Tuesday News: 100th Pulitzer Prizes, wine train book club settles suit, SCOTUS turns down Authors Guild, and Russia’s “womanhood schools”
Publishing NewsAuthors Guild / Book-club / digital books / discrimination / Google / lawsuit / marriage / Pulitzer-Prize / Russia7 Comments
100th Pulitzer prizes announced – Journalism awards, in particular, stood out this year, with the Los Angeles Times winning for their breaking coverage of the San Bernadino shooting, and digital media ProPublica and the Marshall Project’s collaborative win for explanatory reporting. The full list of winners can be found here, and it includes Lin-Manuel Miranda for drama (Hamilton), and Viet Thanh Nguyen for fiction (The Sympathizer).
The AP won the gold medal in public service for its investigation series entitled “Seafood from Slaves” about the Southeast Asian fishing industry. The series helped secure the freedom for more than 2,000 slaves. It is the 52nd Pulitzer won by the AP.
The Washington Post was recognized for its enterprise work on police shootings in the United States. The Post won the Pulitzer for “Fatal Force,” a project that detailed the number of deadly police shootings throughout the country last year.
There are 14 journalism categories, primarily recognizing the work of print newspapers, but also recognizing magazines and digital news organizations. There are five book categories, one drama category and one music composition. – CNN Money
Book club members settle suit over ejection from Napa wine train – The eleven women (10 of whom are African American), who were ejected from the Napa Valley Wine Train for allegedly being too boisterous during their book club (they were scheduled to read Brenda Jackson’s A Man’s Promise, by the way), have settled their racial discrimination suit with the Wine Train (which was sold in September, not long after this incident).
The settlement still needs to be approved by the Wine Train’s governing board. But the women’s attorney, Waukeen McCoy, described the agreement as amicable and said he hopes the case serves as “a learning experience for all businesses” in the need for “diversity and sensitivity training.”
Representatives of the Wine Train did not immediately respond to a request for comment. – SF Gate and Napa Valley Register
Google wins copyright battle over books – Well, hallelujah, the U.S. Supreme Court finally shut down the Authors Guild, eleven long years after they sued Google for their scanned book database, which the company consistently defended as Fair Use (“a card catalogue for the digital age,” as they call it). Orphan works, in particular (those books for which the copyright holder could not be located, for example) were at issue, in part because orphan works have become more and more common, especially as copyright terms have increased beyond all reason. Google had already been granted summary judgment on the fair use issue in 2013, which was affirmed on appeal in 2015.
The Authors Guild said it was “disappointed” that the Supreme Court would not hear its appeal.
The organisation’s president Roxana Robinson said: “We believed then and we believe now that authors should be compensated when their work is copied for commercial purposes”.
A Google spokeswoman said: “We are grateful that the court has agreed to uphold the decision of the Second Circuit which concluded that Google Books is transformative and consistent with copyright law.” – BBC News
Inside the strange, retro world of Russian ‘womanhood schools’ – A fascinating and at times disturbing look at the growing industry of training programs for Russian women who want to get married but are having no luck finding a husband. On the surface, these “schools” look a little like the Russian version of the Millionaire Matchmaker or self-helpy relationship consulting. But there are deeper issues related to Russia’s social and economic evolution following the dissolution of the USSR. while high numbers of educated women wanted to pursue their careers, other women pursued marriage for economic and social security, and growing conservatism has helped solidify a strongly patriarchal model of “traditional” marriage and family life. Some of these “schools” go so far as to instruct women on what facial expression is appropriate during sex (and, of course, what kind of sex will be most pleasing to their prospective husband).
In Russia, where unmarried women are considered old maids by their mid-twenties, a cottage industry has sprung up around women’s last-ditch efforts to find or keep a man. On VKontakte, the country’s Facebook equivalent, dozens of “womanhood schools” have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. There seems to be one for every taste imaginable, from how to catch a husband by giving the perfect blowjob to saving oneself until marriage, a strategy [“Woman Inside” founder Alesya] Terekhova recommends. . . .
Nadezhda Nartova, a professor at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, says that while civil rights movements were popping up left and right across the world in the mid-20th century, none were happening in Russia. Because of this, along with Russia’s extensive military history, the old model of masculinity still dominates. “It’s not only that men want a woman to stay at home and cook borscht,” she says. “It’s also on a symbolic level–how else can a man prove his masculinity, prove he’s a normal, cool macho?” – Fusion
Yep – old maids if you are not married by mid twenties – was true fifteen years ago, apparently still true now .
Hallelujah indeed, particularly for orphan books and the possibility of a new audience for them.
The whole “womanhood schools” thing is both sad and true. I was born in the former USSR and never fit in. I truly found myself in the US. And that article describes why, very precisely. Women being constantly told that “showing intellect” is a bad thing. Marrying for the sake of marriage or not being “old maid” – I have a lot of friends who dislike their husbands but who are staying in the marriages to avoid being labeled as “failures”, or “for the sake of the children” – never mind that the children are only observing adultery, disrespect and discord. The implication that women must be “protected”, but in effect controlled. The whole “you are a girl and your future husband won’t take kindly to this”.
I recently talked to someone who is 10 years younger than I, and she says it got worse since I left. She lives in the UK, is very successful and is very happy there, but she is being constantly being held as an example of total failure: “this is what will happen to you if you are too smart and too educated — you will end up unmarried at 30”. Incidentally, she is in a long-term relationship with someone she loves, but she is not telling her family, because otherwise there will be a new round of pressure on her to stop working, have babies etc., and contempt for him for not “protecting” and “providing”.
@MD: You know what’s funny? While I agree with you overall (one of the most memorable insults of my childhood – you are too smart), I think that women who worked there was less of a big deal than here. I mean I know that some women probably stayed home with kids, but I personally did not know anybody who did that – my mom worked, my grandmother worked, my friends’ parents all worked , etc. Here from my outsider’s POV when I arrived it felt like joining the workforce was a struggle that women achieved (those who wanted to of course!) from what I was reading, listening to, learning. There it was a given that you could do that if you wanted – obviously women there had other struggles and it was hard to get in the college of your choice for Jewish kids like myself and many others, I am just saying that I do not remember back there that state was telling women that their place is with kids first and foremost.
Again, I am not disagreeing with you – about marriages and friends who would stay for the reasons you described, and going back to the original article about the traditional masculinity, was just a thought I wanted to share.
@Sirius:
I agree with you that the presentation was different – the whole idea of “stay at home mom” was impossible, and working was both expected and accepted. But I think there was also a great deception there in the sense that women were restricted in what they could do, but in hidden ways. For example, when people were assigned jobs after college, my mother, who had excellent grades, was nominally given a choice. But the place she chose then said that they would not take a woman, because women have to take care of children, and she won’t be able to do her job properly. She was then shuffled into a job with very poor housing and working conditions. She eventually accepted a marriage offer from my father, who was the student in the same class but ended up in the location that she originally wanted. You can never tell, but I have a strong impression that she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t ended up in that horrible job (and the societal pressure to marry on top of that).
I heard similar stories from a couple of my university teachers who were pushed into teaching roles “more appropriate for women” rather then the jobs that they actually wanted, plus painful discussions with my father, grandparents and random family members on whether the education that I was choosing was appropriate for “a woman and future mother”. Or, for example, there were a lot of woman doctors, unlike the West. But they were siloed in low paid and crappy primary care jobs. If you wanted to be, say, a surgeon, better paid and more prestigious, then suddenly you faced a huge uphill struggle with the same “not appropriate for women” issues (from what I hear from a family friend, who managed to become one, but had to really battle for it).
Similarly, I am not disagreeing with you – there was the expectation for women to be educated and to work, and that created a very different feeling from the West. But I felt like the system required and expected me to work, allowed me to get the education that I wanted, and then took it away at the end through the very strong “these jobs are not appropriate for women” bias.
The late Diana, Princess of Wales famously attended a “womanhood school” in Switzerland. In those circles it’s known as “finishing school.” Switzerland has made a cottage industry of it.
@MD: Sure, agreed about “jobs not appropriate for women”. Although my mom would have loved to get an education in economics and I guess a job which was considered more appropriate for woman – she ended up getting a very technical education and doing something not very “appropriate for woman ” at all. Long story. My aunt wanted to be a doctor, but for Jewish girl with excellent grades but no money? Hard to impossible. She ended up being an engineer too.
So, yeah definitely women there had all kinds of problems to fight against, I was just a little surprised about women getting into workforce being some sort of a struggle here of all places – I guess I felt that the mindset that if you are a mom you should stay home with the kids (and you should if that’s what you want of course) is still way more prevailing here than it was back there even when I left.