The Bold and the Brave, including Monique Frize and her students

The central portion of The Bold and the Brave explores issues for women in contemporary engineering and science, but the book begins with sections on the philosophical and historical views of women's nature and nurture.

Plato, for example, was opposed to equality for all women, but believed that some women were better equipped to be leaders than some men and therefore deserved the same training and education.

Aristotle, on the other hand, believed the female is a "deformed male." Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that science is beyond a woman's grasp, so her education should be practical. David Hume wrote that women "are too easily swayed by their emotions."

Despite the fact that society agreed that women were not suited to science by their own nature and education was routinely denied their nurture, some woman made significant contributions to science. They rarely got credit for it.

The Danish astronomer Sophia Brahe (1556-1643) helped her brother Tycho Brahe predict comets and eclipses, but Tycho usually gets the credit.

Maria Winkelmann (1670-1720) discovered a comet, but her husband's name was on the report.

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the above is an excerpt from an essay "From martyrdom to poor Mrs. Einstein: For women, science and engineering has been -- and is -- a long, hard road" by Joanne Laucius in which she reviews the book -- The Bold and the Brave:  A History of Women in Science and Engineering, a contemporary report and history -- by Monique Frize.

Laucius notes:  "Frize is a scientist, so it's no surprise that she uses numbers to illuminate the modern part of the story, which has hardly been a steady upwards-and-onwards. The Montreal massacre didn't appear to immediately discourage young Canadian women from studying engineering. Between 1990 and 1995, the number of young women who enrolled in undergraduate engineering courses increased to 22 per cent from 12 per cent."  

Frize is also a writing professor (or at least gets her students writing history in and history of science).  Read the rest here.

What do you see in Malcolm X?

Really, what do you see from your own perspective?

Renee at Womanist Musings wishes Malcolm X Happy Birthday by sharing his eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing wonders "Where would we be without Malcolm?" and advises readers to "check out Grace Lee Boggs on knowing Malcolm X, Adrienne Maree Brown on the application of Malcolm's teaching to building power in communities around violence and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on the legacy of Malcolm X." Anna Clark at Isak remembers "Happy Birthday, Malcolm ... and Brown v. Board of Education" and gets readers looking at various posts and essays.

Zettler Clay for Clutch Magazine remembers "his rescinded views towards females" in the post "Malcolm X and Black Women: Struggling For Closure." (My biblioblogger friends are silent. And my rhetorician friends are just as mute. That says a lot, doesn't it? But Linda López McAlister had trouble remembering those rescinded views towards females when she viewed Spike Lee's biographical film when it came out 16 and a half years ago: "In the last few days--in this order--I heard a talk by the white radical lesbian separatist philosopher Mary Daly, saw 'Malcolm X' and heard a talk by black feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks. . . . One thought that kept occurring to me as I was watching Malcolm X give his speeches was how much his separatist rhetoric and Mary Daly's separatist rhetoric had in common. . . . And maybe, if I hadn't heard bell hooks yesterday, I would have come in here today and given a review of 'Malcolm X' that focused more on the cinematic elements of the film and what Black liberation struggles and women's liberation struggles have in common than on the troubling overt misogyny of the film." And maybe, if you remember, you were listening to somebody, from your own perspectives, when you watched the Spike Lee motion picture remembering the life of Malcolm X.)

And maybe, if you were at the Brooklyn Museum between October 31, 2008–April 5, 2009, you would have noticed history in art from your own perspective. What would you have made of "Carrie Mae Weems's Untitled (Man Smoking/Malcolm X), 1990, which explores human experience from the vantage point of an African American female subject"? The work by Weems was part of "Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection . . . an exhibition . . . [the title of which] refers to the idea of the 'master’s house' from two perspectives: the museum as the historical domain of male artists and professed masters of art history, and the house as the supposed proper province of women." Go back, look again, at Weem's photo as you frame it. What do you see in Malcolm X?

Anne Carson and Anne Lamott on Resurrection

Listen to silly Anne Lamott and foolish Anne Carson, wanting hoping desiring so gullibly to keep open the historic and literary possibilities of resurrection, as women see it. The one Anne speaks of Jesus, the other Anne of another Greek-fabled drama, Alcestis in Alcestis by Euripides.

Euripides, of course, is that one of whom the Historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle says: “Euripides and Plato are almost the only [male] authors who show any true appreciation of a woman's real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his [sexist, bigoted] prejudices, was opposed.” But I’m reading the “scholarship” of another “historian” (supposedly) who scoffs, like Aristotle, at true appreciation of a woman’s views. I’m talking about James F. McGrath and his newly published book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. McGrath is crying for reviews, but not this one here. In his book, again and again (on more than a dozen pages so far), McGrath feels like he has to pooh pooh the inclusion of women as credible witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Not surprising. His historiography is straight phallogocentrism. What I mean by that is this. Hélène Cixous, in her book Stigmata: escaping texts, translates and quotes “Clarice Lispector, who did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.” Cixous points out that Lispector provides a definition of the term: “We have seen this before; it is the ‘phallocratic system’ . . . this is how she [Lispector] conceives of it: a ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’” (123). Now the English translation of Cixous’s French translation of Lispector’s Brazilian Portuguese has yielded the term. The three together have made “phal-” from Aristotle’s φαλλικὰ (“ph-a-l-l-ika”); “logo,” from Aristotle’s λόγος (or “l-o-g-os”) which he himself makes (by) his λογική (or “l-o-g-ikē” aka LOGIC); and “centric” from Aristotle’s κεντρική (or “k-e-n-tr-ikē”). McGrath, like father Aristotle, does not permit even a second of incredulity. He redefines “faith” and “history” under the guise of “religion.” Enough of that then.

Here’s Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith:

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.

In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives. (140).

Here’s Anne Carson in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides:

What does Alkestis' resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can’t last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?

Rules broken by Euripides in Alkestis include the rule of closure. What are we to make of the ending? Can we be sure the veiled women is alive? that she is Alkestis? that she will live happily ever after with her husband and children? Critics have doubted all these. There is a kind of nuptial drama staged in the final scene--perhaps a parody of the ancient Greek wedding, which centered upon an unveiling of the bride before the eyes of her husband and some exchange of words between them--that stalls oddly at its peak moment. Here the bride is unveiled to her husband at 971/1121 (or so it seems to me; critics doubt this too) but she will not be permitted to speak for three days due to her death-polluted condition. An eerie silence carries her into the big dark house of her unconventional husband.

I find I want to say less rather than more about Alkestis. Not because there is less in this play but because the surface has a speed and shine that evaporate with exegesis, like some of [Alfred] Hitchcock’s plots. Or a trembling of laughter, terrible if it broke out. (248-49)

Aspasia, her person and our method

Aspasia herself possesses and can possess almost no historical reality. We can form no impression of her as a person. . . We also cannot accept as historical the joke, first perhaps in the comic poet Kallias's Pedetai and later in the philosophers, that Aspasia taught Perikles how to speak and hence was a master rhetorician or philosopher.
--Robert W. Wallace

Let’s look very carefully at what Robert W. Wallace, classics professor, is doing with his review of a history of Aspasia. He dispossesses the figure of a woman from historical reality. He disallows our contemporary impression of her and her own personhood. He divorces truth from humor, teacher from student, and rhetoric from philosophy. (If you must find where he does this, google it.)

“Why does he do this?” some of us ask. “Is it because he is a man, and the history is written by one woman and about another?” So we ask ourselves, “Aren’t such questions too suspicious, too feminist?” And our answer is: “Of course they are; it is not Wallace’s male sex, or the female gender of the subjects that he would so objectively observe that should determine his conclusions.”

It is not his conclusions, or the glaring sexual positions of this scholar, that ought first to trouble us. Rather, it is his starting point, and his pointed self-contradictory method, that initially gives us pause.

Wallace is not original. Aristotle was the first to dispossess his history of Aspasia. When Pericles was learning from her, when Socrates was interacting with her, when Plato and Xenophon and Aristophanes were writing about her, the young Aristotle was doing something altogether different. Aristotle was watching these men grapple with the teachings of Isocrates and Gorgias, of Homer and Hesiod and Sappho, of the playwrights and the poets. Aristotle was listening to the philosophers trump the sophists. Aristotle was determining to be a scientist, an objective observer, the logician who arrives at truth in nature. Either Aristotle would continue to be like his forefathers, or he would liberate Greece from its small place in the world and in history. Aristotle clearly documents this development in his thinking: his “either / or” binary is formed; and he even uses his syllogistic method to document his separation from Socrates and from Plato. The treatise he calls τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά (or meta-physics, or “[I Am] Above Nature”); Aristotle might as well have called it “After Aspasia, Pericles, Socrates, and Plato.”

Of course we tend to look at some of Aristotle’s conclusions about the cosmos, and about rhetoric, and about proper Greek language, and about women. We’re then not surprised that he writes Aspasia out of his history, out of his method for critiqing and writing history. Logic is Aristotle’s big man tool.

Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede call this big tool Aristotle’s “logic-chopping automaton.” It’s worth, also, to listen again to Nancy Mairs describing this big tool in the hands of a man:

“In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. . . [in] a dimorphic world.”(Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 41)

Now, Mairs goes on to say that there is an entire toolbox of tools that Aristotelians using the big tool of “either / or” logic avoid. Women, says Mairs (and she should know), live in a polymorphic world.

Women don’t have the problem that Aristotle had, or that Wallace has, including the woman Aspasia in our cosmos, in our histories. Historians Madeleine Henry, Susan Jarratt (with Rory Ong), Lisa Ede, Andrea Lunsford, and Cheryl Glenn have each one included Aspasia in history as a historical (not merely “hysterical”) person. (Richard Leo Enos has said that Glenn writes a history that is more accurate, more representative, and more complete).

Glenn asks how, if we don’t let her in, can we let Socrates in history—because we only know and know of Socrates in the same way we know and know of Aspasia: through the writings of others’ and not through their own writings. And if we examine carefully their method of knowing, of the question and answer relational dialectic, then we see how very likely it is that Socrates learned his famous method from Aspasia.

As Enos notes, it’s a more complete, more accurate, and more representative history. But there’s more: Glenn’s method of history writing is a better way of writing history. As Patricia Bizzell notes, it’s the feminist method of care, of the subjective. It’s not just some cold distant separation of self from the observed.

This is why I cannot agree with feminist rhetoric scholar Carol Poster who says in her Aristotelian voice ironically that the Rhetoric of “Aristotle has not, and in my opinion, should not, be appropriated for feminist rhetoric.” When she makes this argument, in self-contradiction, Poster appropriates Aristotle’s big tool of logic; she dispossesses one of rhetoric’s most important treatises from inclusive polymorphic (feminist) rhetoric.

So now, when I turn back to Aristotle, to his Rhetoric, to my translating of that treatise of his, then I don’t want to use his big tool alone. Too many translators have limited themselves that way. I think we must make a big big big deal out of the real nature of Aristotle’s treatise. He cannot get around the humility and the polymorphic reality of rhetoric. He would use only logic; but, as he starts in, Aristotle can't even separate himself from Aspasia, from her dialectic/rhetoric/poetic:

ἡ ῥητορική ἐστιν ἀντίστροφος τῃ̂ διαλεκτικη