Apparently, in Montana two people can marry, and presumbly live out an entire marriage, without ever meeting (as long as they are not incarcerated). They can just, like, text each other or something. Facebook should get in on this.
From the category archives:
Family Life
A kind reader alerted me to “an article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/03/health.nhs1 in last Sunday’s Guardian, on the proposal by the Conservative Party to introduce the Dutch system of Kraamzorg in the UK. As I briefly mentioned in “an earlier post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/03/2-weeks-of-birthleave-for-fathers/, under this system a qualified maternity nurse cares for mother and the newborn child at home in the first week after the birth.
The article gives a fair account of what these nurses do, and of the advantages of this system. Yet I’m surprised by the claim that the system would be too expensive to be introduced. Of course the question is ‘expensive in comparison with what’. In the Netherlands, one reason why mothers who give birth leave the hospital so quickly after the delivery (if they go to the hospital at all, that is), is the cost; a maternity nurse at home is much cheaper than the cost of keeping mother and child in hospital (as is the case in Belgium, for example). I don’t know what the kind of care is that is currently provided to newborns and their mothers in the UK – yet it is self-evident that if the comparison is made with no care for the newborn and mother at all, then the system is relatively expensive. But how under a system of no care at all the mothers can take the rest that they need is a mystery to me. The days that this could be provided by family members are, for most of us, long gone. Hence not a bad plan from the Tories, if you ask me.
When last September “Ronald Plasterk”:http://www.minocw.nl/ministerplasterk/index.html, the Dutch minister of Education, Culture and Science, who also holds emancipation in his portfolio, “released his Policy Paper on Emancipation”:http://www.minocw.nl/ministerplasterk/nieuws/35434/Meer-kansen-voor-vrouwen.html, he was criticized for not mentioning men at all. Basically his view is that women should be encouraged to perform more paid work so that they can be ‘financially independent’, and the government should provide the conditions for making this possible, for example by expanding the supply of formal child care facilities. I agree with the critics that what is missing is a vision of what fathers need to be offered, both as a matter of justice for fathers, but also as a precondition for women’s emancipation. So I would like to suggest to Mr. Plasterk, as a first and minimal step towards the inclusion of men in his emancipation policies, that he introduces the right for fathers of a minimum of 2 weeks of fully paid birthleave (and, of course, also for co-mothers in the case of lesbian parents).
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A rich post over at Scatterplot.
bq. I spent a lot of those years exhausted and angry. We continued to have only part-time child care. Some nights I put the children to bed crying because I knew they were better off crying alone in bed than interacting with an angry sleep-deprived mother. I was furious that I had to make constrained choices and could not have the life I wanted. When he was home, my spouse was “superdad,” who did a lot of the work and played a lot with the children, so there was a big hole when he was gone. He was aware of how much he did when he was around, but not of what it was like when he was not around. I wanted him to confront the consequences of the work-home choice he was making and feel just as bad as I did. In retrospect, I probably should have used more paid child care and household help, as the children would probably have been better off with a saner mother, but I did not want to concede defeat to the constraints in my life. I preferred feeling angry to adjusting.
I haven’t said “Read the whole thing” in a while. This one’s worth it.
Until Brian’s posts about cloning, I hadn’t thought much about the various technologies available for choosing how children will turn out, and insofar as I had my instincts were conservative, but my assumptions libertarian. That is, my own reaction to such technologies was that they should not be used, but I didn’t have any real reasons for thinking that, so I assumed that some general presumption in favour of liberty decided in favour of permitting them. My views have changed, or perhaps just solidified, since then, to a point that I am comfortably perfectionist in Raz’s sense and conservative in Cohen’s sense, and by the time I read The Case Against Perfection
I’m teaching a course for freshmen this semester called “Childhood and the Family” covering topics such as children’s rights, parents rights, equality of opportunity, and the justifications of marriage. I’m planning to show movies a couple of evenings for them to watch as a kind of community building activity (the administration clearly wants us to use these small courses for this purpose, and I have a budget to provide food). But what movies to show? You can help. Here are the constraints: the suggestions should be about family life in some interesting way, not too slow-moving (I ruled Etre et Avoir on that ground, even though it is otherwise fantastic), readily available on DVD, and should have quite limited amounts of sex and violence (none, ideally; this is partly because I would like to bring my kids, and partly because I don’t want the students to be embarrassed watching the film with me, or vice versa).
In Vanity Fair. Some excerpts:
No photograph of him has ever been published, but those who know Daniel Miller say that he resembles his father. Some say it’s the nose, others the mischievous glimmer in the eyes when he smiles, but the most telling feature, the one that clearly identifies him as Arthur Miller’s son, is his high forehead and identically receding hairline. He is almost 41 now, but it’s impossible to say whether his father’s friends would notice the resemblance, because the few who have ever seen Daniel have not laid eyes on him since he was a week old …
“Arthur was terribly shaken—he used the term ‘mongoloid,'” Whitehead recalled. He said, “‘I’m going to have to put the baby away.'” A friend of Inge’s recalls visiting her at home, in Roxbury, about a week later. “I was sitting at the bottom of the bed, and Inge was propped up, and my memory is that she was holding the baby and she was very, very unhappy,” she says. “Inge wanted to keep the baby, but Arthur wasn’t going to let her keep him.” Inge, this friend recalls, “said that Arthur felt it would be very hard for Rebecca, and for the household,” to raise Daniel at home. Another friend remembers that “it was a decision that had Rebecca at the center.”
Within days, the child was gone, placed in a home for infants in New York City. When he was about two or three, one friend recalls, Inge tried to bring him home, but Arthur would not have it. Daniel was about four when he was placed at the Southbury Training School. Then one of two Connecticut institutions for the mentally retarded, Southbury was just a 10-minute drive from Roxbury, along shaded country roads. “Inge told me that she went to see him almost every Sunday, and that [Arthur] never wanted to see him,” recalls the writer Francine du Plessix Gray. Once he was placed in Southbury, many friends heard nothing more about Daniel. “After a certain period,” one friend says, “he was not mentioned at all.” …
Marcie Roth remembers seeing Daniel for the first time when he was about “eight or nine.” Now the director of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, Roth worked at Southbury during the 1970s. “Danny was a neat, neat kid,” she says, “a very friendly, happy guy.” Although there were close to 300 children at Southbury at the time, everyone, she says, knew Danny Miller. This was partly because they knew who his father was and partly because Daniel “was among the more able of the young children with Down syndrome,” Roth says. But mainly it was because of Daniel’s personality. “He had a great spirit about him,” she says. This was no small achievement, because, according to Roth, “Southbury Training School was not a place you would want your dog to live.” …
Bowen recalls the first time she met Daniel: “He was just a delight, eager, happy, outgoing—in those days even more so than now, because of his isolation.” He showed her his room, which he shared with 20 other people, and his dresser, which was nearly empty, because everyone wore communal clothing. “I remember very clearly trying to respond with happiness, but it was very hard, because there was nothing there,” she says. “He really had nothing. His sole possession was this little tiny transistor radio with earplugs. It was something you’d pick up at a five-and-dime. And he was so proud to have it. You couldn’t help but think, This is Arthur Miller’s son? How could this be?”
Our wedding was, in so far as any can be, a happy accident, and nearly as low-key as possible (we had four guests, I made dinner, and the secretary in the UC Davis Philosophy department who was a minister of that church that the Revd. Jim was with in Taxi, signed the papers with us. She subsequently presided over an even more minimalist wedding, inspired by ours, over lunch on a workday in the outstanding student cafeteria they used to, and for all I know still, have there). So, no family, and not much in the way of gifts.
So you might think I’m not one to offer advice on what to ask for for a wedding present. But, as ever, I have strong opinions, after 15 years of marriage, about what is actually worth having, and feel obliged to pass them on to my excellent friends who are about to tie the knot, and have relatives who will not only attend the wedding but are keen to give them gifts. Here are my 4 top picks:
You can help! I’m giving a brownbag talk at UW Madison’s Center for the Humanities in December, and the administrator, despite knowing me well enough to know that I have no aesthetic or design sense at all, has asked me for an image to go on the poster for my talk. The title is “What so great about the family anyway?”, and the description is as follows:
The phrase “family values” is often associated with a conservative political agenda, and liberals, committed as they are to ideals of personal freedom, have tended to shy away from being judgmental about the different familial arrangements people choose. Recent work in egalitarian political philosophy has focussed on the moral justification of the family; what “family values” are actually justified? Harry Brighouse will talk about this work, showing that there is interesting common ground between some conservatives and some egalitarians, and will discuss the significance of abstract theorising about values for family policy.
So far, we have between us come up only with three flippant ideas, based on very quick googling, but worth sharing: the Reagans; the Bushes; and these guys. Any better ideas? In deference to my lack of good sense, it would be kind to flag flippancy.
This is a pretty weird post from “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/what_is_eugenics.php.
Ezra writes that it’s “very unfair” to apply the word “eugenics” to, say, the contemporary trend toward the elimination of Down’s Syndrome by selective abortion, because “traditionally, the term has been used to denote efforts to direct or encourage breeding by high status, socially dominant individuals in order to select for their characteristics, and discourage breeding by low status individuals (criminals, the insane, blacks, etc) in order to wipe their characteristics from the gene pool. For Ross to conflate that with parents who decide to abort infants with medically disastrous genetic mutations is a real stretch.” First of all, Down’s Syndrome is not a “medically disastrous” genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term “disastrous.” Second, while the means of “traditional eugenics” were obviously very different from what’s emerging now – involving state power rather than parental choice, and selective breeding/sterilization rather than prenatal genetic screening and abortion – the ends were the same: the genetic improvement of the human species through the scientific management of the reproductive process.
Does Ross _seriously_ believe that people who have abortions because their foetus appears likely to have Tay-Sachs syndrome or Downs syndrome are doing so because their “end” is “the genetic improvement of the human species?” Can he even realistically contend that the genetic improvement of the human species crosses most people’s minds when they are making this kind of decision?? This claim seems to me to be ridiculous on its face, regardless of your underlying position on whether abortion is a good or bad thing.
What’s going on here, as best as I understand it, is something like the following. There’s a long-standing label in US politics called “progressive,” which used to mean something like “social democrat or non-revolutionary socialist.” As vaguely-left Democrats have increasingly become disenchanted with the term ‘liberal’ and its milksop connotations, they too have begun to embrace the term “progressive.” However, for them, it doesn’t mean ‘social democratic, but instead something like ‘vaguely pro-union liberal with balls’ (or ovaries depending … you get my drift). This in turn has led critics on the right to start harking back to some of the old-style socialist progressives’ sins, and to try to hang them around the necks of Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and company.
Here, Ross has been trying to assert in a series of posts that there is some sort of continuity between ‘old’ progressives’ views on eugenics, and ‘new’ progressives’ views on abortion. Which is kinda nonsensical. The modern liberal position on abortion isn’t rooted in the imperative towards genetic improvement of the species, or anything like it. It’s rooted in a particular notion of individual rights. That’s why they call it ‘choice’ rather than ’embrace your genetic duty by destroying imperfect foetuses for the benefit of mankind.’ The old-style eugenics of H.G. Wells, Swedish social democrats, Anglo-American family planners etc has _nothing to do_ with modern liberalism, or with liberals who have started to call themselves progressives. Instead, if it’s an embarrassment for anyone, it’s an embarrassment for social democrats like myself, who have some real continuities with that older tradition (although hopefully not with that particular part of it).
Question: what is the latest — i.e., most recent — example you know of an academic’s first book where, in the acknowledgments, the author thanks his wife (or some other person’s wife, as in “the redoubtable Mrs Elizabeth Arbuthnot”) for typing and retyping the manuscript with great patience, forbearance, accuracy, and so on? The acknowledgments to academic books are a mini-institution with pretty clear rules that change only slowly over time and show a high degree of homogeneity, particularly for first books. Up until a certain point, the endlessly patient and also busily typing wife was a fixture in them. But no longer. How precisely, I wonder, can her extinction be dated?
My hypotheses are: (1) The typing wife disappeared earlier than the typing employee, but (1a), The typing employee has also now disappeared. (2) Things must have been in decline for a long time (typewriters are not exactly a new technology, and then women started going to graduate school on their own account), but the big drop-off comes some time in the 1980s, as cheap computers and word-processors arrive. I suspect specimens continued to appear into the 1990s, however. (3) The typing wife may have disappeared from acknowledgments faster than actual wives doing actual typing disappeared in practice. (4) I expect variance across fields due mostly for reasons of technological affinity. But I’m not sure how fine-grained this is.
As evidence for (2), as an undergraduate in 1993 not in possession of a computer, and not lucky enough to be attending a university with any decent computing facilities, I along with almost all others hand-wrote all my essays and regular coursework. But it was a requirement of both my honours theses that they be typed, so I had to marry pay someone to do that. The following year, though, I had saved up and bought a powerbook and typed my MA paper myself. So it seems reasonable to think that academic books published around this time might still have phantom typists working away – though maybe by then it was people who took a typewritten manuscript and retyped it on a wordprocessor. But I want specific examples. So the main question is, in whose set of acknowledgments is the most recent typing wife to be found?
Judith Warner wrote a “column”:http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/opinion/24warner.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26thQ26emcQ3Dth&OP=5051bb3fQ2FdTYrdQ3F1affQ3FdkwwDdwDdkAdfQ7E.Q7D.fQ7DdkAT5aQ7DYa_Q3CQ3FQ5BP in yesterday’s NYT (unfortunately behind the pay-wall) on the need to make part-time work genuinely available for all American workers. She argues that study after study shows that up to 80% of mothers, both those holding jobs or caring at home, want to work part-time, but that currently only 24% do so because “part-time work doesn’t pay”:
Women on a reduced schedule earn almost 18 percent less than their full-time female peers with equivalent jobs and education levels, according to research by Janet Gornick, a professor of sociology and political science at City University of New York, and the labor economist Elena Bardasi. Part-time jobs rarely come with benefits. They tend to be clustered in low-paying fields like the retail and service industries. And in better-paid professions, a reduced work schedule very often can mean cutting down from 50-plus hours a week to 40-odd — hardly a “privilege” worth paying for with a big pay cut.
So checking the post today I found a letter addressed to my son, inviting him to apply for a Citibank Platinum Select Mastercard. Up to 40,000 American Airlines airmiles included! I’ve had a chat with the little guy about it (I still call him the little guy — corny, I know, but other Dads will understand), and he won’t be signing up, partly because it’s a bad deal (18.24 percent variable rate, annual fee after the first year), but mostly because he is six and a half weeks old.
I believe my last post here — almost a month ago — was all about <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/03/time-check/”>not having enough time in the day</a>. Well, today my summer finally begins. I returned the last of my twelve graduate seminar essays, and I dropped off the First Child. I left him the car in which we drove 800 miles in one day, and flew back to central Pennsylvania the next day. Now that’s efficiency! We decided to forego <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/reporting_for_duty/”>the traditional father-son knife fight</a> upon parting, because I had myself a one-way airline ticket that I’d purchased only eight days before, and we figured I would attract quite enough attention in the airport without having to explain away sundry fresh flesh wounds.
Nick turned 21 last month, and will begin his senior year of college in the fall. I don’t know whether that makes me the CT contributor with the oldest child, but I figure I’ve got a shot at that dubious distinction. And so, for my return-from-little-hiatus post, I’m going to dilate a bit about parents and professors.