Vummanhood

 To Staff Vumman, Brita DeRemee:

I propose as the philosophical locus classicus for vummanhood, the following passage from William James. It is part of a letter sent to his wife after traveling in—where else?—Germany. Like the original coinage, it comes from a man, and like any classical text, it needs updating—but it has the essentials of self-respect and power stirred into a mash of self-sacrifice.

Vienna September 24, 1882

Dear, perhaps the deepest impression I’ve got since I’ve been in Germany is that made on me by the indefatigable beavers of old wrinkled peasant women, striding like men through the streets, dragging their carts or lugging their baskets, minding their business, seeming to notice nothing in the stream of luxury and vice, but belonging far away, to something better and purer. Their poor, old, ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls make me weep. ‘They are our conscripts.’ They are the venerable ones whom we should reverence. All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being—the Mothers! The Mothers! Ye are all one! Yes, Alice, dear, what I love in you is only what these blessed creatures have; and I’m glad and proud when I think of my own dear Mother with tears running down my face, to know that she is one with these.

  I wonder what Alice dear thought of the compliment! Better yet, it would be fun to imagine what the other Alice in his life—his sister, with her acerbic wit—would have made of it.

 Cordially,

Charlene Haddock Seigfried 

And a second response from Patrick McCormack of New Brighton, MN (and bro-in-law of Brita)

  My initial reaction to Brita DeRemee’s article on vummunhood was to ponder the gender question. Is there a male cognate? Is there a manly apposite to a vummun?

How about a Mennan? The ice blue? A man with fat triceps wearing a wife beater? He drives a Ford pickup, scratches his ass in public, and wears cheap cologne on dates. His idea of cuisine runs from beans to weiners and back again.

He calls forth vummunhood by his lack of involvement in child rearing... he roughhouses the kids and heads off to bowl. She shakes the flour off her apron, and squeezes her fat arms around the kids for a quick hug before doing the laundry.

They live in a trailer.

I was sniggering my way through these witless caricatures when I tumbled onto something. There is real substance to the entire question of vummunhood.

Start with Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, pages 59-61. MacIntyre outlines how the Enlightenment destroyed rational discussions of ethics by destroying the concept of a person-as-they-should-be. Ethical principles are merely guideposts to direct you to become the good man or woman. Destroy the concept of a good man or woman, and ethics are arbitrary personal preferences.

In this light, when John Wayne says, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, he is really saying that there is somewhere out there a debatable concept of a good man, and in that light, a man has to do what a good man has to do, to become a good man. And a good woman has to do what a good vummun has to do, in order to be a good vummun.

So, the entire concept of vummunhood is an attempt to restore a discussable image of what a good woman is.... a specific sub-species, the mother of children. Doughty. A bulwark. A whirling combination of hard work, wit, discipline, and commitment. This is not a concept against feminism, it is a flavor of what it means to be an independent woman -- A feminist with kids and a tincture of selflessness. One who does what is necessary, because the vummun is able to see what is crucial, and do it because it has to be done.

So a vummun does not exist except as a process towards a set of goals..... the vummun is a creature of motion, and snapshots look like caricatures because they flatten the dialectic of a woman in the midst of the whirl of change that is a family. Instead of chopping logic at the entire concept of vummunhood, the legitimate critic would offer instead a different image of what a woman should be.... If not a vummun, what?

I need to rotate the tires on my old pickup, and my ass itches, so I will leave off on this essay. Onward, vummunhood!