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Forever Valentine: Surviving the Slings and Arrows of Early Wedlock

By Yasmin Anwar

Gene and Barbara Ferguson have been married 39 years and counting. They joined UC Berkeley’s couples study in the 1980s. (Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Philip Ebener)

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage — and then what?

That was the question bugging UC Berkeley psychologist Robert Levenson in the 1980s when the U.S. divorce rate peaked at around 50 percent. So in 1989, he and fellow psychologists — John Gottman at the University of Washington and Stanford University’s Laura Carstensen — launched a longitudinal study of 156 middle-aged and older couples in the San Francisco Bay Area who had survived the slings and arrows of early wedlock, and were in it for the long haul.

“It was Berkeley, and the chance to be part of something big,” recalls Levenson about why the couples, recruited from senior centers, churches, fliers at BART stations and newspaper ads, joined the study. Each five years, the couples came to the Berkeley campus to share their marital ups and downs while researchers videotaped them and coded their conversations based on their facial expressions, body language, tones of voice and topics of discussion.

Today, the spouses are in their 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s — a few have divorced, a few are on their second marriages, a few have died — and Levenson’s 25-year look at marriage in middle and late life is winding down. But the data will live on. Among other things, the study has found that couples who say “we” have a better shot at resolving conflict, that DNA is linked to marital satisfaction and that wives matter more when it comes to calming marital conflict.

Here’s what Levenson, 65, has to say about what he learned.

Does the story about long-term marriage have a happy ending?

The emotional story for long-tern marriages is really quite positive. People who get through the first 15 years of marriage learn to value each other. They don’t have a lot of contempt for one another. They accept each other. They take pride in one another’s accomplishments. There’s this genuine respect for one another. They are no longer engaged in futile attempts to change one another.

February 13, 2014
CultureWatch Review of Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

In This Issue

Reviewed by Jill Norgren

Miss Anne in Harlem expands our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a story about female independence, race, and most of all unconventional lives — lives, Carla Kaplan writes, that are by definition the most difficult ones to live — and to judge. The book commands attention because it joins other memoir, biography, and political works that give us insight into the personalities and power relations of people who seek to create a different future.

Drawing in two colors / Winold Reiss. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Books

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

By Carla Kaplan; c. 2013

Published by HarperCollins; Hardbook; ebook; 505 pp in total including some 160 pages of notes and index

Miss Anne in Harlem was written as the result of Carla Kaplan’s inability to find information about the many white women who involved themselves in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. While writing Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters Kaplan, a professor of literature, found that there was ample material about Hurston’s black Harlem contemporaries. In the archives of cultural history, however, “Miss Anne” — the often derisive moniker given to white women by blacks — was either ignored or dismissed mockingly. In this fascinating and thoughtful group biography, six of these women have been given voice. Kaplan should be praised for doing the difficult work of researching their lives and, even more, congratulated for the fairness of her presentation, one that neither criticizes nor forgives. Nothing would have been easier than to use her author’s perch to judge these women. Kaplan does not, but neither does she shirk in writing down the details of lives that often make the twenty-first century reader cringe.

Miss Anne tells a story of creative, assertive women who, in different ways, crossed race lines in the years after World War I, women who put issues of race and race politics at the center of their lives. These women lived at a time when discrimination and white violence against blacks was the norm. Hundreds of lynchings occurred in the 1920s; mob action and all-white juries undercut any chance of justice at the 1930s trials of the black ‘Scottsboro’ teenagers falsely accused of rape by a white woman.

In the same period, however, blacks were increasingly acclaimed for their contributions to music, dance, art, and literature. The “New Negro” was, in the words of poet Langston Hughes, “in vogue.” Whites poured into Harlem. They said that white culture was “dull and depleted.” Kaplan writes that these visitors “felt entitled to Harlem’s vaunted exotic sensuality and the escape it promised from urban capitalism’s alienation.”

Kaplan argues that Harlem was an “imagined community” as well as a geographic center.” As a result, it attracted interest from across the country and around the world. One Miss Anne, Lillian E. Wood, who “wanted in on the new black movement” viewed Harlem from her home in Tennessee where, for decades she taught at a black college. In 1925 she published a novel, Let My People Go. Wood hoped to convince southern blacks that they need not go to New York to make a difference. In writing the book she also hoped to prove that a white woman could understand and serve the black community, again, without being in Harlem. A novel about rape and lynching, Wood joined other Misses Anne in blaming white women both for causing lynching and not acting to end it. Wood hoped that her northern Miss Anne sisters would recognize a “kindred sister tucked away in the South.” Curiously, Wood was immediately thought to be black, an error she did not correct. As a result, the message of activism and morality aimed at southern white women failed.

February 12, 2014
Couples, the Internet, and Social Media
A Summary of Findings From the Pew Report
The internet, cell phones, and social media have become key actors in the life of many American couples — the 66% of adults who are married or in committed relationships. Couples use technology in the little and large moments. They negotiate over when to use it and when to abstain. A portion of them quarrel over its use and have had hurtful experiences caused by tech use. At the same time, some couples find that digital tools facilitate communication and support. A majority of those in couples maintain their own separate email and social media accounts, though a smaller number report sharing accounts and calendars. And fully two-thirds of couples share passwords. The broad statistical picture looks like this:

The overall impact of technology on long term relationships
- 10% of internet users who are married or partnered say that the internet has had a “major impact” on their relationship, and 17% say that it has had a “minor impact.” Fully 72% of married or committed online adults said the internet has “no real impact at all” on their partnership.
- 74% of the adult internet users who report that the internet had an impact on their marriage or partnership say the impact was positive. Still, 20% said the impact was mostly negative, and 4% said it was both good and bad.
Tech as a source of support and communication
- 25% of married or partnered adults who text have texted their partner when they were both home together.
- 21% of cell owners or internet users in a committed relationship have felt closer to their spouse or partner because of exchanges they had online or via text message.
- 9% have resolved an argument with their partner online or by text message that they were having difficulty resolving in person.
Tech as a source of tension
- 25% of cell phone owners in a marriage or partnership have felt their spouse or partner was distracted by their cell phone when they were together.
- 8% of internet users in a committed relationship have had an argument with their spouse or partner about the amount of time one of them was spending online.
- 4% of internet users in a committed relationship have gotten upset at something that they found out their spouse or partner was doing online.
Shared passwords:
- 67% of internet users in a marriage or committed relationship have shared the password to one or more of their online accounts with their spouse or partner.
February 11, 2014
Happy Birthday To Min, Who Has Decided She Is 65

by Elaine Soloway

Today is my mother Min Shapiro’s birthday. If she were celebrating at an earthly venue, she’d be 102. But since Mom is in her heavenly high-rise with ocean views on all sides, she has elected to be 65.

“Any age?” I asked as we Face Time-ed on our iPads. (I have the 2. She has 3. They get them first up there.) “If you get to choose any age, why 65? Why not some time in your 20’s when you were a hot chick?”

Mother frowned; I had erred for I knew she had always considered herself a glamour girl. A Dorothy Lamour look-alike I had written in my memoir.

“I didn’t mean that, Mom,” I said quickly. “You were gorgeous your whole life, and, um, afterlife. I’m just wondering what was so special about that age.”

With that, she held a photo up to the screen. “Remember?” she asked. “The 40th birthday party I threw for you? I was so proud I could pay for it myself. You were skinny then. Your hair was long. A beauty.”

“So you loved 65 because I looked good?” I asked. Another familiar theme: Mom concerned that pudginess could thwart chances at my happiness. I changed the subject. “What about you, Mom? Other than the party, was that a good year for you?”

“Well, your father had been dead — by the way, he says ‘hello’ — for 20 years so I was free of worrying about his health and when he would drop dead and make me a widow. And to be honest, widowhood wasn’t so bad. I should have stuck to it rather than … “

“Oh yes, your awful second marriage.”

“That’s been deleted from my file,” she said. “Like it never happened.”

“Boy, you’ve got it good up there,” I said. “You get to choose your age, erase bad experiences, not so bad. Of course, there’s the part about missing us down here on earth, and not being in on the good things that happen here.”

February 10, 2014
Tackling Spats Over Disliked Facebook Posts

By Yasmin Anwar

Tagged in an embarrassing photo? Hurt by an insensitive comment? Shocked by vulgar displays of what passes for humor? From Mumbai to Menlo Park, Facebook is swamped with complaints about “inappropriate” posts, each of which must be manually reviewed by an employee. Yet rather than take down the offending content, the social network has tapped the emotional intelligence of UC Berkeley psychologists, among other top minds, to resolve disputes over posts that don’t clearly violate the company’s community standards.

Logo: Facebook and Eric Olson of Process Type Foundry; Wikimedia Commons

And their efforts are paying off: “By working with experts in developmental psychology and the science of human emotion, we’re proud to see Facebook’s social resolution tools help, on average, 3.9 million people each week,” said Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld.

In its 10th year, Facebook is thriving with more than 1 billion active monthly users. But it’s also a magnet for uncomfortable interactions over everything from unflattering snapshots to cyber-bullying. That’s why the company’s engineers have teamed up with university scholars to create messaging tools to make the social network a safer and more empathetic space.

“Our driving mission is to make people feel more inclusive and tender towards each other because a culture – including an online community – that uses the full range of emotions is just healthier,” said Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

Building a more ‘tender’ Facebook community

A neuroscientist, Simon-Thomas is on Facebook’s “compassion research team” along with UC Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner. Among other things, they’ve helped tweak pop-up text and create emoticons to encourage Facebook users to communicate their “authentic” feelings about posts that do not fall into the categories of bullying, hate speech or pornography, but are nonetheless upsetting to them.

UC Berkeley neuroscientist Emiliana Simon-Thomas has been embedded at Facebook as a member of the social network’s compassion research team

“It’s amazing how intimate Facebook can quickly get, and how the written word can be trouble,” said Keltner, who has helped to shape Facebook emoticons based on naturalist Charles Darwin’s study of how facial muscles are used to express emotions. “That’s why we’ve had to build in visuals that express the apologetic, the ironic, and all those emotions that you can’t convey in a smiley face or in words alone.”

Complicating this endeavor is that different cultures find different things funny or offensive.For example, “People who use Facebook in India are offended by different things, like a photo that mocks a favorite cricket player or Bollywood actor,” Simon-Thomas said. “They tend not to use Facebook as much for personal sharing.”

February 9, 2014
Ferida Wolff’s Backyard: Cardinal on the Edge; Rabbit in the Snow

Cardinal on the Edge

Guess what? It’s snowing here, again. It was warm yesterday and some prior snow had melted. I could actually see grass in the yard and buds on the trees. Just when I put the snow shovel away, I have to drag it back out.

I wonder how confused the outdoor creatures must be. I can almost here the squirrels saying, “Snow again? Didn’t it snow already this winter? What is going on?”

The birds, too, might be getting fed up with the weather. Snow covers the birdbath, blows into the feeders, coats the tree branches. It’s almost nesting season but who wants to build a nest just to have it soaked when the snow melts?

I tuck myself into a warm coat just to get to my car. I can see the animals puffed out against the flakes and the wind. The birds fluff their feathers for whatever protection that provides.

And yet, it isn’t snowing everywhere. In one town over it is only raining. It seems weird that weather systems have edges. These are known as weather fronts. It is the boundary between two air masses. One side can be dry and cold while the other moist and warm.

But it really shouldn’t be a surprise. Doesn’t everything have an edge? How would we distinguish one thing from another if it all blended together? People are individuals. So are all living things. The boundary needn’t be abrasive, however. I’m thinking about countries that are reluctant to let each other live in peace, religions that stigmatize anyone who doesn’t follow the dogma, or politicians who discredit any idea that doesn’t echo their own. Perhaps if we see boundaries as places to connect rather than divide, we will be able to appreciate that edge – even if it means more snow. And aren’t snowflakes beautiful?

Check out the weather predictions for your area: http://www.weather.gov/

And if you are a history buff, here are historical weather records: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Snow

Rabbit in the Snow

I was gazing out the window, looking under the butterfly bushes at the juncos scrambling for seed when I saw what looked like a piece of a log slowly being covered with snowflakes. But it wasn’t a log at all – it was a rabbit! It was resting in a depression atop last week’s snow. Its fur was puffed up like a down blanket, protection against the cold.

Rabbits do not hibernate in the winter. I have seen several cottontails bounding through my yard all season even when the temperature has been cold enough to keep me inside.

I thought it might like a carrot, given that snow had been covering the ground for the better part of a week and no doubt interfered with the animal’s foraging. I didn’t want to throw it out the window and scare the rabbit away so when I saw it had moved away, I tossed out a nice, juicy organic carrot and hoped it would come back and find the treat. It didn’t – return or eat the carrot.

What I found out was that rabbits change their dietary needs in the cold weather, from vegetables (yes, gardens are a prime venue for these creatures in the spring and summer) to buds, seeds, twigs, branches, and pine needles. We have all of those in our backyard so I guess the rabbit felt welcome but didn’t need the carrot.

February 7, 2014
Trafficking at Major Sporting Events, Part Two, Congressional Bills Introduced

Hearings:

Last week the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations held a hearing, “Lessons Learned from Super Bowl Preparations: Preventing International Human Trafficking at Major Sporting Events.“

With the Super Bowl now over to be followed quickly by the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and the World Cup in Brazil in June, the issue of human trafficking at major sporting events is timely. In his opening remarks, Chair Chris Smith (R-NJ) noted that “more than 10,000 exploited women and girls were trafficked to Miami for the Super Bowl in 2010.”

US Figure Skater Gracie Gold; Photograph of ISU World TeamTrophy Competition 2012. David W. Carmichael photo, Wikimedia Commons

With regard to international sporting events, Luis CdeBaca, ambassador-at-large, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, Department of State, said, “In many cases, major sporting events require massive capital improvement and infrastructure projects, creating a huge demand for cost-effective labor and materials. In regions with sizable migrant populations, much of this labor force will cross at least one border to reach the job site. Once the event takes place, the locations become massive destinations for travel and tourism. At every step of this process, we see characteristic vulnerabilities to human trafficking. Addressing those risks means putting safeguards in place every step of the way. What protections exist for these laborers? What methods are being used to screen migrant workers who may be victims of trafficking, including through debt bondage that resulted from paying hefty recruitment fees in their home countries? How are law enforcement personnel and partners in the travel, tourism, and hospitality industry being trained to identify potential trafficking situations — not just child sex trafficking, but that of adults as well? These are questions governments should be grappling with every day, and especially when a major gathering is on the horizon. And these are some of the specifics we’re watching for as we approach additional major sporting events.”

“This year, thousands of people will make the trip to the New York City metropolitan area for Super Bowl XLVIII,” said Letty Ashworth, general manager of Global Diversity, Delta Airlines. Ms. Ashworth continued, “As New York’s largest carrier and official airline sponsor of the Seahawks, Delta will not only transport the Seahawks to the game, but we will carry many of the thousands of fans who will attend the Super Bowl to the region from dozens of points in our extensive global network that covers six continents. Delta’s 80,000 employees worldwide – over 8,000 of whom live and work in the New York City region alone – have received training and are in prime positions to be eyes and ears to spot potential cases of human trafficking and point them out to law enforcement for action.”

February 6, 2014
Janet Yellen: A Quiet Swearing In for First Woman Fed Chairwoman and a Women’s College Graduate

Editor’s Note: SeniorWomen.com has included speeches by Chairwoman Yellen in the past. Frankly, we are surprised by the lack of ceremony afforded the first chairwoman in the Federal Reserve’s history. We note that one of her best known papers — one written with her professor husband, George Akerlof — is on the topic of fair wages. The Oxford Journals abstract is quoted below:

The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis and Unemployment*

This paper introduces the fair wage-effort hypothesis and explores its implications. This hypothesis is motivated by equity theory in social psychology and social exchange theory in sociology. According to the fair wage-effort hypothesis, workers proportionately withdraw effort as their actual wage falls short of their fair wage. Such behavior causes unemployment and is also consistent with observed cross-section wage differentials and unemployment patterns.

Janet L. Yellen took office as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 3, 2014, for a four-year term ending February 3, 2018. Dr. Yellen also serves as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System’s principal monetary policymaking body. Prior to her appointment as Chair, Dr. Yellen served as Vice Chair of the Board of Governors, taking office in October 2010, when she simultaneously began a 14-year term as a member of the Board that will expire January 31, 2024.

Dr. Yellen is Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley where she was the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics and has been a faculty member since 1980.

Dr. Yellen took leave from Berkeley for five years starting August 1994. She served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System through February 1997, and then left the Federal Reserve to become chair of the Council of Economic Advisers through August 1999. She also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from 1997 to 1999. She also served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010.

Dr. Yellen is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has served as President of the Western Economic Association, Vice President of the American Economic Association and a Fellow of the Yale Corporation.

Dr. Yellen graduated summa cum laude from Brown University** with a degree in economics in 1967, and received her Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1971. She received the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale in 1997, an honorary doctor of laws degree from Brown in 1998, and an honorary doctor of humane letters from Bard College in 2000.

An Assistant Professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1976, Dr. Yellen served as an Economist with the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in 1977 and 1978, and on the faculty of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1978 to 1980.

Dr. Yellen has written on a wide variety of macroeconomic issues, while specializing in the causes, mechanisms, and implications of unemployment.

Dr. Yellen is married [to UC Berkeley professor and Nobel Prize winner, George Akerlof, above] and has an adult son.

February 5, 2014
Monuments Men (and Women): National Gallery of Art’s The Inside Story, Smithsonian’s On the Frontline to Save Europe’s Art

The officers who served in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program rescued masterpieces from Nazi thieves during the chaos of liberation. Prior to the war, six of these officers were associated with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and in later years three held important positions at the museum. Perhaps more important, even before the MFAA operation was established, the Gallery was the center of lobbying efforts to create such a program and later, in association with the Roberts Commission, worked tirelessly to support MFAA activities in the field.

“The Gallery is proud to have played such an integral role in the story of these real-life Monuments Men, ” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. “These men — and women — worked to protect Europe’s cultural heritage at the height of World War II, ensuring its safety in the aftermath and returning works, when possible, to their rightful owners once peace and security were restored.”

Photo: The Crowley Company; OS14000 A1; Authorities inspect the condition of a French-owned Goya.

From February 11 to September 1, 2014, the Gallery will showcase The Monuments Men and the National Gallery of Art: Behind the History, an archival display featuring World War II-era photographs, documents, and memorabilia, many never before exhibited. On view in the West Building Art Information Room, the display will demonstrate the seminal role the National Gallery of Art played in the creation of the MFAA, the Roberts Commission, and the experiences of real-life MFAA officers.

On March 16 at 2:00 p.m., the Gallery will host the lecture The Inside Story: The Monuments Men and the National Gallery of Art detailing its relationship with the Monuments Men of the MFAA. Speakers will include Maygene Daniels, chief of Gallery Archives; Gregory Most, the Gallery’s chief of library image collections; and Lynn H. Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. Faya Causey, head of the academic programs department, will moderate. The event is free and open to the public and the audience is invited to participate in an open discussion afterwards.

The Monuments Men Film: A Story about Real-Life Heroes

The film The Monuments Men, based on Robert M. Edsel’s book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, dramatizes the efforts and successes of an unlikely group of aesthetes in uniform. In peacetime, many were art historians, curators, archivists, and librarians who staffed cultural institutions such as National Gallery of Art, which was in its infancy when the war broke out. Editor’s Note: Edsel followed that book up with Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures From the Nazis.

The Gallery sent its most fragile and irreplaceable objects to Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina less than a year after it opened. They remained there until 1944. Meanwhile, the National Gallery in London had long since stripped its walls and secured its most important works in Welsh coal mines. An exhibition of late 18th and 19th century French masterpieces organized by the Louvre was left stranded in South America; through the efforts of Walter Heil, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the show was resuscitated for a tour of museums in the United States, including the National Gallery of Art, where the collection remained from 1942 until the end of the war.

Troubles in Europe left the cultural communities in both the United States and abroad disquieted at best, panicked at worst. Amid the air of uncertainty and uproar that engulfed academics, artists, historians, and museum professionals alike, the American Defense, Harvard Group — established by university faculty and personnel — began working with the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to devise plans for protecting cultural property in Europe. Gallery Director David Finley and Chief Justice and Gallery Chairman Harlan F. Stone became the groups’ spokesmen in Washington, an advocacy that ultimately led to the formation of a government organization to protect and conserve works of art and other cultural treasures during the war.

February 4, 2014
Samples from the Sister Study: Insight into Why Cancer Incidence Increases With Age

The accumulation of age-associated changes in a biochemical process that helps control genes may be responsible for some of the increased risk of cancer seen in older people, according to a National Institutes of Health study.

Scientists have known for years that age is a leading risk factor for the development of many types of cancer, but why aging increases cancer risk remains unclear. Researchers suspect that DNA methylation, or the binding of chemical tags, called methyl groups, onto DNA, may be involved. Methyl groups activate or silence genes, by affecting interactions between DNA and the cell’s protein-making machinery.

This image shows a DNA molecule that is methylated on both strands on the center cytosine. DNA methylation plays an important role for epigenetic gene regulation in development and cancer. Christoph Bock (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), Wikimedia Commons

Zongli Xu, Ph.D., and Jack Taylor, M.D., Ph.D., researchers from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of NIH, identified DNA methylation sites across the human genome that changed with age. They demonstrated that a subset of those sites — the ones that become increasingly methylated with advancing age — are also disproportionately methylated in a variety of human cancers. Their findings were published online in the journal Carcinogenesis.

“You can think of methylation as dust settling on an unused switch, which then prevents the cell from turning on certain genes,” Taylor said. “If a cell can no longer turn on critical developmental programs, it might be easier for it to become a cancer cell.”

Xu and Taylor made the discovery using blood samples from participants in the Sister Study, a nationwide research effort to find the environmental and genetic causes of breast cancer and other diseases. More than 50,000 sisters of women who have had breast cancer are participating in the study.

The researchers analyzed blood samples from 1,000 women, using a microarray that contained 27,000 specific methylation sites. Nearly one-third of the sites showed increased DNA methylation in association with age. They then looked at three additional data sets from smaller studies that used the same microarray and found 749 methylation sites that behaved consistently across all four data sets. As an additional check, they consulted methylation data from normal tissues and seven different types of cancerous tumors in The Cancer Genome Atlas, a database funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Taylor said that DNA methylation appears to be part of the normal aging process and occurs in genes involved in cell development. Cancer cells often have altered DNA methylation, but the researchers were surprised to find that 70-90 percent of the sites associated with age showed significantly increased methylation in all seven cancer types. Taylor suggests that age-related methylation may disable the expression of certain genes, making it easier for cells to transition to cancer.

The research also determined how fast these methylation events accumulate in cells. They occur at a rate of one per year, according to Xu.

February 3, 2014