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!

Born This Way

Some book I read a long time ago --- it may have been Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate --- maintained that, in the US, conventional wisdom has swung back and forth on whether differences between people that show up in adulthood have been present since birth, or whether they are acquired during childhood and adolescence.

It's usually intelligence that gets discussed in this way, almost always in the context of racist, sexist, or otherwise inequality-justifying theories about some groups being naturally smarter than others, but there's been a similar periodicity in thinking about other things, like personality traits. (Gender differences in cognitive style, interests, and personality are some of the things that are now widely believed to be present at birth; see Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender for a lot more about these ideas' ubiquity and the still-ambiguous nature of the evidence they're supposed to be grounded in).

Right now, I want to talk about how this idea has gotten established in two different subcultures to which I belong: the autism community* and the gay community.

Autism and homosexuality have somewhat similar recent histories in US culture: both either are, or have been, considered mental disorders, both were thought in the 1950s and early '60s to be caused by some warping of the normal bond between mother and child (either, as with autism, too much distance between them, or with male homosexuality, not enough), and papers from the 1960s, '70s and '80s document various attempts to "treat," with aversion therapies that would now be considered abusive, children showing signs of either one. (One researcher even worked on both projects: O. Ivar Lovaas, who has done famous, if controversial, work adapting Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for use with autistic children, has also co-written several articles about "feminine boys," and using ABA to normalize their behavior).

Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but there are still people who consider it (or anything deviating from straight, married monogamy, really) a pathological condition, and therapists who specialize in trying to turn gay people straight.

In contrast to that idea --- that gay people can change, and therefore should change --- the gay-rights movement has embraced the idea that sexual orientation is inborn. (And most mental-health professionals, including groups like the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Counseling Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and the American Medical Association, pretty much agree with them that no sexual orientation is inherently pathological, and that you can't change a person's sexual orientation through therapy).

The picture is somewhat different for autistic people. Not only is autism still considered a disease, and a pretty serious one, by almost everybody, but the idea of innateness, when it comes to autism, doesn't have the same implied corollary of "... and therefore you should accept us the way we are" that it has in reference to sexuality.

No, the shift from "psychogenic" to "biogenic" theories of autism happened for two reasons: first, and probably most important, the evidence (what little there was in the early '60s) didn't fit well with the psychogenic model**, and fit better with the biogenic one; another factor was activism by parents, who were fed up with being blamed for their children's condition, and who called for more research into potential biological causes.

Here, Boston University law professor Daniela Caruso, who has written an article on the history and legal impact of autism advocacy in the US, describes the relationship between the nascent field of biomedical research into autism and the beginnings of the US's major autism-advocacy groups:

It was only in 1964 that Bernard Rimland put forth an alternative explanation of the syndrome, based not on psychodynamics but rather on neurobiology. In 1965, Rimland founded the American Society for Autism (ASA) which is, to this day, a major center of advocacy.

Following Rimland's work, activism in the name of autism began to flourish thanks to both grassroots efforts and power houses. Some groups - most visibly Cure Autism Now (CAN) and the National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR) - coalesced around genetic research and investigation of toxic substances potentially related to the surge of autism. It is no coincidence that such movements emerged in a context of burgeoning environmental activism. Many other capillary initiatives focused instead on the reality of living with autism by developing information centers for parents of newly diagnosed children, and starting awareness campaigns aimed at educating the public about this poorly-understood phenomenon.

(See also: this post, which discusses another article on the history of autism advocacy in the US. I also found another recent article about the role of parent activism throughout the history of autism, but I can't get at the full text of it).

I also found this snippet in Rimland's book itself (that part of it I could see on the Internet, anyway; I don't own the book), discussing why he thought so many researchers were reluctant to consider the possibility that autism had a biological basis:

In discussing the obvious prejudice against the hereditary viewpoint, Nolan Lewis (1954) points out, "It would seem that most of the prejudice against genetic inheritance stems from a feeling in the realm of wish fulfillment, based on the idea that acceptance of genetic factors would create an attitude of therapeutic hopelessness." Williams (1956) cites this point among others in his attempt to penetrate the prejudice against heredity. He notes that hopelessness is by no means justified by the evidence, and cites the ready correction of diabetes, phenylketonuria and hypothyroidism as examples.

So, that's kind of interesting --- that, at the outset, there was reluctance to adopt a conception of autism as innate and biologically based because of worries that that might mean it was impossible to eradicate through treatment --- but the answer to that wasn't, "so let's not try to make them non-autistic, let's just try to integrate them into society to the best of our, and their, ability", it was "don't be silly, of course we can make them non-autistic!"

I'd also want to point out that the two competing narratives of autism came from the same source: medical professionals, whether psychoanalysts or biomedical researchers. This is in contrast to the two competing narratives of homosexuality, one of which came from medical professionals and the other of which came straight (heh) from the people they were trying to describe. It wasn't until much later that autistic people's own viewpoints were even known to exist, much less taken into account by medical professionals and policymakers.

So, while as far as I know most autistic people do think they were born autistic, that idea doesn't have the same liberatory subtext for autism that it has for sexual orientation. (Indeed, the switch over to a mainstream view of autism as innate and biologically based had already happened when research into "extinguishing" autistic behaviors was at its peak.) The biggest thing it did was to free parents from guilt at having caused the autism, which is important and was definitely needed, but it left the position of the autistic people themselves unchanged.

*I'm using that phrase --- instead of "the autistic community" --- because I am mostly talking about parents. I've made this distinction before: the autism community, which includes parents/caregivers, healthcare workers, autism researchers, and educators; and the autistic community, which is the autistic people themselves. Sometimes the latter group is included in the former, but mostly it is not, and sometimes the two groups are at odds with each other.

**See Chapter 3 of Rimland's 1964 book, Infantile Autism, for a discussion of what those findings were and how they conflicted with the psychogenic model of autism.

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.)

More Disagreeing by Diagnosing: the Aspie-in-Chief

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Partial transcript of a podcast by two progressive political bloggers that criticizes President Obama's leadership style, which the podcast hosts believe is weak. The podcast, titled "Hey Obama, Get Your Head Out of Your Asperger's!" spends a lot of time drawing a picture of Barack Obama as a "high-functioning Asperger's" autistic, who is fixated on governing according to his own ideas of what the Presidency is supposed to be, even at the expense of governing well, or of doing any of the things the people who voted for him want him to do. Besides producing this transcript, I also critique the Obama-as-Aspie metaphor, and quote another autistic blogger's (Leah Jane) criticism that I particularly endorse.
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Leah Jane at The Quixotic Autistic linked to this Professional Left podcast from a couple of weeks ago, titled "Hey Obama, Get Your Head Out of Your Asperger's!"

The podcast couches some actually very good criticism of Barack Obama's approach to being President in some really offensive stereotyping of autistic people (similar to the instances of Disagreeing by Diagnosing I've chronicled earlier on this blog). Leah Jane transcribed and paraphrased a little bit of the relevant part of the podcast (which is very long --- almost the whole first half of the forty-minute recording), but invited other people to transcribe more of it, so I figured I'd do that.

The participants in this exchange are progressive bloggers Driftglass and Blue Gal:

Driftglass: ... I'm very disappointed in my president right now.

Blue Gal: Yep. I actually woke up this morning and had a revelation about Barack Obama that I want to share with you.

Driftglass: Ooh! Pray tell, pray tell.

Blue Gal: I haven't even put this in the podcast notes, because I want it to be fresh.

Driftglass: Well, hold on, let me "man up" so I can handle it!

Blue Gal: (Laughs)

Driftglass: Let me put on my "man pants," as the new parlance for bracing myself ---I'm girding my loins.

Blue Gal: Girding your loins. There ya go.

Driftglass: Ready, gird! Okay, go.

Blue Gal: You and I both know --- and I actually did Photoshops this week of Obama as Spock --- and you and I both know, and lots of people have said that basically, Obama is sort of on that high-functioning Asperger's end of the spectrum, of not being emotional, of being very rational about things rather than getting mad, and that's very frustrating to a lot of us.

Driftglass: Yes.

Blue Gal: But along with that --- and also, full disclosure: Driftglass and I are very familiar with what it feels like to be on the Asperger's end of the spectrum; I think I can speak for both of us in that regard, may I?

Driftglass: That's a fair statement.

Blue Gal: We've talked about that before.

Driftglass: Yes, that's a reasonable ---

Blue Gal: Obsessive interests, you know, being able to ignore everything else to the point of a fault, and so forth. But one of the things that people like us, at that end of the spectrum, often do, is focus on one little detail --- again, to the fault of forgetting the big picture.

Driftglass: Yes.

Blue Gal: --- and I really think that the Constitutional scholar Barack Obama has this little seed in his mind that the Presidency is supposed to be weak, Constitutionally speaking, in relation to the Congress, in terms of starting legislation, and so forth. He's decided that he's going to return, he's going to change the way Washington works, and what he means by that is he's going to go back to a time when the Presidency and the Congress and the courts were part of this balancing act --- you know, the three branches ---

Driftglass: (cuts in) Pre-Imperial.

Blue Gal: Pre-Imperial presidency. So I'm thinking this morning in my kitchen about, "Well, when was it that we sort of got this imperial presidency?" and I realized, "Oh, my God, FDR!"

Driftglass: Yeah?

Blue Gal: And, so, doing this is antithetical to the New Deal! You know? It really is!
Driftglass: It is. It is.

Blue Gal: And that's why we're all having such a collective freakout, like "Revenge of the Nerds," when the nerd gets elected to the presidency of the student council, and, instead of sitting down and taking over and representing the rest of us nerds, and doing what we want him to do, he sits down and takes out the bylaws, and says (speaks in nasal voice) "Well, ya know, we really have to go by the bylaws and the bylaws say that everyone gets a vote and we all have to work together on a consensus."

Driftglass: Uh-huh.

Blue Gal: And we sit there and we're like, "But wait! We elected you President because we don't want the Alpha Betas to have a voice in this! They're jock assholes! They're not gonna come up with anything that's gonna even resemble a reasonable answer to any of the problems we have." (nasal voice) "No, but the bylaws say we have to do it this way." (resumes her normal voice) And the collective freakout from the progressive base, is, "Oh my God! He's going by the bylaws! Stop it! Stop it! Stop him now! We want you to be an imperial President. We want you to be strong."

Driftglass: He's an originalist. He's a Constitutional originalist; the first branch of government is the Congress.

Blue Gal: Yeah! And they're the ones that originate legislation.

Driftglass: Yeah, absolutely true.

Blue Gal: And, as someone who came fresh out of the Senate --- you know, was really in the Senate for a very short time --- and being the Constitutional scholar that he is --- but the other thing about this "Aspie" thing, this Asperger's thing, is, two things: One is, I think Barack Obama really has faith in America, and thinks
that America can survive anything. We survived Reagan. But I think he really has fundamental faith in America to survive anything, and so it's perfectly okay for him to conduct this experiment, and I really think he's conducting an experiment now, in his head. Let's go ahead and really do this Constitutional thing of letting the Congress have more power.

Driftglass: Yeah.

Blue Gal: And I think he realizes that, the people he's dealing with, they're Republicans, you know?

Driftglass: Yes. Well, there's the fly in the ointment, isn't it?

Blue Gal: Yeah! The fly in the ointment is, they want to destroy him. And he doesn't care because he's gonna conduct this little experiment in Constitutional originalism --- it's almost ironic in terms of the Tea Party always talking about defending the original Constitution, which to them means "we only have white men for President" ---

Driftglass: The Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, and nothing else.

Blue Gal: --- but the real Constitutional originalist is Barack Obama.

Driftglass: That's a very interesting revelation.

Blue Gal: And it's intellectualizing it like that that distracts me from wanting to (bleep) Congressional offices, damn it!

Driftglass: Okay, you'll have to, uh ---

Blue Gal: I think I'll have to edit that out.

(Both laugh).

Blue Gal: It's a joke! It's a joke. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Driftglass: Send them a very firm letter.

Blue Gal: I'm going to send a very firm letter, too!

Driftglass: Well, I can understand that point of view. I can respect that point of view. You raise a very interesting point, that he is conducting his presidency as a mediator among the branches of government, and as a modest, confirm-or-deny kind of person, but [one] who doesn't originate. And that is what the Constitution generally says a President should be.

Blue Gal: We're so not used to this, because, when I teach middle-school U.S. history, it's all about who was President. You start there, with U.S. history.

Driftglass: Of course.

Blue Gal: "Okay, when FDR was President, this, this, this and this happened." You don't start with, "The great Congresspeople of 1945, how brave they were!" You know? You don't go there! That's not how we think of history.

Driftglass: So he's essentially gone to the House basement and pulled out this 200-year-old machine, and said, "I'm going to oil it up and get it running again and make it run the way it was originally intended to run." That's a very interesting theory, and I think that we could spend probably the rest of the podcast talking about it.

Blue Gal: I think so. Yeah.

Driftglass: But if I'm that guy, then Step One is, I stop torturing people.

Blue Gal: Yeah. Yeah.

Driftglass: Step Two, I close down secret prisons. If you really ---

Blue Gal: And that's it. I think that's where he fails his own experiment.

Driftglass: He does.

Blue Gal: Because, there are areas --- particularly during the Bush administration --- where presidential power just exploded.

Driftglass: And he wants to hang onto that.

Blue Gal: He wants to hang onto that! You can't have it both ways.

I do think there might be something to Blue Gal's notion that Barack Obama, the Constitutional scholar, might be deliberately not being as strong a leader as he could be because he believes the Presidency *should* be weak. Of course, there is a conflict there with his keeping in force all the totalitarian measures his predecessor adopted after 9/11, using a vague Terrorist Threat to justify all manner of surveillance-state excesses --- and Driftglass and Blue Gal catch that inconsistency, and acknowledge it. They make some other criticisms of Obama's leadership style that I think carry a lot of weight, like his persistence in believing that the extremists who've largely taken over control of the Republican Party (in what I think of as a two-stage process that began with the anti-Clinton Republican Revolution of 1994, which gave us Newt Gingrich, and has culminated with the current anti-Obama backlash) will move even one nanometer to the left in order to compromise with him --- even if he moves a mile to the right first, as a gesture of good faith. Driftglass also makes a good point that Obama is not only President, he is also leader of the Democratic Party, and he is abandoning this second responsibility. I also appreciated their discussion of the long historical roots* of the "imperial Presidency" that they suspect Obama of wanting (if not quite wholeheartedly) to abdicate.

But this "oh, the President is an Aspie, that's why he's so 1) emotionless, 2) naive and 3) stubbornly committed to principle at the expense of realpolitik" thing, that's the part I didn't find particularly helpful or illuminating.

I thought Leah Jane put her finger on the biggest thing that's wrong with this use of autism-as-metaphor:

[W]hen the American people were at an all time euphoria about Obama, he was compared to Spock, and Superman, and other idols of nerd culture, but the "A" word never came up. Now, progressives are finding a few walloping things wrong with his decisionmaking and snubbing of progressives, and now it's so convenient to label him with autism or some other "disorder" or invisible disability. Disability need not apply to people when they're doing what you think is right, but the moment you find fault with them, disabilities begin to be thrown about, and always the negative stereotypical traits are thrown in too. Never would it be suggested (at least while he is alive, see Einstein and Newton) that Obama has Asperger Syndrome for an exceptional trait which makes him a fine leader. Always focus on what makes them different, not good. Same for Narcissistic Personality, or Psychopathic Personality, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or now, Asperger Syndrome. Yay. Or just happily labeling anyone who disagrees with you as part of the Loonie Left, or a Wingnut, or a Right Wing Nutjob, having "Nazi Tourettes," having some type of ADD or ADHD, or a Crazy [insert noun], or Republitard.

How delightful to know that the mentally and intellectually disabled are so disposable.

I remember this, too: during the campaign and shortly after he became President, people would use words like "cerebral," "rational" (or "hyper-rational," if you're fond of superlatives), "intellectual," "professorial," or talk about his desire to transcend partisanship, or dirty politics, or whatever; the image was of a guy who practically embodied Reason and Idealism and Moderation in All Things. And we did not use a psychiatric diagnosis to convey this image; we used mere adjectives. Now that some commentators see these same traits as flaws --- as impediments to his being an effective President --- they describe them in psychiatric terms. What were character traits or habits are now symptoms.

Using metaphors like that --- comparing some trait, or philosophical stance, or policy position, in a politician to a DSM diagnosis --- does two things. First, it marginalizes and delegitimizes the person you're talking about, since whatever they say can (and usually is) just be used as further evidence of their incapacity; and second, it feeds the stigma against people with that particular diagnosis. There's already a stereotype that autistic people are never leaders, never politicians, because of our total lack of social skills; if "autistic" or "Aspie" become common insults for a leader who is seen to be ineffective, the stereotype becomes stronger (and also, more specific to political leadership). Young autistic people trying to find something they're good at and want to do with their lives might assume they can't go into politics (even if they might want to, or have an aptitude for it**), or people in a position to hire, say, campaign workers might choose not to hire anyone who says they're autistic, or who looks autistic, because they've gotten the idea that autistic people don't belong in politics.

*I wonder if, based on some things I've read at Arthur Silber's blog (start with this nine-part series on "Dominion Over the World" and follow links to his other writings on the history of American imperialism, if you've got lots of time and an intense interest in this matter), if this overpowered executive branch might not be even older than they seem to think it is --- if maybe it didn't start with Woodrow Wilson (or earlier --- you wouldn't call Teddy Roosevelt a passive, retiring, conciliatory sort of leader, would you?) rather than Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wilson was also a very active, aggressive President who embroiled the nation in bloody, imperialistic wars that it had no need to fight (in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Russia, according to Wikipedia; he also ultimately made the choice to involve the U.S. in World War I). But Wilson in particular seems to have done a lot of the thing that I had previously thought started with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that kicked off U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War: using executive power to declare war without ever formally declaring war, which the Constitution allows only Congress to do.

**Which some of us do!

Awesome Website: Take Back Halloween!

Suzie posted a link to this wonderful website today on Echidne's blog; the site is called Take Back Halloween!, and it's full of cool ideas for Halloween costumes based on powerful female figures from history and mythology.

(The name, Take Back Halloween!, refers to the current trend for women's Halloween costumes to be a "sexy" version of some generic category or character: I've blogged before about unimaginatively "sexy" superhero costumes. The ladies at Take Back Halloween! want to see more thoughtful, creative, personalized Halloween costumes; it's not sexiness per se but rather homogeneity and lack of imagination in Halloween costumes that they lament. See the Take Back Halloween! About page for more details.)

My favorite costume on that site, so far, is actually one that had occurred to me before as someone it would be cool, and relatively easy, to dress up as: the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Here's what Take Back Halloween! says about her:

Hatshepsut (ca. 1508-1458 BCE) was an extremely successful pharaoh whose reign was full of accomplishments --- important trade missions, gorgeous architecture, a booming economy. But the thing she's most famous for, at least nowadays, is that she had herself depicted as male on her monuments. There she is, King Hatshepsut, striding across the ancient bas reliefs with her broad shoulders and her beard ... it's a little weird until you understand what's going on. The role of pharaoh was gendered male in ancient Egypt, and Hatshepsut was just assuming the badges of office. She wasn't pretending to be personally male, and the texts unmistakably refer to her as female: "she" is the beloved "daughter" of Amun, destined to rule, and so forth. But Egyptian iconography and religion called for the pharaoh to have a male form, and so Hatshepsut had herself depicted with beard, kilt, the whole bit.

Take Back Halloween! suggests a standard dime-store Egyptian Queen costume, with the stripey headdress of a pharaoh substituted for whatever crown the costume comes with.

My own idea, when I conceived of a Hatshepsut costume, was to dress as the masculinized "King Hatshepsut" character --- fake beard, stripey headdress, crook and flail, pleated linen kilt, boobs bound down with a strip of the same material I'd used for the kilt. (This would be, obviously, only practical if the weather was warm, or if I was going to wear it to a party or other indoor event. In Kansas, it is usually too cold at night in late October to be running around outside with that little clothing on).
I would also wear a cardboard cartouche around my neck on a string, with (if I could find them) the hieroglyphs spelling Hatshepsut's name painted on it.

Another thing I thought would be fun to add to this costume, to throw a little gamer-geekery into the mix, would be to wear shoes evoking the "Freudian slippers" card from Munchkin, which allow your character in that game to function as whatever gender you say they are, even both at the same time. I thought that would be particularly a propos for Hatshepsut, who is female, but yet also male in her role as Pharaoh.

They also have lots of ideas for mythological-character costumes, which is another area of geekery that is dear to my heart. I was actually just pondering the best way to make a Gorgon costume that wasn't just a bunch of rubber snakes braided into one's hair --- the Gorgons, depending on what version of the myth you're reading, might have talons of bronze, wings of gold, and tusks like a wild boar or hippopotamus, or they might just be scaly and dragonlike; either way, "normal-looking woman with snakes on her head" falls short of the level of fearsomeness required.

Unfortunately, their Medusa costume is just a snake wig and a coat. Blah.

But they've got an impressive array of ancient-goddess costume ideas: there's the winged Egyptian goddess Isis, the Mayan goddess Ix Chel, the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu, and the Sumerian goddess Inanna. And those are only the goddesses I'd heard of before going to the site!

Andrea Dworkin on Female Rebellion

In her book Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin includes a chapter on female virginity, citing Joan of Arc and the two female saints who inspired her as examples of celibate women refusing to live the narrow, cramped lives to which their societies consigned them. For these women, their virgin state was both a practical strategy (since it's easier to risk your life when you have no children who depend on you, and no husband whose property you legally are) and a defiant gesture in itself:

The Church that killed [Joan of Arc] may now identify her as a martyr; but for women inspired by her legend, she is a martial hero luminous with genius and courage, an emblem of possibility and potentiality consistently forbidden, obliterated, or denied by the rigid tyranny of sex-role imperatives or the outright humiliation of second-class citizenship. Women have many martyrs, many valiant pacifists, sung and unsung; few heroes who made war. We know how to die, also how not to kill; Joan inexplicably knew how to make war. At her trial, Joan insisted that she had never killed on the battlefield, improbable since the combat was hand-to-hand; but she was known among her own men for standing against the commonplace practices of sadism on the battlefield. It is hard to believe that she did not kill; but whether she did or did not, she was an exemplary martial liberator -- nearly unique in the iconography and history of the European female, that tamed and incomprehensibly peaceful creature. Joan's story is not female until the end, when she died, like nine million other women, in flames, condemned by the Inquisition for witchcraft, heresy, and sorcery. Precisely because she was a hero whose biography brazenly and without precedent violates the constraints of being female until the terrible suffering of her death, her story, valorous and tragic, is political, not magical; mythic because she existed, was real, not because her persona has been enlarged over the centuries. Her virginity was not an expression of some aspect of her femininity or her preciousness as a woman, despite the existence of a cultish worship of virginity as a feminine ideal. She was known as Joan the Maid or, simply, The Maid ("La Pucelle"). Her reputation, her declaration, preceded her, established her intention and her terms; not in the context of being a holy or ideal female but in the context of waging war. Her virginity was a self-conscious and militant repudiation of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status, which, then as now, appeared to have something to do with being fucked. Joan wanted to be virtuous in the old sense, before the Christians got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. She incarnated virtue in its original meaning: strength or manliness. Her virginity was an essential element of her virility, her autonomy, her rebellious and intransigent self-definition. Virginity was freedom from the real meaning of being female; it was not just another style of being female. Being female meant tiny boundaries and degraded possibilities; social inferiority and sexual subordination; surrender to male force or violence; sexual accessibility to men or withdrawal from the world; and civil insignificance. Unlike the feminine virgins who accepted the social subordination while exempting themselves from the sex on which it was premised, Joan rejected the status and the sex as one thing -- empirical synonyms: low civil status and being fucked as indistinguishable one from the other. She refused to be fucked and she refused civil insignificance: and it was one refusal; a rejection of the social meaning of being female in its entirety, no part of the feminine exempted and saved. Her virginity was a radical renunciation of a civil worthlessness rooted in real sexual practice. She refused to be female. As she put it at her trial [a full transcript of which is available online here - Lindsay], not nicely: "And as for womanly duties. She said there were enough other women to do them."

...

We have role models; Joan had voices. Her voices were always accompanied by a radiance, illumination, an expanse of light. She saw angels and was visited by saints. Her two special voices, guides and consolation, were St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret of Antioch. While many of the elaborations on their legends show the iconoclastic individuality of the two saints, the main outlines of their lives -- the substance of their heroism -- were virtually identical. Both were desired by powerful men (heads of state), turned them down, were tortured and decapitated. Both were in mortal combat with male power, were militant in their opposition to it, did not capitulate, and were killed for resisting. Both were virgins.

St. Catherine was the patron saint of unmarried girls and also of philosophers and students. She was famous for her erudition, one of the rare and great women of learning. Her father, a king, wanted her to be married but she kept turning down suitors. One night she dreamed that Mary, holding Jesus, asked her if she wanted to be his bride. She said yes, but Jesus turned her down because she was not a Christian. She got baptized; that night Jesus, surrounded by angels and saints, put a wedding ring on her hand. When the Emperor Maxentius ordered all the Christians in Alexandria killed, Catherine went to him to argue for her faith. The Emperor made her debate fifty learned men, skilled orators; she won each debate and the fifty men were burned. The Emperor wanted Catherine for his mistress and promised that her image would be worshipped everywhere if only she would make a sacrifice to the gods. She refused, for Jesus and her faith. The Emperor threw her into prison and she was terribly tortured. The Catherine wheel, an instrument of torture, was invented for the purpose of eviscerating and killing her; but an angel destroyed the wheel. Catherine was killed by decapitation.

St. Margaret was the patron saint of peasants and women in childbirth, the latter not because she had children but because she was swallowed by the devil in the form of a dragon, and her purity and resistance were so great that he had to spew her up again whole and unhurt. Viewed as someone miraculously reborn uninjured, she became a symbol of hope in the life-and-death agony of childbirth. Margaret's father was a pagan priest, but she was secretly baptized. She tended animals in the fields. The governor, Olybrius, saw her, wanted her, and had her brought to him. She refused him and declared her faith. She was imprisoned, flogged, and terribly tortured. In prison she was swallowed by the dragon; and when she triumphed over the dragon, the devil confronted her again, this time in the form of a sympathetic man who told her that she had suffered too much:

But she seized his hair, hurled him to the ground, and placing her foot on his head, exclaimed:
"Tremble, great enemy. You now lie under the foot of a woman."

She was burned, torches applied to various parts of her body, but she acted as though she felt no pain. She was killed by decapitation.

The legends of both saints were well known in Joan's time and environment, common stories for everyone, not arcane anecdotes for the educated. The narrative details were so familiar that an evil and stupid person was even referred to, in the common parlance, as an "Olybrius." Women were named after these saints and celebrated name days. These saints were figures of mass adoration in stories of adventure, romance, and heroism. There was an elaborate and epic imagery in the churches to communicate visually the drama and scale of their bravery and martyrdom. The artifacts and paintings in the churches told the stories of the saints and their heroism and suffering in dramatic, graphic pictures; a bold, articulate, mesmerizing iconography not rivaled for effect until the invention of the wide screen in cinema. St. Catherine was pictured with the wheel named for her, St. Margaret with a dragon, both with swords. They were shown with swords because they had been decapitated, but the abridgement of the narrative into a martial image conveyed militance, not just martyrdom. Each faced what amounted to a state-waged war against her person: the whole power of the state -- military, physical, sadistic -- arrayed against her will and her resistance and the limits of a body fragile because human. This goes beyond the timorous ambition of today: a woman fights off a rapist. Each of these women fought off a rapist who used the apparatus of the state -- prison and torture -- to destroy her as if she were an enemy nation. Each refused the male appropriation of her body for sex, the right to which is a basic premise of male domination; each refused a man in whom male power and state power were united, a prototype for male power over women; and each viewed the integrity of her physical body as synonymous with the purity of her faith, her purpose, her self-determination, her honor. This was not a puerile virginity defined by fear or effeminacy. This was a rebel virginity harmonious with the deepest values of resistance to any political despotism.

Joan identified deeply with these women ... [s]he learned from them the way a genius learns: she did not repeat them in form or in content; she invented new form, new content, a revolutionary resistance. Joan did not die because men desired her; but because she refused the status, including the outward trappings (female clothing), of one who could be so desired at all. Virginity was one dimension of her overall strategy, one aspect of her rebellion; and, interestingly, her refusal to have sex with a man was not a dogmatic or ideological one. As Marina Warner points out in her book on Joan, the name Joan called herself and by which she was widely known, La Pucelle, "denotes a time of passage, not a permanent condition." Her own testimony at her trial seems to confirm this nuance:

Asked whether it had been revealed to her that if she lost her virginity she would lose her good fortune, and that her voices would come no more to her.
She said: That has not been revealed to me.
Asked whether she believes that if she were married the voices would come to her,
She answered: I do not know, and I wait upon Our Lord.

Had Joan simply learned a Church precept by rote or had she wanted to conform to a theological code of sexual purity, she would have held virginity to be a sacred state of being, one that would ennoble her for the duration of her life, a passive state intrinsically holy and magical with God's blessings. In her society, virginity was "an ideal wreathed in the finest poetry and exalted in beautiful Latin hymns and conventual chants." It was a common belief cited as fact by Church authorities with whom she came into contact that "God had revealed to virgins ... that which He had kept hidden from men." Instead for Joan -- and Catherine and Margaret -- virginity was an active element of self-determined integrity, an existential independence, affirmed in choice and faith from minute to minute; not a retreat from life but an active engagement with it; dangerous and confrontational because it repudiated rather than endorsed male power over women. For all three women, virginity was "a passage, not a permanent condition," the precondition for a precocious, tragic passage to death. As rebellion, virginity amounted to a capital crime. No woman, however, had ever rebelled the way Joan of Arc, virgin, rebelled.

Later in the chapter, Dworkin contrasts Joan's rebellion with the rebellion of a much later --- and fictional --- French heroine, this one created by a male novelist:

[Gustave Flaubert] wrote what a current paperback edition of his masterwork hails as "the greatest portrait ever written of a woman's soul in revolt against conventional society." The book is not about Joan of Arc. It is, instead and on the contrary, about Emma Bovary, a petite bourgeois whose great act of rebellion is to commit adultery. With this woman, called "my little lady" by her creator, the modern era begins: the era of the petite bourgeoisie seeking freedom. Female freedom is defined strictly in terms of committing forbidden sexual acts. Female heroism is in getting fucked and wanting it. Female equality means that one experiences real sexual passion -- driven to it, not faking. There is an equation between appetite and freedom, especially promiscuity (as one form of appetite) and freedom. A romantic distinctly not in the traveling, lyric tradition of Shelley or Byron, indeed, a female romantic with lightness in the head and fragmented fantasies feverish on the brain, "she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women ... who stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven ..." For Emma, Joan was such a comet, a figure of fantasy, in the ether, not ever having lived on earth in the framework of real human possibility. Emma's mind, murky with religious and romantic fantasy, wanted "the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts." In her sentimentality, "she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries"; and in her effete impotence, "[s]he tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing for a whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill." Alternately agitated and bored, having a mind filled with fantasies rather than ideas or possibilities, having no purpose or commitment, having no action, no vocation, only the boring chores and obligations of domesticity; too self-involved to find either passion or emotion in commonplace human relations, including motherhood, she is incapable -- to use the language of Iris Murdoch -- of moral or artistic excellence, defeated because she is immersed in personal fantasy, "the chief enemy of excellence," "the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is outside one." ...

Preoccupied with fantasy, Emma does not see or experience the world outside herself except as a deprivation of attention from her inner fog, and so she remains essentially untouched -- by the husband who fucks her and by human possibility in the wider world of real events. Virginity is redefined through her, given a modern meaning: a woman untouched is a woman who has not yet felt sexual desire enough to be made sick by it, experienced sexual passion enough to crave it, and broken rules in order to be carnal; a woman fucked by her husband but feeling nothing, or not enough, no lust, no romance, no brilliance of sensation, is still a woman untouched. This new virginity of body and soul survives marriage, and marriage itself generates new, incoherent fantasies of romantic or sexual grandeur: "Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires." There is no freedom, no heroism, no ambition, no equality, outside the domain of sex experienced as carnal passion and also as the breaking of a rule. Danger is in the extremity of feeling and the risk of flouting convention; and the danger verifies the authenticity of the event, hidden from history yet having the significance of a male act of freedom inside history. The large, brave world of Joan becomes the tiny, suffocating world of Emma: and in it we still live. The old virginity -- with its real potential for freedom and self-determination -- is transformed into the new virginity -- listless, dissatisfied ennui until awakened by the adventure of male sexual domination: combat on the world's tiniest battlefield. It took Freud to call the refusal to fight on that little battlefield "repression" and to name the ambition to fight on the large one "penis envy." The cell door closed behind us, and the key turned in the lock.