Tipped off by Dmitriy T.M., I enjoyed a Slate slideshow depicting and contextualizing the shrinking of the middle class and the growing advantage of the very top earners in the U.S. over time. We’ve highlighted this slideshow before, but I thought this image deserved its own post. Drawing on data from 1948 to 2005, put together by Larry Bartels, Slate shows that all income brackets prosper under both Democratic and Republican leadership, despite the idea that Republicans are fiscally responsible and Democrats irresponsible. Under Democrats, however, nearly everyone is much more prosperous. The highest income brackets are, given the margin of error, equally prosperous and all other brackets are significantly more so.
The figure reminds us that stereotypes about Republicans and Democrats don’t reflect reality and economic prosperity isn’t a zero sum game.
Sociologists have noted that wives of men with very high-paying, high-status job often serve as a non-official, auxiliary employee to the company for which their husbands work. They do so not only by ensuring that his house is clean, his clothes washed, his belly full, and his kids are raised, but by supporting his actual work. For example, they may act as a second secretary in the evenings: typing or editing his writing, keeping his calendar, and screening his calls.
The commercial for Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese is a great example of this kind of relationship. In the video, a man surprises his wife by bringing a “client” home for dinner. The wife is pissed off at the lack of notice, but the idea that women should be entertaining men to lubricate their husbands’ work relationships is taken-for-granted. This dinner is work, for both the husband and the wife, but only the husband is on the payroll.
Thanks to my good friend Nils for sending along this video.
Suzy S. sent in an illuminating confession from PostSecret in which a woman confesses to being girly, but feels like she has to look more masculine because she’s a lesbian. It reads: “Because I’m a LESBIAN I feel obligated to cut my hair short and wear men’s clothing… I’m actually really girly”:
This woman says she feel “obligated” to tone down her girliness. In fact, adopting a masculinized appearance is one way that women signal to other people that they are gay, something they need to do because heterosexuality is normative and, therefore, generally assumed of everyone in the absence of signs otherwise. There are lots of reasons why lesbians may want to be visible.
They may want to be a symbol of the very existence of gay people and thereby fight the assumption that everyone is straight. They may want to find other gay women with which to build community or to find a girlfriend. Or they may simply want to ward off the unwanted attention of men. The style choices made by lesbians, then, aren’t simply about fashion or some internal inclination towards the masculine, as our confessor neatly illustrates. In some cases, at least a little bit, they’re strategic communication.
In two of my favorite earlier posts, I featured photographs by artist Edward Burtynsky. These photos depicted the outcomes of our consumerist societies: giant repositories of recycle-able materials and the consequences of resource extraction. In the same vein, J. Henry Fair has been taking photographs of industrial sites and environmental disasters from an even more distant place: small planes.
Everyone says that Barbie has unrealistic proportions, but have you seen them? Denise Winterman at the BBC decided to make a visual, borrowing one Barbie doll, one real human woman, Libby, and the wonders of photoshop.
First, Barbie’s measurements:
bust 4.6ins (11.6cm)
waist 3.5ins (8.9cm)
hips 5ins (12.7cm)
Second, the transformation:
Writes Winterman:
If Libby’s waist size of 28ins (71.1cm) were to remain unchanged, then applying Barbie’s proportions to her would mean Libby shoots up in height, to an Amazonian at 7ft 6ins (2.28m) tall. That’s just two inches shorter than the world’s tallest woman, Yao Defen. She would also have hips measuring 40ins (101.6cm) and a bust of 37ins (83.9cm).
But what if, instead, Libby’s height of 5ft 6ins (1.68m) was to remain unchanged. Doing the maths, Libby would have an extraordinarily tight waist of just 20ins (50.8cm), while her bust would be 27ins (68.5cm) and her hips 29ins (73.6cm). Even the famously slight Victoria Beckham reportedly only has a 23ins (58.4cm) waist. But neither are they unheard of — Brigitte Bardot was famous for her 20ins (50.8cm) waist.
Citing scholarship, Winterman reports that “the likelihood of a woman having Barbie’s body shape is one in 100,000. So not impossible, but extremely rare.”
Many Americans are familiar with “female genital mutilation.” The term is typically applied to practices occurring in some parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but not to genital cutting practices that happen in the U.S. and other Western societies (including cosmetic surgeries on the genitals, surgeries on children with ambiguous genitalia, and transsexual surgery) and, by definition, not to genital cutting practices that happen to men in both Western and non-Western countries (male circumcision and other rare but more extreme practices). “Female genital mutilation” elsewhere, then, is widely condemned by Americans, but rarely condemned in light of these other genital cutting practices, nor America’s own history of genital cutting. In fact, it was not unusual to subject women in the U.S. to proper circumcision (removal of the clitoral prepuce, or foreskin) until the 1960s and these procedures remained legal until 1996 (though, as far as I’m concerned, their legality is still up in the air).
In any case, RabbitWrite gives us a glimpse into this era in American history. Reading from a Playgirl published in 1973, she recounts the confessions of a woman who chose to be circumcised and offers a short critique.
Nils G. drew my attention to a fascinating now-abandoned America educational practice that nicely illustrates how ideas about ideal parenting shift over time. Between 1919 and 1969, the Home Economics departments of about 50 colleges and universities served as foster homes for orphans. Writes Emily Anthes at Wonderland:
During this time, homemaking… was considered to be something that could be conquered by science. Running a home based on instinct was considered to be woefully old-fashioned; the idea that raising a child and maintaining a home could be optimized by following a set of scientific rules was gaining currency.
Accordingly, getting a degree in Home Economics included a labratory set up exactly like a home: “practice apartments.” And what better to fill these homes with than “practice babies!” Students would practice applying the latest science-endorsed parenting techniques on orphans. An article published in the Journal of Home Economics in 1920, by Elizabeth Vermilye, explained the rotation of care:
Each girl, in rotation, carried the work of “baby manager” for one week… The “baby manager” assumed the entire responsibility for the care of the child during her period. She herself did the actual work of caring for him between the hours of 6.00 to 8.00 a.m. and from 4.30 to 6.00 p.m. During the day the child was in the care of three or four other students during the time they were not in class, the manager making the program for this care, giving instructions regarding food and other matters needing attention. The baby manager did the baby’s laundry work.
A student taking care of a practice baby:
Far from being exploited, it was believed that these babies would get not just excellent, attentive care, but the best, most scientifically-valid care. Vermilye claims that the examining physician was highly impressed with the children’s development during their stay with the students. She quotes him saying, “The improvement in the condition of these children speaks highly for your cooperative motherhood.”
These pictures of orphan and practice baby Bobby Domecon (surnamed after his role in the Domestic Economics department) reveal his chubbification.
A skinny 6 pounds at 2 months old:
Perking up at age 10 months:
Nice and chubby 5 months later:
Because these children were believed to be benefiting from the latest science of parenting, they were highly adoptable; many couples were eager to get their hands on a child that had such a good start in life (source).
Eventually, however, ideas about mothering began to change. In particular, scholars began to talk about Attachment Disorder and argue that a child’s development required that it strongly bond to one unique person. In 1954, a short Time magazine article on the subject included experts suggesting that the program was harmful. Starting with the Superintendent of the Illinois State Child Welfare Division, the author writes:
“It is not a normal family setting,” said he. “There are just too many persons involved in the handling of that child.” Heaven only knows, added the superintendent, how many neuroses little David might develop. Other officials seemed to agree. “Imagine.” cried Mrs. Babette Penner, director of the Women’s Services Division of United Charities, “what anxieties there are in a child who is given a bottle in twelve or more pairs of arms.”
The scientific consensus eventually changed and, as a result, by 1969, then, “practice babies” were a thing of the past.
In this video from ABC Doris Mitchell, Cornell University graduate and Home Economics major, sweetly remembers her experience helping raise a practice baby at Cornell University:
For another fantastic example of historic management of children without parents, see our post on the Orphan Trains.
The term “food desert” was coined to draw attention to the fact that some people live far from a source of healthy, affordable food. For these people, compared to those with easier access, consistently eating fresh fruit and vegetables and avoiding convenience store and restaurant food is more difficult. Food deserts are more often found in poor neighborhoods, which is part of why the poor are more likely than people of other socioeconomic classes to be overweight and obese.
Over 2 percent of U.S. households, 2.3 million, live at least one mile from a grocery store and do not have a car (USDA). The map below depicts the percent of such households by county. In the darkest counties, over 10 percent of the households are isolated in a food desert:
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
