I received word today that my godmother’s book, The Papal No: A Comprehensive Guide to the Vatican’s Refusal of Women’s Ordination, has made it into the top 4% of Amazon sellers.

And it’s not even partly because of the fact that it’s the first book that includes my name in the acknowledgements. It’s a thorough and readable historical examination of the Church’s position, and well worth a read by all of you who are concerned with this sort of issue. I’m rather proud of her, and also proud of the fact that she’s already at work on her next book.

Update: It also won first place in the Gender Issues category at this year’s Catholic Press Awards.

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There’s an discussion going on over at CultureCat, where Clancy has responded to Ayelet Waldman’s essay that both Lauren and I quoted from. I’d be participating if I weren’t up against a deadline.

Clancy’s done far more work with pro-choice and feminist rhetoric than I have, and she makes a solid point in saying that using real body terms such as "kill" and "child" reinforce the pro-life stance. (And she's also right in pointing out that the pro-life movement desperately needs a Lakoff.)

How rhetorically effective is it to say, "yes, it's killing (in some cases), but I should have the legal right to do it because I'm acting on my values and my personal truth"? I can already hear chilling, flippant responses from some who lack sympathy for the position, along the lines of the "who among the unwanted will be the next to be declared disposable" line of thinking Kissling cites, only far less sincere: "So I can kill gays and lesbians because to do so is to act on my values? Yay!" And exactly how will such a shades-of-grey pro-choice rhetoric be more "relevant to the contemporary world"?

I won’t argue with that, since it’s exactly what would happen. But my question is: How is that any different from what’s being said now anyway by pro-choice advocates? Has the rhetorical tack that we’ve been taking - removing body language, "terminating" "clusters of cells" - worked? (I’ll leave the issue of honoring women’s truths out of this, because the main pragmatic concern here is keeping abortion legal.) I’m not sure. Abortion is legal now, but more people are dying every day to keep it that way and our rights are steadily being eroded.
Pro-choice rhetoric suffers from the same problem copyfight rhetoric does: polarization. In each area, two diametrically opposed camps develop symbiotic opposition, feeding off of each other's discourse and further distancing everyone involved. There is no middle ground in the arena, and that leaves no room for resolution. It also situates the participants in a smackdown environment where somebody eventually has to lose.
Ayelet’s essay occupies that rare middle ground, placing abortion within the context of real, living, feeling, bleeding bodies. It calls it what it is, and explains why it is absolutely, irrevocably, a necessary right. The Clinton administration made steps toward this same stance with its abortion and education legislation, by embracing the "Safe, Legal, and Rare" rhetoric. Abortion rates dropped. Now that we’re back to a more polarized debate, rates and tensions are higher again.
Middle ground is a somewhat utopian hope, since extreme advocates of either side will never come around. I also think it’s an achievable hope for a moderate majority. How we get there ... that, I don’t know.

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Ayelet Waldman discusses the need to couch pro-choice rhetoric within real language of the body, life, and death. She ends with some thoughts about the current polarized discourse:

To be relevant to the contemporary world, to be valid, the pro-choice movement must listen to pregnant women. We must listen to the woman and value her words. A woman who is unwillingly pregnant, whose pregnancy at, say, 10 weeks, is nothing more than a source of desperation, of misery, knows one truth and we must respect it and honor it. A pregnant woman whose 4 month-old fetus has Down’s Syndrome knows another truth, and we must respect that, too. A pregnant woman whose batterer kicks her in the stomach, trying to end her baby’s life, knows another truth. Respecting the truths of these pregnant women allows us to deal in shades of grey, to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of the black and white.

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Another thing I've meant to comment on since summer is Lauren's posts about the Vatican's stance on women's issues. I kept thinking I'd have time to write a decent post on it, but that hasn't happened in four months. I do, however, have time to point out Deborah Halter's The Papal No: A Comprehensive Guide to the Vatican's Rejection of Women's Ordination. It deals with many of the questions Lauren raised. Halter is a Religious Studies lecturer at Loyola New Orleans and a past chair of the Women's Ordination Conference. She's also my godmother.

Now back to the grant proposal. All that's left is the methodologies and budget sections, and then I can ship it to my collaborator.

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This artifact of my great-grandma's recipe collection was passed on to me years ago, and I ran across it again while packing. The recipes are old-fashioned, interesting, and often scary, but I'm more interested in the bits of wisdom imparted at the back of the book. Behold:

What the Right Napery Means
The best meal is a disappointment if the table looks unattractive. The basis of charming service is the linen — it must be smooth, shining, clean — with the refreshing appearance that only Linit gives.

The simplest meal is “good enough for company” — when the table is right. With fresh pretty napery — a flower or so for the center-piece, and carefully served food — unexpected guests have no terrors.

For centuries, the linen chest, and future home-making, have been synonymous. The hope chest and the Bride will always endure. Our daughters are destined for home-making. Young though they may seem, girls of all ages can be interested in correct table setting — the care of napery — the acquiring of linen that some day will grace a real home — the doll’s house grown up!

Teach her to hem table linen — make doilies and runners to use with her doll’s dishes. Let her wash, Linit and iron them herself. Teach her that lovely things last if they are cared for. Show her your best linens — teach her to love them. If you care properly for them now, they will be hers later — and her children’s children.

Plant in her that precious germ of conscious womanliness that later will help her to be a true home-maker. (108)

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So yesterday was my 10,000th Day. It had become apparent that High Adventure wasn't in the cards (or in my checkbook, although that's becoming an adventure in itself) so I took Mister Boyfriend's suggestion and and headed off to the baths of Hot Springs for a bit of girliness.

I've been having massages since I was about sixteen, but I had never been to the baths. Figuring that one's 10,000th day demanded a new experience, I booked both a bath and a massage (for a surprisingly reasonable sum) and took off on the hour drive from Little Rock. The Arlington Hotel is the grandest hotel and bath on Bathhouse Row, and they've obviously worked hard to restore and maintain the 1920s architecture, both in the hotel proper and in the baths. That's where I went*.

Since I've always been a bath person (as opposed to a shower person), it was a foregone conclusion that I would be a sucker for the baths. They put you in a tub of very very hot water that has what looks like a 50-year-old outboard motor stuck in it, only instead of blades it has tubes that shoot out compressed air. (Swear to God, the thing really should say Evinrude on the side.) The whole contraption is plugged into the wall. Your first thought is "I'm a-gonna die of electrocution." Your next thought, a full five minutes later, is "I don't care. What an excellent way to go." You stay in the bath for 20 minutes, sipping the very very hot water they give you to sip, and you become very happy - so happy that you are inclined to protest when the very nice attendant named Annie comes to fish you out.

But you get out anyway, because the next step is to sit in your own tiny private steamroom and sip very cold water while the 130 degree air** billows around you and the hot marble seat gently roasts your bottom. The maximum stay allowed in the steam room is five minutes, and you stay every second of them. Then you lie down so you can be wrapped entirely in hot towels and have a cold towel placed on your face, and you stay there until you start to feel kind of soggy, and then it is time for the massage.

It was like they opened up a plug on my big toe (or possibly it was in my belly button) and drained out all the Extreme Grownupness of this summer and replaced it with fabulously clear water. I was so happy and light by the time they got done.

So I proceeded to McClard's Bar-B-Q for dinner. I've been going there all my life, first with the parents and then by myself and with friends. I once introduced a German exchange student to Southern barbeque there. I've gone through phases of ordering - when I was a teenager, it was always a chopped beef sandwich and fries, no slaw because I was scared of slaw. Then I went through a long while of tamale spreads, until a couple of years ago when I became a devotee of the chopped beef plate. Last night, I reverted to the tamale spread, which is a rather curious beast: a layer of fritos and a layer of tamales, followed by successive layers of baked beans, chopped beef, onions, cheddar cheese, and barbeque sauce. And since I am now not only not scared of slaw but on a constant quest for the Slaw Epitome, I ordered up a side of their very excellent slaw. There was no way I could eat all of it - half of everything came home in a box, and I'm finishing it off now as breakfast while typing this.

Then I stopped by Mister Boyfriend's on the way home and watched Mr. Deeds, which I've never seen all of before, and then I went home and slept for 11 hours.

I feel much better now.

*In spite of the grandeur, they're very nice and not at all snotty. They'll even valet park a Kia for you.
**Yes, I am the sort of person who will sit in a 130 degree room in summer in Arkansas.

Are you happy now, Michelle? (Just so long as you know I would have written this anyway. Ha!)

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I wrote something a while back in Scott's comments about pulp fiction girls and true confessions rags. Yesterday's post got me thinking about the topic again. Here's what originally got me started: Scott, writing in Serious Victorianist mode about the Fallen Woman archetype in Victorian lit, said:

Their fall is not the result, then, of the machinations of some libertine seducer; it's the result of a series of internal, individual failures. ... Dingley's arguments, however, suggest a greater consideration for the environmental causes of the woman's fall.

It's nature versus nurture, to some extent. Is the fallen woman constructed by her environment or is she inherently corrupt?

It is the latter position that dominates much of the public discussion (and especially the more evangelical sermons) on the subject for the 100 years between the founding of the Magdalen and the emergence of the tremendously popular reclamation movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. The fallen woman is a social pariah. She is dangerous, libidinous, and predatory. She corrupts all those around her, and she is to be avoided at all costs. Her path as set, and representations of her, like Hogarth's can serve as cautionary tales.

So I was thinking, isn't the 20th century corollary to all this found in pulp fiction covers and True Confessions magazines? Pulp fiction covers concerning women seem to focus on the she-devil within - with titles like Lust Is A Woman, Sin on Wheels and Dime-A-Dance Queen, how could they not? These are inherently lusty creatures - "dangerous, libidinous and predatory" - who lure men down the path of sin. Prostitution (or at least promiscuity) is inherent nature, and is even seen as destiny.

On the other hand, the True Confessions genre deals with the flip side of the coin - good girls led astray, or who merely perceive themselves as "dirty girls." Their sinfulness comes about accidentally, or due to untoward circumstances - i.e., nurture. There's always remorse, guilt and repentance. Florence King wrote true confessions before moving on to her better-known novels and historical essays. Her first published piece was "I Committed Adultery in A Diabetic Coma." In Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, she details her initial survey of the genre, ending with:

What really mattered in all the stories was not what actually happened but what the heroine believed she had done, or what she seemed to have done in the eyes of other people. Once in a while a heroine went out and got plastered and fucked, but it was never worth it, never. Every plot was constructed on a solid foundation of free-floating female guilt." (245)

It seems to me that the Magdalen operated on a premise of female guilt combined with religious guilt. Of course, their goals surrounding public hygiene were noble - I certainly don't begrudge them that. (But I never cease to be fascinated by organized religion's demonization of female sexuality.) Besides concerning themselves with venereal health, they also contributed to general cleanliness. As I told Scott, I think it's interesting that the Magdalen put these women to work doing laundry as rehabilitation exercise - impure women/dirty girls redeeming themselves by cleaning. Laundry, and the boiling of sheets particularly, is nothing if not purification. (As is cleaning up the everyday impurities of the home. This was an age of chamberpots and mysterious diseases, after all.) Was the metaphorical supposed to transform the personal, perhaps?

Also, now I'm thinking about how traditional "women's work" is all about purification. And the fact that there are fallen women, but no fallen men. Good little girls are clean, both sexually and otherwise; males who are "all boy" are lusty and grimy. And the old observation that girls who sleep around are sluts, but boys who sleep around are just sowing their oats.

Scott also mentioned that the Magdalen sheared incoming inmates' hair, possibly for hygiene reasons. But I think one could argue that this is symbolically significant as well - woman's glory and all that. Shearing women of an essential, wild bit of femaleness might make them easier to control. Look at all the pulp fiction girls - wild, long hair, preferably of some strong shade - red or blonde or black. Cutting all that off means no messy bed hair, just a clean, innocent-looking face. If you don't look lusty, then you must not be lusty. The external informs (reforms?) the internal.

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Digital Pulp Fiction postcards reside here. The site also features bad boys and gay and lesbian pulp postcards, amongst a host of others. The titles of these things are every bit as good as the pictures: The Gay Way. Tomcat in Tights. Sinful Cowboy. She Got What She Wanted. Hypno-Sin. Dykes on Bikes! (Wasn't that last one made into a movie?)

PlanetOut also has a lovely archived piece, "The Heydey of Lesbian Pulp Novels."

And in related news, Halley has blogged Prayer Panties.

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