mecurtin: two partially-excavated figures from the Xi'an Terracotta Army with the character 史 for History (chinese)
[personal profile] mecurtin
Purrcy was loving being petted while being as close to outside in the lovely fall sunshine and smells as he could get. Even though we're in NJ, we have *coyotes* as well as foxes, Great Horned Owls, & motor vehicles--it's much safer to be indoor-only, as well as better for the birds.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby lies on his back in the sunlight on a window ledge in front of a screen, looking up lovingly at his human. His pupil is only a slit in his light green eye, his nose is very pink, his whiskers long, his paws are folded like a bunny's, his belly looks VERY soft. You can tell the window is low to the ground, blurry leaves, stones, and a few plants are visible outside it.




This week (well, last week) Bret Devereaux continued his series on "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant" with Part IVd: Spinning Plates, about women's traditional work: household textile production. Devereaux's expertise is on Rome, broadening to the Meditteranean and premodern European more generally. I commented:
Women's textile production was *even more important* in China than in western Eurasia, believe it or not. The saying "Men till, women weave" was the classic expression of the gendered division of labor for more than 2000 years. Since the time of the Han dynasty at least both men and women were subject to taxation. Depending on the dynasty, either the household had to provide both grain and textiles, or each adult male was assessed an amount of grain, each adult female, textiles.

The cash value of the grain & textile taxes tended to be roughly equal (see, e.g. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, p. 186), but it's rare to see either primary sources or scholars admit it: the life-or-death significance of the grain tax, and the grain harvest, absolutely dominates everyone's thinking. But (as Bray shows) up until the Single-Whip Tax reform of the late 16thC (after which all taxes were rolled into one, to be payed in silver) women's textile production wasn't just a foundation of the home, it was a foundation of the *state*.

As is usual for premodern technology, most of the technical innovations Dr Devereaux mentions above were invented in China several centuries (at least) before they appeared further west. Originally, Chinese tax textiles were hemp in the north, silk in the south. Cotton became important starting around the time of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, and spread rapidly. I don't know enough about the workflow for hemp and cotton textile production to know how much of it went to spinning. The workflow for silk production is very different: silk is "reeled", because it comes off the cocoons as long threads, several of which need to be twisted together to make a workable floss.
I linked to my comment on Bluesky, and suggested that Chinese peasant households were probably more *efficient* at producing textiles than West Eurasian ones were, because they HAD to produce surplus to the household's needs: enough for the family, plus enough for taxes.

I also pointed out that although, unlike in the west, Chinese women's labor was a crucial & explicit part of the state's tax system, and the marriage system relied on bride prices, not dowries (which are supposed to be better, maybe?, for women's rights)--yet neither factor gave women rights, respect or control.

I also got to tell someone about how Iceland used to use cloth as currency.
mecurtin: Clio, Muse of History as fully clothed young woman with laurel crown, writing in book & side-eyeing viewer as if unimpressed with your antics (clio)
[personal profile] mecurtin
An empty jacuzzi is an ideal spot for wild! shenanigans! And it's also great for slowly sneaking toward mom, like the mighty predator you are.

A slightly blurry action shot of Purrcy the tuxedo tabby in the empty jacuzzi bathtub, twisting around after his tail

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby has crept to the inside rim of the tub and is staring up with his big, light green eyes, very much like a stalking tiger. Beware!



Purrcy was very concerned, walking hunched and close to the floor, because there had been the distant sounds of a *very* large growling something out there in the sky earlier ... he REALLY hates the Thunder Growler, this is his Sad Face about it

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby is standing on a wood floor, looking up with his head cocked. His whiskers are rather droopy, his pupils wide, his expression deeply worried. He is very concerned that the Thunder Growler may show up again.




My new icon is Clio, the Muse of History, from this painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Moreelse, because she doesn't look *at all* like a Greek goddess picking heroes, she's a young woman taking notes on your stupid-ass behavior.




Last week Bret Devereaux's Friday post was On the Use and Abuse of Malthus, and I commented:
The standard description of the demographic transition has a important counterexample. Birth rates in France started falling in the 18th century, before industrialization or a drop in infant mortality. Guillaume Blanc's 2023 paper, The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France, begins with a quote from Malthus, in fact. Blanc presents preliminary evidence that France's demographic transition was the result of secularization & anti-clericalism.

A reasonable level of birth control could be achieved using only materials found in the home (mutual masturbation, coitus interruptus--not to mention oral sex, sodomy, or the other thousand & one fun activities that are not PiV), once French people stopped worrying what God wanted them to do. The assumption that premodern people *had* to have as many offspring as possible is not supported by this evidence.

Faustine Perrin (2022) suggests that the Enlightenment/the Revolution/anticlericalism led to a rising level of felt equality for French women in marriages, so that they were better able to assert their desire to bear fewer children.

In the present day, this ties into the work of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, whose article on The Downside of Fertility I just read because she talked about Bujold's Vorkosigan series in an economics podcast. TLDR: Bearing & raising children is hard work, labor even, and women are reluctant to do it if they don't have help.

Re: Church Moderation & Class Issues

Sep. 27th, 2025 02:32 pm
lettersfromeleanorrigby: (Waldorf Statler)
[personal profile] lettersfromeleanorrigby
I agreed, with internal but unvoiced reservations, to serve as co-Moderator of my church council this year (and probably next, but I left my self an opt-out for my Dad's health) and it has been-- interesting, time-consuming, a little frustrating, occasionally very funny, and a significant reminder of the gap between the working class and the middle class in terms of the middle-class progressive's conception of what it means to really struggle. 

Read more... )

Some travel photos, Sept. 24-26

Sep. 27th, 2025 07:56 am
lettersfromeleanorrigby: (Default)
[personal profile] lettersfromeleanorrigby
I did some photo posts on Tumblr of my trip, first for the covered bridges along US Route 4 between Enfield NH and W. Woodstock, VT, and then for the Enfield Shaker Museum where I stayed overnight two nights to see the museum and the local surroundings.  I'm happy with the new camera, but didn't fuss with processing the photos-- these are just the unadorned jpegs.  It was rainy the first two and a half days I was there and it was pretty miserable-- I didn't get any of the light hiking I would have liked to do done, but made the best of it with seeking out the bridges instead as the counterpoint to the museum. 

I went to the Canterbury Shaker Museum yesterday after the rain broke, and it was sunny, agrarian heaven-- still downloading those pictures but will do a tumblr post there and link here, as well as a blog here about the experience.  

Sept. 15-23

Sep. 27th, 2025 07:07 am
lettersfromeleanorrigby: (Default)
[personal profile] lettersfromeleanorrigby
Hah, in the rush to get work and church and home and pet & etc. done, of course this fell by the wayside. 

Work has been busy with the new President onboarding and now the CFO retiring.  I was inundated with staffing agencies trying to send me candidates and I had to keep saying no, and one of them tried to go around me only to get slapped back by the CFO and the Controller-- and now they go in the "never work with you" pile.  It's just been a lot, and open enrollment is soon, too, so now through Christmas will be flat out.   We also had a bit of a COVID outbreak after a staff gathering and while no one was seriously ill, notifying folks and making sure bosses were in the know about department impacts was one more thing to add to the pile.   Our vaccination clinic is Tues. the 30th, but in the outbreak a lot of our well folks went and got vaccinated early (thank you, Massachusetts governor, for being sane and ordering unrestricted patient access to the vaccine) so I'm not sure how many people will show up.  

It was probably unwise to take last week off-- and I did have to work Monday AM and Tuesday for an hour or two-- but I have so much vacation to use up that it's crazy to waste it, and of course, I could use a little downtime.  I did get my room and the dining room better sorted and cleaned (and some pictures hung that have been stacked, gathering dust) before the asleep overnight PA came, and she and Dad both reported that things went well.  It's so expensive, though, for private pay-- $35/hr for asleep coverage, $40/hr for awake.  He needs it in that if he falls out of bed or gets suddenly ill, his cognition goes through the floor and he's not going to manage to find and use the phone to call for help, but of course he's healthy unless it's something out of the blue.  Still, I'm glad it was an option-- and that I make enough money that it was only uncomfortable, not impossible.  

Not looking forward to looking at email tomorrow afternoon, but if I don't it'll be an almighty mess.  

One fun thing I did do in the run-up to going away was trade in my camera.  I've been using the range of Canon EOS Rebel DSLRs with a range of zoom, macro, and prime lenses, but the 2019 trip to Rome was a lot between the 95F degree heat every day (in late September), juggling the camera, and Dad being in active heart failure (i.e., had a heart attack and a triple bypass three weeks after we got home) and I never fully processed the photos-- or trauma-- and pretty much stopped lugging the camera around.  I have missed taking pictures but've become hostile to the weight and gear-ness of the camera I had, and all the fussiness of processing photos in Lightroom (plus Adobe's shitty business practices), so I just never really picked it up again.  

I was able to do some research, though, and decided a bridge camera was the way to go.  With the trade of my camera and lenses I ended up only paying a third of the final price (and I appreciate the manager showing me I could make more money trying to sell it myself even as I told him one of the reasons I was trading down was that the gearhead aspects took the fun out of it for me) and the new camera is smaller, lighter, easy to use, and has good menu options for shooting manual or auto, as well as some interesting preset filters I need to try out.  I took 400 photos during this trip, however, and like them a lot.  I've got to figure out some free Lightroom alternative for the purpose of tagging and processing, but that's secondary to enjoying getting out there with my camera again.  

Profile

syredronning: (Default)
syredronning

March 2020

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
1516171819 2021
22232425262728
293031    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags