Breastfeeding Iמ Public? Not In My Front Yard

In the 1980s when my daughters were born, in the US, I was advised to breastfeed them until they were at least a year old. I was also urged to do it as much and as often as possible. So during that first year I nursed my babies everywhere I went: the public library, the mall, and the coffee shop.  It wasn’t a big deal, all the other mothers did it as well, no one ever stared at us or made a comment.

That was how life was in Iowa City, a small university town in the Midwest, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." It was that simple, since mother’s milk was essential to the well-being of the baby, it meant that breastfeeding mothers were made welcome everywhere.

But our breastfeeding friendly world has all but disappeared, 

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/breastfeeding-in-public-not-in-my-front-yard/

The Remote Father

FEB.24.2013

 I got the idea for today’s post from a very unusual program of This American  Life. The topic of  the 1996 broadcast was Accidental Documentaries. It told the stories of old audio tapes from the late 1960s which were discovered accidentally in a  thrift store in Chicago. These tapes were audio letters between a family in Michigan and their son, who was in medical school in California, at the time. The tapes document the life of the family as its members:  the father, mother, and the younger sister, chose to share it with their son. 

The program's  producers got hold of the son who is a physician in California. This is Glass’ report: “We sent him uncut tapes of everything that was on the tape. And he heard them. And he said that it was fine with him for us to play the tapes on the radio. He said that the tapes captured the dynamics of his family perfectly. The drama of a lot of American families is the emotional distance of the father, the father staying away from the family orbit, the father not being around, the father holding himself apart. And Arthur Davis, Junior says that his father was like a lot of American dads in that way and was, in fact, pretty removed.”

I believe that the remote father is not only an American phenomenon. Growing up in Israel in the late 1950s I hardly have any childhood memories of my father. He was always away at work. My mother and my older brother were in charge of my upbringing. I got to know my father only as an adult.

 Arthur Davis Junior from the tapes tells a similar story: “He was reared in a divorced home. And there was a lot of bitterness. And so it was pretty tough for him to even consider getting married. And then when I was born, my mom said that he just broke into tears, thinking that he might have to deal with some of those issues as a parent. He never did really want to be a parent. And she really helped him through that a lot. It was very fascinating, Ira. After my mom died, my dad changed tremendously. And he came to live with me, and spent quite a bit of time with my sister and me, and was very connected with us and our children. So that all changed after Mom died.”

And in 1950s Britain,  in issues of Girl magazine we could see in pictures and in stories that the father is always away, either physically at work, or emotionally, uninvolved --withdrawn. Even when the father is at home he sits at the table.  the newspaper which he always reads separates him from the rest of his family .

I always feel that in the 1950s and the 1960s men had a much easier life at home than they do today: Fathers were spoilt by their family, which demanded nothing of them but gave them a lot of respect.

Some changes are good; my husband was an involved father and we raised our daughters together. And when I think of the close connection that they enjoyed, it seems to me that after all the 1950s fathers did not get the best deal.

This American Life  Accidental Documetaries transcript:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/14/transcript

Radio Show

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/14/accidental-documentaries

Mother Tells You How": The Mother As A Role Model in Girl Magazine

JUN.22.2013 - 9:18 AM

Today as I was driving on the highway, I  saw a yellow building with the sign IMA --on one side and GINATION on the other. Ima in Hebrew is mother. I decided that this was my sign to post some ideas from my work on  "Mother Tells you How" from Girl Magazine.

In December 31st  1952, in a letter from the editor, Marcus Morris, editor of Girl Magazine introduced a new section called “Mother tells you how.” The new comic strip featured two characters:  the Mother in her role as a teacher and a mentor, and her daughter Judy in the role of the student.  The first story teaches Judy how to bathe a baby, but throughout the strip the mother would teach her daughter other different skills that were regarded as essential to her life.

 Introducing the mother as a role-model was a big change for a magazine, whose first role model was a young female pilot. Girl was a weekly comic magazine for Secondary School girls, published by Hulton Press in GB from 1951 till 1964. It was the sister of a similar magazines for boys Eagle founded a year earlier in 1950.

The founder and editor of the two magazines was Marcus Morris, a clergyman. This fact is essential to understand the spirit and agenda of the magazine: Morris envisioned a clean popular children's comic like he remembered from  his school days. The result of his vision  was another magazine devoted to adventures, which did not reflect the reality of the secondary school middle class reader.

At that time girls were much more involved in the family and home life than boys, but traditionally girls' magazines used as their settings locations and situations which were far away from home and family. The focus was on girls outside the home: in boarding schools, girls’ guide camps, foreign land and circuses. Magazines devoted relatively little space to discussion of readers as daughters and sisters, and in general, in the adolescence literature of the day mothers are noticably absent.

Adventures in children's literature is normally an escapist, sexless genre demonstrating universal qualities in boys and girls such as courage, imagination, initiative and resourcefulness. Yet adolescence is an age of physical and emotional changes; in this aspect Girl  did not reflect the life of its readers

However, in “Mother Tells You How,” Girl stepped in to the home and acknowledged the reality of its readers. In contrast to the unusual, the exceptional, and the courageous, bringing in the mother was a celebration of the ordinary, an attempt to rebrand the mother and to establish her authority as a source of knowledge. Her knowledge is practical and focuses on the private sphere –the home but within that realm she knows everything and provides practical advice.

 “Mother Tells You How” (actually shows) demonstrates the type of relationship in which the mother is “every mother” and Judy the adolescent daughter is “every daughter.” The latter knows nothing about the topic at hand but has a strong will to learn, and cooperates with the mother.

The fact that such a section is offered by the magazine at an age when adolescents normally would not want to be told what and how, is intriguing and unexpected.  Moreover, the adolescent is being told, not by a teacher or a specialist, but by her mother. I believe that in doing so the magazine decided to empower the mother by making her the expert and the teacher.

The fact that this feature stayed in the magazine for the rest of the decade suggests that it was relevant to the reader. The mother is competent, no-nonsense, even professional in her teaching. She has a large body of knowledge about everything in the house. The mother is a handywoman, talented, full of useful ideas. Yet she is elegant, feminine  young and full of energy.

The interaction between mother and daughter is not personal or warm, it is functional yet respectful. The body language indicates that the mother does not crowd the daughter’s space and they don’t hug or kiss at the end of a successful project.

In spite of the basic skills that the mother teaches, I see it not only as an attempt to reaffirm the choice that the mothers made by staying at home, but also as empowering the mother and rebranding her role as an authority as a source  of knowledge.

But why was such a feature needed? It is safe to assume that the girls shared that feature with the mothers (who also provided the pocket money for buying the magazine) and they tried the project together at home. At that time, 75% of married women stayed home and very few mothers worked outside the home. But as the mothers themselves who were young women themselves during the war, they didn’t have a chance to learn how to do everything around the home. The encouragement to marry and stay home was reinforced by popular media: films, radio and popular women magazines.

 In addition, the 1950s was the first decade in which middle class families didn’t have domestic help, and it was up to the mother and her daughters to do the housework. So if we consider this, it makes sense that the feature was very relevant to the reader at that time.

Generally girls’ teenage comics and magazines have in general received poor critical reception. Complaints have concentrated upon the type of literary escapism in their contents, which originally led to the word ‘bovarism’ after Mm. Bovary, meaning the domination of the personality by romantic or unreal concept.

Broader criticism of girls’ magazines and comics have since encompassed not just their fiction but almost everything else in the contents from horoscope to articles about the perfectibility of marriage or beauty enhancement as a life-time goal. Only the printed readers’ letters stood outside the accusation that such magazines peddled unreal fantasies to what was seen as a very gullible audience.  The fact that these letters spoke of a harsher reality gave critics extra ammunition when drawing attention to what they saw as a dangerous gap between hard home truths and the magazines deluding day-dreams.

Such criticism came from a tradition of irritated liberalism which saw magazine fiction as something like the new opiate of the people. Only when girls and women readers faced the world as it really was would any change for the better become possible. The counterargument presented by the magazine publishers and their defenders was that they took the impoverished lives of most of their readers for granted, but saw escapist fiction as welcome relief from what might otherwise be a fairly bleak existence. 

I believe that the letters that were sent to Girl had a lot to do with the choice to bring the mother into center place. The magazine’s  agony aunt was James Hemming, who wrote his PhD based on  letters from 1953—55 that were sent to the magazine.  Many of the problems that the girls experienced had to do with their relationship with the mothers.

In his book, Problems of Adolescent Girls (1957), Hemming describes home for the adolescent girl as a “base and a springboard, she still needs a haven where she feels secure and protected.” He claims that “not infrequently, the tension and sensitivity find an outlet in the mother-daughter relationship.

 In his study Hemming not only lists the problems, but also offers some solutions; his basic assumption is that girls want to have guidance. Yet there is a problem of trust, as many parents, especially mothers, fail to win the trust or cooperation of their daughters, who no longer are prepared to accept the authority of parental opinion on trust. He suggests that parents should lead by guidance through understanding, and that guidance by example is important, and dependent on the existence of good relationships. He claims that  adolescents are quick to follow the ways of hero and heroine figures and behind this mimicry is respect and a longing for a relationship of understanding. The example of a person they do not like and trust has no meaning for them

Hemming poses the question “how best we may provide for adolescents the sort of support and guidance they need to help them negotiate the difficulties and dangers which beset their path to maturity... How, moreover, can we provide such help in a form which will be both acceptable and useful to them.” I believe that “Mother Tells You How” offered that exact guidance. The comics were an important step in building trust between daughter and he mother. Since the teaching of the mother was limited to practical instruction, it was “acceptable and useful.” Mother was ready with the solutions for her daughter’s questions and by doing so gave her help and some skills  in her path to maturity.

On Remaining Unpublished, or The Most Underrated Novelist of the 20th Century

JUL.04.2013 

What could you do if you fall out of favor all of a sudden, or somehow become irrelevant?  A poignant example is the rejection experienced by the British novelist Barbara Pym (1913—1980) after publishing six novels from 1949—1960.

Barbara Pym did not write bestsellers,  but she enjoyed a steady success (we have to take into account that in the 1950s most people borrowed books from the library: Excellent Women sold 6577 copies, Jane and Prudence 5052, Less Than Angels 3569 and A Glass of Blessing 3071), and got favorable reviews. Hazel Holt, Pym’s biographer and literary executor, argues that her books never lost her publisher, Jonathan Cape, any money.

Thus, as a published author of six books, Pym must have felt that she had arrived; she knew her audience and understood what they wanted to read.  I suppose that she had every reason to believe that her writing career was on a safe and steady path.

The shock came in 1963 when  her  seventh novel,  An Unsuitable Attachment, was rejected by Jonathan Cape, and she could not find another publisher for the work. For 15 years, all her new writings remained unpublished.

Pym was totally unprepared for the rejection; as her world had remained unchanged, she could not have predicted that her writing would become irrelevant in the 1960s.

I cannot begin to imagine her reaction, her distress. She must have started to doubt her whole perception of reality, how could she have been so wrong? What about her loyal readers? Had they stopped being interested in what she had to say? Moreover, writing was her whole life; she had never married or had children.  

Pym was 50 year old when she encountered rejection. I know from experience that this is an age when women start to feel invisible. My female friends report that no one sees them, and  I sense  that Pym’s  rejection may have augmented the feelings of being transparent.

Still being invisible has its advantages. A friend of mine says that since no one sees you, you are free to do whatever you choose. Pym did just that, she did not cave in but kept writing novels  in her own style, and did not try to please anyone but herself. 

Like in fairy tales, Pym’ s consistency and hard work were rewarded.  For its  75th anniversary, the Times Literary Supplement issued a list of the most underrated writers of the century, drawn up by forty-three eminent literary figures. Pym was the only living writer to be named by two people – the poet Philip Larkin, and the historian and biographer Lord David Cecil.

This nomination brought about a revived interest in Pym; her novels were reissued and Quartet in Autumn (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

 So like in Greek tragedies, in which the greater good always takes precedent over the fate of the individual: order was restored;  Pym was rediscovered. However, for her success came too late,  and she did not have long to enjoy the fruits of this triumph as she died of cancer in 1980.

Blue Jasmine, A College Dropout Or A Gifted Anthropologist?

Although women’s education is not the main theme of Woody Allen’s movie Blue Jasmine, it is an important leitmotif --serving both as a characterization  device and as a moving force of the plot. In the opening scene on the plane, the heroine Jasmine tells the unfortunate lady who happens to sit next to her that after she had met her future husband she dropped out of university. She asks her neighbor whether she could imagine her as an anthropologist.

The neighbor does not have an answer, she has no idea who this rambling lady is, but Woody Allen has made a clever choice. Jasmine has not completed her education, still she is a gifted anthropologist. She becomes involved in a long standing field study of the rich and  famous. She does not keep a scientific distance from her subjects, quite the contrary. For several years she lives among them, carefully observes their movements and studies their practices, gradually she adopts  their norms and attitudes and becomes almost indistinguishable from them.

For years Jasmine has not worried about completing her education, as it served its purpose—marrying a rich man. However, when this chapter in her life abruptly and tragically ends, she is forced into a totally different field. Here she could no longer function as an anthropologist, she has no desire to study her new environment or adopt its customs. Thus she turns to education again hoping that once more it will provide her with the delivery she so desparately needs.

Unfortunately this time around Jasmine cannot be saved, going back to school proves too difficult in her current state of mind, and the connections that she obtains let her down.

Education (or learning), as it is presented in Blue Jasmine, does not have any intrinsic value; it only serves as a means for a specific purpose or as desperate prospect for a way out. I feel that Allen's disbelief in human nature has resulted in his cynical view of education in general and of education of women in particular.

This view of education brings back images of bleak periods in the history of Feminism; for generations women had to work much harder than men in order to be taken seriously. Moreover, their dedication was mocked or frowned upon by men (and sometimes by women). Until the 1980s gaining admission to either Oxford or Cambridge was much more difficult for women than for men, since their enrollment was limited to the only few openings in the women’s colleges.

Once they were admitted, their presence in these universities was not always welcome. Earlier in the century the poet and critic John Betjeman expressed a highly negative view of Oxford’s women who “drive out many good men from the clubs and societies they invade.” He even accused them of raising the standard of examinations since “they work so more doggedly than many of the men” The prominent feminist Edith Summerskill (an Oxford graduate, a physician, a Member of Parliament and a Minister of Cabinet), wrote to her daughter Shirley, a student in Oxford in the fifties that “it would be quite inaccurate to suggest that we were welcomed into the universities or into the public life”

 Blue Jasmine does not take place in the 1950s, a period when women were accused of going to university only to find a suitable husband, but in the present. Thus Jasmine must have attended university toward the end of the 20th century; I don't believe that at that time many women dropped out of school in order  to become  socialites.

Critics would argue  that Blue Jasmine is one of Woody Allen's best films, and  I am quite certain that it will win numerous awards. And yes, it is true that Cate Blanchett is brilliant as Jasmine and Woody Allen's  homage to old Blanche from Streetcar Named Desire is touching. However, we should not forget how hard we worked to get to where we are today and leave the 1950s behind. So at the risk of sounding humorless, I say: "it's not funny" and demand not to be  sent back there.

Still Tasty? The Merit Of A Taste of Honey At the National Theatre London

For the past ten years I have been studying Britain in the 1950s, so when a friend suggested that we'd see A Taste of Honey at The National Theatre in London, it sounded  like a perfect choice

A Taste of Honey is the first play by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney, written when she was only  18 year old. It was produced in 1958 in a small fringe theatre in London and a year later moved to the West End. It tells the story of an awkward seventeen year old working class girl, and her sexy single mother.

In the openning scene the two move into a shabby flat in Salford in North West England. Soon afterwards the mother leaves the daughter alone in the flat and goes off with a younger man. The daughter falls in love with a black sailor who returns to sea and leaves her pregnant on her own. Out of nowhere appears a gay art student and he takes care of the girl, the play ends when the mother moves back into the flat and throws the young man out.

If the above reads like a jumble of stereotypes and clichés it is no accident, it seems that unlike some good wines A Taste of Honey has not aged well.

But in 1958 at the height of British conservatism a play by a young woman, a mere teen-ager herself was by itself an exception. Moreover, she bravely explored issues that were highly explosive: teen pregnancy, interracial love affair, homosexuality, and drinking.

 It is unclear whether the black sailor was a West Indian or arrived to Britain from one of  its  former colonies in Africa. My research of the period found that for white English people, at that time, they were all black strangers. The American sociologist, Joel S. Kahn, recorded his impressions when he first arrived in London in the early 1960s from America: "I can still remember how shocked I was to find overtly primitivist representations of Blacks in British popular culture, representations that were unthinkable in polite American society of that time. Advertisements for tropical fruit drinks shown in cinemas, for example, depicted happy African natives with prominent lips cavorting through the jungle; the appearance of blacks on the football pitch was inevitably accompanied by chants about jungles and bananas by baying crowds of spectators making ape-like sounds — either of which would have led to riots in contemporary American cities.״

Homosexuality too was a highly sensitive topic; in the 1950s after several decades of tolerance, homosexuals once again suffered from a new wave of discrimination and criminal prosecution. In the beginning of the decade, the police took on the responsibility of fighting homosexuality with new enthusiasm as several prominent men were charged with various homosexual offences and were put on trial.  The courtroom discourse emphasized the stereotype of male homosexuals as decadent, corrupt, effete, and effeminate These negative labels were reinforced by popular newspapers  that presented male homosexuals as painted perverts the corrupters of youth, poisoners of society and traitors.  In Coming Out, Jeffrey Weeks portrays a society that, on the one hand, tries to rebuild itself on the strength of a productive family and, on the other hand, is faced with rising divorce rates, social alienation, and crime. In Weeks’ words: “With the Korean War a searing memory and McCarthyism burning like a bush fire in the United States, homosexuals emerged to the fore as scapegoats and victims of the Cold War”

Thus, in order to find a political solution to the problem, in 1954 Parliament appointed the Wolfenden Committee. Its task was to study “the law and practice relating to homosexual offences and the treatment of persons convicted of such offences by the courts.” According to Eustace Chesser, the point of the report was that a distinction must be drawn between crime and sin.

 A Taste of Honey presents other social and cultural issues which were of public concern at the time: abuse in the family, issues of femininity,  professional prospects (or lack of) for women, suspicion toward foreigners etc. The play even alludes to the famous British aversion toward anything spicy or foreign, especially garlic.

Yet, the text is not insightful enough to hold the interest of the audience, the plot is predictable, the dialogue is banal, and the characters are shallow and stereotypical. Their motivations remain unclear and they are not sympathetic.

 If I compare A Taste of Honey  to  the excellent novel  Small Island by Andrea Levy which describes the plight of the West Indians in Britain in the 1950s,  or to  the moving BBC series Call the Midwife, I find the later portrayal of the period much stronger. 

 Perhaps due to its topical urgency A Taste of Honey has lost its merit. So I feel that rather than seeing a mediocre play from the 1950s it is far more interesting to learn about that period from the distance of contemporary works of art  in which the research provides the necessary perspective and creates exciting plots, engaging dialogues and memorable characters.