----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- This is a very interesting thread, and I want to venture forth without any expertise in the issues being discussed. Roy Weintraub wrote: "Today, as I look around at the still relative absence of women in highest levels of the economics profession, I hear the echos of a time past when female graduate students were asked about their seriousness for academic work if they were married, or planned children, questions asked of them by the most courtly and gentle and kind men who would have defended womenhood as they did mother and apple pie" I am missing the relevance of this analogy. Did the kindly southern gentlemen academicians take any actions to support the women students in their quest for excelling in graduate education? Did they recognize the students' individual abilities? If they defended womanhood, I am sure it was of the traditional, passive, put-on-a-pedestal kind. That does not seem to be the picture that emerges of Keynes's relationship with his Jewish colleagues and friends. "In both cases the underlying set of attitudes is based on "difference". That attitude is one of "I am different from you" and that difference was, and of course still is, valorized. That is one of the issues that Marie Duggan put forward, and I think is worth attending to." On a broader note, the difference that is used for valorizing one over the 'other' is very much contingent on the particular time and place. Social movements change them gradually; but individuals, even otherwise great ones, rarely transcend them in ways that would satisfy later generations. If Keynes showed his humanity concretely in helping not only Jewish scholars, but also Jews as a group (mentioned in a previous post about an article by Anand Chandavarkar), then he deserves credit for not only his actions, but maybe some inner goodness that is of a transcendental nature. Sincerely, Sumitra Shah St. John's University ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]