Six Intellectual Women of the Last Hundred Years: Hannah Arendt, Jane Jacobs, Maya Angelou, Judith Shklar, Lynn Margulis, and Helen Fisher

 
Helen E Fisher (1945-2024)

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB  

I recently learned that my friend Helen E Fisher, anthropologist, died on August 27 this year, 2024. Wow. I am sorry I won’t be able to see her anymore. Actually, I had hardly heard from her since she got married, for the first time — at age 75! Although Helen had been writing about “love,” she did not get knocked over by it herself until she met John Tierney.

I started to write an obituary for her, but that made me wonder where she fits against other great women. Hence this little list of six biographies. I’ve put them in chronological order by their date of Birth. Hence, Helen Fisher comes last as she was a 1945 baby (along with a twin sister who died at age 42).

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) 

Hannah Arendt, Photo credit: Berghahn Books

Arendt was born in Germany and studied with Martin Heidegger. In the 1960s we all heard about Hannah as she had reported live from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who had escaped to South America but was brought to an Israeli court for Holocaust crimes. In her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” This is a concept to which we should pay continuing attention. The guy who does evil things might live an otherwise ordinary life, as in a bureaucratic government office.

But Hannah is also the author of two other huge contributions to our understanding of politics. Her book On Revolution (1982) is clearly needed today. Even more so we need her 1948 book Totalitarianism (updated in 1976). I quote the concluding chapter:

“… organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it—a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end—before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to assert itself.

“But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; …. . Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est —’that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”

Whew.

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) 

Jane Jacobs, Photo credit: CommonEdge.org

In 1961, Jane Jacobs, a journalist, wrote The Death and Life of American Cities. At that time, “urban renewal” was happening, presumably at the direction of developers. Ms Jacobs had the sense to see that the design should have in mind the life of the individual. What affects his ability to trust neighbors? In what way would he like to share public facilities? What landscape is conducive to his health?

An oddment was the way Jane popped up as a non-academic voice but was studied seriously in such university departments such as Environment and Psychology. At Boston College, Professor Bernard Lonergan, who had authored the book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding said of Jane Jacobs: “She’s Mrs Insight.”

I became interested in her 2005 book Dark Age Ahead, when things were looking very bad. Although I expected her to have some all-new ideas for the future, she preferred to hold down what we have already achieved.  I quote from page 24 of Dark Age Ahead:

Dark ages are horrible ordeals….The mass amnesia of survivors becomes permanent. I single out five  pillars  of our culture  that we depend on to stand firm, …they are in process of becoming irrelevant, and so are dangerously close to the brink of lost memory:

[1]   Community and family

[2]   Higher education

[3]   The effective practice of science

[4]   Taxes  and  governmental  powers  directly  in  touch  with  needs and possibilities

[5]   Self-policing by the learned professions.

My, what we unthinkingly gave up!

Maya Angelou (1928-2014)

Maya Angelou. Photo credit: Victory for Women

At Amazon today, Maya Angelou’s book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has 36, 418 ratings, mostly 5-star. But that’s nothing. At Goodreads it has 549, 107 ratings. Says the description:

“Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. [It] captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right”.

I am not sure what the copyright rules are for poems, so here I will just pick and choose some verses from “The Pulse of the Morning” by Maya Angelou:

POEM – ‘PULSE OF THE MORNING’

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed, Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow. …

You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness.
Have lain too long

Face down in ignorance. Your mouths spilling words Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me, But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song. It says,

Come, rest here by my side.

… Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more.

Come, clad in peace
And I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow And when you yet knew you still knew nothing. The River sang and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,

The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

Today, the first and last of every Tree Speaks to humankind today.
Come to me,
Here beside the River.

… Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours – your Passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

… Each new hour holds new chances For new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally

To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward, Offering you space
To place new steps of change. Here, on the pulse of this fine day You may have the courage

To look up and out and upon me,
The Rock, the River, the Tree, your country. No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Judith Shklar (1928-1992)

Judith Shklar, Photo credit: Jewish Philosophy Place

The most important “directive” Judith Shklar ever gave, in my opinion, was: “Put cruelty first.” Shklar was born in Latvia and escaped both Hitler and Stalin. By 1971 she was a professor in Harvard’s Department of Government. Among her brilliant books are: Ordinary Vices, Legalism, and The Faces of Injustice.

That last one was based on her Storrs Lectures on Jurisprudence, at Yale, in 1988. That year can give us a rough dividing line. Before that date, you could expect to attend, at academic conferences, some thrilling lectures. You could expect to have your soul burst with admiration for higher thought.  After that date, scholars got more specialized and more timid.

As Judith’s death in 1992 was four years after that 1988 cutoff, and as she gave no sign of ever becoming timid, it is my guess that she was taken out. Seriously. How could the Powers That Be allow a Harvard professor, whose great interests were morality and the law, to continue to babble on after the curtains on that thing were supposed to fall?

Let me re-state that even more strongly.  Had Judith Shklar continued to do her thing past age 64 (that is, past 1992), our country would not have, could not have, fallen apart as it did.

From the description on the back cover of The Faces of Injustice:

“What can we learn from the victims of calamity about the sense of injustice they harbor? In this book a distinguished political theorist ponders [certain] questions and formulates a new political and moral theory of injustice that encompasses not only deliberate acts of cruelty or unfairness but indifference to such acts.”

Holy cow!

 

Lynn Margulis (1938-2011)

Lynn Margulis, Photo credit: mujeres.con.clencia

Yo could put it this way: First, there was Charles Darwin, and then there was Lynn Margulis. For Darwin, who published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, it was enough to account for the emergence of the myriad kinds of animals in this world. “They got there by natural selection.” A mutation here and there, if it gave the creature a helpful adaption to the environment, could become the basis for all the progeny of that species.

Well, that’s fine, but Lynn Margulis sensed the symbiosis among species, and argued that the complexity of life is related to the “intimacy of strangers” — that is, whole systems, made of water, air, plants, and animals, have something going on that we need to discover.

She was born in Chicago and entered the University of Chicago at age 14. Her further degrees are from U. Wisconsin and U. Cal. From 1957 to 1965 she was married to Carl Sagan and their son      is co-author of some of her books. She was a professor at Boston U for 22 years and then joined the faculty at U Mass Amherst in

Microbiology was essential in her work. She claimed that our cells

Helen E Fisher (1945-2024)

from the cover of Helen Fisher’s 2015 book Histore Naturelle De L’amour

And finally to another intellectual woman of the twentieth century, dear Helen

Fisher. She was on the staff of Rutgers Anthropology department and is also known for her connection to the American Museum of Natural History in New York — and to New York in general. It was pleasing to read in her NY Times obituary, that before dying of endometrial cancer, she said: “I have had a magic life.  I never imagined I could have accomplished so much. I am ready to die.”

I knew Helen in the context of sociobiology; we attended conferences together. It’s hard to do justice, in this little obituary, to her enthusiasm, her sense of humor, and her sharp mind. She was a dynamo and also very kind and helpful.

She authored a few books, which got translated into many languages. The best known is The Anatomy of Love. My favorite line is her simple description about obsession over the person with whom you are falling in love. You can’t stop thinking of them:  “They are camping in your head.”

In an interview with Rae Frye on ABC’s Health report, Helen said:”I basically divide love into more than one variety. I think that there’s three different systems in the brain: one is the system for lust, associated primarily with testosterone in men and women. I mean if you inject a middle-aged woman with testosterone, her sex drive goes up.

“The second brain system I think is romantic love, obsessive love, infatuation, associated in the brain I think, or I hypothesise, with high levels of dopamine and norpenephrin, these natural stimulants, and probably low levels of seratonin, which gives you that obsessive thinking.

“And the third chemical system in the brain I think is attachment, that sense of calm and peace and security that people have with a long-term partner. And other sciences have begun to think that that feeling of attachment is associated with vasopressin and oxytocin which are different chemicals in the brain.  So we basically have sort of different brain systems that operate to have us do different things, but they are related.”

This compares to Lynn Margulis wide ranging search for connections. Now that I see it, each of the six women in this article — Arendt, Jacobs, Angelou, Shklar, Margulis, and Fisher were not satisfied until they had swept the universe to get the full picture.