Author: Linda Charnes

I grew up during the height of “the Playboy generation”—the late 60s and 70s, when the “free love” counterculture movement was co-opted by the 1950s “Mad Men” society that still peddled jokes and cartoons about secretaries being chased around desks. When I was a teenager in the 70s, Playboy magazine was delivered monthly to our house for my father’s subscription. There were three daughters in our household, two of us teenagers. We absorbed, by watching our parents’ behavior, the default message that we lived in a both a man’s house and a man’s world, and that his pleasures and...

ARE WE BEING CLASSY YET? LINDA CHARNES Point of historical consciousness: In the Renaissance, the idea of class was entirely ligamented into heritable large land estates, titles, and access to the royal ear. In other words, “class” (or prestige) was automatic and a part of the birth and death calendars of the landed gentry (cf my book, Hamlet’s Heirs). It was about land enclosures and not about persons or even money. Chaucer, French troubadours and Shakespeare started challenging that paradigm with the concept of “gentilesse,” which applied to conduct and courtesy (a word derived from a la mode behavior...