Dana Goldstein

"Gender Republicans"

I just finished reading Katha Pollitt's excellent new book of essays, Learning to Drive. It's a moving exploration of the times when our personal lives and politics meet, often in confusing, combustive ways. In this Guardian America interview with Pollitt, my TAP colleague Ann Friedman zeroes in on one of the most interesting phrases in the book, "gender Republicans." This, Pollitt writes, is what many well-meaning lefties (including herself and former husband) become once they have kids, and they're forced to decide how to divy up childcare and other domestic work. Here's the exchange:

The phrase "gender Republicans," from the chapter about the birth of your daughter, really gets at the heart of the feminism's unfinished business in the domestic, personal sphere.

What struck me so forcefully about having a baby as an experience was my feeling that I had just done this incredible thing, and it's so great, and it's such an intense and joyful experience, so different than other things I had done. But having a baby is a moment when the latent gender expectations of the couple are revealed. Not just the expectations psychologically, but, more importantly, they realize they have put themselves on a path that makes certain outcomes rational. That's when it turns out to matter who's got health insurance, or who's the freelancer, or who's the free spirit who is not on such a straight and narrow path. And there I think the free spirit often loses out.

Of course, it doens't always take a child to become a "gender Republican." Many feminists I know feel that in any romantic relationship with a man, they're constantly fighting such expectations.

Jenna's Story

My post here Sunday on some of the unexpectedly progressive statements coming out of Jenna Bush's mouth during her book tour has led to a full-length Prospect column. I think I may be the only journalist who wrote about the book to have actually read the entire thing. And as my editor Ann Friedman points out, this article is where Wonky McWonkster feminist liberal journalism meets Us Weekly. So if that appeals to you, I hope you'll check it out:

Like the vast majority of Americans in their mid-twenties, Jenna Bush believes condoms effectively prevent the spread of HIV, comprehensive sex education helps young people make healthy choices, and sex between two mutually loving people is okay -- even if they aren't married.

None of that is surprising. But given that Jenna Bush is the daughter of a deeply conservative president, one whose administration has in part been defined by retrograde sexual politics, it's rather extraordinary that Jenna has written a book advocating a practical, social justice stance toward the problems of poverty, AIDS, child abuse, sexual abuse, and teenage motherhood in Latin America.

What I've Been Up To + A Great Book

First of all, apologies for being away from this space for so long; I've been in a particularly busy period at the Prospect, live-blogging the presidential candidates' forum at the SEIU meeting on Monday, and for the past week, working on a meaty piece about No Child Left Behind's failure to confront racial and economic segregation in shools. Here's an excerpt:

Most fundamentally, NCLB ignored a key underlying sociological problem -- segregation -- that contributes to the achievement gap. We've known for a long time that separate cannot be equal, but as NCLB's supporters well understood, it is doubtful the bill would have passed had it imposed on privileged white people any substantive responsibility for the achievement of minority students. When George W. Bush introduced NCLB during a 2000 campaign address to the NAACP, he said, "No child in America should be segregated by low expectations." But he didn't mention segregation inside brick-and-mortar school buildings, the kind caused by state school district lines cutting off rich people from poor people, or by highways separating black neighborhoods from white.

Parts of the piece were inspired by a truly excellent book that surfaced in TAP's offices, The Children in Room E4, by Susan Eaton. An education Ph.D. and experienced journalist, Eaton spent a year in Hartford, CT observing how poor black and Latino children learn in a segregated elementary school. Her findings are dire: Although the students Eaton gets to know have a loving, skilled classroom teacher, they are held back by a stifling curriculum and an almost total lack of understanding of the social world beyond their ghetto neighborhood. Alongside her classroom observations, Eaton tells the story of Sheff v. O'Neill, the Connecticutt Supreme Court case that ruled the state was negligent in providing minority kids an integrated, quality education. The ruling was a major civil rights victory. But then the governor, state legislature, and local districts did....next to nothing to change the system.

I'm hoping to write a lot more about education policy; it's something that has fascinated me and gotten me riled up for a long time -- probably my whole life -- in part due to being raised by two adamantly pro-public education parents, one of whom worked in New York public schools his entire career. I took some education courses in college, but I want to read more, so book recommendations in comments would be greatly appreciated!

One Last Thing Before I Go!

Check out this interview I conducted with my American Prospect colleague Tara McKelvey, the author of Monstering, a gripping and disturbing new book on the lives of the abusers and abused at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Tara's book contains the first ever interview with Lynndie England, and also reveals the torture of female and children detainees at the hands of the U.S. military in Iraq.

Matt Zeitlin Says Outloud

What I was implying.

OOPS. Here's the link to Zeitlin.

A Few More Words on Harry's Politics

Right, that's Harry Potter. I got some interesting comments here and here responding to my argument that there's a socially conservative undercurrent to J.K. Rowling's series. First, as I tried to make clear in the piece, my critique of the books' gender ideology lies not in their depiction of individual female characters, who, yes, are quite diverse, but in the depiction of the structure of wizarding society. At one point in Deathly Hallows, consumed by guilt over his central role in the war that has consumed his world, Harry expresses regret that he's prevented the Weasley brothers from working -- no mention of whether their wives, too, have careers waylaid by the resistance movement. The assumption I've made, and that I think is well backed up by the entireity of the epic, is that witches are often stay-at-home moms. That's why I linked to Rowling's explanation on her website that magical children are home-schooled before the age of 11. One parent must be doing that work, right? I think that through characters like Hermione and Tonks, Rowling flirts with upending traditional gender roles, but that the larger society she's created actually conforms to them.

As to my analysis of Rowling's racial ideology, which I knew would be controversial, goblins do indeed interbreed with humans. Professor Flitwick, for example, is part goblin. Neither Harry nor Griphook comes off very well in the tale of the sword. Harry plans to trick the goblin, and the goblin lives up to the streotypes of himself as greedy and backstabbing. I think it's fair to say that the books show individual characters, such as Dobby, rising above the stereotypes they were born into, but that they also follow the fantasy script of obsessive categorization. The "Sorting Hat" is a prime example of this. Who isn't fascinated by the idea of a hat that, when placed on the head of an 11-year old, can instantly predict whether the child will turn out good or evil, courageous or cowardly, intellectual or simple? Toward the end of Deathly Hallows, we learn that Professor Dumbledore had doubts about the hat's ability to correctly predict a person's character. Yet the entire wizarding universe is predicated on this hat's sifting ability. Children who read the books understand this, and are attracted to this element of the series. At Rowling's website, they ask her which houses various adult characters belonged to as children at Hogwarts. There's a strong element of predestination present in the series, whether because of family history or membership in a certain species.

Commenter jfaberuiuc makes a good point that when Harry rejects unifying the deathly hallows, he in many ways rejects his own pure-blood heritage. And Matt Zeitlin says it is Harry's ability to love, not to fight, that ultimately saves the day time and time again in the series, which seriously undermines the warrior misogyny of traditional fantasy. These are ways in which Rowling updates the fantasy genre, and I appreciate that. But in reading the last book and considering its appeal, I believe that one reason Harry Potter is so popular is because his world sates one of our more conservative cultural needs: the desire to sort groups of people out from one another.

Harry Potter and the Complicated Identity Politics

I felt a tad hypocritical writing this new article, since just last week I proclaimed myself sick of all the bitter Harry Potter haters. And indeed, I'm a big fan of the books, having stayed inside all day Sunday to finish my copy of Deathly Hallows with the plan of writing an article about the series' politics. I wasn't sure what my thesis would be as I sat down to begin outlining yesterday, but as I gathered evidence from the parts of the story that seemed the most politically and culturally interesting, I found myself realizing that although the books are anti-violence and anti-authoritarian, there's a powerful current of social conservatism running through them. As I write in the piece, I think this is mostly due to fantasy's inherently conservative vision, and J.K. Rowling's tendency to hew rather closely to the classical rules of the fantasy genre.

Hope the article stirs up some debate, so let me know what you think!

HARRY POTTER SPOILER

Just kidding. But of all the fake endings to the series I've read, this is by far the best:

"Gosh, how long has it been?" wondered Harry aloud, sitting down on an Ikea Hagrid chair. "I haven't seen you since..." he hesitated haltingly.

"Since you divorced Ginny?" said Hermione, raising her eyebrows upwardly.

"You know what it's like, er, childhood sweethearts and all that," Harry said with an airy shrug. "After all we went through at Hogwarts..." his voice trailed away. "Especially in the last book ... er, I mean year."

"Yes, it was terrible," said Hermione. "Who would have guessed that Professor Snape was the good guy all along?"

"Yes," said Harry. "Or that weedy Neville Longbottom actually turned out to be 'the One' who saved us after a heroic struggle in which several well-known characters died, as you will recall from the previous chapters. What happened to Neville?"

"He's the headmaster of Hogwarts now. But the place hasn't been the same since they adopted the national curriculum," replied Hermoine sharply.

Christian Fantasy & Harry Potter

So we've known for years that some fundamentalist Christians disapprove of the Harry Potter series because it depicts humans using magic. It seems to me that this stance is uniquely fantastical: Magic is only to be feared if it's real, right? This just confirms my feeling that believing in witches, warlocks, and quidditch is not so different from believing an old man in the sky impregnated a peasant girl and the resulting child rose from the dead a few decades later.

In anticipation of the release of the last Harry book this Saturday (yep, I've pre-ordered my copy), the Washingon Post reports on alternative Chrisitian fantasy books. Although even James Dobson believes J.K. Rowling's series is a positive moral influence on children, some literalists disagree:

The use of magical powers by humans is a controversial theme for Christian writers and readers. They cite this biblical verse from the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament: "Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead."

The writers of the Old Testament clearly believed sorcery was a real, powerful force for evil in the world. Why would contemporary religious people stigmatize themselves by continuing this line of reasoning?

Kids (and the young at heart!) effing love Harry Potter. In "Jesus Camp," the documentary about fundamentalist Christian children's programs, preachers scream at kids that Harry stands alongside the devil. But as the film depicts, just a few minutes later while eating lunch, the children buzz about which person's glasses are more like Harry's and who has seen the most recent Potter film. And I think this is why, like Matt Yglesias, I'm totally sick of all the bitter Potter critics. It isn't often that a piece of pop culture comes along and truly unites so many of us in delight.

Bill Clinton, Activist

You don't need to earn earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per speaking engagement to influence hearts and minds! You just need to read Giving: How Each Of Us Can Change The World, a new book by Clinton due in September and based on his inspirational speeches.

In other Bill news, the former president says his preferred title come January 2009 would be "first laddie."