Are girls primed to have superior penmanship? (Flickr/Pink Sherbet Photography)

In April, Washington officially struck the word “penmanship” from any state statutes and replaced it with “handwriting” in an effort to use only gender-neutral language. To me, it’s funny that “penmanship” is a male-gendered noun since there’s a common assumption that women have neater handwriting than men. A lefty lady with chicken scratch-screwing handwriting, I’ve been particularly aware of that stereotype as I’ve never much fit the mold.

It also reminds me of being in tenth-grade chemistry class and fascinated by my jock desk neighbor’s impeccably written notes.

“You write like a girl,” I told him one day as a compliment (and probably also a poor attempt at flirting).

“Whatever,” he responded, clearly unwelcome to such an uncool compliment (and probably also to a terribly awkward attempt at flirting).

In her book “Handwriting in America: A Cultural History,” Tamara P. Thornton noted a 1910 handwriting expert’s study on identifying sex differences in penmanship, which concluded that confident, original script is interpreted as masculine, whereas neat, conventional and circular are considered feminine. As a result, contemporary studies find that people are pretty good (usually better than 60 percent) at guessing whether a handwriting sample came from a man or a woman. In fact, a 2005 study out of the University of Leicester on sex hormones and handwriting noted that biological sex is the only consistent correlate with handwriting — although I would argue that upon graduating from medical school, doctors are magically endowed with unintelligible-to-all-but-pharmacists penmanship. And since his-hers handwriting differences exist across cultures, could there be a biological explanation for them?

Writing for Parenting, Kristin Kane attributes handwriting disparities to the pace of brain hard-wiring. “During the early school years, when kids are learning to shape letters, the nerve fibers that control fine motor skills in boys’ brains typically haven’t matured as much as girls’ have,” Kane writes. Of course, boys’ brain eventually catch up girls’, but their stereotypically messier handwriting may be a holdover from that slight lag.

Those University of Leicester researchers turn the clock back beyond early childhood to prenatal development. Their theory maintains that exposure to female sex hormones in utero accounts for girls’ typically neater handwriting. They implicated progesterone in particular as the chemical that, in the process of fostering more traditionally feminine characteristics including sociability and nurturance, guides girls’ primmer penmanship.

Interestingly though, fetal exposure to testosterone doesn’t appear to have the opposite effect of messing up handwriting; the prenatal hormone connection only held for females. And given that, it really does seem like good handwriting is more of a girl thing — just not for this left-handed girl who maybe didn’t get enough progesterone exposure in the womb (thanks a lot, mom!).

Dowager Empress Cixi (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)

Cixi started out as one of Emperor Xianfeng’s many concubines, but she wound up ruling China from behind a screen for more than 45 years. Her decisions toward the end were factors in the eventual collapse of the Qing dynasty. But in spite of her long and notorious rein, much of what we know about her boils down to rumor and gossip.

Our listener mail today is a listener request and PSA from Lily Ann, reminding us of the importance of giving blood (or of giving in some other way, if you cannot give blood).

Episode link: China’s Empress Dowager Cixi

Holly did the research on this one:

• Bensen, Amanda. “Cixi: The Woman Behind the Throne.” Smithsonian. March 1, 2008. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/da-cixi.html
• Cultural China. http://www.cultural-china.com/
• Edwards, Owen. “Presenting China’s Last Empress Dowager.” Smithsonian. October 2011. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Presenting-Chinas-Last-Empress-Dowager.html
• Gao, James Z. “Historical Dictionary of Modern China.” Scarecrow Press. 2009. http://books.google.com/books?id=dVzLG1aqlNkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
• Kwong, Luke S.K. “Chinese Politics at the Crossroads: Reflections on the Hundred Days Reform of 1898.” Cambridge University Press. Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 34, No. 3. pp. 663-695. July 2000. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/313144?uid=3739832&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102218078327
• Lim, Louisa. “Who murdered China’s emperor 100 years ago?” NPR. Nov. 14, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96993694
• Qi, Lin. “The Poisoned Palace — Mystery of Last Emperor’s Death.” China Daily. Nov. 21, 2008. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-11/21/content_7226663.htm  
• Scott, Dr. Howard. “The Second Opium War 1856-1860.” http://www.howardscott.net/4/Shameen_A_Colonial_Heritage/Files/Documentation/Second_Opium_War.pdf
• Sit, Tony. “The Life of Empress Cixi.” China Now. 2001. Republished by the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. http://www.sacu.org/cixi.html

You can listen to Stuff You Missed in History Class via iTunes, Stitcher or the Stuff You Missed in History Class RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter at @missedinhistory, and you can keep up with us on the official Stuff You Missed in History Class Facebook page. We’re also on Tumblr  and Pinterest.

Writing the cursive alphabet is good for the brain, studies suggest.(Flickr/Evelyn Saenz)

Earlier this spring, North Carolina passed a international headline-garnering bill that requires public schools to teach multiplication tables as well as cursive handwriting. Although most people would probably agree that “times tables” are useful learning tools for kids, there’s much less of a supportive consensus over cursive. In fact, the recently amended Common Core State Standards for U.S. public education have officially made cursive handwriting curriculum optional in order to free up more teaching time for other skills, such as the much less aesthetically pleasing art form of typing.

In a New York Times Room for Debate segment on cursive in the classroom, University of Southern California education professor Morgan Polikoff argued that since few adults regularly employ it and most workplace communication is conducted via keyboard, teaching penmanship only gobbles up valuable classroom minutes. Speaking to NPR, a New Jersey school principal said bluntly, “It’s just that with all the state mandates, we don’t have time.” Most kids are board with abandoning cursive as well, not surprisingly; in reporting on public schools’ collective move away from cursive, The Wall Street Journal cited a Scholastic survey, which found that 79 percent of middle schoolers polled dislike the fancy handwriting.

States like North Carolina and California, which have preserved a cursive requirement, see a value in kids mastering those curliques and flourishes beyond them forging a Declaration of Independence-worthy signature. Like many cursive supporters, California occupational therapist Suzanne Baruch Asherson says over at NYT’s Room for Debate that cursive is good for children’s developing brains:

“Putting pen to paper stimulates the brain like nothing else, even in this age of e-mails, texts and tweets. In fact, learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing.”

At Psychology Today, Texas A&M neuroscience professor William Klemm similarly decried the downfall of cursive education. Brain studies on younger children suggest that cursive simultaneously stokes the brain’s visual, tactile and fine motor circuits and helps optimize how efficiency it works. The sometimes painstaking process of learning cursive, by that logic, is healthy for kids’ over the long-term, regardless of how often people encounter situations that demand classy penmanship.

And I have a feeling that few, if any, educators would argue that cursive handwriting has no positive effect on the brain. It seems most of the motivation for making cursive optional has to do with prioritization and time management — a slightly ironic move since cursive ultimately speeds up (and sloppies up, for yours truly) one’s writing pace. Consequently, the decline of teaching cursive disappoints me, not so much because fewer children will be learning an increasingly rare handwriting style, but because the decision to do away with it seems largely based on not having enough hours in the school day to squeeze it in. This is also coming from a former kid who felt incredibly grown up and dignified after mastering cursive, hence I’m subjectively biased. In which take heart that at least for interested boys and girls out there — and they do exist! — cursive clubs are beginning to pop up to preserve what may very be a relic of a bygone penmanship era a generation from now.

This August 2012 photo shows four shallow chops to an incomplete skull excavated in James Fort, Jamestown, Va., by William Kelso. (Photo by Don Hurlbert, Smithsonian)

When news broke that researchers had found actual physical evidence of cannibalism at Jamestown, it seemed like just about everyone in the Internet sent us the link. Along with all those links, we got a hefty chunk of requests for an episode. So here it is.

Our listener mail is two letters on The Princess who Swallowed a Glass Piano, from Laurie and Molly.

Episode link: Cannibalism at Jamestown

Here’s where our facts came from:

• “The Starving Time”: John Smith Recounts the Early History of Jamestown, 1609. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6593
• Hume, Ivor Noel. “We are starved”. Colonial Williamsburg. http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/Winter07/starving.cfm
• “Jamestown Colony.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2013. Web. 06 May. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/300134/Jamestown-Colony&gt;.
• Wade, Lizzie. “Jamestown Bones Show Signs of Cannibalism.” http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/05/jamestown-bones-show-signs-of-ca.html
• Smithsonian. “Smithsonian and Preservation Virginia Reveal Startling Survival Story at Historic Jamestown” http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/smithsonian-and-preservation-virginia-reveal-startling-survival-story-historic-jamestown
• Historic Jamestowne. “History of Jamestown.” http://www.apva.org/history/
• Historic Jamestowne. “Captain John Smith.” http://apva.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=25
• Historic Jamestowne. “Virginia Company.” http://apva.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=22
• Historic Jamestowne. “Jane’s Story.” https://www.historicjamestowne.org/jane/jane.php
• National Park Service. “Smith, Powhatan & Pocahontas.” http://smith.npschesapeakebay.net/native-americans/indians-smith/smith-powhatan-pocahontas

You can listen to Stuff You Missed in History Class via iTunes, Stitcher or the Stuff You Missed in History Class RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter at @missedinhistory, and you can keep up with us on the official Stuff You Missed in History Class Facebook page. We’re also on Tumblr  and Pinterest.

During pregnancy, many women experience a period of forgetfulness or absentmindedness nicknamed “mommy brain,” and as I detailed in How Motherhood Works, those might be inconvenient symptoms of brain remodeling underway. In 2010, when some Yale scientists examined fMRI scans of new moms’ brains, they discovered small but significant structural changes the hypothalamus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex — areas specifically involved with motivation and reward. As I explain in the delightful video below, those alterations offer evidence that what we think of as “maternal instinct” might be neurologically hardwired into new mom’s brains:

Speaking to Smithsonian magazine, mom brain researcher Adam Franssen of Longwood University explained how he thinks that moms not only have different, but also smarter, noggins. Longwood and his colleague Craig Kinsley of the University of Richmond have conducted multiple experiments on female rats and found a number of stark differences between those with and without offspring. On top of rat moms having larger neurons that sprout additional “neuronal branches” that speed up communication among brain cells, they’re also:

• Better at problem solving, as demonstrated in maze navigation tests.
• Better at managing stress
• Better at recognizing emotions
• Better and more efficient at food foraging
• Better at memory tasks, particularly for prospective memory (i.e. packing a raincoat in a child’s backpack since there’s a chance of afternoon rain)
• Better at defending their offspring

Granted, these results are based off rat brains, but the implications for human moms are compelling. It makes sense that nature possibly sharpens new moms’ brains to prepare them for what many call the toughest job in the world. What mom brain researcher and relatively new father Adam Franssen still wants to know though, he told Smithsonian, is how paternal brains can get a parenting boost as well.

A classic flapper bob on American actress Peaches Browning. (Flickr/Library of Congress)

America’s got flapper fever, thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s Art Deco-drenched “The Great Gatsby” remix. And even though Carrie Mulligan makes for a dazzling Daisy Buchanan, the film flapper extraordinaire is a bit of highly revisionist history. As sociologist Lisa Hix notes over at Collector’s Weekly, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed the New Woman flapper of the early 1920s as little more than a dizzy drunks, obsessed with fashion, speakeasy hijinks and breaking men’s hearts. And while Gatsby on screen might be a sumptuous Vogue-ready feast for the eyes, it skips right over the cultural significance of the flapper who openly defied the rules for how young women should conduct themselves. Sure, they dressed differently, smoked, danced and drank, but flappers also were turn-of-the-century feminists.

So if you’re reading (or re-reading) “The Great Gatsby” or going to see the movie spectacle, here’s some recommended reading to understand who the real Daisy Buchanan and her drop-waist dress-sporting gal pals might’ve been:

How Flappers Worked (by me!) — “In 1915, two years before the United States became involved in World War I, H.L. Mencken introduced the word “flapper” into popular media. The term traces back to British slang for a teenage girl, but Mencken reclaimed it with more specificity. Writing for the literary magazine, “The Smart Set,” he described a new sort of female identity emerging in the United States: a woman who consumed music, literature and periodicals voraciously, taking her cues for behavior and style from the media in front of her, rather than the moral codes of decorum.”

‘The Great Gatsby’ Still Gets Flappers Wrong (Lisa Hix) — “The flapper movement wasn’t simply a fashion trend, as Emily Spivack at Smithsonian.com’s Threaded blog explains; it was a full-blown, grassroots feminist revolution. After an 80-year campaign by suffragists, women were finally granted the right to vote in the United States in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. When the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917, many women entered the workforce, and when the soldiers returned in November 1918, their female counterparts were reluctant to give up their jobs. As a result, young, unmarried women experienced far greater financial independence than they’d ever had before.”

The Flapper: The Heroine or Antagonist of the 1920s (NYU) — “As Ford mass-produced cars via the assembly line and gained competition, automobiles became more affordable to even the newly working young women. Not only did the automobile allow the Flapper to go wherever men could and to share in all their enjoyments, but it also spawned what would become a great shift in traditional courtship and dating. “In other days the boy paid court to his ‘girl’ on an ivied porch or in a cosy parlor, under the watchful eyes of a mother or the stricter vigil of a maiden aunt”. In the twenties, however, couples drove away from home, “indecently” as the parents believed. “By 1927 more autos were enclosed… creating new private space for courtship and sex”. This more intimate setting combined with the close dancing habits of the Flapper altered women’s perspective on, and openness to, sexual behavior.”

A Flapper’s Dictionary (Bookflaps) — “The dictionary went into some detail, listing the group’s slang and providing definitions. In the process, it also provided an insight: through the slang we can begin to discern attitudes and priorities and the mindset of the adherents. And the adherents, after all, were our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Who knew?”

1920s Fashion History (Fashion Era) — “High fashion until the twenties had been for the richer women of society.  But because construction of the flapper’s dress was less complicated than earlier fashions, women were much more successful at home dressmaking a flapper dress which was a straight shift.  It was easier to produce up to date plain flapper fashions quickly using flapper fashion Butterick dress patterns.  Recorded fashion history images after the twenties do reflect what ordinary women really wore rather than just the clothing of the rich.”

Emblazoned on the bodies of so many sweaty (Always sweaty! Should be called “sweatspo” if you ask me, but nobody did.) are pithy sayings that range from the genuinely inspiration — “Be positive, patience and persistent” — to the sinister –”It’s always too early to quit.” And mostly, the fitspo that I found motivates with body-shaming threats that twist exercise into a constant state, rather than a healthful retreat. For instance:

via Pinterest

One thing that struck me, too, about the fitspo ethos is how much it echoes the hallmarks of compulsive exercise. This compulsive exercise checklist comes from Dr. Suzanne Girard at UC Berkeley.

• Preoccupation with exercise or intrusive thoughts about exercise
• Finding time to exercise — at any cost
• Exercise substitutes social life
• Feeling overly anxious, guilty or angry if you can’t exercise
• Exercise driven primarily by a desire to control weight, shape and body composition
• Exercise as “punishment” for eating “bad” food
• How you feel about yourself is based on the amount of exercise you get
• Constant dissatisfaction with physical achievements

Those are precisely the types of unhealthy behaviors rooted on by fitspo: that you should feel guilty if you don’t workout, that your figure isn’t adequate, that there’s no excuse to not push yourself to the limit. And since it’s connected to cleaner diets and exercise, fitspo gets a pass as being good for folks, escaping the degree of censure social media outlets like Pinterest have brought down on thinspo. Yet the clinical signals hallmarks of a disordered relationship with one’s body are still there: anxiety, obsession and perfectionism. Is that really the wind we want at our backs pushing us as we spring toward the top of the hill?

Why are men traveling to Turkey for mustache implants? (iStockPhoto)

Nipple-darkening tattoos in Britain, double eyelid surgery in South Korea, and now mustache implants in Turkey. I’m not going out of my way to turn this blog into Stuff Mom Never Told You About Faddish Cosmetic Surgeries, I swear. But how could I resist spreading the word about how men are apparently “flocking” to Turkey to get mustache implants? Answer: I couldn’t.

On the heels of its breathless economic reporting of a faltering cupcake market, the Wall Street Journal informs that “hair transplants for the face are growing in popularity, cosmetic surgeons and tourism agencies say, with men from the Middle East, Europe and Asia coming to Istanbul seeking a virile addition for the upper lip.”

“The Turkish mustache is still the envy of the world,” an mustachioed salesman from Istanbul proudly told the WSJ.

For around $5,000 a pop, men can get a follicle-hair extraction that takes hair from an…er…hairy patch on the body and — presto change-o — implants in the upper lip and/or cheek region. (Now imagining a flowing mustache of armpit hair…) Some even spring for a travel package (The Handlebar Deluxe, perhaps?) centered around the mustache transplant that includes post-operative pampering and shopping. A couple cosmetic surgeon sources said they were performing around 60 transplants per month, which apparently meets the mark for “booming” business.

When Turkey’s mustache transplant industry caught CNN’s attention in November 2012, it cited masculinity and virility as the motivators behind paying for a Magnum PI look. Though the number of Turkish men sporting ‘staches has dropped to 34 percent in 2011 from 78 percent in 1993, there’s nevertheless something about a thicket of upper lip hair that seems to signal manliness. Christa Salamandra, an anthropology associate professor at City University of New York told CNN that mustaches in Middle Eastern culture have long symbolized high class and honor, with men sometimes swearing on their mustaches. One old Turkish saying even goes”a man without a mustache is like a house without a balcony.” A $5,000 balcony, that is.

Beards and mustaches may also signal political and religious affiliation with, for instance, a clean-shaven face indicating political alignment with the West. From CNN: “In 2008, militants in Gaza abducted a Fatah opponent and shaved off his mustache to dishonor him, while in 2003, in the lead up to the Second Gulf War, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri — a senior aide to Hussein and, like the rest of the former Iraqi leader’s inner circle, himself mustachioed — created headlines when he yelled “Curse be upon your mustache!” at a Kuwaiti counterpart at an emergency summit of Islamic states.”

Mustache implants don’t come cheap but they may pay for themselves over time. In 2009, the American Mustache Institute published a “white paper” finding that U.S. men with upper lip thickets bring home 8.2 percent higher salaries compared to clean-shaven fellows. Bruce Watson at DailyFinance did some light digging and discovered that the survey data were largely bunk, but I wonder whether the earnings difference may in fact hold up in the Middle East and neighboring regions where mustaches are consistently held in higher esteem. Clearly, some followup reporting on the mustache transplant business is needed.

(iStockphoto/ThinkStock)

No matter where you live, and no matter what your cat (or the neighbor’s cat, if you’re not a cat person) looks like, cats all share a common history that stretches way, way back. Farther back than cheese. It’s a long, adorable and maybe also evil history.

Our listener mail is about our “Happy Birthday to You” episode. One is from Mike and is about “The Simpsons.” Novella also asks about Marilyn Monroe’s famous singing of “Happy Birthday to You” to the President.

Here’s an article: How Animal Domestication Works

Episode link: Here, Kitty Kitty: The Domestication of the Cat

Holly’s research legwork on this is amplified by her many years of owning, caring for and studying cats:

• Brown, David. “Why Do Cats Hang Around Us? (Hint: They Can’t Open Cans)” The Washington Post. June 29, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/28/AR2007062802343.html
• Brown, David and Carlos A. Driscoll. “Science: Cats Domesticated Themselves.” Washington Post. June 29, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/06/29/DI2007062900911.html
• Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. “The Evolution of House Cats.” Scientific American. June 10, 2009. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-taming-of-the-cat
• Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. “From Wild Animals to Domestic Pets, An Evolutionary View of Domestication.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. June 16, 2009. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/suppl.1/9971.full
• Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. “The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication.” Science. June 28, 2007. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5837/519.abstract?sid=ffb6fd2c-61a7-4ca3-82b6-dfd691794949
• Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. “A Suite of Genetic Markers Useful in Assessing Wildcat (Felis silvestris ssp.)-Domestic Cat (Felis silvestris catus) Admixture.” Journal of Heredity. 2011. http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/content/102/Suppl_1/S87.full.pdf+html
• Holden, Constance. “A Fertile Domestication of Cats.” Science. June 28, 2007. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2007/06/28-01.html
• Wastlhuber, J. “History of Domestic Cats and Cat Breeds.” http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/CCAH/local-assets/pdfs/FelHusCh1.pdf
• Zax, David. “A Brief History of House Cats.” Smithsonian. July 1, 2007. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/brief_cats.html?c=y&page=1

You can listen to Stuff You Missed in History Class via iTunes, Stitcher or the Stuff You Missed in History Class RSS feed. Follow us on Twitter at @missedinhistory, and you can keep up with us on the official Stuff You Missed in History Class Facebook page. We’re also on Tumblr  and Pinterest.

20 Miss Korea contestants who look suspiciously similar (via Buzzfeed).

In response to a widely circulated photo of 20 Miss Korea beauty contestants that originated on a Japanese blog, a Reddit commenter who claimed to be from South Korean said: “This is called the Korean plastic face look. In certain areas of Seoul, you would think all the women are sisters because they look so similar due to same surgeries.”

Even though South Korea’s penchant for plastic surgery already had been well established, the glaring side-by-side similarity among the young women attracted widespread attention online, with some like Hello Giggles’ Jennifer Still wondering whether it signaled a “new beauty standard” in South Korea (not to mention increased difficulty with judging beauty contestants that all look remarkably the same).

Why are so many South Korean women — roughly 20 percent of those between 19 and 49 years old — surgically reshaping their faces? Some blame the infiltration of Western media; others point a finger at many of the suspiciously sculpted faces of K-pop stars. In the country with the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery in the world,  eyelid surgery also is popular and though less intensive than a double-jaw surgery it nevertheless has radical face-altering results. As Dodai Stewart explained over at Jezebel: “One in five women in Seoul have undergone some kind of procedure. Most popular: Eyelid surgery, to make the eyes “more Western,” and getting your jawbone shaved or chiseled down for a less-square and more V-shaped look.” Whatever the source, the so-called “beauty belt” in Seoul is literally lined with plastic surgery clinics, some of which are in such vigorous competition, The New York Times noted, that they organize promotional “Cinderella” contests to give away free surgeries.

In 2011, The New York Times reported that “In South Korea, Plastic Surgery Comes Out of the Closet” detailing how an increasing number of women and men (but especially women) were going under the knife and to greater extremes, such as double-jaw surgery. That same year, a study from the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery shows how South Korea isn’t the only place with rampant plastic surgeries happening. The United States is home to the largest proportion of cosmetic procedures around the globe — 21.1 percent — with No. 2 Brazil coming in with 9.8 percent. Whereas Americans are keen on “enhancements” (see: breast augmentations), South Koreans are more focused on skin and hair-related procedures, as well as invasive facial surgeries.

So while the Miss Korea contestants are certainly something to look at, they’re simply part of a global beauty phenomenon. Or make that, a global discomfort with our own beauty.