“restraining” #AbolishThePolice

Feminism destroyed the traditional family? Well, good. – – – cut here – – – In March 1957, in the case of ‘Josh’ and ‘Elsa’, Elsa reported that Josh hit her after he came home late from an office party. In the course of her description of their relationship, Elsa tells the counsellor that when their daughter Sally was born: ‘Josh showed plainly his disappointment that the baby wasn’t a boy.’ ‘When the baby and I came home,’ she added, ‘I stayed in bed and let him prepare his own breakfast. He was outraged and yelled so furiously all the neighbours heard him.’ Elsa told the counsellor that she was absolutely miserable in her marriage: ‘When [Josh] abuses me in the presence of our children, when he humiliates me before the neighbours, I want to curl up and die. There is an ache deep in my chest, in my heart. I feel physically sick.’ The counsellor wrote that Elsa was ‘jolted and shocked when I told her she was partly at fault’. This wife needed to be convinced out of her own self-righteous understanding of the situation, the counsellor argued. ‘If she wanted a serene family life, she would have to learn to give Josh what he wanted from their marriage and thereby help him control his temper.’ . . . Perhaps most disturbingly, ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ counsellors minimised and ignored domestic violence, as in the case of Josh and Elsa. Wives would report incidences of physical aggression, but these were never headlined as the major complaint – they were submerged in the couple’s larger story. Popenoe introduced the September 1953 column, which featured ‘Sue’, a wife who showed up to the counsellor’s office with a ‘large purple bruise darken[ing] her cheekbone’, by referring to the husband’s complaints, rather than the wife’s: ‘Many a husband has to pay the penalty for his wife’s failure to get any real education in homemaking before she married, or to acquire such skills after the wedding, when she must have begun to realise that she needs them.’ (Again: the wife should have known that she wasn’t measuring up.) ‘In a canvas of more the 500 marriages made by the American Institute of Family Relations,’ Popenoe continues, ‘it was interesting to find how bitterly the average man resents a sloppy and slovenly wife – even when his own habits are not beyond criticism.’ In Sue’s case, the counsellor found that her husband ‘Jack’ needed to ‘master his temper’, a simple trick accomplished after ‘a single consultation proved to him that his temper was not “inherited” but represented a poor pattern established in his childhood’. But it was Sue who had the most work to do. She showed a lack of insight – she didn’t understand her husband. By refusing to have sex with him after he hit her, ‘she… touched off another almost inevitable explosion. Many husbands endeavour to make up for their misdeeds by such ardour, a fact of life that wise and loving wives accept.’ Sue had to systematise her housework in order to get good at it – a recommendation that reflected Popenoe’s professional roots in the efficiency-happy 1920s. The happy ending: Sue ‘spends 15 minutes every morning planning and writing down a list of daily tasks. Any specific request of Jack’s takes top position on the list. As she acquits each task, she checks it off the list. This means she finishes one job before she begins another.’

I been tagged by Jonathan Wilbur and Andy Bass. I’m bad at these things, because once I get rolling I’m bad at cutting my list short. That’s why my list is going to be lucky 13 instead of 10. Instructions: “In your status, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes and do not think too hard. They do not have to be the ‘right’ books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. Tag 10 friends including me so I can see your list.” 1. NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, Aristotle. 2. THE POLITICS OF REALITY, Marilyn Frye. 3. A WRINKLE IN TIME, Madeleine L’Engle. Got me on the whole sci-fi thing, and the whole dystopian literature thing, and in retrospect it is just astonishingly beautiful. 4. INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC, Irving M. Copi. I know the proof system is incomplete. Oh well. It’s here because it was an old, used copy of Copi, dating back to the 1960s, that I used to teach myself Logic back when I was in high school and supposed to be learning something else. 5. PRINCIPIA ETHICA, G. E. Moore. 6. Dialectics & Liberty series (AYN RAND: THE RUSSIAN RADICAL, MARX, HAYEK AND UTOPIA, and TOTAL FREEDOM) by Chris Sciabarra. Convinced me that left-wing market libertarianism is possibly a thing. 7. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? . . . Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” 8. THE SILMARILLION, J.R.R. Tolkien. Oh God, don’t get me started. 9. FOUNDATION, Isaac Asimov. (Or the first three FOUNDATION collections collectively, if you like. I don’t care for most of the later novels, and was affected by them mostly in gaining a distaste for forced continuity mergers.) 10. LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE, Andrea Dworkin. 11. WITTGENSTEIN, AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND THE LOGIC OF ACTION, Roderick Long. (MS.). Introduced me to anti-psychologism, praxeological methods, and Roderick Long. 12. ALL ON FIRE: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON AND THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY. By Henry Mayer. 13. LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, by James Loewen. Of course, when I read this book many years ago, it somewhat affected my views on a number of specific points about American history, and about questions on the perspective from which history is told. But it also, beyond that, it really radically shifted how I think about teaching, and about the nature of textbooks.

Late Cretaceous South America was a hell of a place.