Sports and the Battle of the Sexes in the Classroom

In two weeks, I’ll be entering the university classroom as a teaching assistant for the third time. To tell the truth, I’m a bit nervous. Instead of teaching U.S. History to 1865 or Modern European History, I’m teaching a course on sports.

In elementary school, I cringed when a ball came towards me during four square, whimpered when it was my turn during kick ball, and seized when asked to do a cartwheel. Middle and high school were no better. What worries me, however, is not necessarily my utter lack of coordination or my fear of being conked on the head by a stray ball but the fact that I am female.

cotton menorah

I created a menorah on my wall from torn strips of white cotton fabric. The branches have magazine cutouts at the top representing each day of creation. The stand is a picture of a pile of records and large butterflies. Next to the menorah are duplicate crosses, flanked by mountains and a beach scene likewise cut from a magazine.

The Invisible Hands of History

As I read the 1971 “pink issue” of Dialogue, much like Elizabeth I was jarred by the intimacy of the articles. I guess I’d expected treatises on women and the priesthood, discussions of the Mother Goddess, and perhaps more of a bitter, academic edginess. Instead I found that the most subversive element (besides the sometimes odd juxtaposition of handwritten quotes or drawings throughout the issue) was that many of the contributors merely described the pedestrian details of their own lives in straight-forward, engaging, and distinctive voices. Reflecting on Claudia’s earlier post, it seems like perhaps such a collection of ordinary, honest accounts by LDS women is the best defense against what Leonard Arrington terms “the male interpretation of Mormon history.”¹

In a lengthy volume on the futility of social science research, John Elster warns against the danger of trusting experts in any field: when dealing with experts, we can’t always separate out fact and evidence from the unquestioning assumptions of our informant.² To illustrate: while grappling with the evolution of present day gender roles, feminist writers are often tempted to suggest that the modern [i.e. Western] organization of the sexes stems from more or less unfair prehistoric practices. Indeed, paleontological literature tends to reinforce the stereotype of the Man-as-Hunter, Woman-as-Weaver-Gatherer. However, this has much more to do with paleontologists’ reliance on personal preconceptions for explaining the past than anything implied by the fossil evidence. If a hominid skeleton is found alongside sharp objects or tools, it is generally assumed to be male; if it is small, it is assumed to be female, although generally it might just as well be a smaller or younger male. Some paleontologists concede that the tiny skeleton of the famous “Lucy” could just as well be remonikered “Lucifer.”³

Gals with Guns

In researching Cold War religion and the 1962 tour of the Robert Shaw Chorale in the Soviet Union, I found this photo in an online archive. It’s of a female Soviet soldier guarding a WWII monument during the 1980s. Becca, do you know anything about female soldiery during the Cold War?

New TLC Show: Sister Wives

A few days ago, I was looking through the sidebar at Juvenile Instructor when I saw that a link to a new reality TV show on TLC about polygamy. I was understandably excited. For those of you who don’t know me, I am addicted to reality TV. It began with Flavor of Love, continued through I Love New York and Rock of Love, and I’m 16 and Pregnant. The trashier the better. The link also played into my interest in polygamy and the ways that individuals negotiate relationships in such marriages.

Quick Review: Tony DuShane’s Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk

Instead of flying back from Provo, UT after participating in the Joseph Smith Summer Seminar, I took the California Zephyr, a train that winds through Denver, Co before crossing the plains of Nebraska and Iowa. It largely follows the route of nineteenth-century passengers who traveled from Chicago to San Francisco. While on-board, my friend Chris and I met two self-identified lez-brarians from New Zealand. We started talking about religion – about the responses of various churches to the earthquake in Samoa, to the Mormon Church’s response to homosexuality and Prop 8, to the rise of Christian fundamentalism in what they see an otherwise ultra-liberal New Zealand.

CFP: Western Association of Women Historians

I just received this CFP in my mailbox from a colleague:

CALL FOR PAPERS
WESTERN ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN HISTORIANS
43rd Annual Conference
Huntington Library
Pasadena, California
April 7-9, 2011

The WAWH invites faculty members, graduate students, independent scholars and others for a collegial, stimulating, and professional weekend of history and networking.

The program committee welcomes proposals for panels or single papers on any historical subject, time period, or region. Papers do not necessarily have to focus on women’s or gender history, although these issues are of interest to the membership. All fields and periods of history are welcome, and especially non-U.S. history. Panels, workshops, or roundtables on issues in the historical profession are also encouraged. Proposals for complete panels, including commentators, are preferred, but individual papers are also welcome.

WAWH offers a prize for the best paper presented by a graduate student at the WAWH meeting. Please see http://www.wawh.org for guidelines.

Proposals must include each of the following:
1) A required WAWH Cover Page (found at http://www.wawh.org)
2) A one-half to one-page abstract for each paper submitted
3) One-to-two-page curriculum vitae for each panelist

Email proposal to wawhconference2011@wawh.org by 11:59pm on September 15, 2010.
Save all three parts of the proposal for each presenter (whether an individual paper or a panel) as a single word document, naming the file as lastnamefirstnamewawh2011. For a panel, the file name should be the name of the contact person.

If you have any questions, please contact either program co-chair:
Corliss K. Slack, cslack@whitworth.edu, 509-777-4366.
April Bullock, abullock@fullerton.edu. 951-684-2452.

Karen Lystra, The Young Woman’s Journal, and Mormon Patterns of Courtship

We plan to have a few more posts on the Pink Dialogue.  In the meantime, however, I thought I would share some of the research that I have been doing.

As I mentioned in a comment to Elizabeth’s post on the Pink Dialogue, I have been reading Karen Lystra’s “Searching the Heart” as part of my research on debates over polygamy during the late nineteenth century.[1] One of the things that I want to do in my research is move beyond studies that focus on how many wives Joseph Smith or Brigham Young had to look at how Mormon men and women thought about marriage and love itself.