Merry Christmas! (That is not the spoiler alert.) If you are a crossword puzzle solver and have not yet done the New York Times puzzle stop reading.
I learned a new word today while solving the New York Times crossword puzzle. The clue was "labor leader?" By getting a variety of intersecting answers, I came up with the letters "doula" which eventually turned out to be correct, but I had not the foggiest idea what the word was or what it meant. After I had solved the puzzle, I looked it up. A doula is "a woman, typically without formal obstetric training, who is employed to provide guidance and support to a pregnant woman during labor."I do not even have any notion what language this word comes from. It does not sound Indo-European.
A small Christmas present to my readers.
Addendum: it turns out it is a classical Greek word meaning "female slave."
12 comments:
I remember an episode of Frasier in which Daphne and Niles hired a doula. She was portrayed as a hippy-ish character who talked a lot of gibberish and charged a lot of money.
Graham
Oh my!
The term has a connotation that wouldn’t be obvious if you're not Greek.
First of all, although the word is ancient, Doula is a modern term that middle class ladies used to call their one maid. It pretty much means the same thing: Slave. They were poor young girls that needed work and send usually from rural Greece into towns, because their family either could not support or thought them to be “shameful”. She assists the housewife’s hard work and buys her precious time to be also lovable. It has nothing to do with giving birth here, although they probably helped in that too. It‘s not the proper name for the job. It is a demining term and it’s very baffling to see it in the English language meaning something else no less.
Keep in mind, it associates ONLY with women, that is to say a male servant or worker in modern times would never be called slave (δούλος).
One of the most misogynistic Greek proverbs states: The good housewife is both a doula and a lady. Thus the feminist motto “neither doula, nor a lady” and the famous motherly battle cry “do it yourself, I’m not your doula” we all hear as children. I hate to think what kind of nice 50’s middle class lady has introduced it to America. Surreal.
Although it’s classical Greek you are right to suspect that it’s not Indo-European. My lexicon says we took it from Canaanite. Who knew!
Thank you so much for that truly knowledgeable explication of the term. I suspect that the person who created the crossword puzzle had no idea of these connotations and historical associations. Probably the puzzle maker found himself or herself stuck with a series of letters that meant nothing apparently and in desperation look the term up only to discover that it was a real word.
I bookmarked a Wikipedia entry on doula back in March. I don't fully recall what led me to that article, but as it had been around Easter, I believe I had been trying to learn more about historical views of Christians toward slavery—something I mentioned in the comments here a few weeks back. That quest had me reading passages from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, where ebed and doulos/doula make a number of appearances.
Historian Philip Jenkins of Baylor comments on how translators of the Bible have dealt with the term doulos, in a blog article he calls "Slavery, Euphemism, and the New Testament". I hope Prof Jenkins will forgive me for quoting at length here; but I think it is worth pointing to two very problematic passages from the Gospels (problematic from the perspective of our moral precepts today):
Never Thank a Slave
...In Luke 17. 7-10, Jesus is teaching the disciples about the nature of faith. He uses an example that will speak to many of his listeners. Suppose, he says, you have a doulos plowing or keeping sheep. When he comes in at the end of the day, do you tell him to sit right down at table to eat and drink? Obviously not. You would command him to make supper for you, then serve at table, and after that, then he can go and eat. You masters don’t thank a doulos for doing what he is ordered to do. So you disciples too, you should likewise only say, “We are unworthy douloi; we have only done what was our duty.”
This text gives an interesting picture of the earliest audiences for Jesus’s message, listeners who included small-time but respectable people who could reasonably be assumed to own a slave or two. (Anyone richer would have had multiple slaves to tackle the very different kinds of labor demanded in the field in the household). Meanwhile, Jesus is clearly not addressing the slaves themselves, at least not here.
How do we translate doulos in this passage? In the original context, it unquestionably meant “slave,” but if we use the word today, then a modern reader will be so focused on that fact as to miss any other points in the story. We are likely to ask: how on earth can that man justify keeping a slave in the first place, and to treat him so roughly? So we say servant (or handmaiden), and miss the total subjection and constraint implied by slave.
Or to cite another passage in Luke that rarely receives much attention in modern sermons, Jesus notes that “that doulos who knew his master’s will, but did not make ready or act according to his will, shall receive a severe beating. But he who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, shall receive a light beating” (12.47-48). Translating doulos here as “servant” rather than slave is just silly, and yet that is the course followed by most standard English versions. The slave system was founded on corporal punishment, which did not apply to hired labor.
I have a good friend who works as a doula, reportedly she and her clients have found it to lead to some very rewarding and what they've described as spiritual experiences. But I had no idea about the origin of the word!
Knowing my friend, she is very likely aware of its history and gladly accepts it, so as to reform and change its meaning to be more positive. I'll have to ask her about it now.
Completely off topic, but...
I want to commend Professor Wolff for making his writing available online for free. I'm so out of it that I just realized what an exceptional gesture that is in the context of contemporary capitalism.
I follow Glenn Greenwald online and he gives you the option of a paid subscription to his writing and a free one. I have the free one and in fact, since I don't have a credit card in dollars (it's a long story which I'll spare you), I have no way of subscribing. I just tried to making a comment on his podcast and discovered that only paid subscribers can comment. As my favorite Chilean political analyst, Mirko Macari, says "tiene un business", using the English word with his heavy Chilean accent, just to hammer the point home. Professor Wolff doesn't have a business and that's to his credit and a point in favor his credibility.
Eric,
This may strike some as blasphemous, but the historical fact of the matter is that none of the authors of the Gospels knew Jesus, or lived when he was alive. The Gospel according to Luke was the last of the Gospels to be written, sometime between 90 and 100 C..E., approximately 70 years after Jesus was crucified. So it would be appropriate, from an historical perspective, if not a theological one, to treat the words which Luke attributes to Jesus regarding doulas with some skepticism, particularly given their inconsistency with his other teachings set forth in the prior and earlier Gospels.
Gia_lege
My spouse, who is a mid-wife, was not aware of the Greek usage, or Canaanite origins and thanks you for your post. The term certainly has taken on a life of its own and, as would be the case in late capitalism, doulas have a national organization and certification requirements to meet. By the way, mid wife comes from Middle English: mid (with) wif (woman).
Robert Paul Wolff
Well thank you! Isn't it wonderful how culture travels and transforms when leaving the natural habitat? I actually collect such cases so you can see how interesting it was to me reading it came up in the puzzle and means something else. What a Babel tower the world is! My most precious of such stories is how a Greek song from the 60’s about the Holocaust, written by two communists somehow ended up in Afghanistan (either through Germany or Israel – I haven’t found out yet) where it became the unofficial national anthem. A song that was about help between two prisoners in Dachau came to be about the afghan homeland and patriotic duty. Isn't it amazing? I ‘m telling you, the world is simply surreal.
Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D.
I m’ glad you and your wife liked my information. Thank her on my behalf for her work and thank you for the etymology! I was surprised to see it was from Canaanite also. I thought it was related with dolor/ dolorous/ Dolores and so on. I guess not.
This is a day late and a drachma short, but the discussion of doula reminded me of a scholarly factoid from M.I. Findley’s “The World of Odysseus”:
“Only twice does Homer use the word that later became standard in Greek for a slave, doulos, which seems etymologically tied to the idea of labor. Otherwise, his word is dmos, with its obvious link with doma or domos, a house; and after Homer and Hesiod dmos never appears in literature apart from a few instances of deliberate archaizing, as in Sophocles and Euripides.”--Fritz Poebel
I am beginning to think that I am the only person on this blog who was unfamiliar with the word :-)
Anonymous
May i add, it never stopped being tied to the idea of labor. Here the standard verb for working is douleuw (δουλεύω). We call a job douleia (δουλειά) and the institution of slavery also douleia (δουλεία). The difference is a matter of pronunciation (mind the accent mark).
The word slave is also Greek. It comes from the Byzantine Greek Sklabos whitch means Slav (anyone who speaks a slavic language), since the slavic people that tried to settle lower and lower in the balkans were taken as prisoners of war by the East Roman Empire and turned into douloi.
Because people here gradually became Christians, this very notion Eric describes in his comment, played a fundamental role. All Christians were a doulos/douli of god, thus equal in His eyes and eventually they got recognized as people and not a res ( latin:thing ) by the law of Justinian. Yet the practice didn’t change, they were still bought and sold, but they had a personality, they were human. They were first a doulos of God and then a doulos to their master.
Meanwhile, the institution became pretty much unsustainable, given you had to feed and provide for a doulos as opposed to paying someone for the labor he provides (δουλειά). As the empire had to deal with foreign invaders -pagan Slavs and Muslims- and since slavery (δουλεία) was first and foremost a law of war, the institution changed hands. Douloi went from being property of a citizen to being the non Christian prisoners of war that belong to the state: the slavs. Gradually Christian douloi got more and more rights because of this distinction between Christian and non Christian.
Eventually after centuries of wars Slavic people settled in the area, became subjects of the empire, and the word sklabos came to mean exactly that. The second class subject of a foreign power you have to pay taxes to. When Turks conquered the empire, the Greeks stayed for 400 years as sklaboi of the sultan. Yet they still provided each other with δουλειά (labor) and when the revolution came in 1821, they abolish δουλεία (slavery) meaning the institution of someone owning another.
Thus as far as our language goes, Afro-Americans were douloi(δούλοι), nazi occupation is slavery (σκλαβιά), and doing the dices or having a job labor(δουλειά).
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