Where Do Babies Come From? . . . Or, Sexism And Women In Fantasy

A lot of electrons have been spilled recently about the presence (or lack thereof) and roles of women in fantasy stories.  Both The Mary Sue and Tansy Roberts have weighed in on the supposed historical justification of sexism in the fantasy genre, and each author makes compelling arguments.  Basically, it goes that women throughout history have played vital roles and pursued all sorts of careers so it makes little sense to indulge historically inaccurate portrayals of women in fantasy stories.

Roberts's critique of The Mary Sue is spot on:

"History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely."

Her point is absolutely right, but then she moves to identify the two main tropes in fantasy as military/warfare and politics.  Magic is identified as a strong third, and links these to male dominance in historical reporting.  Ignoring the role that women played in war and politics, however, is a willful ignorance on the part of ancient reporters, and continues to be so in the fantasy genre.

"When it comes to politics, I’m sorry, but there are no excuses. Sure, women have been excluded from the public political process for large swathes of history and culture (except, you know, when they weren’t—even the supreme patriarchy that was Rome didn’t have complete control over the provinces, where female politicians and civil servants sprung up like weeds) but public is only one piece of politics. The Mary Sue article refers substantially to Game of Thrones, and that’s a very good example, but again you can look to history—as soon as there is any form of dynastic element to your politics, then women are IMPORTANT. Even when the political careers are solely male, those men have wives and families who have a stake in the proceedings and the outcomes, they have risks to take and campaigns to wage every bit as much as the men. And if the women’s politics are happening in salons rather than assembly halls… maybe you should be peeking into those salons. I can guarantee political DYNAMITE is going on in there. With finger sandwiches and mint tea? Why not?"

Okay, that makes a bit of sense.  But here's where I digress.  Historically inspired stories, like the fantastically successful Game of Thrones mentioned above, replicate stereotypes and inadequately populate fantastical worlds with shallow or fulsome representations of human activity.

I don't really want to engage the staggering sexism in fantasy except to make a more general point: historically inspired fantasy is boring.  Don't get me wrong, history is chock full of great stories, and they're perfect jumping off points for a couple dozen novels.  But historically flavored novels that simply replace the Lancasters with the Lannisters and England for Westeros (but what if St. George really did kill a dragon?) is about as interesting as sitting in traffic.

I suspect that my distaste for George Martin's novels stems from its conscious departure from fantasy tropes; instead of dealing with heroes and magic, his world is ours, though dimly glimpsed.  Essentially, it's bad fantasy and boring history, yet readers mistake it for verisimilitude the way a man dying of thirst will mistake a mirage for an oasis in the desert.

So thinking about fantasy as somehow a historical representation misses the point entirely.  Literature in all its guises is about human behavior.  Science fiction and fantasy offer wonder, but they also allow us to examine our present and speculate about our future.  Political worries, cultural values, dominant hierarchies are all reflected in fantasy and reveal a glimpse of the zeitgeist.  That is their power.

Science fiction excels by extrapolating human achievements to their logical end.  Fantasy can do the same by extrapolating human activity in settings beyond the mundane.  J.R.R. Tolkien reproduced the Earthly milieu consciously.  Writers following in that vein from Robert Jordan to Terry Brooks continued that trend with greater or lesser success.  Where G.R.R. Martin succeeds is creating a world disengaged from the environment of evolutionary adaptation -- though by failing to follow his worldbuilding to a logical end it quickly reveals its shaky foundations.  Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings successfully disengages from a historical model by creating whole-cloth both a world and its inhabitants.

Marie Antoinette

None of these authors engage the elephant in the fantastical room, however.  Why there are human beings more or less indistinguishable from the reader is never addressed.  Indeed, it remains such a persistent trope that it is rarely considered.  C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy successfully tackles the trope by wrapping it science fiction -- the human beings in her story are the descendants of human colonists on an alien world (where physics is kind of wonky -- a concession to the genre which corresponds well enough with what we know of science).

Regardless, instead of confronting sexism in the genre, commentators like Tansy Roberts should instead engage sexism in our own culture (and in our authors), and recast the mirror which reflects it.  And calling your empire

Undaunted Fraud . . . Or, What Is History? Pt 3

Stephen E. Ambrose

This isn't news.  When Stephen Ambrose was accused of citing numerous works nearly verbatim without proper attribution, it was in the middle of the another plagiarism scandal involving Doris Kearns Goodwin.  You might know her from Team of Rivals, the book which laid the foundation for Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln. 

Back in 2002, ferreting out plagiarism in popular history seemed all the rage as journalists and amateur historians began noticing errors and discrepancies in Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue.  According to Fred Barnes over at The Weekly Standard, Ambrose lifted substantial sections from Thomas Childers's book Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II.  Childers, a University of Pennsylvania history professor, was attributed in footnotes, but his words remained largely unchanged in Ambrose's book.

At the same time that this was brewing, The Daily Standard turned its attention to Doris Goodwin and noted that much of her work on The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys pulled material from Lynne McTaggart's book, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times.  As with Ambrose, Goodwin was charged with lifting whole sentences and failing to attribute them properly.  In essence, she claimed another's work as her own.

A bookshop.  Cuz, you know, that's where real history happens.

In work that relies to a considerable extent on the work of others, plagiarism is always a looming danger.  Most academics rely on the research of others; indeed, modern research is more like adding a single pebble to an edifice than in laying foundations or erecting the framework.  We rely on the work of others to reinforce our work, or to support our conclusions.  The interpretation is often unique, and the work is genuine, but it relies on the work of others.  Clearly delineating what is your own from the another's work is necessary to build credibility and reproducibility. 

Because historians rely so heavily on sources, it's often difficult to reproduce certain conclusions.  The necessary documents are sometimes hidden in archives.  Those archives are more often than not on the other side of the country and can be accessed only with difficulty and expense.  So we trust that others have done a good job; that trust is built on an unshakable foundation of historical ethics.  And plagiarism undermines that foundation. 

To her credit, when Goodwin was called on her plagiarism, she responded by acknowledging her error and strove to correct it.  Though many charge that her correctives were insufficient, she nonetheless seemed to respond in a more forthright manner than Ambrose. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin

But his errors were more grievous.  He'd long been in arrears with veterans groups for his sometimes unflattering portrayal of soldiers in the second world war.  Their charges are serious, but far from condemnatory, since historians often make unflattering claims against revered figures and individual experience may differ from the broad summary which historians try to make.  More serious are accusations that Ambrose distorted the historical record or inflated his sources. 

In 2001, after the publication of his book Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 describing the building of the Pacific Railroad, a group of railroad historians compiled a paper detailing the numerous factual errors it contained.  Writing for the Journal of American History, reviewer Walter Nugent was driven to exasperation by the frequent factual errors.

What initially brought this whole controversy to my attention, however, was the revelation by Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center that Ambrose grossly distorted his relationship with the former President.  As Ambrose told it, Eisenhower approached him to write his biography after the former President read Ambrose's biography of Henry Halleck.  No such thing happened.  In fact it was the other way around, and Rives had the letter to show that Ambrose approached Eisenhower. 

Henry Halleck

When Ambrose's two volume biography was finally published, he cited the hundreds of hours of interviews he had had with the President as the source of many of his conclusions.  Once again, Eisenhower's exhaustive schedule told another story.  It showed Ambrose speaking with Eisenhower three times for a grand total of less than half a dozen hours.  Furthermore, Rives goes on to assert that interview times that Ambros claims in his book Supreme Commander just don't jive with Eisenhower's personal schedule. 

Basically, he made it up. 

This is ridiculously frustrating for a profession that already deals with the lay perception that "you just make stuff up."  The rigors of historical research and writing require that historians adhere to a level of ethical conduct just as strenuous as physical researchers. 

Undaunted Fraud . . . Or, What Is History? Pt 2

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey

Welcome back to my discussion on what history is and what it is not.  I suppose I ought to once again define my terms.  History is everything that came before now; it is the sum of all the moments that came before this one.  The study of history, which unless I specify otherwise is what I mean in this article, is something a bit more specific. 

The study of history is the attempt to create a narrative which approximates as closely as possible the experience of living those moments.  Experience is a loose term, but it requires that someone be around to live those moments.  It's also really helpful (though not always necessary) for them to write down their experience.

But it's impossible to fully recreate the experience of whole peoples, eras, civilizations, societies, et cetera.  It's impossible to even adequately summarize a single life -- even if you were to fill a library with dense volumes. 

Winston as a boy

Think about William Manchester's remarkable biography of the life of Winston Churchill.  At three volumes, each spanning nearly a thousand pages (or more), the biography seems incontrovertible.  A life read about in (let's assume) twenty hours, however, is hardly an adequate approximation of a life which spanned 90 years.  Sufficient, perhaps, but still inadequate. 

Volumes of this size also hide the vast repository of material from which each volume is gleaned.  Personal letters, official correspondence, personal recollections, government papers, diaries, journals, ledgers, tax reports, a myriad of sources are concealed by the authoritative presentation of those three volumes.

And that brings me around to a few short remarks about what a historian actually does.  When I tell people about the research I'm helping my professor do, I usually explain that the historian crafts a narrative from sources.  The comment I get back is, "So you make stuff up."

No, because a historian is beholden to the sources.  Let's look at something I'm researching as an example.  A public figure like President Eisenhower has his day minutely scheduled and it seems easy to trace this historical narrative.  On January 7, 1954, he delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress, in which he explained for the first time the New Look of the American military.  It emphasized a reliance on nuclear weapons to offset the austerity-level defense budget he advocated.  Notably (though not many people took much note) it articulated "massive retaliation" for the first time. 

The Library of Congress

Though he advocated that the United States was stronger with allies than standing alone, President Eisenhower admitted that "while determined to use atomic power to serve the usages of peace, we take into full account our great and growing number of nuclear weapons and the most effective means of using them against an aggressor if they are needed to preserve our freedom."  Importantly, though the United States would refrain from aggression, "we and our allies have and will maintain a massive capability to strike back" [emphasis my own].  (Take a look at the whole thing here.)

Historically, however, we attribute massive retaliation to John Foster Dulles, who was much more belligerent in a speech given to the Council on Foreign Relations on January 12, 1954.  You could (and historians have) make the argument that Dulles's belligerence informed President Eisenhower's later statements; that it was a case of the Secretary of State's tail wagging the President's foreign policy dog.  (Wow, that was a tortured metaphor.)

You can figure this one out.

This debate is entirely academic.  Who articulated massive retaliation first (and I've seen it attributed to others in the Republican Party as far back as 1951) matters if we want to understand where it originate, how it changed, and how the idea influenced Americans -- from the general public to policy makers.  More broadly, it helps vindicate Eisenhower, who was criticized for seeming to golf the presidency away; instead, it reinforces a picture of a man deftly manipulating the levers of state.

When historians are not true to their sources, however, the picture shifts and the events as they occurred are misrepresented.  Misrepresentation leads to being misunderstood, and the value of historical research is cheapened.

A historian must be true to his sources. 

With that said, tomorrow we'll finally get around to talking about plagiarism and the "Imbroglio Ambrose."*

*How the Ambrose Story Developed

Undaunted Fraud . . . Or, What Is History? Pt. I

History fascinates me.  It makes sense then that I'd get a degree in it, and want to pursue a masters, Ph.D and eventually teach it.  That last part is what fascinates me the most.  The modern historian's job is to teach, and they do their job both in the classroom and by constantly reporting the sum of their findings -- either in the form of books, or in peer-reviewed articles.  The telling of story in which the whole truth can never be known, presents inherent challenges.  The first is in answering the question What Is History?

A lay interpretation is something like "the sum of all things which occurred in the past."  But during the twentieth century historians (and just about everyone else) realized that as important as the events are the ways in which they are perceived.  This means that for every event that occurs today, there are millions of equally valid perspectives; history then becomes distilling them into a narrative that approximates truth.  A daunting prospect.  

I've spent the last two months or so reading just about everything ever written on and by Dwight Eisenhower.  I'm working for Dr. Christopher McKnight Nichols write his next book which chronicles the shift in Republican conservatism in the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower. 

What makes this project particularly compelling is the breadth of knowledge already compiled about Eisenhower.  His early life is far from fully documented, but from the moment he entered West Point in 1911 his life became documented in performance evaluations, journal articles, efficiency reports, public speeches, private correspondences, government reports, State Department communiques, Congressional Records, magazine and newspaper articles, drafts, memos, and his own letters and diaries. 

The extent of documents is daunting.  Much of it remains locked away in the vaults of the Eisenhower museum, or the Library of Congress, or scattered throughout the United States -- indeed, the world.  But so much more is published that researching from my cubicle in the library is made that much easier.

His first biography was published in 1945, Soldier of Democracy by Kenneth David, and paints the picture of a glorious war hero.  Invested heavily with overtures to greatness, it reads as though David Dwight Eisenhower (the names were reversed later to avoid confusion with his father, also David) had been born in the midst of thunder and lightening and three wizened crones had haggled over his future.  It's well written, but nonetheless is a homogenized "great man" history that paints the victory in Europe as all but inevitable. 

Later biographies follow that model.  Man from Abilene by Kevin McCann is a 1952 biopic published in the midst of his successful bid for the White House.  It's contribution lies in the presentation of Eisenhower's childhood before At Ease, Eisenhower's own reminiscences, was published.  But the adoration remains.  It would remain, in fact, until after Ike's presidency when arm-chair policymakers had begun criticizing and dismantling his two-term run. 

Kay Summersby

In 1948, Kay Summersby published her kiss-and-tell, Eisenhower Was My Boss which didn't so much tell as it intimated that the long and oft-repeated rumors about Ike's wartime lover were true.  After Ike died, Summersby published a follow-up which no longer hinted: it told outright.  The 1976 book was explicit in its title: Past Forgetting: My Love Affair With Dwight D. Eisenhower.  His wife, Mamie, responded by publishing the love letter Ike sent her during the war but it quickly became evident that perhaps the general doth protest too much.

The facade had slipped, and as public perceptions about Ike shifted in the years following his death, historians and pundits began chipping away at his accomplishments.  His presidency became the lens through which his life was viewed, and as nay-sayers began charging him with absenteeism in the White House, they began to suspect that he'd been an absentee general.  Living a life of luxury in England, gallivanting with Kay and his harem of WACs, the picture gradually being painted was a lurid depiction of a man given supreme command not because of his ability to form coalitions, but as a sop to Americans who needed a friendly face to promote the war effort.  Montgomery, Bradley, Patton, Alexander, Spaatz, just about every general other than Ike became responsible for winning the war. 

Ike with SecState John Foster Dulles in 1956

That sort of revisionism is a necessary response to the gushing praise of earlier generations, and it helps inform the contributions of others in that great enterprise.  Defenders of Ike had to answer these charges, and they helped create a picture of the President that was both more subtle and more involved than previous historians suspected.  A master manipulator, he guided U.S. policy through his deft use of his secretary of state, the vice-president, and the CIA.  With his intimate understanding of military procurement and insight into the ways the Army (still) pads its budget, he was able to steer the United States toward disarmament while maintaining national security.  He despaired of a time when a President would arrive who didn't have his knowledge of how the Army worked, understanding that it would ride roughshod over its civilian masters.

But then came Stephen Ambrose.  His two volume biography on Eisenhower remains the most popular depiction of the general and president.  The problem?  Much of it is made up.

Join me on Monday as I discuss Ambrose, making stuff up, and conclude just what history is.