Kind Of Life Research Articles

“Conversi” Revert: Voluntary and Forced Return to Judaism in the Early Fourteenth Century

Forced to choose between conversion and death, many medieval Jews chose to be baptized as Christians. While not all Jews in Western Europe faced such stark choices, during the fourteenth century pressure increased on the Jewish minority to join the Christian majority. Economic, social, and political barriers to Jews often made conversion a necessity or at least an advantage, exerting a degree of coercion even without brute force. Once baptized these new Christians, called conversi, were required to abandon their Jewish practices entirely. But what kind of life actually awaited these converts? In the abstract, the converts had clear options: they could either remain Christians or return to judaism. Reality would surely reveal a range of possibilities, however, as these conversi tried to live out their conversion or to reject it without running afoul of the authorities. While the dominant Christian culture undoubtedly exerted pressure to convert, Jews did not necessarily sit idly by while their people approached the baptismal font. Some conversi felt contrary pressure to take up Judaism again. In the most extreme cases, conversi who reverted to Judaism faced death as well. This paper examines forces exerted on Jewish converts to Christianity to return to Judaism, using examples from France and northern Spain in the first half of the fourteenth century.

“Conversi” Revert: Voluntary and Forced Return to Judaism in the Early Fourteenth Century

Forced to choose between conversion and death, many medieval Jews chose to be baptized as Christians. While not all Jews in Western Europe faced such stark choices, during the fourteenth century pressure increased on the Jewish minority to join the Christian majority. Economic, social, and political barriers to Jews often made conversion a necessity or at least an advantage, exerting a degree of coercion even without brute force. Once baptized these new Christians, called conversi, were required to abandon their Jewish practices entirely. But what kind of life actually awaited these converts? In the abstract, the converts had clear options: they could either remain Christians or return to judaism. Reality would surely reveal a range of possibilities, however, as these conversi tried to live out their conversion or to reject it without running afoul of the authorities. While the dominant Christian culture undoubtedly exerted pressure to convert, Jews did not necessarily sit idly by while their people approached the baptismal font. Some conversi felt contrary pressure to take up Judaism again. In the most extreme cases, conversi who reverted to Judaism faced death as well. This paper examines forces exerted on Jewish converts to Christianity to return to Judaism, using examples from France and northern Spain in the first half of the fourteenth century.

Looking for the most “primitive” organism(s) on Earth today: the state of the art

Molecular phylogenetic studies have revealed a tripartite division of the living world into two procaryotic groups, Bacteria and Archaea, and one eucaryotic group, Eucarya. Which group is the most “primitive”? Which groups are sister? The answer to these questions would help to delineate the characters of the last common ancestor to all living beings, as a first step to reconstruct the earliest periods of biological evolution on Earth. The current “Procaryotic dogma” claims that procaryotes are primitive. Since the ancestor of Archaea was most probably a hyperthermophile, and since bacteria too might have originated from hyperthermophiles, the procaryotic dogma has been recently connected to the hot origin of life hypothesis. However, the notion that present-day hyperthermophiles are primitive has been challenged by recent findings, in these unique microorganisms, of very elaborate adaptative devices for life at high temperature. Accordingly, I discuss here alternative hypotheses that challenge the procaryotic dogma, such as the idea of a universal ancestor with molecular features in between those of eucaryotes and procaryotes, or the origin of procaryotes via thermophilic adaptation. Clearly, major evolutionary questions about early cellular evolution on Earth remain to be settled before we can speculate with confidence about which kinds of life might have appeared on other planets.

A Discourse on Methods

It is widely accepted that cultures are reflected by, and are reflections of, their technologies, and also that changes in technology may both reflect and catalyze significant changes in the societies that employ them. Perhaps the generic case in point is agriculture, where advances in crop cultivation led to fundamental changes in the organization of society. Crop cultivation “encouraged settlement of stable farm communities, some of which grew to be towns and city states. … Early agricultural implements—the digging stick, the scythe, the hoe, and the plow—developed slowly over the centuries, each innovation … causing profound changes in human life.” (Bridgwater & Kurtz, 1963, p. 29.) Similar effects can be traced to the current era: The existence of techniques for mass agricultural production is a necessary condition for the existence of a highly urbanized society, as well as a contributor to the decrease in the percentage of the farming population, and the kind of life associated with it.

Desire and the Human Good

When we compare contemporary moral philosophy with the well-known moral systems of earlier centuries, we should be struck by the fact that a certain assumption about human well being that is now widely taken for granted was universally rejected in the past. The contemporary moral climate predisposes us to be pluralistic about the human good, whereas earlier systems of ethics embraced a conception of well being that we would now call narrow and restrictive. One way to convey the sort of contrast I have in mind is to note that according to Plato and Aristotle, there is one kind of life, that of the philosopher, that represents the summit of human flourishing, and all other lives are worth leading to the extent that they approximate this ideal. Certain other ethical theories of the past were in a way more narrow than this, for whereas Plato and Aristotle maintained that many things are in themselves worthwhile, others argued that there is only one intrinsic good-pleasure according to the Epicureans, virtue according to the Stoics. By contrast, it is now widely assumed that all such approaches are too exclusive, that not only are there many types of intrinsic goods but there is no one specific kind of life-whether it is that of a philosopher or a poet or anyone else-that is the single human ideal.1 Even hedonism, a conception of the good that had a powerful influence in the modern period, has few contemporary proponents. A consensus has arisen in our time that there is no single ultimate end that provides the measure by which the worth of all other goods must be assessed.2 But if we want not merely to take note of our departure from the past, but also to show why we are justified in being pluralists about the good, then we must have something to say about what human well being is. We should not simply assert that there are many goods and many kinds of good lives, but must offer some general account of what well being is that explains why it is so multiform. In response to this demand, many philosophers would, as a first approximation, equate the human good with the satisfaction of desire, and would explain the multiplicity of the good by pointing out that because of the enormous variety of our interests and tastes, our desires exhibit a similar heterogeneity. Roughly speaking, what makes a state of affairs good for someone is its satisfaction of one of that person's desires; accordingly, our lives go well to the extent that our desires, or the ones to which we give the greatest weight, are satisfied.3

Just Remember My Name . . .

Founders and Helpers Just Remember My Name Rudy Abramson Two years after her husband, John Stephenson, took the reins of Berea College in 1984, Jane Stephenson was still looking for a project. By nature, she was an activist in the tradition of other wives who had preceded her at the President's House on Chestnut Street, but she still had found no consuming cause to call her own. Her search ended rather abruptly one morning in the fall of 1986—with a telephone call from her friend Gurney Norman, the writer and English professor at the University of Kentucky. Norman was looking for help. He had a female friend facing a crisis. The middle-aged woman was going through a divorce; she was financially distressed; she had no marketable job skill; and she was on her own. Her problems were compounded by a debilitating lack of Rudy Abramson, retired Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, is author o/Spanning the Century, a biography of W. Averell Harriman, published in 1992. confi dence. It was, of course, an increasingly familiar story, and it was especially so to Stephenson. Growing up in the mountains at Banner Elk, North Carolina, she had known a great many women like Norman's friend. She had worked with people like them as a specialist in adult education and the wife of an Appalachian scholar. Theirs was one of the recurring tragedies of the mountains, the kind of lives that Loyal Jones once described as a trip on a "circular sorghum mill." Norman's friend was still on Stephenson's mind the following day and she spoke with her husband about it. Later on John Stephenson received a call— this one from the California-based Educational Foundation of America. The organization had supported Berea programs in the past. It was completing its budget planning for the coming year, and its officials wanted to know whether Berea had a special need where the foundation could be helpful. John Stephenson answered with a question of his own. Would the foundation be interested in a program to help low-income women desperately needing jobs? It was. Thus was born the New Opportunity School for Women. Facing a deadline less than a week away, Jane Stephenson put together a formal proposal. Using Norman's friend as a prototype, she sketched an intense and ambitious program designed to instill selfesteem and confidence in women whose aspirations had been stillborn. It was a quixotic plan to help them believe that middle age was the beginning of their life, not the end. Six months later, in June of 1987, the new school welcomed its first students to the Berea campus. Without fully realizing it even then, Stephenson had found her cause—as part of what is perhaps the most significant social movement in Appalachia during the last years of the twenieth century: the emerging ofwomen. The New Opportunity School opened for business in the midst of a decade in which the collapse of the coal economy and revolutionary changes in technology shook the social order of the mountains. Unemployment in coal towns soared as men found themselves with job skills no longer needed in their native hills—and with attitudes and prospects irrelevant in the cities to which miners used to migrate. A generation of mountain men now finds itself "with attitudes and values no longer consistent with the modern world," says Ronald Eller, director of the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky. For them, migration to Cincinnati or Charlotte or Pittsburgh is no longer the option that it once was. Consequently, efforts to bring about grass-roots community change are increasingly being led by women, who have assumed growing 10 responsibility for the feeding, clothing, and maintaining of families. As employment of men stagnated or declined, robust numbers of women have joined the work force. Birth rates have plummeted. Three-fourths of the students now entering community colleges in the region are female. With divorce and single parenthood becoming acceptable, families headed by women are commonplace in the mountains, as they have long been in inner cities. Women, authorities such as Eller and Loyal Jones, retired director of the...

My Appalachia

My Appalachia Robert Connor My Appalachia is not a factor of heritage in my life; I have no ancestral roots there. I am not from Appalachia but, like so many others, am rather an invader, an explorer, a student, a defender, an observer and a portrayer by virtue of having photographed the people, hollows, strip mines, rocky hillsided farms, pearl gray, sagging, tin-roofed barns, giant coal-cleaning plants and the tiny, unincorporated communities that slow you down every couple of miles on secondary roads. Long before I came to Appalachia to live and work, I knew it as a storied region starting with Kentucky as "the Dark and Bloody Ground." For me, Appalachia began with Indians; The Last of the Mohicans had me picturing the forests of Kentucky as a network ofwelltraveled footpaths, bordered by dense forests teeming with wild game and used by the Indians primarily as a hunting area. To imagine it with few permanent settlements made it seem all the more wild, mysterious, primitive, and dangerous. As a consequence, I had a tremendous respect and admiration for those hardy souls who dared penetrate this unmapped wilderness. As a boy, I read everything I could about pioneers. I know now that many of the episodes I read were romanticized. These were hardy pioneers, so I wasn't able to share any physical suffering with them; while they encountered many obstacles, they overcame them. In my fantasies about them I wanted to live that kind of life. I wanted buckskin clothing trimmed with fringe. I wanted to wear moccasins so that I could have supreme stealth, able to feel every little twig underfoot (and therefore not loudly break it for everyone to hear); and, of course, have my trusty hunting knife on my belt, along with my throwing tomahawk. My muzzle-loading flintlock would be exactly as long as Daniel Boone's. Of course, I had no idea how much a muzzle-loading flintlock weighed, but it couldn't be too much because I had read where ole Dan'l could Robert Connor, freelance photographer and editor ofMountain Life & Work in the early 1960s, went to Bluefield, West Virginia, from Berea, and then retired to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 13 load on the run, while being chased, mind you, by screaming native Americans. And in these fantasies there were no mosquitoes and my thinking never got so far as to consider gong to the bathroom out in the wilderness. As I grew older, my concept of Appalachia expanded to accept the setting ofthe mountain regions, the extensive timbering, the discovering of coal, the penetration of the railroads and the growing exploitation of the region's prime resources: minerals and people. But in spite of a growing population and pockets of industrialization, Appalachia retained its aura of wildness. And there emerged, in my mind's eye, a prototype, characterized as a "mountaineer." He was taciturn, suspicious of strangers, a crack shot with a rifle. He didn't have much learnin', but he had a lot of savvy. He was adept at "folkways" and well versed in "folklore." He knew the healing nostrums that were available in the fields and forests. He liked to hunt and trap; but for some reason I never associated him much with fishing. And, of course, he made moonshine and was constantly at odds with revenooers. He spoke an odd language that scholars said went back to Chaucer, and he played music on the dulcimer and sang songs that had somehow traveled through time and space from the Old Country of his ancestors. I remember seeing Gary Cooper in Sergeant York. Cooper seemed to embody all the characteristics of my mountaineer prototype. And then there was the film The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a movie that made mountain living more acceptable, more desirable than ever. I remember crying freely when one of the film's characters died, a casualty of feuding families. For years Appalachia retained, for me, a mystique, as a separate realm, peopled by a special breed, either puzzled over or ignored by the outside world; an area visited only by those who wanted to take something from it. It wasn't that...

What Kind of Life. The Limits of Medical Progress

What Kind of Life. The Limits of Medical Progress

William Eggleston

John Szarkowski once wrote that he heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of colour photographs, but added wisely ‘I did not believe him, although I can believe that it might be an advantage to him to think so, or to pretend to think so’.1 Is Eggleston a photographer of the South, of America, or of the world? Does his subject matter matter? A permanent display of one of his portfolios in Memphis, Tennessee, is accompanied by the following statement: I've done a lot of work in the South, and it's true that I understand there's a certain kind of life here that's different. People think there's something Southern about what I do because of what's in a lot of my pictures. But to tell you the truth, I've never felt the problems I've addressed have been any different whether I was in Africa, West Berlin, or the South. In fact, the places where I take my pictures may be the least important thing about whether they're any good or not.2

What Kind of Life?

What Kind of Life?

John Rollin Ridge: His Life & Works

This answers call for biographies of leading Cherokees of nineteenth century such as John Rollin Ridge. It should be of interest to Native scholars, historians of California, and those interested in ninteenth-century literature. - William L. Anderson, Western Carolina University. fine book providing valuable information about an important Cherokee writer and politician. - A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, University of Illinois at Chicago. A cross between Lord Byron, romantic poet who made things happen, and Joaquin legendary bandit he would immortalize - that was John Rollin Ridge. His was kind of life that inspires ballads an dsagas. He was born to a prominent Cherokee Indian family in 1827, a tumultuous time when state of Georgia was trying to impose its sovereignty on Cherokee Nation and whites were pressing against its borders. He grew up amid violence of removal and post-removal factionalism. murder of his father (which he witnessed) and of his grandfather and uncle, who had advocated removal to West, marked him permanently, activated his mental and spiritual powers to make him someone to be reckoned with. John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works is first full-length biography of a Cherokee whose best revenge was in writing well. James W. Parins places Ridge in circle of his family and recreates circumstances surrounding assassination of his father, John Ridge; grandfather, Major Ridge; and uncle, Elias Boudinot, by rival Cherokees led by John Ross. Eventful chapters portray boy's flight with his mother and her family to Arkansas; his surprisingly good classical education there; his killing of a Ross loyalist and his exile to California during Gold Rush; his talent as a romantic poet and as author of The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), one of first novels ever written by an Indian; and his career as a journalist. Newspaper editing and politicking (he was anti-Lincoln and anti-Abolitionist) suited Ridge's passionate temperament. To end of his life in 1867 he advocated Cherokee' assimilation into white society. Parins takes full measure of a controversial, contradictory, celebrated, self-cast exile. James W. Parins is a professor of English and director of Native Press Archives at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His publications include Biobibliography of Native Writers, 1772-1924 (1984, 1985) and American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodical, 1826-1985 (1985, 1986), both with Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.

From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 301 Yosef Kaplan. From Christianity toJudaism: The Story of Isaac Orobiode Castro.Translated by Raphael Loewe. Oxford: Littman Library, Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. xvi + 53 I. Cloth, $45.oo. Orobio de Castro, 1617-1687, was the most philosophically acute member of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. He had been trained in medicine and Catholic theology in Spain, taught at the medical faculty at the University of Toulouse, and then joined the Jewish community in Amsterdam in 166o, became an eminent physician in The Netherlands, and a defender of Judaism against Catholics and Protestants, and against the rebel, Spinoza. Orobio made a spiritual journey from Christianity to Judaism , fully aware of the intellectual difficulties and issues involved. He used the tools of his Spanish scholastic heritage, his knowledge of current scientific, philosophical, and theological thought, to buttress his final faith. Unlike Spinoza, who was born a Jew in the fairly tolerant world of Amsterdam, Orobio was born a Catholic, and remained one for about forty years, until persecuted by the Inquisition, and then found his way to his version of the faith of his ancestors. Some of his work was influential for a century or more, until he slipped into oblivion. Yosef Kaplan, Professor of Jewish History at Hebrew University, has devoted many years of excellent scholarship, mainly in The Netherlands, in the archives of the Jewish community, to unearthing what can be known about Orobio's career and his intellectual biography. The results of his researches first appeared in Hebrew in 198~, and have now been made accessible to the general scholarly world by this English translation. (The work will appear soon in French translation as well.) The first four chapters give a superb picture of the intellectual and spiritual life of a Marrano, a member of a group of people of Jewish ancestry in Iberia, forced to live as Christians, and constandy hounded by the Inquisition. Kaplan has found much to indicate what this kind of life was like, and how it was carried on. Orobio, originally from a Portuguese New Christian family that moved into southern Spain, became a successful medical doctor, and leader of a small crypto-Jewish group. Kaplan is able to piece together the really minimal Jewish practice that he and his friends and relatives carried on, the support system they developed to protect each other, and the way this finally fell apart when several of them were arrested and tortured by the Inquisition. Orobio found kindred souls, including his classmate, Dr. Juan de Prado, who later became involved with the, young Spinoza. The Inquisition's inventory of Orobio's property provides an interesting window into what the Marranos' life was like. Marranos like Orobio and Prado, consciously committed to a truncated Judaism that was mainly an internal spiritual religion rather than a set of outward practices, stayed in Spain as long as possible, with occasional rest and recreation trips to Marrano communities in southern France or Italy. They only left Spain when the situation was impossible, when it became evident they would be killed if they stayed. Prado moved to Hamburg and Amsterdam in 1654-55 and joined the Jewish communities there. Orobio went first to southern France, and became a professor of pharmacy at the University of Toulouse. Kaplan makes the interesting suggestion that 302 ,JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL 1992 he was influenced there by the fideism of the New Christian sceptic, Francisco Sanches, Montaigne's cousin. Orobio tired of living as an ostensible Christian, and so moved to Amsterdam where he could join the Jewish community. He circumcised himself, changed his first name from "Bathazaar" to "Isaac," and quickly became a major intellectual figure in the Jewish world there. We mainly know of the Jewish community of the time through Spinoza's very bad relations with them, and his negative statements about them. Kaplan allows us to see a quite different vision of the group through the eyes of the two doctors, Prado and Orobio. Prado arrived in 1655 with many doubts about Judaism, and about religion in general. He was not shy about raising these, and became a cause c~l~bre. He...

What Kind of Medicine?

Journal Article What Kind of Medicine? Get access The Nature of Suffering and the Coals of Medicine, by Eric J. Cassell. Oxford University Press, New York, 1991, 254 pp., $22.95 (cloth).Too Old for Health Care? Controversies in Medicine, Law, Economics, and Ethics, edited by Robert H. Binstock and Stephen G. Post. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1991, 209 pp., $50.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paper).What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress, by Daniel Callahan. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1990, 318 pp., $19.95 (cloth). Edward F. Lawlor, PhD Edward F. Lawlor, PhD Director Associate Professor of Public Policy Studies and Social Service Administration, Center for Health Administration Studies University of Chicago969 East Sixtieth Street Chicago, IL 60637 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Gerontologist, Volume 32, Issue 1, February 1992, Pages 131–133, https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/32.1.131 Published: 01 February 1992

The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics by Romanus Cessario, O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics. By RoMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. x +204. $24.95. What we learn from Holy Scripture about the kind of life which God commands us to lead depends in key part upon our prior natural and rational understanding of many of the key expressions used in Scripture . So it is with those expressions which name and characterize the virtues. We are commanded not only to do certain types of action and to refrain from others, but also to become a certain type of person, one whose qualities of character are such that our actions spring from and give expression to those qualities. We are required not only to do what is just and courageous and temperate, but to do it because we ourselves have become just, courageous, and temperate, injunctions that we could not adequately understand, let alone obey, were it not for a prior knowledge of what these virtues are and what it is that makes them virtues. Moreover we also learn from Scripture about how we fail and about how we are called to account for our failures in the virtues. So we need also to know what it is to develop the virtues and what it is to fail or to be frustrated in that development. Few Christians are or can be theorists of the virtues; but every Christian by her or his actions presupposes the truth of some kind of theory of the virtues and of their development, a theory which, even when not explicitly articulated, enables her or him to find application for the Scriptures in the actions and transactions of everyday life. And every pastor and preacher has to draw upon the resources of some such theory. No theory of this kind can be adequate unless it satisfies two standards: that of fidelity to Scripture and that of conformity to the best understanding which philosophy and the human sciences afford of how human beings are constituted by appetites, passions, will, and reason. What would the content and structure of such a theory, satisfying these two standards, have to be? This is the question posed and answered by Romanus Cessario in his unusually important, stimulating, and incisive book. The content and structure of the theory which he presents are essentially Thomistic, but his theory is only incidentally and in part a historical exposition of St. Thomas's account. It is Thomistic rather in that it uses resources drawn from that account in order to address issues in contemporary moral theology, resources which enable him to identify and to formulate crucial but sometimes neglected 339 340 BOOK REVIEWS questions, as well as to propose answers to them. And in so doing, as we shall see, he presses inquiry to a point such that he needs to go he· yond what St. Thomas provides. Cessario's claim throughout is that the teaching of Scripture can become adequately intelligible to us only in the light afforded by a systematic understanding of the virtues, moral, intellectual, and theological. The only plausible alternatives to the type of theory which he proposes do not include some type of atheoretical reliance on scripture. Plausible alternative standpoints always involve open or covert appeal to some other rival type of moral theory. And Cessario from time to time provides acute and telling criticisms of some of the alternatives more influential at present. But he is careful to avoid :more than a bare minimum of such polemic, sometimes even too careful . In his first chapter, for example, Cessario recognizes that what he has to say about the radical nature of the transformation of character required by the Christian life and of the distinctive qualities of that life puts him at odds with certain theses of Karl Rahner. He notes almost in passing that it is his allegiance to metaphysical realism (with its claims about the teleological ordering of human nature) which gen· erates this conflict with Rahner's positions-positions which of course depend heavily on Heideggerian borrowings. But he never pursues the philosophical issues which divide Thomistic metaphysics from Rahner's blending of Heidegger with a theology aptly...

A model for teaching criminal justice ethics

This article asks whether we can reasonably expect to make people more ethical by teaching ethics to them. We suggest that a justifiable aim in teaching ethics is to engage students in a serious dialogue concerning how they should conduct their lives as they embark on their careers. If a model for teaching ethics can accomplish this, it also might make students more ethical. After identifying several options that must be considered in designing a model, we describe and give a rationale for a model that involves students in evaluating two different ethical approaches by applying them to a wide range of cases and by assessing the kind of life they would lead if they adopted each approach.

What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress

The focus of this work by Daniel Callahan is individualism vs the good of the community as played out on the wards of American medicine. He is concerned about a runaway health care caused by the excessive expectations and demands of given patients to restore and maintain health, an aging population that dominates this claim, and a proliferation of medical science and technology that fuels the pursuit of health but never quite satisfies it. He warns that if these activities are unchecked, increasingly we will sacrifice other important social goods. He questions the wisdom of this quest for medical progress and the inordinate place of maintaining health in our scale of individual and social values. He sees these problems as inadequately addressed by developing new schemes to reorganize health services; by reining in the profits of physicians, health care institutions, or manufacturers of technology; or by the myriad other regulatory

What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress.

What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress.

Unfillable Prescription for Medicine What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress Daniel Callahan

Unfillable Prescription for Medicine What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress Daniel Callahan

What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress.

What Kind of Life: The Limits of Medical Progress.

“Our Serving Sisters”: Swedish-American Domestic Servants and Their Ethnic Community

I have observed, heard, read, and believed that the respectable American girls who work will cheerfully slave and suffocate in a mill, factory, or big department store, or live almost any other kind of life, rather than grow healthy, fat, and opulent in domestic service. . . . How can my countrywomen, with their own living to make, be so blind to the butter side of their bread?[Pettengill 1903: v]American women’s disdain of employment in domestic service was common knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the logic behind this disdain was not. Lillian Pettengill investigated why American women viewed domestic service so negatively. In her research, based upon actual experience as a servant, Pettengill found that a major complaint about domestic employment was the “social stigma” attached to it (ibid.: 366). More recent research on domestic service supports her findings. Katzman (1978: I4ff.) found that most American women viewed household employment negatively in large part because of its lack of prestige in American society. Young native-born white women refused opportunities for domestic work for fear that they would be looked down upon by friends, lose their social position, and be less attractive on the marriage market.