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The Current Transcript for August 14, 2018

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: He joined several organizations that were affiliated with the Nazi party and he supported as you mentioned, the euthanasia program that murdered children considered to be disabled.

LAURA LYNCH: He is Hans Asperger and his name is synonymous with a syndrome that affects children who are described as being high functioning autistics. But historian Edith Sheffer dug into his past to his rise to prominence in Vienna after the Nazis annexed Austria. And she has no doubt Asperger, instead of treating all the children in his care, was part of the killing machine in his country. That is in half an hour. After that.

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VOICE: For me the idea of having a garment that I could wear every day, that has always been a kind of dream of mine because I have to make so many creative choices during the day. It's very appealing that I could sort of eliminate one of those choices.

LL: It comes in 248 sizes and you can wear it all day, every day. Which is exactly what the founders of the rational dress society want you to do, escape the tyranny of fashion, environmental degradation and endless choice. In an hour, when the politics of fashion offer an uncomfortable fit, but first.

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LL: If there is anyone who has dollars, euros or gold under their pillows, that you go exchange it for liras at our banks. This is a national domestic battle. This will be my people's response to those who have waged an economic war against us.

LL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is presiding over a currency crisis, watching the lira tumble as he engages the United States in a tariff battle over the continued detention of an American pastor. But Erdogan isn't backing down and the economic instability in Turkey threatens to spread beyond its borders. That's where we start today. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to this summer edition of The Current.

Turkey's lira crisis puts European economies at risk, says expert

Guests: Kareem Shaheen, Nilgun Onder

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VOICE 1: The distributers do not want to give the products to us because they bought with dollar and they want to sell with dollar.

VOICE 2: I need the mold for glass factory. We need to reduce glass. I called the molder today. They said to me we don't make any mold because of steel don't find in Turkey now.

VOICE 3: Personally, affecting me only because I'm going to grocery shopping and right now I can't even find the basic stuff that I need for living like cleaning stuff. It's not enough.

LL: Some reaction today from Istanbul, as people react to the free fall of Turkey's currency over the past week. The lira lost about a third of its value before stabilizing around near record lows at about 6.55 per dollar. Even before this crisis, the lira was the world's worst performing currency, but this latest decline was accelerated after U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted he would double tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum. Inside Turkey many people are being squeezed by high inflation and soaring prices and merchants and business owners are some of the hardest hit. Sertac Haznedaroglu, who is I should say a friend, has a textiles business in Istanbul selling European imports. Here's how she says the currency crisis will affect her.

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VOICE: I think nobody will be able to buy them anymore because everyone is paid in Turkish lira and now prices are doubled. So my business is almost, I think it will stop because I can't sell. Now I don't know what to do right now you know because it happened so fast, but my plan is stopping all orders.

LL: Now she says other people she knows in the textiles industry and elsewhere are worried about the economic impacts as well.

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VOICE: For example, in textile everything is imported and so many manufacturers are scared to continue their business and the first thing to cut the expenses is fire people. And everyone is scared around me to lose their job. And everyone is also scared because when you go to a bar, when you go to a restaurant, all prices will be doubled soon. People may not be able to afford it anymore.

LL: Despite this escalating crisis, Turkey's President Erdogan has remained defiant. He said that Turkey is fighting an economic war and he's urged citizens to dig out their dollars, euros and gold from under their pillows and to cash them in for Turkish lira. Kareem Shaheen is a reporter who covers the Middle East and Turkey for the Guardian newspaper and he joins me from the streets of Istanbul. Hello.

KAREEM SHAHEEN: Hi. Thank you for having me.

LL: Can you give us a sense of how people there are reacting to the country's currency crisis?

KS: It's basically like your friend described. I mean we're looking at a lot of people who earn money in liras and they're suddenly being priced out of you know basic goods and services. The costs of any imported food products is rising really high. Things like hotels where people are booked to go on holidays just before the Muslim Eid festival are finding it too expensive to go on those vacations, to buy traditional sweets and presents and so forth. So on a day to day basis, while this is a big geopolitical crisis, in reality it's ordinary Turkish citizens who are the ones who are likely to pay a price for it.

LL: And those ordinary Turkish citizens that you're speaking to, how concerned are they about this in the longer term?

KS: They're pretty concerned about it, except that they don't really know what to do about it. So you know a lot of these designers or clothes shop owners or grocers who are buying you know imported products from abroad in hard currency are having to raise their prices. They don't know if ordinary Turkish citizens are going to be able to afford them and if they're going to go bankrupt or have to shut down their businesses. So what they're doing is they're just waiting to see if this crisis resolves itself. One hairdresser I was talking to yesterday said you know Erdogan and Trump have their arguments and we're the ones who are always backed into a corner.

LL: And I've heard tales of foreign tourists coming in, which usually is a welcome thing, but lining up to buy luxury goods because they're cheaper.

ES: That's right. Over the weekend, there were lines, queues outside of shops like Louis Vuitton and you know other luxury products like Chanel. All those people who were queuing out, they were foreigners, they were tourists who suddenly you know flush with liras, realized that they could purchase these luxury products for you know much lower than they would back home. And so you know, but no Turkish citizens were out there at those queues as well.

LL: Now Kareem for people who might not have been following this, remind us what caused diplomatic relations between Turkey and the United States to go sour.

KS: So relations between the two have been sour for quite some time, particularly over U.S. policy in Syria. The U.S. there backs some militias that Turkey considers to be terrorist groups you know on their border. Turkey also wanted the U.S. to intervene very strongly against President Bashar al-Assad over there. But the more immediate cause of the crisis is the ongoing detention of an American pastor called Andrew Brunson, who's been leading a congregation here in Turkey for years and he's been held for over 600 days now over allegations of espionage for various terrorist groups. The U.S. says these charges are nonsense. Turkey says that they have an independent judiciary and the case needs to run its course. And but you know there were talks for a potential deal in which Andrew Brunson would be swapped for a Turkish citizen who was held in Israel and for some American concessions over an ongoing investigation of one of their state owned banks in the U.S. because it was circumventing Iran's sanctions. Those talks sort of fell through and Brunson's planned release did not go ahead. Instead, Turkey put him on house arrest and as a consequence President Trump announced sanctions first on the Turkish interior and justice ministers and then went on to impose tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum. And last night announced that he would be blocking Turkey from access to the F35 fighter jet, which Turkey helped build as a member of NATO.

LL: And then it's just this morning Erdogan said that the Turks were going to boycott American electronics, another sign of this continuing defiance and standoff. Now we're going to get into this more with our next guests, but can you just briefly outline the other factors that led to this point with the currency?

KS: Yes. So there are a number of structural issues that are related to Turkey's banking system. A lot of Turkish businesses are you know have borrowed heavily from external debtors. They owe a lot of money in dollars. There are also concerns over the Turkish central bank's independence from Erdogan. Erdogan recently won an election in June. He was sworn in with vast new powers that a lot of people feared would allow him to impose you know fiscal and economic policies and pressure the central bank into taking certain stances. Turkey has really high inflation, over 15 per cent and the orthodox solution to that is to raise interest rates. But Erdogan has been ideologically opposed to raising interest rates to curb this inflation. And his victory and the fact that he appointed his son-in-law as Treasury and Finance Minister, increased the fears that the central bank would not be independent to take the necessary measures to prevent a currency crisis like the one we're seeing right now.

LL: So what steps is the Turkish government taking to deal with this?

KS: So they've taken a couple steps over the last couple of days. They tried to increase the equity of the local banks. They're also lowering the requirement for foreign currency reserves and for lira reserves to try and sort of give the banks some space to operate in the midst of this ongoing crisis. But they haven't taken the step that all the investors want them to take, which is to raise interest rates in order to prevent this currency slide.

LL: Now Erdogan just won an election. He's always enjoyed support from those who are from more rural areas or those who lived in the lower rungs of the economic society in Turkey. How is his popularity right now? Are people blaming this on him or does he still have the support of the nation?

KS: I think it's difficult to gage right now because we've just had an election. We won't have one for a while. There's some municipal elections that are coming up next year, but the issue at the moment is that Erdoğan basically controls the vast majority of the media outlets in the country. And so his portrayal of the crisis as an economic war against Turkey by external actors and his portrayal of the U.S. as having stabbed Turkey, a NATO ally in the back, is the one that's kind of gaining traction in the country at the moment. That's that's the portrayal. That's the image that they've been pushing to give to local citizens, as well as to the outside world and it's sort of held right now because that's they own basically the majority of the media outlets in the country.

LL: So what then what should we be watching for in the days ahead?

KS: I think we're going to have to watch, whether you know the problem with this crisis is that the solution to it is obvious. It's release Andrew Brunson and fix relations with the U.S. The problem is that Turkey, as a government, has sort of pushed itself into a corner by saying that they have an independent judiciary and so they can't release him without looking like they caved to external pressure from a much more powerful actor, which as of right Erdogan appears to be unwilling to do.

LL: Alright we'll keep watching this. Kareen, thank you.

KS: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

LL: Kareem Shaheen is a reporter who covers the Middle East and Turkey for the Guardian newspaper and we reached him in Istanbul, Turkey. Many observers point out that the current crisis with the Turkish lira has been coming for some time. It's a symptom of a bigger problem and it is exacerbating political problems in the country. That could have implications for the country's neighbours in Europe. For some insight into that I'm joined by Nilgun Onder. She is an associate professor of politics and international studies at the University of Regina. And we have reached her in Regina. Hello.

NILGUN ONDER: Hello. Good morning.

LL: How serious is the economic crisis in Turkey right now?

NO: Oh, it is a very serious crisis, as the speaker, the previous speaker explained the Turkish lira crashed. The crisis turning to a full blown currency crisis. Of course it is not going to stop at the currency level. It is likely that it will weaken the banking system. Currency crisis' are usually followed by a banking crisis, fortunately Turkish banking system was significantly reformed and strengthened in the early 2000s, more specifically 2001 and 2002, following a serious financial crisis in Turkey. But I would say the crisis is a very serious one. As you mentioned earlier, the crisis was actually in the making for quite some time. The Turkish economy had been giving signs of structural chronic weaknesses and imbalances for quite some time. Unfortunately, the Turkish authorities did not take the necessary steps to address those structural weaknesses. Actually just the opposite. The Turkish government insisted on boosting the Turkish economy by a policy of low interest rates. Actually as the previous guest mentioned, there is also an ideological reason behind this policy. More specifically, President Erdogan believes that you need to keep interest rates low to keep the economy growing and going, but also to keep the inflation rate low, which really goes against economic thinking. Just to outline some of the structural weaknesses that have been underlying the Turkish economy for quite some time are some of these weaknesses are the Turkish economy's significant dependence on short term international financial inflows. And short term financial inflows are the most unstable types of international financial investments. Concurrently of course that means private corporate that has increased significantly. Currently to my knowledge private corporate that is around 300 billion U.S. dollars and much of the debt, private debt is denominated in hard currency, more specifically U.S. dollars or euros. So that makes the currency crisis the huge loss of the exchange value of Turkish lira makes it very difficult for corporations.

LL: Professor, so in that sense then what, how worried should people be that Turkey's currency crisis will spread to other countries?

NO: I think there are significant concerns that yes it may prove to be contagious given the fact that the Turkish economy and financial system are closely integrated with the rest of the world economy. Yes there are risks of contagion. We are already seeing some signs of contagion. Stock markets are feeling the pressure, especially that is likely to affect emerging market economies. Some emerging market economies currencies have lost some value and Dow Jones index also dropped what just around 5:30. In Regina currently I haven't seen the of course stock market indices yet, but there are risks of contagion. It is a serious crisis.

LL: Especially as you explained with all the corporate debt to what are I think largely European banks.

NO: Yeah. That's True.

LL: So other than Turkey who has the most at stake when it comes to Turkey's economic prosperity?

NO: Its allies should really worry. When I say its allies, Turkey has been politically and economically closely connected with the European countries and also with the United States. Given the fact that the global financial markets are globalized and closely integrated, I think many countries should worry. But the risks are higher for European economies because European economies I would say with which Turkey has a very high trade and investment relations. And as you pointed out some European banks have loaned huge amounts to Turkish corporations, Turkish banks. So the crisis can have such a kind of contagious effect or ripple effect throughout Europe.

LL: So what does Turkey need to do to contain the crisis then?

NO: Well the Turkish government needs to take this crisis more seriously. Unfortunately, in the first several days of the crisis, Turkish authorities failed to take the necessary steps to prevent the situation from turning into a full blown currency crisis. We don't yet see any series of policy measures being adopted by Turkish authorities, actually just the opposite. President Erdogan keeps referring to an economic war with the United States and putting the blame on some type of foreign conspiracy. All that talk sort of undermines investors' confidence in the Turkish economy and also of Turkish economy and Turkish currency.

LL: Well then Turkey's relations with other European nations, particularly with Germany have been strained. Yesterday, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany wants to see economic prosperity in Turkey and urged Ankara to ensure the independence of its central bank. How likely are we to see Germany or other European powers intervene to support Turkey?

NO: Well I doubt that European governments are going to support to or are going to intervene to support Turkey. I don't know what kind of intervention they can do. Not direct intervention, but official statements of support, even verbal support, could make a difference. The kind of statements Merkel issued the other day, pointing out that Turkey is important to the world economy, to Europe, such and of course urging some caution as well with respect to the independence of a central bank. Meaning make it more independent. Verbal support, diplomatic support could make a difference as far as investors' confidence is concerned. You are right, Turkey's relations with the EU have been strained for some time as well. But the kind of statements Merkel issued I think is important and I hope that some of the major European governments are going to follow suit. Such as the especially British government. I don't expect such statements coming from the USA. Unfortunately President Trump is sort of inflaming the crisis and the political conflict in Turkey.

LL: You're right. We will have to leave it there. You're right. This is far from over, but thank.

NO: You're very welcome. My pleasure.

LL: Nilgun Onder is an associate professor of politics and international studies at the University of Regina. And we reached her in Regina. The CBC News is coming up next. Then, the hidden history of the Nazi connection to autism's most famous researcher. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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'A Nazi in all but name': Author argues Asperger's syndrome should be renamed

Guest: Edith Sheffer

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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LL: Still to come, freedom from fashion. Making the leap into jumpsuits. But first, Nazi science in Austria and the eminent doctor who helped torment and kill children. And a warning, before we start this part of the show the story deals with very disturbing material that may not be appropriate for young listeners.

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VOICE: Stored deep in this basement corner, 417 carefully preserved human brains. Jar after jar, row after row, shelf after shelf, notice their size. They belong to children. Infants, toddlers, little boys and girls brought to this hospital during the war for treatment of mental or physical disabilities. One by one, their frightened faces and frail bodies captured by a young doctor whose hobby was photography and then one by one all these children died. Pneumonia, said most of their death certificates, but in reality most of these children were murdered. Murdered by or at the behest of doctors.

LL: Those children's brains were part of the private collection of Dr. Heinrich Gross. That 1997 ABC News investigation looked into the doctor's career at Spiegelgrund. Ostensibly a children's clinic in Vienna, Austria during World War II. It was essentially a child killing centre. The employment of German and Austrian doctors in the murderous Nazi eugenics program is well known. After the war, doctors were tried. Some were sentenced to death for their crimes, but some like Heinrich Gross thrived and were honoured, despite their involvement in the extermination program. Another doctor connected with Spiegelgrund who did very well for himself was Dr. Hans Asperger. His name became internationally famous during the 1990s, when Asperger's Syndrome became a popular diagnosis for people called high functioning autistics. The dark and little known career of Hans Asperger during the Nazi years is told by Edith Sheffer in her new book, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. Edith Sheffer is a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies, University of California Berkeley. She joins me from Stanford, California. And a reminder again, this interview deals with very disturbing material and is likely not appropriate for younger listeners. Edith Sheffer, hello.

EDITH SHEFFER: Hello. Thank you for having me.

LL: Tell me a bit about Hans Asperger before Nazi Germany took over Austria in 1938.

ES: Sure. Hans Asperger was born in 1906 in a rural farming village outside of Vienna and according to his own autobiographical statements, his father had very high expectations for him. And from a young age he excelled at school. He described himself as bookish with talents in languages and mathematics and he at a very early age decided to study medicine. He was highly influenced by his experience in boys groups, outside, hiking. He loved the camaraderie and he would say that this experience also affected his approach to children and his evaluation of social skills and children as they aged.

LL: And so he decided to go into medicine. At what point did he head towards psychiatry?

ES: He studied pediatrics and in fact, his position was as a pediatrician officially for the rest of his life. The branch of pediatrics he practiced though, I refer to as more of a holistic kind of child psychiatry. It was called curative education and the idea was to treat the whole child much as we look forward to today and childrearing, looking for potential biological causes for children's disturbances. But he also engaged in what he called soul care. Curative education really took the idea of tending the spirit and saw itself as really trying to enlighten children in a way that we don't see today. And this is a branch of psychiatry that came to the fore when the Nazis took over medicine.

LL: OK. So the Nazis take over medicine. They take over Austria. Was Hans Asperger a Nazi?

ES: You know, that's a complicated question and it has been seen as complicated because he never officially joined the Nazi party. And this is a fact that he grabbed on to in the post-war period to really salvage his career. If you look more closely at his history, he was in fact a Nazi in all, but name. He joined several organizations that were affiliated with the Nazi party and he supported as you mentioned, the euthanasia program that murdered children considered to be disabled. His closest colleagues were high up in the euthanasia system and were high ranking Nazis. He also assumed a number of positions in government, at the very sensitive Vienna public health office, which was really the organization responsible for enforcing racial hygiene measures in the city. And in order to have this position, he was vetted very closely by the Nazi party, as well as the SS and deemed to be a supporter of racial hygiene policies of sterilization. There's even an oblique report by the SS that he supported what was going on at the children's hospital, which included medical experiments on babies and toddlers, as well as the sending of children to the killing centre.

LL: Now you used that phrase racial hygiene. Can you spell that out a bit more?

ES: Nazis would say what they were doing was eugenics, which is you know the science of supposedly upbreeding the population and then eliminating the kinds of people that you don't. Racial Hygiene is the extreme lengths to which Nazis went, which was forcibly sterilizing almost half a million people in the population, as well as you know deporting people to concentration camps and killing them. So it differed from eugenics that was practiced in other western countries at the time and just the extent that it went to.

LL: And Asperger agreed with this?

ES: According to these Nazi reports, he was in support of these measures and in his own writings he supports the use of sterilization. And I should add that sterilization, forced sterilization was not popular in Austria compared to Germany where it really was accepted by a large swath of the population. Austria was over 90 per cent Catholic and most people did not support it.

LL: I wonder if you can actually set the scene for us a bit more about that era too, when the Nazis were taking over in Austria. In the medical profession where he was working, Asperger found himself sort of shooting his trajectory was very quick up the hierarchy at a very young age. Tell us about why that happened. What vacuum was created that he was chosen to fill?

ES: Well sure. So as I mentioned, he was training in curative education, which was really, occupied a fringe position in Vienna psychoanalysis and psychiatry, which you know was renowned and shaped by luminaries such as Freud and then child psychiatry, his daughter Anna Freud. And Asperger and his colleagues were very peripheral to mainstream Viennese psychiatry and were not in fact taken very seriously by these people and routinely dismissed. With the Nazi annexation of Vienna in 1938, a lot of their ideas about transforming children, attending the souls were in concert with Nazi psychiatry, as it was already practiced in Germany and Asperger's associates were on the far right. And so what had previously been peripheral, became mainstream and came to dominate Nazi pediatrics. And Asperger was considered very loyal to the regime and the head of his hospital, Franz Hamburger was a radical Nazi, who trusted Asperger beyond the long standing physicians in his clinic. And so Asperger at age 28 was appointed to be head of the clinic, over the heads of long-time staffers who'd been there for over a decade, basically because of his political reliability.

LL: And Nazi psychiatrists looked at people with autism as being subversive to the state. Why?

ES: Asperger and his colleagues really believed in kind of a metaphysical idea of social spirit. They believed that children were to feel you know, part of a larger organism of the full thesis language that Asperger used and it wasn't enough to be conformist and to follow the rules. You really had to feel part of the group. And the word they used for this was "gemut." This was you know a word that is famously untranslatable in the German language and took on different meanings at different times, but Nazi psychiatrists began to measure what they called children's quantity of gemut. And the idea was to strengthen these children's quality of gemut, which you could measure in percentages, in order to make them you know productive and vital citizens of the full.

LL: And why was that so important to the Nazis?

ES: You know, in the book I really argue first seeing the Nazi state more in terms of fascism than exterminationism. You know in the horrors of the Holocaust, I think we really focus on the project to eliminate people, when the actual goal was to create this strong purified Aryan folk. And only one of them means toward that was elimination and rightly that's deserved the focus. But one of the things this book calls attention to is the other side of the coin, which is remediating, people who they felt could be remediated. And these children who lacked gemut, could supposedly be taught how to have a soul.

LL: But for those children who were deemed ineducable or otherwise not remediable, there was the place called, Spiegelgrund. What was its purpose between 1940 and 1945?

ES: The other side of the coin, as you say, was eliminating those who could not be redeemed. And Asperger has had his post-war reputation glorified because he did argue that some children could be redeemed and those are the children he would diagnose. But he did diagnose a number of children ineducable, as did his colleagues and they would be sent to Spiegelgrund for observation. In contrast to other programs of Nazi extermination, child euthanasia was supposed to be a very deliberative scientific process. It wasn't like the murder of Jews, which was indiscriminate. It was a different kind of killing, where these children had long case files. They were referred to a panel of three in Berlin for careful examination and approval for each killing. And it's even more chilling if you think about it. These nurses who knew the children's names and changed their beds and fed them, were responsible for issuing the drugs that then led to their deaths. They would take barbiturates and grind them up in the food that the children would eat. And then the children would be growing so weak from illness from the barbiturates. They would start injecting them until as you'd mentioned at the top of the program, they would die from pneumonia, which was supposed to look like a natural cause of death, but it was really a result of these overdoses.

LL: Did Hans Asperger ever send children to Spiegelgrund?

ES: Yes he did and he did in several different capacities. First as I mentioned, he worked for the Public Health Office in Vienna, which was responsible for racial hygiene in the city and he was a member of a seven person commission that evaluated children from one children's institution. Asperger also transferred children to Spiegelgrund in his capacity as a consultant for remedial schools and institutions. He would put his name on transfer orders and then children who were seen at his own clinic in the curative education clinic, he transferred as well.

LL: But here's the critical question, would he have known that they would likely have been killed when he sent them there?

ES: Absolutely. He was close colleagues as I said with Frans Hamburger who was very involved in the euthanasia program and he was close colleagues with Erwin Jekelius, who was the director of Spiegelgrund. And together with these men, Asperger co-founded a society, which was believed to also try and expand you know not only curative education, but the mandate of Spiegelgrund in the city. There is no doubt that everyone in the medical community knew what was happening and he was well aware of the risks.

LL: I just want to talk just one, a little bit more about Spiegelgrund. Obviously, there was the horror of children being murdered there, but there were also children who lived there. What was life like for the children who actually lived there for a time.

ES: Typically, Spiegelgrund experiences were like asylum experiences. Children were given very little food. They were treated with incredible strictness. They were unable to visit, see their parents. There are stories about children being given vomit shots as punishments, where they would be vomiting up their food uncontrollably, then forced to eat the vomit and vomit again. There was something called the sulphur cure, where children were injected in experiencing incredible pain in their legs and not able to stand for two weeks. There was another asylum treatment called the wrap treatment, where children would be wrapped in cold sheets and forced to stay in bed basically wrapped up like a mummy for three days. And Spiegelgrund was horrific in this sense, but a lot of children's institutions in Nazi Germany and Nazi Austria were comparably bad, in terms of violence. I mean this was a period of time where children were treated despicably. Spiegelgrund was no exception, except that of course children were in constant danger of being designated for death.

LL: How do you respond to people who might say that making moral decisions wasn't a luxury, when you were dealing with a totalitarian state like Nazi Germany.

ES: I understand that life in Nazi Germany was lived in terms of shades of grey and that it was very difficult not to conform. If you walk by a store that says "Jews unwanted" and you don't bat an eye, what is that? Right. And so people were forced into different moral choices at different times of the day. Although, Asperger occupied a leadership position in Nazi psychiatry that he did not need to occupy, he could have left the hospital. He could have gone into private practice. He associated with people at the highest echelons of the killing centre. He founded societies with them and he published on the need for sterilization and for sending children to Spiegelgrund. These were all elective choices. His livelihood, his family's well-being did not depend on these really voluntary choices. So yeah for an ambitious physician, sure he would go along, but he didn't have to do it to the extent that he did.

LL: Now people today know Asperger, mostly because of the term Asperger's syndrome. That's the first time I came across it. Did he ever actually use the term syndrome to describe children with autism?

ES: No and this is a very important point for understanding how his diagnosis jumped across the Atlantic and became accepted today. He was very much a peripheral figure after the war and interestingly, he barely ever wrote about autistic psychopathy again. His work was discovered by leading British psychiatrist, Lorna Wing in 1970s. And she published her seminal article on this in 1981 because she herself had conducted extensive research on children who she didn't feel fit into standard definitions of autism at the time. She was noticing a wider variety of characteristics and she picked up Asperger's thesis. Her husband translated it for her and very generously credited him with an eponymous diagnosis. She did not need to do that, but she felt that you know that was the tradition in medicine and she disagreed with the term psychopathy and if he read her paper, it's very different from Asperger's. She's very compassionate and understanding of the children she describes. And she just decides to call it Asperger's syndrome because she wanted a neutral term. She wanted to get rid of psychopathy. And so we should really be thinking of what we call Asperger's syndrome today, as much as Wings syndrome and Asperger, I really credit her with the pioneering research on it.

LL: And yet, it's his name that goes on the syndrome into the diagnostics manual. His research became really popular during the 1990s. Why?

ES: I think parenting, psychiatry, the educational system became ever more attuned to milder and milder traits that would be considered defects in children. This was a time where school counselling is growing. This is a time when people are paying more attention to childhood milestones and Asperger's is a word that encompasses potentially problem behaviours in children that wouldn't have been caught in the 70s or 80s. And it's this expansion of the diagnostic criteria, which I think, which many agree is partially responsible for the rise or the exponential rise in diagnosis today.

LL: But you would like to see the eraser of Asperger's name from any association with this, but you also don't like categories at all. That comes pretty clear.

ES: I think the Psychiatric Association has left us without a vocabulary yet to describe what's happening. So eponymous diagnoses are granted to credit someone with discovering a diagnosis and then to honour them with that name and I argue that Asperger merits neither. He did not come up with the diagnosis, as we understand it today. Again, he's calling these children psychopaths, sadists, automata and then he also doesn't deserve the honour. So that's my problem with Asperger's. The problem with the autism label in general, is that it's widely recognized to be heterogeneous and we just don't have the terminology yet with autism to break this up into subtypes. But medicine is recognizing and hoping that we can break up the autism label into more accurate subtypes, which would ultimately be in the service of children.

LL: Now you have personal experience of this. Your son, Eric, you dedicated your book to him. Why?

ES: You know he was diagnosed with autism when he was 17 months old. I should also add, this is not in the book, he was diagnosed with PDD-NOS.

LL: What does it stand for?

ES: Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise specified. And so I you know tried my darndest to figure out what the difference with all of these things were. Autism seemed to be, if you had a lot of issues. Asperger's was if you only had social issues. And PDD-NOS was if you had, if you were social, but you had other issues. And apparently no clinicians could agree on what my son had, which is one of the reasons I was so skeptical about labels. And it wasn't until I started this research, where I really felt empowered to just look at my son, as my son and treat him for what he needed and not according to what you do for PDD-NOS or what you do for autism or what you do for Asperger's. And he himself chafes against the label of autism because he hates being treated as a stereotype and when people find out that he has a diagnosis, he finds that they make a bunch of assumptions about him that aren't true. And so personally, it hasn't been helpful for him. And we never use the word autism because you know as I said there are a lot of reasons why the label didn't fit him. Then one day in fourth grade, they had a disability day, where they showed cartoons of deaf children and cartoons of children in a wheelchair. And guess what, there was a cartoon of a kid with autism who was playing with trains. And you know, there were bullet points listing the symptoms. No eye contact, you know lack of asking questions, whatever, I don't even remember what those bullet points were. But he came home, just in shock and you know slammed the paper down on the dinner table and said is this me? Is this really me? And yeah it was an extremely painful conversation after that. He wanted to have brain surgery to take it out of his head. Labels can be helpful, when they're helpful and right now we're not at a place in the nomenclature where autism is necessarily a helpful label yet because it's not describing something accurately enough to identify.

LL: Asperger sought a hierarchy of autism, higher or lower functioning. Do you still see echoes of that today?

ES: Absolutely. And in fact, just the language you used is language that parents used to describe their own children. When Eric was diagnosed I'd go to meetings where parents would introduce my middle functioning child. My low functioning child and if you think hard about that, what does that say to the child you're introducing and is that not replicating the eugenicist hierarchy that Asperger was using? A lot of people self-identify with the term Asperger's because it has connotations that they would be able to be productive members of society and assimilate and have jobs, whereas if you have autism you're perceived to have a disability. You know, I absolutely would think there is a sense in which we're replicating the hierarchy that he himself had.

LL: It is a fascinating albeit disturbing book. And I thank you for coming in to talk to us about it.

ES: Thank you very much.

LL: Edith Sheffer is a Senior Fellow Institute of European Studies, University of California at Berkeley. Her new book is Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. And she was in Stanford, California.

[Music]

LL: Coming up in our next half hour, making the case for jumpsuit only fashion world. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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These designers think everyone should wear jumpsuits — so they've made one in 248 sizes

Guests: Abigail Glaum-Lathbury, Maura Brewer

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and this is the summer edition of The Current. The city of Fredericton is still coming to terms with a deadly shooting on Friday. Four people were killed outside of an apartment building there. Two were police officers, Constable Robb Costello and Constable Sara Burns. Bobbie Lee Wright and Donnie Robichaud also lost their lives that morning. Matthew Vincent Raymond is facing four counts of first degree murder. Vigils were held last night and on the weekend as the community mourns. Here are some of the voices of the people in Fredericton, living through one of the cruellest moments in that city's history.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: We are just outside the Fredericton Police Department this evening. This has become the scene of a growing memorial for the victims of Friday's deadly shooting, two of them sworn police officers.

VOICE 2: As your chief and as members of my senior command team, it's important for us to stand in front of the community and reassure you that our city is in good hands. And we are moving forward the best we can after Friday's horrific events.

VOICE 3: As mayor, you know my parent people are you know, yes they want answers, but they're hurting and they want to heal. You know it's perhaps one of the worst weekends in you know days in Fredericton's history. You know people are hurting. It hurts deeply. We lost Constable Robb and Constable Sara and Donnie and Bobbie and I mention their names by first name because I want people to realize they're human beings right. And we lost, we lost four people and we lost two of our best officers. And that hurts deeply.

VOICE 4: He was really the love of my life. He was really my Prince Charming and he would often say, "Did I tell you yet today that how awesome you are?" or "Have I told you yet today that I love you?" And it is hard for me to know that I'm not going to hear that anymore.

VOICE 3: There's a lot of grieving to do over the next little while and we'll do it together. We'll do it together and we will heal together in time. It'll take time. We're not immune. You know we are, we're a growing community. We're a very safe community and we'll remain a safe community, but you can never stop things from happening. You know sometimes and that's all I can get my head around right now is something happened right. And it's something tragic. We lost you know people others, there's 10 children without a mother or father.

VOICE 5: Robb really stepped in and became a second dad to them, for sure.

VOICE 6: It's hard to put it into words. Like he's like a second father figure. He's like such a good person to look up to. He just gave off this air of like just like positivity. He was just this person that I would want to be. I do want to be that person and I'm not sure if I can. That's going to be my goal. I'm going to try to be as good a person as I possibly can and Robb is that standard.

VOICE 5: I mean best case scenario, no one who is a law enforcement's spouse should have to sit in the seat that I'm in right now. But hey I knew that this could happen and I didn't enter into it blindly. I just like most people who go through tragedies never thought that it would happen to me.

VOICE 2: I want to reiterate, please this is an ongoing investigation and it is not complete. One aspect that is complete is that investigators have finished collecting the evidence required from the apartment buildings at the scene of the shootings. The buildings have now been released back to the owner.

VOICE 7: I would be comfortable there, yes I want to go back. It's just the fact that what I saw and like just it would probably like keep coming back just because it's right there outside my window. Where it happened. It'd just bring back the memories. It's just it's very, very shocking and I I tried my best to help with what I could, but the shooting was kind of crazy, I guess. What I seen was pretty dramatic too. Comes back all the time.

VOICE 8: Have you had trouble sleeping at all?

VOICE 7: No I can sleep, but I definitely dream about it. How I could have reacted differently I guess. If I could have saved them, if I could have helped them at all cause I sat there and watched them lay there for probably 20 minutes to half hour. It was very hard to do. After when you hear gunshots outside, you wonder if you want to go out and help, but you're putting your own life at risk too. Yeah the last couple days it's just been still very hard to process that it has happened. I just don't know how to feel about it. Just very shocked though, I guess.

VOICE 5: He always told me that it don't matter what happened on the job that he would always come home. And that's the hardest part for me right now, is that he hasn't come home.

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LL: Jackie McLean was the spouse of Constable Robb Costello. Her son is Zach Steeves. You also heard the voices of a witness to the shooting, 19-year-old Justin McLean, the mayor of Fredericton, Michael O'Brien, and the police Chief Leanne Fitch. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current. Well the United Nations calls the fashion industry "an environmental and social emergency." That's because the garment business is responsible for producing 20 per cent of global wastewater, 10 per cent of global carbon emissions and of course for years the industry has been criticized for paying low wages to workers toiling in dangerous sweatshops. Yet, we just keep buying the stuff. The average consumer is purchasing 60 per cent more clothing annually than even a decade ago. My next guests have a proposal for how to stop the fashion madness. They would like us all to trade in our wardrobes for one simple garment: the jumpsuit. You heard right, the jumpsuit. Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer are members of what they call, The Rational Dress Society. And they have both been wearing jumpsuits exclusively for more than three years. Abigail was in Chicago and Maura was in Los Angeles when Anna Maria Tremonti spoke with them in April. And she began the conversation with a simple question for Abigail. Why jumpsuits?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: So we started the Jumpsuit Project about four years ago and it was really born out of a lot of conversations we were having around identity and sort of what it was that we were able to wear as artists specifically. And we started thinking about what kind of garment could you have that would be universal, something that you could wear all the time for every situation and not have to be sort of perpetually thinking about whether or not you were blending in appropriately or what were you know dress codes. And so we started thinking about this idea of a universal garment which then broadened into: well if it's a universal garment for us how could it be a universal garment for everyone.

AMT: And you're wearing jumpsuits today can you tell me what they look like?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Sure. So the jumpsuit — I'm wearing the short sleeve version — it has a fly zip. And then it has something called a convertible collar which looks very much like a regular dress shirt collar. And then it has pockets, a couple of tucks in the back, sort of a regular trouser fit.

AMT: Maura what's yours look like?

MAURA BREWER: I'm also wearing the short sleeve this morning and it's a black short sleeve which I have accessorized with a sweater.

AMT: And Maura was it hard to give up the variety in your wardrobe?

MAURA BREWER: No not at all. I think you know this is a sort of difference between Abigail and I. I'm trained as a visual artist and so for me the idea of having a garment that I could wear every day has always been a kind of dream of mine because I have to make so many creative choices during the day. It's very appealing that I could sort of eliminate one of those choices. So the second Abigail had a prototype, I like threw it on and never looked back.

AMT: Ok. Now Abigail was there a time when you worried the jumpsuit might not be appropriate for certain occasions? Or does it come in sparkle?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Oh two very good questions. So I have a couple of fancy jumpsuits. I have one that's polkadot, which I wear very frequently which is actually also the answer to your first question which is have I ever felt inappropriate? And the answer to that and I really had to think hard about this is no with one exception and that one exception was when I was invited to a wedding where both of the brides were also wearing jump suit. And so I was nervous to upstage the brides. And so one of them was wearing the white version and the other one was wearing the black version and so I opted for the polkadot version so not to upstage them.

AMT: Ok well our listeners can see photos of the jumpsuit on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and we have also linked to your site where we can read your manifesto and where you actually have jumpsuits on order. But I want to talk about that manifesto. Maura how is your jumpsuit project a critique of American capitalism?

MAURA BREWER: Well so I think capitalism and fashion are really closely intertwined and that capitalism tells us that we are all competing with each other all the time and fashion has always sort of served as an extension of that, a way to produce hierarchies and social space; like who's cool and who isn't cool and who can afford what. And our clothes are sort of signaling our differentness all the time. And so for us it's important to think about the ways that clothes might be able to bring us together and produce community.

AMT: And what kinds of historical examples were in your mind when you were developing this concept?

MAURA BREWER: Yeah. So for us thinking about — we call dressing to produce like a shared community "counter fashion." We've been for the last four years doing a lot of research into different kinds of alternative and utopian dress. And so you can really see counter fashion happening you know for as long as fashion has existed as a modern phenomena maybe starting with the French Revolution and the Sankula which was a garment that French workers wore. And then you know other people adopted to signal solidarity with the workers. We're also very interested in 19th century feminist dress reform which was the movement to get women out of corsets. And in fact our name the Rational Dress Society is drawn from a feminist Dress Reform movement from the late 19th century which was called by the same name.

AMT: Oh so you're talking about like the Victorian kind of dressing and…

MAURA BREWER: Yeah yeah. Susan B Anthony actually wrote a lot about garments and the ways that women really wouldn't you know Victorian garments were extremely cumbersome and heavy and restricting and she was very concerned that woman wouldn't be able to hold a job unless they could come up with a different thing for women to wear. And so if you can't have a job the only way of making money that you have as a woman especially in Victorian-era America is to make money by marriage. So for her like finding something that women could wear was extremely important and that's where the Bloomers garment comes from in 1850s.

AMT: And you know at the same time when you talk about some critique of American capitalism one could argue fashion today has made clothing more democratic. Pretty ornate clothing was once only for the very rich. And now anyone can have it.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah. So I think a lot of things about this. So the language of democracy frequently gets used in terms of like fast fashion. So taking runway styles and then turning them around in a short amount of time into styles that really anybody can buy for very low sums of money which sounds fine except for the conditions under which those garments are being produced which are generally pretty terrible.

AMT: The work conditions.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah the work conditions. Absolutely. And just like the volumes of clothing.

AMT: It's interesting I was just reading last week that H&M has such an inventory that they can't move, that there's actually a power plant in one town where H&M founded its first store and it actually burns defective products that the retailer can't sell to create energy. That's how much leftover they have.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah that was an incredible piece in The New York Times. Maura and I were having a meltdown about it.

[Sound: laughter]

AMT: That's about fast fashion, right? So much fast fashion that you can't even move at all.

MAURA BREWER: Right. I mean it's extra crazy because you have a situation in which like H&M is producing so many garments that there are you know billions of dollars’ worth of garments that no one wants. And so then there are like burning those garments to make energy to make more garments that no one wants, right? So I think we find ourselves in a really extreme situation.

AMT: And I want to ask a few more questions about that as well. But let's talk practicalities as well. One of the big challenges with a jumpsuit is sizing. We asked Don Kerr about this in addition to playing with the Rheostatics he is the front man for the Toronto band Communism and they wear vintage jumpsuits in their act.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: It has to really fit properly which is not easy to come by. You can get one that's the right length from neck to cuff at the bottom of the leg but you put it on and the crotch is either choking you or hanging down by your knees.

AMT: Ok I think he's essentially talking about the length of the inseam, huh? What about the sizing for jumpsuits? How tough is that?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: So I'm totally going to jump in on this. We have 248 individual sizes and the big challenge here and the reason why we have so many sizes is actually largely because of height. So when you sow your pants to your shirt you the situation that was just described where you can have the torso length essentially it can be either much too short in which case you can't wear the garment or much too long and in that scenario it actually just becomes difficult to walk.

AMT: You got some inspiration from NASA on this didn't you?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: It was interesting developing the sizing table. So I'm a trained fashion designer. So Maura is an artist and I'm trained as a fashion designer and I actually teach fashion design and so I have stacks of textbooks that have sizing tables on them. And one of the most interesting things to me was when I first started I was thinking where am I going to find this data and how exactly do you accommodate more than just an industry sample size which is generally on the whole quite small and also tall. And so I ended up having to move outside of that sort of fashion data and I found a number of points of data from uniform companies, military data, and there's a really wonderful anthropometric study that's was released by NASA.

AMT: What about people with disabilities or mobility issues? Are there people that for jumpsuits might not work?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah there are actually. There absolutely are. So a lot of what we talk about you know we are offering a solution. But essentially the other way to think about the garment is that it provokes a conversation. And so you know whether or not somebody is adopting our garments, right? It's not about sort of substituting one thing for another thing so much as it is about having a broader conversation around dress and ideas of you know the conflation of consumption and expression.

AMT: Ok I fully accept that but I do have to ask one practical question. What about the bathroom? Like public washroom, dirty floors, a toilet.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah we get asked this question a lot. It was actually one of the most surprising things to me about the project is how much anxiety people have about jumpsuit bathroom compatibility issues. I will say that for me it has never been a significant problem. You know one thing I think is that every garment has a kind of trade-off. So you know you don't have to pick out your tops so you save a couple of minutes there but then maybe you have to take a couple extra minutes in the bathroom you know taking off your sweater first. But otherwise you know I think it's pretty straightforward our zippers very fast acting. So I personally have not encountered any significant challenges in the bathroom department.

AMT: Ok well I'll accept that. I want to bring in another voice here. Heather Radke test drove or test wore the jumpsuit and she wrote about all of this in the Paris Review and she joins us now. Hi Heather.

HEATHER RADKE: Hi.

AMT: What was it about the concept of the jumpsuit that appealed to you?

HEATHER RADKE: Well I had heard about Abigail and Maura's work from when I was a curator in Chicago and I'd always been interested in it because I actually don't like picking out my clothes and I've never really had a great experience with fashion. You know I don't hate it or anything but it's just not been my favourite part of life. But it's actually just such a present part of every single day of your life. So when I started to read more about their project I was just super excited about the way that they were critiquing the fashion industry and I was frankly just curious like could you wear a jumpsuit all the time?

AMT: And so what did yours look like when you took it out of the box? We know it looks like a jumpsuit. But what was yours like?

HEATHER RADKE: Well so I had a denim version of the jumpsuit so it was sort of like dark blue denim. And I'd say the jumpsuit looks somewhere between Rosie the Riveter and Car Mechanic. And so when Abigail handed it to me it was folded in a nice little rectangle and I brought it home and I tried it on and I was actually surprised about the fit as Abigail and Maura know because they saw me the next day. And I was surprised actually about how loose it was.

AMT: And this bothered you?

HEATHER RADKE: Well I think that we live in a — well at least for me — time of tight clothing. So I think I actually just had never or it had probably been years since I had worn such a loose garment in public.

AMT: And as you continued to wear it what did you think?

HEATHER RADKE: I mean I think that the main takeaway I had from the three weeks in the jumpsuit was that I really had an experience of thinking about what I was wearing. So every morning I just really noticed that I didn't have to choose anything to wear. I had already chosen. And every day at work I was kind of anxious that maybe somebody would notice that I haven't been wearing the same thing for you know not just three days in a row but three weeks in a row. And I started to notice things actually a lot about my gender and my gender identity. You know I'm a pretty femme lady and I started to really notice how the way that I was presenting myself had a lot actually to do with my clothes.

AMT: Tell me more about that.

HEATHER RADKE: So you know like I was in a work meeting and normally to a work meeting I'd wear something like a skirt and some high heeled shoes or something and all of a sudden I was wearing like you know what felt like a work garment as much as anything else. And I think that that actual juxtaposition of feeling like: "Oh this is not a particularly feminine garment." And I realized how often in various situations I feel certain power or a certain kind of authority that comes from wearing more feminine garments. Maybe that's like a little bit vague but I think what I really mean to say is that…

AMT: I get that...like a sexual power?

HEATHER RADKE: Well I mean I guess it's a thing. It's not exactly like a sexual power in the sense that it's related to sex. I guess that what I realized is what a professional outfit was for me was actually a very feminine outfit.

AMT: How did people around you react to you?

HEATHER RADKE: Well it's funny because I think part of the only thing I notice is like how few people actually pay attention to what you're wearing.

[Sound: Laughter]

HEATHER RADKE: Some people noticed of course and said something to me. Like I work with students and I had a student that I saw a couple of times over the course of one week and he was sort of like "What's up with the outfit?" But then you know actually I just told some people I was coming to do this interview and they were like "Wait you’re a jumpsuit for three weeks?" And these were people who saw me you know most of the days of those three weeks and hadn't noticed at all.

AMT: So you came away with a different view of your relationship to your clothing?

HEATHER RADKE: I definitely did and I still think about it every day. Even when I was coming to the studio today I was like "Oh what should I wear? How do I look professional?" But then it's also funny because this is radio so in some ways I could be wearing anything right now and it wouldn't really matter.

AMT: I could be wearing a jumpsuit [laughs].

HEATHER RADKE: Exactly. We can all be wearing jumpsuits.

AMT: Maybe I should be, right.

HEATHER RADKE: Yes exactly [laughs].

AMT: Ok well Heather thanks for speaking to us about this.

HEATHER RADKE: Thank you.

AMT: Heather Radke test wore the jumpsuit. She wrote about this in the Paris Review. Bring back our two designers Abigail Glaum-Lathbury is in Chicago, Maura Brewer is in L.A. So Heather talked about the power she felt and kind of dressing in a certain way — dressing femme. Like Maura what do you think of that and that versus the jumpsuit? What's the message? What's the thinking there? What's your political mind doing with that?

MAURA BREWER: Yeah you know it's an interesting question. Abigail and I have talked about this a lot in terms of like our different experiences adopting the garment. I think you know for me I have typically not dressed very femme and so it was a very easy garment for me to adopt that I felt very comfortable in. But you know overall I think that for us it was important to make a garment that would sort of be comfortable and practical and that a wide range of people would be able to wear without it seeming like a costume or drawing some kind of crazy attention to yourself. And so by that standard I think it's very functional.

AMT: Well we brought this idea to one of Canada's biggest fashion mavens to see what she would think of the jumpsuit concept. Jeanne Beker hosted Fashion Television for 30 years. This is what she had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Conceptually the idea delights me and terrifies me at the same time because I see wardrobe as a means of personal self-expression and a great way to communicate with other people and give signals about who you are, express your identity. Everyone wearing the same baggy white jumpsuit you know not so much. I don't know where that will leave us although I suppose we could just accessorize like crazy.

AMT: Ok. Canadian style guru Jeanne Beker. Maura what about that idea of self-expression, communication, you've talked a little bit about how we use fashion for this but maybe fashion uses us.

MAURA BREWER: You know a lot of times we see fashion as just a kind of natural extension of ourselves or our personal taste. We have like this idea that we're expressing ourselves through garments and that our individuality is extremely important and central to that. However I teach in a sort of lecture style classroom and I'll sort of look out at my students and you know in terms of our day to day choices we really do already tend to dress quite similarly. Like most people are wearing jeans and a T-shirt or some kind of combination of that. I have a friend who said something to me that I think is really interesting which is that in some ways our garments used to communicate a lot more. Like you used to be able to wear morning dress for example like to wear black to signify that you have lost someone and that people should sort of relate to you differently. Now if you wear black no one notices at all, right?

AMT: You don't wear black people notice [laughs].

MAURA BREWER: Right. Totally. So in some ways our garments communicate much less I think than we think they do.

AMT: It's interesting we see a lot of uniformity in clothing in dystopian science fiction. Look at the Handmaid's Tale for example. What do you think of that?

MAURA BREWER: Well I think you know just as often it's in utopian science fiction like Star Trek. So I think actually the relationship between science fiction — I'm a big science fiction fan — the relationship between science fiction and jumpsuits is actually a really interesting one. You know the jumpsuit on the one hand has these associations with work wear but it also has close ties to space travel, right? Like jumpsuit is like parachuting that's where the jump comes from in jumpsuit and then that kind of garment gets adapted and becomes a space suit. And so by the time you get to the 1960s you have all these designers like Rudi Gernreich for instance using the jumpsuit, mobilizing the jumpsuit as a sign of futurity and equality.

AMT: And at the same time what would you say to people who grew up under some kind of totalitarianism? The Mao jacket…

MAURA BREWER: Sure.

AMT: The idea that you can't wear a tie in Iran because that is Western.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah. Yeah.

AMT: Different religious demands on clothing.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah absolutely. You know one thing that's important to us is that garments in and of themselves don't have political valence, right? Like they there's nothing inherently political about a tie or a pair of pants. It's the context in which garments are utilized that gives them meaning, right? So a garment like Mao suit actually really predates Mao historically. It came about in early 20th century China as a way of sort of response to the Western suit like the way that Chinese people might be able to develop their own kind of business uniform and then is taken up by Mao and receives the sort of cultural connotations of the cultural revolution. But it is also a garment that still commonly worn in Chinese diplomatic settings. Or you might think about something like the Pussy hat or the MAGA hat, right? These are garments you know before the election in the United States you could wear a red baseball cap and no one would look at you twice. Now you can't really wear a baseball cap without it you know people sort of taking a closer look at you, right? So garments kind of pick up these cultural and historical and social meanings and these meanings change over time.

AMT: And I guess the jumpsuit would change over time too if we all adopted it then.

MAURA BREWER: Definitely.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: So we have a tagline, we always talk about rejecting choice and we talk about that in terms of like the idea of consumer choices. But we also talk about that you have to choose to reject choice, right? Which sounds sort of ridiculous but jumpsuit isn't a mandate. It is a proposition, right? It is an option or a vehicle for discussion. We do not have any political power to put everybody in jumpsuit.

AMT: So you actually care less about what we wear and more about what we think?

MAURA BREWER: Definitely.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah I think that's absolutely right.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah we see jumpsuit as a tool, right? Like if people think similarly to us then it's an option or a kind of gift from us to them that they could opt into this garment. But I also think that it's important to know that you don't have to own a jumpsuit to be a member of the Rational Dress Society. It's our shared beliefs that draw us together.

AMT: Ok well thank you for your thoughts and your ideas.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Thank you.

MAURA BREWER: Thank you.

LL: Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer are the founders of The Rational Dress Society. And the conversation with Anna Maria originally aired in April. Well that is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Jenny Han is the Korean-American writer behind the New York Times best-selling novel, "To All The Boys I've Loved Before." This week, the film adaptation of the book hits Netflix. Ahead of its release, Jenny will join host Tom Power to talk about why the teenage experience fascinates her and the importance of representation on screen. And just before we go today, we're going to welcome a new member to our family at The Current. Luca Eoin Rua was born a few days ago to our long-time producer, Lara O'Brien and her partner, Jesse Boyer. And he is beautiful little boy. You can take my word for it. I'm Laura Lynch and thank you for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Aug. 14, 2018 episode transcript

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