Mother Media
By Hannah Zeavin
Want to strike a nerve at a dinner party? Profess a strongly held belief about mothering and technology. Bad mothers are one of the great boogeymen (boogeywomen?) of our collective consciousness, and technology is either here to save the day or destroy our lives, depending on whom you ask.
In Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, UC Berkeley historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines the intersecting moral panics surrounding motherhood and technology. Coming on the heels of The Distance Cure, her book about the history of teletherapy, Zeavin explores the tools created to save mothers from their never-ending labor and to keep children safe.
Take the Nanny Cam and the baby monitor, the roots of which Zeavin traces back to the panic surrounding the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Zeavin resists the binary trap of “all technology is bad, all closeness with mother is good.” Sometimes technology saves lives, and some well-meaning parenting advice can be deadly. Psychologist B.F. Skinner designed what was essentially a SIDS prevention crib that looked more like an aquarium, and parents were horrified, while the beloved child-rearing guru, Dr. Benjamin Spock, counseled parents to put babies to sleep on their stomachs, and countless infants died.
Though Zeavin’s story finishes at the end of the 20th century, before the rise of some of today’s most hotly debated technological developments—social media and smartphones, to name two—readers will easily draw parallels for themselves.
—Laura Smith
Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals)
By Kevin Schultz, Ph.D. ’05
In 1963, Playboy magazine published the transcript from a debate between conservative writer and commentator William F. Buckley and left-wing journalist and author Norman Mailer. The title of the piece—“The Conservative versus the Liberal”—sent Mailer into a rage, which he expressed in his subsequent letter to the editor, Hugh Hefner himself. “I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative,” Mailer wrote. “But please don’t ever call me a liberal.”
If the sentiment sounds oddly resonant even sixty years later, well, that’s no surprise. The roots of anti-liberalism run deep, according to Kevin Schultz, Ph.D. ’05, professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In his latest book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), Schultz takes a close look at the origins and ill-fated evolution of the term liberal. Hardly an accident, the demonization of liberalism by the conservative right wing and progressive left wing, alike, was what he refers to as a political “assassination…coldhearted, deliberate, and designed to transfer power in America.”
From Franklin Delano Roosevelt—“the first white liberal”—to neoliberal America, Schultz traces the history of liberalism, its distortion into a sort of political hobgoblin, and why it might be time to retire the tarnished term in favor of something new.
—Leah Worthington
The Last Class
Directed by Elliot Kirschner
In his final semester at Berkeley, Robert Reich noticed many of his students half-jokingly (or maybe not) calling themselves the “last generation”—as in “the world is ending.” That grim outlook is exactly what the former U.S. Labor Secretary and beloved Cal public policy professor refuses to accept. The Last Class, a new documentary focused on the closing act of Reich’s teaching career, captures how he relentlessly turns despair into determination in the classroom.
For 17 years, Reich’s popular course, Wealth and Poverty, challenged Berkeley students to grapple with the causes and consequences of America’s widening income inequality. But now, after more than 40 years in classrooms (also at Harvard and Brandeis) and some 40,000 students taught, he’s ready to pass the torch. We see Berkeley’s biggest lecture room, Wheeler Hall Auditorium, packed one last time with hundreds of undergrads for Reich’s final dose of wisdom, and his exhortation not to accept society as is.
As he said goodbye to Berkeley, Reich also slipped in one more project, Coming Up Short, a memoir reflecting on how his baby-boomer generation “failed to stop the bullies”—and what the next generation can do to make sure they’re not the last. Class may be dismissed, but Robert Reich isn’t done schooling us yet.
—Nathalia Alcantara
Black Gold: Stories Untold
FOR-SITE exhibition
Demetri Broxton ’02, who grew up in Oakland, remembers the first drawing he made, at age eight, of Yosemite Sam. His mother told him it was amazing and to keep drawing.
Years later, when Broxton said he wanted to study art in college, his mother didn’t think it was so amazing, and he went to Carnegie Mellon to study architecture instead. He hated it and switched to UC Berkeley where he studied art. That set him on the path to where he is now: the executive director of Root Division, an arts nonprofit, and a successful artist with work at institutions like the de Young Museum and the Norton Museum of Art.
“I would say art saved my life. I took that very first painting class at UC Berkeley and had my very first professor that looked like me, that had a cultural background that was similar to mine,” said Broxton, who is Filipino and African American. “I was able to conjure whatever I wanted through painting.”
Now, Broxton makes textiles, using beads and sequins. Two of them are in Black Gold: Stories Untold, a FOR-SITE exhibition at Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge. The work explores the history of Black Californians in the period from the Gold Rush to Reconstruction, and along with Broxton, it includes other local artists like Trina Robinson, Mildred Howard, and Adrian Burrell.
As a subject, Broxton chose whaler William T. Shorey, the so-called “Black Ahab,” a man so famous that reporters would row out to his ship when it laid anchor, anxious to hear about his adventures in Japan and the Arctic Circle. Referencing Shorey’s travels, Broxton used Japanese glass beads and cowrie shells, which the Yoruba people used for protection, to adorn his pieces.
“My work is all about taking ancestors or people in the past and transporting them to a future where whatever their hopes and their dreams were at the time that they couldn’t achieve are achievable and are a reality,” Broxton said.
—Emily Wilson
Coyote on the Bridge
By Susan Woodward ’75, M.A. ’81
Susan Woodward’s love story began in the 1970s in Southern California, when she met her high-school friend’s brother, a twenty-one-year-old, fourth-generation Berkeley student. Christopher Woodward ’73, M.B.A. ’75 would soon become her “grad-school boyfriend,” and pull up in his ’67 Ford Fairlane to meet her parents. They grew closer when both were at Berkeley, and eventually they started a marriage that lasted nearly forty years, with children, grandchildren, and countless hikes through the Sierra Nevada.
One ordinary Tuesday, Chris flew to the East Coast for what they thought would be a routine board meeting. Back in California, Susan went about her day, after waking up to his usual texts teasing her, thanks to the time difference, about her being “late” to the office. It was his way of showing he cared, she writes. That afternoon a message arrived from the meeting’s host saying Chris was nowhere to be found. By the end of the day Susan knew he wasn’t coming home.
In Coyote on the Bridge, a brief, moving memoir, Woodward recounts the aftermath of her husband’s unexpected death. She returns to the trails they once hiked together and, alone in the wilderness, begins to piece herself back again. On a snowy bridge she locks eyes with a coyote, a moment she comes to see as a message. What follows is less a story of grief than of transformation. In nature, Woodward finds the solace needed to begin shaping a new identity, while also holding close the man whose humor and wit she evokes with such warmth that you can’t help loving him a little, too.
—N.A.
Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America
By Sarah Gold McBride
From painstakingly coiffed wigs to gravity-defying mohawks, hair—more than any other part of the human body—has long been a means of self-expression and an object of fascination. But in all its cultural importance, hair has also been notably absent from the history of modern America, as historian and American Studies lecturer at UC Berkeley Sarah Gold McBride writes in Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America.
Pulling from an eclectic collection of sources, ranging from letters and diaries to political cartoons and etiquette guides, Gold McBride explores how hair became a “lightning rod” for claims to gender, race, and citizenship in an increasingly industrial and multicultural America. She focuses her lens on four debates—long hair, facial hair, hair science, and hair fraud—surfacing a long-standing fascination with hair and its changing role in defining identity.
Her book takes its name from New Orleans journalist Dennis Corcoran who coined the term “whiskerology” in 1843 to describe a new, supposedly scientific system of hair classification, akin to phrenology. Corcoran believed, as did many of his contemporaries, that hair was an intrinsic and meaningful expression of human biological truths.
No surprise then, Gold McBride writes, that hair would become a tool of “defining, policing, and contesting the borders of belonging” in nineteenth-century America. From criminologists who “read criminality in a person’s hair” to ethnologists who characterized beards as a uniquely white male trait, she traces the weaponization of hair in a broader discourse about who was an American.
A fundamentally historical and academic project, Gold McBride’s book untangles a never-before-told story of the American body, and body politic. As she writes, “Hair’s unique material form—its middle position between biology and style—gave it the power to help shape social and political citizenship unlike any other part of the body.”
—L.W.
