Lady Business: The Grinch, Rosie the Riveter, and Ursula K. Le Guin

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixteenth issue, published February 1, 2018.

The State of Our Union

In the past week, powerful men continued to be caught for years of terrible behavior, awards shows continued to provide imperfect referenda on What It All Means, and a local leader continued trying to perfect his Grinch.

But let’s focus on something more cheerful: Death!

Or at least the life appreciations that result from the passing of accomplished people. Obituaries are supposed to provide the definitive, and sometimes the only, summaries of significant lives. As we’ve previously discussed, sometimes they fall down hard—by failing to name the deceased instead of her husband, for example; or as my friend Ilena recently reminded me, by referring to an experienced fashion designer as “Some Rocker’s Girlfriend.” But the best obituaries are great reads, summarizing and elevating and providing that oft-mentioned early draft of history.

It’s been a good few weeks for obituaries/bad few weeks for interesting people! There was Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, who was dogged for decades by reports of his Nazi past and who also, “perhaps most shocking" to his followers, drove a Porsche instead of the beat-up Volvo he kept for photo ops.
 
There was Naomi Parker Fraley, the long-obscured inspiration for Rosie the Riveter, who died at age 96 (and whose NYT obituary is more than half devoted to the detective work of the dude who ultimately gave her the credit).
 
The caption on the original photo of Fraley was also … an interesting contrast to the feminism that it’s become known for (as well as to conventional spelling and good writing):
 

“Pretty Naomi Parker is as easy to look at as overtime pay on the week’s check. And she’s a good example of an old contention that glamor is what goes into the clothes, and not the clothes."

 
There was also Ursula K. Le Guin, who lived long enough to see her accomplishments widely recognized while she could appreciate the praise, and who inspired some pretty great tributes in the past week.
 
I first read Le Guin in college during a completely fun and completely elective Science Fiction Literature class, one that introduced me to some of the many women who’ve been writing speculative fiction since the genre was invented: James Tiptree, Jr., aka Alice B. Sheldon; CJ Cherryh, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, and so many others; I dearly wish I could dig up that syllabus.
 
Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, was shockingly prescient about gender and sexuality in ways that have only become mainstream in the past five years or so. Which is one of several reasons I had no patience with the science-fiction world’s version of the alt-right, the Gamergate-style “Sad Puppies” who started whining about the Hugo Awards a few years ago. This faction complained that scifi books have gotten too diverse and “message-oriented” of late—conveniently forgetting that some of the best scifi has always been diverse and message-oriented. For example: The Left Hand of Darkness, about a dark-skinned man falling in love with a gender-swapping alien, won the Hugo in 1970.
 
Le Guin won another Hugo last year, during an awards sweep by women authors. It was a nice grace note to a career that at one point, thirty years earlier, required her to write letters like this one. In 1987, when she was asked to blurb an anthology of science-fiction stories written entirely by men, Le Guin told it straight:

I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here. 

Lady Bits

 
-My love for The Good Place is by now well-documented in this newsletter. This New York Times review hits exactly on why I so enjoy it, especially in these times of both terrible world news and mostly-grim TV: It’s a comedy about the hard work of being a good person. The Good Place’s main characters are flawed people who genuinely want to become better, even if they don’t like the process. And it somehow manages to be a sitcom about morality and philosophy while pulling off jokes about sexism and the Jacksonville Jaguars and Hamilton and farts.
 
--I’ve never been much of a Woody Allen fan, even before the current wave of disavowals, but this essay about his recent “tribute” speech to Diane Keaton took my breath away with his nastiness. Even putting aside the comment about her fellatio skills, there’s this: “She’s very uncompromising. She prefers to look old.”
 
--I am very much here for this post about 1930s librarians on horseback, who delivered books and newspapers to rural Kentucky residents, riding “as much as 120 miles within a given week, regardless of the terrain or weather conditions.”

 
--Programming note: Lady Business will be off next week. See you on February 15!
 
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