Book Review: The China I Knew and My Several Worlds

Title: The China I Knew (condensed from My Several Worlds)

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Date: 1954

Publisher: John Day Co.

ISBN: none

Quote: “[T]his is not a complete autobiography. My private life has been uneventfully happy.”

The question is whether you can be content with the condensed version of Pearl Buck’s memoir, or must have the long one. I’ve read both. If you have the luxury of time to read a long book, get My Several Worlds; Buck had enough memories to make it worth reading. If you’re not sure how much time you want to spend with one of the most remarkable women of her generation, The China I Knew is a good short read.

Briefly, as a missionary child Buck was allowed more contact with Chinese people than many missionary children, remaining in Asia even after the revolution. She studied Chinese with native teachers; apparently she was the sort of borderline child prodigy who finds adults more interesting than children until they’re old enough to tutor or baby-sit, and her friends were mostly Chinese women. She understood the things people said about “the foreign devils,” and often heard instances of kindness, as when people not exactly ready to be baptized listened to her father’s evangelical sermons: “He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in Heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” a Chinese elderwoman shushed the restless audience. Among themselves she often heard Chinese people laughing at foreigners, but “more often than not” someone would “say tolerantly” that “these Christians...do their best and we must not blame them for what they do not know. After all, they were not born Chinese.”

She describes Chinese cooking, child care, footbinding (already on the way out of fashion) and men’s “pigtails” (ditto), but of the things Buck saw in old China, perhaps the most relevant to new China is the way “the Manchu invasion of 1644 was success­ful in a military sense...the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese per­suaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves...Since the Manchus were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of government were soon performed by Chinese...The Manchus were like pet cats.”

I don’t do foreign policy so I’ll stop there.

Buck knew children who were sold as slaves, who had no recourse against abuse but, as a status symbol, were often well treated. (The ones she knew were probably overworked and underfed, and complained about as much as well-off teenagers do.) She knew people who didn’t know how to walk up and down stairs. She met a woman who asked wistfully, “Is it true your husband speaks to you in the presence of other people? Not shameful?” (It was “shameful” for him to talk to his wife instead of his parents during family time, rude for her to talk to his female relatives unless she was spoken to—“This rigorousness of family decorum was of course not to be found except in the...most conservative Chinese families.”) As China briefly considered gradual change rather than revolution, another friend said to Buck, of daughters, “Small feet or education she must have, one or the other” (in order to marry well and maintain social status).

The longer version of Buck’s autobiography contains more personal stories, notably the one about why the second child in The Good Earth had brain damage: Buck had a brain-damaged child and became an advocate for those with cognitive impairments. The short one contains most, not all, the vignettes of Old China.

Book Review: Anny in Love

Title: Anny in Love

Author: Barbara Wright 

Date: 2024 

Publisher: Onslow Square 

ISBN: 979-8-9904036-1-1 

Quote: "William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair...died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve." 

It was 1863. He was survived by two daughters and a certifiably insane wife, and, because he had never remarried, his funeral was gate-crashed by a crowd of prostitutes. Wright tells us that it had become customary for women not to attend funerals so that they wouldn't find out that kind of thing about their fathers and husbands... 

What was wrong with Mrs. Thackeray? There's little overlap between psychiatric diagnoses of the 1860s and those in use today. Wright characterizes her in terms that suggest the tired old "Brilliant creative people are susceptible to ballooning-brain autistic disorders" theory. (Brilliant creative people are the ones who learn to work around autistic-type disorders, and other disabilities. There's a correlation between intelligence and becoming famous as having worked through or around disabilities, not one between intelligence and having disabilities.) Mrs. Thackeray was certified on the basis of things like throwing herself and dragging her children into deep water where they nearly drowned, tearing out her own hair and her children's. She was also Irish; she may have had the really rather rare combination of genes that seems to allow classic schizophrenia to develop. In any case, Wright clearly concluded after studying the evidence, Mrs. Thackeray was genuinely dangerous to herself and others, not one of the women (and Irish people) who were declared insane merely because they were inconvenient to someone. 

Wright thinks William Makepeace Thackeray honestly loved his wife and daughters. Wright suggests that Anny and Minny Thackeray worried about having inherited "insanity" from their mother, and, since they hadn't done that, about having passed it on to Minny's daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen. 

 What was wrong with Laura Stephen? Wright characterizes her as a classic case of autism, just functional enough that it must have broken her aunt's heart when Laura grew big enough to be dangerous and had to be put in an institution. In historical fact, Anny's mother and niece lived quite a long time in the institutions where they were kept, and Anny visited them whenever she could, though she wasn't always sure they knew. 

 The title of Anny in Love may seem ironic while you're reading the book. In a period where upper-middle-class women weren't supposed to cultivate any marketable job skills or do any kind of paid work, Anny was a writer just like her Papa. (Only not, so far as anyone has yet tried to claim, anywhere near as good.) She wasn't rich, beautiful, or sentimental. Young men left her alone. In the 1840s and 1850s "fat" was not automatically heard as meaning "ugly" or "repulsive." Thackeray called Anny fat, presumably in contrast to her sister Minny as being thin, but in their case Minny was skinny and tubercular. Anny was sturdy and strong; the scant evidence available indicates that she was ordinary-looking, but not obese. 

Portrait of Anne Thackeray Ritchie from Wikipedia.

Minny married first. Anny was the unmarried aunt who took care of sickly Minny and the one of her babies that survived, brain-damaged Laura Makepeace Stephen (no, not Stephens). Anny lived "in love" of her family with never a suitor in sight until she was old enough to create a scandal by marrying a much younger man--a relative of hers, at that. If she "fell in love" with him, as may have been the case, she concealed it well. She knew how to say no when she wanted to, so, Wright seems to conclude, when she said yes she must have meant it.

Anyway, because the Thackerays and most of their friends were literary types, they left enough details of their lives to make an enjoyable fact-based novel. When Wright describes the characters exchanging witticisms at a party, she's likely to be quoting the ones noted in their letters, diaries, or even published work. The result is fun to read and seems reasonably accurate. 

Book Review: A Woman of Genius

Title: A Woman of Genius

Author: Mary Austin

Date: 1912

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Quote: “[I]f you are looking for anything ordinarily called plot, you will be disappointed. Plot is distinctly the province of fiction.”

I downloaded this book from Gutenberg.org. If you’re online, you can read, print, or download it too, paying only printing expenses. If you’re not, I’ll print a copy for you at cost.

And this novel, of course, is fiction, but it purports to be the memoir of a gifted actress and the men who get, more or less pleasantly, in her way. In many ways A Woman of Genius is the feminine of The Lovely Lady: a long, unpleasingly realistic study of an unadmirable person. Olivia is the only one who describes Olivia as a genius or her acting as art. She acts in plays, gets good reviews, quarrels with men who think theatre groups are Bad Company, is disgusted by men who make it so, and blames society for her not being “Good” in the sense of “chaste.” Her sins against chastity are, however, overshadowed by her sins against modesty, and other virtues, and other people.

In this case the resonance with the facts of Women’s History held my attention a little better than the man’s story failed to hold it in The Lovely Lady. A little, but not a lot.

 

Book Review: The Opoponax

Title: The Opoponax

Author: Monique Wittig

Translator: Helen Weaver

Date: 1964 (French), 1966 (English)

Publisher: Les Editions de minuit (1964), Simon & Schuster (1966)

ISBN: 0-913780-15-4

Length: 256 pages

Quote: “She writes...OPOPONAX and a colon and then, can change its shape. You can’t describe it because it never has the same form.”

For Catherine LeGrand, “opoponax” is not a plant but the word that sounds like the name for her adolescent rebelliousness. Apparently, in Wittig’s mind, her fictional antiheroine Catherine is going to grow up to be one of Les Guerillères, the de-individuated collective protagonists of her more famous novel. However, Les Guerillères is a fantasy; L’Opoponax is a realistic story about not-very-nice Catholic middle school girls.

Since I generally prefer nonfiction to novels anyway, it’s only fair for me to tell you that people who like and respect fiction said good things about The Opoponax. From a literary viewpoint, what the book accomplished is “to use nothing but pure description conveyed by purely objective language.” Within the narrow constraints of this writing-exercise form, Marguerite Duras pronounced it “a masterpiece”; Natalie Sarraute saw it as evidence of a real talent that “in ten or twenty years” the world would recognize.

What about Catherine and her little friends? If you think that “the violence of the girl underworld” is either natural, or a healthy reaction to the oppressive convent school rules, Catherine is a heroine because she “refuses to give up her violence.” If you think that the children’s abnormal violence and nastiness is an unhealthy symptom of overcrowding, Catherine is a horrible little brat and her story is an uninspiring, even degrading, study of brutalization.

Wittig chose the form of this novel in order not to take sides. We share Catherine’s perceptions of sight, sound, sensation, a healthy delight in French poetry, and the hormonal mood swings that prompt her to write “I am the Opoponax,” identifying herself with a symbol of perversity, sin, and Satan. For a child who instinctively loves the discipline of classical poetic form, we may feel, a happy ending must involve outgrowing this sense of perversity, but Wittig refuses to show any suggestion of how, when, or whether Catherine will ever succeed in defending her ego boundaries well enough to become a poet or a friend, much less a wife or mother. At the end of the book she’s still a child, perceiving other children and sometimes going along with what they’re doing, but forming no bonds and having nothing to give.

This ending leaves me with an unpleasant suspicion that the story is autobiographical, that Wittig was still stuck in adolescent rebellion when she wrote it, and that that’s why she wrote those annoying long lists without commas.

Nevertheless, it’s recommended to anyone interested in placing Sartre and de Beauvoir in their historical context, or in reading the original French text with an approved translation on hand for reference.

 

Book Review: And It Was Good

Title: And It Was Good

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Publisher: Shaw

Date: 1983

ISBN: 0-87788-046-8

Length: 21 pages

Quote: “It has long struck me with joy and awe that the theory of evolution is not contrary to the teaching of the Bible.”

Like many people my age I discovered A Wrinkle in Time in the school library in grade six, where I recognized it as science fiction. I liked it enough to read the other books beside it on the shelf, also genre fiction. When I found The Moon by Night I was surprised; not because the story turned the usual conventions of teen romance stories upside down, which I liked, but because the heroine was meditating on a Psalm before, during, and after the romance. Could someone who wrote genre fiction be a Christian?

Well, actually, yes. As explained in the nonfiction books she was able to publish only after building a reputation for writing excellent genre fiction, L’Engle was a very active, even orthodox, member of the Episcopalian church. On some points that church’s doctrines were more liberal than those of some other Protestant churches. The competing substitute-for-religion of evolutionism was very noisy and dogmatic at the time, and had apparently bullied many Episcopalians into accepting faith in the dogma of macroevolution, as preached by the prophet Darwin, as objective, scientific fact. They had discovered that they didn’t have to reject the book of Genesis in order to accept the alternative origin myth. The book of Genesis is a collection of poems and legends about a time long ago. It could be “poetic truth,” a metaphor…

As a doctrine to take seriously and teach, that one never satisfied me either. Why, I wondered, is it so difficult for some people to accept the objective scientific facts about the origins of life? We. Do. Not. Know. There is no empirically verifiable way of “scientifically studying” any of the various origin stories floating about. “The fossil record” seems to tell a nice clear story, supported by carbon dating, of “simpler” lifeforms being displaced by “more complex” lifeforms, until you realize that it was put together for that purpose. Microevolution, the rule that natural or human-guided selection will cause a population to evolve toward one or another extreme of what is possible within their species, is a scientific fact students can verify. Macroevolution, the idea that one species can evolve into another species, is a theory that many people treat as a religious doctrine; it can’t be scientifically verified. Like the Anglo-Israelite Theory of more recent prehistory, it’s logical, it fits into the incomplete collection of known facts, it has emotional appeal for some people, but it can never be proved or disproved. Good people can take such theories seriously; that doesn’t make them true, or scientific. Giving a theory the status of a fact moves thought from the category of "science" to the category of "religion," and I prefer my Christianity neat, not watered down with other religions. I don't mind at all a discussion of "If this fossil is what I think it is...," nor do I mind the most literal interpretations of the stories in the book of Genesis, but I don't think it's either good science or good religion to blather about "the myths of Creation and the facts of Evolution." That' is, in my opinion, proselytizing for an antichristian religion that's been tagged as "Scientism," a thoroughly unscientific worship of scientists...

So, when I found And It Was Good in a public library, some years after its publication, I can’t say I was thrilled by L’Engle’s treatment of the stories of the Creation as myths to which writers can add whatever fanciful details they like. The whimsies L’Engle adds to the story of Cain illuminate a serious Christian consideration of moral responsibility, and prefigure the speculative novel later published as Many Waters…but, but…that’s just not the way many Christians were taught to approach Bible stories.

If, like me, you find it simpler to say that our faith is that life on Earth was created (because that takes fewer leaps of credulity than believing it evolved without some sort of “intelligent design”), then you may feel that L’Engle wastes a lot of words, and mental energy, philosophizing about something you could have explained much more simply—“elegantly,” if you will. Christians believe that our world was created by a Supreme Being, a force of “Powerful Goodness,” and that originally our Creator pronounced it good; what was not good came later. Once you accept the idea of a Creator there is no reason to doubt any of the extraordinary things the Bible writers say the Creator has done. We have not necessarily been told how it was done. There is no reason to feel positive that what the words they used suggest to our minds is what we would have seen and heard if we had been there when whatever they tried to describe happened, but also no reason to doubt that, if the Creator did choose some extraordinary ways to make things happen, a Being capable of creating life could have done those things too.

A Being capable of creating life could have evolved it through "more primitive" forms of life as easily as created it by fiat, and the Bible never says that when the waters parted and the dry land appeared, there were no fossils from previous eras of which we are told nothing. The Bible not only never says that there were no dinosaurs, but affirms that ancient people were familiar with an idea of "dragons." But We. Do. Not. Know.

“How can the world be round,” a nineteenth century literalist supposedly exclaimed, “when the Bible speaks of its four corners?” At tremendous risk and expense, in the twentieth century a few humans were able to step back and get a look at the world, and it is round. There is no need to make fun of the literalist, though. Israel and its surrounding countries, the Bible writer’s world, occupy a piece of earth bounded almost entirely by water, technically a peninsula rather than a large island or small continent, and its shape is basically four-cornered.

Those ancient kings of whom nothing is known, who lived hundreds of years, the one of them who was closest to God living fewer years than the others. L’Engle apparently had not read that non-Hebrew historians had the same list of long-gone kings whose dynasties lasted the same numbers of years that the book of Genesis suggests the individual kings lived.

Even the ages of Moses’ ancestors, which some people find hard to believe…Some Christians dogmatically believe that this family lived their lives at about half the speed most people do, and Sarah gave birth at age ninety and Jacob’s thirteen (or more) children were all born after he was seventy, because of their faith in a God with Whom all things are possible. The Creator has in fact given a minority of humans “longevity genes.” Maybe the family of Abraham were given super-longevity genes to impress the Semitic tribes to whom they preached against the apparently prevalent custom of human sacrifice. Maybe. Then again, in some cultures, especially in climates that have wet and dry “seasons” rather than hot, cold, and transitional seasons, time is counted in seasons, two to a year.

The Bible does not contradict itself on the deep level at which it has meaning, but it does contain disparities. Maybe the lesson to be learned is that “we’ll understand it better by and by.” That we are hard-wired to believe in Powerful Goodness suggests that there must be some truth behind our belief. The Bible is by far the most credible ancient document of this belief…but our faith needs to be in God, rather than in the details of any ancient document.

L’Engle plays with the details, teasing psychological meaning out of them. Maybe her poetic visions are true. Maybe in the afterlife Moses will tell her “That is not what I meant, at all.” Who knows. L’Engle does take some pains, in this book and in her other Christian books, to make a clear distinction between what Christianity has historically taught and what L’Engle, personally, thought.

It was probably this more sophisticated (High Church) Anglican thought, reflected in those of their books that are most accessible to children, that got both L’Engle and C.S. Lewis onto a list of books some busybody recommended not making available to children. This list was misreported to L’Engle as a list of “pornographic” books, and she marvels both at being compared with Lewis and with either writer’s being considered “pornographic.” (Sometimes I wish now that, while she was living, I’d written to tell her that I started buying her books at the same time I started buying Lewis’s and, since the main difference between Anglicans and Episcopalians is nationality, I found many similarities.) As all book lovers remember, the only references to sex in either the Narnia books or the series that started with A Wrinkle in Time are the words that have genders: he, she, mother, father. What would have scared the busybody would be the “Christian mythology.” Is it impious to imagine God incarnated in a world of rational animals as a Lion? In Wrinkle the “three ladies” who guide the children on their adventure aren’t called angels, but it’s fairly obvious that they’re meant to be messengers of God teaching the children how to be messengers from God. “Apprentice angels” is my phrase not L’Engle’s. I’m comfortable with the idea of Christians thinking of ourselves as apprentice angels. Not everyone is. We are not yet pure spirits, like the angels, that can survive travel between solar systems; perhaps we will be. I’m not perturbed by the idea of God choosing to incarnate as a talking lion in a world different from ours, either, and I’m comfortable with the cute little fauns in Narnia and the hobbits in Middle-Earth too. Not everyone is. L’Engle usually managed to sustain the dry bemused tone with which she reports how people just didn’t understand her work, in And It Was Good; my take on a late work, The Rock That Is Higher, was that in that late work the old lady indulged in a bit of whining. Some people should only apply the creativity with which they misread other people’s books to writing books of their own.

The explanation of the misunderstanding is also discussed, briefly, in And It Was Good. Christianity is not Positive Thinking, which tries to dismiss unpleasant things as “negative,” not really there. Christianity has historically recognized that evil things, evildoers, and an Evil Principle exist. Neither is Christianity a dualistic philosophy in which good and evil are equal or balance each other. Christianity teaches that Powerful Goodness will prevail in the end. L’Engle, like her characters, got through difficult times by clinging to memories of good things. Yet the Evil Principle often—some Christians say, consciously and deliberately—corrupts even the best things. No writer is infallible. Anyone who writes very much has written some things that were wrong, that might have confused, deceived, or distracted somebody somewhere.

Sincere Christian readers criticize Christian books (as I’m doing here) and recommend them with reservations, but we don’t want them banned or censored; we recognize that even something that harmed us might have helped someone else. One person’s temptation to a bad investment of time or money may be another’s encouragement to a good one; one person’s “soft on New Age groups like that awful cult that…” is another’s “Blessed may this author be for affirming that there are good things about my non-Christian heritage.” There are books—as a bookseller I’ve received some books—that, upon thoughtful reading, we decide may be most useful for their bulk, to raise a seat or cover a crack, or perhaps for their chemical properties, to absorb water or light fires. I’ve burned multiple copies of once-popular novels in which characters have sex at age twelve (or under), doctors prescribe medications that would be likely to kill patients in real life, anyone speaking as an expert recommends something that’s now known to be counterproductive. I’m not going to resell those books; others have a right to sell their copies if they choose. I’d agree with, and extend, something L’Engle said in And It Was Good: it’s when I confuse my bookseller’s right to choose my stock with the Voice of God, and start pontificating, ‘Nobody should read this, nobody should see it, it should be banned,” that I am in grave spiritual danger.

I recommend And It Was Good to those who would like to know more about the author of A Wrinkle in Time, to all students of women’s history and especially of women’s spirituality. For those who want to know more about the Bible and Christianity, other books would be better studied before this one. I like this book very much; every book is not meant, does not need, to be a first book on its topic.

Book Review: Parson Austen's Daughter

Title: Parson Austen’s Daughter

Author: Helen Ashton

Publisher: Dodd Mead

Date: 1949

ISBN: none

Length: 336 pages

Quote: “Cassandra Austen was born in 1773, so that she was only in her third year when her sister Jane, a winter child, first blinked her bright eyes at the light, on the sixteenth of December, in the year 1775.”

This is a novelized biography of Jane Austen, 1775-1817, whose closest friend was probably her sister Cassandra, 1773-1845. All eight of Parson George Austen’s children seem to have been fairly close to each other. That is how we know much of what we know about their lives. They were widely separated in age and, after growing up, in physical space; so they wrote lots of newsy, chatty letters, which Ashton reworked into the details of this book. Though Jane and Cassandra were born less than three years apart their parents managed to squeeze a brother, Frank, in between them. Still, Jane and “Cassy” had something else in common: though they were popular girls, the young men they fancied (or those men’s parents) didn’t think they had enough money to be good prospects, so neither of them ever married.

While British society generally snubbed “old maids” and “poor relations,” and the Austen sisters were both, they seem to have found ways to enjoy being those things. Five of the six brothers married; the sisters evidently enjoyed being aunts. They had friends, went to parties and dances, though the older they got the more likely other people were to write that (both sisters, but Jane much more than Cassandra) seemed a little too pretty, witty, and bright to suit their opinions of how “old maids” and “poor relations” ought to behave. They lived mostly in charming country houses with lots of space for long walks, which both sisters enjoyed. They had all kinds of books to read. Jane started adding to the world’s supply of books at a very early age, but made her important contributions in her thirties.

Possibly because they walked so much, both sisters resisted infectious diseases for several years. Cassandra even achieved what was then considered old age. Jane barely made it into middle age before succumbing to some unknown infection.

Ashton finds hints of autobiography in Jane Austen’s romances…and something less endearing. I suspect it was not her fault. In the early twentieth century, when Ashton was learning to write, the fashionable thought was “We girls can do anything!” In the early 1940s it was actually fashionable for young women to have full-time jobs outside the home, and to think of their single-adult years as time for lots of other things, regardless of whether they ever married. Then in the late 1940s, as the soldiers came home, there was a push for women to give up their careers and choose to be housewives for the rest of their lives. I seriously doubt whether, in 1949, anyone would have published a book about Jane Austen that didn’t fit the prevailing line of propaganda: “Well, girls, if you’re very talented and don’t find anyone you want to marry, you could do worse than have lives like Jane Austen’s, that poor little thing. She was pretty and nice and popular and a Major Talent…and she died young…a-a-a-alllll aloooone” (usually this phrase would be uttered with some vibrato, as if dying alone were worse than dying, e.g., in a maternity ward with a half-dozen medical students peering at the cause of death). “And she was constantly alienating even her women friends,” (then stereotyped as unreliable, second-rate friends) “by being too witty and intelligent, you know. I’ve always felt that it was more feminine to laugh at a man’s jokes rather than make jokes.” The well documented result of which was that masses of talented, educated, promotable young women swallowed the whole line, tried being full-time housewives, and were bored out of their minds, and turned to drugs and became the stereotyped homeless seniors of the 1980s, or left their husbands and became the less conspicuous very poor seniors of that era...

Well…to be fair…I grew up among quite a few women who’d survived the late 1940s and 1950s. Most (not all) of them were related to me. And what they did was make a choice pop culture ignored: they ignored both of the stereotypes pop culture was pushing, They chose careers that were compatible with motherhood, worked, took time off when their children were actually babies who needed constant mothering or took the babies to work with them, and lived more or less happily ever after. Not that all of them were uniformly happy all the time. Some had serious illnesses; some were seriously scared by some eager-beaver doctor’s telling them they had serious illnesses when they didn’t. Despite modern hygiene and antibiotics, some of the husbands and children died. Sometimes they disagreed with their husbands. At least one couple did eventually divorce, in their sixties, so the disabled one could collect a pension while the healthy one continued to work. I saw some of them cry and heard some of them swear. Nevertheless they seemed much happier than any of the women who believed that they could have either paying jobs or marriage but not both.

Who knows how Jane Austen really felt about the course her life took. Feelings come and go, and the Austens’ whole generation had been taught that letters should be written when people had worked off their emotions and were thinking logically. Even in Austen’s novels emotions are expressed more in the details of “manners” than in the histrionic outbursts the next generation of writers loved to describe. Ashton would not have been allowed to publish a novel that presented Jane Austen as completely satisfied with the decision to forget the silly boys who’d passed briefly through her “friendzone” and enjoy being an aunt and a writer—and it would be hard to prove that she was, anyway, from her letters. (What her lettters do make clear was that both sisters were cheerful people who managed to find things to enjoy and to laugh about, even during sad times.) Today Ashton might have an equally hard time publishing a novel that suggested that Jane Austen cared how many people thought she ought to be sad and dull, or ever even wanted to marry any of her spineless suitors.

What we do know is that Jane Austen didn’t try to change her behavior…and encouraged a favorite niece who seemed to be growing up just like her, though the niece never became a famous author. If she could have known how much time she had, she might have said that her life could have been better than it was, but it could more easily have been worse.

Book Review: The Virgin of Bennington

Title: The Virgin of Bennington

Author: Kathleen Norris

Publisher: Penguin

Date: 2001

ISBN: 1-57322-179-1

Length: 256 pages

Quote: “Before I arrived at Bennington, I had no notion of its reputation on thed East Coast.But I soon learned that to many people the term ‘Bennington girl’ connoted someone who was flamboyantly (if not oppressively) artsy, bohemian, and also notoriously easy with sexual favors…I was by no means the only student who took her studies seriously. But I did feel isolated.”

This book is actually a pleasant adult read—very adult, all about work and philosophy, never a steamy moment—but it deserves some sort of award for having the Worst Title. It’s not about virgins, or Catholics, or religious art. I think the publisher was hoping to sell this book to people looking for sensational stories about any or all of those things—something like The Da Vinci Code—and those readers are guaranteed to be disappointed.

At Bennington, the author of Dakota and Little Girls in Church wasn’t exactly religious. She was just an introvert who didn’t want to go quite as far into sex, drugs, and every other mindless rebellion a kid could think of, quite as fast, as her dorm mates did. So although she didn’t actually stay a virgin for most of her college years she was nicknamed “the Virgin of Bennington.”

But that’s only a preface to explain the attention-grabbing title, not what the book is about. The sins of good writers’ youth are seldom memorable; Norris doesn’t claim to be an exception. (One married man—not named—and a few underwhelming drug trips.) So what she actually delivers to readers is a memoir of the last years of her first employer, a friend to poets, and what her employer did for writers and writing in the late twentieth century. This turns out to be an inspirational story—about poets, working to spread interest in poetry out from New York City. Elizabeth Kray, “Betty,” had been married long before Norris met her, and Norris was at least considering marriage to David Dwyer at the end of this memoir.

Since none of Norris’s books is exactly sensational, and this one’s not even religious, The Virgin of Bennington is a book for a small niche market. It’s more biography than autobiography, but a personal reminiscence rather than a formal, researched, full-length biography. It’s written in short bloggy sections arranged mostly in chronological order, with a little noticeable repetition, not much. The question it answers, in the context of Norris’s better known books, is “How did Norris prepare for the extraordinary half-monastic, half-artistic life for which she’s known? Did she ever have to work for someone else, and if so who, when, where, and why?” We learn how Kray helped prepare both Norris and the United States for Norris’s adult career.

Those seriously interested in women’s history, literary history, poems, and poets will love this story. I do. But although you can recognize the voice of the bestselling essayist in this memoir, it's also easy to see why the memoir was not a bestseller.

Book Review: I've Got to Talk to Somebody God

Title: I've got to Talk to Somebody God

Author: Marjorie Holmes (Mighell)

Date: 1968

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: none

Length: 121 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Betty Fraser

Quote: "I don't peel potatoes as often as my mother did, Lord, but when I do, I'm grateful. I suddenly feel near to you, my creator."

Marjorie Holmes had written seven novels, all moderately successful in their time and forgotten now, and a book about the art of writing, before this breakthrough book of prayers, many of which had been printed as columns in the Washington Evening Star. In her time Holmes was well connected; this slim book carries blurbs from Catherine Marshall, Mary Martin, and Senator Margaret Chase Smith.

My guess would be that, if this book had been written by some obscure private Jane Doe, it would never even have been printed.

But it was printed; it sold well; it made Holmes' reputation as a Christian writer. Margaret Chase Smith's praise for Holmes' "rare and unusual talent for releasing deep, inner feelings" might have given people pause in 1978, but in 1968 the "deep, inner feelings" people were still encouraging each other to release took words like:

"How much am I free to spend without feeling guilty?"

"I'm not young and beautiful any more, the way my heart imagines. When I look in the mirror I could cry."

"Bless the school buses and their drivers, let them trans­port our children safely."

"I'm tired of Scout meetings and music lessons...And oh, God, so tired of P.T.A."

"I don't believe I've ever thought to thank you, God, for this wonderful friend...for all the years we've known each other."

In short, this book reads like a Christian mom-blog from fifty years ago. It's recommended to young "Moms" who want to reflect on how much has and has not changed in all those years.

Book Review: The Tall Woman

Title: The Tall Woman 

Author: Wilma Dykeman

Date: 1962

Publisher: Wakestone (and others)

ISBN: 0-9613859-1-X

Length: 315 pages

Quote: "Lydia said softly, 'I never asked for easy, Mama.'"

Trigger warning: This classic of American Women's Literature is not a comedy, in form, but a biography. When a novel has the form of a biography the character may succeed, and her or his successes may be both satisfactory and laughable, but the happy ending is often "Then the character died old, regretted by all, and his or her heir was..." The time frame of the story simply exceeds that of the main character. The time frame of The Tall Woman exceeds that of its protagonist, Lydia McQueen.

In 1962 books that emphasized women's height often addressed baby-boomers who had been so unladylike as to grow taller than their fathers were, and after assuring those girls that there were enough overgrown young men out there to go around, they spent most of the space available talking about how to look shorter (stripes, shirts and skirts in different colors, skirts that reached exactly to the knee). The Tall Woman broke that rule; though Lydia is apparently the tall skinny type, according to the jacket drawing, the story is not about how she copes with her body shape but about how she copes with crises, brings up children, appreciates the differences among most of her neighbors and eventually beats the one really unlikable neighbor she has in a political dispute. It's a feel-good story.

One of the things I've regretted in life was that, though Wilma Dykeman Stokely was still teaching at Berea when I was there, I didn't demand to be admitted to her class. However, apart from the history in this novel about the late nineteenth century, there's not all that much to discuss about The Tall Woman; the story is easy to follow. It reads like a family legend and, going by its dedication, probably is one. Lydia is as lovable as Elvira Ware in Jubilee, as admirable as Mary Peters. 

Despite its appearance on some school reading lists, this is a novel that can be read for pleasure. It's almost sex-free (we read about the children, not about their begetting) and less violent than many novels about this period (Lydia does kill a bear). It won't embarrass adults if the children read it, at all. It will repay attentive reading; Lydia's relationships with each of her neighbors have their own nuances, and the pleasure of the irony rests on your willingness to remember those nuances.

Book Review: The Life I Really Lived

Book Review: The Life I Really Lived

Author: Jessamyn West

        

Date: 1979

        

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

        

ISBN: 0-15-151562-X

        

Length: 404 pages

        

Quote: “Why tell the truth now? To...end the belief that I wrote of joy and courage and faith because I had never known anything else.”

        

This is not, of course, the life Jessamyn West really lived. This is a melodramatic novel, written as the memoir of an inspirational novelist, Orpha Chase, who decides in her late seventies to write about what she did before her last, and lasting, marriage.

        

In a sense this novel is a sort of apologium for the kind of novels Jessamyn West chose to write. They weren’t saccharine, exactly; they dealt with war and murder and slavery and betrayal and suicide; but they dealt with those things as good Christian ladies deal with them—clearheadedly, refusing denial or despondency, holding the self at a distance from ugliness. In the 1960s and 1970s any novel that was neither obscene nor depressing was likely to be accused of escapism, of having “refused to confront the reality” of the bad things in the world, or of having been written by someone without life experience. The Life I Really Lived is West’s retort. It's fiction to protect the privacy of West's family and friends.

       

Orpha has chosen to write about joy and faith because she was born poor and brought up tough; because her first husband, a bisexual teacher falsely accused of molesting a girl student, shot the accuser and himself in front of Orpha; because Orpha chose, at first with the help of her first husband’s boyfriend, to adopt the student’s unwanted baby; because her second husband, chosen for the hope of security, stifled her creativity until she chose the disgrace of divorce in the 1920s; because her brother, an ordinary bratty boy, matured into a saintly minister whose reward for his good deeds was to be accused of murder. In addition to the brother and the first two husbands Orpha also finds time to love two other men before finding the right one to marry. She also remarks darkly that her memoir will include incest, though this at least turns out to be in a psychological sense.

        

It takes a while for Orpha to discover the liberating joy of sexual self-control, but in other ways there is a consistent integrity about her—not to mention a gift for pithy phrases that summarize things perfectly. She deserves a happy ending. She will get one, but it won’t be any of the ones she’s led readers to imagine.

        

West was one of the handful of novelists whose fiction-for-adults I’ve consistently liked. A lot of people who felt that way about novels-for-adults felt that way about Jessamyn West, in her day. High school literature books used to include episodes from The Friendly Persuasion or Cress Delahanty alongside the work of Steinbeck or Hemingway. I suspect her sudden disappearance from the canon had more to do with academic identity politics than with any reevaluation of the merit of her work—I’ve never seen such a reevaluation. West, like Pearl S. Buck, Madeleine L’Engle, or even Phyllis McGinley, was the sort of feminist foremother the NOW movement found embarrassingly hard to live up to, and although all of them made solid feminist statements in their writings, none has been much studied in Women’s Literature courses led by NOW feminists.

       

And there is, ahem, that little matter of their being Christian. Despite the adultery and incest in Orpha’s life, The Life I Really Lived is a story about the spiritual life and growth of a serious, even radical Christian. Women don’t adopt the unwanted babies of the people responsible for their adored first husbands’ death unless the women have some kind of radical faith; Orpha’s faith happens to be conservative and Protestant. Orpha’s brother believes that his life, throughout most of the story, is the direct result of a spiritual experience. By the time we learn that Orpha is moving up on age eighty (as was West), we have to consider the possibility that her survival is also intended to be read as the result of her spiritual experience. This is not a book Christian-phobics can appreciate.

        

If you are not Christian-phobic, and if you appreciate the kind of stories smart, tough, goodhearted senior citizens tell, you’ll probably like The Life I Really Lived. A particular treat is the way the novel manages to show us the young Orpha’s passionate sexuality without ever being graphic or tasteless. “Today a woman having bedded with a great general feels free to tell us that in bed the general could not present arms. Women of my generation would have spared the great general the revelation of this failure...I would have, though Jake needs no such protection.”

        

Then there’s the wit that sparkles through a story that’s never actually funny. “Bernard...just stuttered away until what he was after came out. He seemed to like stuttering.” “I was just as ladylike as could be about words myself. I never said belly for stomach...True, there were quite a few words I didn’t know were bad...like pussy.” “He could’ve stirred the soup with his toes without harming the soup.” “Ending my thirties, I thought I had entered age.” One of the qualities for which Jessamyn West used to be known was the high percentage of wise or witty, very quotable, aphorisms in all her work. The Life I Really Lived is rich in them.

        

There are Christians who disapprove of the whole idea of novel writing. They existed even during the mid-twentieth century, although during West’s active years the rest of the reading world tended to view nonfiction as hack work, memoirs as self-indulgence, and only novels or poems as respectable forms of Literary Art. Christians who accept novels as a valid way for writers to say what they think may want to reread Jessamyn West’s books, and demand that the literary community reestablish them in the canon of excellent twentieth-century fiction.

Book Review: Raised by Strangers

Title: Raised by Strangers

Author: Brooke Lynn

Date: 2014

Publisher: Light Messages

ISBN: 978-1-61153-127-5

Length: 199 pages

Quote: "I was kidnapped, abandoned, given away, and then raised by strangers...My father had spent years searching for me with help from the police and the FBI. For him, it ended in a moment of relief and triumph...However, this wasn’t the “happily ever after” that I expected."

On the surface, the writer known as Brooke Lynn might seem like a "normal' (for Washington) yuppie-type nurse and counsellor who tries to help young people with eating disorders. Things are seldom as they seem. Eating disorders tend to have roots in a deeply disorderly life, and by typical yuppie standards Lynn had one.

Actually, if you've listened to the stories of the American welfare class, the story Lynn tells about growing up in that lifestyle is not unusual. Partly it's that people who've made poor choices often become poor in financial terms; partly it's that the system ironically rewards them for making poor choices. Individual social workers may believe they are trying to help families stay together, but the fact is that people can collect more benefits when families are split up and everyone presents a maximally "needy" profile. To reconcile themselves to taking handouts, people lose whatever sense of honor they had. They start to feel that it's "smarter" to drift from job to job, collect maximum handout benefits, and fill in any gaps with fraud and outright theft, rather than work their way up to a steadier, better paid job.

I wasn't allowed to talk to many of the people who told my parents stories like this one when I was a child. We weren't rich; after successfully petitioning for food stamps to replace a food handout program, Dad's reward in the summer of 1974 was to get to try out those new food stamps to feed his family till his next job started (he'd been the man who packed up the free food), but we weren't going to live like those people. I recognize the genre, though. I went to school with kids who were going through experiences like those of little Brooke and little James in this book.

The parents married too young, were not emotionally ready for the commitment and did not honor it. The marriage fell apart. Desperately clinging to her babies, the mother went underground and came up with a second husband who abused her, abused the children, and broke the law. Rather than restore custody of the babies to their coldhearted father and his hostile second wife, the mother left them in the care of the second husband's sister, who "seemed like the normal one in the family." This aunt-substitute, called "Natalie" in the book, got a job now and then but was really a professional welfare cheat and thief who used the children to help her steal supplies for her illegal day care operation. The mother grew sadder and sicker as the children floundered in school.

Finally the kids reclaimed their father and stepmother, who had a more conventional middle-class life...into which little Brooke just didn't fit. Among other things the father told her she was fat. She developed eating disorders and, in a few years, became really fat, eventually to gain 70 pounds of "baby weight." Especially after giving in too easily to a high school boyfriend, she heard her father's scolding words as a form of sexual abuse and ran away, spending the rest of her teen years with a friend's family.

For Lynn hope was always associated with Christian faith and, although she brought plenty of emotional baggage into her adult life, she was able to claim the promises of God to help her break the patterns of behavior she'd learned. Her own early marriage started to fall apart just as her parents did, but through their faith Lynn and her husband received the help they needed to stay together and give their children a home.

As a memoir, Raised by Strangers belongs to a genre that's not been widely published or received much attention in the literary world. It's not confessional, romantic, symbolic. It is "testimonies." Traditionally "testimonies" were primarily oral literature--the stories individuals were encouraged to tell, in some churches more than others. Though they narrated family sagas, the failures and the successes of the people involved, the focus of a "testimony" is always on what the narrator believes to be God's guiding influence. Most stories of this type were never polished enough to be collected as books, and, if published, most were privately published and circulated only in families or congregations...even though, as Kathleen Norris has observed, the retelling of "testimonies" often identifies good stories and polishes them into a solid, if simple, form.

The Internet is likely to bring many more volumes of "testimonies" before the public. How good or bad for American Literature is this development likely to be? For Women's Literature--literature as sociological documents--it will be important, and valuable. For literary pleasure...a book of "testimonies" is not a novel, but, like Raised by Strangers, it can be a satisfactory collection of good stories well told.

If you are a Christian you're likely to enjoy these affirmations of our faith. If you're not a Christian, I'd be interested in reading your reactions to this book. I suspect that it may be one of the more successful books in helping people who are not Christians themselves at least understand why so many people are. Brooke Lynn has learned better than most of us how to tell a Christian "testimony" to skeptical East Coast yuppie-intellectual audiences.

Lady Day? Women's Day? Can Protestants Observe Either?

(Updated to improve and enlarge the book list!)

This is Women's History Month, and the eighth of March has been designated as both "Women's Day" and "Lady Day." Yes, the intention of most of the people publicizing both celebrations is to polarize women into thinking we have to pick just one.

Here, at a site that has steered several readers to this site, is the case for "Lady Day"...I was going to leave this one to the Catholics, but whether the second e-mail about it was addressed to me personally, to all women readers, or to all readers, I felt goaded by the e-mail to write a full-length post in response. (Yes, a sponsor paid cash for a full-length post this morning.)

http://www.returntoorder.org/2018/02/true-motherhood-will-clash-feminist-theme-march-8th-2/

Non-Catholics may be most familiar with the phrase "Lady Day" as an ironic nickname for the legendary singer and addict known as Billie Holiday, whose biography has very little in common with that of the Mother of Jesus.

For those who don't remember...

Catholics observe "Lady Day" as one of several celebrations of the Virgin Mother Mary.

Here's our Protestant e-friend's book about...actually there's some debate whether Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene may have been the same person, but Mary of Nazareth was a separate person from either.

Among Christians, not to mention Jews and Muslims, there's a wide range of belief about who Mary was and what it means that she was a "virgin mother." The simplest interpretation is that she became the Mother of Jesus on the occasion of losing her virginity in the normal way, to her husband Joseph or to someone else; in support of this interpretation, the Bible records that Jesus let people refer to him as Joseph's son. The traditional Christian belief is that she became the Mother of Jesus by a miracle, without (ever?) having normal marital relations with her husband. Catholics have built a whole set of minor religious holidays on the further interpretations of this miracle story that people have come to believe. The position of this web site is that which, if any, religious tradition you find believable is probably determined by your life experience or even your neurological wiring, so this web site is not going to argue about the details of Mary's private life.

Jaroslav Pelikan had read enough to be qualified to write an overview...

What we do know about Mary, historically, is that she had the most common given name for women of her generation, and shared that name with as many as five other early Christians; that Jesus was called her "firstborn," and that at least four men and two women were called his brothers and sisters; that she was present at the Crucifixion, where one of Jesus's last words was an order that she and "beloved disciple" John adopt each other; and that she was revered as a leader, a mother figure, by the apostolic church.

From the fact that Jesus "knew letters, having never learned" in a recognized school, many also infer that either Mary or Joseph, or more likely both of them, had been Bible scholars and had taught Jesus at home. During the period of captivity in Babylon many Jewish Rabbis had adopted a Pagan opinion that girls were unfit to study the Bible, but Jesus did not hold this opinion, so it's likely that his grandparents didn't either. (The ancient Roman Empire was actually quite literate; working-class Jews, and even enslaved Greeks, often read extensively and sometimes were employed as teachers.)

Beyond that, the Holy Family themselves seem to have guarded their privacy well. We know that the apostles solicited Mother Mary's opinion while she was alive; we don't know what her opinions were, nor can historians be certain whether she helped Luke write his Gospel, or contributed to the Epistle to the Hebrews, or went to Europe with other early Christians, although legends suggest that she may have done any or all of those things. (What survives in the way of history from this period also makes it clear that there were other noteworthy people called Joshua or Jesus, Miriam or Maria or Mary, John or Jochanan, and Joseph or Yusuf; at least one other person with each of those names was also active in the apostolic church, and some of them were related to each other, which makes the extrabiblical record super-confusing. Unbelievers were particularly apt to confuse Jesus whom Christians call Christ with a different man, Jesus son of Pantera, whose mother was also called Mary; they seem to have lived about a hundred years before the events recorded in the Gospels.) We do know that the best of all mothers was not "tied down to the nursery" or considered unfit for leadership positions among adults.

This web site recently reviewed a long book that examines the religious and social history of the early Roman Empire, with particular attention to the backlash of sexist bigotry that formed in reaction to the excessive sexual freedom of some early Christian groups. It's too soon to go back there again. Let's just say that some authentic statements by some early Christian writers were misinterpreted by later generations who were more bigoted than the original writers were. "Hating" the idea of sex, even the company of the opposite sex, when you are young and full of hormones and determined to practice celibacy anyway, has nothing to do with hating fellow believers of the opposite sex. The apostolic church did not hate or oppress women; it attracted masses of women for that reason. The medieval church, unfortunately, often did hate and oppress women. An emotional need for special celebrations of very private events in the life of a very private lady, as manifested in some of the Catholic "festivals of Mary," seems to have been a backlash to that earlier backlash. To modern-day Protestants, all these festivals in honor of Mary seem distinctly weird.

"Lady Day" is at least a celebration of Mary's public image rather than the mysteries of her private life, so in theory Protestants can join Catholics in honoring the Ideal of Christian Motherhood.

In "Mother" Teresa's case, that would be spiritual motherhood...

We all had mothers. Most of us still have mothers. We should all be able to find something to celebrate about our mothers, even if they were inadequate and still are annoying.

Mine was inadequate in one outstanding way: she was disabled by a genetic disease, which made her hard enough to live with, and on top of that she went around proclaiming how much less sick she was as a result of eating a "California health food freak" diet--while still visibly existing at a level of health people wanted to avoid, at any cost.

Apart from that, and in view of that, she was a rather heroic mother. She still is. She was the beauty queen who chose to be the chaste, modest, and obscure consultant to women who wanted to be "stars." She had to fight, physically fight off bigger and stronger people, to give birth "naturally" so we children would be minimally damaged by her disaster gene. Her home teaching, before we went to school, was what made me the child prodigy and my brother the real "genius" we were. She homeschooled my neurologically damaged natural sister. While being no example of healthiness herself, she succeeded in working a few "miracle cures" for private patients as a home nurse. She never became "too old to learn"; in her sixties she joined a Messianic Jewish temple (in order to be a home nurse for a dear friend) and made Bas Mitzvah; at seventy she became the good example of gluten-free good health she'd always wanted to be, and was a leader in a celiac support group. At eighty-three, she's still complaining that Wal-Mart's afraid to hire her as a "greeter" (unarmed guard)--she wants to walk to a job that keeps her on her feet!

Like most mothers, she's capable of annoying the living daylights out of me. Like most daughters, I appreciate that we have two different houses and work very hard to keep this the case, but I admire and love my mother. If Protestants canonized saints, I think my mother might be one.

We don't, of course. We don't believe we know whether anyone has been fast-tracked into Heaven or promoted to any special position there. We don't even claim to know whether Mother Mary is still resting in peace until the Final Judgment, or is watching us from Heaven. No Protestant would doubt that, if any mortal is watching us from Heaven, Mary would be; but we don't know. (A Protestant friend once quoted a Catholic friend having asked him, "Do you believe that Jesus would leave his mother in the grave?" I don't know that you have to have grown up with a hypothyroid celiac mother to understand how a loving son might have been well trained not to disturb his mother's sleep.)

All Protestants officially think about the great saints is that their lives are moral examples to us. Mary's certainly was. We can celebrate her dedication to a great and terrible lifework, her love of her son, her fortitude in appearing publicly as his mother at the foot of the Cross, her "motherly" position among his followers during what was probably at least a double bereavement--Joseph does not appear in the Gospels after Jesus appears as an adult...

Our Catholic e-friend's post, with its photographs of random girls acting bratty at a pro-abortion demonstration juxtaposed to a particularly young and pretty European aristocrat, contrasts two extremes while overlooking a vast middle ground.

Most women do not, in fact, even have the option of choosing full-time motherhood instead of a "worldly career." Probably, throughout most of history, most women have always had to work. The titled ladies of feudal Europe, like the titled lords, were exempt from having to work and were in fact socially penalized if they even learned any marketable job skills--but poor women, and children, worked in coal mines. Likewise the wealthy could "modestly" cover every inch of skin with yards of expensive material, often dyed and even embroidered in beautiful colors, while the poor were lucky if they could keep the rag they wore day in and day out, and any animal hides they might have been able to throw over it in winter, intact enough to cover all of their sensitive parts at the same time. (When the Bible writers spoke of "clothing the naked," they did not mean the people wearing secondhand clothes.) Today, rather than support women who want to choose full-time motherhood even for a year, some young men will bully the mothers of their children into "choosing" abortion. Historically, when that kind of men weren't aware of abortion as an option, some of them murdered the mothers; or, in countries where they had the options, sold the mothers into slavery or prostitution.

Amazon link to the classic ballad about a woman who was murdered by the "baby daddy," even after allegedly pleading, "Have pity on your baby, and spare me my life. I'll go as a beggar if I can't be your wife."

Then there are the women who might or might not have "had to" work if the option of being full-time mothers had been available to us, but for one reason or another, it wasn't. As the human population fills up the Earth, increasing congestion correlates with increasing sterility among would-be parents, increasing interest in the "dual income, no kids" lifestyle among couples, increasing homosexuality, increasing asexuality--and if we don't heed those things as warnings, I believe we'll see increasing violent insanity and perhaps cannibalism, as found in overcrowded animal populations.

I might have been able to have children, and would even have been legally allowed to marry, during the years when (for the educated class only, at that time) everyone was screaming that I was "under age" and needed to be "innocent" and "protected" and treated like a "little girl." Like every red-blooded baby-boomer I felt ready to be an adult at fourteen, much less at eighteen--but I wanted to be a celibate adult. No gambling with birth control pills and gadgets for me. I had no idea what the family curse--the celiac gene--really was, but I had seen that, for the women affected by it, it formed a vicious cycle with pregnancy. Celibacy seemed the best way to postpone or reduce the damage. So although I didn't particularly like being an awkward baby-faced adolescent, I accepted the security of being one and worked the "little girl" angle as long and as hard as possible. Then, around the time when older people started to think it might not be the end of the world if I'd felt any interest in marriage, the PCOS kicked in and I became sterile. And I was glad. Even after going gluten-free for years, I saw some evidence that I would have had, at best, problem pregnancies that produced unhealthy babies--while all those other relatives who looked like me, only without the celiac gene, were producing beautiful, strong, healthy babies. As a little girl I'd wanted to play "aunt" or "teacher" more than "mother," and as a mature woman I believe that was the best choice for me.


So obviously there's no way I can endorse any idea that there's anything particularly virtuous about a young woman choosing full-time motherhood over a "worldly career." The closest to that I can get is to agree that, if people want to be parents, then at least one of them should be a full-time parent for at least five or six years after birth. For the first year that practically has to be the mother, and after that, even if the father wants a turn at being the full-time "househusband"--mine did--at best the family can hope to be considered heroically eccentric.

But even the Mother of Christ never locked herself into "the home" and renounced having a "worldly career." She reared competent children (whether or not the other six or more were related to her), and when those children were adults she was qualified to work with at least her own son's colleagues in their job.

Young women who choose Mary as an example would be well advised to train for the best "worldly careers" for which they have any talent. They should plan to work as independently as possible, and either work from home, take their babies to work in their own businesses, or take a few years away from their corporate careers to rear their babies. Rather than disparaging women who need to have decent jobs in order to educate their children, older people might do better to urge more employers to think of marriage as a skill-building detour on a young person's career track, comparable in many ways with military service.

The science in this book is as debatable as the theology in the other books, but it's based on facts.

All mothers risk their lives. (All soldiers and sailors commit to risk their lives, but in reality many never leave the security of a "home base" where their jobs don't necessarily even involve heavy lifting.)

All competent mothers build special, hard-to-measure cognitive skills that can be identified as a solid asset in a corporate career--specifically in management. All competent military personnel build special, hard-to-measure cognitive skills that can be identified as a solid asset in a corporate career--specifically in maintaining discipline and watching details.

Good mothers build a nation by producing the next generation of people. Good military personnel preserve a nation by defending it against its enemies.

Mothers don't punch time clocks and log hours in the federal bureaucracy; they're entitled to hope to be supported and cared for, when necessary, by their adult children. Military personnel are entitled to expect pensions because their service may have left them unfit to bring up children.

Not all mothers made a free, untrammelled choice to become mothers. Not all military people made a free, untrammelled choice to become soldiers or sailors. Though both decisions ought to be made freely and prayerfully, in fact a lot of people have been bullied into making both by financial need and/or social pressure. Amazingly, many of those people have risen to the challenge and been good mothers, or soldiers...

And reality is that even good mothers don't usually have the option of being "Ladies" in the feudal European sense.

In the Southern sense of choosing to act with honor, yes. Though even my English-aristocrat ancestors have been untitled Americans for ten generations, and I personally live in a shabby little old farmhouse on an Internet writer's pathetic income, I was not brought up to consider myself inferior--or allow myself to be inferior in any moral way--to the Duchess of Oldenburg. I was not brought up to believe that a fellow Virginian whose ancestors came from a country that had no feudal aristocracy, or even came here as slaves, may not be as much a Virginia Lady as I am, or as the Duchess would undoubtedly be if she were a Virginian.

Still, when people evoke feudal associations by contrasting "ladies" with "women" of the working class, reality is that most good mothers are, and most always have been, women. Aristocrats are by definition a minority. That minority is defined by an accident of birth and, even if we believe that God may have planned accidents of birth to put people in the positions for which they are best fitted, a lot of the world's aristocrats have accomplished remarkably little good with what they've had, compared with non-aristocrats like Helen Keller or George Washington Carver. In Europe feudal traditions of expecting every aristocrat to be the natural leader in every group may still exist...well, in America, that kind of thinking is what we've put behind us. In terms of social thinking, we are the butterfly in flight, and Europe is the damp, raw, crumpled butterfly still heaving itself out of the chrysalis.

A blurry picture is appropriate since Nancy Ward lived before photography existed...anyway, there's a real lady for you.

So, American Protestants have to identify with "women"...though not necessarily with that sorry-looking mob of abortion apologists at that ReturnToOrder page. I don't want to pass judgment on half-grown girls who are probably going through nobody-wants-to-know-what kind of drug-fuddled emotional aftermath from less than fully voluntary abortions. Any woman or man could have been raped; almost any woman could have become pregnant as a result of rape; many women, and I'm a textbook example of the genotype, could have had a spontaneous abortion as the result of an involuntary pregnancy. We should try to pity more than blame those girls, although I also pity the parents of the ones making obscene gestures for the camera.
Tomorrow, American Protestants are invited to find some way of celebrating womanhood itself--our own womanhood, or our mothers', sisters', daughters', or wives'. Here are a few more book links, in case anyone can use any further suggestions...

One of those left-wing feminist books...that contains a particularly eye-opening essay all Internet users should read.

In this book, a left-wing feminist studies other ways women were liberating ourselves, tries to be fair, and, in my judgment, mostly succeeds. This one is a rare treasure.

And in this one, one of the younger activists Burkett's book interviewed speaks for herself. 

We Protestants have much to learn from Jewish Bible studies...I think this is a different edition of one I remember as a particularly broad-ranging and interesting read.
(Update: I was wrong. This is a book I borrowed from the library about twenty years ago, and appreciate...but the Jewish Bible study book I bought was Five Books of Miriam. Typical mistake generated by trying to finish a post fast.)

And here's volume one (sorry, Amazon's not showing a boxed set) in a series of thoroughly Protestant studies of biblical models for modern women.

Right. More books, more inclusiveness...

Jewish study of women in the Torah, containing much extrabiblical tradition, Hebrew word studies, examples of midrashic commentary...

What this book is, of course, is The Woman's Bible Commentary. It was titled for shock value. 

Episcopalian feminist, utterly "ladylike," reflecting on (among other things) the writing of the novel that's about to come out as a star-spangled blockbuster movie.

Sisterhood is global but, if women overseas are going to make progress, they need to make it for themselves; they do not necessarily want to be "empowered" to be just like Americans.

And what women want to be empowered to do may, in fact, be to support the same just causes our men support.