The fact that race is socially constructed does not negate the fact that systematically different patterns of outcomes are produced within a racially stratified society.-- Michael C. Dawson
I wrote this a while back, but came across it recently and realized that it ought to be posted here:
Abortion has always been a women’s issue. It has not always been a medical issue, or a legal issue, but it has always been an issue of personal liberty and reproductive freedom for women.
As a historian-in-training, I’m convinced of the value of perspective. All too often people don’t stop to consider the larger picture, and so they fail to see the context surrounding our many “contemporary social problems.” I think that, just as with any number of other such problems, abortion can and should be analyzed and considered in historical context; not as some abhorrent aberration, but as the result of complex historical happenstance. By seeking to understand the history surrounding the current debate we can reach a more nuanced, profound comprehension of the issue.
This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive telling of the history of birth control; rather, it is intended as a sketch of the sexual politics and power that have held sway over women’s lives for so many millennia, which is being played out presently, in part, in the abortion debate.
Before the advent of a reliable oral contraceptive in the 1950s, women’s lives were controlled by birth. Prior to that, a woman could not exert much control over her sexual and reproductive functions – that was the province of her father, her husband, or her brother. There was no such thing as reproductive freedom; ordinary women’s very lives were at the mercy of their husband’s sex drives. Who can imagine the countless sorrowful women who died in childbirth or from pregnancy complications? And how many of those pregnancies were unintentional?
Abortion is a form of birth control. For as long as women have been sentient they have dealt with issues of birth control, including abortion and infanticide. Since the dawn of civilization The Powers That Be have legislated dictates proscribing when and how such acts are acceptable. These are not new issues.
Women have not historically been afforded the personal liberty to determine for themselves when they might reproduce. They have been beholden unto their husbands' desires, and not free to decide whether or when they wanted to be mothers. It was a given: women were, by their biological nature, wives and mothers.
Only in the modern world have women been granted the freedom and – through the birth control pill and other, newer contraceptive innovations – the license to exercise any significant influence over the sexual and reproductive aspects of their persons. The abortion debate is about how much reproductive freedom society is willing to allow women. It is not about the sanctity of human life; that is an issue in the debate, no doubt, but it is not the central issue. The central issue of the abortion debate is female autonomy, and it always has been.
Women have always sought to control their procreative function — be it via contraception or abortion or infanticide — as a way to exert some measure of influence over their lot in life, and they always will. And that is precisely why they continue do so today, and why ardent feminists will always be in favor of granting women access to safe abortions.
Thanks to Mark Bernhardt I've been able to recognize advertising as another socio-cultural innovation that wields great power in society. Unlike race, gender, and the rule of law, however, advertising is wholly of the modern age.
I'll have to gather my thoughts about this before I can write at length, but I wanted to pen blog the idea while it was still fresh.
At this point though it seems so obvious that advertising is indeed a socio-cultural innovation that I'm ashamed I didn't recognize it as such sooner.
Note to self: elaborating on how advertising is a socio-cultural innovation will help me in my quest for a working definition of socio-cultural technologies, i.e., stating the ways that it functions as such will help me identify the crucial criteria...
Gender constructs constitute one of the most fundamental organizational mechanisms of human society. This has been almost universally true throughout time and space. The practical implications and the real consequences of this fact have profoundly impacted the course of human history. For this reason the phenomenon of gender, as opposed to the existence of two biological sexes, demands extensive inquiry. I could dedicate my life to pursuing myriad avenues of research into the varying application of gender constructs in human society and the resulting influences on world events.
As a bit of an aside:
Likewise, technology - from the plow to the cellular telephone - has profoundly influenced the course of human history. Technological innovations that allow for changes to human society deserve investigation, particularly those which directly and indirectly engage socio-cultural innovations.
A little over 45 years ago, on a humid June night in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers was gunned down by a White Power Asshole. Medgar was unpacking "Jim Crow Must Go" tshirts from his car at the time he was shot, while his wife and three children waited for him to return home from a long day's work as Field Secretary for the NAACP.
Last night I spent an hour in the house where Medgar was shot. I heard the story of his life's work for racial equality in Jim Crow Mississippi and the ways his family coped with the dangers associated with that work. I saw his blood on the concrete in the carport, and heard the tale of his unjust treatment the night of his death: how there were no ambulances nor police patrol cars available to transport him to the hospital, how his family and neighbors made a makeshift ambulance by placing one of his children's matresses down in the back of a station wagon, and how he was refused treatment at the hospital once he finally arrived.
A 1942 law segregated facilities at hospitals in Mississippi. In 1963 white doctors did not treat black patients to save their lives and the life-saving blood of white folks was withheld from those with black skin. Such pernicious racist practices culminated on the night of June 12, 1963 with the death of Medgar Evers.
It took 30 years to convict the racist son of a bitch whose bullet killed Medgar and left Myrlie Evers a widowed housewife with three small children.
At the Evers' home last night, my husband and I were the only white people present.
Some Many people think that in the year 2008 racism doesn't matter any more; that the problems of slavery and Jim Crow have been left behind as the years have passed, but I'm convinced that these people are wrong. They are either ignorant or blind to the fact of the matter: that racism still plays heavily in the day-to-day lives of many Americans.
So it goes that I'm convinced that racism in America is the second-most insidious socio-cultural innovation to be implemented by humankind for the exploitation of one group by a more powerful group. (The all-time winner of that esteemed honor is, of course, gender.)
The most interesting cases of human technological advancements are those wherein socio-cultural and material technologies come together and create progress. Other areas of interest include those wherein socio-cultural and material technologies combine in ways that are more confrontational than harmonious.
{As a philosophical aside, one must wonder: what exactly is progress?}
Robert McElvaine noted the instance of gender roles and agriculture occurring close enough in time to influence and propel the furtherance of one another in a sort of symbiotic, mutually dependent relationship.
Indeed, other examples abound throughout the history of humanity, such as:
Religion as a socio-cultural technology that aided in the consolidation of power wielded by early city-state rulers;
Spoken language as a socio-cultural technology that led to the development of the material technology of a written language;
Racism as a socio-cultural innovation that made feasible the material technology of a slave-labor system in the United States;
the Rule of Law as a socio-cultural technology which led to the legitimization of socio-political power structures, state sovereignty, and the like;
and countless others...
There are any number of instances where socio-cultural and material technologies have interested and interacted to profoundly affect the course of human history, if only I train myself to consider the world in such a manner.
It occurs to me that it will be necessary that I develop a working definition for 'technology' if I intend to write or think extensively about it, and especially if I intend to make the case that ethereal things like race and gender ought to be classified as technologies.
Back in 2006, in my very first semester as a university student, I took a class called The History of Science and Society. Somehow, although I was interested in the class, I didn't realize at the time how profoundly that very idea - science and society - would affect my future studies and the very course of my life's work.
One of my first assignments in that class was to submit a definition of technology. At that early stage, before I had done much thinking on the matter, I submitted the following:
Technology is the body of knowledge that members of a society apply to their physical environment to meet their survival needs.
-- from Renzetti, Claire M., and Daniel H. Curran. Living Sociology. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.
Truly this is was a fairly good starting point considering how little I knew two years ago. Nevertheless, here I find myself still struggling to come up with a good, solid definition that will allow me to apply the term 'technology' to both material and socio-cultural innovations.
So far, I think I can say this:
Technology is the implementation of a method to manipulate the natural world to the advantage of humanity or in such a way as to further 'progress.' (Defining progress, of course, would be the stuff of another discussion entirely.)
While this may be a good beginning in that it allows for the expansion of 'technology' to go beyond material technologies, it does not succinctly and specifically convey my meaning that the term ought not be so narrowly defined as to only refer to physical manipulation of the environment. Alas, it does not readily convey the idea that the manipulation of the social environment (which is, after all, a part of the natural world since humans evolved as social creatures) is a form of technological advancement as well.
I must work on this. A good place to start doing this would be to draw comparisions between material and socio-cultural examples of human ingenuity, and I've got an entire career ahead of me to figure all this out.
Last night I had an epiphany: I realized where I’d gone wrong with this blog! I had thought of blogging here as a chore, and associated it with something I needed to be doing as a conscientious aspiring scholar, but I now see that that was all wrong, because this blog isn’t a chore at all; it is a tool!
Yay for me for discovering this.
I have now officially begin my last semester as an undergraduate, on a good note, too. Good, that is, other than the fact that my first class of the semester - Logic - didn’t meet because of a tornado warning.The five classes which will round out my undergraduate studies are: (1) Logic, (2) Contemporary US History, (3) Sociology 455 or, Race and Ethnic Relations, (4) Creative Writing, and (5) Women in US History. So far it’s shaping up to be an interesting semester. I’ll have to get to write a lot, which will be a fulfilling challenge that will allow me to expand and hone my skills as an academic. No worries, just learning new stuff.
The two things I must fret about now are: (1) the GRE, and (2) my UCLA application.
I’m struggling to come up with a feasible research topic. My mind seems stuck in broad, overarching-theme-mode, and I don’t know where or how to pare down. An alumnus of the institute advised me that the research doesn’t have to be self-contained, that it can be part of a larger research project, which is encouraging indeed.
Race and Gender are what I’m stuck on. Specifically, the ways that race and gender are both used to oppress segments of society. These two — for lack of a better description — soci-cultural technologies have profoundly shaped the course of history. This seems so obvious to me that I don’t know where to begin to try to prove it.
Then the thought of socio-cultural technology brings me back to that other historical truth that I have convinced myself of: that human culture - and, accordingly, its myriad assorted mechanism and functions - is a technological innovation just like any other that has made our existence on earth that much easier and efficient-in-a-primitive-sort-of-way.
So I’ve much to mull over.
In the meanwhile I need to do a little sociology 101 review.
In keeping with my new theory, I’ve been noticing instances of socio-cultural technologies everywhere. Here’s my preliminary list:
