Snapshots of Disillusionment

There's a book I have, From Poor Law to Welfare State, that's a history of welfare programs in the US, from the colonial period to the mid-'90s or thereabouts. It's a hugely informative book, and maybe one day I'll write a more substantial post about it.

But today I just want to point out something interesting --- if also very depressing --- about the particular edition I own.

It's the Sixth Edition, and after the author's preface it has all the prefaces from every earlier edition. So you can almost travel back in time, reading how the author's thinking and outlook evolved as he had to keep updating the book. (There's a span of, like, more than twenty years between the publication dates of the first and sixth editions, and they happen to be twenty very momentous years in the history of welfare policy.)

What's depressing, though, is that in every successive preface he has to point out that he had been overly optimistic in his concluding remarks to the previous book. 

Here's a snippet from the preface to the Second Edition (1978):

The initial version [of this book], completed early in 1973, brought the account of social welfare in America up to the start of this decade.To leave it at that critical juncture would be to shirk an obligation to readers who have witnessed the important, often complex occurrences since then and who seek to know how they are related to prior events. One of the most significant elements in the new edition, then, is the addition of a chapter on the 1970s, “Where Do We Go From Here?” 

I was especially pleased to have the opportunity to bring the text up to date because, writing some five or six years ago, I ended the manuscript on a rather optimistic note. For reasons discussed in the work, I suggested that “as 1970 approached, all was not bleak”; despite the lack of progress, “there were rays of hope.” Events over the past half-decade have proved me unduly sanguine, as the new concluding chapter indicates. Perhaps a future edition of this work will see the restoration of my confidence in the future; I hope so.

 And here's one from the Third Edition (1983):

Less than two decades ago, during the “booming” 1960s, a consensus existed in America regarding the welfare state. Few people on either side of the political aisle opposed strengthening the Social Security system or even declaring “war on poverty.” It was widely believed that the federal government was responsible for the well-being of all citizens, including their basic economic security and their physical and mental health. 

Now, in the midst of a long period of low productivity, deep recession, near-record levels of unemployment, high inflation, and widespread and growing suffering, the welfare state is under severe attack. In the forefront of that attack is the Reagan administration, with its neo-conservative philosophy. After his landslide victory in 1980, Ronald Reagan and his business-oriented advisors came into office intent on altering the direction of public affairs, particularly with regard to the scope and costs of federal activities and the relationship between the public and the private sector, especially in the area of social welfare. Since that time, they have consistently sought, with great success, to eliminate some federal and federally subsidized welfare programs and to cut back on others in a concerted attempt to reverse the steady drift toward Washington’s greater involvement in the nation’s social welfare system. 

The assault against the welfare state has come from the left as well as from the right, from radical scholars and activists as well as from conservative politicians, businessmen, and working class Americans. During the past fifteen years or so, the literature on social welfare, in fact, has been dominated by critics from the left, those who advocate the so-called social control thesis — the argument that the middle and upper classes have devised and used the nation’s welfare institutions and agencies not to help but to control the needy in order to safeguard the existing class system, perpetuate capitalism, and serve their own interests. In fact, so pervasive had such a view become that David Rothman, one of the authors of a widely cited statement on the “limits of benevolence,” rightly indicated that there even existed a widespread and acute suspicion of the very idea of doing good: “Whereas once historians and policy analysts were prone to label some movements reform, thereby assuming their humanitarian aspects,” Rothman wrote in 1978, “they are presently far more comfortable with a designation of social control, thereby assuming their coercive quality …” 

Activists of all kinds also see the needy as less beneficiaries of a benevolent society and more as victims of an all-controlling state; such activists include radicals who preach “participatory democracy” and “community control,” liberals fed up with big government and the federal bureaucracy, and even some social workers and members of the other helping professions who are convinced that the “experts” or “helpers” do not really help, that their professional knowledge, techniques, and institutions have been used to promote a sort of societal imperialism designed to keep the needy in a dependent position in order to perpetuate and enhance professionals’ own role in society. 

This, then, is an exciting and challenging (if not very encouraging) time to be thinking and writing about American social welfare history and the social work profession — and one of the justifications for a new edition of this work.This revised text is a product, at least in part, of the many things that have happened in the field, intellectually and practically, since the appearance of the last edition in 1979.

... the Fourth Edition (1988):

At the conclusion of the Preface to the third edition of this book, written in July, 1983, I stated, “Perhaps … a later edition of … [this] work, should one appear, will have a happier ending.” Unfortunately, that is not so. Despite the efforts of the outgoing administration to deny and conceal the fact, millions of American citizens remain mired in poverty. Indeed, the situation has worsened over the last eight years. In point of fact, there are now more Americans — especially women and children — who are poverty-stricken and in many cases homeless and hungry than there were when President Reagan took office. In addition, in cities all across the nation, there has developed a demoralized “underclass,” comprising school dropouts, gang members, hustlers, criminals, drug addicts, drifters, and other marginal and functionless people who often prey upon and terrorize innocent citizens and threaten the very fabric of American life.  

This new edition gave me the opportunity to take account of, and analyze, these developments and to put them into historical perspective. In so doing, I came to realize that “Reaganism” was not merely the continuation of policies initiated during the Nixon, Ford, and even Carter administrations, as I had believed (and written) earlier. In retrospect, it becomes clear that the period from 1969 to 1981 was a transitional era between the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, with their idealistic and grandiose social policies, and the Reagan administration, with its far more punitive and restrictive measures — measures that, for the first time, were designed to undermine and undo the welfare state that had emerged in America during the prior half-century. 

... Fifth Edition (1993):

Ordinarily, authors are quite pleased to have the opportunity to revise and update books they had written previously. Certainly that was the case with me, as for example my comments in the Preface to the Second Edition indicate. Unfortunately, however, that was not so this time. For the most part, revising and updating this work proved to be a difficult and depressing task.  

The last edition of this book, published in 1989, concluded with George Bush’s election to the presidency after eight years, under Ronald Reagan, of unremitting horror for the nation’s poor. Since that time, however, as I feared, conditions only have gotten worse. Under Bush, the war on the welfare state continued, poverty intensified, and homelessness and a variety of other related social problems reached new heights. All the while, the occupant of the White House and his supporters, who viewed the needy with indifference, if not scorn, did nothing — or worse: they cut even more holes in the social welfare safety net, such as it was. And while the violence that erupted in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992 thrust the state of America’s inner cities and urban poverty into the public consciousness once again, and even rekindled some public debate on these matters, certainly it did not propel them onto the public agenda, at least not yet.  

If there is any light at the end of the tunnel, it is the fact that the twelve dark and dismal years of the Reagan-Bush era have come to an end, and — as I indicate in the conclusion to this work — there is hope (although not quite as much now as there was immediately after the 1992 presidential election) for the onset of a new domestic order, one that will allow Americans to regain their “dignity as a just and compassionate people,” as the authors of The Greatest of Evils: Urban Poverty and the American Underclass (1993) put it. 

... and Sixth Edition (1999):

The first question most readers undoubtedly will ask is, why publish a new edition of From Poor Law to Welfare State this time? While there are a number of reasons for doing so, there are two compelling, although related, answers to that question. First, the previous edition of this work ended on a rather upbeat, or optimistic, note. President Bill Clinton had just introduced his sweeping proposal to overhaul the nation’s health care system, and while many questions about that undertaking remain unanswered, I wrote that “most Americans reacted favorably to the plan and looked forward to the upcoming debate over its specifics.” Furthermore, to again quote from the last edition, “there seemed to be bi-partisan support, in and out of Congress, for the notion that the time had come for some sort of universal national health insurance scheme.” Obviously, I was wrong, and I am glad to have the opportunity to correct myself — and to explain why I was mistaken.  

Second, and closely related, I also misunderstood, or placed too much faith in, President Clinton and his commitment to helping the needy by getting to the heart of their problems — and using the federal government to help resolve them. I really believed, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit, that Clinton, “unlike his immediate predecessors, who either did not recognize the nation’s social problems or refused to face up to them … certainly admits that the nation has many such problems, … that it cannot afford to ignore them, … and that the public sector can and should help to resolve them. Just as our colonial ancestors viewed their villages and towns as communities [I wrote] he cries out for the government again to become an instrument for the improvement of its citizens’ lives, especially by providing at least a minimal level of social welfare for all of its inhabitants.” 

Again, I proved to be in error. Indeed, as readers may already know, or will discover from reading the “new” last chapter of this book — the title of which I changed from “Toward a New Domestic Order?” to “Looking Forward — or Backward?” — just the opposite occurred. Thanks to what is referred to as the welfare reform act of 1996, signed into law by Clinton (just prior to the upcoming presidential election) over the protests of a number of concerned citizens, the entitlement to welfare, put into place in America some sixty years ago in the midst of the Great Depression (if not earlier, during the colonial period), has been removed and replaced by the “work or starve” mentality of an earlier time. 

Book Review: The Dark Side of the Enlightenment

(This review is also posted on GoodReads.com)

Cover of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason, by John V. Fleming

I got this book because I have an abiding interest in science, in the history of science, and in the history of various wider cultural backlashes against science. (I am a STEM/humanities dual degree holder, and came of age in Kansas during the most recent "Evolution Wars," so that's why that sort of thing interests me. How could it not?)

That's kind of what I thought The Dark Side of the Enlightenment would be --- an exploration of counter-trends to the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and empiricism. And, to an extent, it is; the author is a medievalist, not an Enlightenment historian or a historian of science, and he makes the very interesting claim that the "occult" pursuits mentioned in the title were of a piece with the more widely known, and celebrated, empirical investigations of that era.

(This is not the first time I've encountered that idea, but John Fleming does a very good job of making the case for it. His training as a medievalist works to his advantage here, because he can trace the medieval roots of both Enlightenment science and Enlightenment "magic.")

But the thing that was most counter to my expectations was that this book wasn't really the kind of history I was expecting -- one that dealt with places, events, ideas, trends, and in which individual people appeared briefly, like rocks in a streambed, subtly changing the water's flow and then quickly passed by -- no, this was more like a series of long, detailed biographical sketches.

The people and groups he chooses to profile are: Valentine Greatrakes, an Irish country gentleman who became famous for miraculously curing people of scrofula by touching them; a small French Jansenist sect that venerated a churchyard where a Jansenist deacon who was thought to have been able to heal people during his lifetime was buried, and who were struck with shaking fits when they visited his grave; Alchemists; Kabbalists; Freemasons; Rosicrucians (who these people were wasn't entirely clear to me! They don't seem to have been an order or a club so much as any people, anywhere, who were interested in discovering things? So I'm not sure who wasn't a Rosicrucian?); Count Cagliostro, who was actually a Sicilian named Giuseppe Balsamo, who went all over Europe founding Masonic lodges of his own "Egyptian" rite, and who was imprisoned in the Bastille because Marie-Antoinette believed (unfairly) that he had participated in a scheme to defraud her that is remembered today as "The Affair of the Diamond Necklace"; and the very interesting Julie de Krüdener, a Latvian noblewoman who first became famous in pre-revolutionary Paris's literary scene, where she befriended lots of people who are still famous today, like Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, and who later in life converted to Pietism and achieved further fame (or notoriety) as a sort of itinerant preacher. Most amazingly, she became convinced that Napoleon Bonaparte was the literal Antichrist, and that it was her special duty to stop him.

This is all very interesting, and also very well written; Fleming can be very funny. But what I thought was most admirable about his treatment of all these eccentric historical figures is how much he seems to respect them. No one is a fraud or a charlatan in this book, even when what they purport to be doing is physically impossible. Cagliostro in particular he seems to feel it his duty to rehabilitate, because Thomas Carlyle once called him the King of Liars. Fleming does his best to convince us that Cagliostro was not a liar, nor particularly mercenary; that he seems to have been a genuinely nice person, a loyal and honest person, and perhaps a bit too trusting. He is similarly gentle with Julie de Krüdener. Lots of people have written her off as a frivolous, selfish, self-aggrandizing adulteress and social climber. Fleming does not deny the things she did to give people this impression, but he also tries to give us the full context of her actions, and to tell us how she saw things. He sees her as a woman of intense emotion, whose marriage could not give her everything she needed, and who did really love the men she had affairs with. He also does an admirable job of connecting her earlier "worldly" behavior -- her seeking out the literary salons like a flower follows the sun, and also her affairs -- to her later religious conversion, saying that both phases of her life follow logically from her florid emotionality and her need for an outlet for all those emotions. We are sympathetic to men whose devotion to Art, or to Principle, lead them to abandon their duties to family and community; why, besides sexism, would we not extend a woman the same benefit of the doubt?

My only complaint with this book was that it ended too soon; it cuts off abruptly after explaining how Julie de Krüdener reached the conclusion that Napoleon was the Antichrist. We are not shown how it affects the rest of her life. What did she DO with this astonishing information? Did she preach against him on street corners? Did she abandon all other pursuits, to devote her life solely to denouncing him? This sounds like a life-changing revelation, but we don't get to see how, or if, it did change her life! We're just left hanging.

Blaming the Patriarchy for Autistic Children

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: There's a brief passage in Betty Friedan's landmark study of American housewives in the 1950s and '60s, The Feminine Mystique, where she discusses autism. She embraces the understanding of autism popular at the time, which posits that autism is an emotional disturbance arising from the relationship between mother and child. Yet she parts company from other popularizers of this theory by arguing that the confining, constricted nature of the housewife role distorts women's personalities and their relationships with their husbands and children, thereby making psychological problems more, not less, likely in the families where the mothers are full-time housewives.

She was, of course, massively wrong about autism, though I think her overall thesis about women's needs, and the failure of traditional gender roles to meet them, was (and is!) sound. The few paragraphs she devotes to autism aren't crucial to the points she makes in the rest of the book, and the psychogenic theory of autism is pretty much dead today, and hardly in need of aggressive debunking, but she talks about increasing prevalence of autism with an urgency similar to the "autism epidemic" fears of today.
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The Classic Text of the Modern Women's Movement which Exploded the Myth of THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE!

It's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and instead of talking about the book as a whole, or evaluating it in a modern context (as so many other people, far better informed than I, have already done), I am going to spotlight one small part in the book, where she talks about autism.

(If you've read the book, even recently, you might not even remember her talking about autism at all! The idea might even strike you as anachronistic, given that freaking out over an Autism Epidemic is so pervasive in our time. But it's in there --- it hit me with particular force because I am autistic, and the passage is the kind of thing it's not at all nice to read if you're reading it about yourself.)

If you haven't read this book, do, especially if you're interested in feminism or women's history. As profoundly limited in scope as it is (a quality it shares with the earlier, similar work by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which also concerns itself with society's neglect of women's minds and non-reproductive capacities) --- the only women who show up in its pages are well-educated, middle-and-upper-class white women, who don't have to do hard, physical work (or much of any work) to survive, for whom work outside the home could be intellectually demanding and emotionally rewarding, instead of boring, exhausting, dangerous, soul-killing drudgery, and whose labor is only exploited within the home and never also outside it --- it's still valuable for its detailed enumeration of the psychological costs of limiting women's lives to marriage, home and family.

Off and on throughout the book, and in a more sustained fashion in Chapters Eleven and Twelve, Friedan talks about how, perversely, the 1950s and '60s funneling of women back into the full-time housewife role actually hurt family life and sexual relations. In Chapter Twelve, "Progressive Dehumanization," she describes a pattern she sees of women whose too-early entry into marriage and motherhood precluded their developing authentic selves of their own, and thus rendered them incapable of raising children with all the skills and character traits they needed to become independent, themselves.

(I am going to quote at some length from the chapter, so for readability's sake I'm going to do what I did in this post and not blockquote the entire thing, but instead draw lines above and below the quoted text to separate it from my own. Quotations within the quoted passage I will still blockquote).

Here she brings in autism as the logical endpoint of this Great Chain of Nonbeing, this "progressive dehumanization" as one psychologically stunted generation brings up another, even more psychologically stunted, to the point of being autistic.
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At its most extreme, this pattern of progressive dehumanization can be seen in the cases of schizophrenic children: "autistic" or "atypical" children, as they are sometimes called. I visisted a famous clinic which has been studying these children for almost twenty years. During this period, cases of these children, arrested at a very primitive, sub-infantile level, have seemed to some to be on the increase. The authorities differ as to the cause of this strange condition, and whether it is actually on the increase or only seems to be because it is now more often diagnosed. Until quite recently, most of these children were thought to be mentally retarded. But the condition is being seen more frequently now, in hospitals and clinics, by doctors and psychiatrists. And it is not the same as the irreversible, organic types of mental retardation. It can be treated, and sometimes cured.

These children often identify themselves with things, inanimate objects --- cars, radios, etc., or with animals --- pigs, dogs, cats. The crux of the problem seems to be that these children have not organized or developed strong enough selves to cope even with the child's reality; they live on the level of things or of instinctual biological impulse that has not been organized into human framework at all. As for the causes, the authorities felt they "must examine the personality of the mother, who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms himself into a socialized human being."

At the clinic I visited (The James Jackson Putnam Children's Center in Boston) the workers were cautious about drawing conclusions about these profoundly disturbed children. But one of the doctors said, a bit impatiently, about the increasing stream of "missing egos, fragile egos, poorly developed selves" that he encountered --- "It's just the thing we've always known, that if the parent has a fragile ego, the child will."
Most of the mothers of the children who never developed a core of human self were "extremely immature individuals" themselves, though on the surface they "give the impression of being well-adjusted." They were very dependent on their own mothers, fled this dependency into early marriage, and "have struggled heroically to build and maintain the image they have created of a fine woman, wife and mother."

The need to be a mother, the hope and expectation that through this experience she may become a real person, capable of true emotions, is so desperate that of itself it may create anxiety, ambivalence, fear of failure. Because she is so barren of spontaneous manifestations of maternal feelings, she studies vigilantly all the new methods of upbringing and reads treatises about physical and mental hygiene. [This passage, along with the one a few paragraphs down, comes from Beata Rank (1949), "Adaptation of the Psychoanalytical Technique for the Treatment of Young Children with Atypical Development," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry*, Vol. 19, Issue 1, pp. 130-139]

Her omnipresent care of her child is based not on spontaneity but on following "the picture of what a good mother should be," in the hope that "through identification with the child, her own flesh and blood, she may experience vicariously the joys of real living, of genuine feeling."
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(Is anyone else starting to think of the evil Other Mother from "Coraline" yet?)
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And thus, the child is reduced from "passive inertia" to "screaming in the night" to non-humanness. "The passive child is less of a threat because he does not make exaggerated demands on the mother, who feels constantly in danger of revealing that emotionally she has little or nothing to offer, that she is a fraud." When she discovers that she cannot really find her own fulfillment through the child:

... she fights desperately for control, no longer of herself perhaps, but of the child. The struggles over toilet training and weaning are generally battles in which she tries to redeem herself. The child becomes the real victim --- victim of the mother's helplessness which, in turn, creates an aggression in her that mounts to destruction. The only way for the child to survive is to retreat, to withdraw, not only from the dangerous mother, but from the whole world as well.

And so he becomes a "thing," or an animal, or "a restless wanderer in search of no one and no place, weaving about the room, circling the walls as if they were bars he would break through."

In this clinic, the doctors were often able to trace a similar pattern back several generations. The dehumanization was indeed progressive.
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The first thing about this passage that jumps out at me is the objectification of the autistic children Friedan and her expert interlocutors are observing. 

It's just so explicit: autistic people are not human, we're not even conscious. We represent the endpoint of a multigenerational loss of humanity. It's kind of ironic and weird that a book whose aim is to prove that women's minds are more complex, capable of more and needing more, than the psych experts of the time thought possible, would make the same kind of categorical dismissal of the possibility of any inner life in another group of people.

Maybe it's not that weird. And the point she's trying to make --- that people who are shunted into parenthood without any opportunity to live their own lives, or find out what they really want (including whether they want to be parents!) tend to make poor parents --- is a valid one; it's just that autistic people are neither "dehumanized" nor the result of poor parenting. We're as fully human as anyone else.

Moving on: You can see Bruno Bettelheim's** "refrigerator mother" theory of autism supplying most of the basic theory here; it's just that Friedan is more sympathetic to the mothers than he is. Both writers (and Friedan was trained as a psychologist, too) think autism is a state of psychological emptiness (no self, no thoughts, no capacity to relate to others) caused by something going wrong in the mother/child relationship --- something the mother does wrong. Bettelheim thought children became autistic because their mothers rejected them --- at some level (whether they were aware of it or not) they "wish(ed) that (their) child(ren) should not exist." For Friedan, the problem starts earlier: the mothers' own emotional development is curtailed, because they never had a chance to do anything other than marry young and have children, so the mothers lean too hard on their young children for emotional support, which then stunts the children's emotional growth to an even greater extent. Mother and child are both victims, and the social order is to blame.

I see no difference at all between Friedan and Bettelheim in their degree of empathy for actual autistic children (and perish the thought that they might consider autistic adults): there is none. The whole point of both of their theories is that we are not people, we have no inner lives worth considering; they only differ on how we came to be that way. We represent the end stage of some pathology, whether it is social (patriarchy, in Friedan) or personal (refrigerator motherhood, in Bettelheim).

*Am I the only person who finds the term "orthopsychiatry" to be very creepy? It has a connotation of straightening, of bringing into line, that I don't think belongs in the mental-health profession. I know (partially from reading The Feminine Mystique itself, although The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd also helped give me this impression) that that was indeed the aim of psychiatry in those days --- to bring people into line, to help them "adjust" --- but it still creeps me out a lot.

**Bettelheim isn't cited in any of the sections describing autism, probably because The Feminine Mystique predated his most famous work about autism, The Empty Fortress, by four years. But he had been running his Orthogenic School for "disturbed" children since the mid-1940s, and had written at least two things (an essay for Scientific American magazine, and an article about feral children, whom he believed were really autistic) about autism prior to The Feminine Mystique's publication in 1963. Bettelheim is quoted at length elsewhere in the chapter --- Friedan devotes a lot of space to his observations of his fellow prisoners in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Also, William Long, who has written a series of articles on how various writers have understood autism throughout its history, believes that Bettelheim must have been popularizing his theories of autism long before he published The Empty Fortress, because Bernard Rimland criticizes Bettelheim and his "psychogenic" view of autism in his own book, Early Infantile Autism, published in 1964.

Everything Old Is New Again

I recently inherited a copy of a book I've wanted to read for a long time: Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

(I've wanted to read this book for a long time because when I was a teenager two things happened: I came to the understanding that what I really wanted to do with my life was be a scientist, preferably in some flavor of biology; and there was a periodic eruption of anti-evolution crusading here in Kansas. That those two things happened so close together made me especially eager to find out why people were so hostile to evolution, and later I figured the answer must lie somewhere in American history, as this seems to be a particularly American bit of unreasonableness.)

Anyway, I got my hands on one of my uncles' old copy of this book (it's from 1966! The physical book is that old! Isn't that neat?), and am now reading it.

It's hugely interesting, and I might review it here if I can organize my thoughts about it sufficiently to do so, but right now I want to point out one particular thing that astonished me.

What astonished me was that a strain of magical thinking that I had thought mostly emerged in recent decades, and whose roots must lie in the 1960s counterculture-derived New Age movement, is really a whole lot older:

As late nineteenth-century America became more secular, traditional religion became infused with, and in the end to some degree displaced by, a curious cult of religious practicality. If we accept the evidence of a long history of best-selling handbooks, from Russell H. Conwell's "Acres of Diamonds" to the works of Norman Vincent Peale, this cult has had millions of devotees. It has become, by all internal evidence and everything we know about its readership, one of the leading faiths of the American middle class. It is, as I hope to show, a rather drastically altered descendant of the older self-help literature, but it affords, in any case, striking evidence of the broad diffusion in American life of the practical motif. Modern inspirational literature takes its stand firmly with the world: what it has to offer is practical. "Christianity," writes Norman Vincent Peale, "is entirely practical. It is astounding how defeated persons can be changed into victorious individuals when they actually utilize their religious faith as a workable instrument."
...
Modern inspirational literature builds upon the old self-help tradition and bears a general resemblance to it, but it also has major differences. In the old self-help system, faith led to character and character to a successful manipulation of the world; in the new system, faith leads directly to a capacity for self-manipulation, which is believed to be the key to health, wealth, popularity, or peace of mind. On the surface, this may seem to indicate a turning away from the secular goals of the older self-help books, but it actually represents a turning away from their grasp of reality, for it embodies a blurring of the distinction between the realms of the world and the spirit. In the old literature these realms interacted; in the new they become vaguely fused. ...

It is what Raymond Fosdick calls "power for daily living" that the success writers purport to give. In the nineteenth century the primary promise of success writers was that religion would bring wealth. Since the early 1930's there has been a growing emphasis on the promise of mental or physical health; inspirational writing has been infused with safe borrowings from psychiatry and has taken on a faint coloration from the existential anxieties of the past twenty years. Although success literature has given way to a literature of inspiration, its goals remain largely everyday practical goals. For more than a generation, the metaphorical language of this writing has been infiltrated and coarsened by terms taken from business, technology, and advertising; one often gets the sense that the spiritual life can be promoted by good copy and achieved like technological progress by systematic progressive means. Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch, in their illuminating study of the themes of inspirational books, have spoken of this as "spiritual technology." One success writer tells us that "God is a twenty-four-hour station. All you need to do is plug in." Another that "religious practice is an exact science that ... follows spiritual laws as truly as radio follows its laws." ... "Conduct the affairs of your soul in a businesslike way," exhorts Emmet Fox. Prayer is conceived as a usable instrument. "A man," says Glenn Clark, "who learns and practices the laws of prayer correctly should be able to golf better, do business better, work better, love better, serve better." "Learn to pray scientifically," commands Norman Vincent Peale. "Employ tested and proven methods. Avoid slipshod praying."

... What the inspirational writers mean ... is that you can will your goals and mobilize God to help you release fabulous energies. Fabulous indeed they are: "There is enough power in you," says Norman Vincent Peale in an alarming passage, "to blow the city of New York to rubble. That, and nothing less, is what advanced physics tells us." Faith can release these forces, and then one can overcome any obstacle.

All of the stuff about instrumental faith --- faith that was supposed to make good things happen for you in this world, particularly to bring you riches --- rang some bells for me, as I'd read about something called the Prosperity Gospel that pretty much said the same thing, but was held to be a recent development coming out of the megachurches.

I was also somewhat reminded of The Secret (an appalling bit of woo popularized in a mega-best-selling book from 2006, where if you want something badly enough, "the universe" will bring it to you --- poor, innocent quantum mechanics is horribly abused in attempts to explain how this supposedly works) by the mentions of willing what you want into being, particularly in a long paragraph following the passage I quoted, where Hofstadter describes a nineteenth-century quasi-spiritual movement called the New Thought, which apparently held that "... one could have whatever one wishes by 'sending out a requisition to the great subconscious'." That nailed it down for me; except for what they call the mysterious, all-pervading cosmic sugar daddy, the Handbook of New Thought and The Secret might well be interchangeable*.

I also got a chuckle out of the throwaway reference to "advanced physics" in the last Norman Vincent Peale quote. I suppose that, back then, the physics that people misused to justify their magical thinking was either electromagnetics (those newfangled radio and TV waves!) or nuclear fission (I imagine this is where the bizarre comment about New York is coming from --- all that energy, lurking inside atoms! Never mind that only a few elements are fissile, and even then only under a very specific set of conditions; it's not like common household objects will explode if you look at them while thinking explodey thoughts), while today, of course, it's quantum mechanics.

*Apparently this is only news to me, as Wikipedia mentions the New Thought on its page for New Age philosophy, and their page for prosperity theology mentions both New Thought and the mid-20th-century writers that Hofstadter was talking about.

Did You Know ...

(T. S. Eliot, wearing a white rose)

One of my favorite poets, T. S. Eliot, apparently wore a white rose in his lapel to show loyalty to Richard III (whom he is supposed to have called the last legitimate English king, per this article in The New Yorker about him) and the house of York, on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field (when Richard was killed).

From this, and from the fact that the Song of Ice and Fire is (very loosely) based on the events of the Wars of the Roses, I conclude that, if he were alive today and would condescend to read science fiction or fantasy (which is probably a greater leap than bringing him back from the dead --- the man was a humongous literary snob), he would probably be a Stark fan. :)

Winter is coming!

City Mouse, Country Mouse, Autistic Mouse

There's one more thing from Unstrange Minds that stuck in my head, that I didn't think to include in this post and which probably deserves its own post anyway, given how much stuff was already in the other post.

Anyway, in the chapter on autism in South Korea, Roy Richard Grinker alludes to something I've seen mentioned before, and am curious about.

While describing differences between rural South Korean villages and the capital city of Seoul in how these communities treat their autistic members, Grinker mentions some research conducted by the World Health Organization comparing how well people with mental illnesses fare in developed vs. developing countries:

An agricultural area often belittled by Koreans and long neglected by the government, Cholla-do remains the most underdeveloped region in one of the richest countries in the world. Cholla residents are familiar with discrimination and adversity and find it hard to improve their class and social status. They consider it a great success to make one's career in Seoul, where more than 25 percent of South Korea's 44 million people now live.
...
Still, after asking a few questions here and there (Are there any children who don't speak well? Are there children here with brain disorders?), I found a sixteen-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl in a mountainous county. Everyone seemed to know about them. And when I talked to the barber and the local grocery-store owner about them, there was no hint of discomfort or pity. Peter, as his mother wanted him to be called, was good with bicycles and served as a messenger for two villages, delivering letters and packages with a broad smile. He saw a doctor once every two months and was medicated with a small dose of an antipsychotic drug that calmed his anxiety and some of his repetitive movements. The girl, Soo-Rin, was in the village with her single mother only on weekends because she attended a special school for children with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and mental retardation. But everyone knew her too. Her room at home was lovely, pink with lace curtains, stuffed animals, and Disney characters. Her mother said she takes a medication at school to help her pay attention, but she didn't know what it was called. In these villages, you can find proof of something the World Health Organization has been arguing for years: People with mental disorders do better over time in remote, nonindustrial societies than in urban, industrial ones.

I'd read about that research before, in Robert Whitaker's book Anatomy of an Epidemic; in that book, he argues that the reason the people in developing countries are more likely to recover from acute mental illnesses, and don't become chronically mentally ill as often as people in developed countries, is because people in developing countries often don't have access to psychiatric medication, which Whitaker argues actually worsen a person's condition over time.

Grinker lists an earlier book by Whitaker --- Mad in America --- in his bibliography, along with a book-length follow-up to this study (full text here), but he is not making Whitaker's argument here. Instead, he thinks the people in the rural villages are more accepting than the people in the cities:

This is not to say that life for the disabled is easy in the villages --- even someone with a mild speech impediment, who is otherwise normal, will have just as much trouble finding a spouse as an urban dweller with the same problem. And parents can be just as devastated. One man confessed to me that in his despair he once took his young autistic son high up in the mountains, intending to slit his throat, but couldn't bring himself to do it. But for most parents of disabled children, life in the rich city of Seoul is more stressful than in the more humble village. One of the paradoxes of rural life is that people in the villages tend to be relatively accepting of diversity. Little remains secret, and there seems to be a place for everyone. In the rural areas, people assume that things would be much better for their children in the city. But in the city, in the sprawling, indistinguishable apartment complexes of Seoul, most people do not know their neighbors, even though they watch them as closely as they can. The pressures to measure up can seem overwhelming, and families try to keep anything that might reflect badly on their status hidden from view. The moment you bring your disabled child outside in this densely populated city is the moment you are confronted by strangers, people who will watch and judge you.

Later on, he says something that would seem to rule out Whitaker's non-drug hypothesis: the children he met in the rural villages were taking psychiatric medications, while very few of the children he met in Seoul were taking any.

He sees this as symptomatic of the prevailing viewpoint in Seoul that autism is basically a death sentence; if nothing can make an autistic child non-autistic, what's the point of drugs or therapies? It all just costs money, and with drugs there's also the matter of side effects to consider.

(I actually thought his interviewees' concern about the side effects of psychotropic drugs was sensible; I thought Grinker in this passage was being way too uncritical of US psychiatrists' willingness to prescribe these drugs to children when so little is known about their long-term or developmental effects. I think his point about the all-or-nothing mentality is a valid one --- and that mentality is certainly not restricted to South Korea! --- but I don't share his faith that drugs always lead to better quality of life. Indeed, often their use is a symptom of the same societal rigidity that he blames for making urban life so much harder for autistic people to participate in than rural life.)

Anyway, his mention of those WHO studies reminded me that I had wanted to read them (and there are still more follow-ups, meta-analyses and similar studies from more recent years, too), and post about them.

Strangers in an "Unstrange" Land

I just finished Roy Richard Grinker's book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, and I very much recommend it to just about anyone with an interest in autism.

It's written from a parent's point of view, and mostly (it seemed to me) for an audience of other parents, but there's a lot in it to interest people outside that core audience, too. There's a lot of historical stuff about the first descriptions of autism, and about how psychologists have tried to understand it over the past six decades or so; Grinker's father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all psychoanalysts (psychiatrists, too --- his grandfather founded the Archives of General Psychiatry), so he has a very strong grounding in the history of psychology and psychoanalysis.

He also addresses the question of whether there is or is not an autism epidemic, going into some detail about how diagnostic categories have changed, how the availability of special-education services varies by diagnosis, and how the ways of measuring the prevalence of autism have changed.

The first edition of the DSM to have "autism" as a category was the DSM-III, published in 1980. The criteria for "Infantile Autism" were fairly specific:

A. Onset before 30 months of age
B. Pervasive lack of responsiveness to other people (autism)
C. Gross deficits in language development
D. If speech is present, peculiar speech patterns such as immediate and delayed echolalia, metaphorical language, and pronominal reversal.

(There was also a category for people meeting all of these criteria, but with the condition not appearing until after 30 months of age; there were also "residual state" diagnoses for people whose speech problems or unresponsiveness had lessened to the point that they no longer met the above criteria).

The DSM-III-R criteria were somewhat looser, getting rid of the age-of-onset criterion and collapsing the "residual states" into Autistic Disorder itself --- you could have an autism diagnosis even if you did not currently meet all the criteria, as long as you had met them before.

The loosest criteria of all were those of the DSM-IV, which I had already known, but what I didn't know was that their flexibility wasn't all by design:

[T]here was an error in the final manuscript. It is not well known, even among experts, but in 1993, when the authors of the child psychiatry section of the DSM were editing the proofs of the new DSM-IV, which would be published in 1994, they missed a critical mistake. For PDD-NOS, the largest group of autism spectrum disorders, they had intended to write as the criteria, "impairment of reciprocal social interaction and in verbal or nonverbal communication skills." A different text was accidentally published. It said, "impairment of reciprocal social interaction or verbal and nonverbal communication skills, or when stereotyped behavior, interests, and activities are present." The authors had wanted someone to qualify as autistic only if they had impairment in more than one area, but the criteria, as published, required impairment in only one area for a diagnosis of PDD-NOS.

Another interesting aspect of his discussion of autism diagnoses hinges on the different priorities of clinicians and researchers, and his idea (well-buttressed with quotations from prominent psychiatrists) that autism diagnoses are often made not because "autism" accurately describes the child being evaluated, but because they think the special-education services targeted at autistic children will do the most good for that child. That would go a long way toward explaining the "diagnostic substitution" that's occurred over the years, with more children being classified as "autistic" at the same time as fewer children are being classified as having plain old intellectual disability. (Grinker also includes a parallel instance of a diagnostic category that no one would argue is actually becoming more common --- traumatic brain injury --- becoming more widely used over the same period of time, due to changes in the U.S. Department of Education's disability coding system).

The part of the book that was most interesting to me was the series of chapters on cultural attitudes toward autism in three other countries: India, South Korea and South Africa. For each country, Grinker profiles one or two families with autistic children, usually starting with the mother, and letting her tell the story of how she came to suspect that there was something different about her child, and how she overcame varying degrees of stigma, disbelief and lack of services to get her child therapy, special education and a place to live when she could no longer take care of him/her.

We meet Golden and Suzanna Khumalo, and their son, Big Boy, who moved from Soweto to Cape Town in South Africa to get their son to a psychiatrist, and away from Golden's parents and ex-wife, who blamed Big Boy's autism on, respectively, displeased ancestors and witchcraft. We meet a woman named Merry Barua, in Delhi, India, who founded a school for autistic children called Open Door, which she began for her own son, in the absence of any other school that met his needs. We also meet two families from South Korea: a woman named Seung-Mee, with an autistic daughter named Soo-Yong, who joined a Christian church because the church members were the only people she ever met who really seemed to accept her or her daughter, and another family with three children, one of whom is autistic and kept hidden from the world. Autism is a highly stigmatized condition in South Korea, and one that reflects poorly on an entire family, so often doctors will diagnose a child with an attachment disorder instead. Grinker does think it's getting better for autistic people there, though: a recent film about an autistic marathon runner is lessening the taboo somewhat, and giving people the idea that autistic people can do more, and have fuller lives, than they had previously thought.

There was one aspect of autism that I thought this book didn't go into very much, though: he doesn't include very many quotes from autistic people themselves. (I can only remember one, actually --- at the very end, talking about a college class on autism he taught where one of the students had Asperger's syndrome). This didn't bother me as much as it might have, since he wrote about his autistic daughter Isabel in such an empathic way; rather than simply describe her behavior as if she were some kind of space alien, he gives context for everything she does, and tries to convey something of her feelings. He lets us see her grow up, learn things, acquire skills, and pursue her special interests. He writes from a caregiver's point of view, and everyone he interviews is also a caregiver, but he writes about his daughter with such love, respect and understanding that I never got the feeling that he thought of her as a burden, as an extension of himself or as anything but her own person.

A Fun Fact About Leo Kanner

I just started reading Roy Richard Grinker's book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, and in a chapter on the early history of autism (covering Kanner and Asperger, plus Eugen Bleuler's and Sigmund Freud's use of the term "autistic" to describe aspects of other conditions, and also stories of feral children, whom Grinker believes were probably autistic), I came across this anecdote:

In 1943, a New York psychoanalyst named Abram Blau wrote a paper in which he argued that whereas there were numerous words, proper and slang, for the penis, there were few words, and virtually no slang words, for the analogous organ in women, the clitoris. Based on this assumption, Blau made grand arguments about the universal symbolic importance of the penis to humanity. Kanner, as evidence-based as anyone in psychiatry at that time, was furious about Blau's assumption, based on no data collection at all, and quickly wrote a paper with the dry title "A Philological Note on Sex Organ Nomenclature," which he published in a psychoanalytic journal. In it, Kanner listed dozens of words for the clitoris, from languages all over the world, and all of them, he claimed, from memory. He destroyed Blau's argument.

Grinker included it to illustrate Kanner's prodigious memory, which Grinker believes was one of the "subclinical," autistic-like traits Kanner possessed that may have given him insight into the inner lives of the children he studied.

I'm posting it here because I think it's funny. Male psychoanalysts and their penis fixations never cease to amuse me.

(Unfortunately, the only copy of the article I can find online is here, with the full text only accessible to subscribers to that website. So I can't find any of the words Kanner listed, which is annoying.)

Guest Blogging

I wrote a guest post about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's book Herland for Her Circle Ezine, a website about women, writing and art.

The post is an expansion on one paragraph in this old post I wrote juxtaposing Herland with Marilyn French's book The Women's Room*.

I expanded this paragraph into a longer essay on how masculinity and femininity are portayed in Herland, which is as complementary performances that distort human nature and interactions between the sexes, and which each depend on the other to work. (Particularly, I look at the character of Terry, and how his brand of brash, overbearing hypermasculinity works against him in the all-woman, but not particularly "feminine," society of Herland.)

Here's the link, if you want to go read it!

*Here are a couple of essays on the same blog that deal with that book; there's also another essay on Gilman, this one about The Yellow Wallpaper.

In Which I Finally Get Back to Writing About Autism in Fiction

Marti Leimbach's 2006 novel, Daniel Isn't Talking, covers a lot of the same narrative territory as the first volume of Keiko Tobe's manga series "With the Light" --- the protagonist is a young wife and mother who discovers that her son is autistic, and the story follows this pattern, more or less: 1) following her child's diagnosis, the main character goes into shock, grieves for the "normal" child she wishes she had instead, and watches her life and her marriage fall apart around her; 2) she comes out of her depression and begins to fight for her child, wrangling with various therapists, educators and bureaucrats over what sort of treatment to pursue; and 3) as she, and her allies in the school and health-care systems, and among her in-laws, begin to find schools, therapies, and accommodations that work well for her child, her life regains a semblance of order and she comes to understand her child better and love him for the person he is more than she grieves for the person he's not.

I'll review this book as a whole later, but what I want to focus on right now is Leimbach's use of military metaphors throughout this book: her protagonist, Melanie Marsh, refers to herself repeatedly as someone fighting a war against autism.

Here are some instances of this parenting-as-combat, autism-as-The-Enemy metaphor:

Stephen's uncle Raymond, that dear man, rings to tell me not to regret giving Daniel the MMR. His voice is loud in the receiver; he speaks as one who has endured early attempts at telephonic communication, who has shouted into tortoiseshell receivers fixed on wall phones, gone through operators in order to place calls. Now he tells me that in his time he has seen children die of measles; they died in droves when he was a boy. Temperatures of a hundred and six, their brains burned inside their skulls. I mustn't regret a thing.

"Please come and see us," I say to him. Raymond lives on the other side of London. He owns the same house in which he grew up and that he shared with his mother until her death some thirty years ago. He has taken me around the upstairs to show me the scars in the ceiling where a bomb came through the roof during the war. He has stood by me by the window and pointed to the areas, now dense with houses, where once there was nothing but craters and buildings in ruin. He has seen things he will not tell me about, the experiences of being a soldier. "I would not wish my memories upon you," he once said, then asked me if I could find a use for the cake pan his mother used to bake birthday cakes for him and his brother when they were children. Whether, too, I might like some of his mother's damask linen.

"I will come," he says now. "But meanwhile, you mustn't blame yourself."

"I don't," I tell him, a lie. I am fast becoming a good liar, which I discover is a means of camouflage for the protection of others, those who have not been conscripted into this battle with autism, those who have normal children, for example.

(Notice, too, the juxtaposition of Melanie's silence, as an embattled (in a metaphorical sense) Mom of an Autistic Kid with the silence of this other character, Raymond, who has fought in an actual war. He and Melanie have identical reasons for concealing their darkest thoughts from each other, and I think Leimbach's highlighting the similarities between Melanie and Raymond, and their reasoning behind fencing off a portion of their minds from other people, for those other people's protection, helps emphasize the mom-as-soldier metaphor in a way that merely explicitly stating it, as Melanie does when she says she has been "conscripted into this battle with autism," can't do.)

Another example:

"What about all these other therapies?" I ask Andy. There's art therapy, music therapy, sound therapy, therapies that involve brushing the child in order to help with "sensory" issues, not to mention many highly structured teaching practices that happen in schools.

Andy is setting out a new track [of a toy train set; he's playing a game with Daniel, who likes Thomas the Tank Engine], one that finishes at the edge of a seat cushion so the train will crash to the floor. He looks at me, then back down to the track again. He says, "You can try other things. Mostly they won't hurt him."

"But will they help him?"

He shrugs. "I'm a play therapist. And I like the behavioral approach." A flat statement, a non-comment. But it feels to me he is saying much more, that I am speaking to someone in the trenches, who has been in the trenches for a long time, who is battle-weary but full of wisdom. It is as though he is saying, "Here is the only gun that fires. Pick up the bloody gun."

Here's another metaphor that I think is related to the parenting-an-autistic-child-as-war metaphor; Melanie compares her efforts to get her son, Daniel, to speak before it's "too late" for his prognosis to improve to trying to get him out of a burning building:

To ask a person to do nothing for their child or to do very little is unfair. For them to do nothing means they have to fight the overwhelming urge to push away the danger, to run through the flames, to slay the dragon. However hopeless the situation might appear, it is infinitely more difficult to do nothing than even an ill-considered something. I knew a man whose teenage son was stabbed to death in the early hours of a Saturday night by kids his own age who wanted the sneakers he was wearing. His father had repeated dreams --- the day-and-night dreams that I came to be familiar with after Daniel's diagnosis --- in which he was there when it happened, just behind the gang as they circled his boy. There, hidden in the luxuriant green of unkempt bushes, he would be crouching. Or he stepped off the bus just in time to reach over and pluck his son, vibrant and alive, from the hands of his attackers. In his dreams, the five-inch steel blade that pierced his son's chest never so much as scratched his skin. Instead, he took his child in his arms as he had as a baby, running at a supernatural speed, flying even, not knowing where he was going but knowing it was away --- away from threat and danger and harm, away from four youths and their deadly, sharpened blade.

But the dreams were only dreams. The reality was, the boy died. The father slept.

My reality is that my child lives peacefully within a dysfunctional brain while I search madly --- tear myself apart --- trying to think for the both of us how to get out of the burning building of autism. Even using this method --- this play therapy mixed with applied behavior therapy and whatever else Andy brings to bear --- there are limitations. With every learned word or spontaneous moment of play, I see Daniel becoming more like any other child, less "autistic"-seeming, and I know that if he will interact with others as he is now interacting with Andy, with me, with [his sister] Emily, his life will not be entirely ruined by the condition. But there is also a time factor. As he develops so do all the other children around him. He has to race to catch up or never catch up at all. I understand this very well. It is almost as though someone has told me, "If he is going to escape the fire, he must do so early, before the roof caves in."

There's another comparison to armed conflict at the beginning of this quoted passage, where Melanie compares her own angst over having an autistic son to the recurring nightmares of a father of a murdered son; placing herself in the father's shoes, Melanie makes Daniel's autism into the gang of teenage thugs that took the other boy's life.

Later in the same passage, Daniel's autism becomes a burning building that he must escape --- that Melanie has to lead him out of.

All of these metaphors work to convey several things that I think Marti Leimbach was trying to emphasize with them --- Melanie's desperation, her constant feeling that something of life-or-death importance is happening in her son's life, that will determine the course of her son's life, that she cannot figure out how to wade in and help him. Her repeated use of images of battle, of sacrifice, of terrible, outsized, Herculean struggles waged on his behalf, seem like they reflect the gap between what she can do for him --- what she is doing for him --- and what she wishes she could do for him. She reaches for life-and-death scenarios to compare her efforts to, and most often she returns to the battlefield for her metaphor of choice.

While I am sure Leimbach chose these metaphors to highlight her character's sense of living under extreme circumstances, and her frustrated desire to help her son, I also see something in these metaphors that I'm not sure she meant to imply.

What all of these metaphors --- of war, of individual combat, of fleeing a collapsing, burning building --- do is they separate Daniel from a part of himself, and set that part in conflict with the whole person. To save her son, Melanie makes war on ... her son. She doesn't see it that way; she sees her war as being against the thing that has taken her son from her, but Daniel hasn't been taken from her at all. He's still there, he's just not the way she wishes he could be.

This conflict Melanie sees between Daniel and Daniel's autism reminds me of the autism-as-prison metaphor I described in my post about spatial metaphors and autism:

One thing the autism-as-container metaphor tends to leave muddled is where the autistic person dwells in this metaphorical space. It's quite eloquent on the position of the parents, peers and teachers trying to relate to this strange being --- we're given to understand quite clearly that they feel locked out and exhausted from battering at the door --- but what's not always clear is whether the autistic person is in the metaphorical Fortress of Solitude, or whether they are it.

Judy and Sean Barron's 1992 book There's a Boy In Here makes it unusually clear: Sean is inside his autism, his thoughts, feelings, desires, and self obscured from his mother's sight by his intense anger, his tantrums, his reckless, aggressive and often destructive behaviors. But in other books, like The Siege (which I haven't read) and Bruno Bettelheim's mother-blaming opus The Empty Fortress (which I likewise haven't read), it's not clear whether the walls that the authors advocate tearing down imprison the child, or whether they constitute a part of hir, like a protective cocoon or exoskeleton. The act of trying to "break through" to an autistic child becomes a violent one if the latter construction is implied ...

Melanie's understanding of her son's autism in Daniel Isn't Talking is, as I mentioned above, stuck in "But this is not my child!" mode. For her, Autism is a hostile Other that has taken, and changed, her son. Her son's autism might be a part of him, but it's a dangerous, diseased part that Melanie believes Daniel will be much better off without. Because she sees Autism as a separate, hostile entity and Daniel as its victim, she can cast herself as Autism's implacable foe without seeing any tension between that role and the unconditional love of Daniel that the maternal role demands.

Other reviews of this book: Sharon at The Voyage, Kristina Chew at Blisstree.com

An Intriguing Idea from Cordelia Fine's "Delusions of Gender"

In Chapter 19 (titled "Gender Detectives") of her book, Delusions of Gender (which I review here), Cordelia Fine describes how children learn to sort themselves into gender categories:

Anyone who spends time around children will know how rare it is come across a baby or child whose sex is not labeled by clothing, hairstyle, or accessories. Anyone with ears can hear how adults constantly label gender with words: he, she, man, woman, boy, girl, and so on. And we do this even when we don't have to. Mothers reading picture books, for instance, choose to refer to storybook characters by gender labels (like woman) twice as often as they chose nongendered alternatives (like teacher or person). [Gelman, Taylor & Naguyen, 2004] Just as if adults were always referring to people as left-handers or right-handers (or Anglos and Latinos, or Jews and Catholics), this also helps to draw attention to gender as an important way of dividing the social world into categories.

This tagging of gender --- especially different conventions for male and female dress, hairstyle, and accessories, and use of makeup --- may well help children learn how to divvy up the people around them by sex. We've seen that babies as young as three to four months old can discriminate between males and females. At just ten months old, babies have developed the ability to make mental notes regarding what goes along with being male or female: they will look longer, in surprise, at a picture of a man with an object that was previously only paired with women, and vice versa. [Levy & Haaf, 1994] This means that children are well-placed, early on, to start learning the gender ropes. As they approach their second birthday, children are already learning to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping. There's some tentative evidence that they know for whom fire hats, dolls, makeup, and so on are intended before their second birthday. [Serbin, Poulin-Dubois, & Eichstedt, 2002 (PDF); Poulin-Dubois et al., 2002] And at around this time, children start to use gender labels themselves and are able to say to which sex they themselves belong. [Zosuls et al., 2009]

It's at this critical point in their toddler years that children lose their status as objective observers. It is hard to merely dispassionately note what is for boys and what is for girls once you realize that you are a boy (or a girl) yourself. Once children have personally relevant boxes in which to file what they learn (labeled "Me" versus "Not Me"), this adds an extra oomph to the drive to solve the mysteries of gender. [Martin, Ruble & Szkrybalo, 2002 (PDF); Martin & Halverson, 1981] Developmental psychologists Carol Martin and Diane Ruble suggest that children become "gender detectives," in search of clues as to the implications of belonging to the male or female tribe. [Martin & Ruble, 2004 (PDF)] Nor do they wait for formal instruction. The academic literature is scattered with anecdotal reports of preschoolers' amusingly flawed scientific accounts of gender difference:

[O]ne child believed that men drank tea and women drank coffee, because that was the way it was in his house. He was thus perplexed when a male visitor requested coffee. Another child, dangling his legs with his father in a very cold lake, announced "only boys like cold water, right Dad?" Such examples suggest that children are actively seeking and "chewing" on information about gender, rather than passively absorbing it from the environment. [Ruble, Lurye, & Zosuls, 2008]

In a later chapter, she hypothesizes that this drive to delineate gender categories, and to sort oneself into one of them, might stem from a broader human desire to belong to a group:

As we've seen, children are born into a world in which gender is continually emphasized through conventions of dress, appearance, language, color, segregation, and symbols. Everything around the child indicates that whether one is male or female is a matter of great importance. Meanwhile, at about two years of age, children discover on which side of the divide they are located. It remains to be seen, in my view, whether subtle gender differences in babies' toy preferences before they know their own sex can be explained by socialization by parents, unwitting or otherwise. But once children know their own sex, in theory they can start to take socialization into their own hands.

And it's plausible to think that they will. Gaining membership to a group, any group, normally brings a money-back guarantee of favoritism. In the infamous minimal group studies conducted by Henri Tajfel and colleagues, adults are randomly assigned to trivial groups. For example, they are asked to estimate the number of dots on an array, and then categorized as either a dot overestimator or a dot underestimator. It's hard to imagine a categorization of less psychological significance. And yet membership of even such arbitrarily assigned and short-lived social categories can engender a warm glow toward fellow dot overestimators (or underestimators) that does not extend so far as those who take a different approach to dot guesstimating.

Children, it turns out, are also susceptible to an in-group bias to prefer what belongs to their group. Recent work by Rebecca Bigler and colleagues has shown that this is especially the case when groups are made visually distinct, and authority figures use and label the groups. In one study, three- to five-year-old preschoolers in two child-care classrooms were randomly assigned to the Blue group or the Red group. Over a three-week period all the children wore a red or blue T-shirt every day (according to the group to which they'd been assigned). In one classroom, the teachers left it at that. The color groups were not mentioned again. But in the other classroom, the teachers made constant use of the two categories. Children's cubbies were decorated with blue and red labels, at the door they were told to line up with Blues on this side and Reds on that side, and they were regularly referred to by group label ("Good morning, Blues and Reds"). At the end of the three weeks, the experimenters canvassed each child's opinion on a number of matters. They found that being categorized as a Red or a Blue for just three weeks was enough to bias children's views. The children, for example, preferred toys they were told were liked by their own group and expressed a greater desire to play with other Red (or Blue) children. While some forms of favoritism were common to all the children, more was seen in kids from the classroom in which teachers had made a bigger deal out of the Red versus Blue dichotomy.

Just imagine how powerfully exactly the same psychological mechanisms can drive in-group pride and out-group prejudice when it comes to gender. In the young child's world, gender is the social category that stands out above all others, right from the start. Conventions of clothing and accessories mean that gender is extremely obvious visually, and boys and girls may be regularly labeled and organized ("Now it's the boys' turn to wash their hands") by gender, especially in early education settings. And, unlike adults and older children, younger children don't tend to have other social categories like jock, doctor, Christian or artist with which to identify. The drive for group belonging may explain why young children insist on girlish or boyish behavior or dress even in the face of parental displeasure, suggest Diane Ruble and colleagues.

This theory is really interesting to me, and I particularly like the idea that it's not a particular set of gender-related traits that are innate, but rather 1) the capacity to distinguish the sexes, and to know one's own sex, and 2) the drive to find one's place in the social group in which one lives. In our large, mobile, relatively fluid but still highly gendered society, gender roles are probably going to be the first social identities that suggest themselves to a child.

I like this theory, because it explains a lot of the same things that "hard-wiring" theories of gender explain, but it's much more flexible. Which is good, considering that gender norms have changed, a lot, throughout history and today's conceptions of the Eternal Feminine or the Eternal Masculine sometimes conflict with these past notions of masculine and feminine.

(One trivial example: pink and blue. Pink used to be for boys, because it was like a softer version of red, while blue, the color of the Virgin's veil, used to be for girls. Now, of course, it's the other way round).

There is one thing that the book doesn't address, that I'd like what Fine (or any of those developmental psychologists she cites) thinks about it: given that the usual course is for children to discover what sex they are, and then become interested in learning, and correctly performing, the gender role corresponding to that sex, why do some children choose a different sex to emulate?

I can remember that, while I did not always think of myself as having gender (or even as being human) throughout my entire childhood, when I did think in those terms I always knew two things: 1) I was a girl, and 2) I was, and wanted to be, like a boy. And when I grew up, I would be a woman who was like a man. Furthermore, this wasn't just who I was in the absence of any gender self-socialization; I self-socialized in very much the way Fine describes. I just chose to learn, and conform to, the masculine role.

That sort of thing --- why you would choose to imitate people of the other sex, rather than your own --- isn't answered. And neither is the related matter of how transgenderedsexual* people form their gender identities --- they often have strong senses of themselves as sexed, gendered beings, but the sex and gender categories they feel they belong to are not the ones assigned to them at birth.

*Edited 1/23/11 to reflect Juliet's preference, stated in comments, for "transsexual" over "transgendered."