LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

This is a few days late getting to you but it is tremendous. It is Herman Cain on Jimmy Kimmel Live responding to sexual harassment charges. I love the banter of this man, like the “real American” men used to speak, unself-conscious and without fear or PC, and, his elocution, enunciation, articulation, etc. are excellent. By the way, he is introduced in this way, “Our next guest has never held a public office, but he does know what is most important to Americans: pizza!” Read More »

The Artist's Wife with their children, Philip and Caterina, Hans Holbein the Younger (1528)

THE current practice of referring to mothers as “moms” and women at home as “stay-at-home moms” is part of the trivialization of motherhood, as I discuss here. Mommy-ness suggests fun and play. But motherhood is, by its very nature, sacrificial. Even in modern life, the mother is called upon to give up self and die for others.

When motherhood is equated with fun, it is often shocking for women to learn the truth. They may think something is wrong with them that it is so difficult. By contrast, a job may seem easy. The expectations are clear and the rewards are concrete. Besides when people say, “What do you do?” which they inevitably will in a world in which identity is based on career and consumption, a woman can hold her head up high and say, “I am a teacher” or “I am a lawyer” or “I am a marketing associate.” By comparison, to say, “I am a stay-at-home mom” suggests she is a child herself and has yet to grow up and enter the real world.

The mother has gone since the time of the above portrait by Hans Holbein from heroine to playmate.

MRS. HAYWOOD writes from Indiana:

I just spent a very interesting evening reading many columns on your website. You represent sanity and common sense on the topic of women and work, which is never allowed in mainstream media. 

Just a quick thought/question: Are you as offended by the term “stay-at-home mom” as I am? It seems clearly a feminist linguistic fabrication to avoid the obvious and truthful “full-time mother” (which of course has the corollary that working mothers are merely “part-time mothers.”) “Stay-at-home mom” also implies that it is the mother who stays at home who needs a qualifier, as the one departing from the norm. Read More »

COLUMNIST David Brooks actually has a column in today’s New York Times in which he makes an important observation. Radical egalitarianism does not abolish inequality. It only creates new forms of it. He writes:

Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?”

This is an excellent question. I will provide you with a guide to the American inequality map to help you avoid embarrassment. Read More »

KAREN KRAUSHAUER, another woman who has come forward to describe being sexually harassed by Herman Cain, told The New York Times: “Anyone should be able to report allegations of sexual harassment without fear that their lives and careers will be put on public display and laid open to public scrutiny.” Read More »

Eydie Gormé

ALAN writes:

To a certain extent, your blog is a chronicle of loss – of common sense, moral principles, cultural standards, beauty, decency, manners, restraint, elegance, patriotism, strong families, respect for elders, and respect for the past, among other things; and a plea for the restoration of those things, a goal with which I wholeheartedly agree. 

Another thing Americans have lost is popular music that is cheerful, engaging, uplifting, memorable, and easy to sing along with; ballads with lovely melodies and sentimental lyrics; and songs that celebrate the virtues of marriage, family life, parenthood, self-restraint, and loyalty.  

Consider these examples from an American culture now vanished:  Read More »

JAMES H. writes:

I just bought Chesterton’s book on Dickens on your splendid recommendation. I can hardly wait! 

Every Saturday morning, since discovering CWNY, I wake up, print the latest installment, and read it over breakfast. I cannot tell you how much I enjoy his writing. Your blog also provides such tremendous food for thought and great reading. Thanks. 

I sent my wife the posts on smaller homes (here, here, and here). Man, I’d love to move out of our monstrosity (modest by local standards), but my wife loves it. Our neighbors are building a 25,000-square-foot, $35,000,000 grotesquerie. Read More »

[The Mermaid, Howard Pyle; 1910. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.] 

THE WORKS of the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, who died 100 years ago today, are a message from the past.  In the hundred years since Pyle died, the world of children has changed profoundly. It has not changed all for the worse obviously. Medical care is much better and living conditions are good. However, children no longer inhabit a mentally separate realm. It’s not just that they are exposed to sexually-explicit imagery and music. Even in run-of-the-mill commercials, as Neil Postman noted in his book The Disappearance of Childhood, children are initiated into the world of adult worries and concerns. In commercials about prescription drugs, car insurance and politics, they encounter the trivial preoccupations of adult life.

Childhood is in some ways a form of higher awareness. “What a distressing contrast there is,” said Sigmund Freud, “between the radiant intelligence of a child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.” Children know things adults can no longer fully grasp.  The adult world once protected that knowledge and melded it gradually with reason, information, practical ability and wisdom. Technological change and spiritual decline have abolished that protection. It is gone in a larger cultural sense and the individual parent is left to fight against the prevailing tide.

Fortunately, Howard Pyle is still alive. Just last weekend, I was at a library book sale when, as I was about to leave, I turned to a table of children’s classics. There for $2 was the 1919 edition of Howard Pyle’s novel Men of Iron. It was one of those moments of synchronicity, given that I have been writing about Pyle, that have convinced me over the years that angels have specific interests and like to interfere with our reading. Men of Iron is the fictional account of the young son of a lord during the reign of Henry IV who is unjustly accused of treason. The son, Myles Falworth, sets out to avenge his father and recover his family’s good name. Pyle’s illustration below, courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum (now staging a major retrospective of his work), depicts Henry IV on the first page of the book.

I brought the book home. It was a message from a past that still lives and from a remarkable man who had a sense of the inherent nobility of his artistic mission. Where the children’s illustrator today offers unease, confusion and escape in the occult, Pyle offered the heroic. He gave children a reason to anticipate adulthood with excitement and to perceive it for what it is, even in modern cities and office parks: a battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light.

Read More »

From Burroughs' Barsoom series, which also included A Princess of Mars

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

This week the text in my course on “Science Fiction in Literature and Film” is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first-published work, A Princess of Mars (1912 – original title, Under the Moons of Mars). The protagonist is John Carter, formerly of the Army of Virginia under General Lee, who, succumbing to a paralyzing gas in an Arizona Cave circa 1870, wakes up on Mars and begins his rise through the strata of Martian society. He finds a helpmate in the beautiful and resourceful Dejah Thoris, Princess of the Twin Cities of Helium. It is essentially a chivalric romance on another planet. Predictably, the women in the class speak out positively in praise of the novel, which they like a good deal more than they liked The World Set Free and The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells or Last and First Men by W. Olaf Stapledon. They do not consciously realise how opposite to the feminist values that they have learned elsewhere A Princess of Mars is, but they intuit it. The men like Burroughs too. A couple of years ago I wrote an article (it appeared at The Brussels Journal) on “Edgar Rice Burroughs and Masculine Narrative.” 

 I believe that college students are starved for moral narrative, of the kind once offered by Howard Pyle. There is nothing PC in Burroughs, but the characters male and female are independent, decent, loyal, resourceful, stalwart, and courageous.

Read More »

HERE IS A photo of Howard Pyle taken by C.P.M. Runeford in 1898 (courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.) A reader named Jim writes:

Growing up, my mother read me stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood, and I loved the Howard Pyle illustrations. I assumed that everyone was read these stories, along with Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now I realize how lucky I was.

 [“We Started to Run Back to the Raft For Our Lives,” Howard Pyle, 1902. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.]

I was looking up this painting by the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, whose centennial I have been honoring in recent posts, when I found a blog devoted to the artist. Under a reproduction of this Pyle illustration of “Sinbad on Burrator” by A. T. Quiller Couch in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1902, the blog’s author Ian Schoenherr quotes this letter from the artist to William Merchant Richardson French, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, in June 22, 1905. These words express what every great artist knows, that though art depicts reality, its main source of knowledge is unseen:

…I think you may easily see that in the making of a successful picture, the artist must compose and arrange his figures and effects altogether from his imagination, and that there is very little opportunity in the making of such a picture for him to copy exactly the position of a model placed before him in the lights and shadows which the studios afford. Nor is it likely that he can find any background to copy accurately and exactly into such an imaginative picture. Read More »

IF AT LEAST one of the major comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live does not do a send up of yesterday’s press conference by Sharon Bialek then the entire comedy establishment is bankrupt and derelict in its partisan duty to make fun of Republicans.

Here we have a woman effusing sensuality with tousled hair, dangling earrings and heavy make-up who stands before the nation and says that many years before, when she was presumably much more attractive and effusively sensual, she went out on a dinner date alone with a business associate who had just told her he had upgraded her hotel room to a suite. Then – horrors! – after a number of drinks together and a romantic evening in an Italian restaurant, he put his hand up her skirt and moved her head towards him.

“How could this happen to widdle ol’ me?! I was only looking for a job!”

Not only is Cain’s accuser a joke, but Cain himself (if what she says is true, and it appears to be true) is a joke. Who wants a man guilty of such reckless, illicit behavior in the presidency? I don’t.

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JAMES P. writes:

According to the Daily Mail,

A veteran police officer, 55, was beaten and stabbed to death by her 15-year-old grandson after she came home to find he had skipped school, prosecutors said. Read More »

Fagin in his cell; George Cruikshank

ONE OF MY favorite works of literary criticism is G.K. Chesterton’s book on Charles Dickens. I recommended it to a reader and in return received this excellent essay. 

Greg Jinkerson writes:

I took you up on the advice to read Chesterton’s Charles Dickens, the Last of the Great Men. What an inspiration. It became obvious after one chapter that I would need to read all of Dickens. There is nothing quite like the experience of having Chesterton point you to the wonders of other writers and areas of thought. His encomium to Dickens is exemplary in this regard. It is almost a hagiography of Dickens; or perhaps I should say a theology of the world Dickens created. Read More »

ACCORDING to The Sydney Morning Herald, the Girl Guides of Australia are looking to improve their image in the face of declining membership. The organization is seeking advice for changes to its traditional pledge: ”I promise that I will do my best: to do my duty to God, to serve the Queen and my country; to help other people; and to keep the Guide law.

Here’s what I propose instead: “I promise that I will do my best to be selfish and un-feminine; to keep the Guide law and to use this invaluable experience as a credential.”

Read More »

THE HOMEMAKER today, unless she is wealthy, often faces a hostile environment. Not only does society at large continually celebrate careerism and refuse to grant the full-time mother and wife moral support, but friends and relatives may criticize her or refrain from any enthusiasm for her way of life.

At Home Living, Lydia Sherman encourages women at home to turn their minds from all this. She writes: Read More »

ACCORDING to the American Association of University Women, an organization that neatly refutes the eighteenth century reformer Mary Wollstonecraft’s idea that education would elevate women, nearly half of all high school students in America have been subject to “sexual harassment.”

“It’s pervasive, and almost a normal part of the school day,” Catherine Hill, the director of research at the association, told The New York Times.

What will the future hold for the harassed? The university women recommend that each school have a “coordinator.” But, I thought Stalin tried that and it didn’t work.

Schools should shut down immediately to prevent this plague from spreading.

AT VFR, Lawrence Auster argues that the women’s franchise initially had little noticeable effect on political life, but has been progressively damaging. (The politicization of women, I would add, has deprived natural feminine preoccupations of dignity and led to the trivialization of women’s work.) Mr. Auster writes:

There are many examples of the deleterious effects that the women’s franchise and the assumption of political power by women have had on politics. Think of the mob of Democratic female House members like a bunch of crazed Bacchae climbing the stairs of the U.S. Senate in October 1991 demanding the destruction of Clarence Thomas. Read More »