June 3, 2013 · 8:18 pm

Jades and Bawds

While I’m writing up two other projects (eep!) and house-training a 10-week-old puppy, I amuse myself in the breaks by reading up on the language of insult in early modern England. There’s a thriving literature on the subject: see this bibliography at Early Modern Web.

Of course, reading the literature’s only part of the fun. It’s the primary sources that draw me in as a historian. I often turn to the Old Bailey Online to see insults in the wild. Most recently, I searched “jade” and “bawd” in the Proceedings, insulting terms used to denigrate women.

The earliest appearance of “jade” dates to 1724 in the case of Penelope Adair, aka Bertless, aka Countess Spinello (what a string of pseudonyms), who was charged with grand larceny:

That he for some Reasons (which he did not think fit to mention in Court) took her another Lodging at Hoxton; she had a third Lodging in Wardrobe-Court in Carter-Lane, and a fourth at Mr. Falkenham’s in Thames-Street. So that in a little time she had cost him near a hundred Pounds. Yet, after all this, she ungratefully, and like a wicked jade as she was, had endeavoured to ruin him.1

The jade might be “vile” or “impudent” – it conjures a woman who is grasping, pushy and destructive. Here it’s used as a descriptor, after the fact, to let the judge know just what Aaron Pritchard thinks of this woman.

To be termed a “jade” is bad enough but far worse of an insult is “bawd”. That’s a particularly sexual term. An “old bawd” was understood to describe a down-on-her-luck and aged prostitute or procuress. To call a woman a “bawd” was a grievous insult as seen here in a murder prosecution from 1722:

It appeared that as the prisoner and the Deceased were scolding, the Deceased said, My Mother never was a Bawd to me: Whose Mother was? says the prisoner. I tell you mine wasn’t says the Deceased. Why Impudence, says the prisoner, I’ll throw the Tea in your Face if ye call my Mother Bawd; and with that threw Tea, Cup, and all at the Deceased, which missing her, struck Mary Fennel , the prisoner’s Maid.2

We’re all told that ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me’. That said, the evidence from the Old Bailey shows that, quite to the contrary, some insults could be deadly!

NOTES
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1. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 04 June 2013), December 1724, trial of Penelope Adair , alias Bertless, alias Countess Spinello, alias Sylvia Anna Landina (t17241204-25).
2. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 04 June 2013), September 1722, trial of Susan Higner (t17220907-64).

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May 7, 2013 · 7:30 pm

Another Crop of Students Done

Yesterday I participated in an excellent graduate student’s M.A. thesis defense (in French – now that kept me on my passively-bilingual toes). This is the third student in nine months to complete an M.A. under my direction or co-direction. It’s been an anomalous last two years with multiple students on the go, pursuing feasible and fabulous projects related to my own early modern specialty. Usually I’ll supervise one grad student every few years as more of our students are interested in modern Canadian history which definitely isn’t my strength.

Right now, I have no grad students lined up for next year and that’s all right with me. First off, most people don’t need a graduate degree in history. Second? Well, let’s just say that graduate students require a lot of work. It’s all the good kind of work: the real exercise of scholarship for which we all entered our fields. Still, I look forward to focusing on my own research and writing in the next while.

I pride myself on the fact that these three received excellent support, not just from myself but from our program!, and a chance to develop as researchers and writers. They can apply these skills inside and outside academia. That’s a vital consideration these days. Only one of the three is going on to doctoral work at the present and that’s because this student received full funding. Without that support, it’s really hard to justify the endeavour.

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May 4, 2013 · 10:07 pm

Bingeing on Books

I wrapped up my winter’s term marking just as the last of the ice melted off of the lake. While getting back into my academic writing that’s been shelved most of the past month and pulling together the reams of documentation necessary for my annual report, I’ve been reading lots. Bingeing, almost. Fiction, that is. Genre-style.

Over at Novel Readings, Rohan Maitzen has an intriguing post on binge reading. In her case, she’s doing it for a project, to review the novels of Dick Francis. When I saw mention of this on her Twitter update earlier in the week, I was intrigued. Not only because I was a big fan of Dick Francis’s work back in the day (when I was a teen, I binged on about twelve or fifteen books of his in quick succession, borrowing a stack at a go from our city library). I quickly recognized the formula (wiry, game ex-jockey who goes through some horrifying torture on his way to solving a racing-related mystery) and reveled in the easy read that predictability provided.

Today we read more about binge-watching television shows but binge-reading has its uses. Concentrated non-academic reading clears my mind of the detritus of a term of teaching. I’m not obsessing about the successes and failures of my students (or the recurrent problem some demonstrated in differentiating between hanged and hung in a discussion of early modern punishments). By reading a raft of mysteries, romances, fantasies and other completely non-work-related non-fiction, I’m attuned to words in a very different way than I was in the midst of marking. I’m thinking about what makes a story compelling and where it disappoints. I’m aware of how word choice can make or break a scene, all in a way that’s fun and energizing. I’m reminded about what I love in reading and ready to get back into writing, even my own much more sedate academic history.

Reading for teaching is diagnostic: you’re trying to find problems or help prescribe solutions. Reading for research is surgical: you’re in there to get some specific nuggets of information to fuel your own scholarship. Reading for entertainment is restorative: you’re in there to relax or explore or think in different ways. A balanced reading life includes all of these aspects. Sadly, when term’s crazy, I tend towards only the first two forms but this entertainment binge has me back in balance and just in time. Another deadline’s looming!

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April 24, 2013 · 8:35 pm

So What (I’m Still a Rock Star)

I got a professional rejection today. Or, should I say, a rejection for a professional application: a research grant. The rejection itself wasn’t very professional. In fact, it was downright dismissive.

Now, I can take away some useful lessons from this, like, hrm, I need to work more on articulating what I’m doing in the grant and beefing up the bibliography. Some other lessons aren’t terribly useful because I can’t do anything about my research record until more of the pending articles and chapters get into print. I also suspect that I won’t get this group to fund anything to do with this line of research until it’s all but done because they really just don’t get it. So unless they see many related prior publications, they’re not going to see where this is going. These are all important lessons for the academic researcher. However, the best lesson was paying attention to my own emotional reaction.

I was a bit disappointed. That was all. I read the reasons for my rejection and chuckled at the heavy-handed rhetoric while retaining the useful elements.

Most important was what I didn’t feel. I wasn’t crushed. I wasn’t even angry. Irked, maybe, at the tone, but that was all. Honestly, the first words that sprung to my mind were “So what?”

Is this rejection really going to negatively effect my research plans for the next year? No. In fact, since all of my M.A. students are graduating, I’m short of prospects. I don’t have a grad student working with me in 2013-14 or even any seniors lined up for projects. I’d have a hard time finding a student to work on the project which involves reading a lot of seventeenth-century manuscripts: not a skill you can expect to build in every undergraduate who comes along.

Without the grant money and hiring concerns, I can scale back the project from communities in three counties to one and cover all the material myself. I won’t have to devote time to hiring and training: I can simply segue into this project when I’ve wrapped up the next chapter on my to-do list and that’s just what I’ll do.

So what? I’m still a research rock star (or maybe, more realistically, a wedding singer? Whatever!). I got my rock moves and I don’t need that grant.

So for all those other great academics who’ve also been rejected this grant season, P!nk says it better than I could:

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April 13, 2013 · 1:05 pm

To Boldly Go: Historical Prospects of the Old Bailey Online

It’s ten years since The Old Bailey Online rolled out and what a glorious ten years it’s been. The Old Bailey Online (or OBO) provides, online, the complete texts of printed accounts dealing with criminal trials at London’s General Criminal Court circa 1674-1913. That’s almost 200,000 records!

I’ve been a fan since the very early days: looking back through my teaching dossier, I know that I stumbled upon the site in 2003 and began teaching with it that year. The website enabled students to run statistical searches and see, even tweak, the results immediately – a powerful tool when learning to do quantitative history. In the decade since, I’ve learned to love the site for much more than its awesome pedagogical power: it’s become a linchpin in my own historical research. Looking forward, I can’t see a time when I won’t find the OBO to be a vital historical resource. Why? The genius lies in the source’s searchability. Any trail you choose to blaze, you can follow!

The unsung heroes of historical research are those who provide finding aids. Whether they`re calendars of collections or indices or what-have-you, archives or even publications without some sort of search function are daunting piles to work through. A researcher can lose herself in the task of simply wading through dozens to hundreds of volumes, boxes or rolls. The early days of computerization gave researchers a few glimmers of hope but, even so, there was nothing easy about consulting one set of books to identify the catalogue number of the source you were interested in, another book to correlate the catalogue number with the microfilm reel number and then, only then, trot off to the microforms room to request the reel to run in the machine to read the book you originally wanted to consult.

The genius of the OBO is that, by integrating so many levels of searchability, almost any question you want to ask you can pursue in robust ways. Are you interested in a specific individual, whether as a scholar or a genealogist? The Old Bailey Online can be searched by name. Are you interested in seeing how many women were put on trial for breaking the peace in the nineteenth century? You can find that out. (There are 963 items returned when I search those parameters, 641 with guilty verdicts. Of course, some are duplicates as mu) Or let’s say that you’re interested in seeing how language changed in the time – great! The Old Bailey Online lets you search the entire text by keywords. There are place and map functions – do you want to track eighteenth-century criminal behaviour in the streets and by the parishes? Go right ahead!

The Old Bailey Online is more than just an excellent tool for historical research: it’s fostered an amazing community of scholars who’ve come together at conferences, who share their work online and whose publications citing the OBO add up to an amazing bibliography growing all the time.

Have I got you excited about the Old Bailey Online? Great: Click here to get started.
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March 18, 2013 · 10:24 pm

I Used To Believe in Renewal

I just saw another tweet scroll by commenting on how tenure-track jobs are scare because older profs are hanging onto their jobs. Whether that’s because they believe they need to (to build up their pensions, etc.) or simply because they can (people are staying healthier longer and mandatory retirement’s mostly disappeared) isn’t the issue, here. It’s the belief that if only these older professors retired that new jobs would open up that has me shaking my head because from what I’ve seen in the last seven or eight years, it’s simply not true. At least not at most institutions. Sure, some of the rich privates and elite publics have healthy endowments, but even they’re playing by new rules these days.

Don’t get me wrong: there used to be a time when departments and programs could count on faculty renewal. Professor A retires or departs, leaving the department short one [insert faculty specialty here]. Department files a request with the dean to conduct a search to hire a new [insert faculty specialty here] in order to sustain the program. Permission is granted, a job ad is drafted: applications are received, assessed, etc. Soon, Professor B is part of the department faculty and all is well. That’s a pattern that I saw operating for years, from my childhood days as a faculty brat right through into my own academic career.

These days, when a faculty member departs, all bets are off. Continue reading →

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February 21, 2013 · 2:09 pm

“The Feminine Mystique”: Fifty Years On

Can you believe it’s fifty years since “The Feminine Mystique” came out? I couldn’t and I’m almost as old as the book!

I’m not a modern historian or an American historian, so I’d never had cause to read the book before. I’d read selections from “The Feminine Mystique” over the years but never sat down to read the entire work until this 50th anniversary edition appeared. I was inspired by seeing Emily Bazelon’s post on her own reading at Doublex. The book is well worth digging into, particularly in this edition which includes multiple epilogues and introductory materials from earlier editions. They provide snapshots of how Friedan’s book was seen at launch, ten, twenty and many more years after. This reiterates the enormous impact that her book had on readers then and later on as well as upon her own life, including her work as a co-founder of NOW.

However, the meat of the book remains the text itself and “The Feminine Mystique” stands up well as a readable work, even half a century on. Friedan’s perceptiveness in describing ‘the problem without a name’ is bolstered by material from her own research, interviews and countless other contemporary sources. Where contemporary society encouraged men to pursue higher education, careers and grow in fulfilling ways, the mystique, bolstered by some cherry-picked elements from Freudian psychology and functionalist philosophies, urged women to subordinate all of those elements to their gender-mandated and absolutely certain fulfillment as a wife and mother. The problem was that so many women were driven to despair by the frustrations that they encountered in what was marketed to them as the ultimate in personal fulfillment and rewarding feminine duty. The mystique also contributed to a precipitous decline in the age of marriage across the American middle class. Higher education for women was condemned as counter to their natural and rewarding mission at home so that even women’s colleges began to step back from the academic programs they’d fought so hard to offer in favour of helping women prepare for their “Mrs.” degree path.

The book lays out a damning case for how the mystique ran counter to the previous trends in American middle class culture where women’s freedom and initiative had been celebrated. More damningly, Friedan shows how the mystique was endlessly useful to marketers in the burgeoning era of consumerism as well as their peers in the worlds of magazines, education and so on. Margaret Mead comes off rather badly for pushing the mystique’s key message to urge women to embrace domestic service to husband and children early and totally while she, herself, did no such thing.

The book is flawed in my mind by an excessive reliance upon psychoanalysis. Many chapters focus in detail on this subject beginning with a long background on Freud’s own problematic relationships with and understanding of women to page after page where Friedan uses psychoanalysis to diagnose problems in American housewives and their families all deriving from the toxic powers of the mystique. It is also relentlessly middle class: the world of the working class is almost non-existent except when evoked as servants!

I also couldn’t accept her dismissals of homosexuality, particularly in men, and autism in children as consequences of pathological mother-love run amuck or improperly applied but, as I read those sections, I knew that she was approaching these topics using the thinking of the time. It’s impossible to expect a book from 1963 to speak with the voice of 2013 all the time. The strength of “The Feminine Mystique” is that it evokes the past so vividly you’ll think you’re reading a modern history until you’re jolted back into reality by those occasional tone-deaf moments.

Occasionally you might feel a deep sense of depression as you read about the ways in which marketing heavily reinforced the mystique’s domestic mission. Friedan’s story about how many women attempted to fit the mold and failed is also sobering. No wonder the Stones did so well with “Mother’s Little Helper”!

If you want to understand the U.S. middle class culture of the 1950s and 1960s as how it played out in the media, medical, educational and marketing industries as well as in the personal stories of countless women, you should pick up Friedan’s book and get to reading! (And follow me at Goodreads where I’d initially posted a version of this review.)

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