The Stargazer's Sister: A Novel by Carrie Brown

What odd choices! That's my initial impression of The Stargazer's Sister, a novel based on the life of Caroline Herschel, astronomer and assistant to her illustrious brother William (discoverer of the planet Uranus).  Brown makes several significant changes to the historical record (most notably, deleting the existence of William's son and notable scientist John Herschel), adds several imagined characters (two of whom are inserted to give Caroline's life some romance), and omits some of the documented events in Caroline's life that I personally find most interesting.  

Overall, I still found this a relatively engaging novel, especially as it made me think about the entire genre of historical fiction. Obviously there are always gaps in the historical record, which is where the imagination of the historical novelist comes in. Perhaps just as obviously what draws an author to a particular subject will be the aspects of that subject that they find more interesting -- which may or may not align with the reader's interests.

Which is to say that Carrie Brown is most concerned with Caroline's internal life, especially her intense devotion to her brother and to his work, and she is not as concerned with Caroline's intellectual life and with her scientific accomplishments.  Personally, I found this disappointing.  The Stargazer's Sister is not the book of Caroline Herschel's life that I would have written, or that I would have preferred to read.  That doesn't make it a bad novel, but I would warn readers primarily interested in the Herschels to read some nonfiction instead (like The Georgian Star, which is quite engaging), or even Caroline Herschel's memoir. 

Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes

I'll start by saying that I think a more accurate subtitle for this book would be something like "A discussion of the gender controversy in sports in the United States, and how it has been weaponized by the Trumpian Right Wing" 

That makes the book a bit of a puzzling read for me because:

• I am not an American
• I am not a sports person

But given how the very existence of trans people (particularly trans children) has become a key way for current "conservative" parties to generate outrage, I thought this book could be a timely and perhaps informative read.

My thoughts? 

First of all, Katie Barnes is an excellent journalist.  They have been covering trans folks in American sport since 2016 (the book was published in 2023), and bring their in-depth knowledge, personal experiences, and full professionalism to the discussion. This feels particularly impressive given that Barnes was a child athlete and is trans themselves. No matter how understandable it might have been for Barnes to write either a rant or a polemic, they have not done so.  Instead Fair Play is a thoughtful and well-informed book that benefits from Barnes' empathy, insight, and deep knowledge of the subject matter.  Throughout they go beyond the obvious to tell the human stories of people like Lia Thomas or Mack Beggs (who are more often treated as talking points than people), while also diving into what we know about the science of gender-based athletic difference, the history of post Title IX American women's sport, and the known history of trans/intersex people's involvement. 

In other words, Barnes did an excellent job with Fair Play.  

Does that mean that I think everyone should read this book? The answer for me would have to be, yes but. And the reasons for that but really boil down to the fact that fundamentally, this is a sports book and an American book:

• Example #1:   Barnes expresses as a supposed truism that "Sports are important; all kids should be able to play them".  This sounds admirable, but I don't believe sports as a whole actually believes that in any real way.  For example, when some of the trans/gender-non-conforming athletes interviewed for this book speak about how they felt isolated or excluded within their sports, my gut reaction was "I'm so sorry you experienced that, but that's sports and sports people for you. That's exactly what they're like." 

In other words,  I find it sad but unsurprising that gender-non-conforming kids have the same experience within sports that I did as an unathletic nerdy child. 

• Example #2:  The book is full of "inside baseball" details about American sport. The most literal example comes when Barnes describes the experiences of a kid who started their sports career playing girls softball before transitioning. I have sympathy for the difficulties that kid faced, but:

•  the idea that softball is gendered as a female is weird (which Barnes acknowledges. Unlike in Canada or Australia, in the US softball is purely a women's sport.)  
•  the idea that softball and baseball are somehow completely different sports is hilarious to me. (I played league softball as a kid.  IIRC, the differences are underhanded pitching in softball vs. overhand pitching in baseball, a different ball, and a few minor rule differences around strikes and outs. In other words, softball and baseball are essentially the same sport! We aren't comparing rugby and rhythmic gymnastics here.) 

In other words, as with many books, its specificity is both its weakness and its strength. Which is to say, once again, that fundamentally Fair Play is both an American book and a sports book.  

My last observation is that I found the discussion in Chapter 8: The Breakup in Women's Sport heart-breaking.  This is where Barnes covers the attempt of a group of 'old school feminist sports advocates' and a group of 'new school LGBTQIA+ activists' [my words, fwiw] to come up with a common position and an agreed-upon set of policies around trans inclusion in women's sport. 

They failed. 

The resulting fracture was seized upon and weaponized by those who wanted nothing more than to stoke hatred and division (ie/ Trumpian politicians). You could say that we are seeing the repercussions of that failure everywhere today (including in the despicable laws recently enacted by the Alberta government).

What happened?  

A reductionist view is that one side favoured "fairness" while the other favoured "inclusion". But in some ways the division reminds me of a division that I've seen in the world of computer programming.  

To be a good UI designer (and to make a truly awesome user interface), your designs must make the tasks that most people do most of the time easy and intuitive. Sure, there are less-common tasks, and there are people who need to do unusual things. But if your user interface focuses on that 20%? Disaster. Most people will dislike your software, avoid using it, use it incorrectly, or even hate it.

On the other hand, to be a good back-end programmer, you need to obsessively concentrate on edge conditions. If you don't account for every 'uncommon' case that could possibly happen, your code will fail -- probably spectacularly and at the worst possible time.  In other words, to make a system work you need to spend 80% of your time concentrating on the 20% of edge conditions that could make everything fall apart. 

 In the world of computer programming, the best software comes from teams with both sets of skills, of course, where each kind of expert can focus on their area of expertise. Then the team can work together to build something great.  

But outside of the technical sphere? Well, even within it we live in a world with UIs built by back-end specialists, and back-ends that fail because they don't account for easily predictable situations. And outside? I wonder what kind of software we'd have if every bug was treated as a deliberate provocation and if stoking outrage was a goal written into the product specs?

Overall, Fair Play is an interesting and often thought-provoking read. 

One book leads to another: Half-Breed, The One and a Half Men, The Northwest is Our Mother

The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet: an activist political and social history of the Metis people

The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin: an extensively researched political biography of two Metis activists active from the 1930s through the 1960s

Half-Breed by Maria Campbell: a personal memoir showing the impact of Metis social and political history through the story of one Metis woman

OR, in reverse order....zooming out from the story of a few decades of a single life (Campbell), to one thread through political and social life of the Metis people over the course of two men's entire lives (Norris and Brady), to the story of a people (Teillet).

One book leads to another: Half Breed by Maria Campbell leads to The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin leads to The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet

First I re-read Half Breed.

I read Maria Campbell's book many years ago, when I lived in Saskatoon.  Even then, before she was perhaps technically an elder, she was an honoured elder Metis, a noted indigenous activist, and a legend.  Our circles didn't touch, but that was because I was an unremarkable white juvenile activist who wouldn't have rated an introduction even if we had happened to be in the same place at the same time.  Maria was a celebrity, someone who people would name-drop if she'd been at their baby shower or potluck, or especially if they'd rated an invitation to her place at Gabriel's crossing at Batoche.

What did I think of Half Breed on re-reading it more than a half-century after publication?  First, how the book still resonates in so many ways.  The vividness of Campbell's stories leap from the page, especially as she tells the stories of her childhood living as one of the 'road allowance people' in North-Central Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 50s.  Those are stories of poverty and struggle, discrimination and official abuse -- but also of happiness and family and connection, at least until her mother dies and her father falls apart, leaving her and her younger siblings to struggle and ultimately be separated for many many years.  Broken families are nothing new for indigenous peoples in Canada.  Neither are the tough choices and unhappy circumstances that lead to sex work, addiction and often despair, as they did for Campbell in the 1960s.

Campbell overcame.  She reclaimed her life and her heritage, became politically active, and wrote the story of her life in the early 1970s.  In the process, she became one of the first indigenous voices to be published in Canada, and the fore-mother of a new literature.

So, how did this book lead me to One and a Half Men?  When Campbell talks about the forces that destroyed her father's life, she talks about his deep disappointment with the failure of political organizing by the Metis people in Saskatchewan in the 1940s, and his disappointment with the noted Metis organizers Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris.  She also talks of the many betrayals of the Metis by the CCF government (who are otherwise heroes of mine).  It made me curious.  I googled Brady and Norris, and discovered One and a Half Men, a political biography written by someone I had actually known in my long-ago Saskatoon days -- Murray Dobbin.

Murray wasn't someone I knew well -- he was of the notable political generation just ahead of mine.  But the combination of a book by someone I knew and a history I did not made finding and reading this book irresistible.

One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin

My initial reaction:  Wow.  What an amazing book.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying that everyone should drop everything right now to read One and a Half Men.  It's an extensively researched and competently written political biography, but it's probably not a book that will change how you see the world.  It isn't written with ground-breaking literary quality. It isn't the self-expression of an oppressed people and it doesn't tell a universal story of interest to people everywhere in the world.

But writing One and a Half Men was an extraordinary act of respect and service to the Indigenous communities of Saskatchewan and Alberta.   Murray Dobbin spent years diving into archives and interviewing friends, families, and political allies and foes of the legendary Metis political organizers and activists Malcolm Norris and James Brady.  Because he did so, a detailed record exists of their decades-long political struggle from the 1920s and 1930s in Alberta (where they were responsible for the grudging creation of the Metis Settlements by the Alberta government) through the late 40s, 50s, and 60s in Saskatchewan where they nurtured the spark of Metis Nationalism through dark times while mentoring and inspiring future generations of Metis activists and leaders.

This book is an important historical record of one part of the long struggle of Indigenous peoples against colonial settler society.  You can read it to learn more about the racism, neglect, hostility, and extraordinary vindictiveness* of mid-20th century government officials towards Metis and Indigenous peoples, particularly those who dared to advocate for themselves.  More importantly, it allows people today to see and honour the strength and dedication of two extraordinary men who spent their lives in service to their people.

Metis people would undoubtedly themselves tell this story differently -- and next I should seek out The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet to see how.  But because Dobbin did the research, asked the hard questions, and donated his records to the Saskatchewan archives, researchers have much more detailed source information than they otherwise would.  

 * The supremely competent but politically outspoken Norris was fired from his Saskatchewan government job mere months before he qualified for a pension by the Liberal Ross Thatcher government -- who then went on to make sure that he was fired from his replacement job at the Prince Albert Friendship Centre.  Norris died of a stroke soon afterwards.

The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet

In her introduction to One and a Half Men Maria Campbell explains that her immediate and visceral reaction to the book was that she did not want Murray Dobbin to write about her heroes -- even though Murray was a friend and the book was excellent. She did not want a white historian to tell Brady and Norris's story.  

After reading Jean Teillet's history of the Metis People, I completely understand Campbell's reaction.  

Teillet's book is the story of the Metis people, told from the perspective of the Metis people.  

What does this mean?

The Northwest is our Mother is comprehensive and extensively researched, and tells the stories that are important to the Metis.  One example:  the book includes a few pages explaining the brief visit of a white grifter to the Forks in the early 19th century.  Why?  This is not a particularly notable event!  But there is a traditional Metis song mocking this man and his pretensions, so of course it is of interest to the Metis to understand the song's origins.  Another example:  Teillet describes in detail the Metis perspective on what she calls "the Northwest Resistance" -- when the Metis' heart-breakingly reasonable requests of the Canadian government were met by Gatling guns at Batoche.  She doesn't describe events during the Resistance that involved only First Nations peoples, even though those are important to understanding the overall arc of events. Teillet is telling the story of the Metis, not an objective history of Western Canada.  A final example:  Teillet focuses on a single decade of Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's lives, the decade of activism and struggle that led to the creation of the Metis Settlements in Alberta.  In doing so she gives a much better perspective on the importance of those settlements -- because despite the profound disappointment Norris and Brady felt at their limited land and their limited autonomy, the settlements remain to this day the Metis' only secured land base and so remain profoundly important to the Metis people.

But it's not only the content of Teillet's book that is striking.  She speaks in a Metis voice. Her language is sometimes non-academic. She focuses on the perspective and experiences of the Metis in all situations.  She includes stories about how these historical events impacted members of her family, and how those events are remembered today. In telling the story of the Metis she not only explains the origins and history of her people, she tells us what the Metis remember, what they valued and who they are. 

Dobbin is alway sympathetic to his subjects, but he writes about Metis lives, Metis politics, and Metis history.  He is always at at least one remove, the objective observer.   Not to mention that the very title of his book is offensive: it is based on a historical story that positions the Metis people as 'other' and not entirely human: 

"...in the early 1850s...he asked a Catholic priest about a nearby group of boisterous men. They were dark skinned but obviously not Indians. 'They are the one-and-a-half men,' the priest replied, 'half Indian, half white and half devil.'"

And while Dobbin researched and wrote within 10 years of Norris and Brady's deaths, and so had access to people who knew them and remembered events described in his book-- reading Teillet's book reminds me that the stories important to the Metis would not have been lost.  Those men's families, their compatriots, their communities: they remember.  They told and continue to tell their own stories, both as inheritors of the oral culture of their indigenous ancestors and as descendants of highly educated and literate French Canadians and Hudson's Bay traders.

The Metis did not need Murray Dobbin to tell Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's story, any more than the Woman's Movement of the 1970s needed Murray to create a 'Men's Auxilliary' and hold bakesales to raise money for them (which he apparently did in his youth).

So, in the end, the most amazing and impressive of the three books is undoubtedly Teillet's.  Not only does she tell the Metis stories about themselves that they need to know and remember,  her book clearly explains to white Canadians just who the Metis are.  Which makes it clear just how insulting it is when pretendians with some tiny random fraction of indigenous ancestry call themselves Metis.  

Everyone knows your mother is a witch by Rivka Galchen

This book has a great title.  Who wouldn't pick it up off the shelf? The title also really captures the voice of the protagonist and the tone of the writing.  It's thematically appropriate too.  If there isn't a book award for titles*, there should be, and Everyone knows should be nominated.

Title aside, Everyone knows your mother is a witch has a lot to recommend it. First of all, it's short.  Yeah for short books, and especially for short historical fiction!  There's a time and a place for wrist-busting world-building, but Everyone knows shows that you don't need to include pages of historical background, detailed descriptions of places, people, and things, or write in an accurate historical dialect to capture something essential about a time and a place and a person.  Instead, Everyone uses the voices of the accused witch (Katharina), her neighbour Simon, and the depositions of Katharina's accusers to build a compelling picture of an aged widow whose sharp eyes, sharper tongue, and complete lack of tact turn much of her community against her.

So read about Katharina Kepler, the illiterate mother of Imperial Mathematician (and famed physicist) Johannes Kepler, laugh at her observations of the ducal governor Einhorn (the false unicorn), smile at her fondness for her cow Chamomile, and ponder the fate of this "frighteningly intelligent woman -- also a fool". 

You won't regret it.

(*The Diagram Prize is awarded to the book with the oddest title, which is not at all the same.)

The future of another timeline (a review of Trouble and her friends by Melissa Scott)

Reading Trouble and her friends made me nostalgic.  Remember when we thought that Usenet would evolve into an entirely different world that was separate from, but connected to our own?  When we visualized it as a place of abstract shapes and arbitrary physical laws, a virtual frontier where outlaw crackers would battle through corporate Intrusion Control Entities (ICE) for data or for valuable code?   Remember when we thought the internet would be "Cyberspace"?

As I was reading Scott's book, I was reminded of the title of Annalee Newitz's latest book:  The future of another timeline.  Trouble lives in the future of a timeline not our own.... the future as imagined in 1993 or so, a future where you visit cyberspace by plugging a cable directly into your augmented brain.  A future that is an oddly hopeful dystopia where dispossessed kids can develop world-shaking skills, and world-shaking reputations.

I wonder if Scott is ever nostalgic for that future too? It seems so remote from us now.  The internet is ....just so ordinary.  It's out-of-date websites that local businesspeople don't have the access or the skills to update with their COVID-19 opening hours (if any). It's corporate news sites, struggling to find ways to gather the money to do journalism. It's advertising tracking you through your days.  It's working from home, doing yoga from home, having video calls with your pet. It's the crazy uncle you used to only have to talk to at Christmas posting offensive political memes on your Facebook page.  It's community and an excuse never to talk to anyone directly, all at the same time.

Unless you're William Gibson (who scares me), we suck at predicting the future.

And all of that is a digression from saying that Trouble and her friends is a well-imagined world with engaging characters, an interesting plot, and interesting ideas.  Why haven't I read more Melissa Scott?  I need to scare up more of her books, and visit more of her past futures.

Summer will show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Pages: 329
Published: 1936

This is an odd novel.

It does some things very well.  I'm not sure I've ever read anything that seems to capture so well the experience of living through momentous events.  As you live your life, you don't necessarily know that you're living through something that history will regard as significant.  And as the experience drags on, day by day, week by week, month by month...well, you have to eat, and get dressed, and be hungry or bored just as you would if History weren't happening. Your friends will still misunderstand you, your ex-husband might still betray you for the most personal of reasons.  And the fact that you're literally part of a Communist plot might not feel as important to you as your lover's life or happiness.

Some parts of the characterizations are also skilful.  The entire first section of the book captures in a very plausible way the interior life of an upper class British woman of the mid-19th century.  Mrs Willoughby of Blandameer is both focused on perfectly meeting the obligations of raising her children and of managing her estate, and is impatient with them.  The doctor's wife is a mouse who is fiercely, secretly opposed to meddling in her neighbour's life. The lime kiln keeper is equally indifferent to the expectations and the griefs of his mistress.

And yet, the novel does some things so badly.  It's disjointed:  there are jumps in time that don't really make sense.  The fatal, compelling attraction of the main character to her ex-husband's mistress Minna isn't well drawn, and the previous mutual attraction between the ex-husband and Minna seems implausible once you meet both characters. It also assumes things you may not be familiar with:  if you don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 you might not realize that the characters are in the midst of them, and the ending of the novel will not have the same resonance if you don't recognize that Sophie is reading the Communist Manifesto.

I picked this up at the library, initially thinking that it was an imprint of the Virago Press. Instead it's a similar 'lost classics' imprint from the New York Review of Books.  It has a similar interest:  in the moment, it is impossible to tell which books will be thought to be important by a later era.  And yet, the books that "don't last", that aren't characterized as "classics", and that don't join the "canon"....can still be interesting reads.  This is one of them.

Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine

Men take more risks than women, are more competitive, and have a greater drive for both sex and dominance.  Women are more nurturing, take fewer risks, and value fidelity over sexual novelty.  These differences are rooted in human biology.  Over thousands of generations women bore and raised children while men hunted, leading to the evolution of fundamental differences between the sexes.  We see similar differences in a wide variety of other species.  In general males compete for females, while females bear and raise young.  Testosterone is the primary mechanism that drives these sex differences.  When we see a young man in a hot car, aggressive stock traders, or risk-taking sky divers, we're seeing testosterone at work.

You are familiar with this story.  It is simple and is widely understood.  It has only a single flaw:  it's not supported by the modern science of sex difference.

Take for example the concept of 'risk-taking'.   Who is more likely to take risks?  The answer turns out not to be simple.  What kind of risk you are talking about?  A physical risk?  A financial risk? A social risk?  What are the circumstances under which you are asking the test subject to take the risk?  Who is being asked to take the risk and what is their background?  Are we asking a Chinese woman who is a part of a social group of her peers to gamble a trivial amount, a man to take the social risk of disagreeing with his friends on a matter of principle, or a young woman to decide whether or not to have a baby?  (As it turns out,  if you look at mortality rates per 100,000, in the US you are 20 times more likely to die as a result of a pregnancy than as a result of skydiving).

When you look at the research, who takes which risks depends critically on who is being asked, the particular risk under consideration,  and the circumstances under which the risk is presented.  And, in the end, there is no such thing as a generic 'risk-taker'.  Day traders are no more likely than average to enjoy wing-suit base jumping.  In short, the biological sex of the test subject is not the defining criteria that determines what their risk-taking behaviour will be like, not even when you consider the highly gendered lens through which 'risk' has historically been defined for the purposes of social science research.

Testosterone Rex doesn't deny that there are differences between men and women, or deny that evolution has played a role in human biology.  That would be silly, even if Fine does wish that she had the nerve to claim "Testicles are a social construct" just to see people's reactions.  (Not to mention that it would give her an excuse to discuss a species of fish whose testicular development does in fact depend on the individual fish's social status.) 

Instead in this book Fine surveys the state of research on sex difference and dissects the mythology of testosterone. She argues that there is no such thing as biology unaffected by culture, especially for the human species. She also speculates that perhaps the very lack of fundamental behavioural differences between women and men found by modern research is how evolution has manifested itself in humans: after all, our flexibility to adapt to wildly varying circumstances is the basis of our success as a species.  Large and hard-wired differences between the sexes would leave us less adaptive.

Testosterone Rex won the 2017 Royal Society prize for popular science books.  It's easy to see why:  the book is comprehensive, rigorous, relevant, and entertaining.    Nevertheless, I didn't find a copy in stock at a book store until I hit New York City in January.  I hope the book gets the audience that it deserves.

The only woman in the room: Why science is still a boy's club by Eileen Pollack

I have a M.Sc. in Physics.  I'm a woman.  I did not go on to get a Ph.D.  I've never worked as a scientist.

I have a story that I tell when I'm asked about my history.  I think of it as my "just so" story.  It is a little fable that that makes my choices sound logical and satisfying.  I pull it out when I talk to young people about career choices and career progression, at networking events, or when I reveal my academic background to interviewers or colleagues.

As is the nature of such stories, it has been polished and abbreviated over the years.   While the story has a core of truth, it omits much more than it tells:  the anxieties, the uncertainties, the dead ends, and the mistakes.

Eileen Pollack is about 10 years older than I am.  She has a B.Sc. in Physics from Yale.  She did not do graduate work after she completed her bachelor's degree and has never worked as a scientist.  She is a novelist and author.

The only woman in the room is Pollack's attempt to get beyond her own 'just so' story to understand and explain why she did not become a scientist, and in doing so, to talk about factors that still keep women from becoming scientists.  The core of the book is Pollack's own story,  supplemented by "woman in science" research and with interviews with women who are scientists, who aspire to be scientists, and who, like Pollack, once aspired to be scientists.

The summary version of Pollack's story is that she chose to become a writer rather than a physicist because she lacked encouragement to pursue physics and lacked the self-confidence to do without encouragement.  She was pushed by a physics prof to expand her horizons beyond physics, then felt welcomed and validated by her writing professor and peers in a way that she never was in her scientific life.

When I read Pollack's story, I am staggered that she doubted her ability to become a physicist:  she won, and then turned down a scholarship to MIT.  As an undergraduate, she did original research in theoretical physics and was sponsored to present that research at a student conference. But she didn't know she was exceptional, and no one told her.  She took her initial awkwardness in the lab to mean that she lacked experimental talent, rather than understanding those failures as part of a learning process.  She didn't know, except in a general way, what her professional path forward as a physicist would have been, and lacked mentorship that might have helped her put her accomplishments in context or could have helped her understand the rewards and challenges that would have faced her as a scientist.

Did any of the factors that affected Pollack's decision to abandon physics influence my own decisions?  Like her, I got a terrible score in my first first year physics midterm, badly shaking my confidence.  Like her, I didn't know that the male undergraduates were completing their assignments collaboratively in a study group, instead doing all my own work throughout my undergraduate career.  Like Pollack, I ignored indications that my professors thought that I had talent, or did not understand them as such. (My experimental results from one first year lab were posted as an example for other students for a couple of years afterwards. In second year I received a physics scholarship.  No one told me that it was because in addition to getting good grades, I was asking interesting questions in class.)

Pollack cites research that shows that women need more encouragement to continue in science than men do, but receive less.  There are whys on both sides of that equation, of course.  But women may be less to blame if you consider that women start from a place where the paucity of women scientists itself sends the message that what they want to do is unusual, gives them fewer models to follow, and means they have fewer potential mentors who can address concerns particular to their experience as women.  And the fact that I feel defensive about women needing more encouragement also highlights another truth:  male is taken as the default, and when women deviate from that default their behaviour is seen as needing explanation. 

Pollack doesn't have answers to the "why" questions of women in science, and doesn't offer solutions.  She does expand the discussion past skills, aptitudes, and details of different program offerings to a more personal story, and to the consideration of the impact that more personal issues have on the lives of women who love (or once loved) physics.

Conflict is not Abuse by Sarah Schulman

This is not a book club book -- it's just an interesting read, even if the entirety of its contents can really be summarized by its title.

What does the title mean?  Basically, Schulman's thesis is that there is a destructive tendency in modern life to wrongly conflate conflict and abuse. People who find themselves in conflict with others will claim that they are being harmed, or abused, by the person they are in conflict with.  The claim of abuse puts them on a moral high ground, in some cases gives them access to the power of the state to end the 'abuse', and relieves them from the obligation to engage with the person they are in conflict with so that they need not understand their own role in and responsibility for the destructive interaction.

This conflation of conflict and abuse happens on the interpersonal level, where one domestic partner may call the police as a result of a dispute with their partner when they are in no physical danger.  It can happen within organizations, for example, when students suffering from a history of trauma insist that material related to their trauma not be taught in a classroom, as it is 'triggering'.  Or it can happen on a societal level, where white people may claim that they are being treated unfairly by the mere existence of anti-racism activism, because "White Lives Matter".

Why is this trend destructive?  First of all, it is damaging.  In our society, those who are abused are seen as worthy of sympathy and assistance, and those who perpetuate abuse are not.  The incorrect accusation of abuse relieves the accuser of the obligation to engage with the person with whom they are in conflict.  And although unpleasant, conflict is a normal part of life.  Learning to resolve conflict can be personally enriching, as doing so in a genuine way means examining your own role, taking responsibility, and gaining insight.  Resolving conflict can strengthen relationships instead of destroying them. 

Claiming abuse when there is none simply raises barriers.

Schulman hypothesizes that there are two fundamentally similar reasons for confusing conflict and abuse:  Supremacy and Trauma.  In a supremacy situation, the person with the most power in a relationship may claim -- and may indeed feel -- that they are being abused when in conflict with someone that has less power.  If someone resists your unjust attempts to control their behaviour, their resistance is not abuse, even if you feel that you have a "right" to command them.  Think of a police officer who is infuriated when you get  'lippy' by asking to see a warrant when they make unreasonable demands.  The second situation, of Trauma, arises when one party to a conflict has been abused in the past.  Because of their trauma, they may overreact to normative conflict, and, in a sad mirror of the Supremacy situation, be unable to tolerate difference or experience differences as abuse. Think of Israel and its inability to tolerate criticism of its treatment of Palestinians.

As you can guess from my examples, my primary interest in Schulman's hypothesis comes from mentally applying her thesis on a social level, although she spends at least as much time exploring interpersonal relationships.   It's a worthwhile read, even though I spent chunks of the book mentally arguing with Schulman about large and small points.  (Ever consider that Canadian nationalism is a form of resistance to overwhelming American economic and social power?  Or that whatever your personal beliefs about abuse and trauma, not everyone is going to be ready or willing to deal with their issues at the time and in the way that you feel is correct? )  But the book is thought-provoking, and gave me new tools for thinking about and understanding reactions in the Age of Trump.

A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollestonecraft

Published: 1792

Mary Wollestonecraft was one of the historical heroines of"Second Wave" feminism, identified as "the first feminist", and her defining book A Vindication of the Rights of Women lauded as "the first" published work of feminist writing.  The "firsts" weren't true, of course, but in the early days of academic feminism the claims drew a lot of attention to Wollestonecraft.  Wollestonecraft was certainly an early feminist in the Western tradition, and was unique in her era as a woman who supported herself by her writing.  She was also the mother of Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and Wollestonecrafts' own works presage Romanticism.

As you might imagine, Wollestonecraft has been the subject of many biographies.

I'm no longer sure why she initially drew my attention, but at this point I've read something like four of those biographies.  Wollestonecraft was a fascinating -- and difficult -- person.  No surprise.  The ordinary, less-stubborn, and more practical middle-class woman of the late eighteenth century became wives.  Failing marriage, they became dependents of their married siblings, or perhaps governesses or paid companions.   The truly unfortunate presumably became prostitutes and/or died in penury.  All of those fates were intolerable to Wollestonecraft.  Some combination of determination and luck allowed her to transcend her failed career as a governess and her failed career as a school proprietress, and allowed her to become a professional writer.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is by far her most famous work.   Despite its title, it's not really a general justification of rights for women. It's a treatise on education, and in particular, women's education.   Its title is a product of its time, and a product of marketing. Wollestonecraft was writing in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution of 1789, and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.  More particularly, her title echoes that of her own earlier work, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, which was written as a hot rebuttal of the conservative Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.  That book made her reputation and gave her a public profile.  It was natural to title her next book in such a way as to remind readers of that fact.

Is the book relevant today?  I bookmarked a few quotes that could have been written yesterday.  But overall, its arguments aren't ones that one would make today, at least in the Western world.  In Vindication, Wollestonecraft argues that women's intellectual and moral inferiority is a result of their ignorance.  When girls were educated at all, their education focused on domestic skills and pleasing men.  The result:  ignorant, petty, and vain women who were unfit for their natural roles as mothers,  teachers of children, and companions to men.  Worst of all, women were unfit to live moral lives.  The cure that Wollestonecraft advocated was to educate girls alongside boys, teaching all children the same range of historical, philosophical, and religious subjects.

Is there any reason to read Vindications today?  It's certainly an important historical work.  If you're interested in Mary Wollestonecraft, it is an essential complement to reading about her life. And like the Claudine novels, Vindications throws unintended light on the era in which it was written.

Wollestonecraft was raised in a family that skimmed the bottom of the middle class through the improvidence of her father.  She worked as a governess for aristocratic Irish families.  She operated a school for middle class girls, and she circulated in intellectual circles both in England and later in Revolutionary France.  She was, of course, acquainted with servants, with whom she lived for most of her life.  The portrait that she paints of women's lives was drawn from her own experience.  It was designed to resonate with her audience as plausible background to her arguments for women's education.

It's upsetting.

The most telling part is that Wollestonecraft didn't argue that women would be just as able as men, given the same education and opportunities.  Either she didn't believe that herself, or she thought that such an argument was be too far beyond the pale to be included in a serious work of analysis and advocacy -- even as she demonstrated her own learning via extensive in-line references to various learned sources throughout her work.  

And even if you're familiar with period literature, you don't get the texture of everyday life from Jane Austen.  Wollestonecraft paints a world where men automatically patronized women or preyed upon them....or both.  Where women were on the whole ignorant, gossipy, scheming, weak, and silly...because middle class and aristocratic women had no outlet for their energies, no cultivation for their minds, and were degraded by the necessity of obedience first to their fathers, and then to their husbands.  Even 'progressive' contemporary thinkers like Rousseau valued women almost exclusively for their appearance.

Yes, Wollestonecraft was writing a polemic.  But from my young experiences working various blue collar jobs, I found that gossip, opinion, and petty scheming are much closer to the surface among people with less education.   Education really does broaden one's perspective -- or at least teaches you to moderate your less attractive instincts.  In a world where women's education was discouraged or blocked, I can well imagine that her world looked much as she described.

The moral of the story: if you're a woman, it's hard not to believe in historical progress.  Female time travellers take note! Visiting different eras would be fascinating, but if you're looking to settle somewhere, the modern era rocks.

Claudine at School by Colette

Started: 12 July
Finished: 25 July
Pages: 187

I first read Colette when took a class in 20th Century French Literature in translation, offered by the French department at the University of Saskatchewan back in the 1980s.  I think that must be why I picked up a second-hand copy of The Claudine Novels at some point, and why I finally pulled it down off the shelf earlier this month when I was looking for something to read.

More or less by coincidence, I also started reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollestonecraft and a book of SF short stories by Judith Merrill at almost the same time.  Claudine at School was written in the 1890s, Vindications was written about a hundred years earlier in 1792, while the Judith Merrill short stories were written between the late 1940s and the 1970s. All three are by and about middle class women.

I feel a bit as if I'm starting a "compare and contrast" essay.  But perhaps I'll desist, given that I haven't yet finished Vindications or the Merrill stories, and it's been more than 25 years since I wrote my last literary essay.  I will say that reading the three books together felt a bit like time travel: as I write about the other books perhaps I'll pull a bit of commentary together.

Of the books, Collette's is not self-consciously a commentary on women and women's lives.  This is her first novel, written as a very young married woman, to please a demanding older husband who eventually got the book published under his own name.  Her later novels explore women's lives, but this one simply describes the life of a teenaged girl attending her local village school.

Claudine at School is described as "charming" on Wikipedia and in its introduction.  And so it is.  It's  a slice of a lost time, set in a quiet village where a visit from a local politician is enough to justify an all day program of welcoming songs by schoolchildren dressed in their best clothes and speeches by local dignitaries. It's a time when girls from village families might get an education so that they could train as school teachers, girls from not-so-ambitous families might snatch kisses from boys in the forest, while girls from good families like Claudine might go to school solely to keep themselves amused while waiting for their lives to begin.  The book's not quaint:  the school girls and school teachers leap off the page as real, complicated, squabbling people.  And because the book was originally written as soft porn (Colette's husband kept nagging her to make the contents 'hot'), it reads as surprisingly modern.  (Lesbians, oh my.)

Would I recommend it?  Colette's later books, like The Captive are more interesting.  Claudine feels more like backstory, and a reminder of some of the ways that women's lives have changed (more opportunities), and have not changed (harassing male authority figures) over the last 100 plus years.

Are you my mother? A comic drama by Alison Bechdel

Started: 26 December, 2012

Finished: 8 January, 2013

Pages: 290

First things first:  this is not a picture book about a baby bird searching for its mother and finding a SNERT.  

Or, maybe it is....kind of.

Have you heard of graphic novels?  Well, this is a graphic memoir:  that is, a memoir written in the form of a comic.  And this version of Are you my mother? is about the author's struggle to make sense of her relationship with her mother. It's by Alison Bechdel,  the creator of  Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running serial comic that you could hardly have missed if you read feminist newspapers in the late 80s and 90s.  

 I started it at the inlaws over Christmas and puzzled my partner's mom.  She wanted to know why I wasn't chuckling while I was reading.  Wasn't it comics?   Well, yes.  But it's a natural question.  Although there are now"serious" comics, our collective default assumption is that stories told with pictures are stories for children. (Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense, really.  After all:  movies.)

So why don't we think of pictorial stories written on paper as serious?

I don't have an answer to that.  Constant advances in printing technology throughout the 20th century made printed pictures ubiquitous.  And other than a few 19th century political cartoons, comics really began in the 20th century.  But for the most part using pictures as well as text to tell a story was only done when the subject matter of the story was something that was hard to imagine otherwise:  when the characters in the stories were talking mice, say, or the story was about a extra-strong flying man.

Which brings us to the book at hand. What is added by telling Bechdel's story in comic form?

Well, I guess the most obvious thing that the pictures add is emotional impact and immediacy.  Being told that her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was 7 years old is different than watching a small and vulnerable girl pretend not to mind that her mother is walking away from her bed.

Using drawings also permits Bechdel to use compression and inference to tell parts of her story. There is a sequence of frames that recounts a year that she spent in therapy by showing her and her therapist facing each other across a room, while a tree visible in the window behind them cycles through the seasons.

Drawings also allow her to give information that would be difficult to convey otherwise.  Being told that Bechdel has been in therapy for her entire adult life is different seeing a timeline that simultaneously shows both the duration of every love relationship she's ever had and the duration of every therapist she's ever had. (wow:  I can't even imagine therapy playing that kind of role in my life.)

So....Bechdel could likely have told her story in text alone.  But telling it as a comic definitely gives her additional tools.

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

Started: 24 Sept 2012
Finished: 3 Oct 2012
Pages: 292

Tooth and Claw is "Jane Austen with dragons".  No, not a pastiche of classic fiction, like "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" or "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"   Tooth and Claw is a mannered romantic tale where all of the parts are played by dragons.

Books like this are generally a part of a separate sub-genre of fantasy/speculative fiction.  Depending on its tone,  you'd expect Tooth and Claw's readers to be either people who will read anything and everything about vampires or dragons or zombies or <insert favourite trope here>,  or, if the tone is arch rather than twee, to be people who enjoy satire.

But Tooth and Claw is simply a well-written regency-style romance that explores an interesting idea or two about what kind of society might be established by dragons, and what kind of role might be played by women (dragons) within that society.  It won the World Fantasy Award in 2004, which gives you an idea that the writing and plotting are well above average.

I'd previously read two of Walton's later books:  Farthing and Half-penny.  Be warned.  In the same way that a reader of To Say Nothing of the Dog might be surprised by the Domesday Book, a reader of Tooth and Claw might be a little taken aback by some of her later work.  Farthing and Half-penny take place in an alternative history where British fascists gain the ascendancy and Britain abstains from the Second World War.   The first book (Farthing) perfectly captured the zeitgeist of George Bush's America....a world in which certainties about logic, justice, and decency are heartbreakingly false.  Recommended, but not exactly something to curl up with with a cup of tea and a cat -- unlike Tooth and Claw.

Sister of the Road, as told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman

Started: May 25, 2012
Finished: May 30, 2012
Pages:314
Copyright: 1937

Now this is an interesting book.  I picked it up last year on a whim at a second-hand bookstore out in Chilliwack.  It's an autobiography of a female hobo, "Box Car" Bertha Thompson, written during the dirty 30s.

Why did I read it?  I've also read:

• an autobiography of a suffragette.  Laugh a Defiance by Mary Richardson is a matter-of-fact description of, well, frankly, her terrorist actions while following Emmeline Pankhurst in the struggle to win the vote for British women.  
• the memoir of Caroline Herschel, an 18th century astronomer who discovered 7 comets at a time when there were only about 20 in total known, and who also helped her brother William do the first systematic astronomical survey of the skies.  
• Sister Marie Celeste's letters in Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo.  (translated and published by Dana Sobel after she wrote Galileo's Daughter)
• the autobiography of Diane Di Prima, a 50s Beatnik poet who was a contemporary of Jack Kerouac.

These women have nothing in common except that they tell their own stories in their own words. History in the raw. The books are an adventure for someone who isn't used to reading primary sources that drop you--- slam!--into the past.  They are also a very immediate way of connecting to the lost history of women's lives.

That's the context I brought to Sister of the Road.  And in some ways this book didn't disappoint. I wondered how shocked contemporary readers would have been at Bertha's unconventional lifestyle. I was interested in the range of women and men that Bertha met on the road, and was surprised at how commonplace radical political movements appeared to be in the  hobo camps.  More lost history:  when we talk about "the homeless problem" today we aren't generally talking about the problem of  I.W.W. or anarchist agitators.  Except sometimes in the Occupy camps, which ended up hosting all three types of travellers that Bertha knew: hobos (jobless wanderers), tramps (those looking for adventure), and bums (drunks or addicts).

The book follows Bertha from age 15 or so until just past her 30th birthday.  But at about age 22 I started to have doubts.  Granted Bertha was a tramp who was interested in people and any and all experiences of life.  But .....her experiences started to seem a tich too comprehensive for plausibility.  Why did she take up working for a pimp in a brothel again?  Really?  Just as she leaves that life, pregnant and afflicted with venereal disease,  her grifter ex-boyfriend dramatically finds her again from death row.  Ah ..okay.  Which made me start thinking: Bertha is literate, well-educated, and articulate.  Why is this book is "as told to"  rather than written by Bertha herself?   Hm....and here's an appendix of statistics about homeless men and women.  New hypothesis: Bertha is a fabrication by a sociologist who chose to illustrate ALL of those statistics in a single woman's life?. 

I have an original 1937 edition of the book, but I thought "what the hell" and googled it anyway.  Thanks to the gods of the internet I did come up with something.  But it was a weirder something than I expected.  Sister of the Road was reprinted in the 2000s with an appendix that explained that it was a fabrication based on the stories of 3 or more hobo women interviewed by Ben Reitman.

It also explained that Ben Reitman was an anarchist, abortionist, birth control activist, and Emma Goldman's lover.  Which of course changed my perceptions of the book all over again. Of course he chose to make Bertha a political activist moving in a network of political activists.  Even if that hadn't been his life, it would have been his propaganda.  But why did he make Bertha so promiscuous and so unconventional?  Originally I'd thought the book was sensationalistic simply to draw in readers. Was he instead trying to advocate for free love by treating Bertha's sexual adventures matter-of-factly?  Why did he write the book in the first place?  He romanticizes Bertha's life and makes her likeable, but she and the others she meets on the road are often far from admirable.  Did he feel it was important to circulate and humanize those statistics ?  I don't see another clear political purpose to the book and I think there must be one.  Finding out the book was fictional raised more questions than it answered.

In the end the best part of reading this Sister of the Road was having my perceptions altered first by Bertha's story, and then by my understanding that Bertha's story was fiction.  Which makes it a very modern book after all, a la "A Million Little Pieces" and "Three Cups of Tea".