Sue > Recent Status Updates

Apparently, it's all about bread. White bread. Whoda thunk. I would have guessed beer.

I have a super duper crush on Hilary Mantel's talent.

"'Early domesticity has always been most characteristic of most savages, of most peasants, of the urban poor....'" Was quoted in the context that academic institutions were dumbing down women's curriculums as women felt the life of the mind was unfeminine. Women were running from challenges with personal growth and self realization, they fled to positions as wives/mothers and chose to remain as a shell of a human.

"What the feminine mystique took from Margaret Mead [and her study of matriarchal cultures] was not her vision of woman's great untested potential of human creativity....it took [the vision of] where women, ...by merely bearing children, will earn the same respect accorded to men...all other things that a woman can do...are pale substitutes for the conception of a child."

She's writing about the impact of Freudian theory on the US; being the grandfather of documenting the systemic oppression of women. Penis envy, my ass.

Sojourner Truth kicks ass. Hard.

Betty quickly builds the historical/cultural context of how women were demoralized. Her interviews with 1950's working women stunned me as I hadn't realized their moms were "Rosie the Riviter" and their grandmothers were suffragettes. These career women found themselves were watching 50 years of progression fizzle out in front of their eyes. Has Dorothy Parker been a woman of the 1950's, she'd have been ignored.

If you weren't on love with John Singer Sergent already, you will be now.

Couldn't help but laugh in horror reading about the French medical geniuses and their distinct lack of bedside-manner. If they found a patient with an ailment requiring surgery that could bring them waves of glory and "one-up" another, they would perform the procedure. Right there. As in, "whip a scalpel out of the pocket and cut away without consent." Punching the frightened patient to keep them still was common.