April 3, 2007
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- Study Raises Possibility of Jewish Tie for Jefferson
Was Thomas Jefferson the first Jewish president? Researchers studying Jefferson’s Y chromosome have found it belongs to a lineage that is rare in Europe but common in the Middle East, raising the possibility that the third president of the United States had a Jewish ancestor many generations ago.
No biological samples of Jefferson remain, but his Y chromosome, the genetic element that determines maleness, is assumed to be the same as that carried by living descendants of Field Jefferson, his paternal uncle. These relatives donated cells for an inquiry into whether Jefferson had fathered a hidden family with his slave Sally Hemings, a possibility that most historians had scoffed at.
But researchers reported in 1998 that the Jefferson family chromosome matched perfectly that of a male-line descendant of Eston Hemings, one of Sally Hemings’s sons. The genetic evidence was not conclusive by itself but made a strong case combined with the historical evidence that Hemings had indeed become Jefferson’s mistress after the death of his wife, Martha.
Geneticists at the University of Leicester in England, led by Turi E. King and Mark A. Jobling, have now undertaken a survey of the branch or lineage to which Jefferson’s Y chromosome belongs. All Y chromosomes fall on branches of a single tree, descended from one man in the ancestral human population. The reason is that all the other potential Adams in this population had Y chromosomes that fell extinct when they had no children or only daughters.
Jefferson’s Y chromosome belongs to the branch designated K2, which is quite rare. It occurs in a few men in Spain and Portugal and is most common in the Middle East and eastern Africa, being carried by about 10 percent of men in Oman and Somalia, the geneticists report in the current issue of The American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Puzzled at the lack of K2 Y chromosomes in Britain given that Jefferson’s own family traced its origin to Wales, Dr. Jobling’s group decided to scan a special population most likely to carry K2 — that of men named Jefferson.
Of 85 British Jeffersons tested, just two proved to have Y chromosomes of the K2 lineage. The paternal grandfather of one was born in Yorkshire, that of the other in the West Midlands.
Discovery of these two English members of K2 supports the idea that Thomas Jefferson’s recent paternal ancestry is from Britain. Had they not been found, Dr. Jobling’s team writes, the geographic distribution of K2 would have made the Middle East seem the most likely origin of Jefferson’s family.
The fact that K2 is common in the Middle East, however, raises the possibility that Jefferson had a Jewish ancestor, Dr. Jobling said. Jewish Y chromosomes resemble those of Middle Eastern peoples, and the Jewish Diaspora is one way Middle Eastern chromosomes entered Europe. But because so little work has been done on the rare K2 lineage, “our research raises the possibility, but doesn’t help anyone to answer it either way,” Dr. Jobling said.
Michael Hammer, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, said he had compared the Jefferson Y chromosome with those in his database of Y chromosomes and found close matches with four other individuals. There was a perfect match to the Y chromosome of a Moroccan Jew, and matches that differed by two mutations from another Moroccan Jew, a Kurdish Jew and an Egyptian.
Dr. Hammer said he would “hazard a guess at Sephardic Jewish ancestry” for Jefferson, although any such interpretation was highly tentative. Sephardic Jews are descendants of those expelled from Spain and Portugal after 1492.
Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA, a DNA-testing service, said that among the 90,000 Y chromosome samples contributed to his database, K2 occurred in 2 percent of Ashkenazim, Jews of Central or Northern European origin, and 3 percent of Sephardim.
“Whether the non-Jews with K2 are descendants of Jews or come from an earlier migration into Europe is hard to say,” Mr. Greenspan said, “but my sense is that it’s separate migrations from the Middle East.”
Even if Thomas Jefferson had had a Sephardic Jew in his ancestry in the 15th century, very little of that ancestor’s genome would have come down to him along with the Y chromosome, given that in each generation a child inherits only half of each parent’s genes.
- Brits Behaving Badly
.A tour of such New York British hangouts as Soho House, the Red Lion, and Tea & Sympathy left the author, an Englishman, blushing: what makes his fellow expats such a thoroughly annoying lot?
by A. A. Gill April 2007
Illustrations by André Carrilho.
This is a true story. A friend of mine, an English girl, moved to New York and, soon after arriving, romantically acquired a local boyfriend. Shortly after that they were both invited to a party. It would be, she was told, fancy-dress. Fancy-dress parties, unlike emotional openness, child care, and pedicures, are one of those inconsequential and nebulous little things that the English take with an infinite, furrowed-browed, death-or-glory seriousness. After many sleepless hours, my friend decided on witty outfits for herself and the boyfriend. After days of construction, they turned up resplendent and a little sweaty as a pair of tomatoes. She had coutured a Gershwin lyric. She was a tomato, he a tomato. (This doesn’t really work in print.) It was a tongue-in-taffeta pun. The English simply adore little puns. They were shown into the grand residence and waddled into a room full of Americans wearing black-tie, cocktail frocks, and diamonds. My friend had misunderstood. “Fancy-dress” had meant dress fancy. For any Englishman reading this, stitching a Robin Hood outfit, the American for “fancy-dress” is “costume party.” What did you do? I asked my friend. “I laughed and got drunk.” That was very British of you. What did the boyfriend do? “He had a bit of a sense-of-humor failure. But we’re still friends.”
The British have colonized Manhattan, acquiring minute rent-stabilized apartments in the West Village that they pass on to each other like hereditary titles. It’s hard to spot the women—unless they open their mouths. But the British men can be identified by their cropped hair, which they shave to obscure their genetically endemic premature hair loss. They imagine it gives them a street-hard look. Most Americans think they look like gay Marines with deformed ears. They wear their blue jeans like their school shorts—too high and too tight, leaving them with severe moose knuckle. They will occasionally wear items of indigenous clothing—a baseball cap, a plaid work shirt—just to show that they’re not tourists. But they wear them with irony. Indeed, Brits are rarely seen in New York without their magic cloaks of invisible irony—they think that, on a fundamental level, their calling here is as irony missionaries. They bless everything and everyone with the little flick quotation marks, that rabbit-ear genuflection of cool, ironic sterility. How often their mocking conversations about the natives return to the amusing truth that New Yorkers have an unbelievable, ridiculous irony deficiency, which ignores the fact that a city that produced Dorothy Parker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Abstract Expressionism, Woody Allen, and Woody Allen’s love life has quite enough irony to build the Brooklyn Bridge.
Why is it that the English continue to get it all so wrong in New York? There is something particularly, peculiarly irritating about the Brits over here. This is a city that’s wide open to strangers, lumpy with a homogeneity of schemers and immigrants, yet the Brits manage to remain aloof and apart, the grit in the Vaseline. Those with the voices like broken crockery, the book-at-bedtime accent, have a lot to answer for. The Brits believe that they have a birth-given sincerity and that it’s not what you say but how you say it that matters. And that all silly, gullible Yanks, from policemen to society hostesses, will wave us ahead on life’s road when we open our euphonious mouth. In fact, most Americans can’t tell the difference between Billy Connolly and Russell Crowe, and why on earth should they? If you really, really want to disjoint an Englishman—ruin his day—then just ask him which bit of Australia he’s from.
And then there is the air of patronage, combined with an odor of neediness and a thick-skinned, unembarrassable meanness. “Oh God, have you eaten with the Brits here?” a friend asked me. “They’ll book a table for six, and then nine of them turn up. Ask for the check and they’ll all have to go to the bathroom or smoke a cigarette or make a phone call, and there’ll be one guy left at the table. That’ll be the D.A.S.—the Designated American Sucker, who through sheer naked embarrassment will pick up the tab, and suddenly they’ll all be back at the table, thanking him with their impeccable manners. This will be the only time they’ve actually spoken to him, because for the rest of the meal they’ll be talking about people who they were at school with, who all have the names of small dogs. If there’s no D.A.S., they’ll hold an auction over who had the steak and two beers. I’m not kidding. You know what gets me? It’s not like they’re poor. Not really poor, like lots of immigrants. They just think we’re lucky to have them. They walk into a room and imagine it just got classier.”
The British in New York are not good mixers. We hunker together, forming bitchy old boys’ and girls’ clubs where we complain about and giggle over Americans like nannies talking about difficult, stupid children. An English girl, newly arrived, has been picked up by the expat coven and asked for tea. And rather nonplussed, she says, “It’s sad and sort of weird. This is the way our grandparents used to behave in Africa and India.”
New York’s grand British club, the social embassy, is Soho House. Go up to the bar on any Thursday night and see the serried, slouched, braying, bitten-nailed ranks of them, all in need of a toothbrush, a cotton bud, and a dermatologist. Nursing beers and a well-thumbed ragged project. They’re all here not making a film, not writing a book, not selling a sitcom. Don’t tell me about your latest script. You’re not a film writer. You’re a handyman. You’ve never made so much as a wedding video. You do a bit of decorating, some plumbing, and you house-sit plants. There’s no shame in it. It’s what immigrants do.
In the Red Lion, a bar on Bleecker Street, half a dozen televisions pump out the Rugby match between England and Scotland. It’s 9:30 in the morning and the place is packed with geezers and a few chubby-cheeked, ruddy rugger-bugger girls.
They’re a particularly big-boned, docile, good-natured type, who look like members of some alternative royal-family-pedigree breeding farm. The blokes are necking pints of Guinness and projectile bellowing. It’s uncannily like being back in London. The only difference is that half of them are England fans, and half Scotland. If anyone walked into a Scottish bar back home wearing an English accent during this match, they’d leave wearing their nose as an earring. And it strikes me that there’s something unreal about this. It looks right and smells right. It even sounds right. But it’s not right. They’re all playing extras in their own me-in-New-York movie. They’re putting on the Britishness as a show. They’re going through the motions only because they’re here.As we kick back into the street, I notice a man in a kilt. For Chrissake, who moves to America and brings a kilt? Did his mother say, “Farewell, son. Make something of yourself in the New World. Have you packed your native costume, just in case?” Just in case of what? Just in case we decide to re-invade Canada? Just in case he finds a girl with a thing for men in frocks with no knickers? Just in case there’s an England-versus-Scotland match on the satellite television in some fake pub? Other countries keep their quaint ethnic customs, their special days. But somehow Diwali, Panamanian Martyrs’ Day, or Jewish Family Friday Dinner seem quaint and diverse, while a drunk Scots banker in a skirt in the early morning is actually pathetically annoying.
There is a little parade of adjoining storefronts in the West Village. One sells fish-and-chips. Another is a little café called Tea & Sympathy. The third specializes in English comestibles, the sort of thing that Englishmen abroad are supposed to yearn for: Bird’s custard, Marmite, Bovril, Jammie Dodgers. The window looks like a pre-war Ealing Studios film set. Nowhere in Britain has looked remotely like this in living memory. Inside, four young Englishmen from the Midlands are reminiscing over lists of Edwardian boiled sweets, like a spoof of High Fidelity. With an intense reverie, they fold me into the conversation for a balming moment of confectionery nostalgia. “So, Victory V’s or aniseed balls? We were just discussing Curlywurly versus Caramac.” After we’ve all had a suck on the humbug of Blighty’s tuck box, one of them asks, “Ever tried an American sweet? First time I ate a Hershey’s bar, saddest day of my life.” I managed to get out just before I turned into Oliver Twist.
If it were just you that the Brits annoyed, I wouldn’t really care. What I mind is that they’ve re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and I’m implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery. These ex-Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan aren’t our brightest and our best—they are our remittance men, paid to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don’t mellow, their consonants don’t soften. They don’t relax into being another local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made, knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.
A.A. Gill is a V.F. contributing editor and author of A.A. Gill Is Away (Simon & Schuster
- The discovery of a previously unknown treasure chest of e-mails
Follow the e-mails
The discovery of a previously unknown treasure chest of e-mails buried by the Bush administration may prove to be as informative as Nixon’s secret White House tapes.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Mar. 29, 2007 | The rise and fall of the Bush presidency has had four phases: the befuddled period of steady political decline during the president’s first nine months; the high tide of hubris from Sept. 11, 2001, through the 2004 election; the self-destructive overreaching to consolidate a one-party state from 2005 to 2006, culminating in the repudiation of the Republican Congress; and, now, the terminal stage, the great unraveling, as the Democratic Congress works to uncover the abuses of the previous six years.
Richard Nixon and George W. Bush both invoked secrecy for national security. Both insisted war — the war in Vietnam, the war on terror — justified impunity. And both offered the reason of secrecy to cover political power grabs.
In Watergate, “Deep Throat” counseled that the royal road to the scandal’s source was to “follow the money.” In the proliferating scandals of the Bush presidency, Congress is searching down a trail of records that did not exist in the time of Nixon: Follow the e-mails.
The discovery of a hitherto unknown treasure-trove of e-mails buried by the Bush White House may prove to be as informative as Nixon’s secret White House tapes. Last week the National Journal disclosed that Karl Rove does “about 95 percent” of his e-mails outside the White House system, instead using a Republican National Committee account. What’s more, Rove doesn’t tap most of his messages on a White House computer, but rather on a BlackBerry provided by the RNC. By this method, Rove and other White House aides evade the legally required archiving of official e-mails. The first glimmer of this dodge appeared in a small item buried in a January 2004 issue of U.S. News & World Report: “‘I don’t want my E-mail made public,’ said one insider. As a result, many aides have shifted to Internet E-mail instead of the White House system. ‘It’s Yahoo!, baby,’ says a Bushie.”
The offshoring of White House records via RNC e-mails became apparent when an RNC domain, gwb43.com (referring to George W. Bush, 43rd president), turned up in a batch of e-mails the White House gave to House and Senate committees earlier this month. Rove’s deputy, Scott Jennings, former Bush legal counsel Harriet Miers and her deputies strangely had used gwb43.com as an e-mail domain.
The production of these e-mails to Congress was a kind of slip. In its tense negotiations with lawmakers, the White House has steadfastly refused to give Congress e-mails other than those between the White House and the Justice Department or the White House and Congress. E-mails among presidential aides have been withheld under the claim of executive privilege.
When I worked in the Clinton White House, people brought in their personal computers if they were engaged in any campaign work, but all official transactions had to be done within the White House system as stipulated by the Presidential Records Act of 1978. (The PRA requires that “the President shall take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records.”) Having forsaken the use of Executive Office of the President e-mail, executive privilege has been sacrificed. Moreover, Rove’s and the others’ practice may not be legal.
The revelation of the gwb43 e-mails illuminates the widespread exploitation of nongovernmental e-mail by Bush White House officials, which initially surfaced in the investigations and trial of convicted Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Susan Ralston, Abramoff’s former personal assistant and then executive assistant to Rove, who served as the liaison between the two men in their constant dealings, used “georgewbush.com” and “rnchq.org” e-mail accounts to communicate with Abramoff between 2001 and 2003. In one of her e-mails, Ralston cautioned that “it is better to not put this stuff in writing in [the White House] … email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc.” Abramoff replied: “Dammit. It was sent to Susan on her rnc pager and was not supposed to go into the WH system.”
The Ralston e-mails were not fully appreciated as a clue to the vast cache of hidden e-mails at the time the Justice Department’s inspector general conducted a probe into whether Abramoff had been involved in the firing of the U.S. attorney in Guam in 2002. That prosecutor, Frederick Black, who had been appointed by George H.W. Bush and served for 10 years, had opened an investigation into the $324,000 in secret payments Abramoff received from the Guam Superior Court to lobby in Washington against court reform. The day after Black subpoenaed Abramoff’s contract, he was fired. In a 2006 report, the I.G. found no criminal wrongdoing — but he did not have access to the nongovernmental e-mails (i.e., those sent outside the official White House system). Now, the I.G. may have cause to reopen his case.
Under the RNC’s gwb43.com domain a myriad of e-mail accounts flourish, including the ones used by Rove’s office to conduct his business with Abramoff. Among these accounts are ones for Republican Senate campaigns, for RepublicanVictoryTeam.com and the like, and, curiously, for ScooterLibby.com. The latter e-mail account serves the Web site of the defense fund of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. ScooterLibby.com amounts to an in-kind contribution from the RNC.
On Monday, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent letters to RNC officials demanding that they preserve the White House e-mails sent on RNC accounts. “The e-mail exchanges reviewed by the Committee provide evidence that in some instances, White House officials were using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications,” he wrote. “What assurance can the RNC provide the Committee,” he asked, “that no e-mails involving official White House business have been destroyed or altered?”
Even as the Bush administration withholds evidence that would allow Congress to fulfill its obligation of oversight, administration officials are having difficulty keeping their stories straight. The release of each new batch of e-mails forces them to scramble for new alibis.
On March 12, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had nothing to do with the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys late last year. How they happened to be removed remained a mystery to him. “I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on,” he said. But e-mails released last week show that he was informed of the plan twice in late 2006. In fact, on Nov. 27, 2006, he met with at least five senior Justice Department officials to finalize a “five-step plan for carrying out the firings of the prosecutors.” With the appearance of the incriminating e-mails, Gonzales’ spokespeople have been sent out to tell the press that there is “no inconsistency,” a brazen assertion of the Groucho Marx defense: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
Despite the resignation of Gonzales’ chief of staff and counselor, Kyle Sampson, on March 12, another fall guy has emerged, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. On Jan. 18, Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, presenting a public explanation that politics had nothing to do with the U.S. attorney firings — “we would never, ever make a change in the U.S. attorney position for political reasons” — and private assurances to Republican senators that they were dismissed for disagreements over policy.
Three weeks later, McNulty appeared before the committee, contradicting his boss, explaining that the U.S. attorneys were fired for “performance-related” reasons. Then he admitted that the U.S. attorney for Arkansas, H.E. “Bud” Cummins, was being replaced by a Rove protégé, Tim Griffin. McNulty’s testimony incited the U.S. attorneys to defend their reputations, agitated the Democrats to ferret out the underlying political motives and forced the administration to react with a spray of excuses.
On Monday, the administration leaked an e-mail to ABC News in an attempt to blame the entire scandal on McNulty. “McNulty’s testimony directly conflicted with the approach Miers advised, according to an unreleased internal White House e-mail described to ABC News,” it reported. “According to that e-mail, sources said, Miers said the administration should take the firm position that it would not comment on personnel issues.” The leak fit the administration scenario that the U.S. attorneys scandal was nothing but a P.R. mistake — and now McNulty was the one fingered as the culprit. But in trying to shift blame the leaking of the e-mail would seem to undercut the White House’s claim of executive privilege that it cannot give internal communications to Congress.
Also on Monday Gonzales’ senior counselor and White House liaison, Monica Goodling, invoked the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in her refusal to testify before the Senate. (Goodling, who graduated from law school in 1999, is one of the highest-ranking officials in the Department of Justice. Her doctor of jurisprudence degree comes from Regent University, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson. Its Web site boasts that it has “150 graduates serving in the Bush Administration.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Kay Coles James, a former Regent University dean, was director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 2001 to 2005.)
Goodling’s lawyer’s extraordinarily argumentative letter explaining her silence accused “certain members” of the committee of “already” having “reached conclusions about the affair”; stated that the inquiry is “being used to promote a political party” and that it lacks a “legitimate reason … basic fairness … objectivity”; and stated that an unnamed “senior Department of Justice official” had told Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., that he was “not entirely candid” to the committee because “our client did not inform him of certain pertinent facts.”
McNulty, of course, is that official. As Goodling’s lawyer’s letter reveals, he is refusing to go gently into that good night and declining to cooperate with the latest cover story. Hence, she is taking the Fifth, perhaps more because she doesn’t know what story to tell than because she might face a perjury trap before the committee. So the fall gal blames the fall guy.
As Congress extends its oversight, President Bush stiffens his resistance. He treats the Democratic Congress as basically illegitimate. He reacts to every assertion of oversight as an invasion of presidential prerogative. Not only does he reject compromise and negotiation, but he also transforms every point of difference into a conflict over first principles, even as every new disclosure reveals his purely political motivation.
Bush’s radicalism becomes more fervent as he becomes more embattled, and separates him from presidents past. Richard Nixon compromised regularly with a Democratic Congress, even as he secretly laid the foundation of an imperial presidency, his unfinished project left in ruins after the Watergate scandal. Ronald Reagan, the old union leader, president of the Screen Actors Guild, stood resolutely on his convictions until the better part of political valor led him to cut a deal, as he did when he abandoned his long-held belief in privatizing Social Security, conceding his supposedly inviolate ground to Speaker Tip O’Neill, and happily proclaiming the pact afterward. George H.W. Bush, a former congressman with many friends across the aisle, famously jettisoned his tenuous conservative bona fides as Reagan’s heir, a credo he embraced in his 1988 acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention — “Read my lips: no new taxes” — when, anxious about the expanding deficit, he cut a deal with the Democratic leadership to lower it through tax increases.
The Republican right’s excoriation of the elder Bush’s betrayal, rather than his overriding sense of responsibility, was the lesson learned by the son. His imperative to avoid making enemies on the right is compounded into his larger notion of an unfettered presidency.
For six years, Bush had a Republican Congress whipped into obedience — and it provided him his only experience in legislative affairs. The rise of the Democratic Congress, reviving the powers of oversight and investigation, is a shock to his system. But he is not without an understanding of his changed circumstances. Bush sees the new Congress as the same beast that ensnared his father in fatal compromise and as a monstrous threat to the imperial presidency he has spent six years carefully building.
As the return of oversight suddenly exposes pervasive corruption throughout the executive branch, Bush struggles against Congress as though it were an alien force. Bush has no sense that the Framers, wary of the concentration of power in the executive, deliberately established the powers of the Congress in Article I of the Constitution and those of the president in Article II. Once again he straps on his armor and clasps his shield. His defense of secrecy, executive fiat and one-party rule has become his battle of Thermopylae.
- Gospel according to Judas
The recently unearthed Gospel of Judas “contradicts everything we know about Christianity,” says religious historian Elaine Pagels.
By Steve Paulson
Apr. 02, 2007 | As almost every child knows, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus, selling his life for 30 pieces of silver. If there’s an arch villain in the story of Jesus, it’s Judas Iscariot. Or is it? The newly discovered Gospel of Judas suggests that Judas was, in fact, the favorite disciple, the only one Jesus trusted to carry out his final command to hand him over to the Romans.
Rumors about the gospel have circulated for centuries. Early church fathers called it a “very dangerous, blasphemous, horrendous gospel,” according to historian Elaine Pagels. We now know that the manuscript was passed around the shadowy world of antiquities dealers, at one point sitting in a safe deposit box in a small town in New York for 17 years. Pagels herself was once asked by a dealer in Cleveland to examine it, but he only showed her the last few pages, which revealed little more than the title page. She assumed there was nothing of significance. Finally, the manuscript was acquired by the National Geographic Society, which hired Pagels as a consultant to study it.
More than any other scholar, Pagels has brought the lost texts of early Christianity to public attention. A Princeton historian of religion, she wrote the 1979 bestseller “The Gnostic Gospels” — the book that launched the popular fascination with the Nag Hammadi manuscripts found by Egyptian peasants in 1945. That book, which won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, was later chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century. Pagels went on to write a series of acclaimed books about early Christianity and, along the way, recounted her own personal tragedies — her young son’s death after a long illness and, just a year later, her first husband’s death in a hiking accident. It’s no surprise that Pagels has felt compelled to wrestle with some of religion’s thorniest subjects, like how to make sense of suffering and evil.
For much of her career, Pagels has straddled two worlds — the academic and the popular. She’s often the go-to expert when a magazine needs a comment on the latest theory about Mary Magdalene or some other bit of revisionist Christian history. But her standing among the scholars who study early Christianity is more complicated. Conservative scholars tend to dismiss the Gnostic texts as a footnote in Christian history, hardly worth all the hype that’s been generated by “The Da Vinci Code” and other racy stories. Not surprisingly, these scholars have questioned Pagels’ interpretations of early Christian texts.
With Harvard historian Karen L. King, Pagels has written a new book, “Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity.” The authors argue that this recently discovered gospel offers a new understanding of the death of Jesus. I spoke with Pagels by phone about the bitter quarrels among early Christians, why it’s a bad idea to read the Bible literally, and the importance of this new discovery.
When was the Gospel of Judas written?
As far we can tell, probably at the end of the first or early second century.
So it’s clearly not written by Judas himself, or even dictated by Judas.
That’s right. And most New Testament scholars would say the gospels in the New Testament — all of them attributed to disciples or followers of disciples — were probably not written by the people whose names are on them. If you say, “the Gospel according to Matthew,” you might not be pretending to be Matthew if you wrote it. You might be saying, this is the gospel the way Matthew taught it, and he was my teacher. So these are certain followers of Jesus who collected and transmitted his teaching.
Does this Gospel of Judas reveal something new about early Christianity?
Yes, the Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there’s no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel. So that’s quite startling.
It’s shocking to suggest that Judas wasn’t just one of the disciples but was actually the favorite disciple of Jesus.
That’s right. And also the idea that he handed over Jesus to be arrested at the orders of Jesus himself. This wasn’t a betrayal at all. In fact, it was obedience to a command or request that Jesus had made.
But how do we reconcile this with all the other stories we’ve ever heard about Judas? He’s the symbol of treachery and betrayal.
Well, he has become the symbol of treachery and betrayal. But once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him. The earliest gospel, Mark, says Judas handed him over, but it doesn’t give any motive at all. The people who wrote after Mark — Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels — apparently felt that what was wrong with the Gospel of Mark was that there was no motive. So Matthew adds a motive. Matthew says Judas went to the chief priests who were Jesus’ enemies, and said, “What will you give me if I hand him over to you?” And they agree on a certain sum of money. So in Matthew’s view, the motive was greed. In Luke’s gospel, it’s entirely different. It says the power of evil took over Judas. Satan entered into him.
I think Luke is struggling with the question, If Jesus is the son of God, how could he be taken by a mere trick, by a human being? And Luke is trying to show that all evil power was concentrated in Judas. So they are very different stories. However, other gospels, like John’s, suggest that Jesus not only anticipated what was going to happen but initiated it. The Gospel of John says that he told Judas to go out and do what he had to do, which Jesus knew was to betray him. So the Gospel of Judas just takes the suggestion one step further. Jesus not only knew what was going to happen but initiated the action.
There’s something else that’s striking about the Gospel of Judas. The writer is very angry, and he’s especially angry at the other disciples.
Yes, that’s where we realized that it’s not just a story about Jesus and the disciples. It’s a story about this follower of Jesus — the Christian who’s writing this story, maybe 60 years after the death of Jesus. Even using the name of Judas is a slap in the face to the tradition. You realize that whoever wrote it was a very angry person. And we were asking, What’s going on here? Why is he so angry? And we discovered that it’s very dangerous to be a follower of Jesus in the generations after his death. You know, they say his disciple Peter was crucified upside down. And Paul was probably beheaded by the Romans. James was lynched by a crowd, and so were Stephen and other followers. So leaders of this movement were in great danger. And other Christians were also in danger of being arrested and killed because they followed Jesus. The question for many of them was, What do you do if you’re arrested?
And to acknowledge that you were a Christian would probably kill you.
Exactly. All you had to do is say no. Or you can try to escape or bribe the people persecuting you. And many did. The only answer that most Christians agreed was right was to say, “Yes, I’m a Christian.” You defy them and you go heroically into the lions. So we’ve always thought of Christianity as a religion that glorifies martyrdom. Now we realize that we’ve had that impression because the people who weren’t in favor of martyrdom had their writings buried and burned and trashed and ridiculed. And they were called cowards and heretics.
So the Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It’s challenging leaders of the church. Here the leaders are personified as disciples who are encouraging people to get killed, to “die for God,” as they called martyrdom. This gospel is challenging them and saying, when you encourage young people to die for God, you’re really complicit in murder.
Are there also theological issues at stake? This gets at the meaning of suffering, and the nature of evil as well.
It does. This was at a time when all followers of Jesus were struggling with the question, Why did Jesus die? What does it all mean? In the New Testament, the gospels say he died as a sacrifice. Paul says Christ, our Passover lamb, was sacrificed for us. Why? Well, to save us from sin.
But this author is saying, wait a minute. If you think God wants his son to be tortured and killed before he’ll forgive people their sins, what kind of God do you have in mind? Is this the God who didn’t want animals to be sacrificed in the temple anymore? So this author’s asking, isn’t God a loving father? Isn’t that what Jesus taught? Why are we saying that God requires his son to die for the sins of the world? So it’s a challenge to the whole idea of atonement, and the idea that Christians — when they worship — eat bread and drink wine as if it were the body and blood of Christ. This person sees that whole thing as a celebration of violence.
You can see why some early Christians would have attacked this gospel. This is very threatening to other Christian accounts of why Jesus died.
It contradicts everything we know about Christianity. But there’s a lot we don’t know about Christianity. There are different ways of understanding the death of Jesus that have been buried and suppressed. This author suggests that God does not require sacrifice to forgive sin, and that the message of Jesus is that we come from God and we go back to God, that we all live in God. It’s not about bloody sacrifice for forgiveness of sins. It suggests that Jesus’ death demonstrates that, essentially and spiritually, we’re not our bodies. Even when our bodies die, we go to live in God.
Does this raise questions about how we should think about the Resurrection? In orthodox Christian accounts, this is considered a resurrection of the flesh.
That’s right. The idea that Jesus rose in the flesh is very important for a lot of Christians. And certainly for the martyrs. When people were going to get themselves killed, some of them were asked, Do you believe that you’re going to be raised from the dead in your body? And many of them said yes, of course we do. That’s why we’re doing this. So those promises of bodily resurrection and heavenly rewards were very important for many Christians.
Some of the things we’re talking about would seem to have great resonance in the Islamic world. Do you see any parallels between this Christian history and what we’re seeing among Muslim martyrs today?
I do. The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn’t against martyrdom, and he didn’t ever insult the martyrs. He said it’s one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it’s another thing to say that’s what God wants, that this is a glorification of God. I think he would have spoken in the way that an imam might today, saying those who encourage young people to go out and supposedly die for God as martyrs are complicit in murder. The question of the uses of violence is very much at the heart of the Gospel of Judas. If you have to die as a martyr, you do because you don’t deny Christ. But you don’t go around encouraging people to do it as though they would get higher rewards in heaven.
Can you put the Gospel of Judas in perspective, alongside some of the other Gnostic texts that have come to light in recent decades — the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene? Do these really change our understanding of early Christianity?
Before, we had a puzzle with just a few pieces. Now we have many more pieces. We begin to see that in the early Christian movement, people discussed and struggled with all the issues that we now think of as normative Christianity, like, What does the death of Jesus mean? There wasn’t one kind of understanding of Jesus in the early Christian movement. Actually, there were many.
In recent years, there’s been a huge debate over what to make of the Gnostic Gospels. And plenty of Christian scholars and theologians say there’s good reason they were not admitted into the Christian canon. They say the Bible presents the most reliable story of Jesus based on eyewitness accounts. For instance, Ben Witherington has written, “The four canonical gospels have stood the test of time and other apocryphal gospels and texts have not … This is because the canonical gospels are our earliest gospels and have actual historical substance, while the later gospels have none.”
Well, Witherington has a particular point of view to prove. I would say it’s very hard to date these other texts. Some of them are as early as the gospels of the New Testament, like the Gospel of John. But what’s different is the emphasis. Let me give you an example. The Gospel of Thomas says that all who recognize that they come from God are also children of God, instead of teaching that Jesus is the only son of God through whom one must be saved. It’s a teaching that is akin to what the Quakers and some other Christian groups teach, including some Greek and Russian Orthodox groups. The divine is to be found in everyone, and we can discover, at some level, that we’re like Christ. It’s not a complete contradiction, but it is somewhat different.
But aren’t there crucial doctrinal issues at stake in terms of what it means to be a Christian? For instance, was Jesus the son of God? Was the return of Jesus an actual resurrection of the flesh?
In the fourth century, the Council of Nicaea established certain doctrines about what it means to be orthodox: belief in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and one Jesus Christ, his only son and Lord. So Jesus Christ is the only one who brings salvation to the whole world. There are, of course, Christians who believe in Jesus but also wonder whether people can’t find God in other religions — if they’re Jews or Muslims or Buddhists and so forth. There’s nothing Jesus himself said that contradicts that, as far as I can see. But fourth-century Christian orthodoxy did set out the doctrines you’re talking about.
Some people say the historical study of early Christianity really doesn’t matter to a person’s faith. Being a Christian means you believe in certain things, like the Resurrection, like the Virgin Birth. These are matters of faith, not of historical research. You can choose not to believe those things, but then you’re not part of the Christian creed. How do you respond to that argument?
Well, it’s absolutely true that the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection can’t be verified historically. On the other hand, if you start to look at it historically, you find out that there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians who see those very things differently. There have been Christians from the beginning — St. Paul is one of them — who say the Resurrection is not a matter of this kind of body. Paul talks about resurrection as a matter of being transformed. Yes, it’s about the body, he said, but it’s more like a body of the stars or the moon or the sun — a body of light. So there are many ways that people have understood themselves to be Christians.
This has huge implications for so many people today, especially those who simply can’t accept these kinds of miracles. It does raise the question of whether you can be a Christian if you don’t believe any of the Bible’s supernatural stories.
I don’t think you have to discard all the supernatural stories. The Bible is really about what is beyond the natural. But there are other ways of understanding. For example, the Gospel of Philip, which some people called a heretical text, actually says Jesus had human parents as you and I do. His parents were Mary and Joseph. But when he was born of the spirit, he became the son of the Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit. In Syriac and Hebrew, the spirit is spoken of in feminine forms, so metaphorically, one could speak of her as a divine mother, just as one speaks of God as a divine father. So there are Christians who didn’t reject the Virgin Birth, but said wait a minute, why would you take it literally? Why don’t you take it as an image for spiritual reality?
You have spent decades studying early Christian history. Do you consider yourself a Christian?
Yes, I do. And the reason I can is that I understand that there are countless people who’ve been Christians for 2,000 years, in many different ways. It’s not a matter of one version, you must believe this exactly the way I tell it to you. Christian theologians have always said that the truth of God is beyond our understanding. And so we speak in metaphors. Paul said we see through a glass darkly.
I’ve heard that you didn’t grow up in a religious family.
Well, it was a Protestant family, nominally. We went to church, but my father had rejected the Bible for Darwin. He decided the Bible was a bunch of old fables and that evolution was right. So I was brought up to think the Bible was just kind of irrelevant. I grew up and became deeply and passionately interested in it and went to a church and was born again. I was 14 or 15. It was quite wonderful, and I loved what I found there.
Even though your father was a confirmed atheist.
It did shock him, yes. Of course, that’s one way adolescents like to shock their parents. I didn’t do it for that reason, but it had that effect. The power and the passion of that kind of evangelical Christianity was very real for me. And it was a discovery of something very important — a spiritual dimension in life that I was not able to ignore. On the other hand, after a year of living in that church, one of my friends in high school was killed in an automobile accident. The people at the church asked, was he born again? And I said, no, he wasn’t. And they said, well, then he’s in hell. And I thought to myself, I don’t believe that. That doesn’t match up with what I’d heard about God. So at that point, I decided I had to find out for myself what I could about the early Christian movement, what I believe about it, and what is being said in the name of Jesus that I found not true.
That’s fascinating. Basically, it was because you couldn’t buy into that fundamentalist version of Christianity that you launched your career as a historian of Christianity.
That’s the truth, yes.
Well, this does raise the question of what we mean by God and what we mean by transcendence, and whether there is a transcendent reality out there. Is that discussion of transcendence meaningful to you?
Oh, certainly it is. If we don’t understand how important spiritual life is to people, I don’t think we’re going to understand human beings or the 21st century. There are many people who said religion is essentially over now, and everyone will become rational. They don’t understand that the way humans are has a lot to do with religious experience.
Your late husband, the eminent physicist Heinz Pagels, wrote very eloquently about the mysteries of science. Did he influence your thinking about this intersection between science and religion?
Oh yes, he was deeply interested in philosophy and religion and science, and understood how profound and complicated those issues are. When you’re dealing with science, for example, you’re dealing all the time with metaphors. So to assume that religious language isn’t metaphor doesn’t make sense to me.
There’s a big debate right now over whether religion and science are two totally different domains, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, or whether they overlap. Where do you come down on that?
That’s a very tough question. I think religion and science both have a lot to do with understanding and imagination, but they certainly explore the world in very different ways. For example, when the eminent physicist Stephen Weinberg wrote in his book “The First Three Minutes,” “the more we know about the universe, the more we know it’s pointless and meaningless,” my late husband said, “That doesn’t make any sense.” Einstein thought the more we knew about the universe, the more we knew about the divine intelligence. There are many ways to make inferences from physics. And inferences like that are not scientific at all; they’re philosophic.
Of course, there’s still a huge debate about whether Einstein was religious or not. The atheists want to claim him for their camp, but religious people say he was actually quite open to religious ideas.
Part of the problem is that Einstein used the language about God as a metaphor. When he said, “God does not play dice with the universe,” he meant the universe is not put together in an accidental way. It does show a kind of intelligent process in it. Einstein was speaking about God in the way that physicists would — aware that language like that is always going to be metaphorical, speaking beyond our understanding. But many people took him literally and said he’s a religious man. Scientists said he was just using language carelessly.
Isn’t that part of the problem that we get into when we talk about metaphor and the religious imagination? If you don’t take scripture literally, how do you take it?
You can take scripture seriously without taking it literally. If you speak about the Resurrection of Christ, all we know historically is that after Jesus died, his followers became convinced that he was alive again. Now, what does that mean? They told many stories. Some of them said, I saw him with my own eyes, I touched him, he actually ate food, he was not a ghost. That’s in Luke’s gospel. And others said, I saw him for a moment and then he faded — the way many people say they’ve seen people they knew who died. What I’m saying is there are many ways that people who believe in the Resurrection speak about Christ being alive after his death without meaning that his body got out of the grave and walked.
It sounds like you’re saying that it’s perfectly possible to take the Bible very seriously, to be a Christian, and yet not to believe in the supernatural miracles that so many people simply cannot accept.
Well, that may be. I don’t dismiss all supernatural miracles, like a healing that can’t be explained. Those do happen sometimes.
You’ve been studying these texts for decades. Has your scholarly work deepened your own faith?
Yes. And the scholarly work is part of the spiritual quest. Opening ourselves to exploring as much as we can about this can be, in fact, an act of faith. At Princeton, there’s a course in the study of New Testament that some evangelical students were warned not to take. They called it “Faith Busters 101.” And some of them come just to flex their muscles and see if they can sit there and stand it while somebody teaches them about how the gospels were written. But what they usually discover is that learning about those things doesn’t change the fundamental questions about faith.
Does faith necessarily involve some leap into mystery, into something that can’t be explained?
I think it does. Earlier this year, I was asked to do an interview with somebody who had written a book to demonstrate that Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead. And they expected me to say that was impossible. But I can’t say it’s impossible. From a historical point of view, there’s no way you can comment on that. It’s just not susceptible to that kind of analysis. So there’s a lot that history can’t answer and that science can’t answer. I mean, there’s a lot about all of our lives that we have no rational understanding of. And so faith comes into our relationships with the people we love, and our relationship to our life and our death.
There seems to be a rather vigorous movement among scientists to try to explain the origins of religion. I’m struck by how often these theories come from atheists. And I think the underlying impulse is to demystify the divine. But can religion really be explained from the outside, by people who are not themselves religious?
Probably not. For example, suppose you found the basic brain chemistry that explains religious perceptions. In fact, there are neurologists in New York trying very hard to understand precisely that. And you find that when people who’ve clinically died say they’ve had a near-death experience, they’ve gone into a brilliant light and then they’ve come back from some place. This is the flashes of light on the brain as it expires. Well, it may be. And it may not be. Is this a trick that our brain plays on us? Or is this intimations of some other kind of reality? I don’t think science is going to answer that question.
Isn’t there an inherent limitation to any of those brain-imaging studies? Because there’s the whole question, Are we just imagining this? Or is there really some contact with the divine?
Exactly. For example, there’s a study now at New York University about epilepsy. We know that epileptics often have an experience of seeing an aura. They can have an epileptic convulsion and they have a kind of vision. It was understood in ancient times to be demonic possession. So if people then say, epilepsy has a certain relationship to electrical activity in the brain, and that’s what precipitates these experiences, does that mean that they are not real? I don’t think that answers the question.
What do you make of the recent claim by the atheist Richard Dawkins that the existence of God is itself a scientific question? If you accept the idea that God intervenes in the physical world, don’t there have to be physical mechanisms for that to happen? Therefore, doesn’t this become a question for science?
So when you think about the God that you believe in, how would you describe that God?
Yes, I’m particularly thinking about the Hebrew Bible.
So how should we read those passages that are so violent?
You’re saying that we have to understand context.
– By Steve Paulson“The Feminine Mistake”
In her new book, boomer Leslie Bennetts warns younger women of the perils of dumping fulfilling careers. I agree, but why are women always told they’re doing something wrong?By Joan Walsh
Apr. 03, 2007 | If female fear and self-doubt were ever eradicated, the publishing industry would collapse. Another day, another book or magazine article about how women can have better orgasms, more money, smarter kids; mix job and family, spirituality and ambition; be a feminist and a stripper. But no matter the issue, the premise is pretty much the same: We’re doing something wrong.
Leslie Bennetts’ “The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?” is a great rejoinder to Caitlin Flanagan’s “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife,” last year’s contribution to the literature of how women are screwing up. Bennetts’ book captures so much so well — the perils of dumping your career to stay home with your kids; the joy of having work you love and excel at — that it took me a few days to figure out what bothered me. The problem is the so-called mistake at the heart of the book. It made me think about Flanagan’s false alarms about what’s “lost” when a mother works, and the scary must-read for women from five Aprils ago (is this a Mother’s Day thing?), Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s “The Baby Panic.” Women are constantly being warned about the way we keep bollixing this whole love, work and family thing. But are we? And who’s we?
It’s true that the women Bennetts, Flanagan and Hewlett are writing about are a tiny, affluent minority, but that’s not exactly what irks me. Still, let me say upfront: Any piece about women grappling with the choice to abandon careers for children has to make clear how rare it is to have that option. Nobody’s done that better lately than E.J. Graff in the Columbia Journalism Review, writing about the spate of books and articles that began with Lisa Belkin’s solipsistic 2003 “Opt-Out Revolution” in the New York Times magazine, and continued through the fantasies of Caitlin Flanagan and her mortal enemy Linda Hirshman (whose “Get to Work” captured the gist of Bennetts’ argument with roughly one-third the words and twice the indignation). Such books and articles, Graff notes, “focus excessively on a tiny proportion of American women — white, highly educated, in well-paying professional/managerial jobs. Just 8 percent of American working women fit this demographic,” she says, while “only 4 percent of women in their mid- to late 30s with children have advanced degrees and are in a privileged income bracket” like the women Belkin and other “opt-out” chroniclers are writing about.
Graff calls it “my friends and me journalism,” writing that inflates the issues of a tiny percentage of mostly white, straight, privileged women and pretends they’re global. Bennetts’ book may be the ultimate example of the “my friends and me” approach, and yet I agree with her, and with Hirshman, about why these privileged women’s choices matter to all of us: because they’re disproportionately visible to the privileged men who run the world — they are their wives and daughters and, if things continue, their mothers. And as long as affluent women opt out or get pushed out of top jobs and decision-making positions in order to raise children, men with stay-at-home wives and daughters and mothers will continue to make rules that make it hard for less privileged women — and men — to balance work and family. So these advantaged women and their decisions do matter.
In her lively book, Bennetts employs her own variation of “my friends and me” journalism: It’s “my friends and me” vs. “the women who drive my friends and me frickin’ nuts.” In one corner, we meet the author and a roster of named and unnamed alpha females, who have great husbands and houses and kids, and fabulous careers, too. In the other corner are women who could be their evil twins, bright, privileged wives who threw it all over to raise their children and enjoy their suburban Colonial houses — and all too often, lord it over the rest of us. Bennetts brilliantly captures the conspicuous consumption behind at least some of the so-called “opt-out revolution”: Where a plump, well-fed wife used to be enough to prove a man’s earning power, now it’s having a stay-at-home spouse, Pilatesized and pedicured to perfection, who flaunts her unused Ivy League professional degree like a big flashy diamond. And for certain soulless, status-seeking women (yes, they get under my skin, too) it seems that in a world of abundance and excess, the best way to prove your worth is to squander it, to forgo making a difference in the wider world while pretending that raising children is a lifelong endeavor (it isn’t) that makes you better than other women (it doesn’t).
“The Feminine Mistake” does several other things well. First and foremost, it reminds women that marriage usually isn’t a lifelong paycheck. Roughly half of all marriages end in divorce (Bennetts visits the controversy over that statistic but never comes up with a more reliable one, and neither can I), but even if you’re one of the lucky ones whose marriage lasts, you’re almost certain to outlive your husband. The book is peppered with stories of women whose husbands got sick, developed alcohol or drug problems, lost their jobs or died young. Bennetts doesn’t come up with a percentage of women who avoid divorce and the death, disability or unemployment of a spouse, but it’s got to be a lucky few. Against that backdrop, she’s got good numbers on what giving up work for stay-at-home motherhood costs women: They lose 37 percent of their earning power when they spend three or more years out of the workplace. Elderly women are twice as likely as elderly men to live in poverty.
Bennetts depicts the blithe self-confidence of privileged women who don’t believe these troubles can befall them. Over and over the women she interviews tell her they simply haven’t given a thought to the chances their husbands might die young or leave them. “I don’t feel like I’m approaching these choices expecting the worst,” says one. “I don’t look at my life in a defensive way.” She explores the fear at the bottom of why many women simply give up pursuing a fulfilling work life. Life and work are hard; some women don’t want to be corporate cogs, and that’s admirable; some can’t find careers that let them balance work and family, and that’s lamentable; and some just don’t want to do the hard work of finding a career they love and getting good at it, and they use kids as an excuse, which is deplorable. For such women it’s easier (in the short run; back to those actuarial tables) to pretend you never wanted to succeed in the first place, and to let your husband do the hard work of building a rewarding career. Bennetts’ last chapter borrows Simone de Beauvoir’s great phrase “the anxiety of liberty” as its title, and exhorts women to live through that anxiety to embrace a full and complex life of work and family.
Finally, the book does something crucial: It reminds women that the absorbing, exhausting, exhilarating years of tending to small children actually make up a relatively small portion of your adult life. Whether provoked by baby lust or sleep deprivation or an inability to get husbands to share childcare, women often abandon their careers in the early years, not knowing that things are going to get much easier. Bennetts offers women “the fifteen year paradigm” for the time it might take to juggle work and family and successfully launch two or three children into the years (we can fight over which they are) they need their mother less. Maybe most important, Bennetts is a champion for finding work you love. You rarely read ambitious, successful women talking about how much they love their work, and love being good at it. Bennetts frequently quotes Anna Fels, whose “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives” explored how admitting that you want success, even greatness, is one of the last taboos for women.
“The Feminine Mistake” fell short, however, in its over-reliance on repetitive anecdotes about the many, many, many ways husbands fail their wives. It reminded me, oddly, of Hewlett’s “The Baby Panic,” where on almost every page we met accomplished women with fabulous careers who nonetheless pine for the children they didn’t have. In Bennetts’ book we’re constantly encountering accomplished women without careers who pine for the security they lost when their husbands dropped dead or became alcoholics or lost their jobs, or most frequently, ditched them. I got the point about a quarter of the way through, and started skimming when I met yet another desperate former housewife.
Plus, all books like these tend to come with a side order of smug. Caitlin Flanagan’s was supersized; Bennetts’ is more modest but still unmistakable. Maybe it’s a necessary corrective to the opt-out myth, to set out these stories of superwomen married to terrific men and balancing work and family, never effortlessly but with little evident doubt or pain or sacrifice. But I found it just more myth-making. Bennetts is trying to rehabilitate “have it all” feminism, which I think was retired with good reason years ago. It’s very, very tricky to have it all — great careers, great kids, great marriages. It’s possible to have all three, but rarely all three at once. I’d rather not establish a new paradigm for feminine success that many young women will be unable to attain.
And while Bennetts wrote the book with the admirable intent of helping young women, there’s a little too much visible pique at their confusion about these issues. For me, the only debate more deadly and futile than the Mommy Wars is the Generation Wars, in which baby boomers and those who’ve come after them battle it out over who’s more selfish and clueless. The last chapter of “The Feminine Mistake” simmers with the irritation of baby boomer feminists tired of hearing younger women complain that “the system is rigged against us” and retreat to their homes. The book sometimes feels like a feminist “Greatest Generation,” exhorting younger women to both appreciate and emulate these brave role models who came before them. It closes with this cranky challenge on its next to last page: “If younger generations don’t think that Baby Boom mothers with thriving careers are good role models, maybe they’re using the wrong criteria to make that judgment. We may not be invincible, and we’re certainly not perfect, but we are strong, we are self-sufficient, and we are prepared to handle whatever challenges the future might bring. Are you?” Bennetts means well, but I know if I talked to my teenage daughter that way, she’d turn up the volume on her iPod.
In the end, I’m not sure the book’s bravado will be entirely convincing to all of the women she wants to persuade. It’s deaf to the way a child and family-centered life calls out to a lot of women, and to some men. When I’ve written on these topics before and gotten shrill about the importance of having a career and keeping maternal urges in check, I’ve gotten thoughtful and sometimes persuasive letters from women and a few men who derive more joy from family than from work, who’ve sacrificed to make sure at least one parent is regularly home with their kids, who take the time to make their house a home, not in a competitive or compulsive way, but out of love and longing. I no longer dismiss them as victims of a new feminine mystique.
Still, I’m glad to have “The Feminine Mistake” reminding women to protect their future and that of their kids. In the end, women have to search their hearts, and not merely books, to find the right balance of child rearing, work and home for their own lives.
– By Joan Walsh
