Ruth Frick O'Brien

Category: Women Impacting Politics

  • protest politics

    protest politics

    Any one who knows me knows I’m rather persistent when it comes to physicał protests.

    Anyone who really knows me knows if and why i ‘show’-up, for a protest or stage one with my Fred or follow my fearless sons, can figure out these photos.The where and when.

    Too decide is an ordeal.

    It’s always an ordeal, or better yet a calculation to determine if my physical body can “take it.”

    When I arrived at CUNY I had a workplace injury as University of Denver (DU) –Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), I taught and published only that. I was the “negative” example, if you will.

    No doubt about it!

    How (not why because too obvious) is the question.

    HOW is so much harder, though potentially counter-intuitive then way more interesting. Like ” “disinterest” not rational self-interest.

    Indeed, I get tired hearing either the why — the justification disguised or ʼframedʼ as I write in at least one book racialized – en-cultured or -en-appropriated (Penelope). And if you wanna play the game, select 2 ids please. It is only fair Rudi.

    What is my MO? Mother Courage or Reckless Ruthje? I love to name and to have acronyms like TAP (new-ish) and PRISM. I asked for over 23 years how a Germanic language like Dutch did not soften my name nor Ruudʼs. Happy to catch up with Gradi during the holidays. It is her cennential all year, after all.RPM taught me a lot about what radically changes meaning in transliteration. Being “lost in translation – is too obvious. Cultures are akin to climate(s). Get it?

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  • Weasel Zippers Snip the Menu and if it says “oops” this means

    Take it from the Weasel-Zippers, as a woman “writing politics” I’m effective enough to try to silence. They want to silence me. I may seek shelter in scholarship sometimes, but I will not be silenced.

    I appreciate the mirroring with CUNY Academic Commons that stems from my private site to my professional site. CUNY practices freedom of speech protection. No research and travel budget does not help. (Double negative intended.) Images are all mine.

    The National Review trained me (via Frederic D. O’Brien, formerly Frederic. D. Schwarz — his mug name.).

    Even more importantly, University of Chicago. Senior-sage-wise or the legendary academic editor John Tryneski helped me immensely. I forgot Out of Many, One: The Third American Political Tradition was almost pulped give the racket the late Rush Limbaugh made. This is an academic book with lots of footnotes, documenting former President Barack Obama’s first term

    Being a Congressional Page and an American presidency scholar means one tends to get the panic of having two years (or 100 days) to pass a law. Executive orders have always existed but . . .

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  • Ruth Frick(s)

    Ruth Frick(s)

    Here is a photo of my grandmother in 1913 in Des Moines Iowa– the caucus state. She would be thrilled-I think or should I say I speculate – to know not only was I given her first name by my parents but I am honoring her and her daughter Virginia Frick O’Brien in finally revealing Ruth’s married name.

     

    iii = Idea Impact.org Institute
    Idea_Impact.org*_Institute *estab. 501(c)(3) Non-Profit, Non-Partisan Higher Education Outreach
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  • /Control?/Resist?!?/Bodies_in_Revolt*

    /Control?/Resist?!?/Bodies_in_Revolt*

    This was written before the ADAAA was passed in 2008 as President George W. Bush (43, not 41) with Routledge, 2005 and sold as chapters or I can send PDFs per requests (robrien@gc.cuny.edu within each semester (approximately September to December and February to May) each year. I only have select chapters.

    Finally, Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (USA: Oxford University Press, 2004)

    Crippled Justice: The History of Disability in the Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, October 2001).

    https://www.hulu.com/watch/88ceaa35-dea2-49de-9985-8993d49574a0

    https://press.princeton.edu/series/the-public-square

    Writing Politics inspired both Voices from the Edge and the Public Square (PS) by PUP in Princeton, New Jersey)

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  • The Plot Against AOC

    The Plot Against AOC

    Ruth O’Brien, Editor

    Assassinating AOC? Wow. Trump seems to have literally succeeded in hiring a hit man the Trump way (no need to pay for it when you can incite folks to do the dirty work for free).  A good thing it didn’t work.

    As a female professor in the nation’s biggest urban public university, at the campus with the strongest research record, years ago — in 2014 — I launched Heretical Thought, a book series I solo-edit with Oxford University Press, USA, that emanated out of my doctoral seminars in American political thought.  Now we are up to 4 books: Assembly, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, by Catherine Rottenberg; Insurgent Universality, by Massimiliano Tomba; and Call Your “Mutha,” by Jane Caputi. This compounds my existing series, The Public Square, from 11 years earlier, including Jill Lepore’s award-winning The Whites of Their Eyes, about the Tea Party, and a forthcoming book by Anne-Marie Slaughter. The schtick about Heretical Thought is that if you don’t have a fatwa or witch-burning against you, your ideas aren’t significant enough to be published by the oldest university press in the world.

    Global in nature, Heretical Thought takes an image my direct ancestor could relate to, since she was mentored by the only woman to be banished from the Mayflower community, who later got a patent of land in Gravesend (now Coney Island).  Once the British took over, Penelope returned with her large family to the soil she had first landed on, in Sandy Hook, present-day New Jersey, where her first husband was killed and scalped, and Penelope herself was scalped and impaled but survived, being rescued by a matrilineal indigenous tribe.

    I was taught this history by a great-aunt who disguised her own gender, not once but twice, in Esquire — to publish an article alongside Ernest Hemingway. I listened to Great-Aunt Mary, who heard my entire 600-page dissertation from UCLA when she was blind, as she advised me that I didn’t have to be a Frick; I could relate just as much to the Stouts. I have tried to live up to the Penelope Stout name.  Like her, I’ve had a lot of firsts as a woman in academia in a field that practices systemic sexism — being a member of one of the first classes with women to graduate from Claremont McKenna College (as it is now known, though my diploma has the distinction of saying Claremont Men’s College even though I was born female), and the first female EO of the CUNY Graduate Center Political Science Ph.D. Program, where I hired three central lines, including Peter Beinart for the Writing Politics specialization that I designed.  Meanwhile, APSA has only now started writing reports about PS misogyny, to some avail, and its journal now has 12 editors who reflect diversity.  I have had the honor (dis) of being named a “doctoral major” haha.

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  • Courageous 10 (GOP House of Representative Members) Impeaching Trump

    Courageous 10 (GOP House of Representative Members) Impeaching Trump

    white house
    Photo by Aaron Kittredge on Pexels.com

    Here are the names of the courageous ten GOP members impeaching Trump.

    Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back the impeachment proceedings. Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be “a direct threat to the future of our democracy,” he said.

    Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday evening that she would vote to impeach, citing the president’s role in an insurrection that caused “death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.”

    Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump “encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.”

    Representative Fred Upton of Michigan issued a statement saying that he would vote to impeach after Mr. Trump “expressed no regrets” for what had happened at the Capitol.

    Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State issued a statement saying, “The president’s offenses, in my reading of the Constitution, were impeachable based on the indisputable evidence we already have.” (An earlier version of this item incorrectly stated which state Ms. Herrera Beutler represents.)

    Representative Dan Newhouse of Washington announced that he was backing impeachment, attacking his party’s core argument, that the process was being rushed. “I will not use process as an excuse,” he said during the impeachment debate, to cheers and applause from Democrats. Mr. Newhouse also offered a mea culpa, chiding himself and other Republicans for “not speaking out sooner” against the president.

    Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan said that Mr. Trump had “betrayed his oath of office by seeking to undermine our constitutional process, and he bears responsibility for inciting the insurrection we suffered last week.”

    Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio said Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers in the House and Senate “had their lives put in grave danger as a result of the president’s actions,” adding, “When I consider the full scope of events leading up to Jan. 6 including the president’s lack of response as the United States Capitol was under attack, I am compelled to support impeachment.”

    Representatives Tom Rice of South Carolina and David Valadao of California also voted for impeachment.

     

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  • Gendering a Traitor

    Gendering a Traitor

    HANDOUT PHOTO:
    Ashli Babbitt, 35, was shot and killed in the Capitol Wednesday.
    (Courtesy of Timothy McEntee)

    When women fought and won the right to fight, it wasn’t to then be romanticized as “poor her.”  She got killed. No.  She — Ashli Babbitt —  was trained by the U.S. military.

    She knew the difference between the police — who shoot to kill in America — and enemy combatants. There’s no exception for the U.S. Capitol Police.  So stop gendering the woman’s right to die – by combat — her choice when she stormed the Capitol as a traitor.

    It’s shameless for the GOP to invoke “due process” now.  So, Senator Ted Cruz is trying to steal the flag and the constituents who followed Trump.  Hopefully, he’ll thrown out by Texans who are now forming a blue wave in their state.

    President Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “we are all Americans” came only after his election to office when he buried the Federalists — temporarily — and caught his own party wave as Jeffersonian Republicans captured both sides.  The United States never planned on having political parties — and their existence is a constant extralegal — potentially disruptive — disastrous force.  The GOP now can finally grab their party back from Trump.  What’s stopping them?  (Oh, the 75 million mob-sters — a gang of misogynistic white supremacists men and women — like Ashli they want to shamefully use and abuse to take power. Mob-ocracy.  What a silly word.)

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  • 3-repubs

    3-repubs

    Representative Millicent Fenwick
    In 1977 and 1978, I got to walk with this brave Republican woman from New Jersey who knew Kevin McCarthy’s Dad — and/or The Grapes of Wrath managers who knew who Steinbeck named “the” book after

    These posts reflect my original interest in American politics, history and political theory broadly cast.

    What I call this is American Political Thought squared or (APT+APT).  You guessed it, I’m not interested in APD — with the D standing for “development.”

    I’m interested in exploring the nexus between American Political Development (APD) and American Political Thought (APT) as well as American Studies and Africana Studies or all regional “studies,” including working with Gajo Petrovic a leader in Praxis published in the former Yugoslavia. Now I found “Olde Good Things” where Fred and I can purchase “Americana” that is upcycled-not recycled nor antiqued. Check it out 🙂

    Indeed, APT squared or APT/APT explains my Master-Slave Hegelian re-interpretation discovered in CAPT (C stands for contemporary) where “A perfect Martini” and I and other students first discussed the too long APT reading list that includes/excludes not PwD but people who are not part of “All Other Persons” found in Federalist Paper #48.

    This was the reason I stayed in American practical or street level politics for my Ph.D. rather than leaving for law school, history, sociology or business school.  To be sure, UCLA doctoral faculty kept trying to convince me to leave and write (who has a career in writing in the 1980s? Wives to be sure but . . . )

    After working with Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time propagator — longstanding IAS member and philosophy professor Gajo Petrovic (Zagreb) after being working with the Fulbright scholar who wrote the only working Yugoslavian Constitution (i.e. the one that stuck — written in the 1970s). The constitutional scholar attended the Sorbonne in the 1930s and ended his career as the Dean of the best law school in Belgrade after Claremont Graduate School.

    In the 1980s the Fulbright funded his scholarship on Jefferson at Claremont Graduate School, which is similar to Jefferson’s table, I worked with him for my B.A. thesis — Beyond Reification — on Marx, existentialism, phenomenology and Yugoslavian self-management supervised by Claremont Men’s College’s public law professor Winston Fisk.  Fisk’s daughter is a well-known labor legal scholar, who last I saw or talked to was at Duke Law School in labor-capitalism theory.

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  • New York Times Running Insult Tally (Trump Years)

    New York Times Running Insult Tally (Trump Years)

    Click on URL below since the New York Times keeps adding to who President Donald J. Trump, our 45th, insults. Plenty of stories to tell with this material, hence Jim Phelan’s reference to Narratives as well as the ole’ machine folk is like me started using when we were in.

    Stories We Told mode. (Check out https://atomic-temporary-94207862.wpcomstaging.com/2020/10/05/stories-we-tell-part-2/ ). I’ve been insulted for writing since I was 12 years old. The first insulter-in-power was my Principal Morrisey who ran Thompson Junior High School in Bakersfield CA. He told me to knock off writing letters that the Bakersfield Californian published. I ignored him and wrote at least one more to show him I would not be cowed.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html

    black vintage typewriter
    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
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  • Political Elites, Public Opinion, Social Media or No — Women Writing Politics

    Political Elites, Public Opinion, Social Media or No — Women Writing Politics

    Men don’t follow the rules; they make the rules.  And by rules I mean political rules that do determine economics or the market, let alone society (norms, beliefs, values, et al.).  Though women in power get to dictate in a multitude of directions (which is why they get called “uppity bitch” all the time).  (My partner does not know what color of shoes to wear to what function.)

    Put differently, SMIGS (straight male, Ivy, gender speak), instead of mugs (not to be confused with maiden names), who are not all smug (who again don’t know how to pair maidens with mugs any more than Ivies and their sisters — colleges that is).

    At least my mug is not smug.  He may have gone Ivy, and the only one in the largest city once controlled by the Dutch (New Netherlands), but he wasn’t about to attend HPY (our license plate – Harvard-Princeton-Yale connection, though we had no intention of being part of the “H’s: when it came to license plates).

    My partner also helped me with SLAMs and SCAMs, though a great colleague thought this was insulting to men.  With a 50 percent admission rate for legacy, we are talking about a very small group of smug people, and only one gender who could get in.  Not only my partner but first generation of any nationality, let alone religion or tradition, or mixed first generation of any kind has this high of an admissions rate.  (CUNY has a much lower admissions rate, in effect, than Harvard,  Go figure.)

    How do I know this?  I went from CPS (Capitol Page School) to CMC (Claremont Men’s College), where they tried to “GCO” us (Get C-word Out). This is similar to the Princeton University Press book ”Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation.

    A better way to look at gender, or women as the most trod-upon gender, is that when we enter the institution we make it stronger — intellectually first and foremost.  No more need for Gentleman’s C’s.  Having been disappointed by my mother’s notion that I only had to “earn” a Gentleman’s C, I was happy that I got into CMC instead of an all-female sister school, or the Western equivalent nearby.  She transferred from Mills to Berkeley and regretted it.  I got in via transfer and decided against going.  I preferred understanding how socialism succeeded in the former Yugoslavia rather than attending a university with more men. I didn’t even accept an invitation to be the prototype or the type of professor — University Professor — since I found California less diverse than, yes, NYC, even though it is a one-Ivy town.  UC Berkeley, or Cal, is over 85 percent privately funded with a public purpose, so where better to hide your former superiority to Harvard?

    Before I forget, though I haven’t found the citation to this day to “Gov-Speak,” a Harvard thesis, MA thesis, or dissertation that gave us the rules of Gov-Speak, which is to say male speak.  And while I’m the third professor in my 11-generation family, I’m only the second one who addresses religion.  The first helped found Brown, was George Washington’s aide-de-camp, and practiced “pro-fessing,” not confessing, when he was a prof back in the 1790s.  So the first prof in my family was a prof of religion.  Back then Brown and other institutions were “liberal” (i.e. secular).  Not only did I assume that this meant the religion professor helped clean Washington’s boots, but that the town he professed in must have been Princeton or New Brunswick, not Providence, Rhode Island. Being from a radical county of a radical state — New Jersey — (which allowed women to vote for a nanosecond or from the 1790s until 1807) — he helped found the community with Native Americans from one sovereign nation.

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  • Gender, Race and American Political Development Spring 2020, Syllabus with revisions accommodating “the Pandemic of 2020”

     

     

     

     

     

    PSC72009/Hist74900/WSC 81000-10  Spring 2020*Gender, Race, and American Political Development:American Dream or American Dread?

    Tuesdays 11:45 AM-1:45 PM until March 10, then remote via Slack (see announcements)

    David Waldstreicher 5411.09  Office Hour Tues 2:00-3:00 (remote and by appointment)

    Ruth O’Brien 5200.01 Office Hour Tues. 2:00-3:00 (remote, and by appointment)

    Course Overview:   This course examines to what extent, in what ways, are exceptionalist understandings of U.S. political traditions a problem or a solution? Do accounts that stress race, or gender, or the confluence of the two, provide a necessary or sufficient theory or counter-narrative of political development? Do frameworks developed in European politics, in critical theory, in postcolonial thought, or in domestic vernaculars comprehend the roles of race and gender, or their relationship to each other, in the political past and political time now? What kinds of analytical scholarship and storytelling have been adequate to the task?  Finally, given the recent resurgence of angry and martial rhetoric at the center of national politics, how might we understand the relationship between the revolutionary or Enlightenment dreams of justice, peace, freedom and progress, on the one hand, and the recurrent dread or nightmare of decline and oppression, as shaping facts of specifically political traditions?

    Written Assignments:

    •Weekly brief (1-2 pp.) reflections on the readings.

    •A term paper of 12-15 pages, due May 8, that may take one of the following forms:

    •A historiography or “literature review” that takes as its subject one of the week’s readings and incorporates the recommend readings and possibly others as well.

    •A research paper according to the expectations of one’s discipline or the course one is registered for (political science, history, women’s studies etc.)

    •A proposal for a more substantial research project. Consult with one of the instructors about expectations according to disciplinary specificities.

    A 2-3 page PROPOSAL for term final paper is due on March 31.

    Schedule and Readings      

    1 Jan. 28 Introduction: a discipline counts: histories (social, intellectual, political, economic, material, cultural); APD meets APT; theories of living and dead thinkers, significant social theory.

    2  Feb. 4  Defining Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Concepts: Definition of APD methods (historical institutionalism, regimes, epistemic communities);  APD meets APT;  APT themes, including settler political theory, West/Imperialism, Migration/Immigration

    Reading: Stephen Skowronek & Karen Orren, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) chps. 1-2; Rogers M. Smith, “Ideas and the Spirals of Politics: The Place of American Political Thought in American Political Development,” American Political Thought 3 (Spring 2014), pp. 126-136; Jeffrey Checkel, Jeffrey Friedman, Matthias Matthijs, and Rogers Smith, “Roundtable on Ideational Turns in the Four Sub-Disciplines of Political Science,” Critical Review, Vol. 28, Issue 2, (2016), 171-202 [Read Rogers Smith only]; Brian J. Glenn, “Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America as Method.” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 2 (2005): 234–39.

    Recommended: Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 1993): 549-566; Giacomo Gambino “‘Our End Was in Our Beginning’: Judith Shklar and the American Founding,” American Political Thought 8 (Mar 2019): 202-30; Ruth Abbey, “The Political Thought of America’s Founding Feminists, by Lisa Pace Vetter,” American Political Thought 7 (Sep 2018): 671-73; Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016): Chapters 1-4, pp. 1-57; Paul Pierson, “The Study of Policy Development,” Journal of Policy History 17 No. 1(2005): 34-51; Robert Lieberman, “Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change,” American Political Science Review 96, No. 4 (2002): 697-712; Rogan Kersh, “Rethinking Periodization? APD and the Macro-History of the United States,” Polity 37: 4 (Oct. 2005), pp. 513-522; Aili Mari Tripp, “Historical Perspectives in Comparative Politics and Gender Studies.” Politics & Gender 3, no. 3 (2007): 397–408.

    3. Feb. 11    Settler Political Thought: Land, Dispossession, Revolution, and Empire

    Reading: Aziz Rana, “Introduction: Liberty and Empire in the American Experience” The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard UP, 2010), 1-19; Jack P. Greene, “The Symbiotic Relationship between Liberty and Inequality in the Cultural Construction of Colonial British America and the United States: An Overview,” American Political Thought 5 (Fall 2016), 549-66; Craig Yirush, “The Idea of Rights in the Imperial Crisis,” Social Philosophy & Policy 29 (Jul 2012): 82-103; Carole Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 52 (Jan. 1995), 104-45.

    Recommended: Aziz Rana, “Settler Revolt and the Foundations of American Freedom,” The Two Faces of American Freedom, ch. 1, pp. 20-98; Nancy Isenberg,” Taking Out the Trash: Waste People in the New World” and “John Locke’s Lubberland: The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia” ch. 1& 2 of White Trash: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Class in America (Viking, 2016), 18-63; David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004); Peter S. Onuf, “American Exceptionalism and National Identity,” American Political Thought 1:1 (Spring 2012), 77-99

    4  Feb. 18  Constituting the Republic

    Reading: David Waldstreicher, “The Mansfieldian Moment: Slavery, the Constitution, and American Political Traditions,” Rutgers Law Journal 43 (2013), 471-86; Jan Ellen Lewis,  “What Happened to the Three Fifths Clause: The Relationship Between Women and Slaves in Constitutional Thought, 1787-1866,” Journal of the Early Republic 37 (Spring 2017), 1-46; Joshua Simon, “Alexander Hamilton in Hemispheric Perspective,” The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought (Cambridge UP, 2017), 48-88; Gregory Ablavsky, “The Savage Constitution,” Duke Law Journal 63 (June 2014), 999-1089

    Recommended:Sanford V. Levinson, “On the Inevitability of ‘Constitutional Design,’” 48 Arizona State Law Journal 249 (2016); Elvin T. Lim, “Political Thought, Political Development, and America’s Two Foundings,” American Political Thought 3 (2014),146-56; David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009); Max Edling, “Peace Pact and Nation: An International Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States,” Past and Present 240 (Aug. 2018), 267-303; David Brian Robertson, The Original Compromise (Oxford U. Press, 2013).

    5. Feb. 25  Settlers: Labor(ing)

    Reading:Christopher Tomlins, “Law, Population, Labor” in Tomlins and Grossberg eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America (Cambridge UP, 2008), 211-52; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), chapters 3-4, pp. 43-92; Nancy Isenberg, “Pedigree and Poor White Trash: Bad Blood, Half-Breeds, and Clay-Eaters” and “Cowards, Poltroons, and Mudsills: Civil War as Class Warfare” chapters 6 and 7 of White Trash: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Class in America (Viking, 2016), pp. 135-73; Gunther Peck, “Labor Abolitionism and the Politics of White Victimhood: Rethinking the History of Working-Class Racism,” Journal of the Early Republic 39 (Spring 2019), 89-98; Gordon, Jane Anna, and Keisha Lindsay. “Black on Red: Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century New World Black Interpretative Uses of Native American Political Experience.” The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 4, no. 2 (2019): 324–51.

    Recommended:  Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States” (1990/2011) in New Left Review (1990) or in Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life; David F. Ericson, “The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic.” Studies in American Political Development 31, no. 1 (2017): 130–48; Dana Frank, “White Working-Class Women and the Race Question.” International Labor and Working-Class History 54 (1998): 80–102; Catherine Carstairs, “Defining Whiteness: Race, Class, and Gender Perspectives in North American History.” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001): 203–6.

    6. March 3   Democracy in Theory and Practice

    Reading:Reeve Huston, “Rethinking the Origins of Partisan Democracy in the United States, 1795-1840” in Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith eds., Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War (2016), 46-71; Andrew W. Robertson, “Jeffersonian Parties, Politics and Participation: The Tortuous Trajectory of American Democracy” in Peart and Smith eds., Practicing Democracy, 99-122; Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (Yale UP, 2015), Introduction and ch. 5 (pp. 1-12, 120-43); Laura Edwards, “The Legal World of Elizabeth Bagby’s Commonplace Book: Federalism, Women, and Governance,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (Dec. 2019), 504-23; John L. Brooke, “Patriarchal Magistrates, Associated Improvers, and Monitoring Militias: Visions of Self-Government in the Early American Republic, 1760-1840” in Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf eds., State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States (UP of Virginia, 2013), 178-217

    Recommended:David Waldstreicher, “The Nationalization and Racialization of American Politics: Before, Between, and Beneath Parties, 1790-1840” in Anthony J. Badger and Byron E. Shafer eds., Contesting Democracy: Structure and Substance in American Political History, 1775-2000  (University Press of Kansas, 2001), 37-63; Aziz Rana, “Citizens and Subjects in Postcolonial America,” The Two Faces of American Freedom, ch. 2, 99-175; Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (2017); Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., “Tocqueville as Critical Race Theorist: Whiteness as Property, Interest Convergence, and the Limits of Jacksonian Democracy” Political Research Quarterly 62, No. 4 (Dec., 2009); Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (2009)

    7. March 10   Settlers: Migrating and Warring

    Reading:Jason M. Opal, “General Jackson’s Passports: Natural Rights and Sovereign Citizens in the Political Thought of Andrew Jackson, 1780s-1820s,” Studies in American Political Development 27 (2013): 69-85; Laurel Clark Shire, “Turning Sufferers into Settlers: Gender, Welfare, and National Expansion in Frontier Florida,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (2013); Anna O. Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen—Immigration Federalism and the Early American State.” Studies in American Political Development 28, no. 2 (2014): 107–28; Paul Frymer, “‘A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours’: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation,” Perspectives on Politics 12: 1 (March 2014), pp. 119-144

    Recommended: Michael Paul Rogin, “Liberal Society and the Indian Question,” Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975), 3-15; Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (2011), especially ch. 1 and 5; Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (2010); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

    ———————- Remote Instruction begins via Slack

    8. March 17 Racial Orders, Mobility, and (Second) Civil War/Revolution/Reconstruction

    Reading:Van Gosse, “Racial Orders in the United States, 1790-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic, forthcoming Spring 2020; Gautham Rao, “The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 26 (Spring, 2008), pp. 1-56; Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (2016), Introduction and ch. 2 “Becoming Mobile in an Age of Segregation,” pp. 1-9, 44-75; Amy Dru Stanley, “The Sovereign Market and Sex Difference: Human Rights in America” in Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, American Capitalism: New Histories (Columbia UP, 2018), 140-69.

    Recommended: Gautham Rao, “The State the Slaveholders Made: Regulating Fugitive Slaves in the Early Republic” in T. Freyer and L. Campbell eds., Freedom’s Conditions in the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands in the Age of Emancipation (Durham NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), 88-108; Kate Masur, “State Sovereignty and Migration Before Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (Dec. 2019); Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998); Carole Shammas, “The Household’s Civil War in an Era of Domestic Bliss,” A History of Household Government in America (UP of Virginia, 2001), ch. 5, pp. 108-44;l Woody Holton, “Equality as Unintended Consequence: The Contracts Clause and the Married Women’s Property Acts,” Journal of Southern History (May 2015), pp.313-340; Laura Edwards, “Reconstruction and the History of Governance” in Gregory Downs and Kate Masur eds., The World the Civil War Made (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 22-45; Aziz Rana, “Freedom Struggles and the Limits of Constitutional Continuity” 71 Md. L. Rev. 1015 (2012); William A. Blair, “Vagabond Voters and Racial Suffrage in the Jacksonian Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 9 (2019), 569-87.

    9. March 24 Manifest Domesticity & Imperialism

    Reading:Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard University Press, 2005),  Intro and ch. 1; Desmond S. King, and Rogers M. Smith, “Racial Orders in American Political Development,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005): 75–92; Carol Nackenoff, “The Private Roots of American Political Development: The Immigrants’ Protective League’s ‘Friendly and Sympathetic Touch,’ 1908–1924.” Studies in American Political Development 28, no. 2 (2014): 129–60; Eileen McDonagh, The Motherless State, Women’s Political Leadership and American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2009),  Chp. 6; Mark W. Van Weinen, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “A Suggestion on ‘The Negro Problem,’” American Literary Realism 48 No. 1 (2015): 25-39.

    Recommended:Gretchen Ritter, “Gender and Politics over Time.” Politics & Gender 3, no. 3 (2007): 386–97; Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581-606; Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease Cultures of United States Imperialism (Duke University Press, 1993) excerpts

    10. March 31 Regressive Progressives

    Reading: Alexander Sanger “Eugenics, Race, and Margaret Sanger Revisited: Reproductive Freedom for All?,” Hypatia 22 (2007): 210-17; Priscilla Yamin, “The Search for Martial Order: Civic Membership and the Politics of Marriage in the Progressive Era,” Polity, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), 86-112; Julie Novkov, “Bringing the States Back In: Understanding Legal Subordination and Identity through Political Development,” Polity, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan., 2008), pp. 24-48; Yvonne Pitts,  “Disability, Scientific Authority, and Women’s Political Participation at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of Women’s History, 24 (2012): 37-61; Adolph Reed, “DuBois’s ‘Double Consciousness’: Race and Gender in Progressive Era American Thought.” Studies in American Political Development 6, no. 1 (1992): 93–139; 93–139.

    Recommended: Dana Seitler, “Unnatural Selection: Mothers, Eugenic Feminism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Regeneration Narratives,” American Quarterly 55 (2003): 61-88; Thomas C. Leonard, “More Merciful and Not Less Effective”: Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era,” History of Political Economy, 35 (2003): 687-712; Randall Hansen and Desmond S. King, “Eugenic Ideas, Political Interests, and Policy Variance: Immigration and Sterilization Policy in Britain and the U.S.” World Politics 53 (2001): 237-63; Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York University Press, 2006); Anna Stubblefield, Ethics Along the Color Line (Cornell University Press, 2005).

    11. April  7  New Deal Emoting or New Deal Buy Body Building

    Reading:Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2014),. Intro & ch 1; Ruth O’Brien, Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal, Ch 1; Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol, Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (Norton, 2016), excerpt; Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Summer, 1982), pp. 255-278; Jessica Wang, “Imagining the Administrative State: Legal Pragmatism, Securities Regulation, and New Deal Liberalism.” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 3 (2005): 257–93.

    RecommendedCathy J. Cohen & David R Mayhew in “A Discussion of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, By Ira Katznelson,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 708–13; Margaret Weir,“States, Race, and the Decline of New Deal Liberalism,” Studies in American Political Development 19, no. 2 (2005): 157–72.

    Spring Recess

    12.   April 21 Intertwining, embedding the CRA and the creation of the EEOCt

    Readings: Ira Katznelson, “When Is Affirmative Action Fair? On Grievous Harms and Public Remedies,” Social Research, Vol. 73, No. 2, (Summer 2006), pp. 541-568; Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development 1960-1972 (Oxford University Press, 1990), Chp. 5 or pp. 125-152; Sarah Staszak, “Institutions, Rulemaking, and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment,” Studies in American Political Development 24, no. 2 (2010): 168–89; David A. Hollinger, “The Disciplines and the Identity Debates, 1970-1995.” Daedalus 126, no. 1 (1997): 333-51; David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John Lapinski. “Southern Politics Revisited: On V. O. Key’s ‘South in the House,’” Studies in American Political Development 29, no. 2 (2015): 154–84.; Gloria Anzaldua, “This Bridge Called My Back” in This Bridge Called My Back: The Gloria Anzaldua Reader (Duke University Press, 2009), excerpt; Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, Back Women, Rape and Resistance, a New History of the Civil Rights Movement From Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, ​ prologue or pp. xv-xxii.

    RecommendedIra Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005); S. Taylor, “The Body Is Not an Apology” (2013, March),  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7lKPdh_y-8  ; 

    13. April 28 Righting the Right under the Civil Rights Many Movement

    Reading:Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, revised ed. 2015), selections; Michael J. Graetz and Linda Greenhouse, The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (Simon & Schuster, 2016), Lewis Powell memorandum excerpt; Kundai Chirindo, “Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Approaches to the Obama Presidency,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 19 No. 3 (2016): 491-504; Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party and the Battle for American History (Princeton University Press, 2010), Prologue; Stephen M. Engel, “Developmental Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Politics: Fragmented Citizenship in a Fragmented State,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 2 (2015): 287–311.

    RecommendedThomas B. Edsall, Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Ruth O’Brien, Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), Chp. 3 and Epilogue; Andrew Marantz, Anti-Social, Online Extremists, Techno-Utopias and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (2019), (Identity Evropa) Chps. 12 and 27; Mark, Neven “Nixon Loyalists, Barry Goldwater, and Republican Support for President Nixon during Watergate.” Journal of Policy History 29, no. 3 (2017): 403–30.

    14. May 5 Trump: A Departure?Reading: Students brainstorm readings

    *Subject to Revision

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • Spiritual Sisterhood across States (and by sister I mean any non-patriarchal thinkers welcome)

    Spiritual Sisterhood across States (and by sister I mean any non-patriarchal thinkers welcome)

    dna  https://www.google.com/search?q=heretical+thought&oq=heretical+thought&aqs=chrome..69i57j0j69i60l3j0.2381j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 IdeaImpact.org’s project “Spiritual Sisterhood across States” 
    welcomes you.  Until I get conversant with Zoom and lick this COVID-19 fully, we hope to begin with 12ish participants to whom we have extended invitations. Our initial topic will be how we are all coping in light of this isolating, alienating pandemic. We could all benefit from 45 minutes of discussing and sharing once a week/month/whatever helps. Think book club, only this will be a virtual coping club.

    While we are not all girls and women, we are all sisters in openness. Spiritual Sisterhood Across States is for all those who are authentic and honest, and seek to understand or are searching for the nexus of their own epistemology/ontology, or what Socrates called “Know Thy Self.”  In common theoretical lingo — try situated-ness.

    Spiritual Sisterhood Across States could well appeal to atheists, agnostics, or those who study or find fascinating all the different religious traditions over time (three dominant world religions, such as mainline and non-mainline Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and of course Zen, Atheism and Agnosticism).  This spiritual sisterhood is inclusive of all peoples in all ethical, spiritual, and religious traditions across all continents.

    We are excluding those who believe in harming any group or category of peoples, forms of life, fauna and flora.

    We’ve sent out the first round of invitations to those we think might be interested initially.  We hope to expand, though we must figure out logistics to do that.

    And by all means, please do not think this is limited to girls or women or trans — it’s those who practice some form of the Society of Ethical Culture’s “Deeds before Creeds” ethics that are inclusive of all bodies (or peoples), no matter how many different intersecting, overlapping identities they embody or could embody.

    To that end, a current picture, space, email and phone number will be required to guarantee that our space remains open and safe.  There will be zero tolerance of people, ideas or thoughts who profess white supremacy, white nationalism, other nationalisms, misogyny, institutional sexism, sexism, racism, nativism, xenophobia, and anti-atheism as well as anti-agnosticism.

    Good Deeds over Creeds is accepting of all peoples, all genders, all sexualities and non-sexualities, races, ethnicities — excluding white supremacists, supremacists, misogynists, sexists, racists, nativists, xenophobes, homophobes, abilists, and any other artificial human hierarchies or institutionalizations. (Note: auto-correct keeps changing “othering” to “mothering” haha). Also it is not limited to academics.

    So if you’re interested in joining once we get Zoom up and working for break out groups, please identify your “hood,” culture, tradition, religion, set of ethics, or what you most call the intersection of your ontology/epistemology over time or from an experiential perspective.  Drop me an email with the subject line “Spiritual Sisterhood Across States” at ruthobriencunygc@gmail.com.

    To throw myself out there first, here is a short selection of ideas and thoughts from people, in books and in institutions or programs that I have read, edited, written, or heard. They greatly influenced my own ontology/epistemology nexus, helping me better “know” myself.

     

    Martha Fineman, Emory Law


    _4484822

    WiTNY-CUNY-RI-Cornell Collab https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/03/31/cuny-witny

    The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Joan Wallach Scott, Politics of the Veil

    The Public Square Book Series,PUP, Jeff Madrick, The Case for Big Government

    The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Andrei Codescru, The PostHuman Dada Guide, Tzara and Lenin Play Chess

    The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

    Writing Politics Specialization Founded

    Ruth O’Brien, author and editor, Voices from the Edge, edited, OUP

    1st book In Heretical Thought Book Series ~
    Book Series Editor, Ruth O’Brien, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York

    The Public Square Book Series, PUP, Jill Lepore, The Whites of their Eyes, the Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • “Manalyzing” in Stereo by Distinguished Professor David Waldstreicher, team teaching American Political Development 2020

    “Manalyzing” in Stereo by Distinguished Professor David Waldstreicher, team teaching American Political Development 2020

    As the historian in this manalyzing duo, of course I feel less responsible for the limits of the field of American Political Development, more excited about how it might help compensate for some of the foibles of historians….

    Yes, the lesson of Trump is that it’s corruption all the way down, corruption as  a multigenerational (American Political) tradition, yet on a spiral that makes it somewhat different each time. The grandfather was all about railroad towns and hotels (brothels), and land, exploiting his fellow immigrants. The father about urban segregation and (un)creative destruction.  The grandson about the simulacrum of luxury, leveraged gloss, and televised publicity as ponzi scheme. Party politics had to be the endgame because it undergirded the possibilities of profiting from infrastructure all along.

    Alas, as the trigenerational story suggests, the other continuity in the Trumpian spiral appears to be the reliance on whiteness, which is why Trump so repeatedly doubles down on it, why he seized as no one else on the notion that Obama could not have possibly been born in this country. The surprise at the daily untruth or tweet covers over the primal lie of his politics, and the willingness of 40+% of voters to accept it so as not to have to accede to the other party’s kinder gentler corruption. After all, the system constantly tells us, in a democracy, origins and history don’t matter. The question is always, which of two sides are we on?

    It’s funny today to hear both the president and allies trumpeting party loyalty against (Bain capitalist) Romney, when Trump ran against party and the establishment. Only a long-term approach to American politics can capture how he has recapitulated the Jacksonian art of turning from antipartisan outsider to enforcer of more party loyalty than ever, in just a  few years. Partisanship relies on, feeds on, putative outsiders, sometimes  in order to contain the real insurgencies. Part of Trump’s appeal is to perform and capitalize on American ambivalence about the problems that result from the normal workings of the system. It is tempting to conclude, for the moment, that he fits all too well into institutional patterns even as he shatters norms. We’ll see — and we’ll study…..

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell

  • More Women in Congress?

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    Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.)

    We’ll see if we get more female politicians today. A minimum of 20 percent women, an old law-school study said, is necessary in any institution to change the agenda. In the outgoing Congress, the House has 19 percent and the Senate has 23 percent. While more women than ever have run for office, the amount of violence (i.e. death threats, harassment) is enough to turn anyone away from reading the news. I’m beginning to hear women from Hollywood to Washington start to roar.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell

  • Playing Her Cards Wright

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    Brilliant. Well done. Talk about lemons and lemonade. House of Cards did it. They turned Kevin Spacey’s sexual-harassment death (i.e. Netflix had the strength to fire him) into a great piece about women and the humiliation of intimate-partner violence, misogyny, and sexism. Robin Wright and Diane Lane gave powerful performances as women who like being extremely powerful and even in charge — the oligarch and the president. They are bitter rivals and — spoiler alert — both of them are going to survive, and the strongest will kill the embodiment of the system of misogyny, sexism, and intimate-partner violence.

    To be sure, Michael Dobbs wrote a three-part play out of real life in Maggie Thatcher’s court and Netflix turned it into 70-odd episodes; still, it was quite masterful in that it went from being your typical inside-the-court White House drama to one that tries to slay misogyny. I could not help but wonder about the chicken and the egg when it came to the choice of Robin Wright and Diane Lane, who themselves had to fight for their own dignity in real life as they both were married to men who were accused of intimate-partner violence.

    This was obviously timed to try to influence the election. New seasons used to be released in the spring, but now it’s the fall, for all those people who dive into fiction rather than watching CNN or Fox News or daring to read a newspaper that contains all the evidence that we live in a rape culture, i.e. the Trump presidency.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell

  • Santorum Says

    The brave woman who appeared before the Senate, Senator Rick Santorum, Mr. “Man on Dog,” was “authentic.”  Before he could utter the “but,” I turned CNN off.  Well, this says it all.  We don’t have to hear any more. Or Brett shouldn’t have to hear any more; he needs to withdraw.

    Ruth O’Brien, editor, Telling Stories Out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination
    I, for one (among the many who are now demonstrating in the #MeToo social movement), have experienced too much harassment and assault.  Having gone to the local police and family courts for protection from a harasser — where if I sat in the chair I always received relief — was hard.

    My last memory in the Domestic Violence Hearing Officers room less than five years ago was hearing the chains rattle on the men incarcerated in the basement below.  I asked the hearing officer what that noise was and she explained: The men below were chained so that everyone in the room above could hear them.

    For me, this only heightened my fear of reprisal from this man, a former husband, a father, and a respected scholar.  Then I had to sign something saying that I knew I would increase my chances of being killed violently and having my sons killed if I proceeded to ask the State of New Jersey for help.  Again, it was hard.

    All we know now is that even Senator Susan Collins is having reservations.  She can see, too, that no public servant like him should be confirmed.
    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • Harasser vs. Harassed and Assaulted Cash Outs

    Harasser vs. Harassed and Assaulted Cash Outs

    download-2How is $120 million different from Roger Ailes’s $45 million?  Zero tolerance for media means that the harassers get rich or richer, whereas the victims of their harassment and violent sexual assault (i.e. rape) are lucky not to get blackballed from their profession or remain powerless.  Even if you’re a journalist, like Ronan Farrow, they can drive you out or into a different medium.  (The New Yorker being the out, and lucky for The New Yorker.)

    What does this mean for the American government?  Brett will not cash out, will he?  Certainly the good citizen Professor Ford will be destroyed.  But here’s what we can take away this morning.

    The religious right is happy to practice toleration when it comes to Trump.  Unlike the Catholic Church — which does give its victims real cash outs — the religious right uses its harassers to exert pressure — to get politically what they want.  This story is as old as the religious right’s entry into politics (see Garry Wills’ book on Nixon).

    Meanwhile, Brett has been buttering up the feds — Senators, House, etc. — for months, while they call the citizen doing the right thing having “terms.” What a contradiction in terms (i.e. hypocrisy) this is, no?

    No wonder Congress got rid of House pages or jail bait before they gave in and adopted anti-harassment rules.  Republican speaker John Boehner got rid of them in 2011 so the House would not have to pay the parents of these largely legacy kids (not me, though) huge settlements for harassing their own children.  If that’s the situation, why would Paul let his kids be pages any more than Ted would let his?

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell

  • Good Furor – NYROB

    Now-former NYROB editor Ian Buruma pledged to practice democracy after replacing longtime editor Robert Silvers, whom Buruma criticized for being monarchical.  Yet, Buruma forgot that democracy includes women (which includes our sensibilities).  So, by the way, does monarchy. And when you pledge to practice democracy and then accept self-pity for sexual assaulters and harassers, it should not include sniveling self-pity.  All editors should set an open and inclusive tone.  Stopping women, men, or children from practicing anything in public by sexually harassing or assaulting them (and then later whining about getting caught) hinders their ability to write, publish, earn a living, and provide for their family, does it not?  The self-pity of admitted harassers is offensive. Full stop. In the United States, publishing has always been a privileged white man’s profession.  Hopefully the current furor means this can and will diminish or even end — at least in this important and significant publication.
    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • Real Rape

    Real Rape

    I have to admit I had not heard of rape epistemology, though I read Susan Estrich’s book Real Rape — as you can imagine, right away, or should I say the moment I knew about it and it was published — as I and another person in my nuclear family had it happen to us.  (This is their story to tell).  Witnessing the aftermath being washed away is almost more horrific when it happens to someone else than when it happens to you.

    That said, I witnessed before I experienced — aftermath only — as for this person I was not ashamed but outraged — or at least enough to watch . . . I remember feeling powerless, and being afraid.  Given the absence of clothing (i.e. pants), I figured it was a gang — so my only comfort years and years later was that mine was not.  We, who were awake, were all agog.

    Now, decades upon decades later — I was a child, a minor, therefore was I agog or we were encouraged — to do this was to do the “right” (i.e. wrong) thing.

    Rape epistemology — as I sat there in a friendly audience of most, not all, who accepted the premises — is just remembering: Rape jurisprudence means that it was the men — fathers, sons, brothers, uncles — who were to blame.

    We lived in a household with no brother, uncle, son, let alone father — had no one to ask, therefore my nuclear-family member and I simply did the right thing — not report it so as not to bring shame to THE family — THE big family or the extended nuclear family.

    What I can now see — and this echoes one of my mother’s favorite expressions — is that curiosity kills cats, and we knew better than to ask — only do the right thing.  In this case, the right thing for the family was to swallow it all, if you were a witness, or had gained this terrifying experience.  How is this different than honor killing — this took me years and years to face — and then neotribalism said it all.

    My mother made sure that we remained silent — and all did the right thing.  I had an early lesson learned that I would not need for 5ish years, as my situation took that long.  I was no longer a minor, nor was s/he/they.#

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell
  • Rape Culture, Rape Daddy, Congress COULD Legislate and Amend IF Congress Preferred Zero Tolerance!

    Rape Culture, Rape Daddy, Congress COULD Legislate and Amend IF Congress Preferred Zero Tolerance!

    I woke with a start after only four hours. I had been listening to a podcast late at night, when the name of my own #MeToo surfaced.  I had also seen a map of the town this week where he came from (it’s small enough that I’m sure I could track him down. Being a smart neocon, I bet he’s probably successful. Who knows? I don’t have the strength to look it up, yet).

    I lived through Anita Hill’s debacle. Do we have to go through it again? I lived through Christine Blasey Ford’s nightmare. I too could not face what I knew, what every woman my age knew: that reporting leads to escalation, and escalation leads to the victim — boy, girl, woman, man — and you’re thrown out. I told about it only to intimate figures in my life — husband, boyfriends, children who came of age.

    On Saturday I couldn’t look at the press. My husband, Fred, an editor who knows politics, had spared me the news of nominee Brett Kavanagh’s rape (which at that point was still an anonymous accusation) until after work on Friday. (Fred says: “I waited to tell Ruth because I knew it would disturb her, especially in view of her history, and would distract her from her work.”)

    Now the question was whether it would derail his nomination. I knew the news that was released on Friday would be played out by Monday, with three possibilities in the “blame the victim” rape culture in which we live:

    1. The information that came to light will be dismissed, and the rapist will be put on the Supreme Court. This seemed the most likely outcome on Saturday, when the story was not on the front page above the fold of theNew York Times.
    1. The vulnerable hero will bravely come forward and will be roundly belittled and dismissed. (This is the nightmare that all persons who have been raped fear the most.)
    1. The vulnerable hero will bravely face the nation, as Anita Hill did. She will be put on trial in the court of public opinion, and her loved ones, colleagues, and most of all she herself will have to field all the horrific comments, death threats, etc., for doing the right thing, the brave thing, that very few victims of rape can do.

    It’s no excuse that “men think with their dicks” or “boys will be boys” or any other outrageous statement that a content, complicit man will say, think, or do.

    How can Christine Blasey be so brave, is all I need to know. Plus two other things:

    We cannot shield children from allegations that their fathers are rapists, and witnesses will testify no matter how many decades old — then it’s time for them to step back to resign for “family” reasons.  (Think of your children, Brett).

    Congress could institute real, national changes in laws to protect women now. Recess for Mid-terms, or no.

    Enough is enough. #MeToo should now flip into #Enough. Meanwhile, Congress — Democrats and Republicans — should amend (ERA) and legislate. After all, it had to make lynching a federal crime though murder has and had always been illegal and a state and local crime.

    MuckrakerIdaTarbell

  • Misogyny has No Party

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    All this Hillary-versus-Joe talk got me thinking: Misogyny knows no American political party — that is, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum parties within the American two-party system both have strands of misogyny, or what I call neotribalism.
    The Biden-promoting or Joe-talking Democrats don’t acknowledge this, any more than the Democrats serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee realized during now-Justice Clarence Thomas’s nomination hearings that the former head of the EEOC being accused of sexual harassment was political dirt-digging gold for undermining his nomination. The GOP, after all, was shamelessly self-serving in putting Thomas up for Marshall’s seat. So is the GOP now.
    What the Biden-talking Democrats are counting on is the inside-the-“progressive”-party misogyny in the American two-party legacy of neotribalism. That is to say, all those folks who vote in their self-interest — which is to say, the 5 percent who are NOT in protected identity categories (i.e. women, children, men and women between 18 and 21, LGBTQers, persons with different abilities or disabilities, as well as those older than 39 (age discrimination is for everyone 40 years old and older).
    Hillary Clinton may be just as centrist as Joe, and Bernie is pushing her properly progressively leftwards (plus he’s being a good partisan by squashing all third-party rumors, unlike the Donald).
    So this is how Hillary is harmed by talk of Joe running? This would be how her Ready for Hillary team could lose control?
    Put differently, the 5 percent I’m addressing are SLAMs and SCAMS.  Shouldn’t democracy — with a small D or a big D — protect 95 percent of the American populace? That’s my definition of small-d democracy, even if all those who are for Joe say it ain’t so.
    MuckrakerIdaTarbell