Post by snacky on Nov 30, 2014 2:28:40 GMT
I read Theory of the Leisure Class in college, and for some reason I thought it was from around the 1920s - but actually it's from 1899! This book was in play during the time of MM!
One of the things that interested me about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's work was her idea that marriage had somehow malformed natural sexual selection, so it was pointless to even discuss Social Darwinism is a completely natural process: marriage was the primary example of the way people could use culture to guide (or misguide) evolution. Veblen also pointed out how natural selection could be "handicapped".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen
But Veblen is particularly famous for his theory of conspicuous consumption: that people have to dress up like peacocks in order to preserve their status. In Theory of the Leisure Class he added "leisure" and symbolic economic activity as another class marker: people displayed high status by their ability to participate in intellectual and artistic activities while avoiding "lower class" manual labor.
Both Gilman and Veblen laid the groundwork for the professional field of "social work", which relies on the notion that society can be tended like a garden and improved through active intervention. This field attracted women and rapidly became associated with women (much like other "soft sciences"). When men pursued and theorized on the social sciences, they were bestowed the more dynamic name of "Technocrat".
As I mentioned in the Gilman thread, there was a huge native "socialist" movement in the U.S. greatly inspired by Bellamy's utopian novel "Looking Backward" - though there were other intellectual currents they could draw on like the Fabians, nascent unionism, and some books about how big corporations were destroying community and impoverishing people (sound familiar?). This was all before Bolshevism in the USSR wigged everyone out with fear of communists.
I'd like to see MM do more with this. Maybe that's where they are going with Margaret Haile. We'll see!
One of the things that interested me about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's work was her idea that marriage had somehow malformed natural sexual selection, so it was pointless to even discuss Social Darwinism is a completely natural process: marriage was the primary example of the way people could use culture to guide (or misguide) evolution. Veblen also pointed out how natural selection could be "handicapped".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen
But Veblen is particularly famous for his theory of conspicuous consumption: that people have to dress up like peacocks in order to preserve their status. In Theory of the Leisure Class he added "leisure" and symbolic economic activity as another class marker: people displayed high status by their ability to participate in intellectual and artistic activities while avoiding "lower class" manual labor.
Both Gilman and Veblen laid the groundwork for the professional field of "social work", which relies on the notion that society can be tended like a garden and improved through active intervention. This field attracted women and rapidly became associated with women (much like other "soft sciences"). When men pursued and theorized on the social sciences, they were bestowed the more dynamic name of "Technocrat".
As I mentioned in the Gilman thread, there was a huge native "socialist" movement in the U.S. greatly inspired by Bellamy's utopian novel "Looking Backward" - though there were other intellectual currents they could draw on like the Fabians, nascent unionism, and some books about how big corporations were destroying community and impoverishing people (sound familiar?). This was all before Bolshevism in the USSR wigged everyone out with fear of communists.
I'd like to see MM do more with this. Maybe that's where they are going with Margaret Haile. We'll see!
