FEMINISM views history as one long male conspiracy against women. Misogyny, we are told, was omnipresent in society in the past. However, when we look closely at history, we find not opposition to women so much as deference to them, not rights denied so much as privileges embodied and enforced in law, customs and manners.

When property laws forbade married women to hold property in their own names, the sense of male responsibility for female welfare was so strong that men were held liable for the criminal acts and debts of their wives.

One of the most famous examples of male deference is, of course, the Titanic, which sank 100 years ago today. The next time a feminist says that everything must change to make up for past discrimination, say: “What about the Titanic? Is that the sort of discrimination you mean?”

Almost 70 percent of the people on the Titanic died, including more than 100 women, but the rescued were overwhelmingly women and children. Men, because of the size of the crew, were far more numerous on the ship, but still strongly disfavored when loading the lifeboats. As Lawrence Auster writes, “[T]he crew and the male passengers were so assiduous in following the rule of “women and children first,” that many lifeboats left the Titanic with empty seats. Many more people died than was necessary, because, far from pushing each other out of the way, people (i.e. men) willingly died in conformity with the moral code of that time.”

Among second class passengers, 86 percent of the women were saved, and eight percent of the men. Ninety-seven percent of the first class women lived while 33 percent of the men did. (Wikipedia provides a complete chart here.)

Among the men who perished was Father Thomas Byles. (His interesting story can be found at fatherbyles.com.) (more…)

IN AN excellent piece at American Thinker, Lauri B. Regan writes:

The Obama administration’s empowerment of black rebellion began at the very start of his presidency, has grown exponentially since then, and can be seen in all sorts of machinations across the country. (more…)

THESE are shocking photos of London in 1959, a city without tattooed grandmothers, denim, purple hair, men with earrings in their noses and angry foreigners. Thankfully, we do not live in that age, a time when women were held in chains, children had to sit up straight at the dinner table and Britons wallowed in primitive racial homogeneity. I offer these pictures purely for documentary purposes. Please view them when children are not in the room.

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FITZGERALD writes:

Your comment that the Democrats are sitting on a “powder keg” because liberal attitudes and policies have forced women into the full-time workforce is spot on.

There is a quiet groaning across society from women who feel they must work to be valuable. The having-it-all lie in particular has them trapped. Women are highly susceptible to peer pressure and the feminist overlords have been able to perpetuate a web of lies that has trapped a large majority of women into wage slavery and abandonment of their families, with a resulting quiet desperation and longing for a loss most can’t quite place entirely. (more…)

DIANA writes:

Hilary Rosen,  the Democratic strategist in the news for insulting Ann Romney and non-employed mothers, is a lesbian. The Catholic League pointed this out and Forbes magazine has slammed them for it. Here is a Washington Post profile of her. She has two adopted children and is separated from her girlfriend. What a great mom. (more…)

HILARY ROSEN, a Democratic Party strategist, said yesterday that Mitt Romney can’t possibly have women’s economic interests at heart because his wife has “never worked a day in her life.” The Huffington Post reports:

“Guess what?” Rosen said. “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing.”

Rosen continued, “There’s something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney. He seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women, and I think that comes across, and I think that that’s going to hurt him over the long term. He just doesn’t really see us as equal.” (more…)

NO STATE prosecutor ever met with the parents of Beau Zabel and promised to seek justice for their dead son, as Florida Prosecutor Angela Corey did recently with the parents of Trayvon Martin. Zabel was shot in the neck on a street in Philadelphia in 2008 in what a police detective called “a robbery gone terribly wrong.” No public outrage was expressed by prominent political officials or newspaper columnists. His killer was never apprehended and Beau Zabel remains largely forgotten except by those who knew him and by overworked Philadelphia homicide detectives who occasionally reopen his file.

It’s interesting to compare the shooting death of Zabel in June of 2008 and the Martin case. (more…)

NOW THAT Rick Santorum has withdrawn from the Republican primary, the presidential race is devoid of any candidate who will stand up to feminist bullies. Today’s New York Times says Romney’s support among women voters is lagging. In response, Romney is prepared with the predictable liberal line: he will find women more jobs.

Romney, you can be assured, will not say, “Virtually every employed man is earning money for women. I refuse to see the sexes as pitted against each other.” He will resort to statistics showing that Obama has hurt female employment instead. (more…)

A STUDENT at Pilgrim High School in Rhode Island painted a mural depicting a boy in the various phases of life, growing up and then becoming a married father. That part of the mural in which the boy appeared as a man with his wife and child, however, was deemed unacceptable by the school. It was painted over. In the words of the superintendent’s press release, “some of the members of the Pilgrim High School community suggested that the depiction of a young man’s development from boyhood through adulthood as displayed may not represent the life experiences of many of the students at Pilgrim High School.”  (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

The 20th century Russian traditionalist Ivan Ilyin, who was exiled from his native land by the Bolshevik Revolution, made these observations about the differences between the organic society and the mechanistic society:

There are two different understandings of the state and politics: the mechanistic and the organic. The mechanistic asserts instinctive man and his private interests; it measures life quantitatively and formalistically. The organic derives from the human spirit and ascends to national unity and its common interests; it is qualitative, searching out spiritual roots and solutions. (more…)

SARAH S. writes:

I have been so encouraged to discover your blog. I was home-schooled as a teen (although my mother had one foot out the door working part-time), and find great fulfillment being a housewife and full-time mother today. We look forward to educating our children at home. (more…)

A READER in Italy writes:

Your post on what happened to unwanted babies in Italy was very personal for me. I am actually a descendant of one of those babies, born centuries ago somewhere in Sicily. The surname Di Dio (of God) was often given to those babies left in convents in Sicily, and I think that it may have been used to a lesser extent in some other parts of southern Italy as well. (more…)

IN A SPEECH in Berlin on Good Friday, Melinda Gates, a self-proclaimed Catholic, explained why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending some of its vast wealth to push artificial contraception around the world, according to The Seattle Times. "Some people worry that the real goal is to control populations," she stated. But ... "every year 100,000 women who didn't wish to conceive die during childbirth." She stated, "600,000 women who did not want to become pregnant [give] birth to infants who die in the first month of life." Life is only meaningful if your mother wanted you or was in a good mood when she was pregnant. Men and women "should be able to decide" when to have a child. But men and women have always been able to decide when to not have a child. What she really means is global engineers such as the Gates Foundation should be able to influence heavily the decision. Gates claims she is Catholic and yet -- on Good Friday -- said she has the right as a Catholic to defy Church doctrine. So weak and timid are those who claim to be Church authorities that someone like Gates can go on making statements like this and still be a member of the Church in good standing. This permissiveness is an affront to Catholics everywhere and an aggressive assault on the Church. Gates also misrepresented the Church's position. The Church is not against continence and abstinence, which are…

JEFF W. writes:

I agree with you that Joyce Maynard has exceptional skill for getting publicity and for understanding her reading audience. Her affair with J.D. Salinger was a publicist’s dream. But I do not think that skill developed in a vacuum. Nor am I saying that she has necessarily ever had a paid publicist. (more…)

ST. JOHN and Mary Magdalene as depicted in Raphael’s Deposition.

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THE idea that dangerous back alley abortions are the only alternatives to legalized abortion is one of the left’s most pernicious and evil lies. Writing in response to this excellent entry at VFR on abortion as “a form of child sacrifice” (see Thomas F. Bertonneau’s outstanding commentary), Vincent C. writes:

I wanted to mention two separate scenarios once used to deal with unwanted, but not aborted, births that may interest your readers.

Near the main church in Segovia, Spain, is a convent of cloistered nuns, although given Spain’s apostasy, I am not sure that it still exists. As one entered the convent, and I was fortunate enough to do so, I was shown a corridor that was windowless, and at the end of it was a door that opened up to what appears to be a huge lazy Susan device. (more…)