It's A Poor Sort Of Memory That Only Works Backwards; Or, New (Old) Thoughts About Tenure

Alice Ad-dressing the White Queen.

`You're wrong there, at any rate,' said the Queen: `were you ever punished?'

`Only for faults,' said Alice.

`And you were all the better for it, I know!' the Queen said triumphantly.

`Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for,' said Alice: `that makes all the difference.'

`But if you hadn't done them,' the Queen said, `that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!' Her voice went higher with each `better,' till it got quite to a squeak at last.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There) (1871)

Paul Caron over at Tax Prof Blog reports that a new study "conducted under the auspices of the American Bar Foundation with additional funding from the Law School Admission Council" finds that "the perceptions of female tenured faculty members and tenured faculty of color" about the granting of tenure in law schools "differ significantly" from the perceptions "of their white male counterparts. Both female professors and professors of color perceived the tenure process as less fair and more difficult than did male or white professors. Female professors of color had the most negative perceptions [.]" 
  
Quelle surprise.  Try doing this study in the humanities and social sciences, why don't you?

It is interesting how we can know these things and then continue on as if we did not know these things.  I have to wonder whether any empirical study is capable of altering the ingrained practices that produce the "perceptions" described above (many of us would substitute the word "reality" here, but never mind.)  For different reasons, depending on our position in the hierarchy of academic bodies, like Alice's White Queen, we who are tenured have become adept at managing impossible information.  While one commenter on Caron's post is amazed that you would survey a group of people who have succeeded in a gate keeping process about the fairness of the gate keeping, I would argue that part of what is interesting about the study is that people who have succeeded don't always see their own success at achieving tenure as an unqualified vote of confidence for their intellectual work.  Indeed, the difficulty of evaluation and promotion, the rude inquiries that are often made about women and scholars of color during tenure procedures and the public undermining of the intellectual authority of these scholars even in successful promotion cases, is often stunning.  It is equally stunning to me how eager one's colleagues are to relieve white men from the burdens of such scrutiny.  A variety of what might be considered flaws and procedural bloopers that require lengthy revisiting for women and scholars of color are simply dismissed as irrelevant for white men.  Connections of the candidate to prominent people in hir field that are serving as tenure referees are seen as proof of a white man's prestige (correct).  But in the case of (wo)men of color, such referees are often dismissed because they are perceived as lacking objectivity (they are often perceived as lacking status in the field as well), and new ones must be found, even if those new referees are further from the field of specialization. And scholars in queer studies?  Fugedaboudit.

Here's another piece of unofficial data for you:  the number of women, and people of color who, denied tenure in one place, go on to a better job elsewhere.  Not always true, but boy, would I like to see the numbers on it.  A common assumption about failed promotion cases is that the person's career as a scholar is brought to an abrupt end by denial, and that is true in too many cases.  However, very often it is not true, and that is where follow up of failed tenure cases might be worthy of investigation. At one prestigious SLAC I know well, two tenure cases involving individuals in the group under scrutiny were differently fumbled in the not so recent past, and both individuals almost immediately went on to tenured positions at prestigious R-I universities.  You would think that would count as some kind of data, wouldn't you? Or that it might trigger some kind of public recognition at the tenure-denying institution that what is being smugly articulated as high standards could be, just perhaps, something else.

`That accounts for the bleeding, you see,' [the White Queen] said to Alice with a smile. `Now you understand the way things happen here.'

`But why don't you scream now?' Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.

`Why, I've done all the screaming already,' said the Queen. `What would be the good of having it all over again?'

What is Our Work? Towards A Feminist Future in Education

Ellie Smeal and Alan Alda, ERA rally
June 30, 1981.  Photo credit

This concludes a three part series on feminist education:  you may want to read Part I and Part II first.

Gender inequality occurs in educational, and subsequently professional, atmospheres in which we have substantial evidence that men and women are equally able. The gender gap in math testing is shrinking rapidly, and at the top levels, it is insignificant. But as  New York Times reporter Tamar Lewin noted in her commentary on “Why So Few,” a lack of faith in women’s abilities on the part of those who should be welcoming them to the next level of achievement may also reduce the confidence of even the top young female mathematicians. Hence, as Lewin concluded, “girls’ lesser belief in their own skills may partly explain why fewer women go into scientific careers.”

So returning to the question I asked in a different way --what is the role for a women's college in creating gender equality?  First and foremost, women's colleges create visible locations to find and connect to talented women are eager to be found and have their interests promoted aggressively.  Second, a woman's college is a critical institutional base for feminism.  Third, it is a location from which feminists have an obligation to articulate all institutional issues – scientific, commercial, political --as women’s issues.  


These are not tasks whose time has passed.  And at a historical moment where the wage gap between men and women has stalled at an average of .77 to the dollar for over four decades, the task is urgent.  The fact that this gap grows as the job itself requires more education and training makes discussion of this problem even more urgent for educators. Women's colleges have a special civic and an international obligation to be leaders in the debate over gender equality and wage gaps, in the United States and around the globe.  All feminists must support them in this task, holding conferences, creating forums, and generating policy papers that build on and reproduce feminism's successes while striving to correct its failures.

Science is just one important example of why an institutional locations for feminism matter, in the private and in the public university world. When I say “feminism,” I use that word as a historian who understands the range of political and social meanings that can have among women of different racial, class and national backgrounds. It is, by definition, an inclusive posture that articulates rights and responsibilities for women. As Nancy Hewitt has recently argued, there have been no “permanent waves” of feminism over the last 150 years, only tendencies that often compete with as much as they support each other. But all feminisms assume that the health of any social order can be measured by the status of women within it. Bettye Goldstein, who I introduced you to in Part I of this series, was an old Popular Front feminist who saw coalition as essential, even though it wasn’t something she was always good at achieving. She began NOW as an explicitly non-partisan organization, believing that feminism ought to cast its net as broadly as possibly in the interests of women’s equality. Hence, my feminism may be different from your feminism, but for the purposes of building and strengthening women’s colleges, let me make this argument: institutional feminism should be a broadly inclusive, woman-centered approach to pedagogy and community that recognizes and supports all women’s aspirations to equality.

This commitment to equality would include:

Recognizing a parent’s connection to (and often primary responsibility for) children and family. In the absence of universal daycare, it would endow a subsidized, co-operative 24-hr daycare center on campus where undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, administrators and staff could know their children would be safe and loved until they or their partners could pick them up.


Recognizing women’s rights – on campus, in the United States, in the hemisphere and around the globe – as a critical topic of study, both academically and as a co-curricular focus.


Aggressive affirmative action for demobilized veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and reaching out to women veterans, many of whom will leave the service deeply traumatized by their experiences in and around combat zones.

What this kind of agenda requires is close attention to the needs of the individual student who is seeking equality in a gendered world: it is the kind of work a feminist, women's college can do. Such spaces must be inclusive, places where feminists of many descriptions -- some of whom will be men -- can make arguments on behalf of women’s right to have access to everything.  The support of a like-minded community is important, but it is pedagogical, curricular, and practical reforms that will support women’s aspirations to scientific, or any other rigorous form of education. That might mean daycare, as I suggested, so that women can maintain an onerous lab schedule; it might mean enhancing mentoring. It might mean a center dedicated to women’s physical and sexual safety, where concerned men are included in a feminist project to prevent campus violence. It might mean a women’s gym, like Harvard has established, so that women who must limit their physical exposure to men on religious grounds may relax and be physically healthy.  It might mean a veterans’ center, where military women could be paired with mentors, have quick access to psychological support and tutoring, and from which a phone call would originate when a woman doesn’t show up for class, a phone call that would gently inquire whether she is sick, has missed her bus, or is just overwhelmed.

Equality is never a finished project. As women’s aspirations and achievements change, so do their needs. While a women’s college privileges a feminism that puts women at the center, we must remember the other piece of the gender equality equation that feminism attends to: providing spaces where men who care deeply about the advancement of women in science, or any other field, can come to recruit the best minds, to partner with them, to mentor them, and to learn from them. Gender equality is a project, and it is, as Mary Maples Dunn said to me, an unfinished one. But to believe and invest in a project like feminist education is to demonstrate optimism about gender equality by investing in the institutions that will create it. Gender equality is, in the most optimistic scenario, a feminist task that may remain unfinished as long as women continues to re-imagine and re-invent themselves to meet the challenges of their own generation.

This is, to paraphrase Katherine McBride, Our Work.

Cross Posted at Cliopatria.

Gonna Walk Before They Make Me Run: On Helen Thomas And Retirement

Because of my grown niece, a second wave feminist in a third wave body, I took an interest in Helen Thomas a few years back. Third Wave Niece, a Smith grad, is very into biographies of interesting women who have battled their way through to careers that are characterized by their maleness -- journalism, politics, and whatnot. So I purchased a copy of Thomas's Front Row At The White House: My Life And Times (Scribners, 2000) and read it. A lively account of her career with UPI, it's a great history of journalism from one woman's point of view. But it's also graphic example of all the ways women were locked out of professional life in structural ways until federal legislation, and lawsuits filed under that legislation, literally permitted them in the room. As Thomas (a not particularly ideological feminist) broke down those barriers in political reporting, women streamed in behind her. I remember back in 1979, thinking that we at Oligarch's college newspaper might just elect the first woman to chair the editorial board less than a decade after women had been admitted to the university at all. It was not to be, and we elected a fine man. But the woman we didn't elect, and numerous others (including Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post) went on to fine careers in journalism through the doors opened by Thomas and her contemporaries.

But over the years, Thomas -- who had a reputation for asking "tough" questions -- became less of a reporter than a nostalgic symbol of what journalism used to be. This was particularly the case after she quit UPI and signed on as a columnist for Hearst. She was cultivated by successive White House press secretaries as a kind of mascot and news-granny, an annoying but beloved old cat that is always leaving fur in your favorite chair. Helen asked the tough questions, sure, but because only Helen asked the tough questions, presidents and press secretaries were also able to reply to them as if they were eccentric. Perhaps you remember --as I do -- spinmeister Ronald Reagan responding to a much younger Thomas's questions with an indulgent smile and a "We-e-ell Helen (a-heh-heh-heh) I don't know whether (a-heh-heh)...."

Now Thomas has, as Jonathan Ferris coined the phrase in And Then We Came To The End, been "made to walk Spanish." Or rather, she has abruptly retired, after having gone on record as anti-Israel (in a particularly cruel way) with Rabbi David Nesenoff after a White House Jewish heritage event. View the video here courtesy of RabbiLive.com. George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made sure that Thomas's remarks got out to the mainstream media; Bill Clinton's former press secretary (talk about a job from hell) Lanny Davis followed Sunday with a statement that "Thomas, who he used to consider a close friend, 'has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot.'"

Do we think maybe none of these guys really liked Thomas after all? She resigned from Hearst on Monday.

Gone the special chair, the distinctive red dresses, the ritual first question. Of course, what happened was nothing new. As most reports of the incident note, Thomas -- the daughter of Lebanese immigrants -- has always been a sharp critic of Israel and of U.S. support for Israel's foreign policy. What pushed things over the edge was not her anti-Israel statements, but her colossal error in judgement in suggesting that the people of Israel "go home" to Germany and Poland. Oh -- and to America, which would be a better idea because there weren't any extermination camps there.

Surely it was a set-up: beware of clerics carrying video cameras, is my advice, and do your best not to say noxious things when you are being taped. I do agree with the many people who are arguing that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh say horrid things in public all the time, and no one is calling for their resignation. Yet if, at the age of 89, Thomas is no longer able to distinguish between suggesting that the descendants of Holocaust survivors return to the site of their ancestors' murder and appropriately partisan political statements about Israel's neo-imperialist policies in Gaza and the West Bank, one suspects that it is long past time for her to go.

Why hasn't someone had the kindness to make that happen before now? Answer: it takes guts to remove an iconic figure. Few people do it, even when they know they should. This is, of course, a common problem in the academy. Venerable professor famous for irascible personality and eclectic remarks goes right over the edge one day and has to be forcibly retired, when in fact the signs of ineffectiveness and mental decline have been clear to close colleagues for several years: inappropriate remarks, fits of rage and/or confusion, memory lapses of gargantuan proportions. And yet, you go to the administration and say, "Hey, I think we have a problem" and administrators claim their hands are tied because of tenure, academic freedom, blah, blah, blah. I have a friend who made this lonesome trek year after year, recounting numerous horror stories that appeared in the teaching evaluations or were related by befuddled students about Famous Professor X, and was repeatedly sent away with a condescending lecture about age discrimination. In one of these meetings, an administrator said to my friend sharply, "Are you a doctor? What makes you think you know what is going on?"

"Oh," s/he replied casually: "Venerable Professor doesn't recognize me anymore, and s/he recently asked the administrative assistant who she was and why she was robbing the department office." Needless to say, nothing happened until said faculty member let loose a blistering stream of muddled hate speech at a stunned group of first-year students who fled the room weeping and dropped the class en masse.

The argument that prim little Ari Fleischer made about ejecting Thomas from the White House press corps is that she has lost her objectivity. The truth is that Thomas has not been objective for years -- she has been strongly opinionated, a useful foil who allowed conservatives and neo-liberals alike to articulate themselves against her. That has in many ways made her an asset, especially to conservative presidents, and to a White House press corps that either doesn't like to ask the hard questions, or doesn't really care to report or think very hard about the answers. The real problem is that Helen Thomas has lost her good judgment -- and while this is not the case for everyone who is 89, we should all see this as a lesson about retiring before we do something awful that allows people to give us the old heave-ho.

What a value added it was for Republicans to make Obama kick the little old lady out of the White House too! If he would only return Bo to the breeder while PETA films his weeping children, a Republican sweep in November will be assured.

But the real moral of the story is for everyone over 50: age narrows most of us more than we can possibly be aware of. It trims away the subtleties and politesse that can make the most extreme things we believe bearable to others. It causes to overestimate our authority, and underestimate the destruction our words cause. It makes us arrogant, because younger people don't want to tell us that we are finished, even as we become caricatures of ourselves. My advice? Pick a retirement age now and stick to it, knowing that you will get out while people still remember you for the best things that you were. Keith Richards says it better than I ever could: this is for you, Helen.

Sunday Radical Roundup: Policy History Conference Summary

Because I can only be one place at a time, and because I left Columbus at noon yesterday, my view of the Policy History Conference has necessarily been partial. But one of the thing I learned Friday night at the reception sponsored by the Miller Center at UVA is that the sponsoring organization, The Institute for Political History, is relatively young. Founded in 2000, it "supports the training and research projects of graduate students interested in American political history." As Matt Lassiter explained to me, the organization was responding to a sense that the field was losing ground, but an ironic outcome has been that many of those drawn to the organization are intellectually committed to bringing other fields associated with cultural and social history to bear on politics. As Lassiter put it, it's "all good." That would be my take too.

Closer investigation reveals a somewhat entrepreneurial intellectual venture. There may or may not be a connection between the fact that the founding gift was given by (or on behalf of) someone named Thomas Critchlow, and the journal ("committed to an interdisciplinary approach to policy history since 1989) it puts out is run by historian Don Critchlow -- who is also Director of the Institute. As one editorial board member put it when I was praising the conference, "Don basically runs things. I mean, it's a democratic organization, but he tells us what to do."

Well, if so, he's doing a good job. And although I have heard that Critchlow is a conservative scholar, the stimulating ideological diversity of the conference makes me wonder: what kind of mileage do we actually get from labeling ourselves or others? Is it just a symptom of our tendency, as academics, to distinguish ourselves from the herd or, more unfortunately, excuse what we are afraid others will perceive as our shortcomings? Interesting scholars are interesting scholars, and it dumbs everything down to put people in boxes - or worse, choose a box and proclaim loudly that it's the best box there is.

Speaking of diversity, I did want to run the question of gender up the flagpole for a second. Women -- and to some extent scholars of color -- were well-represented at the conference, and that' a heartening thing to see for a middle-aged scholar who has experienced the dismay that by gender alone she was often disqualified from being perceived as a political historian. It is also gratifying to see, as Lassiter observes, that the methods of cultural history are now an acknowledged tool for doing political history, because that simply wasn't true when some of us began that project several decades ago. It is also true that panels with women and scholars of color were well-populated. That said -- the panels that were actually about gender were placed at times where it was likely that they would have small audiences: in my case, this was at 8:30 Saturday morning. The Petigny panel was in the first slot Thursday when many people had not yet arrived, and the panel on ERA was Sunday morning. For the last, obviously it is going on as I speak, and I have no idea how many are there. This is particularly odd, since a significant amount of Critchlow's work has been on the political history of gender, including a very well received book on Phyllis Schlafly and another on abortion.

One thing that has occurred to me is that political historians are delighted to hear from women -- hearing about women, gender or sexuality and imagining them as vital political topics is still a hurdle to be crossed, as is hearing about those topics from women since the Petigny panel on Thursday was quite well-attended.

So that's something to think about when planning for the 2012 conference begins: my guess is that this is a phenomenon I noticed because of the size of the conference, but for the same reason, it could be easily addressed.

Ova There! Ova There! Send The Word, Send The Word, Ova There!

After reading a critical piece in the New York Times about the booming market in Ivy League ova earlier in the week, Radical Correspondent Oklahoma Annie writes that she was "incensed" by it:

What’s going on, in summary, is this: Agencies who traffic in human ova are seeking the highest achieving young women from top universities as donors, and are offering them upwards of $10,000 to donate their eggs.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which set the $10,000 cap on payments in its guidelines, is now “concerned” that young women may be lured by excessively high payments to become donors “against their own best interests.”

Now, excuse me, but we’re talking about the top percentile, crème de la crème of American elite universities, and we’re afraid they won’t be able to make informed decisions about their own health and finances?

Well, OK, so we’re also talking about 22 year olds, so there may be something to that. But hey, this is the first time I’ve heard it argued that women are being exploited by being paid too much.

I think it’s a load of paternalistic crap. (I want to see the gender and age distribution of the members of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.)

What really aggravates me is, here is one thing in which women are uniquely positioned to make more money than men, fair and square, and we don’t want to let them fully exploit their advantage “for their own protection."

Couldn't agree more, Annie. Go to this this California sperm bank and you will see that inseminations start at under $500, which means that the donors can't be getting more than a hundred dollars a squirt. Methinks you are onto something, so let's investigate further.

When you read the whole article, you will see that Annie's outrage is well founded on several levels. Egg donation, as it turns out, is not to be undertaken lightly, since the primary damage cited for women is psychological -- only several paragraphs lower does the author mention that the procedure itself, which includes stimulating the ovaries with massive amounts of hormones as well as surgery -- has medical risks. In other words, an egg is not an egg: it's a pre-baby! And for the rest of their lives, these poor women will be haunted by the specter of "their" babies out there in the world.

Not inconsequentially, the notion that every egg is a complete soul would be the position held by the Catholic Church, the LDS Church and numerous evangelical Christians, as they wrap numerous forms of contraception into their jihad against abortion. Furthermore, Annie's point about how threatening it is to the cult of true motherhood when women game the market in white designer babies has a longer history. Remember when Mary Beth Whitehead refused to hand over Baby M to William and Elizabeth Stern in 1986, and the papers kept referring to her as the "surrogate mother" -- when, in fact, she was the actual mother? And do you recall that when working-class Whitehead demonstrated true grief at giving up the baby, she was reminded repeatedly that she had no right to her feelings because the baby had been bought and paid for? That it was upper-class Elizabeth Stern who really had the right to grieve?

Clearly there are big stakes here. As Annie observes, even a liberal newspaper seems committed to constantly instructing women as to what they should think and feel. I can't help but notice that in its handling of this issue the New York Times also invokes the specious claims among anti-choicers that abortion, at any stage of gestation, inflicts lasting psychological damage on women. "Temporary feelings of relief are frequently followed by a period psychiatrists identify as emotional 'paralysis,' or post-abortion 'numbness,'" reports the conservative Elliot Institute (as if paralysis and numbness are technical terms requiring scare quotes.) "Like shell-shocked soldiers, these aborted women are unable to express or even feel their own emotions. Their focus is primarily on having survived the ordeal, and they are at least temporarily out of touch with their feelings."

Note the use of the phrase "aborted women," which cleverly conveys that these failed mothers are grieving for the privileged access to womanhood only childbirth provides, a maturing process that can never be complete once they have terminated a pregnancy. If a woman believes that she is not distressed following an abortion, it is simply proof that she is "out of touch." On the other hand, this anti-abortion website goes out of its way to urge women that they can trust their feelings and maternal instincts during the process of bringing a pregnancy to term and giving the baby up for adoption; and that they will always feel good about themselves for making this decision to give a close relative to complete strangers.

I would add a final comment: if the egg donation procedure has risks for women (and all surgical procedures do, including egg implantation), then why aren't we concerned about the routine use of these hormones and surgeries on women who are trying to use their own, or other people's, ova to grow babies in their uteruses that they cannot conceive without technology? The women who, if they are successful, often end up carrying high-risk multiple pregnancies? Because it's a multi-billion dollar industry, that's why, in which all of the money goes into the pockets of fertility docs, for-profit labs and Big Pharma! Ever wondered whether Elizabeth Edwards' battle with cancer has anything to do with the "miracle" of giving birth to twins at an age when most women are completely infertile? When was the last time you saw a front page article about the long-term risks associated with thirty-something and forty-something women juicing up their ovaries with dangerous chemicals over a period of anywhere from one to five years?

But that's cool because they become mothers, as opposed to becoming unnatural, selfish women whose only goal is to pay for college and graduate school.

Is Sarah Palin Good For Women?

A commenter who can only be known as Anonymous 7:50 (choose names, people! it's half the fun of blogging!) asked yesterday on my Obama post, "So, given all that, what didja think of the Palin selection today? Another historic step in the advancement of
women?" I hope this person is one of my students, because it is one of the best questions I have been asked lately and the idea that I might encounter Anonymous 7:50 in the classroom sounds fun.

My answer, less direct than you might like, is: Yes. I Suppose. And No. Not Really. And -- Good For Her! Let's Crack Open A Cold One!

For details on Sarah Palin's career, you can go to this article in the Los Angeles Times. For her official bio, including pictures of her family and of the Governor holding a dead caribou by its rack, click here. For a checklist of why Palin strengthens the McCain ticket among conservatives, go to the ever-reliable and witty Historiann.

After quick research, I have a strong feeling that I would probably like Palin as a person. She's outdoorsy, and so am I. She seems real. While I don't hunt, I can imagine kicking back on the porch with her after cross-country skiing or snowshoeing, having a few laughs and a serious policy discussion that was intelligent and mutually respectful. I have firm roots in Idaho and the mountain West, and so am quite comfortable being friendly, intimate with, and interested in, people who cleave to beliefs and practices that the Northeastern intelligentsia sees as quite marginal or worrisome. For example, here are some things I like about her:

While I think guns are too dangerous for crazy people and untrained enthusiasts to own, I grew up around a lot of rifles and shotguns, and understand why rural people in particular value hunting and often have an economic need to hunt. I understand less well when they feel the need to own automatic weapons and rocket launchers, drill with the Michigan Militia, patrol the border looking for migrant workers, and collect seven years worth of canned food in the basement in preparation for the Last Days, but Palin doesn't do that. She buys a license and shoots her limit every year. That's all.

I'd really like to go to dinner at her house: I bet she makes a heck of a caribou roast.

I have no problem with creationists as long as they are not trying to institutionalize that knowledge as "the truth," and I have no problem with people who are morally opposed to abortion, as long as they don't interfere with the right of my nieces to choose not to give birth to an unwanted child, deny them knowledge about their own sexuality, and prevent them from having access to birth control. I think Palin's decision to carry a child she knew had Downs' Syndrome to term makes her particularly likable, since not everyone has the empathy and emotional strength to contemplate that. Downs' kids are more often than not really nice people, and I think it speaks well of Palin that she isn't eugenicist and doesn't need to have traditionally perfect children like so many of us do. On the other hand, as we admire her capacity to juggle family and (a very ambitious) career, and her willingness to raise a disabled child, let's take a look at the financial resources she has to do that and get those to other families too!

As an anti-war liberal, I respect it that Palin's eldest son is in the military, which is neither here nor there, except that so few proponents of the war seem to live in families where military service is valued over other ambitions. I hear he is deploying soon, and I hope that she gives McCain a good talking to about his failure to support preparedness in the military, his opposition to expanded veterans' benefits and his incredible current silence on the issue of torture.

Palin sounds ambitious, decent, honest and -- while I resent the political turn which has forced every candidate to talk about God as if She was House Majority Leader -- I have several good friends and colleagues who are people of strong, sometimes evangelical, faith, so I don't happen to have that particular liberal prejudice. Being religious may have something to do with what seems to be an ethical profile that one might argue is unusually good for politicians in Alaska.

So Palin's nomination may be a good one, and it seems to be consistent with the past three decades of Republican political positions. But is Palin's nomination good for women?

I think that is harder to say. One of the great contrasts between Republicans and Democrats is that the GOP doesn't really do women's politics, and hasn't since the Ford administration: they do what they call family politics, and strenuously resist the idea that there is such a thing as inequality, racism or sexism. Current Republican policies are based on the ideological position that identity is irrelevant to individual prosperity, and that the only differences between people are their relative level of virtue, which can be gauged by an individual's capacity to be disciplined and adhere to "values." Economic success, for example, is a subset of virtue; hence, the incredible concentration of poverty among women and minorities is usually ascribed to their lack of values. This is not unrelated to the importance of religion in Republican party politics after 1972. Christians, and particularly antinomian Protestants, have long believed that personal misfortune is an outcome of being at odds with the Lord, and that tracing the source of God's wrath to failures of virtue may be the only way to prevent misfortune in the future. General catastrophe, however, is a good thing, as it might be a harbinger of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming. It's a stretch, but if you understand this you will also understand why government not responding to AIDS and the Bush administration provoking the possibility of nuclear war in the Middle East would, in the end, be consistent with family values.

But I digress. The Palin nomination may be good for some women, particularly Republicans who have ambitions for higher office, but in the terms I am arguing, not good for most other women. It's hard to tell, and hard to care, because a Republican victory in November (which I think is unlikely) will be bad for the poor, and bad for those who are not poor -- including women -- who suffer from structural inequalities and have nowhere to go for help, given that there is now a pro-business majority on the Supreme Court. A United States without national health insurance will be bad for women; a prison system that is Hoovering up black men and warehousing them for generations can't be good for women; badly crippled and mentally traumatized veterans with no health insurance will be bad for women, particularly when they are women; schools that think they are making children more capable through rote learning and testing will be bad for girls who are becoming women; welfare policies that offer no route for improving yourself aside from getting married will be very bad for women; assuming that sex just works itself out after marriage, and that normal humans are content to wait for a committed monogamous relationship to have sex, has historically been bad for women; taking children away from mothers because they are lesbians is really bad for women; teenagers having babies they can't afford and don't know how to raise will be bad for girls and the women who are their mothers and grandmothers. And so on. Pick your issue: I can tell you why Republican policies are bad for most women. And Sarah Palin isn't going to change that.

I also think that the Republicans may get little effect from a move that is historic for them, since they have also come to the party too late. And it isn't just because Hillary Clinton ran a terrific campaign, and could have been President. It's that interest group politics, which flourished in the 1960's and began to break apart during the Ford and Carter administrations, are really over. They have been killed by the relative successes of 1960s social movements, and not sufficientIy sustained by the things the civil rights, gay rights and women's liberation movements failed to achieve. As a result, I don't think most people vote on sentiment or identity; I think they vote pragmatically, and attend to more than one identity when they do. I don't think there is a category empty of ideology and political content called "women" that a candidate can -- or cannot -- be good for. I don't think having "a woman" on the ticket is necessarily moving the cause of "women" ahead more generally, since women have moved towards a variety of forms of equality without a female chief executive or veep, even under conservative administrations. Note: in 1984, when Democrat Geraldine Ferrarro was chosen by Walter Mondale and the convention as the first woman Vice Presidential candidate, other women were in the mix -- Dianne Feinstein, the Mayor of San Francisco and Martha Layne Collins, the Governor of Kentucky. Since then, a quarter of a century ago, not only has a woman not been chosen or elected, but very few women have even been vetted for the position.

I think what is more important than whether the Palin nomination is good for women is that the Republican Party Platform, regardless of who is on the ticket, is not good for women. Women are more likely to be poor, homeless, uninsured, single parents, and caring for dependent relatives than men. As long as Republicans believe that they can campaign on "social issues" rather than "pocketbook issues" they can put the Virgin Mary on the ticket and "women," as well as "men," will vote Democrat in the fall.

The Eight Questions Meme: From Squadratomagico

Squadratomagico has created an offshoot of the Eight Facts meme called the Eight Questions Meme. Unlike the original meme, it has no rules that need be published, and the questions are idiosyncratic enough that tagging up is a very difficult thing indeed. You can read Squadratomagico's answers to her own questions here.

Question the first: How different are men and women really? Such a good question. When I was in my Marxist-lesbian-feminist phrase I would have been shocked that this was even a question. Nowadays, when sometimes I can't tell whether the wedding pictures in the New York Times are two women or a heterosexual couple (unless I look closely at the names), I'm not so sure whether I have changed or whether men have changed. Three things I do know are that: in academia, at least, women are not inherently nicer, better feminists, or fairer people than men; that many young FTM transgender folks look like butch women to me (and don't even seem to be trying to look like men at the same time that they are clear that they are men) which suggests that gender isn't even about performativity any more; and that, as a person approaching 50, I have more in common with people of both genders who are my age than women in their twenties and thirties.

Question the second: Why do academics believe that they must work 24/7? Easy-peasy. Because we think everyone else is, so we should say we are working 24/7 even if we are not, and then others think we are, and so on. It's like a hamster on a wheel. Also, we waste a lot of time ditzing around while we are supposed to be working, so everything takes longer: for example, revising a book review and watching Wimbledon at the same time. Also, we love to read, so we are constantly reading even when we don't have to, and we pretend we are working when we are not.

Question the third: Why are cats' covered litter boxes designed with the cover nestling over the bottom tray (so that the pee hits the wall and trickles out)? Because they are designed and sold by the same people who sell Absorbing Cat Mats for under the box, Cat-Pee-Go for the floor, plastic dishliners that the cats claw through instantly, and those hideous plastic scoopettes for plucking the poops out. After our last cat moved in with our friend Wesley, following a variety of misunderstandings with the dog that resulted in a Grooming Strike and a demoralized cat covered with a large mat of orange tabby felt, I realized that the litter box was the main impediment to ever having a cat again.

Question the fourth:Why do I absolutely melt when I see a baby animal, but have a minimal response to baby humans? As an aging lesbian, I switched gears on this: once I realized no one was gonna make me have a baby, I began to take an interest in other people's babies, found them more or less as charming as puppies and kittens, and started to request their presence in my home as loaners. Baby animals, however, contrary to popular opinion, are not surrogate babies. They are animals, and their adorableness is enhanced by the fact that they more or less take care of themselves, do not have to be educated for a minimum of twelve to sixteen years, do not generate endless laundry, and do not require a government-sponsored savings plan for college and medical school. So their cuteness is unencumbered by things like physical pain, debt, endless birthday parties, tears, and socializing with their friends' parents whether you like them or not.

Question the fifth: Why do people enjoy high levels of conformity? Because no one wants to be that person on the kindergarten playground (or be that person again) who gets noticed, and all of a sudden people are pushing up against her and saying, "EEEEE-yew! Why does YOUR mother give you LIVERWURST? EEEEEEE-yew! Liverwurst girl! Liverwurst girl!" And all of a sudden you become "Liverwurst Girl" until you move to another school or your entire class goes down in a plane.

Question the sixth: Why does astrology makes sense to me practically, if not theoretically? Beats me, Chief. Particularly since we know that having a star chart was mandatory for the Aztecs, but if you didn't like how it turned out, you could pay the astrologer more and get another, better one.

Question the seventh: Lately I've been wondering -- should I get dreadlocks? You ask this of a woman who practically shaves her head? OK: I have an answer, but it may be upsetting to those who believe that Fashion is Blind to race. Yes, if you are Black. It would be gorgeous and hot. No, if you are White. White hair starts coming out of the braids almost immediately, and the dreds get this grimy, greasy, matted look that I think is a little gross. You might get away with it if you are White and tall, but definitely not if you are White and short. If you are Black and short, yes, but if you grow them too long it will only emphasize your shortness, so beware. But don't ask me. I'm almost fifty and I know nothing about fashion: I buy my clothes at the Gap for Men. And I've never even gotten a tattoo. So ask someone your own age.

Question the eighth: Why do people believe in "rational choice" theory? For the same reason that they believe that they aren't really smokers if they only bum ciggies off other people at parties and never buy a whole pack. It's comforting. If we really faced the fact that many choices were irrational, we would have to come to terms with how flawed we are and how unpredictable the world is.

Having just completed this, it occurred to me that perhaps I was supposed to ask my own questions, but nuts to that. My tags go to: Barnet Bound, professorial confessions, Ph.D. In History, Prone to Laughter, Dr. Crazy and The Proletarian.

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Update for those who were tagged: ask your own questions is the rule, but I am giving myself dispensation.

Am I That Name? Why the AHA's Gender Policies Make Sense to Some of Us

I've been participating in a fascinating discussion about graduate advisors over at Ferule and Fescue; instead of recapitulating it, I'll just send you there.

I also want to thank those people who commented on my last post: you were, in turns, funny, sweet and -- most importantly -- you took the post in the spirit it was intended. Mary Dudziak took the trouble to do a retrospective post on my book, which was also really nice.

So in the spirit of following up on other people's posts, I want to point to a fair amount of chatter in the history blogosphere on the question of the American Historical Association's requirement that panels at the Annual Meeting be gender diverse: you can get to much of the discussion, and some interesting commentary, by going to this post by Rebecca Goetz, the Historianess. Rebecca has included a number of good links to other posts on the topic, and also engages in a spirited debate in the comments section (and in the post itself) over gender, and gender equality, in the historical profession more generally. Why, she argues, when we should be focused on structural inequality, should the AHA have a policy in place that serves to make women "tokens" on panels where their only function is to sit there and "be" women? Furthermore, she implies that this rule on the program committee might cause a panel organizer to limit her/himself in choosing participants, and perhaps compromise the intellectual integrity of the panel.

OK. I understand where Rebecca is coming from, and if you read the whole thing rather than my necessarily brief recapitulation, you will see how thoughtful she is. But -- even though her observation is sensible, and Denise Riley and Joan Scott would be jumping up and singing hallelujah at Rebecca's accurate take on the epistemological issue at hand -- I beg to differ with Rebecca's conclusion about how the policy affects women -- and men -- in the historical profession.

The AHA's requirement is not senseless. Discrimination against women in many intellectual fields, history being but one of them, has been directly connected to what spaces women are -- or are not -- permitted to occupy and what networks they have been excluded from. You can go very far back, to 1912, when AHA president-elect William Dunning wrote J. Franklin Jameson to say that the AHA council meeting could not be held at the Century Club in New York because Lucy Maynard Salmon would be forced to enter through the Ladies' entrance and it would make her feel like a second-class citizen. Jameson more or less called him a sissy in response; Dunning went ahead and rented a faculty dining room at Columbia where Salmon could be a historian, not just a "lady" who happened to be a historian.



Fast forward to 1930, when "The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians [was] formed...in response to women academics' sense of professional isolation," as the website explains. "Although allowed to join the American Historical Association...women were never invited to the 'smokers,' the parties, the dinners and the informal gatherings where the leading men of the profession introduced their graduate students to their colleagues and generally shepherded them into history jobs in colleges and universities." One of the things our foremothers were responding to was the direct connection between these informal networks and the access women had to jobs, status, and publication in the American Historical Review. And let's be honest -- with all the talk about mentoring and networking in our professional circles (we hold workshops on these activities at annual meetings and urge graduate students to develop these skills), anyone who thinks that hiring and publishing have been transformed into utterly objective processes where connections do not matter, and scholarship alone reigns supreme, is not paying attention.

And of course, black scholars continued to be discriminated against in the same way long into the twentieth century. As with barriers to the employment of women, few white historians were willing to challenge the racial segregation of public facilities that meant black scholars not only had little access to the networks, in many cases they couldn't even register for the convention without breaking the color bar and getting arrested. Fred A. Bailey has a great article about the efforts of the Southern Historical Association to alter this in the November, 2003 issue of the Journal of Southern History: Bailey focuses on the central role of John Hope Franklin and determined white allies in this desegregation effort. And I have to tell you, the Southern is still one of the best integrated history conferences -- race, gender, sexuality, you name it -- that I go to, thanks in part to the efforts of these progressives.

Lack of diversity in the profession is not ancient history either, as my three examples might inadvertantly suggest, and racial diversity is a topic that deserves its own post. But gender: let me tell you. I am just old enough (49) to remember a time when many of us women were mentored in part or wholly by men, because -- well, there just weren't that many women on history faculties. And if you didn't want to do your primary graduate work in the emerging field of women's history, forget it.

This is a long way around to explaining to a younger generation of scholars -- men and women -- from a vantage of almost twenty-five years as a historian observing change in the profession, that integrating panels by gender is not just an annoyance, or some kind of PC bandaid intended to cover up "real" problems. Take a look at the AHA's Lunbeck report if you don't think the organization takes gender discrimination seriously. I want to say that I take these younger historians' concerns seriously too. But I would also like to point out that although assistant professors are living in a different world than the one even I came up in, it is also one in which women are successfully getting the majority of Ph.D.'s in history but oddly, not the majority of jobs. And yet, in departments that are predominantly male, it is not infrequent to hear people grumbling about quotas when it is suggested that perhaps seeing men's scholarship as inherently better, or hiring women primarily to teach the history of gender, is still pervasive.

I repeat: clearly it is time to find a new way to articulate the values of equal opportunity, in a way that makes sense to a younger generation grappling with a changed gender terrain. But I would like to make three final points:

1. The gender diversity rule, by asking you to include more than one gender on a panel, should expand, not shrink the pool of people you are considering for a panel. For example, because of gender diversity, when I was but a wee Radical, I once asked Alan Brinkley to be on a panel of mine on women in the New Deal. Alan, you may have noticed, does not work on women, but is a prominent scholar all the same. By asking a scholar, who happened to be a man and didn't work on gender, we got a terrific comment that authoritatively connected what some people might have perceived as marginal work to the field of New Deal political history. Finding a woman in those days who worked on the New Deal and didn't work on women would have been a feat. Gender diversity, while not a direct path to intellectual excellence, did lead there. And as an aside, Alan was really flattered to have been asked to join a conversation that otherwise, at best, he might have observed from the audience.

2. As I have grown older, I have been in the Brinkley position. If saying "we need a woman" gives some younger scholars the incentive to work up the nerve to ask me to work with them, terrific. And it has given me the opportunity to meet young people whose networks I am not automatically going to be in because of age and status differences.

3. The AHA's rule is simply not about discrimination against men, period: this is a right-wing canard that has unfortunately become common sense in centrist and liberal discourse over the past decade. A panel with three to five men on it and one woman has actually offered the lion's share of opportunities on the panel to men. I am not saying that discrimination of any kind has precluded an invitation to a woman, but we all know that we tend to operate within our own networks, particularly as we are entering the profession and we worry that we will not be taken seriously by those as yet unknown to us. And those networks can be very gendered.

All of these points emphasize that crossing gender lines can encourage scholars who -- let's face it -- are enmeshed in different but not insignificant contests for authority that continue to be marked by gender hierarchies to challenge themselves to interact more broadly in the profession. Even though women are not completely excluded from many fields as they were in the past, and you could argue that some subfields in history are quite feminized, several subfields -- political history, foreign policy, military history -- are dominated by men. The above examples also should suggest that the AHA's gender policy can push scholars to cross generational lines as well.

It would be hard to convince me that this is a destructive rule because I have no pervasive sense that a panel is worse off by "adding the woman:" ok, we're not asking you to add any old woman -- find a good one, like Rebecca Goetz, for example. But try. Because although gender diversity does not necessarily mean you will go outside your networks, it expands the chance that you will. Choosing someone for your panel who you would not otherwise have though of will have a variety of good effects and should not be a burden.

So let's scrap the tee-shirt that says "Token." How about, as Rebecca's post underlines, one that says "Equal Pay for Equal Work?"