The Books of My Life: Revolutionary Mothers

Carol Berkin, in her Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for American Independence (New York: Knopf, 2005), argues that the American Revolution brought about a political revolution but not a social revolution for Colonial American women. The American Revolution was not, in other words, a radical revolution because it kept the culture genteel women were brought up in and lived in, the genteel world of deference and obedience, largely in place, after the war ended. 

During the war Colonial American women, Berkin notes, served as the unofficial quartermaster corps of the Continental Army supplying the army with much needed items, cooked for, nursed, and did the laundry of soldiers, spied for the Patriots, those who supported the American Revolution, and for the Loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution, propagandised for the war effort, and even donned men’s clothes, on occasion and fought in the militaries of the Patriots, the Loyalists, and the British. Colonial American women raised funds for the troops, made gunpowder for the troops, and collected metal to make bullets for the troops. Colonial American women, like Paul Revere and Nathan Hale, called Americans to arms, and they spied behind enemy lines for both sides using a combination of surveillance, charm, and wiles to do it, and acted as couriers for both sides during the Revolutionary War. Colonial American African-American and First Peoples' women had different stories to tell than Colonial America's White women, notes Berkin, about their experiences during the American Revolution. They told tales of violence, oppression, exploitation, and violence.

After the war, notes Berkin, change for American women seemed to be in the republican air. A number of intellectuals, Susanna Wright, Judith Sargent Murray, and Benjamin Rush amongst them, debated the “woman question”. Changes in the perception of women, which were afoot before the war, continued to impact notions of gender and perceptions of the role the new American woman should play after the war fed into debates over the “woman question” in the new United States. In essays, poems, plays, and speeches, these reforming and cosmopolitan intellectuals, impacted by the Enlightenment of the Atlantic world, science, and liberal religion, debated the role women should play in the new United States and what new roles women should play, if any, in the new American republic.

America’s reforming intellectuals, following Enlightenment logic, denied that women were intellectually inferior to men and argued that women’s vanity, superficiality, and materialism was a product of society rather than something innate in the female of the species. As a result they campaigned for the creation of schools that would cultivate inherent female rationality by training women in history, rhetoric, geography, composition, science, empirical and logical thought, and mathematics, so they could fulfill their republican duties of teaching their children to be good republican citizens and keeping their husbands virtuous by their own republican example. Benjamin Rush argued that republican women should also be taught the genteel arts like music in order to sooth their husbands and their households. Academies, by the way, did arise in the new United States, as Berkin notes, to do just that including the Philadelphia Young Ladies Academy. By the end of the 18^th century elite American society frowned on poorly educated young women.

The result of the rise of the republican woman and the training of American women for their republican duties was a new cultural iron cage for women, claims Berkin, the cult or culture of domesticity. Despite the fact that women had managed farms and shops, defended their homes from the “enemy”, and coped with the various problems associated with the Revolutionary War, women were relegated to the private sphere of the home where their role and their duty was to take care of their husbands and train their children to be good republicans.

The new American gender culture meant that women had no role in the public economic and political spheres in the new America, which, in the cult of domesticity, were the domains of White elite and middle class males. Murray argued that women should also be trained for self-sufficiency and independence and that women should be fully engaged in the politics of the new nation, but few listened to her and even fewer followed her lead. Most Americans continued to believe that women were supposed to be patient, to endure, to be frugal, and to be strong in whatever circumstances arose. Only New Jersey, and this more as a result of oversight than of conviction, allowed its women to vote in local elections from 1776 to 1801. In 1801, however, as a result of concerns that women and daughters would follow the lead of their husbands and fathers when voting and concerns that female reserve and delicacy were incompatible with politics, New Jersey, ended female voting to, as a supplement to the law ending the right of women to vote in the state said, to restore good order to the state.

The cult of domesticity also meant that American women still could not own property, that women could not even claim the clothes on their back as their own, and that women still could not sue or be sued. Abigail Adams, wife of founding father John Adams, Berkin notes, tried to get her husband to change women’s legal status, comparing the fact that women could not own property and could not sue, a legal status they shared with children and the insane, to the tyranny of King George III from which America rebelled. In a paternalistic reply to his wife that would echo the paternalism of slaveholders in Antebellum America, however, John Adams maintained that such laws were actually benign.

The more things change...

I found Berkin's book an excellent read. It is very well written and quite informative. I recommend it to anyone interested in American history, American women's history, Women's history, culture history, and the history of the American Revolution. Highly recommended.

Musings on A Religion That Would Not Fade Away: Randian Communism

  The interesting thing about Ayn Rand is that she is an inverted early Soviet communist in a number of ways. Like the early Soviet Communists Rand believed that utopia was just over that hill. For Leninists, Lenin and Leninism offered a map that guided the faithful to a radiant future where history would end. For Rand the radiant future was a kind Nietzschean libertarianism with herself as the ultimate ubermensch and guide, guiding true believing faithful travellers to a utopia in which they too could become super capitalist-artists (with art conceived in a rather lumpen bourgeois very mediocre way). For both Leninists and Randians a intellectualitariat would guide the faithful toward this radiant future, which is why the statue to your left can represent both Leninism and Randianism equally well. For the former it is the worker and peasant who are emblematic of a radiant future while for the Randian it is the capitalist-romantic artist-libertarian-philosopher king and queen guiding one toward the radiant future of individualistic narcissistic capitalism who are icons. Like the early Soviet Communists Rand was manichean. For Soviet Communists, Leninism was the essence of good in the universe while capitalism was the essence of evil. For Rand it was just the opposite. Rand style capitalism was good while communism was evil. For both Leninists and Rand religion was a relic of a dark past that would fade away thanks to the triumph of Enlightenment rationality which makes the religious like nature of both Leninism and Randianism--they are both meaning systems after all--and the faith that the faithful had in both faiths rather ironic, I suppose.

The Books of My Life: The Holocaust Industry

Norman Finkelstein's muckracking expose The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, second edition, 2003), explores the morally questionable side of what Finkelstein calls the holocaust industry. The holocaust industry of mainstream American Jewish organisations has, Finkelstein argues and documents, used the holocaust as an ideological and public relations weapon to expropriate or extort monies from the Swiss and German governments, with the aid of American lawyers and the American government, and to sterilse and shield the contemporary state of Israel from any valid criticism of its policies and actions particularly toward the indigenous people of this settler society, the Palestinians.

Finkelstein argues that the ideological use of the Holocaust by the holocaust industry is grounded in the teleological notions that the Holocaust is unique and that Jews have been the unique and only victims of this singular Holocaust. Given that the Holocaust is a species of murder, in this instance mass murder or genocide, Finkelstein argues, both cultural and ideological assumptions are problematic since there have been and will certainly be more instances of planned and intentional mass murders beyond the Armenian Genocide, the genocide aimed at Jews, the Romany, communists, and the disabled in Nazi Germany, the Indonesian Genocide, the genocide of Native Americans, and the genocide associated with American slavery. Murder, in other words, must be seen as on a continuum ranging from murder, intentional or not, to mass murder and genocide rather than as a binary of holocaust/not holocaust.

After reading Finkelstein's expose I couldn't help but wonder whether it is the the pursuit of power and the pursuit of plunder rather than prostitution or spying that is the real oldest profession of the world. After all, holocaust industry organisations come off, in Finkelstein's book, as working less for the benefit of holocaust survivors, who seem to get both smaller in number and larger in number in holocaust industry rhetoric, than for its own benefit, and holocaust industry lawyers come off as interested more in big payoffs than in helping those who survived the horrors of the actual Holocaust. Ironically, argues Finkelstein, this holocaust industry has ended up aiding and abetting that which one would hope it would try to undermine, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Welcome to the rabbit hole.

The Books of My Life: Its Only a Movie

Raymond Haberski's doctoral dissertation cum book, Its Only a Movie: Films and Critics in American Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), is a rather odd if far too frequent kind of hybrid one finds in the world of academe these days. Haberski’s book is, as befits a work of history, generally descriptive. It explores how film, which was initially seen as a dangerous dumbing down form of capitalism by Progressives and Mass Culture analysts, came to be seen as an art form, movies, in the 1950s and afterwords thanks to the Cahiers crowd, Andrew Sarris, and academic film studies.

Then, unfortunately, the reader of Its Only a Movie arrives at chapter seven, the chapter on the film and movie culture war between "pragmatist" Pauline Kael and auteurist Sarris in the 1960s. In chapter seven, It’s Only a Movie suddenly morphs into something far more polemical and apologetic than descriptive, far more ideological than historical. 

Haberski’s apologetics and polemics seem to revolve heavily around the orbit of Pauline Kael. Kael, with her intellectual anti-intellectualism, her anti-elitist elitism, her messianism, her theoretical anti-theoreticism, her anti-historical historicism, her fetishisation and romanticisation of her own emotional responses to films, her narcissistic belief that she could make a movie better than many of those she reviewed, a trait she shared with a number of rock critics of the era, and "borrower of research without citation, is a rather strange saint to hang one’s icon on since the auteur policy of Cahiers and Sarris has won the day in contemporary film studies and film criticism to such an extent that even the anti-auteurist crowd write books about directors like David Lynch. Haberski, the historian-critic-polemicist-king, seems, on the basis of evidence in Its Only a Movie, to want to be a little bit Pauline Kael, a little bit Andrew Sarris, and a little bit Arthur Schlesinger, Junior, for the 2000s. As a result, Haberski champions a revival of a middle way or vital centre form of criticism that seeks to preserve and conserve a criticism that has set modernist standards in a postmodernist world lost in a hallucinatory and foggy maze of demagoguery and simulation.

There are a number of problems with Haberski’s history of American film criticism. First, as Its Only a Movie implies on several occasions, film criticism has been an international practise and particularly an Atlantic world practise as Iris Barry and the influence of Cahiers du Cinema on film criticism in the Anglo-American world in the 1960s and 1970s points up and to which Haberski makes mention. Haberski doesn't explore the influence of another film journal, the British film journal Movie, and Robin Wood, who was associated with Movie, on American film criticism. Movie, in fact, had a major influence on film criticism and film studies in the UK, the US, and Australia. Haberski is far too selective in his exploration of American film criticism. Critics like John Simon and Stanley Kaufmann, at best, reside in the very dark shadows cast by Kael and Sarris in the book. Haberski takes a far too functionalist approach to criticism largely ignoring the process by which critical standards and critical canons are established by elites and elite institutions. A conflict approach to criticism would seem to promise a more fruitful way to approach the manufacture of cultural standards and values. Finally, Haberski's book is full of mistakes. Peter Biskind becomes Bisking in the index. The title of Roland Marchand's essay is missing in action from the bibliography. These, by the way, are only the tip of the mistake iceberg in the book.

There were some things I liked about Haberski’s history of American film criticism. I agree, as Haberski implies, that much contemporary film studies is problematised by its crystal ball textualism, its belief that everything you need to know about a movie or film can be found in its final textual form, and its increasingly esoteric if not occult reliance on psychoanalysis as a tool in deciphering the finished film text, something that, in the process, has, as Biblical Studies did before it, detached the academic study from the broader audience and isolated academia from the general public in the process. I agree with Haberski that economic factors--the decline of the studio system and the rise of television--demographic factors--the coming of age of the baby boom generation--and cultural factors--the advent of the director star--created a space that gave rise, if briefly, to the new American cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. That creative space disappeared very quickly, however, as Hollywood found the answer to its economic woes in the blockbuster and its multiple ancillary economic products.

So, to sum up, Its Only a Movie is an interesting book marred, in my opinion, by a shift from descriptive analysis into polemics and apologetics overdrive in chapter seven. The book on the history of film criticism in the US remains, in my opinion, to be written.

The Books of My Life: Rebirth of a Nation

Jackson Lears's history of the United States from the end of the Civil War to 1920, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), argues that regeneration, renewal, or revitalisation, was at the heart of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America. In Rebirth of a Nation Lears explores how Protestant conversion and rebirth themes were transformed and secularised into social psychologies associated with starting over. These secularised forms of conversion, argues Lears, gave rise to a notion that White males could be regenerated through violence, war, and imperialism, that White females could be regenerated through reform, that America could be regenerated through a purification of politics and competitive economic competition, and that everyone could be regenerated through order and control.

There was a lot I liked about Lears's book. In particular, I greatly appreciated Lears's contention, a contention I whole heartedly agree with, that Protestantism has been at the heart of American culture and ideology. I appreciated Lears's exploration of how Protestant religious ideologies were secularised into  political, economic, and cultural ideologies that impacted the politics, economics, and culture of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era as a curative to the unfortunate tendency within the contemporary American historical profession to ignore the critical cultural role religion has played in American life over its history.

I highly recommend Lears's Rebirth of a Nation. If I was asked to teach a graduate seminar on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Lears's book, along with Alan Tractenberg's The Incorporation of America, would be the first two the books I would have graduate students. Both provide students and those interested in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era an excellent sense of recent important historiographic debates on the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Given its historiographic importance I also recommend Lears's book to anyone interested in a state of the art synthesis of America from the Civil War to the end of World War I. Lears's book is, in my opinion, cultural history at its most enlightening and thought provoking best.