History of the Book/Cookie Pushers Redux

I was hoping to avoid another archive trip to finish this article, but it looks like I'm going to have to go. Part of this project is to compare two editions of a book. Or rather, two printings of a book—specifically, the Girl Scout Handbook; more specifically, the fourth and sixth impressions. (I'd also like to see the fifth, of course, but I'm pretty sure the most significant changes happened between the fourth and the sixth.) So it would seem that a trip to the Girl Scouts archive is in order. I feel tired just thinking about it.

Interlibrary loan: my savior, and the bane of my existence. I requested "the 1953 edition" of the Girl Scout Handbook. Little did I know that it had gone through so many impressions. The one ILL got me was from late 1955. But it's the right "edition," so I guess I can't be mad.

Ever wonder about those Girl Scouts? Where did they get their marching orders from? Let's peruse the 1953 handbook (eighth impression, November 1955) and see if we can find out.

According to a report submitted to Congress, the most popular Girl Scout badge in 1953 was Cook. (What, not Truck Gardener?!) To earn this badge, a Girl Scout had to "Prepare a breakfast, lunch, or supper for your family or patrol." Now, lots of scholars have jumped all over the Girl Scouts for trying to mold girls into compliant homemakers. But my subversive reading of this badge requirement is that the handbook offers "patrol" as a legitimate alternative to "family": a chosen community of girl peers gets equal billing with a bio family. Let's see, what else. "Cook eggs in three different ways." Hmmm, an activity that undercuts ovobinarisms. Moving on: "Make cocoa with three kinds of milk and decide which kind you prefer." While the signifying Other (the dark "cocoa") here is singular, and outnumbered and thus dominated by the plural, decidedly Eurocentric subject (the light "milk"), the passage also suggests a post-racial hybridity in which the Other can be both "pure" ("unmixed" cocoa powder) and "mongrel" (milkified cocoa for drinking); moreover, one's hybridity may be chosen.

Just for fun, let's open the book at random and see what badge we get. OK, how about Wood? You'll be interested to know the badge pictures a totem pole. Oh, this is great! One of the three absolute requirements to earn this badge: "Make some article of wood for the comfort of your animal friends." I don't know why, but "litter box" comes to mind. Mine would for sure have a totem pole on it.

Here's one called Minstrel—ulp! It's 1955, I don't know what we're in for. Ah, phew, nothing to do with minstrel shows (thank you, Girl Scouts, thank you). "Write a story about the meistersingers in Germany, troubadours in France and Spain, or minstrels of England. Learn several of their songs." Do I have to sing them too?

Finally, Clerk. Oh dear. Absolute requirements: "Dramatize the courteous way to approach salespeople, to wait on people, and to receive visitors in an office"; "Learn how to use and care for the following: typewriter, hand-stapling machine, fountain pen, and automatic pencil. Be able to read a postal scale"; "In a skit show how to apply for a job." According to eBay, this is a rare badge. I guess I'm happy for that. I wonder if the seller can read a postal scale to know how much to charge for shipping!

I'd write more, but I have to go learn to care for my automatic pencil.

Too Many Broths Spoil the Cook

One of the promises I make as CheeseQuest is never to bore you with whining and complaining about my work. I know I've broken this rule on occasion, but the Quest is all about bringing you enough fun facts to make you wish you were writing my dissertation. I hope you'll also cheer me on when it comes to this crazy article I'm writing. Seriously, I thought it would take me two weeks to bang out a first draft. But production is a bit slow. I feel like Nestor Almendros waiting for "the golden hour" to shoot Days of Heaven, by which I mean I can only write the equivalent of Almendros shooting twenty-five minutes of film for an entire day. The Paramount Studios breathing down my back, freaking out about the budget overruns, my narcissistic perfectionism, and the long delays, is my dissertation.

Let me get back on track before I run too far with this analogy and turn into Terrence Malick, the brilliant but underproductive director of Days of Heaven. (CheeseQuest! Step away from the analogy!) What I meant to write about was the state of knowing too much, which one of the Cheeseville U. faculty members always says can torpedo a work. As I'm finding out now, knowing too much causes you to write in too much detail. Each detail leads to more qualification, which, if you're not careful, can lead you to make razor-thin changes in your interpretation. If you're writing from a particular theoretical standpoint, it can cause you to do backflips in order to get your evidence to fit your thesis, which you should never do. And because you've got tons of evidence, your thesis becomes ever more complicated; you may lose track of it completely. I have the additional problem of finding each detail endlessly fascinating. Ultimately, as I am finding, knowing too much makes your work very late, and you're often unhappy with the result.

I spent all of yesterday trying to figure out my protagonist's views on race. This was actually one of my priorities as I was gathering my evidence, because the minor political dustup I am writing about happened in 1954, pretty much to the day of the Brown decision, and my protagonist was an adopted southerner. He personally benefited from segregation and opposed Brown as inimical to southern tradition. The problem that has stumped me is that he had an opportunity to spread a rumor smearing an African American man as a communist, and to the best of my knowledge, he didn't.

Why? I tried to answer this question by looking at his autobiography, but I give that masterpiece almost no credence because the letters he wrote at the time directly contradict it. I looked at his libertarian magnum opus, and while it gave me a good idea of his philosophy in 1960, it was quite unlike what he was writing in 1954. What caused him to shift his views so radically? I tried to figure out his political lineage: which conservatives influenced him? This also stumped me, most likely because he cut his teeth on anti-FDR politics during the Depression, and I've read absolutely nothing in graduate school on contemporary opposition to the New Deal—only the anti-ND conservative movement that culminates (maybe) in Reagan's presidency. I looked at the liberals he seemed to be attacking, but this only led to more confusion because they didn't say what I thought they'd say.

You can see where I'm going with this. Despite all these lacunae, I know too much. I wouldn't even have been asking these questions had I not known this rumor was spreading. It does figure in how the scandal played out, but it's kind of a sideshow. It has to do with race, however, and I'm pretty stubborn about figuring out racial politics. It's political that this guy apparently chose not to spread this rumor. But is it important? I can no longer tell.

Dear Julia Kristeva

What ejects the abject?

Your friend,

CheeseQuest

P.S. Do you like my new umbrella?

I Love Me

In the 1920s, Eddie Cantor had this great song called "I Love Me."

I love me, I love me, I love to squeeze my hand
I love me, I love me, It always feels so grand
With me I get right in my tub
I let myself give me a rub
Oh how I love to feel me scrub
I'm wild about myself.

Ooh, Eddie, so perverted. Actually, I think it's pretty cute. Maybe Eddie Cantor was the last person who could have gotten away with singing a song like "I Love Me."

Anyway, I love me too, in so many ways. As this is a family blog, I'm not going to detail all of those ways, except to note that I do not take baths.

What was the point of this post? Oh, yeah, I got a new umbrella. It's Marimekko, pink and orange. Go Finns! This is one of the ways I say "I love me." Buying shit.

(I have been trying to upload a picture of my beautiful Finnish umbrella for fifteen minutes, but the signal in this cafe is really weak. So here's the link.)

CheeseQuest Totally Loses It at the Stop 'n' Shop

Yesterday it took me about five hours to forgive the local Stop 'n' Shop for not stocking fresh mint. Now I am all in a stew because it did not have scallions. Freaking scallions! And the gourmet (HA!) cheese section is now half kosher. To think I moved to this town pretty much for the supermarket.

Bathroom Anticommunists Take On Collectivist Cookie Pushers

Cheeseville has two major employers: Cheeseville U. and a giant conglomerate known for making products that you probably have in your bathroom. We'll try to give this company a name that sounds like it could be one of those products: Cheesemoxynol Inc. Today I found a letter from the man who was president of Cheesemoxynol Inc. in the 1950s among the small mountain of photocopies I had made in Eugene. There are tons of buildings and institutions in Cheeseville named for this man. And here I am with his confident signature sitting in my lap! The historians out there can, I'm sure, relate to this moment of frisson. I'll rehearse a portion of this letter here:

Aware as I am of the infiltration tactics of the collectivists I should like to aid in ridding the country of this dangerous influence. For some time it has seemed to me that the best way to do this is to take up the cudgels of freedom in specific circumstances. This is such a circumstance.

What was the circumstance he was referring to? What was the "dangerous influence"? Why, the systematic brainwashing of little girls known best for selling awesome (though expensive) cookies door-to-door. Those communist wolves in liberal internationalists' clothing would stop at nothing, nothing, I tell you!

With this letter from the Cheesemoxynol president, I can't help feeling that this article is going to make the pages of Us Weekly. What a scoop!

CheeseQuest's First Grant

Good news—the nice people at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe saw fit to give me a goodly-sized chunk o' change (more than I asked for, in fact) to do more work in the papers of Miriam Van Waters, a Progressive penologist and superintendent of a girls' reformatory in the early twentieth century. I wrote about one of her articles a couple months ago.

I'm excited, because I went to the Schlesinger a year ago, and let me tell you, it totally spoiled me. Lovely people, gorgeous reading room, and possibly the best luxury of all: quick box-retrieval time (I think they keep a lot of their collections on site). It was one of the first archives I went to, and most of the other ones have failed to measure up. (The exception might be the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, which, like the Schlesinger, has fascinating material, a dedicated staff, and a reading room that was quite comfortable.) Important fact: Schlesinger is pronounced "shlay-sing-er," not "shlessinjer."

Anyway, one of my missions will be to figure out how Miriam Van Waters and her Progressive colleagues managed to square their optimism about girl delinquents' potential to "go right" with how some (many?) of these girls actually behaved—running away, setting fires, and worse. Van Waters believed maternal love could reform girls. So how did she feel when these girls essentially rejected her love?

And another thing: many of the girls' reformatories she approved of in the 1920s were hellholes by the 1930s. Some of them performed forced sterilizations. Did she know this? What did she think?

Fingers crossed that stuff turns up.

Case 89

I recently had a true "duh" moment (not unlike the one I had a few months ago). Did you know that if you're using a book that has a bunch of case histories chopped up and strewn over ten chapters, there's this amazing technique called "taking notes" that can allow you to reassemble these histories? I must admit, I prefer to see them all chopped up. I guess it's an aesthetic thing; like, a sculpture is more interesting to me than a hunk of marble, and part of the pleasure of a study in psychology or social work is to see how the author chops up and arranges the traces of the human beings who form her data.

But hey, you don't have to do it that way all the time! The other day I was reading a book called Varieties of Adolescent Experience (1926), by E. Leigh Mudge. (Could you ask for a better name if you were a psychiatric social worker? No, you could not.) I had great hopes that it would resemble William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, a beloved of my adviser's, if not mine, but it would give me something to talk about with him. In any case, E. Leigh's method was to give a survey to 100 female college students and have them write their life history. So these are examples of relatively rare case studies from the 1920s that use first-person narratives.

I'm not sure why, but I thought, gee, maybe I should write down the cases that seem like tomboys and keep track of them throughout the book. And holy mackerel, I'm glad I did. I've pieced together one so far: Case 89. I'll let her speak for herself.

I was always tomboyish; I am yet at times.... Before I entered my teens, I loved to take part in the wildly exciting boy-amusements. Indian games gave my childish soul thrills of delight, even though at night I did dream of horrible redskins who were lying in the corners of our haymow to grab me. I even flew kites and performed marvelous "stunts" on the trapeze in the vacant lot back of our barn.

One day, however, I discovered that I did n't want to play with "horrid little boys" who were interested in guns and dogs and Indians and dirt.... But I was restless and uneasy if I tried to be still. I did n't know why—but some funny feeling inside of me just would n't let me keep quiet. So...I played fairies—not quiet, beautiful, passive fairies, but more in the category of imps. For hours at a time two "dearest girls in the world" and I floated gracefully around the yard to the strains of weirdly enchanting music.

My thirteenth year saw a peculiar individual.... I was filled with the idea that I wanted to be a deaconess. I suppose this came as a result of the visit of Miss Susie ----. I admired her so much that I felt hers to be the very highest calling in the world.... Not content to wait until I was old enough, I persuaded my two boon companions to play deaconess.

I felt that I was called to help make humanity happy, and for a time I exulted in lecturing big, loppy trees who were drunkards with big families to support, and in comforting brown-eyed susans, who were frail wives, spending their lives in sweat-shops or over the wash-tub, and the dirty little children whom I could please with just a smile or a word.

Tomboy I was for a time, then religious, moody, violently happy. Through it all, however, my mother moved as the great, true heart who believed in me. To her I told everything. To her I went to cry in her arms when petty griefs arose.... I believe that it is to this chum, Mother o' Mine, that I owe all the comfort and content that I got out of that trying period; and when to others I appeared uncivil, grouchy, or hysterically happy, to her I was only a little girl who was growing up.

The Newsprint Closet?

Last month I got taken to task for being tempted to interpret some of my subjects as "gay." Well, I'm tempted again. Do you see the sketch above? Can you read the caption? This ran in the New York Times in June 1927.

I have a friend who has a theory about the Times. It goes like this: the New York Times editors are not liberal, but the photo editors are. How else to explain the rather frequently encountered photos of Cheney snarling, Rumsfeld looking diabolical, and Bush looking clueless? (He had this theory in the early days of the Iraq War.)

There's another theory out there, from a guy named Vito Russo, author of the great book The Celluoid Closet. Russo argued that homo Hollywoodians managed to sneak the gay into mainstream films via effeminate and butch characters, cross-dressing scenes, throwaway jokes, and so forth. It's pretty convincing—see the awesome documentary (some clips here) based on the book, which has all the footage that Russo talks about.

Combining the two theories, I'm thinking it might be possible that the Times had photo editors/illustrators who were "that way" in the 1920s. Seriously, I'm not looking for this stuff. It just has a way of finding me.

When You're a Jet, You're a Jet All the Way

This is the cockpit of the Airbus A320. It is the jet I flew on from PDX to MSP. And guess what, I happened to be sitting next to a flight attendant! She was mostly concerned with chatting with her fellow flight attendants, but for the last half hour or so she talked to me and the guy next to me about flying, jets, airports, and turbulence. Guys, I got the poop! Here are some interesting facts.

• Flight attendants aren't assigned to specific routes. They look at flight plans themselves, consider things like which planes fly on those routes, and then bid on the routes they want. I'm not too clear on what this involves, but it's way more complicated than I thought. The flight attendant I was talking to likes DC9s and 757s the best. She called the 757 the '57, so I did too. I complained about the hard landing (complete with bounce onto the runway) the last time I rode a 757. She gave me a blank look, and I realized it probably wasn't the plane, it was the pilot, or wind patterns, or something else.

• When the pilot lands one wheel at a time (back wheel, back wheel, front wheel), this is not a mistake. It is because of wind shear. The wind is blowing the plane from the side, and when you land a plane in wind shear, this is how you adapt your landing.

• Also not a mistake: the figure eight pattern around an airport. I said that I felt like the pilot had missed his exit off the freeway, especially when descending from low-lying clouds. No, this is a holding pattern. I told her about the time my Q400 (the turboprop) was about to land in Newark and we pulled up and flew around for twenty minutes. The pilot said it was to maintain even spacing between the planes. She said that she'd once been on a 747 (a massive plane) that was about to land in Detroit, only a DC9 was taking off on the same runway. If the 747 had landed, it would have caught the back of the DC9 as it took off. So the tower made them pull up. "They don't usually do that to a 747," she said. No doubt!

• The binging noises all mean something different, and they really bug flight attendants. "We're always getting binged," she said. "On the '57 the bings go bing, bing, but on these planes they go bing bing bing bing bing. I hate it!" She pointed to an exit sign. "In a few seconds you'll see the exit sign light up and hear another bing. That means we have about two minutes till we absolutely have to be in our jump seats. But I don't need the bing, I can tell by the way the plane's flying."

• The amount of turbulence on every flight varies, but you can count on it in some places. I noticed the flight attendant was turning green whenever we hit some bumps. Was this a bad sign? Shouldn't she be used to this? I asked her if she was OK, and she said, "Yes, I'm just pregnant." Oh! She leaned over to look out the window. "I'm just trying to see what approach we're taking," she said. "If we fly over the lake, we should be OK, but if we go over the valley, we're gonna get thumped. It looks like we're coming in over the lake." We talked some more about wind tunnels and the like, then we started turning. She looked out the window. The ground was visible below. "Oh, I shouldn't have looked," she said, and turned green again. "I wonder if we're coming in over the valley. Oh, looks like it. We're gonna get thumped. Sorry, guys."

For all the shaking, the landing was amazingly smooth. "Wow, nice landing!" she said. I agreed. I took out my boarding pass to see where my connecting flight would be. "Where are you going?" she asked. Newark. "Ugh, well, have fun." I am trying to take her words to heart my first morning back in Cheeseville. Trying.