, have all the information and entertainment they could ever want at their fingertips, and are free to explore the whole spectrum from rationalist atheism or the most fundamentalist of religion. In the face of all that, maybe there is a "justifiable" fear running through the Hasidic, Amish, far-right Christian, and Islamist societies of the world. So they wall their people in, and while some are quite satisfied with their lot, there are those who are not. Furthermore, I think the extreme example of North Korea effectively demonstrates that where there is isolation, there is also a greatly increased potential for abuse that will inevitably remain hidden. In a discussion thread on the anti-patriocentric blog true womanhood in the new millennium, Cindy K.'s comment (#226) is especially chilling:

I put up that Overcoming Botkin Syndrome [link mine] blog just for girls like this. I’ve been through very similar problems, with some of my experiences more intense and some less troubling that don’t compare to what these girls have suffered.

Things I would like everyone here to consider because there may come a day when each one of us is asked to take these young women into our homes. I remember so vividly praying to the Lord on the way home from the theater after seeing the Hiding Place. I sat in the passenger seat with my mother (who went to bed for three days from depression as a result and did not speak to me), and I promised the Lord with all my heart that I would hide Jews in my home for Him. In a restaurant on Sunday afternoon, I burst into tears, and my husband and I decided that it may not be Jews that we’ll be hiding — it may be girls that are seeking refuge from their Christian homes. . .

1. There are legal considerations. Some of these girls have been physically abused. Some have endured sexual abuse. If they are a day over 18, there is not much help available to them, yet they have been trained to be children. . .

2. There are more immediate concerns that are more practical. The girls usually have few skills. Some of them have to get the police to help them retrieve their personal records so that they can get employment or arrange for assistance.

Says Mara in comment #228: "It’s like FLDS [link mine] in Texas all over again." Many Hasidic Jews who want to leave face similar issues and often barely even speak English despite being third-generation Americans. Malkie Schwartz, one of Winston's interview subjects, actually has an organization called Footsteps aimed at helping ex-Hasids adjust to mainstream life and acquire the requisite skills and education.

In closing, I guess I just have to say that when you get down to it, fundamentalist religion is fundamentalist religion, whatever the actual theology is. Some people are happy with it, some aren't, and some are too happy with it. I still wish Winston had been more creative in her research and that Unchosen had explored the flip side of the subject (Hasids who are perfectly content) to give it more balance. But this post has gone on long enough so I'll just stop here and let my readers ruminate.

Hasidic Rebels

This post is first in a two-part series.

Disclaimer: I have never met an Hasidic Jew in my entire life. No joke. The closest I've ever come was in last October when I went to New York City for a job interview. My aunt took me on a taxi tour through Brooklyn, including Williamsburg, which is known for its strange bedfellows of Satmar Hasids and secular hipsters. That being said, however, I have occasionally lurked at the following J-Blogs:

Also A Chussid
Hasidic Rebel
A Hasid and a Heretic

I've actually had a bit of interest in Judaism ever since I read Chaim Potok's The Chosen and became a fan of Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus books, a mystery series about a Modern Orthodox LAPD police detective and his wife. So when I heard about Hella Winston's Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels (no relation to the Hasidic Rebel blog) I was intrigued. Yes, it is totally different from what I usually read, but it's fun to go completely outside the box every once in awhile.

Unchosen originally started out as a Winston's doctoral dissertation in sociology, for which she had decided to study the everyday lives of Hasidic Jews. The monolithic term "Hasidic" actually refers to numerous individual sects, ranging from the extremely insular Satmars to the comparatively liberal Lubavitchers. (In other words, to call someone a Hasid is akin to calling someone a Protestant. Okay, but what denomination?) Most research on Hasidic Jews has apparently been done on the latter group, due primarily to their global outreach program aimed at encouraging assimilated Jews to adopt a more frum (religiously observant) lifestyle. As a result, many Lubavitchers were not born into their sect but joined as adults (and any statistician will tell that a self-selected sample population tends to skewer things). Other sects include the Ger, Bobov, Breslover, Belz, Viznitz, Skver, Spinka, and Pupa, to name only a few. Winston, a secular Jew, ultimately felt that the well-oiled Lubavitcher PR machine would make it more difficult to get a sense of what real community life was like and, after weeks of negotiating, was finally able to attend a dinner with several Satmar housewives. Though initially impressed with their confidence and sense of peace and contentment, she was astonished when the hostess and her daughter told her afterwards that things were not quite what they seemed. Despite all appearances of conformity, unknown numbers of Hasids are deeply dissatisfied, questioning, and even leading double lives. (In fact, all of the blogs I listed above are anonymous.) Fascinated, Winston turned her research to this hitherto unstudied, undocumented Hasidic underground.

As someone used to reading academic history books, I was struck by both the manner in which Unchosen was structured and its the surprising (to me) lack of source material. Of course, sociology deals with the living whereas history is often concerned with the long-dead, but I was still mystified that Winston built practically the entire thing on anecdotes and her personal experiences with Hasidic rebels (whom I will refer to as HR's). It certainly makes for compelling reading but it also had me confused about the tone of her work. Is it intended for a scholarly audience or the general public? With all Winston's recounts of her interactions with HR's, as well as their own recollections of the events and revelations that led them to their current positions as closeted or overt dissenters, Unchosen had the feel of a memoir, which collided uncomfortably with my historian's demand for objectivity. Also A Chussid's "open letter to Hella Winston" puts it more bluntly:

Can it be that you got too close to Yossi (the main character in your book) and too emotionally involved in his hardships that you had to blame a whole society, and not only his parents? Or is it because you wanted to sell more copies of your book that you had to make it more titillating and scandalous? Regardless which of them was the cause; you - however - betrayed your professionalism.

Unlike the other two bloggers I listed, AAC is perfectly happy being Hasidic and merely wishes to see reform. (Note: like many Hasids, his first language is Yiddish. He says elsewhere on the blog that he barely spoke English until he was married.) It is interesting, however, that both of us - an actual Hasid and a secular Lutheran - had similar reactions to the book. Again, I do not know how sociologists usually do things, but Unchosen felt very one-sided and excessively personal. Yossi (not his real name) is certainly an intense case, no denying that. The falling-out with his family and community over him shaving his beard and peyos (sidelocks), in addition to the cognitive dissonance and emotional strain of trying to straddle two worlds, literally landed him in the psych ward for several days. His behavior while in Boston for the very first time was deliriously childlike. I am aware the empirical investigation plays a large role in sociology; nevertheless, Winston's prose when dealing with him frequently came across as overly empathic and better suited for a novel:

Yossie found his way to Cambridge and spent an hour or so walking around Harvard Square. The store windows were all done up with festive Christimas decorations, and there were lights strung through the trees. It was still early, so nothing much was open, except for a few coffee places and a Dunkin Donuts. Yossi went in and bought himself a juice, and he sat there drinking it while flipping through a free local paper full of classified ads. Soon, students began streaming into the place for their bagels and coffee. Most of them were loaded with heavy book bags. It was hard to tell, just from looking at them, that they were so smart. Harvard students were supposed to be the best, but to Yossi they looked the same as anyone else their age. Still, in a way he envied them. He didn't want to be schlepping around a big heavy bag filled with assignments, but it might have been nice to have the chance. (155)

Did Yossi actually relate every last detail of his trip or did Winston embellish it for dramatic effect? Although Winston described all the HR's she met with great sympathy, the pathos of Yossi's sections really stood out to me.

Nearly everything she cites in her notes section is a secondary source: other sociological works and magazine and newspaper articles. If this were history, she would also be expected to discuss the historiography of her subject and how her research has led her to new or different conclusions and what that means for future study. Again, Winston does explain in the introduction that nearly every scholarly inquiry into Hasidic life has dealt almost exclusively with the Lubavitchers, but, since that is a legitimate Hasidic sect, I wonder if there was anything useful in any of these past studies that she could have applied to her own work. A frequent topic of discussion among historians has been the growing synthesis of various disciplines; for example, "psychological history" or the blending of history, statistics, sociology, literature, art and/or anthropology (or anything else falling under the broad label "humanities") to create amalgamations like "American studies." (Which makes a ton of sense - as and English-History double major I was often able to use what I had learned in one to enhance and clarify what I was learning in the other.) Given the paucity of sociological material related to Hasidic Jews, I am genuinely surprised that Winston did not seem to have looked into other disciplines. If she did, there is little evidence of it. (Like, why not literature? Chaim Potok's novels The Chosen and The Gift of Asher Lev both concern Hasidic misfits who end up leaving. So where did he get his ideas from? Have any English professors out there explored that? And discussed similar writers?)

Now all that being said, Unchosen is still a worthwhile book and groundbreaking in its choice of subject matter. Although it borders on sensational, there is no denying that some Hasidic and Orthodox bloggers, such as Shtreimel of A Hasid and a Heretic, Off the Derech, and Baal Habos seem to genuinely identify with it and see within it a reflection of their own sentiments and experiences. (And on the flip side: a review by a Satmar woman who feels that Winston's "stifled giggles are deafening.") There is definitely a lot to be said in favor of emotional truth – in the ability of a book to either validate a reader's feelings and bring them to a broader understanding of their situation, or to enable others to sympathize with, and be made aware of, another's predicament. As far as I can tell, Unchosen is the only book of its kind and it's been pretty much proven that bringing publicity to an issue is a sure way to force TPTB to tackle it. (I mean, you wall people off long enough, the amount of dysfunctional behavior they'll accept gets downright alarming.) But despite my lack of real-world familiarity with Hasidic culture, I am still bothered by this book's lack of substance and in-depth academic research, as well as its obvious one-sidedness, particularly her conclusion that modern Hasidism is inherently defective and regulated solely by fear. Of course, scholarship is by its nature ever-evolving, and someone will doubtlessly come out with their own book disputing this one. Truth is a many-sided thing.

Part II will appear within the next few days. In the interests of interdisciplinarian-ism, I shall bring you comparative religion! Prepare for the Christian patriocentrists!