Fred Clark’s Slactivist (one of my favourite blogs) has something of a thing about Prairie Muffins
(see e.g. http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2006/06/you_aint_seen_n.html, http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2007/08/cossacks-and-pr.html)
These are a group of Christian women who have put together a manifesto
arguing for a life dedicated to homemaking and families (http://buriedtreasurebooks.com/PrairieMuffinManifesto.php).Fred admits his disdain for the group, which I suspect to him symbolises all that’s worst about right-wing Christianity. When I looked at the manifesto, many of its ideals seemed very familiar to me. It is in many ways the kind of life that my mother (a minister’s wife in rural Sussex, thousands of miles away from the prairies) would have subscribed to. It is not however, a document that she would ever have written.

To try and understand why these women are writing such a manifesto, and why some of the more peculiar demands get in to it, I go back once again to one of my current favourite books: Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride. In the competition between ascetics and those Christians in traditional household living, Christian married women were particularly vulnerable. As Cooper puts it (p 126):

When obstacles barred a woman from altering the broad outline of her circumstances or actions, a greater importance was correspondingly placed in strategies of interpretation through which available experience and agency could be mined for significance and affirmation. The need for compensatory strategies of self-interpretation must have been felt especially keenly by married women, whose status and duties afforded far less opportunity to accommodate a chosen religious identity than did those of the consecrated virgin.

Wives, whose domestic responsibilities and social position meant they did not have the time or resources to take up heroic Christian roles, needed a way to feel they were not second-class Christians. As a result, a pastoral literature grew up stressing the significance that such humdrum lives could have. Such a literature, as this shows, has venerable roots and has attracted some great writers. Think of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or George Herbert’s The Elixir:

All may of Thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture--"for Thy sake"--
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
Makes that and th' action fine.

Much of the Prairie Muffin Manifesto is a way of making sense of a life that is constrained by circumstances and may well be seen as second-best to others, even other Christians. Their family responsibilities mean that Prairie Muffins cannot go out and be missionaries, their denominations (I presume) exclude them from ordained ministry. They cannot even spend vast proportions of time in church-going, Bible study or incessant prayer without risking being accused of neglecting their husbands and families. They must find a way of holiness that is compatible with the social conventions of their world.

That seems unobjectionable enough, but there is also another side to the Prairie Muffins, which worries more liberal Christians, as well as turning the stomachs of many non-Christians. One is the emphasis on submission of wives to husbands. Another is the rejection of such authors as Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott as dangerous subversives. There is also the fact that some Prairie Muffins seemingly think that only men should have the vote. The response I’ve seen in many of the commentators on Slactivist is to conclude that these women are secretly masochists or authoritarian personalities. They wanted to be bossed around by somebody else. After reading Cooper, however, I think something more complex is going on. I think what is happening is some rather odd competitive asceticism.

One of the useful things about Cooper’s books is she doesn’t assume that Christians or women or Christian women are immune from competition and undermining each other. In theory fourth and fifth century spiritual warfare may all be about fighting the devil; in practice, there’s a lot of doing down your rivals as well, literally being holier-than-thou. In that sense, the Manifesto itself can be seen as staking out a competitive ascetic position, even as it tries to suggest it’s not doing that, by explicitly rejecting Phariseeism. (That is the big difference between what these women are doing and what previous generations did - they are proclaiming their own intentions). But modern day asceticism has to take rather different forms from the patristic period. It’s now harder to find an ascetic practice that finds at least some social admiration and is distinctively Christian. For a start, food asceticism is now the province of dieters and female celebrities. Similarly, competitive care for one’s family (I do so much for my husband/children) is not culturally distinct. (Goodness Gracious Me, the Asian TV comedy, used to have a sketch with two competitive Indian mothers, boasting about their (married) sons, which at least one time focused on how helpless their sons were and how dependent on them, culminating in one claiming something to the effect about her son being still in nappies and her changing them. You could probably do a similar sketch about Jewish mothers, Italian mothers etc.) Similarly, classic forms of sexual asceticism are effectively unavailable to modern married people. The gulf separating Western culture from its patristic roots is seen when you consider the response today if a Christian wife attempted to convert her husband to a sexless marriage or even unilaterally refused him sexual relations. (Such behaviour is admired, by contrast, in e.g. the Apocryphal Acts of Andrew).

As a result, it seems to me that a lot of modern Christian asceticism (at least in the US) focuses on visual/verbal asceticism: preventing yourself and your family from seeing or hearing something ‘ungodly’. (This avoiding of entertainments isn’t in itself new, but what is new is creating a whole new parallel world of acceptable Christian pleasures, rather than just rejecting pleasure). In this world, refusing to read Laura Ingalls Wider or something equally innocuous is an ascetic move and a competitive one. The speaker implicitly proclaims that they can see deeper and are not fooled by seeming pleasures that are in fact traps of the devil. Obedience to one’s husband, meanwhile, is a symbolic form of one of the most difficult forms of asceticism: renouncing one’s own self-will and desire to get one’s own way.

But it’s important to see that such women don’t necessarily intend submission to a husband to be masochistic. A lot of these concepts of spiritual warfare work by a kind of ju-jitsu; you use your opponent’s strengths against him. The ascetic woman who is submissive to her husband doesn’t normally want him to be cruel to her (though if he is and she submits to this patiently, she also wins). Instead, she wants to inspire him to do what she wants. So that, as the sixth century Liber ad Gregoriam (Cooper p 131) has it, addressing a Roman matron:

Show...how fastidious you are in the service of charity, how decorous in compliance to a command, so that - bound by consideration of this - [your husband] may cease to keep his own counsel and will receive your whole will as a divine pattern and will shiver at your displeasure as at sacrilege.
...
You will be blessed if, standing in front of the tribunal of Christ on that day [of judgement], you are able to say, “Here, Lord, is the man who you ordained should be my husband: I guided him by so great a compliance of manner that he never held out against my will...”

With this ideal of private womanly influence, even being willing to give up the vote has a perverse kind of logic. After all, the Victorian reason for not giving women the vote was precisely their role as ‘domestic tyrants’: they already decided how their husbands would vote. There is no denying that voting and political involvement generally is often spiritually disappointing: the candidates you want don’t get in, or if they do, don’t do what you’ve hoped for. If however, you remove women’s votes and you can then redefine voting success as getting your husband to vote the way you want, for some women this might be more satisfying. (It’s a stupid idea for very many reasons, but it does have that merit for such women).

Finally, there’s the question of how one might counter such women. In some ways, the most Christian thing to do may be to ignore them, or at least smile sweetly at them and then take your own spiritual path. If they think that domestic virtue is the only true path to holiness, one effective retort is to show through your own example that a holy life ‘in the world’ is possible. For those who think a more aggressive response is needed, there are always the late antique techniques for undermining one’s spiritual rivals. You could, for example, start suggesting that such women are trying to publicise their own virtue by the very act of having a manifesto. As John Cassian puts in the Conferences (Cooper p 128):

Take care not to follow the example of those, who have acquired the habit of holding forth...and because they know how to speak elegantly and with abundance on whatever subject pleases them, pass for having spiritual science to the eyes of those who have not learned how to assess their true character.

Throw in a bit from St Paul about being stumbling blocks for the weaker brethren and you’re almost there in a plausibly ‘spiritual’ counter-attack. What you don’t do, however, is simply try derision or ridicule. That is far more likely simply to convince the Prairie Muffins (or similar groups) that they are on the right track. After all, if Jesus was mocked and spurned and they are mocked and spurned, by a false syllogism, that makes them more like Jesus.

I’ve been back again reading Kate Cooper’s The Virgin and the Bride, which is not only a very useful book for considering late antiquity, but as I’ve already indicated, has a surprising number of contemporary resonances in considering the links between religion, gender and social reputation. At the core of her book are several chapters on what one could call the ‘asceticism war’ of the western Roman empire in 380s till the early fifth century. The fourth century had seen major changes to the Christian church, with it becoming first tolerated and then the official religion of the Roman Empire and with the gradual conversion of the senatorial elite. The asceticism war was really about how an old social hierarchy based on birth and wealth could be reconciled with the moral hierarchies which had developed in a Christian sub-culture. On one side were Christian authors such as Ambrose and Jerome who saw ascetics and virgins as true Christians and others as inferior; on the other was a traditional view that saw holiness as located in the Christianised household, focused on a married couple living in conjugal harmony.

The achievement of Cooper (following Peter Brown) and other recent scholars is to show that the verbal conflicts between these sides weren’t simply a matter of True Christians like Jerome trying to tackle a few backsliders who were really pagans. (This has been the traditional view, mainly because the ascetics were the winners and the texts that their opponents wrote are rarely preserved). Instead the ascetics were a shrill minority, trying to separate Christians from a social structure that had been Christianised, but was still traditional. And this small but very influential minority used some fairly nasty tactics, particularly Jerome. As readers of earlier entries may know, I’m not fond of Jerome, and nor is Cooper. He gets accused in the book of opportunism, vulgarity and also ‘sanctimonious posturing’. The asceticism war and particularly Jerome’s contributions to it accentuated and possibly even created some of the worst aspects of the Christian tradition: its misogyny, its negative attitude to almost all sexual acts. Seeing its impact (still felt today, particularly in the Catholic church), it’s easy to conclude not only that this outcome wasn’t inevitable but that the wrong side won the war.

And yet, as I look again at it, I’m no longer so sure. A model of Christianity based around the holy household and the married couple has in many ways far more to offer the majority of Christian women, then and now. But this model, as Cooper points out, was essentially a traditional Christianity, containing Christian behaviour within existing social structures of the pre-Christian world. As Peter Brown suggests, if Christianity has not become a religion of ‘two ways’ (the ordinary family and the celibate elite) it would have probably have ended up with a sexual morality much like that of traditional Judaism or Islam, focusing on control of wives and daughters within the house. A religion that does not sanction moving outside family tradition for women (or indeed men) is less amenable not just to the development of women’s potential, but arguably to all sense of individualism. (This isn’t to argue that individualism can’t be seen within Islam or Judaism, just that it is less central to their religious traditions). Christianity preserved a sense that ‘conversion’ could involve a radical break with an individual’s past and a necessary abandonment of all pre-existing commitments, including one’s family. Such a view, inherent in the gospels, could easily have become seen after the Christianisation of the Roman Empire as suitable only for the early church, to be marvelled at but not repeated. Instead the fourth century church ‘institutionalised’ the possibility of radicalism (for both men and women) in clerical and monastic orders. Yet the radical possibility remained there as a resource for the future, whether in the innumerable visionaries and eccentrics founding their own Christian sects or orders, or the Christian men and women who felt justified in putting their personal relationship with Christ before social conventions. With a different outcome in the asceticism war, I think such claims to individual truth may have become harder to make. Perhaps, after all, the providence of God ordained that even Jerome was of use.

Anyone doing any work on women’s history or gender history in most periods has to find an approach to the phenomenon of the sources’ description of the Bad Woman. This is the woman (normally royal in my period) who is an active force for evil, the cause of all that’s gone wrong in the country, the court, the royal family etc. I have been thinking again about the Carolingian Bad Women and coming to the conclusion: as far as evil goes, they’re really second-rate.

Who are the Carolingian bad women? There are really only three of them who play any kind of active role: Fastrada (Charlemagne’s fourth wife), Waldrada (Lothar II’s concubine) and Judith (Louis the Pious’ second wife). Einhard blames Fastrada’s cruelty for a couple of revolts against Charlemagne, but gives no details. Waldrada, the ‘other woman’ in Lothar II’s divorce case, gets accused of bewitching him (as well as counting as an adulteress). But these two aren’t women who really take the centre stage. The only woman who does is the Empress Judith. As Elizabeth Ward has shown (in a paper in Studies in Church History, 27), most criticisms of Judith are dependent on Agobard of Lyons and Paschasius Radbertus. These variously accuse Judith of adultery (with Bernard of Septimania), vague ideas of sorcery and corrupting the court and plotting the death of Judith’s husband Louis the Pious and his sons in order to take over the empire.

Leaving aside the plausibility of all these allegations, adultery and simply plotting murder are extremely tame things for a Bad Woman to do. Consider, after all, other classical and early medieval Bad Women. From the Roman and Byzantine world there are the lethal Roman empresses Livia and Messalina and the sexually insatiable Theodora of Procopius’ Secret Histories. Early medieval villainesses include the ruthless Merovingian queens Fredegund, Brunhilda and Balthild (the last one of the few saints accused of instigating the murder of bishops) as well as Liutprand of Cremona’s claims about the pornocracy of the tenth century papacy. Next to this, Judith’s alleged sins look very tame.

Why does the Carolingian world produce so few Bad Women? The most common feminist view of early medieval Bad Women has been that the sources show hostile responses by men (particularly clerics) to powerful women, who they therefore defame. On this view, there are no Carolingian Bad Women because there are no powerful Carolingian women, because they are being successfully repressed by the patriarchy. However, another take on the Bad Woman has recently emerged, by scholars such as Kate Cooper and Ross Balzaretti. This argues that in many cases representations of Bad Women are in fact being used to attack the powerful men who are their husbands/lovers or fathers (occasionally both). These men can’t control their women and are therefore not fit to rule. This use of women as symbols is very clear, for example, in the use of Cleopatra as a way to get at Mark Anthony. In this view the Carolingian lack of symbolic women doesn’t actually tell us much about the real role of women in the period, but more about the fact that conflicts between powerful men are being conducted in a different way. Bad Women aren’t needed, so they don’t appear in the sources in the same way.

A week or so ago, the wonderful Hilzoy on Obsidian Wings had an entry on how her father taught her about money supply and inflation, aged eight or nine (http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/07/printing-money.html). In many ways it sounds like a slightly more advanced version of my teaching L about the world around her. But though L has already got taught things ranging from the largest number I know to how to play chess (that was down to my husband), I suspect I’m not going to be teaching her economics, like Hilzoy’s Dad did. That’s not particularly because I don’t know much about economics (even though I don’t). I will do my best to teach her some physics, even though I’m fairly ropey at that. It’s my deeper problems with economics, which emerged as I read about how Hilzoy’s Dad was explaining to her why printing money is not a good idea:

Dadzoy said: imagine that you and I are the only people in the world, and I have a candy bar, and you have a dime. Also imagine that there is nothing else in the world that you want to buy, and no other money. How much would you pay me for my candy bar? Cleverly, I said: The whole dime! Right, said Dadzoy. Now suppose that right before you were going to offer to buy my candy bar, you found another dime. Now how much would you pay me for my candy bar? I said: I'd only offer you one dime. Dadzoy said: but if I knew that you had two dimes, I might ask for both of them. I thought for a while, and finally allowed as how I would pay both dimes for the candy bar.

So, said Dadzoy, do you think that finding that second dime made you any better off? Yes, I said: I had more money! -- But, said Dadzoy, even though you had twice as much money, you could still only buy one candy bar. Having twice as much money just made the candy bar more expensive.

As Hilzoy admits, she questioned her Dad about various aspects of this several times. It’s at those questions I would come unstuck. Because L (I suspect) would sooner or later raise the point that ‘it’s not fair for you to charge me more for the same candy bar’. At which point, I am revealed as the economics non-believer that I am. I would have to agree - it’s not fair. Deep down, I do not accept the underlying morality that says a good’s only value is what someone is prepared to pay for it. And unless you either believe that that axiom is right, or that you can just ignore moral issues in economics, then you’re stuck.

My economic model (which I admit is a deeply naive one) is that there is a ‘just price’ for goods, based on production costs (including overheads etc) plus profit. It doesn’t seem to me moral to assume that a producer is entitled to charge whatever the market can bear, regardless of his/her own costs. But equally, it doesn’t seem moral to me that the customer should expect something for nothing. When L starts getting pocket money, she will have to learn that if she hasn’t got enough money, she can’t buy something. She can’t expect a shopkeeper to give her something for less than it’s worth, just because she wants that to happen. But the fact is, that’s what supermarkets and the like do all the time to their suppliers, and that’s seen too often as just good business practice.

I’m not sure yet what I will tell L about economics, but I doubt she going to get an accurate account of it from me, any more than an atheist is likely to give a good account of a particular religions's beliefs. (Still, at least I hope L will get a moral education that’s more effective than Robert Mugabe’s was).