Oxford University Press's Blog, page 222

The ‘New Woman’ & American literature

In the late 19th and early 20th-century America, a new image of womanhood emerged that began to shape public views and understandings of women’s role in society. With the suffrage and labor movements, the “new woman” emerged. These modern women were attending colleges, rejecting domesticity, asserting themselves politically in public, and becoming a part of the cultural landscape through literature. As the 12th century progresses, the voices of women pushed for more self-discovery and freedom from society’s traditional limitations.

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature delves into some of the most prominent literary figures in the 20th century that shaped the ideas of modern womanhood.

EARLY 20TH CENTURY

Edith Wharton (24 January 1862 – 11 August 1937): Edith Wharton’s novels explore the lives of upper-class women confined by the expectations imposed on them by a materialistic and acquisitive society. In her novels, Wharton challenges wealthy New York City society and discusses how it created a generation of sheltered women disconnected from the world beyond tea parties, balls, and dressmakers. Wharton condemns the society for making these women ornamental and useless, while simultaneously depicting them as sabotaging themselves through an acceptance of the definition of women as decorative objects.

Gertrude Stein (3 February 1874 – 27 July 1946): Gertrude Stein is cited as the leader of the female branch of the modernist movement. She shattered all literary expectations as she released language from its common meanings, expelled linear time from the narrative, and reinvented the reader’s relationship to the text.

Image credit: Zora Neale Hurston by US Library of Congress. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Zora Neale Hurston (7 January 1891 – 28 January 1960): Generally acknowledged as Hurston‘s best novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the story of Janie Crawford, repressed by prevalent racism, sexism, and poverty. Janie grows into a woman with a greater understanding of the complexities of self-definition. Hurston’s story stands as a testament to the strength of a generation of African-American women striving for a place in the world.

POST-WAR PERIOD

Gwendolyn Brooks (7 June 1917 – 3 December 2000): Gwendolyn Brooks made history by being the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collection, Annie Allen (1949). In her work, she uses black idiom and slang as a vehicle to express frustrations with society’s oppression.

Flannery O’Conor (25 March 1925 – 3 August 1964): Southern writer Flannery O’Connor offered a radical revision to the very fabric of American life through her Southern Gothic literature. In her novels, her women characters are defined not by their perfection but by the very flaws that make them vulnerable to seduction, violence, or disappointment. Her female characters stand as a testament to the terrible beauty of faults and foibles, and O’Connor shines a blinding light on cultural expectations of perfection.

Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 – 11 February 1963): Sylvia Plath‘s poems utilize simple language and repetition to craft poems about the most difficult of subjects: paternal relationships, motherhood, depression. Plath’s poems begin in the personal but, by incorporating the metaphysical symbolism of the natural world, they become universal statements about one’s place in the universe.

Image credit: Sylvia Plath by Giovannetti. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

LATE 20TH CENTURY-PRESENT

Toni Morrison (b. 18 February 1931): In December 1993, Toni Morrison reached the capstone of her career, attaining the highest literary accolade possible: the Nobel Prize in literature. This distinction was made even sweeter by the fact that Morrison was the first African-American recipient and only the eighth woman in the world honored in this way.

Joyce Carol Oates (b. 16 June 1938): Joyce Carol Oates’s ability to write in so many literary forms, the range and depth of her work have made her undeniably, and deservedly, one of the most distinguished and celebrated American authors.

Alice Walker (b. 9 February 1944): When Alice Walker was eight years old her brother blinded her in one eye with a BB gun. In Walker’s view, a lifetime of partial blindness provided a fitting metaphor to help her understand the burden of going through life with a part of your body violently excised by a society that does not take seriously the pain inflicted on the bodies of girls.

Sandra Cisneros (b. 20 December 1954): Sandra Cisneros‘s straightforward style, interchanging between Spanish, English, and Spanglish, and commitment to telling stories about ordinary people offer an essential portrait of Latina life and culture in the larger context of American culture. Sandra Cisneros’s two collections of short stories, The House on Mango Street (1984) and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) incorporated Mexican myths while presenting Latinas as continuously creating a vital, contemporary culture.

Explore more women who changed the American literary canon in the 20th century.

Featured image: “Toni Morrison by West Point – The U.S. Military Academy.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Financial capability for all

Millions of U.S. families find themselves in precarious financial circumstances, living on the wrong side of the growing income and wealth divide. Despite the recent economic recovery, average wages buy about the same amount of goods and services as they did 40 years ago. The federal minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, buys less today than it did in 1968. Income increases have mostly gone to top income earners. Meanwhile, household wealth is even more concentrated. The top 20% of households own 90% of wealth, with an average net worth of nearly $3 million in 2016. Meanwhile, net worth for the bottom 40% of households is negative $8,900, that is, they owe more than they own.

The implications for people’s standard of living are far reaching. Families are having trouble earning enough income and they lack a financial cushion to get them through hard times. Many cannot afford to invest in their children’s future. Meanwhile, safety net programs that can provide a protection during hard times have been diminished. Cash assistance for poor families reached less than one quarter of families in poverty in 2016, compared to more than two-thirds of families in poverty 20 years earlier.

At the same time, families lack tools to improve their standard of living. An estimated 45 million people do not have a credit history or have unscoreable credit records. This inhibits their ability to obtain loans at reasonable rates, but also curtails their ability to acquire necessities of modern life.

How can millions of financially challenged families be reached with support that can build their capability?

When money poor and credit poor families want to build financial security for their family, they have few places to turn for guidance and support. Well-to-do families buy financial and legal advice, and they also benefit from an array of job benefits and tax policies that build their family’s financial security. Meanwhile, disadvantaged families make do on their own, turning to family and friends, or falling prey to predatory schemes that promise to get people out of financial trouble.

How can millions of financially challenged families be reached with support that can build their capability?

Human service professionals work every day “among the people,” as Nobel laureate Jane Addams pointed out. They are in organizations that serve every kind of vulnerable group, from all walks of life. Tens of thousands of community-based organizations and their staff day in and day out deliver support and services to vulnerable populations. These services include, emergency housing to homeless families, offer counseling to victims of domestic violence, prepare foster youth for independent living, link disabled people with vocational opportunities, assist the formerly incarcerated in finding a residence and a job, and so much more. .

With just a modest change in how human service professionals are trained, they could be mobilized to improve the financial capability of disadvantaged populations by providing basic financial guidance and counseling to disadvantaged populations. Assessment of a person’s financial capability could accompany assessments of health and psychological functioning.   These professionals could link families to financial benefits and low-cost financial services, help them manage debt and build credit, and refer particular cases for specialized financial and legal assistance.

Innovators, such as The Financial Clinic  Fund—along with community credit unions and other community-based organizations—are leading the way. They are demonstrating that this strategy for building financial capability is not “pie in the sky”—it can be done, it is happening. The Financial Clinic trains human service professionals in financial coaching techniques through its program called the Change Machine. A randomized study of financial coaching at the Financial Clinic demonstrated that low- and moderate-income clients were successful in saving and paying down debt.

The reality, however, is that poverty is not born of individual circumstances and it cannot be eradicated on the individual level. Poverty is a systemic problem and the voices of human service professionals are also needed on the policy level.

Social workers created Child Development Accounts (CDAs), which today provide an account for all children in Maine, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and soon in Pennsylvania, as well as San Francisco and St. Louis, with New York City and Los Angeles just getting started. The goal of this work is an account for every newborn, with greater public support for children in the poorest families. Human service professionals can help design and shape many other policies and programs that build financial capability for the whole population.

This is in many ways a return to roots. A hundred years ago, a normal part of social work practice was financial—working with newly urbanized families on budgets, consumption, saving, and risks of indebtedness. In this way, social workers played a key role in adaptation of families to industrial society. Unfortunately, social work financial practice was dropped about mid-20th century in favor of more psychological approaches.

By returning to these roots, basic financial capability supports could be made available to literally millions of disadvantaged families that today lack these resources. Social workers, counselors, and other human service professionals can contribute to new practices and policies that build the financial security for all families, not just the wealthy ones.

Photo by Sam Truong Dan on Unsplash

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Tips for Surviving and Thriving During the Foundation Programme

As the new university year begins, many newly-qualified trainee doctors will have already started their training for The Foundation Programme. The UK Foundation Programme (FP) is a two-year standard training programme, established in 2005, for all UK trainee doctors which builds upon medical school training with the generic skills and capabilities needed during specialty training.

The Foundation Programme ensures that newly qualified doctors can advance their clinical and professional skills in a practical workplace environment, dealing with common and rare clinical situations across the specialties to effectively prepare for their core, specialty, or general practice training. Ultimately, it aims to guarantee that all doctors can deliver safe and effective patient care and aspire to excellence in their professional development, in accordance with GMC guidance. 

Naturally it’s both an exciting and daunting time for newly qualified doctors, so we’ve created an interactive factsheet outlining the top tips and tricks from the latest edition of the Oxford Handbook for the Foundation Programme that you’ll need to excel during this vital time in your career and make the most out of your foundation years. 

Hover over the stethoscope icon to gain access to open access resources for further information and support. 

If you would like to write for the Oxford Student Room, please send us an email with your ideas.

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Consent on campus minisode [podcast]

This episode of The Oxford Comment includes discussion of sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

As students head back to university to start their fall semester, the conversation of consent will no doubt surround them on campus. But what can actually be defined as consent? Where do students learn what consent actually means?

On this minisode of The Oxford Comment, we hop on a call with Jes Lukes, co-owner of “A Room of One’s Own” an independent book store in the heart of college town Madison, Wisconsin. Jes provides insight to some new initiatives by college campuses to acknowledge the culture of consent, including some applicable literature recommendations.

Follow @roomofonesownbooks on Instagram and @RoomofOnesOwn on Twitter as well as their website, www.roomofonesown.com.

RAINN: 800.656.4673 (U.S) www.rainn.org


National Rape Crisis Helpline: 0808.802.9999 (U.K)


Rape and Domestic Violence Services: 1.800.424.017 (AUS)


Rape Crisis Europe: www.rcne.com (International)

Featured image credit: Unsplash Backpack by Scott Webb. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Moral resilience – how to navigate ethical complexity in clinical practice

Clinicians are constantly confronted with ethical questions. Recent examples of healthcare workers caught up in high-profile best-interest cases are on the rise, but decisions regarding the allocation of the clinician’s time and skills, or scare resources such as organs and medication, are everyday occurrences. The increasing pressure of “doing more with less” is one that can take its toll.

Dr Cynda Rushton is a professor of clinical ethics, and a proponent of ‘moral resilience’ as a pathway through which clinicians can lessen their experience of moral distress, and navigate the contentious issues they may face with a greater sense of integrity. In the video series below, she provides the guiding principles of moral resilience, and explores how they can be put into practice.

Ethical challenges for clinicians


 

 


What is the cause of moral distress in healthcare professionals?


 

 


Fee vs free: moral distress in other healthcare systems


 

 


What is moral resilience?


 

 


Using moral resilience in everyday practice


 

 


Does society contribute to moral distress in healthcare?


 

 


Featured Image Credit: Lonely Tree by Mahkeo. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Animal of the month: the evolution of the imperfect honeybee

Honey bee colonies have historically been considered as marvels of evolution resulting in perfectly cooperative and harmonious societies, and exemplars of what we humans might achieve. This is an appealing image to many, but it is of course a caricature. Nobody is perfect, not even honey bees. As with any complex social system, honey bee societies are prone to error, robbery and social parasitism. Although there is only a single queen, the honey bee colony is composed of many subfamilies as the queen can mate with over 50 drones, using the sperm from all to produce offspring. The resulting web of subfamilies facilitates worker specialization, but also provides huge potential for intracolonial conflict.

Although efficient mechanisms are in place to prevent overt conflict among the subfamilies in the hive this is far from being perfect, and the apparently harmonious, cooperative whole has a considerable dark side. It is full of individual mistakes, obvious maladaptations and evolutionary dead ends. There is conflict, cheating, worker inefficiency, and unfair reproduction strategies.

The fact that honey bee colonies get by remarkably well in spite of many seemingly odd biological features is surprising. However, these “aberrations” are central to fully understanding the social organization of the colony.

Image credit: ‘bee-bees-honey’ by dmohanna. CC0 via Pixabay.

Aberrations observed within colonies include:

Fierce competition among the colony members using both physical force and chemical signaling where individual interests are often pursued at the expense of the colony, in some cases resulting in social parasitism. For example, Cape honeybee workers can invade foreign colonies to replace the native queen and take over the host colony. As these workers can produce female offspring that are also parasitic, the colony will eventually die as there are no workers to take care of the brood. The parasites need to find new host colonies in order to maintain the parasitic lineage.
Honey bees have evolved risky, sub-optimal and seemingly maladaptive solutions to organizational problems compared to other closely related social bee species. Reproductive swarming behavior is an excellent example of such a high risk strategy. As the old queen swarms with half of the colony’s worker force she needs to stall egg laying well before the actual swarming. This is important as she needs to decrease her ovary size to regain flight ability. Thus the colony has to suffer from a huge brood gap in the middle of the season when it actually seems more efficient to invest in a bigger colony size. In addition the swarm sets off without any clue where to find a new nesting site. Instead they fly off to the nearest tree branch to bivouac for several days before an appropriate nesting site has been identified and agreed upon by all members of the colony. Stingless bees show us how efficient swarming can be organized. The old queen stays in the nest and reproductive colony fission only starts once a new nesting site has been established. Workers then guide the newly mated queen to the new site when all is in place.
Honey bees have a highly specific mode of sex determination controlled by a single gene (complementary sex determiner, or csd). When an individual is heterozygous at this locus it is a female, if it is hemizygous like the haploid drone it becomes a male. Diploid individuals that are homozygous at the sex allele become diploid males that are sterile and in honey bees cannibalized by the workers. This causes serious problems in inbred colonies as up to 50% of the brood will be diploid males if the queen mates with a drone that shares a sex allele with her. Clearly any genetic system with more than one locus would be much more adaptive since it would result in a much lower frequency of diploid drones.
A clear example of a foraging failure is the robbery of bird seed from a bird feeder that we observed a few years ago. Honey bee workers recruited their nestmates to the feeder and numerous foragers were frantically rolling in the seed grains to fill their pollen basket on the hind legs (corbicula) with one seed each. This was achieved much faster than flying from flower to flower slowly filling the corbiculae with a pollen pellet. At the same time the birds were chased away as they were loath to confront the bees. Eventually the dish was emptied. Yet in the hive the drama must have been great because the bees cannot use the seed grains as food. This is a lose-lose situation that is clearly maladaptive and one of the rare cases where innate behavior can result in the reduction of the fitness of all the parties involved.

Honey bees are an exceptionally successful species with the ability to survive in the wild, in cities, in habitats from deserts to rainforests and even in beekeepers’ boxes. They get by because they have adequate but not perfect skills, and as with all social insects, it is the large number of individuals in the colony that compensates for a lack of perfection.

Featured image credit: ‘lavender-bee-summer’ by castleguard. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Are you an informed voter? [quiz]

With the 2018 U.S. midterm elections quickly approaching, it’s important that Americans feel prepared to enter the voting booths. To help our U.S. readers feel better prepared on election day, we created a quiz to test your knowledge on key political issues.

Referencing a selection of titles from our What Everyone Needs to Know® series, we collected questions about a variety of topics, including climate change, healthcare reform, and the news media. Take the quiz to find out what you need to know more about before November.

 

Featured image credit: Question Doubt Problem by Tumisu. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Coming together side by side: avocational musicians performing with professionals

“It’s such a big deal for non-pros to come in and play with the orchestra, throwing themselves into the ‘deep end.’ Our orchestra musicians are respectful and supportive of them,” says Larissa Agosti, who coordinates the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra’s Rusty Musicians and B-Sides programs, which let avocational musicians perform side-by-side with this Canadian orchestra’s pros.

Avocational musicians can use some encouragement, according to the more than 300 non-pros interviewed for the book Making Time for Making Music. Nagging feelings of self-doubt in their musical skills blocked many for a while from doing what they have since come to love—making music in their spare time. Finding supportive ensembles, teachers, and Meetup groups helped many take the plunge. Now, professional orchestras have joined the avocational-musician support team, spurred by the success of the Baltimore Symphony’s programs for non-pros that began in 2010.

Marin Alsop had launched Rusty Musicians programs earlier with the Bournemouth Symphony in the UK (which still has them) before introducing them in the U.S. when she became the Baltimore Symphony’s music director. Rusty Musicians programs invite avocational musicians to sign up, without an audition, to sit side-by-side with the orchestra’s pros to rehearse classical repertoire under a professional conductor’s baton. As a one-day experience, this is an affordable option for an orchestra, with moderate tuition fees covering expenses. Several other orchestras now offer similar programs: Edmonton’s B-Sides, the Richmond Symphony’s Come and Play, the Pacific Symphony’s OC Can You Play With Us, and the Columbus Symphony’s Side-by-Side with the CSO. One Columbus participant notes, “This was a life changing event for me.” Another adds, “To be surrounded by strings and woodwinds and brass and all the percussion—it was incredible.”

The Baltimore Symphony also introduced a more comprehensive, weeklong program for non-pros: BSO Academy Week. Again, there is no audition, but music-reading ability is a must. For a week during the summer, non-pros rehearse, coached by BSO musicians, and also attend lectures and workshops. At the final performance, they sit side-by-side on stage with the BSO. There is a chamber music option and an educator track, offering credits from a local university. “We cheer people on, encourage them to do the best that they can, and be happy, even if it’s not technically perfect,” says Jane Marvine, the BSO English horn player who helped create Academy Week.

In this photo from the book Making Time for Making Music, Dr. Deborah Edge, a retired Washington physician, is performing in the center of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s double bass section during a Rusty Musicians side-by-side workshop. Image credit: © Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, photographer Kenneth Adam.

A weeklong program is more costly than a one-day affair, both for the orchestra and for participants, although the Baltimore Symphony has a grant which lets it offer some financial aid. Even so, other orchestras have adopted this format, including the Edmonton Symphony with its Rusty Musicians Summer Camp. The Buffalo Philharmonic teams up with the World Doctors Orchestra for a five-day summer option. This fall, the Pacific Symphony is offering a modified version of this format—a Chamber Edition, with fewer pros from the orchestra needing to be paid to serve as coaches than with a full orchestra program. Non-pros are grouped into five chamber ensembles that have three rehearsals each over a month, leading to a concert performance.

The goal for these programs is to serve “as a community builder,” explains Edmonton’s Larissa Agosti, “to connect the orchestra with the community.” Alison Levinson, director of arts engagement for the Pacific Symphony, notes that there is a “robust community of avocational musicians in Orange County, with a lot of community ensembles. We are looking for a way to draw them closer to us and for us to be a resource for them.” Many who sign up for the Pacific Symphony’s side-by-sides are experienced players who want to step up their musicianship and also do some networking, learning from each other about local non-pro ensembles to join. “It’s important to know what’s going on in the community,” adds Ms. Levinson, “so the big orchestra in town isn’t usurping small community ensembles that are already doing great work.”

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra supports avocational musicians by creating its own community band and orchestra for local non-pros to join, with DSO musicians leading sectionals, conducting, and sometimes performing as soloists. “Many people leave the music world because of the pressure to be perfect,” says Nelson Rodríguez-Parada, the ensembles’ manager. “I’ve tried to remove those notions. We can still strive for excellence, but let’s manage expectations. What’s the difference if the musicians and audience are truly enjoying themselves.”

The Berlin Philharmonic had a more global goal in mind for its BE PHIL ensemble, organized in 2018. It invited non-pros from around the world to send in a videotaped audition. After receiving 1,900 applications, a jury of 12 Philharmonikers selected 101 non-pros from about thirty countries to come to Berlin to perform Brahms First Symphony. A Berlin Phil violinist rehearsed them for two days and then its music director, Sir Simon Rattle, rehearsed the non-pros for another two days and conducted the final performance. “He said it made no difference whether they are professional or amateurs, it’s about people who love music. He could feel their love for music,” says Andrea Tober, the Berlin Phil’s director of education. Participants had to pay their own travel and hotel expenses, although she hopes to change that next time. “We want to continue this, to spread a message at a time when people talk about separation and building walls. We want to show the idea of coming together—and thinking about things that we share and we all love.”

Featured image credit: “Cello” by Mathew Bajoras. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Sitting down with author and historian Colin G. Calloway

The National Book Award is an American literary prize given out each year by the Nation Book Foundation. Five judging panels made up of writers, literary critics, librarians, and booksellers determine a long list, award finalists, and award winners for a selection of categories.

We recently had the opportunity to catch up with historian Colin G. Calloway, whose book The Indian World of George Washington has been longlisted for the Nonfiction National Book Award. In the interview below, Colin discusses the research behind his book, the complicated relationship between George Washington and Native Americans, and his one key takeaway from Washington’s life.

When you were researching Washington, Native Americans, and early American life for this book, what did you learn that was new or surprising to you?

I knew that Washington was an avid speculator in Indian lands, but I was not aware of the lengths to which he went to acquire lands at the expense of former comrades-in-arms.

I knew the broad outlines of the Indian policy Washington formulated, and the destructive assaults he launched in Indian country, but I was not aware of the amount of thought and worry he devoted to trying to treat Indian peoples fairly and honorably, as he understood those terms. His concerns never stood in the way of acquiring Indian land, but I found I could not simply dismiss them as hypocrisy.

Image credit: Colin G. Calloway. Photo provided by Meg Calloway. Please do not use without permission.

Could you describe George Washington’s relationship with Native Americans?

I find it ambivalent. On the one hand, he demonstrates the prejudices of his times, has a lifelong obsession with getting Indian land—either for himself or for his nation—and initiates policies and campaigns that have devastating effects in Indian country. On the other, he struggles with how to reconcile expansion over Indian land with just treatment of Native people. As a result, some Indian people after his death remembered him as “Town Destroyer”; others revered his memory as a president who, in contrast with some of his successors, at least tried to deal justly with Native people.

George Washington’s legacy has led to him being referred to as both the “great father” and the “Town Destroyer.” Could you elaborate on why both these titles are fitting?

The two descriptions seem contradictory but are actually two sides of the same coin. Washington fathered a nation that was built on Indian land. The growth of the nation demanded the dispossession of Indian people. Washington hoped the process could be bloodless and that Indian people would give up their lands for a “fair” price and move away. But if Indians refused and resisted, as they often did, he felt he had no choice but to “extirpate” them and that the expeditions he sent to destroy Indian towns were therefore entirely justified.

After learning more about Washington’s relationship with Native Americans, do you think that readers will think differently of Washington and his legacy as one of our founding fathers?

I hope that readers will not see the book as an attempt to make George Washington look bad, although, obviously, any frank examination of his career as a land speculator and his record on Indian relations reveals a darker side to the first president than that we usually see. I hope instead that readers will have a greater appreciation of the presence and power of Indian nations in the formative era of US history, of the extent to which Washington’s life was interwoven with Native America, and of Washington’s role in developing policies that permanently affected Native America.

If you could impart one key takeaway from Washington’s life, what would it be?

Indian people and Indian lands played a crucial role in shaping the life of the man who shaped the nation.

Featured image credit: “conservatory-coffee-plants-table-1031494” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay.

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The bride all dressed in white bows out [part 2]

So where did the word bride come from? Granted, the initial meaning of bride is not entirely clear, but neither is it hopelessly opaque. Whatever the interpretation, the bride has always been a woman who will soon become a wife, and the mystery surrounding the sought-after etymology comes as a surprise, regardless of whether the initial sense of the noun was “the woman to be married,” “the woman after the consummation of the marriage rite,” or even “daughter-in-law” ~ “a new female member of the adopting family.” We are partly in the dark because we don’t know whether the word is ancient, with its root in the misty Indo-European, or a Germanic coinage. As noted in the post two weeks ago, bride has exact cognates in all the Germanic languages, but nowhere else. However, that need not have been such a formidable obstacle in our search for its origin.

The strange thing about the word for “bride” is its obscurity not only in Germanic (this fact was also noted in the previous post). The Celtic word is equally impenetrable, and the Slavic name remains a matter of debate. What is so mysterious about it? Are all such words really opaque, or do the benighted etymologists sometimes seek the answer in a wrong place? In each language group, the problems are different, so that a clever blow won’t solve all of them.

The following Latin phrase has been found in a text by a third-century Latin grammarian: “Venus Mater quae Frutis dicitur” (“Mother Venus who is called Frutis”). Frutis is akin to Latin frutex and means “shrub, bush.” On discovering Frutis, those who associated the word bride with the consummation of marriage and emphasized the aspect of fertility in bride were ready to announce the problem solved. But, presumably, we need a word meaning “young woman” or “wife-to-be,” or something like it, rather than “bush,” even if the reference is to a fruit-bearing shrub. To make matters worse, nothing is known about Frutis. Perhaps it is a garbled name of Aphrodite transmitted to the Romans by Etruscan speakers. After all, no one has ever called Venus Frutis (except in the text quoted above).

Is this the prototype of the bride? Some people may have doubts. Image credit: Jasmine Jasmine Flower Mock Orange by Capri23auto. Public Domain via Pixabay.Aphrodite, a.k.n. as Frutis? Image credit: Statue of Aphrodite in the Museo delle Terme di Diocleziano by Livioandronico2013. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Among others, Frutis has been compared with the word for “rut; mating season” (German Brunst), with reference to “excitement.” Yet it is hard to imagine that bride originally meant “eager for intercourse, mad with desire.” While speaking about ancient brides, we are in the legal or ritual, rather than emotional or physiological, sphere. In an Old Icelandic farce, the god Thor, accompanied by the wily Loki, flies to the giants’ world (the giants are the gods’ mortal enemies), to regain his hammer. Thor is disguised as the bride of the giant who hopes to marry the goddess Freyja and who believes that he sees her. Thor, forgetting where he is, eats so voraciously and drinks so much that the giant grows suspicious, but Loki puts his mind at rest by saying that the bride has been so anxious for the giant’s embraces, while expecting this encounter, that she has not eaten or drunk anything for a long time. I have great doubts that a similar situation gave rise to the Germanic word for “bride” and will also repeat the rule trodden to death in this blog, namely, that one word of unclear origin should never be invoked for the explanation of another unclear word. When this rule is violated, the result invariably comes out wrong.

In historical research, linguists try to find cognates that look reasonable from the phonetic and the semantic points of view. Yet not only Franz Bopp (an astute and incredibly prolific philologist) but also Jacob Grimm compared bride (that is, Germanic brūth-) with Sanskrit praudhā “bride,” literally “she who has been brought home,” though the vowels don’t match. This comparison has not been fully abandoned even today.

In some cases, initial br– in Germanic goes back to mr-, and there have been attempts to find the evasive etymon along those lines. They don’t look persuasive, and I’ll skip them here. Birth and other br– words seem more promising as the etymons of bride than the words mentioned above. Brood and bread were compared with bride, allegedly meaning “she who produces offspring,” long ago. According to the latest hypothesis known to me, Germanic brūth– may go back to būthr-, with the result that bride meant “planter, begetter.” The more ingenious and convoluted etymological reconstruction is, the greater the chance that it is merely a display of the scholar’s jeu d’esprit, or fantasy run wild.

Askr and Embla, the beginning of humanity. Image credit: Ask and Embla by Robert Engels by Robert Engels (1866-1920). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The impression left by this rundown on the conjectures presented above is that we are on a wrong track. I have no proposal to offer, but I would like to justify my statement by citing two examples showing that etymologists should treat women (or at least the words for “women”) gingerly. Example No. 1. Wife is a word as obscure from the etymological point of view as bride. Numerous attempts have left us nowhere. Here, I was so audacious as to suggest my own etymology (see the post for October 12, 2011; much to my dismay, I see that our correspondents still add comments to old posts; thus, while looking at what I wrote about wife, I discovered for the first time a note added in 2017; how can I be expected to find such additions? Please, always write comments on the page for the most recent post!). If I am correct, the protoform of wife did not originally mean “a female married to a man” but referred to an entire clan (hence the word’s neuter grammatical gender), and all attempts to “decipher” wife as a certain kind of woman, naturally, failed. Example No. 2. A Scandinavian myth tells us that the names of the first human beings were Askr and Embla, originally two trees, but the gods gave them clothes and turned the pair into a man and a woman. Askr means “ash,” but Embla is impenetrable: there is no such tree name. The existing etymologies are uninspiring legerdemain. I suspect that Embla was not a tree name at all, but perhaps some word for “wood”: the pair might designate a stick, part of a sacred tree (Askr), and its recipient (Embla).

A somewhat similar situation confronts us in dealing with bride. Strangely, the bride is supposed to be the person whom the husband takes home, but he is called bridegroom (groom is an alternation of Old Engl. guma “man”; compare German Bräutigam), so “bride’s man.” Shouldn’t the bride have been called the prospective husband’s woman, especially in patriarchal societies? Also, as is known, bridal goes back to bride + ale. Once it was a noun meaning “ale drinking”, but the deceptive group –al turned it into an adjective. Obviously, at the wedding feast, a ceremony of great importance, people drank to the health of both newlyweds (as they still do). Why then only bridal? The Scandinavian word for “wedding” (Swedish bröllop, etc., literally, “bride-running”; the reference to the original custom is not quite clear) also has the root cognate with Engl. bride. Everything in the wedding seems to have centered on the bride.

One gets the impression that initially brūth– was the name of an institution or a ritual rather than of a person. If so, some word beginning with br- may furnish a clue to the origin of bride, but ideally, it should mean “competition” or “dowry,” or “union,” or “progeny”—anything that is connected with the treaty allowing a man and a woman to become husband and wife. Etymologists were probably close to the sought-after root, but the word did not necessarily mean “a nubile woman.” On the other hand, bride may have had a root whose existence we don’t even begin to suspect. By contrast, the history of the words for “husband” is simple. In Germanic, the husband was just “man.” Wife and bride are quite different. The riddle remains unsolved. The important thing is to ask it correctly.

Featured image credit: Rosemary Flowers Blue by Hans. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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