One Way to Tell Elizabeth Warren's Story

[This began at a Facebook comment Monday morning, and now it's a Politico article. The version below is the one I wrote before it was edited down. One way or another, I hope someone gets it to Warren's hands, because I'd like to believe she might this helpful, or at least food for thought.]

Elizabeth Warren’s formal announcement last Saturday that she was running for President of the United States was not, if the world of online activists was any indication, accompanied by an excited rush of progressive speculation. Not that there was a complete absence of such–that was hardly the case. Warren has long had her fans, and campaign consultants, strategic advisors, and fund-raisers on both sides of the political aisle see her as a serious, credible candidate for the highest office in the land. But the overarching narrative of her announcement, the feel it had as the news broke, was not what some once imagined it would be.

Part of this is simply that times change. Warren’s 2014 book A Fighting Chance fervently attacked the rising inequality that, by the end of Obama’s time in office, increasing numbers of Democrats were being forced to admit their president had done little to alleviate, and made her–someone whose ideas were central to Dodd-Frank, one of the very few financial reforms Washington passed in the wake of the Great Recession–the de facto star of what was called, just four years ago, “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” Paul Krugman ruefully admired her “enlightened populism”; she was labeled “the most recognizable leader of a resurgent progressive movement” by The New York Review of Books, and compared to Louis Brandeis in The New Yorker. But that was then. Today, it is failed (and maybe once-again) presidential nominee Bernie Sanders, not former President Obama, whom most Democratic presidential aspirants are modeling themselves after, and proposals for Medicare-for-All, minimum wage hikes, and wealth taxes abound among the declared nominees. That’s not to say that Warren’s mix of serious wonkery and "save-capitalism-from-the-oligarchs" ideology wouldn’t be able to distinguish itself from the positions staked out by Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, or anyone else; it probably could. But at the very least, like Sanders himself, she now finds herself occupying some very contested space.

But for all that, the real reason for the perceived lack of mojo for Warren among some of the loudest members of the activist left was the news, which broke just days before, that she had described herself as “American Indian” on her application to the Texas bar in 1986. This wasn’t a bombshell. It has long been known that Warren had for years, on and off, identified herself as Native American, in keeping with family legends about Cherokee and Delaware ancestors. Yet for some, actually seeing that seemingly bizarre claim in Warren’s own 32-year-old handwriting was the end of the line. In the middle of a desire to exorcize the Democratic Party’s racist past, as well as the need to find a presidential candidate whose mistakes won’t provide Trump with a ready-made script of mockery (one that, in Warren’s case, is already much-practiced by our president), more than a few Democrats seem prepared to declare her candidacy prematurely over. She’s damaged goods, this line of thinking goes, no matter how great her ideas are.

In response to this skepticism, some suggest that Warren’s best (and perhaps only) option is to stay away from her past and lock away her family stories, and instead focus her campaign entirely on her attacks on the 1 percent and her proposals for structural economic reforms. But there is, I think, a better alternative. It is risky, and the odds of Warren being able to pull it off are, I admit, not very good. But still, the rewards--both for her candidacy and, for those of us who mostly agree with her diagnosis of American capitalism in 2019, for the country--would be great. I think Elizabeth Warren, an intellectual white female lawyer, a bankruptcy expert and U.S. senator and an emeritus professor at the most prestigious university in America, should tie her Oklahoma history and her life story and her ideology all together. I think she should give her version of “The Speech.”


I refer, of course, to Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union,” the speech he gave in March 2008 when the Jeremiah Wright scandal threatened his run for the Democratic nomination. It was beautiful and audacious, a speech that talked about racial resentments and divisive Christian traditions and the mysteries of faith and the legacy of lynching and the burden of history and the idea of a national community that can include all of the above while still remaining whole. It is the speech more closely associated with his campaign and his vision of politics than any other, and more than a few believe he wouldn’t have been elected president without it. (I was personally blown away by it, as this blog post made clear.)

Now, I am pretty confident that Warren wouldn’t be able give a speech that good. She doesn’t have Obama’s rhetorical gifts, and the context from which she would give it—a 69-year-old white woman discussing her own ethnic appropriation, as opposed to a 47-year-old black man discussing his pastor’s anti-American language—isn’t nearly as open to charitable understanding. Still, it be worth it for her to try.

Why? Because while the story she could tell in such a speech would be even harder--because it would be more personal, more embarrassing, and more complicated--than the one Obama took on, it might, with the hindsight of the past decade, be an even truer one. It would be a story about economics and class as well as race. It would be about Warren growing up aspiring and ambitious in lower middle-class Oklahoma in the 1950s and 1960s. There she was, a smart young woman, a talker and a thinker, far from the easy routes to social acceptance and financial power, working from when she was 13 to help keep her family from falling into poverty. And it would be about--because it would have to be--how a resurgent Native American population unavoidably complicated the question of where an ambitious lower middle-class young white woman in the small city that was Oklahoma City in the early 1960s could socially find herself.

Seeing Warren, the daughter of white Oklahoma, alongside the assimilatory Indian termination policies imposed by the federal government during the years while she grew up would be educational in itself. Those policies led to the end of much of tribal sovereignty and the cutting of funds to reservations. They complemented the well-meant but deeply troubling Indian foster systems that numerous white churches (including my own) set up through these decades. And they helped to flood mostly white urban public schools with Native American children and teen-agers, most particularly in her own home state--Oklahoma having been born, after all, as essentially a glorified holding cell for tens of thousands of Native Americans defeated in America’s genocidal wars against them.Warren could use the speech to ask both herself and her audience: How would all that affect the way you might have received the (apparently mostly fictitious, but treasured all the same) stories of Native heritage which your beloved aunts passed down to you? And what might that history tell us about who was able to use the tools that postwar American capitalism provided to change their fortunes--and who wasn’t?

But that’s just the beginning. Because it’s also a story about growing up a somewhat liberated (going to law school while a young mother, and raising children as a single law professor after her divorce) but nonetheless mainstream Republican in the 1970s. It’s about finding success through that ethic, mastering the arcane topic of bankruptcy law and ambitiously job-hopping, building a new life for herself bit by bit. Yet during these same years, her party was rebuilt along small-government and Christian conservative lines--mostly, as an interesting parallel, by the descendants of white farmers who fled the bankruptcy, poverty, and near starvation they faced in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, and built new lives for themselves in California, a generation before Warren was born.

This could be a striving middle-class story as rich as any John Updike novel. Someone from the edges of the establishment--an Okie, no less!--gets to the center, to the big cities of the East Coast, to Harvard Law School itself. No one could show that kind of determination without being willing to leave behind a lot. And yet, did she nonetheless feel kind of guilty (or maybe kind of defiant) about succeeding? Sometimes did she feel out of place in this social and economic and intellectual world, so very distinct from the one she sacrificed so much to escape from?The centers of elite academia are for the most part racially and economically homogeneous, nothing like the congenially low-rent, mixed-ethnicity, public school Oklahoma world Warren was born into. Once again, Warren could pose a crucial question about America to herself and her audience: What are the costs of an economy that rewards the strivers (sometimes, anyway), but also deepens the gaps between the lives they build and the lives of those they left behind?

In the 1980s and 1990s, Warren co-wrote two important academic books, As We Forgive Our Debtors and The Fragile Middle Class. Both showed in great detail how the loosening of banking regulations and the shift away from an industrial economy made consumer spending and debt central to middle-class life, and how damaging the effects of this change were to those who simply wanted to hold on to the sort of life which, 30 years before, Warren was raised to believe was expected. (The book she co-wrote with her daughter, The Two-Income Trap, makes this comparison even clearer.) All these writings were informed by Warren’s own choices, as well as by the shifting ground beneath others as they sought to follow a similar path. Which presents more hard, yet revealing, questions to ask and answer. How much did her obviously conflicted feelings about her Oklahoma (and, yes, her folkloric Native) heritage, about the distinctiveness of her early years and experiences, and about how (or if) she should express that in an environment filled with trust-fund children and Phillips Exeter or Deerfield graduates, play out in her mind? What did it have to do with her eyes being opened and seeing the real social and familial implications of the data she was researching? And finally, the real political heart of this exploration: how did her life and her life’s work combine to lead her to the political change she went through in the late 1990s?

The progressives of today--and Democrats in general, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat--have little interest in the politics of Clintonian triangulation. But Warren could take that era and present it as a turning point. It may be that this nearly 70-year-old woman, exactly because of where and when she came from, exactly because of the rungs of the ladders she clumsily (and, yes, in some cases wrongly) grabbed at and found comfort in as she moved upwards and away from where she started, was able to see what was wrong not just with the Republican Party she was leaving, but also with the Democratic Party she was joining. That was a Democratic Party which, for the most part, couldn’t present its ideals or its candidates without complicated and, in retrospect, often damaging compromises. Warren’s story could, perhaps, model a new path, in a way that Hillary Clinton’s story never fully could.

At least, that’s a story I imagine Warren might be able to tell. Many wouldn’t find it persuasive, and many others, even if they found it coherent and powerful, couldn’t accept Warren as the vehicle for it. But still, it’s the sort of story that, were it packaged into a campaign speech, could bring the dreams and resentments and hopes and fears of tens of millions of white American middle-class women along with it, exposing their concerns and desires to a probably discomforting light--but also, perhaps, casting them in a new one.

To be honest, I don’t expect this to happen. I expect, instead, that Warren will stick with bashing the billionaires. Heaven knows they deserve it! But if she never thinks enough about her own story, her own choices, and her own mistakes, in order to show us a way of seeing her, at this moment, as someone who could be president, and someone who could make the structural changes she’s promising personally meaningful—well, that would be a loss. Because in following her career, and her scholarship, and maybe most of all her embarrassing mis-steps, I’ve come to suspect that she really does have a story like this in her. My hope is that she, and her speechwriters, suspect she does too.

Nature, Wisdom, Spirit, Mother

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

This is an expanded and re-written version of a Mother's Day sermon I gave in church last week, on May 13, 2018. Please see the note attached at the conclusion of the post.

I'm pretty certain that ever since I became old enough to wonder about matters theological, I hadn't been all that enthused by the Mormon idea of Mother in Heaven. The Christian message which consistently spoke (and still speaks) most strongly to me was Pauline, Augustinian, and Lutheran; I took (and still take) seriously the omniscience and omnipresence of God presented through the Biblical tradition, and saw His relationship with us as profoundly grace-centered and not at all humanist. This left little room in my thinking for the discourse about Heavenly Mother that I was most familiar with, which seemed rooted in deeply literal and humanist presumptions about God's identity, sexuality, and relationships. "In the heav’ns are parents single?/ No, the thought makes reason stare! / Truth is reason; truth eternal / Tells me I’ve a mother there"--to a great many of my fellow Mormons, for many years, the claim made in this old hymn seems both persuasive and obvious. But it wasn't for me.

I write all that in the past tense, though, because not too long ago I read an essay which made me realize that maybe, just maybe, I've actually been thinking about, and perhaps even worshiping, Mother in Heaven all along. But let me work around to that.

Over the past two years, a large number of the trees which once lined the run-off beside the street in front of our home were affected by a blight, and were removed by the city. Last summer, they were replaced with saplings--many of which, I noticed over our long dry winter, got snapped off. Maybe the wind did it, but more likely it was stupid kids wandering along the street. And yet today all of them, even those that were left stubby and close to the ground, are growing. Rain finally came to this part of Kansas, and growth has too.

One of the most common themes in our sacrament meetings is "gratitude," and this is something I'm grateful for: the abundance of the natural world all around us, the rhythm of growth that returns, again and again, even in the face of all the harm we do to creation. It's an abundance we are invited, despite all our environmental crimes, to contribute to and benefit from, and by so doing learn from as well. That's something else to be grateful for: the satisfaction--and the often humbling learning which precedes that feeling of satisfaction--of being a part of nature's cycle of renewal and bounty. I grew up working in gardens, bailing hay, tromping through alfalfa fields, milking cows by hand, and the productive interplay of us human beings with the growing, gracious things that fill our stomachs with food and our minds with beauty is something that, even as an academic, attends much of my thinking. If you're looking for a romantic agrarian, someone who enjoys weeding the tomato plants and contemplating the meaning of the soil as I turn it over with a spade, you've got one right here. 

The week before I was assigned to speak, we sang in church one of my favorite hymns: "All Creatures of our God and King." The fourth verse, in particular, caught by eye:

Dear Mother Earth, who day by day
Unfoldest blessings on our way,
Alleluia! Alleluia!
The flowers and fruits that in thee grow,
Let them His glory also show.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Alleluia! O praise Him! Alleluia!

The lyrics of this hymn are a slightly changed version of those composed by William H. Draper, who in the early 1900s translated St. Francis of Assisi’s poem "Canticle of the Sun," which was written around 1224, and inspired by the 148th Psalm. Here's a translation of the relevant passage from the poem:

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Draper was inspired to see in that poem a hymn something he wanted to his congregation to be able to hear and sing for a Whitsunday service--Whitsunday being an old English liturgical term for the Day of Pentecost, the day, seven weeks after Easter, that the Christian world celebrates the blessing of Holy Ghost which comes to surround and sustain Jesus's disciples and all who come into His community. There is a reason, I think, why this particular work by St. Francis spoke to Draper as he made plans for this holy day--specifically, the association between the manifold gifts of the spirit, and the diverse fecundity of the natural world, which Francis placed all together in his poem as a family: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water, Brother Fire. Note, though, that his "Nature" is not only a sibling; she is also a "Mother," by which and through which the governing, productive rule of life--the fruit and herbs we consume from the world, and the flowers by which it is decorated--is sustained.

Where did this idea come from, that the natural world, the world we work in and are sustained and enlightened by, is both feminine and maternal? If you turn to non-Christian history and mythology, there are plenty of ancient examples: Durga in Hinduism, Gaia from the Greeks. But these deities often are understood as embodying the wildness of the natural world, and are indifferent to, or often hostile towards, actual human beings. What of the image of nature as something which mothers us, feeds and teaches and overseas and loves us, and to which we owe the respect that we do to a mother?

The earliest example of a "Mother Nature" that I know of came from the pen of the French cleric Alain de Lille, who wrote, perhaps 60 years before St. Francis's "Canticle," a Latin work of theology titled (in translation) The Plaint of Nature. There is much in this work of prose and verse which audiences today might find strange or offensive--but it also gave the Christian world, for the first time we have record of, the idea of Nature as a ruling, feminine figure:

O child of God, the mother of Creation, bond of the universe and its stable link....you, who by your reins guide the universe, unite all things in a stable and harmonious bond and wed heaven to earth in a union of peace; who, working on the pure idea of Divine Wisdom, mold the species of all created things...

In the words of James Sheridan, translator of The Plaint, Nature comes to declare that "it was God's will that by a mutually related circle of birth and death, transitory things should be given stability by instability, endlessness by endings, eternity by temporariness, and that the series of things should ever be knit by successive renewals of birth." The idea of an immanent order, always linked, always disciplining, always rewarding.

I learned about Alain de Lille's Plaint from a long essay by Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, critic, farmer, and agrarian, who once famously declared “I’d rather rely on Mother Nature’s wisdom than man’s cleverness.” Contained in his latest collection, The Art of Loading Brush, "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World" is a deep dive into the depictions of nature in the history of English literature, and its influence on consequent writings about conservation and farming. His study is often a tendentious one (he doesn't like industrial agriculture, or tractors, for that matter), but it is revealing nonetheless. His aim to remind his readers that observers of the natural world have consistently recognized that there is an order to it, a miraculous rhythm that follows a mysterious logic which we can learn from, but never master.

Berry is a Christian, a man who knows the Bible very well, but who sometimes has a problem with the conventionality of Christianity in America. He is drawn to those who seem to him to respect the mystery, the glory, the stern wonder of creation, rather than those who want to explain it all in some tidy ideological or theological package. Thomas Merton, a French Catholic who settled in a monastery in Kentucky, where Berry also lives, wrote a prose poem about the “Hagia Sophia” or “divine wisdom,” an ancient Christian idea found in 1 Corinthians 2:7 ( “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory”) which Alain de Lille associated with the "mother of Creation," and Francis of Assisi with "Sister Mother Earth": "There is," Merton wrote, "in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans."

In the centuries between Alain de Lille of the 12th century and Berry and Merton of the 20th, many other authors strove to capture the order, surprise, and wisdom of nature--and again and again, their intuition of such took feminine and maternal forms. Geoffrey Chaucer's poem The Parlement of Foules presents Mother Nature as the "vicar of the almighty Lord" who "hot, cold, heavy, light, moist, and dry / Hath knit by even numbers of accord," bringing a wise balance to the renewing, reproducing processes of of nature. Edmund Spenser's Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, which were appended to The Faerie Queene, also gives us the "great dame Nature / With goodly Port and gracious Majesty / Being far greater and more tall of Stature / Than any of the Gods or Powers on high," who, when confronted with the challenge of Mutability, imposes a larger, deeper, unseeable order upon the changeableness of creation. John Milton’s allegorical poem Comus presents us with Nature ("the Lady") wisely resisting those that would indulge in nature’s bounty, instead insisting on "Temperance" so that "Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed in...even proportion."

This only scratches the surface of this one linguistic, poetic tradition (Berry goes on to consider the realization of Nature, and its wise discipline, in the works of Pope, Wordsworth, and Ezra Pound as well), but the themes, I think, are clear. For many Christian artists and thinkers, to take seriously God's creation is to take seriously the idea that some part of God, or something suitably God-like, overseas it, blesses it, makes it meaningful and a source of bounty and wisdom to those who tend to it, and issues a reproach to those who do not. Is this Mormon doctrine, or even Christian, for that matter? Not directly. But the more that I think about it, the less I can read any of revelations of Joseph Smith dealing with the natural world, with their insistence upon bounty, respect, patience, and humble and equitable use--see Doctrine and Covenants 49:18-21, D&C 59:15-21, or D&C 104:14-18--without imaging a distinctly maternal, a loving but also wise and watchful, eye behind them. It is the same loving (but unsentimental) eye I think sometimes I can see through, when I look upon our often frustrating, but just as often rewarding, front yard flower and strawberry patch, when it is weeded and well-watered and flourishing. In it, I sometimes see something more than my work--I see labor in the soil made meaningful. Guided, one might say, to becoming a part of the abiding spiritual rhythms of the natural world.

I realize that if this is an argument for Mother in Heaven, it is a distinctly panentheistic one, with some feminine element of the divine being made manifest through (though not necessarily being identical to) God's creation. I'm happy with that accusation, though. I think it is necessary, if one insists upon doing theology, to be willing to consider such categories, or else one is going to be stuck with a terribly reductive literalism (case in point: the plain comment by Mormon apostle Erastus Snow in March 1878 that "I must believe that deity consists of man and woman" and that we Mormons worship a "Godhead composing two parts, male and female" causing a minor hermaphroditic freak-out in the footnotes to the BYU Studies article cited above).

In the same way that we Christian believers need to be willing to think expansively about we mean when we talk about the Holy Ghost in the connection with Pentecost--remember that in the Fifth of Smith's early Lectures on Faith the Holy Spirit, which in Biblical history begins with the idea of the ruach Elohim or the Breath of God, was identified with the mind of God the Father--we similarly need to think expansively about Heavenly Mother. Might She be that title which we could give (and maybe, through Mother Nature, always have given) to that part of God which is invested in creation, in the wise, tutelary, fecund impulse which governs nature and those of use who live off of and through its creative rewards? No scriptural account that I consider at all inspired says so, in so many words. But lately, I find I'm persuaded that it makes sense.

In the Mother's Day service where I gave the original version of this sermon, the Primary children sang two songs: "Mother Dear" and "My Heavenly Father Loves Me." Both wonderful, sweet songs. And yet, the association they make together--one song about the love one has for mothers, the other about an appreciation for creation--can be achieved much more directly, I thought, by just one song, one of the wisest Primary tunes of all:

I often go walking in meadows of clover,
And I gather armfuls of blossoms of blue.
I gather the blossoms the whole meadow over;
Dear mother, all flowers remind me of you.

O mother, I give you my love with each flower
To give forth sweet fragrance a whole lifetime through;

[And this, right here, I think, is the key verse, the one that really brings it all home:]

For if I love blossoms and meadows and walking,
I learned how to love them, dear mother, from you.

Blossoms and meadows and walking. Which mother did that teaching, do you suppose? The child's, presumably. But also...maybe, another One as well? Some patient mothering spirit or thought, some sehnsucht that calls to us, without us knowing why or how, helping us see something meaningful, something orderly, in every spring surprise, in every growing and good thing. In the Book of Mormon, Alma claimed that "the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it...denote there is a God." He didn't know the half of it, perhaps. Paying attention to, and learning to be properly grateful for the other Half, the Half that we've always known, and named Mother Nature, and yet not always fully seen, may be one of our tasks today. It is one that I long thought I'd dismissed--but yet, I think now that I've been looking for Her all along.

PLEASE NOTE: It has been pointed out to me that the initial premise behind this whole post--seeing Heavenly Mother in and through the concept of Mother Nature--was originally suggested to me by another Mormon blogger, Cynthia Lee, and in writing it, I had completely forgotten her contribution. For that I want to apologize, fully and sincerely. Moreover, the fact that I did that, and probably have done so many times before, particularly in regards to matters involving women in the church, is not only a terrible--and likely much too frequent--mark on my character, but it is reflective of so much casual, oblivious sexism in the way both theological speculation and ordinary practice is performed in the Mormon church. I first thought to take the whole post down, but other female bloggers I know have suggested leaving it up, as an opportunity for conversation and learning. I am one of the first in need of that, and I am grateful for their understanding.

A Tale of Two Superheroine TV Shows

Kristen, our youngest daughter (age 9), and I have finished catching up on Supergirl, which just entered into its winter break. We're loving it, and it's a blast to watch a show together. Kristen loves Kara Danvers; she's excited by her ups and downs as she works out her powers and tries to figure out how best to do good, and just finds it wonderful to see a woman flying around, slugging it out with the bad guys, saving kids on a bus and putting out fires. I suppose my dropping hints at small elements of the DC comic world along the way--"he's the Martian Manhunter!" "he's the son of the Toyman!"--has added to her excitement, as it enables her to see herself and her dad sharing some special inside knowledge.

For myself, I love the show; from the very beginning, I've grooved on the way it makes use of the source material, and delighted in the various clever hat-tips contained in the casting and dialogue (having Kara's boss and emerging-mother-figure Cat Grant, played by Calista Flockhart of Ally McBeal fame, insist that calling the new superheroine "Supergirl" is a feminist statement was a good one; Dean "New Adventures of Superman" Cain's cameo as Kara's adoptive father who insists "I know more about Superman than anyone else alive" was another). Basically, I've enjoyed its upbeat and redemptive tone--one that is appropriate for the Superman mythos as a whole (thus showing up the flaws of the clumsy, harsh direction which Zack Snyder seems determined to take the current incarnation of Superman movies).

Of course, upbeat and redemptive doesn't describe anything in Jessica Jones. Like its forerunner Daredevil, I binged watched this show, and enjoyed it immensely. It was really solid television--often (if somewhat inconsistently) great dialogue and characterizations, with a dark and creepy mood that's hard to balance with an exciting story. But Jones pulled it off. Our oldest daughter (age 19, currently at KU) and our foster daughter (age 15) have both gotten into it as well--the former being deeply enough into its story that the final minutes of the final episode had her freaking out over the fate of Jessica and her sole reliable friend, Trish Walker. And I don't dispute her reaction; Jones absolutely stuck its landing.

I did have some complaints about how the show developed along the way--Kilgrave's powers didn't always seem to operate according to the same rules, and the way in which those around him responded to or dealt with his commands didn't always make sense to me--but they're pretty minor, all things considered. After all, telling an entirely "realistic" story about people with mysterious, secret powers and abilities, and honestly and consistently portraying how ordinary folk would act and think when confronted by individuals with said powers, ain't easy. (The list of films or television shows I've seen that really, fully, pulled off "realistically" telling a comic book-type story begins with Shyamalan's one truly great film, Unbreakable, and pretty much ends there too.) I give Daredevil a slight edge over Jessica Jones in the quality television department, but that mostly has to do with their relevant subplots, not at all their central performances, both of of which I thought were superb, or the way in which they made use of their comic books roots.

One way in which Jones is a clear winner over Daredevil, though, is obviously the way in which it makes central to its story so many topics that reflect upon the experience of women in a patriarchal society--sexual violence, most obviously, but also themes of dependency, code-switching, lookism, sexual longing and confusion, and male privilege generally. It was truly a great bit of feminist story-telling, made that much better because of the determination of the story-tellers to tell Jessica's story in the context of her experience of recovery and resentment. Which is, again, a very, very different approach to that which Supergirl takes: Kara has her problems, but she is not confused by or wounded by resentment, and she definitely is not struggling to assert herself in the face such a devastating, violating experience. So, does that mean Jones is a more or a better bit of feminism than Supergirl?

I'm not the first to ask this question, and every time it gets ask the answer is resounding: both are equally important! And those answer are all correct, of course. But let me play the very slight contrarian, and point out this: whatever "more" or "better" may or may not mean when it comes to feminist storytelling, I think any fair-minder watcher would have to admit that Supergirl is more broad in its feminism that Jones.

Why? Because of the range of female characters, most obviously. You have Kara herself, you have her sister Alex (educated, competent, loving, though also resentment and obsessive in her protectiveness), her boss Cat (smart, sexy, overly self-confident as a way to hide her own secrets and mistakes), her adoptive mother Helen (interfering, condescending, a micromanager, and also utterly dependable), her arch-enemy Astra (her aunt--and possibly more?--and a power-hungry, wickedly funny, contemptuous species-ist regarding these lowly human around her). All the men in these episodes are second-players; even when they are in positions of authority, women are never shown as dependent upon them, but rather as (appropriately enough) maturely responding to them. In short, in Supergirl my daughter Kristen is seeing even more women doing and feeling and dealing with more things than just about any other television show or movie I can think of that would be appropriate for her to watch. In that sense, it's doing something which the more narrowly focused Jones did not: giving viewers a view of the female experience, through the medium of comic book-style stories, that includes all of the ups and downs and difficulties and triumphs which every woman experiences every day.

I suppose I may be coloring the show even brighter than it actually, just because it's great for me to spend time with my youngest child, geeking out on something we both enjoy. But honestly: Supergirl is television that is both feminist and fun. It may not do anything better than any number of other shows, much less the terrific Jessica Jones, but still: it's worth checking out. We certainly intend to keep on doing exactly that.

Power, Sex, and the Real Story of House of Cards

Be warned: spoilers follow.

I finally finished season 3 of House of Cards late last week, and I have to say that I was, at first, disappointed. It was superbly made and consistently entertaining television, to be sure, but it didn't advance the story in ways that I think season 2 had set it up to do, instead giving us viewers a lot of mostly irrelevant--though admittedly compelling--foreign policy shenanigans, and then prolonged excursions through Doug Stamper's and Remy Danton's souls. So honestly, I wasn't sure I was likely to binge on season 4 next year. But after thinking about it over the weekend, I decided: no, I'll give it another shot. But mainly on one condition--that Kevin Spacey's inconsistently vicious President Frank Underwood be sidelined somewhat, so that the story arc of Robin Wright's First Lady Claire Underwood can take center stage, and be recognized as that which really pulls House of Cards fully together.

I don't know what percentage of Netflix's HoC viewers were fans of the original British House of Cards, but I was, and I don't think I was at all alone in approaching the Netflix series in comparison to that small masterpiece. At its center was Francis Urquhart, a truly brilliant Machiavellian literary and television creation brought to life by Ian Richardson. The first season of the BBC HoC is simply tremendous storytelling, because through Urquhart the series' creators managed to explore--in the context of a deliciously compelling story of media manipulation, outright bribery, sexual blackmail, and (most of all) bureaucratic maneuvering--not just the heart of an ambitious and amoral politician but the twisted logic by which ambition operates in a parliamentary system. Urquhart's assent to the top of his party, then to near unchallengeable authority over the machinery of power throughout the United Kingdom, made a spooky amount of sense; it was, in short, not only fun to watch but plausible to contemplate, in a way which Frank Underwood's machinations through Washington DC's various chambers of power have really never been.

The level of intricate and devilish plotting which the original BBC series laid out wasn't maintained, in my opinion; in the subsequent series about Urquhart's political career (To Play the King and The Final Cut), he relied crudely on the drumbeats of war--the terrorist threat of the Irish Republican Army, to be specific--to mask increasingly fascistic moves as prime minister, making him over into a less complicated stand-in for everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher. At the same time, his occasional feelings of regret over the murder of Mattie Storin seemed arbitrarily dropped into the plot, in a clumsy attempt to humanize him. Whereas in the case of Frank Underwood, season 2 of the Netflix HoC was a real step up from the already excellent season 1. Once Frank was in the executive branch, a heart-beat away from the presidency, the opportunities were presented for the writers to get really gonzo in the telling of this story, and did they ever. Killing Zoe Barnes, railroading Lucas Goodwin, silencing Jaimie Skorsky, intimidating Tom Hammerschmidt, turning the tables of Raymond Tusk....this was great, crazy, conspiracy-minded television! Sure, the actual politics which the writers were making use of were, in contrast to the case with the BBC HoC, pretty much baloney--but it was cool baloney, and I loved it.

Hence my disappointment with season 3--Frank wasn't making his snarky asides to the camera nearly as much any longer, and while there was some true nutso audaciousness on display in how he wielded the powers of the presidency (twisting the arm of FEMA so as to use earmarked emergency funds to pay for a congressionally road-blocked job-creation program, insisting on a mano-a-mano showdown meeting with Russian President Viktor Petrov in the middle of a war zone), by and large, with his life's ambitions fulfilled, some of the fun had gone out the story. So I thought for the first day or two after I finished season 3--until, that is, I realized that maybe the real story, all along, hasn't been about Frank, but rather about the conflicted, ambitious, secretive, ferociously talented and dangerous uncertain woman who shares his bed.

Urquhart's wife Elizabeth was clearly a major player in his ascent to power, and she remained crucial to the story until the very end, when she arranged for her husband's assassination in order to protect his (and her) reputation. But she had little depth as a character; we saw her almost always as responding to the actions of her husband or others, whereas Claire Underwood has been a person with her own agenda right from the start. In reflecting upon the state of this agenda by the end of the latest season--Claire having taken a humanitarian organization in a new and ambitious direction, throwing the staff into a tumult, then abandoning that organization in order to lay the groundwork for her career as a diplomat, which she achieves and then loses as her husband sacrifices her accomplishments to appease an embarrassed Russian president--one can see the source of much of the best drama of the whole show. But there's even more to it than that, I think; HoC gives us Claire Underwood, through Wright's fascinating embodiment of her, as a driven yet sometimes icily indecisive symbol for all women in a world shaped around male sexual power.

Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that matters of sex--its use and abuse, the longing for it and the complications of it--are a constant sub-theme throughout House of Cards. To start with: what is Frank's sexual orientation, anyway? He obviously delights in reigning (literally) over younger, impressionable women, but we can't forget the way he seduced Agent Meechum, culminating in the three-way with his own wife, nor the weird undertone of sexual attraction which vibrates through his meetings with biographer Tom Yates (who we are supposed to believe became a nationally famous and best-selling novelist with a novel about his years as a male prostitute). Claire has regular acquiesced to Frank's sexual predilections, yet when she angrily insists that he make love to her roughly, face to face, he can't manage it. Claire herself was at first reluctant to re-ignite her sexual relationship with Adam Galloway, but then later embraced it, and later yet twisted her feelings for him such that he was willing to undermine himself on live television just to protect her own husband. The tension between Claire and the Russian president made me wonder if we were going to see some further attempts as sexual blackmail there. But through all this Claire is also shown as somewhat half-hearted, betraying almost stereotypical feminine weaknesses mostly behind the scenes (such as early on, when she reconsidered her and Frank's decision not to have children, to the point of exploring fertility treatments without his knowledge). The suicide of Michael Corrigan shocks her into a state of maternal defensiveness (he hung himself while she was lying there, getting her much needed rest, using her own scarf!), but of course this was the same woman who contemptuously mocked her one-time employee Gillian Cole for getting pregnant by a man she wasn't married to, and for allowing her fate and her unborn baby's health to be entirely in Claire's unsympathetic hands.

And more: consider how prevalent themes of sexuality, women's rights, and motherhood came to dominate all the electoral discussions of season 3. Heather Dunbar, at first refusing to use against Frank secret information about Claire's season 2 story about being raped and having an abortion, and then being willing to pay almost any price to get a hold of that information. Jackie Sharp, married to a man she doesn't love because Frank wanted her to be married before he added her to his re-election ticket, lusting after a former lover, willing to hypocritically attack Heather for choices that indict her own less-than-fully-loving childcare choices. (And don't forget that Jackie was able to attain the position she has mainly because she was willing to expose another politician's secret illegitimate child.) The scenes we're given in season 3 all about Claire's hair color, and how simple decisions like that can't fully be her own in the political world her and Frank's mutual ambition have committed themselves to, speak volumes--as does, in fact, the constantly repeated refrain that Claire's approval numbers are higher than the president's, thus making it imperative than she be used by the president and his handlers carefully. Important sexual contrasts are built up: with Heather Dunbar and Jackie Sharp, of course, but more particularly with Catherine Durant, a Democratic Senator and later Secretary of State who has had her share of entanglements over the years, yet stands interestingly apart from the machinations of the Underwood presidency. And then, most particularly, the strange encounter between Claire and the young mother in Iowa, whose openness about her own sexual freedom, her mothering responsibilities, and even just her own breastfeeding of her child, seemed like one long bizarre taunt to the terribly controlled Claire.


Season 3 ended with Claire announcing that she's leaving Frank, so here's to hoping that season 4, rather than staying in the White House, actually follows her. Some of have called Claire Underwood a feminist icon, some have called her a sell-out; in truth, we've seen her be both. So forget President Underwood; we have his number, for better or worse. Claire is the one who is still a mystery, who we viewers are--and, as presented on screen, who she herself is--still trying to figure out. If we're no longer being treated to the contained story of a tyrant's rise and fall, as the original House of Cards suggested, but rather to an exploration of what an American-style pseudo-tyranny does to people, then let's forget about the tyrant himself; it is the Lady Macbeth at his side (or no longer at his side) whose journey as a woman and sexual being I want to understand.

Thoughts on Elshtain

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Jean Bethke Elshtain, a profound and important political theorist and ethicist, died yesterday I was lucky enough to have met her perhaps a handful of times, being able to ask her a question or two about this or that work of hers, at various conferences and dinners over the years. I wish I could have known her better, and learned from her more, because far more than any of the other philosophers and theologians I've felt inspired to write encomiums to before, Elshtain's work mixed theory, politics, history, and faith together in a way which mattered to me deeply. Save perhaps Charles Taylor or G.A. Cohen or Fred Dallmayr, I can't think of another scholar whose intellectual work overlapped with my own professional life that mattered to me more.

The surprising part of that claim, as I acknowledged it to myself yesterday, is that its heart is not to be found in Elshtain's major works of scholarship. Her work on Jane Addams is an important addition to her many writings on democracy and civil society over the years; her book on Augustine was hugely influential to my thinking about Christian realism; and her earlier writings on women in the context of both war and public life, most crucially her twin essays "Antigone's Daughters" and "Antigone's Daughters Reconsidered," are essential texts in second-wave "difference feminism." All that I know (and I haven't even mentioned her final major work, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, based on her Gifford Lectures, mainly because I haven't gotten around to reading it yet)...and yet, that's not the stuff which made her voice so vital to my own reflections. No, the Elshtain that mattered to me was the public intellectual of the mid-1990s, the author of numerous essays and reviews for First Things (which posted a fine, brief tribute to her yesterday) and The New Republic, and of a short, wonderful book (a revision of her Massey Lectures), Democracy on Trial, which I have used multiple times in my classes over the years. The voice Elshtain used in those comparatively short writings was a kind but trenchantly common-sensical one, the voice of someone of genuinely conservative cultural and religious sensibilities who was dealing honestly and straightforwardly with the manner in which social and economic changes--many of which she openly acknowledged to be positive--were obliging those in her camp to be clear and uncompromising on just what they wished to conserve, and why. For Elshtain, the what was, primarily, a well-marked out public space, one which separated the public from the private (a distinction which she saw grounded significantly in the real, bodily, natural characteristics and rhythms of men and women and children and family life), and which thereby opened up a space for open-minded (but never abstract or theory-driven) education and debate and compromise. The why of such a space was very simple: the possibility of genuine democracy, and the civic virtues which popular self-government make possible. Hence, Elshtain was a conservative defender of culture, community, manners, and tradition for the sake of good democratic government and civil society--which meant that those trends and ideas which she challenged, while often overlapping which those whom conservative Republicans throughout the Clinton years already regularly and gleefully attacked, were approached in a manner that made her words stand out. Certainly, at the very least, they stood out for me.

At the time, I considered Elshtain's arguments to be of a piece with those of various communitarian writers, both left and right: William Galston, Michael Sandel, Amitai Etzioni, and others. There's a good deal of truth in that association. Like Alan Wolfe or Mary Ann Glendon, she saw the language of rights as being "increasingly [expressed] in individualistic terms as their civic dimensions withered on the vine"; like Robert Putnam, she was very concerned with social capital, and wrote persuasively about how the "black and white, winner-take-all" model of juridical politics "preempts democratic contestation and a politics of respect and melioration"; and like Sheldon Wolin, she feared that the "new ideology of difference" represented a kind of "exclusionist sameness," one that would dissolve the more important category of "citizen," within which, by contrast, a "broad measure of similarity...support[s] a notion of membership that entails equality of rights, responsibilities, and treatment" (Democracy on Trial [1995], 14-15, 27, 74-75). To this day, I am comfortable describing Elshtain as part of that post-Reagan movement to dig deeper into and do more with the explosive transformation of American (and international) liberalism following the end of the Cold War, to add civic republicanism and participatory democracy--or, in other words, to add Alexis Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt--to American political discourse. In the years before 9/11--after which Elshtain's own political sympathies and her deep connection to the Augustianian/Niebuhrian tradition of realism led her (like many others, unfortunately) to mostly accept without much dispute Bush's War on Terror--her arguments stood as a powerful conservative complement to what might be seen as a broad work of vital communitarian renewal.

But now, in retrospect, I wonder if it might not be more accurate to describe her voice during those years as one that played a part--perhaps a small one, but perhaps not--in laying the groundwork for a different, more localist and more realistic, conservatism. The kind of conservatism I have in mind here was, of course, pretty much completely foreign to the Reagan years, and during the Bush years it took refuge in various libertarian, traditionalist, and/or paleoconservative corners....but which today, in our moment of technological and financial overreach and social and sexual transformation, it has found itself, I think, echoed (if not strongly affirmed) by certain mainstream voices in surprising ways. I go back to her review-essay "Suffer the Little Children," a harsh--but with a tragic, rather than a vindictive or mean tone--takedown of Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village (and book which, I should note, I like and am willing to defend), published in The New Republic on March 4, 1996, and I see in it not just a sharp democratic and civic rejection of the cult of expertise, but an insistence on putting modernity's cultural costs to the family (particularly those costs which flow from educational attainments, economic diversification, and the general suburbanization and professionalization of American society) front and center:

I am no a family-above-all person. Some families are rotten and the children in those families should be spirited to safety as quickly as possible. But truly rotten families are, thank God, few and far between. More commonly we have good enough families or almost good enough ones. How high do we place the threshhold in assessing good and bad parenting? Whose business is it anyway? Here Clinton makes one of the more lamentable moves in her book. She is dead-on about the importance of being attuned to the needs of infants, feeding them, cuddling them, holding them, but in a discussion of the fact that there is not "substitute for regular, undivided attention from parents" we learn that the "biggest difference" that emerged from a study she cites and endorses, was "in the sheer amount of talking that occurred" in various households. It is no surprise that Clinton favors the chattering classes, but she proceeds to malign poor and working-class parents because they interact less with their children....

Like Clinton, I recoil when I hear a parent shout at a child. I, too, cringe when a parent is curt, abrupt and dismissive. But I recognize that this is not the same thing as neglect, not the same thing as abuse. Perhaps, as the late Christopher Lasch insisted, the working-class or lower-middle-class style aims to instill in children a tough, early recognition that life is not a bowl of cherries, not a world in which everyone is telling you how great you are; that their lives will be carried out in a world in which they tasks they are suited for, the jobs they do, the lives they live, and even the way they talk (or do not talk) will be scrutinized and found wanting by their "betters." I know that Clinton would argue, in response, that she means no invidious comparison. But the comparison is there and it is invidious. According to her book, the higher the income and education, the better the parenting, all other things being equal....Don't get me wrong. As a general rule, children shouldn't have to...[suffer]. And no group of children should be stuck in such a situation as a permanent condition. But life is hard, and its necessities bear down on people. In the light of such recognitions, it is best at times to restrain ourselves and not rush to intervene and fix everything and tell people struggling against enormous odds that they are doing a crummy job. Sometimes Clinton understands this, sometimes she doesn't ("Suffer the Little Children," 36, 38).

Harsh, as I said. But then Elshtain turns that same analysis on herself:

Those of us who have departed our villages and taken up residence in more complicated places should, in an unblinkered way, face the fact that we are not doing exactly what are parents and grandparents did. Some things were lost; something we gave up. This hit me with great force when, with my husband and children, I drove out of my grandmother's yard about twenty years ago. She was by then utterly bowed over--the years of stoop labor [Elshtain's family, as she explains in this essay, had come to northern Colorado in her grandparents' time as immigrant labor, working the beet fields] had taken their toll--but she came out to the car for a last goodbye, thrusting into my arms more homemade noodles, another loaf of rye bread, freshly gathered eggs, a new apron, another remarkable quilt. What would I had to my own grandchildren, I wondered, as they lingered in the yard with their own families? Will I give them offprints of articles? Copies of my latest books? I suppose I will. But I will not comfort myself with the notion that this is the same as rye bread and quilts. It isn't. I made a choice. That is sometimes called growing up ("Suffer the Little Children," 38).

Elshtain does not condemn herself for her choices, nor does she condemn (at least not whole-heartedly) the Baby Boomer mentality that she was born only a few years in advance of--on the contrary, as those who knew her and know her writings well can attest, she had no interest whatsoever in defending those whose conservatism would lead them to reject the progress which the social and economic choices of women like Jane Addams had pointed towards. Ever the Augustinian, she just wanted to insist that the conservative agenda she supported never reduce itself to a Panglossian best-of-both-worlds utopianism. Conserving certain things did not mean being able to graft those things without change on the present situation. Instead, her conservatism was of an Oakshottian sensibility. She wished to conserve the traditional family--just like she wanted to conserve the simple, direct, communal (and non technologically mediated) public space--because she thought those to be the best possible arenas for people to learn how to work out, and live with, the limitations and tragic compromises which attend all our lives. That's a powerful claim, one rooted in an (I think, at least) essentially incontestable, deeply Aristotelian, philosophical anthropology. We really are, I believe, creatures of community, beings whose language and whole ability to interpret and interact with the given world simply reveals how much our mutual belonging conditions us, intellectually and otherwise. Even if--as I strongly suspect would have been the case between Elshtain and I, if we'd somehow have been able to have a conversation about same-sex marriage or some similar topic--we would have come out on different sides of any given argument over what all that natural and social belonging obliges us recognize and what it obliges us to reject, we nonetheless would have shared enough fundamentals regarding our limits and our place as human beings to be able to productively talk about it. And, ultimately, keeping such democratic conversations going--conserving their basic moral and civic requirements, as it were--was, from all of what I read by her, her most important intellectual goal. That's the sort of conservatism that I want be a part of, and I am in Elshtain's debt for having helped me see, a little bit better, just what it entailed.

I would have liked it if Elshtain's communitarian and democratic sensibilities had directed her to think more about economic matters as opposed to cultural ones, and while I value her culturally-attuned engagements in foreign policy, I think ultimately she made the same mistake many others of us did: allowed her own theory (in her case, a putatively hard-headed "realism") to guide her thinking about the actual people and actual institutions conducting this actual war. But for now, I'm not thinking about where I believe she went wrong; I'm thinking about how often her arguments, even when they didn't persuade me, pointed me in the right direction. There won't be any more of that now from her, which is our loss. Jean Bethke Elshtain, requiescat in pace.

Radical Homemaking, Radically Enriching

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

I first heard about Shannon Hayes work through Laura McKenna's blog nearly two years ago. I was already disposed to like the sorts of localist, agrarian, and traditional causes that Hayes urges us to consider when I first read about her (after all, Melissa and I vaguely aspire to that sort of lifestyle ourselves), but it was Laura's concluding line--"There is absolutely no reason that feminism should mean a devotion to capitalism"--that really pulled me in. When I finally got a copy of Hayes's book, Radical Homemakers, I confess it wasn't what I expected--rather than a serious, theoretically grounded critique of consumer culture, family life, and the structural obstacles that often stand in the way of adopting a simpler, more communal lifestyle, I found an often sloppily researched but nonetheless impassioned instruction manual-cum-rallying cry. A cry and a manual for what? Very simply, for rejecting the economic demands which insist of dual-income households (p. 17), for relearning how to grow and preserve your own food (pp. 78-83), and for refusing the economically and environmentally devastating materialism of modern American life (pp. 93-94). And I thought to myself: now, wouldn't this make for a great Relief Society lesson?

Relief Society, for those who don't know and actually care (a pretty small number, I'll admit), is the historical label given to the Mormon church's women's organization--the general principle being to bring together the women of the church as a charitable, educational, and service unit. The organizing conceit here was, of course, very much a thoroughly 19th-century gendered assumption, an assumption which remains--for good and for bad--a part of Mormonism's official doctrinal rhetoric: namely, that women are more naturally empathetic than men, and so will of course find greater fulfillment through the providing of "relief" to their community and others around them. The history of the Relief Society is, in fact, a pretty fascinating and revealing guide to how the Mormon church as a whole first struggled against, then later struggled to acclimate to, modern American life. But what most attracted my interest was the parallel between, on the one hand, Hayes's (often flaky, but also often insightful, and always passionately and persuasively stated) arguments which reject much our media-drenched, money-and-gadget obsessed consumerist world, and embrace the ideal of the homemaker as someone able to help produce healthy, sustainable, durable goods and services for themselves and their community, and on the other hand, the long-standing Mormon Relief Society practice of "enrichment".

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of putting together a panel discussion (at this conference, with the wonderful people you see on the left) which took off, in many different directions, from Hayes's insistence upon thinking seriously about just what "making" a simple, sustainable, spiritually-edifying "home" truly consisted of. What I wanted to do was plant some seeds of discussion (seeds which grow in surprising directions in Hayes's book), presenting the "home" as something other than a unit of consumption, other than a place where individuals rest their heads and eat their meals and watch their television shows, all of which require ever-increasing (and often debt-driven) economic participation to keep going. In preparation for that, I asked a Mormon audience exactly what kind of "homemaking" and "enrichment" activities their local congregations still participate in, if any. The answers were, to say the least, revealing. And they should be--for some decades, extending for many years out beyond Mormonism's 19th-century pioneer period, the ability to live frugally, to share resources and skills with family and friends so as to become self-sustaining, to basically dissent from the pursuit of wealth and growth, was an unstated principle of a great deal that Relief Society did. Enriching the home meant making it more tendable, more nuturable, more amenable to (one might say more "organic to", but such language is unfortunately foreign to most American Mormons, whether in the 19th century or today) the work and production and play of those who live there, rather than more dependent upon the size of the paycheck brought home and the caprice of the market in general. That distant ideal remains a half-life existence throughout much of Mormon culture (and not just Mormons--Laura McKenna, who confessed herself highly attracted to much of Hayes's call, has made clear her own disposition to the "pioneer virtues" of "making do or doing without" before as well).

Part of this story, of course, can't be told without talking about Mormonism's ultimately mostly abandoned effort to develop a truly alternative--more communitarian, more egalitarian, more localized--culture and economy in Utah. This is part of why I'd love to see Hayes's book be the centerpiece of a Relief Society lesson: because in the mostly conservative, mostly middle- and upper-class white American Mormon church, Hayes's righteous attacks on capitalism as an economic system which drives us to debt and competition, invades the sanctity of the home which consumer values and fears, and commodifies and individualizes our most intimate and emotionally connective choices...well, it might not go over too well. But then again, if it was stated by way of quoting 19th-century church leaders and passages of scripture which make essentially the same point, maybe some real enrichment could be possible.

The other elephant that would be present in the room, which any Relief Society taking up my challenge ought to consider, is why should be the Relief Society that thinks about "homemaking" and "enrichment", as opposed to any of the men's organizations in our church? It's an important question--for Hayes clearly envisions to inspire both partners in any family unit to turn aside from the rat race, return to the home, and engage in the sort of practical work necessary to achieve real sustainability, simplicity, and health. When she rants (and she often does) about how "[w]e have lost the innate knowledge and tradition crafts essential to countless functions for our daily survival, with the end result being a disconnection from our communities and our natural world" (p. 83), none of her words pertain to the female partner over the male, or vice versa. But she's no stupid; she's fully aware of how her call to reject the rewards of the market will go over with most of the second-wave feminists among us--feminists who, she believes, have traded in the birthright of building freer, cleaner, more beautiful and more just homes for the cash rewards of the workplace:

In running the homemaking banner up the flagpole, I understand that I may garner two different salutes--one with a full hand lifted respectfully at eyebrow level, and a second where only a single finger is raised. For generations now, the homemaker banner has come to represent two primary struggles. In the first, the homemaker is viewed as a subservient loser in the battle of the sexes, where a man has presumably gained power over a woman if she stays home. In the second struggle, woman faces off against woman; the struggle for autonomy, self-fulfillment, and economic independence is pitted against society's need for nurturers (p. 23).

Tweak a few words here and there, and you can could find words like these coming from the mouth or pen of any one of a dozen well-known female "backlash" authors, including Mormon ones--concerned women who think, like Hayes, that modern American life and modern American feminism are serving the family wrong. But how many would recognize the way in which these ideologies and practices are disrupting the very simple, very conservative, very traditional ideal of the home? Would they see, as Hayes does, that exploring and defending the construction of the home obliges one to stop thinking so much about the behavior of those within the home--which is their preferred route--and instead to contemplate more about the ugly fact that we our complicit in a system which places a price tag on all those behaviors, both good and bad? Well...maybe if the Relief Society instructor was a particularly good one, they would.

My fellow panel participants opened up the discussion of "making" a home to all sorts of considerations--personal, sexual, and theoretical; they talked about church programs, economic resources, psychological growth, and political justice. I think Hayes's would have been pleased with their "radicalness", even if she might have wondered about some of their conclusions. Asking the questions she asks is, after all, the first step. Now, getting someone to make Radical Homemakers--with all its sometimes-crazy-but-just-as-often-insightful suggestions regarding transportation (p. 126), home ownership (p. 130), health care (p. 139), child care (p. 154), education (p. 160), and savings (p. 176)--a manual for an Enrichment lesson...well, that would be the next one.

Sharing the Kids Equally (Thoughts on Feminism, Capitalism, and Simplicity)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

So, Melissa has flown the coop, escaping to Washington D.C. for the next four days to hang out with friends old and new, and chat in person with many of her online book-blogger peers at the KidLitosphere Conference, an annual gathering of bloggers who specialize in children's, youth, and young adult fiction. (Melissa will read and review anything, but she does have her preferences.) That leaves me at home, responsible for four girls ranging in age from 3 to 13. Which makes me wonder about a few things. But first, the obligatory "Mr. Mom" clip:



I know for a fact that I'm not that pathetic. Not quite, anyway.

The humorous reputation which most husbands and fathers in America carry around when they're--when we're; no reason to leave myself out of this--obliged to take up duties which are usually, and stereotypically, assumed by wives and mothers is pretty insulting, of course, however true it may be. Not primarily to us guys, I think; in all likelihood, when such humor is engaged in we'll find ourselves happily appropriating it as way to set ourselves up for failure, and excuse our reliance upon women to keep the family alive and the house operating normally. No, mostly it's insulting to women, in a kind of putting-them-up-on-an-inverted-pedestal sort of way. Not that women don't use the same humorous stereotypes too; of course they do. But I think when I've heard Melissa and her friends chortle about the fact that, say, I don't know the first thing about laundry, it seems to be a bit of a defense mechanism, a reluctant, self-martyring, head-shaking justification for the world of work which invariably seems their lot in life. Of course, I'm not saying anything new or original; anyone who has taken even the tiniest glimpse at the literature--hell, anyone who has ever been married, or even in a more or less permanent heterosexual relationship--knows for a fact that most women do most household and child-rearing chores, partly by choice, but also partly because apparently even the most egalitarian of husbands and fathers find it hard to fight patterns of socialization which have surrounded us for generations.

A lot of that socialization, obviously, is tied up in a particular model of the bourgeois, post-WWII, middle- and upper-class, suburban household: one bread-winner, the man, who leaves home to work in a factory or office, and then returns home to the woman, who has stayed there all day to tend the children, prepare the food, and maintain order. It's an unequal form of socialization which has been attacked by feminists at least since Betty Friedan, if not earlier. (Some conservatives have criticized this artificial division as well, but such localist or distributist "conservative" messages have never had much luck escaping the untouched from Republican machine.)

The success of the feminist attack on this arrangement has been limited, I think, pretty much exactly to the degree to which it has not, for the most part (at least outside of purely academic circles), been extended into a attack on the capitalist presumptions which underscore it. So long as women and men are going to want to have children and bring them up in an environment of at least some stability, and so long as this essentially natural and historical process has to happen in a socio-economic context which hammers home, again and again, the arbitrary demands of specialized labor and consumer acquisition, then obviously some sort of bifurcation of the home and the workplace is going to occur, and mothers and fathers are going to have to adjust their lives so as to accommodate that. So we have the SAHMs and their incompetent husbands, or we have working moms with daycare stresses and guilt, and husbands who are enlightened enough to actually help out with some of the vacuuming occasionally. Of course, there are numerous exceptions to this, and perhaps we're seeing more all the time; but still, overall those exceptions remain just that: exceptionally rare. (I just got back from picking up Kristen, our youngest, from her half-day pre-school, and I was the only man anywhere in the building. Admittedly, Wichita isn't going to be particularly rife with folks choosing to buck traditional stereotypes, but I seriously doubt that even in New York or San Francisco would you see such numbers skewed a whole lot the other way.)

I think about all this, because I think about equality, and would like to believe that, in small ways, here and there, Melissa and I have managed to make for ourselves a somewhat more egalitarian home than the ones we knew growing up. Part of our success in this, I believe, can be attributed to the fact that we've been conscientious enough, or lucky enough, or both, to develop a way of life which minimizes some of the ways which the marketplace can drive a person away from a home environment where it's possible to implement and maintain a little more balance.

As in so many things, I find Laura McKenna to be a brilliant guide to this tangle of issues, and she's contributed some sharp observations to the debate again and again. In one of the above posts, she comments about the idea of families embracing the kind of equal division of labor which opting out of consumer capitalism potentially makes possible; while she's dubious of going the whole "radical" distance, she thinks the idea has merit, point out that "[t]here is absolutely no reason that feminism should mean a devotion to capitalism." This comment of hers came back to me when I read Rod Dreher's recent post about how much he--a full-time journalist and writer, a man who has confessed several times that, despite his localist aspirations, he'd simply feel lost and useless if he had provide for his family without relying upon the broad world of information and words and ideas--depends on his wife to manage a life which dissents in even small ways from the pressures of consumer capitalism. Rod quotes at length from the always provocative Sharon Astyk, who, in the context of a discussion about dealing with economic breakdown rather trenchantly observes:

[W]hile collapse as a whole, with its radical dislocation of male roles and providers, is probably scarier and more destructive to men than to women; volunteering to live a low energy life probably is more frightening to many women than to men--and for pretty good reasons. Because there's an excellent chance that the reality is likely to be that the practical burdens of hauling groceries home on a donkey, emptying the composting toilet bucket and stoking the sauna are likely to become the wife's chores...I [do not] think it is coincidental that many women married to more traditional men are unthrilled with the vision of a low energy future, and a return to the bad old days, in which "men may work from sun to sun, but women's work is never done."

It's not unusual to get arguments from a variety of mainstream liberals--not populists or social democrats or others that can sometimes be called up short by arguments about what kind of socio-economic and cultural conditions really make democratic communities possible, but ordinary, smart progressives--that recognize Astyk's point, and as a result want to call the whole thing off. Matthew Yglesias, when talking about the way certain celebrity chefs have turned to a celebration of locally produced, home-cooked meals, observes very simply: "If...gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening." Indeded, it's not. And rightly so; the revolution which enabled women to exercise rights and develop themselves as full participants in public life has been, whatever its incidental downsides, an overwhelming moral and civic boon to Western civilization (when you've even got folks on a localist website like Front Porch Republic observing that downsizing one's involvement in consumer capitalism is harder on wives than husbands, or writing that "I'm not sure if, given the choice with the sweep of history in front of me, I would choose a century or place other than the 20th Century west, and I’m even more inclined to think I wouldn't choose anything else for my daughters"--a sentiment I completely agree with--then you know there's no going back). So clearly, there is going to be a limit to how far the great majority of us who desire the many natural and historical goods provided by your basic family unit are going to be able or willing to fight against the specialization and consumption which I mentioned above. The question, I suppose, a question without any one lasting or universal answer, will figuring out where those limits are, and whether they can be pushed in any way, in the name of a life both humble and equal.

Rod argues that the only hope for families to achieve both goals is to have a relationship that focuses on something besides each other. He has a point there. I wonder if it may be that only a higher trust can make it possible for each partner to truly trust that the other will do whatever is necessary, or learn whatever skill is necessary, to support the other as they turn, if only partly, away from systems of consumer dependence that may be truly liberating in particular (as they historically have been for most women) but which overall make any long-term equality that much more difficult to achieve. But I also wonder--in the spirit of the aforementioned compromises, or at least in the spirit of sharing the tensions involved in such--if that trust might not be productively aided by a little wise public policy. Which takes me back to one of my favorite pieces of writing: my friend Damon Linker's essay about when he first became a father, and the conclusions it brought to him in regards to family life:

Ever since the 1950s, a woman choosing the life of the stay-at-home mom has faced the prospect of isolation far more profound than would have been typical in earlier times. After her husband walks out the door in the morning, she is usually left alone with only her child for company. Such a life is hardly traditional; nor is it, for many women, appealing...Instead of asking women to suppress their desire for the goods that come from pursuing an occupation outside the home, men could begin to put somewhat less emphasis on their own careers and recognize the very real goods that flow from sharing more of the joys and the burdens of parenting--even if it means that they must live with the same tensions faced by modern women...[S]uch tensions could be somewhat diminished for both parents if the government would expand the provisions for maternity leave that are part of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. We could also follow the lead of many European countries in providing for paternity leave. Surely a nation as wealthy as ours could afford the costs of policies that would so clearly benefit the modern family.

That wouldn't solve the whole dilemma of sharing the kids equally (a dilemma particularly vexing for those of us who want to pursue a simpler, more local way of life), of course--no one thing ever could. But at the very least, Laura agrees with me that a little European-style "conservatism" might make for family relationships that are a little more equal, a little more feminist, and slightly less filled with complex and confusing competing. Worth striving for, wouldn't you agree?

All right, Kristen's done with Backyardigans; time to clean up a bit before everyone else comes home. Back to doing my bit, I suppose.