Misplaced Advice: For Her Own Good (Ehrenreich & English)

     Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English. For Her Own Good (1978 & 2005) The subtitle reads Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. It looks like the authors have read just about every piece of advice ever written. The notes to the chapters are extensive: there is a reference for every quotation and assertion. The book is a model of how to tell a history of ideas. The Woman Question arose when the roles of men and women in the family and society were eroded when the Industrial Revolution changed the economic function of the family, which changed from the primary supplier of daily needs to become the place of respite and recuperation from labour. The market came to dominate the economy.
     When a man’s role became that of the wage earner whose income would be used to buy what hitherto had been made by the family, his wife no longer had an economic function. There resulted more or less frantic, and in hindsight ridiculous, attempts to find a role for Woman outside the market economy, which meant in practice confining her to the home and redefining her role within it in terms of human relationships instead of economic value. The justifications danced around the idea that women were too weak, too emotional, too irrational etc to be trusted with work and power outside the home.
     The authors show how initially there was a concerted effort to eliminate women’s economic value. It was easy enough to transfer manufacture from the home to the factory. It was much harder to transfer women’s value as healers, and effort that began well before the industrial revolution, because womens’ power to heal threatened the hegemony of the celibate male church hierarchy. The story of how it was done is painful to read.
     Once women were transformed into consumers rather than producers, the problem became that of keeping them happy and satisfied. It was the upper and upper middle classes that first had to deal with the problem of the idle wife whose lack of economic and productive value naturally caused more or less painful psychosomatic suffering. The puzzle was how to make a woman feel useful when she obviously wasn’t, and worse, knew that she wasn’t. She became the Angel in the Home, the quasi-mother that comforted her husband when he returned from the cruel world of economic battle. She became the Hand the Rocked the Cradle. And so on.
     It all makes for an odd mix of depressing and entertaining reading, the effect of amazingly obtuse ideas and sentiments expressed by men (and a few women) who really should have known better. The authors give us large swatches of quotations and paraphrases from the experts’ advice books and articles. The book is worth reading for these alone.
     In an afterword written in 2004, Ehrenreich and English point to the economic emancipation of women, which has of course changed the problem once again. Now that women are no longer economically dependent on men, there is no reason to fabricate some essential role for her in marriage and the family. This of course brings with it a whole new range of issues: For if marriage and family are no longer one of the main, if not the main, purposes of growing up, what is the role of men and women? We shall see, and no doubt a generation or two from now, somebody will write a book about how the Woman Question morphed in the Life Question. I hope they do as good a job as Ehrenreich and English.
     Highly recommended. ****
Footnote: Women's and men's changing economic roles also transformed marriage. Marriage had been a primarily economic institution. As its economic value diminished, marriage became a private and personal relationship. So much so that these days people generally view an "arranged marriage" as inferior, since in such a marraige status and economics count for more than personal feelings. [20191030]

Tama Starr. The "Natural Inferiority" of Women (1991)

     Tama Starr. The "Natural Inferiority" of Women (1991) "Outrageous Pronouncements by Misguided Males". Starr has assembled an astonishing collection of quotations illustrating the patriarchal theory that men are superior and women are inferior. Occasionally, they are witty, especially those put in the mouths of fictional characters, but mostly they are absurd, and occasionally bizarre. Reading so many misogynistic pronouncements all in one place confirms the suspicion that misogyny at one extreme is self-serving deliberate ignorance, and at the other is a mental illness. Technically, I think it’s a type of hysteria, which is ironic, considering the origin of that term.

     The collection also shows that religious leaders have a lot to answer for. In the soi-disant Christian West, Augustine of Hippo’s self-absorption had a very damaging effect on the early church. He believed, as narcissists have always done, that his experience is universal. When he got religion, he projected his disgust over his past life of debauchery onto his new-found ideology, and distorted the lessons of the Bible. Not that he was unique: religionists from all faith traditions have done exactly the same.
      I don’t know what impulse leads some men into fear and loathing of their women. Freud’s theories suggest an answer, but Freud himself would have resisted it: these men (including Freud himself) suffer from fear. There’s something about women that terrifies these men, and their only defence (per Freud) is to transform the object of fear into an object of loathed inferiority. By imagining superiority, such men prop up their faltering ego, which threatens to dissolve into abject terror. I suspect the fear is prompted in large part by the recognition that we are animals, a fact that humans tend to deny more or less indignantly. For some people, the animal in the human is a disgusting stain on what they believe is  a spiritual nature; so Woman, who reminds us of our animal nature by giving birth to us as all other mammals do, becomes the focus of that fear. That mothers wield practically absolute power over small children no doubt injects the note of impotent hate.
     Starr has arranged the quotations in something resembling an argument, which is (as she notes) circular. Women arouse men’s baser instincts, so women must be evil. Because women are evil, they arouse men’s baser instincts. That men may be responsible for allowing their baser instincts to be aroused seems to be an idea considerably beyond the intellectual capacity of all those clever theologians and philosophers who prove their superiority by producing elaborations on this fallacy.
     Starr compiled a companion volume, Eve's Revenge, which I haven't seen.
     Recommended. ***

Annie Proulx. Brokeback Mountain (1998)

     Annie Proulx. Brokeback Mountain (1998) Reprint of a New Yorker story. I read about 1/3rd of it and skimmed the rest. The style seems more important than the story, which delineates a homosexual affair between two drifters, both of whom end up loners, losing whatever connection to community they had when they abandon their wives (or vice versa). Raymond Carver I think does a better job of treating such themes. It may be that Proulx intends the story to show that unacknowledged homosexuality exacts a heavy price, but that’s a truism. It may be she wants to show that even among the ill-educated passion flows true and deep, and love hurts. Many New Yorker stories give me the impression, as this one does, that the reader is slumming, perhaps because they are set amidst ads for goods that the characters in the stories will never be able to afford (and may never desire) * (2004)
     Update: in 2005, a movie of the story was released, It won 3 Oscars.

Bonk! (Book Review)

Mary Roach Bonk! (2008) The subtitle, “The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex” both describes the book and sets the tone. It’s a history of scientific research into sex, research
made very difficult by the fact that humans are the only mammals who feel squeamish about coupling in public. The result is both a compendium of well-established facts and more or less dubious speculations,  many of which are still circulated in school playgrounds, sex-ed classes, and doctor’s offices.
     It’s clear that Roach likes sex, but likes research and reporting even more. She has a mordant wit, exhibited in asides and footnotes that demonstrate that she pays attention not only to the facts, but also the subjects’ feelings. She likes puns, too, a weakness I share. Our embarrassment about sex promotes euphemism, arch allusion, and jokes, a fact that Freud misinterpreted to mean that all humour is sexual. Recommended as an addition to one’s knowledge of both history and sex. I’m sure that the book could help relieve the anxieties of the naive and untutored. ***