Richard Watson Gordon parades an amazing ignorance

Gordon is talking up an art exhibit on the subject of 19th century prostitution in Paris:

 It was a subject that interested them. Why? The obvious answer is that they were men, but another reason was that prostitution was linked to the idea of modernity. People had moved to the city, which was in itself a new concept, where the moral strictures of the village had disappeared. 

Gordon is a professor of fine arts.

A newspaper series you might want to know about

Keen-eyed reporters at the Globe and Mail became aware that a lot of sexual assault cases in Canada were being dropped as "unfounded." Unfounded is supposed to mean that nothing happened. That sometimes 40% of complaintants, people who went to the police knowing that such complaints often go nowhere, were being turned aside and not believed -- this made the reporters suspicious that the category "unfounded" was being misused.

Sure enough, a large-scale investigation has established just that. Likewise the Globe and Mail's efforts have cast new light on the issue of consent. Well worth reading.

Leading the way

Not.

From  Gail Collins in the New York Times:  

Next session, women will compose 19.5 percent of Congress. “We went from 104 to 104 — down one in the House, up one in the Senate,” reported Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. Obviously we could do better, but on the plus side, we’re just a sliver away from passing Equatorial Guinea when it comes to gender diversity in the nation’s legislature.

Of course, we are no longer taken aback by such comparisons.

Two great women of the medievalist variety

From the Medieval Review.  Many of my readers either know Waddell or will be glad to learn of her.

FitzGerald, Jennifer.  Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke: Irishwomen, Friends, and Scholars. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Pp. xvi, 293. €44.40/$62.95. ISBN: 978-3034307123.

FitzGerald, Jennifer, ed. Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014. Pp. ix, 342. €56.00/$72.95. ISBN: 978-3034309783.

   Reviewed by Joel T. Rosenthal
        SUNY Stony Brook (emeritus)
        Joel.rosenthal@stonybrook.edu


Helen Waddell (1889-1965) has been a name to conjure with ever since the first edition of The Wandering Scholars appeared in 1927. She achieved great popularity and success with this collection as well as with a number of subsequent volumes, especially her labor-of-love and best-selling novel, Peter Abelard in 1933. Her works have remained in print, still being virtually "must" reading for a medievalist, and her life and many of her lesser-known writings have continued to be a subject of interest. We have a 1973 biography by Monica Blackett and another in 1984 by Dame Felicitas Corrigan. Corrigan also edited a 1993 volume, Between Two Eternities: A Helen Waddell Anthology with quotations from Waddell and from the many figures whose works she paraphrased and adopted in her own collections, while in 2005 David Burleigh edited a volume of some of her very early work, Helen Waddell's Writings from Japan. In the volumes under review here FitzGerald adds a further dimension to these earlier works, the biographical volume weaving together the lives of two long-time and very close friends, Waddell and the highly esteemed fourteenth century historian, Maude V. Clarke (1892-1935); the volume of edited papers brings together thirteen essays on various aspects of Waddell's writings, life and family, and literary and intellectual affinities.

While previous biographers have looked at Waddell in the setting of her family--liberal Presbyterian missionary father with roots in Belfast, early life in Japan, close ties with her sister Meg, the difficulties in the path of a woman seeking to establish herself as a scholar/writer--FitzGerald draws the parallel lines between Waddell and Clarke, close friends from their student days at Queen's University, Belfast. The ties and impositions of family slowed them both down; Clarke with a mother who went insane (albeit with a supportive father), Waddell as the youngest of many siblings and therefore tied for years to the care of a sickly and alcoholic stepmother, only free to heed the call of scholarly and literary ambition in 1920 when she was over thirty. Clarke overcame the predictable obstacles to emerge as an important historian, suffering from but winning through the denigration of her Irish degree, academic misogyny at many levels, and the heavy duties demanded of residential faculty at an Oxford woman's college. But mostly she knew where she wanted to go and eventually she got there. Finally and firmly established at Somerville she worked with and drew the admiration of colleagues: F. M. Powicke (who had taught both women at Belfast), V. H. Galbraith (who wrote her British Academy obituary), and E. F. Jacob. Only her sad death prevented her from accepting the invitation to write the fourteenth-century volume of The Oxford History of England, this being about as high a tribute as British academia could offer. When that volume did appear, in 1959, it was by May McKisack, Clarke's friend and contemporary.

Waddell, by contrast, found the bonds of academia too narrow, and was rejected several times for positions for which she had applied (and was well qualified). But she had the good fortune to gather enough fellowship money for research in Paris, work that led to those medieval volumes that, soon after publication, brought her fame (and probably a fair degree of fortune). She had begun her serious studies with an interest in the role of women in literature and FitzGerald gives us her hitherto unpublished "Women in the Drama before Shakespeare" in an appendix (187-230). But in the course of Waddell's intellectual development she came to aspire to a wider sweep, a larger vision of the role of literature. As she read medieval sources she found a charm in the material that few had discovered, let alone championed. As FitzGerald says, it was this "that would make her famous; she is distinguished among her fellow 'discoverers' of twelfth-century humanism for emphasizing the inclination towards love, friendship, nature, the bonds of humankind" (77). This sort of "ode to joy" was to be the spirit or theme behind her work, including the collections of Latin poetry that argued for a common vein of human experience from late classical-pagan times through the Middle Ages. The high-water mark of this approach is found in Waddell's fictionalized tale of Abelard and Heloise. Here she manages to identify with each or both in their quest for love and spiritual fulfillment; a follow-up novel on Heloise was planned but never written. When her learned but eccentric books began to attract popular acclaim (and sales figures to match), an academic critic accused her of "jazzing" up the Middle Ages. No doubt, she was guilty as charged--to the pleasure of readers for about three-quarters of a century.

Helen Waddell Reassessed brings together thirteen papers (eleven authors) from a 2012 conference at which all paid tribute to Waddell's unique blend of "scholarship and imagination" (1). The papers are divided into three groupings, opening with "Medieval Contexts." Under this heading Constant Mews discussed how Waddell came to grips with the multi-faceted history of Abelard and Heloise; lust and sin and, simultaneously, a painful search for salvation and peace. Charles Lock looks at the virtual stranglehold that Germanic philology had on medieval studies (at least in the literary realms) and how Waddell rebelled against this, championing Irish-Celtic, pagan, and late classical elements in medieval culture. Ann Buckley tells of the liturgies for some fairly obscure Irish saints--a background that, again, helps explain Waddell's emphasis on this body of literature and the traditions that lay behind it. FitzGerald covers some of the biographical material of her full volume though now she emphasizes aspects of Waddell's continual growth and tries to recapture some of her views about poetry and the human spirit as they had been enunciated in a now-lost lecture on mime.

"Critical Readings" carries papers by Stephen Kelly, Amanda Tucker, Norman Vance, and FitzGerald, looking at such varied topics as the influence upon Waddell or her convergence with Walter Benjamin and R. G. Collingwood, the legacy of liberal Presbyterianism, her Irish roots and the legacy of national identity, and her development during the "lost decade" that she spent tending her step-mother. "Parallel and Influences" does what it promises, in some cases by illuminating links that seem perfectly obvious after they have been called to our attention: David Burleigh on Waddell and Arthur Waley as they both paraphrased and/or translated Chinese verse, Helen Carr on Waddell and Ezra Pound as they both turned to the charm and inspiration of that same body of writing, Louis Watson on parallels between Waddell and Hope Emily Allen (who brought Margery Kempe to our attention), and Norman Vance on the similarities between Waddell's Protestant commitment and the spiritual quest of some contemporary Roman Catholic, Irish figures. Nini Rogers very lucidly puts much of the biographical material into the context of the large late-Victorian family with its many webs of affection and repression.

In this collection of papers on a variety of Waddell-focused topics we range to what we now think of as theory, as in the references to Benjamin and Collingwood, or to comparative religion--setting Waddell against Catholic theologians--or transnational literature as in her writings that looked to China and Japan. Behind it all, was her view of a universal love of expression, whether in joy or sorrow or quiet contemplation--a belief that the common bonds of humanity overleaped the obvious boundaries of language, nation, and religion. FitzGerald does extra service, beyond that of editor and contributor, by including an admirable and seemingly exhaustive bibliography to the collected volume: Waddell's works, large and small and including her own poems and reviews, reviews of her many books, biographical material, literary criticism, and seven dissertations.

As the third biography and the fifth or sixth book on Waddell in recent decades, we may ask why she is still of such interest, a question that goes beyond the power and charm of her writings. Maude Clarke, we can say, was a very good academic historian and students of medieval England still know her work--or they should. But Waddell brought unique qualities to her work and they continue to give her, as well as those books, considerable currency. Interest in her life goes beyond the obviously biographical, though no doubt we all enjoy a story of how adversity is overcome and diligence and perseverance (and a touch of genius) come to the top. In addition, we note (from the many quotations and notes in both books) that Waddell and Clarke--especially Waddell--are rich subject for biography because they wrote so much: letters, notes to themselves and each other and to friends and siblings and colleagues. They chronicled their lives, both the up sides and the down sides, in great detail and the challenge of reconstructing these lives is an intriguing one. These two books take us to a world of a century ago with exciting frontiers and time-honored rigidities. Waddell saw some of her near and dear die in each World War and her writings reflect touches of sorrow and anxiety, as they do of the soaring spirit. In the best sense Maude Clarke represents exacting scholarship; we still honor her for that. Waddell seems to transcend exacting scholarship--in numerous works on Chinese poetry, as in her more familiar work on the Latin West--and we continue to honor her for that; we look at her life and we read what she wrote. No wonder that her legacy is alive and well

Mary Carleton, the Heroine Bigamist

Janice Liedl introduces us to a "bad girl" celebrity of the 17th century.

Young women in Chechnya

A compelling piece from the Big Picture.

Mixed feelings about this

Comments welcome.

My father, the hero -- a story from Syria (later revealed to be a hoax)

An amazing story out of Damascus.  -- which turned out  to be a hoax.

Two security guys show up in the middle of the night to arrest, harass, brutalize or rape Amina, a known gay/lesbian activist.  The following scene unfolds (excerpted and emphasis added):

"We have enough [reason to arrest you]," the same one says. "Conspiring against the state, urging armed uprising, working with foreign elements."
"Uh huh, which ones?" [says Amina]
"The Salafi plot," the other one says, his accent marks him as straight from a village in the Jebel Ansariya. "Making sectarian plots."
"Really?" my father interrupts. "My daughter is a salafi?" he starts laughing. "Look at her: can't you see that that is ridiculous? She doesn't even cover any more ... and if you have really read even half of what she has written, you know how ridiculous that is. When was the last time you heard a wahhabi, or even someone from the brotherhood say that wearing hijab is the woman's choice only?"
he pauses, they don't say anything.
"I did not think so," he goes on. "When was the last time you saw one of those write that there should be no religion as religion of the state?"
Again nothing.
"When was the last time you saw them saying that the gays should be allowed the right to marry, a man to a man or a woman to a woman?"
Nothing.
"And when you say nothing, you show," he says, "that you have no reason to take my daughter."
They say nothing. Then one whispers something to the other, he smiles.
"Uh huh," the man says, "so your daughter tells you everything, huh?"
"Of course," my father says.
"Did she tell you that she likes to sleep with women?" he grins, pure poison, feeling like he has made a hit. "That she is one of those faggots who fucks little girls?" (the arabic he used is far cruder ... you get the idea)
My dad glances at me. I nod; we understand each other.
"She is my daughter," he says and I can see the anger growing in his eyes, "and she is who she is and if you want her, you must take me as well."
"Stupid city-fuckers," says the same guy. "All you rich pansies are the same. No wonder she ends up fucking girls and kikes" (again, the Arabic is much rawer ,,,)
He steps towards me and puts his hand on my breast.
"Maybe if you were with a real man," he leers, "you'd stop this nonsense and lies; maybe we should show you now and let your pansy father watch so he understands how real men are."
I am almost trembling with rage. My dad moves his head slightly to tell me to be silent.
"What are you?" he says. "Did the jackal sleep with the monkey before you were born? What are your names?"
They tell him. He nods
"Your father," he says to the one who threatened to rape me, "does he know this is how you act? He was an officer, yes? And he served in ..." (he mentions exactly and then turns to the other) "and your mother? Wasn't she the daughter of ...?"
They are both wide-eyed, yes, that is right,
"What would they think if they heard how you act? And my daughter? Let me tell you this about her; she has done many things that, if I had been her, I would not have done. But she has never once stopped being my daughter and I will never once let you do any harm to her. You will not take her from here. And, if you try, know that generations of her ancestors are looking down on you. Do you know what is our family name? You do? Then you know where we stood when Muhammad, peace be upon him, went to Medina, you know who it was who liberated al Quds, you know too, maybe, that my father fought to save this country from the foreigners and who he was, know who my uncles and my brothers were ... and if that doesn't shame you enough, you know my cousins and you will leave here.
"You will leave her alone and you will tell the rest of your gang to leave her alone. And I will tell you something now because I think maybe you are too stupid to figure this out on your own. You are alawiyeen; do not deny that, I know you both are. We are Sunni. You know that. And in your offices and in your villages they are telling you that all of you must stand shoulder to shoulder now because we are coming for you as soon as we can and we will serve you as they have served ours in the land of the two rivers. So you are scared. I would be too.
"So you come here to take Amina. Let me tell you something though. She is not the one you should fear; you should be heaping praises on her and on people like her. They are the ones saying alawi, sunni, arabi, kurdi, duruzi, christian, everyone is the same and will be equal in the new Syria; they are the ones who, if the revolution comes, will be saving Your mother and your sisters. They are the ones fighting the wahhabi most seriously. You idiots are, though, serving them by saying 'every sunni is salafi, every protester is salafi, every one of them is an enemy' because when you do that you make it so.
"Your Bashar and your Maher, they will not live forever, they will not rule forever, and you both know that. So, if you want good things for yourselves in the future, you will leave and you will not take Amina with you. You will go back and you will tell the rest of yours that the people like her are the best friends the Alawi could ever have and you will not come for her again.
"And right now, you two will both apologize for waking her and putting her through all this. Do you understand me?"
And time froze when he stopped speaking. Now, they would either smack him down and beat him, rape me, and take us both away ... or ...

the first one nodded, then the second one.
"Go back to sleep," he said, "we are sorry for troubling you."
And they left!
...

 Thanks to Syria Comment

Huda Sha’rawi speaks

While we all marvel at the role women have taken in the recent Arab revolutions, especially in Egypt,Huda Sha’rawi, an early 20th-century Egyptian activist, reminds us that we've been here before:

Exceptional women appear at certain moments in history and are moved by special forces. Men view these women as supernatural beings and their deeds as miracles... In moments of danger, when women emerge by their side, men utter no protest. Yet women’s great acts and endless sacrifices do not change men’s views of women. Through their arrogance, men refuse to see the capabilities of women....

A relevant thought, if not a happy one, for International Women's Day #100.

Women and the revolution

Naomi Wolf in Aljazeera English:

Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?
In both countries, women protesters were nothing like the Western stereotype: they were front and centre, in news clips and on Facebook forums, and even in the leadership. In Egypt's Tahrir Square, women volunteers, some accompanied by children, worked steadily to support the protests – helping with security, communications, and shelter. Many commentators credited the great numbers of women and children with the remarkable overall peacefulness of the protesters in the face of grave provocations.

Other citizen reporters in Tahrir Square – and virtually anyone with a cell phone could become one – noted that the masses of women involved in the protests were demographically inclusive. Many wore headscarves and other signs of religious conservatism, while others reveled in the freedom to kiss a friend or smoke a cigarette in public.

Supporters, leaders

But women were not serving only as support workers, the habitual role to which they are relegated in protest movements, from those of the 1960s to the recent student riots in the United Kingdom. Egyptian women also organised, strategised, and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

The role of women in the great upheaval in the Middle East has been woefully under-analysed. Women in Egypt did not just "join" the protests – they were a leading force behind the cultural evolution that made the protests inevitable. And what is true for Egypt is true, to a greater and lesser extent, throughout the Arab world. When women change, everything changes - and women in the Muslim world are changing radically.

The greatest shift is educational. Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today, women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They are being trained to use power in ways that their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers - as Sanaa el Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating; campaigning for student leadership posts; fundraising for student organisations; and running meetings.

Indeed, a substantial minority of young women in Egypt and other Arab countries have now spent their formative years thinking critically in mixed-gender environments, and even publicly challenging male professors in the classroom. It is far easier to tyrannise a population when half are poorly educated and trained to be submissive. But, as Westerners should know from their own historical experience, once you educate women, democratic agitation is likely to accompany the massive cultural shift that follows.

Harassmap.org -- using web-based publicity in Cairo to fight the harassment of women

From PRI:

Cairo is a bustling city. Its streets are almost always full. But walking around for women here can be unpleasant.
EMAN MORSI: You get people just saying things like hey sweetie, hey honey… Or just insults.
Eman Morsi is an Egyptian woman in her twenties.
EMAN MORSI: Another type of street harassment is when they just brush across. And that kinds of tends to be a bit intimidating. There’s also when they grope you and stuff. I think pretty much many women went through that but we don’t really talk about that.
That’s why a crowd of young Egyptians gathered last week at a cultural center in Cairo. We all know that sexual harassment is a wide-spread phenomenon, online activist Sara El-Demerdash told the audience.
The kids – many with laptops on their knees – were being introduced to a new website that hopes to help change that.
The site allows women to send emails or SMS messages reporting harassment. The information is used to create an online map of harassment in Cairo: HarassMap. Rebecca Chiao is with the HarassMap team.
Rebecca Chiao: “The goal of our effort actually is not just to create a map. The goal is to change the social acceptability of harassment. So, the map is the first step.”
Chiao is an American who’s lived in Egypt for many years, working on women’s rights. She and three Egyptian colleagues created HarassMap. The online map will help identify harassment hotspots, says Chiao.
Rebecca Chiao: “And after identifying them, we’ll go to the communities in groups of volunteers and speak to people with roots in community, you know, shop owners, and use the map to show them: this is what’s happening in your neighborhood.”

...

Nihad Al Qumsan heads the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights. A 2008 survey the center carried out showed that about 80 percent of women in Egypt have faced some form of harassment.
NIHAD AL QUMSAN: “When they’re speaking generally, men will say that harassment is the result of women wearing provocative clothes. But when they filled out our survey they admitted they also harass women who are veiled. The men try to find an excuse for their behaviour, but most women in Egypt are veiled. And anyway a woman is free to wear what she wants.”

See Harassmap.org (English version).

The 10th century nun diet

A lot of intelligent people know more about diet and nutrition than I do, so I will merely comment on the following information from Jonathan Jarrett's blog.  It seems there is a forged charter that gives the total amount of food supposedly consumed by nuns in  a monastery with a certain number of nuns in it.  Divide one dicey number by another dicey number and you get what supposedly was the daily intake of the ninth or 10th century nun:

• 1,440 g of bread
• 1.38 l of wine
• 70 g of cheese
• 133 g of dry vegetables
• 16 g of salt
• 0.6 g of honey (which I guess was used in accumulated dollops)

Verdon (or perhaps Rouche) [scholars Jarrett has consulted]  calculates that this is 4,727 calories and says that the required daily intake is 2,400. That was France in 1975, and a rapid websearch suggests that UK women are advised by the National Health Service to keep calories down to 2000 a day. Of course, there is a big difference in how many calories the nuns were burning in just not freezing for at least half the year, but Verdon is presumably still right when he observes that this diet was seriously lacking in protein and vitamins.

So what do you say, informed eaters?

PS:  Historians of earlier eras are often forced to look at documents that were forged by institution trying to nail down what they thought were their historic rights.

Image:  Escapee nuns eating fast food.

One of the things that's wrong with the world today, 2

A scary guest editorial at Informed Comment by Houshang Asadi, who once shared a cell with Khamenei during the Shah's regime:

...

Since its inception, the Islamic Revolution has sought to suppress civil society by replacing civil law with sharia law as the legal basis of the Iranian society. But the long-lasting conflict between liberal-minded clergymen and their fundamentalist colleagues has only surfaced recently as Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has taken drastic measures to turn the ‘Islamic Republic’ into the ‘Islamic Caliphate’.

There are now two distinct camps in Iran. The first faction is composed of Shi’a fundamentalists who support Ayatollah Khamenei. Khamenei’s views have three major influences: First, the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are generally seen as the founding fathers of Islamic fundamentalism in modern times. Before the 1979 Revolution, Khamenei personally translated into Persian from the original Arabic the important works of the leading intellectual of the Brotherhood, Sayyed Qutb. Qutb’s views, especially his profound hatred of the West, are easily discernable among Iran’s ruling clergy today.

The second group that has influenced Khamenei is known as Fadā’iyān-e Islam (devotees of Islam), the first followers of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iran led by Mujtaba Navab-Safavi, who carried out some of the earliest acts of religious terrorism in modern Iran. Khamenei has repeatedly referred to Navab-Safavi as his role model in politics. That he has named his eldest son Mujtaba might be an indication of Khamenei’s admiration for this man.

The third sphere of influence is a group known as Hujjatiyeh Society, which sees as its mission to pave the way for the reappearance of the Mahdi, the 12th Shi’a Imam, who is believed to have gone into a millennium-old occultation and whose ultimate return in the End Times is expected to bring peace and justice to the world. Recently it has been revealed that each Wednesday, Khamenei visits Jamkaran, a well in the city of Qum that is regarded by many Shi’as as the hiding place of Mahdi. Eyewitnesses have reported that Khamenei has been seen in a state of deep prayer, allegedly communicating with the Hidden Imam.

The members of the second camp see themselves totally at odds with the other faction whose views and actions they regard as nothing short of catastrophic for Iran’s future. The vast majority of the country’s intellectuals, the middle class, the youth and a significant portion of those who work in “the system”, belong to this second camp, and are collectively referred to as the Green Movement. From the perspective of the Shi’a fundamentalists, the members of this movement are no better than infidels. As such, they can be imprisoned, tortured, raped etc.

The outcome of the ongoing power struggle between these two opposing factions carries great significance not just for Iran but for the international community. A victory by the Iranian “Taliban” will take Iran on a downward spiral and would place the country’s wealth and geopolitical powers entirely at the disposal of those who believe Islam’s global hegemony is possible through violent jihad, which is why they wish to secure nuclear capabilities. Bearing in mind that Iran has long served as a source of inspiration for many social and ideological movements in the region, it becomes clear how critical is the outcome of the battle between these two camps in Iran for the country, the region, and the world at large.

The difficulties of adapting a religious tradition

Over at Informed Comment, Juan Cole has an interesting take on the recent proposal by a few Saudi clerics that "breast-milk feeding should be used as a way of establishing kinship between men and women, which would then allow the two to be in each others’ presence when the woman is alone and unveiled," which would be helpful, for instance, if a man and a woman worked in the same office.

I took this as sheer nuttiness from one of the most rigid (and atypical) religious establishments in the Muslim world, but Cole says no:

The things driving this legal advice or fatwa are first of all that Saudis mostly practice the Wahhabi form of Islam and people in the Arabian Peninsula generally tend to be more strict about the notion of gender segregation. Segregating women from unrelated males and having them veil when they go out of the house is not in the Qur’an ...

Most Muslim women in history never veiled or were secluded. Pastoral nomads were a significant proportion of most Middle Eastern societies, and their women rode camels and horses outside during migrations to where the pasturage popped up. And peasant women worked the fields and could not be secluded or mostly afford to veil. Only in the past two centuries has veiling and sometimes seclusion been adopted in some Muslim countries as a sign of upward mobility (since these were aristocratic customs they are ways of putting on airs if you bet better off some year).

Since the Saudi religious authorities are so worried about secluding women, they are inevitably also worried about the ways in which contemporary societies and economies increasingly make such practices (which were only practical in the past for the very rich anyway) impossible.

Thus the appeal to “milk kinship.” Now, milk kinship is in fact a social institution in premodern Muslim societies, but it was not typically appealed to with regard to loosening gender segregation (which anyway was not so common in the medieval period). Where upper-class families had a nanny she might breastfeed the aristocratic baby at the same time that she breastfed her own infant, and that practice was considered to make the children a kind of sibling. Then the aristocratic could never take the daughter of his nanny to wife, and he might give special promotions or patronage to his ‘milk brother,’ the nanny’s son. These customs existed everywhere from Iran to Senegal, though they affected a small sliver of Muslim society.

...

If you weren’t religious or weren’t Wahhabi, you could just suggest that strictures on women and men mixing socially are hidebound and more customary than Islamic, and just change the practice. Hundreds of millions of modern Muslims practice gender mixing (Saudi Arabia, which Westerners often misunderstand as having a normative Islam, is viewed by most Muslims as an outlier). In fact, the spread of the headscarf in places like Egypt is probably not a sign so much of increased female conservatism but an attempt to make it all right for women to enter the public sphere in much greater numbers (also women wearing headscarfs are a little bit less likely to be pinched and harassed by men in public). But such an argument would not work in Saudi Arabia, where the authorities are zealous about Wahhabi tradition.

...

So the Saudi clerics are tinkering with the tradition, since in the past it concerned a wetnurse and children under 5, not adult women and adult men. And when that change is made, it becomes weird. But it isn’t a sign of conservatism (it departs from the traditional custom into new territory). It is a sign of modernism. It is an attempt to create a wider circle of men with whom women can legitimately interact in public.

It occurs to me that this effort at modernism may be worth thinking about when arguments about the use of the hijab, the niqab, or the burka come up, as it has in Canada recently.

A curious, moving memoir of an Iranian mother

I have just started following the blog IranWrites, though it has been around for a while. Today a post called A Woman by Her Own Rights showed up. It would be impossible to make a representative excerpt, so I will just recommend it to you.

Is the past another country?

Brad DeLong gave me the opportunity today to put a deeply-felt conviction of mine into words.

Brad was quoting from a blog called The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, whose author, Rufus F., was reflecting on the Odyssey.

[Brad]: Rufus F. on the Homecoming of Odysseus:

Homer “The Odyssey” | The League of Ordinary Gentlemen: I find his homecoming strange though. After winning a test of strength, Odysseus and Telemachus slaughter the suitors. The whole scene is excessive; he claims to kill them for their outrageous violence, but it amounts to boorish behavior and a failed plot to kill Telemachus. It would make more sense to run them off: “Scram, wimps!” Instead, Odysseus kills every last man for having dropped in for a visit and deciding to stay for several years...

[Brad:] It's considerably worse than that: consider the servant-women of Odysseus's palace who had consorted with the suitors:

"I will tell you the truth, my son," answered Euryclea. "There are fifty women in the house whom we teach to do things, such as carding wool, and all kinds of household work. Of these, twelve in all have misbehaved, and have been wanting in respect to me, and also to Penelope....

[T]he women came down in a body, weeping and wailing bitterly.... [T]hey took the women out and hemmed them in the narrow space between the wall of the domed room and that of the yard, so that they could not get away: and Telemachus said to the other two, "I shall not let these women die a clean death, for they were insolent to me and my mother, and used to sleep with the suitors."

So saying he made a ship's cable fast to one of the bearing-posts that supported the roof of the domed room, and secured it all around the building, at a good height, lest any of the women's feet should touch the ground; and as thrushes or doves beat against a net that has been set for them in a thicket just as they were getting to their nest, and a terrible fate awaits them, even so did the women have to put their heads in nooses one after the other and die most miserably. Their feet moved convulsively for a while, but not for very long...

Here's what I said in comments (touched up a little):

I am not so sure that the past is another country... Can't you imagine a similar scene taking place in another neighborhood in our own time, with the woman killers giving a similar justification? Remember that even in his own time that Odysseus was a smalltime pirate; today, unless he got particularly ambitious and inconvenienced the big guys,perhaps by hijacking a ship off the Horn of Africa, he would rate no space in the New York Times. Certainly the killing of the insolent women would get no coverage. Neither would the destruction of their elementary school or women's health clinic.

My point was, that the past is not one country, and our time is not a single country either, and the differences between different countries in any one era are very big sometimes' and broad similarities exist between some past countries and some in the present. Not everything that existed in the past exists in some corner of our own world now, but I believe that many things that existed in the time of, say, the Greek dark ages have rough analogues today. The failure to recognize that, I think, leads to one of the big errors of historical understanding: focusing on one country, one short period, one culture, one imperial court, one literary circle, and saying "this was the human experience on planet Earth at such and such a time."

And another serious mistake is to believe that some phenomenon that you find impressive or repulsive is absolutely unique in human history.

"All the fuss we made over these writers, as if what they said was a matter of life and death to us."

I have just finished reading one of the most remarkable books I've read in a very long time: Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. It is a difficult book to describe; one might say it is a memoir, perhaps somewhat fictionalized, of an upper-class Iranian woman, partly raised in Britain and the United States and now living in the USA, which focuses on what it was like to teach English literature in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq. In particular, she talks about her interactions with some of her students during this period. Nafisi comes across as a secular person, and she sees the Islamic revolution as nothing but a disaster. For instance page 119, when she talks to one of her students, a Khomeini supporter, about the trial of a supposed counterrevolutionary:

I told him they had no proof that the gentleman in question was a CIA agent, in any case I doubt if the CIA would be foolish enough to employ someone like him. But even those whom he called the functionaries of the old regime, regardless of their guilt, shouldn't be treated this way. I cannot understand why the Islamic government had to gloat over these people's deaths, brandishing their photographs after they had been tortured and executed. Why did they show us these pictures? Why did our students every day shout slogans demanding new death sentences?

Mr. Bahri did not respond at first. He stood still, his head bent, his hands linked in front of him. Then he started to speak slowly and with tens precision. Well, they have to pay, he said they're on trial for their past deeds. The Iranian nation will not tolerate their crimes. And these new crimes? I asked as soon as he had uttered his last word. These new crimes? Should they be tolerated in silence? Everyone nowadays is an enemy of God -- former ministers and educators, prostitutes, leftist revolutionaries: they are murdered daily. What is his and his had these people done to deserve such treatment?

His face had become hard, and of the shadow of obstinacy has colored his eyes. He repeated that people had to pay for their past crimes. This is not a game, he said. It is a revolution. I asked him if I too was on trial for my past. But he was right in a sense: we all have to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle. I did not know then that I had already begun to pay, that what was happening was part of the payment. It was much later that these feelings would be clarified.

This book has been criticized for giving a very negative view of the Islamic Republic of Iran, of women and even more men in Iran and even of Islam itself. Notably, Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz (another Iranian academic based in United States and writing in English) accuses Nafisi of promoting a neo-Orientalist agenda and confirming all the old clichés of the backward, static and exotic East. I don't see it myself. There's nothing exotic about the presentation of life in Tehran in this book, and there's plenty of action and change. What is really wrong with the criticisms I've heard is that they assume that Nafisi had to write the book that the critics wanted to read, or have other people read. This is a very personal memoir, not the history of revolutionary Iran. It tells Nafisi's story of how the revolution affected her as a teacher and scholar, and how it seemed to affect some of her more memorable students -- and not just the ones he liked. I have yet to read a review that picks up on what I think is very important point: this memoir might easily be about the Cultural Revolution in China, or the Jacobin revolution in France, or any other number of similar upheavals.

The quotation at the head of this post tells the story as I read it. It is about reading, teaching, learning, speaking about intellectual subjects when it is really important and far from easy. Again, p. 338:

I said to him that I wanted to write a book [after she left Iran] in which I would thank the Islamic Republic for all the things it had taught me -- to love Austen and James and ice cream and freedom. I said, right now it is not enough to appreciate all this; I want to write about it. He said, you will not be able to write about Austen without writing about us, about this place where you rediscovered Austen. You will not be able to put us out of your head. Try, you'll see. The Austen you know is so irretrievably linked to this place, this land and these trees. You don't think that this is the same Austen you read with Dr. French -- it was Dr. French [probably at U. of Oklahoma], wasn't it? Do you? This is the Austen you read here, in the place where the film censor is nearly blind and where they hang people in the streets and put a curtain across the sea to segregate men and women. I said, When I write about all that perhaps I'll become more generous, less angry.

If you like that sample of Nafisi's writing, there is lots more where that came from.

Population crash in Europe?

Fred Pearce has written a book called Peoplequake and also an article in the Guardian flogging its message of anxiety about Europe's lack of enthusiasm for reproduction. Some excerpts from a meaty article:

On the windswept roof of the Lausitz Tower, the town's only landmark, I meet Felix Ringel. A young German anthropologist studying at Cambridge University, he has passed up chances taken by his friends to ­investigate the rituals of Amazon tribes or Mongolian peasants. As we survey the empty plots of fenced scrub below, he explains that the underbelly of his own country seemed weirder and far less studied than those exotic worlds.

In its heyday in the 60s, Hoyerswerda was a model community in communist East Germany, a brave new world attracting migrants from all over the country. They dug brown coal from huge open-cast mines on the plain around the town. There was good money and two free bottles of brandy a month. But the fall of the Berlin Wall changed all that.

...

Under communism, East ­German women worked more, and were ­often better educated, than the more conservative western hausfrau. But when their jobs disappeared in the early 90s, hundreds of thousands of them, encouraged by their ­mothers, took their school diplomas and CVs and headed west to cities such as ­Heidelberg. The boys, however, seeing their fathers out of work, often just gave up. In adulthood, they form a rump of ill-educated, alienated, ­often unemployable men, most of them ­unattractive mates – a further factor in the departure of young women.

...

"There has been nothing ­comparable in world peacetime ­history," says the French demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais. After the Berlin Wall came down, millions of East Germans who stayed behind decided against producing another generation. Their fertility more than halved. In 1988, 216,000 ­babies were born in East Germany; in 1994, just 88,000 were born. The fertility rate worked out at 0.8 children per woman. Since then it has struggled up to around 1.2, but that is still only just over half the rate needed to maintain the population. About a million homes have been abandoned, and the ­government is demolishing them as fast as it can. Left ­behind are "perforated ­cities", with huge random chunks of ­wasteland. Europe hasn't seen ­cityscapes like this since the bombing of the second world war.

And nowhere has emptied as much as Hoyerswerda. In the 80s, it had a population of 75,000 and the highest birth rate in East Germany. Today, the town's population has halved. It has gone from being ­Germany's fastest-growing town to its fastest-shrinking one. The biggest age groups are in their 60s and 70s, and the town's former birth clinic is an old people's home. Its population pyramid is ­upturned – more like a mushroom cloud.

In a school in a partly demolished suburb known simply as Area Nine, I meet Nancy, a tattooed and quietly ­spoken social worker. Forty years ago, her parents were among the new­comers: her mother was a midwife, her father a train driver. "There were modern flats and services here then. It was a prestige development. When you asked the kids what they wanted to do when they grew up, they had ambitions to drive buses or work in the power station. But now parents find it very difficult to encourage their ­children when they have no jobs or prospects themselves. My friends have all left. I'd like to stay, but I have a three-year-old daughter and the schools are no good any more. I'll ­probably go too."

...

Across the rest of Germany, Hoyerswerda is regarded as a feral wasteland – complete with wolves. Slinking in from Poland and the Czech Republic, they are finding empty spaces where once there were apartment blocks and mines. And the wolves, at least, are staying. A few kilometres down the road, near the tiny town of Spreewitz, wolf enthusiast Ilka Reinhardt can't believe his luck: "We have more wolves than we have had in 200 years." The badlands of former East Germany are going "back to nature". And Europeans should be worried, for some fear that eastern Germany is, as it was back in the 1960s, a trailblazer for the demographic future of the continent.

This is definitely an interesting phenomenon, but strangely I am not moved. First, the traditional population of Europe may be falling, or look like it's about to fall, but the population of the world is still going up, with devastating impacts on climate and the rest of the environment. If Europeans don't want to devote their lives to aggravating the problem, who am I to tell them that they should?

Also, there are sizable parts of North America where the population is thinning out pretty drastically, too. Canada and the United States both have growing populations, but the places where people used to support themselves by breaking the sod or digging mines by hand are clearing out and these areas may well end up with populations of the scale that existed before the huge invasion from Europe. Remember that huge invasion from Europe? That took place because Europe could not support its population under decent conditions with technology and institutions of the time. I am not so sure why people get so excited about this stuff, but it may have something do with the fear of slang-speaking kids wearing baseball caps backwards.

Me, my neighborhood has both wolves and kids with baseball caps worn at various angles. So what.

Image: This is Hoyerswerda.

A new translation of the Menagier de Paris

An excerpt of the review on the e-mail list, TMR-L (The Medieval Review), a useful and timely resource you can subscribe to free.

Greco, Gina L. and Christine M. Rose, translators. The Good
Wife's Guide (Le Menagier de Paris): A Medieval Household Book.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Pp. 384. $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-
8014-4738-9.

Reviewed by Kate Kelsey Staples
West Virginia University
Kate.Staples@mail.wvu.edu


According to the fourteenth-century Le Menagier de Paris, the key to being a good wife included these edifying directives: "be obedient...to your husband and to his commandments, whatever they be, whether they be made in earnest or in jest" (104); "choose rather to please your husband than yourself, because his happiness must come before yours" (104); "it is through good obeisance that a wise woman
obtains her husband's love and, in the end, receives from him what she desires" (119); "protect [your future husband] from holes in the roof and smoky fires, and do not quarrel with him, but be sweet, pleasant, and peaceful with him"(139); "steer clear of swaggering and idle young men who live beyond their means and who, possessing no land or lineage, become dancers" (94). While perhaps shocking to modern sensibilities, or comical in turn, this fascinating and relatively understudied text overflows with suggestions for a woman's obedience, attention to reputation, proper piety, and correct conduct. The anonymous author also advises his audience, presumably his young wife, on the practicalities household management: when to transplant cabbage (212), how to delegate tasks to servants (section 2.3), in what ways to tend to ropy, musty, and moldy wine (221), and how to care for horses (223-228). Completing the manual of instruction is a rich selection of cooking menus and a guide to buying spices and foodstuffs, continuing the practical nature of the guidebook.

As the first modern English translation of Le Menagier de Paris, this edition makes a gem of a text accessible beyond French literary courses. With their clear translation, Gina Greco, Associate Professor of French, and Christine Rose, Professor of English, both at Portland State University, open spaces for discussion of the composition of the late medieval household, the reading practices of the bourgeoisie, late medieval culture, culinary practices, and women's history, more generally.

One of the greatest attributes of this edition is that Greco and Rose present Le Menagier de Paris as we may expect it to have originally appeared. There are only three surviving fifteenth-century manuscripts and one early sixteenth-century manuscript; the original is lost (2). The modern scholarly Middle French edition (Brereton and Ferrier, 1981) omits three sections of the text that appear in the
manuscripts: the Griselda tale, the Melibee tale, and Jacques Bruyant's Le Chemin de povrete et richesse (here, too, appear the first modern English translations of the latter two texts). Karin Ueltschi's Middle French and Modern French facing-page translation (1994) includes the tales of Griselda and Melibee, but consigns Le
Chemin poem to an appendix. As the translators rightfully point out, presenting it without these texts or in an alternate order, even if they were not originally compiled by the author, does a disservice to understanding reading practices, the author's goals, and household composition in late medieval France (5)...

Then there is this...

Behind the Veil, a video report on women in Kandahar from the Globe and Mail.