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]

My Father Was a Soldier (A Song About War)

I wrote the chorus about two years ago, the rest of the song fell into place last summer.  It's based on an actual event: One of my students at U of Alberta (Edmonton) in 1965/66 came to say goodbye when he got his draft card. "Over there" is Vietnam. Lois Jones has set it to music, but I hadn't heard it as of this writing. [Copyright 2016 Wolf Kirchmeir]

My father was a soldier,

and my grandpa, too;

they went to war to save the world.

What good did that do? O my,

What good did that do?

There was a boy, he came up north,

to get away from war.

He got his card, and came to me,

“Sir, I have to go.”

“You can stay here and live in peace.”

“My brother’s over there,

I have to leave, I can’t stay here,

so it’s goodbye, Sir.”

My father was a soldier,

and my grandpa, too;

they went to war to save the world.

What good did that do? O my,

What good did that do?

Oh, look at me, the hero says,

I’ll fight to my last breath.

When bones bleach white in the noonday sun,

The one who wins is Death.

[instrumental bridge]

My father was a soldier,

and my grandpa, too;

they went to war to save the world.

What good did that do? O my,

What good did that do?

Homer knew that war is hell,

he told it like it was,

the spear that split the Trojan’s throat,

the blood that stained the dust.

But the tale he told was already old,

though each war makes it new.

We learn the story, sing the songs,

and don’t know what to do.

My father was a soldier,

and my grandpa, too;

they went to war to save the world.

What good did that do? O my,

What good did that do?

We learn the story, sing the songs,

and don’t know what to do.

Daesh Murders in Manchester and Egypt

In Manchester (2017-05-23), Daesh targeted girls. In Egypt, Daesh targeted Coptic Christians (2017-04-09). In Manchester, Daesh utilised an angry, alienated British-born Muslim man to carry the bomb. In Egypt, Daesh cadre dressed in Egyptian military uniforms. In Manchester, the bomb-carrier was an expendable weapons platform and died. In Egypt, the Daesh cadre fled immediately after discharging their weapons. They did not stay to face any possible defence.

In short, Daesh operated as it always does: First, attack the softest, least defended target possible. Second, never expose Daesh cadre to serious risk. Third, never place a Daesh commander at the scene.

The fight with Daesh in Mosul shows a variation on the theme. Daesh embeds itself among civilians, thus ensuring civilian deaths. While they can, Daesh uses human shields, murders civilians that they accuse of working with the enemy, and arranges to escape as quickly as possible. They are continuing to fight in Mosul only because they don’t have an easy escape route.

Daesh is commanded and staffed by cowardly thugs.

Is 2 Minutes enough to Solve a Crime?

     Donald J. Sobol. Two-Minute Mysteries (1967) Scholastic books for many years offrered books to schoolchidren, with a cut of sales going to the school's extra-curricular programs. One the most popular categories among middle school students was puzzle books. This is an example; there were many versions on it, including 5-Minute Mysteries.
     This one pffers 79 puzzles, all fairly placing the clues, but too many relying on non-general knowledge, with at least one error: the author claims that a right-handed man “invariably” puts his trousers on left leg first. Well, I don’t. Some illustrate how culture and general knowledge change over time: a puzzle asserting that a Professor of English wouldn’t make certain errors no longer flies. Besides, is mistakes usage for grammar.
     A few puzzles are ambiguous, with an alternative solution possible. However, the vast majority demonstrate that a small mistake is enough to convict a crook.
     There are of course recurring characters, the hero is Dr Hanedjian, his friend Inspector Winters, Nick the nose whose attempts at earning a few extra dollars by supplying information to the police always fail, and so on. I read the book in two sittings, having been interrupted after reading the first dozen or so. **½

Lost in the snow: Ellis Peters. The Will and the Deed

     Ellis Peters. The Will and the Deed (1960) One of Peters’ first books. It’s a nicely done closed group puzzle. Isolated following an emergency landing in a snow-bound valley, Antonia Byrnes’ six heirs have to come to terms with her capricious bequests. Which of them murdered her old friend when he was writing a new will repudiating her bequest of almost all her estate to him? Peters is at heart a writer of love romance, and likes to create ambience. She does a good but unnecessarily extended job of describing what it’s like to bring back a person almost dead from a morphine overdose, and a chase through deep snow and almost lethally bad weather. But she draws plausible characters, and gives us a nice mix of clues and red herrings. **½

So you think you'd be a good detective?

     M. Diane Vogt. Bathroom Crime Puzzles (2005) Even if you have an expert knowledge of forensics and law, you will not be able to solve all 65 of these puzzles. About half a dozen omit crucial information needed for the solution. But the rest are fair puzzles. In a novel, some forensic expert would provide the forensic significance pof the clues, leaving it to the reader to apply them to the case. Or watch detective do so, and second-guess the solution before All Is Revealed. The puzzles have the ring of truth: the backstories in the solutions add information about motives, etc, which only a person close to the actual case would know. I enjoyed reading this potato chip book. For a mystery writer, it’s a compendium of ready-made plot outlines. **½

Smarter than an octopus? Maybe not.

Recent dicussion on a Usenet group about a picture of octopuses "researching" a human diver prompted a search. Cephalopods are smart. See So You Think You're Smarter Than a Cephalopod? from the Smithsonian website.