Branson and the feminist Lady Sybil: Oh my!!

ACCORDING to Annetta Ramsay, writing for a feminist site, the soap opera “Downton Abbey” appeals to women primarily because the female characters are working to subvert the patriarchal system.

For female viewers, Downton’s pleasure is … that of a historical nightmare from which we can escape. The wardrobes and ease that some women enjoy presents an enviable fantasy but the overall class system depicted by the series imposes an oppressive system of patriarchy on every woman.

What a hoot.

“Downton Abbey” is a domestic spectacular. The hugely popular series lavishly celebrates domestic order and beauty, highly feminine dress, traditional sex roles (as we can see from the scene above in which the chauffeur Branson carries the swooning and not-all-that-liberated suffragette Lady Sybil away from a political rally) and the English nobility, all of which depended on the “patriarchal system.” Women viewers, many of whom live amid the domestic chaos and sterility which today’s nominally egalitarian elite has imposed on the lower orders, love these scenes of a house well run. Some view this as a guilty pleasure. Almost all bask in it. Look at the busy and efficient kitchen! Look at the lovely wallpaper! Look at the exquisite clothes of landed aristocrats and the starched servants’ dress, both so different from the unisex uniform of denim and T-shirts which factories churn out for the New Order proletariat! The servants are better dressed by any standards but those of purveyors of nihilistic ugliness than wealthy CEO’s in Silicon Valley. In short, look at the manners and civility of it all. This is a world in which even a paid servant would NOT eat dinner from grease-stained boxes of industrial grade pizza (though probably a handsome percentage of viewers are eating pizza while watching it all, such being the internal contradictions and demands of entertainment).

Such retro themes and domestic romanticism are interspersed with heavy doses of socialist and feminist rhetoric so that viewers from this very different world are not so overcome with guilt or nostalgia that they become radicalized in the wrong direction and so that the female viewers in particular, upon whom the success of the series depends, are the beneficiaries of ceaseless pandering. To pander to a woman today is to tell her she can have absolutely everything. She can be a feminist pitted against the past and its evil ways and a princess indulging in her ancestral civilization and the boons of male authority. Her emotional instincts are unfailingly right. It is not surprising that Ramsay approves of this pandering given the aggrieved narcissism of the publication for which she writes, which is calculated political pandering to the max and leads to true female oppression.

Ramsay has a few of her historical facts wrong. But that’s nothing new for feminists.

At that time, British women couldn’t own property, not all of them could vote and they had no rights if their husbands died. Like water penetrating cracks, even the upper-crust women of “Downton Abbey” seem eager to subtly dismantle the British class system holding them back.

Not all men could vote either. For most of British history voting rights were severely restricted for men. Most men couldn’t vote.

It is not true that women could not own property. (Didn’t Matthew Crawley’s mother own her house? Or perhaps it was a rental. I can’t remember but she certainly lived in style. In fact none of the Downton women, even the servants, seem to be suffering too much.) Property rights in Britain for women were previously restricted for married women. That was because families were viewed as a unit. Even so, denying married women the right to own property was indeed a serious flaw in the British system, instituted, I believe, after the Middle Ages, a flaw which was rectified in the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882. “Downton Abbey” takes place in the 1920s.

The system of male entail which threatened the Earl of Grantham’s estate, intended to protect the property from being divided and dispersed, ended in 1925.

— Comments —

Mary writes:

Yes, in the U.S. too until 1850 only property-owning males could vote, a very small percentage of the population. Feminists ignore this fact. Within 70 years everyone could vote. But the false narrative of only women being excluded persists. The idea was one vote per household. Married couples who vote red and blue in a way forfeit their vote because they cancel each other out.

Feminists also like to ignore the fact of primogeniture in England (and in the early US) in which the eldest male child inherited most or all of the family estate, i.e. if a man has six sons and six daughters only the firstborn male enjoys the major portion of the inheritance, excluding not only daughters but the remaining five sons. That all men have always enjoyed freedoms and advantages women were denied is nonsense. The hardship and suffering which the majority of men endured throughout the centuries (and many still endure) is entirely ignored because is doesn’t advance the agenda. Or to give them the benefit of the doubt in their self-focus maybe they are truly blind to reality.

Feminism was started by bored elite women and in its most basic form still consists of the same, who covet the perceived advantages of elite (no other) men and achieve their ambitions while standing on the backs of the underclasses, who support their cause in naivete and clean their toilets, too. The world is full of confused feminist-ettes who have been snookered into thinking that sexual license is empowering and single motherhood is easy, even cool, but would let a hot guy support them in a heartbeat. See, it is empowering and cool to be an elite feminist with a sexy job, who can pay others for the best “child care”, elite schools, house cleaning, meals, etc. etc. and who doesn’t long for a good man in their lives. But that is not how most women see things contrary to what the media tells us.

Anti-Globalist Expatriate writes:

The problem is even more fundamental than a lack of knowledge of recent history and/or deliberate distortion thereof.

Most Americans don’t know the difference between a democracy and a republic, nor why the United States were founded as a republic, rather than as a democracy. Indeed, we’re preached at all the time about the supposed virtues of ‘our democracy’, and about how ‘democracy’ is a supposedly unalloyed good, despite the fact that democracy was deliberately excluded by the Founders as the basis for our system of government.

The United States – there was a time when they were referred to as ‘these United States’, for a reason – have been sliding downhill from a republic into a mere democracy since at least the War of Northern Aggression, and ever-more-rapidly since the adoption of the 17th Amendment, the huge blunder of the Great War, the failed New Deal, and the centralization of the economy brought on by involvement in the Second World War and the foundation of the national security state required to win the Cold War (the latter two of which were the direct result of our blunder into the Great War, plus Soviet espionage and influence operations).

History teaches us that democracy is merely a waystation on the path to tyranny and empire. Our Founders knew this; it’s a shame that most contemporary Americans do not.

“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814. Here’s a decent summary article on this topic from The American Thinker.

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