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A couple of days ago the New York Times' sports section reported on the fascinating saga of Dorothy Jane Mills, who, for several decades beginning around 1950, assisted her husband, the historian Harold Seymour, in writing a three-volume scholarly history of baseball. More than assisted: She co-wrote it, but received little recognition at the time and, it would seem, precious little thanks from her husband.
Seymour, according to the Times, initially was Mills' American history professor; as his student she typed up his lectures, got in the habit of critiquing them, fell in love, married him, and helped research his dissertation. According to the Times' account, when Oxford University Press arranged to publish it, Mills "conducted research, devised outlines and rewrote sections" but "kept quiet when she received no credit on the cover and barely even in the acknowledgments in the first volume and its sequel, published in 1972."
By the third book, Seymour was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and so Mills wrote most of it. When she asked her husband (whom she always addressed by his last name) for co-author credit, she says, he refused. Asked why she didn't go ahead and put her name on the cover, she said, "I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t change things. No. He felt they were his books. Even though I knew better, I couldn’t alter that.”
Seymour is now dead, and Mills—who remarried, continued writing under her own byline, and, at 81, is working on a novel—continued to resent her lack of credit. She began talking and writing about her contributions after he died, and subsequent reporters confirmed the work she did. This month, when the Society for American Baseball Research chose to honor Seymour and his series with an award, she fumed and so, apparently, did female members of SABR. After a bit of a kerfluffle, she, too, was honored. “ 'Everyone assumed that he had done all that work by himself—that’s what he wanted them to assume, but we were equal partners,' ” Mills is quoted saying. “'He just couldn’t share credit. And I didn’t say anything at the time, because at the time, wives just didn’t do that.' ”
The Times suggests that what may have been going on was "intellectual spousal abuse," an interesting concept and one I had not heard of before. The term introduces the possibility that even when a wife—or, I guess, a husband—agrees to contribute work to a spouse's project and have it go uncredited, it may not be truly consensual. Or wasn't, back then. Her speaking up after the fact reminds me of situations in which a woman goes public about alleged sexual harassment that occurred in the past. I have always thought the dynamics of those situations easy to understand. There are lots of factors that can mitigate against speaking up at the time, but at a certain point—often when the alleged harasser is about to get a major promotion involving public glory, supervision of lots more women, or, say, a major judgeship—it becomes harder to stay quiet.
More to the point, reading the piece, I also thought of recent instances where a wife contributes significantly to work published under her husband's byline. A year or so again there was much discussion of the fact that writer Dan Baum acknowledged that his wife, Margaret Knox, does a great deal of editing and organizing on his bylined work. We blogged about it, and the American Prospect published a thoughtful post that received a number of comments including some suggesting that whatever consenting adult writers consent to is their business. Others found the arrangement troubling, given the history of women typing their husbands' theses and not getting credit. More recently, Jezebel meditated on a profile of Paul Krugman that shows his wife, the economist Robin Wells, has done a fair amount of editing of his work. Jezebel writes that "it's hard not to see their relationship in the context of a larger pattern of famous male writers and their devoted, semi-invisible wives."
Marriage is such a complex arrangement, involving competition, support, synergy, compromise, cheerleading, constructive criticism, unconstructive criticism, etc. How much help is OK? How much uncredited help is OK? If you'd credit a research assistant, shouldn't you credit a spouse? How do we think about these things in the era of companionate marriage and wives with degrees and accomplishments? If the husband cheerfully acknowledges the help—as Seymour clearly did not, back then—is it OK? If the wife is OK with providing the help uncredited—as Mills, apparently, really wasn't, even back then—is it OK? The Mills case is a useful reminder that what a person agrees to at the time sometimes rankles, later, under altered circumstances. But then, that's true of many things in marriage. One wonders if spousal co-writing will ever factor into a divorce settlement and if so, how that will be untangled.
Then again, in this case technology, or maybe just technological glitches, can also mete out a peculiar justice: Looking for Seymour's books on Amazon, I noted that Mills (who also wrote under the name Dorothy Z. Seymour) is credited as an author in the blurbs advertising the paperback versions of the baseball history (though her name is not on the cover, as far as I can tell). And in some cases, thanks to computer truncating or something, Dorothy Seymour is named in the blurb as the sole author of the book. So, at least in that way, she gets the last laugh.
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—Despite the increasing popularity of baby slings, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has declared them a suffocation hazard. [New York Times]
—Rep. Eric Massa’s chief of staff gave Nancy Pelosi advance warning about his scandalous behavior. [Washington Post]
—Even pro-choice pioneers question the value of Angie Jackson’s abortion tweet. [Salon]
—“Jihad Jane” led a troubled life before turning to radical Islam. [Washington Post]
—New evidence emerges in the investigation of John Ensign, the embattled Nevada senator who tried to steer lobbying work to his mistress’ spouse. [New York Times]
—Howard Stern feigns concern for Gabourey Sidibe’s health. [Gawker]
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Baby slings and carriers have become ubiquitous everywhere from the streets of Brooklyn to the pages of People magazine, with two predictable results: an imminent Consumer Product Safety commission warning and a front-page appearance in the NYT Style section. In spite of a few scaremongering headlines, baby slings and soft carriers appear to be safe if properly used, which puts them one up on strollers and cribs (both of which have been involved in injuries and even deaths that appeared to be utterly out of a parents' control). The risk is that a very small infant, curled up at the bottom of a sling, might suffocate. It's a horrible thought, but there's something to be said for providing the new parent with something manageable to worry about. Most parents might want to be considering a more distant danger: that in eight years, they'll be wandering the house, old and spent, bent over and clutching their backs.
I wore four kids all over in my sling. I loved it. As a New Yorker, losing the stroller was ideal—far easier on the subway and in store after downtown store with no ramp. I didn't lose it once we moved—I hiked with a 2-year-old in it while seven months pregnant and used it to bond (and restrain) my newly adopted 3-year-old last summer in China. I say sling, singular, but I had them all, from the mei tai to the Moby wrap (someone warn the woman in the NYT pictures that it takes a village to tie one of those things) to the Ergo. And now I am paying the price. Years of yoga may yet save my posture, but if you're currently a baby-wearing parent, don't shun the stroller. Your back needs a break. Soon enough, you'll be hauling a sleeping third-grader up the stairs. And mothers might want to consider another aspect—despite all those photos of Brad Pitt sporting one of his sprouts, the majority of people still strapped to their young are women. If you are the one wearing the trendy, adorable, patterned carrier, you will also be the one left carrying the baby.
Photograph of a baby in a sling by Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.
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The oft-repeated cliché about the French is that they don't care when celebrities have affairs, and they find the American pearl-clutching over presidential mistresses to be provincial. But in the past few days, it seems that some French people care very much: Rumors have been rampant in the European press that both French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni were both having affairs. According to the Times of London, these rumors began as an offhand joke on the Web site of the French publication Journal du Dimanche about Sarkozy having an affair with a staffer. Gossip sites picked up this jokey item as a serious piece of news, and the notion that the first French couple have an open marriage spread across continents. It's worth noting that the mainstream French media has ignored the entire kerfuffle, but the rumors bothered Carla Bruni so much she gave the following quote to Sky News about her husband: "He would never have affairs."
Maybe the elite French folks who run the newspapers still don't care if their president is having an affair—but the lowly Internet gossip types certainly do.
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Many women hope to give birth vaginally after experiencing a cesarean delivery—but VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) rates fell to an all-time low in 2004. Fewer than 10 percent of women had a VBAC, but the medical evidence shows that about 70 percent of women can successfully give birth vaginally even after cesarean delivery—and there are ways, although none absolute, of determining which women are more at risk of complications. (The most frightening possibility is uterine rupture, which generally results in an emergency hysterectomy and can—rarely—be deadly for the baby.)
The NIH hosted a two-day long conference earlier this week, hoping to reach some consensus recommendation for VBACs. They did, but it didn't represent much progress. Their draft statement calls for more research, more hospital policies surrounding VBAC, and policy-making to "mitigate" one of the primary things standing between women and VBACs: fear of lawsuits. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, along with the American Society of Anesthesiologists, were called upon to revisit their current requirements for the level of emergency response available in a hospital supporting VBACs, which some hospitals cite as a barrier. Anyone hoping for major change will be (and was bound to be) disappointed, but it does look like the medical establishment may be inching toward at least offering women an informed choice.
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A woman without a high school degree in America has very few options in life. Apparently one of them is to “wage violent jihad,” in the words of our next iconic American female outlaw, the ready-made New York Post headline, Jihad Jane. In another era, Jihad Jane—the 4' 11" blond, blue-eyed Colleen Renee LaRose from suburban Philadelphia—would have been a petty grafter. She has a trail of bad checks, DUIs, and failed marriages to her name. But in this age, when immigrants live in every suburb in America and Osama is the new Che, LaRose declared she was “desperate to do something somewhere to help” suffering Muslims. In this case, authorities are implying, she decided to become involved in a plot to attack Lars Vilk, the Swedish artist who drew a cartoon of Muhammed with the body of a dog.
Like Amy Bishop, the Alabama professor arrested for shooting her colleagues, and Holly Graf, the world’s nastiest navy captain, I imagine the story of Jihad Jane will resonate in an age when women can do and be anything—even killers—and their power has become, to many people, frightening.
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A middle-aged woman from the Pennsylvania suburbs, self-titled JihadJane, has been linked to an assasination plot against a Swedish cartoonist who depicted the prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog. She allegedly recruited a network of terrorists in Europe and Asia and travelled to Sweden to kills the man and scare "the whole Kufar [nonbeliever] world." [New York Times, Los Angeles Times]
Congressman Eric Massa is being investigated for allegedly groping two aides and propositioning male staffers. He has resigned—effective Monday—but on the talk-show circuit he equivocated about why. Massa told Glenn Beck that he got "too familiar with his staff," and on Larry King claimed it was for health reasons and argued on Sunday that it was a Democrat healthcare-related conspiracy. "This is a very sick person,” said Nancy Pelosi. [The Washington Post, Politico]
Both French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni, are allegedly having extramarital affairs. Rumors link Sarkozy to a right-wing cabinet member, Chantal Jouanno, and Bruni to the musician Benjamin Biolay. [NY Daily News]
The archdiocese of Denver, Colorado, refuses to re-enroll two children in a Boulder Catholic school because they have two moms. He insists it is a central tenet of Catholicism that "sexual intimacy by anyone outside marriage is wrong ... and that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman." [CNN]
According to a new study, the stronger a woman's immune system—measured by a diversity of genes of the major histocompatibility complex—the more sexual partners she has. [New Scientist]
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When I wrote about the MTV reality show 16 and Pregnant and its spinoff Teen Mom earlier this year, I wondered whether the young women on that show had really considered what it meant to put their personal lives out there for consumption. These new moms are being treated as public figures during a vulnerable period of their lives, and nothing proves this more than this headline from TMZ today:"' Teen Mom' 911 Call - My Mom Hit Me in the Face." 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham was portrayed as having a volatile relationship with her mother on both these shows, and now viewers know the extent of Farrah's domestic drama outside the confines of the program.
This isn't the first time TMZ has written about Farrah's domestic-violence incident. It reported on the incident back in January when Farrah's mom was initially arrested for choking her. Now TMZ has obtained the 911 call, a completely unnecessary move, in my mind, considering Farrah's meager level of fame. Just goes to show that once you open the box on notoriety—even if you put yourself out there to educate other teens about pregnancy—it's impossible to get your private life back.
Photograph of Farrah Abraham from 16 and Pregnant (c) 2009 MTV Productions.
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There are a few things people even start to say that are guaranteed to get under my skin within milliseconds. "You know, Avatar was pretty entertaining," "Say what you will, but Rush has a great drummer, " or "I've been studying tantric sex." But my shoulders really start to tense up when I hear, "I'm pro-choice, but ... ." What follows that "but" is 99 percent guaranteed to be egregiously sexist, a suggestion that huge numbers of women wait eight months and abort for the hell of it or that women prefer to have their uteruses vacuumed out instead of taking a pill or that you should feel ashamed—or at least act like it. And that's what I got off this guilt-tripping "I'm pro-choice, but ... " whine written by Mary Ann Sorrentino.
In this case, what follows the "but" is twofold: that a woman who has an abortion should take on the stance of a woman ashamed, and that to prove that she takes the right very seriously, she should have invasive sterilization surgery. Or, at least, one woman in particular, Angie Jackson, the woman who blogged and tweeted and YouTubed her RU-486 abortion to much media and anti-choice outcry. Sorrentino detects a whiff of uppitiness in this young woman, and she's ready to lay down some judgment.
For someone who lays claim to feminist history, Sorrentino sure is ready to engage in two of the most sexist tropes around in order to shame Angie for having an abortion and talking about it in public. She demands that Jackson get herself sterilized if she doesn't want any more children, which, of course, is the classic sexist idea (used to justify abortion bans, no less) that perfect strangers know better how to use a woman's reproductive system than she does. (I don't want children, so I suppose Sorrentino probably thinks I'm an ungrateful wretch because I don't immediately offer my stomach to be sliced open for sterilization.) And she shames Jackson for having ambition, holding her nose while suggesting that Angie might be angling for a book deal. Heaven forbid! Feminists didn't fight and bleed in order to give their daughters a world where we could do things men do without apology, such as write books about our experiences or get a fair wage for our work, right?
The irony here should not be lost on anyone who knows the history of the abortion-rights movement in this country. For all that Sorrentino wrings her hands about how the right to privacy incurs an obligation to hang your head and shut up about your experiences, the reality looks a lot more like, well, what Angie Jackson did. Which is to argue for the right to abortion through story-telling. Feminists took the secret of abortion out of the closet and spoke openly about theirs at consciousness-raising meetings or bombarded government meetings about abortion and demanded that women with direct experiences with abortion speak. Putting a face on the women who have abortions made it easier to realize what people forget nowadays, that it's your neighbors, your friends, your sister, your mom—and that if you've had one, you're not alone. Even Sorrentino cannot escape this history while shaming a woman for speaking out; she references stories of women's experiences with abortion while shaming a woman for speaking of her experience with abortion! And that's on top of publishing an article shaming another woman for wanting to publish a book.
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In the New York Times, Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Roman Skaskiw explains why he won’t be watching The Hurt Locker, The Messenger, or any other celebrated take on our current quagmires: He fears for the integrity of his wartime memories. After a while, Skaskiw says, “you struggle to distinguish how you felt from how you are expected to feel. Often it feels easier to surrender to expectation.” It’s a lovely essay, too subtle to be summarized here, and deserving of the few moments it takes to read in full. This bit especially jumps out:
Although it puts me and many of my personal friends in a flattering light, I fear the narrative of the reluctant, well-intentioned soldier because, along with similar reverence for all things military, it seems a requisite for endless war. The misguided motives of empire hide behind the sympathetic portrayal of its servants…
I resent the thanks I occasionally get because it is given without knowing whether I commanded an infantry platoon or a desk, whether I’d been a good leader or a bad one, and I resent the pity because, all told, I’ve benefited from all the military has taught me. Occasionally, I’m tempted to walk the red carpet of victimhood so often unrolled at my feet. For a split second, I even wonder if it isn’t deserved, and this scares me. I feel my memories bending to accommodate the world.
I think Skaskiw’s comments actually speak well of The Hurt Locker, a film less interested in victimhood than thrill-seeking. But the vast majority of public analysis does conform to this dubious hierarchy of moral agency: troops as clueless, blameless servants, politicians as guilt-laden warlords. Granting that the choice to enlist is, in fact, a choice remains taboo. One supports the troops; one claps for them in the airport; one avoids asking questions. Whatever the merits of this kind of mindless, mass absolution, it entails a great a deal of condescension.
Skaskiw is an acquaintance of mine here in Iowa, and I don’t want to belittle his experience by drawing outlandish comparisons he wants nothing to do with. But this is a blog about women, and part of the reason I found his essay so moving is that I recognized its emotional logic in the experience of being told, as a woman, that my choices are not my own. That one engages in sex work because one is damaged or sells ova because one is desperate or sleeps around in sad search of acceptance. You can call this “dehumanizing,” or something, but as Skaskiw recognizes, the danger lies somewhere deeper—in coming, through repetition, to believe in the excuses others think you are owed.
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