When a progressive utopia burned

Gender ideology cannot survive contact with nature's wrath

On October 20, 1991, a spark ignited on a dry California hillside. With shocking speed, it turned into a raging firestorm which swept into Oakland and Berkeley, driven downwards by the so-called ‘Diablo winds’ which came off the mountain range at 100km per hour.

The fire was fierce enough to also generate its own winds. As the superheated gusts met the cool air over the bay, vortices formed which spread embers in all directions. Chaos ensued.

Within four hours, it had destroyed over 3000 homes and everything inside them. Over the next two days, it wrought billions of dollars of damage and killed 25 people. It was the largest urban fire that the United States had ever witnessed.

A leading anthropologist, Susanna Hoffman, was among the people whose homes - and entire ways of life - were destroyed. In the aftermath of the fire, she wrote a brave but largely forgotten anthropological history titled ‘The Regenesis of Traditional Gender Patterns in the Wake of Disaster’.

Hoffman, a progressive, records in unflinching detail how the fire destroyed not just the homes but the entire progressive supersystem of her Bay Area neighbourhood:

While standing amid the rubble of my home, I also stood amid the rubble of a social and cultural system. An entire community and its trappings, both physical and metaphysical, had been dismantled… Though the community had long stood as a vanguard of cultural progressiveness, in the fury of the fire recent cultural innovations burned away like so much patina.

The document is fascinating; as an anthropologist, Hoffman has the strength to record brute facts, but as a feminist, she cannot help but lament the implosion of her cultural ideals. As such, her writings stand as a conflicted and remarkably engaging analysis.

Before the fire it would be fair to say that the Oakland firestorm survivors to a large degree represented the pinnacle of modern sexual definition, or better put, non-division. The women of the community were independent, men equitable, couples by and large egalitarian. People of both genders occupied the same segments of space, public and private arenas, hours of day and night. But for many, progress in carving out new gender behaviour suffered a fifty-year setback after the firestorm.

Hoffman records the men as immediately - and perhaps surprisingly - launching into ‘command’ and ‘action’, ‘assuming the family helm’ and exercising ‘autonomous decision-making’.

…men picked rental houses and very often commandeered family finances, money allocation, the filling out of paperwork, the choice of professionals, and all other decisions, even down to new telephone numbers… Most men among the disaster survivors immediately reclaimed the public world.

While one might assume that such decisiveness would be laudable, Hoffman has the strength to record the actions of the men but not the distance to celebrate them. In fact, in her personal commentary, she manages to twist these actions into chauvinistic reflexes which she asks us to be sceptical of.

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In contrast to the men, who are defined by their agency, Hoffman frames the women ‘finding themselves’ with the duties of preparing food and caring for each other - as if they lacked all agency and a supernatural force had declared it would be so.

With the domicile gone, women on the other hand found themselves thrown into utter domesticity… A constant topic in my women’s group was how to deal with food needs, where to get meals, what to feed the family, how to maintain some semblance of a proper balanced diet.

Hoffman never quite manages to offer an explanation as to why this should be so, resorting to vague abstractions like tasks ‘fell to women’. She seems unwilling to contemplate that these women - most of whom were intelligent, experienced, and successful - sensed that they were better suited to take on these duties; that they might want to take on these roles, finding satisfaction, consolation, and purpose in them.

Men’s rapid psychological recovery from the fire (most returned to work within a week) is presented within a critical frame, as if they were uncaring. There is an implication that their lack of sympathy might underpin the heightened and lasting emotional distress of the women:

…the women, uprooted from or severely diminished in their venues, outwardly suffered more depression and longer recovery periods. The Alameda Health Department tallied a far greater use of health services and recommendations for therapy and therapy groups for women than men…

She records them as regularly breaking into tears in their group meetings and negotiations with insurance agents.

Women, on the whole, were not able to secure as favourable arrangements with insurance companies as men were, and Hoffman charts this up to sexism.

But a clearer explanation might be that the men were simply better negotiators in the moment. Insurance companies have no incentive to offer better deals to men just because they were men. Instead, masculine emotional resilience and ability to project confidence served them better in a vulnerable situation.

Equally, men - with greater strength, technical aptitude, and ability to rapidly organize into informal hierarchies - could make a greater contribution towards others’ reconstruction efforts, and thus could demand a greater contribution in return. This might explain the immediacy of their going out and ‘reclaiming the public space’.

These were acts of loyalty and sacrifice! These men were not uncaring - they were aware that recovery would be swifter and more secure in a time of extreme vulnerability with a single, self-confident decision-maker rapidly making all key building decisions himself.

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These men had committed their lives to living progressive lifestyles in a remarkably progressive neighbourhood. It seems unlikely that they were really chomping at the bit to reassert the patriarchy, and jumped at the first chance they got.

Hoffman basically makes no note of men’s suffering whatsoever, while devoting great tracts to describing how hard life was for women. I don’t really begrudge her for this. It makes for fascinating insight of a different kind.

Another interesting detail is the rapidity with which long-forgotten family ties reasserted themselves, and local ‘friendships’ proved to be weaker than might have been assumed.

Oakland firestorm survivors had marched well into the brave new world of social alliances. Extended families had long given way to nuclear. Many nuclear families were broken down yet further, and most victims felt their closest ties lay with nonrelated friends…

But our new bonds, mere decades rather than millennia old, disclosed their lack of shared and culturally reinforced rules. Friendships bear no understood schedule of obligations, no course of expected action, no set of proscribed emotions… Friends did not, or could not, offer aid or comfort. Friends grew impatient, proved unsympathetic, disappeared.

But the salience of family - previously discounted by many progressives if there was ideological conflict within their own - returned swiftly and with great strength.

What were maintained for most were the links that lie more deeply rooted in our society: blood kinship ties. Like clans gathering, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, cousins arrived. Relatives sent family heirlooms. A cousin replaced my vaporized silver vase, a gift from my father’s long-dead, beloved cousin, with a creamer and sugarer of her mother’s, though her mother was not my blood kin. Siblings returned borrowed property, sent money, and took in children… Extended families, such as they were, embraced their own, stood up and were counted in both presence and presents.

The whole piece is worth a read. It’s a fascinating story if nothing else.

Make sure you have family close, and a spouse you can rely on.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann