Mrs. Partner’s Last-Name

I bit my tongue when she called me Mrs. Partner’s Last-Name.  I bit my tongue because it felt more important to me in that moment to have her as an ally than to correct her assumption.  I bit my tongue, but Mrs. Partner’s Last-Name does not even begin to be my name.

If you wish to address me formally, you may call me Dr. Whedon.  See, I have an independently earned professional title.  I am not defined by my relationship status.  You don’t even really need to know that a married title is totally wrong.  And I have my own name.

Let me repeat that, because it’s important: I have my own name.

Scholarship and practice

What is the relationship between scholarship and spiritual practice?  That’s a question I asked my Pagan Elders and Ancestors students to consider.

It came up after we read historian Ronald Hutton’s assessment of Starhawk’s work, in which he writes that her accounts of European witch trials were not based on any real research.  He wrote in The Triumph of the Moon:

Starhawk had suggested what should have happened in early modern Europe, while making no attempt to discover what really did happen.

Starhawk, of course, knows she’s not a professional historian.  As she wrote in the 20th anniversary introduction to The Spiral Dance

Were I writing today I would probably be more cautious about the history I present.

Hutton is still writing history today, and Caroline Tully has published a fabulous new interview with him in which he addresses the relationship between his own spiritual life and scholarship (sort of) and between his scholarship and the life of Pagan communities (a lot).

Here’s a little taste of what he shared in that rich interview:

I am surprised and dismayed by the heavy emphasis which Pagans who are attempting to reassert an unbroken tradition of pagan witchcraft, of the kind developed by scholars in nineteenth-century universities, place on tradition itself as the main test of authenticity in religion. It seems to relegate to second place, if not to discount altogether, what are usually taken to be the two most important aspects of religious authenticity: the relationship between the adherents of a religion and the deities or spirits whom it honours, and the impact that this makes on a society.

If this piques your interest, I suggest taking the time to read the entire interview.  Then you tell me: What’s the relationship between scholarship and spiritual practice?  And what should it be?

Homebirth on the rise

Homebirth is on the rise!  Between 2004 and 2008 homebirths in the U.S. rose 20%. This still represents a pretty small number of the total U.S. births – only about 1%.  Still, the increase is significant.

The rise in homebirths has been driven mostly by non-Hispanic white women who represent more than 90% of the increase.

This Public Health Doula post raises questions about how to bring awareness of homebirth to more diverse and disadvantaged populations:

I see basically zero outreach to low-income/minority communities from the birth community, and walking my delicate line between working in the system right now, I am guilty of that too. How do we fix this??

Requiring insurance to cover homebirth is a beginning, but outreach and education are also a part of access.  What else can we do to support all families in their full ability to choose their best births?

New Vermont law supports homebirth

Vermont has passed a law requiring health insurance companies to cover home birth.  Governor Peter Shumlin reportedly said

This law will ensure that all expectant mothers get the coverage and care they want and deserve.

This is such a big step in the right direction for families’ true ability to choose the type of birth they want.

We made the choice to pay for our homebirth out of pocket, but we were lucky to have the means and we shouldn’t have had to do that.  I had health insurance, but was told that it wouldn’t cover a “non-traditional” birth.  What a short memory — in the long history of childbirth, hospital births only became the norm in the last century.

So I’m celebrating this new bill (quietly, so as not to wake my homebirth baby who’s finally napping) and hoping to see more like it in the future.

Why I let my kid eat dirt

The Free Farm

I think I just fell in love.  With this urban, volunteer-run, free food farm.  Bridget and I spent yesterday morning there.  I weeded squash beds and pruned tomatoes.  Bridget helped to plant a tomato seedling and harvested lots of strawberries and raspberries.  She made friends with some nice grown-ups, freeing me up enough for a quick, quiet walk through the labyrinth.  We were invited to take hands in a circle of gratitude before sharing a free lunch.  I asked Bridget if she liked the farm and she answered an enthusiastic “yes!”  I’m pretty sure we’ll be back.  The only imperfect thing for us about this farm is that they fling the gate wide open to the street, which means I can’t just leave Bridget to roam the farm, since she’s prone to mischievous bolting toward traffic.

Mothers Day trees

I thought to check out the farm because it provides produce for the Free Farm Stand in our neighborhood.  I discovered the other night that my family shows up in words and images in the Free Farm Stand blog post covering a Mother’s Day tree-planting event that we participated in.

Gardening with a child

I’m surprised not to see more children in these gardens. Food and farming have woven in and out of my own life story since childhood, and the garden seems to me an obvious place to spend a morning with a child.

By gardening, Bridget is slowly learning where her food comes from, that it takes hard work and healthy soil to grow a vegetable. She’s playing hard and resting better because of it. She’s immersing herself in the unspeakable pleasure of plucking a sun-warmed berry off the plant and popping it directly into her mouth. If that berry has a little soil on it, I don’t make a fuss. I want Bridget to know that rain and compost are real things in the world, not just pretty poetry of the sort often found in nature spirituality.

So I say, let her eat a little dirt. I pray she learns how precious that healthy soil is.

A bedtime book for the parents

This isn’t a book review.  Go the F**k to Sleep hasn’t even been released yet.  But the previews available online are just brilliant.  These people clearly know what it’s like.  I must have this book.  Luckily for me when I told my partner about it he revealed that he’d already secretly preordered a copy.

Work her soul must have

I’ve let a week slip by without posting anything here.  I’m tempted to blame the baby and her erratic napping habits, but that’s not really fair because I’ve sat down at the computer nearly every day with my post topics and their accompanying links and photos, only to find that I don’t really know what I want to say.  Hopefully, soon I’ll figure out what that is.

So here it is, Friday afternoon already, and here’s what I can share: some especially good Friday reading links, a photo and a quote about gardening, and a tease that there’s actually another juicy project I’m working on and hoping to be ready to share very soon.

Here’s your Friday reading list:

• One mama shares her experience of a Pagan pregnancy.
• You can donate to Best for Babes for free.
• This post about Feminism For Real makes me want to defend all the women’s studies professors I know who work really hard on their pedagogy, but I think that means I should read the book and see whether it has something to teach me.
• While I’ve had a second long post for Good Vibrations lingering partially drafted for ages now, Renee Randazzo started a discussion that partially overlaps with what I think I want to write about.
• I set aside that longer post that’s just not coming together, to write this quick one about the SlutWalks.  I know some of you are in Boston.  Did any of you make it to the SlutWalk there?

I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty. –Alice Walker

I love a good archive

Here’s some of what I saw yesterday in the Starhawk Collection at the Graduate Theological Union library: manuscripts written on typewriters and more recent ones printed from 1980s computers, handwritten notes, flyers for events spanning nearly half a century, proposals for courses, lots of publisher’s rejection letters, correspondence from Reclaiming community members and Witches seeking guidance and fans of her writing who just had to express their gratitude for her work.

I get a thrill from this kind of archival research.  I love the little scraps of a complex human life: mention of changes in in her romantic relationships – sure she gives the broad outlines of these in her printed work and the letters here reveal little more, but they somehow become more real – less the official story – written out by hand with first names attached.  And I feel more connected to the research – here a mention of Starhawk’s participation in a one-time event sponsored by an organization I work with, there a thin folder of ephemera from a community celebration in the neighborhood I moved to this winter.

There wasn’t really enough time to read, only to glance through, to assess just a few of the many boxes.  Someone could develop a fine dissertation if she could come here every morning instead of just this one morning.  I did manage to glean a few tidbits to supplement what I already intend to teach when the Cherry Hill Seminary course on Starhawk begins in little more than a week.

So here comes the sales pitch: CHS just announced a 50% (!) discount for first-time students for this course.  To sign up you don’t need to be matriculated, you just need to be curious.  At $48 this is a ridiculous bargain.  So if you’ve even considered it, now’s the time to give CHS a try — and learn something about the writer, teacher, and ritualist whose papers I got to rifle through yesterday.

Celebrating Our Bodies, Ourselves

Our Bodies, Ourselves, a pioneering book of the women’s health movement, turns 40 this year.  My appreciation for the book and the organization that creates it is now up at Our Bodies, Our Blog.  Check it out and all the other personal stories of how Our Bodies, Ourselves made a difference in someone’s life, and consider submitting your own story.

Book review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

At 19 months old my daughter has been learning colors.  She can (usually) identify red, yellow, green, and blue.  And then there’s pink, which already she seems to notice more.  I dress her in a rainbow of cloth diapers, but it’s when I’m putting on the pink one that she calls out with the pleasure of recognition, “pink!”

It’s not all pink all the time.  The other day she rejected a pink sweater in favor of a blue one (and then was identified as a boy all day, despite the pink flowers all over her pants).  But her increased awareness of pink is something her father and I have both noticed in the last week or two.

Is this the beginning of an inevitable deluge of pink?  Probably, yes.  So says Peggy Orenstein in Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.

In this book, Orenstein documents the complete pinkification and princessification of girls culture.  It’s Disney’s ubiquitous princesses, a branding success that Orenstein reports began with a Disney executive’s idea in 2000, followed by endless

pink dinnerware sets emblazoned with the word PRINCESS; pink fun fur stoles and boas; pink princess beds pink diaries . . .; pink vanity mirrors, pink brushes, and toy pink blow-dryers; pink telephones; pink bunny ears . . . (34)

The list goes on and on.  And it’s not just a color – pink stands for a passive femininity emphasizing physical appearance and sexual desirability.  Yes, for preschoolers.

So what am I to do if I want more choices for my daughter than toys and media that tell her she should spend all her resources on looking pretty as a pink pink princess?

The real strength of this book is not so much in documenting anything new about girl culture, but in taking us with her through Orenstein’s own sometimes funny, sometimes agonizing process of deciding what’s harmless and what’s not, what will only acquire the allure of forbidden fruit if she denies her girl and what is just unacceptable in her house, and how to help her daughter learn to navigate the intense pressure of the gendered marketing.

Orenstein concludes

Though it may sound like a big duh, the best approach is to put reasonable limits on the girlz-with-a-z stuff for as long as you can and, over time, engage (without nagging) in regular dialogue with your daughter about what she consumes. (187)

That’s a tough enough job, but doable within a family.

I wonder, though, about collective action.  This book is a much-hyped bestseller right now.  When I tried to get it from my public library system I found myself at position 90 on the waiting list so I opted to purchase it at a local independent bookstore.  If everybody reading this book now agrees even just a little bit that girls need more  freedom and diversity in their imaginative possibilities what can we do together in our playgroups and schools or even on the national scale (in Sweden, says Orenstein “marketing to children under twelve … is actually illegal“) to improve the situation for our girls? 

PS. That blue sweater my daughter wore the other day?  I pulled it out of a drawer overflowing with pink sweaters.  They’re not there because we’ve chosen to buy all that pink; they’re there because we’ve chosen to dress her mostly in hand-me-downs so we get what we get, and what we get is often pink.  And I guess that’s how a kid who doesn’t even know she’s a girl – her dad asked her if she’s a girl or a boy and she obviously didn’t understand the question – could already have a preference for pink.

PPS.  Check out The Pink & Blue Project for a vivid visual documentation of the pink/blue divide in children’s things.

PPPS. And here’s a discussion of a discussion of whether and how to let Barbie in the house.  I confess I feel terrified of the day I’m presented with this problem.  Will I let my daughter have a toy I cherished as a child but now have big problems with?