The topic I wish I could find (or write) a book on would be what I think of as “mother media” - where does it come from, who writes it, who funds it, who consumes it, how has it shifted? I’m thinking of everything here from generalist sites like Romper and Scary Mommy to niche-r sites like Working Mother and Screen Free Parenting to mother and mother-adjacent essays in publications like NYT Magazine to mom-related social media.
Jan 14, 2022·edited Jan 14, 2022Liked by Leah Libresco Sargeant
I'm late to the party, but I'd like to recommend "Blessed" by Kate Bowler – or really, *any* book by Kate Bowler. But particularly "Blessed".
It's a history of America's Prosperity Gospel.
When people grasp for words to describe why American culture seems so prone to shaming the weak, plenty come to mind. "Capitalism!" "Individualism!" "Libertarianism!" "Reducing humanity to Homo oeconomicus!" "Meritocracy!" Of those, "meritocracy" comes closest to describing the actual problem — that of treating suffering not just as some material failure, but a moral one.
America — including secular America — is so steeped in the prosperity gospel that it's no wonder we associate material failure with moral blame in a way that economics, by itself, never could. Academic economists, be they ever so free-market, don't typically go around believing in the just-world fallacy. Honoring individuals and their liberty does not *logically* entail supposing individuals have so much agency that they can transcend any contingency as long as they're "good enough". Conservative voters, though, tend to answer surveys as if the benefits of freedom and prosperity were the *result* of the just-world fallacy, making the fallacy more foundational to their stance than any particular economic arrangement or notion of rights. If their confidence in a just world is shaken, so is their support for economic and individual liberties.
Why is this? I believe it rhymes with "posterity loss bell".
If the prosperity gospel were true, then success *would* flow from confidence that God is on your side. The prosperity gospel, more than any dry economic reasoning or libertarian idealism, shames people for being contingent beings. Kick the libertarianism out of people, but not their prosperity-gospel streak, and you're still left with people who'll shame others for their contingency. Perhaps even shame them worse, from a more authoritarian perspective. The prosperity gospel makes a mockery of Christlike mercy toward contingent beings. And, whether in "sacred" or secular form, it is very, very popular.
One book (actually, my number one of 2021) that was very Other Feminism-ish (that's exactly how I think of it!) was Honor Moore's "Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury" about her and her mother, Jenny Moore. Honor Moore's father was the Episcopal bishop Paul Moore Jr., and she also wrote a memoir focusing more on him. I thought it would be an excellent choice for a Christian feminist book club. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TK52P9W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Just finished Christopher Lasch's collection of essays & reviews, titled Women & the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, and knew I'd have to tell you about it: The work explicitly references the need for a feminism that opts out of -- or at least substantively and powerfully critiques -- the capitalist, consumerist, classist economic consensus of educated and privileged America, that revolves around masculine embodiment as a functional default and forces women to play by its rules, so to speak (where rule #1a is, infuriatingly, "don't visibly gestate, birth, or breastfeed anything" and rule #1b is "if you must break rule 1a, for pete's sake don't let it disturb your [paycheck-validated, preferably white-collar] work"). Lasch is no fan of that consensus (though the above thoroughly irascible articulation of it is mine, not his; he's, at times soothingly and at times maddeningly, much more even-handed). He is most critical not even of our economic house of horrors but of the therapeutic Leviathan that has risen up ostensibly to help people bear the excessive freight of obligation, expectation, and emotional upset that in (post)modern times tends to center on nuclear domesticity (but, Lasch reads for "help," rather to police and manage the internal business of families and thus create a non-self-limiting, endlessly self-justifying need for its auxiliary services). I'm undecided what I think of his conclusions but convinced he articulates our shared problems better than most.
Two new Naomi Novik books--the first 2 in the "Scholomance" series! ("A Deadly Education" and "The Last Graduate.") It's set in an AU version of our present-day world with this major change: "If You Are A Magic-Enabled Human, There Are Lots Of Magical Entities That Want to Devour You." It was explained to me like this: "The odds of surviving to graduation at The Scholomance are extremely low. (Like 20-40%. Maybe more towards 40.) HOWEVER, people want to go there because the survival rate is even lower for magical young people on the outside." Also, the protagonist is someone who, for various reasons, nobody likes. However she is awesome, and (for SOME reason!) snarky.
I'm also reading "The Strategy of Conflict," by Thomas Schelling. Promised another person in an online community I'm in that we'll read and discuss it. (Maybe we'll be the "seed" for a book club to grow around.)
I tell which books I'm "planning" to read for the next year with fear and trembling; I've looked at old lists of ones I claimed I would, and usually I completed very few of them, but went off and read other ones.
There's only one novel I read all in one day last year, and it was The Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. Definitely a lot of Other Feminism themes going on in that work of fiction!
I felt many echos of this list's conversations as I've been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Dawn of Everything and Debt: the First 500 years (Graeber, Wengrow). I'm excited to read your thoughts on the gift economy, Leah!
I also really enjoyed Uprooted by Grace Olmstead.
Looking ahead to 2022, I'm looking forward to reading The Night Watchman & The Sentence by Erdrich, Communion & Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks, New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, Reclaiming the Commons by Vandana Shiva, Iwigara by Enrique Salmon, Perilous Bounty by Tom Philpott, The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry, & The Frontlines of Peace by Severine Autesserre.
May we all have a year of great reads and good thoughts :)
In 2022, I hope to get to Erika Bachiochi's 'The Rights of Women' and Leah A. Jacobson's 'Wholistic Feminism' — thanks for all the work you put into this newsletter this year, Leah!
One book I've come across but not gotten around to reading (so many books, so little time!) is A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug by Sarah Lacy. I think it's a couple years old now, but it definitely seems to fit your theme. I did read the introduction when I first stumbled upon it in a library, where her reflection on working an international journalism assignment while pregnant really resonated with my own pro-life feminism, even if that may not have been the explicit intent. I gathered that the main intention (not unrelated to the above) was affirmation of the female body along with everything it's capable of, and how that shouldn't be considered a hindrance to making active contributions to human society.
I would love to know what books you all have to recommend on the topic of marriage--as in, marriage preparation, how to be a good spouse, etc. I'm definitely open to books on this topic from any religion (though maybe not a book about, say, the importance of praying with your spouse).
The topic I wish I could find (or write) a book on would be what I think of as “mother media” - where does it come from, who writes it, who funds it, who consumes it, how has it shifted? I’m thinking of everything here from generalist sites like Romper and Scary Mommy to niche-r sites like Working Mother and Screen Free Parenting to mother and mother-adjacent essays in publications like NYT Magazine to mom-related social media.
I'm late to the party, but I'd like to recommend "Blessed" by Kate Bowler – or really, *any* book by Kate Bowler. But particularly "Blessed".
It's a history of America's Prosperity Gospel.
When people grasp for words to describe why American culture seems so prone to shaming the weak, plenty come to mind. "Capitalism!" "Individualism!" "Libertarianism!" "Reducing humanity to Homo oeconomicus!" "Meritocracy!" Of those, "meritocracy" comes closest to describing the actual problem — that of treating suffering not just as some material failure, but a moral one.
America — including secular America — is so steeped in the prosperity gospel that it's no wonder we associate material failure with moral blame in a way that economics, by itself, never could. Academic economists, be they ever so free-market, don't typically go around believing in the just-world fallacy. Honoring individuals and their liberty does not *logically* entail supposing individuals have so much agency that they can transcend any contingency as long as they're "good enough". Conservative voters, though, tend to answer surveys as if the benefits of freedom and prosperity were the *result* of the just-world fallacy, making the fallacy more foundational to their stance than any particular economic arrangement or notion of rights. If their confidence in a just world is shaken, so is their support for economic and individual liberties.
Why is this? I believe it rhymes with "posterity loss bell".
If the prosperity gospel were true, then success *would* flow from confidence that God is on your side. The prosperity gospel, more than any dry economic reasoning or libertarian idealism, shames people for being contingent beings. Kick the libertarianism out of people, but not their prosperity-gospel streak, and you're still left with people who'll shame others for their contingency. Perhaps even shame them worse, from a more authoritarian perspective. The prosperity gospel makes a mockery of Christlike mercy toward contingent beings. And, whether in "sacred" or secular form, it is very, very popular.
One book (actually, my number one of 2021) that was very Other Feminism-ish (that's exactly how I think of it!) was Honor Moore's "Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury" about her and her mother, Jenny Moore. Honor Moore's father was the Episcopal bishop Paul Moore Jr., and she also wrote a memoir focusing more on him. I thought it would be an excellent choice for a Christian feminist book club. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TK52P9W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Just finished Christopher Lasch's collection of essays & reviews, titled Women & the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, and knew I'd have to tell you about it: The work explicitly references the need for a feminism that opts out of -- or at least substantively and powerfully critiques -- the capitalist, consumerist, classist economic consensus of educated and privileged America, that revolves around masculine embodiment as a functional default and forces women to play by its rules, so to speak (where rule #1a is, infuriatingly, "don't visibly gestate, birth, or breastfeed anything" and rule #1b is "if you must break rule 1a, for pete's sake don't let it disturb your [paycheck-validated, preferably white-collar] work"). Lasch is no fan of that consensus (though the above thoroughly irascible articulation of it is mine, not his; he's, at times soothingly and at times maddeningly, much more even-handed). He is most critical not even of our economic house of horrors but of the therapeutic Leviathan that has risen up ostensibly to help people bear the excessive freight of obligation, expectation, and emotional upset that in (post)modern times tends to center on nuclear domesticity (but, Lasch reads for "help," rather to police and manage the internal business of families and thus create a non-self-limiting, endlessly self-justifying need for its auxiliary services). I'm undecided what I think of his conclusions but convinced he articulates our shared problems better than most.
Two new Naomi Novik books--the first 2 in the "Scholomance" series! ("A Deadly Education" and "The Last Graduate.") It's set in an AU version of our present-day world with this major change: "If You Are A Magic-Enabled Human, There Are Lots Of Magical Entities That Want to Devour You." It was explained to me like this: "The odds of surviving to graduation at The Scholomance are extremely low. (Like 20-40%. Maybe more towards 40.) HOWEVER, people want to go there because the survival rate is even lower for magical young people on the outside." Also, the protagonist is someone who, for various reasons, nobody likes. However she is awesome, and (for SOME reason!) snarky.
I'm also reading "The Strategy of Conflict," by Thomas Schelling. Promised another person in an online community I'm in that we'll read and discuss it. (Maybe we'll be the "seed" for a book club to grow around.)
I tell which books I'm "planning" to read for the next year with fear and trembling; I've looked at old lists of ones I claimed I would, and usually I completed very few of them, but went off and read other ones.
There's only one novel I read all in one day last year, and it was The Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. Definitely a lot of Other Feminism themes going on in that work of fiction!
I felt many echos of this list's conversations as I've been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Dawn of Everything and Debt: the First 500 years (Graeber, Wengrow). I'm excited to read your thoughts on the gift economy, Leah!
I also really enjoyed Uprooted by Grace Olmstead.
Looking ahead to 2022, I'm looking forward to reading The Night Watchman & The Sentence by Erdrich, Communion & Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks, New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, Reclaiming the Commons by Vandana Shiva, Iwigara by Enrique Salmon, Perilous Bounty by Tom Philpott, The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry, & The Frontlines of Peace by Severine Autesserre.
May we all have a year of great reads and good thoughts :)
In 2022, I hope to get to Erika Bachiochi's 'The Rights of Women' and Leah A. Jacobson's 'Wholistic Feminism' — thanks for all the work you put into this newsletter this year, Leah!
One book I've come across but not gotten around to reading (so many books, so little time!) is A Uterus Is a Feature, Not a Bug by Sarah Lacy. I think it's a couple years old now, but it definitely seems to fit your theme. I did read the introduction when I first stumbled upon it in a library, where her reflection on working an international journalism assignment while pregnant really resonated with my own pro-life feminism, even if that may not have been the explicit intent. I gathered that the main intention (not unrelated to the above) was affirmation of the female body along with everything it's capable of, and how that shouldn't be considered a hindrance to making active contributions to human society.
I would love to know what books you all have to recommend on the topic of marriage--as in, marriage preparation, how to be a good spouse, etc. I'm definitely open to books on this topic from any religion (though maybe not a book about, say, the importance of praying with your spouse).