Ever Wonder What the Market Value of Mothering Is?

An interesting study was just done in Waltham, MA by Salary.com that calculates what a full-time mother would earn if she was selling her skills in the marketplace: $134, 121.00. You can read about this here and here. I have always found arguments that consider the remuneration of women for raising children to be an exceptional feminist argument. The problem that I imagine that most pro-market people would have is proposals that we pay full-time mothers from taxes. My new thought is that women should sign pre-nuptial agreements or some other sort of contract with their partner to be paid what the market would bear if she were to work. Why not turn marriage or civil partnerships, where childrearing will be involved, into business contracts? We already have folks signing pre-nups and post-nups anyway.

How about this pro-market feminist proposal?

In Memoriam: Farewell Mary

A few days ago one of my closest friends lost her mother. It was a sudden thing. She had an aneurysm in March, the month that Emma has always sweared to me is the worst month, and then two days ago she died. The family decided to take her off the respirator, paying respect to her advanced directive.

I spent a week last July with Mary. Emma, Jack, and I drove to Wisconsin to spend time at their lake cabin. We sat on the porch with her enjoying cocktails, watching the lake lap up on the shore, egging each other on to try a hand a fishing. Jack decided to take a try at fishing out there in the lake, while Emma and I decided to hop in and swim to the nearest buoy. Jack tried as hard as she could to catch a fish--changing lures, putting new bait, even trying one our left over marshmellows from S'mores. Nothing. Then Mary walked onto the dock, cast out, and within 30 seconds had a nibble on her line. She reeled in it and, proudly, showed Jack her catch. We doubled over in laughter.

Later that evening we sat in the huge cabin roasting more S'mores while a big thunderstorm knocked out T.V. We shared more stories of Mary's childhood, her mother's wit, and the adventures of her childhood on this property in Wisconsin. She shared with us her new plans for decorating the cabin: she had masterfully assembled a team of builders, decorators, and landscapers to help her realize her vision. She was quite effective at handling the hot tub guy, who was telling her that delivering her purchase would cost extra. I loved being around Mary. She hired some local guys to fill up a trailer that Emma, Jack and I were going to haul back, full of furniture, to PA. They loaded it, she shook her head, told them to leave. And proceeded to have us unload it and do it right.

One night after having dinner in the clubhouse, Mary showed us the half-century old merry go-around outside the lodge. At her suggestion, we all climbed onto this structure--that no one in their right mind would let their children play on--and whirled around to her laughter. She was delightful to be around.

Only three months ago Mary flew out to help Emma recover from knee surgery. I didn't get a chance to see her on this trip, but I saw signs of her all over Emma's house after she had gone. It was the last time Emma had spent time with her mom before her aneurysm. For weeks since the fateful evening, Emma has been flying back and forth across the country to sit by her mother's bed, reading her articles from the Wall Street Journal, hoping she would awake.

Emma said that Mary's death was at least some kind of end to the hours of waiting and hoping that her family found themselves paralyzed by for the last few weeks. Now Emma is focused on the funeral and helping her devastated father put his life together. I grieve now for her, because I know that she has yet to really feel this loss. Everytime I speak to her I find myself in tears.

I am flying out to see my own mother, who is only slightly older than Mary, this weekend. I find myself clinging to my mother as Mary's sudden death so acutely reminds me of how fast life can go.

We spend so much time worried about silly things, making plans for days that may never arrive. All we really have is this day, this moment. If we are lucky enough, we might remember to smile, to caress, to kiss those around us who we love. We must remember to say now what we think we will have plenty of time to say later. Life goes so fast. We only have this day to remind those around us that we love them. We only have this moment to remind our loved ones that they are the most precious people to us. I know Emma will not regret her last visit with her mom. But, I wish for all of us that we can say goodbye without regret.

Life goes so fast. It is so easy to miss. Please, for Mary, embrace this day as if it were your last.

Sci-Fi and Gender Roles: Why Does Zoe Have to Act Like a Man?

I am have been reborn as a Firefly fan. This science fiction show aired for only one season in 2002 on Fox. The show was too good to be renewed. This happens to many of the shows I have like, most recently Cupid, with Jeremy Piven.

Anyway, as I have been watching these firefly episodes, I can't help but wonder why science fiction never goes quite far enough in imagining a world far different than our own. Perhaps we need enough of the familiar to connect to the story and thereby become self-reflective of our plights. I started thinking about this in connection with the character Zoe. Zoe is a laconic, tough war hero. Mal, the captain, and Zoe have been in many battles and now are partners in crime on the ship Serenity. Zoe is a stunning black woman, with great self-possession and military loyalty. While she is gorgeous woman, everything about her character is masculine. In fact, she is the ideal man: skillful, brave, war hero, protective, faithful to her fellow crew, etc. She carries herself far more like a man would, especially when you compare her to Inara, the companion. Zoe is a woman of few words, direct, and loyal.

I watched the new Battlestar Galactica movie two nights ago and, again, starting thinking about the way Starbuck, recast as a woman, is even more masculine than Zoe. Now, many women are drawn to science fiction because it imagines worlds where women and formerly marginalized people are now equals, that is, they hold positions of authority, enjoy the respect of their peers, and ones' professional excellence is not tied to one's sex. There is no deliberating over whether Starbuck, a woman, can fly a fighter plane. She is the best, so no one sits around making jokes about being beat out by a woman. And yet, if you watch how Starbuck moves, her gestures: wide stance, brushes her thumbs over her nose with a smirk, swagger when she walks, prone to fighting--it's hard to ignore how masculine her features are.

So, in both Firefly and Battlestar Galactica you have these tough female icons in the future, but each of them more closely resemble men. The reason why you have such characters is because we understand there is a difference between sex and gender. One's sex is the biological self, whereas one's gender is the set of practices, behaviors, as well as cultural expectations of how you should be behave, that have typically been coordinated with one's sex. Starbuck and Zoe are the ideal of female attractiveness, and yet their characters are quite typical heroic male. The need for both of these women to be attractive and "kick ass" is interesting, since it shows a preference that only drop dead gorgeous women are allowed to be tough characters. At least a preference among viewers and fans of the show.

What I couldn't help but think about is why these shows cannot imagine more complex gender roles, or even imagine human interactions ungoverned by strict gender roles?. Taking Firefly for the moment: Why must the empathetic, sensitive character be a female: Inara. Why is the moral conscience a black man: Book? These are rather entrenched gender and racial stereotypes. Moreover, Zoe is a black woman--sexual and tough--another well entrenched stereotype. Now, on the whole, I love the show, the characters, the dialogue and the fact that the ship's mechanic is a woman--Kaylee. On the whole, the show imagines a world wherein the gender straigthjackkets we negotiate through now--whether male or female--are loosened.

But, why can't we imagine a "female" battle hero or captain who does not have to adopt quite typical male body language and poses to be taken seriously? The fact is that toughness is profoundly linked, in our popular imagination, with masculinity. Is it possible to break apart those gender roles and imagine admirable characters that are defined less by typical masculine or feminine traits (or racial stereotypes for that matter), and hence provide a window for us of a world wherein we move beyond these already archaic human artifacts?

Sharp Knives and Klutzy Girls

Sorry for the lack of posts. I was working on my manuscript since I have so little time left before the end of my sabbatical. And, then, last night, I cut my finger deeply with my new Wusthof paring knife. My mom convinced me to buy these fancy knives last Wednesday, and so I invited people over for dinner last night. I was going to make a bunch of paninis with my new panini grill (x-mas gift). Anyway, while cutting the Muenster cheese with my uber sharp Wusthof, I sliced right into my index finger and was bleeding profusely for 2 hours before admitting that I had to go to the E.R. room. I kept thinking it would stop. And, I had guests over.

But, the bleeding didn't stop and so Za had to drive me to the E.R. room on a friday night, hence we waited for hours to get in. I felt like a Desperate Housewife, sitting there with my bleeding index finger, dressed in pink and surrounded by people with serious health issues. It was ridiculous. We got back home at midnight, and my adorable guests had stayed to see how it turned out. I was so exhausted and the novacaine was wearing off that I fell asleep almost immediately.

When I woke up, I realized typing was basically a nightmare. So, I am not sure how regularly I will be able to post until the stitches are out (I got 4!).

So, feel free to browse the archives . . .

Rethinking Feminism Series: Words

My first foray into sharing my reflections on how feminism needs to change to stay relevant and efficacious politically generated interesting comments. On the whole I think that much of what I said resonated with readers. However, my post certainly rubbed one reader the wrong way at The Reaction. I think that Marc (the formerly disgruntled reader) and I had a productive exchange over my post. What set him off was what he perceived to be my tone: a slumming, self-loathing, middle-class white woman. I found his reaction to be interesting, particularly because it was a perfect example of what my colleague SteveG means when he said in his post: "white guilt has a short shelf life."

I thought this was a good place to start my post today. In a post I wrote to criticize current feminist activists for failing to update their message and their paradigms so that our message might resonate with more people, particularly men, I pissed off exactly the kind of male I want to attract. I think that Marc might agree with me when I say that his irritation at my post came from preconceptions of what feminist arguments about "privilege" are. Upon rereading my post he decided that perhaps I had made good points and he even accepted my explanation of what I mean by privilege. So, this story had a good ending, but it perfectly illustrates how grating feminist arguments are to fellow liberals. I don't think that I am making the arguments that Marc thought I was. Nor do I think that my message is a major deviation from what feminists are doing now. But, where the communication breaks down is over words.

Unfortunately, I think that feminism needs a serious PR job. Many of the amazing writers our there in the femosphere are doing that work. But, we clearly have a long way to go. No matter how nuanced our arguments, no matter how reasonable our arguments, no matter how conciliatory we are toward our interlocutors, a few words--in this case, "feminism" and "white privilege"--had the effect of turning off and tuning out a reader. I could respond to this by picking on Marc for being narrow-minded, hostile to feminism, misogynistic, or in denial about his white privilege. But, to what end? I see this kind of total communication break down happen all the time in the classroom, among colleagues, or in conversations over beers. The minute a feminist opens her mouth and uses any of the language of early feminist theory--"patriarchy" or "misogyny" pretty soon someone at the table is going to roll their eyes or get pissed off. This is not what I consider to be effective political activism.

The shock and awe approach of feminism will only shore up our base, but it won't do anything to make real changes in our institutions. In fact, much of the "politically correct" analyses of my undergraduate and graduate school years have resulted in very little significant material change in the world. I know that sounds harsh, and I wouldn't be surprised if I ticked off more than one feminist reader, but it's true.

I became active in NOW this past year. I organized a local chapter and got lots of women at the meeting, ready to do something to make a difference in our county. Early on a member pointed out to me that we could really benefit from trying to change our message and our image to break through the entrenched and stultifying images of bra-burners, man-haters and baby-killers. She was and is right. While my chapter is still going and many members are passionately commited, I found myself getting pissed off regularly with the state and national leadership. During the Roberts hearing, I was called up at one point and told that I should take my chapter back to D.C. to get Senator Specter to talk to me, and if he wouldn't get arrested. I understood that it was a "media strategy," but from my standpoint it was a strategy that was not only logistically impossible (some of us had already taken off work to lobby) but it was destined to make us look like lunatics. I was outside the Senate buildings during the Roberts hearing. There were not a whole lot of us. In fact, we were woefully outnumbered by Roberts supporters. The media wanted to get any of us NOW folks to make some stupid statement so as to further sink our cause. We weren't going to win that one; I knew from that experience we weren't going to win the Alito cause either.

We aren't effective politically because we tend to play right into the worst stereotypes promulgated out there by right wingnuts and the MSM. We have not had enough foresight and cunning to craft a clever, enticing and powerful message. Our rhetoric simply does not resonate with many women or men anymore (although I think the "every woman is a working woman" campaign is good stuff). To start making change happen in our communities, to actually fight back the feminist backlash, we are going to have to use different words.

When I was first interviewed on TV and the radio (when the chapter was starting up), inevitably I would get the question: "how will your liberal message reach people in this conservative county"? I also had a few interviewers ask me if we were getting funded by National NOW (ha, ha, ha!). My response was always: "NOW is a MAINSTREAM organization. Everyone is loves, is related to, or was cared for by a woman. What NOW wants is to help families be able to cope with the changing economy: more pressure on both parents to work, lower wages, unaffordable daycare and healthcare etc." This approach almost always baffled my interviewers. They didn't know what to do with me. My co-President would also note that we were the National Organization FOR Women, not OF Women, hence men were welcomed to join.

The reason that we baffled the media was because they couldn't figure out why, exactly, we called ourselves feminists, given our mission. That was when I really got it; we are fighting an uphill battle. So, I spend hours and hours of time that should go toward sleeping thinking about how to cut through the stereotypes, the "gut reactions" that are not so positive, and get our message heard.

Every Mother is a Working Mother

NOW has started a new campaign, galvanized by Kim Gandy's appearance on Good Morning America in order to defuse the media-made "mommy wars." To sign the petition go here.

Please join NOW in supporting mothers and caregivers by adding your name to the petition encouraging real family values through public policies and workplace benefits that recognize and promote the value and work of caregiving and caregivers. Your signature will be added to the thousands of others from across the country and will be included as we deliver this petition to policy makers and employers when the time is appropriate.

32%

Not so good . . .Time for Bolten to roll out the uber-conservative, bolster-the-base 5-point plan.

BOLTEN'S 5 POINT WHITE HOUSE "RECOVERY PLAN": ...The musical chairs is just the first of a two-act makeover. Friends and colleagues of [Josh] Bolten told TIME about an informal, five-point "recovery plan" for Bush that is aimed at pushing him up slightly in opinion polls and reassuring Republican activists, whose disaffection could cost him dearly in November. The White House has no visions of expanding the G.O.P.'s position in the midterms; the mission is just to hold on to control of Congress by playing to the base. Here is the Bolten plan: 1 DEPLOY GUNS AND BADGES; 2 MAKE WALL STREET HAPPY; 3 BRAG MORE; 4 RECLAIM SECURITY CREDIBILITY; 5 COURT THE PRESS. TIME: Can The New Sheriff Tame The West Wing?

Rethinking Feminism Series: Poverty and Healthcare

I imagine that over the next few weeks I will be exploring what I think are the challenges for feminists in this new century. This past year I have devoted a lot of time to rethinking not only what feminists need to do politically, but also how Women's Studies programs need to change to remain relevant to this generation of students we are teaching. I don't yet have a plan for how I will be addressing these issues in my posts, but today I will focus on health care, reproductive rights, and poverty

A month ago, I decided to transfer all of my OBGYN care to Planned Parenthood. I want Planned Parenthood to get my money and continue to stay in business in this small county, and so I gave up some of my privilege to basically attend a free clinic to get my yearly exams and birth control. I am not going to pretend that this has been an easy decision, or that I don’t consider switching back to the clean, sparkling, and less crowded office of my old gynecologist. Sitting in the waiting room of Planned Parenthood, when you have never had to spend time in such a setting for health care, is unsettling. I had an appointment at 4, and didn’t get into see the nurse practitioner until 6. Furthermore, the waiting room is rather dingy, with dilapidated furniture, low lighting, and packed with all the residents in my county that I would never have occasion to meet, talk to, or spend time with. Planned Parenthood is one of the most popular providers to the migrant population here. They do not perform any abortions at our clinic site, but rather spend a lot of time offering affordable health care to men and women in Adams County. Half of the patients sitting with me in the waiting room spoke no English, a third were young girls who already had children or feared they were pregnant, and the last third were men.

I sat in my chair, listening to the conversations around me, mainly teenage girls with dead-end jobs, and two children, talking about their loser boyfriends who drank too much and didn’t help out with the kids. These young women were the age of many of my students, but clearly were never encouraged to attend college, especially the private college where I teach. These women were poor: they were raised in poverty and likely to continue the cycle. They had probably dropped out of high school once they got pregnant, and were now likely to raise their kids in the same environment they grew up in. Almost all of these young women were church going folk, and none of them were self-proclaimed feminists. They were at Planned Parenthood because that was the only health care provider they could afford. Moreover, they were likely to be treated with some dignity there. At least two young women, perhaps students at my college, came in to get birth control and the difference between them and these young mothers was stark. In fact, these young mothers shot angry glances at the well dressed, blonde, bejeweled, young, college women coming in for pills, especially when one was sweetly playing with one mother's little boy.

When I finally got in to see the nurse practitioner, the first question she asked me was why I was coming here to get my pap smear. “For solidarity,” I said. She lit up, patted my back, and then proceeded with my exam. She apologized for the wait, and I dismissed it as no big deal. Of course, I hated it, but I was trying to consciously question my economic and race privilege and thereby force myself to live what I teach my students. I ask my students to work in agencies like Planned Parenthood, with this population of local residents almost every year, and yet, I don’t put myself in the same situation I ask my students to be in. So, this was “putting my money where my mouth is.” The health care, however, was excellent. Having a feminist nurse practitioner talk to me about the negative reactions I might have to the form of birth control I use (the Nuva-Ring) was amazing. No other doctor had taken the time to go over all of these issues with me in such detail before. She was also human; she seemed interested in my life, my goals, and my health. While my other gynecologist was efficient and had a pristine office setting, he had never talked to me for more than 5 minutes before.

I have chewed on this experience for over a month, and wanted to write about it to start thinking more about what I think should be the priority issues for feminists in this day and age. And, while having the right to control one’s fertility is paramount, I also think that we should be striving in general for better health care information and access for all of our citizens. While I have participated in or read numerous debates on health care all over the blogosphere, at dinner parties, or with my students, nothing will ever bring this point home to you until you put yourself in the same situation as the poor in our country. If you are someone who argues that we should set up “medical savings accounts” or that we should pass more of the cost of insurance onto the “consumer” rather than the employer, then sit for a few hours in a clinic or hospital E.R. room and pay attention to the kind of health care available to the poor in this country. You don’t have to go to Guatemala on a church missionary trip or volunteer with Doctors Without Borders to see what crushing poverty does to the self-esteem and thereby future life chances of people. That kind of crushing poverty is right here in our communities.

Young girls and boys grow up without any well care visits, without the nutrition they need, and for certain, without any knowledge of their bodies. If you add on top of that school programs, targeting precisely this population—which is lower income White, African-American, Latino, and around here a Russian immigrants—with the misinformation of abstinence only programs, you are guaranteeing an even harder life for these folks. Rather than being treated with the same dignity that many of us can expect due to health insurance, middle class income, and white privilege, these young children grow up being reminded daily that no one cares about them: whether that be their neighbors, their government, their educators, their physicians (if they even have any), or their employers. Just sitting in a depressing waiting room of a health clinic (let me note, however, that thanks to Kate Michelman, Planned Parenthood does a reasonably good job creating settings that enable their patients to feel they are being treated with dignity more than other clinic providers) gives you a sense of what these children grow up expecting about how life is, how others will treat them, and what they deserve. It doesn’t look good.

Sure, I am bound to get some comments in my thread here, and perhaps from some of my former students, who will give me a lecture on “personal responsibility.” Fine, you know what, I support and embrace “personal responsibility” too. But, where I part company with many of the personal responsibility crowd is that I recognize that much of what we have, who we are, and where we are going has been the product of others who have invested in us, cared about us, and given us the opportunity to see a bright future. While I could go on and on judging these young women for getting pregnant so young, or the young men who irresponsibly impregnated them, and for all of them giving up on a better future, what exactly would I be accomplishing? The fact is that these young women and young men need our attention, our resources, and a sense that we give a damn about them as much as we do children born to the kind of privilege that I was born into. Yes, ultimately, we are the product of many choices that we made. But, to make good choices in life, you need good information, you need to be given a sense that you matter or that you have value. Churches are certainly places well equipped to do the latter work. And, thank goodness many churches do actually fulfill Jesus’ mission to care for the poorest among us. But many other “Christians” in this day and age would rather blame the victim, and deny them the help they need, justifying this behavior by calling these young people “sinners” or “wicked.” Certainly this rhetoric is a helpful way to blind us from our own complicity in their poverty.

I started this with the intention of tying this into what I think the future of feminism should look like. And, my bottom line here is that feminists need to care about poverty (and believe me, I know that many of us do). They don’t just need to care about poor women, or the poor women who have had to degrade themselves by becoming “exotic dancers” or who have been raped or molested. Certainly we do need to care about these women. But, we need to reach out and work with those who we might have dismissed in the past as “the patriarchy” or “conservatives” to fight the poverty that is right in our backyards and likely to turn our “1st World Nation” into a populace that is simply not literate enough to maintain a democracy. We need to invest in all of our citizens, and fight the labels, rhetoric, and bigotry that justify our continued mistreatment of the poor. Perhaps more of us need to give up some of our privileges in order to ensure that more of us get the basics. We need to be open to all solutions for getting good health care to every citizen, and not allow partisan bickering to divide us. I know that we can transcend politics, especially if we start in our local communities.

The risk here for many feminists is that we would be neglecting the specific agenda already laid out. But, I am sorry, I just don’t believe that feminist politics—whether we are talking about NOW or Feminist Majority—are going to be effective until they give up the old paradigms, and the old political rhetoric, and start attracting more men and women to participate in their activism. We may need to rethink how we sell our message, what we call ourselves in the public realm, and how we frame our issues. If we don’t do this, we are simply inefficacious. We are sacrificing good works, for purity of message.

Cross-Posted at The Reaction

The Government and Your Eggs

Check out this nice piece of satire over at YouTube: Your Body and Your Government.

Hat Tip: Bitch Ph.D.

Carnival of Feminists XIII

I See Invisible People has hosted the 13th Carnival of Feminists. Always worth the read. The 14th Carnival of Feminists will be hosted at Women's Autonomy and Sexual Sovereignty. Submit your posts with this form.

I am So Sick of the Analytic-Continental Feud

Rather than doing some "real" research today, I found myself sucked into reading this post over at Crooked Timber. The more I read on, the more frustrated I became. In particular, it forced me to think about the nastiness that most of my Analytic professors and former graduate students heaped on me or anyone else interested in Continental Philosophy during grad school. (I could tell you stories!) I am a Continental philosopher and quite proud of it. I get unbelievably pissed off when I watch thinkers, whose work I would generally respect, dismiss the value of studying Continental philosophy.

Harry (from Crooked Timber) writes:

I have long been uneasy about the behaviour of analytical philosophers in the 1980’s and 1990’s, during which time the kind of ideas associated with Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida (names he mentions) had enormous influence within the humanities and social sciences. With some very honorable exceptions, my sense was that we kept our heads down, identified ourselves in some way with the hard sciences and mathematics, and allowed those ideas to do their worst; all the time maintaining a sense of our own superiority because we weren’t fooled by that nonsense.

While Harry doesn't do this in his post, many of his commentors go on to equate all Continental philosophy with Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, or Jacques Lacan. This is a classic strawman argument, not to mention the piles of ad hominem attacks in the comment thread. Not all who have interest in or study Continental Philosophy are interested only in Post-modernism, Post-structuralism or Psychoanalytic thought. Continental Philosophy=Post '68 French thought. Moreover, there are plenty of folks like me, whose entire orientation toward philosophy was first inspired by reading thinkers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, or Simone de Beauvoir, who find these petty arguments perpetuated among Analytic philosophers to be tiring.

One of the things that has always bugged me the most is how Analytic philosophers often like to portray themselves as "victims" of the "Continental nonsense" of Butler and Derrida. They argue that this fashionable nonsense took over the humanities and infected graduate students with sophistical thinking. And yet, as a Continental philosopher, nothing could be clearer to me than the fact that Analytic Philosophy totally dominates the university. When you are on the job market as a Continentally trained thinker--especially after Leiter started his report--you are told straight up that you shouldn't even consider applying for jobs at ANY school where there is not a majority of faculty sympathetic to Continental thought. One of my good friends, who got an interview at Michigan (VERY Analytic program), actually stood up and left the interview after 20 minutes when it became clear that the interviewers were having more fun trying to demonstrate why his work on Habermas and Kant was just plain stupid.

In my graduate program, which was indeed Continental, all of us were REQUIRED to study Analytic philosophy and logic. All of us are qualified to teach these subjects and many of my former Continental philosophy grad buddies are the logic professors at the colleges where they landed. It's just ridiculous to me that Analytic philosophers think that Continental thinkers don't care about or understand rational arguments. I am fairly certain that none of my Analytic friends who studied at their hard-core Analytic programs were ever required to read any Continental thought, either from the 19th or 20th century. In fact, many of them probably got away with not reading a whole lot of the canon of philosophy outside of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Locke and Kant. Whereas, I can say with confidence that I received a rather rigorous grounding in the history of philosophy from all of the Continental programs I attended.

What is also interesting, btw, is how often you find the Continental philosophers really drawing in undergraduate majors to continue to study philosophy in this day and age where the liberal arts in general seems rather devalued. My department of 5 professors at a small liberal arts college once boasted of having 100 majors, more than Penn State. And, I would dare to say that it was in part because three of us are Continental Philosophers who have used our training to raise questions of identity, moral responsibility, what makes for a meaningful life, what our obligation is to the Other, freedom, etc. Not one of my colleagues teaches a course in Derrida or Butler. While many of us might teach an essay once in awhile, we don't see the point of an undergraduate education in philosophy to train our students to understand one narrow strand of philosophical thought from 20th century France. I would say that our Continental training has influenced the kind of courses we design: The Ethics of Food, The Philosophy of Psychiatry, Human Rights, Gender and Identity, The Meaning of Work, The Many Meanings of Illness, etc. We teach really interesting courses that raise questions that many of our students want to think about. We also--all of us--care about careful arguments. None of us ever advocates teaching our students to be relativists or to see all philosophy as some kind of aesthetic dance with texts.

I am also fortunate to have learned a lot from my Analytic colleague, Steve G. I am grateful for the education he gave me, which stirred up my earlier love of science (I started in Chemistry). I spent some time doing a reading group in Geometry with him. He has helped me to be a better writer, while never telling me that my ideas were just plain "nonsense." I also had the opportunity to have my dissertation directed by a logician, who had studied with Alonzo Church. Again, I was never treated by him with the sort of haughty disdain that I see in the comments on Crooked Timber site. It is not inconceivable or impossible to imagine that Analytic philosophers might find something of value from us Continental types. The sub-specialty that I work in--the Philosophy of Psychiatry--is a perfect example of a discipline that is a real dialogue between Analytic and Continental thinkers. This is, in part, because many of the Psychiatrists were trained when people still read thinkers like Karl Jaspers. But also, it is because in their practice, existential questions are simply unavoidable. I cherish these productive exchanges and wish I could see more of them.

The fact is, that the Analytic takeover (you should read John McCumber (Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era) of Philosophy departments has institutionalized a bitter feud between Continentals and Analytics. We are taught to disdain each other (sort of like the way you grow up hating Israelis if you are Palestinian or vice versa), which is rather unfortunate for any real productive and fruitful exchange that might be mutually beneficial in the ways I have been fortunate enough to experience. I am proud that Steve G and I have not pigeon-holed our students into "Continental" or "Analytic." They leave probably unaware of the distinction. Granted, most of our students don't go onto graduate school (Thank God!), the ones that do have gone off equally to Analytic and Continental programs.

I fear that this bitter feud will continue as long as Analytic philosophers see the importance of Philosophy to lie in a very technical, narrow, research program centered mostly on Philosophy of Language, Logic, or Philosophy of Science. I applaud that careful technical work, but it is not all that Philosophy has to offer. I think Philosophy and its commitment to teach students to be critical--if nothing else--has enormous benefits for almost anyone willing to take a course. Philosophy allows us to step back from the merely technical questions or pragmatic questions and look at the bigger picture. It gives us pause in an era that is flooded with too much information, and most of it really misleading or bad. I refuse to believe that the future of Philosophy lies in the methodological innovations that need not have any cultural relevance. Sure, advances in logic will be profoundly important. But, there are a great deal of questions that hopefully philosophers will think through that are not only culturally relevant, but that promise to transform many of our ideas about what it means to be human. Biotechnologies or Genetic Engineering, for example. We need to think about what these practices mean to our very notions of what a self is.

I Am Thoroughly Confused by Feminism these Days

Guest Post by Libby


I think it happened slowly. First, my son was diagnosed with a debilitating life-long disorder which has upended my family. This caused me to reconsider much of what I'd worked on when he was a baby. I'd begun graduate school when he was six months old and finished just six months after his diagnosis. My scholarly interest was in women's studies and my master's focused on women's history. What I'd envisioned for myself was a return to teaching, some sort of career tangent writing about and studying women. Perhaps a PhD too. What I discovered about feminism, I liked. It was also simple: women should be treated equally. Of course, there are lots of shades of meaning in this over time, but the message has remained at least a constant underlying one no matter when mainstream feminism took it.

And then came the disorder, the TSS's, the behavior specialists, the juggling of babysitters. Essentially all of these various nannies with their varied functions. Now, the babysitters also serve as transportation for my other children, taking them to preschool and gymnastics and the library for storytime. Sometimes two are required at the same time. All of this so that I can work. It's very unfeminist (to coin a phrase) to question whether or not all of these extra people are truly necessary, but the question is relevant because for me, these people are necessary. In a rational sense, I understand this. But deep down is the nagging feeling that I should be home and that the sitters are being deprived of their own sense of self and my son is in need of me more than trained experts.

I'm sure what's under all of this is the same engineered guilt that working mothers are taught to have by books like The Mommy Wars and surely by Caitlin Flanagan's new book, To Hell with All That. The New York Times says:

What makes Flanagan's book original and vital is that she is a realist, willing to acknowledge the essential gray areas in too often polarized positions. As it stands, sensitivities are so attuned to the slightest insult of any one of women's myriad work-life choices that Flanagan's simplest observations — for example, when a woman works something is lost — are taken as an indictment of working women. Yet any working mother can see the truth in such a statement: time spent working = less time with children = something lost. What's appalling is that pointing this out raises such ire.

She does raise ire - her articles in the Atlantic Monthly regularly piss me off, in part because she's on to something there. She plays to my fear that my working takes something from my children and that, especially with my youngest's disorder, my working is selfish (and yet this is the same writer who confesses that the only way she could successfully be a stay-at-home mom was with a nanny!).

All of this is to say that I still feel ambivalent about mothers, both those who work and those who stay at home, but more so now than ever before. Are those who are at home subjugating their needs in exchange for the tediousness and drudgery of home? Or are they simply waiting for their children to leave the nest so they can pursue their own lives? Are those who work subjugating the needs of their families in exchange for their own satisfaction? What about women who *must* work?

Why Philosophy Is Likely to Make You More Ethical

Will asked in the comments to my post, "Why We Need More Philosophers," the following:

" I am interested in the comment someone made about law schools not making people ethical.

Do PHd programs make their graduates ethical? How about medical schools? Engineering schools? Business schools? How exactly do philosophy programs make their students ethical? Has anyone conducted any studies on that issue?"

I sort of apologized to Will for my post in the comments, but have now since thought a lot more about his question. I have no idea if anyone has done studies that determine whether students in business schools turn out more ethical than say engineering schools? But, I do know something about getting a Ph.D. and I do think it differs in some ways from professional schools. Before I continue, let me say that I don't think that getting a Ph.D. necessarily makes you a more ethical person. I saw plenty of unethical behavior during my grad school years done to students by professors, or among students, or among administrators to both faculty and students for me to make the naive claim that purusing a Ph.D. ensures you will be more ethical.

However, my post was about what I think is important about getting a Ph.D. in philosophy in particular. Now, interestingly, the kind of philosophy that I studied is universally undervalued by the mainstream philosophy programs in the United States. I studied Continental philosophy, which tends to tackle the more existential questions--the fuzzier questions--and does not necessarily rely on the same method or manner of argumentation taught by Analytic departments. Analytic philosophers tend to rely on the same rules of argument (avoiding fallacies, clarifying premises, justifying evidence, etc.). In fact, Analytic philosophers style themselves after scientists and therefore are much more conservative in their arguments, and take on narrow questions. Analytic philosophers certainly do consider ethical questions, but they approach them with the same method that they approach questions of set theory.

I have been fortunate to work with two very smart and affable Analytic philosophers while at Gettysburg: Hanno and Steve G. Both of them gave me another education in philosophy, one that emphasized a particular form of argument, even if they could never convince me to give up the content that interested me. I have decidely embraced much of what they both taught me about how to make arguments. I didn't really get this education in graduate school, hence honing these skills in my professional life is something that I welcome. And, I think that the method and rules of argument taught by Analytic philosophers do make you more ethical if you consistently use them.

The reason why these rules of argument make you more ethical is because they force you to admit when you don't know the answer, they force you to consider the strongest possible counter-arguments to your position, and to test and re-test the evidence that you use to make your argument. While you may play devil's advocate to another's position, the reason you do so is not to win with tricks and crappy arguments, but to strenghten your opponent's argument. Many philosophers do, unfortunately, resort to ad hominem attacks, or make strawman arguments out of their opposition. But, at least someone can call them on that and almost anyone in the community will agree that those tricks don't count as a good counterargument.

So, if your subject matter teaches you fair rules and a truth-seeking method by which to pursue answers to questions, then I think it makes you a more ethical person. However, anticipating counter-arguments, I should clarify what I mean by ethical. In this context, what I mean is that an education in Philosophy makes you (a) committed to truth-seeking and (b) teaches you how to be charitable, humble, and fair in the way you seek out truth. Philosophy also often encourages you to be a professional skeptic. Not everyone is happy to be a skeptic, but good philosophers are. Being a professional skeptic means that you are open to the possibility that you are wrong and that new evidence means you will need to radically rethink your position. That last skill requires a certain kind of psychological toughness.

In order to be the kind of person willing to reconsider your position, you need to be able to withstand tough criticisms that point to you being wrong. You need to see yourself as fallible, as likely to be committed to certain positions because for irrational reasons (read: no evidence), and susceptible to letting your emotional attachments cloud your judgments. It is no easy thing to be a person willing to consider that you are wrong. The danger is that your opponents will consider you "weak," a "flip-flopper," or "incompetent." These are the risks inherent in being the sort of person willing to reconsider his or her positions in the face of a better argument. Moreover, you need to be willing to do some tough emotional work once you realize that a position that you once passionately committed yourself to is wrong. That stuff is hard.

I have some experience with dealing with the latter this year. Specifically, I have confronted instances where my feminist positions turned out to be at odds with the facts on the ground. I have had to actually rethink some of my most basic intuitions of the world. This has been a rather demoralizing and stressful act. It has in fact put me in a state of crisis more than once as I reconsidered campus sexual misconduct policies, or the mommy wars, or the partiality of the law towards mothers vis-a-vis children. What has spurred my crisis are real experiences that forced me to question my earlier positions. Alot of people, philosophers or not, might not be willing to do this kind of emotional work. It's scary. It can leave you feeling rather unmoored. But, I believe that my commitment to being a philosopher is what impels me to have done this work; to keep it real.

Now, let me return to the issue of why getting a Ph.D. in general is quite different from getting a professional degree. I might be wrong here, and so comments are encouraged, but when one commits oneself to pursuing a Ph.D., one is generally commiting oneself to a life of inquiry and truth-seeking. Rarely does earning a Ph.D. ensure you future employment, future earnings, or happiness. In fact, many people who pursue Ph.D.s end up a lot less happier than people earning professional degrees. Part of the unhappiness comes from the type of emotional and intellectual labor entangled with the kind of questions and pursuits involved in a Ph.D. Some of it comes from the isolation one feels, often, from the rest of the world. The kind of things that get me fired up definitely are not even on the radar screen of most people (i.e., I spent the last two days reading solely about the issue of validity and reliability in psychiatric nosology). Lastly, (and this is not a researched claim) I think you have to be a bit mad to get a Ph.D. You have to have a single-minded focus and dogged commitment, usually to questions that no one but you cares about.

Recently, because I am in such debt (getting a Ph.D. is expensive too!), many family members and friends have encouraged me to go to law school. The idea is that I would earn more, I would be able to use my skills in ways that make an immediate difference, etc. I spent some time thinking seriously about this. But, at the end of the day, I realized that the one thing I have going for me with the Ph.D. in philosophy is that I am doing what I actually love. I care about the questions I am asking, I care about teaching students how to think better and argue better, and I care about truth-seeking in general. What is interesting is that doing what you love, what you care passionately about, does not always guarantee that you are happy. Odd, eh? I might be happier if I worked less, had less debt, could leave my work at work, or could better separate my work life from my personal life. But, I would not be following my passion.

Does following your passion make you more ethical? Obviously not. And, I come back to what the issue of what one is pursuing by pursuing a Ph.D. One is searching for the best answer, not the answer that one prefers to believe. And, not the answer that people will pay you to give. Maybe, that distinction is what might make a Ph.D. more likely to be ethical than say an M.B.A.

I Love Public Libraries

After a harried morning, Za and I finally located wireless. It's totally pathetic how dependent both of us are on it. We drove out to our vacation spot, depended on the local cafe to juice us up, and the damn router was broken. There was an hour of panic. We wondered whether we would have to cut our vacation short (seriously!)

Then, we found a library with a signal. And, now I am just going to write a short entry on how great public libraries are. I am sitting in this lovely building, where you can get on a computer, take out a book, or rent movies and cds for free. It is one of our absolute best public resources. I don't take advantage of my public library like I ought to, mostly because I have access to a college library and I buy whatever else I might get from the library. But, being here makes me wonder why I don't get a library card.

More importantly, why doesn't everyone take advantage of this totally free resource? I suppose literacy is the problem. Others might also fail to see the return they can get from reading the newspaper everyday, or the periodicals, or flipping through books about how to rewire your home.

I just poked my head up and recognized that a lot more people are in here now than I realized. Pretty cool. Lots of kids too.

So, I am off to wander the stacks now and find something interesting to read. I will post more later when I think of something interesting to say . . .

Womenomics

Isn't that a mouthful? Anyway, Broadsheet put me on the trail to this article analyzing women and the world economy. While I found myself puzzled by the phrase "feminisation of the workforce,"I enjoyed this piece quite a bit.

Here's a nibble:

In poor countries too, the under-utilisation of women stunts economic growth. A study last year by the World Economic Forum found a clear correlation between sex equality (measured by economic participation, education, health and political empowerment) and GDP per head. Correlation does not prove the direction of causation. But other studies also suggest that inequality between the sexes harms long-term growth.

In particular, there is strong evidence that educating girls boosts prosperity. It is probably the single best investment that can be made in the developing world. Not only are better educated women more productive, but they raise healthier, better educated children. There is huge potential to raise income per head in developing countries, where fewer girls go to school than boys. More than two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women.

It is sometimes argued that it is shortsighted to get more women into paid employment. The more women go out to work, it is said, the fewer children there will be and the lower growth will be in the long run. Yet the facts suggest otherwise. Chart 3 shows that countries with high female labour participation rates, such as Sweden, tend to have higher fertility rates than Germany, Italy and Japan, where fewer women work. Indeed, the decline in fertility has been greatest in several countries where female employment is low.

It seems that if higher female labour participation is supported by the right policies, it need not reduce fertility. To make full use of their national pools of female talent, governments need to remove obstacles that make it hard for women to combine work with having children. This may mean offering parental leave and child care, allowing more flexible working hours, and reforming tax and social-security systems that create disincentives for women to work.

Countries in which more women have stayed at home, namely Germany, Japan and Italy, offer less support for working mothers. This means that fewer women take or look for jobs; but it also means lower birth rates because women postpone childbearing. Japan, for example, offers little support for working mothers: only 13% of children under three attend day-care centres, compared with 54% in America and 34% in Britain.

Despite the increased economic importance of women, they could become more important still: more of them could join the labour market and more could make full use of their skills and qualifications. This would provide a sounder base for long-term growth. It would help to finance rich countries' welfare states as populations age and it would boost incomes in the developing world. However, if women are to get out and power the global economy, it is surely only fair that men should at last do more of the housework.

Girl Power and Antidepressants: We Need You for Research

If there are any young women out there who are between 18-30, who read my blog, and who would like to participate in a very interesting research project: keep reading. Delanie Woodlock, a Ph.D. candidate at Monash University, Australia, is writing a dissertation entitled: "Why So Sad? Antidepressants and The Girl Power Generation." The title alone is intriguing for this melancholic feminista, always on the look out for how Prozac is winding its way into discourses on female identity.

Here is Delanie's invitation to participate in her study:

Hi,

I am a PhD student at Monash University, Australia. I am conducting research with young women, aged 18-30 years, who have been prescribed antidepressant
medication for three months or longer. The research will be in the form of an online survey that will take about an hour to complete. This research will ask you
general questions about your experiences of antidepressant medication and also cover experiences of mental illness. There will also be questions that ask about your experiences of being a young woman. The survey is designed for women in Australia, but women from any country are welcome to participate. If you are interested in this survey please go to http://www.girlpowerandantidepressants.com for more information.

Thank you,
Delanie Woodlock

Why We Need More Philosophers: A Service Announcement

I don't think Philosophy departments are booming these days in Academia. I doubt that colleges and Universities are trying to create more lines and expand their philosophy programs. But they should.

I had to tangle with an attorney yesterday. Our goals were so wholly different that I had to just walk out of the room. While I was interested in truth-seeking, fairness, and ethical behavior, she was interested in figuring out (a) either how to discredit me or (b) convince me that the practices I objected to could be defended by case law.

At this point, I asked her what her real goals were in having a conversation with me. While I can argue like the best of them, and spot bad arguments, and fallacies, I was hoping that the two of us could have a real conversation. I asked her if she was interested in seeking the truth or figuring out what she could get away with legally.

To this, she smugly replied: those two goals are not distinct. I was astounded by this comment. Prior to making this comment, she had pulled out every possible crappy trick in the book of poor argument. She threw up red herrings, she tried to make strawmans out of my statements, she engaged in quite a bit of non-sequitor, and relied on innuendo. The experience left me with two main insights. First, whatever the practice of law is, it has nothing to do with justice or truth. Secondly, I was offended as a Philosophy professor to be confronted with this kind of nonsense argumentation.

To all my current, former, or future students who read this blog, do not allow yourself to win this way. If you do, then you have wasted your gifts, your intelligence, and the valuable skills you learned from Philosophy. If you want to make money being a sophist, then please be upfront that you are knowingly throwing out all the skills we taught you.

We are an era of shills and sophists. Rarely do I enter into a discussion with someone--outside of my colleagues, Za, or my friends--who is actually interested in a real debate. My colleague Steve, from Philosopher's Playground, is currently writing a book about the degraded state of moral debates. I hope his book gets published and as many people as possible read it. I am sick of debates with people who simply want to win by hitting below the belt, bending all rules of logic, and using intimidation.

Without the ability to actually debate, substantively, and by following rules of argument and committing ourselves to truth-seeking, then our precious liberty and democracy are worthless. What is legal is certainly not, in many cases, what is right. Moreover, what is legal, is often at odds with telling the truth. Lawyers who have lied to themselves in order to believe that if they can defend their client's practices as legal, then they are honest and ethical people deeply disturb me. I know there are some good lawyers out there. And, I also know that a great many lawyers play this game of sophistry for a greater good.

But, man, life is too short. And, while my love of Socrates and my belief that I should actually live what I teach might is quaint, so be it. If you read this entry, and you are as tired of the lies and posturing as I am--either in your workplace, your campus, or among our elected officials--then take a philosophy course. Sure, probably no one will listen to you right away, but at least you will have done something good for your soul. And, yes, more and more I like the word soul, if for no other reason that I believe it gives us a way to think about our actions, our thoughts, and our beliefs as molding the person we are. We become what we think, how we act, and what we believe. So, take a philosophy class, and ask yourself: "why do I believe what I believe? " "What matters most in my life? " "What value does truth have?" "How do I know when something is true?"

If nothing else, you might be able to sleep better at night.

UPDATE: The Happy Feminist has an interesting post on the presumption of innocence and guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Inventing Diseases? Why Would Big Pharma Do That?

Majikthise alerted me to this BBC article. This is one of those newspaper articles where I shake my head and say "duh." But, then I remember that what is perfectly obvious to me, in part because so much of my research hinges on this, is news to most people. In fact, what often prevents me from writing is thinking that what I have to say is just plain trivial. Let this article be a reminder that it is worthwhile to point out what is obvious to me regularly.

Anyone who watches TV and the thousands of Big Pharma ads parading in front of them, and doesn't realize that they are hoodwinking you to think that "problems of living" are diseases, needs to put on his or her thinking cap. Where does Big Pharma put their dollars, you ask: marketing drugs that solve problems resulting (a) either from overindulgent American habits or (b) drugs that enhance ones personality or looks.

Now, to fully unmask my identity, here is a review I wrote over at Metapsychology of a book called the Merck Druggernaut. You should also check out my review of David Healy's book, Let Them Eat Prozac.

Melancholy Monday: How to Lose

Today has turned melancholy for me, despite the beautiful weather. I found myself in a funk after a spotty day of writing. While I could rationalize and chalk my black mood to an unproductive day, or allergies, I think that the real source is a slow realization I have been coming to the last few days. I am confronting my ineptitude to deal with death, loss, and evil. I can't believe I actually wrote the word evil, because I would rather believe that evil doesn't exist. But, it does and I have to learn to deal with it.

This weekend, my oldest friend asked me why I hadn't become a cynic after all of the messed up things I have seen go down. I responded, perhaps too quickly, that I wouldn't be who I was if I did finally succumb to cynicism. But, her question has been bugging me for two days. My Dad loves to say that everyone has to learn how to live life on the life's terms, and everytime he says that I think my rational mind is keeping me real. But, it's not. I am perpetually deluded by the belief that I actually have magic powers to fight evil, right all wrongs, and protect my friends from suffering.

I don't.

I am watching a lot of my friends deal with real, painful suffering right now. Antheia's mother is dying. My friend Emma's mother lies in a coma after an aneurysm. Another friend is trying to outpace the jaws of the black dog. I can't take their suffering away. I am not even sure that I am doing a good job hearing them.

So, I can't help but put my philosophizing mind to work and wonder aloud if the failure to accept that the world is full of decay, death, suffering, trauma and evil deprives us of a part of our humanity? Is my stubborn persistence in fighting these dark forces keeping me from listening to, attending to, and witnessing my friends live through loss?

Protecting the Religious Freedom of Bigots

Now here is a puzzling legal and moral dilemma.

How do you balance the rights of people to be bigots with the rights of people not to be harmed by bigotry? I guess it is a matter of religious freedom to allow some evangelical Christians to practice bigotry against the LGBTQ community. I swear we will be embarrassed by these arguments against civil rights one day. While in my other post, I am debating whether or not abortionists use the same logic as racists, here I am reminded that homophobia really does. But, at least the evangelicals will demand that lesbian be has right to be born, even though they will totally reject and abandon her later. How do you reconcile these things? Do lesbian fetuses have more civil rights than full-grown adult lesbians?