Historiann

For Madeline, with all our love.

Here’s one for Madeline and Annabel: Continue Reading »

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Teresa Sullivan reinstated unanimously by the University of Virginia governing board.

Looks like her political capital is pretty high!  This is something that always leaves me filled with mirth:  the incompetence of the evil when they try to oust the decent and the responsible.  They do it poorly, at a truly amazing rate.  They’re so stupid they can’t even find stupid with two hands and a looking glass.  I’d say the governing board has pie on its faces, but that seems to underestimate the amount of damage they’ve done to themselves, unless it is a pile filled with horse crap-covered M-80s and frosted with napalm.

Dumba$$es.

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Per the last post (and many of your thoughtful comments), I’ve been thinking about that expression, “having it all” which has been evoked as a proxy for feminist goals for at least thirty years.  (Some intrepid M.A. student in a History or American Studies department should do a history of this expression, “having it all,” and its application to the women’s movement.  There:  that’s my mentoring for the day, and it’s only just 8:30 a.m. MDT!  On to the laundry and the library, now.)

What an ugly expression, meant to portray feminists as greedy consumers rather than social justice advocates.  And yet, many feminists have accepted or embraced “having it all” as the terms of the debate!  Continue Reading »

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In her thoughtful review of Linda Hirshman’s Victory:  The Triumphant Gay Revolution (2012)  E.J. Graff says that Hirshman presents a serviceable overview of the GLBT movement.  However, she says that Hirshman’s core argument for its remarkable success slights the Civil Rights and feminist movements that preceded gay liberation, and misunderstands the importance of the previous two movements to the victories of LGBT rights:

Of course, Hirshman isn’t trying to tell the entire history of the lesbian and gay movement, but so much is missing that she gets her analysis wrong. Or did she limit her focus because her analysis is off? In the book’s introduction,Hirshman claims that America’s two great preceding social movements, for racial justice and women’s equal rights, were less ambitious and therefore less successful, making strategic calculations to emphasize their similarities to the dominant social order. Lesbians and gay men, in contrast, had to work hard to open up room for our deviance, and therefore achieved more profound social change.

.       .       .       .       .

But in praising the LGBT movement’s drive to make the world safe for difference, Hirshman implies that black people and feminists never had to establish their moral cred. Is she kidding? Blacks had to fight depiction as subhumans, sexual monsters, immoral criminals, and intellectual inferiors. Feminists were painted as sterile, heartless harpies; women’s brains as supposedly too small for public life. Both groups expanded the meaning of the founding American dictum: All of us are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Continue Reading »

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That’s better.  Too much negative energy in that last post and the accompanying image.  Sadly, it looks like we’ll miss the Transit of Venus out here on the Front Range, as it’s entirely overcast.  (Imagine your own frowny-face here.)  Neat discovery:  old X-ray films are really handy for observing things like solar eclipses and Transits of Venus, although who knows what technology they’ll have on hand for the 2117 viewings! Continue Reading »

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Via Echidne, we learn that Tbogg has discovered that MRAs don’t understand how social media or the intertoobz work.  Also:  they have totally crap spelling and punctuation:

Misunderstanding how the Twitter works, George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina seemed to think he was using his “inside voice” when speaking (tw@tting) to [Sandra] Fluke on Twitter only to find out, in a very round-about way, that she elected to retweet to her 36,000 followers what George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina had to say to her and she only did this because she is obviously racist against douchebags who like to shout stuff at ladies on the internet because, as we like to say: virtual manhood is better than no manhood at all.

Anyway, that is where I came in when I screen-capped the whole exchange and made a post out of it, which brings us to last week when George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina decided to google himself on the internet and OH HOLY $HIT! he is now kind of semi-famous for Doing Internet Swears At Ladies and now that all that money he spent on eHarmony is just f^(king wasted because ladies will not want to go on a date with him ever ever again besides the fact that all he ever wants to talk about is golf which is like the third gayest sport ever. Besides, also: boring. Continue Reading »

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I had a phone call the other day from a historian I’ve never met who had assigned my book to a graduate seminar this quarter and who wanted to tell me how much he and his students liked my book.  (This was in a seminar in which they apparently scorched nearly every other book–unfairly, of course, but he passed this along to me because their appreciation for my book was so striking by comparison.*)  In the course of conveying these extravagant compliments, he said something very thoughtful and very wise:

It’s been a bad past few years here [at my university].  Since we’re not going to get recognition or support from our institutions for our work, I’ve decided to e-mail or call everyone whose book my students and I really like to thank them and let them know.

Isn’t that a great idea?  Let’s all do this!  Continue Reading »

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You can have the coaches, the royal balls, the glass slippers, and personality-free Handsome Princes. For a library like that, I’d happily live with a beast. Continue Reading »

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A colleague of mine recently gave a talk at my undergraduate college.  While we caught up over a cup of coffee, he asked about my experiences there, as he’s interested in sending his daughter to a college or university like that.  As I told him stories about the safety and liberty I felt there–and have felt nowhere else before Freshman convocation or since graduation–it occured to me that a surprising number of my fondest memories involved semi-public nudity.  Most of the naked memories were streaking up and down Senior Row or skinny-dipping in a fountain after dark when few people were around to witness us, and it was always a group endeavor–sometimes all-women, sometimes a coed group.

Is it just me, or do some of you have similar stories and memories?  What do you think is behind the compulsion of students to experience a college campus in Eve’s Livery? Continue Reading »

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Scram already, willya?

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