During the Titanic disaster of 1912, men secured lifeboat seats for women and children, and those men who survived the sinking were grilled in the U.S. Senate about why they weren’t dead. The traditional notion that men owed women protection, and women owed men gratitude, was generally confirmed by the behavior of passengers and crew. The feminist response to the sinking, however, was to deny that women owed men anything, and to express outrage that men had never yet done enough for them.
Sunday, May 15, 2022
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Nineteenth-Century Novelist Henry James Predicted Twentieth-Century Feminism
In 1914, a newly painted portrait of American novelist Henry James was attacked by a suffragette wielding a meat cleaver. It’s not clear whether the target was the painting or the novelist himself. It’s possible that the suffragette had been enraged by James’s 1886 masterpiece, The Bostonians, a work that rivals the writings of Ernest Belfort Bax as the Anglosphere’s most prescient nineteenth-century analysis of the doctrine of female supremacism.
Monday, May 2, 2022
The White Feather Campaign
It is sometimes assumed that at times of war, men become vitally important, and women stop taking them for granted. But history shows that even or especially at times of crisis, many women express hatred for men and contemptuous demands for their sacrifice, as became clear during the First World War in Britain.