A thread about annyoing re-writings of history

[Sakura]

Just thinking about how feted male authors/artists/scientists/revolutionaries in our culture and how female equivalents are ignored. Dworkin wrote of how good writing by women is despised, not in a romantic way, but actually despised.

I opened up Sep 27 2010 issue of Newsweek today and saw this enormous 5 page article called Men's lib. IN the first paragraph:

...As the U.S evonomy has transitioned from brawn to brain over the past three decades, a growing number of women have gone off to work....

Immediately this paragraph denies the brawn of domestic drudgery that women have undertaken, the fact that women worked in the factories for a pittance, that they were the cheap labour that drove the industrial revolution, that they did the back-breaking work of carrying water, hoeing, harvesting and cooking..that today women still get the low-status manual labour and that while men do carry out manual labour, a hell of a lot of men have kept the cushy, light, prestigious jobs for themselves.

In one fell swoop, the sentence denies Herstory with a rewriting of history. How often does this "mistake" happen on a daily basis? Does it serve to brainwash the new generation of men and women that women only started working after the fifties when men finally "allowed" them to ?

is it getting worse, do you think?
The mass-media creates apathy and keeps people stupid, doesn't it. It's probably worse

Going back to the ideal of Jesus as feminine, Caroline Walker Bynum has done some really interesting stuff on this sort of imagery. I have managed to forget far more than I ever knew about it, so off to re-read it! Would recommend it though.

There are so many medieval women who have been disappeared from the mainstream histories, some of whom were really radical for their time - its a shame that you don't come across them unless you're really looking. And even within the accepted framework of the Catholic church, they were pushing the boundaries. It's fascinating.

What a great thread.
One thing I learned recently that has incensed me is about the Shetland women who knitted for a living in late Victorian/Edwardian times and I think beyond that too.

History has set them up as a bunch of women sitting round gossiping at their knitting, and drinking tea. Apparently they couldn't get enough tea, cups and cups they drank as they clacked away.

Which neatly neglects the fact that for a good portion of time, they were paid in tea, which they then couldn't sell on as the market in their tiny, isolated part of the world was totally saturated.

I resent that their intense (though not backbreaking) labour - done in what we would call leisure and sleep time and totally vital to their families - has been reduced to an idle stereotype, and the actual cruel economics of it has been glossed over.

SGM I suspect it is a rather niche bit of knowledge

Well you're doing a good job of disseminating it.

Here's an interesting article on the textile industry in NI for the last few hundred years. There are a few points worth noting: women were traditionally in competition with children and the poorest of men for access to income-generating work; women and children were culturally seen as dependent on men/the family breadwinner for income which justified the low wages for often dangerous work they did (the worked for 'extra' money, not the main wage according to the myth); the availability of a very cheap labour pool and the generation of high profits discouraged the capitalist class from undertaking technological innovation in the textile industry in NI (why bother when the profits are rolling in?); men tended to unionise at much higher rates than women and the effect on their incomes was significant (women tended not to be included in unions partly because they were seen as independent operators even in a factory setting, not the main breadwinners in the family)

This is really interesting, please keep it coming.

I just wondered, does anyone know when women started being accused of 'taking men's jobs'? I've heard that phrase applied to the late 19th/early 20th century but would be interested to know how old the idea is. I get the impression that, at least in the last century or so, that phrase is used by those people who want to pretend that women working is a recent thing.

I don't know but I remember hearing --argh it was Fay Weldon or Janet Street-Porter talking on the radio, saying how they'd been promoted and as they walked out of the boss's office, a male colleague stalked up to her and hissed "you're taking the bread from a baby's mouth".

Wow, elephants. That is terrible. Mind you, one of my supervisors told us how when she went for her first job interview (it can't have been that long ago; I'd guess she's late 30s), one of the interviewers had to be restrained by his colleagues from ranting about how he objected to women wasting the interviewers' time when serious men were applying for job.

'Taking men's jobs' may have been something to do with men returning from wars?

Now that I've been reading a bit I find the term 'earning' less than men to be as much of a misleading statement, one that manages to obscure reality, as the one in the OP. 'Earn' implies some sort of deserving, while the true state of affairs is that women are 'paid less' than men, which is all to do with employers deciding what they will pay women.

Just thought of a V annoying one.

Patriarchy has been obsessed with ripping children away from their mothers, whether it's the wealthy woman's sons sent to boarding school, or the obsession with vilifying breastfeeding. Formula companies and the medical establishment have systematically offered cry-it-out/ don't pick them up/ pram at the bottom of the garden "advice" to women. I feel that they are almost jealous of the mother-baby bond and have tried their damndest to sever it. Doctors also refused to believe newborns could feel pain and circumsised boys wihout anaesthetic. IF they'd have asked the mothers, the mothers could have told them they knew their babies felt pain by the sound of their cries. Idiots.

Anyway, fast forward to the 21st century and we now have male childcare gurus, like Biddulph and Alfie Kohn, who have miraculously discovered attatchment parenting by themselves and are going about teaching us silly women the basics.

I've read both Kohn and Biddulph and neither of them reference Jean Liedloff, the woman who originally invented attatchment theory in the Continuum Concept, after living with a rainforest tribe. Her work is a masterpiece and sociologist JOhn Holt admitted that it was a "book that could change the world."
Why is everyone ignoring her work? Why are Biddulph and Kohn trying to pass these ideas and theories off as their own? WOuld they have been able to ignore a man in the same way?
And for good measure Kohn (or was it Biddulph?) recommends you to show porn to your boys

Grrrr... rant over.

Actually Catholicism has lots of female goddess-like figures, starting with Mary, Queen of Heaven, and going down to thousands of female saints, who were venerated. It was Protestantism that insisted that the only bit that mattered was Jesus and God.

sorry, about LIedloff, I don't think she originally invented the concept of bonding, although that is partly the basis of her work, but she was definitely the first to attempt to formulate a workable way of living as an attatchment parent in the modern world. I love her emphasis on how babies don't require their mothers attention all the time, and how it's in fact healthy that they don't have a helicopter parent- about how women should go about their business and bring the baby along for the ride.

sbr1de yes my spanish friend mentioned they celebrate Godesses in Spain

which brings us onto the subject of how our western media incessantly tries to portray Anglo cultures as superior to the rest of the world, then you travel and live in other places, and you realise that women have got it much better in some respects elsewhere (although worse in others usually)

the thing about women working taking bread from babies's mouths etc reminds me of when a fellow PhD student of mine was appointed to a temporary lectureship in the faculty (circa 10 years ago), one of the older profs there was heard to observe how lovely it was that the job had gone to him because he was about to get married and so would need the money.
Now, as it happened the woman he was about to marry was a city lawyer type and earned shitloads more than any poxy academic, so it would have made more sense to say 'though he's getting married soon, so he won't need the money'. But above all it struck me that they would NEVER have said that about a woman - if she had been getting married she would have been perceived as less committed and less in need of money

WHat baffles me, thought TBE, is that while authors like Biddulph and Kohn don'T respect her, they still use the ideas she invented in their parenting books

it baffles you Sakura?

mathanxiety wrote

"women and children were culturally seen as dependent on men"

and

"women tended not to be included in unions partly because they were seen as independent operators"

In other words, the status of women changed whenever it suited men.

LittleRedDragon wrote - "does anyone know when women started being accused of 'taking men's jobs'?"

I agree with mathanxiety that it is probably linked to men returning from wars. I think the effects are most likely to have first become a major social issue at the end of World War I due to the large numbers involved, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had occurred on a smaller scale after earlier wars.

I think the Continuum Concept is a masterpiece, bringing psychoanalysis, anthropologly, sociology together. I think John Holt had it right. She demonstrates why Freud got it so wrong [because in the cultures he lived in (Germany and the UK) the "continuum" of the people had been disrupted in childhood/babyhood, leading to neuroses] But unlike Freud, she places the blame firmly at the foot of society. It's also a feminist text. Its significance has been written out of history.