Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

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Current entries

Friday, April 21, 2006, 1:05 am

The "Matrimonial Market" in 1935. I came across the following little debate in the Ann Arbor News (March 27, 1935):

Is Grade B Spouse Better Than None?

by Dorothy Dix

"Is it better to have an indifferent husband--a sort of second-class instead of first-class husband, so to speak--than to have none at all?" asked a girl of a group of married women.

"Now," she went on, "I am financially independent. I have interesting work that I enjoy doing, that fills my time and makes me feel that I am of some use in the world. I am not in love and no Prince Charming has ever ridden down my street. But I am wondering if I am making a mistake in not marrying because I have not found my ideal and whether it wouldn't be better to marry some ordinary man whom I merely like and respect than to be an old maid."

"No. A thousand times no," cried one of the women to whom she was speaking. "A man can put up with a make-shift wife, ut a woman has to have the husband that she craves, or else marriage is cinders, ashes and dust to her. It doesn't matter so much to a man whom he marries because his life is lived mosly out of the home and his thoughts are filled with outside interests. His hopes and ambitions and struggles and triumphs and failures absorb him. But a woman's life is centered in the home. If she doesn't find her happiness there, she doesn't find it anywhere, and the core of a woman's happiness is always the husband who is her heart's desire.

"Of course, many women do marry their opportunities when they can't get their preferences. They take the men they can get when they can't get the men that they want and they live miserably and scrappily ever afterward. To this class belong the bored wives who yawn in their husband's faces and who always want to step out somewhere of an evening; the complaining wives who consider themselves martyrs because they have to keep house and rear children; the lazy wives who never think it worth while to make their husbands comfortable, and the whining wives who always tell you wnat brilliant careers they could have had if they hadn't got married.

"Marriage is full of sacrifices for a woman even at its best, an the only thing that justifies it and makes it worth while to her is for her to have married her own particular tin god that she can spend the remainder of her life worshipping. Believe me, there is a lot of peace and happiness and comfort in single blessedness and in having your own individual pocketbook and latchkey, and a woman is a fool who trades these off for anything short of the very best the matrimonial market affords."

"I don't agree with you at all," said another woman. "I think that almost any sort of husband is better than no husband at all. Marriage is the vocation to which God has called women and they are only content when they follow it. A woman's life without a man in it is an unflavored dish, flat and tasteless. She has to have a husband to pep it up, to give it some savor.

"Why, a woman even has to have a husband to cook for to put any punch in her housekeeping. It doesn't seem worth while to her to get up a good dinner unless a man is to help eat it. Three-fourths of the widows and old maids live on a tea-and-toast diet or something they can get out of a can.

"And women have to have husbands to dress up for after they begin to get to the time when corsets are a burden and a kimona looks good to them, to keep them from getting sloppy. And they have to have husbands coming home at night to put a point to their days, even if they know they are going to be grouchy or about as conversational as store dummies. For it is better to have somebody to quarrel wiith than nobody to speak to at all.

"Then, of course, there is the matter of money, and nobody can deny that a husband is a mightty handy thing to have around the house when bills come in, even if he isn't exactly the hero of your girlish dreams. Maybe he isn't all your fondest fancy painted, but is is somebody to stand between you and the world and you don't have that gone feeling that you used to have when you wondered what would happen to you if you got sick or lost your job.

"Furthermore, most married women are better taken care of than they could take care of themselves. It would take many and many a long year's work to get the average women to the place where she could have the nice little home and the car that she marries, if she had to earn them herself."

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

Thursday, April 20, 2006, 10:11 pm

Barbara Bauer and other "Literary Agent" Scammers. Via Making Light, we learn of yet another little fraud subculture, in the form of "agents" who rip off authors while pretending to find publishing deals for them.

There's a list of 20 worst agents [link updated 5/26/06] from Writer Beware, which says:

None of these agents has a significant track record of sales to commercial (advance-paying) publishers, and most have virtually no documented and verified sales at all (many sales claimed by these agents turn out to be vanity publishers). All charge clients before a sale is made, whether directly, by charging fees such as reading or administrative fees, or indirectly, for "editing services."

See also Writer Beware and Preditors & Editors.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden published the list and then, like some others, she received a cease and desist threat from one of the notorious scammers, Barbara Bauer. Since exposing and ridiculing scammers is also an interest of mine, I am happy to support Teresa by linking to the sites she recommends on this.

These scam "literary agents" remind me of the Manutius "publishing house" in Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum.

It was more than just a vanity press. With fake, glossy "literary magazines" and staged book signings and social events, Manutius lulled its authors into an expansive belief in their own importance.

Then the publisher would quietly let slip to the author that the book wasn't selling as well as hoped, and all those newly printed volumes would have to be pulped unless, ahem, someone came up with the money to buy them all...

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

Monday, April 17, 2006, 3:45 pm

From the Clerk-Register. Today's message to my staff.

Not long ago, I received a copy of a recent article [subscription site; click "cancel" on password dialog to see citation] sent by our Public Defender, Lloyd Powell. "Thought provoking," he said.

The article describes the unhappy tendency in schools, organizations, and workplaces for specific individuals to become identified as scapegoats, leading all the others to gang up against them, usually over vaguely defined offenses or problems. The targeted person may be ostracized, or even humiliated, in an attempt to isolate them and drive them out of the class or club or office.

I'm sure all of us have seen examples of this phenomenon in our own experience, whether we have taken part in it, been victimized by it, or both.

Once again, I am reminded of the old Jewish parable that Heaven and Hell are exactly the same - except for the way the inhabitants treat one another.

No one deserves to be mistreated or harassed. And everyone loses when the tone of a social environment degenerates into ugly scapegoating.

But you can be part of the solution.

When you come to work here in the Clerk-Register's office, or really in any office, part of your job is to get along with your co-workers, to treat every one of them with courtesy and respect.

Perhaps there is something you dislike about one of your colleagues. That's inevitable in any group of people.

But here at work, it is your responsibility to put that dislike aside, and treat the person as a valued member of your team. Focus, instead, on what you like about them.

If someone in your office has a behavior that annoys you, quietly take it up with them directly. Don't gossip about it to other staff.

Perhaps you feel that a co-worker has wronged you in some way. If so, you should try to find it in your heart to forgive them. Do you really want to spend the rest of your work life seething at the person at the next desk?

Each one of you took a solemn oath to "faithfully discharge the duties" of your position.

"Faithful," that is, not just to the details of the work you do, but to the integrity of the office and the work environment.

"Faithful" means showing courtesy and respect every workday, not just to our customers, but to our co-workers.

Let's take that oath seriously.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

Thursday, April 13, 2006, 10:44 pm

Lisa Radtke. Just one week ago this evening, I attended the honors banquet for the Political Science department at Eastern Michigan University. I was the guest speaker, and I talked about the world of politics and my own experiences in it.

Lisa Radtke, a 23-year-old graduating senior, was one of the honorees, as president of the Public Administration Club. She stopped at the table where I was sitting and chatted with us. I was impressed with her.

One of her professors wrote:

She was in my 100 student introductory class perhaps 3 years ago and stood out in my mind as energetic, animated, and engaged. Very sweet young woman. It was nice to continue to know her as an advanced student in our department, and the work she did ... on the Public Administration Club really made a nice contribution to the department.

The following evening, Lisa Radtke was shot and killed by her own mother.

Here are some of the headlines in local media:

EMU student's death a sad shock to many (Ann Arbor News, the most complete report)
Mom charged in daughter's death (Detroit News)
Mother faces murder charge in shooting of daughter, 23 (News-Herald)
EMU senior killed in Taylor (Eastern Echo)
Mother Accused of Shooting, Killing Daughter (WDIV News)
EMU should issue posthumous degree (Eastern Echo)

The causes of this senseless tragedy are not hard to find. According to the Ann Arbor News:

But as [Lisa] Radtke's future came together, police and family members say her mother's life was unraveling.... Sharon Radtke, 56, had lost her job as a legal secretary in February and was having trouble making ends meet. With the job went her health insurance and ability to afford medication for depression that had been prescribed for her a few years earlier.

[Sharon Radtke] suffered from depression and had taken medication until her insurance ran out, and she couldn't afford the $200 a month for the pills....

Here, in other words, we have a person with mental illness who was apparently helped to maintain an even keel through medication. After the job disappears, her life comes apart. Unmedicated, increasingly agitated (e.g., "she was getting more devastated all the time"), and in distress over the prospect of becoming homeless, she kills her beloved daughter.

I supppose technically Sharon Radtke might have been eligible for Medicaid. But the devil is in the details, and poor people are served slowly and badly. Continuity of medical care from private insurance to Medicaid would be difficult under the best of circumstances, and impossible for a person under emotional and financial stress.

Needless to say, this wouldn't have happened under the kind of comprehensive health insurance system that exists in nearly every industrialized country besides the U.S.

UM law student Kurt Hunt has links to almost two dozen bloggers who wrote about their memories of Lisa Radtke.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum — Comments

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