The Kingdom of Evils Is Within You

Guys, check out this book immediately. I was reading about it in Elizabeth Lunbeck's awesome book The Psychiatric Persuasion. She uses tons of case studies from the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, founded by psychiatrists and social workers in 1912 as a modern institution that they hoped would replace the nineteenth-century asylum, with its physical restraints and other treatments they considered barbaric.

The Kingdom of Evils was written by the head psychiatrist dude and the chief social worker of the BPH. It's amazing—100 case studies ranging from no. 1, "Agnes Jackson, pathetic nuisance," to no. 100, "Henry Allen, draughtsman who had to work alone." Don't miss no. 23, "Julia Brown, who lived as a man." I think my own favorite is no. 2, "Richard Sully, morbid altruist." Richard kept founding clubs for boys. He brought refreshments to the meetings, and resorted to eating them himself when no one showed up.

Just check out the table of contents and tell me which diagnosis fits you best. I think I'm "enraged by the vindictive ticking of the clock" (no. 69)—why must time pass so quickly during my fellowship year?! I am enraged!

I vowed to stay off the nerd crack, but it's a monster.

P.S. I'm back in Indiana for two weeks to look at more sexual case histories.

"Welfare, Adjustment, and Education"

Miriam Van Waters, 1922:

"If one were asked to sum up in a phrase the background idea of correctional institutions for girls in this country, it would be, not punishment, nor discipline, but 'welfare, adjustment, and education.' The strictly modern institution is a composite of school, home, workshop, hospital and laboratory, and its plant and entire atmosphere express its goal as re-education and the adjustment to normal life of the girl whose parents and whose community have failed her.

...

"Helen, aged fifteen, had run away from three institutions, had bobbed her hair, wore boys' clothes, smoked, drank and beat her way on freight cars. She had an irresistible sense of the comic and she had gifted hands. In the Kansas State School she was set to making original dolls. She made them of cloth, of wood, and of paper. Their faces resembled those of the people she had met: porters, policemen, waiters, tramps, Japs, jugglers and matrons. She made rabbit dolls with human faces. Gradually as she sat day after day in her discipline room, for her language made segregation necessary, her dolls began to have a commercial value. She 'found herself' and later when she was put in charge of the kitchen department her only gesture of independence was to hang a sign, which I am glad to state remained unmolested:

"NO SLANG HERE: BY HECK."

Paging Michel Foucault...

Crushed

I'm a big one for parallel reading, also known as following tangents. While going through an advice book, I saw a reference to a 1929 novel called Schoolgirl by a sixteen-year-old writer, which "gave a graphic description of the development of homosexual tendencies in a group of girls more or less segregated from contacts with the opposite sex." Google Books had only a snippet view, so I was forced to order the thing from ILL. And for once, ILL came through for me! Schoolgirl arrived from the Hartford library system last week. And wow, did this book deliver.

While it doesn't portray boyish girls, Schoolgirl is a really good document about the "environmental causes" theory of homosexuality, which gained currency when the vogue for psychoanalysis took hold in the early twentieth century. One of the big fears parents had was that single-sex environments would turn their children into sex perverts. (I don't know whether it's because I'm reading so much about girls, but this fear seems to have applied more to girls than boys, with the exception of men's prison environments.) By the 1920s, middle-class adults knew that adolescent girls had sexual desires; the problem was in finding a wholesome outlet for these desires so that they could effect a satisfactory heterosexual "adjustment." You can see the dilemma. You didn't want girls to pet or, heaven forbid, "go the limit," but you wanted them to date, go to mixers, kiss a little, that kind of thing. If, however, there weren't any boys around, the girl's "sex urges" would go for the only available outlet, other girls.

This is the position that Schoolgirl endorses. Being written by a sixteen-year-old girls' school student lent it an air of authenticity. Despite the controversy it provoked, its message was au courant and intellectually sound enough to appear in a 1930 advice book.

So you didn't think I'd take you this far without a juicy quotation, did you? Here's a sample:

A house full of girls and all apparently contented! Naomi watched them silently, and wondered if it would be disconcerting to the vanity of a male to walk in upon this satisfied séance of femininity. She turned to Olive.

"Why do girls have crushes, Olive—on each other?"

In the half-dark, Olive's brown face was troubled.

"...I don't guess you've been with girls a lot; neither had I before I came up here. But I asked Dad—about—about crushes and—"

"You asked your Dad?" Naomi was shocked and incredulous....

"...My Dad's different. I tell him everything I get messed up over, and he can do wonders figuring things out. About crushes he said—that being with boys a lot and then being suddenly transferred to a girls' school with only a lot of females—well, you just sort of transfer your affections. No, not affections, but emotions or something. Do you get what I mean?"

Naomi nodded her head. "You sort of crave—uh—well—uh—"

"Exactly. Sex excitement, or something, whatever you want to call it. Rotten, but I suppose some of us weak little nimpcompoops can't be blamed. No backbone or sense either."

This is only the psychological theory the book presents. It is not the reason the book was so controversial. To find that out, you'll have to go through ILL.

There's No Business Like No Business

Hey, kids, let's put on a show! We'll call it "Gold Diggers of 2009," and it'll be all about trying to get people to give you money now that Cheeseville U. has announced that for 2009-2010 it will no longer fund grad students past their eighth year. Nope, not even tuition remission. Not that we're starting our ninth years, but in 2010-2011 Cheeseville U. will no longer fund grad students past their seventh year. Now we're getting into Slightly Scary Land, huh? You better hope there's no family emergency or serious illness in your near future. Or that you don't have to change your topic at the last minute because your committee members can't get their acts together for a year to approve your prospectus. Or that your archive doesn't burn down. Or that that foundation you were counting on to give you a grant didn't get sucked into the Bernie Madoff vortex.

Oh, wait, I've got it! Let's get the New York Times to write a blistering exposé about the academic job market. Impossible? Well, how about a quizzical piece about how jobs for humanities Ph.D.'s are drying up? Start it off with a guy who applied for two dozen (two dozen!) jobs (can you hear the sound of my hands wringing?) and try to keep from wondering why he only found two dozen institutions worthy of receiving his cover letters and teaching portfolios. Raise your hand if you know people who sent out more than forty within the past several years, way before the Times discovered this "downturn in jobs for Ph.D.'s in the humanities." It's true that lots of searches were cancelled this year because of hiring freezes and the AHA reported a 15 percent decline in the number of schools doing interviews at the annual conference. But what exactly is new here? Did the Times send Jimmy Olsen, Boy Reporter, to write this? Anyone who even applied to grad school within the past fifteen years knew this (and if you didn't, you should have your undergrad adviser assassinated). Academe is kind of like show business, except in show business you will probably land in New York at some point and take a turn as a clueless witness on Law and Order, the residuals from which will likely be higher than the royalties you'd get from publishing a book with an academic press. You will also come away with professional headshots instead of five hundred books that weigh a ton. Times, wake up.

This post was brought to you today by the letters C, R, A, and B.

Stomping the Blues

My research is massively hung up by grading midterms. I was either really naive or really ambitious to think I could grade 95 bluebooks in less than a week (although I didn't know when I agreed to do this that the prof wanted "extensive comments"). I am thus missing an important conference I've been dying to go to for a couple of months. My IRB application is languishing somewhere on my hard drive. And I've forgotten where I was in my research. (Thank god I have my blog to remind me!)

Unlike most grad students, I don't care all that much about student spelling mistakes and grammatical infelicities on in-class exams (take-home essays are another story). I was a copy editor for eight years; once you've been around that long, you know that even hugely famous writers can't spell. But I still insist on historical accuracy and I can't be bothered to argue about what students "meant" to write. I grade the words on the page, period.

So far, I've only had to write one "?!" in the margin. "?!" is a nice way of saying "WTF." Here it is:

"The Birth of a Nation: This film is important to so much for its historical accuracy but for showing the prevalence of rasicm in America. The film is based around a group of African American slaves that rise up and hold their white masters prisoners only until the KKK arrives to save them.... The heros are white supremes.... The movie...in no way accurately represents the people of its time accept its racism."

Did this kid even watch the movie? If so, where were the white supremes? Somewhere Flo Ballard is smacking her forehead.