Download Book One Small Plot Of Heaven : Reflections On Family Life By A Quaker Sociologist By Elise
Phillipp Schneeberger
Boulding's Quaker faith played a vital role in her focus and development as a sociologist and peace activist. She found the Religious Society of Friends in young adulthood, but did not have a particularly religious upbringing. Though there was a church near her childhood home that had services in Norwegian (her family had emigrated from Norway), her family did not attend. Her father would read the story of Jesus from the Bible on Christmas Eve, and she knew the Lord's Prayer in Norwegian all her life. Despite the lack of structured religion in her youth, she claims she felt the presence of God as a young child, and when she was 9 years old she began attending a local Protestant church on her own. She developed a relationship with the minister's wife, who served as a spiritual mentor of sorts for the young Elise. In her teens, however, she recalls a longing to know "god" (she often used a lowercase g in referring to God in her personal writings) but felt that "no religion can quite fulfill [her] needs, so [she] will make [her] own religion". She also was strongly influenced by her mother, who in Norway had been involved in peace parades and was a social worker for girls who worked in Norwegian factories. Elise shared her mother's nostalgia for Norway, and always thought of her homeland as a "safe place" until her last year of college when the Nazis invaded it. It was then that she embraced pacifism, and began attending Quaker meetings that she had been introduced to by college friends. She decided that if "safe places" were to exist in the world, she would have to work for them, and this was her calling as a Friend.
Sponsored by an association of professional planners, "The City" premiered at the 1939 World's Fair in New Yorkwhere its producers hoped to influence public opinion and public policy. The director-cinematographer team ofRalph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke, aided by an Aaron Copland score, presented a montage of scenes depictingvarious aspects of city life from quaint New England towns to the industrial blight of Pittsburgh toovercrowded, over-commercialized New York streets to idyllic family-friendly planned communities. A mixture ofstaged and actuality footage illustrated a script by sociologist and literary critic Lewis Mumford from anoutline by documentarian Pare Lorentz. World War II initially stalled acceptance of the film's American dream,but by the late 1940s, veterans eager to take advantage of G.I. home loans helped to fuel its popularity.
Expanded essay byKyle Westphal (PDF, 501KB)
Download book One small plot of heaven : reflections on family life by a Quaker sociologist by Elise
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Director Wayne Wang's adaptation of Amy Tan's novel tells a story of relationships between Chinese-American womenand their Chinese immigrant mothers. The four mothers meet weekly to play Mahjong, tell stories and reminisce.The richly layered plot features key themes including the often complicated relationships between mothers anddaughters, assimilation into a far different culture, wistfulness for aspects of former lifestyles, theintersections between past and present, and the strong bond of family ties between two generations who grew upin vastly different circumstances. Wang's film "Chan Is Missing" was selected to the National Film Registry in1995.
The first social innovation that followed the transplanting of the Negro was the substitution of the West Indian plantation for the tribal and clan life of Africa. The real significance of this change will not appear at first glance. The despotic political power of the chief was now vested in the white master; the clan had lost its ties of blood relationship and became simply the aggregation of individuals on a plot of ground, with common rules and customs, common dwellings, and a certain communism in property. The two greatest changes, however, were, first, the enforcement of severe and unremitted toil, and, second, Page 4the establishment of a new polygamy--a new family life. These social innovations were introduced with much difficulty and met determined resistance on the part of the slaves, especially when there was community of blood and language. Gradually, however, superior force and organized methods prevailed, and the plantation became the unit of a new development. The enforcement of continual toil was not the most revolutionary change which the plantation introduced. Where this enforced labor did not descend to barbarism and slow murder, it was not bad discipline; the African had the natural indolence of a tropical nature which had never felt the necessity of work; his first great awakening came with hard labor, and a pity it was, not that he worked, but that voluntary labor on his part was not from the first encouraged and rewarded. The vast and overshadowing change that the plantation system introduced was the change in the status of women--the new polygamy. This new polygamy had all the evils and not one of the safeguards of the African prototype. The African system was a complete protection for girls, and a strong protection for wives against everything but the tyranny of the husband; the plantation polygamy left the chastity of Negro women absolutely unprotected in law, and practically little guarded in custom. The number of wives of a native African was limited and limited very effectually by the number of cattle he could command or his prowess in war. The number of wives of a West India slave was limited chiefly by his lust and cunning. The black females, were they wives or growing girls, were the legitimate prey of the men, and on this system there was one, and only one, safeguard, the character of the master of the plantation. Where the master was himself lewd and avaricious the degradation of the women was complete. Where, on the other hand, the plantation system reached its best development, as in Virginia, there was a fair approximation of a monogamic marriage system among the slaves; and yet even here, on the best conducted plantations, the protection of Negro women was but imperfect; the seduction of girls was frequent, and seldom did an illegitimate child bring shame, or an adulterous wife punishment to the Negro quarters.
The number of girls who would resent solicitations to evil is not a small one and among those who have been carefully reared, who have had something of moral training, the percentage of those who go astray is a small one. The number of homes where the pure ideal of family life exists has increased constantly since I have been in the South. There are some pure homes among the poor and illiterate. Among those who are educated the dishonored homes are few.
Eloise Dunlap, Ph.D. is a sociologist and graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. She has extensive qualitative experience in research and analysis with African-American families, drug users, drug dealers, distressed households, sex workers, and with drug-abusing families. Her work is rooted in an attempt to understand violence, drug use and markets, male-female and family relations and whether and how these relationships contribute to African-American family instability. Dr. Dunlap has conducted survey research, focus groups, intensive ethnographic studies, including lengthy in-depth interview and detailed observations in many African-American households, communities, drug settings, and a variety of inner city social context. Her research has been focused upon the nature of family interaction patterns and how the presence of drug users/sellers affects family life.
The Berkeley state of mind is also a bubble: a center of intellectual narcissism, radical parochialism, and social hypocrisies. A male sociologist told me to forget about pursuing family life because to dedicate oneself to the sociologists calling was a full-time endeavor (unless, of course, one had a wife). Later, in the early 1990s, I was proud to have sociologist Jim Stockinger as my son's pre-school teacher, demonstrating the effects of Berkeley sociology even on small children!