Harvard University Press Blog

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bechdel

Alison Bechdel, a favorite of many here at the Press, has a new graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother that attempts to answer the ages-old (or at least Freud-old) question of why we are who we are. As Lawrence Weschler explains in his warm endorsement of Are You My Mother?, Bechdel “deploys everyone from Virginia Woolf to D. W. Winnicott (the legendary psychoanalytic theorist who comes to serve as her quest’s benign fairy godfather) to untie the snares of a fraught past.”

One of the great pleasures of the book is getting to see the progression of Bechdel’s immersion in Woolf et al. She depicts herself buried in works ranging from Lacan, Freud, and Jung, to C. S. Lewis, A. A. Milne, and Dr. Seuss. And so, in tracking her syllabus, we couldn’t help but notice an HUP title in the mix, Adam Phillips’ On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Here’s Bechdel in repose with Phillips:

Then, later in the story, Bechdel turns to Phillips for insight into her mother’s paralyzing arachnophobia:

So, of course, we ran off to find a copy of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, which was a New York Times Notable Book back when released in 1993. The book’s essays find Phillips, a children’s psychotherapist, bringing a relaxed humor to stories about the subtleties of human behavior and the unconscious. The fascinating passage on spiders from which Bechdel quotes is excerpted 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.

The Journey of Mary Walker

There’s a claim, one with quite a lineage in both historical analysis and social science circles, that slavery destroyed African American families. It was compelling evidence against that claim, found in both Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and Alex Haley’s Roots, that led historian Sydney Nathans to shift his focus years ago from work on nineteenth-century American political leaders to the social history of African Americans. Now comes the completion of a book he started researching in 1988, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker.

Nathans first learned of Mary Walker in a remarkable letter referenced in Gutman’s book. Sent in 1859 from a University of Pennsylvania professor named J. P. Lesley to Mildred Cameron, one of North Carolina’s wealthiest women, the letter was written on behalf of “Mary Walker, formerly in your family,” a polite way of referring to Cameron’s ownership of Walker. Cameron would have well remembered Walker, for Walker’s family had belonged to the Camerons for generations, and though Walker herself had escaped eleven years prior, her children and mother remained. From Lesley’s letter:

I have been lately touched to the heart with a case of heart breaking distress which you have it entirely in your power I find to cure… I have come to know one Mary Walker formerly in your family, and I have seen how sick at heart she is about her mother and especially her two children… She thinks of nothing but her children, and speaks of nothing else when she speaks of herself at all, which is very seldom. Her mother-heart yearns unspeakably after them… She has saved a considerable sum of money to buy them, can command more from friends, and will sacrifice anything to see them once again and have their young lives renew the freshness of her own weary spirit. It is in this behalf that I address you,—to realize this hope of hers.

Walker had fled from slavery while accompanying the Camerons to Philadelphia, only making the agonizing choice to leave her family behind in North Carolina after her master threatened to banish her to an Alabama plantation. In the years between Walker’s escape and Lesley’s letter to Mildred Cameron, Walker had made a life for herself in the North with the aid of a network of allies and friends. To Free a Family is based on thousands of letters written by these allies, chiefly the Lesley family, and by Walker’s adversaries, the Camerons.

We recently spoke with Nathans for an episode of our podcast (which you can listen to below), and he explained some of the particulars of Walker’s story, as well as some of its broader implications:

The larger story is that we think of antislavery people as single-minded, focused on the attack against slavery and on the emancipation of the slaves—which they were. But at the same time, a good number of them were engaged in trying to help individual slaves recover family members… For a good many of them, they had no idea when emancipation would come about, when antislavery would triumph, and so these personal cases were their ways of dealing with slavery on a human basis, one by one.

 

With To Free a Family, Nathans has restored a story as indelible as that of Harriet Jacobs, whom Walker knew. The book now serves as a tribute to the memory of a brave woman—and as a reminder of how history is painfully, triumphantly lived.

You can learn more about Mary Walker in stories from Radio Boston and WBUR, or read an excerpt from To Free a Family at the Ms. Magazine blog. Those in the Boston/Cambridge area can also catch Sydney Nathans on February 23rd at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, which is the current occupant of the Brattle Street Blacksmith House once owned by… Mary Walker.

Someday All This Will Be Yours

In a piece published this weekend, Hendrik Hartog, author of Someday All This Will Be Yours, explained that the predominant view of the history of elder care in America isn’t actually very accurate. When thinking of the time before social security, senior homes, and assisted living, people too often imagine families in which children cared for aging parents out of familial love and filial duty, routinely piling three generations into houses together.

But, as Hartog writes, “this portrait is too rosy”:

If we confront what old-age support once looked like — what actually happened when care was almost fully privatized, when the old depended on their families, without the bureaucratic structures and the (under)paid caregivers we take for granted — a different picture emerges.

For the past decade I have been researching cases of family conflict over old-age care in the decades before Social Security. I have found extraordinary testimony about the intimate management of family care: how the old negotiated with the young for what they called retirement, and the exertions of caregiving at a time when support by relatives was the only sustenance available for the old.

In that world, older people could not rely on habit or culture or nature if they wanted their children to support them when they became frail. In an America strongly identified with economic and physical mobility, parents had to offer inducements. Usually, the bait they used was the promise of an inheritance: stay and take care of me and your mother, and someday you will get the house and the farm or the store or the bank account.

But of course what was at stake was never just an economic bargain between rational actors. Older people negotiated with the young to receive love, to be cared for with affection, not just self-interest.

Someday All This Will Be Yours presents the decade of research Hartog conducted, a project he first undertook during an extended stay near his own elderly mother. He eventually assembled a database of more than 200 cases in which a caretaker brought suit, alleging that the deceased had failed to make good on a promise of quid pro quo. In each case, the plaintiff claimed to have been promised, either implicitly or explicitly, that, in exchange for late-life care of their relative, employer, neighbor, or friend, they’d been promised some later recompense such as money or land. As Hartog explains, in order to win the case the aggrieved would have to prove both that a bargain existed and that they’d upheld their half. More often than not, they were unable to do so and were left with nothing.

Such cases, Hartog found, were essentially standard legal business; run-of-the-mill trials evidencing a social dynamic that we’ve somehow largely forgotten in our age of social services. Hartog’s goal for the project was to better understand this history of intimate transaction:

On Fathers, Evolution, and Bedtime

Dads got their annual time in the spotlight over this past week as we geared up for and then celebrated Father’s Day. Here at HUP we’ve been glad to see a book we published last year get a nice bit of attention in the Father’s Day media blitz. It’s called Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior, and it was co-written by Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson.  Just in the past week the BabyCenter blog cited the book; it featured in a Vancouver Sun op-ed; and there was a particularly thorough post about the book on MSNBC.com’s Cosmic Log, where Alan Boyle looked at how anthropologists suggest that current social trends might be reshaping fatherhood in the mold of the “good old days of hunter-gatherer fathering,” an era when researchers like Gray and Anderson assert that fathers were more active in their children’s development than in much of modern history.

All of this attention on modern fathers, and this welcome coverage of Gray and Anderson’s rich evolutionary perspective, makes a recent article on a persistent societal barrier between motherhood and fatherhood even more interesting. The piece appeared on Jezebel last week and is titled “Could A Mom Have Written Go The F--k To Sleep? And Would It Have Been A Bestseller?” (Well, actually, Jezebel doesn’t bother with the coy hyphens, and, in what follows, neither will we. Be warned.)

For those who’ve somehow missed it, Go the Fuck to Sleep is a parenting and publishing sensation.
It’s a picture book, written by the novelist Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Roberto Cortés, that gives us a father at his wit’s end come bedtime. The book began as a lark, picked up steam online, went to number one on Amazon, had a first printing of 300,000 copies, has been performed by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog, and has already been optioned for film. That kid who wouldn’t go to sleep is suddenly making an awful lot of money for daddy.

What Amy Sohn asks in her Jezebel piece is whether a mother could have gotten away with a book like this—and been met with a reception that would pay for her kid’s college just based on preorders. From her piece:

As much as I want to believe that “Funny is funny” and it would have been a runaway success regardless, I can't help but think that things might have gone down differently.

A mom who even thinks the word “fuck” around her kid? A mom who can’t get her child to sleep or is unwilling to co-sleep to do it? A mom who isn’t more lovable than caustic, always and forever? I can't help but think the Internet masses on parenting sites like this would have a field day with it, raking me over the coals for the same sentiment that is so funny when expressed by a dad.

— If you hate being a mom so much, why did you have a child in the first place?

— Clearly your daughter can’t rest because you work.

— You have an anger management problem and you're giving your kid ADHD.

— You need Zoloft.

— I pray that you bring no more children into the world because it will spare another individual the years of therapy he will need to get over the trauma of having been raised by such a selfish and insensitive person.

And, of course: That book is so lame, I could have written it.

Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection

The general story we tell about boys’ friendships does not include a lot of intimacy. We tend to think boys mostly bond over sports and roughhousing. Not a lot of emotional vulnerability there, we think; that's for girls’ friendships. Niobe Way’s Deep Secrets is an ethnographic study of boys’ friendships that helps us to rewrite those stories we tell.

As Way learned through years of watching boys develop, their friendships in early adolescence are often marked by intense emotional feeling. She quotes a fifteen year old as saying of his closest friend “My best friend and I love each other. That’s it. You have this thing that is deep. So deep it’s within you. You can’t explain it… I guess in life sometimes two people can really really understand each other, and really have a trust respect and love for each other. It just happens, it’s human nature.” Such responses are typical of 14 and 15 year old boys, she found.

However, usually around age 16 boys begin to experience what Way calls a “crisis of connection” as they grow up and encounter the pressures imposed by our hypermasculine culture. Boys, in other words, are not “naturally” emotionally detached and “independent”; rather, they learn how to be this way, at the cost of their relationships with their friends. The consequences can be extreme, as Way notes that the suicide rate for boys in late adolescence spikes to four to five times the rate of girls just at the age when boys lose the emotional language that they had in early and middle adolescence.

We had a conversation about the topic with Niobe Way on the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear by clicking the icon below, or pointing your browser here.

 HUP Podcast - Niobe Way

As she explains in the conversation, the crisis being faced by boys and young men is not necessarily their lack of male role models, as is often assumed. What boys need, she says, is what everyone needs: “People that allow them to express a full range of human capacity. So (they) are allowed to be empathic, allowed to be emotional. Have intimate friendships, express the desire for those intimate friendships. They need models in their lives that foster those kinds of human needs and allow boys to thrive.”

Those models don't have to be men. Way shows how, in fact, male role models sometimes can compound the problem, in that they’re often products of this same culture and thus can serve to reinforce the crisis of connection. Deep Secrets helps us to break through the stereotypes around the dominant culture of masculinity that all too often result in strict and harmful images of boys and men in society. The book tells a sadly unfamiliar story that has important implications for parents, teachers, and others who work with and live with boys.

Put the "play" back in play

We don't usually highlight reviews of other presses' books, but today's New York Times has an interesting review of Howard P. Chudacoff’s Children at Play: An American History, a book whose main conclusion amounts to "leave those kids alone!":

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — For children, play is easy. You can do it anytime, anywhere, with anyone, and it’s fun. For adults, play is hard. They want to know if it’s safe for their kids, if it’s educational, if it promotes motor coordination, if it’s environmentally friendly, if it will look good on a preschool application.

The tension between how children spend their free time and how adults want them to spend it runs through Howard P. Chudacoff’s new book, “Children at Play: An American History” (New York University Press), like a yellow line smack down the middle of a highway.

“Kids should have their own world, and parents are nuisances,” said Mr. Chudacoff, a professor of history at Brown University.

Chudacoff's book dovetails nicely with our own award-winning Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, by Stephen Mintz, which traces the transformation of children from the sinful creatures perceived by Puritans to the productive workers of nineteenth-century farms and factories, from the cosseted cherubs of the Victorian era to the confident consumers of our own.

||| Read an excerpt from Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood.

The Pain of Suicide

Everyone will agree that there is nothing more devastating than a death of a loved one. There is the initial shock of the loss and then the grief that lingers. But when a family member's death is brought on by suicide, there is the grief, the loss and the persistent question: why?

In Why People Die by Suicide Thomas Joiner develops a new and persuasive account of which people are at greater risk of dying by suicide. Joiner, whose father died by suicide, provides an intimate window into the pain of enduring the suicide of a loved one and insight into how to make sense of the death. The Boston Globe has recently published a nice review of Joiner's book:

||| Read an excerpt from the book