#helpmeet literature

[campgender]

summary of the Titus 2 movement

from Saving Sex: Sexuality and Salvation in American Evangelicalism by Amy DeRogatis (2015) pp.97-102

transcript under the cut

[…] families. Pro-natalists use this argument to define themselves against culture and other evangelicals.

Open Embrace, and other books like it, circulate among conservative Protestant women in loosely affiliated groups that identify with the labels Titus 2 or “Biblical Womanhood.” There is no one specific denomination or umbrella group that coordinates groups within this movement. The individuals who blog, write books, run workshops and seminars promoting Biblical Womanhood, or who identify as Titus 2 women, may hold differing theological views and practices. Some tend toward Reform Protestantism; others are more charismatic. Titus 2 writers are united around the belief in the inerrancy of Scripture and the effort to define the meaning of biblical womanhood—the view that men are the head of the household and obedience to a husband is ultimately obedience to God’s will—in their everyday lives.

There is a spectrum among Titus 2 ministries but the majority affirms that married women should fulfill their biblical role through homemaking skills, childrearing, and following their husbands’ leadership. This goal typically is portrayed as a countercultural position that is challenging for young wives who have grown up in country that supports feminism. Typically in the Titus 2movement, men are not characterized as brutes who force women to stay in the home and serve them. Women choose this role. Itisthe job of older women to teach younger women that true liberation comes from fulfilling their proper biblical roles.

Some—but not all—of these groups also oppose contraception. Whether they allow for family planning or not, biblical women position themselves against feminism, which they believe destroys godly families, ruins the lives of women with false promises, sanctions unbiblical sexuality, and promotes a pagan religion.

THE EXCELLENT WIFE

Biblical womanhood is defined by the most visible leaders of Titus 2 as an effort to reclaim women’s proper scriptural role of “helpmeet.” According to Nancy Leigh DeMoss, older women must teach younger women to serve their husbands and God before all others, and together they will change the world. In her words, it will be “a revolution” (unlike feminism) “that will take place on our knees.”

Writers like DeMoss find biblical authority and definitions for female submission throughout Scripture. For specifics, however, they focus on Titus 2:3- 5. In this letter from the Apostle Paul to Titus, his colleague living in Crete, Paul provides rules for organizing new churches, including the proper roles for Christian men and women. The specific verses state:

“Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.”

Besides detailing the qualities of a “good” woman (modest, loves her children, etc.), proponents of biblical womanhood emphasize wifely submission to support the word of God. A Christian wife’s willing submission to her husband, they explain, is a unique, daily way of witnessing to Christ.

There are a range of views regarding the meaning and practice of wifely submission based on Titus 2:3-5. Some glorify the Christian homemaker and her ability to provide hospitality. Others instruct women to stay with physically and emotionally abusive husbands— abused women should look to Christ, the divine model for suffering. Still others present an expansive vision of biblical womanhood, explaining that women are created by God to excel at multi-tasking in all areas of life, not simply in homemaking. Monique Mack, the founder of Titus 2 Women’s Network, praises a woman’s God-given abilities but does not specifically state that women work only in the home.

Women, Wife, Mother, wherever you find yourself in the following pages, you are unique. God masterfully created you with enormous ability. As women we have the ability to effectively function in nearly any arena that we enter. As mothers we have a tremendous ability to multi-task in the greatest sense of the word. As wives, He called us “helper” and enabled us as such to bring a greater capacity to the human relational experience. We are uniquely fashioned to bring a level of fulfillment to those we are connected to. God has duly equipped and enabled us to be triumphant in multiple roles.

Biblical womanhood is a fluid category that can include single, married, and widowed women who may or may not be mothers or homemakers.

Still, the majority of Titus 2 writers believe that women can best fulfill their biblical roles from within the home. Homemaking is a sacred calling. Here again there is a range of opinions regarding women’s roles and authority within the household. Some Titus 2 writers affirm that women are in charge of the domestic sphere. A few writers believe that husbands should be in control of all matters in the family, including household management.

In her 2009 book Quiverfull, Kathleen Joyce notes that “among some purists, it means submitting a list of daily activities to one’s husband for approval and following his directions regarding work, going to church, clothing, head covering, and makeup choices, as well as what a wife does with the remainder of her time. Sexually, it means being available at all times for all activities (barring a very limited number of ‘ungodly, ‘homosexual’ acts).”

Despite these range of opinions, all Titus 2 women agree that God created them as distinct from men. Women have unique roles, talents, and obligations to their husbands, children, extended family, other women, as well as to the church. These roles and obligations are given by God and found in Scripture.

Biblical womanhood, according to Titus 2 proponents, offers women a role in Christian missions without leaving the home. Authors such as Martha Peace consider a Christian woman’s cheerful submission to her husband’s authority as a form of ministry to him and to others. Peace looks to examples of celebrated Christian wives such as Edith Schaeffer, author and wife of Francis Schaeffer, who created a hospitable household and supported her husband even when he made poor decisions for the family. This, according to Peace, was Edith Schaeffer’s “accidental” contribution to her husband’s ministry.

Creating a beautiful home with dutiful children and a happy husband, Peace believes, presents a compelling witness to non-believers. Homemaking becomes a form of missionary work. Lonely and unsaved men need look no further than the honored Christian husband, admired by his wife and children, living in a peaceful, charming home, to find compelling non-theological reasons to accept Christ.

Peace and many other writers make clear that this complementarian understanding of spousal roles does not define wives as lesser than husbands. Each simply has distinct roles and obligations within marriage. The husband’s is to provide for and guide the family; the wife’s to support the husband in all of his endeavors and nurture the children.

Many of the leaders of the Titus 2 movement turn to the life and writings of Edith Schaeffer for inspiration. Edith and Francis Schaeffer were missionaries to Switzerland sent by the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. In 1955 they started L’Abri (meaning “shelter”) in their home.

Over time the community grew and by the 1970s L’Abri became known as a place for evangelical youth to stay for a few months. There, they engaged in heated discussions about philosophy, theology, art, music, culture, and literature. Francis Schaeffer presided at the center of the community, a charismatic preacher and teacher who desired to meld conservative Protestant doctrine with the history and intellectual concerns of Western culture.

Edith Schaeffer developed a reputation in evangelical circles as an extraordinary hostess who cheerfully cooked and cleaned for countless young adults who backpacked to her house and dropped in for a few months. Schaeffer wrote over a dozen books but the most important for Titus 2 women is her 1971 Hidden Art, later retitled The Hidden Art of Homemaking.

Hidden Art provides artistic inspiration for home design using natural and readily available resources (such a pinecones or scraps of material). In her slim book Schaeffer makes a case for the power of beauty and art to enrich a family’s life even in small and homespun ways. In her view, the home provided daily opportunities for a woman to express her creativity and love for her family.

Martha Peace is not the only conservative Protestant woman who valorized Edith Schaeffer. In the 1970s and 1980s her thrifty ideas and focus on the beauty of homemaking caught the attention of many Titus 2 women, who have gone on to enthusiastically recommend and cite her book over the years. In his 2011 memoir, her son Frank who left his family’s faith writes:

“An Edith Schaeffer cult (made up mostly of born-again middle-class white American women) grew up around Mom’s books after she began to be published in the late 1960s. I’ve met countless women who say that they raised their children ‘according to Edith Schaeffer.’ Of course what they mean is that they raised their children according to the ‘Edith Schaeffer’ fantasies they encountered in her books.”

Whether fantasy or reality, Edith Schaeffer’s life and writings provide a model of the quintessential Titus 2 woman who is a husband’s “helpmeet.”

Martha Peace’s portrait of a godly wife represents a fairly mainstream evangelical view on gender roles. The theological stance that men and women have distinct roles that “complement” each other in marriage was codified at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in 1998. The preferred language for the wife’s God-given role in Titus 2 literature is “helpmeet.”

Peace explains, “Basically, we have said that the wife’s role is to glorify and submit to her husband. She was created to fulfill her role as ‘helper’ for her husband. It’s easy to see Eve’s role, but what about you? How, practically, can you carry out your God-given role?” The key to success and happiness in Christian marriage is for each person to fulfill his or her specific role and respect the unique qualities and distinctions between husband and wife. Trouble begins when either spouse acts outside of their God-given gender role.

On the margins of the Titus 2 spectrum are authors like Debi Pearl. In Created to Be His Help Meet, Pearl suggests that even in abusive situations women are called by God to remain with their husbands. She believes that this type of submission is a visible and important testimony to faith. According to Pearl, even the most loathsome husband should be respected and supported. Submission to an awful husband is godly because it is ultimately service to Christ.

“If you look at your husband and can’t find any reason to want to help him—and I know some of you are married to men like that—then look to Christ and know that it is He who made you to be a help meet. You serve Christ by serving your husband, whether your husband deserves it or not.”

Pearl urges women to look to all areas—including the tiny details of their lives—to find a reason that they may be the cause of their husband’s discontent or failures. “Always remember that the day you stop smiling is the day you stop trying to make your marriage heavenly, and it is the first day leading to your divorce proceedings.”

Some husbands will act in despicable ways toward their wives. This, however, is not a reason for divorce. A wife should always find ways to improve herself in her husband’s eyes and that effort will save her marriage. Marriage always requires sacrifice.

It is tempting to cast Debi Pearl as a radical outlier. For example, the blogger Mary Kassian of “Girls Gone Wise,” a blog dedicated to promoting biblical womanhood, characterized Debi Pearl as “fringe and extremist. She certainly is not representative of the modern complementarian movement.”

But her position is not as far-flung as some proponents of biblical womanhood have argued. John Piper, one of the founders of the Biblical Council on Manhood and Womanhood, author, and Chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary, stated in 2009 that women should be able to endure some physical abuse in marriage.

“If it’s not requiring her to sin but simply hurting her, then I think she endures verbal abuse for a season, and she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help from the church.”

Piper is clear that simply being hurt does not warrant a woman’s refusal to submit to her husband’s authority. Women are sometimes called to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their marriage. A wife who finds herself in this situation should call the church, not the police.

[betsy-the-eclectic-reader]

A word can have such force, and a name is an entire incantation.

– Naben Ruthnum, Helpmeet

[lesbianmariuspontmercy]

1 and 24 for the book ask!! :D

Thank you! I track these things obsessively. I've read 28 full length books! And I've DNF'd 12 books.

thanks for asking!

Here's a list of both:

Read (bold = favorite)

Patricia Wants to Cuddle - Samantha Allen

Negative Space - BR Yeager

The House in Abigail Lane - Kealan Patrick Burke

Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner

Different Seasons - Stephen King

The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allan Poe

Sorrowland - Rivers Solomon

Found: An Anthology of Found Footage

Scanlines - Todd Keisling

This is Where We Talk Things Out - Caitlin Marceau

The World Cannot Give - Tara Isabella Burton

Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn

Fluids - May Leitz

The Elementals - Michael McDowell

Educated - Tara Westover

Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe

Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

Psychic Teenage Bloodbath - Carl John Lee

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (reread)

Mister Magic - Kiersten White

The Last Days of Jack Sparks - Jason Arnopp

The Bayou - Arden Powell

The Iliad - Homer

Helpmeet - Naben Ruthnum

The Weight of Blood - Tiffany D. Jackson

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah

Suffer the Children - Craig DiLouie

Intercepts - TJ Payne

and i'm hoping to finish at least 5 more books, but we shall see! (Les Mis, The Once Yellow House, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Penance, and Pet Sematary)

as for DNFs;

Ghost Wall - Sarah Moss: Too tedious even for me

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay: I feel there's more up to date feminist literature to read

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Catherine Lacey: as a Mexican, the way she talked about death and corpses left a bad taste in my mouth.

Kentukis - Samanta Schwelbin (Little Eyes in the translation): Gave up on this author, the stories went nowhere at all.

Heaven - Mieko Kawakami: I felt this book was going to leave me with nothing

Sleeping Giants - Sylvain Neuvel: This is just the set up for something very NGE and I didn't wanna commit to a saga

Anybody Home? by Michael J Seidlinger: Tries too hard

Ugly Girls - Lindsay Hunter: Wouldn't give me what i was craving atm

The Children of Red Peak - Craig DiLouie: Too infodumpy

Brutes - Dizz Tate: Wasn't providing what I needed

A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers: cringe

Stolen Tongues - Felix Blackwell: A creepypasta turned book that extends too much, weird treatment of Native American characters.

[little--brittle]

E

stee Williams faced her TikTok followers and detractors head-on with full makeup, coiffed blonde waves, and a floral-printed puff sleeve peasant top cinched at the center with a tidy bow. She felt obligated to clarify a few things about what it really meant to be a “tradwife”—a portmanteau denoting “traditional wife”: “So the man goes outside the house, works, provides for the family. The woman stays home, and she’s the homemaker. She takes care of the home and the children if there are any.”

But Williams’ definition moved beyond the idyllic character of June Cleaver or even the Victorian-era presumptions of separate spheres. “Tradwives also believe,” she insisted, “that they should submit to their husbands and serve their husbands and family.” Williams was quick to defend her position against potential critics, noting that she did not believe women were inferior to men, but that they had an equally important but different role.

Tradwives have not escaped the notice of journalists and social commentators who track their popular rise on various social media platforms. Some analyses of the tradwife trend reference the 1950s, while other commentators focus on influencers like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm fame, who perform the role of 19th-century homesteaders (despite Neeleman’s occlusion of her husband’s inherited wealth). But the ideology behind the fad has much deeper—and more insidious—roots in American history.

Although the use of social media and the power of tradwife “influencers” may be new, the use of media to reinforce conservative social norms is not. Women in 18th-century Anglo-America, for example, were inundated by “conduct literature”: writing in magazines, newspapers, and novels that dictated how they ought to behave, especially in their marriages.

Conduct literature provided women and men with pointed guidance about how to choose a spouse.

Women were ostensibly imbued with a significant choice in this regard, yet this choice was highly circumscribed. Once she wed, she had little choice remaining within this marital union. The “good wife,” for example, was to be “strictly and conscientiously virtuous...chaste, pure and unblemished in every thought, word and deed.” More prescriptions followed: “she is humble and modest from reason and conviction; submissive from choice, and obedient from inclination.” She was the helpmeet of her husband, “always” making it “her business to serve and oblige” him. Her happiness was contingent upon his own.

Social expectations for wives likewise filled the pages of novels like The Coquette (1797) and Pamela (1740) which extolled the virtues of white femininity. These popular books were entertaining for readers, much like contemporary tradwives’ social media posts, but also didactic in their demonstrations of what would become of “fallen” women who had chosen their partners poorly. For instance, Eliza Wharton, The Coquette’s protagonist, died giving birth to a stillborn, illegitimate child after eschewing a pious suitor in favor of an attractive cad.

Eighteenth and early 19th century American women’s submission was not merely suggested in prescriptive literature; it also had the force of law. Married women lived under the legal doctrine of coverture, in which their individual, legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands. The oft-cited legal commentator, Sir William Blackstone—foreshadowing the refrain of tradwives today—asserted that wives’ submission to their husbands was “for her protection and benefit,” making her “a favourite” under the law.

In reality, coverture erased wives’ independent legal identities under the guise of protection and care from husbands. This legal framework dictated that a married woman owned no property in her own name; any wages she earned belonged to her husband.

Under coverture, wives had no clearly defined parental rights, and their bodies were not their own. Marital rape, for example, was not considered a crime in the 18th century (and did not become a crime in all 50 states until 1993). In certain circumstances, domestic abuse was condoned as a corrective measure to the submissive wife; Blackstone’s Commentaries indicate that “moderate correction” was permissible if it fell within “reasonable bounds.”

Women’s access to divorce in early American history was likewise limited. Some colonies, and later states, permitted divorce under certain circumstances (and the number of states providing for access to marital separation would expand over time), though relatively few women availed themselves of this legal mechanism. Given the other stringencies of coverture, life as a single woman and a single mother likely proved a greater trial for many.

Eighteenth- and 19th-century women did not possess rights as full citizens in the United States. Historically, citizenship rights have been linked to gender, wherein the obligations and thus the benefits of citizenship depended on sex. Tradwives who claim that women are “naturally” suited for submission to male authority and thus deserving of “protection” from men are implicitly condoning women’s second-class citizenship.

Coverture thus cast a long shadow over women’s rights in American history. Each generation of American women seemingly needed to be reminded—through the law, economic constraints, and even now in social media—of the “naturalness” of her submissive role. These constant reminders, however, suggest equally constant remonstrations from women, albeit with mixed results.

In the 19th century, for example, women’s organizations sought to change the law at the state level to allow married women to own property in certain circumstances, finding some success. But it was not until the 1970s that married women had the right to obtain credit cards separate from their husbands.

The 19th Amendment’s passage in 1920—nearly a century and a half after this nation’s founding—granted some women suffrage, though it would be decades before all women could vote. Women could not serve on juries until the 1870s, although even the recent history of their inclusion has been mixed. Tradwives often insist, as Williams puts it, that their choices “[don’t] mean that we are trying to take away from what woman [sic] fought for.” In her video, she adds that she and other tradwives do not have an agenda: “It’s not really a movement. Nobody’s pushing it. People are typically just living it and maybe showcasing their lifestyle like me.”

But their glorification of these views obscures the reality of the consequences of women’s submission and subordination to men, whether it is a “choice” or not.

Some do not want it to be a choice at all. Speaker Mike Johnson called for a return to “18th-century values” more than a decade ago. An Alabama State Supreme Court justice’s recent concurring opinion in the case which ruled that embryos were persons under the law invoked the Seven Mountains Mandate, which seeks to impose Christian nationalism over many realms of American life, including government. There is even a growing movement to outlaw “no fault” divorce in favor of promoting “covenant marriages.”

Tradwives figure importantly in this movement. In many ways, they are exploited as pawns of the right, laundering extremist views and transforming them into ostensibly more palatable packaging. This was perhaps the intent behind Senator Katie Britt’s ill-received response to President Biden’s State of the Union address in early March; Senator Tommy Tuberville indicated as much. Yet her performance of womanhood—her breathy vocalization dubbed “fundie baby voice” by critics—appeared as empty as her kitchen and did nothing to soften the blow of her party’s apocalyptic interpretation of current events.

Yet tradwives also entice their followers with soothing videos of sourdough bread baking and #OOTDs evoking prairie chic or Donna Reed, with dangerous consequences. Their advocacy for the ideology and principles of so-called “traditional” gender roles in marriage ultimately have the effect of promoting a return to the days of coverture and an erasure of the hard-fought (if incomplete) gains of women’s rights activists throughout American history.

Jacqueline Beatty, Ph.D. is Assistant professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania and author of In Dependence: Women, Power, and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America.

[lesbiansforboromir]

The letter he sends to Michael in 1941 full of advice about relationships with women is generally the source I go too whenever I have these questions. Although, as I've always said, we don't really need to worry about what Tolkien's thinking anymore in regards to what his books 'mean', they should speak for themselves. But either way, we still might as well hear what he has to say about his own beliefs, like;

In this fallen world the 'friendship' that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman.

[-]

The sexual impulse makes women (naturally when unspoiled more unselfish) very sympathetic and understanding, or specially desirous of being so (or seeming so), and very ready to enter into all the interests, as far as they can, from ties to religion, of the young man they are attracted to. No intent necessarily to deceive: sheer instinct: the servient, helpmeet instinct, generously warmed by desire and young blood. Under this impulse they can in fact often achieve very remarkable insight and understanding, even of things otherwise outside their natural range: for it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male. Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand, or when they cease to take a personal interest in him.

[-]

You may meet in life (as in literature* ) women who are flighty, or even plain wanton — I don't refer to mere flirtatiousness, the sparring practice for the real combat, but to women who are too silly to take even love seriously, or are actually so depraved as to enjoy 'conquests', or even enjoy the giving of pain – but these are abnormalities, even though false teaching, bad upbringing, and corrupt fashions may encourage them. Much though modern conditions have changed feminine circumstances, and the detail of what is considered propriety, they have not changed natural instinct. A man has a life-work, a career, (and male friends), all of which could (and do where he has any guts) survive the shipwreck of 'love'. A young woman, even one 'economically independent', as they say now (it usually really means economic subservience to male commercial employers instead of to a father or a family), begins to think of the 'bottom drawer' and dream of a home, almost at once.

The letter itself is actually pretty interesting and I've cut out only the clearest misogyny sections but it goes into his opinions in far more detail. I kind of enjoy reading it, it gives this nuanced examination of precisely how at least A man of the time and with such misogynistic views percieves the women around him and his relationship with them without any like... hold back or sense of trying to defend himself. So it comes across with a lot more candour and so within that a kind of less clinical more understandable tone, like I can get how a human man might believe these things.

But with that being said, I don't think there's really a mystery to solve here right? Aragorn tells everyone including the reader what Eowyn's deal was over her sickbed in Minas Tirith. We are actually meant to percieve Eowyn as lying when she explains her desires and motives in this scene, her true secret object was always to follow Aragorn (whom she fancies herself in love with), and in being rebuffed by him she is sent into literal suicidal despair. Like I am fairly convinced that was Tolkien's entire intent. I ignore it with prejudice, I will never ever be convinced that is what this Eowyn's story is about, but I still think that's what Tolkien believed he wrote. Even Faramir declares this to be the case by the end, to Eowyn's face, during their so called love confesssion, and she does not correct him. It's truly grim honestly, Eowyn should get a divorce and change her pronouns.

Got real exercised about Peter Jackson’s defanged Eowyn and needed to draw my girl going slowly out of her mind as Aragorn’s apathy makes her more and more desperate until she finally breaks free of the chains that bind her and decides that if she is to die, she would choose how.

[joandfriedrich]

1/2 On a darker note, a reason Jo could have found Friedrich desirable as a husband and not Laurie (outside her mad attraction to Fritz and her lack of attraction to Laurie) is because she knew what Victorian Wifehood was, and knew she'd much rather be the helpmeet of a poor schoolteacher (as she loved children) than of a wealthy partyboy/socialite (considering she hated the culture of conspicuous consumption that she'd have to build her life around).

2/2 True, they ended up with a more egalitarian marriage than that, (they ended up with one of the most egalitarian marriages in C19 literature!) but her choice of Fritz vs Laurie is very much related to the question of, "What do I want to do with my life?

--------------------------------------

Is it just me, or do I get some real confusing asks? On a darker note? How is wanting a partner who would be more of an equal, treat her like a partner rather than a mother a darker note? I think it’s pretty normal for anyone who is seeking a romantic partner to pick someone who is going to be an equal partner and love them as they want to be loved. You are right in the fact that Jo and Friedrich do have one of the most egalitarian marriages from 19th century literature, but the question “what do I want to do with my life?” isn’t related exactly to Friedrich. She was given the house before she married him, she knew that she wanted to do, making Plumfield a school as well as continuing to farm the land. And we see in the sequel that Jo gets to write, and all this regardless of who she would have married. True, Laurie would have stifled her writings while Friedrich supported her, but she would have just done as she pleased, and I am sure that even if she got Plumfield before Friedrich, she would have done just the same thing.

Jo never relied on anyone’s opinion of her life in order to live it, so why should that have changed even when there were two men who vied for her love?

“Her choice of Fritz vs Laurie “ Choice? You think Laurie was even an option for marriage? She made it very clear she was not interested in marrying him. When he proposed, she made it very clear that she would rather be an old maid then ever marry Laurie, because she didn’t love him.

“I don’t know why I can’t love you as you want me to. I’ve tried, but I can’t change the feeling, and it would be a lie to say I do when I don’t.”

That’s pretty clear isn’t it?

“I wish you wouldn’t take it so hard, I can’t help it. You know it’s impossible for people to make themselves love other people if they don’t,” cried Jo inelegantly but remorsefully, as she softly patted his shoulder, remembering the time when he had comforted her so long ago.

“They do sometimes,” said a muffled voice from the post. “I don’t believe it’s the right sort of love, and I’d rather not try it,” was the decided answer.

If that isn’t clear enough, how about this?

“I shall always be fond of you, very fond indeed, as a friend, but I’ll never marry you, and the sooner you believe it the better for both of us—so now!”

Jo never thought of Laurie as an option, even when she was lonely, she wouldn’t have married him because she loved him any different. Here in the conversation she has with Marmee, in Chapter 42.

“I knew you were sincere then, Jo, but lately I have thought that if he came back, and asked again, you might perhaps, feel like giving another answer. Forgive me, dear, I can’t help seeing that you are very lonely, and sometimes there is a hungry look in your eyes that goes to my heart. So I fancied that your boy might fill the empty place if he tried now.”

“No, Mother, it is better as it is, and I’m glad Amy has learned to love him. But you are right in one thing. I am lonely, and perhaps if Teddy had tried again, I might have said ‘Yes’, not because I love him any more, but because I care more to be loved than when he went away.”

Overall, Jo would have done just as she pleased, regardless of who she ended up with.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Intelligence may be located in the brain, but it affects other parts of the anatomy. Consider the pelvis as a secret theater where thinking and walking meet and, according to some anatomists, conflict. One of the most elegant and complicated parts of the skeleton, it is also one of the hardest to perceive, shrouded as it is in flesh, orifices and preoccupations. The pelvis of all other primates is a long vertical structure that rises nearly to the ribcage and is flattish from back to front. The hip joints are close together, the birth canal opens backwards, and the whole bony slab faces down when the ape is in its usual posture, as do the pelvises of most quadrupeds. The human pelvis has tilted up to cradle the viscera and support the weight of the upright body, becoming a shallow vase from which the stem of the waist rises. It is comparatively short and broad, with wide-set hipjoints. This width and the abductor muscles that extend from the iliac crests--the bone on each side that sweeps around towards the front of the body just below the navel--steady the body as it walks. The birth canal points downward, and the whole pelvis is, from the obstetrical point of view, a kind of funnel through which babies fall--though this fall is one of the most difficult of human falls. If there is a part of anatomical evolution that recalls Genesis, it is the pelvis and the curse "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children."

Giving birth for apes, as for most mammals, is a relatively simple process, but for humans it is difficult and occasionally fatal for mother and child. As hominids evolved, their birth canals became smaller, but as humans have evolved, their brains have grown larger and larger. At birth the human infant's head, already containing a brain as big as that of an adult chimpanzee, strains the capacity of this bony theater. To exit, it must corkscrew down the birth canal, now facing forward, now sideways, now backwards. The pregnant woman's body has already increased pelvic capacity by manufacturing hormones that soften the ligaments binding the pelvis together, and toward the end of pregnancy the cartilege of the pubic bone separates. Often these transformations make walking more difficult during and after giving birth.

It has been argued that the limitation on our intelligence is the capacity of the pelvis to accomodate the infant's head, or contrarily that the limitations on our mobility is the need for the pelvis to accomodate birth. Some go further to say that the adaptation of the female pelvis to large-headed babies makes women worse walkers than men, or makes all of us worse walkers than our small-brained ancestors. The belief that women walk worse is widespread throughout the literature of human evolution. It seems to be another hangover from Genesis, the idea that women brought a fatal curse to the species, or that they were mere helpmeets along the evolutionary route, or that if walking is related to both thinking and freedom they have or deserve less of each. If learning to walk freed the species--to travel to new places, to take up new practices, to think--then the freedom of women has often been associated with sexuality, a sexuality that needs to be controlled and contained. But this is morality, not physiology.

I got so annoyed by the ambiguous record on gender and walking that early one fine morning in Joshua Tree, while the cottontails were hopping in the yard, I called up Owen Lovejoy. He pointed to some differences between male and female anatomy that, he said, ought to make women's pelvises less well adapted to walking. "Mechanically," he said, "women are less advantaged." Well, I pressed, do these differences actually make a practical difference? No, he conceded, "it has no effect on their walking ability at all," and I walked back out into the sunshine to admire a huge desert tortoise munching on the prickly pear in the driveway.

Stern and Sussman had laughed when I asked them whether women were indeed worse walkers and said that as far as they knew, no one had ever done the scientific experiments that would back up this assertion. Great runners tend to converge in certain body types, whichever gender they are, they ruminated, but walking is not running, and the question of what constitutes greatness there is more ambiguous. What, they asked, does better mean? Faster? More efficiently? Humans are slow animals, they said, and what we excel at is distance, sustaining a pace for hours or days.

— Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Rebecca Solnit

[misscrawfords]

"Jung perpetually links woman with nature as the terrifying wildness men must conquer and tame in order to incorporate into the self. Thus woman must struggle in a culture that considers her a minority. Woman often considers her needs inessential because women's identity is perceived and defined by men. To woman, struggling to define the Self, centuries of literature and symbolism that consider her man's helpmeet and support undermine her journey. As Simone de Beauvoir notes, "What peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she - a free and autonomous being like all the human creatures - nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.""

-- Valerie Estelle Frankel, 'From Girl to Goddess: the Heroine's Journey through Myth and Legend'

[hime-memes]

** Disclaimer: This particular bit of literature is from a little over 100 years ago ! This text is merely a fun glimpse into the past and is in no way claiming factual validity or otherwise today in 2022. Don’t shoot the messenger essentially - if there is misinformation here. I am simply transcribing it here for historical reference. Feel free to reblog and add further commentary if you’d like ! ** 

Here is an excerpt from ‘ The Book of Knowledge ‘ - A Children’s Encyclopedia from 1918. ( Page 5,923 to be exact ! ) This best serves as a reference when writing historical characters, as I will be transcribing verbatim the selected passages that I find interesting:  The Meaning of Halloween || Things To Do On Halloween circa 1918 can be found under the cut!

                                               • The Meaning of Halloween •

‘ Hallowe’en which brings to most of us visions of fun and jollity, is an old, old festival.  The old Romans held it about the the first of November in honor of Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees. In Britain, the Druids celebrated a festival at the same time in honor of the sun god, and in thanksgiving for the harvest, and the two festivals seem to have become one in the mind of the Britons. When the people became Christians the early Church Fathers wisely let them keep their old feast, but gave it a new association by holding it in commemoration of all departed souls. The eve of the festival came to be called All Hallow E’en. The name comes from the old English word ‘ halwe ’, or as we now say ‘ Holy ‘.  Many beliefs grew up about this feast, such as the belief that on this one night of all the year, the spirits of the departed were allowed to visit their old homes. In many parts of the old countries food was left, hearths were carefully swept, and chairs were set in order before the inhabitants of the villages went to rest. Many of the old superstitions, some of them going back as far as Pagan times, came to this country with our Puritan ancestors, and though they lost the meaning years ago, we still keep some of the quaint old customs. 

                                                   • Things To Do On Halloween •

                                                        - Ducking For Apples -

Get ready two tubs, each half filled with water, one for the boys, one for the girls. Put in each a number of apples with long stems, each stem having a name very securely attached to it on a slip of paper. The fun consists in trying to catch  one of the bobbing apples with the teeth; the apple must not be caught by the stem. The name attached to the apple is supposed to be the name of the future helpmeet of the youth or maiden who contrives to fish it out of the water. The hands must be fastened behind the back for this trick. 

                                                           - Burning Nuts - 

Name two nuts and place them on a shovel held over an open fire -- a gas log will do. Repeat this charm: ‘ Nuts I place upon the fire, and to each nut I give a sweetheart’s name. ‘ If either of the nuts hisses or steams, it shows that the owner of the name has a cranky temper. If the nuts pop together, and towards each other the friendship between the two persons will probably increase and grow warmer. If, however, one does not pop at all, or they fall away from each other, the feeling will grow cooler and the friends will be divided.  

                                                  - Apple And Candle Trick - 

Hang by the stout cord, attached to a hook in the ceiling, a short stick -- about eighteen inches long. The stick must be fastened so that it will balance horizontally. At one end of the stick fasten a short piece of lighted candle, at the other end fix an apple. Set the stick revolving rapidly, and let the players try to snatch the apple from it with their teeth. 

                                                           - Apple Paring -

Peel an apple without breaking the skin, swing the paring round your head three times and let it fall to the floor over the left shoulder. The letter formed as it falls to the floor will give the initial of your future spouse.  

                                               - Combing Hair Before Mirror - 

Comb your hair at midnight standing alone before a mirror by the light of a candle. If a face appears, in the glass , looking over your shoulder, it will be that of your future partner. 

                                                     - Winnowing Grain - 

Steal out into the garden or barn alone near midnight and go three times through the motion of throwing grain against the wind. The third time your future spouse will appear in some mysterious way, or you may gain some intimation of his or her station in life.  

                                               - Prophecy By Feathers - 

Take three small, fluffy feathers. On three small pieces of paper write the words “ Blonde “, “ Brunette “, and “ Medium “ and attach these pieces of paper to the ends of the little quills. To make the test hold up the feathers by their tops, and with a puff of breath send them flying towards the table. The one that falls nearest to you tells the complexion of your true love. The test should be made three times to make the prophecy quite sure. 

                                                       - Ghost Writing - 

With a perfectly new pen, dipped in pure lemon juice, write a number of charms, or prophecies on small pieces of paper, and let them dry, when the writing disappears. Fold the slips of paper , and place them in a basket, from which each player draws one. When the pieces of paper are held over the flame of a lamp or candle, the heat causes the writing to reappear, and the prophecy can be read. This trick may be made quite mystical by appropriate ceremonies, such as reading the prophecies in a room dimly lighted by a small colored lamp over which the slips must be held. One person should read the slips one by one, and can add to the effect by reading very slowly or solemnly. The reader can be one of the players who has slipped out and assumed a long cloak, witch’s hat, and a small black velvet mask. ‘

[stopmakingliberalslookbad]

I took a Jewish women's literature class in college, and as I learned, there's unfortunately a reason why feminists tend to be so hypocritical about the Jews (like the Women's March thing): the reason is because Judaism was the first "Abrahamic" religion (before Christianity and Islam), so feminists blame Judaism for the rise of patriarchal social systems, since the Old Testament has Eve created as "helpmeet" for Adam. So feminists actually WANT Judaism gone, because they think it caused sexism.

I have never heard such a thing and to be honest, it sounds a bit dubious to me.

[oneshul]

Shemini

I am Tsilya, daughter of Yitzhar, wife of Aaron, the High Priest, mother of my Lost Boys, Nadav and Avihu. You will not read my name in the Great Scroll of the Torah-Teaching; no; my name has been lost in darkness, for I spent my days mourning for my boys, my sons, Nadav and Avihu, who died blamelessly, for their mistake before the Most High.

That day, the Great Day of Coronation and Dedication of the Altar through Sacrifice, had begun so favorably, so full of promise for the future—I was exhausted, as usual, but running all about, as I had to, caring for our children; we had many—not just the four boys, but our three daughters; you will never read their stories, either. .

Girls do not count; why should they? They cannot learn the Laws of the Hidden One, He Who Dwells in Smoke and Thunder. We women-folk are more quietly learned; we know the ways of the Earth-Mother, the Shechinah, the Old Goddess of Grains, and Fruits, and the Cycles of Seasons. We are the ones who cook, and bake, and sew; we bring Life to Being. We are kept from the Learning of the Scrolls, but we have our own Hidden Knowledge, unknown to the Men, who believe they know everything—but they are fools, in so many ways! And now, their so-called wisdom has taken away my sons, my babies, from me….

As I said… it began in triumph. My boys, my boys—Nadav and Avihu—they were anxious, though eager to serve God; they were nervous. Their father Aaron had instructed them; Moses, their uncle, had drilled them, over and over and over: so many details! So many ingredients! This, to make up the Holy Incense; That, to measure out the Sacred Oil—and of course, how to examine the carcass of a Beast to judge it fit for a sacrifice. Only perfect cattle could be offered to the LORD GOD.

I know my boys so well—and, naturally, they were overwhelmed. I had laid out all of their garments, so carefully, so lovingly, the night before. I was their mother! Who should know better than I, who raised them? But, so quick-and-hurried are the Ways of Men, and of Priests, and Levites, that they yanked at their robes, and pulled at their holy shirts (which might have torn, had I not thought beforehand, and used the extra-strong Thread)—

They were out the door, before I could gather my three beautiful Daughters, and bring them along, too—

In hopes that, perhaps the girls, too, might gain a fraction, just a small, tiny portion of the Glory thereunto pertaining to their Famous Brothers—I hurried them along, but they were hard to hurry; they ran along, finally, giggling and whispering—but then, I heard the silver horns of the Tent-of-Meeting sounding a sennet, and the earthier tones of the shofarote, the rams’ horns, summoning the People, in the distance. I heard, and saw, the assembled multitudes of the Israelite Tribes cheering—

But, as I finally, desperately, snatched up my youngest, my dark-eyed, sweet, four-year-old Ariela, who was laughing and turning her head away from her Mother’s kisses, I rushed for the door of the tent—

And there, there he stood: my Husband, my Aaron. Where was his Splendor? His Golden Headband, with its Golden Words, “Holiness to the Lord”? Instead, he stood there, his royal, priestly robes bedraggled, torn, and trembling. He did not—look at me. I gave Ariela to her sister, Noa, to hold—the Little One wailed a bit, upon seeing her father, distressed, and fell silent—and then, I  approached him, slowly; he looked—strange.

“How is it with you, My Husband Aaron, My Lord?” I asked him.

He stood, stock-still. I took him by his priestly shoulders and shook him:

“Aaron! It is I, Tsilya, your Wife and Helpmeet-Partner, who speaks to you!”

He blinked, and looked down at me—and rasped; a throaty noise came from his lips, as if he had been drained of all juice in his body; as if he had become a piece of wood himself, like those piney chips he burns atop the Altar-Flame. He wiped a sooty hand across his lips, opened his mouth, and—

“Dead,” he croaked.

“Dead cows? Dead goats?” I asked, “Why do you speak to me of sacrificial beasts?”

“No. Dead—“ he rasped.

I then realized. Slowly. But did not wish to.

“Aaron,” I said, and the words stuck in my throat, “Aaron. Where are my boys? Where are Nadav and Avihu? And Elazar and Itamar, my younger sons?”

“Nadav and Avihu,” he muttered, more to himself than to me, “are struck down—by the Hand of the Invisible One. They—“

Each word of his echoed in my ears, and tore a hole into my Mother’s heart. Nadav? Avihu? Dead? But I just saw them leave; they were going—were going—

“How? Why?” I said.

“They made a mistake,” he said, “Strange fire. They did something wrong; I cannot tell. The smoke—the fire—the clouds, all black—I could not see. They disappeared into the darkness—there was a lightning-bolt, an explosion—and then, I saw: they were lying there. Gone—gone, gone….”

“I saw it happen,” came a voice, a strong, deep one.

I looked, and saw Moses—my brother-in-law, the Spokesman for our G-d—his G-d, at least. No more mine.

“It was harsh, but justified,” he said to me—Moses, that is—“Your boys were wrong, in what they did. They did not follow my—that is, God’s—instructions. When a priest wields the Sacred Fire, he must do so correctly, strictly according to Torah, or God knows what might happen. As it did. And they are dead. I am sorry, Tsilya, but the ways of God are just! Amen; Selah.”

“God knows, and—God—is—just—” I croaked, legs suddenly numb, so that I slumped to the ground, there in the dust before my-husband-my-lord and his-brother-the-Spokesman, “God may know, but I—but I….”

I lay there, and wept. The men left, as men do who know not what to say. My daughters gathered ‘round, and we cried together, for my poor, dead, Lost Boys….

Why? What did they do? Tell me God what did they ever do to You? You Who claim to love us so….         

…And that is why I left the Camp, and stay in this tent, this Black Goatskin Tent, outside the Camp Boundaries. I mourn; I pile dust upon my head; no one comes to visit me, but—Bless Her! Miriam. She is my solace.

My brother Korach has also been by:

“There is no Justice, and no Judge,” he whispers, through the closed tent door, and, “You will be avenged, my Shadow, my Sister, my Tsilya.”

Miriam does not agree. She weeps without; I weep within. We mourn my Boys together.

I still do not know exactly what they did wrong.

They were so young. Why must the Young die because of the Instructions of the Old?

O Shechinah, Earth-Goddess-Mother! Help me to return to my People; help me to believe, again….

Rabbi David Hartley Mark is from New York City’s Lower East Side. He attended Yeshiva University, the City University of NY Graduate Center for English Literature, and received semicha at the Academy for Jewish Religion. He currently teaches English at Everglades University in Boca Raton, FL, and has a Shabbat pulpit at Temple Sholom of Pompano Beach. His literary tastes run to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stephen King, King David, Kohelet, Christopher Marlowe, and the Harlem Renaissance.

[sveniasblog]

Forest of a Thousand Daemons

By Geoff Wisner

Forest of a Thousand Daemons was written in 1938 in response to a literary contest sponsored by the Nigerian ministry of education. It is considered the first novel to be written in Yoruba and one of the first to be written in any of Africa's indigenous languages.

The book begins with a simple frame story. One beautiful morning, the narrator says, he was seated in his favorite chair, “settled into it with voluptuous contentment, enjoying my very existence,” when an old man came up to greet him, sighed, and told him to take down the story he was about to tell.

The old man explains that he was once a mighty hunter known as Akara-ogun or Compound-of-Spells. Over the next 140 pages or so, he describes his adventures in the forest and his clashes with a variety of supernatural beings.

The literal meaning of the book's title is “The Brave Hunter in the Forest of 400 Deities,” but the translator — none other than Wole Soyinka — explains that “four hundred” has a similar meaning in Yoruba to what we mean by “a thousand,” and that daemon is “closer in essence” to the Yoruba imale than gods, deities, or demons.

Much like Nabokov translating Eugene Onegin, Soyinka deploys obscure English words to convey shades of meaning and sort out the many types of creature in this tale. After an unsettling encounter with a warrior named Agbako, whose sixteen eyes are “arranged around the base of his head,” the hero is greeted by a beautiful woman who spells things out for him:

‘Akara-ogun, you are aware that even as dewilds exist on this earth, so do spirits exist also; even as spirits exist so also do kobolds; as kobolds on this earth, so are gnoms; as gnoms so also exist the dead. These ghommids and trolls together make up the entire thousand and one daemons who exist upon earth. I am one of them, and Helpmeet is my name...’

Like the better-known novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola, Forest of a Thousand Daemons is based in Yoruba folk tales, but although it came earlier than Tutuola’s book (which was written in English), it is less grotesque and more “traditional” in tone. One reason is that it is told not in the odd but powerful “broken English” of Tutuola but in the sophisticated, sometimes antique language of its translator.

The hunter’s meeting with Helpmeet suggests Pilgrim’s Progress, and the impression is reinforced a page later when he arrives at a city called Filth, “a place of suffering and contempt, a city of greed and contumely, a city of envy and of thievery...”

Elsewhere we seem to be in the world of Paradise Lost, since Christian and Yoruba myths coexist in the tale. On page 63, a ghommid with two heads and two horns tells the hunter, “I was one of the original angels who were much beloved of God, but I rejected the laws of God and His ways and engineered chaos in heaven. God saw that I was intractable, and that my genius was an evil one. He handed me to Satan to inflict agonies on me for seven years, and even so did it come about that I lived in Hell for seven clear years.”

Forest of a Thousand Daemons is said to have been a strong influence on The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Some of its grotesque creatures may also have helped inspire those in Ben Okri’s story collection Stars of the New Curfew. And on page 11 a smoke monster boils up from the ground that is startlingly similar to the one in the TV series Lost.

The language of Forest of a Thousand Daemons is sometimes odd or awkward, and Soyinka seems to have preserved its flavor. Recounting the third day of his journey, the hunter says, "I ate, filled up properly so that my belly protuberated most roundly.”

Yet peculiar as it sometimes is, the book has life, and helps bridge the gap between oral tradition and the modern literature of Nigeria — one of the most fertile on the continent.

Published May 21, 2010  

[windigomoon]

Lost Stories, Waiting to be found

  Recently, I attended a lecture about the migration of the Ojibwe from the Atlantic Coast to the Upper Great Lakes sometime over the past thousand years. The presenter was of the Anishinaabek, the true people of the Ojibwe, and her all-white audience was spellbound by her story of the epic migration, which had played out over centuries.

  After her talk came many questions, one of which was what movies did she enjoy?  She answered “Smoke Signals,” of course, and then “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Dances With Wolves.” After that, she was stumped.

  What a loss, I thought, because only “Smoke Signals” is a film entirely about Native peoples.  In every other film, from “Black Robe” to “Mohicans,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Little Big Man,” the protagonists are all white men and the Indians tend to be helpmeets or victims.

  This extends to television, with Tonto serving the Lone Ranger and Mingo serving Daniel Boone in the ‘60s.  In “Hell on Wheels,” the Indians have a sense of dignity, but inevitably they, too, aid in their own destruction at the hands of a transcontinental railroad, or serve as its victims. Only recently in “The Revenant” did a band of the Arikara get their due as being independent and dangerous adversaries of white trappers, demanding and receiving justice for a stolen daughter.

 INDIANS IN LITERATURE

  The image of the Indian as a helpmeet or a victim extends to literature.  I’m eager to be corrected if I’m wrong, but as far as I know, the only major work of fiction about the Anishinaabek as they existed prior to the European invasion of North America is The Song of Hiawatha, published in 1855 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  This, despite the fact that Native peoples have occupied the Upper Great Lakes for up to 11,000 years and the Ojibwe are the second largest tribal unit in North America.

�� Based on a Christlike statesman of the Iroquois, Hiawatha was one of the bestsellers of the 19th century.  It has long been derided as a poem which promoted the ideal of the “noble savage,” meaning nostalgia by white intellectuals for the Native peoples their forefathers murdered or transplanted in a genocidal sweep.

  Yet, other than Hiawatha, one is hard-pressed to find works of fiction which deal with the Ojibwe before the advent of white invaders.  There are many novels which deal with the post-Columbian epoch, including those by Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie and Tony Hillerman, but many are about Native peoples trying to get a leg up on their oppressors or survive the aftermath of ethnic cleansing.  Other than Hanta Yo, the bestselling 1979 novel of the Sioux by Ruth Beebe Hill and a series of Hopewell-era novels by W. Michael Gear and Katherine O’Neal Gear there seem to be few, if any, major works of fiction which depict Native peoples in their absolutely free state of being before the white invasion.

 ARROWHEADS & SPEAR POINTS

  I find this strange because the prehistory of Native America is as rich with story material as anything found in Harry Potter, Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings.

  I have a particular interest in this regard because my forthcoming book, Windigo Moon - A Novel of Native America, is set more than 400 years ago on the Upper Great Lakes, beginning in 1588, the so-called “Lost Century,” which was a devastating time for Native peoples. Spanning 31 years, Windigo Moon is a love story which ends in 1619, two years before the Anishinaabek met the first white man at present-day Sault Ste. Marie.  This was the French explorer Etienne Brulé, who was reportedly later boiled and eaten by the Hurons for being too eager with their women.

   It’s my hope that my novel will be a clarion call to Native writers to dig deeper into their own history, which is rich with opportunities for story-telling.  It’s worth noting that story-tellers were among the most valued members of Anishinaabek society for thousands of years because they entertained their clan-mates through endless long winter nights with tales of animals, heroes, monsters, spirits and wayward humans.

  Native American lore is well suited to historical fiction and magical realism. In Windigo Moon I take Anishinaabek myths and spirits at face value. My characters deal with ghosts, manitos and supernatural monsters in addition to the everyday challenges of survival, tribal politics, marital problems and human folly.

 COMPARE & CONTRAST

  So consider Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings with their wizards and magical wands or rings.  Ojibwe lore is filled with corollaries, including shamans with wizard-like powers and weapons or places imbued with spiritual energy. There are also mermen, pukwudgie fairies, manito spirits, talking animals, frost giants, windigo monsters, animal tricksters and more in Ojibwe legends.

  Consider Game of Thrones with its dragons and feuding kingdoms.  Ojibwe lore has mishepezhu, the lynx-head dragon of the Great Lakes, also, animiki, the thunderbird who wages eternal war with the monsters of the underworld. And even after the arrival of white invaders, Native peoples fought with neighboring tribes as they had for centuries with the same ferocity and political fervor as the kingdoms of Game of Thrones.  There are an infinite range of story opportunities in those conflicts that might rival the best of anything on the New York Times bestseller list.

  Consider Samson, Hercules or Achilles in Western mythology; Ojibwe mythology has Manabozho and Aayash to offer, shape-shifting demigods who walk among mortals performing good deeds. Manabozho figures in my own novel as the “great uncle” of the Ojibwe.  I also have a character, Animi-ma’lingan, He Who Outruns the Wolves, a club-footed shaman who serves as the eyes and ears the Ojibwe Mide-wi-win Society of Shamans; he’s literally a spy traveling in the guise of a trader throughout the tribes of North America.

  Moving on, consider the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus or the Norse gods of Asgard who are always poking their noses into popular fiction (we’re talking about you, Thor).  Native American cosmology has hundreds of gods who might bend their will to literary service.

  Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the lack of historical depth in Native American fiction is that this incredible trove of material has been hidden in plain sight while the reading public has gone gaga over the fantasy novels of writers from England or middle class white America.  Surely, there is a Native version of Stephen King or George R. R. Martin awaiting discovery.

    Native storytelling material has a close-to-the-bone authenticity that nothing like The Hobbit, The Dark Tower, The Wizard of Oz or One Hundred Years of Solitude can match in that Indians actually lived through the experience of their stories only a few lifetimes ago.  Like the rough gems of emeralds, rubies and sapphires glittering in a stream, the myths and legends of Native America await any author willing to shape them into treasures of the imagination.

   Robert Downes’ novel, Windigo Moon - A Novel of Native America, will be published September 5 by Blank Slate Press, a division of Amphorae Publishing.

[kevrocksicehouse]

The Wife

D: Bjorn Runge

Before it is anything else, “The Wife” is the story of a woman’s face. Glenn Close plays Joan Castleman whose novelist husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce) wins the Nobel Prize for literature, and as she navigates the chaos of the days leading up to the ceremony, her face is a study of self-effacing placidity, of a woman who defines “helpmeet” to the point of requesting he not thank her in his acceptance speech. (“I don’t want to be that cliché.”). Later, while engaging in barbed repartee with a would-be biographer (Christian Slater, charming and sly) we see that her face is a mask and a shield, used to hide certain bitter truths from both without and within.  And it’s cracking.

Runge’s film, based on a novel by Meg Worlitzer is a slick melodrama given life by its performances. Joe Castleman is his own type of cliché – a pompous and egocentric philanderer – but Pryce brings some depth to a man painfully aware of his limitations, especially after a plot reveal  that’s not so much a twist as  a slow rollout. And Joan is one of Close’s best and most mysterious performances. Even after the movie has resolved itself with a pat (if tragic) conclusion she still wears a face that tells us we’ve barely scratched the surface. She’s a sphinx.

[justforbooks]

The Guardian – The £30m bookshelf: Pierre Bergé and the greatest stories ever sold

With Impressionists on their walls and priceless books on their shelves, Pierre Bergé and his former partner Yves Saint Laurent were the ultimate collectors. But now the art and YSL have gone, Bergé says it’s time ‘to attend the funeral’ of his library.

On an evening when Anonymous were berating the 1% in Trafalgar Square, I was in a book-lined salon a short distance away with a man who has spent a lifetime dressing the wives of le premier cru. Pierre Bergé never actually had pins in his mouth himself, you understand – that was his lover and partner, Yves Saint Laurent. But Bergé was the cool maitre d’ who kept La Maison YSL running on castors while the maestro was in the back, agonising over his sketchpad.

“Fashion is not an art,” says Bergé, “but it takes an artist to make fashion.” The 84-year-old unburdens himself of this apothegm with the foxy charm of the late French actor Charles Boyer. He is wearing a dark brown suit by Anderson & Sheppard, the Savile Row cutters where he has been going for 30 years, with the discreet blazon of the Légion d’honneur in his bespoke lapel. As for the book-lined salon, we are surrounded by his “jardin secret”, he exhales raptly: the most priceless and exquisite library in private hands, grown from 1,600 vanishingly rare and hysterically hard-to-find books and manuscripts.

Bergé has decided to part with his beautiful specimens and the auctioneers handling the sale have put an estimate of almost £30 million on them, making this perhaps the most valuable collection ever to come to market. It includes early editions of books which are cornerstones of western civilisation: a first edition of St Augustine’s Confessions printed in Strasbourg in 1470 and estimated at up to £140,000; Dante’s Divine Comedy from 1487; Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies printed in London in 1664. Coddled by gloved flunkies in dehumidified rooms, these volumes have been cherished with the same hushed attention that Saint Laurent and Bergé once lavished on Parisian ladies of a certain age.

Together, Bergé and I admire a heavily worked manuscript of The Sentimental Education by his favourite, Flaubert, published in 1870 and valued at up to £420,000. Naturally, he also has a copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: it has the author’s handwritten dedication to Victor Hugo on the flyleaf. He adores connections like these. He has a volume by Baudelaire dedicated to Flaubert, and his copy of Treasure Island (1883) is not only a first edition, but a present from Robert Louis Stevenson to a friend who suggested the character of Long John Silver.

The eminence grise of the rag trade shows me an illustrated copy of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. “I don’t like Poe so much, but this was translated (into French) by the great Mallarmé and the art is by Manet,” he says. Briefly released from a vitrine for our delectation are the fragile, handwritten notes for the Marquis de Sade’s last erotic novel (all that survived the fastidious bonfire lit by the Marquis’s scandalised son). These provocative jottings, composed on paper as dry as the leaves of an old cigar, could set you back £280,000. In addition, la Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé boasts super-rare early copies of classics by Cervantes, Joyce, Bronte, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and more. They were acquired by Bergé himself and “his agents”, to a strict formula that only books by authors he admired were admitted.

It was literature that gave the young Bergé his lucky break, although this good fortune was at first well disguised. On his first day in Paris, as he was strolling the Champs-Elysées, a Surrealist poet called Jacques Prévert fell from a window and landed on top of him. A winded Bergé chose to see this defenestration as an augury that the French capital had been waiting for him. He embarked on a career in antique books, truffling for overlooked treasures among the bouquinistes, the bookstalls on the banks of the Seine. In the brilliant young tailor Yves Saint Laurent, he recognised another man with an eye for a silver lining. “Christian Dior fired him, and on the same day, he told me we will set up our own business, the house of Yves Saint Laurent.”

Before long, the pair were dressing the screen goddess Catherine Deneuve. The spouses, and mistresses, of the rulers of the Fifth Republic soon followed. Twice a year, in readiness for YSL collections, the designer and his major domo repaired to their villa in Marrakech. They had another home redecorated to a theme of Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu, the one literary interest they had in common. “It was the only book he ever read,” says Bergé. “Of course, it is a very long book.”

The couple amassed an art collection to excite the salivary glands of gallery directors and oligarchs, including works by Matisse, Cezanne and Klimt. The anguished genius and his suave helpmeet, walled in by Old Masters and first folios – it recalls A Rebours, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s great novel of decadence, of which Bergé naturally owns a highly covetable first edition. The pictures were sold after Saint Laurent’s death in 2008, fetching more than £240m. When asked if he would miss them, Bergé replied, “Everyone dreams of attending their own funeral. I am going to attend the funeral of my collection.” “It must have been an exquisite life,” I suggest. But Bergé hasn’t devoted himself to the luxe, calme et volupté [luxury, peace and pleasure: Baudelaire] of the super-rich without developing a keen nose for how fashions change, swiftly and fatally. “I don’t care to look back,” he says insouciantly.

Bergé claims that Saint Laurent’s great insight was to remove couture from chic restaurants and fashionable apartments and take it “to the street”. The fashion house “empowered” women by putting them in men’s tailoring, in the broad-shouldered shape of the marvellously franglais le smoking. The stress of bringing YSL’s creations before the public and the fashion press took its toll. The couple’s intimate relationship ended in 1976, though they remained friends and business partners.

Today, haute couture is finished, snorts Bergé at his most gallic, no more than a licence to flog scent and handbags, and a pastime for bored supermodels and cashiered pop stars. Only in France, perhaps, could a man with his profile have been a fundraiser for those well-groomed socialists, François Mitterand and Ségolène Royal. I invite Bergé to run a couturier’s tape measure over our own ruling elite. He approves of David Cameron’s holiday wardrobe, but he is not an admirer of the prime minister. He says of Jeremy Corbyn: “I like him. He is a dreamer – and without dreams you have nothing.” But as he claps eyes on a picture of the Labour leader in shorts and dark ankle socks, he shudders almost imperceptibly, like a sequin shaken by a distant Métro.

Our tête-à-tête at an end, Bergé musters his entourage of stubbled younger men who are dressed in autumnal tones. They’re going on to a party. “On y va!” he instructs, leaning dapperly on a cane. La Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé auctioned at Sotheby’s, Paris, on 11 December 2015. His interview with Stephen Smith appears on BBC Newsnight on a following post.

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The Independent Working Woman as Deviant in Tokugawa Japan, 1600-1867

by Shiho Imai Author: Shiho Imai Title: The Independent Working Woman As Deviant in Todugawa Japan, 1600-1867 Publication info: Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library 2002 Availability: This work is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu for more information. Source: The Independent Working Woman As Deviant in Todugawa Japan, 1600-1867 Shiho Imai vol. 16, 2002 Issue title: Deviance Subject terms: Asia Domesticity History Prostitution Sexuality URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.ark5583.0016.005 As all students of early modern Japan are aware, the ukiyoe ("pictures of the floating world") prominently depict lovers, courtesans, kabuki actors, and various categories of urban entertainers. They also feature a relatively unknown group of women who made their living by selling flowers, tea, and books on the streets of Edo (now Tokyo) and Osaka. These female street peddlers constituted an essential part of the urban scene, both real and imagined. Yet while contemporary artists and writers both scrutinized and celebrated the lives of the women of the "pleasure quarters," they largely ignored the existence of the humble peddlers. [1] To the extent that these peddlers were represented at all, it was in their capacity as sexual beings. When the artists expanded their horizons to include city dwellers, from female street peddlers to maids and wet nurses of merchant households, their depictions were often sensual. [2] Subsumed under the common stereotype of being sexually charged, the differences among the women receded into the background. But if the ukiyoe artists found the slightest resemblance between the courtesans and the working women of Edo, it was not merely the product of their sexual fantasies. It was evidence of an emerging language of "difference" to mark those women who worked beyond the family economy. While the presence of women at work outside the home was nothing new to the Tokugawa period (1600-1867), a clear indication of their growing importance was the emergence of a discourse that cast women's work outside of the household as deviant. To understand how working women came to be seen as deviant, the primary focus here will be on the women of artisan and merchant classes in the cities of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Distinguished from both the samurai and the peasantry, these two classes constituted the lower ranks of the four-tiered social hierarchy in the Tokugawa period. At the top of the four classes was the samurai. This was followed in neo-Confucian theory by the peasant and artisan classes. The merchants found themselves at the bottom of the social order because, in theory, they did no productive work. Although the samurai, the ruling elite, held the merchants and their concern with money in contempt, the townspeople (mainly, merchants and artisans) were financially better off than the peasants. In a period of relative peace and stability like the Tokugawa era, conditions became even more favorable for the merchants. [3] This social class structure determined the ways in which women experienced womanhood in Tokugawa Japan. At the center of the female world was the ie or the extended family - most women lived and worked within the ie. But while the woman of the samurai class was expected to "look to her husband as her lord, and serve him with all worship and reverence," as one moral tract instructed, this kind of subservience to the husband was not necessarily demanded of the women of the lower classes. [4] As historian Anne Walthall has suggested, women in peasant households worked in the fields in much the same way as men. The similarity in the type of work performed allowed for a greater flexibility of gender roles in other areas, such as the participation in social protests. [5] Moreover, historian Kathleen Uno has argued that all members of artisan and merchant households frequently shared productive and reproductive work. The proximity of production and reproduction encouraged men, women, and children alike to contribute to the fundamental goal of family continuity. [6] But if the preservation of the ie took precedence over individual and personal concerns, what of the women who did not marry out? What was the fate of the women who by choice and necessity lived and worked independently of the ie? In this paper, I argue that the emergence of a discourse on deviance that pathologized women's non-domestic work was closely connected to the increasing presence of women who deviated from conventional work patterns that revolved around the maintenance of the ie. As work relations based on ancestral and communal ties gradually gave way to those mediated by money and wages, it made it easier for women to work in areas that had previously been dominated by men. My contention is that the labeling of women who worked beyond the household economy as deviants was a product of this unprecedented commercial expansion. Many scholars of Japanese history in the West have explored the possibilities and limitations of independent working women in Tokugawa Japan through individual case studies: Jennifer Robertson's work on women of the Shingaku (Heart Learning) movement; Patricia Fister's biography of a female poet; and Joyce Chapman Lebra's study of a female sake brewer have contributed to an understanding of the ambivalent roles of working women in artisan and merchant society. [7] More recently, Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko have translated the works of Japanese scholars such as Yokota Fuyuhiko's study of the period's early encyclopedias on women's work; these scholars have turned to literary sources to reconstruct the ordinary, everyday work roles of women. Given the social and chronological context in which the sources were produced, Yokota has argued that various forms of labor had already been available to women by the mid-seventeenth-century. [8] This essay builds on the research of the scholars above and Japanese-language works by Nishioka Masako and Seki Tamiko, who have made extensive use of contemporary literature that helped to shape the configuration of gender roles. [9] It is an attempt to juxtapose the period's literary production with "real" events and state policy to probe the relationship between ideology and practice. This essay begins by examining some of the urban occupations that were accessible to women. Most of the primary sources used in this paper are literary materials from the Genroku (1688-1703) era. Well-known as an age of brilliant cultural achievement, rooted in the experiences of the expanding bourgeoisie, the Genroku era was a cultural epoch that continued well into the eighteenth century. The celebration of life and sexuality epitomized by ukiyoe art and Genroku literature stood in sharp contrast to the relatively staid cultural productions of the samurai elite. The era's art and fiction may not necessarily mirror the full measure of women's experience, but they reveal the social attitudes about women that are deeply embedded in the narratives. They also reflect the ways in which popular culture shaped expectations of and biases towards women. Genroku culture devoted particular attention to the human body - male and female - as an erotic object and helped essentialize the meaning of gender. [10] It further facilitated the commodification of that essentialized female body with far-reaching implications for women. Modes of representing female bodies in artistic and literary representations echoed the availability of those bodies through channels of public and private prostitution. Next, I will examine the phenomenon that historian Yokota Fuyuhiko has defined as yujo-ka ("prostitute-like"), the blurring of distinctions between the courtesans and laywomen by the early eighteenth century. [11] It was within this context that women who worked independently of the ie came to be identified less through their type of labor than by cultural and spatial markers of deviance. Finally, I will consider the social and economic transformations of the late Tokugawa period as the backdrop to the changing relationship between working women and the state. An analysis of governmental sources, including criminal records and loyalty awards, exposes the role of deviance as a method of social control. The attempt on the part of the Tokugawa bakufu (government) to further distance the sexual labor of the yujo from the productive and reproductive labor of the laywomen sheds light on the continual assessment of women's work. By examining the changing parameters of respectability, I hope to address the fluidity of what constituted deviance for women in early modern Japan and how it evolved over time. Limits of Working Opportunities for Women Within and Beyond the Household There are numerous episodes in writer Ihara Saikaku's (1642-1693) Japanese Family Storehouse (1688) and Five Women who Loved Love (1686) that confirm the presence of women on the shop floor. In Kyoto, a small dyer's shop was run by the husband-wife team of Kikyoya; [12] in the town of Sakata, a man and his wife worked together as brokers of Abumiya; [13] and in Osaka, a cooper and his wife worked day and night, never failing to meet their debts. [14] At first glance, the arbitrary division of household labor suggests that women faced few restrictions governing the character of their work. But limitations on the work roles and space which women could occupy were inherent in this recognition of their work roles. Female labor was all too important to ignore, but women were to be no more than helpmeets in the household economy. The authors of contemporary literature were careful to distinguish women who overstepped these boundaries from the dutiful wives and daughters of merchant households, and they depicted the former far less favorably. The contradictory messages behind society's reliance on female labor were most pronounced in the description of working women that were young, single, and relatively free of direct male supervision. There are many episodes in Tokugawa literature from the Genroku era that emphasize the sexuality of women at work. A case in point is the common portrayal of maids as mischievous young women. Historian Gary Leupp has explained that most artisan and merchant households were able to employ at least one maid-of-all-work by the end of the Tokugawa period. [15] According to Saikaku's Some Final Words of Advice (1694), some of the girls "look just like any other parlor maid but [their] intentions are quite another matter. These stylish women, who fabricate as trustworthy an impression as possible, are actually parlor thieves." [16]Onna daigaku (Greater Learning for Women), the infamous text on womanhood attributed to the Confucian moralist Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714) shared Saikaku's concerns and noted: "Those low-born girls have had no proper education...They are stupid, obstinate, and vulgar in their speech...If a servant girl be altogether too loquacious and bad, she should be speedily dismissed." [17] Ekken claimed that the gossip among female servants was often responsible for the disruption of the household and the decline of the family fortune. Women were also employed as wet nurses and seamstresses in the houses of samurai and well-to-do merchants. As Leupp has explained, employers had little leeway in the selection of wet nurses because of high turnover rates and the constant demand for their services. As evidence, Leupp invokes a description by Saikaku of the circumstances under which the wet nurses were hired: "When you look at the people who take up employment as wet nurses these days, they are generally either people whose marriages are broken up, or servant girls who, unable to get boyfriends, go chasing after men [and get pregnant]." [18] Saikaku's portrayal of the seamstress is also fraught with sexual overtones. The protagonist of Life of an Amorous Woman (1686) attempts a series of occupations to regain her long-lost respectability, one of which is a seamstress, only to slip back into her amorous habits. "From this time forward I was seamstress in name only," she admits; "when I went out on my visits, it was by another form of work that I contrived to make my own living." [19] While it is difficult to assess the accuracy of the ways in which the servants are characterized, the stereotypes also illustrate the employers' concerns over the servants' moral qualities as well as possible acts of violence and sabotage by dissatisfied servants. Most employers incorporated an element of paternalism in their relationship with their servants and provided food, shelter, clothing, and occasional leisure time. In writer Shikitei Sanba's (1776-1822) comedic tale, Ukiyoburo (1809), two maids discuss their mistresses at a bathhouse. "Don't be fooled by her appearance as she is very demanding," one insists. To this the other replies, "If we ever try to live up to their expectations, we'd die of tuberculosis!" Just as the women are about to finish their conversation, they spot a member of the household and immerse themselves in the tub in embarrassment. [20] According to Leupp, the bathhouse was a frequent site where members of nearly all classes met. In addition to random visits to the theater, the bathhouse provided an opportunity for the servants to interact and socialize with each other. [21] However much they were disparaged in popular literature, servant girls were indispensable members of many merchant and samurai households. For the sake of small businesses, domestic service was seen as a proper wage-earning opportunity for women analogous to the cooperation of married women within the ie. As Saikaku himself acknowledged, many were "drawn into a life of service with a view to the future...their main wish being to make prospects for the future as secure as possible." [22] It is likely that domestic service did not impinge on conventional definitions of female labor as long as women's employment was restricted to the home. The final resort for many young women who were either unable or unwilling to work in a household setting was to work in the cities' pleasure quarters. According to historian Cecilia Seigle, the pleasure quarters of Yoshiwara first opened its gate in 1617 to meet the demands of a growing population of wifeless men in Edo. Since it attracted so many new inhabitants, Yoshiwara was suddenly ordered to move to a new location in 1656. The eviction of Yoshiwara was partly due to the city's expansion, but more so to the proximity of the brothels to the center of official activities. Their new site was located beyond the city limits but accessible by road or boat. What is most telling about the character of its operation is that the bakufu was willing to negotiate the terms of the establishment in exchange for operation fees. [23] This reveals the reciprocal relationship between the pleasure quarters and the state and their mutual interest in containing prostitution to a limited area. Since courtesans were confined to the pleasure quarters and hemmed in by many rules and regulations, they constituted a stratum of women specifically "other" than the respectable wives and daughters of urban residents who lived and worked outside the quarters. The courtesans' containment, in turn, justified their labor as necessary evil. As historian Sone Hiromi has suggested, the traffic of women - sold into prostitution by their poverty-stricken parents - and the contractual relationship that bound the courtesans to the quarters reveals how much the female body had taken on the character of merchandise. [24] As long as the courtesan was enclosed within the walls where she could not influence other women, her labor, seen as a commercial transaction, was an accepted part of society. The society of artisan and merchant classes in the cities of Tokugawa Japan, then, did not inhibit women from working altogether. From assisting in family business to working as domestic servants and courtesans, customary means of making a living for women encompassed household labor, wage work and publicly authorized prostitution. But young single women who worked on a contractual basis, whether as waged workers or publicly authorized prostitutes, entered the literary imagination as commodities of sexual desire. To be sure, there is an underlying distrust towards women in general in many of Saikaku's novels. For example, even the ideal wife of a townsman may be "captivated by a delicious love story" or "deluded by the latest dramatic productions." [25] Nevertheless, Saikaku drew a clear line between the temptress and the helpless victim. A woman engaged in the kind of work that removed her from the ie could easily be accused of being overtly sexual. By the early nineteenth century, working women were at once idealized and marginalized, exposing the limitations for women in public. Yujo-ka: Pushing the Limits of Respectability In his reassessment of Confucian moralist Kaibara Ekken's Onna daigaku, historian Yokota Fuyuhiko has argued that implicit in artistic and literary representations of female labor was the possibility of "yujo-ka," or likeness to the courtesans. The repetitive imagery of the female body as commodity confined working women to the status of sexual objects. Not even the women who worked within the accepted bounds of the ie were immune. To guard against the socially dangerous implications of such a possibility, Onna daigaku, according to Yokota, may have been an attempt to deny those sexual connotations attached to women's work by setting the boundaries between respectability and the lack thereof in its cultural and spatial manifestations. Far from subordinating women to the home, Ekken had tried to dissociate the respectable working women from the "real" prostitutes and courtesans. [26] In what instances, then, could yujo-ka or "prostitute-like" status be ascribed to the women of artisan and merchant households? What do those instances tell us about the changing patterns of women's work? What were the implications for wage-earning women whose work occurred outside the ie? As early as the Genroku era, Ekken showed particular concern over the exuberant tastes of the townswomen and stated that "the women of lower classes, ignoring all rules of this nature, behave themselves [in a] disorderly [fashion]...they contaminate their reputations, bring down reproach upon the head of their parents and brothers, and spend their whole lives in an unprofitable manner." [27] As a critic of conspicuous spending, Ekken was adamant when it came to the appropriate apparel for artisan and merchant women. "Her personal adornments and the color and pattern of her garments should be unobtrusive," he warned, because "it is wrong in her, by an excess of care, to obtrude herself on other people's notice." [28] Ekken's concerns were not unwarranted. As historian Cecilia Seigle has noted, the Yoshiwara courtesan exerted a formidable influence on society. It was the courtesans who set the trends for much of urban fashion and culture. [29] Ejima Kiseki (1666-1735), the author of Seken musume katagi (1717), was deeply disturbed by the townswomen who increasingly resembled the courtesans and the onnagata (female roles played by kabuki actors), and he blamed mothers who enjoyed the attention their daughters received in their frequent outings to temples and shrines. [30] The yujo-ka in this regard - the imitation of the courtesans' fashion and consumption patterns - blurred the line between the yujo and the respectable women of artisan and merchant classes. One of the most obvious symbols of yujo-ka was the adoption of the hairstyles favored by the courtesans. Author Ihara Saikaku observed in Life of an Amorous Woman that the "modern young wives have truly lost all gentleness of manner. They are forever striving to learn the [hair] styles favored by the courtesans and actors of kabuki." [31] According to historian Yasukuni Ryoichi, a man's hairstyle reflected status, but only on rare occasions when a man attended a town meeting or event, did he bother to take note of his hair. [32] By contrast, hairstyling for women was a form of self-expression. The following senryu (sarcastic poetry) mocks the seriousness with which the townswomen attended to their hair: Kami wo yufu tokiniWhen a woman does her hair onna wa me ga suwariher eyes are glued to the mirror [33] It is likely that the senryu was written when women were still able to do their own hair. But as the latest trends became more complex and difficult to imitate, the townswomen did not hesitate to seek professional help from the hairdressers. According to historian Nishioka Masako, the first female hairdressers were spotted in Osaka sometime between the Meiwa (1764-71) and Anei (1772-80) eras. While the early hairdressers catered mostly to women of the pleasure quarters, it was not long before they began attracting women of the artisan and merchant classes. Yasukuni has pointed out that popular hairstyles were not only fashionable but also convenient, particularly for the townswomen who could maintain the same set for up to one or two months. By the Kaei (1848-53) era, there were more than 1,400 female hairdressers in Edo alone. [34] The emergence of the hairdressers exemplifies how far female labor had developed by the mid-Tokugawa period. In writer Tamenaga Shunsui's Shunshoku umegoyomi (1832), one of the female characters is a young hairdresser who is described as a tomboy, otherwise known as "anego" (female boss) among the town youths. [35] While there is no reason to assume that all hairdressers took on a masculine character, it is likely that many were either self-sufficient or less dependent on the ie. Given the phrase, "kamiyui no teishu" (the hairdresser's husband) that referred to a man who lived off a woman's income, historian Seki Tamiko has suggested that the hairdressers' earnings were often on a par with men's. [36] The newly invented stereotypes that address the hairdressers' potential self-sufficiency must be considered within the context of a rapidly expanding commercial economy that supported the employment of independent wage-earning women and the society's continued fascination with yet denigration of female labor. As historian Susan Hanley has pointed out, during the course of the Tokugawa period the townspeople spent large proportions of their incomes on status goods and gifts to maintain and enhance existing social networks. [37] These acts were serious challenges to the rigid social distinctions of the period and frowned upon by the Tokugawa government. In an episode in businessman Mitsui Takafusa's (1684-1748) Chonin kokenroku (ca. 1730), a merchant of Edo is severely punished when his spendthrift wife is mistaken for a lady by none other than the Shogun himself. [38] As historian Mikiso Hane has explained, some merchant households lost their fortunes by incurring the wrath of the ruling authorities. [39] Hence the women who catered to the extravagant needs of merchant wives and daughters faced heavy consequences when they violated the official banning of hairdressers in a series of moral reforms in the late eighteenth century. Not only were the hairdressers fined, but their husbands and parents were also held accountable. Nevertheless, the hairdressers were continually brought back by popular demand. [40] At stake were not only social but also spatial demarcations. As Ekken wrote in Onna daigaku, a woman was expected to limit her trips to "temples and other like places where there is a great concourse of people" until she had reached the age of forty. [41] Historian Ono Sawako has pointed out that shrine and temple compounds were known for yuraku (play), an open space for casual contact between men and women of different classes. The hanami (cherry blossom outings), festivals, and pilgrimages were all opportunities in which men and women could join together in the games and rituals that accompanied many of these occasions. [42] In a society where existing hierarchical relations assumed distinct spatial expressions, the mingling of women of diverse backgrounds posed a particular threat to the already ambiguous boundaries of class and gender. Notwithstanding the risk of being accused of yujo-ka, the wives of merchant households continued to patronize the culture of the yujo that embraced the liberating qualities of leisure and entertainment. Seki has noted that the kabuki plays written by playwright Tsuruya Nanboku (1755-1829) were particularly popular among merchant women. One story depicts a ghost of a woman who haunts her unfaithful husband and drives him to his death. Seki has argued that the out-of-the-ordinary storylines gave the townswomen a moment to breathe in an otherwise suffocating patriarchal household economy. [43] The culture of the yujo, then, imbued a sense of liberation among women of all occupations and status, exposing the cracks in a system that bound the working women to the ie. Much like the existing social hierarchy that was honored more in the breach than in its maintenance by the eighteenth century, the respectability that Ekken's Onna daigaku attempted to restore was gradually slipping away. [44] But it was not the merchant women themselves who were to blame - they were, after all, victims of bad influence. It was, rather, the women associated with the yujo, those who had deviated from the ie system in their capacity to support themselves, who were held accountable. In reality, it was not so much the yujo as it was the growing consumer society that tempted the people of artisan and merchant classes to give in to sumptuous tastes and habits. The desire to consume both goods and services, in turn, necessitated the emergence of female occupations such as the Yoshiwara courtesans and the hairdressers. It also allowed women to engage in various types of wage work, from which the cities' numerous employment agencies profited. [45] As young women and men migrated to the city to take employment as servants and laborers, isolation and anonymity touched the ways in which people interacted with each other. In these changing and fluid communities, people were less likely to know a person's history and had to rely on external factors such as dress and hairstyle to determine a person's social standing. Yet it was precisely this ability to judge someone based on her or his appearance that was increasingly called into question. In an episode in Saikaku's Some Final Words of Advice, an employer must choose between two housemaids; one is very attractive and the other is most ordinary. When they agree to work on a trial basis, the employer discovers that the prettier of the two is incompetent while the less attractive girl could easily pass as a private secretary. The moral of the story was that one "can never tell about people just by looking at them." [46] Still, in another instance, personal appearance is rendered less dependable as it is purchased or forfeited. The protagonist in Saikaku's Life of an Amorous Woman confesses: "I now changed into a garb that fitted my new role [as chambermaid]. In every respect I made myself look like an innocent young girl." [47] It was also in this thriving economy that a variety of illegal monetary transactions emerged, including those involving the female body. Working outside the designated pleasure quarters, the women engaged in private prostitution were punishable by law. Nevertheless, private prostitution saw no signs of disappearing. For example, the suwai (kimono broker) in writer Takizawa Bakin's (1767-1848) travel narrative is described as a gentle and obedient woman, devoid of any mention of prostitution; but as historian Komori Takayoshi has indicated, it was also around this time that the suwai earned their reputations as agents of private prostitution. [48] Seen in this light, women engaged in some occupations may have provoked the image of being sexually loose by actually engaging in private prostitution. The following Edo senryu depicts the goze, or blind female street musicians who were often reduced to the life of a beggar: Goze no iro The blind woman's choice koseki no yoi otoko is the man with the sweet nari voice [49] The senryu describes the goze's flirtatious behavior in spite of her inability to see. References to affairs initiated by the goze in exchange for petty cash are common. As Yasukuni has explained, illegal prostitutes frequently disguised themselves as wandering musicians, maids, hairdressers, and waitresses. According to Yasukuni, the private prostitutes were in some ways responsible for a series of regulations concerning female house ownership in Kyoto and Osaka. It necessarily aroused suspicion when women of the above-mentioned occupations rented or owned a home. This may have caused further problems for working women particularly from the mid- to late Tokugawa period. [50] The blending of culture and the overlapping character of private prostitution and wage work, then, compounded the ascription of yujo-ka status in literary representations of female labor. However, many contradictions are inherent in the discourse of yujo-ka. On the one hand, the yujo was synonymous with female extravagance and sexual immorality. On the other hand, the courtesan was singled out for her elaborate and sophisticated tastes. It was not just the merchant wives and daughters who were mesmerized by the power of the yujo. One woman who tried to imitate a courtesan could not escape Saikaku's disgust in Seken munesanyo (1692). Everything from the way the laywoman walked, talked, and dressed did not live up to his expectations. [51] In Saikaku's Some Final Words of Advice, another woman was criticized for believing that her most important concern should be the declining fortune of her family. As she took up different forms of menial work to lift her husband's spirits, she began to pay less and less attention to her personal appearance only to look older than her age. [52] The yujo, therefore, was not a menace in itself. It was rather the fading distinction between the yujo and the laywoman in their manners and appearances that harbored potential problems. For the culture of the deviants represented the kind of freedom and independence that the townsmen were unwilling to grant all women. However, the women of artisan and merchant classes defied the codes of socially prescribed norms and pushed at the limits of respectability. As we shall see, when the state intervened in the process of delineating the two types of women and their work, the "othering" of anyone associated with the yujo became legitimized, reinforced, and eventually, normalized. The Changing Relations between Women and the State In 1832, a woman by the name of Take was arrested for stealing some old clothing from her former master's home. Take was not only accused of theft, but also—among other offenses—dressing as a man. Even the town officials were baffled by the crime and sentenced her to fifty days in prison, forbidding her from engaging in further acts of cross-dressing. Five years later, however, Take was arrested again for disguising herself as a male officer. This time, Take faced one hundred days in prison and was eventually exiled to Hachijo Island. She was only twenty-four years old at the time. [53] The unusual cruelty on the part of the town officials reflects the changing relationship between women and the state by the late Tokugawa period. As historian Seki Tamiko has noted, Take's offense entailed more than a transgression of gender. Take, a self-supporting individual with no particular affiliation with the ie, was an alarming presence in the eyes of the Tokugawa officials. [54] To be sure, with the exception of private prostitution and female hairdressing, the bakufu did little to impose legal measures regulating the activities of wage-earning women. As historian Sone Hiromi has pointed out, without a definitive system of social welfare, there was no reason for the bakufu to discourage women of lower status from making a living. [55] But as historian Natalie Zemon Davis has suggested, tales of crime and pardon could circulate among the masses not as an imposing "official culture," but as cultural exchange, conducted under an overarching authority. [56] In a climate of increasing tension between the bakufu and the prosperous merchants, talk of punishment and rewards may have functioned as a measure of social control. The state's intervention in commending those work roles that focused on the preservation of the ie became particularly salient in a time of political and economic crisis. Inspired by the already existing cultural imagery and institutionalized in the form of licensed prostitution, the difference between the yujo and respectable working women, hence the distinction between sex and reproduction, had become official. [57] In 1787, Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758-1829) became the bakufu's chief councilor to cope with the devastating consequences of a year of great floods, inflation, food shortage, and rioting. The policies he adopted were conservative in nature, and concentrated on reducing expenditures and encouraging frugality. [58] But the bakufu's endeavor to regulate and reduce the expenditure of the townspeople took unusual turns. For example, Sadanobu forbade the use of barbers and hairdressers on the premise that imitation of Kabuki actors and yujo necessarily involved excessive clothing and would, therefore, corrupt public morals. [59] As noted earlier, the ban was of little avail in imposing frugality upon the townspeople. In the hope of increasing agricultural production, Sadanobu and Mizuno Tadakuni (1793-1851), his successor in reform, encouraged the peasants in the cities to return to farming. Tadakuni further attempted to curtail secondary work such as weaving so that peasants could focus on tilling the soil. [60] In his study of artisan and merchant women in Kyoto, historian Yasukuni Ryoichi has pointed out that the specialization and diversification of labor in the textile industry created greater opportunities for female weavers within the household division of labor. [61] The demand in silk encouraged farmers to favor sericulture over other cash crops, allowing women to engage in the kinds of work that reaped higher profits than did typical male labor. Despite the growing recognition of female weavers as breadwinners in the family, the differences in the kinds of work performed led to lower pay scales for women, often at the insistence of the Tokugawa government. [62] This is not to imply that the bakufu discouraged women from working outside the home. According to historian Katakura Hisako, the number of rewards by which the machi-bugyo (town magistrate) honored the good deeds of the urban community rose particularly during the Kansei (1789-1801) and Tenpo (1830-1843) Reform eras, with forty-four cases and forty-six cases respectively. In one instance, a woman by the name of Tetsu was praised for her continuous support of her elderly father from her income as seamstress and peddler. In another example, Hisa was commended for supporting her family when her husband became permanently ill. Carrying her two-year old daughter on her back, she sold flowers in the morning, tofu and bean curd by day, and took care of her husband at night. Most of the work in this category involved street peddling, but the kind of work rewarded by the bakufu became diversified over the years. [63] Yet, the stark reality remains that women's work rewarded by the bakufu was mainly for the benefit of the family or its male members, unlike other urban occupations that stressed the individual. Behind the bakufu's ardent support for women's work, then, was a striking message that contained women to the ie system. In 1789, the bakufu arrested several thousand illegal prostitutes in Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka. In Edo, the arrested women were sent to Yoshiwara or banished to agricultural villages in nearby regions. As historian Cecilia Seigle has explained, this was an attempt to solve two problems with one measure: cleanse Edo of vice and alleviate the shortage of marriageable women in rural villages. [64] Through this gesture of punishment and discipline, the bakufu desperately sought to bolster its sense of control. In this respect, the deportation of illegal prostitutes to nearby agricultural villages resonated with the function of the ninsoku yoseba (almshouses), facilities constructed in 1790 for the purpose of providing housing and employment for the homeless and convicts of Edo. As historian Kato Takashi has illustrated, Sadanobu attempted to clear the streets of persons he considered threats to society by placing vagrants in a supervised institution. He further hoped to reform those persons to become productive members of society by introducing such potential troublemakers to the discipline and rewards of work. [65] As such, one illegal prostitute who supported a bedridden father received a lighter sentence in a private prostitution raid in 1828. [66] In this age of reform, the working woman as deviant took on a tamable character worthy of redemption, as long as she was willing to subsume her personal gains to the needs of the family. Meanwhile, the pleasure quarters became an institution where the fate of the courtesans was sealed as a necessary evil. Inherent in contemporary discourse about women's work was thus a factor that restricted both freedom and individuality. The labeling of self-reliant, outspoken women as deviants not only deprived working women of a viable identity, but also gave commoner men and the state overarching control over their bodies. As society began to rely on female labor outside the traditional household economy, the reaffirmation of gender roles became a priority. Historian Gary Leupp's analysis of the various grounds on which the bakufu rewarded the commendable behavior of commoners reveals the language that defined such gender roles: charity, loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and purity. [67] This context makes it conceivable why Take, who not only disguised herself as a man but also assumed a male identity, was severely punished for such a petty offense as theft. In a period of change and fading distinctions between established categories, evinced by the notion of the yujo-ka, ideals of gender and sexual propriety were reinscribed in other ways - lauding the women who worked to support their households but condemning those who defied male authority by working independently of the ie. Conclusion The celebration of sexuality that characterized much of Genroku culture and its representations of women in ukiyoe art and literature, then, cannot necessarily be taken at face value. With an emphasis on the female body as an object of sexual desire, Genroku culture accelerated the commodification of women through public and private prostitution. Described as young, single, and free-spirited, working women also gained visibility and recognition, but could not escape the stigma of promiscuity. Often at the hands of the ukiyoe artists and writers of contemporary literature, those women who worked beyond the confines of the ie were transformed from innocent bystanders into dangerous sexual predators. Although the pleasure quarters and the "real" yujo were accepted parts of society, the discourse of yujo-ka attempted to prevent their autonomous and transient lifestyle from spilling over to the more respectable working women of the artisan and merchant classes. Indeed the yujo exerted control over the culture of the townswomen and indirectly undermined the patriarchal household economy. Yet, the society of artisans and merchants could not afford to condemn female wage work altogether and its presence beyond the household. Carefully distinguishing between the wifely duties of married women engaged in small businesses, male writers as well as the state at once encouraged and denigrated female labor. Furthermore, in a series of reforms initiated by the Tokugawa bakufu, the discourse on deviance assumed a different character as the working woman turned aggressor now became the object of rescue. Although government crackdowns on private prostitution, both real and disguised, were customary practices, the bakufu found a novel, practical solution to this nagging problem by the end of the Tokugawa period. Rather than punishing women for their imputed association with lewd activities, the government opted to confine them to the kinds of work and areas in which their labor was most needed. In so doing, it facilitated the gradual relinquishing of a woman's right to her body and labor and foreshadowed the changing role of woman from wife and helpmeet to agent of reproduction, hence, motherhood. It would not be until the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the subsequent policies that promoted modern industry and commerce that the separate spheres ideal would take root among members of the new urban middle-class. But the continued construction of independent working women as deviant was a legacy of the "floating world." Brown University Providence, Rhode Island 1. See, for example, Okumura Masanobu, "The Traveling Woman Bookseller"; Okumura Toshinobu, "Actors as a Flower Seller and Street Musician"; and Nishimura Shigenaga, "The Actor Sanyo Kantaro as a Tea Seller" in Early Masters: Ukiyoe Prints and Paintings from 1680-1750 (New York: Japan Society Gallery, 1991). The names of those who reside or have resided primarily in Japan are written with the family name preceding the given name. 2. See, for example, Kitagawa Utamaro, "Beauties in the Kitchen" and "Needlework," in Utamaro, ed. Muneshige Narayuki and Sadao Kikuchi, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1974). 3. Mikiso Hane, Premodern Japan: A Historical Survey (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 149-151. 4. Kaibara Ekken, Greater Learning for Women, trans. Basil H. Chamberlain (London: John Murray, 1905), 43. 5. Anne Walthall, "Devoted Wives/Unruly Women: Invisible Presence in the History of Japanese Social Protest," Signs (Autumn 1994): 106-36; see also Walthall, "The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan," in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 6. Kathleen Uno, "Women and Changes in the Household Division of Labor," in Recreating Japanese Women; Hane, Premodern Japan, 154-5. 7. Jennifer Robertson, "The Shingaku Woman: Straight from the Heart"; Patricia Fister, "Female Bunjin: The Life of Poet-Painter Ema Saiko"; and Joyce Chapman Lebra, "Women in an All-Male Industry: The Case of Sake Brewer Tatsu'uma Kiyo," in Recreating Japanese Women. 8. Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, eds., Women and Class in Japanese History (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1999). 9. Nishioka Masako, Edo no onnabanashi (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, 1993); Seki Tamiko, Edo koki no joseitachi (Tokyo: Aki shobo, 1980). 10. I use the term essentialize to suggest that Genroku culture had a tendency to subsume all women under a common biological category regardless of their differences. 11. Yokota Fuyuhiko, "Onna daigaku saiko," in Gender no nihonshi: ge, ed. Wakita Haruko and S. B. Hanley, (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1995), 382; see also "Imagining Working Women in Early Modern Japan," in Women and Class , ed. Tamanoi Tonomura, trans. Mariko Asano. 12. Ihara Saikaku, Japanese Family Storehouse, trans. G. W. Sargent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 81. 13. Ihara, Japanese Family Storehouse, 53. 14. Ihara Saikaku, Five Women who Loved Love, trans. Wm. Theodore De Bary (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1956), 104-5. 15. Gary P. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 50-1. 16. Ihara Saikaku, Some Final Words of Advice, trans. Peter Nosco (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1980), 218-9. 17. Kaibara, Greater Learning for Women, 43. 18. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers, 52. 19. Ihara Saikaku, Life of an Amorous Woman, trans. Ivan Morris (New York: New Directions, 1963), 173-83. 20. Shikitei Sanba, Ukiyoburo, trans. into modern Japanese by Nakamura Michio (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1957), 193. 21. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers, 115. 22. Saikaku, Some Final Words of Advice, 218; see also Yokota, "Imagining Working Women,"160-3. 23. Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 9-23. 24. Sone Hiromi, "Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan," trans. Akiko Terashima and Anne Walthall, Women and Class, 171-2. 25. Ibid. 26. Yokota, "Onna daigaku saiko," 382. 27. Kaibara, Greater Learning for Women, 35. 28. Kaibara, Greater Learning for Women, 41. 29. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 71. 30. Ejima Kiseki, Seken musume katagi, trans. into modern Japanese by Nakajima Takashi (Tokyo: Shakai shisosha, 1990), 121. 31. Ihara, Life of an Amorous Woman, 173. 32. Yasukuni Ryoichi, "Kinsei Kyoto no shomin josei," Joseishi sogo kenkyukai, ed., Nihon josei seikatsushi 3 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990), 102. 33. Hamada Giichiro and Morikawa Akira, eds., Kansho nihon koten bungaku 31(Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 1977), 30. Author unknown. 34. Nishioka, Edo no onnabanashi, 38-40; Yasukuni, "Kinsei Kyoto no shomin josei," 98-102. 35. Tamenaga Shunsui, Shunshoku umegoyomi, trans. into modern Japanese by Funabashi Seiichi (Tokyo: Kawade shobo, 1974), 325-7. 36. Seki, Edo koki no joseitachi , 37. 37. Susan Hanley, "Tokugawa Society: Material Culture, Standard of Living, and Lifestyles," in The Cambridge History of Japan, v. 4: Early Modern Japan, ed. John W. Hall, et al. (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1988), 660-705. 38. David J. Lu, "On Being a Good Merchant, 1726-33," Japan: A Documentary History (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 229. Adapted from E. S. Crawcour, "Some Observations on Merchants: A Translation of Mitsui Takafusa's Chonin Kokenroku," Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 8 (1962), 114-22. 39. Hane, Premodern Japan, 152. 40. Nishioka, Edo no onnabanashi, 33. 41. Kaibara, Greater Learning for Women, 40. 42. Ono Sawako, Edo no hanami (Tokyo: Tsukiji shokan, 1992), 126. 43. Seki, Edo koki no joseitachi, 23. 44. By this time, the merchants who were at the bottom of the social order were financially better off than the ruling samurai elite. 45. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers, 70. 46. Ihara, Some Final Words of Advice, 216-7. 47. Ihara, Life of an Amorous Woman, 161. 48. Yasukuni, "Kinsei Kyoto no shomin josei," 90-1; Komori Takayoshi, "Tsugi tsugi arawareru kakubaita," in Yujo, ed. Nishiyama Matsunosuke (Tokyo: Kondo shuppansha, 1985), 44. 49. Tanabe Sadanosuke, Kosenryu fuzoku jiten (Tokyo: Seiabo, 1962), 105-7. The senryu was written by an unknown author sometime between the Horeki (1751-63) and Tenmei (1781-88) eras. 50. Yasukuni, "Kinsei Kyoto no shomin josei,"74-7; see also Seigle, Yoshiwara, 210 51. Ihara Saikaku, Seken munesanyo, trans. into modern Japanese by M. Tanizawa, Z. Zinbo, and Y. Teruoka, (Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1996), 384-5. 52. Ihara, Some Final Words of Advice, 185. 53. Seki, Edo koki no joseitachi , 76-8; see also Robertson, "The Shingaku Woman," 92. 54. Ibid. 55. Sone, "Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan," 183 56. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 112. 57. I draw upon Yokota's reinterpretation of Greater Learning for Women, "Imagining Working Women," 164-5, to understand the relationship between the sexual bodies of the prostitutes and the labor of ordinary women. 58. Hane, Premodern Japan,187. 59. George Sansom, A History of Japan, 1615-1867 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), 206. 60. Hane, Premodern Japan, 188. 61. Yasukuni, "Kinsei Kyoto no shomin josei," 88-97. 62. Wakita Haruko, Hayashi Reiko, and Nagahara Kazuko, eds., Nihon joseishi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1987), 171. 63. Katakura Hisako, "Bakumatsu ishinki no toshi kazoku to joshi rodo," in Josei no Kurashi to rodo, ed. Sogo joseishi kenkyukai (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1998), 85-91. 64. Seigle, Yoshiwara, 167. 65. Kato Takashi, "Governing Edo," in Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, eds. James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 60. 66. Seki, Edo koki no joseitachi, 41-2; see, for example, Walthall, "Devoted Wives/Unruly Women." 67. Leupp, Servants, Shophands, and Laborers, 78.