Historiann

Well, kids:  you gotta hand it to John McCain.  He’s made Democrats go totally crayzee with his choice of VP!

First of all, via Shakesville, the Palin family has announced that their eldest daughter Bristol is currently five months pregnant, which pretty much scotches the tacky rumormongering that Sarah Palin’s youngest son Trig is her grandson, and not her son.  The young lady and her baby’s father plan to marry and raise their child together.  Seems to me like there are a lot of families in this situation today–Dems will push unsourced rumors and nasty comments about other people’s sex lives at their peril.  (Hey–aren’t we also the party that stays out of people’s bedrooms?  Like we’re also the party of feminist values, I guess.)  D’ya still want to go after her for going after her wife-beating, stepson-tasing ex-brother in law?  Does anyone have some dirt on the kid who’s off to Iraq this fall?  Well, do ya, punks?

And secondly, also via Shakesville, Joe Biden steps in it this morning, at a rally in Historiann’s hometown, no less:

“There’s a gigantic difference between John McCain and Barack Obama and between me and I suspect my vice presidential opponent,” Biden said at an outdoor rally Sunday, getting ready to hit the GOP ticket for their economic policies.

“She’s good-looking,” he quipped.

Heh heh heh.  What’s the matter, honey?  Can’t you take a joke?  You should smile more, with such a pretty face.  And Gloria Steinem was just a slut from East Toledo!  Heh heh heh.

Keep it up, Dems!  Remember:  the people don’t think you’re laughing at Palin.  They think you’re laughing at them.

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Those of you who know me in real life know that I pretend to be a really hard-core jock while struggling to get out to run 5-6 miles twice a week and doing curls with 10-pound weights about twice a month.  One of the ways that I preserve this illusion is that I like to run on the Ute Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, which runs from the visitor’s center at the top of the park at 11,796 feet above sea level, down to Milner Pass, the continental divide, at 10,800 feet.  I end up doing this about once or twice a year–it’s about a two-hour drive from my house, depending on the time of day and traffic, so I can’t justify getting out to do it weekly or even monthly during the summer, the only time the road and the trail are accessible (usually early May to late September, depending on the snow.)  Sometimes I do it round trip, but yesterday I only had time for a one-way jog, downhill.

Yesterday was the day, and it was great!  I’ve never had any trouble running at that altitude, for some reason.  You feel a little lightheaded and tingly at first, but then it’s just another run, albeit with better scenery than my neighborhood routes.  No large animal sightings–not even an elk, which in RMNP are as common as pigeons in big cities.  Once I saw a couple of bighorn sheep on this run–fortunately, they left me and my running partner alone, as they can be very nasty creatures.  There were still lots of wildflowers, like asters, Indian paintbrushes, and all kinds of little yellow and white blossoms.  And the weather was mixed–overcast with thunderstorms all around me, but patches of warm sun (as you can see in this picture of the trailhead.)  Maybe I can get up there again in a few weeks to do the round-trip run before they close the road!

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Is anyone else struck by the way that men and women in both the print and broadcast media describe women athletes who happen to have children as (to paraphrase) “an Olympic athlete and a XX year-old mom!” in a tone that suggests they’re saying something like “an Olympic athlete and a XX year-old two-packs-a-day smoker!” or “an Olympic athlete and a XX year-old liver transplant patient!”  Why does anyone think that motherhood necessarily erodes or competes with athletic talent?  Of course, not every mother physically gives birth to her children, but even for those who do, childbirth and its aftermath doesn’t necessarily alter the body in ways that would affect athletic performance.  (And, if a woman is an Olympic-level competitor before she has children, her level of fitness means that she would be among the likliest candidates to snap back from pregnancy and childbirth extremely quickly.)

NPR did it again this morning in reporting on the women’s marathon gold medal winner, Romania’s Constantina Tomescu-Dita.  The reporter declared “she’s a 38 year-old mom who made it look easy!”  And U.S. women’s swim team member Dara Torres is almost always described as a “mom”in any reporting on her comeback efforts.  (With both Tomescu-Dita and Torres, the reporters seem equally amazed at their “advanced” ages, too, which are history-making but–do we really think of 40 as enfeebled any more?  U. S. Olympic weightlifter Melanie Roach’s motherhood is also heavily featured in the reporting on her, although she is still a relatively dewy 33.  The fact that reporters and the media are making such a big deal out of female parenthood suggests that culturally we’re still very invested in the notion of women’s bodies’ weakness and delicacy compared to men’s bodies.  I haven’t heard any male athletes being described in breathless terms as “dads,” although my study of this subject is admittedly accidental and anecdotal.

Finally, what’s with the word “mom,” instead of “mother?”  This seems to be an appropriation of the expression “stay-at-home mom,” or “full-time mom,” which are almost never rendered as “stay-at-home mother” or “full-time mother.”  To me, it sounds grating, because “mom” is a name, not a job, and not a word that should be used with the indefinite article (as in “a mom.”)

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UPDATED BELOW

This letter came in across the transom in the H-WOMEN digest Monday night:

I have a question that deals not so much with scholarship as with academic
life.  I would very much appreciate hearing how other women in higher
education — and their institutions — may have managed having a baby
during an academic term.  I am currently pregnant, due February 10, right
in the midst of Spring 2009 semester, which runs from mid-January to early
May.  I am entering my 5th year in a tenure-track position, and am in good
standing. However, the university where I am employed does not have an
official maternity leave policy for faculty members.  We all teach a 4/4
load, and the courses I will be teaching in the spring have already been
added to the registrar’s page, though I’m sure it would be possible to
change days and times.

I realize that I am of course entitled to 6 weeks unpaid leave via FMLA,
but my husband and I cannot go without my paycheck.  I will have to work
out the details with my dean and I am curious to know what others have
done in similar situations.  I would like to have a few good possible
plans in mind before I meet with the dean.

This is a real request for ideas to take to the Dean–although I’m sure the vast majority of us think it’s ridiculous that any university would still not have some kind of a maternity leave policy at this point, let’s keep the laments to a minimum and the helpful advice and suggestions to a maximum.  At Baa Ram U., at least in the Liberal Arts College, people giving birth or adopting a child are now entitled to a one course release from our 2-2 load, in addition to maxing out whatever accrued sick leave time one has.  (I believe that it’s typical even for newish Assistant Professors to have 6 weeks of paid sick leave for a vaginal birth, and 8 weeks total to recover from a C-section.)  This of course still doesn’t solve the problem of who might cover or teach your courses during your recovery–that is still unfortunately handled by the pregnant individuals themselves, who must rely on the kindness of colleagues–and that’s a terrible burden to put on an untenured person especially.  It’s one thing to ask a colleague and teaching assistants to sub for one or two classes–and quite another magnitude of annoyance to have to worry about covering four classes! 

Coincidentally, yesterday I ran into a male colleague in another department, and heard a tale of woe about his last academic year, which was marked by different surgeries followed by other surgeries meant to fix infections and other problems caused by the initial surgeries.  He told me that he wished he had taken the whole first semester off (he’s got a wad of accrued sick leave), because 1) he pushed himself too hard to get back to work because 2) he really disliked relying on the charity of his colleagues to cover his classes while he recovered.  (Why can’t the Dean keep a little pot of money to distribute to hire emergency adjuncts to take over and teach for a month, or two, or for the rest of the term, without forcing us to make decisions on the fly while ailing, and burdening our already overworked colleagues?)  Although we are hired for our minds, those minds are unfortunately embedded in human bodies, which are subject to traumatic injury, decay, and transformation.  Given that fact, my suggestions to this maternity leave question are, in no particular order:

• Find out what paid sick leave you’re entitled to–it should be decent, given that you’ve been there 4 years.  That may help you decide what kind of relief you’ll need, and when.
• Since you’re married, your husband should investigate what kind of parental leave his job offers, and how to go about taking advantage of it.
• Suggest to the Dean that you be offered a one- or two course-release next spring.  (After all, it doesn’t cost 25% of your salary to pay an adjunct to cover a course–sadly, they can probably get that done for $3,000.)
• If you’re not already signed up to teach a seminar course or two (or other such course that meets only once a week), see if you can change your schedule in that fashion.
• Consider offering to teach some summer classes, in order to “pay back” courses, if they’re unwilling to grant you one or more course releases, and see if you can do it over the following two summers rather than just next summer. 

If you, dear readers, have dealt with this issue before, or if you have knowledge as to how this has been handled at your university (productively or otherwise), please leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.  (I’m also picking up the Bat Phone to see if Ann Bartow and her coven of legal experts can help!)

UPDATED 8/14/08:  H-WOMEN has posted some interesting, angry, and helpful replies to the above query, although I don’t see too many strategies that haven’t been suggested here and in the comments below.  See here for a collection of replies, and see also Catherine Clinton’s thoughtful and sad commentary on the lack of progress for academics on this issue over the past twenty-five years.  Sigh.

UPDATED 8/15/08:  H-WOMEN has seven more responses–these range into more personal reflections, some of which are more useful than others.  See especially Susan Yohn’s post on the personal versus the political, and also her thoughts from the perspective of a department chair.  She offers both practical advice for now, as well as urges us to take political action on this issue.  Sounds like we’ve got an old-fashioned Consciousness Raising going on right here on the internets!

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Although still a dewy young thing in her 30s (for a few precious, precious weeks, anyway!), Historiann feels a slight chill in the air when she contemplates these harbingers of old age and mortality:

• Kelly Bundy has breast cancer.  (Seriously–send good wishes to actress Christina Applegate, who is being treated for breast cancer at age 36.  Breast cancer is never good news of course, but being diagnosed before your 40s is very alarming.)
• Brandon Walsh is seriously pushing 40.  (He turns 39 at the end of this month!)  Donna Martin graduates!  Donna Martin graduates!  Donna Martin graduates!
• Check this out:  Marcia Cross (”Bree Van de Kamp/Hodge”) and Kristin Davis (”Charlotte York Goldenblatt”) used to play bad girls, and Courtney Thorne-Smith (of According to Jim) used to have attractive male co-stars!  (You tell kids that today, and they just won’t believe you!)
• Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth got her AARP card in the mail five years ago!  Sigh.  (See this new history of the band:  David Browne, Goodbye 20th Century:  A Biography of Sonic Youth, just released in hardcover in May.)    Rock-and-roll band biographies are a really strange genre of writing–written by and for superfans, with very few clues or ways into the book for anyone who’s not a superfan.  (Kind of like the most hagiographic biography you can imagine!)  But, if you want to spend 15 minutes laughing and shaking your head, look up “Love, Courtney,” or “Lollapalloza 1995″ in the index and go straight to those pages.  Ahhh, my misspent (sonic and otherwise) youth!

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Cakewrecks is the most hillarious website I’ve seen in a long time.  The photo at right comes from this post.  (Thanks to Susie Madrak for linking to Cakewrecks last week.)  Don’t you wish you could have been invited to that wedding?

I’m really impressed (in a queasy sort of way) by the large number of professionally decorated cakes there are in the world in the shape of body parts and/or bodily traumas.  Don’t miss the extremely weird baby shower/childbirth cakes.  Today’s post is a cake in the shape of a bound foot.

Cakewrecks is internet crackrocks if you’re looking to fritter away some time on the world wide timewasting web. 

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Duh.  (And where are Senators Obama and McCain on this?  Inquiring minds want to know!)

Sign the petition, in the name of all that is right and just in the world.  (H/t Lambert at Corrente.)

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Happy Juneteenth!  I want to follow up today on some of the dynamite panels on pre-emancipation African American women’s history I saw at the Berkshire Conference last weekend. 

Researching and Writing the Lives of Unfree Women, Friday June 13.  I reported briefly on this panel on Sunday, but want to follow up because it was so good.  The room was jam-packed, so that when Natalie Zemon Davis arrived after the session had already started, a thoughtful junior scholar gave up her seat so that NZD could sit.  Other senior scholars like Tera Hunter and Elaine Forman Crane were in Standing Room Only (although Historiann tried to get them to take her seat)!  The session was chaired by Annette Gordon-Reed, whose work on Sally Hemings (and new book on the Hemings family) is justifiably admired.  All of the presentations were interesting, but I thought that these were especially fascinating:

• Terri Snyder’s discussion of researching Jane Webb (ca. 1682-1764), a sometimes-enslaved, sometimes free woman of color in Virginia and her efforts to secure the liberty of her seven children
• Cassandra Pybus’s presentation on Mary Perth (ca. 1772-1800), an enslaved Virginia creole whose life she has traced to Nova Scotia (as one of the “Black Loyalists”) and then to Sierra Leone.  Pybus spoke of the frustrations of the gaps in the historical record, and her reluctance to “make it up,” although other panelists said that all history has gaps that must be reconciled, and so they’re perfectly comfortable with sketching out a series of possible scenarios in their writing.
• Sharon Wood spoke about Priscilla Baltimore (ca. 1801-1882), a locally famous St. Louis and western Illinois entrepreneur and alleged conductor on the Underground Railroad.  Wood’s presentation offered some insight into researching in local archives, and a guide for people interested in African American women’s history in the western U.S.
• Angelita Reyes gave a wonderful presentation on Vicey Skipwith (ca. 1856-1930), a woman born in Virginia in slavery, who became a landowner after emancipation.  Reyes’s work illustrated the sequential connections from freedom, to marriage, to property ownership, and thence to “respectability,” and brought it all home (literally!) with her work uncovering the Vicey Skipwith Home Place and getting it on the National Register for Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register.  The preservation of material culture and landmarks like the Skipwith Home are vital to African American history, and was especially welcome at the Berks given our emphasis on public history in many panels, roundtables, workshops, and seminars.

This roundtable discussion was a clarion call to get back into the archives, particularly into the state and local archives, do some old-fashioned social history, and discover the lives of unfree and recently emancipated women in order to (in Pybus’s words) uncover the “specificity of African American lives.”  Many panelists gave high praise to the genealogists and archivists whose work has enabled their work tremendously.  The sources and stories are out there, and they are recoverable. 

Surviving Dislocation, Separation, and Sale:  Enslaved Women in the Americas, Saturday June 14.  V.P.Franklin chaired and commented on two papers, one by Jessica Millward (”Abandoned Lands and Abandoned Plantations:  Enslaved Women and Mobility in the Age of Revolution”) and Daina Berry (”‘Young Girls are First on the Stand’:  Enslaved Females and the Domestic Market.”)  There is no better evidence of the return of social history than Berry’s database of 81,000 slave valuations and her efforts to give us a nuanced portrait of the prices set on enslaved people according to age, sex, health, etc. in Antebellum slave markets.  Particularly interesting was her discussion of “fancy girls,” enslaved women who were used as sex workers, and of the self-mutilation (chopping off a hand or a foot) enslaved people engaged in as resistance, in order to decrease their market value.  

That’s all for today–if you saw these panels, please comment further.  If you saw other great African American panels, please report on those!  (I’ve heard that the discussion in Stephanie Camp’s seminar Sunday morning was terrific–but I wasn’t there myself, unfortunately!)  I hope you all honor our ancestors and enjoy a nice picnic today!

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Historiann has promised herself that she’s going to run many miles this morning and then spend the rest of the day in the eighteenth century thinking about Abenaki national security issues, but fortunately so many other clever and insightful Berks bloggers have posted wonderful comments and overviews of the sessions they saw last weekend at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women that Historiann is pleased to direct you to them today.  To wit:

• Knitting Clio has an excellent post up about a roundtable discussion that I desperately wanted to see, and it looks like it was as good as I thought it would be, darn it all!  About the panel called CHILDHOOD AS A USEFUL CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS, she writes that it was a fascinating look at the ways in which feminist historians are inventing a new history of childhood.  She also has overviews of SEXUAL SCIENCE REVISITED:  A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION WITH CYNTHIA RUSSET, another roundtable called TRANSFORMING HEALTH CARE FROM BELOW, a fascinating public history panel that links directly to KC’s own research agenda called TEACHING ABOUT HEALTH AND CONTRACEPTION OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM, and KC’s own seminar, WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF THE BODY?  (My only complaint:  why does she call her post a “post-mortem?”  Women’s history is alive I tell you!  It’s ALIVE!)
• Kittywampus has a little blurb about us, directing us to new feminist blogs.  It was great to meet you, and I’m so pleased you enjoyed our new seminar format!
• Finally, Tenured Radical has more Berks blogging, from the Complaints Department.  Apparently, the notion of 1,400 women and men getting together to talk about women’s and gender history is proof of the irrelevance and faddishness of our field.  (Either that or it’s extremely threatening to someone named Miss Mary Rusticus, who didn’t attend the conference but apparently feels extremely entitled to complain about our little kaffeeklatsch.  Jealous, much?)  Now, while not all forms of history are Historiann’s cuppa joe by the campfire, I can’t imagine the sense of entitlement (or embattlement?) that would lead me to complain publicly about the mere existence of a sub-field of history.  Historiann says:  let a thousand flowers bloom!  And if that’s just not your style, you can kiss my ass.

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Since my post OB/GYNs, Ourselves was so popular (or at least inspired a very interesting debate in the comments), I thought I would let you all know about some of the large number of sessions we’re featuring at the 2008 Berkshire Conference this weekend on the subject of childbirth, motherhood, and the maternal body.  As anyone working in women’s history knows, the history of the body and the history of sexuality have been really big lately, and they’ve given birth (so to speak) to books, articles, and conference papers on the broad subject of maternity.  Here are some very interesting examples:

MOTHERS, WETNURSES, AND THE EVOLUTION OF REPRODUCTIVE MEDICINE IN PREMODERN EUROPE

Chair: Jacqueline H. Wolf, Ohio University

Comares: Mothers, Midwives, and Wetnurses in Late Medieval Valencia

Debra Gene Blumenthal, University of California, Santa Barbara

The Anatomy of Eve: Imagining the Maternal Body in 16th-Century Germany

Kathleen Maisie Crowther, University of Oklahoma

Examining the Wetnurse: Theory and Practice in Medical Texts of the 12th and 13th Centuries

William F. MacLehose, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Comment: Rebecca Lynn Winer, Villanova University

ALTRUISM, SELF-INTEREST, AND AMERICAN MOTHERHOOD, 1943-2008

Chair: Elizabeth Watkins, University of California, San Francisco

In Their Best Interests: Social Science, Feminism, and the Revaluing of Working Mothers in the 1960s

Elizabeth More, Harvard University

Mixers and Moulders: Neo-Evangelical Models of American Motherhood, 1943-1960

Eliza Young, Harvard University

Mother’s Milk without Mother’s Body: A History of the Late 20th-Century Milk Bank

Kara Swanson, Harvard University

Comment: Janet Golden, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

IMAGING MOTHERHOOD: SHIFTING REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MATERNAL BODY

Chair: Rebecca M. Kluchin, California State University, Sacramento

Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Maternal Body in Contemporary Art

Rachel Epp Buller, Independent Scholar

(Re-) addressing the Maternal Body: Representations of Motherhood, Modernization, and the Roots of Public Health in Chile

Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, University of Arizona

“Baby Factories” and Squatting “Primitives”: Laboring Bodies in Mid 20th-Century Representations of Natural Childbirth

Jane Simonsen, Augustana College

Comment: Cheryl Lemus, Northern Illinois University

Ann Simonsen Oswood, The Childbirth Collective

Saturday, June 13, 11 a.m.

Chair: Anna R. Igra, Carleton College

Enforcing Dependency: Immigrant Mothers and Health Care Access

Lisa Sun-Hee Park, University of California, San Diego

Begging a Different Memory: Revisionary Images of Mothers in Rickie Solinger’s Beggars and Choosers

Ruby Tapia, Ohio State University

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