Some bosses offer dating tips. Diane Sawyer counsels her colleagues on freezing their eggs.

The anchor of ABC’s World News has long been a sounding board for her famously hard-working staff on a host of personal issues, from dating to the more complex realities of a demanding career. A recurring theme with women: finding time away from the office to meet a partner and have kids before they hit 40. It doesn’t always happen, as Sawyer, who first married at age 42, well knows. When it doesn’t, Sawyer sends her workers to New York University’s Fertility Clinic.

.       .       .       .       .       .      

Three quarters come in because they aren’t ready to have children yet. Some are sent by their parents: I know you want to work, but I want grandkids someday. Many are furious their doctors didn’t tell them about egg freezing sooner. “I want to send Diane a basket of flowers for what she’s doing,” says one childless 40-something in the media.

The idea that one could be a woman in her 40s in the media and not be aware of fertility issues is just completely laughable.  This is the same news media that for at least thirty years has been bullying women to get pregnant before they’re 25 or else!!!  That “childless 40-something in the media” probably spent her college internships back in the 1980s writing scripts that scolded women who didn’t get pregnant by 25, then worked as a producer for TV segments in the 1990s discussing the heartbreak of infertility and the joy of international adoption/IVF babies/donor eggs/babies via surrogacy, and then was promoted to create shows in the 2000s recycling these scripts and story lines on daytime TV, the nightly news, and evening news magazines.

Never mind that women in their 30s or 40s who don’t have children might not have them because they don’t want them.  I wonder how many of Diane Sawyer’s employees submit to this expensive procedure because they’re afraid to tell their bosses or co-workers, “no, thank you, I don’t want children.”  I wonder how many women in their 50s and 60s feel pressure to cast their decisions not to have children as some kind of bad luck or physiological failure, because of the opprobrium they might face if they say, “I’m really not into children, so I didn’t have them?”

But, really:  the notion that these stories offer some kind of secret wisdom that women have never heard of before is just too stupid to believe.

We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  (I occasionally get comments like this about the sex of book authors on my evaluation forms that went something like this:  “I thought that this course was biased because we read mostly female-authored books, but then we read some books by men that seem to agree with the women, so I guess the books in this class aren’t biased.”  I really must ask my male colleagues if they ever are informed that including women-authored books on their syllabi is reassuring because it means that the information presented by a male professor and male authors isn’t biased after all.)

A few students suggested that next time we don’t talk about rape so much, but then they didn’t like the one book we assigned that focused on married heterosexuality either.  But the truth is that none of the books in the history of sexuality are super-sexy, because the historiography of sexuality is very Foucaultian and is therefore about the distribution of and challenges to power, challenges that frequently hurt the challengers more than the reigning system of power distribution.  I think the students were surprised that studying sex could be so depressing, although I warned them from the beginning that I think I teach the most depressing courses in the Baa Ram U. history curriculum.

I think the problem is that most modern college students experience sex as liberating, and they don’t want to think about the constraints on sexuality or even the sexual abuse that was a much more widespread experience of most people transhistorically, even in the present.  (I know that’s how I would have thought about these issues as a 20-year old, so I’m sympathetic to this view.)  I get it that the class turned out to be kind of a bummer for them, even if the reading assignments hadn’t been so heavy.  (But quite frankly, the last thing I’d ever want to be accused of is a lack of rigor when teaching anything, let alone a pilot class on the history of sexuality.)

Senator Ted Kennedy was of course notably silent through these hearings, because he had been a witness called at his nephew’s rape trial the previous summer. (That’s what Snarlin’ Arlen meant to imply when he said towards the end of the clip above, “Mr. Chairman I object to that. I object to that vociferously. . . If Senator Kennedy has anything to say, let him participate in this hearing.”)

Anita Hill looks so young and without defenses or allies in these old clips. She was unimaginably brave to endure this in public. Deborah Gray White suggests the powerful historical currents that Hill swam against 20 years ago in Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2008):

Their particular history, the black woman’s history, was especially oppressive. [One author] alluded to its prohibitive nature when she delicately noted the “almost unmentionable history of the burdens of those soul-trying times when, to bring profit to the slave trade and to satisfy the base desires of the stronger hand, the Negro woman was the subject of compulsory immorality.” Sylvia Francoz Williams was even more direct. So painful was the wound of the black woman’s history, she argued, that “her detractors rely upon her not voluntarily reopening it, even to probe it for its cure.” Perceptively, Williams maintained that the black woman’s “sensitiveness on this point has been the greatest shield to the originators of the scandal,” 5.

I recall being in a graduate seminar that week in which the professor asked, “what do you think will be the historical legacy of the Thomas hearings?  Is this a turning point?”  Some students said that yes, the Thomas hearings would change a lot, and one third-year graduate student informed us that “I’m taking notes for future lectures right now.”  Perhaps unimaginatively, I answered “no,” mostly because for me, the Thomas hearings were about men closing ranks to trash a young woman’s testimony.  Secondarily, they revealed a continuing and disturbing white fascination with black bodies and black sexuality. I didn’t think the Thomas hearings would make the problem of sexual harassment go away, or even that there would even be a consensus that it was a problem at all.  Unfortunately, I think I was right.  In the past twenty years or so we have witnessed a fierce backlash against feminist efforts in the 1970s and 1980s to define rape and sexual harassment.  The 1990s and the 2000s have featured high-profile and successful efforts by men to redefine rape as consensual sex.

Perhaps one small thing has changed for the better, at least in the field of American women’s history.  Since the Thomas hearings, African American feminist scholars have developed a small but powerful bibliography on the rape and sexual trauma that was central to the process of enslavement in the Americas.  Before 1991, Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South(1985) was the only monograph on enslaved women.  But the ferment of the 1990s produced a growing number of young scholars who would write about the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in slavery and in the post-emancipation United States in articles and books that put black women’s experiences at their centers. African American and feminist historians are now developing a historiography and a language with which to confront a history that is characterized by rape and other forms of sexual and family trauma. I wonder if there would have been the beginnings of this kind of history without Anita Hill’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee twenty years ago.

Here is a list of selected titles in my field that address sexuality in African American women’s history:

• Mia Bay, “In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era,” Reviews in American History, 34:4 (2006), 407-426.
• Daina Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe”:  Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (2007)
• Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (2006)
• Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs : Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996)
• Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom:  Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004)
• Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations:  Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (2002)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:  An American Controversy (1998) 
• Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women:  Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004)
• Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth:  A Life, A Symbol (1996)
• Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (2009)
• Wendy Anne Warren, “‘The Cause of her Grief’:  The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 93:4 (2007) 1031-1049.

Where there's smoke. . .

Howdy, friends.  It’s just another gorgeous, clear, warm, sunny, dry, earthquake-free, hurricane-free, and (of course) tsunami-free autumn day here on the High Plains Desert.  The crickets are chirping happily, and there are a few lawnmowers humming in the distance.  I’ve got a stack of student essays to mark while I sit outside trying to extend the tan on my gams, but here’s some fun links to keep you amused if the weather (or something else) is keeping you indoors.  To wit:

• The Denver Post apparently has reporters who listened to Grace Hood’s story last week on KUNC radio, as they went out and either plagiarized or simply replicated her reporting on the K12 Inc./Colorado Virtual Academy online schools.  Guess what?  No accountability and high dropout rates, but K12 Inc. is  making big money on their for-profit hinky schemes!  I’m glad the only surviving major Colorado daily has picked this up–but I’m kind of stunned by how closely the DP story hews to Hood’s reporting.  Then again, as we noted last week, the results of online education are pretty predictable and repeatable, wherever you look.   
• Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar has some funny (as in LOLSOB!) reflections on her days as a server and remembrances of “the verbal tip,” and how this is curiously relevant to Excellence Without Money.
• I believe Squadratomagico made it back alive from Burning Man–but she hasn’t posted a report on this year’s festival yet.  What gives?
• I for one sure as hell hope New Jersey Governor Chris Christie doesn’t run for president, not because I completely disagree with him about pretty much every political and policy position (and you know I do), but because the U.S. media is going to be awash in stupid fat jokes for the duration of his campaign and/or presidency.  We went through this in 2008 with Sarah Palin’s Vice-Presidential run, friends.  Just as I told you then–and have continued to tell you–calling Republicans stoopid is clearly not an effective strategy for electoral success–or would President Adlai Stevenson, President Walter Mondale, President Michael Dukakis, and President Al Gore care to disagree with me?  Similarly, calling the political opposition fat seems pretty stoopid, especially since the majority of American adults–who are all eligible voters, BTW– are by many studies considered overweight or obese!
• Speaking of presidential politics:  Eric Wemple thinks that the news media should actually read Ron Suskind’s book and his documentation instead of just recycling White House pushback claims.  (Claims which upon examination of the actual book look pretty ridiculous, according to Wemple.)
• Call your shot for the Republican primary next year:  Who’s it gonna be?  The handsome guy from Texas with great hair, or the handsome guy from Michimassachutah with slightly stiffer and silverier hair?  (Handsome for grandfathers, that is.)
• My one concession to the fact that summer is over:  Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good.  Never mind that the name invites a George Carlin-style “jumbo shrimp” routine–it’s what’s for dinner!

Dear Historiann–

I work out at a gym off campus.  I have often seen some of my colleagues and one of my graduate students in various states of undress, including nudity.  Likewise, they have seen me the same way.  While I am generally very comfortable being naked in front of others, I have found that these encounters make me slightly uncomfortable.  They also make me laugh.  What is the etiquette for seeing your colleagues and your students naked in the gym locker room?  I sure could use some advice.

Heh.  I’ve never been so grateful for my 33 mile commute as I am today!

Dear readers, let me throw this one out to you.  While I’ve lived in college towns for the past 14 years, they weren’t the towns where my university was located, so while I appreciate that this is a problem for many uni faculty and students, I’m not the best person to answer this question.  (Come to think of it, I’ve never regularly showered anywhere but home.  I’m a runner–I don’t need a gym.)  What do you think?  What is locker-room etiquette anyway, besides “don’t stare” and/or “acknowledge your colleague/student but only above the collar bone?”

Related but not immediately relevant confession:  I’m just not into all of the body care in public facilities that’s become nearly de rigeur over the past decade.  What’s with all the spas and waxing everywhere, all of the time?  It’s like middle-class women are all ancient Romans, getting oiled up and wiped down by strigil-wielding  attendants.  Thanks, but no thanks!

‘Cos it’s a steady job
And it’s the only thing that makes me money
And it gives me something to laugh about. . .

I understood when she went Hollywood and decided to write and direct movies–it pays a hell of a lot more than writing for print or online publications, after all.  And lord knows, it’s not like Hollywood is glutted with working women writers and directors who want to produce something other than bam-bam/cops-n-robbers/blowemup movies.  But I miss the writing she did in the 1970s, which was of the moment and became an important work documenting the history of feminism in that era.

She’s got a commentary this week on The Daily Beast from the perspective of someone who was “an adult in the 1960s.”  Accordingly, she serves as an important feminist corrective and offers some words of caution about the Mad Men-ripoff, 60s nostalgia trap of The Playboy Club, which is apparently a teevee show now.  I would love to quote the whole article, but you’ll just have to click this link to read it.  Here’s a little flava:

Inspired by the success of Mad Men, it has gone back to the early 1960s, to that golden moment just before the women’s movement came along and ruined everything. It’s about several Bunnies, an ambitious Chicago lawyer, and the mob. The show (or at least the opening episode) is not unlike Playboy magazine in the early years: it has its moments, but it’s mostly an excuse to show women’s breasts, which (in this version, because it’s on a network) are usually encased in fabulous pointy period bras or shoved upward in satin-polyester Bunny costumes. Hefner doesn’t appear except as a shadowy figure, like a masked mafioso in the Federal Witness Protection Program. But he does provide a weird, creepy voice-over, on which he says that Bunnies “were the only women in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be.”

This of course is so preposterous on so many levels that it is almost not worth attacking. But I worry (as someone who was an adult in the 1960s) that young people will see The Playboy Club and think that this is what life was like back then and that Hefner, as he also says in his weird, creepy voice-over, was in fact “changing the world, one Bunny at a time.”

So I would like to say this:

1. Trust me, no one wanted to be a Bunny.

2. A Bunny’s life was essentially that of an underpaid waitress forced to wear a tight costume.

3. Playboy did not change the world.

Incidentally, the weird, creepy voice-over is probably my favorite thing about The Playboy Club, and I was disappointed to read that it might not continue after the first episode. Not that I am planning to watch it again. Although you never know. Before she became a feminist and did change the world, Gloria Steinem wrote a famous piece about being a Bunny, and made clear how shabby and pathetic life was at a Playboy Club. She recently called for women to boycott the show. I am currently boycotting so many television shows that I may not have time to boycott another.

If President Obama backs raising the age of medicare, which won’t save the Government money in the long run due to the huge numbers of 65 and 66 year olds who will shift to Medicaid and who will break the backs of small businesses providing health care to elderly workers — and which will force middle class elderly workers who don’t have employer paid health care to pay premiums of ten thousand dollars a year or more for two more years, with huge deductibles and out of pocket costs, he doesn’t deserve a second term as Democratic President. Let him run as as Republican or go home to Chicago. He will have sold us out.

I am a knowledge worker who outside of voluntary gardening or home improvement chores has the privilege of working with my brain in a climate-controlled environment.  However, I have two elderly relatives who although mentally and physically disabled from infancy, worked all their lives on their feet and with the strength of their bodies, frequently in very hot and/or very uncomfortable circumstances:  light factory work, janitorial work, and busing tables and running the dishwasher at a Bob Evans restaurant.  Towards the end of their working lives, as they were “downsized” from union-protected jobs, they did this for little more than the minimum wage.

Most of you reading this blog right now are like me, I’m guessing.  We’re the kind of people who have to seek out opportunities for physical activity via running clubs and gym memberships because it’s not something that’s called for on the job.  Barring a serious illness, because our work takes only a minimal toll on our physical strength, many of us hope or expect to continue working past 65.  Not everyone has that privilege, which is why Medicare eligibility must remain where it is.

Does anyone else find it tragic that a few years ago in the midst of the ”health” “care” “reform” debates in the U.S., there were serious proposals to lower the age of Medicare eligibility as a strategy to moving towards universal care?  Does anyone doubt what the so-called “left” in this country would do if a Republican president floated raising the age of Medicare eligibility?  (Bueller?  Bueller?  Anyone?)

Why does everything somehow come back to The Music Man at this blog? (I guess that tells you a little bit about the pace of life and the apparent year on the calendar here in sweet, quiet Potterville, which often–and especially in the summer–feels more like 1912 than 2011.) But of course, Harold Hill was the master of inventing moral panics, right? No traveling sales for him today–he’d be using Facebook, blogs, and Twitter to gin up controversy and drive traffic to his website, where he’d sell Moral Panic Computer Endpoint Protection at $29.95 a pop, guaranteed to protect children from the “libertine men and scarlet women” out there on the world-wide non peer-reviewed internets.

Good night, ladies! Enjoy this hot day, and try to store up some fun memories to keep you warm in the coming winter. The time is swift and will be gone.