First is your student ID, then your points and finally your percentage.
The total possible is out of 600. Rounding up will be done if you have attendance points. Have a great break!
CWID
11232012 402 0.67
11290899 560 0.933333333
11347867 482 0.803333333
11336143 587 0.978333333
11344559 482 0.803333333
11280865 170 0.283333333
11293372 494 0.823333333
11341067 507 0.845
11341608 570 0.95
11372619 469 0.781666667
11289381 493 0.821666667
11215448 552 0.92
11365442 559 0.931666667
11213138 578 0.963333333
11184119 529 0.881666667
MD 0
11362632 456 0.76
11346944 429 0.715
11334207 463 0.771666667
10341072 395 0.877777778
11160056 436 0.726666667
11275568 491 0.818333333
11294690 542 0.903333333
H.J 474 0.79
11312722 455 0.758333333
11187145 574 0.956666667
11347909 524 0.873333333
11326725 489 0.815
11347475 542 0.903333333
11363957 574 0.956666667
11339645 422 0.703333333
11357793 368 0.817777778
11266487 446 0.743333333
11339957 379 0.631666667
11360978 444 0.74
A. V. 475 0.791666667
11298037 503 0.838333333
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Quiz 9 & 10 as HW
Women H9 Quiz 9
1. Even before the advent of the flapper, weight issues were in the minds of American women.
2. The slenderized female was picked up from the French.
3. Anorexia is caused by internal and external factors.
4. In the 1930s drought plagued the U.S. from Virginia to Arkansas.
5. Specialization in working conditions isolated individuals.
6. In the 1950s women in American media worked outside of the home.
7. Working class women were unaffected by The Feminine Mystique.
8. Concepts of “femininity” are the same for white and black women.
9. Welfare kept families together.
10. Black women were not part of the Civil Rights movement.
Women H9 Quiz 10
1. Betty Friedman stated that women had not a “single fight left to fight.”
2. The emergence of the pill left women half of their lives not taken up by the drive of their biology.
3. The Civil Rights Bill did not include laws for equality of sexes.
4. Some NOW members considered abortion too controversial to take on.
5. Intitially there was only one Women ‘s Liberation Group.
6. By 1970 CR groups had become “the heart and soul of the women’s liberation movement.”
7. Feminists wanted the choices to be limited.
8. Feminists wanted women to have a yes/no choice in sex and if yes to have pleasure in the act.
9. Minority women were a huge part of the early women’s movement.
10. Because there are different feminists groups, there is room for all women.
1. Even before the advent of the flapper, weight issues were in the minds of American women.
2. The slenderized female was picked up from the French.
3. Anorexia is caused by internal and external factors.
4. In the 1930s drought plagued the U.S. from Virginia to Arkansas.
5. Specialization in working conditions isolated individuals.
6. In the 1950s women in American media worked outside of the home.
7. Working class women were unaffected by The Feminine Mystique.
8. Concepts of “femininity” are the same for white and black women.
9. Welfare kept families together.
10. Black women were not part of the Civil Rights movement.
Women H9 Quiz 10
1. Betty Friedman stated that women had not a “single fight left to fight.”
2. The emergence of the pill left women half of their lives not taken up by the drive of their biology.
3. The Civil Rights Bill did not include laws for equality of sexes.
4. Some NOW members considered abortion too controversial to take on.
5. Intitially there was only one Women ‘s Liberation Group.
6. By 1970 CR groups had become “the heart and soul of the women’s liberation movement.”
7. Feminists wanted the choices to be limited.
8. Feminists wanted women to have a yes/no choice in sex and if yes to have pleasure in the act.
9. Minority women were a huge part of the early women’s movement.
10. Because there are different feminists groups, there is room for all women.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Here are the COMPLETE grades up to this point in the class. The total so far in the class is 315.
This includes all points (including the blog points and attendence extra credit). The only remaining points left which aren not included in the total of 315, are:
15 points for class work (which will be done during Final Projects), 20 pts for Quiz 9 & 10, 100 points for Final Project, and 150 points for the midterm.
CWID
11232012 192
11290899 330
11347867 245
11336143 320
11344559 267
11280865 75
11293372 272
11341067 254
11341608 275
11372619 213
11289381 271
11215448 312
11365442 302
10545877 75
11213138 321
11184119 298
11362632 209
11346944 204
11334207 233
10341072 239
11160056 211
11275568 237
11294690 305
247
11312722 236
11187145 302
11347909 260
11326725 250
11252146 19
11288158 225
11347475 303
11363957 316
11339645 201
11357793 275
11266487 226
11339957 184
11360978 226
241
11298037 282
This includes all points (including the blog points and attendence extra credit). The only remaining points left which aren not included in the total of 315, are:
15 points for class work (which will be done during Final Projects), 20 pts for Quiz 9 & 10, 100 points for Final Project, and 150 points for the midterm.
CWID
11232012 192
11290899 330
11347867 245
11336143 320
11344559 267
11280865 75
11293372 272
11341067 254
11341608 275
11372619 213
11289381 271
11215448 312
11365442 302
10545877 75
11213138 321
11184119 298
11362632 209
11346944 204
11334207 233
10341072 239
11160056 211
11275568 237
11294690 305
247
11312722 236
11187145 302
11347909 260
11326725 250
11252146 19
11288158 225
11347475 303
11363957 316
11339645 201
11357793 275
11266487 226
11339957 184
11360978 226
241
11298037 282
DISCUSSION ON WEDNESDAY
There will be a discussion based on the blog article about dating and the Kerber article on pg. 390 (after presentations).
Bring your text and a copy of the article to class!
Bring your text and a copy of the article to class!
Modern Feminism PP Notes
Feminism and Theories of Empowerment
Gloria Steinman
History
Feminism and other empowerment oriented approaches grew out of the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
These movements demonstrated that dedicated individuals, acting together, in a generally non-violent way could change public attitudes significantly and thus change public policy.
Dolores Huerta
What began as the Women’s Movement developed quickly into a number of theoretical perspectives and methods of analysis for the understanding of human behavior.
Feminism is not one thing but a number of different perspectives that share a common set of postulates.
Betty Friedman
Clinical Illustration
The Self-In-Relationship approach was largely used to inform the notion of “codependency”.
– Defining one’s self as independent, assertive, aggressive, and separate – like a man – is good.
– Defining one’s self as interdependent, connected to other, and empathic -- like a woman – is bad.
“Although the codependency construct is popular, it has been poorly defined, lacks empirical research, is culturally determined, and is used primarily in a discriminatory way to pathologize women’s gender-specific behavior”
– Logan, TK; Walker, J.R.; Cole, J.; Leukefeld, C.G. (2002).
Feminism Family Tree
Liberal Feminism
• Earliest perspective and most often popularly
identified with feminism as a whole.
• Men and women are the same because both
have capacity for reason.
• Disparities are based on culture not on ability.
• Women need and deserve access to all that
men have and have access to.
• What is needed is a level playing field where
men and women can compete based on ability
and merit.
• Classic Liberal Feminism
– Government should protect everyone’s civil
liberties.
– Government should insure equal opportunities
for all people.
• Welfare Liberal Feminism
– Government should regulate the marketplace
to improve opportunities for women.
– Government should ensure mechanisms to
redress past injustice against women.
Radical Feminism
• Began as a reaction to the male centered civil
rights movement.
• Sexism is oppression and it is woven into the
fabric of society.
• “The personal is political.”
• A radical change in society is necessary to end
oppression of women.
• Advocates for public provision of child care and
an end to marriage or, at least, the privileged
status of marriage.
Cultural Feminism
• Grew out of and is a reaction to Radical
Feminism.
• Men and women are different.
• There are different ways of knowing and
understanding.
• Difference should be cultivated and valued.
• Relationships among women should be
encouraged and cultivated to develop and
enhance a culture of women.
• Innate Cultural Feminism
– The differences between men and women as regards
world view, ways of knowing, and valuing are inborn
and genetic in origin.
– Men and women can never fully understand each
other.
• Conditioned Cultural Feminism
– The differences between men and women as regards
world view, ways of knowing, and valuing are largely,
if not entirely, socially learned.
– With effort, men and women can understand and
value each others perspectives.
Sally Ride
Socialist Feminism
• Earlier feminist approaches focused primarily on
the personal and psychological effects of
patriarchy Socialist Feminism focused on the
social and economic effects.
• Capitalism is a system developed out of
patriarchy.
• Women are treated as an underclass whose
labor is exploited to make life easier for men.
• Homemaking and child rearing should be seen
as societal and not parental responsibilities.
Lesbian Feminism
• A challenge to sexism and heterosexism.
• Heterosexism is an outgrowth of patriarchy,
people should not be privileged or discriminated
against because of who they choose to be
intimate with.
• All hierarchy serves patriarchy.
• Women are taught to look to men to tell them
how to be women.
• Women should look to women to define
themselves: “woman-identified woman.”
• Women should abandon care taking of men.
Condoleezza Rice
Womanism
• Arose as a reaction to the perception that
feminism was dominated by upper middle
class white women who did not appreciate
the situation of women of color.
• Women have multiple identities: gender,
race, class.
• All of these identities have to be taken into
account in the work of liberation.
• The identity of women of color is fragmented and much
like that of colonized people.
• Activism is primary and should not be sacrificed to prove
some abstract theoretical point.
• Psychotherapeutic Decolonization
– Recognize the systematic and societal process of colonization
and oppression and so become aware of the colonized
mentality.
– Correct cognitive errors that reinforce a colonized mentality.
– Assert and affirm racial and gender identity, developing a more
integrated identity.
– Increase self-mastery and achieve autonomous dignity.
– Work toward transforming oneself and the colonized condition.
Ursula Burns – The 1st Black Female CEO of a Fortune 500 Company
Postmodern Feminism
• Emphasis on socially constructed meaning defining
one’s identity.
• “Gender”, “class”, “race” are all constructs that are
reductionistic and lead to only a superficial
understanding of the human experience.
• Recognizing the diversity of experience is critical.
• Until men and women can move beyond such constructs
they will never be free to be fully themselves.
• Anti-theoretical bias.
• “Woman” is not a universal construct and therefore no
individual or group can speak for all women.
Clinical Implications
• Feminist approaches, like all approaches that
center on the plight of oppressed groups share
much in common with conflict theories.
– Consciousness raising is a first step.
– Recognition of the effects of oppression on personal
identity and self-definition.
– Understanding that personal and social change are
coterminous.
– Movement toward personal liberation and then social
change.
• The object of intervention is
empowerment.
– Empowerment is increasing a person’s power
so that she can take action to improve her
own situation and gain Clinical Implications
control of her own life.
– Raising awareness, validation of feelings, self
disclosure, and building cohesive community
are all powerful tools to this end.
One of the wealthiest women in the world
Feminist Agenda: Intimate Violence
• Societal Level (Macro):
– Pass laws proscribing violence against
women which mandate consequences
including both punishment and intervention for
batterers.
– Give women access to all the privileges and
resources to which men have access.
• Community Level (meso)
– Develop a coordinated community response
to intimate violence that includes all segments
of the community.
– Provide shelters and services for women who
are victims of intimate violence and their
children so that they can experience safety,
security, and hope.
• Provide effective interventions to batterers
to assist them in changing their
misogynistic attitudes and developing
more egalitarian ones.
• Provide effective interventions for victims
of intimate violence which will empower
them to leave abuse relationships.
Judy Chu, 1st Chinese American woman elected to Congress
Gloria Steinman
History
Feminism and other empowerment oriented approaches grew out of the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
These movements demonstrated that dedicated individuals, acting together, in a generally non-violent way could change public attitudes significantly and thus change public policy.
Dolores Huerta
What began as the Women’s Movement developed quickly into a number of theoretical perspectives and methods of analysis for the understanding of human behavior.
Feminism is not one thing but a number of different perspectives that share a common set of postulates.
Betty Friedman
Clinical Illustration
The Self-In-Relationship approach was largely used to inform the notion of “codependency”.
– Defining one’s self as independent, assertive, aggressive, and separate – like a man – is good.
– Defining one’s self as interdependent, connected to other, and empathic -- like a woman – is bad.
“Although the codependency construct is popular, it has been poorly defined, lacks empirical research, is culturally determined, and is used primarily in a discriminatory way to pathologize women’s gender-specific behavior”
– Logan, TK; Walker, J.R.; Cole, J.; Leukefeld, C.G. (2002).
Feminism Family Tree
Liberal Feminism
• Earliest perspective and most often popularly
identified with feminism as a whole.
• Men and women are the same because both
have capacity for reason.
• Disparities are based on culture not on ability.
• Women need and deserve access to all that
men have and have access to.
• What is needed is a level playing field where
men and women can compete based on ability
and merit.
• Classic Liberal Feminism
– Government should protect everyone’s civil
liberties.
– Government should insure equal opportunities
for all people.
• Welfare Liberal Feminism
– Government should regulate the marketplace
to improve opportunities for women.
– Government should ensure mechanisms to
redress past injustice against women.
Radical Feminism
• Began as a reaction to the male centered civil
rights movement.
• Sexism is oppression and it is woven into the
fabric of society.
• “The personal is political.”
• A radical change in society is necessary to end
oppression of women.
• Advocates for public provision of child care and
an end to marriage or, at least, the privileged
status of marriage.
Cultural Feminism
• Grew out of and is a reaction to Radical
Feminism.
• Men and women are different.
• There are different ways of knowing and
understanding.
• Difference should be cultivated and valued.
• Relationships among women should be
encouraged and cultivated to develop and
enhance a culture of women.
• Innate Cultural Feminism
– The differences between men and women as regards
world view, ways of knowing, and valuing are inborn
and genetic in origin.
– Men and women can never fully understand each
other.
• Conditioned Cultural Feminism
– The differences between men and women as regards
world view, ways of knowing, and valuing are largely,
if not entirely, socially learned.
– With effort, men and women can understand and
value each others perspectives.
Sally Ride
Socialist Feminism
• Earlier feminist approaches focused primarily on
the personal and psychological effects of
patriarchy Socialist Feminism focused on the
social and economic effects.
• Capitalism is a system developed out of
patriarchy.
• Women are treated as an underclass whose
labor is exploited to make life easier for men.
• Homemaking and child rearing should be seen
as societal and not parental responsibilities.
Lesbian Feminism
• A challenge to sexism and heterosexism.
• Heterosexism is an outgrowth of patriarchy,
people should not be privileged or discriminated
against because of who they choose to be
intimate with.
• All hierarchy serves patriarchy.
• Women are taught to look to men to tell them
how to be women.
• Women should look to women to define
themselves: “woman-identified woman.”
• Women should abandon care taking of men.
Condoleezza Rice
Womanism
• Arose as a reaction to the perception that
feminism was dominated by upper middle
class white women who did not appreciate
the situation of women of color.
• Women have multiple identities: gender,
race, class.
• All of these identities have to be taken into
account in the work of liberation.
• The identity of women of color is fragmented and much
like that of colonized people.
• Activism is primary and should not be sacrificed to prove
some abstract theoretical point.
• Psychotherapeutic Decolonization
– Recognize the systematic and societal process of colonization
and oppression and so become aware of the colonized
mentality.
– Correct cognitive errors that reinforce a colonized mentality.
– Assert and affirm racial and gender identity, developing a more
integrated identity.
– Increase self-mastery and achieve autonomous dignity.
– Work toward transforming oneself and the colonized condition.
Ursula Burns – The 1st Black Female CEO of a Fortune 500 Company
Postmodern Feminism
• Emphasis on socially constructed meaning defining
one’s identity.
• “Gender”, “class”, “race” are all constructs that are
reductionistic and lead to only a superficial
understanding of the human experience.
• Recognizing the diversity of experience is critical.
• Until men and women can move beyond such constructs
they will never be free to be fully themselves.
• Anti-theoretical bias.
• “Woman” is not a universal construct and therefore no
individual or group can speak for all women.
Clinical Implications
• Feminist approaches, like all approaches that
center on the plight of oppressed groups share
much in common with conflict theories.
– Consciousness raising is a first step.
– Recognition of the effects of oppression on personal
identity and self-definition.
– Understanding that personal and social change are
coterminous.
– Movement toward personal liberation and then social
change.
• The object of intervention is
empowerment.
– Empowerment is increasing a person’s power
so that she can take action to improve her
own situation and gain Clinical Implications
control of her own life.
– Raising awareness, validation of feelings, self
disclosure, and building cohesive community
are all powerful tools to this end.
One of the wealthiest women in the world
Feminist Agenda: Intimate Violence
• Societal Level (Macro):
– Pass laws proscribing violence against
women which mandate consequences
including both punishment and intervention for
batterers.
– Give women access to all the privileges and
resources to which men have access.
• Community Level (meso)
– Develop a coordinated community response
to intimate violence that includes all segments
of the community.
– Provide shelters and services for women who
are victims of intimate violence and their
children so that they can experience safety,
security, and hope.
• Provide effective interventions to batterers
to assist them in changing their
misogynistic attitudes and developing
more egalitarian ones.
• Provide effective interventions for victims
of intimate violence which will empower
them to leave abuse relationships.
Judy Chu, 1st Chinese American woman elected to Congress
Saturday, March 13, 2010
ORAL MIDTERM UPDATES SCHEUDLE
Monday March 15
10:00 David Ma 17A
10:10 Jamie H9
10:20 Ashley F H9
11:20 Nicole J H9
12:20 Danielle Mehaz 17A
12:30 Phung Nguyen 17A
12:40 Student 17A
Tuesday March 16
9:30 Roanna 17A
9:40 Shinji 17A
9:50 Anam 17A
10:00 Sonya M 17A
10:10 Thomas L 17A
10:20 Steve E 17A
11:20 Rianne H9
12:20 Pavrati H9
Wednesday March 17
9:30 Thien N 17A
9:40 Inas 17A
9:50 Michelle T H9
10:00 Amy D H9
10:10 Michelle Y H9
10:20 Stefanie S H9
11:20 Huan Phi
12:20 Kelsey St. Marie
12:30 Lane Kagiyama
Thursday March 18
9:30 Tuan T 17A
9:40 Virginia H9
9:50 Andrew H9
10:00 Kimberly H9
10:10 Mich H9
10:20 Milam H9
11:20 Branden W 17A
12:20 Erfani H
12:30 Yuliya S
10:00 David Ma 17A
10:10 Jamie H9
10:20 Ashley F H9
11:20 Nicole J H9
12:20 Danielle Mehaz 17A
12:30 Phung Nguyen 17A
12:40 Student 17A
Tuesday March 16
9:30 Roanna 17A
9:40 Shinji 17A
9:50 Anam 17A
10:00 Sonya M 17A
10:10 Thomas L 17A
10:20 Steve E 17A
11:20 Rianne H9
12:20 Pavrati H9
Wednesday March 17
9:30 Thien N 17A
9:40 Inas 17A
9:50 Michelle T H9
10:00 Amy D H9
10:10 Michelle Y H9
10:20 Stefanie S H9
11:20 Huan Phi
12:20 Kelsey St. Marie
12:30 Lane Kagiyama
Thursday March 18
9:30 Tuan T 17A
9:40 Virginia H9
9:50 Andrew H9
10:00 Kimberly H9
10:10 Mich H9
10:20 Milam H9
11:20 Branden W 17A
12:20 Erfani H
12:30 Yuliya S
Thursday, March 11, 2010
GRADES (WOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!!) It finally worked.
This is out of 255 (does not count attendance points).
StudentID Total
11232012
11290899 252
11347867 187
11336143
11344559 209
11280865 20
11293372 194
11295025
11341067 176
11341608 197
11351405 4
11372619 190
11289381 193
11215448 234
11365442 224
10545877 20
11371406 4
10223951 4
11213138
11184119 233
11341241 4
11362632 196
11346944 191
11334207
11288030 4
11373856
10341072 181
11160056 198
11275568 224
11294690 227
11312722 216
11187145 195
11347909
11326725 217
11252146 9
11288158
11347475 225
11363957 209
11339645 188
11357793 209
11266487 203
11348869
11339957
11360978
11298037
StudentID Total
11232012
11290899 252
11347867 187
11336143
11344559 209
11280865 20
11293372 194
11295025
11341067 176
11341608 197
11351405 4
11372619 190
11289381 193
11215448 234
11365442 224
10545877 20
11371406 4
10223951 4
11213138
11184119 233
11341241 4
11362632 196
11346944 191
11334207
11288030 4
11373856
10341072 181
11160056 198
11275568 224
11294690 227
11312722 216
11187145 195
11347909
11326725 217
11252146 9
11288158
11347475 225
11363957 209
11339645 188
11357793 209
11266487 203
11348869
11339957
11360978
11298037
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
PP Notes Minority Women
Hispanic Women in America
Large Mexican immigrants began coming into the U.S. in the 20s, as MX was exempt from immigration laws
During Great Depression, exported
Labor struggles
Civil Rights Movement
Ceasar Chavez and Dolores Huerta
Impact to Democratic Party
The Chicano Movement
Hispanic women: isolated from external society because of demands in home (cultural)
Limited by language and literacy
Poor medical care
Dominated domestic and agricultural labor (provided cheap work force) but thus lacked decent working conditions
Racial disempowerment: both gender and race
Affirmative Action sought to repair some of the injustice
Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez became the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as well as the first Hispanic woman to serve as chair or ranking member of a full committee in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Issues of children being citizens (Logan, Ut example)
1960s – 80s continued to be a time of struggling for economic and legal recognition, protection and equality
Become a major demographic in political life (voting, lobbying etc)
Black Women in America
Post Harlem Renaissance into identity
Continued issues of prejudice
Civil Rights Movement
Feminist Movements
Affirmative Action
Still disparity in education, wages, standard of living
Issues of divor, violence, single mothers, abandonment
Become a major demographic politically
Largest registered voters/voter turn out of any minority group
Highest levels of education attained than any other minority group
Usually vote Democratic ticket
CURRENT trends show a move toward re-segregation (by blacks, black primary schools)
Second largest consumer group in America
Still have wage disparity and poor at a rate not in line with whites
Under represented in government like all minority groups in U.S.
Asian Women in America
Less than 5% of U.S. population
More urbanized than other minority groups
Women more likely to work
Fewer children than other minority groups
Impacting various elements of cultural
Medical – changed the landscape of American medicine
Have the highest educational qualifications
Includes all of Asia (China, Japan, Pakistan, India, etc.)
Highest rate of college degrees
Vincent Chin 1982
Culturally disapprove of intermarriage but is more common
Seek more heavily to maintain independent culture
In many, women have minimal freedom
Victims to husbands
Other Minority Women in America
Cultural, language, legality
Education
Poverty and Income
Families
Large Mexican immigrants began coming into the U.S. in the 20s, as MX was exempt from immigration laws
During Great Depression, exported
Labor struggles
Civil Rights Movement
Ceasar Chavez and Dolores Huerta
Impact to Democratic Party
The Chicano Movement
Hispanic women: isolated from external society because of demands in home (cultural)
Limited by language and literacy
Poor medical care
Dominated domestic and agricultural labor (provided cheap work force) but thus lacked decent working conditions
Racial disempowerment: both gender and race
Affirmative Action sought to repair some of the injustice
Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez became the first Puerto Rican woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as well as the first Hispanic woman to serve as chair or ranking member of a full committee in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Issues of children being citizens (Logan, Ut example)
1960s – 80s continued to be a time of struggling for economic and legal recognition, protection and equality
Become a major demographic in political life (voting, lobbying etc)
Black Women in America
Post Harlem Renaissance into identity
Continued issues of prejudice
Civil Rights Movement
Feminist Movements
Affirmative Action
Still disparity in education, wages, standard of living
Issues of divor, violence, single mothers, abandonment
Become a major demographic politically
Largest registered voters/voter turn out of any minority group
Highest levels of education attained than any other minority group
Usually vote Democratic ticket
CURRENT trends show a move toward re-segregation (by blacks, black primary schools)
Second largest consumer group in America
Still have wage disparity and poor at a rate not in line with whites
Under represented in government like all minority groups in U.S.
Asian Women in America
Less than 5% of U.S. population
More urbanized than other minority groups
Women more likely to work
Fewer children than other minority groups
Impacting various elements of cultural
Medical – changed the landscape of American medicine
Have the highest educational qualifications
Includes all of Asia (China, Japan, Pakistan, India, etc.)
Highest rate of college degrees
Vincent Chin 1982
Culturally disapprove of intermarriage but is more common
Seek more heavily to maintain independent culture
In many, women have minimal freedom
Victims to husbands
Other Minority Women in America
Cultural, language, legality
Education
Poverty and Income
Families
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Study Guide II Midterm 2: Part 2 (ORAL)
1. Discuss women in American History through WWI and the 1920s. What was life like for women before and then during WWI? What legal rights or limitations did they have? Work and educational opporutnities? What were the values for women up through WWI? Make sure to discuss the Comstock law, birthcontrol and early feminism. What happened for American women during WWI? How did work, education and home life change because of the war? What happened post war? Discuss music, styles and attitudes or cultural changes in the 1920s? What caused these changes in women? Give at least 3 specific examples of women from this era (from our reading or lectures) who are historically significant and explain why. (i.e. Margaret Sanger)
2. Discuss women in the U.S. after World War II. How did education, family and work change? How did birth control influence these changes? How did the politics of this time change? (Discuss Roe v. Wade and other important political issues for women). How did the women's movement emerge and what was it? What about life for minority women in the U.S. - what was it like, did they experience the same progress? Why or why not? Discuss modern feminism and explain at least two different types of it, and why it is important. Discuss at least two specific women from our readings and lectures, post WWII, who are historically significant and explain why.
2. Discuss women in the U.S. after World War II. How did education, family and work change? How did birth control influence these changes? How did the politics of this time change? (Discuss Roe v. Wade and other important political issues for women). How did the women's movement emerge and what was it? What about life for minority women in the U.S. - what was it like, did they experience the same progress? Why or why not? Discuss modern feminism and explain at least two different types of it, and why it is important. Discuss at least two specific women from our readings and lectures, post WWII, who are historically significant and explain why.
Study Guide Midterm 2: Part I
1. Who was Helen Keller? Why was she important?
2. Discuss the First Wave of Feminism. And suffrage. How did it shape and change life for U.S. women going into the 20th century?
3. Discuss the Comstock Mine.
4. What were the Comstock Laws? What did they attempt to prevent or do? Why did some oppose them?
5. Who was Margaret Sanger and what did she do regarding the Comstock Laws?
6. What did Griswald vs. Connecticut do for women?
7. What was the Woman Rebel and what issues did it addres?
8. What was the American Birth Control League? Who founded it and for what purpose?
9. Why weren't women allowed to know about their own bodies? Forms of birthcontrol? The need for medical care?
10. When was the first oral birth control used and who developed it? The Pill?
11. How is the pill now different from when it was first made?
12. What was the problem with estrogen using pills?
13. What is an IUD? Why is it so widely used and why isn't it in the U.S.?
14. Identify:
Marie Stewart
Sojourner Truth
Margaret Sanger
Frank Colton
Carl Djerassi
Envoid
Birth control
Gregory Pincus
16. Discuss life for women in America before WWI in the U.S.? During WWI? After?
17. How was WWI different from other wars? What role did women play? Discuss jobs, wages and family for women during WWI. What happened to women workers after men came home from the war?
18. What was the Roaring 20s?
19. How had life and values changed for and toward women?
20. What were 'Victorian Values'?
21. Discuss jazz, speakeasies and prohibition.
22. Who were flappers? How were they viewed and why? What kinds of social activities, dancing and interests did these women have?
23. What is a middle class? Why is it important? What kinds of industries were created because of a middle class? What values changed?
24. How did the Industrial Revolution influence life in America? For women?
25. Discuss early captialism: Who were the Robber Barons? Why were they important? What industries did they dominate?
26. Why were factories and industry important? How did they change urban and rural areas? How did these businesses and early capitalism impact Americans? The American family? Women?
27. What was the Great Depression and when did it happen? How had the U.S. been able to avoid it for so long? Discuss the Stock Market Crash and Dust Bowl.
28. What did FDR do to help in the depression? How were families and women impacted because of the depression?
29. Discuss WWII. Who were the Axis and Allied Powers? How was this war different from previous wars? What happened to women in war and at home? What kinds of opporunities did they have?
30. How did the U.S. finally become invovlved in WWII? Why so late? What was D-Day? Normandy? How did the change the tide of the war?
31. What was the Holocaust? How many Jews in Europe were murdered because of this? What was the death toll of WWII?
32. How did WWII change the lives of American women? Why were they not willing to givve up what they had gained in the war?
33. What happened to Europe, Germany and the Allied countries after WWII? Where did the treaty talks occurr for WWII? How did this affect relations globally?
34. What is the Cold War? Discuss Soviet and U.S. relations. How did this influence the U.S., culture and lives of women?
35. Identify:
Iron Curtain
Eastern Bloc
Cold War
Gorbachev
Yeltzin
Thatcher
Reagan
The Wall
East Germany
West Germany
Martin Luther King
Malcolm X
Simone de Beauvior
Mother Theresa
Nelson Mandela
36. What was the Civil Rights Movement? Why is it important? How did it influence women in the U.S.? What areas of life did it seek to change?
37. What was segregation? What kinds of laws prevented blacks from voting? What is Jim Crow? Discuss conditions in schools, public transport etc. (especially in the South) for blacks. How was it even more difficult for black women?
39. Discuss minority women in the U.S. What special challenges did they face? How was it similiar or different to 'white' women?
40. What is Modern Feminism? Discuss the different kinds of feminism in the U.S.
41. What gains or losses have women in the U.S. experienced in the 21st century?
2. Discuss the First Wave of Feminism. And suffrage. How did it shape and change life for U.S. women going into the 20th century?
3. Discuss the Comstock Mine.
4. What were the Comstock Laws? What did they attempt to prevent or do? Why did some oppose them?
5. Who was Margaret Sanger and what did she do regarding the Comstock Laws?
6. What did Griswald vs. Connecticut do for women?
7. What was the Woman Rebel and what issues did it addres?
8. What was the American Birth Control League? Who founded it and for what purpose?
9. Why weren't women allowed to know about their own bodies? Forms of birthcontrol? The need for medical care?
10. When was the first oral birth control used and who developed it? The Pill?
11. How is the pill now different from when it was first made?
12. What was the problem with estrogen using pills?
13. What is an IUD? Why is it so widely used and why isn't it in the U.S.?
14. Identify:
Marie Stewart
Sojourner Truth
Margaret Sanger
Frank Colton
Carl Djerassi
Envoid
Birth control
Gregory Pincus
16. Discuss life for women in America before WWI in the U.S.? During WWI? After?
17. How was WWI different from other wars? What role did women play? Discuss jobs, wages and family for women during WWI. What happened to women workers after men came home from the war?
18. What was the Roaring 20s?
19. How had life and values changed for and toward women?
20. What were 'Victorian Values'?
21. Discuss jazz, speakeasies and prohibition.
22. Who were flappers? How were they viewed and why? What kinds of social activities, dancing and interests did these women have?
23. What is a middle class? Why is it important? What kinds of industries were created because of a middle class? What values changed?
24. How did the Industrial Revolution influence life in America? For women?
25. Discuss early captialism: Who were the Robber Barons? Why were they important? What industries did they dominate?
26. Why were factories and industry important? How did they change urban and rural areas? How did these businesses and early capitalism impact Americans? The American family? Women?
27. What was the Great Depression and when did it happen? How had the U.S. been able to avoid it for so long? Discuss the Stock Market Crash and Dust Bowl.
28. What did FDR do to help in the depression? How were families and women impacted because of the depression?
29. Discuss WWII. Who were the Axis and Allied Powers? How was this war different from previous wars? What happened to women in war and at home? What kinds of opporunities did they have?
30. How did the U.S. finally become invovlved in WWII? Why so late? What was D-Day? Normandy? How did the change the tide of the war?
31. What was the Holocaust? How many Jews in Europe were murdered because of this? What was the death toll of WWII?
32. How did WWII change the lives of American women? Why were they not willing to givve up what they had gained in the war?
33. What happened to Europe, Germany and the Allied countries after WWII? Where did the treaty talks occurr for WWII? How did this affect relations globally?
34. What is the Cold War? Discuss Soviet and U.S. relations. How did this influence the U.S., culture and lives of women?
35. Identify:
Iron Curtain
Eastern Bloc
Cold War
Gorbachev
Yeltzin
Thatcher
Reagan
The Wall
East Germany
West Germany
Martin Luther King
Malcolm X
Simone de Beauvior
Mother Theresa
Nelson Mandela
36. What was the Civil Rights Movement? Why is it important? How did it influence women in the U.S.? What areas of life did it seek to change?
37. What was segregation? What kinds of laws prevented blacks from voting? What is Jim Crow? Discuss conditions in schools, public transport etc. (especially in the South) for blacks. How was it even more difficult for black women?
39. Discuss minority women in the U.S. What special challenges did they face? How was it similiar or different to 'white' women?
40. What is Modern Feminism? Discuss the different kinds of feminism in the U.S.
41. What gains or losses have women in the U.S. experienced in the 21st century?
GRADES
The Blod will not upload the Spread Sheet so grades will be posted in CLASS by Thursday, March 11th.
Presentation of FINAL
Here is the order we will go in. WE WILL START ON TIME. You will not be allowed to exceed 2 minutes. IF you MISS your day, that is a ZERO (0) grade.
As there are only 2 minutes, you must be prepared to got at any time:
Womens Hist 9
Monday 3/15:
Yadegar, Michelle
Valle, Cecilia A
Turner, Michelle R
Szeto, Stephanie
Sutherlin, Nicole E
Suri, Sid M
Soutar, Amy D
Smith, Danae E
Satariano, Virginia A
Sanchez, Riane A
Salud, Camille R
Rodgers, Andrew A
Ramirez, Yazmin T
Ramans, Mercedes
Rajkumar, Parvathi
Phillips, Courtney E
Pangborn, Brittney N
Pakozdi, Marialena
Newhall, Miyuki H
Tuesday 3/16:
Moreno, Jennifer
Mitchler, Christina R
Martins, Kazue
Martinez, Kimberly D
Mancilla, Daycy E
Magallanes, Sandra C
Lopez, Bianca M
Lerwill, Nichole A
Lee, Amanda B
Johnson, Nichole T
Hwang, Gina
Hurd, Jaya
Howard, Rachael L
Freitas, Ashley E
Flaherty, Jamie
Duong, Amy
Desilva, Erikka E
Del Castillo, Cris
Wednesday 3/17:
Dela Cruz, Kenn L
Chon, Milam
Ceniceros, Melissa
Cavalero, Craig M
Cardenas, Brittany D
Calhoun, Robert
Brasil, Megan
Baez, Berenice K
Arroyo, Veronica
Arroyo, Sandra M
THURSDAY 3/18: MIDTERM
As there are only 2 minutes, you must be prepared to got at any time:
Womens Hist 9
Monday 3/15:
Yadegar, Michelle
Valle, Cecilia A
Turner, Michelle R
Szeto, Stephanie
Sutherlin, Nicole E
Suri, Sid M
Soutar, Amy D
Smith, Danae E
Satariano, Virginia A
Sanchez, Riane A
Salud, Camille R
Rodgers, Andrew A
Ramirez, Yazmin T
Ramans, Mercedes
Rajkumar, Parvathi
Phillips, Courtney E
Pangborn, Brittney N
Pakozdi, Marialena
Newhall, Miyuki H
Tuesday 3/16:
Moreno, Jennifer
Mitchler, Christina R
Martins, Kazue
Martinez, Kimberly D
Mancilla, Daycy E
Magallanes, Sandra C
Lopez, Bianca M
Lerwill, Nichole A
Lee, Amanda B
Johnson, Nichole T
Hwang, Gina
Hurd, Jaya
Howard, Rachael L
Freitas, Ashley E
Flaherty, Jamie
Duong, Amy
Desilva, Erikka E
Del Castillo, Cris
Wednesday 3/17:
Dela Cruz, Kenn L
Chon, Milam
Ceniceros, Melissa
Cavalero, Craig M
Cardenas, Brittany D
Calhoun, Robert
Brasil, Megan
Baez, Berenice K
Arroyo, Veronica
Arroyo, Sandra M
THURSDAY 3/18: MIDTERM
ORAL Midterm
Monday March 15
10:00 David Ma 17A
10:10 Jamie H9
10:20 Ashley F H9
11:20 Nicole J H9
12:20 Danielle Mehaz 17A
12:30 Phung Nguyen 17A
12:40 Sheradoona 17A
Tuesday March 16
9:30 Roanna 17A
9:40 Shinji 17A
9:50 Anam 17A
10:00 Sonya M 17A
10:10 Thomas L 17A
10:20 Steve E 17A
11:20 Rianne H9
12:20 Pavrati H9
Wednesday March 17
9:30 Thien N 17A
9:40 Inas 17A
9:50 Michelle T H9
10:00 Amy D H9
10:10 Michelle Y H9
10:20 Stefanie S H9
11:20 Huan Phi
12:20 Kelsey St. Marie
12:30 Lane Kagiyama
Thursday March 18
9:30 Tuan T 17A
9:40 Virginia H9
9:50 Andrew H9
10:00 Kimberly H9
10:10 Mich H9
10:20 Milam H9
11:20 Branden W 17A
12:20 Erfani H
12:30 Yuliya S
10:00 David Ma 17A
10:10 Jamie H9
10:20 Ashley F H9
11:20 Nicole J H9
12:20 Danielle Mehaz 17A
12:30 Phung Nguyen 17A
12:40 Sheradoona 17A
Tuesday March 16
9:30 Roanna 17A
9:40 Shinji 17A
9:50 Anam 17A
10:00 Sonya M 17A
10:10 Thomas L 17A
10:20 Steve E 17A
11:20 Rianne H9
12:20 Pavrati H9
Wednesday March 17
9:30 Thien N 17A
9:40 Inas 17A
9:50 Michelle T H9
10:00 Amy D H9
10:10 Michelle Y H9
10:20 Stefanie S H9
11:20 Huan Phi
12:20 Kelsey St. Marie
12:30 Lane Kagiyama
Thursday March 18
9:30 Tuan T 17A
9:40 Virginia H9
9:50 Andrew H9
10:00 Kimberly H9
10:10 Mich H9
10:20 Milam H9
11:20 Branden W 17A
12:20 Erfani H
12:30 Yuliya S
Sunday, March 7, 2010
First Wave of Fem. Notes
1
First Wave Feminism and the
• Primary (public) focus on female citizenship
– And the suffrage movement
• But also (less public, less clearly identified as
“feminist”) focus on challenging assumptions
about women’s “essential natures”
Abolitionism and Feminism
• First Wave Feminist activism grew out of
Abolitionism
– Which in itself led to the rise of a suffragist
movement
• Originally to ensure the ending of slavery
– Because it was assumed that women as a group would
end slavery if given the vote
• But later as a basic human right
– That had been denied women politically
– In this latter sense, it needed to disprove theories about
women’s supposed inability to exercise citizenship on
their own behalf.
Abolitionism as both
Inspiration and Experience
• Women’s moral opposition to slavery
– Part of Second Great Awakening
• But also source for political experience
– In abolitionist societies
• Such as the Boston Women’s Antislavery Society
– And as a place where women’s discourse
could be heard
• In part because of the support of leaders like
William Lloyd Garrison
• And because women were speaking to OTHER
women as well as society as a whole.
Women’s Voices in Abolitionism
• One of the chief sites where women’s
political voices can be heard in nineteenthcentury
America
• And even more interesting, a site where
women of broad class and race
backgrounds leave their publiclyexpressed
political thoughts behind for us
to rediscover.
Maria W. Stewart (1803-79)
• One America's first black
women political writers.
• In 1832, in Boston, she
mounted lecture platform
to speak to assembled
crowd of men and
women (promiscuous
assembly) against the
colonization movement, a
scheme to expatriate
black Americans back to
West Africa.
• Her public career was
barely 3 years long.
2
Maria W. Stewart
• After husband (a free black shipfitter) died in
1829, underwent religious conversion and gave
self over to career of secular ministry of political
and religious witness.
• Stewart published a political pamphlet, a
collection of religious meditations and delivered
4 public lectures which were later printed.
• Took public stage after the mysterious death of
David Walker, a black Boston author of an
inflammatory pamphlet “Walker's Appeal,” a call
for slave rebellion in the American South.
Maria W. Stewart
• Stewart knew that she too faced danger
for her unpopular political and abolitionist
beliefs, perhaps especially because of her
race.
• "Many will suffer for pleading the cause of
oppressed Africa," she wrote, "and I shall
glory in being one of her martyrs.“
• Criticized Boston white society for racism
and segregation, but ALSO criticized
Boston’s free black community for its
passivity and “cooperation” with slavery.
Maria W. Stewart
• Argued that women had not only the right
but the duty to speak up about oppression
• Especially those who were “doubly
oppressed” by their race AND gender
• Women must speak on behalf of each
other and children
– Esp. on behalf of unprotected women (like
herself)
– Who were targeted because of the double
standard
Positing Sisterhood
• Angelina Grimké’s
"Appeal to Christian
Women of the South,"
and "Appeal to Women
of Nominally Free
States"
• Theme of both
appeals:
– sisterhood of black and
white women.
– "The female slaves are
Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
• Angelina Grimké's
"Appeal to Women in
Nominally Free
States," which came
out of the 2nd annual
women's antislavery
convention:
• "In consequence of the
odium which the
degradation of slavery has
Positing Sisterhood
• Both appeals, those of sisterhood and of
the degradation of both black and white by
the existence of slavery, promoted political
activism among women based on the
familiar ideas characterizing the cult of true
womanhood: women had greater moral
virtue, sensitivity, and piety.
Positing Sisterhood
3
Sojourner Truth
(1797-1883)
• Part of Second Great
Awakening
• And attacked the
exclusion of Black women
from the category of
womanhood – “Ain’t I a
Woman?” – in the midst
of her argument for
women’s suffrage
(delivered 1851, at
Women's Convention,
Akron, Ohio):
Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t a Woman?” (1851)
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the
negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty
soon. But what's all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have
the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any
best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered
into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a
man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children,
and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!
And ain't I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"]
That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint,
and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a
woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!
Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women
together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the
men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• Abolitionism is the pre-history of the
Woman’s Rights movement in the U.S.
• Where “First Wave Feminism” is born and
tempered
• The internal politics of the Abolitionist
movement itself creates feminist
consciousness and trains women to be
able to conceptualize and express it.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• Within moral reform movement, women
had to fight for their voices to be heard
– But they also believed, because of “Female
Moral Authority,” that women were morally
compelled to speak
– So those who silenced them were, by
definition, immoral.
• Even if the silencers were clergymen or otherwise
moral leaders.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• The abolitionist movement taught women how to
organize
– Abolitionist women emerged as leaders on a local and national
level
• It was a small step for these leaders to argue that the
most expedient way to end slavery was to give women
(who were assumed to be antislavery as a group) the
vote.
– There was an assumption that even Southern women would vote
to end slavery.
• When abolitionist women argued at Seneca Falls in 1848
that women needed the vote, many female leaders
transferred their activism to feminist activity in addition to
abolition.
– For abolitionist women after 1848, suffragism and abolitionism
became the SAME movement.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• First Wave Feminism developed within
abolitionism because:
– A) women in their struggle to speak and to
counteract the proslavery church and sexist
clergy of the north developed a consciousness
of their own oppression
– B) Garrisonian abolition taught women what to
do with that perception and how to make a
movement.
• It gave women the ability to analyze institutions and
provided them with the assumption that absolute
human equality was a first principle in both morality
and politics.
4
Abolitionism and Feminism
• This linkage between abolition and feminism appears
even before 1848
– See, for example, the 1836 "Annual Report" of the Boston
Female Anti-Slavery Society.
• “We sometimes, but not often, hear it said--
‘[Abolitionism] is such an odd, unladylike thing to do.'
We concede that the human soul, in the full exercise
of its most God-like power of self-denial and exertion
for the good of others, is, emphatically, a very
unladylike thing. We have never heard this objection,
but from that sort of a woman who is dead while she
lives, or to be pitied as the victim of domestic tyranny.
The woman who makes it, is generally one who has
struggled from childhood up to womanhood, through a
process of spiritual suffocation. (cont.)
Abolitionism and Feminism
• This linkage between abolition and feminism appears even
before 1848
– See, for example, the 1836 "Annual Report" of the Boston Female Anti-
Slavery Society.
• “…Her infancy was passed in serving as a convenience for the
display of elegant baby linen. Her youth, in training for a more
public display of braiding the hair, and wearing of gold, and
putting on of apparel…. This is the woman who tells us it is
unladylike to ask that children may no longer be sold away from
their parents, or wives from their husbands, in the District of
Columbia, and adds, 'they ought to be mobbed who ask it.' We
present her the only argument she can comprehend — the fact
that 80,000 of the noblest among the matronage of England,
have annually entreated of their government, to do all in its
power for the extinctions of slavery, till they prevailed.” -- (3rd
Annual Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society
(1836), p. 26.)
Ideology: Sexual difference
• In 1870-1890, many suffragists, such as
Stanton and Anthony, argued that women were
human beings first and females second.
– Important argument because
• it implied that the lives of women consisted
of more than their sex roles or their
biological capacity for childrearing.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• This “sexual difference” argument challenged
the 19th-century views
– that the family was the basic social unit and
that the male head of the family was the link
between the family and the broader society
(both politically and economically).
– that men knew the best interests of women
and that, within marriage, the interests of
husband and wife were inseparable and
united.
– that men acted in the interests of women and
children when they represented them at the
polls and in their political deliberations.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• The suffragists proclaimed that the interests of
all women, those who married and those who
did not, were denied by their absence from the
political world.
• These suffragists challenged the male monopoly
on citizenship in the interests of sexual equality.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Suffragists expected women to use the vote to
open the public sphere to women
– so that as women gained greater rights in the
public world,
– they would demand more rights in the private
arena, such as:
• divorce,
• the right to pursue self-expression,
• self-actualization,
• the right to control their own bodies in marriage,
• the right to protect themselves from male lust and
violence, etc.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Women with the vote could then protect
themselves and pursue their own intellectual,
occupational, spiritual development free from
dependence upon men and fully equal to them.
• In arguing for women’s citizenship
because of their equality first, suffragists
attacked the concept of “true
womanhood,” even the politically
expedient variant of “female moral
authority”
Ideology: Sexual difference
• But in the 1870s, suffragists argued that
while this might be true, women should be
given the vote because they were equal as
human beings, as individuals.
• If given equal access to education and
opportunity, women could achieve at the
same level that men could, even if they
would still be different from men.
• This point is FEMINISM – First Wave
Feminism.
6
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Yet, even while arguing for equality,
suffragists continued to argue that women
were different from men – and that women
voters would vote differently (in a positive
sense) than would men.
• Suffragists argued that women’s votes –
hard-won and thus appreciated – would be
less corruptible than men’s (especially the
votes of immigrants – but more on that
later).
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Indeed, women could be counted upon to
use their votes to do the civic work that
they did in their own households: “Social
Housekeeping”
• Women would teach children, clean up
urban messes, care for the sick and
elderly, and create a more humane and
less corrupt society if they were allowed to
vote.
• See for example, Jane Addams:
Ideology: Jane Addams & Social Housekeeping
• “[Life in] the modern city is ... going badly
[because] the quickly-congregated
population has not yet learned to arrange
its affairs satisfactorily. Unsanitary
housing, poisonous sewage,
contaminated water, infant mortality, the
spread of contagion, adulterated food,
impure milk, smoke-laden air, illventilated
factories, dangerous
occupations, juvenile crime,
unwholesome crowding, prostitution and
drunkenness are the enemies which the
modem cities must face and overcome,
would they survive. Logically their
electorate should be made up of those
who can bear a valiant part in this
arduous context, those who in the past
have at least attempted to care for
children, to clean houses, to prepare
foods, to isolate the family from moral
dangers.... (cont.)
Ideology – Jane Addams & Social Housekeeping
• “…City housekeeping has failed partly
because women, the traditional
housekeepers, have not been
consulted.... The men have been
carelessly indifferent to much of this civic
housekeeping, as they have always been
indifferent to the details of the household.
The very multifariousness and
complexity of a city government demand
the help of minds accustomed to detail
and variety of work, to a sense of
obligation for the health and welfare of
young children and to a responsibility for
the cleanliness and comfort of other
people. Because all these things have
traditionally been in the hands of women,
if they take no part in them now they are
not only missing the education which the
natural participation in civic life would
bring to them but they are losing what
they have always had."
Challenge: Racism and Ethnocentricity in the Movement
• Anthony used the “Race Card”
• This led many Black First wave feminists to
organize separately.
• In 1896, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-
Barnett, Margaret Murray Washington, Fanny
Jackson Coppin, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, and former
slave Harriet Tubman meet in Washington,
D.C., to form the National Association of
Colored Women (NACW).
– And, of necessity, they will have to address issues
of race (esp. lynching)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
“A white woman has only one
handicap to overcome, a great
one, true, her sex; a colored
woman faces two-her sex and her
race.” -- Mary Church Terrell
7
Margaret Murray Washington
Charlotte Forten Grimké
Racism and Ethnocentricity
• Although the later phase of First Wave
Feminism will reflect efforts to invite
African American women back into the
movement
– Women of color will be understandably wary
• The strategies of the second phase of
suffrage will create a serious chasm
between white feminists and feminists of
color which is still being felt in the
feminist movement today.
– And which may even render feminism
irrelevant to many women today
(notes by prof. lavendar)
First Wave Feminism and the
• Primary (public) focus on female citizenship
– And the suffrage movement
• But also (less public, less clearly identified as
“feminist”) focus on challenging assumptions
about women’s “essential natures”
Abolitionism and Feminism
• First Wave Feminist activism grew out of
Abolitionism
– Which in itself led to the rise of a suffragist
movement
• Originally to ensure the ending of slavery
– Because it was assumed that women as a group would
end slavery if given the vote
• But later as a basic human right
– That had been denied women politically
– In this latter sense, it needed to disprove theories about
women’s supposed inability to exercise citizenship on
their own behalf.
Abolitionism as both
Inspiration and Experience
• Women’s moral opposition to slavery
– Part of Second Great Awakening
• But also source for political experience
– In abolitionist societies
• Such as the Boston Women’s Antislavery Society
– And as a place where women’s discourse
could be heard
• In part because of the support of leaders like
William Lloyd Garrison
• And because women were speaking to OTHER
women as well as society as a whole.
Women’s Voices in Abolitionism
• One of the chief sites where women’s
political voices can be heard in nineteenthcentury
America
• And even more interesting, a site where
women of broad class and race
backgrounds leave their publiclyexpressed
political thoughts behind for us
to rediscover.
Maria W. Stewart (1803-79)
• One America's first black
women political writers.
• In 1832, in Boston, she
mounted lecture platform
to speak to assembled
crowd of men and
women (promiscuous
assembly) against the
colonization movement, a
scheme to expatriate
black Americans back to
West Africa.
• Her public career was
barely 3 years long.
2
Maria W. Stewart
• After husband (a free black shipfitter) died in
1829, underwent religious conversion and gave
self over to career of secular ministry of political
and religious witness.
• Stewart published a political pamphlet, a
collection of religious meditations and delivered
4 public lectures which were later printed.
• Took public stage after the mysterious death of
David Walker, a black Boston author of an
inflammatory pamphlet “Walker's Appeal,” a call
for slave rebellion in the American South.
Maria W. Stewart
• Stewart knew that she too faced danger
for her unpopular political and abolitionist
beliefs, perhaps especially because of her
race.
• "Many will suffer for pleading the cause of
oppressed Africa," she wrote, "and I shall
glory in being one of her martyrs.“
• Criticized Boston white society for racism
and segregation, but ALSO criticized
Boston’s free black community for its
passivity and “cooperation” with slavery.
Maria W. Stewart
• Argued that women had not only the right
but the duty to speak up about oppression
• Especially those who were “doubly
oppressed” by their race AND gender
• Women must speak on behalf of each
other and children
– Esp. on behalf of unprotected women (like
herself)
– Who were targeted because of the double
standard
Positing Sisterhood
• Angelina Grimké’s
"Appeal to Christian
Women of the South,"
and "Appeal to Women
of Nominally Free
States"
• Theme of both
appeals:
– sisterhood of black and
white women.
– "The female slaves are
Angelina Grimké (1805–1879)
• Angelina Grimké's
"Appeal to Women in
Nominally Free
States," which came
out of the 2nd annual
women's antislavery
convention:
• "In consequence of the
odium which the
degradation of slavery has
Positing Sisterhood
• Both appeals, those of sisterhood and of
the degradation of both black and white by
the existence of slavery, promoted political
activism among women based on the
familiar ideas characterizing the cult of true
womanhood: women had greater moral
virtue, sensitivity, and piety.
Positing Sisterhood
3
Sojourner Truth
(1797-1883)
• Part of Second Great
Awakening
• And attacked the
exclusion of Black women
from the category of
womanhood – “Ain’t I a
Woman?” – in the midst
of her argument for
women’s suffrage
(delivered 1851, at
Women's Convention,
Akron, Ohio):
Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t a Woman?” (1851)
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the
negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty
soon. But what's all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have
the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any
best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered
into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a
man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children,
and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!
And ain't I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"]
That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint,
and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a
woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!
Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women
together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the
men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• Abolitionism is the pre-history of the
Woman’s Rights movement in the U.S.
• Where “First Wave Feminism” is born and
tempered
• The internal politics of the Abolitionist
movement itself creates feminist
consciousness and trains women to be
able to conceptualize and express it.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• Within moral reform movement, women
had to fight for their voices to be heard
– But they also believed, because of “Female
Moral Authority,” that women were morally
compelled to speak
– So those who silenced them were, by
definition, immoral.
• Even if the silencers were clergymen or otherwise
moral leaders.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• The abolitionist movement taught women how to
organize
– Abolitionist women emerged as leaders on a local and national
level
• It was a small step for these leaders to argue that the
most expedient way to end slavery was to give women
(who were assumed to be antislavery as a group) the
vote.
– There was an assumption that even Southern women would vote
to end slavery.
• When abolitionist women argued at Seneca Falls in 1848
that women needed the vote, many female leaders
transferred their activism to feminist activity in addition to
abolition.
– For abolitionist women after 1848, suffragism and abolitionism
became the SAME movement.
Abolitionism and Feminism
• First Wave Feminism developed within
abolitionism because:
– A) women in their struggle to speak and to
counteract the proslavery church and sexist
clergy of the north developed a consciousness
of their own oppression
– B) Garrisonian abolition taught women what to
do with that perception and how to make a
movement.
• It gave women the ability to analyze institutions and
provided them with the assumption that absolute
human equality was a first principle in both morality
and politics.
4
Abolitionism and Feminism
• This linkage between abolition and feminism appears
even before 1848
– See, for example, the 1836 "Annual Report" of the Boston
Female Anti-Slavery Society.
• “We sometimes, but not often, hear it said--
‘[Abolitionism] is such an odd, unladylike thing to do.'
We concede that the human soul, in the full exercise
of its most God-like power of self-denial and exertion
for the good of others, is, emphatically, a very
unladylike thing. We have never heard this objection,
but from that sort of a woman who is dead while she
lives, or to be pitied as the victim of domestic tyranny.
The woman who makes it, is generally one who has
struggled from childhood up to womanhood, through a
process of spiritual suffocation. (cont.)
Abolitionism and Feminism
• This linkage between abolition and feminism appears even
before 1848
– See, for example, the 1836 "Annual Report" of the Boston Female Anti-
Slavery Society.
• “…Her infancy was passed in serving as a convenience for the
display of elegant baby linen. Her youth, in training for a more
public display of braiding the hair, and wearing of gold, and
putting on of apparel…. This is the woman who tells us it is
unladylike to ask that children may no longer be sold away from
their parents, or wives from their husbands, in the District of
Columbia, and adds, 'they ought to be mobbed who ask it.' We
present her the only argument she can comprehend — the fact
that 80,000 of the noblest among the matronage of England,
have annually entreated of their government, to do all in its
power for the extinctions of slavery, till they prevailed.” -- (3rd
Annual Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society
(1836), p. 26.)
Ideology: Sexual difference
• In 1870-1890, many suffragists, such as
Stanton and Anthony, argued that women were
human beings first and females second.
– Important argument because
• it implied that the lives of women consisted
of more than their sex roles or their
biological capacity for childrearing.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• This “sexual difference” argument challenged
the 19th-century views
– that the family was the basic social unit and
that the male head of the family was the link
between the family and the broader society
(both politically and economically).
– that men knew the best interests of women
and that, within marriage, the interests of
husband and wife were inseparable and
united.
– that men acted in the interests of women and
children when they represented them at the
polls and in their political deliberations.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• The suffragists proclaimed that the interests of
all women, those who married and those who
did not, were denied by their absence from the
political world.
• These suffragists challenged the male monopoly
on citizenship in the interests of sexual equality.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Suffragists expected women to use the vote to
open the public sphere to women
– so that as women gained greater rights in the
public world,
– they would demand more rights in the private
arena, such as:
• divorce,
• the right to pursue self-expression,
• self-actualization,
• the right to control their own bodies in marriage,
• the right to protect themselves from male lust and
violence, etc.
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Women with the vote could then protect
themselves and pursue their own intellectual,
occupational, spiritual development free from
dependence upon men and fully equal to them.
• In arguing for women’s citizenship
because of their equality first, suffragists
attacked the concept of “true
womanhood,” even the politically
expedient variant of “female moral
authority”
Ideology: Sexual difference
• But in the 1870s, suffragists argued that
while this might be true, women should be
given the vote because they were equal as
human beings, as individuals.
• If given equal access to education and
opportunity, women could achieve at the
same level that men could, even if they
would still be different from men.
• This point is FEMINISM – First Wave
Feminism.
6
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Yet, even while arguing for equality,
suffragists continued to argue that women
were different from men – and that women
voters would vote differently (in a positive
sense) than would men.
• Suffragists argued that women’s votes –
hard-won and thus appreciated – would be
less corruptible than men’s (especially the
votes of immigrants – but more on that
later).
Ideology: Sexual difference
• Indeed, women could be counted upon to
use their votes to do the civic work that
they did in their own households: “Social
Housekeeping”
• Women would teach children, clean up
urban messes, care for the sick and
elderly, and create a more humane and
less corrupt society if they were allowed to
vote.
• See for example, Jane Addams:
Ideology: Jane Addams & Social Housekeeping
• “[Life in] the modern city is ... going badly
[because] the quickly-congregated
population has not yet learned to arrange
its affairs satisfactorily. Unsanitary
housing, poisonous sewage,
contaminated water, infant mortality, the
spread of contagion, adulterated food,
impure milk, smoke-laden air, illventilated
factories, dangerous
occupations, juvenile crime,
unwholesome crowding, prostitution and
drunkenness are the enemies which the
modem cities must face and overcome,
would they survive. Logically their
electorate should be made up of those
who can bear a valiant part in this
arduous context, those who in the past
have at least attempted to care for
children, to clean houses, to prepare
foods, to isolate the family from moral
dangers.... (cont.)
Ideology – Jane Addams & Social Housekeeping
• “…City housekeeping has failed partly
because women, the traditional
housekeepers, have not been
consulted.... The men have been
carelessly indifferent to much of this civic
housekeeping, as they have always been
indifferent to the details of the household.
The very multifariousness and
complexity of a city government demand
the help of minds accustomed to detail
and variety of work, to a sense of
obligation for the health and welfare of
young children and to a responsibility for
the cleanliness and comfort of other
people. Because all these things have
traditionally been in the hands of women,
if they take no part in them now they are
not only missing the education which the
natural participation in civic life would
bring to them but they are losing what
they have always had."
Challenge: Racism and Ethnocentricity in the Movement
• Anthony used the “Race Card”
• This led many Black First wave feminists to
organize separately.
• In 1896, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-
Barnett, Margaret Murray Washington, Fanny
Jackson Coppin, Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, and former
slave Harriet Tubman meet in Washington,
D.C., to form the National Association of
Colored Women (NACW).
– And, of necessity, they will have to address issues
of race (esp. lynching)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
“A white woman has only one
handicap to overcome, a great
one, true, her sex; a colored
woman faces two-her sex and her
race.” -- Mary Church Terrell
7
Margaret Murray Washington
Charlotte Forten Grimké
Racism and Ethnocentricity
• Although the later phase of First Wave
Feminism will reflect efforts to invite
African American women back into the
movement
– Women of color will be understandably wary
• The strategies of the second phase of
suffrage will create a serious chasm
between white feminists and feminists of
color which is still being felt in the
feminist movement today.
– And which may even render feminism
irrelevant to many women today
(notes by prof. lavendar)
Flappers PP Notes
Roaring 20s and the Sisters
Jumba was derivative (from South – African influence)
Done in speakeasies by flappers
Seen as lewd or improper
Can be dances as a solo or with a partner
Mimics those in supportive of prohibition
20s Started off with the ratification of women’s suffrage
Extend through the Jazz age
1921 Margaret Sanger founds American Birth Control League
1923 Edna St. Vincent Millay receives Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1st woman)
1923 Equal Rights Ammendment sponsored by Alice Paul introduced to Congress
1925 Nellie Taylor Ross becomes governor of WY (1st female governor of a state)
1925 The World’s Exposition of Women’s Progress opens in Chicago (first women’s fair)
1927 Supreme Court upholds Buck vs. Bell – eugenic sterilization law (forced sterilization for the ‘health of the state’ with people i.e. mentally retarded)
1928 Women earn 35% of the college degrees
1928 Olympics – Women compete in field sports for the first time
1929 Gerty and Carl Cori develop theory of “Cori Cycle” (how energy moves in body) and would win Nobel Prize for this in 1947
1929 Mildred Wirt writes her first Nancy Drew novels
Gretta Garbo
THE FLAPPER
Short dresses, short hair, stockings rolled down, and powdered knees
Not confined to just home and family
Socially aware and seen as a little ‘fast’
Accessories and fashion changed: hat, long beads, handbags, bright colors
Bras are introduced (no corset)
Cotton Club was a famous restaurant and night club in NYC
Played live Jazz and had dancing
Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and many famous musicians played there
1920 - Jack Johnson opened it (heavy weight champion) on 142nd St in Harlem.
A gangster would later take over the club by 1923 during prohibition
Jumba was derivative (from South – African influence)
Done in speakeasies by flappers
Seen as lewd or improper
Can be dances as a solo or with a partner
Mimics those in supportive of prohibition
20s Started off with the ratification of women’s suffrage
Extend through the Jazz age
1921 Margaret Sanger founds American Birth Control League
1923 Edna St. Vincent Millay receives Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1st woman)
1923 Equal Rights Ammendment sponsored by Alice Paul introduced to Congress
1925 Nellie Taylor Ross becomes governor of WY (1st female governor of a state)
1925 The World’s Exposition of Women’s Progress opens in Chicago (first women’s fair)
1927 Supreme Court upholds Buck vs. Bell – eugenic sterilization law (forced sterilization for the ‘health of the state’ with people i.e. mentally retarded)
1928 Women earn 35% of the college degrees
1928 Olympics – Women compete in field sports for the first time
1929 Gerty and Carl Cori develop theory of “Cori Cycle” (how energy moves in body) and would win Nobel Prize for this in 1947
1929 Mildred Wirt writes her first Nancy Drew novels
Gretta Garbo
THE FLAPPER
Short dresses, short hair, stockings rolled down, and powdered knees
Not confined to just home and family
Socially aware and seen as a little ‘fast’
Accessories and fashion changed: hat, long beads, handbags, bright colors
Bras are introduced (no corset)
Cotton Club was a famous restaurant and night club in NYC
Played live Jazz and had dancing
Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and many famous musicians played there
1920 - Jack Johnson opened it (heavy weight champion) on 142nd St in Harlem.
A gangster would later take over the club by 1923 during prohibition
20s Music (Article)
Roaring Twenties
excerpted from Jazz: A History of America's Music
Cake Walkin' Babies (From Home)
Clarence Williams' Blue Five
Recorded January 8, 1925
(Courtesy Columbia/Legacy)
The decade following World War I would one day be caricatured as "the Roaring Twenties," and it was a time of unprecedented prosperity — the nation's total wealth nearly doubled between 1920 and 1929, manufactures rose by 60 percent, for the first time most people lived in urban areas — and in homes lit by electricity. They made more money than they ever had before and, spurred on by the giant new advertising industry, spent it faster, too — on washing machines and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, 12 million radios, 30 million automobiles, and untold millions of tickets to the movies, that ushered them into a new fast-living world of luxury and glamour their grandparents never could have imagined. Meanwhile, at the polls and in the workplace as well as on the dance floor, women had begun to assert a new independence.
The Parisian Red Heads, 1927
Image courtesy of Frank Driggs Collection
Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in America. And by the mid-1920s, jazz was being played in dance halls and roadhouses and speakeasies all over the country. The blues, which had once been the product of itinerant black musicians, the poorest of the southern poor, had become an industry, and dancing consumed a country that seemed convinced prosperity would never end. There were "all-girl" orchestras on the road now — including Babe Egan's Hollywood Red Heads, a band billed as the Twelve Vampires, and the Parisian Red Heads, all of whom actually came from Indiana. More than 100 dance bands regularly criss-crossed the wide-open spaces between St. Louis and Denver, Texas and Nebraska, playing one-nighters. They were called "territory bands" — the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks; the Alphonso Trent and Doc Ross and Troy Floyd and Benny Moten Orchestras; the Deluxe Melody Boys and Happy Black Aces; Jesse Stone's Blue Serenaders; George E. Lee and his Singing Novelty Orchestra; Walter Page and his Blue Devils; and Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy. "People didn't think anything about going 150 to 200 miles to dance back in those times," one territory band veteran remembered. They'd say, "We came 200 miles to see y'all."
Meanwhile, radio and phonograph records — Americans bought more than 100 million of them in 1927 — were bringing jazz to locations so remote that no band could reach them. And the music itself was beginning to change — an exuberant, collective music was coming to place more and more emphasis on the innovations of supremely gifted individuals. Improvising soloists, struggling to find their own voices and to tell their own stories, were about to take center stage.
Gary Giddins, critic
On Prohibition, speakeasies and Jazz
(Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns)
But for many of the millions of people for whom the 1920s never roared at all, fearful of such rapid change and nostalgic for the small-town America of the turn of the century, jazz music came to seem not merely an annoyance but a threat, one more cause of loosening morals and frightening dislocation. Ragtime had been bad enough, with its insinuating rhythms and daring couple-dancing, but the jumpy, rancorous version of New Orleans polyphony projected by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and many of its imitators seemed much worse. "As I understand it," said Professor Henry Van Dyck of Princeton University, "it is not music at all. It is merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion. Its fault lies not in syncopation, for that is a legitimate device when sparingly used. But "jazz" is an unmitigated cacophony, a combination of disagreeable sounds in complicated discords, a willful ugliness and a deliberate vulgarity." The editor of Musical Courier reported on a poll of academically trained musicians: most found "the 'ad libbing' or 'jazzing' of a piece ... thoroughly objectionable," he said, "and several of them advanced the opinion that this Bolshevistic smashing of the rules and tenets of decorous music" spelled disaster for American music.
Entertainer at Small's Paradise Club in Harlem, 1929
Image courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettman
For some, jazz simply became synonymous with noise. Thomas Edison, whose invention of the phonograph had made its sudden rapid spread possible, claimed that he played jazz records backward because "they sound better that way." When the New York Times reported that the citizens of one Siberian village had driven hungry polar bears from its streets by banging pots and pans, the headline read "Jazz Frightens Bears," and when a celebrated British conductor collapsed while visiting Coney Island, the same paper blamed the jazz bands — now loudly competing with one another along boardwalk — for his demise.
Jazz — and the dancing it inspired — was also said to be having a catastrophic impact on the national character. "Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American girls," reported the New York American, "through the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras." In just two years in Chicago alone, the Illinois Vigilance Association reported in 1923, the downfall of one thousand girls could be traced directly to the pernicious influence of jazz music. In Cincinnati, the Salvation Army obtained a court injunction to stop construction of a theater next to a home for expectant mothers on the grounds that "the enforced proximity of a theater and jazz palace" would implant dangerous "jazz emotions" in helpless infants. A social worker reported on the "unwholesome excitement" she now encountered even at small-town dances in the Midwest. "Boy-and-girl couples leave the hall in a state of dangerous disturbance. Any worker who has gone into the night to gather the facts of activities outside the dance hall is appalled ... by the blatant disregard of even the elementary rules of civilization ... We must expect a few casualties in social discourse, but the modern dance is producing little short of holocaust."
Beyond its disturbing sounds, its fast pace, and its supposed impact on morals, jazz was also condemned because of its origins. Many white older Americans were appalled to see their children dancing to music that was believed to have emerged from what the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune called "the Negro brothels of the South." "Jazz," said the editor of Etude, "is often associated with vile surroundings, filthy words, unmentionable dances." It was originally "the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer," declared Mrs. Max Obendorfer, national music chairman of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, "stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds ... [It] has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate barbarity and sensuality." Blacks were not the sole sources of the jazz contagion. The critic Carl Engel also worried about the effects on Anglo-Saxon youth of what he called "Semitic purveyors of Broadway melodies," while Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent blamed what it called "the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes" on sinister Jews.
There was nothing new in these attitudes. Twenty years earlier, many whites had deplored ragtime in part because it was based on black songs and dances, just as their descendants would one day denounce rock 'n' roll because of its links to the African-American blues tradition. But something altogether new really was happening here and there across the country. A few white youths — living in small towns and comfortable suburbs as well as big-city slums — started to see more than mere novelty and excitement in this new primarily black music, began actually to hear their own feelings mirrored in the playing of African-Americans, and to look for ways they might participate in it themselves. In a country in which by law and custom blacks and whites were forbidden to compete on anything like an equal basis in any arena — even boxing (the heavyweight title was then off-limits to black challengers) — these young men were willing to brave a brand new world created by black Americans and in which black musicians remained the most admired figures.
excerpted from Jazz: A History of America's Music
Cake Walkin' Babies (From Home)
Clarence Williams' Blue Five
Recorded January 8, 1925
(Courtesy Columbia/Legacy)
The decade following World War I would one day be caricatured as "the Roaring Twenties," and it was a time of unprecedented prosperity — the nation's total wealth nearly doubled between 1920 and 1929, manufactures rose by 60 percent, for the first time most people lived in urban areas — and in homes lit by electricity. They made more money than they ever had before and, spurred on by the giant new advertising industry, spent it faster, too — on washing machines and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, 12 million radios, 30 million automobiles, and untold millions of tickets to the movies, that ushered them into a new fast-living world of luxury and glamour their grandparents never could have imagined. Meanwhile, at the polls and in the workplace as well as on the dance floor, women had begun to assert a new independence.
The Parisian Red Heads, 1927
Image courtesy of Frank Driggs Collection
Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in America. And by the mid-1920s, jazz was being played in dance halls and roadhouses and speakeasies all over the country. The blues, which had once been the product of itinerant black musicians, the poorest of the southern poor, had become an industry, and dancing consumed a country that seemed convinced prosperity would never end. There were "all-girl" orchestras on the road now — including Babe Egan's Hollywood Red Heads, a band billed as the Twelve Vampires, and the Parisian Red Heads, all of whom actually came from Indiana. More than 100 dance bands regularly criss-crossed the wide-open spaces between St. Louis and Denver, Texas and Nebraska, playing one-nighters. They were called "territory bands" — the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks; the Alphonso Trent and Doc Ross and Troy Floyd and Benny Moten Orchestras; the Deluxe Melody Boys and Happy Black Aces; Jesse Stone's Blue Serenaders; George E. Lee and his Singing Novelty Orchestra; Walter Page and his Blue Devils; and Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy. "People didn't think anything about going 150 to 200 miles to dance back in those times," one territory band veteran remembered. They'd say, "We came 200 miles to see y'all."
Meanwhile, radio and phonograph records — Americans bought more than 100 million of them in 1927 — were bringing jazz to locations so remote that no band could reach them. And the music itself was beginning to change — an exuberant, collective music was coming to place more and more emphasis on the innovations of supremely gifted individuals. Improvising soloists, struggling to find their own voices and to tell their own stories, were about to take center stage.
Gary Giddins, critic
On Prohibition, speakeasies and Jazz
(Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns)
But for many of the millions of people for whom the 1920s never roared at all, fearful of such rapid change and nostalgic for the small-town America of the turn of the century, jazz music came to seem not merely an annoyance but a threat, one more cause of loosening morals and frightening dislocation. Ragtime had been bad enough, with its insinuating rhythms and daring couple-dancing, but the jumpy, rancorous version of New Orleans polyphony projected by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and many of its imitators seemed much worse. "As I understand it," said Professor Henry Van Dyck of Princeton University, "it is not music at all. It is merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion. Its fault lies not in syncopation, for that is a legitimate device when sparingly used. But "jazz" is an unmitigated cacophony, a combination of disagreeable sounds in complicated discords, a willful ugliness and a deliberate vulgarity." The editor of Musical Courier reported on a poll of academically trained musicians: most found "the 'ad libbing' or 'jazzing' of a piece ... thoroughly objectionable," he said, "and several of them advanced the opinion that this Bolshevistic smashing of the rules and tenets of decorous music" spelled disaster for American music.
Entertainer at Small's Paradise Club in Harlem, 1929
Image courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettman
For some, jazz simply became synonymous with noise. Thomas Edison, whose invention of the phonograph had made its sudden rapid spread possible, claimed that he played jazz records backward because "they sound better that way." When the New York Times reported that the citizens of one Siberian village had driven hungry polar bears from its streets by banging pots and pans, the headline read "Jazz Frightens Bears," and when a celebrated British conductor collapsed while visiting Coney Island, the same paper blamed the jazz bands — now loudly competing with one another along boardwalk — for his demise.
Jazz — and the dancing it inspired — was also said to be having a catastrophic impact on the national character. "Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American girls," reported the New York American, "through the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras." In just two years in Chicago alone, the Illinois Vigilance Association reported in 1923, the downfall of one thousand girls could be traced directly to the pernicious influence of jazz music. In Cincinnati, the Salvation Army obtained a court injunction to stop construction of a theater next to a home for expectant mothers on the grounds that "the enforced proximity of a theater and jazz palace" would implant dangerous "jazz emotions" in helpless infants. A social worker reported on the "unwholesome excitement" she now encountered even at small-town dances in the Midwest. "Boy-and-girl couples leave the hall in a state of dangerous disturbance. Any worker who has gone into the night to gather the facts of activities outside the dance hall is appalled ... by the blatant disregard of even the elementary rules of civilization ... We must expect a few casualties in social discourse, but the modern dance is producing little short of holocaust."
Beyond its disturbing sounds, its fast pace, and its supposed impact on morals, jazz was also condemned because of its origins. Many white older Americans were appalled to see their children dancing to music that was believed to have emerged from what the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune called "the Negro brothels of the South." "Jazz," said the editor of Etude, "is often associated with vile surroundings, filthy words, unmentionable dances." It was originally "the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer," declared Mrs. Max Obendorfer, national music chairman of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, "stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds ... [It] has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate barbarity and sensuality." Blacks were not the sole sources of the jazz contagion. The critic Carl Engel also worried about the effects on Anglo-Saxon youth of what he called "Semitic purveyors of Broadway melodies," while Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent blamed what it called "the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes" on sinister Jews.
There was nothing new in these attitudes. Twenty years earlier, many whites had deplored ragtime in part because it was based on black songs and dances, just as their descendants would one day denounce rock 'n' roll because of its links to the African-American blues tradition. But something altogether new really was happening here and there across the country. A few white youths — living in small towns and comfortable suburbs as well as big-city slums — started to see more than mere novelty and excitement in this new primarily black music, began actually to hear their own feelings mirrored in the playing of African-Americans, and to look for ways they might participate in it themselves. In a country in which by law and custom blacks and whites were forbidden to compete on anything like an equal basis in any arena — even boxing (the heavyweight title was then off-limits to black challengers) — these young men were willing to brave a brand new world created by black Americans and in which black musicians remained the most admired figures.
WWII PP Notes
Path to War
Hitler became Chancellor Jan 1930
Germany withdraws from League of Nations Oct 1933
Hitler announces German air force Mar 1935
Mussolini Invades Ethiopia Oct 1935
Hitler occupies Rhineland March 1936
World War II
German, Italian and Japanese offensive maneuvers went unchecked
Western fears exaggerated ideological tension
Depression further compounded political tensions
1939
World War II
AXIS POWERS:
Germany
Japan
Italy
Battle of Normandy
Propaganda
The Holocaust
Experiments
High-altitude
Freezing
Seawater
Malaria
Mustard Gas
Sulfanilamide
Bone, Muscle, and Nerve Regeneration and Bone Transplantation
Epidemic Jaundice
Sterilization
Spotted Fever
Poison
Incendiary Bomb
Twins
Artificial insemination
Other medical experiments
Death Toll
50 million people died
20 million of them in the Soviet Union
17 million in battle
18 million civilians
78,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
6 million in Nazi gas chambers
1 million Jews in the Einsatzgruppen
80,000 racially “unfit, mental and physical defects” by T-4
The War is Over!
Pearl Harbor, Dec 1941
Roosevelt died April 12, 1945
Harry Truman
Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam
United Nations
Germany is divided
Russia gets Eastern Europe (annexed Poland)
Japan is reduced and put under U.S. influence
Colonial holdings reconfirmed
Repositioning of the West
Loss of population
End of colonial empires
Advanced weapons monopoly declines
Trade monopoly declines
Economic strengthening of non-Western nations
Technology made isolation impossible
Defining the 20th Century
WWI
The Great Depression
WWII
Resolution of the Cold War
Global population tripled
Hitler became Chancellor Jan 1930
Germany withdraws from League of Nations Oct 1933
Hitler announces German air force Mar 1935
Mussolini Invades Ethiopia Oct 1935
Hitler occupies Rhineland March 1936
World War II
German, Italian and Japanese offensive maneuvers went unchecked
Western fears exaggerated ideological tension
Depression further compounded political tensions
1939
World War II
AXIS POWERS:
Germany
Japan
Italy
Battle of Normandy
Propaganda
The Holocaust
Experiments
High-altitude
Freezing
Seawater
Malaria
Mustard Gas
Sulfanilamide
Bone, Muscle, and Nerve Regeneration and Bone Transplantation
Epidemic Jaundice
Sterilization
Spotted Fever
Poison
Incendiary Bomb
Twins
Artificial insemination
Other medical experiments
Death Toll
50 million people died
20 million of them in the Soviet Union
17 million in battle
18 million civilians
78,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
6 million in Nazi gas chambers
1 million Jews in the Einsatzgruppen
80,000 racially “unfit, mental and physical defects” by T-4
The War is Over!
Pearl Harbor, Dec 1941
Roosevelt died April 12, 1945
Harry Truman
Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam
United Nations
Germany is divided
Russia gets Eastern Europe (annexed Poland)
Japan is reduced and put under U.S. influence
Colonial holdings reconfirmed
Repositioning of the West
Loss of population
End of colonial empires
Advanced weapons monopoly declines
Trade monopoly declines
Economic strengthening of non-Western nations
Technology made isolation impossible
Defining the 20th Century
WWI
The Great Depression
WWII
Resolution of the Cold War
Global population tripled
Industrial Rev PP Notes
The Industrial Revolution
1848
Britain to Western Europe to the United States
Change social structure and cultural values forever
Changed working environments and revenue potential
Social Changes
People left the country, for city life
Child labor decreased, children became valued
More adults used to run factories
Women
Cultural Shifts
Consumption and consumerism
“Middle class” values
Beginnings of product crazes (Popular culture)
Consolidation of the Industrial Order
Continued after 1850
Unification in Germany and Italy
Rise of socialism
Standard of living improved
Slow population growth
Rise of capitalism and industry (U.S.)
Railroads
Western World
Economic dependency, political support, colonization
Broadening reach:
Social/cultural values
Institutions
Arts/science/philosophies
Rising tensions in Europe
Loss of colonies
Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy
Triple Entente: Britain, Russia, France
1848
Britain to Western Europe to the United States
Change social structure and cultural values forever
Changed working environments and revenue potential
Social Changes
People left the country, for city life
Child labor decreased, children became valued
More adults used to run factories
Women
Cultural Shifts
Consumption and consumerism
“Middle class” values
Beginnings of product crazes (Popular culture)
Consolidation of the Industrial Order
Continued after 1850
Unification in Germany and Italy
Rise of socialism
Standard of living improved
Slow population growth
Rise of capitalism and industry (U.S.)
Railroads
Western World
Economic dependency, political support, colonization
Broadening reach:
Social/cultural values
Institutions
Arts/science/philosophies
Rising tensions in Europe
Loss of colonies
Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy
Triple Entente: Britain, Russia, France
Age of Rev. PP Notes
The Age of Revolution
Move away from monarchies
Parliaments
Representation
Freedom of ideas and speech
Awareness and interest of the people
Limited power: government, church
Market economies
American Revolution
The Stamp Act 1765
“ No taxation without representation”
Divergence of national interests
Need for different laws
Forces of Change
Population boom in Europe
Potato crops
Improvement in agriculture
Industrialization of factories
Shift in intellectual thought
Spread of ideas: communication
Education and literacy
Western expansion
Development of new ruling/business models
Move away from monarchies
Parliaments
Representation
Freedom of ideas and speech
Awareness and interest of the people
Limited power: government, church
Market economies
American Revolution
The Stamp Act 1765
“ No taxation without representation”
Divergence of national interests
Need for different laws
Forces of Change
Population boom in Europe
Potato crops
Improvement in agriculture
Industrialization of factories
Shift in intellectual thought
Spread of ideas: communication
Education and literacy
Western expansion
Development of new ruling/business models
Early Cap PP Notes
Robber Barons
“…the three foremost exponents of business enterprise: Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller. The first because he had created a virtual monopoly in banking, a “money Trust”; the second because of his death-grip on the key industry of the country; the third, Rockefeller, because of his amassing of industrial profit continued at such a high rate that an immense reservoir of cash was accumulated, which sought outlet through investment-banking operations of a size exceeding even those of Pierpont Morgan.” -Josephson p 388
Cornelius Vanderbilt
1794-1877
Born to poor Dutch peasants in Staten Island
Left school at 11 to help his father
Self educated
At 16, borrowed $100 from his parents, bought a small boat and started a ferry service to NYC
1818 sold his ships and became a steam ferry captain, eventually managing the fleet
1829 established a line of steamboats
1846 moved to NYC
During the CA gold rush, devised a plan to sail people to Nicaragua, where he then built a RR that could take them up the coast to CA
The “Commodore” was involved in nautical interests (shipping, etc.), and then RRs
1857 invested in NY & Harlem RR
1875 owned most of the RR systems in coming into NY and in the Midwest/East coast area
Considered one of the greatest Railroad Barons
Never too concerned with philanthropy, but gave $1 million to Central Univ. in Nashville, which thus became Vanderbilt Univ.
When he died he was the richest man in NYC and left his fortune to William, one of his thirteen children
Andrew Carnegie
1835-1919
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland and emigrated in 1848
At 14, worked as a bobbin boy in a textile factory, loved “progress”
Optimistic, by 17 he was a telegrapher ($800 a year)
Always looking for a way to get ahead, never let opportunity pass him by – even if meant breaking some rules
The Gospel of Wealth: the rich should help enrich society, not ‘waste’ it on those who don’t have wealth (social Darwinist)
Made his largest fortunes in steel, mass producing for rail lines
Also owned other businesses (Pittsburgh Locomotive, Car Works)
1901 sold his steel holdings to JP Morgan for $250 million (negotiated in secret by Charles Schwab)
By the time he died, he’d given away $350,695,653 and the last $30,000,000 at his death was also given to various interests
“Rags to Riches”
J.P. Morgan
1837-1913
Educated in Boston and Germany, later did banking for his father and then became a partner in Drexel, Morgan and Co.
Collected antiquity art, books and was a philanthropist
Very secretive, avoided too many public appearances, was embarrassed by a deformed nose
Head of JP Morgan (1895) and member of Cromwell’s banking house
Arranged merger of two major electric companies, creating General Electric
Cromwell helped Morgan create the largest company in the world: United Steel
Owned over 5000 miles of American Railroads
In this he also became in Panama and funded the purchase of the French Canal Company
Also lent the money for Panama’s independence, and later administered the country’s treasury
Had incredible financial prowess with connections in the U.S. and Europe
1904 Northern Securities Corp. dissolved by Supreme Court (violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act)
Sat on numerous boards and influenced most of the nations’ major corporations; influenced politics, regulatory and financial laws, industry, etc.
Upon his death his art collection (very extensive) was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY
John D. Rockefeller
1839-1937
By 16 he worked as book keeper
1859 partner in a small produce business
Within 4 years, he entered the oil refinery business
1870 organized Standard Oil
Came to dominate the oil refinery business (mergers, eliminating competition, gaining large capital, agreements with competitors, crushing small businessmen)
1882 all of his diversified holdings were placed together under the Standard Oil Trust
Also an accomplished financer
Also an accomplished financer
One of the directors of the 1901 U.S. Steel Corp.
Had massive holdings in petroleum
Several times the government forced Rockefeller to dissolve his interests
Also avoided public attention
Deep religious faith
Donated to the Baptist Church, YMCA, etc.
1892 founded the University of Chicago
Would start numerous foundations for public health, medical research, child welfare, etc.
“…the three foremost exponents of business enterprise: Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller. The first because he had created a virtual monopoly in banking, a “money Trust”; the second because of his death-grip on the key industry of the country; the third, Rockefeller, because of his amassing of industrial profit continued at such a high rate that an immense reservoir of cash was accumulated, which sought outlet through investment-banking operations of a size exceeding even those of Pierpont Morgan.” -Josephson p 388
Cornelius Vanderbilt
1794-1877
Born to poor Dutch peasants in Staten Island
Left school at 11 to help his father
Self educated
At 16, borrowed $100 from his parents, bought a small boat and started a ferry service to NYC
1818 sold his ships and became a steam ferry captain, eventually managing the fleet
1829 established a line of steamboats
1846 moved to NYC
During the CA gold rush, devised a plan to sail people to Nicaragua, where he then built a RR that could take them up the coast to CA
The “Commodore” was involved in nautical interests (shipping, etc.), and then RRs
1857 invested in NY & Harlem RR
1875 owned most of the RR systems in coming into NY and in the Midwest/East coast area
Considered one of the greatest Railroad Barons
Never too concerned with philanthropy, but gave $1 million to Central Univ. in Nashville, which thus became Vanderbilt Univ.
When he died he was the richest man in NYC and left his fortune to William, one of his thirteen children
Andrew Carnegie
1835-1919
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland and emigrated in 1848
At 14, worked as a bobbin boy in a textile factory, loved “progress”
Optimistic, by 17 he was a telegrapher ($800 a year)
Always looking for a way to get ahead, never let opportunity pass him by – even if meant breaking some rules
The Gospel of Wealth: the rich should help enrich society, not ‘waste’ it on those who don’t have wealth (social Darwinist)
Made his largest fortunes in steel, mass producing for rail lines
Also owned other businesses (Pittsburgh Locomotive, Car Works)
1901 sold his steel holdings to JP Morgan for $250 million (negotiated in secret by Charles Schwab)
By the time he died, he’d given away $350,695,653 and the last $30,000,000 at his death was also given to various interests
“Rags to Riches”
J.P. Morgan
1837-1913
Educated in Boston and Germany, later did banking for his father and then became a partner in Drexel, Morgan and Co.
Collected antiquity art, books and was a philanthropist
Very secretive, avoided too many public appearances, was embarrassed by a deformed nose
Head of JP Morgan (1895) and member of Cromwell’s banking house
Arranged merger of two major electric companies, creating General Electric
Cromwell helped Morgan create the largest company in the world: United Steel
Owned over 5000 miles of American Railroads
In this he also became in Panama and funded the purchase of the French Canal Company
Also lent the money for Panama’s independence, and later administered the country’s treasury
Had incredible financial prowess with connections in the U.S. and Europe
1904 Northern Securities Corp. dissolved by Supreme Court (violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act)
Sat on numerous boards and influenced most of the nations’ major corporations; influenced politics, regulatory and financial laws, industry, etc.
Upon his death his art collection (very extensive) was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY
John D. Rockefeller
1839-1937
By 16 he worked as book keeper
1859 partner in a small produce business
Within 4 years, he entered the oil refinery business
1870 organized Standard Oil
Came to dominate the oil refinery business (mergers, eliminating competition, gaining large capital, agreements with competitors, crushing small businessmen)
1882 all of his diversified holdings were placed together under the Standard Oil Trust
Also an accomplished financer
Also an accomplished financer
One of the directors of the 1901 U.S. Steel Corp.
Had massive holdings in petroleum
Several times the government forced Rockefeller to dissolve his interests
Also avoided public attention
Deep religious faith
Donated to the Baptist Church, YMCA, etc.
1892 founded the University of Chicago
Would start numerous foundations for public health, medical research, child welfare, etc.
WWI PP Notes
World War I
Heir to Austrian-Hungarian throne (Archduke Francis Ferdinand) was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia
Russia mobilizes for war
Germany, as Austria’s ally, declares war on Russia
France, agrees to support Russia so
Germany declares war on France
Germany invades neutral Belgium to get to France
Britain, upset by this violation, declares war on Germany
A New Kind of War
Trench warfare
Handheld machine guns
Tanks
Poison gas
Submarines
Airplanes
Fronts
The Western Front (Trenches)
The Eastern Front (large area mostly in Russia)
The Third Front (Border between Austria-Hungary and Italy)
Other fronts: Middles East, Africa and Mesopotamia
Major Battles
Battle of Tannenberg Aug 26-30, 1914
Battle of Gallipoli begins Apr 25, 1915
Battle of Verdun Feb 21 – Dec 18, 1916
The Somme Offensive Jul 1- Nov 19, 1916
Allied Counteroffensive Nov 11, 1918
Allied Powers:
Serbia
Russia
France
Britain
U.S.
Europe 1914
Treaty of Versailles
Austria-Hungary was divided into Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia
Germany lost land to Poland and France and its colonial empire was divided
Germany had to pay $33 billion to the allies
Russia lost territory to Poland and the Baltic states
Europe after 1918
Hunger, disease, lack of men to work farmland, and industry (and reproduce)
Ottoman Empire ceased
Arabs gained a nation, but under British supervision
Jewish/Palestinian conflict is fueled
Russia shifted into the communist era
Armenians were displaced
More than 400,000 children orphaned in France alone
The Great Depression
October 1929
World wide economic depression
U.S. and European industry suffered
Long term economic instabilities elsewhere, led to crisis
Extremist political groups stagnated economic growth
Inflation (currency devaluation)
Start of chronic over production in farms
Prices dropped NEW YORK stock market crashed 1929
Defaulted loans
Banks failed
Investment capital dried up
Industrial production fell further
Low wages, high unemployment
National policies could not remedy
Heir to Austrian-Hungarian throne (Archduke Francis Ferdinand) was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia
Russia mobilizes for war
Germany, as Austria’s ally, declares war on Russia
France, agrees to support Russia so
Germany declares war on France
Germany invades neutral Belgium to get to France
Britain, upset by this violation, declares war on Germany
A New Kind of War
Trench warfare
Handheld machine guns
Tanks
Poison gas
Submarines
Airplanes
Fronts
The Western Front (Trenches)
The Eastern Front (large area mostly in Russia)
The Third Front (Border between Austria-Hungary and Italy)
Other fronts: Middles East, Africa and Mesopotamia
Major Battles
Battle of Tannenberg Aug 26-30, 1914
Battle of Gallipoli begins Apr 25, 1915
Battle of Verdun Feb 21 – Dec 18, 1916
The Somme Offensive Jul 1- Nov 19, 1916
Allied Counteroffensive Nov 11, 1918
Allied Powers:
Serbia
Russia
France
Britain
U.S.
Europe 1914
Treaty of Versailles
Austria-Hungary was divided into Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia
Germany lost land to Poland and France and its colonial empire was divided
Germany had to pay $33 billion to the allies
Russia lost territory to Poland and the Baltic states
Europe after 1918
Hunger, disease, lack of men to work farmland, and industry (and reproduce)
Ottoman Empire ceased
Arabs gained a nation, but under British supervision
Jewish/Palestinian conflict is fueled
Russia shifted into the communist era
Armenians were displaced
More than 400,000 children orphaned in France alone
The Great Depression
October 1929
World wide economic depression
U.S. and European industry suffered
Long term economic instabilities elsewhere, led to crisis
Extremist political groups stagnated economic growth
Inflation (currency devaluation)
Start of chronic over production in farms
Prices dropped NEW YORK stock market crashed 1929
Defaulted loans
Banks failed
Investment capital dried up
Industrial production fell further
Low wages, high unemployment
National policies could not remedy
Middle Class PP Notes
The Middle Class
More Money More Time
Social Changes
Development of white collar jobs
Aptitude opens doors vs. education
Start of unions
Loss of agricultural careers
Division between men and women widen
More leisure time
Women
Cultural Shifts
Consumption and consumerism
“Middle class” values
Beginnings of product crazes (Popular culture)
Leisure
Baseball
Football
Basketball
Theater
Libraries
Churches
Community Centers
Travel
Western World
Economic dependency, political support, colonization
Broadening reach:
Social/cultural values
Institutions
Arts/science/philosophies
Rising tensions in Europe
Loss of colonies
Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy
Triple Entente: Britain, Russia, France
More Money More Time
Social Changes
Development of white collar jobs
Aptitude opens doors vs. education
Start of unions
Loss of agricultural careers
Division between men and women widen
More leisure time
Women
Cultural Shifts
Consumption and consumerism
“Middle class” values
Beginnings of product crazes (Popular culture)
Leisure
Baseball
Football
Basketball
Theater
Libraries
Churches
Community Centers
Travel
Western World
Economic dependency, political support, colonization
Broadening reach:
Social/cultural values
Institutions
Arts/science/philosophies
Rising tensions in Europe
Loss of colonies
Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy
Triple Entente: Britain, Russia, France
Comstock PP Notes
Comstock
First silver deposit found in U.S. in 1859
Created Virginia City NV
Grew the Port and city of San Francisco
1859-1878
Comstock bought the mines from the death of the Grosh brothers who never realized the wealth of the mine
1877 peak year: $14 Million in gold and $21 Million in silver
Virginia City became a center of economic wealth and importance
Comstock
Dug down to 3200 feet
Used tunnels to excavate
Surface digging was too difficult
Ore was soft and could be lifted by shovels
Dangers of cave-ins
Collapsing tunnels
Flooding
Comstock
Advanced mining technology
Square set timbering
Development of hoisting cages
Use of compressed air in drills and fans was pioneered
Wire rope was created
Comstock
Loads were shipped out first on mules and horses, then via RR to SF
The wealth of the mines allowed SF to boom
Why NV is often called the ‘Silver State’
Comstock
Yielded $400 million in silver and gold
Created Industry and growth
Men like Hertz became millionaires
Virginia City was the most important city between Denver and SF
At its peak it would host 30,000 residents
By the 1950s about 500 people remained
First silver deposit found in U.S. in 1859
Created Virginia City NV
Grew the Port and city of San Francisco
1859-1878
Comstock bought the mines from the death of the Grosh brothers who never realized the wealth of the mine
1877 peak year: $14 Million in gold and $21 Million in silver
Virginia City became a center of economic wealth and importance
Comstock
Dug down to 3200 feet
Used tunnels to excavate
Surface digging was too difficult
Ore was soft and could be lifted by shovels
Dangers of cave-ins
Collapsing tunnels
Flooding
Comstock
Advanced mining technology
Square set timbering
Development of hoisting cages
Use of compressed air in drills and fans was pioneered
Wire rope was created
Comstock
Loads were shipped out first on mules and horses, then via RR to SF
The wealth of the mines allowed SF to boom
Why NV is often called the ‘Silver State’
Comstock
Yielded $400 million in silver and gold
Created Industry and growth
Men like Hertz became millionaires
Virginia City was the most important city between Denver and SF
At its peak it would host 30,000 residents
By the 1950s about 500 people remained
Ideas of Femism PP Notes
Feminism
The Search for Equality
What is Feminism?
How would you define it as an ideology?
What comes to mind when you think of the word “feminism”?
Text definition
An ideology that “opposes the political, economic, and cultural relegation of women to positions of inferiority.”
Simply put, feminism affirms women’s equality with men, and rejects patriarchy.
What does patriarchy mean?
In the text:
“the rule of men as a social group over women as a social group,” and
“a system based on sexual hierarchy,” with men at the top and women below.
Examples of denial of equality
Economically
Women paid less than men throughout the world. In U.S., pay gap about 75% (controlling for all other factors).
Women represent the majority of the world’s poor.
Examples of denial of equality
Politically
Globally, only 23 women ever elected head of state (only 6 served in 1995).
Also underrepresented in legislatures.
Political institutions don’t provide equal protection & equal access to the vote.
Examples of denial of equality
Politically
in U.S.
Examples of denial of equality
Educationally
Girls denied education in many countries; 2/3 of the world’s illiterate adults are women, higher in some places.
Under certain regimes, females punished for seeking an education (as under the Taliban).
Examples of denial of equality
Access to basic health care & food
Females less likely to receive adequate nutrition or health care.
Females subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) in some cultures.
Examples of denial of equality
Violence:
Femicide, the murder of women because they are women.
Outside the home, women vulnerable to assault and rape.
In the home, women beaten and even murdered by husbands or boyfriends, family members, and in-laws (dowry deaths).
Female babies much more likely to be subjected to infanticide in some cultures that value sons.
Feminism’s roots in liberalism
In many ways similar to liberalism: emphasis on equality, on personal autonomy (the right and ability of individuals to make decisions for themselves), on the importance of democratic processes, on the right of revolution against tyranny.
Female subordination
Women’s inferiority to men legitimated historically by:
Enlightenment writers such as Rousseau and Jefferson
Some religious traditions
Aristotle (classical Greece)
Western democracies in the 19th & early 20th centuries
U.S. Historical Trends
First wave of feminism: abolition movement. Mid-19th century
Second wave of feminism: suffrage movement. Late 19th to early 20th c.
Third wave of feminism: equal legal rights & political participation. Mid to late 20th century.
Types of feminisms
Liberal feminism
Radical feminism
Diversity feminism
Liberal feminism
Shared with liberalism these ideas:
Human equality
Human rationality
Importance of individual rights
Early liberal feminists
Mary Wollstonecraft
Lucretia Mott
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B. Anthony
Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th century used classical liberal arguments in favor of women’s rights:
Women are human beings, “rational and capable of self-determination and liberty.”
Patriarchy distorts women’s personalities so that they seem to be the worst stereotypes (vain & shallow).
Modern liberal feminists
Betty Friedan
Gloria Steinem
Working within the
existing democratic
system.
Seeing patriarchy as hurting men as well as women.
Liberal feminist views
Radical feminisms
Multiple types of radical feminisms, but they all share a common critique of liberal feminism for accepting the status quo economic and social structures.
The status quo operates with the male model as the norm (e.g., seeing the world as competitive and aggressive).
Types of Radical Feminisms
Socialist feminists argue that patriarchy & capitalism are linked; both exploitive.
Lesbian feminists criticize society’s definition of heterosexuality as normal, & all other sexualities as deviant.
Anti-pornography feminists argue that pornography fosters violence against women. Liberal feminists, in contrast, emphasize 1st amendment free speech rights.
Diversity feminism
The needs and perspectives of non-Anglo, non-Western, and non-affluent women must be considered. Liberal feminism ignores different perspectives.
Women’s issues change across cultures and across time; no single feminist voice or viewpoint.
Feminism as an emerging ideology
Impacts include:
New thinking about public policy priorities.
The “gender gap” in U.S. politics.
New thinking about traditional assumptions regarding gender roles.
Opens new areas of study in social science.
Feminism as an emerging ideology, continued
Impacts include:
New thinking about war & war crimes.
Realization that rape can be a weapon of war.
New studies of impact of war on children.
Sudanense
refugee
camp
2005
Another emerging ideology:
Environmentalism
Next slide presentation.
The Search for Equality
What is Feminism?
How would you define it as an ideology?
What comes to mind when you think of the word “feminism”?
Text definition
An ideology that “opposes the political, economic, and cultural relegation of women to positions of inferiority.”
Simply put, feminism affirms women’s equality with men, and rejects patriarchy.
What does patriarchy mean?
In the text:
“the rule of men as a social group over women as a social group,” and
“a system based on sexual hierarchy,” with men at the top and women below.
Examples of denial of equality
Economically
Women paid less than men throughout the world. In U.S., pay gap about 75% (controlling for all other factors).
Women represent the majority of the world’s poor.
Examples of denial of equality
Politically
Globally, only 23 women ever elected head of state (only 6 served in 1995).
Also underrepresented in legislatures.
Political institutions don’t provide equal protection & equal access to the vote.
Examples of denial of equality
Politically
in U.S.
Examples of denial of equality
Educationally
Girls denied education in many countries; 2/3 of the world’s illiterate adults are women, higher in some places.
Under certain regimes, females punished for seeking an education (as under the Taliban).
Examples of denial of equality
Access to basic health care & food
Females less likely to receive adequate nutrition or health care.
Females subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) in some cultures.
Examples of denial of equality
Violence:
Femicide, the murder of women because they are women.
Outside the home, women vulnerable to assault and rape.
In the home, women beaten and even murdered by husbands or boyfriends, family members, and in-laws (dowry deaths).
Female babies much more likely to be subjected to infanticide in some cultures that value sons.
Feminism’s roots in liberalism
In many ways similar to liberalism: emphasis on equality, on personal autonomy (the right and ability of individuals to make decisions for themselves), on the importance of democratic processes, on the right of revolution against tyranny.
Female subordination
Women’s inferiority to men legitimated historically by:
Enlightenment writers such as Rousseau and Jefferson
Some religious traditions
Aristotle (classical Greece)
Western democracies in the 19th & early 20th centuries
U.S. Historical Trends
First wave of feminism: abolition movement. Mid-19th century
Second wave of feminism: suffrage movement. Late 19th to early 20th c.
Third wave of feminism: equal legal rights & political participation. Mid to late 20th century.
Types of feminisms
Liberal feminism
Radical feminism
Diversity feminism
Liberal feminism
Shared with liberalism these ideas:
Human equality
Human rationality
Importance of individual rights
Early liberal feminists
Mary Wollstonecraft
Lucretia Mott
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B. Anthony
Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft in the late 18th century used classical liberal arguments in favor of women’s rights:
Women are human beings, “rational and capable of self-determination and liberty.”
Patriarchy distorts women’s personalities so that they seem to be the worst stereotypes (vain & shallow).
Modern liberal feminists
Betty Friedan
Gloria Steinem
Working within the
existing democratic
system.
Seeing patriarchy as hurting men as well as women.
Liberal feminist views
Radical feminisms
Multiple types of radical feminisms, but they all share a common critique of liberal feminism for accepting the status quo economic and social structures.
The status quo operates with the male model as the norm (e.g., seeing the world as competitive and aggressive).
Types of Radical Feminisms
Socialist feminists argue that patriarchy & capitalism are linked; both exploitive.
Lesbian feminists criticize society’s definition of heterosexuality as normal, & all other sexualities as deviant.
Anti-pornography feminists argue that pornography fosters violence against women. Liberal feminists, in contrast, emphasize 1st amendment free speech rights.
Diversity feminism
The needs and perspectives of non-Anglo, non-Western, and non-affluent women must be considered. Liberal feminism ignores different perspectives.
Women’s issues change across cultures and across time; no single feminist voice or viewpoint.
Feminism as an emerging ideology
Impacts include:
New thinking about public policy priorities.
The “gender gap” in U.S. politics.
New thinking about traditional assumptions regarding gender roles.
Opens new areas of study in social science.
Feminism as an emerging ideology, continued
Impacts include:
New thinking about war & war crimes.
Realization that rape can be a weapon of war.
New studies of impact of war on children.
Sudanense
refugee
camp
2005
Another emerging ideology:
Environmentalism
Next slide presentation.
American Revolution PP Notes
The French and Indian War
1754 to 1763 war fought over the land in America between the English and French.
It was called the Seven Years War in Europe.
Called the French and Indian War because the Indians helped the French in the war against the British. The Indians had nothing to lose. The British were taking their land, the French were not.
The British won, but at a cost a lot of money.
Proclamation of 1763
Forbid colonists to settle west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Created to protect colonists from the Indians
Many colonists reacted with anger toward the Proclamation. They did not like being told what to do or where they could live.
The American Revolution was like a parent/child relationship.
Let’s examine what this means.
Taxes
French and Indian War cost a lot of money.
Parliament (the British government) decided to tax to colonies to help pay for it.
The first tax was the Sugar Act of 1764. It placed a tax on molasses and sugar imported by the colonies.
Stamp Act of 1765 placed a tax on all printed material, such as newspapers and playing cards.
This tax upset the colonists even more.
No Taxation without Representation
The colonists claimed “no taxation without representation” because they were being taxed but had no vote in Parliament and had no say in how the colonies were being governed.
The colonists started a boycott, or a refusal to buy certain goods, from the British.
Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty
Samuel Adams led the protests in Boston against the taxes.
He began a secret society called the Sons of Liberty.
Tar and Feather
The Sons of Liberty used violence to scare off the tax collectors.
The Stamp Act was repealed (to do away with) because of all the protests.
The Boston Massacre
Colonial men were shouting insults at the British soldiers.
They started throwing things, probably snow balls and rocks.
Someone yelled “fire” and the Red Coats (what the British soldiers were called) shot.
Five colonists were killed. These were the first Americans killed in the War for Independence.
Sam Adams started calling the incident the Boston Massacre. He used the incident to get more people angry at the British.
A Tax on Tea
Parliament began taxing tea. Tea was the most important beverage in the colonies.
The colonists decided to boycott all British tea.
The Boston Tea Party
Colonists dressed up like Mohawk Indians and boarded three British ships full of tea.
The colonists dumped all the tea into the harbor, about 90,000 pounds.
King George III was furious!
The Intolerable Acts
Laws passed to punish the colonists for the Boston Tea Party.
The port of Boston was closed until the tea was paid for.
The Quartering Act was put into place which forced colonists to quarter, or house and supply British soldiers.
More Tea Parties
Boston was not the only city to have a “tea party.”
They took place in Charleston, New York, Annapolis, and others.
Edenton Tea Party
The Edenton Tea Party was one of the earliest organized women’s political actions in United States history. The women joined in the boycott of British tea.
First Continental Congress
A group of important men met to discuss the crisis in the colonies.
Militias were set up. (citizen soldiers)
The “Shot Heard Round the World”
British soldiers in Boston were sent to capture the militias weapons.
Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Israel Bissell warned the colonists that, “The Red Coats are coming.”
British troops marched to Concord to capture colonial leaders and the ammunition and weapons that were stored there.
The first two battles of the American Revolution were fought at Lexington and Concord, when the American militia met up with British forces.
The Second Continental Congress
The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to discuss the next move of the colonists.
Appointed George Washington as commander of the colonial army.
War with Great Britain was imminent.
Common Sense
Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine was a pamphlet that encouraged colonists to declare independence from Great Britain.
Common Sense was very influential because it was read by many people.
The Declaration of Independence
The United States first needed to declare independence from Great Britain.
Thomas Jefferson, at the young age of 33, wrote the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776.
That is why we celebrate Independence Day on July 4th.
This is the day that the United States of America declared their independence from King George and Great Britain.
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most famous men in the world, was sent to France to ask for military aid as well as a loan.
And so the war began
1754 to 1763 war fought over the land in America between the English and French.
It was called the Seven Years War in Europe.
Called the French and Indian War because the Indians helped the French in the war against the British. The Indians had nothing to lose. The British were taking their land, the French were not.
The British won, but at a cost a lot of money.
Proclamation of 1763
Forbid colonists to settle west of the Appalachian Mountains.
Created to protect colonists from the Indians
Many colonists reacted with anger toward the Proclamation. They did not like being told what to do or where they could live.
The American Revolution was like a parent/child relationship.
Let’s examine what this means.
Taxes
French and Indian War cost a lot of money.
Parliament (the British government) decided to tax to colonies to help pay for it.
The first tax was the Sugar Act of 1764. It placed a tax on molasses and sugar imported by the colonies.
Stamp Act of 1765 placed a tax on all printed material, such as newspapers and playing cards.
This tax upset the colonists even more.
No Taxation without Representation
The colonists claimed “no taxation without representation” because they were being taxed but had no vote in Parliament and had no say in how the colonies were being governed.
The colonists started a boycott, or a refusal to buy certain goods, from the British.
Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty
Samuel Adams led the protests in Boston against the taxes.
He began a secret society called the Sons of Liberty.
Tar and Feather
The Sons of Liberty used violence to scare off the tax collectors.
The Stamp Act was repealed (to do away with) because of all the protests.
The Boston Massacre
Colonial men were shouting insults at the British soldiers.
They started throwing things, probably snow balls and rocks.
Someone yelled “fire” and the Red Coats (what the British soldiers were called) shot.
Five colonists were killed. These were the first Americans killed in the War for Independence.
Sam Adams started calling the incident the Boston Massacre. He used the incident to get more people angry at the British.
A Tax on Tea
Parliament began taxing tea. Tea was the most important beverage in the colonies.
The colonists decided to boycott all British tea.
The Boston Tea Party
Colonists dressed up like Mohawk Indians and boarded three British ships full of tea.
The colonists dumped all the tea into the harbor, about 90,000 pounds.
King George III was furious!
The Intolerable Acts
Laws passed to punish the colonists for the Boston Tea Party.
The port of Boston was closed until the tea was paid for.
The Quartering Act was put into place which forced colonists to quarter, or house and supply British soldiers.
More Tea Parties
Boston was not the only city to have a “tea party.”
They took place in Charleston, New York, Annapolis, and others.
Edenton Tea Party
The Edenton Tea Party was one of the earliest organized women’s political actions in United States history. The women joined in the boycott of British tea.
First Continental Congress
A group of important men met to discuss the crisis in the colonies.
Militias were set up. (citizen soldiers)
The “Shot Heard Round the World”
British soldiers in Boston were sent to capture the militias weapons.
Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Israel Bissell warned the colonists that, “The Red Coats are coming.”
British troops marched to Concord to capture colonial leaders and the ammunition and weapons that were stored there.
The first two battles of the American Revolution were fought at Lexington and Concord, when the American militia met up with British forces.
The Second Continental Congress
The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to discuss the next move of the colonists.
Appointed George Washington as commander of the colonial army.
War with Great Britain was imminent.
Common Sense
Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine was a pamphlet that encouraged colonists to declare independence from Great Britain.
Common Sense was very influential because it was read by many people.
The Declaration of Independence
The United States first needed to declare independence from Great Britain.
Thomas Jefferson, at the young age of 33, wrote the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776.
That is why we celebrate Independence Day on July 4th.
This is the day that the United States of America declared their independence from King George and Great Britain.
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most famous men in the world, was sent to France to ask for military aid as well as a loan.
And so the war began
Abolition PP Notes
Declaration of Independence
Quakers and other groups opposed slavery
Development of secret runaway slave communities
Underground Railroad
International laws forbidding slavery
1776 – Independence would be the beginning of an actual end to slavery in the U.S.
Abolition Groups
Society of Friends
Pennsylvania Antislavery Society
New York Manumission Society
(NY abolished slavery 1799 – members like Alexander Hamilton)
Influence of Anti-Slavery Campaigns
Robert Carter III – freed more slaves than any other owner in history: 450 in 1791
Freed slaves in the Upper Southern States went from 1% to 10% after 1776
Many men who free slaves were influenced by their fight in the Revolution and it’s principles of equality for all men
Anti-Slavery society formed in 1787
Slave trade abolished in 1807, bye Britain
Slaves in British colonies set free in 1834
Arguments for abolition…
Moral Argument: ‘it was wicked’
Economic Argument: ‘slavery was not worth it’
Legal Argument: ‘slavery was illegal’
Religious Argument: ‘slavery was unchristian’
Political Argument: ‘slaves hated slavery’
Revolutionary Argument: ‘slavery would lead to more revolts’
Moral Argument
‘Slavery is an evil of the first magnitude. It is a most horrible iniquity to traffic with the souls of men. Any man who deals with his fellow creatures with such wickedness should be held as the abomination of all mankind. Those who are the procurers and holders of slaves are the greatest villains in the world.’
Economic Argument
In 1776 Adam Smith, in his book The Wealth of Nations argued that slave labour was inefficient, maintaining that a person with no rights had no reason to work hard.
By the 1790s, French sugar was costing 20% less than British sugar. London merchants were no longer able to make good profits from the sugar trade.
They started to transfer their investments from Caribbean plantations to the new cotton mills in Lancashire or the Empire in India.
Legal Argument
By the 1770s there were some 15,000 black people in Britain. Most, brought by their owners from the West Indies, worked as household servants.
A number of test cases seemed to show that slavery was not legal under British law
Somerset case 1771-72: a slave, James Somerset, had been brought to England and now refused to be taken, against his will, back to the colonies. The law decided that he could not be forced to go.
Legal Argument
Zong case 1781: the slave ship Zong had left Africa with 470 slaves and a crew of 17. By the time it was nearing Jamaica, most of the slaves were ill. The captain knew that he would not be able to sell the slaves in such poor condition so he ordered the sick slaves to be thrown overboard. He claimed that he had to do this to save the lives of the others and the crew because he was short of water. This allowed him to claim on the insurance value of the slaves. In fact, the insurers refused to pay and the case went to court. The ship owners claimed that the slaves were ‘goods and property’, not human beings. This case caused widespread horror, and helped to get the Anti-Slavery campaign going.
Religious Argument
‘repugnant to our religion’ (Barnsley Methodists)
‘A system full of wickedness, hateful to God, and a curse and disgrace to Britain’ (Derby)
‘A system revolting to the feelings of mankind and inconsistent with the counsels of Heaven’ (Hereford Ladies)
Agitation to abolish the slave trade began in Britain in the 1760s. Many of its first members were Quakers.
They received massed support from the Baptists and Methodists and, in 1787, persuaded Granville Sharp to become the chairman of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
Problems in the Caribbean
There was never a time when the white British rulers of their Caribbean islands felt totally secure.
Slavery was never accepted, by the Africans particularly, but also by the native born black populations.
There were a number of serious revolts:
1730-40 First Maroon war, Jamaica
1735-36 Revolt in Antigua
1760 Tacky’s revolt in Jamaica
1763 Kofi’s revolt in Guyana
1795-96 Second Maroon War in Jamaica
1795-97 Fedor’s rebellion, Grenada
The Revolutionary Argument
The idea of fighting against oppression was encouraged by the ideas and activities of the French Revolution.
The French island of Saint Domingue was the richest colony in the world, and the biggest slave market in the Americas.
The French Revolution began in 1789 and, in 1791, the French Government declared all people equal.
The whites in Saint Domingue would not accept this, and the slaves rose up in revolt.
The Revolutionary Argument
Their leader was Toussaint L’Ouverture and, in 1794, the French Government granted all slaves in Saint Domingue their freedom.
The British, and other slave-owning countries in the Caribbean were horrified and sent troops to crush the rebellion.
They were easily defeated by Toussaint L’Ouverture.
In 1798 he became the first ruler of an independent black state.
Slave Abolition Act 1833
After 1807 slaves were still held, just not sold
Act 1833 Was given approval from British crown:
Ended slavery, but forced into indentured servants with apprecticeships (1834)
Apprenticeships slowly ended (1840)
After 1807 slaves were still held, just not sold
Quakers and other groups opposed slavery
Development of secret runaway slave communities
Underground Railroad
International laws forbidding slavery
1776 – Independence would be the beginning of an actual end to slavery in the U.S.
Abolition Groups
Society of Friends
Pennsylvania Antislavery Society
New York Manumission Society
(NY abolished slavery 1799 – members like Alexander Hamilton)
Influence of Anti-Slavery Campaigns
Robert Carter III – freed more slaves than any other owner in history: 450 in 1791
Freed slaves in the Upper Southern States went from 1% to 10% after 1776
Many men who free slaves were influenced by their fight in the Revolution and it’s principles of equality for all men
Anti-Slavery society formed in 1787
Slave trade abolished in 1807, bye Britain
Slaves in British colonies set free in 1834
Arguments for abolition…
Moral Argument: ‘it was wicked’
Economic Argument: ‘slavery was not worth it’
Legal Argument: ‘slavery was illegal’
Religious Argument: ‘slavery was unchristian’
Political Argument: ‘slaves hated slavery’
Revolutionary Argument: ‘slavery would lead to more revolts’
Moral Argument
‘Slavery is an evil of the first magnitude. It is a most horrible iniquity to traffic with the souls of men. Any man who deals with his fellow creatures with such wickedness should be held as the abomination of all mankind. Those who are the procurers and holders of slaves are the greatest villains in the world.’
Economic Argument
In 1776 Adam Smith, in his book The Wealth of Nations argued that slave labour was inefficient, maintaining that a person with no rights had no reason to work hard.
By the 1790s, French sugar was costing 20% less than British sugar. London merchants were no longer able to make good profits from the sugar trade.
They started to transfer their investments from Caribbean plantations to the new cotton mills in Lancashire or the Empire in India.
Legal Argument
By the 1770s there were some 15,000 black people in Britain. Most, brought by their owners from the West Indies, worked as household servants.
A number of test cases seemed to show that slavery was not legal under British law
Somerset case 1771-72: a slave, James Somerset, had been brought to England and now refused to be taken, against his will, back to the colonies. The law decided that he could not be forced to go.
Legal Argument
Zong case 1781: the slave ship Zong had left Africa with 470 slaves and a crew of 17. By the time it was nearing Jamaica, most of the slaves were ill. The captain knew that he would not be able to sell the slaves in such poor condition so he ordered the sick slaves to be thrown overboard. He claimed that he had to do this to save the lives of the others and the crew because he was short of water. This allowed him to claim on the insurance value of the slaves. In fact, the insurers refused to pay and the case went to court. The ship owners claimed that the slaves were ‘goods and property’, not human beings. This case caused widespread horror, and helped to get the Anti-Slavery campaign going.
Religious Argument
‘repugnant to our religion’ (Barnsley Methodists)
‘A system full of wickedness, hateful to God, and a curse and disgrace to Britain’ (Derby)
‘A system revolting to the feelings of mankind and inconsistent with the counsels of Heaven’ (Hereford Ladies)
Agitation to abolish the slave trade began in Britain in the 1760s. Many of its first members were Quakers.
They received massed support from the Baptists and Methodists and, in 1787, persuaded Granville Sharp to become the chairman of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
Problems in the Caribbean
There was never a time when the white British rulers of their Caribbean islands felt totally secure.
Slavery was never accepted, by the Africans particularly, but also by the native born black populations.
There were a number of serious revolts:
1730-40 First Maroon war, Jamaica
1735-36 Revolt in Antigua
1760 Tacky’s revolt in Jamaica
1763 Kofi’s revolt in Guyana
1795-96 Second Maroon War in Jamaica
1795-97 Fedor’s rebellion, Grenada
The Revolutionary Argument
The idea of fighting against oppression was encouraged by the ideas and activities of the French Revolution.
The French island of Saint Domingue was the richest colony in the world, and the biggest slave market in the Americas.
The French Revolution began in 1789 and, in 1791, the French Government declared all people equal.
The whites in Saint Domingue would not accept this, and the slaves rose up in revolt.
The Revolutionary Argument
Their leader was Toussaint L’Ouverture and, in 1794, the French Government granted all slaves in Saint Domingue their freedom.
The British, and other slave-owning countries in the Caribbean were horrified and sent troops to crush the rebellion.
They were easily defeated by Toussaint L’Ouverture.
In 1798 he became the first ruler of an independent black state.
Slave Abolition Act 1833
After 1807 slaves were still held, just not sold
Act 1833 Was given approval from British crown:
Ended slavery, but forced into indentured servants with apprecticeships (1834)
Apprenticeships slowly ended (1840)
After 1807 slaves were still held, just not sold
Quiz 6, 7, 8
Quiz 6 (History 9) A- True B- False
By the late 19th century the theory of female moral superiority had become a truism in America.
Reform movements were justified by the fact ‘women had kept homes pure’.
Social Darwinism claimed that society would evolved to higher levels.
4. Three groups helped organize reform: local, national and reform agencies.
Addams bought an old mansion in Chicago and it was a settlement mansion.
By 1900 there were 5 million female wage earners.
Women were demanding better conditions in factories.
The Declaration of Sentiments challenged law and social practice in America.
By the end of the 19th century laws protecting married women were being passed.
Sojouner said “I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.”
Quiz 7 (History 9) A- True B- False
By 1890 the women’s movements in New York and Boston were still fighting each other.
The women who led the suffrage movement in the early 20th century were not realistic about their ideas.
Alice Paul was a less radical suffragette.
4. By the early 20th century their were no women in the U.S. who were opposed to women’s suffrage.
Emma Goldman believed that women should give up everything to have a career.
In the 1920s women began to reject ideas of modern sexuality.
Women had sexual freedom before birthcontrol.
Illegal abortions did nto become a problem till late in the 20th century.
Recognition of female sexuality led to sexual emancipation for women.
Freud’s theory of female sexuality resolved conflicts about the nature of women’s sexuality.
Quiz 8 (History 9) A- True B- False
Alexander Hamilton was called the most polarizing figure of his time.
The Bill of Rights was not supported by the Antifederalists.
Alice Paul was a less radical suffragette.
4. By the early 20th century their were no women in the U.S. who were opposed to women’s suffrage.
Emma Goldman believed that women should give up everything to have a career.
In the 1920s women began to reject ideas of modern sexuality.
Women had sexual freedom before birthcontrol.
Illegal abortions did nto become a problem till late in the 20th century.
Recognition of female sexuality led to sexual emancipation for women.
Freud’s theory of female sexuality resolved conflicts about the nature of women’s sexuality.
By the late 19th century the theory of female moral superiority had become a truism in America.
Reform movements were justified by the fact ‘women had kept homes pure’.
Social Darwinism claimed that society would evolved to higher levels.
4. Three groups helped organize reform: local, national and reform agencies.
Addams bought an old mansion in Chicago and it was a settlement mansion.
By 1900 there were 5 million female wage earners.
Women were demanding better conditions in factories.
The Declaration of Sentiments challenged law and social practice in America.
By the end of the 19th century laws protecting married women were being passed.
Sojouner said “I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.”
Quiz 7 (History 9) A- True B- False
By 1890 the women’s movements in New York and Boston were still fighting each other.
The women who led the suffrage movement in the early 20th century were not realistic about their ideas.
Alice Paul was a less radical suffragette.
4. By the early 20th century their were no women in the U.S. who were opposed to women’s suffrage.
Emma Goldman believed that women should give up everything to have a career.
In the 1920s women began to reject ideas of modern sexuality.
Women had sexual freedom before birthcontrol.
Illegal abortions did nto become a problem till late in the 20th century.
Recognition of female sexuality led to sexual emancipation for women.
Freud’s theory of female sexuality resolved conflicts about the nature of women’s sexuality.
Quiz 8 (History 9) A- True B- False
Alexander Hamilton was called the most polarizing figure of his time.
The Bill of Rights was not supported by the Antifederalists.
Alice Paul was a less radical suffragette.
4. By the early 20th century their were no women in the U.S. who were opposed to women’s suffrage.
Emma Goldman believed that women should give up everything to have a career.
In the 1920s women began to reject ideas of modern sexuality.
Women had sexual freedom before birthcontrol.
Illegal abortions did nto become a problem till late in the 20th century.
Recognition of female sexuality led to sexual emancipation for women.
Freud’s theory of female sexuality resolved conflicts about the nature of women’s sexuality.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
FINAL PROJECT
Due: Thursday of Week 11
Pick a topic (issue) related to women. Write a breif and succint paper about what the issue is and why it is historically significant.
You must research your topic. You must have at least 10 sources, no more than 5 from the internet.
You will also make a brief oral presentation to the class about your project.
Paper Format:
- Name and course number in the corner
- 2 pages typed (MLA format)Times New Roman, 12pt., double spaced, 1 inch margins.
- Works Cited (Does not count as part of the 2 pages)
Pick a topic (issue) related to women. Write a breif and succint paper about what the issue is and why it is historically significant.
You must research your topic. You must have at least 10 sources, no more than 5 from the internet.
You will also make a brief oral presentation to the class about your project.
Paper Format:
- Name and course number in the corner
- 2 pages typed (MLA format)Times New Roman, 12pt., double spaced, 1 inch margins.
- Works Cited (Does not count as part of the 2 pages)
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Music of the 20s
Roaring Twenties
excerpted from Jazz: A History of America's Music
Cake Walkin' Babies (From Home)
Clarence Williams' Blue Five
Recorded January 8, 1925
(Courtesy Columbia/Legacy)
The decade following World War I would one day be caricatured as "the Roaring Twenties," and it was a time of unprecedented prosperity — the nation's total wealth nearly doubled between 1920 and 1929, manufactures rose by 60 percent, for the first time most people lived in urban areas — and in homes lit by electricity. They made more money than they ever had before and, spurred on by the giant new advertising industry, spent it faster, too — on washing machines and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, 12 million radios, 30 million automobiles, and untold millions of tickets to the movies, that ushered them into a new fast-living world of luxury and glamour their grandparents never could have imagined. Meanwhile, at the polls and in the workplace as well as on the dance floor, women had begun to assert a new independence.
The Parisian Red Heads, 1927
Image courtesy of Frank Driggs Collection
Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in America. And by the mid-1920s, jazz was being played in dance halls and roadhouses and speakeasies all over the country. The blues, which had once been the product of itinerant black musicians, the poorest of the southern poor, had become an industry, and dancing consumed a country that seemed convinced prosperity would never end. There were "all-girl" orchestras on the road now — including Babe Egan's Hollywood Red Heads, a band billed as the Twelve Vampires, and the Parisian Red Heads, all of whom actually came from Indiana. More than 100 dance bands regularly criss-crossed the wide-open spaces between St. Louis and Denver, Texas and Nebraska, playing one-nighters. They were called "territory bands" — the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks; the Alphonso Trent and Doc Ross and Troy Floyd and Benny Moten Orchestras; the Deluxe Melody Boys and Happy Black Aces; Jesse Stone's Blue Serenaders; George E. Lee and his Singing Novelty Orchestra; Walter Page and his Blue Devils; and Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy. "People didn't think anything about going 150 to 200 miles to dance back in those times," one territory band veteran remembered. They'd say, "We came 200 miles to see y'all."
Meanwhile, radio and phonograph records — Americans bought more than 100 million of them in 1927 — were bringing jazz to locations so remote that no band could reach them. And the music itself was beginning to change — an exuberant, collective music was coming to place more and more emphasis on the innovations of supremely gifted individuals. Improvising soloists, struggling to find their own voices and to tell their own stories, were about to take center stage.
Gary Giddins, critic
On Prohibition, speakeasies and Jazz
(Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns)
But for many of the millions of people for whom the 1920s never roared at all, fearful of such rapid change and nostalgic for the small-town America of the turn of the century, jazz music came to seem not merely an annoyance but a threat, one more cause of loosening morals and frightening dislocation. Ragtime had been bad enough, with its insinuating rhythms and daring couple-dancing, but the jumpy, rancorous version of New Orleans polyphony projected by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and many of its imitators seemed much worse. "As I understand it," said Professor Henry Van Dyck of Princeton University, "it is not music at all. It is merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion. Its fault lies not in syncopation, for that is a legitimate device when sparingly used. But "jazz" is an unmitigated cacophony, a combination of disagreeable sounds in complicated discords, a willful ugliness and a deliberate vulgarity." The editor of Musical Courier reported on a poll of academically trained musicians: most found "the 'ad libbing' or 'jazzing' of a piece ... thoroughly objectionable," he said, "and several of them advanced the opinion that this Bolshevistic smashing of the rules and tenets of decorous music" spelled disaster for American music.
Entertainer at Small's Paradise Club in Harlem, 1929
Image courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettman
For some, jazz simply became synonymous with noise. Thomas Edison, whose invention of the phonograph had made its sudden rapid spread possible, claimed that he played jazz records backward because "they sound better that way." When the New York Times reported that the citizens of one Siberian village had driven hungry polar bears from its streets by banging pots and pans, the headline read "Jazz Frightens Bears," and when a celebrated British conductor collapsed while visiting Coney Island, the same paper blamed the jazz bands — now loudly competing with one another along boardwalk — for his demise.
Jazz — and the dancing it inspired — was also said to be having a catastrophic impact on the national character. "Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American girls," reported the New York American, "through the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras." In just two years in Chicago alone, the Illinois Vigilance Association reported in 1923, the downfall of one thousand girls could be traced directly to the pernicious influence of jazz music. In Cincinnati, the Salvation Army obtained a court injunction to stop construction of a theater next to a home for expectant mothers on the grounds that "the enforced proximity of a theater and jazz palace" would implant dangerous "jazz emotions" in helpless infants. A social worker reported on the "unwholesome excitement" she now encountered even at small-town dances in the Midwest. "Boy-and-girl couples leave the hall in a state of dangerous disturbance. Any worker who has gone into the night to gather the facts of activities outside the dance hall is appalled ... by the blatant disregard of even the elementary rules of civilization ... We must expect a few casualties in social discourse, but the modern dance is producing little short of holocaust."
Beyond its disturbing sounds, its fast pace, and its supposed impact on morals, jazz was also condemned because of its origins. Many white older Americans were appalled to see their children dancing to music that was believed to have emerged from what the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune called "the Negro brothels of the South." "Jazz," said the editor of Etude, "is often associated with vile surroundings, filthy words, unmentionable dances." It was originally "the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer," declared Mrs. Max Obendorfer, national music chairman of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, "stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds ... [It] has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate barbarity and sensuality." Blacks were not the sole sources of the jazz contagion. The critic Carl Engel also worried about the effects on Anglo-Saxon youth of what he called "Semitic purveyors of Broadway melodies," while Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent blamed what it called "the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes" on sinister Jews.
There was nothing new in these attitudes. Twenty years earlier, many whites had deplored ragtime in part because it was based on black songs and dances, just as their descendants would one day denounce rock 'n' roll because of its links to the African-American blues tradition. But something altogether new really was happening here and there across the country. A few white youths — living in small towns and comfortable suburbs as well as big-city slums — started to see more than mere novelty and excitement in this new primarily black music, began actually to hear their own feelings mirrored in the playing of African-Americans, and to look for ways they might participate in it themselves. In a country in which by law and custom blacks and whites were forbidden to compete on anything like an equal basis in any arena — even boxing (the heavyweight title was then off-limits to black challengers) — these young men were willing to brave a brand new world created by black Americans and in which black musicians remained the most admired figures.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Quiz 6
1. By the late 19th century the theory of female moral superiority had become a truism in America.
2. Reform movements were justified by the fact ‘women had kept homes pure’.
3. Social Darwinism claimed that society would evolved to higher levels.
4. Three groups helped organize reform: local, national and reform agencies.
5. Addams bought an old mansion in Chicago and it was a settlement mansion.
6. By 1900 there were 5 million female wage earners.
7. Women were demanding better conditions in factories.
8.The Declaration of Sentiments challenged law and social practice in America.
9. By the end of the 19th century laws protecting married women were being passed.
10. Sojouner said “I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.”
2. Reform movements were justified by the fact ‘women had kept homes pure’.
3. Social Darwinism claimed that society would evolved to higher levels.
4. Three groups helped organize reform: local, national and reform agencies.
5. Addams bought an old mansion in Chicago and it was a settlement mansion.
6. By 1900 there were 5 million female wage earners.
7. Women were demanding better conditions in factories.
8.The Declaration of Sentiments challenged law and social practice in America.
9. By the end of the 19th century laws protecting married women were being passed.
10. Sojouner said “I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.”
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Dating Game
READ AND COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE by 2/24:
The New Dating Game
Back to the New Paleolithic Age.
BY Charlotte Allen
February 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21
Late last September a college student who called herself Courtney A. posted a story on the feminist website Lemondrop: “I Slept With Tucker Max, the Internet’s Biggest Asshat.”
Courtney, 21, is a student at Penn State University. Tucker Max, 33, six feet tall, extrovertedly good-looking, and usually photographed latched to a girl, a bottle of booze, or a cheeseburger, is an honors graduate (in three years) of the University of Chicago. He has a law degree from Duke University, whose admissions committee was so impressed with his academic record that it awarded him an academic scholarship. Yet his only experience practicing law to date has consisted of getting fired from a $2,400-a-week summer-associate job at a prestigious Silicon Valley firm for, among other things, showing up intoxicated at the orientation meeting and complaining that he couldn’t see anything because he had lost his contacts in a hookup with a girl he had met at a party the night before; informing a female recruiter at the firm that he was “calling a porn line” when she walked into his office unexpectedly; and getting fall-down drunk at a firm retreat and shouting the F-word at a charity auction attended by the partners and their spouses. His email account of the last escapade made its way to laughs around the country.
Max is famous as a blogger (tuckermax.com), and his website is replete with stories like the ones above, all involving graphically rendered bedroom exploits (if your definition of bedroom includes vans, offices, and the great outdoors), massive quantities of alcohol, and copious vomiting. He is the author of several books, including The Definitive Book of Pickup Lines (2001, out of print but selling for close to $200 on Amazon), the 2006 blockbuster I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and the forthcoming Assholes Finish First. Beer in Hell, a dramatization of some of his website yarns, became an indie movie hit in college towns last fall (playing to less-than-enthusiastic audiences elsewhere).
Max and Courtney got together because upon reading a friend’s text message late one Monday evening announcing that Max would be at a bar near campus after a screening of Beer in Hell, she jumped up, changed her clothes, and rushed off to await the great man’s arrival. At the bar, she worked her way through a knot of female rivals to meet him.
“34C?” Tucker asked.
“32C,” Courtney replied, “but good guess. What, are you trying to touch them or something?”
“Oh, I know I can touch them,” he said. “But I like to guess first.”
At the Hampton Inn where Max was staying, he introduced Courtney to his dog: “Say hello to the new slut.” The next morning, after some sessions of “jackhammering a sidewalk,” as she described his sexual technique (although she did concede that he was a “great kisser”), he handed her $20 for the taxi ride of shame back to her apartment. His last words were, “Call me if you’re ever in L.A.”
Many of the commenters to Courtney’s tell-all expressed “disgust” at Max’s manifestly unchivalrous behavior. In a September op-ed for the Washington Post, feminist Jaclyn Friedman, who inexplicably blamed Max’s perverse success with females (half his fans, perhaps the more enthusiastic half, are female) on abstinence-only sex education, sniffed that she found his “antics revolting,” blasted his “unapologetic misogyny,” and accused him of contributing to a campus atmosphere that allows 150,000 young women to be raped every academic year. (Friedman derived that extraordinarily high figure by counting drunken sexual encounters between students as rape.) Amanda Marcotte, the feminist blogger briefly hired by John Edwards during his presidential campaign, chimed in, accusing Max of a “bone-deep hatred of sexual women”—and also of possible “sexual assault” because he had bragged on his website about sleeping with a drunk girl while a friend hidden in a closet filmed the encounter. In May, feminist picketers so disrupted an appearance by Max at Ohio State University that he needed a police escort to get away.
Yet it’s hard to believe that Courtney A. herself shared any of this dudgeon. Next to her story she posted a photograph of her with Max that she had a friend take at the bar. The photo shows a rosy-cheeked strawberry blonde who, although no Scarlett Johansson, is no Ugly Betty either (her C-cup bustline, much in evidence both underneath and spilling over her strapless top, doesn’t hurt). She is also grinning from ear to ear, her smile as wide as a cantaloupe slice. Max, mugging for the camera, has his arm draped proprietarily, if not exactly affectionately, around her shoulder as she leans into his chest. No disapproving peers, either. When Courtney left her apartment to meet Max at the bar, her roommates called after her, “Make sure to bring him back.” She and Max rode off to the inn “with everyone at the bar waving and giving the thumbs up.”
Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.
Here is Max’s seduction technique: “ ‘So,’ he asked scooting in next to me. ‘Are you coming back with me tonight?’ ”
Here is how Courtney reacted: “Around 1:30, I told Tucker that I would, in fact, go home with him. ‘Oh, I know,’ he replied. ‘We have a cab waiting, let’s go.’ ”
It helps, of course, that there’s currently a buyer’s market in women who are up for just about anything with the right kind of cad, what with delayed marriage (the average age for a woman’s first wedding is now 26, compared with 20 in 1960, according to the University of Virginia-based National Marriage Project’s latest report); reliable contraception; and advances in antibiotics (no more worries about what used to be called venereal disease). No-fault divorce, moreover, has pushed the marriage-dissolution rate up to between 40 and 50 percent and swelled the single-female population with “cougars” in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. On top of it all is the feminist-driven academic and journalistic culture celebrating that yesterday’s “loose” women are today’s “liberated” women, able to proudly “explore their sexuality” without “getting punished for their lust,” as the feminist writer Naomi Wolf put it in the Guardian in December.
Wolf devoted her 1997 book Promiscuities to trying to remove the stigma from . . . promiscuity. On the one hand, she decried the double-standard unfairness of labeling a girl who fools around with too many boys a “slut,” and, on the other, she lionized “the Slut” (her capitalization) as the enviable epitome of feminist freedom and feminist transgression against puritanical social norms. Wolf’s point of view is today mainstream. It’s the underlying theme of Eve Ensler’s girls-talk-dirty Vagina Monologues, performed every year on Valentine’s Day on college campuses across the country. A chapter from Promiscuities titled “Sluts” has made so many women’s studies reading lists that term-paper mills sell canned essays purporting to dissect it. A group calling itself the Women’s Direct Action Collective issued a manifesto in 2007 titled Sluts Against Rape insisting that “a woman should have the right to be sexual in any way she chooses” and that easy availability was “a positive assertion of sexual identity.” In other words, if people call you a whore because you, say, fall into bed with someone whose name you can’t quite remember, that’s their problem. Of course, if a man mistakes a woman being “sexual in any way she chooses” for consent to have sex, it’s still rape.
The same feminist academics pooh-pooh concerns about the long-term effects of the hookup culture, arguing that it’s essentially just a harmless college folly, akin to swallowing goldfish, which young women will outgrow after graduation with no lasting scars. As long as they take precautions against disease and pregnancy, the current wisdom goes, it might even be good for you: a sort of rumspringa for the non-Amish in which you get your girls-gone-wild urges out of your system before you settle down to have babies. Pepper Schwartz, a longtime sex columnist and a sociology professor at the University of Washington, told ABC News in November:
Before, guys did this gross kind of sexual behavior, and we said, “Boys will be boys,” but now it’s boys and girls. . . . It’s a period of flexing their muscles and they will look back and say, “Oh, God, what was I thinking?” They will have the permission I didn’t have in my generation to act out, get drunk at frat parties and hook up with somebody.
Schwartz seemed unaware that booze-fueled hooking-up lasts well beyond the frat-party years. Thanks to late marriage, easy divorce, and the well-paying jobs that the feminist revolution has wrought for women, the bars, clubs, sidewalks, and subway straps of nearly every urban center in America overflow every weekend with females, young and not so young, bronzed, blonded, teeth-whitened, and dressed in the maximal cleavage and minimal skirt lengths that used to be associated with streetwalkers but nowadays is standard garb for lawyers and portfolio managers on a girls’ night out. The prelude to the $50,000 wedding these days isn’t just the budget-busting shower—although that’s de rigueur—but the bachelorette party, in which the bride and her BFF’s don their skinnies and spaghetti straps and head to a bar to be hit on, sometimes bride and all, by whatever males are bold enough (the typical accoutrements of the bachelorette party are a $15 “ironic” veil for the bride and a sculpted replica of a male sex organ that’s often brought to the bar).
All this takes place to a basso profundo of feminist cheerleading. Wolf’s op-ed in the Guardian praised the uninhibited sexual “self-expression” of the four female leads in Sex and the City, especially the 40-something Samantha (hitting 50 in the 2008 movie), who, during the six seasons that the series ran, racked up nearly as many sex partners (41) as her three coleads combined—and Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte were no slouches themselves in the quickie department. “Did not thousands of young women . . . breathe a sigh of relief or even liberation watching Samantha down another tequila, unrepentantly ogle the sex god at the end of the bar, and get richer and more beautiful with age, with no STDs or furies pursuing her?,” Wolf gushed.
Urban life, furthermore, turns out to imitate Sex and the City. A survey reported in the New York Daily News around the time of the film’s release revealed that the typical female resident of Manhattan, who marries later on average than almost every other woman in the country, has 20 sex partners during her lifetime. By way of contrast, the median number of lifetime sex partners for all U.S. women ages 15 to 44 is just 3.3, according to the Census Bureau’s latest statistical abstract.
As might be expected, many males would like to help themselves at this overladen buffet. But there’s a problem: While it’s a truism that the main beneficiaries of the sexual revolution are men, it is only some men: the Tucker Maxes, with the good looks, self-confidence, and swagger that enable them to sidle up successfully to a gaggle of well turned-out females in a crowded and anonymous club where the short-statured, the homely, the paunchy, the balding, and the sweater-clad are, if not turned away outside by the bouncer, ignominiously ignored by the busy, beautiful people within.
Out of such anxiety was born the “seduction community,” part band of brothers, part nakedly commercial and ferociously competitive business enterprise. The birth of the seduction business coincided neatly with the sexual revolution: with the 1970 publication of sometime film editor Eric Weber’s bestselling manual (later made into a movie) How to Pick Up Girls. Left behind like flares, double-knits, and dancing the Bus Stop, the art of the pickup was reborn in the 1990s and rebranded as an exact science. A cadre of guru-like leaders appeared with a set of elaborate rites, precisely defined techniques, and an acronym-laden private language known only to initiates—purposely designed to appeal to men, whose minds seem to thrive on ritual, hierarchy, and complex esoterica (think baseball statistics, Scout badges, the military, the Catholic Mass, and the Freemasons).
A UCLA graduate and former comedy writer who calls himself Ross Jeffries devised a hypnosis-based technique he calls “neuro-linguistic programming” that formed the basis of his 1992 book, How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed. Jeffries pioneered the coinage of distinctive seduction lingo—his most widely used neologism: “sarging,” named after his cat Sarge and meaning trolling the bars for desirable women—as well as the use of the Internet. His website, Speed Seduction, is going strong hawking CDs, DVDs, software tutorials, and personal coaching in pickup techniques. Jeffries’s commercial success launched a thousand imitators: Grow Your Game, Double Your Dating, Real Social Dynamics, Alpha Seduction, Seduction Base, Seduction Chronicles, Seduction Lair, Seduction Science, Blissnosis, and so forth. All the sites, many of them with chat rooms for seeking advice and trading conquest yarns, peddle self-help books, CDs, DVDs, and other merchandise. They all feature pictures of scantily clad supermodel-like females and the same acronym-laden jargon ultimately traceable to Jeffries: a “PUA” is a “pickup artist”; an “AFC” is an “average frustrated chump” who hasn’t paid a guru to learn how to be a PUA; an “HB” is a “hot babe”; an “IOI” is an HB’s “indicator of interest” in a PUA, such as leaning in his direction or “accidentally” brushing his hand.
Jeffries’s most famous pupil is a Canadian-born former stage magician called Erik James Horvat-Markovic who subsequently changed his name first to Erik von Markovik and later to just plain Mystery. Most would-be pickup mentors assume new names, perhaps to signify their new identities. Ross Jeffries’s real name is Paul Jeffrey Ross. David DeAngelo of Double Your Dating was born Eben Pagan. Real Social Dynamics’s Tyler Durden (after the character in the 1999 movie Fight Club) is actually named Owen Cook. (Durden coined the phrase “chick crack” in reference to astrology, palm-reading, spells, ESP, dream-analysis, handwriting analysis, personality tests, and other New Age-y preoccupations of females that make great openers for men willing to feign interest in them.) Mystery’s identity transformation was the most thorough, successful, and influential. His 2007 book, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed, is probably the most widely read of the seduction manuals, and a Mystery-hosted reality series, The Pickup Artist, ran for two seasons on VH1 in 2007-08 (the show’s luster was somewhat diminished after it emerged that the winner of the first season’s get-the-girl sweepstakes was a professional actor instead of the video-game programmer that he said he was).
Mystery also pioneered the now-widely imitated weekend-long “workshops” or “boot camps” in hotels aimed at turning AFCs into PUAs nearly overnight. Attendees are shepherded to bars for hands-on experience by master-PUA “trainers” with their own pseudonymous monickers (Captain Jack, HiRoller, Keychain, and so forth). The boot camps aren’t cheap. Mystery’s website, Venusian Arts, doesn’t list prices, but the three-day workshops marketed by Venusian Arts’s top competitor, Love Systems—run by Nick Savoy (real name Nicholas Benedict), a business partner of Mystery’s until a nasty 2007 split—cost $2,997 apiece, with a $999 deposit. And buyer, beware: Although nearly all the master PUAs, including Mystery himself, insist that in their former lives they were socially hopeless geeks who had scarcely ventured within five feet of a nubile woman, many of the trainers, at least at Love Systems, have backgrounds in sales or show business and may not really resemble the introverted IT guys and cubicle nerds who seek their advice. Watching video-clips of workshops in session, with flashily attired mentors strutting and spurting acronyms in front of earnest pupils in search of arm candy will remind you of nothing so much as those all-day “Get Rich Buying Foreclosed Property for Pennies” seminars that target another male yearning.
In the late 1990s, Mystery developed a precise and exacting “algorithm” of moves and routines—pre-scripted lines to be practiced in the field—that are virtually guaranteed (according to Mystery at least) to lure a female into your bed after just seven hours in her company from a cold turkey meeting in a public place. And an ultra-good-looking female to boot. Mystery advises his readers not to bother with any female who rates lower than a 6 (“OK-looking,” in his parlance) on the 1 to 10 scale, while assuring them that if they follow his advice, they can readily score a “supermodel hot” 10. The fundamental strategy is to “demonstrate higher value” (DHV, another Mystery acronym), to appear so fascinating that the woman will want to prove her worthiness to you, not the other way around. You don’t buy her a drink; you offer to let her buy you one. You don’t give her your phone number; you get her to give you hers, in what Mystery calls a “number closing.” If she asks you what you do for a living, you don’t mention the drone desk job that you actually hold down; you tell her you “repair disposable razors” (the choice of a Mystery disciple). You “peacock” (yet another Mystery coinage), which means donning outlandish, attention-grabbing attire. Mystery’s signature peacocking wardrobe includes a black fur bucket hat and matching black nail polish and eyeliner. On The Pickup Artist, he sported a seemingly inexhaustible supply of exotic headgear and man-baubles.
Mystery, Savoy, and Durden were leading characters in Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The book, packaged to look like a King James Bible with an oversize imitation-leather cover and Manga-inspired illustrations, is half self-promotion (Strauss, a self-described former dork who shaved his head, Lasiked his eyes, and took up the name Style after he joined with Mystery, runs his own web-based seduction business, Stylelife Academy) and half chronicle—a monotonous chronicle—of his nightly sarging adventures while living in a pickup-artist group house near Sunset Strip through which drifted an endless string of sordid-if-great-looking strippers, porn stars, model wannabes, and other female inhabitants of the Hollywood demimonde, including Courtney Love at the tag end of her career in between drug-rehab stays. The book’s high point comes when one of the housemates persuades Paris Hilton to give him her phone number at a taco stand.
If it all sounds cheesy, tedious, manipulative, obvious, condescending to women, maybe kind of gay, it’s because it is. But here’s the rub: This stuff works. If you think men who peacock look ridiculous and unmanly, click onto the photo-website Hot Chicks With Douchebags, where spectacular-looking babes hang on the pecs of preening rednecks and “Jersey Shore”-style guidos sporting chest-baring shirts and product-stiffened fauxhawks. Watch the video “Learn Enough Guitar to Get Laid” on YouTube (three chords, max). In June 2005, Craig Malisow, a reporter for the Houston Press, trailed 24-year-old Bashev, a Bulgarian-born graduate student in engineering at Rice University and self-styled pickup expert, to a series of bars and clubs in Houston. Bashev had no intention of telling the 20-something HBs he met that his day job consisted of working with multivariable calculus. Instead he pointed to his shoes and informed them that he was a “foot model.” Then he launched into his canned opener: Did they think reality shows were “really real”? Sure, two groups of females on whom Bashev tried that line rolled their eyes and smirked, but three bars (and the same routine) later, he was relaxing in a lounge chair reading a shapely brunette’s palm (chick crack plus “kino,” a Mystery-ism that refers to getting a woman to crave your touch), and soon enough “her fingers were gently grasping the backs of his wrists,” Malisow observed. Within minutes, Bashev had not only number-closed but gotten a date for the following Wednesday.
Pickup mentors are relying, consciously or sub, on the principles of evolutionary psychology, which uses Darwinian theory to account for human traits and practices. Robert Wright introduced the reading public to evolutionary psychology in his 1994 book, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. He summarized what biologists had observed in the field: that among animals—and especially among our closest relatives, the great apes—males often fight each other for females and so the most dominant, or “alpha,” male has access to the most desirable, and perhaps all, of the females. But it’s the female of the species who ultimately makes the choice as to which member of the pack she will deem the alpha male. “Females are choosy in all the great ape species,” Wright wrote. He also noted that, for example, a female gorilla will be faithful—forced into fidelity, actually—to a single dominant male, but she will willingly desert him for a rival male who impresses her with his superior dominance by fighting with her mate. That’s because, as Darwin postulated, evolution isn’t merely a matter of survival of the fittest but also of the replication of the fittest, “selfish genes,” in the words of neo-Darwinian Richard Dawkins. Driven by instinctual desire for offspring, male primates chase fertile females so they can replicate themselves, while female primates choose strong males on the basis of survival traits to be passed on to young ones.
Evolutionary psychologists like David Buss in The Evolution of Desire (1994) and Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind (2000) have elaborated on these theories, arguing that the human brain itself, with its capacity for consciousness, reasoning, and artistic creation, evolved as an entertainment device for male hominids competing to impress the females in the pack. Dennis Dutton’s new book, The Art Instinct, makes much the same argument. Evolutionary psychologists postulate that the same physical and psychological drives prevail among modern humans: Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are naturally monogamous—but only until a man they perceive as of higher status than their current mate comes along. Hypergamy—marrying up, or, in the absence of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up—is a more accurate description of women’s natural inclinations. Long-term monogamy—one spouse for one person at one time—may be the most desirable condition for ensuring personal happiness, accumulating property, and raising children, but it is an artifact of civilization, Western civilization in particular. In the view of many evolutionary psychologists, long-term monogamy is natural for neither men nor women.
All of this is obviously pure speculation, if imaginatively rendered and bolstered by anthropological observations of hunter-gatherer societies today. Furthermore, there is a troubling chicken-or-egg circularity in evolutionary psychology arguments: How did the female hominids know the males were trying to entertain them unless their own brains were sufficiently evolved to appreciate the effort? You can’t get a gorilla to recognize Mozart or a cave painting. It’s equally easy to laugh out loud at a 2007 interview Mystery gave to Salon in which he asserted that a woman’s scratching the back of her hand when a man talks to her is an “Indicator of Interest” because “[T]hat area of the hand gets itchy when a girl is attracted to a man from ape days, you know—it means, ‘Groom me.’ ” Yet evolutionary psychology offers a persuasive explanation for many things that we are supposed to pretend are culturally conditioned: that the natures of men and women are fundamentally different and that, pace Naomi Wolf and the cougar-empowerment movement, women don’t get sexier as they get older, at least not in the eyes of the man sitting on the next barstool. Youth and beauty are markers of fertility. As Mystery wrote in his book, it may be sexist to say out loud, but women are well aware “that their social value can be rated largely on their looks” or they wouldn’t devote so many hours to toning muscles and adjusting makeup.
Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children’s schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male sex.
It’s increasingly common for women to air their husbands’ perceived faults to both their friends and the general public. There is now an entire blog, My Husband Is Annoying, in which an anonymous wife and her guests post pictures of the schlubs they married and freely criticize their beards, sleeping habits, irritating questions, and dopey poses in photos. Slate’s Hanna Rosin called her husband a “kitchen bitch” because he had dared to cook dinner from a recipe that she wanted to try herself. The Atlantic’s Sandra Tsing Loh, going through a divorce because she found her husband less romantic than her adulterous lover, detailed the personal and sexual failings of her friends’ spouses—in print. New York Times columnist Judith Warner last year wrote about a friend who told her that she wished she were Michelle Obama, married to the president instead of to her own husband, whom she was “tempted to throttle.” And these are not the hardcore feminists.
Not surprisingly, given that “head of the household” is a phrase that cannot be uttered in today’s egalitarian homes, many women satisfy their yearning for dominance by throwing themselves at bad boys or even worse. The very day, March 17, 2005, that Scott Peterson—sentenced to death in California for killing his wife and unborn son and throwing their remains into San Francisco Bay—took up residence on San Quentin’s death row, he received three-dozen phone calls from smitten women, including an 18-year-old who wanted to become his second wife. According to an April story in People, Peterson is still being flooded with letters from female admirers almost five years later, many of the mash notes containing checks to pay for his commissary charges. That’s par for the course on death row, where the rule is: The more notorious the killer, the more fan mail and marriage proposals. The most fan-mail-saturated killer in San Quentin is Richard Allen Davis, who in 1993 kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas at knifepoint from her home in Petaluma, Calif., killed her, and buried her in a shallow grave.
Infatuation with killers is extreme and rare behavior (although perhaps not so rare as we imagine—this past summer a 16-year-old Virginia girl developed an online crush on a 20-year-old horrorcore enthusiast who called himself “Syko Sam.” Syko Sam is now awaiting trial for allegedly bludgeoning the girl, her parents, and her best friend to death). But it’s a fair signal of impending social chaos when the prevailing female attitude is dissatisfaction, either mild or intense, with the workaday Joes—the good-provider beta males—whom one has already married or, in the era before the sexual and feminist revolutions, would be planning to marry because chasing alphas in bars was not a respectable option for the female middle class.
Wives have historically reported less satisfaction from their marriages than husbands, but according to the National Marriage Project’s latest report, their discontent is growing: fewer than 60 percent of wives report that they are “very happy” in their marriages, in contrast to more than 66 percent in 1973. (Male marital happiness has declined, too: from 70 percent to 63 percent.)
“Women initiate two-thirds of divorces,” W. Bradford Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, told me.
With no-fault divorce since the 1960s, that can be divorce for no reason at all. The reasons wives divorce their husbands can be legitimate or illegitimate—adultery and abuse or lack of intimacy, growing apart, or having found someone more exciting. And because it’s no-fault divorce even when there might be actual fault, the spouse left behind is often treated unjustly in dividing income and property, and frequently regarding custody of the children.
Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because sex outside marriage is now so readily available no one need buy the cow, the percentage of married people ages 35 to 44 has declined precipitously over the last 40 years: from 88 percent of men and 87 percent of women in 1960 to 66 percent of men and 67 percent of women in 2005. Since first marriages after age 45—when a woman’s fertile years are finished—are statistically rare, almost everyone who is ever going to marry is already married by that age. The percentage of children growing up in fatherless families—a chief risk factor for social pathologies—has risen concomitantly: from 9 percent of all households with children in 1960 to 26 percent today. On the plus side of the ledger, these negative trends don’t affect the college-educated as severely. College-educated women have significantly higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce than women without college degrees. The bad news is that such women, who tend to marry late, have far fewer children. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, 24 percent of women ages 40 to 44 with bachelor’s degrees were childless, in contrast to 10 percent of women without a high school diploma. Marriage is slowly becoming a preserve of the elite, who pay a price in severely reduced fertility.
In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller wrote:
Our ancestors probably had their first sexual experiences soon after reaching sexual maturity. They would pass through a sequence of relationships of varying durations over the course of a lifetime. Some relationships might have lasted no more than a few days. . . . Many Pleistocene mothers probably had boyfriends. But each woman’s boyfriend may not have been the father of any of her offspring. . . . Males may have given some food to females and their offspring, and may have defended them from other men, but . . . anthropologists now view much of this behavior more as courtship effort than paternal investment.
That’s a pretty fair description of mating life today in the urban underclass and the meth-lab culture of rural America. Take away the offspring, blocked by the Pill and ready abortion, and it’s also a pretty fair description of today’s prolonged singles scene. In other words, we have met the Stone Age, and it is us.
Living in the New Paleolithic can be hard on women, many of whom party on merrily until they reach age 30 and then panic. “They’re at the peak of their beauty in their early 20s—they’re luscious—but the guys their age don’t look as good, so they say to themselves: ‘Why do I want to get married?,’ ” notes Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, who is writing a book about the singles crisis. “Then they get to age 28, 29, and their fertility goes down and they’re not quite so luscious. But the guys their age are starting to make money, they look better, they’ve got self-assurance, and they’ve also got the pick of the 23-year-olds.”
Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas. That is the underlying message of what is undoubtedly the most deftly written and also the darkest of the seduction-community websites, the blog Roissy in DC. Unlike his confreres, Roissy does not sell books or boot camps, and his site carries no ads. He also blogs anonymously, or at least tries to. (Purported photos of Roissy circulating on the Internet show a tall unshaven man in his late 30s with piercing blue eyes and good, if somewhat dissolute, looks.) The pseudonym Roissy derives from the chateau that was the setting for sadomasochistic orgies in The Story of O, the French pornographic classic of the 1960s which featured a beautiful young woman who couldn’t get enough of being violated and flagellated by masterful men. Roissy maintains that he is not an S&M-fetishist but picked the pseudonym because “chicks dig power.”
His blog combines Darwinian analysis, harshly hilarious commentary about the current erotic landscape (one entry guffaws at the chin-pulling psychiatrists who diagnosed Tiger Woods’s “romp through a battalion of trashy, deluded babes who thought they would be the next Mrs. Woods” as a sign that Woods needed to “get help”); graphically raw accounts (be forewarned!) of Roissy’s own pickup adventures in the singles-packed neighborhoods north of Washington’s Dupont Circle; features such as “Girlfriend or Fling?” in which readers look at photos of females and decide whether any of them is worth a second date, and a sense of impending social meltdown as the family crumbles and beta men are increasingly denied access to women.
His post for the last D-Day anniversary, titled “Then and Now,” consisted of two photographs demonstrating women’s changing perception of what constituted an alpha male: a tough and battle-weary GI circa 1944 who looked as though he had just scaled the cliffs of the Pointe du Hoc and a particularly epicene-looking Mystery from his VH1 show, “peacocking” with eyeliner, soul patch, and goggles on top of his head. Roissy’s blog is an unflinching look at female nature at its very worst: the acquisitiveness, the narcissism, the self-absorption, the selfishness, the superficiality, the brainlessness, the wayward lust as powerful as any man’s.
Roissy’s deliberately outrageous posts are a source of controversy. In a write-up on George Sodini, the man who shot up a gym near Pittsburgh last August, killing 3 women before turning the gun on himself, Roissy contended that Sodini, whose diary revealed that he had not had sex for 20 years before the incident, was simply a frustrated beta barred access to women by the sexual/feminist revolution and that “anything was justified” to avoid the “walking death” of celibacy. In other words, Sodini was a hapless victim of the sexual revolution.
Earlier that year Roissy got into an online contretemps with Conor Friedersdorf, a frequent guest-blogger for Andrew Sullivan, over the “neg,” a pickup artist tactic that involves teasing an especially attractive woman about her looks instead of complimenting them, on the theory that she probably gets so many compliments that she brushes them off. It’s an updated version of Lord Chesterfield’s dictum to his son that “a decided and conscious beauty looks upon every tribute paid to her beauty only as her due, but wants to shine and to be considered on the side of her understanding.” Friedersdorf, however, declared that the negger’s intention “is to reduce her self-esteem, or even worse to play on her insecurities with the knowledge that some women react to that technique by having sex or hooking up as a coping mechanism.” Roissy responded by making fun of Friedersdorf’s name.
If Roissy has anything resembling a mentor, it is F. Roger Devlin. Trained as a political philosopher—he has a doctorate from Tulane—Devlin holds no academic post, and his oeuvre, besides a published version of his doctoral thesis on Alexandre Kojève, consists of a series of essays and reviews concerning relations between the sexes for the Occidental Quarterly, a paleoconservative publication whose other contributors tend to focus obsessively on the question of which ethnic groups belong to which race. The dubious nature of the venue aside, Devlin deftly uses theories of evolutionary psychology to argue that the sexual revolution was essentially aimed at restoring primate-style hypergamy to human females and freeing women to try to capture the attention of and mate with the alpha males of their choosing instead of remaining chaste until their early marriage to a decent and hard-working beta (only the very best looking young women stood a chance of snagging an alpha in the old days).
“The sexual revolution in America was an attempt by women to realize their own [hypergamous] utopia, not that of men,” Devlin wrote. Beta men become superfluous until the newly liberated women start double-clutching after years in the serial harems of alphas who won’t “commit,” lower their standards, and “settle.” During this process, monogamy as a stable and civilization-maintaining social institution is shattered. “Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization,” Devlin told me. “It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life.” This isn’t necessarily so anymore in today’s chaotic combination of polygamy for lucky alphas, hypergamy in varying degrees for females depending on their sex appeal, and, at least in theory, large numbers of betas left without mates at all—just as it is in baboon packs. The aim of Mystery-style game is to give those betas better odds.
In a series of interviews, Devlin declined to disclose his own marital status or lack thereof. Nonetheless, in an email to me concerning the disinclination of many of today’s career- and sex-chasing young women to learn, say, how to bake an apple pie to please their husbands, he wrote: “My own experience with pies is limited to buying Tastykakes at Seven-Eleven.” That suggests either nonexistent or unpleasant domestic arrangements which may in turn explain why Devlin’s writing about the feminist and sexual revolutions frequently shades from the refreshingly politically incorrect into the disturbingly punitive.
Devlin may be spot-on when he writes, “The female sexual revolution, as typified by Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmo, amounted to a program of getting women to follow all their worst instincts” or “Part of the folk wisdom of all ages and peoples has been that sexual attraction is an inadequate basis for matrimony.” Yet his review of Wendy Shalit’s 2007 Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good was a merciless evisceration of an author who is on his side, at least insofar as urging her sisters toward sexual restraint and the selection of mates based on criteria other than alpha allure.
Devlin took Shalit to task for implying that young women are essentially the innocent prey of vulpine men who have taken advantage of the sexual revolution as a means of “pressuring” them to surrender their virtue and that in order for young women to recover their “self-esteem,” they ought to hold out for a man who “proves his worthiness.” Devlin argued, perhaps correctly, that Shalit’s position amounted to a socially conservative inversion of the boilerplate feminist view of women as passive victims of evil males who “use” them, evidencing a blindness to women’s responsibility for their all-too-frequent complicity in the seduction scenarios that both feminists and social conservatives decry. Girls Gone Mild, obviously pitched to a youthful readership and couched in a upbeat women’s magazine tone, might have come across as simplistic and overly romanticizing of a fragile-flower female sex. Yet Devlin was so unwilling to give Shalit any quarter—and so eager to heap 100 percent of the blame on women for the current sexual chaos—that he went so far as to declare, “Men do not have to prove their worthiness to anybody.” Really? Anybody?
The word misogyny does come to mind here (men get a free pass but women don’t). Nonetheless, his writings—and those of many of the self-styled alpha bloggers who have taken up his theories—can also be read as cris de coeur. Underlying the bravado is a deep and understandable anger on the part of many men at having to live through the sexual and familial wreckage of the New Paleolithic.
A Washington, D.C., player-blogger who calls himself Roosh (you can subscribe to his Game Tips Newsletter: “7 Tips for Incredible First Dates,” “How to Pick Up Girls in Coffee Shops,” etc.) put up a post in November that he titled “Single Women Who Purposely Have Children Are Committing Crimes Against Humanity.” It was essentially a lament about Roosh’s own childhood growing up without a father at home:
My parents divorced when I was 8, and for the next twelve years or so I visited my dad two nights a week. So when I got out of college, I was only 30% man. . . . Unfortunately many guys have been raised by their fathers but they might as well be fatherless—their dads didn’t teach them s—, sometimes because they didn’t quite know how to be a man themselves. This has happened because Western society has not demanded that men act like men.
The comments section to that post was an echo chamber of rage and sadness: “My dad was largely absent from my upbringing—he was a checkbook, not a presence.” “My dad was an alpha, and due to his philandering my parents divorced when I was 5. I never saw my dad once after that.” Not surprisingly, the “seduction community,” at least as it manifests itself in blog comments on seduction websites, skews heavily toward divorced men still furious at their ex-wives and single young men whose experience with absent or feminism-cowed fathers, or with young women who have not deemed them sufficiently exciting, has made them cynical about all relationships with the opposite sex.
Roissy often writes of a coming “apocalypse,” a thorough collapse of civilization thanks to the stalling of its reproductive matrix (wonderful for him as a sensualist, catastrophic for everyone else). Right now marriage as an institution is still reasonably intact—but mostly for the demographically shrinking educated classes. The decision to halt the advance of the New Paleolithic ultimately lies with women, the mate-choosing sex, just as it lay with women to bring the hypergamous sexual revolution into being. What are the chances of that? “Women have been told for so long that it doesn’t matter what they do [sexually],” one of Roissy’s regular commenters, an Ottawa historian who goes by the online name of Alias Clio, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think [the female sexual free-for-all] has been good for women, but it’s what they’ve chosen. And it’s always hard for women to see beyond the personal level.”
Roissy himself, although arguably the most jaded of all the seduction bloggers, is actually a closet moralist who longs for the more constrained past when women dressed modestly (“Girlfriend or Fling?” is all about the kind of clothing and bearing that mark a girl as a “pump-and-dump”), refrained from swearing like sailors, stayed out of men’s beds (except his!), and generally conducted themselves like wife-and-mother material (although he says he has no intention of getting married himself).
“The best way to get a man to propose marriage is to be a virgin,” Roissy wrote in one of his posts. As a poster child for everything that has gone wrong with the monogamy-based family structure that underlay the flourishing of the West, Roissy singled out one of his regular female commenters, a 28-year-old former bar dancer who calls herself Lady Raine and who on her MySpace page posted photos of herself in derriere- and tattoo-revealing attire alongside a photo of the 6-year-old son she bore out of wedlock to an alcoholic ne’er-do-well. Besides reposting the photos, Roissy taunted Lady Raine as “Single Mom” and told her that her son, whose sole exposure to adult men seemed to be her parade of boyfriends, would likely grow up either gay or a sociopath. (In retaliation, Lady Raine outed Roissy, posting his name and place of employment on her own blog—although Roissy maintained in an email to me that it was all an “experiment” in “identity borrowing.”)
The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.
A week after Courtney A. posted her story about her one-night stand with Tucker Max, he posted a surprisingly kind and courteous response that also happened to make it clear what young women need to do:
Courtney, I know you’re only 21, so that explains a lot, but baby, please understand: We all reap what we sow. . . . I’m sure there are a lot of guys who will be sweet and gentle with you in bed and really pay attention to your needs, but the guys you come out to sport f— probably won’t be among them. . . . I told her I wanted to eventually settle down and have kids. I do. Maybe not now, but soon enough that I think about it now. Of course, traveling around the country f—ing all kinds of college girls who throw themselves at me probably doesn’t help.
No, it probably doesn’t.
Charlotte Allen, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus website, is writing her doctoral dissertation in medieval and Byzantine studies.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/new-dating-game?page=12
The New Dating Game
Back to the New Paleolithic Age.
BY Charlotte Allen
February 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21
Late last September a college student who called herself Courtney A. posted a story on the feminist website Lemondrop: “I Slept With Tucker Max, the Internet’s Biggest Asshat.”
Courtney, 21, is a student at Penn State University. Tucker Max, 33, six feet tall, extrovertedly good-looking, and usually photographed latched to a girl, a bottle of booze, or a cheeseburger, is an honors graduate (in three years) of the University of Chicago. He has a law degree from Duke University, whose admissions committee was so impressed with his academic record that it awarded him an academic scholarship. Yet his only experience practicing law to date has consisted of getting fired from a $2,400-a-week summer-associate job at a prestigious Silicon Valley firm for, among other things, showing up intoxicated at the orientation meeting and complaining that he couldn’t see anything because he had lost his contacts in a hookup with a girl he had met at a party the night before; informing a female recruiter at the firm that he was “calling a porn line” when she walked into his office unexpectedly; and getting fall-down drunk at a firm retreat and shouting the F-word at a charity auction attended by the partners and their spouses. His email account of the last escapade made its way to laughs around the country.
Max is famous as a blogger (tuckermax.com), and his website is replete with stories like the ones above, all involving graphically rendered bedroom exploits (if your definition of bedroom includes vans, offices, and the great outdoors), massive quantities of alcohol, and copious vomiting. He is the author of several books, including The Definitive Book of Pickup Lines (2001, out of print but selling for close to $200 on Amazon), the 2006 blockbuster I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and the forthcoming Assholes Finish First. Beer in Hell, a dramatization of some of his website yarns, became an indie movie hit in college towns last fall (playing to less-than-enthusiastic audiences elsewhere).
Max and Courtney got together because upon reading a friend’s text message late one Monday evening announcing that Max would be at a bar near campus after a screening of Beer in Hell, she jumped up, changed her clothes, and rushed off to await the great man’s arrival. At the bar, she worked her way through a knot of female rivals to meet him.
“34C?” Tucker asked.
“32C,” Courtney replied, “but good guess. What, are you trying to touch them or something?”
“Oh, I know I can touch them,” he said. “But I like to guess first.”
At the Hampton Inn where Max was staying, he introduced Courtney to his dog: “Say hello to the new slut.” The next morning, after some sessions of “jackhammering a sidewalk,” as she described his sexual technique (although she did concede that he was a “great kisser”), he handed her $20 for the taxi ride of shame back to her apartment. His last words were, “Call me if you’re ever in L.A.”
Many of the commenters to Courtney’s tell-all expressed “disgust” at Max’s manifestly unchivalrous behavior. In a September op-ed for the Washington Post, feminist Jaclyn Friedman, who inexplicably blamed Max’s perverse success with females (half his fans, perhaps the more enthusiastic half, are female) on abstinence-only sex education, sniffed that she found his “antics revolting,” blasted his “unapologetic misogyny,” and accused him of contributing to a campus atmosphere that allows 150,000 young women to be raped every academic year. (Friedman derived that extraordinarily high figure by counting drunken sexual encounters between students as rape.) Amanda Marcotte, the feminist blogger briefly hired by John Edwards during his presidential campaign, chimed in, accusing Max of a “bone-deep hatred of sexual women”—and also of possible “sexual assault” because he had bragged on his website about sleeping with a drunk girl while a friend hidden in a closet filmed the encounter. In May, feminist picketers so disrupted an appearance by Max at Ohio State University that he needed a police escort to get away.
Yet it’s hard to believe that Courtney A. herself shared any of this dudgeon. Next to her story she posted a photograph of her with Max that she had a friend take at the bar. The photo shows a rosy-cheeked strawberry blonde who, although no Scarlett Johansson, is no Ugly Betty either (her C-cup bustline, much in evidence both underneath and spilling over her strapless top, doesn’t hurt). She is also grinning from ear to ear, her smile as wide as a cantaloupe slice. Max, mugging for the camera, has his arm draped proprietarily, if not exactly affectionately, around her shoulder as she leans into his chest. No disapproving peers, either. When Courtney left her apartment to meet Max at the bar, her roommates called after her, “Make sure to bring him back.” She and Max rode off to the inn “with everyone at the bar waving and giving the thumbs up.”
Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.
Here is Max’s seduction technique: “ ‘So,’ he asked scooting in next to me. ‘Are you coming back with me tonight?’ ”
Here is how Courtney reacted: “Around 1:30, I told Tucker that I would, in fact, go home with him. ‘Oh, I know,’ he replied. ‘We have a cab waiting, let’s go.’ ”
It helps, of course, that there’s currently a buyer’s market in women who are up for just about anything with the right kind of cad, what with delayed marriage (the average age for a woman’s first wedding is now 26, compared with 20 in 1960, according to the University of Virginia-based National Marriage Project’s latest report); reliable contraception; and advances in antibiotics (no more worries about what used to be called venereal disease). No-fault divorce, moreover, has pushed the marriage-dissolution rate up to between 40 and 50 percent and swelled the single-female population with “cougars” in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. On top of it all is the feminist-driven academic and journalistic culture celebrating that yesterday’s “loose” women are today’s “liberated” women, able to proudly “explore their sexuality” without “getting punished for their lust,” as the feminist writer Naomi Wolf put it in the Guardian in December.
Wolf devoted her 1997 book Promiscuities to trying to remove the stigma from . . . promiscuity. On the one hand, she decried the double-standard unfairness of labeling a girl who fools around with too many boys a “slut,” and, on the other, she lionized “the Slut” (her capitalization) as the enviable epitome of feminist freedom and feminist transgression against puritanical social norms. Wolf’s point of view is today mainstream. It’s the underlying theme of Eve Ensler’s girls-talk-dirty Vagina Monologues, performed every year on Valentine’s Day on college campuses across the country. A chapter from Promiscuities titled “Sluts” has made so many women’s studies reading lists that term-paper mills sell canned essays purporting to dissect it. A group calling itself the Women’s Direct Action Collective issued a manifesto in 2007 titled Sluts Against Rape insisting that “a woman should have the right to be sexual in any way she chooses” and that easy availability was “a positive assertion of sexual identity.” In other words, if people call you a whore because you, say, fall into bed with someone whose name you can’t quite remember, that’s their problem. Of course, if a man mistakes a woman being “sexual in any way she chooses” for consent to have sex, it’s still rape.
The same feminist academics pooh-pooh concerns about the long-term effects of the hookup culture, arguing that it’s essentially just a harmless college folly, akin to swallowing goldfish, which young women will outgrow after graduation with no lasting scars. As long as they take precautions against disease and pregnancy, the current wisdom goes, it might even be good for you: a sort of rumspringa for the non-Amish in which you get your girls-gone-wild urges out of your system before you settle down to have babies. Pepper Schwartz, a longtime sex columnist and a sociology professor at the University of Washington, told ABC News in November:
Before, guys did this gross kind of sexual behavior, and we said, “Boys will be boys,” but now it’s boys and girls. . . . It’s a period of flexing their muscles and they will look back and say, “Oh, God, what was I thinking?” They will have the permission I didn’t have in my generation to act out, get drunk at frat parties and hook up with somebody.
Schwartz seemed unaware that booze-fueled hooking-up lasts well beyond the frat-party years. Thanks to late marriage, easy divorce, and the well-paying jobs that the feminist revolution has wrought for women, the bars, clubs, sidewalks, and subway straps of nearly every urban center in America overflow every weekend with females, young and not so young, bronzed, blonded, teeth-whitened, and dressed in the maximal cleavage and minimal skirt lengths that used to be associated with streetwalkers but nowadays is standard garb for lawyers and portfolio managers on a girls’ night out. The prelude to the $50,000 wedding these days isn’t just the budget-busting shower—although that’s de rigueur—but the bachelorette party, in which the bride and her BFF’s don their skinnies and spaghetti straps and head to a bar to be hit on, sometimes bride and all, by whatever males are bold enough (the typical accoutrements of the bachelorette party are a $15 “ironic” veil for the bride and a sculpted replica of a male sex organ that’s often brought to the bar).
All this takes place to a basso profundo of feminist cheerleading. Wolf’s op-ed in the Guardian praised the uninhibited sexual “self-expression” of the four female leads in Sex and the City, especially the 40-something Samantha (hitting 50 in the 2008 movie), who, during the six seasons that the series ran, racked up nearly as many sex partners (41) as her three coleads combined—and Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte were no slouches themselves in the quickie department. “Did not thousands of young women . . . breathe a sigh of relief or even liberation watching Samantha down another tequila, unrepentantly ogle the sex god at the end of the bar, and get richer and more beautiful with age, with no STDs or furies pursuing her?,” Wolf gushed.
Urban life, furthermore, turns out to imitate Sex and the City. A survey reported in the New York Daily News around the time of the film’s release revealed that the typical female resident of Manhattan, who marries later on average than almost every other woman in the country, has 20 sex partners during her lifetime. By way of contrast, the median number of lifetime sex partners for all U.S. women ages 15 to 44 is just 3.3, according to the Census Bureau’s latest statistical abstract.
As might be expected, many males would like to help themselves at this overladen buffet. But there’s a problem: While it’s a truism that the main beneficiaries of the sexual revolution are men, it is only some men: the Tucker Maxes, with the good looks, self-confidence, and swagger that enable them to sidle up successfully to a gaggle of well turned-out females in a crowded and anonymous club where the short-statured, the homely, the paunchy, the balding, and the sweater-clad are, if not turned away outside by the bouncer, ignominiously ignored by the busy, beautiful people within.
Out of such anxiety was born the “seduction community,” part band of brothers, part nakedly commercial and ferociously competitive business enterprise. The birth of the seduction business coincided neatly with the sexual revolution: with the 1970 publication of sometime film editor Eric Weber’s bestselling manual (later made into a movie) How to Pick Up Girls. Left behind like flares, double-knits, and dancing the Bus Stop, the art of the pickup was reborn in the 1990s and rebranded as an exact science. A cadre of guru-like leaders appeared with a set of elaborate rites, precisely defined techniques, and an acronym-laden private language known only to initiates—purposely designed to appeal to men, whose minds seem to thrive on ritual, hierarchy, and complex esoterica (think baseball statistics, Scout badges, the military, the Catholic Mass, and the Freemasons).
A UCLA graduate and former comedy writer who calls himself Ross Jeffries devised a hypnosis-based technique he calls “neuro-linguistic programming” that formed the basis of his 1992 book, How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed. Jeffries pioneered the coinage of distinctive seduction lingo—his most widely used neologism: “sarging,” named after his cat Sarge and meaning trolling the bars for desirable women—as well as the use of the Internet. His website, Speed Seduction, is going strong hawking CDs, DVDs, software tutorials, and personal coaching in pickup techniques. Jeffries’s commercial success launched a thousand imitators: Grow Your Game, Double Your Dating, Real Social Dynamics, Alpha Seduction, Seduction Base, Seduction Chronicles, Seduction Lair, Seduction Science, Blissnosis, and so forth. All the sites, many of them with chat rooms for seeking advice and trading conquest yarns, peddle self-help books, CDs, DVDs, and other merchandise. They all feature pictures of scantily clad supermodel-like females and the same acronym-laden jargon ultimately traceable to Jeffries: a “PUA” is a “pickup artist”; an “AFC” is an “average frustrated chump” who hasn’t paid a guru to learn how to be a PUA; an “HB” is a “hot babe”; an “IOI” is an HB’s “indicator of interest” in a PUA, such as leaning in his direction or “accidentally” brushing his hand.
Jeffries’s most famous pupil is a Canadian-born former stage magician called Erik James Horvat-Markovic who subsequently changed his name first to Erik von Markovik and later to just plain Mystery. Most would-be pickup mentors assume new names, perhaps to signify their new identities. Ross Jeffries’s real name is Paul Jeffrey Ross. David DeAngelo of Double Your Dating was born Eben Pagan. Real Social Dynamics’s Tyler Durden (after the character in the 1999 movie Fight Club) is actually named Owen Cook. (Durden coined the phrase “chick crack” in reference to astrology, palm-reading, spells, ESP, dream-analysis, handwriting analysis, personality tests, and other New Age-y preoccupations of females that make great openers for men willing to feign interest in them.) Mystery’s identity transformation was the most thorough, successful, and influential. His 2007 book, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed, is probably the most widely read of the seduction manuals, and a Mystery-hosted reality series, The Pickup Artist, ran for two seasons on VH1 in 2007-08 (the show’s luster was somewhat diminished after it emerged that the winner of the first season’s get-the-girl sweepstakes was a professional actor instead of the video-game programmer that he said he was).
Mystery also pioneered the now-widely imitated weekend-long “workshops” or “boot camps” in hotels aimed at turning AFCs into PUAs nearly overnight. Attendees are shepherded to bars for hands-on experience by master-PUA “trainers” with their own pseudonymous monickers (Captain Jack, HiRoller, Keychain, and so forth). The boot camps aren’t cheap. Mystery’s website, Venusian Arts, doesn’t list prices, but the three-day workshops marketed by Venusian Arts’s top competitor, Love Systems—run by Nick Savoy (real name Nicholas Benedict), a business partner of Mystery’s until a nasty 2007 split—cost $2,997 apiece, with a $999 deposit. And buyer, beware: Although nearly all the master PUAs, including Mystery himself, insist that in their former lives they were socially hopeless geeks who had scarcely ventured within five feet of a nubile woman, many of the trainers, at least at Love Systems, have backgrounds in sales or show business and may not really resemble the introverted IT guys and cubicle nerds who seek their advice. Watching video-clips of workshops in session, with flashily attired mentors strutting and spurting acronyms in front of earnest pupils in search of arm candy will remind you of nothing so much as those all-day “Get Rich Buying Foreclosed Property for Pennies” seminars that target another male yearning.
In the late 1990s, Mystery developed a precise and exacting “algorithm” of moves and routines—pre-scripted lines to be practiced in the field—that are virtually guaranteed (according to Mystery at least) to lure a female into your bed after just seven hours in her company from a cold turkey meeting in a public place. And an ultra-good-looking female to boot. Mystery advises his readers not to bother with any female who rates lower than a 6 (“OK-looking,” in his parlance) on the 1 to 10 scale, while assuring them that if they follow his advice, they can readily score a “supermodel hot” 10. The fundamental strategy is to “demonstrate higher value” (DHV, another Mystery acronym), to appear so fascinating that the woman will want to prove her worthiness to you, not the other way around. You don’t buy her a drink; you offer to let her buy you one. You don’t give her your phone number; you get her to give you hers, in what Mystery calls a “number closing.” If she asks you what you do for a living, you don’t mention the drone desk job that you actually hold down; you tell her you “repair disposable razors” (the choice of a Mystery disciple). You “peacock” (yet another Mystery coinage), which means donning outlandish, attention-grabbing attire. Mystery’s signature peacocking wardrobe includes a black fur bucket hat and matching black nail polish and eyeliner. On The Pickup Artist, he sported a seemingly inexhaustible supply of exotic headgear and man-baubles.
Mystery, Savoy, and Durden were leading characters in Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss’s 2005 bestseller The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The book, packaged to look like a King James Bible with an oversize imitation-leather cover and Manga-inspired illustrations, is half self-promotion (Strauss, a self-described former dork who shaved his head, Lasiked his eyes, and took up the name Style after he joined with Mystery, runs his own web-based seduction business, Stylelife Academy) and half chronicle—a monotonous chronicle—of his nightly sarging adventures while living in a pickup-artist group house near Sunset Strip through which drifted an endless string of sordid-if-great-looking strippers, porn stars, model wannabes, and other female inhabitants of the Hollywood demimonde, including Courtney Love at the tag end of her career in between drug-rehab stays. The book’s high point comes when one of the housemates persuades Paris Hilton to give him her phone number at a taco stand.
If it all sounds cheesy, tedious, manipulative, obvious, condescending to women, maybe kind of gay, it’s because it is. But here’s the rub: This stuff works. If you think men who peacock look ridiculous and unmanly, click onto the photo-website Hot Chicks With Douchebags, where spectacular-looking babes hang on the pecs of preening rednecks and “Jersey Shore”-style guidos sporting chest-baring shirts and product-stiffened fauxhawks. Watch the video “Learn Enough Guitar to Get Laid” on YouTube (three chords, max). In June 2005, Craig Malisow, a reporter for the Houston Press, trailed 24-year-old Bashev, a Bulgarian-born graduate student in engineering at Rice University and self-styled pickup expert, to a series of bars and clubs in Houston. Bashev had no intention of telling the 20-something HBs he met that his day job consisted of working with multivariable calculus. Instead he pointed to his shoes and informed them that he was a “foot model.” Then he launched into his canned opener: Did they think reality shows were “really real”? Sure, two groups of females on whom Bashev tried that line rolled their eyes and smirked, but three bars (and the same routine) later, he was relaxing in a lounge chair reading a shapely brunette’s palm (chick crack plus “kino,” a Mystery-ism that refers to getting a woman to crave your touch), and soon enough “her fingers were gently grasping the backs of his wrists,” Malisow observed. Within minutes, Bashev had not only number-closed but gotten a date for the following Wednesday.
Pickup mentors are relying, consciously or sub, on the principles of evolutionary psychology, which uses Darwinian theory to account for human traits and practices. Robert Wright introduced the reading public to evolutionary psychology in his 1994 book, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. He summarized what biologists had observed in the field: that among animals—and especially among our closest relatives, the great apes—males often fight each other for females and so the most dominant, or “alpha,” male has access to the most desirable, and perhaps all, of the females. But it’s the female of the species who ultimately makes the choice as to which member of the pack she will deem the alpha male. “Females are choosy in all the great ape species,” Wright wrote. He also noted that, for example, a female gorilla will be faithful—forced into fidelity, actually—to a single dominant male, but she will willingly desert him for a rival male who impresses her with his superior dominance by fighting with her mate. That’s because, as Darwin postulated, evolution isn’t merely a matter of survival of the fittest but also of the replication of the fittest, “selfish genes,” in the words of neo-Darwinian Richard Dawkins. Driven by instinctual desire for offspring, male primates chase fertile females so they can replicate themselves, while female primates choose strong males on the basis of survival traits to be passed on to young ones.
Evolutionary psychologists like David Buss in The Evolution of Desire (1994) and Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind (2000) have elaborated on these theories, arguing that the human brain itself, with its capacity for consciousness, reasoning, and artistic creation, evolved as an entertainment device for male hominids competing to impress the females in the pack. Dennis Dutton’s new book, The Art Instinct, makes much the same argument. Evolutionary psychologists postulate that the same physical and psychological drives prevail among modern humans: Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are naturally monogamous—but only until a man they perceive as of higher status than their current mate comes along. Hypergamy—marrying up, or, in the absence of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up—is a more accurate description of women’s natural inclinations. Long-term monogamy—one spouse for one person at one time—may be the most desirable condition for ensuring personal happiness, accumulating property, and raising children, but it is an artifact of civilization, Western civilization in particular. In the view of many evolutionary psychologists, long-term monogamy is natural for neither men nor women.
All of this is obviously pure speculation, if imaginatively rendered and bolstered by anthropological observations of hunter-gatherer societies today. Furthermore, there is a troubling chicken-or-egg circularity in evolutionary psychology arguments: How did the female hominids know the males were trying to entertain them unless their own brains were sufficiently evolved to appreciate the effort? You can’t get a gorilla to recognize Mozart or a cave painting. It’s equally easy to laugh out loud at a 2007 interview Mystery gave to Salon in which he asserted that a woman’s scratching the back of her hand when a man talks to her is an “Indicator of Interest” because “[T]hat area of the hand gets itchy when a girl is attracted to a man from ape days, you know—it means, ‘Groom me.’ ” Yet evolutionary psychology offers a persuasive explanation for many things that we are supposed to pretend are culturally conditioned: that the natures of men and women are fundamentally different and that, pace Naomi Wolf and the cougar-empowerment movement, women don’t get sexier as they get older, at least not in the eyes of the man sitting on the next barstool. Youth and beauty are markers of fertility. As Mystery wrote in his book, it may be sexist to say out loud, but women are well aware “that their social value can be rated largely on their looks” or they wouldn’t devote so many hours to toning muscles and adjusting makeup.
Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren’t so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children’s schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male sex.
It’s increasingly common for women to air their husbands’ perceived faults to both their friends and the general public. There is now an entire blog, My Husband Is Annoying, in which an anonymous wife and her guests post pictures of the schlubs they married and freely criticize their beards, sleeping habits, irritating questions, and dopey poses in photos. Slate’s Hanna Rosin called her husband a “kitchen bitch” because he had dared to cook dinner from a recipe that she wanted to try herself. The Atlantic’s Sandra Tsing Loh, going through a divorce because she found her husband less romantic than her adulterous lover, detailed the personal and sexual failings of her friends’ spouses—in print. New York Times columnist Judith Warner last year wrote about a friend who told her that she wished she were Michelle Obama, married to the president instead of to her own husband, whom she was “tempted to throttle.” And these are not the hardcore feminists.
Not surprisingly, given that “head of the household” is a phrase that cannot be uttered in today’s egalitarian homes, many women satisfy their yearning for dominance by throwing themselves at bad boys or even worse. The very day, March 17, 2005, that Scott Peterson—sentenced to death in California for killing his wife and unborn son and throwing their remains into San Francisco Bay—took up residence on San Quentin’s death row, he received three-dozen phone calls from smitten women, including an 18-year-old who wanted to become his second wife. According to an April story in People, Peterson is still being flooded with letters from female admirers almost five years later, many of the mash notes containing checks to pay for his commissary charges. That’s par for the course on death row, where the rule is: The more notorious the killer, the more fan mail and marriage proposals. The most fan-mail-saturated killer in San Quentin is Richard Allen Davis, who in 1993 kidnapped 12-year-old Polly Klaas at knifepoint from her home in Petaluma, Calif., killed her, and buried her in a shallow grave.
Infatuation with killers is extreme and rare behavior (although perhaps not so rare as we imagine—this past summer a 16-year-old Virginia girl developed an online crush on a 20-year-old horrorcore enthusiast who called himself “Syko Sam.” Syko Sam is now awaiting trial for allegedly bludgeoning the girl, her parents, and her best friend to death). But it’s a fair signal of impending social chaos when the prevailing female attitude is dissatisfaction, either mild or intense, with the workaday Joes—the good-provider beta males—whom one has already married or, in the era before the sexual and feminist revolutions, would be planning to marry because chasing alphas in bars was not a respectable option for the female middle class.
Wives have historically reported less satisfaction from their marriages than husbands, but according to the National Marriage Project’s latest report, their discontent is growing: fewer than 60 percent of wives report that they are “very happy” in their marriages, in contrast to more than 66 percent in 1973. (Male marital happiness has declined, too: from 70 percent to 63 percent.)
“Women initiate two-thirds of divorces,” W. Bradford Wilcox, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, told me.
With no-fault divorce since the 1960s, that can be divorce for no reason at all. The reasons wives divorce their husbands can be legitimate or illegitimate—adultery and abuse or lack of intimacy, growing apart, or having found someone more exciting. And because it’s no-fault divorce even when there might be actual fault, the spouse left behind is often treated unjustly in dividing income and property, and frequently regarding custody of the children.
Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because sex outside marriage is now so readily available no one need buy the cow, the percentage of married people ages 35 to 44 has declined precipitously over the last 40 years: from 88 percent of men and 87 percent of women in 1960 to 66 percent of men and 67 percent of women in 2005. Since first marriages after age 45—when a woman’s fertile years are finished—are statistically rare, almost everyone who is ever going to marry is already married by that age. The percentage of children growing up in fatherless families—a chief risk factor for social pathologies—has risen concomitantly: from 9 percent of all households with children in 1960 to 26 percent today. On the plus side of the ledger, these negative trends don’t affect the college-educated as severely. College-educated women have significantly higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce than women without college degrees. The bad news is that such women, who tend to marry late, have far fewer children. In 2004, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, 24 percent of women ages 40 to 44 with bachelor’s degrees were childless, in contrast to 10 percent of women without a high school diploma. Marriage is slowly becoming a preserve of the elite, who pay a price in severely reduced fertility.
In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller wrote:
Our ancestors probably had their first sexual experiences soon after reaching sexual maturity. They would pass through a sequence of relationships of varying durations over the course of a lifetime. Some relationships might have lasted no more than a few days. . . . Many Pleistocene mothers probably had boyfriends. But each woman’s boyfriend may not have been the father of any of her offspring. . . . Males may have given some food to females and their offspring, and may have defended them from other men, but . . . anthropologists now view much of this behavior more as courtship effort than paternal investment.
That’s a pretty fair description of mating life today in the urban underclass and the meth-lab culture of rural America. Take away the offspring, blocked by the Pill and ready abortion, and it’s also a pretty fair description of today’s prolonged singles scene. In other words, we have met the Stone Age, and it is us.
Living in the New Paleolithic can be hard on women, many of whom party on merrily until they reach age 30 and then panic. “They’re at the peak of their beauty in their early 20s—they’re luscious—but the guys their age don’t look as good, so they say to themselves: ‘Why do I want to get married?,’ ” notes Kay Hymowitz, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, who is writing a book about the singles crisis. “Then they get to age 28, 29, and their fertility goes down and they’re not quite so luscious. But the guys their age are starting to make money, they look better, they’ve got self-assurance, and they’ve also got the pick of the 23-year-olds.”
Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas. That is the underlying message of what is undoubtedly the most deftly written and also the darkest of the seduction-community websites, the blog Roissy in DC. Unlike his confreres, Roissy does not sell books or boot camps, and his site carries no ads. He also blogs anonymously, or at least tries to. (Purported photos of Roissy circulating on the Internet show a tall unshaven man in his late 30s with piercing blue eyes and good, if somewhat dissolute, looks.) The pseudonym Roissy derives from the chateau that was the setting for sadomasochistic orgies in The Story of O, the French pornographic classic of the 1960s which featured a beautiful young woman who couldn’t get enough of being violated and flagellated by masterful men. Roissy maintains that he is not an S&M-fetishist but picked the pseudonym because “chicks dig power.”
His blog combines Darwinian analysis, harshly hilarious commentary about the current erotic landscape (one entry guffaws at the chin-pulling psychiatrists who diagnosed Tiger Woods’s “romp through a battalion of trashy, deluded babes who thought they would be the next Mrs. Woods” as a sign that Woods needed to “get help”); graphically raw accounts (be forewarned!) of Roissy’s own pickup adventures in the singles-packed neighborhoods north of Washington’s Dupont Circle; features such as “Girlfriend or Fling?” in which readers look at photos of females and decide whether any of them is worth a second date, and a sense of impending social meltdown as the family crumbles and beta men are increasingly denied access to women.
His post for the last D-Day anniversary, titled “Then and Now,” consisted of two photographs demonstrating women’s changing perception of what constituted an alpha male: a tough and battle-weary GI circa 1944 who looked as though he had just scaled the cliffs of the Pointe du Hoc and a particularly epicene-looking Mystery from his VH1 show, “peacocking” with eyeliner, soul patch, and goggles on top of his head. Roissy’s blog is an unflinching look at female nature at its very worst: the acquisitiveness, the narcissism, the self-absorption, the selfishness, the superficiality, the brainlessness, the wayward lust as powerful as any man’s.
Roissy’s deliberately outrageous posts are a source of controversy. In a write-up on George Sodini, the man who shot up a gym near Pittsburgh last August, killing 3 women before turning the gun on himself, Roissy contended that Sodini, whose diary revealed that he had not had sex for 20 years before the incident, was simply a frustrated beta barred access to women by the sexual/feminist revolution and that “anything was justified” to avoid the “walking death” of celibacy. In other words, Sodini was a hapless victim of the sexual revolution.
Earlier that year Roissy got into an online contretemps with Conor Friedersdorf, a frequent guest-blogger for Andrew Sullivan, over the “neg,” a pickup artist tactic that involves teasing an especially attractive woman about her looks instead of complimenting them, on the theory that she probably gets so many compliments that she brushes them off. It’s an updated version of Lord Chesterfield’s dictum to his son that “a decided and conscious beauty looks upon every tribute paid to her beauty only as her due, but wants to shine and to be considered on the side of her understanding.” Friedersdorf, however, declared that the negger’s intention “is to reduce her self-esteem, or even worse to play on her insecurities with the knowledge that some women react to that technique by having sex or hooking up as a coping mechanism.” Roissy responded by making fun of Friedersdorf’s name.
If Roissy has anything resembling a mentor, it is F. Roger Devlin. Trained as a political philosopher—he has a doctorate from Tulane—Devlin holds no academic post, and his oeuvre, besides a published version of his doctoral thesis on Alexandre Kojève, consists of a series of essays and reviews concerning relations between the sexes for the Occidental Quarterly, a paleoconservative publication whose other contributors tend to focus obsessively on the question of which ethnic groups belong to which race. The dubious nature of the venue aside, Devlin deftly uses theories of evolutionary psychology to argue that the sexual revolution was essentially aimed at restoring primate-style hypergamy to human females and freeing women to try to capture the attention of and mate with the alpha males of their choosing instead of remaining chaste until their early marriage to a decent and hard-working beta (only the very best looking young women stood a chance of snagging an alpha in the old days).
“The sexual revolution in America was an attempt by women to realize their own [hypergamous] utopia, not that of men,” Devlin wrote. Beta men become superfluous until the newly liberated women start double-clutching after years in the serial harems of alphas who won’t “commit,” lower their standards, and “settle.” During this process, monogamy as a stable and civilization-maintaining social institution is shattered. “Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization,” Devlin told me. “It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life.” This isn’t necessarily so anymore in today’s chaotic combination of polygamy for lucky alphas, hypergamy in varying degrees for females depending on their sex appeal, and, at least in theory, large numbers of betas left without mates at all—just as it is in baboon packs. The aim of Mystery-style game is to give those betas better odds.
In a series of interviews, Devlin declined to disclose his own marital status or lack thereof. Nonetheless, in an email to me concerning the disinclination of many of today’s career- and sex-chasing young women to learn, say, how to bake an apple pie to please their husbands, he wrote: “My own experience with pies is limited to buying Tastykakes at Seven-Eleven.” That suggests either nonexistent or unpleasant domestic arrangements which may in turn explain why Devlin’s writing about the feminist and sexual revolutions frequently shades from the refreshingly politically incorrect into the disturbingly punitive.
Devlin may be spot-on when he writes, “The female sexual revolution, as typified by Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmo, amounted to a program of getting women to follow all their worst instincts” or “Part of the folk wisdom of all ages and peoples has been that sexual attraction is an inadequate basis for matrimony.” Yet his review of Wendy Shalit’s 2007 Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good was a merciless evisceration of an author who is on his side, at least insofar as urging her sisters toward sexual restraint and the selection of mates based on criteria other than alpha allure.
Devlin took Shalit to task for implying that young women are essentially the innocent prey of vulpine men who have taken advantage of the sexual revolution as a means of “pressuring” them to surrender their virtue and that in order for young women to recover their “self-esteem,” they ought to hold out for a man who “proves his worthiness.” Devlin argued, perhaps correctly, that Shalit’s position amounted to a socially conservative inversion of the boilerplate feminist view of women as passive victims of evil males who “use” them, evidencing a blindness to women’s responsibility for their all-too-frequent complicity in the seduction scenarios that both feminists and social conservatives decry. Girls Gone Mild, obviously pitched to a youthful readership and couched in a upbeat women’s magazine tone, might have come across as simplistic and overly romanticizing of a fragile-flower female sex. Yet Devlin was so unwilling to give Shalit any quarter—and so eager to heap 100 percent of the blame on women for the current sexual chaos—that he went so far as to declare, “Men do not have to prove their worthiness to anybody.” Really? Anybody?
The word misogyny does come to mind here (men get a free pass but women don’t). Nonetheless, his writings—and those of many of the self-styled alpha bloggers who have taken up his theories—can also be read as cris de coeur. Underlying the bravado is a deep and understandable anger on the part of many men at having to live through the sexual and familial wreckage of the New Paleolithic.
A Washington, D.C., player-blogger who calls himself Roosh (you can subscribe to his Game Tips Newsletter: “7 Tips for Incredible First Dates,” “How to Pick Up Girls in Coffee Shops,” etc.) put up a post in November that he titled “Single Women Who Purposely Have Children Are Committing Crimes Against Humanity.” It was essentially a lament about Roosh’s own childhood growing up without a father at home:
My parents divorced when I was 8, and for the next twelve years or so I visited my dad two nights a week. So when I got out of college, I was only 30% man. . . . Unfortunately many guys have been raised by their fathers but they might as well be fatherless—their dads didn’t teach them s—, sometimes because they didn’t quite know how to be a man themselves. This has happened because Western society has not demanded that men act like men.
The comments section to that post was an echo chamber of rage and sadness: “My dad was largely absent from my upbringing—he was a checkbook, not a presence.” “My dad was an alpha, and due to his philandering my parents divorced when I was 5. I never saw my dad once after that.” Not surprisingly, the “seduction community,” at least as it manifests itself in blog comments on seduction websites, skews heavily toward divorced men still furious at their ex-wives and single young men whose experience with absent or feminism-cowed fathers, or with young women who have not deemed them sufficiently exciting, has made them cynical about all relationships with the opposite sex.
Roissy often writes of a coming “apocalypse,” a thorough collapse of civilization thanks to the stalling of its reproductive matrix (wonderful for him as a sensualist, catastrophic for everyone else). Right now marriage as an institution is still reasonably intact—but mostly for the demographically shrinking educated classes. The decision to halt the advance of the New Paleolithic ultimately lies with women, the mate-choosing sex, just as it lay with women to bring the hypergamous sexual revolution into being. What are the chances of that? “Women have been told for so long that it doesn’t matter what they do [sexually],” one of Roissy’s regular commenters, an Ottawa historian who goes by the online name of Alias Clio, said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think [the female sexual free-for-all] has been good for women, but it’s what they’ve chosen. And it’s always hard for women to see beyond the personal level.”
Roissy himself, although arguably the most jaded of all the seduction bloggers, is actually a closet moralist who longs for the more constrained past when women dressed modestly (“Girlfriend or Fling?” is all about the kind of clothing and bearing that mark a girl as a “pump-and-dump”), refrained from swearing like sailors, stayed out of men’s beds (except his!), and generally conducted themselves like wife-and-mother material (although he says he has no intention of getting married himself).
“The best way to get a man to propose marriage is to be a virgin,” Roissy wrote in one of his posts. As a poster child for everything that has gone wrong with the monogamy-based family structure that underlay the flourishing of the West, Roissy singled out one of his regular female commenters, a 28-year-old former bar dancer who calls herself Lady Raine and who on her MySpace page posted photos of herself in derriere- and tattoo-revealing attire alongside a photo of the 6-year-old son she bore out of wedlock to an alcoholic ne’er-do-well. Besides reposting the photos, Roissy taunted Lady Raine as “Single Mom” and told her that her son, whose sole exposure to adult men seemed to be her parade of boyfriends, would likely grow up either gay or a sociopath. (In retaliation, Lady Raine outed Roissy, posting his name and place of employment on her own blog—although Roissy maintained in an email to me that it was all an “experiment” in “identity borrowing.”)
The whole point of the sexual and feminist revolutions was to obliterate the sexual double standard that supposedly stood in the way of ultimate female freedom. The twin revolutions obliterated much more, but the double standard has reemerged in a harsher, crueler form: wreaking havoc on beta men and on beta women, too, who, as the declining marriage rate indicates, have trouble finding and securing long-term mates in a supply-saturated short-term sexual marketplace. Gorgeous alpha women fare fine—for a few years until the younger competition comes of age. But no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives (the Darwinist explanation is that those traits are predictors of marital fidelity, assuring men that the offspring that their spouses bear are theirs, too). And every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.
A week after Courtney A. posted her story about her one-night stand with Tucker Max, he posted a surprisingly kind and courteous response that also happened to make it clear what young women need to do:
Courtney, I know you’re only 21, so that explains a lot, but baby, please understand: We all reap what we sow. . . . I’m sure there are a lot of guys who will be sweet and gentle with you in bed and really pay attention to your needs, but the guys you come out to sport f— probably won’t be among them. . . . I told her I wanted to eventually settle down and have kids. I do. Maybe not now, but soon enough that I think about it now. Of course, traveling around the country f—ing all kinds of college girls who throw themselves at me probably doesn’t help.
No, it probably doesn’t.
Charlotte Allen, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus website, is writing her doctoral dissertation in medieval and Byzantine studies.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/new-dating-game?page=12
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