By Jacqueline Antonovich
-Sinister Santas.
-The Titanic of the Golden Gate.
-A Victorian sanitary picture book.
-Ebola, women, and the risk of care.
-What books did WWII soldiers read?
-Sex, public memory, and Aaron Burr.
Adventures in the Archives: The First Time
The possibility of having an “adventure in the archives” always seemed a bit far-fetched. My perceptions of academia, particularly as […]
Confessions of a Newborn Father: The Birth of the “Hands-on” Dad
By Ginny Engholm
A recent Vicks Nyquil commercial has a typical scenario for an advertisement set in a workplace. A clearly sick man — coughing, runny nose, the whole works — opens what looks like an office door a crack, pops his head in, and delivers the one line of the commercial: “Dave, I’m sorry to interrupt. I gotta take a sick day tomorrow.” While this might seem like a very traditional depiction of masculinity, a guy at the office asking his male boss for a day off, the ad subverts this narrative by revealing an adorable toddler standing up in his crib. The tagline of the ad — “Dads don’t take sick days. Dads take Nyquil” — makes the ad’s argument clear. A real man is one who is so dedicated to his real job — fatherhood — that he continues to parent through his colds and flus. While the idea of moms’ total and complete dedication to their roles as mothers has of course been part of our cultural understanding of motherhood for, well, forever, the shift in the past decade or so of depicting fathers as equal-opportunity martyrs, devoted to the care of their children, strikes many modern viewers as something new.
Sunday Morning Medicine
By Jacqueline Antonovich
-AIDS history: I want more!
-Remembering Pearl Harbor.
-When disability and race intersect.
-Remember the 1990s power lines panic?
-A presidential daughter you could pick on.
-A history of health disparities in Ferguson.
Crafting Womanhood
By Elizabeth Reis
As a women’s and gender studies professor, I am especially aware of my privilege in not having to think constantly about my gender. Because I fit most of the criteria of a typical white American woman, I never get questioned or called out on my gender expression, and so I’m free to focus on other aspects of my life, leaving this area relatively unexamined. There have been two times in my life when I thought consciously about my gender identity: the first time I had sex (“this is how it’s done?”) and when I gave birth to my first child (“this is what women do?”). With both of those experiences, I remember thinking to myself, “I’ve never really felt like a WOMAN, whatever that’s supposed to feel like, but many women do this, and so I guess I’m one of them.” And that was the end of that. Since both of these events, many years ago, I’ve been able to put the question of my “womanliness” on the back burner and instead teach about the history and politics of gender in the United States.
Hoping for a Good Death
We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this special report: Elizabeth Reis, professor and chair of the Women’s and […]
Sunday Morning Medicine
By Jacqueline Antonovich
-Plague riddled pigeons.
-What did Gettysburg smell like?
-Airport food used to be a big deal.
-Remember the Sand Creek Massacre.
-Mass imprisonment and public health.
Worlds of Rape, Words of Rape
Stories of rape again fill the news. Rolling Stone featured an article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely about University of Virginia’s responses […]
Sunday Morning Medicine
By Jacqueline Antonovich
-Practicing narrative medicine.
-When Thanksgiving was weird.
-How do you memorialize a mob?
-Theories of the first topsy-turvy dolls.
-A November feast in medieval Europe.
-The ethics of healthcare worker strikes.
Motherhood, Expanded
By Rachel Epp Buller
I was a senior in high school when Vice President Dan Quayle delivered his soon-to-be-infamous diatribe against Murphy Brown while on the campaign trail. Quayle was supposed to be addressing the Los Angeles race riots, but along the way he ended up blaming single mothers for a decline in social values and blasting Candice Bergen’s fictional TV character for glorifying single motherhood as “just another lifestyle choice.”[1] Although the speech was viewed at the time as a political gaffe, Quayle and then-President Bush capitalized on the media frenzy to politicize the notion of “family values.” They sought to convey to voters that motherhood should be confined to the institution of heterosexual marriage; morally questionable single mothers endangered both the welfare of children and society as a whole. In the years since Quayle’s speech, journalists, sociologists, and historians have continued to write about the Murphy Brown incident.[2] Some argue that Quayle’s stance has proven prophetic and that single mothers do indeed wreak havoc on the social fabric.[3]
