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History 104A, October 26: Miss America in a Feudal Society

Okay. This meeting will now come to order. Please remember that

Friday there is no Kirshner to hassle or to hassle you. I found out

this morning that my wife's father is dying. She lives in Oklahoma

and she's heading out there, but I may have to go out there for a

funeral. That's not something that I may enjoy; so it may

accidentally give you a day or two. I'm not sure when it will happen

because I can't go out this weekend if it happens because I'm going to

San Diego. In any case, I will try to send out an e-mail to keep you

from walking up the hill in the rain, if you will.

We were dealing with chess as a symbol of, if you will, medieval

Europe and its development to get a picture of what the main role of

life during the period was. I would like to do a two different things

today, basically talk about the futile society -- shush, please -- the

feudal society of medieval Europe as well as feudalism itself. And as

far as feudalism itself is concerned, you basically do have another

chart in your packet which sort of has little castles sitting there at

the end. You have your packet with you? There's these little

diagrams that you use in kindergarten to help students learn, but I

thought it might help you. Before we do, we talked a little about

chess -- my next topic that I wanted to deal with directly as well

tying to this, is the Miss America pageant. You have to keep some

interest going here. Let's start out with one of those things that at

least keeps your interest for at least five minutes and then you can

go back to sleep.

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About 1970-71, I was teaching at a university in Florida and

there was a young woman in class -- I don't think I told you this

story, did I? That always came in wearing a trench coat. Did I

mention that story to you at all? She was quite beautiful; but the

sort of raincoat that she wore all the time, it didn't make any sense

because she wasn't raining outside. She was actually in two or three

of my classes. And all the guys were sort of taken with her and of

course I could see why. And you know how guys are, since there are a

lot of guys here. They like to hang around beautiful women just so

they can fantasize, so they get close making belief to their friends

making locker talk. Of course if guys don't hang around you women,

then you realize -- oh, okay.

A (laughing).

THE PROFESSOR: In any case, one day she comes into my office and

she was doing a paper on feminism and she wanted some direction. I'm

not exactly sure why, because we were teaching under graduate division

level courses, but she had these other courses as well. And her name

was something like Fucks or something like that. It almost sounded

like the word itself. And I don't know what brought it on, but she

mentioned that she had been on the Tonight Show and that Jerry

Lewis -- do you still know the name about the Jerry Lewis? There's

something about Jerry Lewis that the French loved. In any case, he

was making fun of her name and Johnny Carson who was the Tonight Show

host at the time, wasn't on that night. And I said, Well, what were

you doing on the Tonight Show? And she said, Well, I was in the

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Miss America pageant. Oh, I said, okay. You know how I am. I get

interested in asking questions and finding out a little bit about that

part of it. And it just always so happened that I had just received a

new book that I was later to use in the class there and here. It went

out of print. And I've have actually read one article out of it

called "Hang Ups from Way Back" and it dealt with the 1969

Miss America pageants. That was the pageant, by the way, where the

feminist protesters protested the Miss America pageant because it was

seen as a symbol of sexism and making women nothing but sex objects.

Did I mention that at all? That was the pageant supposedly as well

that they burned their bras in protest. Of course that story was sort

of made up but the men loved telling it -- yeah, they burned their

bras and it made a little small fire, that's all.

The other approach of the other element of sexism that went on.

And I gave it to her to sort of take a look at. And she started

reading through it. Of course the article is fairly interesting. It

dealt with the whole development of the Miss America pageant from

medieval Europe, and that certainly to me was interesting in and of

itself. And pointed out, for example, that the guy who sang "Here she

comes Miss America," Burt Parks, was what me in New York used the call

a swisher. It's a male who walks and acts like a female but dresses

like a male. In other words, extremely effeminate. It's a new

addition to your vocabulary for the test. And how the Miss America

had to be protected because they had to be reflective of the pure

virgin and how there were bodyguards which she told me were true.

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They weren't allowed to go out without having protection. They were

watched the whole time. They were not allowed to date during the

pageant, and she was engaged at the time actually. By the way, one of

the interesting elements of the story that she told me was that she

had come from Ohio originally and she lost the Miss Ohio pageant. So

her father moved the family to Kentucky because in about two months

after the Ohio pageant there was going to be the Miss America pageant

qualifier for Miss Kentucky. Of course she won Miss Kentucky. And I

guess there isn't as much competition for the blond blue eyed women in

Kentucky as it is in Ohio. The only people who were in the

Miss America pageant were blond and blue eyed women. Even if they

weren't, they looked like they were blond and blue eyed. I'm not sure

exactly why you did this, if your father pushed you into it.

She's writing this sort of article on feminism anyway. And she

said, Well every woman wants to be placed on a pedestal, wants to be

worshipped, wants to be seen as a Goddess. She said, Doesn't your

wife? Well, no, not really. Of course that was my first wife who --

I may have mentioned to you that she became an organizer for the

communist party. Did I tell you that? After she left me. I do

strange things to women at the end. I said, No, no, she hasn't got

the slightest interest on being on a pedestal. No, no, she wants to

blow them up literally. In fact, that's one of the reasons I got

fired from my job at the university, she dropped this big banner from

the -- remember this was the Vietnam War era, that war before Iraq.

And she dropped this big banner from the library that said "Fuck

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ROTC". Now, the administration wasn't very happy with the professor

whose wife did things like that candidly. I'm not supposed to tell

these personal stories. What the hell, I'm getting so old. Somebody

has got to hear this crap.

In any case, she looked at me sort of strange. And then she went

on the typical excuse that women have for beauty pageants, We got

college scholarships. So I give her this article and she's going

through it and again she's says, Oh, no, no, this woman's mother was a

real bitch. She wore pink and she didn't wear that white outfit. And

it was just historical. She's talking about all these elements of

riding around in the car and the glory she got from it and how she was

able to see her boyfriend who was a musician during the period of

time. And the article identified how, in medieval Europe, there was a

different level of oppression for the female and that was making the

female weak and a sex symbol came through by placing the female on the

pedestal. They were perfect. They were pure. They were domestic.

They were submissive. They were goddesses, which meant that men had

to do everything for them because they couldn't do it for themselves.

This was the birth of what we call chivalry. You take care of the

woman. It was the whole sense of you go out and fight for the female.

You go kill or sleigh the dragon. When you go out in the knight's

tale, you go out and joust and have the woman's scarf on your lance --

you've seen the whole images of that sense. Of course what it boils

down to is basically unrequited love.

Have any of you heard the term unrequited love? Basically what

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it means is love from affair. You idealize the woman as a Goddess.

You place her on the pedestal and you will do anything for her, not

necessarily because you want sex. Of course you're a male, so you do.

But the fact is that just a look or a glance or a kiss on the cheek or

a scarf means absolute fulfillment for life. That is the beauty of

unrequited love. It's love from a distance, love from afar. And it

is worshipping that Goddess that Virgin Mary who bottoms the high

value of actually Christianity and Catholicism. And so some extent

there are those who bin to believe that she become as the mother dad

guess and that Christianity is seen for worshipping the Virgin Mary

than it is worshipping God and Christ. In fact, that becomes a

problem in the church to the extent that by the 1960s in the Catholic

church there were very few men who went to church. The church was the

gathering place for women. And in 1963 at Vatican II, one of the

things that they -- Pope John the 23rd did, was to remove much of that

women imaging and attempt to bring in more men into the church. That

level of it carries through. I'm jumping around here, but you know

the stories, flip around. They pointed out in the article how Burt

Parks switching across the stage as an effeminate gay guy, if you

will, reflected the fact that your woman was pure and that no man was

going to be able to deflower her, to destroy purity. That this is

America, pure, trustworthy, loyal, helpful, curious, kind, cheerful,

cleaner, and reverent and that the Miss America reflected that purity

that existed there. There were not air brushed in those days. They

didn't have supposedly breast implants or liposuction or anything,

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chin tucks. And nobody did know that they put rubber glue on their

bathing suits so that they wouldn't pull up or things on that nature.

It's amazing of course how they could talk all the time with a smile.

I shouldn't ask if any of you are beauty pageant.

A Shut up.

THE PROFESSOR: I thought I would wake you up there.

A That was hard for me to smile the whole time. My cheeks started

like shaking for so long. Am I frowning now? Because I couldn't feel

my face. And of have on top of that, I couldn't feel my feet.

THE PROFESSOR: Did you put rubber glue on your bathing suit?

A They didn't wear bathing suits.

THE PROFESSOR: That's pretty much has been cut because of the

feminist impact on American society. In any case, that sense of the

unrequited love and the chivalry, it's hard to understand because

today we're not chivalrous anymore. I don't think there are many guys

that will go out of their way to open a door for a woman or pull out

their chair.

A Yeah.

THE PROFESSOR: There are a few, but are there a lot?

A No.

THE PROFESSOR: In my day --

A They do in the beginning.

THE PROFESSOR: In my day that was understandable. The whole

chivalrous idea, if you had a mud puddle, you would day your coat

across it for the woman to walk over the mud puddle without getting

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her shoes wet, walking on the outside so they didn't get splashed with

mud, opening the door.

A There's a commercial where the car is driving and he gets out and

puts his jacket over the puddle. That's hows it is now. They do that

for their car.

THE PROFESSOR: The you know what a guy now sees as sex. I got,

yeah. Opening the garage door instead of the door, helps the car on

with its skirt. That's what they call those things that they put on

the front of the car, a skirt?

A A bra.

THE PROFESSOR: Put their bras on the car. It's a very

interesting analogy.

Hang ups from way back. There was a young man in my class who

ain't so young anymore, about 15 years ago. He still had the knight

in shining armor mentality. He still had this unrequited love. And

he fell in love from afar with this woman he had never dated. And he

just kept talking to her. Well, I've seen him in the last 15 years

and he still talks about her. He talked to her once. Now, we worry

today that somebody like that is going to be a stalker. But no, he

wasn't. He was just strange, from the wrong generation.

A Is there any irony that the end of that entire era are Jane Ayre

and Bronte with the whole chivalrous era was the onset of psychology?

THE PROFESSOR: (laughing). I can't answer that. Freud dealt

with those issues, as you well know. And we certainly know that the

end of the era in part in modern times came with The Feminine Mystique

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book by Betty Freiden which talked about the female being placed on a

pedestal and the female being weak and seen as a sex symbol where men

are supposed to be seen as a provider and protector and a success

symbol. Men achieve success. It doesn't matter what they look like

as long as they have a lot of money and nice cars. And women have to

look good under the arm.

In 1972 -- I can't remember the exact name of the book called The

True Woman was published as the republican fund raiser actually.

Actually, I remember in 1971 a book came out -- I was working in a

democratic campaign and we got the republican book that told

republican wives how to dress and how to look at their husbands. They

had to look at them sort of goo gooed eye, like he is the greatest

hero in the world, so everybody would follow him and he knew that he

controlled you, sort of the Nancy Reagan anorexic look was the

approach that basically was projected. But this was the woman I sort

of alluded to once before, talked about why there were so many

divorces occurring and how republican woman who had been sex symbols

in the sense of looking good under the arm but were not to be sexy.

Anyway, if they engaged in quote/unquote real sex, they would be

considered as whores, prostitutes, and therefore their men would want

to get rid of them. In other words, they had to be cold and

unresponsive so that when men went on to conventions, they could hire

prostitutes for real sex. And that was the book, by the way, that

they told them that sometimes they needed to excite their husband in

different ways just to keep them, perhaps the wearing Saran wrap when

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they came to the door with nothing else on. And of course that was

picked up on Fried Green Tomatoes. We did mention that once before.

A Probably not to everyone.

THE PROFESSOR: That was the other class? All right. In any

case, again, the whole point being that if a woman is to be specially

protected as in medieval Europe, if they're to be isolated, if they

were to be pious, pure, domestic and submissive and yet they're still

to be protected. How did they protect them in medieval Europe?

Chastity belt. Some of you saw the old Woody Allen movie when he got

his hand caught in a chastity belt. I thought that was a classic. I

don't know what the classics are anymore. So the woman would be

protected under that level. Despite being Catholic and being a fallen

woman with the scarlet A, that was the sin of the flesh. And the sin

of the flesh was to be expected, and that's why you had chaperones.

I'm not sure when we lost chaperones in the United States. But in

many countries, especially Catholic countries, up until recently,

women did not go out on a date without a chaperone. However, in

America, we have a Puritan ethic which was talked about a bit

predestination. You were born a saint or a sinner and therefore, if

you sinned, you were dammed forever to hell, to you kept it all in.

And in New England they had a system and I'll talk about this later

with Martin Luther called bundling. When you dated or courted in the

winter, men and women often met each other and talked to each other

under the covers of a bed. But there was a bundling board between

them that would separate them. And you would be surprised. Very few

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guys cannot any ever jumped over the board or took advantages of knot

holes in the board or anything -- that pious, pure respect for the

females.

And I remember a few years ago there were a number of woman who

were telling me this they were running into many problems because

American womens have the self-control in doing whatever they wanted us

to do but many times people from other countries especially from Italy

they would see them as quote/unquote whores and sluts and therefore

they were quote/unquote act uncivilized. In their presence. But once

again, that sense of the unrequited love, that symbol of the virgin,

reflects an attitude that comes out of the medieval period and does

identify the woman that I talked about the other day, who is placed on

the pedestal, Eleanor of Aquatain, Richard Lion Hearted's mother. It

also may explain in part why a Joan of Arc was possible at the latter

part of the period. Considering in our society that it's only been

recent that women have had any role in politics, government, and even

in the military in the last 10 years, and yet they're not supposed to

be in combat and of course they are in some levels. The fact is that

Joan of Arc in the early 1400s was given the command of the French

armies, went into battle as a 17 to 19-year-old woman. She was

executed at 19. And to think that the French or any military force

would allow a woman to command it at the point in time under any

circumstances, but if women are placed in the purity and the ability

to talk to the saints, if they're seen as a Goddess in their own

right, then Joan of Arc reflects that purity of the medieval period,

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that unrequited love from afar as part of what really has developed

out.

Now, I do need to make something clear. When I talk about the

woman being placed on the pedestal, what I'm referring to in medieval

Europe is not the lower class quote/unquote women. I'm referring to

the nobility. Please understand that when people looked at the

non-people who were the serfs and the peasants, their women were

nothing but sheep for sexual purposes. Wait a minute. That doesn't

make any sense. It does if you live in Livermore. You didn't hear

about that where this guy in Livermore had to put up an alarm on his

barn because somebody was breaking in and having sex with his sheep?

You have to bring that one up in ethics.

A How would he figure that out.

THE PROFESSOR: I'm not sure. That's a good question. I have

never been a member of the 4H Club so I can't tell you how they

figured that out. Maybe he left a prophylactic. I didn't want to get

the sleep pregnant.

In any case, it was quite common for the women of the working

class, if you want to talk about that, the peasants the serfs, to be

raped. In some cases in Europe, the nobles insisted that the serf

women, before they get married, have sex with them, that they were to

deflower the women. And we're talking about young girls 12, 13.

Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.

When we talk about a woman being placed on a pedestal, that's a

different level. Again, that same level coming down from the

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unrequited love played its role in the United States in the 50s and

60s. No doubt about it. You saw the low class women as nothing but

sex symbols, not a symbol of a Goddess or something to be worshipped.

And how do you know who were the low class women? The Fonzerelli

group, from Richard Cunningham. It was they were pretty obvious to

tell. They're the ones who had tattoos. I'll let that go by as

people through things at me. We've of course changed today.

Acceptable practices. Equality for all, everybody get tattoos.

One other thing on the story of -- I don't even remember her

name -- the woman that I was talking about. I did ask her about the

trench coat, why she wore it all the time. And she told me that she

was wearing it because she was trying to get guys to not to constantly

approach her. And she was married and this way, she thought, it would

sort of keep them away. But what she was really doing was creating an

air of mystery around herself which she didn't really fully

understand.

The other sense of medieval Europe that we've talked about is the

feudal society and feudalism. They really are separate. As we

identified, the feudal society begins really in the early medieval

period. Feudalism begins somewhere around 1,000 and lasts until

around 1300. Elements of the feudal society lasts actually up through

the 18th century. The feudal society is not ended. Feudalism itself

is ended, but serfdom is not ended in France until 1789 with the

French Revolution. Serfdom is ended in Russia in 1861. Feudalism is

a political system. It's the system of government, if you will, the

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feudal society is just that. It deals with the society. It deals

with the culture. It deals with the economics of the era and the time

with the political overlords that remain but later emerge under the

control of the monarchs of Europe.

As we identified the other day, what we had occurring in Europe

was a constant insecurity with the invasions of the Germanic tribes

into Rome and the Roman world, and then the Norsemen and of course

later the Muslims. Among the groups that we've heard of course and we

talked about war, the vandals that came through in this area, the

Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, which brings us to another typical Kirshner

story. When my older son was about to be born, as parents of course

we didn't know it was a boy and we needed to come up with some boy and

girl names. Well, as you already know, I'm a little weird because I'm

a historian. I decided to look for some names that would reflect on

history tied to me. And I became aware that the Visigoths had entered

into what we call the Iberian peninsula with a group known as the

Alans, another Germanic group. So another group that came into the

area of Spain -- it will teach me to open the map and think of these

things -- were the Swevys. And so I figured, well, you know, if it's

a boy, name it with the Alan; we'll call him Swev. Men shouldn't have

wimpy names. Well, I won't give you any. And if it were a girl,

named after the Visigoths, I thought it would be nice to name her

Vissy, nice feminine meaningless name. But my wife got upset and, No,

we cannot name her Vissy because she'll go around being called pissy

Vissy. It's probably true that I didn't think of those things. But

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my father got really upset with the name Swev. In Judaism, you're

supposed to name your child after a dead grandfather or great

grandparent or something. And he wanted my son named after his father

whose name in English was Lewis, which means that you name it with an

L. So and we decided to change Swev to Lev. Now, I was not aware

that Lev was a name for Leo. He went up with the name Lev of course

when nobody knew the name and they would go -- Leon? They'd come up

with all these things -- Levi -- in today he doesn't have as much of a

problem because there are hundreds of Levs all over California who are

imports from the former Soviet Union. Just to let you know what

happens when you study history.

With the movements, of course, as I identified, the peoples of

Europe began to move inland and they created and identified this last

time too, these self-sufficient units that were economically and

socially and culturally self-sufficient which we call manners. Now,

remember I never said I could draw, so let's deal with the manner. Of

course there was always the manner house which was sort of a semi

castle. And as you know, they had the draw bridge around the mote

that protected it with the alligators type of thing. And then on the

manners, they usually of course had a means of growing products and

agriculture. And for much of the later medieval period in northern

Europe, they had the three field system of agriculture where two

fields to be produced and one left fallow. And there were two ways

that people lived on the manner. They either lived in villages or a

hamlet. Anybody know the difference between a village and a hamlet?

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I didn't either. A village is where people live in an area where they

have their nice little grass huts all living with their own little

plots and then they worked the land for the lord of the manner. A

hamlet is where they live in different areas, not in a combined area.

The village and the hamlet was very common, depending on the area that

they lived in. And the peasants owed 40 days of work to the lord,

which translated to, they had to work the lands 40 days to produce

food for the lords as well. 40 days -- I'm not sure if that was

because of the Biblical 40 years wandering of Jesus being out in the

desert or 40 days, 40 nights. I lose time here. It was obligation

that knights had for their lords. They had to fight for them for 40

days as well. And that whole sense of owing an obligation for 40

days.

And within this self-contained manner -- this is sort of a bridge

here -- there was generally a mill which we pointed out that mills

were not used with the windmill during the Roman empire because they

worked through labor of slaves and the slave labor pushed the basic

grinding stones. But the mills became areas that became very active

on most of the northern European manners. And there often was a

little church near the castle. And if it was a wealthy manner, they

would have a residence priest or friar. Now, remember friars were

people who lived under an order. They were like monks, except they

worked in the land. If they were a friar living and working on a

manner, they were also priests in a sense. Friars alone could not

give the sacraments. You had to be a priest to be able to issue the

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sacraments. In most cases, the priests were circuit priests.

Translation, they moved from place to place and visited different

manners. And they might come to a manner only once a year. So once a

year they would do the baptism. Once a year they would do the

marriage. And once a year, I suppose, they would do a combined

funeral for all those that died.

The medieval manner also had an area where that was private land

of the king. These were the king's forest. And here that land like

Sherwood Forest was not to be entered by any of the peasants or

workers. It was only a land for the king to ride on, to go into and

hunt; and therefore, deer or whatever, and so basically he had the

meat and the peasants lived on basically bread, milk, and beer. By

the way, beer was extremely popular because, of course, water was

polluted. And so by making beer, they, in a sense, saved their

health. It is said that monks working hard in the fields in their

monasteries drank up to 2-gallons of beer a day. And that would

explain why friar Tuck had that big beer belly, which explains the

typical look -- I'm serious on that in that sense. That was the

social condition of medieval Europe. And these manners, in a sense,

were to continue up through, as I pointed, out the 18th and 19th

century without the power but the sense of the lords became a part,

especially in England, of the aristocracy. As some of you know, the

expense of the manner to keep up today, at least the expense of the

manner house, that the lords have has created a situation where many

of the lords in England actually run tours through their castles,

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through their manner houses to pay for the taxes and the upkeep. The

feudal system that created these lords lasted probably until about

1350.

I guess then on Monday I'll talk about a little about feudalism.

If you'll bring your little packets on Monday, we can look at that

nice little chart that's in there. Have a long weekend.

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