"Was the problem that had no name possibly the lack of Wi-Fi?"

Noreen Malone gets a grip on what Betty Friedan — on behalf of suburban women in general — was bellyaching about in "The Feminine Mystique." She's responding to a piece by Emily Bazelon, which we talked about in a long comments thread yesterday. Malone says:

I grew up with a whip-smart mom who stayed at home with us, and so I always approach discussions like these with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, alert to any slights whatsoever against the choices and life mission of someone I so love and admire — even if I don’t plan to make precisely the same ones. But more of it is probably generational. For recession-scarred twentysomethings, staying at home or taking menial jobs is involuntary, but not because social mores dictate that women can’t achieve: It’s because so few of us, regardless of gender, have gotten hired at jobs Friedan might consider fulfilling...

I’m sure Betty wouldn’t be happy to see all the expensively educated young women of Brooklyn, where I live, spending their free time taking floral-arranging classes and knitting and fussily setting up their living rooms just so....

What's so wrong about paying close attention to the details of the beauty of your environment? Fussy... there's a word. When is intense, attentive work deemed fussy? This is a word that has long been used against women and against gay men. Is a person supposed to be interested in something other than what he or she finds interesting? Why? Who says what the proper foci of interest are in this world? Some people are more sensitive to the visual specifics of their environment. It's not as if the people who aren't spend their lives plumbing the meaning of the universe. Perhaps the interior decorator is closer to the core of what truly matters than the corporate lawyer. 

Now, I've derailed onto the subject of the word "fussy." I just had a long conversation with Meade about his associations with the word. Knowing nothing of the context in which I'd encountered the word, he associated it with objects — specifically drawings and handmade pottery — that are inferior because they have been overworked. I prompted him to think of calling a person fussy, and he said "a baby." Time to check the Oxford English Dictionary (which I can't link to). The first meaning applies to "persons, their habits and actions": "Fond of fuss, moving and acting with fuss; habitually busy about trifles." Examples:

1831  T. Moore Mem. (1854) VI. 201   Lucky for him that he is so little of an irritable or fussy nature.
1850   Fraser's Mag. 41 163   She is fussy and fidgetty (if there be such words).

The third meaning relates to things: "Of dress, etc.: Full of petty details. Also, in dressmaking language, without depreciatory implication; With many flounces, puffs, pleats, etc."

1858   J. G. Holland Titcomb's Lett. i. 92   Let every garment be well fitted.. fussy in no point....
1896   Westm. Gaz. 7 May 3/1   The fussy sunshade is much beflounced with lace-edged chiffon.

Flounces, puffs... Hear the homophobic echoes. Anyway, the etymology of fussy is obvious. It's just a -y added to fuss. What's the etymology of fuss?

Perhaps echoic of the sound of something sputtering or bubbling, or expressive of the action of ‘puffing and blowing’. 

The 2 oldest examples for fuss:

1701   G. Farquhar Sir Harry Wildair iii. i. 21   Ah! I hate these Congregation-women. There's such a fuss and such a clutter about their Devotion.
c1730   Ld. Lansdowne Wild Boar's Def. in Wks. (1732) I. 140   With your Humanity you keep a Fuss; But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.

And now, I am fully off track, looking for the full text of Lord Landsdowne's very cool poem "The Wild Boar's Defense," which I'm going to type out in full, because I'm only seeing images of book pages and I want to make it more available. The wild boar wants to be free:

A boar, who had enjoy'd a happy reign
For many a year, and fed on many a man,
Call'd to account, softening his savage eyes,
Thus suppliant pleads his cause before he dies:

"For what am I condemned? My crime's no more
To eat a man than yours to eat a boar.
We seek not you, but take what chance provides,
Nature and mere necessity our guides:
You murder us in sport, then dish us up
For drunken feasts, a relish for the cup.
We lengthen not our meals: but you much feast;
Gorge till your bellies burst — pray who's the beast?
With your humanity you keep a fuss,
But are in truth worse brutes than all of us.
We prey not on our kind; but you, dear brother,
Most beastly of all beasts, devour each other:
Kings worry kings, neighbour with neighbour strives,
Fathers and sons, friends, brothers, husbands, wives,
By fraud or force, by poison, sword, or gun,
Destroy each other, every mother's son!"

My Wi-Fi took me there, in my unfussy riffing this morning. I suppose I could tie it all up somehow. Husbands, wives... destroy each other.

Who's the beast?

"My name is Emily Bazelon. I’m a feminist. I’ve never read Betty Friedan’s book—until now."

Says Emily Bazelon (on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of "The Feminine Mystique").

I'd never read the book myself until recently. My reason for not reading it was that I'd regarded it as something that addressed the troubles of my parents' generation. I went to college in 1969, when everyone was reading "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch." "The Feminine Mystique" seemed really old fashioned — about June Cleaver and her cohort.

Here's Bazelon:

[W]hat hit me was Betty’s howl of frustration. It’s primal, and you feel its desperate force on almost every page. God, did she feel trapped among the slipcovers of the suburbs and in the pages of the women’s magazines she wrote for, where big ideas and questions were entirely unwelcome. The only way to escape was to pulverize the image of the Happy Housewife Heroine who is the title of Chapter 2. Betty’s fiercest critique in this book is of the “mistaken choice” she thinks traditional gender roles forced middle-class women and their husbands to make....

What made me dislike the book — when I finally read it — was that Freidan was not in the role of the housewives she purported to understand so well. She was in the role of writing for women's magazines. She didn't like the limited topics that were the stuff of that kind of magazine. She makes an assumption that women who buy a magazine are only interested in the topics covered by that magazine. But that's absurd! If you bought a magazine about cooking/childcare/fashion, that wouldn't mean you aren't interested in politics or science or whatever else is supposed to be more important. You might have other magazines — or books — for that.

Why the assumption? It might be frustrating for a journalist who's interested in politics to crank out material about topics she doesn't care about, but it was wrong to project those frustrations onto the unknown women who bought the magazines for their own purposes and used the information in those magazines in their individual private lives — perhaps to make a nice dinner efficiently so there would be time to read a good book in the extra time one can make in a day when you don't have a job. The notion that A Job belongs at the center of everyone's life is a huge scam, and the blithe rejection of the 1-earner marriage was an amazing, tragic shift in American culture. The equality of women — the ambition and the fulfilment of women — did not demand that we all get a job.

"Telling young people that some jobs are 'menial' is a huge disservice to them and to the whole society."

"Subsidizing them in idleness while they wait for 'meaningful work' is just asking for trouble, both for them and for all those around them."

Also: "The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it's now doing more harm than good."

ADDED: This idea of working when and only when it is meaningful relates to the women's movement. We were told that staying home with the children was unfulfilling and satisfaction was to be found in the workplace. (I've been reading the old feminist classic "The Feminine Mystique" recently.) If women are free to choose — that's what they keep telling us — and it's all about what fulfills us, then of course, work must be meaningful.

Is "liberation" an outdated word?

Yesterday, I wrote "Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if it turned out feminism served, above all, the interests of commerce and not individual liberation?"

In the comments, Leslyn said:

I don't give a flying fuck if it does. I care that it serves my individual "liberation." An outdated word. Young women (and men) are past the time of needing liberation. We have moved into empowerment.

If that also serves commercial interests (which it does), that's a nice side-effect.

I found that sad and strange for reasons that Palladian expressed a bit later:

What a bunch of grim comments. We were given our incredibly brief, beautiful lives above the soil, and what have we done with them? Worried about careers and taxes and other meaningless nonsense.

Tomorrow isn't promised to us. Death is eternal. What matters is love, and beauty, and survival.

I dream of this edifice of falsehood crashing to rubble at our happy feet.

Do what you need to survive, so that you can live in love and beauty as long as you can. Nothing else matters at all.

Let's think about liberation. What happened to that word over the years? Around 1970, everyone said "women's liberation" or "women's liberation movement," and then "liberation" was dropped. Why?

The Oxford English Dictionary has as its "1b" definition: "Freedom from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes." The history of "liberation," used this way, goes back to 1798:

1798 Analyt. Rev. July 35 The consequences from the liberation of women reasonably to be expected, are, such as seldom fail to ensue, when any individuals, or societies, or classes of mankind are restored to their natural rights.

1888 Rep. Internat. Council Women 441 You can obtain the complete liberation of women only by working for the liberation of humanity.

1911 A. G. Chater tr. E. Key Love & Marriage vi. 203 Real liberation for women is thus impossible; the only thing possible is a new division of the burdens.

1971 Black Scholar Jan. 58/1 Those in the struggle have to deal with black separatists because they stand today as a potent obstacle to full black liberation.

1976 Listener 8 Jan. 4/2 Sexual repression and totalitarianism, on one side, and sexual liberation and revolution, on the other.

1984 A. Maupin Babycakes ix. 40 It was no longer a question of butch vs. femme, liberation vs. oppression.

2001 Genre May 37/1 Gay activists in this country and around the world were using the pink triangle as a symbol of activism and liberation. 

Isn't it interesting that the quotes are all about women until 1971, when you get "black liberation"? Did women flee from the word when black people moved in? Did "liberation" begin to sound too radical? Did the OED 1b meaning, upon encountering race, merge uncomfortably with the 2a meaning — "The action of freeing a region or its people from an oppressor or enemy force; the result of this"?

Did burgeoning sexual connotations undermine the word's usefulness? This isn't liberation in the sense of sexual liberation, the women's liberation movement wanted men to know: This isn't about sex (you're not getting more); this is about money (we're getting more). Was it something about gay people moving into the feminist territory and the women needing to draw a distinction? Women's movement leaders openly fought off what they called "the lavender menace":

[Betty] Friedan, and some other straight feminists as well, worried that the association [with lesbianism] would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement. Under her direction, NOW attempted to distance itself from lesbian causes – including omitting the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors of the First Congress to Unite Women in November 1969. 

Get the sex out... get the left-wing revolutionary connotations out. Let's not say "liberation" anymore. If you think the word is outdated, that in itself is significant. Why don't you want to talk about whether the individual is escaping from restrictive or discriminatory social conventions and attitudes? Don't be afraid. I want to talk about whether we are liberated or whether we've followed a path of enslavement — serving the interests of commerce.

As I said in yesterday's post: It was right when we were questioning devoting our lives to commerce — when "turn on, tune in, drop out" was fascinating — that a movement came along and injected women — half the population — with highly commercial ambition. That fed the gigantic engine of the economy for the next 4 decades. And now, the professional, highly organized, intensely busy woman is celebrated in our culture, and the hippie is a figure of fun.  And yet... what matters is love, and beauty, and survival. Live in love and beauty as long as you can.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

Fear of flying fuck.

Goodbye to Adrienne Rich and Earl Scruggs.

She was 82. He was 88. Famous people die in 3s — it has been noted — but who could complete the triad that begins with Rich and Scruggs?

He was the ultimate banjo player...

... best known for performing alongside the guitar-playing Lester Flatt with the Foggy Mountain Boys. Among their signature songs were “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which was used as the getaway music in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme song of the 1960s television sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

For TV and movie watchers of the 60s, this was the sound of freedom — Jed moves away from there, there being wherever it was that the poor mountaineer "lived," and Bonnie, she follows Clyde, who said to her:

You're different.... You know, you're like me. You want different things. You got somethin' better than bein' a waitress. You and me travelin' together, we could cut a path clean across this state and Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma and everybody'd know about it. You listen to me, Miss Bonnie Parker. You listen to me.

And later, she says: "You know what, when we started out, I thought we was really goin' somewhere. This is it. We're just goin', huh?"

That's what poured into our ears back in the 60s, lubricated by banjo music. Adrienne Rich got her cultural foothold in the 60s:

Once mastered, poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women’s letters: “The Feminine Mystique” was also published that year.

In the collection’s title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life.....

I'm going to pulverize your onus, baby. The funny thing though: Rich was a lesbian. And yet she married a man:

In 1953 Ms. Rich had married a Harvard economist, Alfred Haskell Conrad, and by the time she was 30 she was the mother of three small boys....

By 1970, partly because she had begun, inwardly, to acknowledge her erotic love of women, Ms. Rich and her husband had grown estranged. That autumn, he died of a gunshot wound to the head; the death was ruled a suicide. To the end of her life, Ms. Rich rarely spoke of it.

I think I once bought one of her books. It seemed like something in the spirit of the times that one should partake of, but I never read it. I find most poetry annoying, and hers was no exception. I did read that essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," which all the radical feminists were taking terribly seriously circa 1990. It was the assigned text in one of the law school radical feminist reading groups I participated back in those days. There were all these earnest, intelligent, heterosexual women who studied that text and gabbed about it until they genuinely got their minds around the amazing realization that they should not be heterosexual. Not that they should be having sex with women, but in some other, conceptual way. I'd tell you what the concept was but my mind is not longer around that particular realization, and I don't have the time right now to redo all that hard intellectual work that I did amongst the feminists in 1990/1991.

I'm sure it was all about freedom, but I'm free of that now. Since I'm quoting Bob Dylan today:

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Santorum on women in combat: What "other types of emotions" was he talking about?

Jennifer Rubin thinks he may get in trouble for saying:

"I want to create every opportunity for women to be able to serve this country... but I do have concerns about women in front-line combat.

"I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved. It already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat, but I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat... And I think that’s not in the best interests of men, women or the mission."

What "other types of emotions"? I'm guessing that Rubin is worried that he's stuck on some stereotype about women — they're too "emotional" — but I think he's referring to an argument about the way men feel — that is, an urge to protect women that would skew decisionmaking and performance.

Rubin quotes something Santorum said in 2005 the crux of which is: "The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness." Rubin exclaims "Yikes" and pronounces the statement "badly off-key." Is Rubin succumbing to the kind of emotional reasoning that is so typical of... journalists?

Feminism succeeded dramatically in making women feel that life outside of the workplace is stultifying. (Read "The Feminine Mystique," the 1963 rant about how horrifyingly small life is for a homemaker.) Here's the book Santorum was promoting when he called the "radical" feminists to account: "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good." I'm going to read it, as I've been reading "The Feminine Mystique" lately, and it's worth understanding what happened in American culture. You can care about equality without jumping to the conclusion that everyone needs a job! What's so wonderful about a job? If 2 adults can found the economic and emotional unit we call the family, they are most free if they realize that there are many different ways to structure their lives and find happiness together.

I read Santorum's 2005 quote as saying no more than that: You don't need to buy into dogma about "professional accomplishments" as "the key to happiness." What's "yikes"-worthy about that? Is it that women will flip out if you say anything that even sounds like you'd deny them full access to the workplace? Ironically, that thought is the stereotype that women are emotional to the point of irrationality.

ADDED: Here's the passage in Santorum's book about feminism (and the only place in the book were the word "feminism" appears [though the word "feminist/s" appears quite a few times, but I'll leave that to another post]):

Children of two parents who are working don't need more things. They need us! In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might confess that both of them really don't need to, or at least may not need to work as much as they do. Some are working because they think they must buy their kids and themselves more things they “need”—instead of giving of themselves to their kids. And for some parents, the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home. But in this world, at a time when it is increasingly difficult to raise children well, we should all recognize that our kids really need fewer things and more mom and dad.

Many women have told me, and surveys have shown, that they find it easier, more “professionally”gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children. Think about that for a moment. What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else—or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon—find themselves more affirmed by society? Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism, one of the core philosophies of the village elders. It's ironic. Radical feminists have been making the pitch that justice demands that men and women be given an equal opportunity to make it to the top in the workplace. But they refuse to acknowledge, much less value as equal, the essential work women have done in being the primary caregivers of the next generation. It seems to me that justice demands both fair workplace rules and proper respect for work in the home.

Respect for stay-at-home mothers has been poisoned by a toxic combination of the village elders' war on the traditional family and radical feminism's misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect. Both have been communicating to women that motherhood is not only confining and frustrating—which it sometimes is—but also that it is also completely unnecessary in the modern world. Sadly, the propaganda campaign launched in the 1960s has taken root. The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness. As for children? Well, to paraphrase The Wizard of Oz, “Pay no attention to those kids behind the curtain.” But like it or not, the children are there—and our society has let them down by not being supportive of mothers, and even fathers, who dedicate their time and often their lives to their children. 

Notice the attention to equality. He refers to the traditional role of mothers in the home, but he also acknowledges that fathers may perform this role too and that both deserve respect and encouragement.

AND: The term "village elders" is used throughout the book. Here's where he introduces it:

Who are these big, powerful forces upon which so many rely to shape our economy, culture, society, values, and learning? They are what I call the “Bigs”—big news media, big entertainment, big universities and public schools, some big businesses and some big national labor unions, and of course, the biggest Big of all, the federal government. When I hear that catchphrase of the liberals, “It takes a village to raise a child,” I hear Big. It's a homely image, a village, but when you get past the metaphor, what do you really see in the details? Top-down, elitist prescriptions imposed by those who believe they are the postmodern kings of the masses—particularly of the supposedly ill-informed “peasants” of red-state America.

The people who run the Bigs I like to call the “village elders.” They are the liberal elite who think they know what is best for individual Americans and how best to order (or rather, re-order) our society along the lines of their ideological abstractions. They see any institution that stands between the Bigs and the isolated individual as an annoyance or hindrance. In fact, in the view of the Bigs, it is often just these intermediary associations that are responsible for what the Bigs understand to be our social problems. The liberal answer to the “problem” of intermediary institutions is to “liberate” individuals from them—whether individuals want that or not.

And what are these problem-creating associations that liberals believe harm people? They are the “Littles”: local government, civic and fraternal associations, clubs, small businesses, neighborhoods, local school districts, churches and church ministries—and of course, the greatest offender of all and the greatest thorn in the liberals' side, the iconoclastic traditional family. Liberal ideology promises a utopia of freedom and equality, if only the Littles can be engineered out of existence.

So where do we conservatives look for answers to the social issues of such widespread concern to Americans today? Why, to the very associations that the village elders distrust. And we ought to start with what has been the foundation of every successful civilization in history: the traditional family.