Double, Double Toil And Trouble: Or, Why Images Of Witch Burnings Are A Bad Idea

Decades ago, feminists really cared about the casual use of images that exploited women's bodies or that used violence against women as a way to sell a product.  A billboard that went up on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1975 was the catalyst for feminists to form Women Against Violence Against Women, the first of numerous groups in the United States, Canada and England that began to link the anti-battering movement to images that articulated violence against women as part of the status quo.

By the 1990's, the feminist consciousness that promoted swift and effective action in such cases had gone under cover, due in part to profound disagreements about what constituted a radical feminist agenda and what women's civil liberties meant.  I am writing a book about why that was, so I won't go on at length, but you will be hearing more about this topic at Tenured Radical in the coming months.

In the meantime, I would like to pass on an email I received over the N-Net listserve from Julie Landwebber, assistant professor of History and Women's Studies, Montclair State University:

I would not ordinarily post a "take-action" request, but this particular issue hits home for historians of women and gender -- in particular, anyone working on late-medieval or early modern Europe, or colonial America.

Please take a moment out to send a note to Tomme@lostabbey.com, the founder of Lost Abbey Brewery in San Marcos, California. They have just released a new beer, Witches' Wit, featuring a highly disturbing image of a very décolleté woman being burned alive at the stake while hundreds of upturned men watch with interest. For those of you who are unaware of this unlovely chapter of European history, roughly 100,000 women were killed by the Catholic and Protestant churches in the 16th and 17th centuries for, most often, the crime of being a woman. I'm sure the creative team at Lost Abbey can come up with a lot of great medieval imagery that doesn't involve women being burned at the stake.

It's difficult to see in the picture at right, but you get the drift.  Let's underline the point here:  it's not the witch thing that is at issue, particularly since this is a seasonal beer that seems to be available in the fall, but rather, what is being done with the witch.  As you are trying to decide whether Tenured Radical is just another humorless feminist after all, try this consciousness-raising exercise:  given that thousands of men were also burned, beheaded and dismembered as heretics and witches by the church, would a beer company produce an advertisement depicting that? Would a beer company put a Jim Crow-style lynching circa 1925 on the label of a beer named, oh, say, "Baptist Brew"? And if not, why not?


A similar version of this post has been cross posted at Cliopatria.

The Moonlight And Magnolias School Of Women's History: Katie Roiphe's Take On Mad Men

Who needs another blogger bashing Katie Roiphe for not being a feminist? And why read more about what is often obvious nowadays: that if you have decent writing skills, have gone to an Ivy League school, and have a mother in the business you can get published even if your ideas are peculiar, uninformed and often just wrong? And why belabor the fact that, while feminists can't get published nowadays, if you are willing to stand up and tell young women that feminism just doesn't matter, you can make a tidy living?

If, despite my advice, you were a blogger who wrote such a piece, Katie Roiphe would just say you are part of the victim culture bred by 1970s feminism, and you are so deluded.

Which brings me to what I really want to write about Roiphe's contribution to the New York Times "Sunday Styles" section today, The Allure of Messy Lives, in which she argues -- through a superficial reading of Mad Men and Cold War literary culture -- that nowadays people are just too uptight for words. Roiphe, you may recall, earned her chops among the backlash crowd with a book charging that "feminists" had made her generation fearful of heterosexuality by talking about rape and sexual harassment as if they were problems that required solutions.

Silly us: so sorry.

Now, it appears, Roiphe has a new mission: to debunk contemporary social myths that alcoholism, adultery, lying and hypocrisy are to be avoided. Were women and children actually harmed by men drinking and f**king around in the 1960s, when men had all the money, jobs, access to credit and the power of the courts behind them if they chose to dump their families entirely? Heck no: and imagine the price we have paid in lost glamour for giving in to the victim culture once again. After all, Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson only used to beat each other up a little when they were drunk (which was pretty much all the time) -- and they were so witty! Using the popularity of Mad Men, which just launched its fourth season last Sunday, as her central text about Cold War culture, Roiphe asserts that:

The phenomenal success of the show relies at least in part on the thrill of casual vice, on the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior to our relatively staid and enlightened times. As a culture we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, and the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink.

Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the 7-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?

The world of the 1960s has been replaced by "tiny rebellions," she writes; "vices [that] are so minor and controlled" (like Adderall and hooking up? or eating packaged food with preservatives?) Gone the world of chain-smoking, cocktail quaffing pregnant ladies waiting for hubby to come home; gone the "fun"world of the executive suite, where men were men and women were absent; gone the sexual playground of the typing pool, where the real work "the girls" got promoted (to marriage) for was done on their backs after hours; gone the world of fabulously talented, well-paid male writers passed out in public at their desks after sucking down several dry martinis at lunch.

So sad. Gone, gone with the wind, along with electroshock therapy as cure for homosexuality.

As a historian, I can't help but notice the similarities between Roiphe's androcentric view of the Baby Boomer years and the popular post-Reconstruction literature known as "Moonlight and Magnolias," in which southern white women reminisced wistfully about a brutal plantation world they had never known. In the process, they transformed a land of white supremacy and black suffering into a glamorous lost "civilization" staffed with cheerful black slaves (who never got promoted either, come to think of it) and were forcefully separated from the white families they loved by cruel Federal soldiers. Disappearing slavery (as it was) required celebrating slavery (as it wasn't.) By 1900, such women and their male allies in all-white southern state legislatures had begun chartering Mammy Memorial Associations, and building public statues to "Mammy," that fictional, sexless black women who abandoned her own children to raise elite whites for permanent rule.

My connection here is that what Roiphe is celebrating in her nostalgia for the paradise of drinkin', and f***kin', and smokin' in Mad Men is something that even a more slightly subtle reading of the show uncovers: a world where women and children had few, if any, rights; and men did exactly what they wanted, regardless of the consequences. It is the world of the patriarchal family, a world of hypocrisy and lies dressed up as a lost civilization of glamour, creativity and liberated sexuality.

This is not to say that I don't love Mad Men: I do. Although the first episode of the new season was not the winner I had hoped it would be, when I MadMen myself, I identify heavily with the flawed and foolish alcoholic pussy hound Roger Sterling. But Roiphe's superficial gloss on the series is a poor counterpoint to what she claims is her generation's obsessive need for order and control in their own families. While Mad Men's award-winning design and the references to 1960s popular culture are nostalgic, the show itself is quite disturbing: the retro fashion and perfect sets only provide a brittle frame for a fraying heteropatriarchal culture where white people can almost -- but not quite -- ignore the change that is a-gonna come. Whether you think the series is, in and of itself, sexist and racist; or whether, as I do, you think it provides a forum for pondering sexism and racism, the evidence for a far more critical take on the world of my youth is what Roiphe deliberately ignores. For example:

1. The series is called Mad Men. This is hardly an accident, and it is also hardly an accident that nearly all of the older men in the show drink heavily and are also divorced or separated; while the younger men drink less, are more self-disciplined, and despite engaging in sexist banter, are better able to achieve intimacy and equality in their relationships with women. That said, the vast majority of women in Mad Men are on a short journey from their fathers' houses to their husbands' houses, with a stop at a Seven Sisters college and a couple years as an actress, model or secretary.

The few choices offered to women in the 1960s, and the costs of making those choices, tell us why marriage was what women invested in prior to women's liberation. By season 4, Peggy has become a copywriter and a player at the new boutique agency put together by the refugees from Sterling, Cooper. But she is still subject to abusive tirades from Don (do we think the drink in his hand plays a role?); and Peggy is the only woman executive. Don sometimes thinks better of his nastiness towards Peggy; but only once, when he was persuading her to jump ship with him at the end of season 3 and his marriage was collapsing, has he been able to admit how badly he treats her. Joanie, the office manager, as dedicated viewers of the show might recall, ended her regular nooners with married partner Roger Sterling to find a man who was actually available, only to see Roger dump his wife and children for a fresh-faced, new secretary. Later, the physician-fiancee with whom Joanie thought she would make a secure life raped her in Roger's office, and then joined the Army without telling her.

2. Don's drinking is directly connected to his f**king; Don's f**king is connected to his hard-wired need to lie to people he says he loves; and all are directly connected to his inability to care genuinely about anyone but himself as he maintains the parallel lives of home and work. In fact, Don might not be too drunk to function, and function well, as Roiphe points out. But he has certainly been drunk enough for three seasons not to be emotionally available to anyone in his family, and particularly to his wife Betty, who was catastrophically lonely. On top of this, Don's f**king kept him away from the house for days at a time while he assured Betty, and perhaps himself, he was "working" for the family's future. (And can I say that just because TV characters don't get drunk from drinking all day doesn't mean that real people can drink all day and function well?)

Granted, the writers introduced a peculiar subplot in season one, whereby we were given to understand that "Don Draper" was an assumed identity, and the protection of his real past created a context for Don's secretiveness that even he might not have understood. Furthermore, it was the exposure of this lie that was the precipitating event for Betty's decision to leave him for another powerful, wealthy man.

But there is a more significant historical thread Roiphe misses here, and it is about women at a crossroads between dependence and independence in the 1960s. While "Bets," as Don calls her, is an unattractive character -- child-like, ill-tempered, cold, selfish, punitive and unloving towards her children -- she is also a woman whose options have been narrowed by sexism, by her limited access to money, by her enforced immaturity, and by the assumption that women's highest calling is domestic and maternal. A graduate of Bryn Mawr (one is reminded of M. Carey Thomas's famous line, "Our failures only marry"), once Betty married and had children she had the choice of either putting up with Don's endless lies and ill-treatment or subjecting herself to the fate outlined in the punitive divorce laws that plunged many women and their children into poverty prior to the 1970s. When, at the end of season 3, she chooses to leave Don, it is as much for survival as for love, because she no longer trusts him to take care of her.

3. Don's drinking helps him control his own reality, and helps him control the people around him. For three seasons, Don has lied by commission and omission to his wife, and by extension to his children. Yet he views each collection of lies as singular and not as a string of events that point to his own emptiness and corruption. As a metaphor for advertising, I think this is very skillful, but as a recipe for being a human being it has devastating consequences for his family. In season one, for example, we learned that Betty was depressed; Don sends her off to a (male) Freudian therapist to be "cured" of "her problems." What Betty discovers in season two by listening to herself (no thanks to the therapist, who reports regularly to the husband who pays the bills) is that she is depressed because no one has listened to her, and because she is living in a fantasy marriage. Furthermore, she discovers that what she "knows" is that her husband sleeps around, and what is making her crazy is that Don (who has built a wall of alcohol and women between himself and his contempt for Betsy) keeps telling her there is nothing wrong and that she is the one with the problems.

The significancance of booze in this series is not its unimportance. Rather, alcohol is the elephant in the room, a force that is so fully integrated into daily life as to be indistinguishable from its effects. Mad Men is not, in fact, a portrait of a generation, as Roiphe would have it, and it offers far subtler advice to the contemporary world of men and women making lives than Roiphe perhaps understands. If the historiography of the last twenty years tells us anything, it tells us that you can't really generalize about "generations" very profitably, and you certainly can't once you understand that social inequality defies our attempts to synthesize a "generational experience." Finally, the question Roiphe fails to ask is whether the safety her peers desire has something to do with the safety they didn't experience as children, the vulnerability of their own mothers to the whims of fathers who had all the power, and the drinking that kept the whole project of family together.

The Berkshire Conference: What To Do, What To See, What To Wear

In the introduction to her classic volume of essays, Disorderly Conduct:  Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: 1986), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg wrote:

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has proved one of the pivotal influences in my professional and personal life.  Through both formal and informal comments on a succession of papers, Berkshire members have contributed to my development as a woman historian and as a historian of women.

 Second that.

So Sisters, the triennial gathering of the tribe is about to begin.  By tonight, participants in the 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women will have begun to assemble for this year's event, “Generations: Exploring Race, Sexuality, and Labor across Time and Space.” The conference begins on Thursday June 9 and ends on Sunday, a day devoted to seminar-style discussions organized around papers submitted in advance.  Undecided? Living nearby and thinking of dropping in for the day?  On site registrations are welcome.  Click here for all the information you need.  Congratulations to president Kathleen Brown, her program chairs, and everyone else who worked hard to put this together.  By this time Thursday, you will all be watching it unfold before you.  As a former program chair, let me say that is a glorious feeling. (And Sue Porter Benson?  I miss you tonight.)

What follows are some common questions and answers as you pack your suitcases.

Should I network?  Yes and no.  If you are a younger scholar, you should always be networking.  On the other hand, one of the beautiful things about the Berks is a sociability unmarred by icky things like job interviews, editorial board meetings, recruiting, being a dignified senior person blah, blah, blah.   My advice is that you should take this as an opportunity to make friends:  I have made nearly all my best friends in the historical profession through the Berkshire Conference, and let me tell you, being funny is a higher value than being smart.  One of my favorite Berks memories is being in a hotel room with my team and some random graduate students that we had picked up somewhere.   A former undergrad, now a prize-winning professor, showed up with -- well, I guess there's no other way to put it:  weed.  Anyhoo.  We all inhaled, and what followed was a game of charades in which we made the grad students guess who our dissertation advisers were! 

OK, you had to be there.  My point is:  if you have the choice between trying to make an impression on someone by buying them a drink or telling them about your research, you know what to do.

Are men welcome?  Humans of all genders are welcome:  I don't think Tom Dublin has missed a Berkshire Conference since I was a tiny Radical pecking hir way out of the egg.  Tom and his partner, women's history legend Kathryn Kish Sklar will be recruiting for their web-based project, "Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000," so if you see one of them walk by, tell them you're interested, and say that Tenured Radical sent you.  Other male-bodied folk to keep your eyes out for are Shane Landrum of Cliotropic fame (who is on a great state of the field roundtable on transgender history on Saturday at 3:30); Robert Beachy, who has a forthcoming book on gay Berlin (do I see Joan Scott as a comment on that global heteronormativities panel?); political science prof Paisley Currah, who is presenting in a Sunday seminar on his hot project about pregnant men; and many more.  OK, well a dozen more, actually.  So this will be practically the only place where history is practiced that men will find themselves in a distinct minority, which is one reason -- if you are a cool feminist man -- to attend.

What should I wear?  I am the wrong person to ask, as anyone who knows me would testify.  As I write, my black tee shirts are neatly piled across the room next to two pairs of jeans and a pair of black cowboy boots (received just in time, since I mistook the re-heeling shoe bag for the "Please take me to Good Will" shoe bag.)  Coats and ties are not necessary, although I shall bring a tie and a formal shirt just in case it cools down in time for for my own panel (Saturday at 1:15, with Jane Gerhard, Carolyn Bronstein and Vivien Fryd.) The ethic is summer casual:  there's no need to look "professional," in the conventional sense, and don't wear anything that is going to be ruined by sitting in the grass, blowing off the panel you were going to attend, and talking to a new friend.

Also recommended for this weekend?  Sunglasses, sunscreen, a broad-brimmed hat, sandals, and dancing shoes for the Saturday night shindig.  If you are staying in a place that is not air-conditioned, purchase a small fan on your way in from the airport.  There are plenty of places to shop in the vicinity, but be warned:  the UMass campus is a good hike from the town of Amherst itself.

Will I find a girlfriend at the Berks?   I can't guarantee this, but it is true that some nineteenth century Seven Sisters-y thing kicks in at the Berkshire Conference, even (or especially) among the non-Sapphicly inclined.  If you do not have a girlfriend already, it is, in fact, likelier that you will find a girlfriend at the Berks than anywhere else you have been or ever will be.

It is highly unlikely -- although not impossible, I suppose -- that you will find a boyfriend at this conference.


Registration opens at 8:30 AM tomorrow in the campus center, is open until 8:00 PM and the program starts at 3:30.  Yowzah!  I'm partial to round tables, and will be choosing between the following tomorrow:

"What's So Feminist About Food History?"  with Hasia Diner, and Franca Iacovetta, the next president of the Berkshire Conference in its big move to Toronto in 2014.

"New Generations of Feminist Legal History," which features some great new research by Leigh Ann Wheeler on the ACLU's fight for sexual freedom in the 20th century.

"Peyton Place:  Selling Sex and Crafting Readers," with Ardis Cameron who wrote a preface for a brand new edition of the novel that became a synonym for small, petty history departments New England towns.

And of course, you must attend the star-studded opening plenary, with Kathleen Brown, Martha S. Jones and Rebecca Scott, from 7:30 to 9:00.

It's Women's History Month: Do You Know Where The Women's History Blogs Are?

OK, everyone from the Library of Congress to Coca-Cola is "celebrating" women's history month. Whaddya bet we see a commercial next week where a computer-generated Bella Abzug shares a coke with a computer-generated Betty Friedan to yuck about old times at the 1977 Houston Women's Conference and that nutty lesbian plank that made Phyllis Schlafly and Jimmy Carter just plotz!?

Better yet, let's look at some history blogs that celebrate women's history every day of the year.

Let's start with History of American Women Blog, written by Maggie MacLean, who also writes Civil War Women Blog. The first has a keen sidebar with links to the Wives of the Signers, and the second, wives of the Civil War Generals. Because both lists are alphabetized by first names, we learn that an astonishing 11 wives of generals were named Mary (Emily comes in second, with 7.) Mary was also the most popular name in 1776, but was tied with variations on the name Ann(e).

Next, let's drift to Women of History, "a site providing biographies of some of the fascinating women who have graced the pages of history, in addition to articles pertaining to history, and medieval and modern women." Written by "Melisende," who claims to be Australian and female (I'm not saying she isn't, but who knows?), it's eclectic and fun, moving the reader back and forth between centuries in the blink of an eye. A quick scan of the site shows that Melisende doesn't just stick to stuff medieval, her stated field, but has quite an expansive view of the world. It is just as contemporary as it is historical, but if you can handle that, you'll learn a lot.

Finally, check out the LDS Women's History Blog. It's Mormon women's history from a Mormon point of view, and written by "Erin," a Mom who is determined to dig out the herstory hidden behind all those patriarchs. Drawing on sources not available to most of us who do not have access to arcane books of nineteenth century pioneer lore, Erin's recent post was about poor 13-year old Mary Goble, whose mother died on the way to Salt Lake in 1857. If that were not bad enough, she got frostbite, and Brigham Young had her toes amputated. The point of this story, however, is that the doctor wanted to take the feet too, but Young had prophesied that she would keep her feet. You'll have to read it to learn how it worked out!

We're Bewitched -- By Mary Beth Norton! Friday March 5, 8 PM on NBC

Just received at the Radical News Service: "On Friday, March 5, at 8 PM on the new NBC series 'Who Do You Think You Are', Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlan Alger Professor of History at Cornell University and author of In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Knopf, 2002) will tell Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City fame about her Salem witch ancestor."

In addition to being a terrific scholar, an all around good person, and a stalwart of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Mary Beth is also herself descended from a Salem witch! I think she mentions this in the book, but I definitely remember her telling me this when we were out on one of our biannual antiquing treks in western Massachusetts.

The show was taped over a year ago, and will be taped once again in the Radical house, since by the time it is on, this historian will be on a Really Big Broom, flying to London for one of those devastating research trips we have to take every once in a while.

Be sad for me as you imagine the History Police poking me down the airplane chute with a sharp stick.