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Student at Work: Intellectual History

04 Monday May 2009

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Occasionally here at the Future Feminist Librarian-Activist I try to give folks a sense of what kind of work I do in my academic and pre-professional life as opposed to my moonlighting life as a blogger and my leisure time. All semester long in my Intellectual History class, we have been writing reading responses to our weeks’ readings. This was my final response of the semester, which I enjoyed writing and thought I would share with you. I hints at some of the themes I’m currently developing in my final paper on holistic education, humanistic psychology during the 1960s and 1970s (more soon).

“The ‘I’ becomes part of a ‘we’ that, rather than erasing the sense of self, 

calls it fully into existence”: 
New Beings, New Ethics in a Postwar World [1]


Meditating on “the situation of history” in his 1950 essay of the same name, Fernand Braudel begins his analysis by referencing not only the most recent world war, but in broader terms the “events of the past forty years,” during which “experiences have been particularly harsh for all of us; they have thrown us violently back into our deepest selves, and thence into a consideration of the whole destiny of mankind.” [2] This relationship between the individual’s “deepest self” and “the whole destiny of mankind,” seems to be a common thread that preoccupies the authors we read for this week, though they are tackling such diverse problems as the future of historical study, the condition of women as a social class, and the ethics of existential philosophy. Each author – Braudel, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre – begins with the specific and ends with the conclusion that the specific can only be understood in reference to the universal. Braudel’s vision of history in the longue durée is one in which true understanding can only come when one respects “the unity of history which is also the unity of life.” [3] Event-based history, or what he terms the “short time span” view of history, is too narrow a view: instead, “history is the total of all possible histories—an assemblage of professions and points of view, from yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” each individual point coming together as a whole, amorphous, possibly ungraspable vision of all time: past, present, and future.[4]

Similarly, Simone de Beauvoir, in her now-canonical work in feminist theory, The Second Sex (1949), begins with the singular: “A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman.’”[5] She is something specific: a woman. Yet her struggle with this situation comes from the fact that her singularity (her woman-ness) in some sense isolates her from identifying as part of the human species: Man, she writes, as the neutral sex, “thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of a woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it.”[6] To de Beauvoir, her body – and the social narrative surrounding that body, the social narrative of “Other” as opposed to “human” – created a conflict between what she knows about herself, that she is “a free and autonomous being like all human creatures” and the way she is treated in society as not-human.[7] Opposed-to-human. “How can a human being in a woman’s situation attain fulfillment?” she asks.[8]

Finally, Jean-Paul Sarte, in Existentialism and Human Emotions, responds to the charge that existentialism is a despairing and hedonistic philosophy by arguing that in actuality, the recognition of human beings’ ultimate responsibility for their own (and collective) actions. Rather than an ethics of passive fatalism (as critics charged), existentialism, Sartre argues, is “an ethics of action and involvement” in life.[9] Although he argues against “human nature,” per se, Sartre affirms the essential commonality of the human condition: “the necessity for [man] to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be mortal there.”[10] Therefore, as human beings search for ethical responses to this human condition, they necessarily find that their lives are interconnected to the lives of others. “In wanting freedom,” Sartre writes, “we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours.”[11]

All of these narratives of the singular – whether it is a singular even in history or a singular being, or a singular class of being – affirm the existence of the individual event or person, but defy us to accurately understand it in the absence of the collective or the universal; in the absence of Braudel’s “total of all possible histories,” or Sartre’s image of an utterly self-responsible human being who nonetheless finds that her existence as an “I” depends entirely on the existence of “we” – on the existence of others. This vision of the individual in relation to society is radically different from the Enlightenment philosophers’ notion of the individual as the foundation of existence. Sartre criticizes the philosophy of Kant’s “I think therefore I am,” notion of human consciousness in isolation from any other “I,” suggesting instead that “we reach our own self in the presence of others, and the others are just as real to us as our own self.”[12] De Beauvoir’s analysis of gender as a social duality, something so fundamental that “the two sexes have never shared the world in equality,” places human relationships at the very root not just of Rousseau’s social contract (something into which fully-formed individuals enter), but at the root of being itself: man (de Beauvoir suggests) cannot understand himself to be without woman: “Otherness,” she writes, “is a fundamental category of human thought . . . no group ever sets itself up without at once setting up the Other over against itself.” Thus, human beings, as individuals, no longer enter into society as a matter of choice, of convenience, out of some sort of ulterior motive for individual gain. Rather, individuals require human relationships not to thrive, but to exist.

I am struck by the way historical period out of which these narratives of “I” and “we” emerged. Not only out of the extreme violence and chaos of two world wars, European imperialism and decolonization, the Great Depression, and bloody revolutions – but also out of the cultural and intellectual ferment of psychoanalysis and modernity, which we have been discussing over the past two weeks: the “Schorske decades”[14] and the years surrounding World War One, during which those who had believed in the liberal progressivism of Enlightenment political thought were beginning to question the efficacy of their method and the realistic nature of their utopian optimism. Last week, we discussed Freud’s essay “The Disillusionment of War,” in which he argues that “Peoples are more or less represented by the states which they form, and those states by the governments which rule them.”[15] I see echoes of this observation in all of the readings for today, particularly in de Beauvoir and Sartre, as they struggle to come to terms with a humanity far more complex and interconnected than Kant’s enlightened man. As we posed in class, it is possible to read Freud’s statement in two ways: first, that human beings are accurately represented by their governments, and second, that, regardless of accuracy, our governments (that is, the social organization in which we are embedded) become, in some measure, a representation of who we are – a “we” that may or may or may not, to borrow Carol Gilligan’s poetic phrase, “call [the I] fully into existence.” Sartre, arguing for human beings’ ultimate self-responsibility perhaps errs toward the first interpretation; de Beauvoir, wrestling with the limitations imposed upon her agency by the fact of her sex and gender identity, errs toward the latter. Braudel, with his ideal historian’s gaze, would likely say that the truth lies somewhere in a narrative which encompasses them both – and every other point between and beyond. “The total of all possible histories.”[16]

* * *Endnotes* * *

[1] Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure (New York: Knopf, 2002), 173.
[2] Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 6.
[3] Braudel, On History, 16.
[4] Braudel, On History, 34.
[5] Simone de Beauvoir, in Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, edited by Susan Bell and Karen Offen (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1983), 421.
[6] de Beauvoir, Women, the Family, and Freedom, 422.
[7] de Beauvoir, Women, the Family, and Freedom, 427.
[8] de Beauvoir, Women, the Family, and Freedom, 427.
[9] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1967), 36.
[10] Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 38.
[11] Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 46.
[12] Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 37.
[13] de Beauvoir, Women, the Family, and Freedom, 423.
[14] Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1980).
[15] Sigmund Freud, “The Disillusionment of War,” 279.
[16] Braudel, On History, 34.

Quick Hit: Children as Caregivers

19 Sunday Apr 2009

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via the H-Net listserv on history of childhood comes a link to a recent New York Times article about children who care for parents and grandparents with health and other concerns.

Across the country, children are providing care for sick parents or grandparents — lifting frail bodies off beds or toilets, managing medication, washing, feeding, dressing, talking with doctors. Schools, social service agencies and health providers are often unaware of those responsibilities because families members may be too embarrassed, or stoic.

Some children develop maturity and self-esteem. But others grow anxious, depressed or angry, sacrifice social and extracurricular activities and miss — or quit — school.

“Our society thinks of children as being taken care of; it doesn’t think of children as taking care of anybody,” said Carol Levine, director of families and health care at United Hospital Fund, a health services organization that studied child caregivers.

As people on the listserv point out, the concept of children as automatically dependents, rather than caretakers, is historically contingent: throughout history children have been in the position of caring for others. Yet in our contemporary culture, we assume that, ideally, children will be cared for not caretaking. As a result, children who are taking on these responsibilities are often invisible to the public at large, at least in public policy and mainstream media discourses.

What is particularly interesting to me about the NYT article is that many of the organizations they profile are not treating child caretakers as automatically being taken advantage of, although they acknowledge the ways children are often ill-equipped to provide care, and the ways in which their own mental and physical health suffers.

The Caregiving Youth Project in Florida offers the most comprehensive approach, holding weekend camps to give children breaks and teach them caregiving skills. It counsels families and conducts classes and meetings in schools.

While I would obviously have to do much more research and reflection before offering an opinion about the efficacy of this approach in terms of the benefit to children and families, my knee-jerk reaction is to believe that meeting kids where they are realistically at (that is, honoring the valuable work they are doing in their families) rather than treating them as potential delinquents or devaluing their caretaking, is generally on the right track. Thoughts?

stuff i’ve been reading (on the ‘net)

09 Thursday Apr 2009

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Here’s a haphazard collection of stuff I’ve been reading the last couple of weeks.

via MK: two hilarious comics about the experience of reading Twilight.

via Cynthia: a “funny futuredance” from the 1960s German science fiction film “Raumpatrouille Orion.”

via Jeremy: two posts about the ducknapping and recovery of Pack, one of the bronze ducklings in the Boston Public Garden.

Kittywampus blogs about feminism and the sexual revolution (via figleaf).

Figleaf also offers some reflections on how one simple question can make us stop and think about how “heterosexual” is the default assumption we make, as a culture, about peoples’ sexual orientation.

Cool sexuality education resource a conference-goer tipped me off about at WAM!

Miriam at Radical Doula on the creative potential of “crisis” and change.

Surgeon and journalist Atul Gawande on why solitary confinement should be considered torture — and one evidence-based practice proven to reduce prison violence: giving prisoners greater control over their lives.

A new way to think about the concept of “political correctness.”

Given my previously acknowledged love of dictionaries, I couldn’t let this one go by unlinked. (You can view this as my salute to IA, VT, and DC).

Jesse at Pandagon on one reason why we should think twice before judging the purchasing decisions of people in poverty.

Because I linked (in my WAM! post below) to a thread on feministing about gender-neutral restrooms and trans rights, I’m including three responses from MK, queenemily, and catspaw pointing out the problems with how that conversation went down.

And finally, the now-traditional Hanna-link! This has been a feminist-heavy link list (damn; guess the secret’s out), so here are two articles on Marx: a marxist analysis of Grand Theft Auto and a commentary pointing out that Marx was in many ways a product of the very economic structure he set out to critique.

Hanna blogging: "history is soap opera"

03 Friday Apr 2009

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My housemate and fellow historian had some fun yesterday with this column June Purvis wrote, over at the Guardian, about historian David Starkey’s recent allegation that women historians have (gasp!) “feminised history” to his great and everlasting dismay. As Hanna points out:

honestly, the first thing i thought when i read this — other than, “wow, he really is as much of a jerk as he sounds in his books” which i’ve never been able to read although i have tried — was, “but, mr. starkey sir, history is often a soap opera all on its own. it needs no help from anyone of any gender.” i mean, seriously.

Read the rest here.

Booknotes: Five Lectures in Psycho-Analysis

31 Tuesday Mar 2009

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In the few weeks since discussing Darwin, my Intellectual History class has moved through Nietzsche and Fin-de-siecle Vienna and arrived at Sigmund Freud.

I imagine there are few Women’s/Gender Studies students in the country who have not encountered Freud in their intro-level classes: I remember the director of my women’s studies program back at Hope College — whose training was in the field of psychology — suggesting that maybe, possibly, my response to Freud’s theory of sexual development and penis envy was a little too categorically dismissive (if I remember right, my scathing response paper admitted to having thrown our textbook across the room). So I will admit upfront I came to Five Lectures in Psycho-analysis prepared for weary frustration at Freud’s legacy, even as I was interested to see what a fresh reading ten years (yes, ten years!) since that first encounter might bring.

Five Lectures is a slim volume in which Freud recreated from memory five lectures he delivered at Clark University, Worchester, Massachusetts, in 1909 while visiting at the request of the university president, G. Stanley Hall. This fact alone gives me the creeps, since G. Stanley Hall had some heavily social darwinist theories of child- and adolescent development. Five Lectures is an extemporaneous-feeling overview of Freud’s development as a psycho-analyst, his theories of dream interpretation and sexuality, and his beliefs about the role of psychoanalysis human development. Only one of the five lectures focuses specifically on sexuality, although his beliefs about human sexual development are integral to his view of human nature and growth.

While none of his basic views were startlingly new to me, I was struck as I read this chapter by two things: 1) how closely Freud’s description of childhood sexuality corresponds with current, twenty-first century progressive, feminist views of human sexuality, and 2) how strongly Freud seems to feel the need to contain, organize, and channel that sexuality within the circumscribed space of heterosexual intercourse for the purposes of reproduction.

Of childhood sexuality he writes:

A child’s sexual instinct turns out to be put together of a number of factors; it is capable of being divided into numerous components . . . independent of the reproductive function . . . it serves for the acquisition of pleasurable feeling, which, basing ourselves on analogies and connections, we bring together under the idea of sexual pleasure.

He describes masturbation, dominance/submission activities, the “desire for looking,” fantasy, sexual play and emotional bonds all under this broad umbrella. He also points out that “at this early period of childhood difference in sex plays no decisive part.” In sum, “widespread and copious” is the sexual life of children, loosely organized around the principle of pleasure (p. 46-48).

It is only after this rich description of sexuality, replete with possibility for variation, fluidity, and individuality which (crucially, in my opinion) places the recognition of pleasure at the heart of sexual feeling, that Freud retrenches. In the paragraph immediately following the descriptions above, he suggests that all of this abundant energy must, in order for “mature” adult sexuality to emerge, be “brought together and organized” into genitally-centered, reproductive activity (p. 48).

. . . Why? What is so terrifying to Freud (and any others who resist it) the first, “childhood,” model of sexual-sensual experience? This week in class, I’m looking forward to sitting down with this fear and trying to understand what, exactly, is so freaky about “widespread and copious” pleasure.

Quick Hit: Birthday Feminism

30 Monday Mar 2009

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My friend Linda sent me this article, The End of the Women’s Movement, by Courtney E. Martin, today with a query for my thoughts. Linda is herself of the “second wave” generation of feminist activists (although I try to avoid generational language as much as possible when talking and writing about women’s history), while Ms. Martin and I are in our twenties and of the “third” (or possibly forth?) wave era. Since intergenerational tension within feminist activism is an issue I care deeply about, and this article was published on my birthday, I thought it deserved it’s own post rather than being buried in my next links list.

Courtney Martin, whom I read regularly at the blog Feministing, is herself involved in ongoing activism in this area as part of a roadshow of intergenerational feminists. In this particular piece, she takes a gathering at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art as a jumping-off point to write about the process of feminist activism today, and specifically some of the differences between today’s political change and the activism of movements in the 1960s and 1970s:

People within feminist circles may recognize names like Jessica Valenti or Jennifer Baumgardner, but the general public doesn’t. This is largely due to what Wired editor Chris Anderson calls “the long tail” — the decreasing presence of a mainstream culture and the increasing influence of more diffuse communities organized around specific interests. In other words, we don’t have a leader because it’s hard to even pin down who “we” are. Leaders are useful for galvanizing movements, but they also rise to fame at a critical cost. Young feminists should count ourselves lucky that we don’t have one face representing our generation — which would mean one race, one socioeconomic class, one ideological bent. Nothing could be less representative, actually.

She also makes what I think is a fascinating observation that:

Members of the second-wave generation developed their feminist identity during the heyday of direct action. They had ecstatic, very physical experiences of feminism. . . . Now these women are older, many of them happily shifting into what Jane Fonda calls ‘the third act’ — a stage of life when they don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks, and they want to see the world live up to its God damn potential, once and for all. . . They’re prioritizing changing the world again. And as such, they seem to experience an old hankering for an unapologetic women’s movement that they can see, hear, and touch.

I had never before thought of situating women’s movement activism in sensory experience; in the body — and I think using embodiment as a framework to describe what is so compelling about the narrative and experience of that era is an intriguing new approach to understanding what the 1960s and ’70s counterculture might offer us in terms of wisdom for the future.

The essay as a whole is thoughtful, and I think balances fairly well the task of respecting the lessons to be gleaned from historical circumstances and the experiences of our elders — without losing sight of the fact that grafting past tactics onto present-day situations can often be counter-productive. Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Pursuit of Harpyness has a group post up discussing the article as well. Highly recommend checking it out.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Essays & Studies

16 Monday Mar 2009

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The Simmons College journal, Essays & Studies, has just published its Spring 2009 edition, in which I have an essay: ” ‘I have been more or less dissatisfied’: The Educational Project in the Oneida Community.” Also featured is my friend Rachel Searcy, also of the MA/MLS dual-degree program, with her paper ” ‘Seated at the Hearth-side’: The Prescriptive Tradition of Female Nationalist Involvement in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Ireland.”

Booknotes: Autobiography of Charles Darwin

02 Monday Mar 2009

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This is Darwin week in my intellectual history class; we’re reading selections from On the Origin of Species, Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, and finally Charles Darwin’s charmingly personal Autobiography, which he wrote for his family toward the end of his life. I don’t have any Big Thoughts to share with you on Darwin’s story, but there were a couple of passages from his recollections that I thought I would quote here, to give you a sense of his autobiographical writing and sense of himself as a human being.

On his education: “During the three years I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as academical studies were concerned, as complete as at Edinburgh and at school . . . I got into a sporting set, including some dissipated low-minded young men. We often used to dine together in the evening, though these dinners often included men of a higher stamp, and we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards. I know that I ought to feel ashamed of days and evenings thus spent, but as some of my friends were very pleasant and we were all in the highest spirits, I cannot help looking back on these times with much pleasure . . . But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow” (50-53).

On society: “Few persons can have lived a more retired life than we [he and his wife] have done. Besides short visits to the houses of relations, and occasionally to the seaside or elsewhere, we have gone nowhere. During the first part of our residence we went a little into society, and received a few friends here; but my health almost always suffered from the excitement, violent shivering and vomiting attacks thus being brought on . . . I have [thus] lost the power of becoming deeply attached to anyone . . . As far as I can judge this grievous loss of feeling has gradually crept over me, from the expectation of much distress afterwards from exhaustion having become firmly associated in my mind from seeing and talking with anyone for an hour, except my wife and children” (95).

One final note: For those of you who didn’t see this link earlier on my post about Darwin and Lincoln’s joint birthday, check out the beautiful online exhibition about Darwin’s life and work at Chicago Field Museum.

Midweek Bicentennials Post

12 Thursday Feb 2009

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Today marks the 200th anniversary of the births of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Although I only know as much about Lincoln as someone who has grown up in America imbibes with the air and water, I have had a soft spot for Darwin since taking a cultural history class at the University of Aberdeen on Victorian Science and Technology. We will be revisiting some of his writings and ideas in my intellectual history course this spring, and I am looking forward to considering again how he was both influenced by the ideas and events of his time, and how he and his work have continued to inspire and trouble many people over the past two hundred years. One of my regrets about my year in Aberdeen was that I never made it to Down House, Kent, the Darwin family home, which is supposed to be both beautiful and historically fascinating. However, the Chicago Field Museum recently hosted a stunning exhibition, that includes many documents and objects from Down House.

My friend and colleague Jeremy has a note over at his blog, PhiloBiblos, about some of the celebrations taking place in the Boston area. Our own exhibition, coordinated by our head reference librarian, the amazing Elaine Grublin, documents Lincolns ties to Massachusetts, and opens today. It will be open daily, 1-4pm, through the end of April.