Erin Schowalter

Love Translated

barbara — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Love Translated follows a group of men from North America and Europe as they tour the Ukraine on a trip organized by an international dating service that links male clients with “letter order brides.” Over the course of their ten-day trip, the men travel to several cities, judge a beauty pageant of women who have joined the agency, attend social events, and go on “one-on-one” dates (accompanied, normally, by a translator). The film opens with men telling stories of their experiences (or lack of experiences) with women in their own communities, accompanied by a voiceover from an agency representative exhorting the men to be reasonable and keep in mind that they are looking for a partner, “not a statue to hang on the wall.”

Julia Ivanova, the film's director, writer, and editor, does a skillful (and sometimes humorous) job of juxtaposing the men’s views of who the women are and how they will behave with the women contradicting these statements. One man says, “There’s been this transition through feminism and a number of other movements in the United States that have altered how women look at themselves and it has, I think, robbed them of some of the identity they once took great pride in.” The woman he is on a date with replies, “Our women want to have it all; a husband, children, money and their own business. The woman is the head of the family. The man is just an accessory.”

All of the issues that normally come up when the topic of mail-order brides is discussed are on display: the somewhat primitivist notion that the women will be untainted by feminism and, therefore, more ideal; the objectification of women’s bodies; the unequal power dynamics. As much as some or all of the men may be sincere in their desire to find a true life partner, they have also come to the Ukraine because it is, as one man says, like a candy store for middle-aged men. In the absence of the ability to speak directly due to language barriers, the men rely on the women’s looks and letters. The letters have, at the very least, been translated by someone else, but have possibly also been written by someone else. Despite (or perhaps because of) the power that the men have in the situation, there is also uneasiness. Many express concern that the women are using them for money, gifts, and/or a visa.

This uneasiness comes to a head in an uncomfortable scene. A client is displeased because a woman he has been on several dates with expected to receive flowers more often than he would have liked. He physically blocks her ability to sit down and join the group, pointedly ignores her, and explains that he is going to blow smoke in the face of the person who should be punished. His date looks like she is about to cry and becomes conciliatory. By the end of the night, we see them walking hand in hand into a hotel elevator. While it would be unfair to judge all of the participants from the actions of these two individuals or even judge the individuals from the one interaction, it is an uncomfortable reminder of the type of isolation that the women could potentially face if they did follow the men to a foreign country.

Ivanova is impartial in her portrayal of both the male and female participants. Although the film is filled with uncomfortable and awkward moments, the explicit involvement of the documentarian is rarely evident. Instead, Ivanova is confident enough to let the story unfold on screen, supplementing long scenes of the men talking amongst themselves and some awkward—and often silent—dates with individual interviews with the male and female participants.

Despite the uncomfortable and sometimes disturbing subject matter and the long history of subjugation and objectification that are impossible not to consider when viewing it, Ivanona’s film is compelling, watchable, and even—perhaps most surprising of all—entertaining.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, March 18th 2011

Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Nicholas Terpstra

Johns Hopkins University Press

Founded in 1554 by a group of charitable women who called themselves the Compagnia della Pietà, the Casa della Pietà, or Compassion House, was built in Florentine to shelter girls who had been orphaned or abandoned by their parents. The goal of the home was to keep children and adolescent girls from turning to (or being forced into) prostitution in the absence of familial support, and to provide them with the possibility of a dowry and marriage. Despite these good intentions, only 202 of the 526 girls and women who resided in the home survived their stay. As Nicholas Terpstra repeatedly asks in Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence, “What was killing the girls of the Casa della Pietà?”

Terpstra sets out to solve this 456-year-old mystery using the limited documentation still available about the home, as well as other documents that discuss contemporaneous Florence. Throughout the text, Terpstra explores and elaborates upon various theories about what was killing the residents of Casa della Pietà, weaving these theories within the story of the home and the conditions of Florence of the era. In telling this story, Terpstra touches on topics such as the work available for adolescent girls, birth control and abortifacients (and the abortion debate), prostitution, and religious fundamentalism. Although the book is structured as somewhat of a mystery, Terpstra’s question about the fate of the residents is only one part of what is ultimately a social history of the Casa della Pietà and Renaissance Florence.

In terms of women’s history, the book is interesting in two ways. First, it discusses the challenges and options an orphaned or abandoned girl could anticipate facing at the time, even when external support was provided. Second, as was previously mentioned, a group of women established the Casa della Pietà. This was not the norm at the time. Although Terpstra warns against overly romanticizing these women, it is somewhat difficult not to, particularly when the author outlines the differences between the way the Casa della Pietà admitted girls and the way that contemporaneous shelters did, and when he compares Casa della Pietà under the guidance of Compagnia della Pietà to the way it operated once the founding members ceased their involved. As Terpstra notes, “these women challenged more than just the sexual politics of Renaissance Florence—they challenged its political and ecclesiastical establishment.”

The book contains fascinating, and sometimes shocking, information about Terpstra’s topic. I appreciated that Terpstra does not exclusively limit himself to the subject of Casa della Pietà, but uses the mystery of what happened to the home’s residents as a way to examine related issues. Admittedly, some of these discussions were less interesting to me than others. For example, although the section that discusses the textile work done by the home’s residents and the wool and silk industry in general is necessary to have as complete an understanding of the home as possible, I did find it difficult to get through because it is a topic in which I have little interest. This is my bias, however, and I appreciated the level of detail Terpstra demonstrated in this section when he turned this focus to topics that were more in line with my interests.

Overall, despite containing a few sections that were less interesting to me, the text puts forth considerable fascinating information. Perhaps most importantly, the text both taught me about a shelter I had never before heard of, and made me want to learn more about the topic and the social climate of Renaissance Florence and its impact on women and girls.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, July 29th 2010

The Hanging of Susanna Cox: The True Story of Pennsylvania’s Most Notorious Infanticide and the Legend That’s Kept It Alive

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Corinne Earnest, Patricia Earnest Suter, Russell Earnest

Stackpole Books

The story of Susanna Cox, as detailed in Patricia Earnest Suter, Russell Earnest, and Corinne Earnest’s The Hanging of Susanna Cox, nearly perfectly follows the trajectory of the seduction of the mid-to-late eighteenth century: a naive girl is lured from her family, “seduced” (often, in actuality, raped), left by her lover (or rapist), and left to die alone. Seduction novels were simultaneously didactic, propagandistic, prurient, and hugely popular. What differentiates the story of Susanna Cox from the seduction novel is that Cox was a real woman, indentured at the age of fourteen and hung in Pennsylvania for infanticide in 1809 when she was in her early twenties.

The authors tease out the details of Cox’s short life, trial, and execution against the backdrop of the changes to the United States, forensics, the justice system, and the public’s perception of crime. This is all intriguing, albeit concerning, information. The evidence of Cox’s guilt was sparse, her trial exceptionally brief, and the details provided by the authors about her public execution horrific. At Cox’s brief trial, women connected to the case do not testify, nor does the father of Cox’s son, who is not so much as named in public records. Regardless of her guilt or innocence, in many ways Cox’s life was tragic, and the book is particularly sad to read in that her case was likely in no way unique, particularly amongst “invisible” indentured women.

What I found most interesting about the book was the emergence of Cox’s “notorious” status and the visibility that came to her after her death. The authors note, “At the very time Susanna’s life came to an end, her story came alive through the words of printers.” Perhaps because her story was so similar to the type of seduction tale told in countless novels and stories at the time, broadsides and poems about the case were printed simultaneous to her trial and execution, and were widely sold. The story endured. The book opens with the authors’ visit to the Kutztown Folk Festival in 2008—199 years after Cox’s execution—at which one exhibit is the repeated hanging of an effigy of Cox. Although this hanging of Cox’s effigy culminates with a quote from one of the poems about Cox (“Her exit–infamy!”), what is intriguing is that the poems about her are factual, didactic, and moralistic, but also somewhat sympathetic.

Although there are many unanswered questions about the life of Susanna Cox, the authors have assembled an impressive array of facts. As someone who had never heard of Susanna Cox or her execution before reading the book and who has never visited the area in which the story is famous, the book occasionally delved into too much local and geographical detail for me; however, The Hanging of Susanna Cox was still a book that I read with interest and speed, eager to learn more about the story. Beyond just the case of Susanna Cox, which is engaging but frustrating for the impossibility of decisive answers, the book is also a portrayal of a justice system and population in a state of significant change.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, June 16th 2010

Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Susan E. Klepp

University of North Carolina Press

Susan E. Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions tracks the changes in family size ideals and the associated changes in family planning and women’s roles in early America. It is unsurprising that Klepp’s work highlights the limitations to women’s agency in family planning. Revolutionary Conceptions makes clear that women played an increasing role in determining the number of children they would have, and how this was tied to a greater presence of women outside of the domestic sphere.

Klepp reproduces letters from women who talk about their desire to have fewer children, which are usually followed by a revelation that woman, ultimately, gave birth to (by modern, typical North American views, anyway) a large number of children. Female slaves, were, alternately, wanted for their reproductive capacity and then sold for having had “too many” children when large families were no longer en vogue. Klepp also highlights some areas in which women had (limited) control. Women were brought to court to testify as experts in cases such as rape and infanticide; however, it was men who made the ultimate decisions in these cases. Klepp notes, “[I]n the colonies, month-to-month fertility decisions were left to women.”

Throughout the text, the author notes the difficulties in acquiring information about her topic. Early censuses, for example, routinely under-counted infants, particularly girls, which makes Klepp’s task of tracking changes in birth rates difficult. Klepp’s task is even more challenging due to the paucity of birth records for slaves. Further, when Klepp examines family planning, she quotes from letters and other texts in which women talk about limiting the number of children they would have, but the methods these women used were not shared.

In one interesting section, Klepp discusses herbs and concoctions used as emmenagogues (used to induce menstruation), abortifacients, and contraceptives, but notes, “Women usually made only oblique references to their use of these medicines and practices.” Despite this, Klepp is able to produce a highly detailed study of the issue.

I appreciate the comprehensiveness of Klepp’s approach. Not only does she support her study with statistics (represented in text as well as several graphs and tables), but she also includes artwork. Her chapter examining images of women describes and provides examples of portraits of women and their children, as well as husbands, from 1682 to approximately 1830. Klepp traces changes in women’s poses and the symbolism of the accessories that accompany them.

The main flaw I found in this chapter was in the accompanying examples. It is a shame that not all images that Klepp discusses are included in the book, and the black and white reproduction of the images that do appear has obscured many of the significant details Klepp describes; however, these issues do not detract from Klepp’s analysis.

Despite the vagaries, lost information, and reticence to have recorded information in the first place, Klepp has produced a highly detailed, fact-based, and—perhaps most importantly—interesting study of the declining number of children that early colonial American women bore, and what this meant for their agency both within and outside of the household.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, February 27th 2010

Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank

admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Randi Hutter Epstein

W.W. Norton

When researching medical or social history, one of the things that often becomes apparent is the level of mystery that surrounded women’s bodies and bodily functions. This mystery and speculation is the subject of Randi Hutter Epstein’s Get Me Out. As the title suggests, Hutter Epstein, a medical journalist, presents an overview of ideas related to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth spanning from antiquity to the modern day. While it is easy to laugh at some of the mistaken notions from the past (and some of them are, indeed, hilarious and/or terrifying), Hutter Epstein also makes sure to note the unknowns that still surround these processes today.

One thing that Get Me Out makes very clear is the way in which pregnancy and childbirth—and, therefore, women’s bodies—have continuously been the subjects of experimentation. This has sometimes been to women’s benefit, but all too often to their detriment. Early medical texts were written by monks who were not only excluded from the delivery room due to their gender (only women were allowed to attend childbirth) but were also likely completely unfamiliar with women’s bodies, leading to a lot of guesswork. Hutter Epstein describes disturbing experiments on female slaves that did eventually produce positive results, but at unknown cost to the women experimented upon. Another type of experimentation Hutter Epstein recounts is pain suppression during childbirth. Get Me Out describes the contradictory views of women towards drug use during childbirth over time: from these drugs being a part of women’s liberation to the drugs being a tool of subjugation.

The key strengths of Get Me Out are the fascinating nature of the information it provides and the book’s readability. Get Me Out is incredibly engaging. As Hutter Epstein notes in the title, this is a history; she does not attempt to tell the history. This approach allows her to describe some of the high (or low) points of ideas and processes from antiquity to the nineteenth century in the first few chapters, and then focus the rest of the book on the twentieth century. Even with the volume of material presented, I appreciated that Hutter Epstein did not rigidly confine herself to the topic at hand. The book is peppered with footnotes that provide additional, often tangential, information. At one point, the author uses a footnote to discuss the differences in the sperm trade between humans and thoroughbred horses. It is clear that Hutter Epstein has a very curious mind, which has led to her creating an interesting, funny, illuminating, enjoyable book.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, December 27th 2009

Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:03:00 +0000

By Reverend Jen Miller

Soft Skull Press

Reverend Jen Miller—artist, troll museum proprietor, elf-ear wearer, and reverend in the Universal Life Church—reprints and adapts the essays she wrote during her two-year stint as the writer for Nerve.com’s "I Did it for Science" column in Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen. As the name suggests, the essays feature Miller performing experiments related to sex on herself and her friends. Experiments include becoming a “dude for a day,” attending fellatio school, watching a Sex and the City marathon, experiencing female ejaculation, babysitting (babies being the outcome of sex), and holding a sex toy Olympics.

While it is hardly difficult to find stories about women being acted on sexually in any medium, Miller is very much an active agent in her experiments and is in control even when it means surrendering control. She does things that make her uncomfortable, but continues only when they—sometimes unexpectedly—give her sexual or mental pleasure. I appreciated the way Miller broke the “rules” when confronted with something she did not want to do, such as stripping for an apathetic audience in a seedy strip club.

Miller’s essays are still available on Nerve, but what makes the book different is the way she weaves an autobiography through Live Nude Elf. On Nerve, the column is set up like an academic science experiment, with an introduction, list of materials, discussion of method, and conclusions. In the book, essays are supplemented with introductions that relate to the other things that were happening in Miller’s life while each “sexperiment” was occurring. In addition, Live Nude Elf includes chapters that deal exclusively with “experiments” of a more personal kind: Miller’s adolescence, relationships, sacrifice, and heartbreak. What was an amusing, interesting, sometimes uncomfortable, and occasionally thought-provoking column on Nerve has become a book that is all of those things, but also had an emotional impact on me that I had not anticipated. Live Nude Elf made me laugh, made me read some passages aloud, made me a little bit melancholy, and kept me engaged throughout.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, September 16th 2009

Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change

admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:58:00 +0000

By David Holmgren

Chelsea Green Publishing

David Holmgren, one of the founders of the permaculture concept, turns his attention to forecasting the results of changes to energy and climate in Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change. The first half of the book provides an overview of the history of energy, energy futures, and the relationships between climate change and peak oil. It’s likely not surprising that this information is somewhat bleak. While nothing in these sections of the book was completely surprising to me, it was still somewhat bracing to have all of this information presented all at once in such a precise, matter-of-fact way.

After providing historical context, Holmgren moves into the heart of the book: descent scenarios. Holmgren forecasts four scenarios based on different variables of climate change and energy decline (slow energy decline and severe climate change, slow energy decline and moderate climate change, etc.). The scenarios range from dystopian to moderately utopian. I have struggled a lot with my reactions to these scenarios. I cannot argue with the research behind Holmgren’s assertions and his presentation is thorough and clear, but I have a mental disconnect in that I don’t want to believe any of the negative ones. The scenarios that are the most cautiously utopian are comforting, but seem unrealistic (and still hugely life altering).

To his credit, Holmgren is aware of the potential for this reaction. In the final section of the book—by far my favorite section—Holmgren notes, “I believe we can better shape our responses to each of the scenarios if as individuals and communities and nations we recognize the constraining forces that are beyond our control. We can then consider how basic human values and needs can be sustained without wasting resources on projects or objectives that may have little chance of altering the fundamental dynamics of our world.”

This sentiment is what I was hoping for when I started reading Future Scenarios. I had hoped that the book would provide suggestions for ways that communities could work together to adapt to the challenges that we are on the precipice of experiencing. The book mainly focuses, instead, on forecasts. While it is really only the aforementioned final section that delves into what I was hoping for, the book does provide valuable, if sometimes terrifying, information about the possible interactions and ramifications of climate change and peak oil.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, June 25th 2009

My Little Red Book

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:43:00 +0000

By Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

Twelve Books

When something is already a little bit scary, feeling like you are alone in the experience or that it is something you should not talk about makes it all the more terrifying. Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s My Little Red Book seeks to demystify and universalize one such potentially scary experience: the first period. Like its namesake, The Little Red Book, My Little Red Book seeks to strengthen a cultural movement; in Kauder Nalebuff’s case, away from shame and fear about periods, and towards open dialogue.

The book contains more than ninety stories from a wide variety of women telling the story of their first periods. The women range from teenagers to the very elderly, and their stories take place between 1916 and 2008. They are academics, students, writers, filmmakers, household names (at least in some circles), and directors of NGOs, amongst other things. The women’s first periods occur all over the United States, as well as in other countries (Turkey, Australia, and China, to name a few). The stories are sweet, touching, funny, and sometimes a little baffling. They are as different as are the women that provided them. There are stories of shame, pride, excitement, and terror. Yet within most stories, there is similarity. This similarity is good for universalizing the experience of the first period, but does make the book somewhat repetitious at times.

As a concept, My Little Red Book is brilliant. As a set of stories read one after another, it did not entirely work for me. As I was reading it, I felt it was missing the very dialogue that it is intended to promote. I found myself wishing that the women’s stories within the book conversed with and responded to one another, such as would occur in a conversation amongst friends or a documentary. However, this is a small complaint and does not greatly detract from Kauder Nalebuff’s goal.

At the very least, the book provides readers with the knowledge that no matter what her first-period experience, there is someone out there that has felt the same way. Hopefully, though, My Little Red Book’s readers—particularly those readers who have just experienced or are about to experience their first period—will take the dialogue beyond the pages of the book.

On that note, here is my contribution to continuing that dialogue. My first period arrived a few months after I turned eleven. Like many of the women in the book, I called my mom into the bathroom when I discovered it. Similar to Sarah Rosen in My Little Red Book, who gets her first period during her bat mitzvah, the timing of my first period is interesting to me: it came while I was trick-or-treating on Halloween, a holiday in which there is a rather firm line between children and adults. Although the first period does not have that clear of a demarcation between girlhood and womanhood, it does mark a change in a girl’s life, and it deserves to be discussed. My Little Red Book is a positive step toward that.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, April 20th 2009