Harvard University Press Blog

Religious Freedom, Health Care, and Women in the Church

When then-candidate Rick Santorum declared in February that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 comments on the role of people of faith in the public square made him want to “throw up,” he merely presaged a showdown to come. After this week’s announcement of a lawsuit brought by Catholic groups upset with the Obama administration, HUP Publicity Assistant Bridget Martin turned to a few books for context, and offers the post below.

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This week, 43 Catholic organizations including schools and hospitals filed lawsuits against the Obama administration in response to the federal mandate that birth control coverage be included in health care plans. Though the Obama administration proposed a compromise by which the responsibility for payment could be shifted from employers to the insurance companies, those bringing suit characterize the mandate as an assault on religious liberty. The lawsuits have set off a maelstrom of responses, unveiling the political, ethical, and social complexities embedded in the issue.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled “Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government,” Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon defends American bishops and their initiative to preserve the separation of Church and State. Glendon, whose HUP books include Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, argues that the health insurance mandate violates the Catholic Church’s constitutional liberty, ultimately demoting religion to a second-class right. She sees the debate not as an argument about contraception, but as a principle for preserving religious liberty, asserting, “The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women’s health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.”

But what exactly did the founders intend when they included the separation of church and state clause in the US Constitution? In Religious Freedom and the Constitution, Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager caution us against imagining an impenetrable wall between church and state when we consider the ideal. Rather, they argue that while religious institutions and practitioners have the right to be free from governmental discrimination on account of religious beliefs, those religious beliefs do not on their own exempt institutions and practitioners from generally applicable laws. This interpretation sheds a different light on the relationship between church and state, especially as US bishops turn to the court in fear of being marginalized by the federal government.

Government influence is not the only social issue driving the contraception controversy. A day after Glendon’s piece was published, Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in the New York Times took an opposing stance. Dowd frankly rejects the position adopted by Glendon and others: “The church insists it’s an argument about religious freedom, not birth control. But, really it’s about birth control, and women’s lower caste in the church.”

Dowd’s argument is a window into the gender and power implications of this debate. As an institution dependent on male hierarchy, is the Church’s disapproval of contraception a tool to subordinate women? The struggles of women within the male power structure of the Church are chronicled in Jo Ann Kay McNamara’s Sisters in Arms, which traces the history of Catholic nuns in the Western world. McNamara shows that the earliest female converts were attracted to the Church by the proclamation of equality in the Kingdom of Heaven, a notion vastly different from the patriarchal societies of the Early Church. Yet since the establishment of female ministries, women have struggled to be recognized as equals in the church.

Garry Wills emphasized this subordination in an April post on the New York Review blog. Wills explains how the Vatican recently “stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that ‘disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.’” Outraged by this blatant reduction of power for women in the Church, Wills calls attention to the nuns’ unwavering commitment to the social Gospel, aiding those suffering regardless of political implications involved, as in their response to the AIDS crisis, their facilitation of the spiritual needs of gay people, and their activism in the civil rights movement.

Debates over the politics of religious freedom and gender inequality seem certain to reach a fever pitch in this election year. The Catholic Church is planning a national campaign for their cause, “Fortnight for Freedom,” to run from June 21st through the symbolically chosen July 4th. The initiative, intended to encourage prayer, education, and public action about religious freedom, was created in direct response to the perceived threat posed by the Obama administration. With the Church seemingly demonstrating the primacy of a respect for life in its political motivations, it will be interesting to watch the extent to which American Catholics embrace Mitt Romney, even in light of his Mormonism, which some may still find unsettling.

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

Revisiting In a Different Voice

In the current issue of the online journal Classics@, a publication of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, Carol Gilligan looks back on her revolutionary book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Originally published in 1982, the book is widely credited for shocking the social sciences out of their assumptions about women, and their near-exclusive focus on men.

Gilligan begins her article by recalling some of the first indications that her now-classic book had struck a chord:

In the course of editing In a Different Voice, in the days before computers, Harvard University Press sent out the manuscript to be re-typed. Some weeks later, I went to pick it up. The typist, a young woman, lived in a brown, three-decker house in a working-class neighborhood of Somerville. I waited while she retrieved the manuscript, which she was so taken with, she explained, that she had given it to her cousin to read. Standing on the porch, I registered my delight in the realization that the appeal of my book was wider than I had imagined. Some months after the book was published, the sales rep from the Press took me to lunch. As we waited for coffee, he asked the question that was clearly on his mind: Why is this book selling? I thought of the typist and her cousin who lived upstairs. People whose voices were dismissed felt heard.

Looking back now, it is perhaps easier to see that my title, In a Different Voice, calls for a new way of speaking, a change in the very terms of the conversation about ourselves and morality, women and men—about the human condition. In the old conversation, our ears were accustomed to hearing “He was an interesting talker; a man who had traveled all over the world and lived in half a dozen countries,” and “Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in.” I had borrowed these sentences from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (where they demonstrate the correct use of semi-colons and commas) to illustrate a point of view so widely assumed that for a long time we did not notice it. Once seen, the point of view shifted. In the newly illustrated 2008, fiftieth anniversary edition of The Elements of Style, the interesting talker has become “she” and Susan is pictured as a basset hound.

At the time I wrote In a Different Voice, I was aware of a problem in psychology that was in part a problem of method (the selection of boys and men only for studies of human development) and partly a problem of theory (a point of view from which men’s lives appeared interesting and women’s more or less of a mess). Clearly there was a problem, but in some ways the most interesting thing—at least to a psychologist’s eye—was that it had not been seen. Since I was among those who hadn’t seen it, despite the fact that I was teaching psychology, I asked: How could this have happened? In one sense, I was discovering the obvious.

In the article, titled “Looking Back to Look Forward: Revisiting In a Different Voice,” Gilligan presents a sense of the cultural and academic context from which the book sprang three decades ago. She reminds us that it was taken for granted at the time, and for a long time prior, that “the good woman cared for others: she listened to their voices and responded to their needs and concerns.” While noting that such caring is a good thing in itself, Gilligan’s work was about identifying the manner in which this “ethic of feminine goodness” underwrote the perceived normalcy of a focus on men in both academic research and everyday life, with women either overlooking or excusing their omission.

Soccer and the New Religious Intolerance

At the urging of the United Nations, the international rules board for soccer’s world governing body (FIFA) has unanimously approved a proposal to overturn a 2007 ruling that barred women from wearing headscarves in international competition. That restriction had reportedly led to the banning of Iran’s international women’s team from competing in this summer’s Olympic Games. FIFA has held that the ban on headscarves was enacted for safety reasons, rather than out of any religious or political concern, but the ban has been controversial for its effect on the eligibility of female Muslim athletes, and even interpreted by some as an act of Islamophobia.

Whether or not FIFA’s burqa ban is rightly viewed as politically motivated, the situation is reminiscent of many other attempts to legislate physical markers of difference. And be they legal or cultural, efforts to enforce societal homogeneity have been on the rise in recent years. In The New Religious Intolerance, a book we’ll publish next month, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum brings her deeply humane perspective to bear on “the politics of fear in an anxious age.” She focuses on the fear driving episodes such as the controversy surrounding the proposed Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan, and the initial media inclination to blame Islamic extremists for the murder last year of 77 Norwegians.

Nussbaum’s interest in doing such a book was sparked by the reaction to a New York Times piece that she wrote about the proposed bans of the Muslim burqa in Europe. We recently asked Nussbaum about how the comments received by that piece shaped her thinking on the subject:

Some of the comments were insightful, but most showed just what Socrates thought wrong with democracy in his time: haste, prideful boasting, a lack of careful examination, and an unwillingness to listen to the opposing position. I became even more convinced that Socrates was right: patient attention to argument makes democracy work better.

She went on to offer her perspective on why this historical moment has seen the emergence of what she considers to be new forms of religious intolerance:

People are justifiably insecure about many things: the global economy, jobs, safety in an era of terrorism. It is difficult to understand these large-scale problems, much less to fix them. It is far easier to convince oneself that the problem stems from the presence of new minority groups, and that some simple remedy, such as a ban on minarets or the burqa, can fix it.

As noted, FIFA has held that its burqa ban was a safety issue, seemingly freeing it from the taint of religious intolerance. As Nussbaum explains in the book, though, the problem with such safety (and, frequently, “security”) concerns is that they are applied inconsistently. In general, Nussbaum writes, “what inspires fear and mistrust in Europe and, to some extent, in the United States is not covering per se, but Muslim covering.”

At the meeting in which the new FIFA proposal was discussed, Jordan’s Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, a member of the FIFA Executive Committee, reportedly made “an impassioned plea to the Board to allow the wearing of headscarves by female players.” The proposal is expected to be ratified at the Board’s Special Meeting in July, pending an accelerated review of health and safety issues, during which the use of Velcro-fastened headscarves will be tested. As FIFA Secretary General Jerome Valcke remarked, “If women cannot play because of headscarves then we at FIFA are very happy to authorise them so women around the world have access to football.”

History and The Help

One of the most-nominated films for this year’s Academy Awards (ceremony this Sunday!) is The Help, directed by Tate Taylor and adapted for the screen by Taylor and Kathrynn Stockett, from the latter’s mega-selling novel of the same name. The film is up for four awards, including Best Picture. A brief synopsis of the plot (via IMDB):

An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maid's point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

So, The Help is about race, never an easy subject for Hollywood blockbusters, regardless of literary pedigree. The Help’s tangled layering of a white woman (Stockett) telling the story of a white woman telling the story of black women has been a fairly obvious target for commentary. As has been the Academy’s embrace of the film. No one seems to question the worthiness of the nominated performances by the film’s African American stars Viola Davis (Actress in a Leading Role) or Octavia Spencer (Actress in a Supporting Role). The profession of their characters, however, has not escaped notice. From a NYT opinion piece by Brent Staples:

The troubling thing is that the only two black actors in this year’s Oscar competition are cast as domestics, and would probably not have found meaty, starring roles in other films had they passed on “The Help.” This brings to mind the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, who received the award in 1940 for her portrayal of the loyal maid in “Gone With the Wind.” When criticized for often playing a mammy on film, Ms. McDaniel famously said she would rather play a maid in the movies than be one.

Staples’s argument is more about the racial politics of the film industry than about The Help itself, and Davis, for her part, has argued against this position, saying that “The black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy.” Nevertheless, the film’s own presentation of race in the 1960s in the South has come in for widespread critique, including in a recent open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) to fans of The Help:

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Second Chances at First Impressions

Along with all of our new books, each season we release paperback editions of dozens of titles that were first published in cloth a year or two earlier. When a paperback comes out it can be a nice reminder of a favorite work from seasons past, but it can also be an occasion to take a new look at a book that may have escaped notice the first time through. For the books themselves it can be a second chance at a first impression. With that in mind, we’ve collected here the first crop of Fall paperbacks, and excerpted the first few sentences of each. Maybe you’ll find something you didn’t even know you’d missed.

Ian Almond, Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched With Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds

This book is a somewhat primitive book. It has a very straightforward purpose: to relate a selection of moments in European history when, in the very heart of countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece and Hungary, Muslims and Christians collaborated and co-operated with one another to fight against a common enemy–often an enemy also composed of Muslims and Christians. The book does not really do much more than this. It is not some vast overview of Muslim-Christian relations since 1100, nor an in-depth analysis of inter-cultural exchange between Islam and Christianity. It does not offer profound gems of philosophical insight into how human beings can learn to love one another, nor moving moments of idealism concerning the common humanity which can overcome all political/social/religious divisions, etc., etc. The book’s very modest aim, on the contrary, is to show how Muslims do not belong to an ‘other’ civilisation, but rather to the essence of a ‘Europe’ we are quickly in the process of forgetting.

Bernard Bailyn, Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830

Historical accounts of events and developments that took place in the Atlantic world began to appear almost as soon as contacts were established between Europe and the Americas in the late fifteenth century. But Atlantic history itself—that is, the evolving history of the zone of interaction among the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—was first seen as a distinct and cohesive subject of historical inquiry in the years immediately after World War II.

Daniel Bodansky, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

One evening a few years ago, a volunteer for a well-known environmental organization rang my doorbell to solicit a contribution. I declined, saying that I disagreed with the organization’s positions on various issues. The volunteer demanded to know which ones.

Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome

The year was 1468. On Fat Tuesday, the last and most extravagant night of carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat attentively watching the races from his throne high above the boisterous crowd, when suddenly a scuffle broke out. The papal guards had stopped someone who was loudly insisting on speaking with the pope urgently about a matter of life and death. The man, his beard and dark eyes barely discernible under his hood, was dressed like a philosopher. Seeing that he had captured the pope’s attention, the “philosopher” broke free of the guards and intoned: “Holy Father! You are in great danger!” The pope sat up, leaned forward, and beckoned the stranger to approach and explain. What he heard made him tremble and turn pale.

Chrystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

This is a history of two southern women, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) and Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), and the thousands of women who joined their campaigns against rape and for women’s rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the height of lynching in the American South. Felton was born in 1835 to a prosperous slaveholding family in De Kalb, Georgia. Wells, the daughter of slaves, was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Despite differences in their age, race, class, and status, they both, in very different contexts, took radical stances on rape and lynching. Together, their struggles against sexual violence—Wells advocated on black women’s behalf and Felton mostly fought for the protection of poor white women—brought to southern politics the concerns of women who historically had been excluded from debates about rape and protection. Although both campaigned for women’s safety, they confronted the problem of lynching in completely different ways. While Wells became internationally known for her radical anti-lynching crusade, it was Felton’s notorious plea to “lynch a thousand a week” that thrust her into the national spotlight. From different sides of the color line, Felton and Wells were women’s rights pioneers who negotiated and challenged the racial and sexual politics of the New South.

Serena Mayeri on Reasoning from Race

This Spring we published Serena Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution. The book looks at how analogies between sex and race discrimination became a key strategy in the legal battle for women’s rights in the 1960s and ’70s, though one that Mayeri shows to have been complicated from its very beginning.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School, where Mayeri is Assistant Professor of Law and History, recently produced the following short video interview with Mayeri about her book. A partial transcript is below.

 

Serena Mayeri: The book is called Reasoning from Race, and what I mean by that is a number of different strategies that feminists used during the 1960s and ‘70s to make the case that sex discrimination was a problem that was worthy of attention.

The most fun part of researching and writing this book was the opportunity to have access to the papers of various individuals and groups who were involved in the litigation and legislative campaigns and other advocacy efforts that I’m talking about. I looked at the papers of individuals like Pauli Murray, who is a central figure in my story - she was an African American lawyer who pioneered these race-sex analogies as the reasoning for the race strategy in the early ‘60s up through the early ’70s, which was then picked up by people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who litigated a lot of the sex equality cases in the 1970s.

One case that I found particularly fascinating in my research was a challenge by a young African American woman, Katie Mae Andrews, to a policy in New Orleans where the schools districts banned unwed mothers from teaching school. Miss Andrews wanted to be a teacher and she went to a local civil rights attorney, who then collaborated with feminists at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. They made arguments to the federal court in Mississippi, and later took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But when it got there, the very rich intersections between race and sex and sexuality and employment and reproductive freedom were bleached out of the case. And I use this case as an example to show how, in many instances, African American women plaintiffs brought really pivotal sex equality cases to the courts, only to find that by the time they reached the Supreme Court, the really compelling aspects of their case were obscured.

One of the things I’m trying to do in the book is to dispel what I think is the myth about 1970s feminist legal advocacy - that feminists were very focused on the concerns of white middle class women, not concerned with racial justice or with economic justice, or with the connections between reproductive freedom and economic and racial equality.

What came out of the Supreme Court was not what feminists put in, but was something much more limited – a much less capacious vision of equality than what feminists were advancing. And I hope that my book, along a number of different dimensions, can give a richer picture of what feminists did present to the court, much of which was rejected, but is still, I think, really worthy of being exhumed.

The Walmart Mom Goes to Washington

Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart, new in paperback this season, is a deeply and creatively researched study of the world’s largest corporation. The book traces how the company’s meteoric rise was enabled by its thorough integration of the values of the Sun Belt communities from which it sprung. By invoking the fundamentalist Christian principles of its workers and customers, Moreton argues, Walmart has created an environment in which its low wages, paltry benefits, and rigidly gender-based hierarchy are readily tolerated, if not embraced. In 2010 the book received both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book from the Organization of American Historians and the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize for best-published book in American Studies from the American Studies Association. Below, Moreton reflects on the role of the “Walmart Mom” in last month’s historic midterm elections.

(Note: Since the publication of To Serve God and Wal-Mart, the company has dropped the hyphen and rechristened itself “Walmart.”)

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Earlier this month the Supreme Court agreed to a limited review of Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., to determine whether the largest class action suit in history can proceed. Named for Betty Dukes, a Walmart greeter in Pittsburg, California, the nine-year-old case asserts only what internal Walmart sources acknowledge: that despite lower turnover rates and better performance evaluations, women within the company were for decades passed over for promotion and paid less than men for the same jobs. A 1995 memo from the company’s own lawyers, reported the New York Times, warned management that “men in salaried jobs [were] earning 19 percent more than women. By one measure, the law firm found, men were five and a half times as likely as women to be promoted into salaried, management positions.” The Supreme Court will not rule on the discrimination itself, but rather will air Walmart’s challenge that the class of 1.5 million women itself is too big to be meaningful. According to the company that determines the temperatures in each of its stores from its Arkansas headquarters, the women should sue their individual managers one by one.

Few legal observers expect much for these Walmart Moms from the Roberts Court: five of these justices, after all, unleashed the flood of corporate campaign cash via Citizens United and protected the Goodyear corporation’s right to discriminate against Lilly Ledbetter as long as it managed to keep her in the dark for more than six months. But the bigger story is a challenge to our national moral imagination, and can be addressed in fora beyond the reach of pro-corporate judicial activists. The simple fact is that the nation’s wealth, like Walmart’s, has all too often been built for some by systematically undervaluing the work of vast classes of people. Putting those constituents at the center of our economic thinking—treating the majority as the majority—is the change of heart that would remake the “kitchen-table conversation.” This case presents another opportunity, then, for the left to listen to the concerns of Walmart Moms, something at which progressives failed miserably in this fall’s midterm elections.

You remember the Walmart Mom: In the 2008 election cycle, she was the swing voter to watch, but her identity changed radically depending on just who was watching. For Democrats, she was one of Obama’s strongest supporters—the white woman without a four-year degree making under $60,000, regardless of where she shopped. But defined as a woman who shopped at Walmart at least once a week, she was typically a religious, conservative, older white woman, struggling in or retired from a Walmart-type job herself. In this latter incarnation, she represented that persistent American political enigma, the Reagan Democrat who promoted conservative positions on so-called social issues like abortion and gay marriage but showed strong support for classic progressive goals like universal health coverage and an increased minimum wage. The Republican ticket ultimately carried Walmart, and the company itself launched an aggressive effort to brand the electorate as broadly as possible. By identifying the multinational with its customers rather than its public subsidies, labor violations, and sex discrimination, Walmart hoped to deflect the criticism that had steadily mounted: who’s going to attack Walmart if by some measures seventeen percent of voters embraced the moniker for themselves?

Fat Talk Revisited

About a decade ago, we published a book called Fat Talk by Mimi Nichter, currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The book, which one reviewer called “a tantalizing glimpse into the intimate world of adolescent girls,” was the result of years spent interviewing hundreds of teenage girls about the ways that they think and talk about their bodies. Nichter and her colleagues found that girls didn’t so much diet as talk about dieting, engaging together in “fat talk,” an ongoing, ritualistic dialogue that served to build solidarity among them.

Last week, dozens of college campuses across the country took part in an organized event called “Fat Talk Free Week,” which Professor Nichter supported by offering “A Brief History of Fat Talk.”  We invited Professor Nichter to comment here on the movement and its reference to her work.    

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A couple of weeks ago I was walking across my college campus and a colorful poster on the side of a building caught my eye. It read “Fat Talk Free Day.” As I read on, I learned that there was an upcoming sorority event on the college mall where women could “Take the Pledge” to free themselves from fat talk. There was also a Dove “Real Woman” speaker who was coming to campus to speak about “Embracing Real Beauty.” How curious to find a term I had coined ten years back having a new life. What was this fat talk revival all about? Googling the event as I walked, I found that a sorority had adopted “banning fat talk” as their “activity of the year” in an effort to free women, at least those on college campuses, from this common ritual.

I tried to wrap my head around Fat Talk becoming a social movement among sorority girls. And why was it occurring now? It seems to me that fat talk is as common today as it was when my colleagues and I first conducted our fieldwork. I still hear it everywhere, in the high schools and college campuses where I continue to do research, and among my own friends and colleagues.

So what purpose does fat talk serve? By the time a white middle class girl reaches adolescence, she has become a competent participant in this fat talk discourse. Saying “I’m so fat” or complaining about specific body parts (“I hate my thighs,” “Can you believe how big my butt is?”) is really much more than an observation about how a girl looks or feels. It’s a call for support from her peers. Comments like these evoke a response that the girl is not fat, that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Fat talk is a kind of social ritual among friends, an attempt to create solidarity. Saying that you dislike your body makes it clear that you don’t think you’re better than your friends, even if you are thinner than them. When the statement comes before eating, it provides an apology or excuse for what you’re about to indulge in (“I know I really shouldn’t but…"). In the household, there is also a lot of fat talk exchanged between mothers and daughters.

Fat talk is a popular idiom which results in support from friends and family, but at what cost? While it may seem innocuous, fat talk can result in slippage from an initial place of gathering support from friends to a self-destructive space. Commenting in a negative way about one’s body can have a host of ramifications including the lowering of self-esteem and the development of negative self-concept. It reinforces the message that you are far from “perfect” and constantly need to monitor and work on yourself. Further, by engaging in frequent self-deprecation, one can lose sight of who they really are and the enormous potential beneath the surface.

Hypatia: From historical truth to legend to Rachel Weisz (with a stop at Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party)

What can you say about a fifth-century philosopher-mathematician who was (SPOILER ALERT) stoned to death and then torn to pieces by a mob of early Christians? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Plato, Ptolemey, and Apollonius of Perga?

Well, yes. And then you can cast her story—as generations of allegorists, from Voltaire to Gibbon to Charles Kingsley have done—as a battle between the waning light of the ancient pagan world, with its amassed wisdom, and the encroaching darkness of Christian dogmatism.

This is also the approach adopted by the new Rachel Weisz/ Google Earth vehicle and Hypatia biopic Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and now in limited release at Cambridge’s Kendall Square Cinema and elsewhere.

Having sat through the movie, which strings together a number of incidents from Hypatia’s life (although, confusingly, she and her disciples don’t age so much as change clothes as time passes), segueing between them by zooming way out to reveal an incongruously satellite-photo-looking spinning globe and then back in to Alexandria; and which is characterized throughout by lots of show-offy oh-hey-now-we-are-spinning! camerawork reminiscent of that in Elizabeth: The Golden Age—we turned with interest to Maria Dzielska’s Hypatia of Alexandria, translated by F. Lyra, in order to untangle historical truth from legend from celluloid.

And it turns out that lots of the most interesting (and tonally odd) parts of the story told in Agora are true. For example, Hypatia really did rebuke a smitten student by showing him her sanitary napkin, as a reminder that human beings fell short of Platonic ideals of beauty, and are thus not appropriate objects of devotion.

The Patriarch (later Saint) Cyril of Alexandria really does seem to have been threatened by Hypatia’s popularity with the ruling class and by her former disciples’ habit of seeking her guidance even after they had risen to the top ranks of Alexandria’s secular and religious leadership. Though he seems not to have planned her murder, he was almost certainly responsible, Dzielska writes, for her defamation in Alexandria and for her resulting unpopularity among the people, which ultimately resulted in her murder.

And Hypatia did teach both Christians and pagans in increasingly Christianized Alexandria, although Dzielska proves that it’s very unlikely that she and her students were in the Serapeum—the temple to the Hellenistic-Egyptian god Serapis—at the time of its 391 destruction by Christians bent on eliminating pagan monuments and idols.

On the other hand, Hypatia was almost certainly about sixty at the time of her death, rather than in the bloom of youth, as Agora and many posthumous legends have portrayed her.

And there isn’t any evidence to support the movie’s assertion that Hypatia (who would have known Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system) worked out that we instead live in a heliocentric solar system, with the planets bound on elliptical orbits around the sun. Very little is known of her actual work, though Dzielska believes that she may have edited the text of Ptolemy’s Almagest and Handy Tables, editions which have in the past been ascribed to her less-talented father, Theon. But presumably—and much as those of us in the thrill-a-minute field of academic publishing would beg to differ—the filmmakers considered scholarly editing insufficiently cinematic for their purposes.

Hypatia is known to us mostly by way of letters written to her and by passing mention in historical accounts; it’s difficult, at this remove, to reconstruct her life with any degree of certainty. What we can know, Dzielska writes, is that the real, historical woman should be remembered as a resident of Alexandria, a mathematician, a philosopher, a teacher, and a woman characterized by her sophrosyne—“a model of ethical courage, righteousness, veracity, civic devotion, and intellectual prowess.” And that that the richly suggestive legend of Hypatia “will continue to unfold along its own course, according to tastes and fashions.”