Book Time #9: Attica, Segregated Recreation, Corporate Feminism
Hey everyone,
Welcome to another edition of Book Time. I'm finishing up my NYC Starter Pack research, so it's already time to start thinking about the next starter pack. We're going to try something different this time. Rather than picking one myself, I'm going to take suggestions, narrow the list down to a group if finalists, and then hold a vote.
So respond to this email with any suggestions for the next Book Time starter pack. The only requirements are that it must be a non-fiction subject with at least 15 titles in the body of work and is broad enough that it will appeal to a wide audience. Other than that, let your imagination run wild. It could be an historical period, a place, a time, a technology, an author, or even a question. I'd love to hear your ideas!
OK, on to the reviews.
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, Heather Ann Thompson
Blood in the Water is the rare historical work that resists the temptation to dramatize an inherently dramatic event. Not once does Thompson extrapolate from her voluminous research materials and firsthand accounts to make the reader feel like you’re there. Given the subject matter, this took admirable restraint. I am so grateful for it. Accessible yet intelligent, nuanced yet morally clear, Blood in the Water is history at its finest. The book had its moment in the spotlight when it came out in 2016 but deserves to be in eternal sunshine.
The introduction of Blood in the Water tells you everything you need to know about this book despite telling you nothing at all about what happened. It’s a riff on the Investigator Stumbles Upon Game-Changing Records introduction, a classic of the narrative nonfiction genre. And then I found a stack of papers that would change everything is how it usually goes. Traditionally, it’s a way for the author to talk about themselves before launching into the story, assert some authority over the subject matter whether earned or otherwise, and hamfist some suspense into the book.
Blood in the Water’s introduction is almost the exact opposite. Instead, Thompson talks about how many records she couldn’t get. She does mention two fortuitous discoveries, but only to foreshadow the secrets being hidden. The two takeaways from the brief introduction are, first, that Thompson has been obsessed with the subject for at least a decade, and second, there’s something the FBI, State of New York, and various other entities still, after all these years, want to keep secret.
Before I read this book, I could not have told you what happened at Attica in September 1971. I certainly couldn’t have told you anything that happened afterwards. I suspect that is true for most people. In lesser hands, the intro would have told me exactly what happened there. Thompson didn’t do that. You don’t learn what happened until it happens.
As I was writing up this review, I realized that perhaps Thompson didn’t attempt to summarize any of that in the introduction because it is impossible to summarize. As readers, we just have to discover the answer, and reckon with it, for ourselves.
Race, Riots and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America, Victoria Wolcott
For generations of children during the Jim Crow Era, asking their parents why they couldn’t go to the local skating rink, pool, or amusement park was often how they found out they were black. “When you are a child and you see other children having fun, you can’t understand why you can’t do it too,” an unnamed person is quoted as saying in Race, Riots and Roller Coasters about not being able to attend the Fountaine Ferry recreational park in Louisville. “It was a very sad feeling.”
Wolcott’s thorough study of the struggle to desegregate recreational facilities fills an important gap in the literature by treating pools, beaches, and skating rinks not as temporary flashpoints in a civil rights struggle primarily focused on supposedly more important things, but as some of the places black people wanted to access the most. There is no greater indignity than not being allowed to have fun.
Wolcott’s book is a rigorous academic work, which isn’t to say it is jargon-laden or unapproachable. But it is not a narrative, nor does Wolcott tug at the heart strings. Hopefully, this won’t scare people away, because there is so much to learn from this deeply researched work about a long struggle that in many ways encapsulated what historians have come to call the long Civil Rights movement, with all of its victories but also its disappointments. It is yet another work demonstrating how legal desegregation resulted in the bitter victory of privatization, disinvestment, and neglect.
The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960-1990, Allison Elias
In 1950, the most common job for a woman was secretary. Given the events of the next several decades—the advent of equal employment opportunity laws, bans on sex discrimination, growing awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace, and second wave feminism—you’d be excused for thinking that by the turn of the 21st Century the most common jobs for women would no longer be the highly gendered roles of secretary, nurse, and elementary school teacher. But they are.
The Rise of Corporate Feminism is Elias’s attempt to explain why. No question that all those social and legal innovations meant women could get jobs they were effectively barred from having before. The ranks of doctors, lawyers, and executives, for example, have many more women now than 50 years ago. But it is still extremely rare to sit down in an airplane seat and hear a female voice come over the intercom and announce “this is your captain speaking." But it is very common to hear a female voice come over the intercom to remind you the fasten seatbelt sign is still on please remain seated.
Elias’s explanation is a quiet triumph, a modest but profound work that, like Race Riots and Roller Coasters, is academic in nature but never dense with jargon. I learned so much here, from the funny-if-it-wasn’t-sad ways secretaries in the early 20th Century were instructed to basically do all their boss’s work and be a saintly, angelic presence at all times while also maintaining perfect grooming and appearance but not be so sexy they tempted their boss—unless of course the boss wanted it, in which case congrats on your new husband—to the all-too-relevant fights over the dehumanizing introduction of early word processor machines in offices.
But the part of Corporate Feminism that will stick with me the longest is a not-dissimilar lesson from Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters, in which legal and legislative victories were immediately undermined by political and social backlash. As soon as women achieved equal opportunity under the law, Americans elected a president dedicated to gutting the government’s capacity to enforce it (and many other laws, too). Let us not forget who was chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1982 to 1990.
The country largely subscribed to the self-help myth that you can get any job you want as long as you want it badly enough, a precursor to the Rise And Grind culture permeating some of the more nauseating corners of the internet today. The clear implication was all these structural impediments no longer existed, so if you were still stuck as a secretary and didn’t want to be, that was your problem. Ironically, it was the same basic logic proffered a century before, that the discrepancies in occupation by gender were some kind of natural sorting based on what men and women were suited to rather than a reflection of deep-seeded stereotypes, cultural habits, and varying degrees of formal and informal bias based on pseudoscience. The sorting is just as pseudoscientific now, but because it is more explicitly based on traits like "mindset" and "effort" and "work ethic" it is less visible than race or gender. All too often, modern enlightenment takes the form not of new solutions, but new excuses.