Gender Parity and Shoulder Pads

Margaret Wente, in The Globe and Mail, raises the issue of women in science from an economic and political perspective. She asks whether "Gender Parity Trumps Excellence in Science?"

The assumptions Wente makes in this article are quite staggering.

First, Wente's entire premise - that we should give up gender politics and not fund gender parity because we need excellence in science -  is based on what is not in a report done by experts!

"Nowhere in the entire 252-page [Strengthening Canada’s Research Capacity: The Gender Dimension] report is there an inkling that anything but men and culture might be to blame for this sorry state of affairs. Nowhere is there any speculation as to why this gender imbalance exists in every developed country – including those with better child care. Nowhere is there a hint that one reason more women aren’t entering these fields is that maybe they don’t want to ... Yet as far as this report is concerned, it’s all about discrimination – both subtle and systemic. The authors – all senior academics, with some gender-studies experts – also claim that the feminization of science and technology would be a very healthy thing."

Wente dismisses the findings of the entire report for being "as dated as the shoulder pads [she]wore in 1982" and bases her claims, rather, on the speculation that women don't want such jobs (and takes the writers of the report to task for not doing likewise!).

I have discussed the argument before that women simply do not choose jobs in certain areas of science and IT,  regardless of the opportunity to do so - the claim implies or outrightly states there is something inherent in women's genetics that are responsible.

A 2008 article in the Boston Globe by Elaine McArdle argues also that women simply do not want to work in the hard sciences, that the gender gap there is because women "self-select" other careers, mostly involving people.

The McArdle article is better argued than is Wente's but still does not really address the depths of discrimination in many societies. McArdle cites stats from countries in which women's legal rights  to job choice do not result in more women in certain fields.

To me, the fact that women need legal guarantees in job choice screams volumes about the still-extant depths of discrimination. If the choices were so rosy and easy, why legislation?

The title of Wente"s article itself demonstrates the discrimination so ingrained in our society,  in spite of its author claiming to applaud girls who win science prizes. Where is the proof that gender parity and excellence in science are mutually exclusive? Can we not have both? Might gender parity increase our scientific excellence? Why run immediately to a negative assumption about the effect of women on excellence in science?

Discrimination - probably of the kind cited in the report Wente castigates -  exists and acts on females from cradle to grave; it is so ingrained it becomes normal.

Imagine the work involved in becoming a top-funded researcher in one of the hard sciences - the years of study, the financial drain, the restricted social life, the subsequent years of experiment and publishing. Hard for anyone, male or female.

Then add to all of it ongoing discrimination - the articles on the role of women, on the biological clock, on the reduction of excellence in science, on the resulting slip in reputation and economic clout that Canada will surely suffer, on the claim that women don't really want these careers, and add in discrimination in school (my stepdaughter in grade three was told that girls don't really "do" math when she wanted to enter a math contest), in the wider media,  and generally in society - and no one should  be surprised that women don't want to entertain that battle.

And don't forget the glass ceiling, the difficulty getting hired, the derision of men who currently hold such jobs or would like to.

Wente claims that it's mostly an economic issue - our money would be better spent strengthening our competitiveness in certain fields:


"Canada desperately needs to strengthen its competitiveness in the so-called STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Unfortunately, adopting the recommendations in this report would be a giant step back. In effect, Dr. Marsden and her team want to dilute our research efforts by politicizing the way the money gets handed out. For example, they want more money to go to younger and more junior academics (so that more women will be eligible)."

Just how will we "dilute our research efforts" by funding younger and more junior academics, and more women? Those now working in the STEM fields won't be there forever, just as their research will not remain current. Surely, we increase our competitiveness by drawing on the brain power in our whole society and planning for the future.

Last, Wente throws out the spectre of China and India, overtaking us because they supposedly don't concern themselves with gender parity - "That’s not what India and China are doing."  Fact is, they are!

India has a scholarship program precisely to encourage more women to enter into or return to science and technology. It's a federal program run by the Ministry of Science and Technology. A Google search "percent women scientists India" also turns up a vast number of position papers and professional organizations in India with the goal of gender parity.

China is even further ahead. In 2010, nearly 37% (36.91) of all jobs in science and technology were held by women. The Chinese government has scholarship programs to encourage more young women to become scientists - applicants in every region can apply for a scholarship of roughly the equivalent of $12,000 US.

If China and India best us in research, perhaps it will be because they are attempting to draw on the brain power of their entire population, male and female, regardless of ages-old discrimination against women.

Wente may have ditched the dated 1982 shoulder pads she used to wear; she should also ditch the dated  and outmoded attitudes.

The Answer in the Question

Elaine McArdle in her Boston Globe article ("The freedom to say 'no'") - May 2008 - writes about research in economics and the social sciences which shows that smart and highly educated (in math and science) women choose jobs other than those in IT, physics, and engineering. They self-select jobs in which they deal more with organic substances and language, and less with tools and inorganic substances.

These data apparently surprise researchers who sought the reasons for such choices in physiology, education, or at the door or glass ceiling of the workplace. But they found that it’s not about brains, aptitude, ability, or out-and-out barriers; it’s mostly about choice, they say. Women choose freely.

Yet, McArdle reports that researchers don’t know why women choose as they do. They don’t know how experience and socialization work in shaping women and their choices.

But doesn’t the answer about selecting jobs lie exactly there, in the answer to the question of how culture shapes women and their choices from infancy?

We have a willful and collective blindness, in certain quarters at least, about the role of ideology in shaping people’s choices, especially when it has to do with the role and place of women in our society.

We are not so blind when it comes to subcultures, though. It’s interesting that a couple of years ago in Texas, with the FLDS cult, we had no such trouble understanding how constant exposure to certain ideas from infancy shapes women’s beliefs and makes them accept behavior that is harmful to themselves and to their children.

I am frankly pessimistic that researchers will even look to see the results of exposure to beliefs about what it means to be a woman in a dominant culture. If they did, they might have to admit that women actually have less choice than they “find” in the research McArdle reports.

Researchers will continue to look everywhere but where the truth lies. The real answer to the Freudian question about what women want is that it’s only a rhetorical question.

Elaine McArdle is a writer in Cambridge, Mass. She has co-authored a book with Dr. Carolyn Bernstein called The Migraine Brain.

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - December 28 - January 2

Ready to go for the new year and saying goodbye to the last of last year's posts. Enjoy!

Faux or No? - December 28/09

Would That Be Real Chinese Food? - December 29/09

Gambia and a Few Good Pounds - December 30/09

Happy New Year - December 31/09

Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four - Dec 27 to Jan 2 - January 2/10






(credit for red door photo)

Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four - Dec 27 to Jan 2

I'm looking forward to another year of showcasing interesting, incredible blogs and websites.

The blog Women of History features mostly stories about women, past (often medieval) and present and spotlights women's issues around the world. Most posts are quite short and many are excerpts or summaries of other articles with links. The posts are really wide in their range - from Louisa May Alcott to Diane de Poitiers and Cleopatra. I really enjoy this blog for its range, its frequent posts, and its sheer volume of good information (826 posts in 2009!).

The website for the Poetry Foundation has so much to offer and would take several days to fully explore, but what resources they have! "The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience." If you love poetry, you'll love this site.

I came across this site for a documentary by Leo Sacks. The film, which is in production, is A Taste of Heaven: The Heartbreak Life of Raymond Myles, Gospel Genius of New Orleans about the life and death of the gay gospel star. His music is amazing, as his life and death story is for the intolerance and homophobia he endured. The site for the film showcases his incredible singing.

Last but not least, a humour blog - something I haven't checked out before. Of Cabbages & Kings is funny and intelligent with lots of interesting literary and cultural references.

Hardwiring 101 for Shoppers

I am not a violent person, but do wish from time to time that Charles Darwin would rise from his grave and give some of the "scientists" who pervert his ideas a resounding whack on the head. "YOU ARE WRONG!" Darwin would shout.

I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry when I read Richard Alleyne's article "Shopping styles of men and women all down to evolution, claim scientists" in the Telegraph.co.uk. The "scientist" whose work Alleyne writes about is Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan: 

"Prof Kruger decided to conduct the study after a winter holiday trip with friends across Europe.

"After exploring sleepy little villages and reaching Prague, the first thing the women wanted to do was shop, Prof Kruger said, and the men could not understand why."

(I swear, I'm not making it up!)

Simply, women like to shop, know about sales and selecting the best quality goods because they were the gatherers in hunter-gatherer societies. When selecting nuts and berries, women had to be discerning and picky and know when the good stuff was available. So today, when shopping for scarves and sweaters, women are driven by the same imperatives. (No, really, I'm not making it up!)

Men, on the other hand, had to be analytical (the laughing/crying response is bubbling up again) and precise. Plan the hunt, which prey. Out and back quickly, no window shopping (maybe it's nausea I'm experiencing).

I am all for academic freedom and Professor Kruger's right to study whatever he wishes to, but I am amazed and angered by the ignorance he displays about Darwin, anthropology, and some obvious objections to his claims. (And I must be fair here. I have read only Alleyne's article about Kruger's work; however, from Kruger's quotes, I find enough material to object to.)

The most obvious is Kruger's use of Darwin. I don't claim to be an expert on Darwin and evolution, but I have read  The Origin of Species and have an interest as a lay person. The whole Galapagos trip made Darwin realize that in isolation, in a particular environment with particular features, species will develop because individuals with certain traits more successful for that environment will be more successful in reproducing. And eventually, the traits are ongoing prominent features which define (in the sense of a biological class definition) a new species.

Kruger makes a sweeping generalization about humans, assuming that in all environments in the very long hunter-gatherer stage of human existence there were no variations in a gendered division of labour regarding subsistence foraging and hunting. In effect, he is saying that all societies, in every geographical environment on the planet were static and homogenous. Sloppy evolutionist thinking here (and very common, too).

Anthropologists know differently. They know that the male hunter/female gatherer divide is not universal. There were many cases in which the roles were often reversed and/or shared, and places in which either hunting or gathering was non-existant because of the geography. The division of food-procuring labour was quite fluid, not the rigid one that Kruger's argument assumes. The variations preclude the universal existence of  hardwired shopping behaviour in women.

At the level of obvious objections, it's hard to know where to start, but a quote from Kruger works well:

Men on the other hand, decided in advance what animal they wanted to kill and then went looking for it. Once it was found - and killed - they returned home.

Does Kruger know that hunter-gatherer societies spanned more than two millions years? His claim is meaningless without details of time and method - like persistence hunting and hunting with weapons - details that are important for evolution. I also dispute the ease Kruger imagines in selecting and finding prey- it is called hunting, after all.

Also, obviously, with tired bodies and carrying a carcass which could spoil or be stolen by other humans or predators, who would stop and pick berries - or browse to look at the attractive yam foliage? Really, do we need evolutionary explanations when simple physical ones will do? Wouldn't similar kinds of limitations exist for gatherers when they had their hands full and were tired?

And, just as with the claims about women and maternal instinct that I discussed earlier this week, Kruger's claims leave out all the people who don't follow his pattern - men who like to shop, browse, and don't know in advance what they want; women who don't like to shop, who want to dash in and get that one specific item; couples who like to shop together; and all the millions of people in the world who neither can, nor want to shop at all. Even shopping isn't universal in the way Kruger understands it.

This steroetyping is insulting to everyone.

Kruger's research begs the question and is unscientific and illogical. I really do wonder whether Kruger has read Darwin. Nonsense like Kruger's is damaging, sometimes funny, but still damaging. More and more I am deeply suspicious of the agenda of some evolutionary psychologists.

And now I'm off to go Christmas shopping; I've planned all the purchases, have a list and just want to dash in, get the stuff and go home! Hmmm.


(man shopping photo credit)

Hardwiring 101 for Women

Evolutionary psychology has been trendy for nearly two decades, finding increasing numbers of human pursuits for which we are supposedly hardwired. Yet it is no coincidence that the field gained in both popularity and influence during a time of retro-conservatism and backlash against feminism.

Increasingly, evolutionary psychologists "find" that our essential nature conforms quite rigidly to a deeply conservative agenda. The religious right should embrace evolutionary psychology as its best and most helpful friend.

Scientists and psychologists in other areas have long questioned the aims and findings of evolutionary psychologists and researchers in related fields. Applying the laws of evolutionary biology to the human psyche has its detractors. Evolutionary psychology is by no means an uncontentious player in the field.

Even so, articles appear again and again, authoritatively telling us ("us" often meaning women) of the newest findings about motherhood and women's roles in society. One such recent article is "Femina Sapiens in the Nursery" by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal (Autumn 2009).

Hymowitz's article is more balanced than many I have seen and brings in reference to neuroscience, primatology, and genetics, but for all its discussion of the complex frontal cortex of women and their rightful place running the state department, Hymowitz leaves the overall impression that women are driven by hormones which are tanatmount to a "maternal instinct." And although she claims that she believes the answer to the question of female identity is a mystery, the article itself leaves far less room for it.

The article's subtitle - "The conflict between parenting and career is hardwired in the female brain" -  doesn't really relay the thrust of Hymowitz's argument. She acknowledges that women have a role to play in society, other than the mothering role, because of the overall development of the frontal cortex in humans generally. Women, like men, have developed the abilities necessary for careers. But a conflict will result because women have an even more primordial hardwiring to be mothers.

Feminists have long questioned the findings of evolutionary psychologists, especially as one of the main areas of investigation has to do with sexuality, mating, and offspring. Hymowitz believes that many findings of evolutionary psychologists will force feminists to admit defeat:.

Especially galling to feminists has been the field of evolutionary psychology, which proposes that evolution has fundamentally shaped human sexual and reproductive behavior—behavior that often seems to conform to the worst stereotypes.

I think that Hymowitz understands neither feminists nor the limits of the data she promotes.

Hymowitz offers two recent stories in the news about mothers who found it difficult to either stop breastfeeding or return to work, leaving a young child. Her first example:

Consider a recent article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic. Rosin finds that nursing her infant is holding her back from the work she enjoys, despite her plan for a fully egalitarian marriage... She combs through research on the health benefits of breast-feeding for babies and makes a convincing case that they aren’t as strong as experts have insisted. So does she quit nursing? She does not—even though, she admits, “I’m not really sure why.”

Why does Rosin continue? According to Hymowitz, it is because she has mammary glands. Isn't this begging the question? She has mammary glands which allow her to feed her infant, so she continues to use them because she has them!

The other story is by Katie Roiphe who describes an “'addiction to her newborn baby that left her indifferent to work."

Hymowitz ignores much in both stories. First, both Rosin and Roiphe are writers/journalists, and the first rule for a good story is to have conflict. I'm not saying that the stories aren't true, just that they are stories to be published and to compel readers - perhaps not the best examples.

Second, Hymowitz and others who make these arguments ignore the numbers of women who do not feel this conflict, or do not want or have children at all. She also ignores the data regarding women who neglect and/or abuse their children. She assumes the model of the nuclear family also, ignoring other arrangements in which mothers hand off the care of their infants to wet nurses and nannies. She also does not factor in the common social pressure to breastfeed or stay home with young children that many mothers feel, nor does she discuss the fact that many women would be reluctant to be full-time mothers, workers, and homemakers.

Finally, she ignores another compelling argument. While it is true that feminists "consider sexual identity a “social construct,” a human—or, to be more precise, a male—invention," it is not true that they deny that the females of the species carry and give birth to the offspring or have the equipment with which to feed them. Feminists, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, post-modernists, to name a few, do, however, question how much these facts influence identity, sexual or otherwise. So it is not to say that oxytocin has no influence on women, nor is it to deny that oxytocin may be the hormonal name for the "maternal instinct," rather it is to say that this hormone may not shape female behaviour to the extent that some would believe or wish.

The impetus to define women predominantly as mothers has been around for millenia; such a definition serves the patriarchal status quo. It is always interesting to trace the ways in which the claim is argued and supported, changing over centuries as human understanding of what it is to be human changes and as science and technology give us new tools with which to frame the hypothesis.

Women will be mothers; women will love and be connected to their children; women will find it difficult to leave their children and return to work. No argument from me and no judgement about women's choices. Women will also choose not to have children, will choose careers, will have children and regret it, or refuse to breastfeed.

Hymowitz asks "In the struggle for equality between the sexes, it keeps coming down to motherhood, doesn’t it?"  My answer to that is a definite, "No, it doesn't!" My regret is over how many people wish it were so.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book is Marriage and Caste in America.



I would like to invite Kay Hymowitz to my soiree.

The Answer is in the Question

Elaine McArdle in her Boston Globe article (May 2008) writes about research in economics and the social sciences which shows that smart and highly educated (in math and science) women choose jobs other than those in IT, physics, and engineering. They self-select jobs in which they deal more with organic substances and language, and less with tools and inorganic substances.

These data apparently surprise researchers who sought the reasons for such choices in physiology, education, or at the door or glass ceiling of the workplace. But they found that it’s not about brains, aptitude, ability, or out-and-out barriers; it’s mostly about choice, they say. Women choose freely.

Yet, McArdle reports that researchers don’t know why women choose as they do. They don’t know how experience and socialization work in shaping women and their choices.

But doesn’t the answer about selecting jobs lie exactly there, in the answer to the question of how culture shapes women and their choices from infancy?

We have a willful and collective blindness, in certain quarters at least, about the role of ideology in shaping people’s choices, especially when it has to do with the role and place of women in our society.

We are not so blind when it comes to subcultures, though. It’s interesting that last year in Texas, with the FLDS cult, we seem to have no such trouble understanding how constant exposure to certain ideas from infancy shapes women’s beliefs and makes them accept behavior that is harmful to themselves and to their children.

I am frankly pessimistic that researchers will even look to see the results of exposure to beliefs about what it means to be a woman in a dominant culture. If they did, they might have to admit that women actually have less choice than they “find” in the research McArdle reports.

Researchers will continue to look everywhere but where the truth lies. The real answer to the Freudian question about what women want is that it’s only a rhetorical question.

Elaine McArdle is a writer in Cambridge, Mass. She has co-authored a book with Dr. Carolyn Bernstein called The Migraine Brain.



I would like to invite Elaine McArdle to my soiree.

Defining Women, Inviting Violence

(November 25 is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and kicks off 16 days of activism to end violence against women. This post was written especially for the Bloggers Unite event in support of the UN initiative. )



It's no coincidence that second wave feminism and the civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies developed at a time when the nuture side of the nature/nuture equation was predominant. Both movements fostered the development of people according to their abilities, strengths, and dreams, rather than according to a rigidly essentialist view. Although the road was not without setbacks, both from within and from without, in the West we are in a place now where gender and race are somewhat less restrictive.

But it is no done deal, either. In the last several years - nearly two decades, now - there has been a backlash against the gains women have made. Susan Faludi was one of the first to write about the trend in her 1991 book Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women.

For the last few years, the nature side of the equation has made quite a comeback, with researchers from both science and humanities disciplines insisting that we are "hard-wired" for almost everything, including gender roles - the old, ongoing, reactionary, stifling, male-privileging gender roles.

And it's not surprising, considering that even women's modest gains undermine a centuries-old power structure bent on recapturing the little bit it has lost and shoring up its sagging infrastructure.

When Plato declared the world of forms more real than the material, when the Bishops of Christendom decided on the true nature of  Christ's relationship to God and the method of his incarnation, when the Roman church claimed apostolic succession from Peter for its bishop, the Vicar of Christ, women were excluded from the seat of power. 

The great abyss between male and female was effected and male privilege (sexual and otherwise) was entrenched in politics, religion, philosophy, and ideology.

The gender coup of classical Greece and its offspring Christianity led to definitions of women that control them and keep them subject to male power. The definitions are too, too familiar: women are defined as weak; emotional; caregiving; sexually depraved; fertile; enmeshed in nature, rather than reason; provided for man's succour, service, and sex.

 Woman is the chaste virgin queen or modest wife, valiantly eschewing her depraved nature and deserving of male protection, or the debauched woman, unwilling to renounce her evil ways, thereby making herself deserving only of male anger and abuse.

History is full of cases of violence against women perpetrated because they did not, would not, or could not live up (or down) to society's definitions of them.

Recent times are no exception. This year, on December 6th, is the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre in which gunman Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 female engineering students and 13 other students at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique. To the female engineering students he said, "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists."  Then he systematically gunned them down. Women do not become engineers, according to Lepine's definition - and not according to the definition of many who deplore women taking "men's jobs," a common complaint at the time.

Some of the most contested issues in society revolve around women, marriage, and reproductive rights. It's no coincidence that some of the most vocal, dangerous, and charged rhetoric centres on abortion, gay marriage (and the nature of marriage), family planning and birth control. For centuries, marriage, pregnancy, and the fetishization of motherhood have defined women and kept them in their place.

We see enormous concern about boys in a supposedly too-feminine world; we see the likes of the American group of male politicians who call themselves The Family and grant each other the right to subservient wives, sex with whomever they choose, and a will to power that would make Nietschze quake.

And we see sexual slavery, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and honour killings - all because our human societies define women in ways that invite it all. And we say it is in their nature.

We must have as many voices as possible saying that this must stop, but we must realize that it will never stop as long as we don't fight the battle where it starts - with definition, with words.

Jewish Women: Later 19th-Century Salons

guest blog by
Hels
Art and Architecture, mainly


I knew a great deal about the turn-of-the-century salon run by Gertrude and Leo Stein. But I had to rely on Bilski et al, Hertz and Wilhelmy-Dollinger for their original research on the 19th century history of women’s salons.

In the original post called Jewish Women: early 19th century salons, the main points were as follows. The salon allowed educated women to establish a venue in the privacy of their own homes. The women had to be well connected in their families, either to money or to culture. Since the husbands were busy with their businesses, the cultural role could legitimately be given to the wives. But male support was essential. In the salon, like-minded people could study literature, art, philosophy or music together, plus they could support both talented artists and writers. Each saloniere chose her own theme and selected the night of the week in which she wanted the salon to be held. Each saloniere had the responsibility to decide the salon's level of for¬m¬ality and the diversity of guests she favoured. As a result of the habitués and their conversations, the hostesses, guests and the arts flourished.

Schmid, Playing Schubert’s music, 1897

In reviewing the fabulous Jewish Museum Exhibition called Jewish Women and Their Salons, Deborah Hertz wrote: "Among the many difficult questions about salons posed by the exhibit, let us dwell for a moment on the problematic of the specifically Jewish salon tradition. Our curators claim very explicitly that over time more Jewish women hosted salons than Christian women did. If true, this is significant, since for a declassed Jewish woman, salon hosting could be a huge triumph over stereotype, considering that salons began as an aristocratic practice and were thought to set the tone for high culture. The curators make much of the outsider as insider notion; precisely because they were doubly marginal, as Jews and as women, the Jewish salonières became courageous modernists. They also argue that success in salon leadership helped bring about political emancipation, of particular importance for the 18th and early 19th centuries in central Europe. But both with modernism and with emancipation, we also must consider the dark side of success. We need to attend to how the Jewish salonières might have infuriated observers outraged at their extraordinary wealth, their connections to the powerful, and their exercise of patronage" (Hertz).

Herz raised a few of the key issues but there is another issue to be raised, I believe. The salonieres' roles in music, literature and philosophy were comprehensively considered, but I was particularly interested in their role as patrons of the visual arts. Some salonieres' families loved art above all other cultural pursuits, so their salons centred on paintings.

The salons’ impact on the art world could be seen at a time when wealthy non-French art buyers believed Impressionism belonged to the French tradition of shallow showiness. Jewish collectors, on the other hand, may have been less tradition-bound and more open to modern art. At least one salon was critically important. Carl Bernstein and Felicie Rosenthal Bernstein (1850-1908) married and left St Petersburg to set up their home in Berlin. Her salon was quite into modernity and artistic risk-taking. The Bernsteins were known as the first to buy French Impressionist art in Germany, and hang them on their walls in the salon. The artist Max Liebermann, later president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, was a regular particiant. At her salon, art discussions may have led to the founding of the influential Berlin Secession; she most certainly left a legacy to the Secession in her will..

Genevieve Straus was the daughter of the composer Jacques Fromental Halévy, widow of the composer Bizet and then wife of the successful lawyer Emil Straus. Her salon in Bvd Haussmann attracted literary intellectuals and political writers. Her large round drawing-room was decorated with wonderful art, including her own portrait by Delaunay. Remember the terrible Alfred Dreyfus trial, a military-political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s? Straus’ salon became headquarters of pro-Dreyfus supporters who managed to expose the French government’s involvement in the nasty army affair. Degas, Debussy and other anti-Semitic habitués stormed out of her salon in outrage, and never returned. Some salon regulars, who had enjoyed the Straus hospitality for years, crossed the street to avoid her.

Marcel Proust’s notebooks, given to Straus in thanks

Art historian and critic Bernard Berenson was Gertrude and Leo Stein’s greatest mentor. He showed them around the galleries in Florence, teaching them connoisseurship and helping them buy. In particular Berenson in¬trod¬uced Leo to Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Gertrude and Leo persuaded their cousin Etta Cone to buy Picasso drawings, whenever that artist was short of funds. Back in Paris, the Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. Their salon had walls that were packed with paintings and sketches, and art books were spread over the table so young artists could admire and learn from established masters. Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Marie Laurençin and Juan Gris, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire, frequented their salon. Even when Leo Stein moved permanently to Italy, Gertrude (and later Alice B Toklas) continued the Saturday night salon, providing food and mentoring to starving artists, especially those newly arrived from Eastern Europe.

Toklas and Stein in their Paris art salon

Finally back to literature and music. The intellectual orientation of Elsa Porges Bernstein’s family home was a powerful influence: Beethoven, Wagner, Goethe and Shakespeare. She ran Munich’s most famous salon, where the literary and artistic society gathered, and she was the author of Königskinder, with music by Humperdinck. Her father, Heinrich Porges, was very fond of Richard Wagner’s music and played a very active part in establishing the Bayreuth's festival. Elsa’s daughter Eva Bernstein later studied violin in Paris where she married Klaus Hauptmann, son of writer Gerhart Hauptmann. Gerhart, Otto Brahm and Richard Strauss had been intimates member of Elsa’s salon. In these cultural circles the links between Jewish and non Jewish families were very close.

Why did this 100 year period of non-Jewish/Jewish dialogue about culture come to a rather sad end? The disruption of war, leisure time being spent on travel and new mass media meant women of leisure spent their time differently. Polite, witty conversation was of little interest by 1900.

Bernstein’s rather modest salon

Read:

1. Bilski, Emily et al Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation, Jewish Museum New York, 2005.

2. Hertz, Deborah Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin, Syracuse UP, 1988.

3. Wilhelmy-Dollinger, Petra Berlin Salons: Late C18th to early C20th, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/berlin-salons-late-eighteenth-to-early-twentieth-century

Money Only Talks; Micro-Credit Sings and Dances

The Grameen Bank  may look like a conventional bank, but the resemblance ends at the front door. Unlike most banks, owned by rich men, the Grameen is owned by poor women. The bank does not take its clients to court for failing to pay, and interest can never exceed the amount of the original loan.

Economist Professor Muhammad Yunus began the bank as a village project  in Bangladesh in 1976. It became a formal bank in 1983 and has helped millions of poor people.

The Grameen bank lends money to the rural poor, mostly women, without collateral and with terms that would make a conventional banker faint. The women use their loans for self-employment based on their existing skills.

They weave, make mats, do wood and bamboo work, fatten cows and goats, and do embroidery. (The photos are from the bank's gallery.)

The bank is successful. In 27 years as a formal bank, Grameen has made a profit in all but three years. Since 1995, it has taken no money from donors and has been self-reliant.

The repayment rate is 99%!

Professor Yunus believes that micro-credit can go a long way towards eliminating poverty - at least by half by 2015.

So far, the results support this claim:

Grameen Bank has today over 7.5 million borrowers. 65 percent of them managed to clearly improve their socio-economic conditions and lifted themselves out of extreme poverty.

Professor Yunus has written two books about the bank and his theories of a more broadly defined capitalism - Banker to the Poor and The Poor Pay Back.

Professor Yunus and the Grameen bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus won the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

The bank's website has a wealth of information about its history, principles for lending, FAQs, and results.

I would like to invite Professor Yunus to my soiree.

Cursing Silence

I first learned of Linda McCarriston in Bill Moyers' film series The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets that I showed to a first-year literature class. I was awed by her poetry, especially the work she read from her 1991 book Eva-Mary.

Many of the poems in Eva-Mary deal with McCarriston's cruel and violent childhood with a father who beat her and her brother, and sexually abused and assaulted both McCarriston and her mother.

In these poems, McCarriston, with pointed and precise language, transfixes the reader, as her gaze does not waver from the brutal scenes of her past.

My earlier post -Voice of Silence - reminded me of McCarriston's poetry, especially the poem "To Judge Faolin, Dead Long Enough: A Summons" from Eva-Mary. McCarriston summons the spirit of the judge who sent her mother back to her violently abusive husband. He would not hear the agony of the woman appealing to him. In short, he gave her testimony little weight when set against the preservation of the family and the law.

In her interview with Bill Moyers, McCarriston says that this poem is an example of "flinging the curse."

Reminds me of Solnit's curse on Mr. Very Important II and my borrowing of it to curse Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham - To Judge Faolin: "a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization".


I would like to invite Linda McCarriston to my soiree.

Voice of Silence

I had never heard of Rebecca Solnit until I read her LA Times article "Men who explain things." In the article, Solnit discusses the imbalance that creates both women's literal and virtual silence.

She tells of an occasion when a "Mr.Very Important" dismissed her book in favour of another very important work on the same subject - but Solnit had written that other very important work (River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West).

On another occasion a "Mr. Very Important II" sneered at her assertion that the group Women Strike for Peace had contributed greatly to the ending of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1960s. Solnit was correct.

Solnit uses both examples to show how women's voices are silenced in various ways around the world. Solnit experienced sneering and overtalking, but women are silenced legally and violently too. She reminds us of some "Islamic countries where women's testimony has no legal standing."

At this point, I had planned to say how pleased I was to discover Solnit's other books in a bio of her, but something happened in Canada last week that totally distracted me and demonstrates how the forces of silence are still present and powerful everywhere.

Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham of the Ontario Superior Court would not accept the evidence of a member of the provincial parliament in the influence-peddling trial of Larry O'Brien, mayor of Ottawa. The member has to commute between home in Ottawa and the provincial parliament in Toronto, leaving HER family. Lisa MacLeod's testimony is, thus, unreliable because of the distraction this causes, and the judge felt that he "must assign it little weight." And just where is it that a woman's testimony has no legal standing?

I will borrow Solnit's description of Mr. Very Important II for Mr. Justice Douglas Cunningham: "a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization."

I would like to invite Rebecca Solnit to my soiree.