Hubert Harrison at Temple

At the conference I met Jeffrey B. Perry, whose work is on the history and consequences of white supremacism. Jeffrey is currently doing a lecture circuit with his talk and slide presentation on “Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918.” He is at UMass-Boston this afternoon and will be at Temple University in Philadelphia on Thursday. See his website for details.

Although I’ve got some self-taught familiarity with the more famous players in the history of critical race theory, I had not heard of Hubert Harrison until running into Jeffrey between conference sessions. The Columbia UP page for Jeffrey’s book on Harrison offers this compelling capsule:

Hubert Harrison was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist platform associated with Malcolm X.

The foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, Harrison was also the founder of the “New Negro” movement, the editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. He was a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), a freethinker and early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, a leading public intellectual, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture.

Jeffrey has also edited and introduced a collection of Harrison’s writings among numerous other scholarly contributions. His is clearly an extraordinary labor of love and honor.

We met up when my early Sunday morning panel was letting out and his mid Sunday morning talk was about to begin. I was struck by his passion and immediate self-identification as an independent, working-class scholar. I was also struck by his assumption that he had been placed disadvantageously on the program because he was an outsider bringing unwelcome knowledge. He saw a pattern of marginalization there. In contrast, I thought my paper had gotten dumped into the Sunday whatsits (Sunday is when most conference participants leave, so those panels are often loosely organized and sparsely attended) because I had submitted it solo and it hadn’t matched up at a glance with the main themes of the conference.

I suggested to Jeffrey that putting together a coherent panel and targeting it to the conference rubric might be a way to achieve a more favorable placement and reception for his important work. His dismissal of this unsolicited advice was firm and monosyllabic.

I’m glad to know about Hubert Harrison and grateful for Jeffrey’s work.

Infinity and the ‘total institution’

The reference was tickling the edge of my brain so I tracked it down. OK, cool – here’s what I meant:

Each official goal lets loose a doctrine, with its own inquisitors and its own martyrs, and within institutions there seems to be no natural check on the license of easy interpretation that results. Every institution must not only make some effort to realize its official aims but must also be protected, somehow, from the tyranny of a diffuse pursuit of them, lest the exercise of authority be turned into a witch hunt. — Erving Goffman, Asylums (1961)

The temptation is to look at this and say, Yeesh! Those dang institutions. Goffman’s more subtle point is always that these are things we do to ourselves.

Meme vaccine

Over at the really excellent Neuroanthropology, where I always learn something, Daniel has been kind enough to include some of my posts in his Wednesday roundups. (Dude, time to get me on the blogroll!) I’d been meaning to reciprocate and the occasion comes with this week’s links to my and Larval Subjects’ posts on memes.

If this is a topic that interests you, please go and also read Daniel’s post Engaging & Dispatching Memetics, which reviews and links Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s discussion of the topic in his book Engaging Anthropology. The short version of the critique is that memetics is pop anthropology and it’s more complicated than that; but saying so must then invite a more comprehensive and holistic anthropological practice that is also sensitive to getting the word out publicly. That is, the meme meme needs to be shouldered aside in popular appropriations of anthropology by something better. Daniel thinks that with some tweaking of the brand neuroanthropology can fill that bill, and I’m all for it.

Pick your poison

Like most people I’ve been glued to the health care debate, which has predictably turned into yet another of our great national Rorschach tests. I have no great competence in this area so what follows count only as stray thoughts for further discussion.

The number that gets thrown around for the cost of a government health care package is $1 trillion, which is obviously a lot of money; and the question is, where’s that money going to come from. With government, the answer is either taxes or debt. The funny thing to me is that the side of the debate opposed to this often talk as if this would be brand new money to spend on health care. All of a sudden health care is going to cost a trillion bucks more than before.

In reality, as I understand it, we’re already spending that trillion. And the question is not whether we’re going to spend it or not going forward (it should be, but there are wicked wiggly worms and real live ‘death panels’ in that can). The question is whether we’re going to spend it out of incomes and private debt in the form of insurance premiums and direct payments for care, or whether we’re going to spend it in taxes and public debt which then go to pay for the same services. So at this basic level the debate is not about what health care costs but about who’s going to have their hands in our pockets for it, the government or the health care industry.

In principle it ought to be possible to work out with some precision whether the inefficiencies of government or the profit-taking of big business divert more of our money from the basic purpose of keeping us healthy, and whether private or public payments and debts are more cost effective. The idea to run a government option side-by-side with private insurance would actually be a great lab to test this. But here’s where the Rorschach test comes in, because the U.S.American psyche is pretty evenly divided among those for whom Government = Big Scary and those for whom Business = Big Scary. As long as those buttons are available to push, anything like productive national debate of health care policy is unlikely, and what we’ll end up with is the usual kludgy product of interest-group horse trading.

UPDATE: Great survey and analysis of the difference between individual and social insurance here.

Wanted: Prof Whisperer

A couple of remarks by Profacero here and olderwoman at scatterplot are coming together in my head with many such from over the years, to the effect that establishing authority in the classroom is a different challenge for women, race/ethnic minorities, and other stigmatized groups than for white men.

This is now an orthodoxy in the liberal academy, so like all orthodoxies I’m going to try to trouble it here. But it’s also true. It’s undeniable that since Columbus us white boys enjoy an entry privilege as authority figures, especially if we’re ruggedly handsome, brilliant, charismatic and naturally great-smelling like me. A big chunk of this is visually inherent as a function of habits of symbolic ranking and emotional identification. It’s also undeniable that for some fractions of our audiences only white men will do as authority figures, as the underbelly of this last election showed well enough.

It’s important for navigational purposes to understand where these structural reefs and shoals are, but agency at any particular moment is about where we can go, not about where we can’t. Dynamiting Scylla and Charybdis is a worthy project for special occasions but trying to do that daily will wear you out quick, which is one of the worst compounding effects of deprivileging. So in a practical, quotidian sense the question is how authority works under less-than-ideal conditions.

Here I think it’s helpful to come at the question a little bit sideways from the usual focus on qualifying privilege and disqualifying stigma. Things look pretty desperate from that standpoint. We see white guys living it up in the lap of esteemed luxury and ‘others’ struggling, and it looks like the single effective variable is whiteguyness. Looks like we’re stuck with the exhausting dynamite campaign. But wait – what do we do with all the white guys who struggle in the classroom? And what do we do with the race/ethnic/disabled/women/etc. who get in the classroom and kick some ass, without blowing up everything in sight or even breaking a sweat? Don’t we all know some of each of those? Maybe it’s possible to factor out the structural race/gender variable and get comparable positive and negative results across categorical populations! Jeepers, a playground for agency!

The problem with how these discussions go is that they tend to be informed by a lot of reciprocal ignorance and mythology. It’s well-established at this point that hetero white guys don’t know squat about what it’s like to be black/female/queer/etc. We drift around in a happy daze at the gravitic null-point of all social stratifications, unburdened and oblivious to the burdens of others. And relatively speaking, which is all I ever do, this is true. But as Goffman tells us at some length in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, it’s also relatively speaking false. The ideal, unspoiled, unstigmatized identity imagined by disgruntled white-guy voyeurs is a mythic construct not embodied by any real person (this is, for example, the founding joke of “American Dad”). Being a white guy helps a lot in some ways, but it looks better from outside than inside; and if you’ve never been one, you’ll have to take my word for that. We’re all vulnerable in big ways and small, Goffman says (Foucault agrees), and each social interaction is the opportunity for anxious and reciprocal attempts to deploy/negate strengths and conceal/discover weaknesses.

Students looking for an edge against a professor just bump on down the checklist until they find something that will work for them. Race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability make things easy, but it’s a poor strategic interactant who stops there. Nor is whiteguyness much help, after the moment of entry, when there are other white guys around to cancel that advantage out. We’re a dime a dozen, and when we think things are at stake we rip on each other something fierce. We know each others’ weaknesses. So when white guys succeed in the classroom, it’s helped us at first to be white guys but then it almost instantly hasn’t, and we’ve had to deploy some other strength. What is that?

As olderwoman perceptively noted, classroom success comes to those who “carry privilege, a presumption of competence and authority with them into the classroom.” This is the ‘other strength’ that intercepts the stigma game. She ascribes this to upper-class white men, but notice that what’s being described here is not categorical identity but what Bourdieu calls disposition: an acquired scheme of perception, thought and action. Now, categorical identity is still significant because the dispositions of competence and authority are native products of the rich white boy habitus, and are interactively recognized as such. The nature of white boy privilege is therefore a kind of symbolic capital that is enforced through symbolic violence or its threat. It is in this sense that olderwoman is entirely correct that “[p]eople whose status is unquestioned can afford to be Mr. Cool with students,” because the threat of symbolic violence is understood and gratitude for its forebearance is ritually extracted. And this dynamic is what allows symbolic capital to be converted to economic and social capital, in the form of access to careers, advancement, esteem. Thus structure is produced and reproduced in everyday relations.

If we let it. Here’s where I agree with Marx that our conscious human history has not started yet. The dynamic of dispositions and habitus I have described above does not take us very far past the pack behaviors of dogs. In this connection it’s fascinating to watch the Dog Whisperer. Like the Nanny with children and parents, Cesar Millan’s whole insight is that when subordinates are getting unruly it’s not a follower problem, it’s a leader problem. The show gets old quick because it’s always the same schtick – come into a house, find owners fretting about ‘problem’ dog, discover the dog’s just confused about who’s in charge, train owners how to be in charge. Bingo bongo. And the real problem quickly emerges: white, black, man, woman, straight, gay, lotsa lotsa people have no idea how to be in charge of themselves, let alone others, even just dogs!, and anxious yapping ensues.

Cesar teaches the acquirable big dog skills of authority and competence to folks who for one reason or another perceive, think and act like little dogs. That is, he backfills the dispositions that make white guys winners in the big everyone stigma game, and alpha white guys winners in the little white guy stigma game. There’s nothing magical or mysterious about it, either. “Cesar counsels people to calmly, assertively, and consistently give their dogs rules, boundaries, and limitations to establish themselves as solid pack leaders and to help correct and control unwanted behavior.” That’s what the Nanny says about dealing with kids too. That’s what Obama did in this last campaign.

Calm assertion; clear, consistent boundaries. Not grand gestures, not puffery, not loud yapping. Those say ‘not trusting my own authority and competence, overcompensating’. Not negotiation, pleading or resentful disengagement. Those say ‘power vacuum here, please fill it’. Cesar thinks everyone can learn this. I hope so, because I don’t think we get over these pack-power games and get to human together until we do. And until we do, all of those categorical accounts of why things aren’t going right for us, even when they’re true, are little more than theodicies.

Grading – the curve

Interesting old thread popped back up at Lumpenprofessoriat on grading on the curve. The original post offers an elegant way of calculating a curve. Recently, a mom commented with questions about whether her kid was being graded fairly by a high school physics teacher.

Mass higher ed has done its marketing well. The idea that education really matters for life chances has percolated down to many families at this point. Grades sort the levels of accomplishment, so of course grades are what matter. Higher grades must be good. Intervention may be needed to make sure Junior is getting the best grade possible.

But what do grades mean? It’s obvious, I hope, that top grades are meaningless if everyone gets them — unless there’s some very, very dense evidence that excellence has been achieved across the board. Princeton and Harvard (“where the best students in the country get the worst education in the country”) may be able to give everyone A’s on this basis, but most schools can’t. Sorting has to happen. A curve, in particular, starts with the assumption that everyone is not and cannot be excellent. (This is why I think they’re immoral.) You can tweak a curve to get higher or lower distributions, but the point of it is to sort student performances into bad, fair, good, better and best.

As I said over at Lumpenprofessoriat, any competent teacher can sort student performances into bad, fair, good, better and best. If you can’t trust a teacher to do that, ‘fairness’ is the least of your worries. The grading system, whatever it is, is just a pass-through for the evaluative expertise of the teacher. After a whole semester of work and interaction I should – and do – know where a particular student ranks in relation to standards and other students. This is every teacher’s professional responsibility, whether we do it directly or invent a fiddly system to do it for us.

I feel for any parent who cares about their baby’s success. Sometimes mismatches, miscommunications or injustices do occur, and some (self!) advocacy is appropriate. But mostly what’s happening is pretty ordinary, in a this-is-the-rest-of-your-life kind of way. So if a student can’t distinguish her- or himself in a high school or college class, and needs parental intervention to engineer some kind of emotional figleaf, I’m not impressed with their long term life chances. Get smarter, work harder. Eventually the hands of consequence must caress us all — unless when someone hires your kid, you’ll be coming to work with them too.

UPDATE: Ironic karma moment – just opened my school email and found a grade appeal from a student accompanied by separate emails from both parents. If I got it wrong I’ll change it. If I got it right, we’ll see how much my teacherly expertise is worth to various audiences.

Just-so stories: theory

Digging back through some old listserv stuff to see if there’s anything useful, I came upon this answer I wrote to a guy named Mike who wanted to know how theories happen. The context was a discussion about whether historians can go gather facts without having a theory first. (Others said one must, one must, and I said one can’t, one can’t.)

Teaching theories to people who doubt the value of theory in the first place is sweaty and hard. In this post my approach, as it often is, was to tell a fairytale:

Theories develop from the interaction of experience and cognitive processing. This interaction begins at, or even before, birth. You plop out and all this stuff starts happening to you. You have no idea how to make sense of it, of course. Gradually, things happen more than once and you can start to box them up (you develop theories).

Your original boxes are really silly. They’re works-in-progress. Lots of stuff keeps happening, and you’re making more and more sense of it. Because the original boxes were silly (hey, you were a newborn) they end up exploding. You have any number of these cognitive ruptures, when stuff just doesn’t fit into one of the boxes (or fits into several). Eventually, sooner for some, never for others, you get sick of having your world turned upside down all the time and you lock in your theoretical structure where it happens to be at the time. Cats don’t fly. Apples don’t fall upwards. Women don’t make good prime ministers. That sort of thing.

Experiences that aren’t repeated or that just don’t fit anywhere are left lying about (your psychoanalyst may call this “denial”).

Obviously, at some primordial point in the process there was an experience that didn’t have a theory there already trying to make sense of it. But by the time we get old enough to talk, our experiences (and the facts we deduce from them) are thoroughly arranged in meaningful order by the theories developed out of the accidents of our previous experience. Language seals the deal, by offering vocabularies only for those experiences that have been pre-approved by the community that developed and uses the language. We keep learning, but each new bit of experience has to plug itself into the ever more elaborate structure of our (theoretical) sense-making apparatus. There’s still an interaction between the experience and the theory, but the theory’s got a lot of experiential weight behind it by now, including the experience of an entire culture picked up through language.

This is all pragmatic. None of it is philosophically warranted as “True.” As old Hume pointed out, just because the sun rises a bunch of mornings in a row is no good warrant to assert that it will again. But it’s a good bet, and in ordinary life we take those kinds of bets all the time. You could call those bets theories, too.

Now — imagine living life WITHOUT those bets. Anxiety starts over whether the sun will come up, and spreads from there. You don’t even know what a historian is, let alone what you’re doing standing over this dusty box of old papers. That’s what living, or working, without a theory would be like.

The art of the possible

How to tell the leaders from the led in political discourse:

…[I]f the concrete political act, as Croce says, is made real in the person of the political leader, it should be observed that the characteristic of the leader as such is certainly not passionality, but rather cold, precise, objectively almost impersonal calculation of the forces in struggle and of their relationships…. The leader rouses and directs the passions, but he himself is ‘immune’ to them or dominates them [in himself] the better to unleash them, rein them in at the given moment, discipline them, etc. He must know them, as an objective element of fact, as force, more than ‘feel them’ immediately, he must know them and understand them, albeit with ‘great sympathy’ (and in such case passion assumes a superior form…).

– Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere [Prison Notebooks], notebook 26, § 5, 2299, my translation. (In this note Gramsci goes on to discuss irony and sarcasm as political stances; sarcasm is both a form of advanced consciousness and a passional means of criticizing contradictions in order to elevate consciousness in others.)

As many others have noted, Newsweek is currently doing a smashing job of documenting exactly what this kind of leadership looks like in practice in a series of reports on the Obama campaign.

Liberal bias in the liberal arts

No one much disputes that academics are disproportionately liberal, although it may be the case that we are swinging back toward moderate. But does this mean that we indoctrinate the young?

According to three new studies surveyed by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, the answer is no.

The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer…. When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.

“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”

This squares with Tim Clydesdale’s work on first year students and the college experience (previously discussed here), in which he found that students put their core values in an “identity lockbox” and that very few students find a liberal arts education deeply transformative.

And it squares with the research (previously discussed here) suggesting that undecided people have really already decided, and with my observations about default theories.

And it squares with my own experience. If anything, higher education has made me more conservative over the years, as marination in the value of balanced critical thinking and seasoning with diverse perspectives (including outside the academy) has mellowed the strong flavors of my youthful radical certainties. Of course, balanced critical thinking and respectful attention to diverse perspectives are themselves liberal values, ones that are at the heart of the liberal arts. But there’s no traction in them for making anyone change their mind, because whatever you think already is part of what needs to be respected and understood on the way to a more comprehensive understanding. As conservative professor James Joyner wryly notes,

Even attending a state school in the Deep South, my political science and history professors were predominantly (but not exclusively) liberal. But debating them tended to reinforce my conservative leanings. Years later, teaching political science courses to predominantly conservative students, I oftentimes found myself taking a Devil’s Advocate stance simply to force them to challenge their own preconceptions. (Which, on reflection, made me wonder if my own profs hadn’t done the same thing.)

Yeah, I can work with that guy.

Frame analysis: Obama, Palin

As I’ve been writing the preceeding series of posts on Sarah Palin I’ve been using my usual feeds and WordPress’ suggestions to do some further reading, daisy-chaining an unsystematic sampling of reactions to Palin’s candidacy. By the happy accidents of mindless word-association this reading has included reactions to Obama’s candidacy. If you’ll trust my powers of synthesis for a moment I think I can hazard a hypothesis I find interesting about what they have in common, perhaps as an occasion for conversation.

I start from the fact that both are engaged in the normal political business of framing, which most basically involves attempting to engage or create an alignment between a stereotyped self-presentation and the stereotyped interpretive schemata of possible constituencies. They’re working on looking familiar in positive and motivationally effective ways. I’m talking here mostly about the basic framing of them-as-candidates, not so much any particular policy position or counterframing of their opponents.

My hypothesis is that for each of them, the effective frame for their target audiences is unintelligible to people outside that audience. In order to make good sense to their crew, they have to come across wonky to everyone else. Although this is true to some degree in all mass democratic politics, it is accelerated into the uncanny and polarized in this case because Obama is a highly-educated black man and Palin is a conservative woman.

I should say here that my own first impression of Obama is that he is one mighty smart and effective fella who consistently addresses issues of substance. This first reaction is because our frames align. The way framing works is by using a pleasantly familiar self-performance to recruit my own interpretive prejudices to fill out the picture. My Obama is accordingly a bunch of stuff I think already, which I assume he also thinks because he’s activated that bundle of associations by correctly framing his impression on me. This is accomplished through word choice, delivery (pronunciation, accent, tone, rhythm, emphasis, etc.), non-verbal cueing, appearance (clothing, grooming, style), and so on. In particular, Obama has a good feel for the cadences of the civil rights sermon in his speeches, which will stimulate the salivation of any liberal; while in his more conversational mode he plays with words like a guy who reads a lot, and clips with a nicely urban rhythm. (Although I grew up in the country, I’ve spent my adult life in the city.) As is often the case with this stuff, the successful outcome is that I think Barack is ‘like me’; and I like him back.

To get clear of this pre-rational first impression I’ve got many accumulated strategies of self-irony and reframing. They come from letting other people teach me to look sideways at what I take for granted. Specifically, I take seriously the negative reactions to Obama, ranging from invective to puzzlement, to the effect that he has nothing of substance to say. When I look at Barack’s speeches and debate performances, which I have enjoyed and admired, I can’t disagree with this. They are long on generalities and exhortations, short on specifics and practicalities. Of course short campaign performances are not the place to look for substantive positions. Turning to his record and his actual policy proposals, they’re fine, in a generically centrist kind of way. Nothing too upsetting, nothing too exciting, and not a lot of clarity about how to get there from here. So to go back to my first impression, I am totally giving this guy the benefit of the doubt. That’s framing.

While I’m not well justified in being deeply impressed with Obama (yet), the same review has turned up nothing that would justify readings of him as an extreme leftist (my dissertation is on communists, I know those when I see them), a Muslim terrorist, or any other kind of active threat to our democracy. Substantively he’s pretty much your standard Democrat, disagreeable perhaps, a little on the green side, but not at all frightening. Where does that stuff come from? Racism looks like a good answer this time around, and there’s some of that. But I remember a lot of fretting about the doom John Kerry represented, and you don’t get any whiter than John Kerry. The fact is that from deep inside the constellation of Republican frames (social conservatism, neo-conservatism, libertarianism, market fundamentalism) there’s nothing any Democrat as such can say that doesn’t sound scary insane. When Democrats look like socialists, no wonder the specter of real communists produced mass hysteria early in the Cold War. Boo! Happy Halloween!

This is reciprocal. I have friends who see Hitler behind every neo-con and the menstrual hut behind every social conservative. I have a friend who’s pretty sure Sarah Palin is the worst thing for women since footbinding. Like Helen of Margaret and Helen, she just doesn’t have a frame that can make sense of Palin; or rather, the frame she has makes Palin look demonic. And it’s not that she’s considered the alternatives and decided against them; she simply can’t see another way of seeing. Which is an admirable position of integrity, in my view, but disabling in a more analytical frame.

This demonization is unavoidable for Palin, perhaps even productive; because she’s framing herself for her own audience, that fraction of the Republican constellation who on the fringes understand themselves to be embattled by the sinister forces of godless leftism, yada yada, and toward the center oppose the selfishness of liberal ‘rights talk’ by framing individual property, rights and liberties in terms of virtuous participation in and obligation to historically continuous community. Therefore Bob Ritzema is quite right in a previous comment about one positive frame for Palin: she

represents not a new type of woman, but a very old type, one that many traditionalists would quickly recognize. From a Jungian perspective, she is an archetypal figure, one represented by such manifestations as the frontier woman and the Amazon. As I understand it, this is the woman who situates herself not behind the protective barriers of civilization but out where danger resides. She is strong in a direct, assertive way, not in the seductive, deceptive manner that is a common stereotype of women in patriarchal societies–and is respected as such, though sometimes feared as well. Space is created for her not only by her willingness to go beyond the confines of the protective-oppressive system of society, but also by some recognition that the men who are supposed to provide protection are not always adequate to the task. The Palin story seems to fit this prototype in lots of ways, e.g. living in Alaska, being a hunter, the “pit bull with lipstick” image, the Russian bear across the straits, fighting corruption, and refusing to accept earmarks.

Christina Hoff Sommers elaborates this frame historically in a short paper for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, nicely contrasting liberal and conservative notions of feminism:

The classical feminism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries embodied two distinct schools of thought and social activism. The first, egalitarian feminism, was progressive (in the view of many contemporaries of both sexes, radical), and it centered on women as independent agents rather than wives and mothers. It held that men and women are, in their essential nature, the same, and it sought to liberate women through abstract appeals to social justice and universal rights. The second school, conservative feminism, was traditionalist and family-centered. It embraced rather than rejected women’s established roles as homemakers, caregivers, and providers of domestic tranquility–and it promoted women’s rights by redefining, strengthening, and expanding these roles. Conservative feminists argued that a practical, responsible femininity could be a force for good in the world beyond the family, through charitable works and more enlightened politics and government.

Of the two schools, conservative feminism was much more influential. Unlike its more radical sister, conservative feminism has always had great appeal to large majorities of women. By contrast, egalitarian feminists often appeared strange and frightening, with their salons and little journals.

Kay S. Hymowitz talks about “red-state feminism” and notes its opacity to urban liberal feminists. She rehearses Betty Friedan’s critique of “full-time motherhood as a ‘waste of human self’ and home as a ‘comfortable concentration camp’” and argues that in contrast,

central to Palin’s red-state appeal is her earthy embrace of motherhood. She differs from mainstream feminists in that her sexuality and fecundity are not in tension with her achievement and power. If anything, they rise out of them. Instead of holding her back, her five children embody her energy, competence, authority, and optimism…. “She’s a real woman, she’s a real feminist but she’s not strident—she’s like us,” Cheryl Hauswirth, a middle-aged mother from Wisconsin, told Politico writer Jonathan Martin. “She’s strong, powerful and opinionated, all the things a woman should be, while still retaining her femininity, her womanhood.”

Ah, so that’s what all that lipstick, winking and you betchas are about. (Thanks again to The Kibitzer for these last two references.)

Neither the celebration nor the critique of motherhood and domesticity are objective descriptions of womanhood; both are plausible frames for understanding women’s experience, and both fail completely to understand each other. Their contestation looks like a political matter, but the logic of framing has to do with tapping into prejudices that are pre-political. So ultimately reactions to Obama and Palin are diagnostic: what prejudices are we letting ourselves be jerked around with?

UPDATE: for lots more on political framing, in the context of a series of critiques of George Lakoff’s work on liberal and conservative metaphors, follow the links at Mixing Memory.