LisaHistory Blog

I am considering dividing people into Long Viewers and Short Viewers. (After all, there are two types of people -- those who divide people into two types of people, and those who don't.)

Long Viewers would be people who take the historical past into consideration as they move through daily life. Short Viewers don't. I teach both American and European history (Western Civ and History of England). In my modern U.S. history class, I give students this cartoon to discuss:

This semester I've gotten some good discussion, with some students supporting social Darwinistic activities of the U.S., and others being much more cynical. I like to have some objectivity, even though Howard Zinn says it's my obligation to share my views, since I am a Long Viewer (an issue for another entry!).


So today I am reading Bill Bryson's book on Australia, In a Sunburned Country. He and a companion drive 10 hours to get to Alice Springs, in the middle of the Australian outback, only to find Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's and a large K-mart. His companion remarks, "You Yanks have a lot to answer for, you know". He wrote,

He was right. We do. We have created a philosophy of retailing that is totally without aesthetics and totally irrestible. And now we box these places up and ship them to the far corners of the world. Visually, almost every arrestingly regrettable thing in Alice Springs was a product of American enterprise, from people who couldn't know that they had helped to drain the distinctiveness from an outback town and doubtless wouldn't see it that way anyway. Nor come to that, I daresay, would most of the shoppers of Alice Springs, who were no doubt delighted to get lots of free parking and a crack at Martha Stewart towels and shower curtains. What a sad and curious age we live in.

I like this passage in particular because it emphasizes the American lack of the Long View, and the fact that the shoppers themselves are part of the whole sordid thing. Enjoy your Big Mac.

Really, it's a fascinating field. And, like all subjects, its history is NOT one of primitive past methods yielding to modern progress. That's the Major Myth of History. We westerners love the idea that everything and everyone in the past was uninformed, non-scientific, and backward, in the dark about basic information and deep intellectual ideas.

Not at all. There are any number of items of information from the past that are equal to or superlative to what we've got now. The history of contraception and menstruation provides excellent examples.

Current approaches to birth control sanctioned by modern society include:

Condoms
Condoms are expensive and embarrassing to purchase. If you've got latex allergies, you can use the non-latex ones, which break and slip.

Standard birth control pills and patches
These contain artificial hormones and health risks, especially with the newer versions. Another example of older being better.

New no-period pills
I predict these will have horrifying health impacts. They are currently marketed by Wyeth as Anya or Lybrel . Some feminists are actually touting this as the ultimate freedom from being female. So much for power periods, a connection to nature, and paganism as feminist goals. The FDA is being amazingly wimpy about safety. There simply are no long-term studies yet. And there are signs that it will be prescribed as a mood enhancer -- it's already seen as a treatment for PMS. The lack of skepticism (there is a litte bit) is worrisome to me.

Diaphragms
In this country, these require a gynecological exam and a doctor's prescription.

Abstinence
Uh huh. The Virginity Pledge movement has done a lot to make sure that when teens DO have sex, they aren't using birth control.

But lesser known methods are out there and, guess what? Many of them are pretty old.
Just as an example, why don't more of our women today know about:

Natural contraception
Not the "rhythm method" where one counts days (woefully inaccurate) but scientific work with ones own body. Here's a current BBC article.

Other barriers
The contraceptive sponge dates back to ancient Egypt at least, where women soaked sea sponges in the lactic acid from acacia trees to make spermicidal sponges. Removed from the market recently for a weird FDA lab inspection reason, the Today Sponge has now returned. But in my neck of the woods, I only found one drug store carrying it. Canadians have access to a much wider variety of choices in general. These include cervical caps, far more convenient than diaphragms, and available without a prescription in various sizes. I never even heard of Lea's Shield till I stumbled on a Canadian website.

Items not around anymore
100 years ago, at the beginning of the birth control movement led by Margaret Sanger and others, there were various types of pessaries (items that could be inserted and held inside the vagina). At least one was a combination pessary/sheath which could be rolled up to form a cap or unrolled to form a washable, reusable condom. (My students, accustomed to disposable everything, often cannot see how soap and warm water can solve icky problems.)

Methods for helping with menstruation have a similar set-up. In the average U.S. drugstore, you have two choices for dealing with flow.

Most people only know about:

Pads
Cumbersome and annoying, even with the strips,they don't hold much and are bulky. The less-bulky ones are filled with an absorbent gel that has health risks (same as with diapers containing it) and can cause allergic reactions and drying skin.

Tampons
Toxic Shock Syndrome is caused by the super-absorbent materials in tampons. All commercial tampons are also bleached.

Why don't more of our women know about:
Menstrual cups like the Diva Cup, and the Keeper (American) are reusable and effective. The design for the Diva Cup goes back to the 1930s, but the use of cups goes back much further. Again, Canadians have more options in this area. Recently, Instead Softcup came on the market (another old design), but again, can only be found occasionally.

Molly Ivins, one of my all-time favorite columnists, died recently at the age of 62 (NY Times article). That sucks.

Ivins rarely stinted words, and often had her early works edited by people who couldn't handle her forthright style. Her column ran in hundreds of papers.

Here's her last column, on exiting Iraq. Also see tributes in The Nation.

An assistant dean had to remove his website about Mormon polygamy from the Brigham Young University server, but he relocated it quickly. So much for a university keeping true to its name by exploring the broadest possible range of topics using critical thinking and intellectual fervor.

In the 1870s, Emmeline Wells, suffragist and activist, was able to publish her own magazine with other like-minded people in Utah, and discuss subjects like polygamy. A wife in a plural marriage, Wells believed that the institution allowed the wives more time to explore their own interests, without being tied to a single household and children if that wasn't her inclination. It made the man less a center of the women's lives. The movement against polygamy in the U.S. became so strong that the some of the first female voters in this country were deprived of that right in an effort to force the eradication of plural marriage in Utah.

In recent years, however, polygamy scandals and the perverted authority of polygamous husbands like Warren Jeffs have put the whole issue in an even worse light, and made it difficult for students to understand why anyone would have defended plural marriage. How unfortunate. I wonder if this is just a case of the victors writing the history, or whether the "Survivor" reality-TV inanity is creeping into our perception of the historical past.

... is today's metrosexual. I was so glad to discover that!

In the 18th century, fops were men who overdressed, behaved with overly sophisticated manners, acted in an often effeminate way, and spent most of their time conversing with women on issues not typically of concern to men of the day. Many students of history assumed they were homosexual. Sometimes, but usually not, and what's important is that they weren't considered to be gay at a time when sodomy laws could get you executed.

Thinking this as I watched Prince at the Super Bowl last night. I've recently had students tell me they think so much has changed since the 17th and 18th centuries, when men had to dress extravagantly to capture female attention. (This because demographically there were more women than men in the population, thus men had to visually appeal to women in order to compete for mates.) I was thinking, "I should show them some examples from the 1970s, when men wore Afro's, disco suits, platform shoes, shiny jewelry".

Then there was Prince, in his high heels, vaguely 18th-century cut jacket, and head scarf.

I also found a film clip on YouTube that shows the typical 18th century fop, from The Scarlet Pimpernel.

So many events move into our concept of the past and are never heard from again. They are referred to in support of other ideas, new points of view, "remembered" as history.

Today one of the first articles I've seen that refused to permit this was published, because of an upcoming U.S. study on the Exxon Valdez. The Exxon Valdez was an oil tanker that spilled tons into pristine Alaska waters in 1989, a spill subject to years of "clean up". A new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that the sludge is declining at a much slower rate than expected, and is continuing a low level of contamination the affects wildlife.

Just this week, Exxon posted record profits.