In honor of Women's History Month, I'm taking a closer look at Sylvia D. Hoffert's new biography, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women's Rights.
As a New York socialite, Alva was known to be domineering, temperamental, and opinionated. In the later half of her life, she converted to feminism and became the most generous donor to the National Woman's Party.
I talked with Professor Hoffert about the history of the women's rights, how issues have changed (or, how they haven't), and how Alva became a remarkable promoter of the women's social movement.
This year’s theme for Women’s History Month is “Women’s Education—Women’s Empowerment.” In your personal experience and professional studies, how have you seen women’s education change?
The changes have been dramatic. When I applied for admission to college in 1961, many elite colleges including the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, and the Ivy League schools did not admit women as undergraduates. Now they all do.
One of the accomplishments of second wave feminism was to force the introduction of courses about women across the liberal arts curriculum—in such fields as history, sociology, anthropology, communication, political science. ... And female scholars created programs and departments in women’s studies... Essentially there was a re-evaluation of what constituted an appropriate focus of study. The result was an inclusiveness that was unprecedented.
That is not to say that those changes came easily or that women were treated well when they invaded what had previously been almost exclusively male professional space. ...Remember, if you will, that within the last ten years Larry Summers, President of Harvard University, was fired partly because he publicly denigrated the ability of women to excel in science.
Continuing with this year's theme, do you believe that women's empowerment is a direct result of education? How else can young women feel empowered?
The only way for women to achieve power in American society is through education and organization. Education provides them the intellectual tools they need to identify the structural barriers that prevent women from achieving justice and equality and from controlling their own bodies and lives. Organizing provides them with the strength in numbers needed to challenge those structural barriers and destroy them.
How has the women's rights movement progressed in the past century?
Originally, feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a fairly broad agenda for improving the status of women in the United States. The Declaration of Sentiments signed at the 1848 Seneca Falls [New York] Woman’s Rights Convention contained provisions for advancing the status of American women in all aspects of economic, social, political, legal, and religious life. By the time Alva Belmont became a feminist in the early twentieth century the agenda had been reduced to the right to vote.
What issues should modern-day feminists pay attention to?
The issues haven’t changed much. At all levels of society and in all aspects of economic, political, and religious life, women are still second class citizens. Many women are still denied the right to control their bodies. Many women are still the victims of abuse. Many women and their children still don’t have adequate health care. Women are still underrepresented in male dominated fields such as engineering, chemistry, and physics. Most women still make less money than most men. Fortune 500 companies still do not typically appoint women to be their CEOs or to serve on their boards of directors. There are still denominations that refuse to allow women to become full-fledged ministers. Only a few members of congress are female. I could go on and on.
In your book, you discuss how all biographies have a sense of autobiography to them, since the biographer reads their subject’s life through their own lens of personal experiences. Could you expand on this?
It is impossible to spend the time necessary to write a biography and not develop some sort of personal relationship with the subject of your work. You may end up liking or disliking that individual. You may respect or not respect what they did and approve or not approve of the way they did it. It takes years to do the research for a biography and then write it. By the time you have finished, you have an opinion about such matters.
The point I was trying to make is that we inevitably see the world through our own lens and interpret the actions of others through our own experience. Thus the issue is not whether what we write is true but whether our representation of the life of someone else is based solidly on the evidence available to us. That’s as close to the truth as we are ever going to get.
In addition to her generous financial support to the women’s suffrage movement, Alva’s celebrity status was an important part of the social campaign’s success. Would those donations have been as impactful without Alva’s socialite reputation?
Money, and lots of it, always has an impact whether or not it is attached to a celebrity. Alva’s celebrity was important to the woman’s rights movement because it served as an incredibly important form of free advertising. She was a public relations executive’s dream.
Finally, what words of wisdom do you have for the future generations? Or, what do you suppose Alva would say if she saw the world today?
As for words of wisdom—never assume that women will gain and then maintain their rights without a struggle. There has always been and will continue to be a backlash against women’s progress that is supported and organized by those whose interests are served by women’s subordination.
I think Alva would still support women’s rights and be willing to give money to women’s causes. And, given her incredible ego, I think she would still be trying to take credit for the advances that women have been able to gain for themselves.
Goshen News recently interviewed Ligonier author Jeff Moerchen about his book and what inspired him to photograph the city. Moerchen told the Goshen News that this project became very personal to him.
“It’s just as much about the town as it is about immigration and me,” he said.
To view a slideshow of photos from the book, visit goshennews.com.
Although the presidential election of 1944 placed FDR in the White House for an unprecedented fourth term, historical memory of the election itself has changed. Today most people assume that FDR’s reelection was assured. Yet, as the new book FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944 reveals, neither the outcome of the campaign nor even the choice of candidates was assured. On this 67th anniversary of the election, I talked with author David M. Jordan to learn more about the fascinating campaign between FDR and Dewey.
Many assume that FDR’s 1944 re-election was a given, but the presidential race was much closer than many recall. Why has the historical memory of this election changed?
I believe that the historical memory of FDR as a candidate who never lost is part of it—“how could FDR even have a close election?”—and the fact that it was very much a part of the war and the war effort. Also perhaps the fact that Dewey lost again four years later tends to lower him in the historical memory.
What were the reasons that the election was so close?
The country seemed to be trending toward more conservatism and the liberalism of the New Deal was fading as the economy improved. A lot of folks were also unhappy with the government-imposed restrictions of the war effort, and the rumors about Roosevelt’s health had some effect, as did all the Communism talk by the Republicans. And, while it didn’t affect the electoral college vote, FDR’s popular vote in the South went down, as the Democratic strength in the South started on its way down.
What is one of the most interesting aspects of the election?
The most interesting aspect of the election in my eyes was the struggle for the selection of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee: the down-grading of Wallace, the push for Byrnes and others, the reluctance of Truman, and, most of all, the “hands-off” and sometimes duplicitous attitude of Roosevelt.
In the preface, you write about some of your childhood recollections of this presidential election. What is your most vivid memory from that time?
What I remember most is my mother’s constant talk about how bad FDR was. I also have a vivid memory of going to my local barber shop and, while waiting, picking up and reading LIFE magazine and a feature on Senate races across the country; I particularly recall reading about Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts and Wayne Morse of Oregon.
FDR’s personal physician made misleading statements about the president’s health to keep the public in the dark about the seriousness of his condition. Do you think it’s possible to keep this kind of information a secret today?
No, I think today’s media would never stand for something like what Dr. McIntire did. Even then, the reporters could see that Roosevelt looked a lot different from before and they felt that there was something they weren’t being told, but they had nowhere else to turn. Today, even if the mainstream media were to go along with some kind of a cover-up, all those magazines that turn up next to the supermarket check-out lines would have a field day with the president’s health secrets.
How did Dewey, who has been described as “cold,” “humorless,” and having “little natural political endowment,” end up securing the 1944 Republican nomination?
The main reason he got it was the fact that Republican politicians across the country felt that Dewey was the only one who could carry New York State against Roosevelt. They looked at what he had done in the 1938 and 1942 statewide elections and they figured he had a good chance of carrying NY (as well as the other eastern states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, etc.). Most of them liked Bricker much better than Dewey, but they didn’t think Bricker had any real chance to crack the eastern-states bloc. And, of course, Dewey had very persuasive agents like Brownell and Jaeckle going around the country pushing his (invisible) candidacy and getting delegates lined up.
What were some new or surprising facts you learned while doing research for your book?
I never knew about Willkie and the Wisconsin primary until I started on the book or the Warren VP-boom that he scuttled or the struggle to permit some sort of military voting.
How long did it take you to complete the research for the book?
Looking back, I would say it was some six or seven years, with my first research trip to Notre Dame to go through the Frank Walker papers.
In addition to this book, you’ve also written several others on a range of topics, including politics, history, and sports. Are you working on any other books? What will the next one be about?
The publisher of my 2001 history of the Philadelphia Phillies, Occasional Glory, has me doing a second edition, bringing it up to date through 2011. I have also started a history of the Athletics franchise from coast to coast, from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland. And I’ve been giving thought to my next non-baseball work.
In his new book, A Prophetic Peace, Alick Isaacs rejects the notion of Jewish theology as partial to war and vengeance and shows how Judaism can be a path to peace. I recently interviewed Issacs about his book, his role in the Talking Peace project, and what he is reading during Jewish Book Month.
You grew up in England. Why did you decide to move to Israel and join its military?
I tell the story in the book of a life-changing experience that I had at the age of 14 in Birmingham, England. I was walking home one night from a Talmud class wearing a kippah on my head (I was at the time one of only a handful of Jews in Birmingham who did so in the streets) and I was attacked by three "skinheads". They bashed me and beat me up quite badly. Lying literally in a pool of my own blood I decided to leave for Israel as soon as I finished high school and thereafter to volunteer for the military service compulsory for all Israelis. This decision did not come out of nowhere as my family was Zionist and the love of Israel was always part of our lives, but there is no doubt that my encounter with violent anti-Semitism was a formative experience for me. Soon after, as a soldier facing the first intifada I began to recognize the complexities of my choice. My love for Israel has never waned. But the youthful sense that it was the solution to all of the Jewish people's problems was soon replaced with the less naïve position that Israel is the arena or the setting for the Jewish people's most challenging and meaningful questions. I decided to close the book with an account of one of my more dramatic military experiences in 1987 precisely because I wanted to sign off in a way that left the reader with a sense of how demanding and complex the questions we face in Israel are.
How did your combat experience in the second Lebanon war inspire you to write this book?
Reflecting back on it now (from a little more distance), I think that there were two crucial wartime experiences that stimulated me to write. First, I was struck by the sense of ideological confusion—perhaps even loss of direction—that I encountered both in my own thoughts and amongst the other men in my unit during the course of the war. What we were fighting for was not clear. Was fighting this war the best way to resolve the tensions that caused it? I felt these questions forced me to go back to some of my most fundamental assumptions about politics and rethink. The second was the experience of prayer at war. There was a sense of intensity and urgency that grabbed me and forced me to rethink the liberal or dovish understanding of Jewish prayer that I had always cherished. I became very conscious of my ability to pray for the death and destruction of others and to do so quite authentically while reciting the words of the prayer book. This experience brought me to question my assumptions about the relationship between religion and peace. I realized—as I say at the beginning of the book—that finding the path to articulating a religious philosophy of peace was a much harder task than I had thought. At the same time, as I got my first glimpses of that path I recognized its potential for opening the door to a much wider discussion about peace in Israel that would be predicated upon Jewish values and not only on liberal assumptions. The stimulus to write came first from the need to tell the story of what had happened and then from the feeling that I had a glimpse, through my prayer experiences, of a different way of thinking about peace in the Jewish tradition from the one I had previously known. The book was an attempt to see if classical and canonical Jewish texts would yield to my reading.
You reject the notion of Jewish theology as partial to war and vengeance. What are some ways that Judaism can be a path to peace?
I think that the idea that Jewish theology is belligerent and vengeful is based upon a profound misunderstanding of the complexity with which classical Jewish texts deal with adversity and conflict. In order to really grasp the point you need to be able to imagine peace not only as a political concept but also as a theological one. The Jewish tradition's most fundamental principle is not simply the oneness of God but the unity of God. The distinction is that when you say God is one, you mean simply that there are not two or more of him. In Jewish theology, the idea that God is one suggests that all the forces and the energies in creation all emanate from and culminate in his unity. This paradoxical theological principle therefore posits the idea that opposing forces can co-exist peacefully while the opposition between them is not resolved, agreed upon or compromised out. This form of co-existence is a thumbprint that can be found in the vast majority of Jewish literature. Jewish texts most often place opposing points of view together on the same page placing much more emphasis on their co-existence than on the choices that have to be made between them. In this sense, the peaceful co-existence of opposing ideas is always valued above both truth and justice. If you like, you might say that peace, as a theological concept, is a higher or "prophetic" from of truth and "prophetic" justice. It is this quality of transcending truth and justice that I refer to in the book's title as "prophetic peace". A fuller understanding of this principle allows for a radical openness to the other that, I believe, has far-reaching social and political implications all of which stem from a frame of mind that the central principle of Jewish theology engenders. The Jewish religious frame of mind is one of humble attention to the lives of others that stays the hands of the rash and forceful who—even when they act decisively to accomplish their own visions of political peace—find themselves crushing others and triggering off new conflicts along the way.
After praying so intently for your protection and for the destruction of enemies during the war, how did you learn to pray peacefully once the war ended?
I am not sure if I can say that I have that one figured out yet. Prayer is something that always evolves and changes and I think it would be fair to say that of all the chapters in the book, the one about prayer is the one that I feel gives the most intimate and personal insight into the particular frame of mind that I was in at the specific time when I wrote it. The oscillations that the chapter describes continue to rock me today. That said, the central insight there is one that I am still living with and it is that when praying one must try to internalize as best as one can the significance of the fact that the classical texts of Jewish prayer are worded in the plural. The vast majority of Jewish prayers talk about "us" and "we" and not about "I" and "me". Praying to God for one thing with the consciousness that other people are beseeching him at the same time for the exact opposite thing allows the overarching experience of prayer to be perennially peaceful. Also, I feel that it is important to recognize how the texts of traditional Jewish prayer—which are neither spontaneous nor personal—actually address the supplicant. When one imagines that these same words address themselves to others who say them one feels how deeply one's own prayers are necessarily intertwined with those of others. It is not about you. It is about everyone whose feelings about God and prayer are addressed by the stimulus of reading the texts. One can be overwhelmed by that thought and it is humbling to feel so inevitably and inescapably interconnected with those around you. I believe that the state of mind that this experience of prayer creates is a peaceful one.
You write, “Peace in the Middle East will be possible when the idea of it is a timid one.” How do you define this type of peace?
Here, I am being ironic about the culture that gives peace prizes to military generals and terrorists for valiantly putting down their weapons. I am also calling into question the idea that peace can be made by leaders who bully their populations into it. I am troubled by the fact that political leadership—the leadership that uses power and reserves the right to send civilians to war—is the leadership that we all pin our hopes on for forceful interest-based solutions to conflict. I think peace has to come from another place. I think it has to be built in good faith, through listening and learning and loving and caring. It requires a more timid disposition: one that I believe has been cultivated over centuries by the masters of the Jewish tradition whose wisdom we should learn from. Having said this, I also recognize that what I am saying might not be true of all agreements. Politicians have made peace agreements all around the world. But, I believe in many cases that these have been either truces or alliances. The actual peace that follows a political alliance or truce (and often it does not) must necessarily emanate from a more timid place. More specifically, I believe that timidity is required in dealing with the conflict in the Middle East. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one that has deep messianic significance. It is a conflict whose resolution has major implications not only for people's lives, but for the tenets of the three monotheistic faiths. Peace in this context, whether we like it or not, is inescapably associated for millions with the prophetic visions and prayers. The peace that we need to make here must be achieved as the culmination of our collective hopes and not as the victory of one camp over another. I do not feel that the power-politics of truces and alliances is either gentle enough or sufficiently humble to accomplish this highly sentimental and spiritual task.
Tell us about the Talking Peace project. What is the objective of the project, and what impact do you hope it will have?
The Talking Peace project is a shared initiative that I co-direct along with Dr. Avinoam Rosenak and Ms. Sharon Leshem-Zinger. For me, the work of the project is very much an outgrowth of the book. But, since each of my partners has brought incredible knowledge and insights from their own experience in to our work together it is crucial for me to begin by mentioning that this project is a shared venture.
The idea of the Talking Peace project is to try to model an alternative format for moving ahead with constructive discourse about Middle East peace. Our first emphasis was on the ideological conflicts inside the State of Israel which we feel are not given sufficient attention in the arena of international politics. The tenacity with which different factions inside Israel hold to their beliefs is most often painted internationally as an obstacle to peace that must be dealt with internally by any Israeli government that manages to negotiate a deal. In practice, this approach has proved both ineffective and traumatically damaging as was the case in the aftermath of the 2005 disengagement from the Katif Bloc in Gaza. Our first concern was therefore to address this internal conflict about peace in a more open and sensitive way that gives credit to the potential contribution that all the different perspectives can make to a future peace. This work relies on two primary components: sensitivity to group dynamics and insights about co-existence that are rooted in the Jewish tradition. Since our approach does not alienate religious values and even rests upon them, we were successful in bringing some of the most influential and perhaps one might say 'radical' rabbinic leaders of the settlements into constructive discourse with leaders and thinkers from the Israeli center and left. As we look to the future, the Talking Peace project is aiming to broaden the circles of discourse, to reach new sectors inside Israel but also to extend our view towards international dialogue with Palestinians and ultimately with others as well. Finally, working with the insight that peace—which is a foundational concept in political philosophy—is understood differently in the Jewish tradition (as the book tries to show), the Talking Peace project is tackling the challenge of articulating a vision of what a peaceful Jewish politics might look like. How would decisions be made? Which public institutions must Israeli society evolve in order for its regime to benefit from the accumulated wisdom of the Jewish tradition about peace and co-existence in both intra and inter-national politics?
What do you think of the recent deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,027 Palestinians prisoners?
On a personal level, like many other Israelis, I found the spectacle of Gilad's release incredibly moving. I sat glued to the TV all that day and found myself quite literally weeping as he was reunited with his family, given health care and returned to the light of day after over five years of light deprivation and solitude. On a more political level, I was deeply moved by the very "Jewish" complexity with which the decision to exchange Gilad for over a thousand terrorists was made. On the one hand, I appreciated the Jewish concern for the life of each and every individual that this deal brought to light. However, I also really appreciated the openness with which both ends of this highly ambivalent and painful decision were held in view. Inside Israel, the concerns of those who feared future acts of terror and the pain of the families whose loved ones were the victims of the terrorists released in the exchange were very public. In return, the capacity of those families to share in the relief and joy of Aviva and Noam Schalit was quite an incredible thing to behold. It was clear to all that this was a decision between two conflicting points of view whose practical outcome was never designed to crush or silence the feelings and pain of those most directly hurt by it. I believe that this empathy and love is crucial to peacemaking and felt proud of the society that faced the challenge of negotiating Gilad's release with such sensitivity. I was especially moved by Prime Minister Netanyahu's mention of God's promise in Isaiah (42, 7) "…to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house."
November is Jewish Book Month. What are your reading recommendations?
There are so many wonderful Jewish books both classical and recent that I am reluctant to select one or another to recommend. It is perhaps more simple to say that in recent months I have been rereading Heschel and, thanks to Gordon Tucker's wonderful English edition, I have been focusing in particular on his Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations. I read this book in its Hebrew original many years ago, reread it when the English edition was first released and am now rereading it again in preparation for a course that I am teaching this year at the Hebrew University. Each time I go through it, I discover more and more insights. It really is a masterpiece.
Kathy Sloane, author of Keystone Korner, can be heard this Saturday, Oct. 29, on the Berkeley, CA radio station KPFA 94.1 FM. She will be interviewed on Kris Welch's "Saturday Morning Talkies" show, which airs from 9:00-10:00 a.m. (PST). Sloane's interview will begin around 9:30 a.m. (PST).
If you are not in the Berkeley area, you can listen to the show on KPFA's website.
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