Investigations of a Dog

I don’t normally blog about present-day politics. That’s not really true because my support for feminism is political (in exactly the same way that anti-feminism is political), and also because copyright is an important political issue for me. What I mean is that I’m not very interested in what the mainstream media call politics (ie what Labour and the Tories have said about each other, and what lazy journalists have said about them). I don’t watch TV or read newspapers because I just find them boring. So I’m only vaguely aware of what’s going on.

I see from Ted Vallance that the British government is planning to do something involving Habeas Corpus and the number 42, and that various opponents have invoked Magna Carta in a way that misunderstands what Magna Carta was. I heard on Richard Herring’s podcast (which is pretty much my only regular source of news, but perhaps that perspective is no more distorted than any of the papers) that David Davis is standing against this in a by-election.

I’m clearly not the only person to be surprised that Davis is making such a stand for civil liberties. I heard from my friends in the band Billy Ruffian that they’ve recorded a song about this and put the video on YouTube, and that it’s already got a lot of attention from politics blogs. “The Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender of All” isn’t their best song (check out “Death of a Band”) but political songs are notoriously difficult. The kind of words that you need to use don’t fit together easily. I always think Billy Bragg is at his best when he’s singing about woman trouble and that his most overtly political issue-based songs can be quite clunky (the arguments in “Sexuality” can’t be disagreed with but if you’re going to write a song about that then shouldn’t it be, y’know, sexy? For a better celebration of gay sexuality try Luxembourg’s “Close Cropped”).

It’s also pretty unlikely that Billy Ruffian should ever find themselves supporting David Davis. They’re on Filthy Little Angels, they’re friends with Art Brut, their cool alternative credentials are impeccable. I’ve known Ste (the singer) for nearly 7 years and played bass in one of his previous bands (we’ve both come a long way since then) so I know that he’s no friend of the right wing and previously didn’t like David Davis very much. That such unlikely bedfellows are united against them shows just how badly New Labour have screwed up.

I owe Oxoniensis an apology. To a certain extent.

In this post reacting to Mercurius Rusticus’s notorious anti-women rant I wrote that Oxoniensis had made a similar post and then deleted it after I responded. I was wrong. The post in question was not very similar to the one that Rusticus wrote, and has not been deleted. You can see it here. [Edit: it has since been deleted although the blog still seems to be there]

However, I won’t retract the statement I made in the comments to my post that both Oxoniensis and Rusticus are sometimes horribly misogynistic. The thread in question shows that Oxoniensis clearly is hostile to gender history and blind to gender ideology. While the sentence about gender in the main post was relatively innocuous in itself (but less so in the light of the Rusticus incident), his response to my comment showed that he just refuses to be convinced of the importance of gender history, no matter what arguments are put forward. Furthermore, the most likely explanation for my misremembering is that I had conflated that post with another one, which is much more similar to what Rusticus wrote more recently and which has been deleted. But deleting a post from your blog doesn’t delete it from the Google cache: it’s right here.

The most curious thing is that when Oxoniensis pointed out my mistake and demanded evidence he failed to link to the post that I falsely accused him of deleting. By doing that he could easily have proved that he hadn’t deleted it and that it was not as bad as I claimed it was. Instead he just denied having written anything like that. It’s understandable that he didn’t recognise the original post from my inaccurate description, but surely the comments below it were very distinctive and memorable. Just in case he deletes this post too you can find it cached here. But of course he’s not going to do that because it would prove me right. He’s going to have to leave it there so that everyone can see that he dislikes gender history just as much as Rusticus does.

[Edit: I removed these posts in the summer of 2008 because I didn't want to feed the troll and just wanted to forget that he existed. Now (July 2009) I think that was a bad decision, because I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of here. We were right and he was wrong. He being Rusticus and Oxoniensis, who were almost certainly the same person.]

Future Retro is a new blog which forms part of the History Nexus site. “Future / Retro is concerned with all aspects of history, and not just on the web. It is also concerned with information technology, and in particular that which can enhance digital humanities.” It already includes tips on how to start history blogging, and an interview with Dave Tabler of Appalachian History.

It’s probably common knowledge by now that Mercurius Rusticus wrote a post which was very hostile towards gender history and female historians but which didn’t include any detailed evidence to back up the vague assertions that gender history has little or no value. I read it this morning but since then it’s disappeared. Ralph Luker at Cliopatria linked to some responses and Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes has also responded since then. And this is my (possibly quite predictable) response.

I think gender history is important but I still agonized a bit before deciding to write this post. That’s partly because I wondered if it might just be pointless preaching to the converted (more on that later), but mostly because of the dilemma that affects every man who is committed to feminism. Can a man be a feminist? Am I in danger of appropriating something that rightfully belongs to women? Is it patronising for a man to intervene on behalf of women? Judging by the responses that Ralph Luker linked to, the sisters are doing alright for themselves. They really don’t need me to come in and save them.

But the point I want to make is this: gender isn’t just about women. It affects everyone. Patriarchy oppresses pretty much all women, but it also oppresses many men, a point made by Anthony Fletcher and Alexandra Shepard in their studies of early-modern gender. I’m not getting into any men’s movement bullshit here about men being oppressed by feminists. It’s all about the patriarchy, and men who feel oppressed should be uniting with feminists against patriarchy, not uniting with patriarchy against feminists.

So I do have to respond, but judging by previous experience it might not change anyone’s mind about anything. This isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with this situation. Earlier this year Oxoniensis wrote a very similar post. Although I left a comment disagreeing with it, I can’t find the post now so I assume it’s been deleted. The reply to my comment made me realise that there are incommensurable differences here. Some people just don’t want to admit that gender is important, but to me and anyone else sympathetic to feminism that just proves that feminism is needed. If people can be so blind to gender ideology we need to work harder to expose it. But it seems like a debate between these two positions is going to be very difficult.

I set out my position on gender reasonably well in the conclusion to my recent Social-Political Animals paper (certainly better than I managed in my response to Oxoniensis). I think gender is very important, but that it shouldn’t be privileged to the exclusion of other aspects of human identities because we need to see how these things interact with each other. I got that insight from Alexandra Shepard’s recent book on early-modern masculinity, so clearly female gender historians aren’t over privileging gender. In my opinion there still isn’t enough gender history. We need to integrate it better with other aspects of history. That’s an opportunity, not a threat.

Finally, here is a small selection of what I consider to be some particularly good works on gender history (and see also my post on Goldstein’s War and Gender):

1. Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge: London, 1993).
2. Anthony J Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1995).
3. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
4. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
5. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).
6. Dror Wahrman, ‘Percy’s prologue’, Past and Present, 159 (1998), pp. 113-60.

[Edit: I removed these posts in the summer of 2008 because I didn't want to feed the troll and just wanted to forget that he existed. Now (July 2009) I think that was a bad decision, because I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of here. We were right and he was wrong. He being Rusticus and Oxoniensis, who were almost certainly the same person.]

Not really a proper post, just some random things:

Bill Turkel is always right.In the first of his excellent posts on analysing the Old Bailey Proceedings he recommended DownThemAll. This is a Firefox extension that lets you download all the files linked to from a web page in one go. You can set up filters to only download certain types of file, or you can select the files by clicking on a list, then download them all with one click. As well as the obvious benefits for digital historians it’s very handy if you want to download a whole album from LastFM.

Over at Glod’n'Epix Esther posted some interesting thoughts on sexual harassment and gender stereotyping in live action role playing, which also led to some discussion of cross-dressing and gender swapping.

Gary Smailes has launched a new website called OneBook which features brief posts from different people recommending a book. Anyone can submit a post and they don’t have to be very long.

The Difficult Second Article is getting there but still needs a lot of work. Once this is out of the way I never want to hear anything about the causes of the English Civil War ever again.

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hill’s The English Bible and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Apart from lots of useful historical insights it made me think that my generation’s equivalent of the bible is probably Star Wars.

And finally the latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at jliedl.ca.

The 15th Military History Carnival is now up at Cardinal Wolsey’s Today In History. Alun has done an excellent job (and I didn’t even have to send in any extra submissions this time). The next edition will be at the Osprey Publishing blog on 18th August. E-mail submissions to blog at ospreypublishing dot com or use the submission form.

The 15th Military History Carnival will take place at Cardinal Wolsey’s Today In History on Saturday 14th June. Please e-mail submissions to alunadler at yahoo dot co dot uk or use the submission form. Posts on any of the following themes will be particularly welcome:

• forgotten (or little known) engagements
• good and bad tactics
• collateral (civilian impact)
• eyewitness accounts
• (lowish rank) individuals who made an impact
• interesting weapons
• book reviews
• contributions to “big debates” (eg is the Civil War over yet)

The 15th Military History Carnival will take place at Cardinal Wolsey’s Today In History on Saturday 14th June. Please e-mail submissions to alunadler at yahoo dot co dot uk or use the submission form. Posts on any of the following themes will be particularly welcome:

• forgotten (or little known) engagements
• good and bad tactics
• collateral (civilian impact)
• eyewitness accounts
• (lowish rank) individuals who made an impact
• interesting weapons
• book reviews
• contributions to “big debates” (eg is the Civil War over yet)

We also need a host for the July edition. If you’re interested in hosting please leave a comment here or e-mail me. If I don’t get a host for July I might do it myself, or I might just skip a month. Do you feel lucky punk?