Close, But Not Quite

This week, Andrew Sullivan published a 19th-century photo (c. 1870s) submitted by a reader who claimed that it depicts "a would-be transsexual." The person in question (far left) has not been positively identified, but he/she has short hair and the photo is labeled, "Howard."

Another reader wrote in to make the eminently reasonable point that we should not jump to conclusions when we view historical materials with 21st-century eyes:

Sometimes viewing things through a 21st century lens can be very misleading. I think there is a pretty good chance this young man is just a late bloomer and not a transsexual.  Most noticeably, he does not appear to be making any attempt to actually look like a girl.  He's just in a dress.  Of course I may be wrong, as I'm not an expert on the history of the practice of breeching, but I remember seeing pictures of my grandfather in a dress when he was at least five or six and nobody assumed he was a transsexual.

Close, but not quite.

First, dresses were for children — boys were breeched when they were kindergarten age. The person in the photo is an adolescent, not a child. Victorian boys sometimes wore military-style tunics over blousy pants until age 10 or 12, but this person is wearing an adolescent girl's dress.

Second, the reader is wrong when he/she says that there is no "attempt to actually look like a girl." As we've seen before, hair parted in the center is a strong indicator that the subject is female. The other adolescent in this picture has a more cutting-edge hairstyle: bangs. The prop, a parasol, is also a strong signifier of femininity.

The second reader makes a good point about the conclusions drawn by the first, but his/her supporting evidence falls short. Still, I am inclined to be skeptical about the possibility that the photo depicts a young boy. The original poster just makes too many assumptions. For instance, the person on the left looks like a boy to us because he/she has short hair. Yet, Victorian girls sometimes sported brutally short haircuts, particularly when they were recovering from serious illnesses. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

Could this be a photo of a boy in a dress? Sure. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Gender-Neutral Clothing

Today, Slate's Explainer runs down the history of gender-neutral clothing. Slate has previously featured slideshows explaining the history of gender-specific colors. I have also written up some guidelines for telling boys from girls in 19th-century photos.

At the end of the Slate article, Brian Palmer notes that, "Despite an uninterrupted quarter-century of lacy dresses and flowered pink headbands, observers of high-end children's clothing designers detect a trend back toward gender-neutral clothes." I wish he had provided a citation for this, because I haven't seen any evidence yet. Maybe the places I've been looking have not been high-end enough, but, as someone who has purchased approximately a million articles of infant clothing in the past few months, gender-neutral (or even just not overly frilly) clothing is hard to find. My quest for tiny corduroy overalls without appliqued butterflies or trucks on them continues largely without success.

Slate on Pink and Blue

Slate has published a slideshow on this history of pink and blue as gender-specific colors.

Related posts:

• Boy or Girl? 
• Gender-Neutral Clothing
• Victorian Pronouns

Victorian Gender Pronouns

I recently read Kate Summerscale's intriguing The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher for the class I'm tutoring. It's a great read and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in Victorian England, detective fiction, or the beginnings of modern law enforcement.

The book concerns the 1860 murder of 3-year-old Saville Kent, a crime that captured the attention of the nation and inspired the genre of Victorian detective fiction.

One peculiar thing that caught my attention was the tendency of all of the participants — family members, neighbors, detectives, reporters — to refer to the murdered child as "it," as in, "Its little head fell almost off" (pg. 17) or

the child has woke and recognised its Father that the Father through Fear of an Exposure in the Family strangled it in the Room after the Nurse Maid had gone to sleep that  he there carried it to the Closet and cut the Throat (pg. 166).

The use of a gender-neutral pronoun does not seem to indicate that the speaker wished to dehumanize young Saville. Rather, the widespread usage makes me think that Victorians considered a 3-year-old to be more of a gender-neutral child than a gender-specific boy or girl. A few of the court records and press reports do call Saville a boy, but most call him a child and use gender-neutral pronouns.

I can't imagine calling a modern 3-year-old it without being punched by its mother. We talk about infants and toddlers in very strongly gendered language from birth, if not earlier. We dress them in gender-specific clothing and provide them with gender-specific toys. Despite our apparent return to some elements of Victorian mourning culture, a wide gulf separates us on this issue.

Boy or Girl? A Public Service Announcement

Until the middle of the 20th century, young children in Europe and the United States regularly wore dresses, regardless of sex. Many modern Americans are aware of this tidbit of sartorial history, but find it amusing or baffling. When I was looking for a digital image of this Winterhalter portrait of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their five oldest children, many of my Google hits contained comments along the lines of "Two of the kids are boys!?!?"

Yes, two of the children are boys. From left to right, this portrait shows Alfred (b. 1844), Edward (b. 1841), Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Alice (b. 1843), Helena (b. 1846), and Victoria (b. 1840). Before WWII, most European and Euro-American boys wore skirts until they were "breeched" around age 5-6 (sometimes as late as 7-8).

If you looked at Alfred and thought he was a girl, don't worry — lots of people have trouble telling. Luckily, my early years as a Civil War reenactor and historical costume enthusiast have armed me with some tips for deciphering mid-19th-century images and I am happy to pass them along to you.

The most reliable way of identifying the sex of a child in a mid-19th-c image (1840ish-1870ish) is the hairstyle. As a general rule, boys' hair is parted on the side or swept up in a topknot, while girls' hair is nearly always parted dead-center. Take another look at the portrait — the little princes have side parts, the princesses have center parts, and the baby doesn't have enough hair to tell.

Here are some examples from Harvard's Houghton Library:

Girls:

Boy, Boy, Girl, Boy:

(Adorable) Boy, (Adorable) Girl:

Now that we've established a pattern, we can look at some ambiguous images:

Boy or Girl?

side part = boy

Boy or Girl?

center part = girl

Boy or Girl?

top knot = boy

Boy or Girl?

boy on left, girl on right

If you still can't tell the difference, don't feel bad — whoever catalogued these pictures for Houghton can't tell either. Nearly all of the boys under the age of five are misidentified as girls on Harvard's VIA site:

Yet, when we look at pictures with identified subjects, the pattern holds firm:

Ellen Tucker Emerson:

Alice Howe Gibbens James and Mary Sherwin Gibbens:

Tad Lincoln:

It's not a perfect method — for example, the Davis boys have wonky center parts — but it's a good starting point.

Other tips:

• Props: Is the child holding a doll, needlework, or a flower? It's probably a girl. Is it holding a ball, whip, dog, or military accoutrement (drum, toy cannon, kepi)? It's probably a boy. A book? Could be either.
• Accessories: Some types of jewelry can offer hints — earrings and brooches worn at the throat generally signify "female," but necklaces are tricky. Children of both sexes have worn coral necklaces as charms for centuries.
  
• Color: Before the 1930s, Americans generally considered red/pink to be a masculine color (think Mars) and blue to be a feminine color (think Virgin Mary). That said, there was not hard and fast rule on the color issue and it won't help you much unless you're looking at a painting or an actual garment. The Valentine Museum in Richmond had a fabulous exhibit on this subject a few years ago.
  
• Pattern: It would be a mistake to assume that only girls wore floral patterns in the 19th century. Still, if something is all-out floral and other signs point to girl, girl is a safe bet. On the flip side, little boys often wore tartans that evoked a martial style.
  
• Tunics: Sometimes, young boys went through an intermediate stage of dress — neither dresses nor full-on pants. See Prince Edward in the first painting (red belted tunic). Tunics often had a military flair win the form of buttons, belts, and trim. Other types of jackets worn by boys also have military overtones, such as the zouave jackets that became popular during the Civil War.
  

boy in tartan tunic, side-parted hair

I'm sure that people who are familiar with images from other eras could offer similar tips. I imagine the general principles are the same — look at hair, props, cut, etc. — but the specifics are slightly different.

The Gore Children (1755)

John Singleton Copley

Sarah and Frances hold flowers and have loose, flowing hair. John wears child-sized clothes in the style worn by adult men. Samuel's hair is confined and styled differently from his sisters' hair. He is also wearing red/pink and has a dog to mark his masculinity.

My grandfather, Benjamin Manfredo DeAngelis, 1921

Is Battlestar Galactica Feminist?

I wanted to respond to Slate's recent post on the question, which got a lot of things very wrong, but I'm pretty busy this weekend. Thankfully, Amanda Marcotte said a lot of the things I wanted to say. One very important point (I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought this):

Natch, the point is that “BSG”, in my opinion, handles the topic [of rape] responsibly, which means treating rape like a crime of power and not that of a man who just got too horny and lost control.  Every single rape or attempted rape is tied directly to male domination or control of women’s bodies.  They show them raping prisoners because that’s what torturing prison guards do.  The only way they could have been more responsible is to show that they rape male prisoners, too

On Art and Criticism

It's been quite a day here at VPI. I usually get fewer than 50 hits per day, mostly from people looking for gravestones or Puritan names, but yesterday, more than 3,000 people visited the site.

It seems that Internet Personality Jason Kottke linked to my old Pixar post, thus sending quite a flood of readers and commenters my way. Thanks, Jason — I appreciate the attention!

Many of the people who have commented on or linked to that post have engaged meaningfully with my central arument: Pixar movies generally present a male=neutral, female=particular understanding of gender. I appreciate the feedback and the constructive criticisms offered in good faith. Some good points from commenters/friends/linking sites include:

• WALL-E has the potential to be gender subversive. 
• The Incredibles might deserve more than 5/10. (This is a perfectly valid argument that hinges on criteria — I was thinking that 5/10 indicated balance and was a perfectly respectable score.)
• Reading these movies through other categories of analysis might also be fruitful.

I'm happy to take a break from reading a foot-thick biography of Charles II to talk about gender in some of my favorite movies. It's like vacation.

Yet, there is one criticism I just can't wrap my head around. Several commenters (especially at sites that have linked to this one) have argued that Pixar movies are not appropriate texts for serious analysis. This generally takes the form of They're just kids' movies!!!! or Movies are just for entertainment!!!!, etc. These commenters usually accuse me of over-analyzing the films and/or projecting "gender issues" onto them. Occasionally, they accuse me of wanting to censor Pixar or enforce some sort of animation affirmative action policy.

These people are not arguing that my analysis is wrong, they are dismissing it on the grounds that Pixar movies can bear no serious analysis.

Really?

I firmly belive that cultural productions (movies, novels, art, clothing, furniture, architecture, etc.) embody cultural values and are appropriate texts for analysis. The idea that a movie is "just entertainment" makes no sense to me. A film's primary purpose can be to entertain or to make money for a studio, but it is also a rich cultural text.

Do these commenters go into museums and limit their comments on Monet to, "Ooh, pretty?" Do they read Longfellow and say, "Yay, it rhymes!" I know that my definition of "text" is fairly broad — as a material culture person, I believe that anything from hairstyles to bones in a trash pit can be read for cultural meaning — but surely we can all agree that fine art, books, and films can bear critical analysis, can't we?

By treating Pixar movies as serious texts, I mean them no disrespect —in fact, I would argue that I am showing them more respect than people who seem to think that they are mere baubles for distracting children (I also have a healthy respect for children and their capacity to look beyond "shiny"). Maybe people heard "criticism" and thought "hate" rather than "a meaningful engagement with the ideas presented in this piece of art."

What do you think? Are all artifacts fair game for cultural analysis? Or is a talking fish just a talking fish?

Pixar's Gender Problem, 2nd Ed.

I'm bumping this to the first page, since it is by far my most popular post ever. Thanks, Mr. J @ Feministe! Make sure to read the updates at the bottom.

This post has very little to do with history, so feel free to skip it if that's what you come here for.

Pete and I went to see WALL-E last night. It's no Finding Nemo, but it is pretty good and excellent in parts. I'd recommend seeing it for the gorgeous end credits sequence alone.

Whenever a new Pixar movie comes out, I wrestle with the same frustration: Pixar's gender problem. While Disney's long history of antipathy toward mothers and the problematic popularity of the Disney Princess line are well-traveled territory for feminist critiques, Pixar's gender problem often slips under the radar.

The Pixar M.O. is (somewhat) subtler than the old your-stepmom-is-a-witch tropes of Disney past. Instead, Pixar's continued failure to posit female characters as the central protagonists in their stories contributes to the idea that male is neutral and female is particular. This is not to say that Pixar does not write female characters. What I am taking issue with is the ad-nauseam repetition of female characters as helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives.

Let us run down the current and upcoming Pixar films:

Toy Story: This buddy movie revolves around the rivalry/friendship between two male characters, Woody and Buzz. Female characters: Andy's Mom, Bo Peep, Mrs. Potato Head, Sid's sister Hannah, Baby Molly (we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here).
Grrl Power score: 0/10. The women in this story are almost entirely irrelevant.

A Bug's Life: This adventure story concerns the efforts of a male ant (Flik) who sets out on an adventure to save the colony from the wrath of a grasshopper gang. Interestingly enough, real male ants do nothing but eat and fertilize eggs, so Pixar had to go out on a limb to make this character male. Female characters: Dot, Princess Atta, The Queen, Gypsy, Rosie.
Gender Equity score: 1/10. This film gets points for having more than three female characters (out of a main cast of 17). Unfortunately, I had to deduct points for the writers' going out of their way to turn a female-dominated community into a male-dominated movie. To what end?

Toy Story 2: More Woody and Buzz. But now we have Jessie! Jessie is awesome and we love her. Too bad the story is still about Woody's existential crisis. Female characters: Jessie, minor toys (Tour Guide Barbie, Mrs. Potato Head, etc.), Andy's Mom.
Girls Rock score: 3/10. Jessie scores three points all by herself for being present, having a personality, and kicking ass. But the movie isn't about her.

Monsters, Inc.: Another buddy movie about two dudes, Mike and Sully. Female characters: Boo, Celia, Roz.
Feminist Statement score: 1/10. Boo is adorable and Roz turns out to be Agent 001 of the CDC. But seriously, what little kid loves to play with her Roz action figure?

Finding Nemo: Father/son bonding film featuring a male clownfish (Marlin) and his son (Nemo). I'm all for movies about fathers and sons and, in fact, this is my favorite of all Pixar movies. Still, Nemo doesn't put female characters front and center, and it probably shouldn't, considering the subject matter. If it were only one male-dominated movie in a well-balanced oeuvre, I wouldn't have a problem. Female characters: Nemo's dead mom (Coral), Dory, Peach, Deb, Darla.
Ally score: 2/10. Points for having an important female character. Not too many, though, since she is squarely in the selfless helper/moral center role. Should I give points for making 2 of the 8 fish in Nemo's tank female? Should I just be happy that any are female and not quibble on the 25% issue? Also, the elementary school teacher fish is male. Maybe because he's a science teacher.

The Incredibles: The story of Bob Parr's midlife crisis and how his family deals with it. Perhaps that's a little unfair — the whole family has problems that they work through in this film. Still, Bob's story drives the action. It's called The Incredibles, not Elastigirl Saves Your Whiny Ass. Female characters: Elastigirl/Helen, Violet, Mirage, Edna, Frozone's wife's disembodied voice.
Womanpower score: 5/10. Helen is a developed character with feelings and motivations. That gets us halfway there, even though almost all of the other superheroes are male (for no good reason).

Cars: Douchebag hotshot (male) racecar Lightning McQueen reenacts Doc Hollywood. I hated this movie. Female characters: Sally Carrera, Flo, Lizzie.
Girls Are Not Just Objects of Male Desire score: 0/10. Honestly, Wikipedia lists 15 residents of Radiator Springs. Three are female. Also, girls can't be on Lightning's pit crew, but they can be his silly, preening fans. Ye Gods.

Ratatouille: Male rat (Remy) dreams of becoming chef and achieves his goal even though movie sidetracks to cover ludicrous and unnecessary romance between humans part way through. This is the kind of shit that bothers me: Why is it important that the rat have a penis? Couldn't Remy have been written for a female lead? Why not? Collette's right — the restaurant business is tough for women, especially when even the fictional rat-as-chef barrier can only be broken by a male character. Female characters: Colette, that old lady with the gun, um . . . maybe some patrons?
More than a Token score: 1/10. ZOMG, we have one female character. We'd better make her fall inexplicably in love with the bumbling Linguini, stat!

WALL-E: Robot somehow acquires human gender characteristics, strives to clean up earth, goes on adventure to space. Why does WALL-E need to be male? Why does EVE need to be female? Couldn't they both be gender ambiguous and still fall in love? That would have been a bold move, but I think it's safe to say that Pixar is less than bold on the gender front. "Hey, guys, we have this robot with no inherent gender identity. We want to give it an arbitrary gender. Maybe we could make it female. Yeah, no, that would just just be ridiculous." Female characters: EVE, Mary, maybe some of the dead ex-captains of the Axiom
Challenging Gender Stereotypes score: 2/10. EVE is the competent scientist-bot. Still, making something that is inherently genderless male because male=neutral is bullshit.*

Up: This upcoming buddy movie features an elderly man named Carl and his young friend Russell who travel the world together in search of adventure. I don't know much about this film since it won't be released until 2009. What I do know: it's a buddy movie about two guys. See: Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., above. Female characters: IMDb lists five actors for this movie. All of them are fellas.
Are There Any Girls in This Movie? score: can't tell yet, but it's not looking good.

Toy Story 3: see Toy Story, Toy Story 2
Will Jessie Be There? score: dunno


newt: So, we have this movie about the two last blue-footed newts on earth. Scientists want to breed them, but the two can't stand one another. The newts' names are Newt and Brooke. What should we call the movie? Let's call it "newt." Yeah. Brooke's a dumb name.
Female=Normal score: not promising. There are few better ways to tell kids that male=normal and female=weird than to make sure that your male character has the same name as his species and your female character doesn't.

The Bear and the Bow: OOOOOH! Somebody told Pixar that they needed to make a movie with a girl as the main character! So, duh, it's going to be "Pixar's first fairy tale"!!! The main character will be, get this, a PRINCESS! Sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster on a stick. But, since the Pixar people are probably good Bay Area liberals, I'm sure the princess will want to defy her parents'/society's expectations. Where have we seen that before, I wonder? No cookies for rehashing the same old shit. If we're super lucky, she won't marry the prince, which will allow us to cover the same ground that Robert Munsch and Free to Be You and Me covered in the goddamn '70s. Maybe it will be good, but no matter how good it is, it still PISSES ME OFF that girls get to be main characters only when they are princess (or marrying up the social ladder a la Belle and Mulan) in fairy tale worlds. Boys can be main characters anywhere, but if a girl is the main character, you can bet your ass it's a fantasy world. (Side note, as of 6/28/2008, the Wikipedia entry for this movie's premise begins, "In mythical Scotland . . ." Damn. I wanted to go to Scotland next summer.)
Please Don't Be Awful score: unknown, though the girl=fairy tale princess thing means they've got to work their way up from below zero in my book.

What can little girls and the women who love them conclude from surveying Pixar's body of work? Most obviously, it's that girls are particular while boys are general. I suppose this might have something to do with Pixar wanting lots of people to see their movies and fearing that girls will see boy movies but boys won't see girl movies. I heard a lot of that sort of "wisdom" from librarians when I was an elementary school teacher, but I'll tell you now — I read Little House in the Big Woods and Matilda to my second grade class and they ate it up.

I suppose what makes me so mad is not that Pixar makes movies about male characters but that they seem to go out of their way to make sure that this remains the case. This isn't just a problem with their story choices, though they are a little heavy on the buddy film/father-and-son plots. On several occasions (A Bug's Life, WALL-E), they have defied logic in order to make sure that the protagonist of their tale was male. When good female characters are part of the story (Elastigirl/Helen Parr, Jessie), they still focus on the male character's plotline and development. They make infuriating choices (female main character = princess in fairy tale). It's not just the stories they choose to tell, it's how they choose to tell them: in a way that always relegates female characters to the periphery, where they can serve and encourage male characters, but are never, ever important enough to carry a whole movie on their own shoulders. Unless they're, you know, princesses.

/rant

UPDATE: After publishing my own rant, I found a few similar observations. None of them has angry Jessie, though.

*UPDATE 2:
I just returned from seeing WALL-E with my 12-year-old sister, and I'd like to revise my comments on it somewhat. The first time, I just watched for enjoyment, but this time, I tried very hard to identify the cues and actions that marked WALL-E's and EVE's genders and see if I could imagine them as gender neutral. In truth, it wasn't too hard. Up until the scene when they introduce themselves by name, it was pretty easy to imagine each of them as either the opposite gender or gender-neutral.

There are only a few things that specifically gender WALL-E as male: his name, a single comment from John ("I know that guy."), and his copying of the male part of the "Hello Dolly" dances. His voice could be interpreted as masculine, but I forced myself to think "gender neutral" and it actually worked pretty well. With just a few tweaks, particularly the name, I think that WALL-E could have been portrayed without specifying a gender. Of course, there are some visual gender cues, such as his dirty, rusty exterior, lunchbox, and waste management job, but those things only read as masculine because of our tendency to think of the American "working class" as male. If the other aspects of this character were made ambiguous, I could argue that any gendering of WALL-E is totally on the audience, not the filmmaker.

EVE was trickier. Her voice and name are much more strongly female than WALL-E's are male. Then there's her creepy robo-womb. Still, until she uttered her first words, I was fairly successful at thinking of EVE as ungendered. Change the name, pitch the voice lower and with a little less giggling, and you've got a genderless robot.

I tried to keep an eye on the other characters too, and was pleased to find that many of them are actually not gender-specific. The cockroach, MO, Gopher, and the rogue robots are all neutral. And they still have personality (at least, MO and the cockroach do), which proves to me that it is possible to have an anthropomorphized object or animal that does not have a clear-cut gender.

With all this in mind, I want to bump WALL-E's rating to a 7/10. Not a perfect 10, since we can't get around the fact that WALL-E and EVE are given very clear genders and I stand by my earlier call of bullshit. But I want to give credit for having lots of gender-neutral characters and for making the two main characters so close to neutral. The points off are for not taking it all the way. And for having only one female captain among 5 or 6.

If you haven't seen WALL-E yet, I recommend trying to think of the characters as gender-neutral as much as possible — it was a great thought exercise and helped me reflect on how much gender the filmmakers gave to each character and how much I was putting on them by using the visual cues etc. as shortcuts.

Pixar's Gender Problem

This post has very little to do with history, so feel free to skip it if that's what you come here for.

Pete and I went to see WALL-E last night. It's no Finding Nemo, but it is pretty good and excellent in parts. I'd recommend seeing it for the gorgeous end credits sequence alone.

Whenever a new Pixar movie comes out, I wrestle with the same frustration: Pixar's gender problem. While Disney's long history of antipathy toward mothers and the problematic popularity of the Disney Princess line are well-traveled territory for feminist critiques, Pixar's gender problem often slips under the radar.

The Pixar M.O. is (somewhat) subtler than the old your-stepmom-is-a-witch tropes of Disney past. Instead, Pixar's continued failure to posit female characters as the central protagonists in their stories contributes to the idea that male is neutral and female is particular. This is not to say that Pixar does not write female characters. What I am taking issue with is the ad-nauseam repetition of female characters as helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives.

Let us run down the current and upcoming Pixar films:

Toy Story: This buddy movie revolves around the rivalry/friendship between two male characters, Woody and Buzz. Female characters: Andy's Mom, Bo Peep, Mrs. Potato Head, Sid's sister Hannah, Baby Molly (we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here).
Grrl Power score: 0/10. The women in this story are almost entirely irrelevant.

A Bug's Life: This adventure story concerns the efforts of a male ant (Flik) who sets out on an adventure to save the colony from the wrath of a grasshopper gang. Interestingly enough, real male ants do nothing but eat and fertilize eggs, so Pixar had to go out on a limb to make this character male. Female characters: Dot, Princess Atta, The Queen, Gypsy, Rosie.
Gender Equity score: 1/10. This film gets points for having more than three female characters (out of a main cast of 17). Unfortunately, I had to deduct points for the writers' going out of their way to turn a female-dominated community into a male-dominated movie. To what end?

Toy Story 2: More Woody and Buzz. But now we have Jessie! Jessie is awesome and we love her. Too bad the story is still about Woody's existential crisis. Female characters: Jessie, minor toys (Tour Guide Barbie, Mrs. Potato Head, etc.), Andy's Mom.
Girls Rock score: 3/10. Jessie scores three points all by herself for being present, having a personality, and kicking ass. But the movie isn't about her.

Monsters, Inc.: Another buddy movie about two dudes, Mike and Sully. Female characters: Boo, Celia, Roz.
Feminist Statement score: 1/10. Boo is adorable and Roz turns out to be Agent 001 of the CDC. But seriously, what little kid loves to play with her Roz action figure?

Finding Nemo: Father/son bonding film featuring a male clownfish (Marlin) and his son (Nemo). I'm all for movies about fathers and sons and, in fact, this is my favorite of all Pixar movies. Still, Nemo doesn't put female characters front and center, and it probably shouldn't, considering the subject matter. If it were only one male-dominated movie in a well-balanced oeuvre, I wouldn't have a problem. Female characters: Nemo's dead mom (Coral), Dory, Peach, Deb, Darla.
Ally score: 2/10. Points for having an important female character. Not too many, though, since she is squarely in the selfless helper/moral center role. Should I give points for making 2 of the 8 fish in Nemo's tank female? Should I just be happy that any are female and not quibble on the 25% issue? Also, the elementary school teacher fish is male. Maybe because he's a science teacher.

The Incredibles: The story of Bob Parr's midlife crisis and how his family deals with it. Perhaps that's a little unfair — the whole family has problems that they work through in this film. Still, Bob's story drives the action. It's called The Incredibles, not Elastigirl Saves Your Whiny Ass. Female characters: Elastigirl/Helen, Violet, Mirage, Edna, Frozone's wife's disembodied voice.
Womanpower score: 5/10. Helen is a developed character with feelings and motivations. That gets us halfway there, even though almost all of the other superheroes are male (for no good reason).

Cars: Douchebag hotshot (male) racecar Lightning McQueen reenacts Doc Hollywood. I hated this movie. Female characters: Sally Carrera, Flo, Lizzie.
Girls Are Not Just Objects of Male Desire score: 0/10. Honestly, Wikipedia lists 15 residents of Radiator Springs. Three are female. Also, girls can't be on Lightning's pit crew, but they can be his silly, preening fans. Ye Gods.

Ratatouille: Male rat (Remy) dreams of becoming chef and achieves his goal even though movie sidetracks to cover ludicrous and unnecessary romance between humans part way through. This is the kind of shit that bothers me: Why is it important that the rat have a penis? Couldn't Remy have been written for a female lead? Why not? Collette's right — the restaurant business is tough for women, especially when even the fictional rat-as-chef barrier can only be broken by a male character. Female characters: Colette, that old lady with the gun, um . . . maybe some patrons?
More than a Token score: 1/10. ZOMG, we have one female character. We'd better make her fall inexplicably in love with the bumbling Linguini, stat!

WALL-E: Robot somehow acquires human gender characteristics, strives to clean up earth, goes on adventure to space. Why does WALL-E need to be male? Why does EVE need to be female? Couldn't they both be gender ambiguous and still fall in love? That would have been a bold move, but I think it's safe to say that Pixar is less than bold on the gender front. "Hey, guys, we have this robot with no inherent gender identity. We want to give it an arbitrary gender. Maybe we could make it female. Yeah, no, that would just just be ridiculous." Female characters: EVE, Mary, maybe some of the dead ex-captains of the Axiom
Challenging Gender Stereotypes score: 2/10. EVE is the competent scientist-bot. Still, making something that is inherently genderless male because male=neutral is bullshit.*

Up: This upcoming buddy movie features an elderly man named Carl and his young friend Russell who travel the world together in search of adventure. I don't know much about this film since it won't be released until 2009. What I do know: it's a buddy movie about two guys. See: Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., above. Female characters: IMDb lists five actors for this movie. All of them are fellas.
Are There Any Girls in This Movie? score: can't tell yet, but it's not looking good.

Toy Story 3: see Toy Story, Toy Story 2
Will Jessie Be There? score: dunno


newt: So, we have this movie about the two last blue-footed newts on earth. Scientists want to breed them, but the two can't stand one another. The newts' names are Newt and Brooke. What should we call the movie? Let's call it "newt." Yeah. Brooke's a dumb name.
Female=Normal score: not promising. There are few better ways to tell kids that male=normal and female=weird than to make sure that your male character has the same name as his species and your female character doesn't.

The Bear and the Bow: OOOOOH! Somebody told Pixar that they needed to make a movie with a girl as the main character! So, duh, it's going to be "Pixar's first fairy tale"!!! The main character will be, get this, a PRINCESS! But, since the Pixar people are probably good Bay Area liberals, I'm sure the princess will want to defy her parents'/society's expectations. Where have we seen that before, I wonder? No cookies for rehashing the same old shit. If we're super lucky, she won't marry the prince, which will allow us to cover the same ground that Robert Munsch and Free to Be You and Me covered in the goddamn '70s. Maybe it will be good, but no matter how good it is, it still PISSES ME OFF that girls get to be main characters only when they are princess (or marrying up the social ladder a la Belle and Mulan) in fairy tale worlds. Boys can be main characters anywhere, but if a girl is the main character, you can bet your ass it's a fantasy world. (Side note, as of 6/28/2008, the Wikipedia entry for this movie's premise begins, "In mythical Scotland . . ." Damn. I wanted to go to Scotland next summer.)
Please Don't Be Awful score: unknown, though the girl=fairy tale princess thing means they've got to work their way up from below zero in my book.

What can little girls and the women who love them conclude from surveying Pixar's body of work? Most obviously, it's that girls are particular while boys are general. I suppose this might have something to do with Pixar wanting lots of people to see their movies and fearing that girls will see boy movies but boys won't see girl movies. I heard a lot of that sort of "wisdom" from librarians when I was an elementary school teacher, but I'll tell you now — I read Little House in the Big Woods and Matilda to my second grade class and they ate it up.

I suppose what makes me so mad is not that Pixar makes movies about male characters but that they seem to go out of their way to make sure that this remains the case. This isn't just a problem with their story choices, though they are a little heavy on the buddy film/father-and-son plots. On several occasions (A Bug's Life, WALL-E), they have defied logic in order to make sure that the protagonist of their tale was male. When good female characters are part of the story (Elastigirl/Helen Parr, Jessie), they still focus on the male character's plotline and development. They make infuriating choices (female main character = princess in fairy tale). It's not just the stories they choose to tell, it's how they choose to tell them: in a way that always relegates female characters to the periphery, where they can serve and encourage male characters, but are never, ever important enough to carry a whole movie on their own shoulders. Unless they're, you know, princesses.

/rant

UPDATE: After publishing my own rant, I found a few similar observations. None of them has angry Jessie, though.

*UPDATE 2:
I just returned from seeing WALL-E with my 12-year-old sister, and I'd like to revise my comments on it somewhat. The first time, I just watched for enjoyment, but this time, I tried very hard to identify the cues and actions that marked WALL-E's and EVE's genders and see if I could imagine them as gender neutral. In truth, it wasn't too hard. Up until the scene when they introduce themselves by name, it was pretty easy to imagine each of them as either the opposite gender or gender-neutral.

There are only a few things that specifically gender WALL-E as male: his name, a single comment from John ("I know that guy."), and his copying of the male part of the "Hello Dolly" dances. His voice could be interpreted as masculine, but I forced myself to think "gender neutral" and it actually worked pretty well. With just a few tweaks, particularly the name, I think that WALL-E could have been portrayed without specifying a gender. Of course, there are some visual gender cues, such as his dirty, rusty exterior, lunchbox, and waste management job, but those things only read as masculine because of our tendency to think of the American "working class" as male. If the other aspects of this character were made ambiguous, I could argue that any gendering of WALL-E is totally on the audience, not the filmmaker.

EVE was trickier. Her voice and name are much more strongly female than WALL-E's are male. Then there's her creepy robo-womb. Still, until she uttered her first words, I was fairly successful at thinking of EVE as ungendered. Change the name, pitch the voice lower and with a little less giggling, and you've got a genderless robot.

I tried to keep an eye on the other characters too, and was pleased to find that many of them are actually not gender-specific. The cockroach, MO, Gopher, and the rogue robots are all neutral. And they still have personality (at least, MO and the cockroach do), which proves to me that it is possible to have an anthropomorphized object or animal that does not have a clear-cut gender.

With all this in mind, I want to bump WALL-E's rating to a 7/10. Not a perfect 10, since we can't get around the fact that WALL-E and EVE are given very clear genders and I stand by my earlier call of bullshit. But I want to give credit for having lots of gender-neutral characters and for making the two main characters so close to neutral. The points off are for not taking it all the way. And for having only one female captain among 5 or 6.

If you haven't seen WALL-E yet, I recommend trying to think of the characters as gender-neutral as much as possible — it was a great thought exercise and helped me reflect on how much gender the filmmakers gave to each character and how much I was putting on them by using the visual cues etc. as shortcuts.

Masters of Small Worlds

Kevlev's comment reminded me of an excellent book I read recently: Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, & the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995). McCurry argues that South Carolina's many yeomen farmers, like their more affluent neighbors, based their claims to power and political privilege on their status as independent heads of households. Rich and poor alike upheld a system of power that defined white men as the undisputed masters of their families, slaves, and dependents — a system that was bolstered by proslavery Christianity. For a more in-depth review, see Jeanette Keith's article on H-Net.

While the South Carolina Low Country is remembered as a land of massive plantations, impossibly wealthy planters, and overwhelming black majorities (up to 80% of residents in the antebellum period were slaves), the region also had a thriving yeoman class. McCurry's definition of a "yeoman" is anyone who owned his land and worked it with his own hands, which was generally true of farmers who owned fewer than 150 acres and fewer than 10 slaves. While 10 slaves may seem like a large workforce, McCurry shows that yeomen typically bought children or women because they were cheaper than adult men (over half of the slaves on these small farms were children — pg. 49). Similarly, the 150 acres were generally of poor quality, since large planters owned the rich, rice-producing lowlands.

Yeomen considered themselves freemen, citizens, and heads of their own households and, thus, the political equals of their elite planter neighbors. While planters were often uneasy about the ramifications of democratic ideology, they “forged an uneasy alliance” with yeomen on the basis of their common position as heads of households and benefited from yeomen’s support at the polls (93). For their part, yeomen supported the systems of slavery and social hierarchy because their own claims to power rested on the power and privileges afforded them under those systems.

McCurry's book is important because it undercuts the ubiquitous neo-Confederate claim that very few Confederate soldiers were slave owners and thus did not fight to preserve slavery. McCurry argues convincingly that free, white heads of household supported slavery because their privileged position rested on their ability to claim absolute dominion over their households, whether those households included only their own wives and children or hundreds of enslaved workers. She also examines tensions between planters and yeomen, as well as their social interactions:

Out of the personal nature of the ties that bound them, out of their common respect for private property and property in man, and out of the social and political imperatives of slave society, yeomen and planter in the South Carolina Low Country forged a workable alliance (112).

I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever tried to explain why white Southerners who did not own slaves supported the system nevertheless. One caveat: The South Carolina Low Country had a unique social and economic landscape due to the large number of huge rice plantations, so we should be careful not to extrapolate to other parts of the South (for example, over 75% of white heads of households in some SC parishes were slaveowners). That said, her argument about household heads supporting a system of privacy and household autonomy that upheld slavery will probably travel well.

Trumbull Burying Ground

I went home to Connecticut earlier today to catch the matinee of my sister's school play: "Thoroughly Modern Millie." The less said about that, the better.

I had a little time to waste while my parents were out squiring grandparents to and fro, so I stopped by the Trumbull Burying Ground in Lebanon, CT. This has been one of my favorite graveyards ever since I can remember, so it was a little sad to see it in such bad shape. Even in the past ten years, the monuments have degraded significantly, and I was unable to find some of the specific stones I wanted to take pictures of.

Part of the problem is that the stone used in northeastern Connecticut is of much poorer quality than that found in the Marblehead graveyards. Instead of dense slate, the local carvers used local granite full of mica or, even worse, red sandstone. The red stones are beautiful, but the material is so porous that water leaches in and then freezes, causing spalling, which is when a section of the stone flakes off. Here are some examples of pretty serious spalling:














One thing that caught my attention was that there are several stones in Lebanon that refer to men as the husband of a woman. It is common for an early American epitaph to make reference to a woman's husband, but I'm not sure whether I've ever seen it the other way around before. I'll have to keep my eyes open for that.

This one's a little hard to read, but I promise that it says, "Here lies interred the Body of MISTAR JOHN WEBSTERS, who was the loveing consort of Mrs. Elizabeth Webster . . .":
Here is another, which states that Mr. (Unreadable) Phelps was "ye husband of Mrs. Sarah Phelps." I know it's hard to read. If you click on it, the picture will get much bigger, which may help.
As you can see, these stones are in danger of eroding completely. Being buried might actually preserve them.

If you've ever seen another seventeenth- or eighteenth-century gravestone with "husband of" on it, please let me know.

Journal of the Proceedings of Congress, 1774

When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774, secretary Charles Thompson kept daily records of the proceedings. These records were eventually published as the Journal of the Proceedings of Congress. Here is the Journal's emblem:

In his 2005 WMQ article, "Being Alone in the Age of Social Contract," UChicago professor Eric Slauter descibes how the "erect pillar with liberty cap" is "held steady by twelve arms." Apparently, the inscription, "Hanc Tuemur, Hac Nitimur" means something along the lines of "this we guard; for this we strive." I see.

Slauter acknowledges that this image is suggestive of the relationship between masculinity and the founders' idea of liberty, but he fails to mention how hilarious it is.

I wonder why this image isn't on U.S. money, stamps, or government seals. Maybe I'll write to some representatives and see if we can't get them to change the emblem on the Congressional Record letterhead just for old times' sake. After all, it's what the founders wanted.


See the LOC for more.

Elizabeth Murray

Since J.L. Bell mentioned it in the comments (yay!), I thought I would write about Elizabeth Murray: A Woman's Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America by Patricia Cleary (2000). This book is a great example of how a skillful historian can use a biography to illuminate an entire historical moment. Unlike, say, McCullough's John Adams, Elizabeth Murray is about how Murray's life exemplified trends in her society, not about her unique awesomeness.

Not that Elizabeth Murray didn't lead a fascinating life. She was a teacher, a merchant, a successful businesswoman, and a world traveler (well, a British Atlantic traveler, at least).

Unfortunately, the page 123 excerpt makes her sound stuffier than she was:

As 1769 drew to a close, Elizabeth kept herself busy with London's diversions, visiting gardens, tourist attractions, and the theater. She visited Westminster Abbey and saw an exhibit of wax figures, with eyes and features that were "so lively" that her niece Betsy mistook them for real. For Elizabeth the highlight of various wax statues was that of Queen Anne.

When I was writing my undergraduate thesis, I used some of Murray's papers at the MHS. One of my favorites was a schedule for the daily routine at her school. Documents that take the time to chronicle everyday occurrences are incredibly valuable, and this one helped me provide a quick snapshot of female education in Boston during Sally Jackson's youth:

During the operation of her school for young ladies in the 1750s, Elizabeth Murray wrote down a schedule which detailed the activities of her young scholars on a typical school day. After rising at six o’clock, the girls would gather for prayers and readings from scripture before breakfast, and would walk the few blocks to the writing master’s house for “writing school” at eight, where advanced students learned “ciphering” as well as penmanship. From nine until eleven, the students would apply themselves to their needlework and take turns “reading some chosen author” aloud to the others, an activity which both entertained and informed the listeners, as well as improving the reader’s literacy and elocution. At eleven o’clock, the girls would spend an hour copying “Extracts, from books they read, according to their Tastes,” into their copybooks, after which they were free until half past one, “to amuse themselves in any way innocent, improving manners such as writing to each other, reading any Book they find in their way, making any little ornament for their heads, necks, chatting, & enjoying themselves in any part of the House/the Kitchen excepted.” After a midday meal, the pupils would return to their needlework, receive guests, read quietly, or “goe abroad” with either Ms. Murray or her assistant for the remainder of the afternoon. If a student were so inclined, and her parents were willing to pay extra, lessons in singing, dancing, French, and playing the harpsichord were also offered during the afternoon hours. Evenings were spent enjoying tea, taking walks, visiting friends, and “convers[ing] with mirth, ease, & innocence all together.” Before retiring, each girl would detail her daily accomplishments in a journal, which also contained summaries of the sermons they heard in church on Sundays. The billing schedule provided by Ms. Murray suggests that pupils generally stayed at the school for at least a year, though it was also possible to pay by the week.

While this schedule lacked the instruction in Latin, Greek, and philosophy that might characterize an elite boy’s education in colonial Boston, Elizabeth Murray’s students were provided with sound literacy skills and practical mathematics in addition to their “accomplishments.” Over the course of the day, individual pupils had more than adequate access to books, and were even allow some measure of autonomy in deciding what they would read. Although the rules stated that, “no books are allowed to be borrowed, or read but what are first known, and read by some proper judge and well recommended,” the availability of reading material suggests that the girls had a chance to read more than the Bible. Indeed, the stipulation that Saturday nights should include a reading from “some grave serious author or some portion of scripture” in preparation for Sunday implies that some of the works available to the students during the week were not sober enough for Sabbath reading. These titles may have included works of history, poetry, or pious fiction such as “Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Murray's correspondence with Amy and Elizabeth Cummings, the notorious shopkeepers who imported goods during Nonimportation, was equally valuable to me. I even became somewhat personally invested in the Cummings sisters' story; it seemed so unjust that they, among the most marginal merchants in the city, were punished for keeping their business open when they had no other means of support. There were very few jobs open to unmarried women who aspired to a middle-class standard of living, and Nonimportation made it difficult for them to carry on.

Although the Cummings sisters assured Murray that the negative press, “far from being a disadvantage to us Spirits up our friends to Purchase from us,” the Committee of Merchants did not make life easy for them. Their gender shielded Amy and Elizabeth from the worst violence in the autumn of 1769, but the anti-importation crowds did use violence to intimidate them. When a mob attacked John Mein (printer of the loathed Boston Chronicle) and George Gailer (a suspected customs informer) on October 28, 1769, they used the worst of the violence to threaten the Cummings sisters. Elizabeth wrote to Murray:

we was alarmed with a violent Skreeming Kill him Kill him, I fleu to the Windue & to my grate surprize saw Mr. Meen at the head of a larg Crowd of those who Call themselves Gentlemen, but in reality they ware no other thin Murderers for their designe was entirely on his life, sum was armed with kains Capt. Marshall stopt at Mr. Waldos & furnished himself with a spad, which he give two thrusts at Meen with upon which he fired a Pistol he had in his hand, loded only with Powder & run into the Guardhous . . . a larg Mob of [about?] a thousand Man & boys aranged themselves befor our Dorr & on a Kart a Man was Exibited as we thought in a Gore of Blood; & poor meen we was shure was the sufrer but we was happyly mistaken it was an informer [Gailer] they had caught the monin Man found shalter, & instintly posted him on a kart tard him all over the town then fathered him all under our windo thin carid him threu the town obliging him to carry the lantren in his hand & calling to all the inhabitince to put Candles in their Windoes, whan the got to Meens hence they raped loudly at which sum of the man fired a Gun from the Chamber Windo & Despirsed the Mob,

Anyone who has seen the John Adams miniseries on HBO can imagine that having someone tarred and feathered on your doorstep must have been terrifying. I don't think Zobel mentions this act of intimidation in his superb The Boston Massacre, but don't quote me on that - I'll have to check.

Also, I would like to thank Ms. Murray for having the most legible handwriting of any eighteenth-century writer.

A Midwife's Tale

I'm on break this week, but I'm hoping to get a jump on next week's readings.

One of the Tuesday seminar books is A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

This is one of my all-time favorite books. Ulrich combines excellent writing, detailed research, and sensitive interpretation in all of her writing. Her earlier work, Good Wives, is one of the most useful and level-headed books I have read, and her later work, The Age of Homespun, is also a favorite. A Midwife's Tale is so stunning because the source material is so intimidating, but Ulrich manages to read it with incredible nuance and insight.

Here is the passage from page 123:

July 8, 1790. "At ditto. Attended etc etc." Martha was present, Though she gave no details when the jury heard the case of Thomas Meloney, charged with cohabiting with his sister Joannah and murdering an infant born of her body. Their father deposed that the two were indeed brother and sister, and that "they have Lived in one house together Ever Since Johannah had her first Child," that she now had three children, but that "I don't know who was the father of them children." The old man signed his testimony with a mark.

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America

I tried to apply the 123 meme to Wesley Frank Craven's The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689. Alas, Mr. Craven's delightful writing style being what it is, there were only five sentences on page 123. If there were a fine for promiscuous use of the semicolon, Mr. Craven would owe the reading public a substantial debt.

Instead, let's have a look at Sharon Block's Rape and Sexual Power in Early America:

A father or husband could notify a magistrate about the crime, but the victim would have to give a deposition with specifics of the attack. Here the victim's world of women fell away as she had to tell her story to what was sometimes a roomful of men. Victims who had already been questioned or examined by other women probably had some idea what a magistrate would expect in a rape accusation and might have been bolstered by the support of mothers, fathers, husbands, or masters.

Methinks Roger Thompson should take a look at this book instead of declaring patriarchy dead.

123 Meme: Sex in Middlesex

Step 1: Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
Step 2: Find page 123.
Step 3: Read the first five complete sentences.
Step 4: Post the next three sentences.

Here's mine:
Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699
by Roger Thompson (1986)

In 1682 when he was sixty-nine, he was caught in the prison in the act of copulation with the already heavily pregnant Mary Lovell. For this, he was dismissed from his post, evicted from his house, and sentenced with a certain poetic justice to be whipped twenty stripes in April 1683. Six months later the flogged flogger flagged and died.

Interesting. I should do this for all of my seminar books.

Mrs. Gallop, Dorset, England, 1632

The stories of those who left England during the Great Migration are familiar to historians, but those who stayed behind also exercised agency. In a letter to John White on July 4, 1632, John Winthrop recounted the story of a Dorset woman who refused to come to America despite relentless pressure from her husband and other powerful men:

I have much difficultye to keepe John Galloppe heere by reason his wife will not come. I mervayle at the womans weaknesse, that she will live miserably with her children there, when she might live comfortably heere with her husband. I praye perswade and further her comminge by all meanes: if she will come let her have the remainder of his wages, if not, let it be bestowed to bring over his children, for he so desires it: it would be above 40 li losse to him to come for her.

While withholding her husband’s wages from a woman and threatening to take away her children seems to merit a stronger verb than “perswade,” it is clear that Mrs. Gallop was asserting her own wishes in the face of enormous obstacles. Perhaps she did not wish to part from family members, perhaps she feared the crossing or the prospect of starving, freezing, or being killed by Native Americans. Whatever her reasons, Mrs. Gallop shows that ordinary people exercised their own will when it came to emigration.