The Happy Feminist

MY CORGI AND I ARE MORE "BLUE STATE" THAN WE REALIZED

Imagine my shock last night, as I was reading What's the Matter with Kansas?  by Thomas Frank, to come across this passage:

Whatever the target, the conservative social critique always boils down to the same, simple message: liberalism . . . is an affectation of the loathsome rich, as bizarre as their taste for Corgi dogs and extra-virgin olive oil. 

Holy crap!  I think my corgi would be shocked to learn that he is a bizarre affectation of the loathsome rich.  I'll have you know that corgis have a sturdy working class heritage as rough and tumble cow herding dogs.  And my corgi likes to drink beer and watch football as much as the next guy. 

SUGGESTED THEME FOR THE CARNIVAL OF FEMINISTS

The deadline for the Carnival of Feminists is less than a week away (submissions due to me December 5 at [email protected]) but a couple of people have requested that I announce a theme for the upcoming carnival.

This theme is optional, and I fully intend to include a variety of posts that do not relate to this theme.  If you have already submitted a post to me, there is no need to submit a new post. 

What I am most interested in hearing about is how you first came to identify yourself as a feminist.  What made you adopt that designation for yourself?  Was it a slow process or a Eureka moment?  When did you realize that you were a feminist?  I am especially interested in hearing from people who grew up in communities where feminism was a rarity. 

GENTLE CHRISTIAN MOTHERS

I was intrigued to find that this blog got a lot of hits yesterday from a site called Gentle Christian Mothers.  I am not sure why they linked to me because I couldn't find the link, but they seem like an interesting group.  They are Christian mothers who are into something called "attachment parenting," which seems to involve constant contact between mother and child, including breastfeeding for longer than our cultural norm, allowing children to sleep in the same bed with the parents, and responding immediately to a child's cries.  Although I am not a parent, and if I were, I doubt that I would be into all aspects of attachment parenting, I did find their statement on disciplining children refreshing.

I have not blogged about it yet, but I am passionately opposed to the corporal punishment of children.  Most Christian sites I have found on the topic have advocated hitting children for the purposes of discipline, with plenty of Bible quotations to back up that point of view.  But the Gentle Christian Mothers believe that fear and purposely inflicted pain have no place in Biblical childraising. (And they identify support in the Bible for their position.)  As a non-believer, I do not advocate reliance on the Bible for child raising advice, bu I am certainly happy to give three cheers to any group that opposes humiliating and hurting children in the name of discipline. 

HUG YOUR LAWYER TODAY

This is from my silly page-a-day-calendar on lawyers.  I love my job but this description is accurate much of the time:

Your lawyer in practice spends a considerable part of his life in doing distasteful things for disagreeable people who must be satisfied against an impossible time limit in which there are hourly interruptions from other disagreeable people who want to derail the train; and for his blood, sweat, and tears, he receives in the end a few unkind words to the effect that it might have been done better, and a protest at the size of the fee. 

-- William L. Prossner

NOSTALGIC FOR FAVORITE BOOKS OF MY CHILDHOOD

As I emerge from my cocooned and cozy holiday weekend to head out into the hard, cruel world, I am feeling nostalgic for the many books I loved in my bookish childhood.  As I was falling asleep last night, I tried to determine what my top five favorite books when I was growing up.  Disturbingly, they all seem very white and kind of upper-crusty.  Was I snobbish child or were these the only books available?  Who knows -- but I do love these books, so here's my list (in no particular order of preference).

1)  The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare.  I read this book sixteen times I loved it so much.  The theme in this historic novel for children was the clash of world views, to me one of the most fascinating topics even today.  In this case the clash was between the Puritans of 17th century Connecticut and an aristocratic English girl from Barbados who was orphaned and sent to live with her Puritan cousins. 

2)  The Secret of the Amulet by E. Nesbit.   After reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond, I became enamored of historical fiction and time travel books.  Time travel books in particular seemed to have that element of conflicting values which seemed so interesting to me.  This novel by the wildly popular Victorian children's author is not one of her more famous ones (she also wrote The Railway Children and The Phoenix and the Carpet) but I loved the fact that it featured Roman Britain and Babylon. 

3) The Time Garden by Edward Eager.  How I adored this book-- another time travel book!  In this one, the children visit Queen Elizabeth I, folks in the Underground Railroad, and Louisa May Alcott and her sisters.  Edward Eager was unabashedly influenced by E. Nesbit, but he put his own stamp on the genre of magical adventure books for children.  As one of the few book enthusiasts among my peers growing up, I loved the fact that the children in Eager's books loved to read and to refer to books in their everyday conversation.  I also loved the children's droll irreverence. When the children in The Time Garden are sent off to stay with an elderly woman who writes children's books, Eliza says, "It'll be ghastly . . . She'll keep wanting to draw us out.  She'll keep wanting to get at the content of the child mind!" 

4) The Ghost of Blackwood Hall by Carolyn Keene.  This was the first Nancy Drew book I discovered, and in my opinion, one of the best.  In this one, Nancy travels to New Orleans to expose a group of people who use seances and spiritualism to defraud credulous victims.  I went through  a period after I outgrew my Nancy Drews of scorning them for their simplistic writing and characterization (although I probably wouldn't have put it quite that way at the time).   But in my adulthood, I have rediscovered Nancy and have read several books about the series.  I now appreciate how my brief but intense Nancy Drew obsession influenced me in the best way, in light of Nancy's unfailing heroism, competence and can-do attitude.  There are, however, disturbing class issues in the series (even in the updated series with the yellow binders, which I read in the '70s), all of which went right over my head when I was a kid -- for example, the criminals are invariably swarthy and use bad grammar.   Check out this interesting site on Nancy here.

5) Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.  This is the story of a little girl who spies on the adults on her New York City neighborhood, wearing her spy uniform of jeans and red-hooded sweatshirt, and carrying her spy tools, including a flashlight and a spiral notebook, in which she writes all of her observations in block letters.  Like virtually every other little girl who read this book, I began carrying a spiral notebook.  I got into terrible trouble as I wrote in my notebook in the lunch line at school.  Over my shoulder, a teacher was reading my journalistic account of an incident that had occurred earlier in the day in which two classmates had traded insults ("Dodo Bird!"  "Peabrain!").  The teacher suddenly whirled me around, yanked the notebook out of my hand and screamed at me in front of the entire class, saying that she had never seen a child write anything so hateful and horrible in her entire life.  I tried to explain that I was just writing down what happened -- but to no avail.  But it made me love Harriet even more--  I was just as misunderstood as she was (sniffle).

HONORABLE MENTIONS: 

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

Detectives in Togas by Henry Winterfeld

Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Query -- what were some of your favorites?

ONE WEEK UNTIL THE DEADLINE FOR THE CARNIVAL OF FEMINISTS

Calling all submissions for the carnival of feminists!  The carnival will be published HERE on December 7.  Please get your submissions to me by DECEMBER 5 by emailing them to me at [email protected]. 

You can learn more about the Carnival here, or under the new archiving category I have created entitled "Carnival of Feminists."

SNIPPETS ON DARWIN

I'm off to my fourth Turkey Dinner in five days (my sister-in-law and her family are back in town and ready to celebrate Thanksgiving!), but I wanted to share a couple of intriguing snippets from the Newsweek cover story on Darwin (possibly familiar to those who have studied his life):

--He took theodicy (the question of how a just and omnipotent God can allow suffering) to a whole new level:  While human suffering may make us better people, what about "the suffering of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time?"

-- He was apparently from a devout family and was married to a woman who thought he was going straight to hell.  I knew he had planned as a young man to enter the clergy, but I hadn't known that he and his own family were so disconcerted by the idea of evolution.  It reminds me of an apocryphal story I read many years ago about Linnaeus, the great taxonomist and (I think) a devout Christian.  Supposedly Linnaeus happened upon a rare beetle which somehow proved definitively the truth of evolution -- so he immediately squashed it and never thought of it again.  I truly admire the intellectual bravery of people who let the beetle live -- those who are willing to look truth in the face even if it contradicts their most cherished ideals.

-- The article highlights the Religious Right's use of the term "Darwinism," an aspect of the public school debate I'd never focused on before.  Of course, this term implies that somehow the theory of evolution is a religion as though people worship Darwin, the man. 

THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST DOG LOOKS LIKE

WOMEN IN COMBAT: SGT. LEIGH ANN HESTER AND SPEC. ASHLEY PULLEN LEAD OTHERS, EXPOSE THEMSELVES TO EXTREME DANGER, AND SAVE LIVES IN THEIR MIXED-GENDER UNIT

Via Ginmar's entry of November 16:

It amazes me how little we've heard in the media about the top-notch performance of Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, winner of the Silver Star for valor in combat.  When her mixed gender unit was ambushed by 50 Iraqi insurgents last March, Hester "maneuvered her team through the kill zone [consisting of a barrage of fire from machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades], into a flanking position where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 rounds." She cleared two trenches with her squad leader and killed three Iraqi insurgents, thus "sav[ing] the lives of numerous convoy members."

Meanwhile, one of the unit's drivers, Spec. Ashley Pullen, winner of the Bronze Star "laid down fire to suppress insurgents and then exposed herself to heavy AIF fires in order to provide medical assistance to her critically injured comrades, saving several lives."   

Six male soldiers, who also deserve honor for their bravery, won awards for their roles in this counterattack.  The entire unit, including the female combatants, functioned cohesively and with great initiative, discipline, and skill to accomplish their mission.  You can read more details here.

Despite this classic example of the effectiveness of women in combat, very few Americans are familiar with either Hester or Pullen, whereas we have all been subjected to relentless media coverage of damsel-in-distress Jessica Lynch, who was described in one widely published article, as "a hundred-pound girl, barely out of pigtails."  (Here I will refrain from going off an enraged tangent about how such infantilizing terms are never applied to our young men, even if wounded and in distress.  I am not sure our culture even has parallel terms for reducing a man to a wittle boy in quite such a degrading way.  Barely out of Little League?  Still dating cheerleaders?  Not quite done with his GI Joes?)   

The point is that the best argument for women's effectiveness in all sorts of traditionally masculine situations are actual examples of women doing it.  And women have repeatedly risen to the challenge in the face of all naysayers -- in politics, law, medicine, business, and now, combat.  The problem is getting the word out to the public about women like Hester and Pullen, especially in the face of examples like that of Lynch, which conform more closely to cultural expectations.

I'M IN ONE PIECE, THANK YOU

The family togetherness went very well yesterday -- mother-in-law, parents, husband, corgi, and all.  But getting to and from my parents' house (which happens to be located in the middle of approximately NOWHERE) was a bit harrowing, given the snowy and icey weather.  Highlights included:

-- Cars slipsliding all around us on the highway.  Cars careening off the road.  One car rolling over several times and landing on its roof. (No one was hurt.) 

-- Our tortuous journey over the plowed but unsanded seven mile dirt road to my parents' house brought to a halt when we realized we couldn't make it up the last steep incline to their place.

-- Halting to avoid slipping off last steep incline only to have a van come careening over the hill towards us, zig zagging uncontrolledly all over the road, and coming within about an inch of colliding with us head on. 

-- Finally making  it to my parents' house by coming around a more treacherous but sanded route from the other end of the lengthy dirt round, led by my father in his vehicle, only to have my little short dog escape from the car when we got to my parents' home and run towards my dad's car as he was backing up.  I actually let out a bloodcurdling scream as I ran towards my dad's car waving my arms.  It's good to know that I'm capable of a bloodcurdling scream in a pinch.

-- Numerous efforts to make it out of my parents' rather steep driveway after dinner, culminating in being towed backwards by a neighbor, which resulted in us slamming into a ditch on the first try.  I sat in the back seat with my trembling corgi on my lap.

And we still have to do Christmas next month.