I DON’T approve of racial discrimination in hiring, but the literary star Louisa May Alcott most definitely did.

Curiously, this did not affect her sensational success. A new movie version of her novel, Little Women, is showing in theaters now — and yet no one is suggesting a boycott. Very few people even know about Alcott’s racism.

Her main beef was with the Irish. After working with Irish maids, Alcott decided never to hire them again.

In 1874, Alcott wrote an article, “The Servant Girl Problem,” recommending that other women not hire Irish servants too. She apparently wanted to make this discrimination global.

 Last spring, it became my turn to keep house for a very mixed family of old and young, with very different tastes, tempers and pursuits. For several years Irish incapables have reigned in our kitchen, and general discomfort has pervaded the house. The girl then serving had been with us a year, and was an unusually intelligent person, but the faults of her race seemed to be unconquerable, and the winter had been a most trying one all around.

My first edict was, “Biddy must go.” “You won’t get any one else, mum, so early in the season,” said Biddy, with much satisfaction at my approaching downfall. “Then I’ll do the work myself, so you can pack up,” was my undaunted reply. Biddy departed, sure of an early recall, and for a month I do the work myself, looking about meantime for help.

“No Irish need apply,” was my answer to the half-dozen girls who, spite of Biddy’s prophecy, did come to take the place.

I would like to know more about those “faults of her race,” but Alcott does not specify. She eventually found competent American women:

Dear ladies, don’t say this is sentimental or impossible, but try it in all good faith, and take the word of one who has known both sides of the mistress and maid question, that if you do your part faithfully you need never again have your substance wasted, your peace destroyed and your home invaded by foreign incapables.

I have no problem with Alcott’s hate crimes. In finding fault with the Irish, I actually think she had a point. But then I’m Irish.

Not all big-shot literary figures disliked Irish maids. Emily Dickinson was said to have been inspired by hers. For myself, I’d happily employ a defective Irish housekeeper, if I could afford it. Better to have one than be one. (more…)

AFUA HIRSCH, author and barrister, adds to the chorus of those who say Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has been driven from her royal duties by the racism of the British people. Writing in The New York Times, Hirsch says: I am not at all surprised. This was the bitter shadow of their sunny May 2018 wedding. How many of us suspected — hoping but doubting we were wrong — that what would really initiate Meghan into her new role as a Briton with African heritage would be her experience of British racism. And ironically, by taking matters into their own hands, Harry and Meghan’s act of leaving — two fingers up at the racism of the British establishment — might be the most meaningful act of royal leadership I’m ever likely to see. Ms. Hirsch, who is black and Jewish, comes up with not one serious attack on Markle's heritage. Everything, including a supposedly offensive brooch worn by Princess Michael of Kent and a stupid joke by a BBC journalist who was instantly fired, is petty. A woman of African descent is welcomed into the British Royal Family and given a $32 million wedding. And the British are racist!? The Ashanti Royal Family of Ghana (below) does not look any more racially diverse than the British royal family. Would Hirsch consider it racist if it treated a foreign-born white woman with the same level of respect that Meghan…

THE BRITISH people welcomed her with open arms even though she was a divorced, 37-year-old American actress whose bridal expiration date was fast approaching. Now they are accused of “racism” after Meghan Markle and Prince Harry take the “unprecedented” step of announcing they are moving to Canada for part of the year and abandoning many of their royal duties. Their action, which has met with heavy criticism, was preceded by a significant downturn in the Duchess of Sussex’s public reputation.

Race, it seems, was not the cause of her alienation from her role, at least not on the part of the British. Meghan, who is biracial, is more of an American celebrity than a British royal. Her advocacy, for instance, of global menstruation rights for women was more in tune with the vanity politics of Hollywood stars than British royalty, as much as the two cultures resemble each other. As Sam Greenhill of The Daily Mail writes:

Their (Harry and Meghan’s) preaching to ordinary people about how they should lead their lives — particularly about climate change — and what has come to be seen as a drip, drip, drip of complaints about how they are treated, has led to a real disconnect.

A woman who believed her baby’s movement in the womb was “the embryonic kicking of feminism” and championed transgenderism might be too much for even the British to take. Or is that too idealistic a view? In any event, in one poll, she was only exceeded in unpopularity by Prince Andrew.

Richard Kay, also with The Daily Mail,  examines Meghan Markle’s tenure so far in the House of Windsor.

Meghan’s decision to hold an extravagant baby shower in New York didn’t just shock people, it offended them, too. What possible justification could there be for the private jets — no matter who picked up the bill — as well as luxury hotels, lavish parties and expensive baby gifts?

It was the kind of look associated with the Kardashians, not the Windsors.

Then came the biggest shock of all — the secrecy over the birth of baby Archie.

Here, not just tradition but common sense was upended. They announced there would be no bulletins on when or where the baby would be born, no traditional photograph and they even declined to say who was in charge of delivery.

This didn’t just upset royal fans but the Royal Family, too. (more…)

IS AMERICA THE real target of Trump's latest aggression against Iran? Instantly-activated protestors gathered within 24 hours of the drone strike against Iranian General Quassem Soleimani last week. They were complete with pre-printed signs in big cities across America.  (Some conservatives followed suit in welcoming a decline in American power.) The protestors included activists from the feminist peace group Codepink, which supported the Castro government in Cuba and many Cultural Marxist causes. ResistFascism.org, another major organizer of protests, supports Castro, Communists in Nicaragua and socialists in Venezuela. Resist is funded by the Soros-backed, Communist-affiliated Alliance for Global Justice Communismpink has an annual income of about $1.4 million and is also connected to Soros's Open Society Foundations,  as well as other tax-exempt foundations. Its founder is Medea Benjamin. According to Influence Watch: Originally named Susan, Medea Benjamin was born in 1952 to a Jewish family in Long Island, New York. She changed her name to Medea, a Greek mythological character that murdered her children,[6] due to her studies after high school.[7] She has never legally changed her name.[8] Benjamin lived in Fidel Castro’s Cuba from 1979 to 1983, marrying a pro-Castro Cuban during her time in the country.[9]  During her time in the country, Benjamin praised the Castro regime in print, but after she wrote an article against certain policies of the regime,[10] she was deported. Medea!? What a great role model! Not exactly a peaceful character for these pinko peaceniks: According to Euripides' version, Medea took…

  MY HUSBAND, older son and I went to a caroling party a couple of weeks ago. The party was mostly adults, but a couple of teenagers were there too. And there were two children, a sister and a brother, under the age of 12. Everyone was cheerful and determined to have fun. The children, both dressed in dark sweatshirts, were restless, almost agitated. They roamed about the rooms until the singing began. We went to a basement room and the adults began belting out all the popular carols to a keyboard accompaniment. Everyone sang louder than usual. There had been a death in the family of our hosts just a few months before. The singing continued when the girl, who was about nine or ten, sat down on the floor close to the center of the room. As I remember it now, no one else was sitting on the floor. She crossed her legs and adopted the lotus position. She placed her upward-turned hands on her knees, brought her index fingers and thumbs together, and closed her eyes. As she sat there with her eyelids tightly shut and partook of lofty, Asiatic detachment from the scene around her, I remembered another caroling party of many years ago. At that party, children outnumbered the adults by at least two to one. We were gathered in the basement of a modest suburban house to celebrate the Epiphany, the girls in party…

  [Don't miss the "March of the Kings" by British composer Vaughan Williams, a great piece of Christmas music for the Epiphany.] IN Calvinist America (remember, the Puritans didn't even celebrate Christmas), the Christmas season doesn't last much past the busy season of preparation and shopping. It's a festive time before Christmas, but it doesn't leave much room for the observance of Advent. Then there's just one week of celebration between Christmas and New Year's. It's kind of topsy turvy. Discarded trees appear on curbs right after New Year's Day. There is no room in packed calendars and work lives for one of the greatest feasts in the Christmas calendar, the Epiphany on January 6, which marks the day when three highly cultured philosopher kings came from the East to Bethlehem. Their systems of thought now exhausted, these intellectuals were drawn by a mysterious revelation to search for a child who was  a manifestation of divine light. And they found a helpless baby. Here was no symbol or sign. Here was Wisdom itself. Here was no illumination of the mind alone. Their hearts were enlightened too. Their search ended, they fell to their knees and adored. Today, as Eastern mysticism and the cult of "mindfulness" spread in the West, let's remember that these ideas are not new, but very ancient. This road was traveled by the Magi. G.K. Chesterton wrote, in The Everlasting Man: It is still a strange story, though an old one,…

I APPRECIATED comments by readers on a video review I posted of the 1975 movie “The Stepford Wives.” As readers pointed out, the reviewer failed to mention the major plot twist in the movie. I don’t think this failure affected his basic point. It appears to have truly been a movie that portrayed housewives as conformist robots, but he didn’t mention that the men in the movie killed the housewife characters and replaced them with real robots.

For another reason, however, I removed the video. A possibly blasphemous comment in the review couldn’t be edited out by me.

I’ll have to review this movie myself. The later 2004 version probably was not as influential as the 1975 version. Stay tuned. And thank you to alert readers. Their comments are below.

By the way, according to Wikipedia, feminists gave the movie mixed reviews:

Initial reaction to the film by feminist groups was not favorable,^[8] with one studio screening for feminist activists being met with “hisses, groans, and guffaws.”^[8] Cast and crew disagreed with the perceived anti-woman interpretations …, recalling “Bryan [Forbes] always used to say, ‘If anything, it’s anti-men!'”^[8] Despite Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique being a major influence on the original novel upon which the film was based, Friedan’s response to the film was highly critical, calling it “a rip-off of the women’s movement.”^[21] Friedan commented that women should boycott the film and attempt to diminish any publicity for it.^[22]

Writer Gael Greene, however, lauded the film, commenting: “I loved it—those men were like a lot of men I’ve known in my life.”^[22]

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THE NEW YEAR is here and that means it’s the time of year to reprimand one of Europe’s most famous arts institutions: the Vienna Philharmonic, known for its famous New Year’s Day concerts.

This year, the philharmonic got hit from two directions: on one side, for long playing a particular arrangement of Johann Strauss’s famous Radetzky March. The arrangement was written by a member of the National Socialist Party. Leopold Weninger wrote it in 1914, decades before the National Socialists existed. Despite the immense, worldwide popularity of the march, which always ended the New Year’s concert, the orchestra’s most famous annual event, the philharmonic for the first time this year replaced it with another, less rousing arrangement. You can see the former version, with all that disgusting, patriotic clapping, in the video above. Unfortunately, I don’t have a clip of the new one.

That the famous orchestra prefer to disassociate itself from Nazism by undermining a jubilant celebration that has nothing to do with Nazism is not unreasonable, I suppose, but then could we have some balance please?

For instance, could the orchestra stop performing the works of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev and other artists who had connections with the Soviet government, under which tens of millions of innocent people were sent to their deaths and killed in deliberate famines? Prokofiev voluntarily returned to Soviet Russia after living in the West for two decades; he wrote music meant to boost the morale of the Soviet army; won Stalin prizes and in 1937 composed a cantata celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, featuring musical settings of texts by Stalin, Marx and Lenin.

Now I don’t believe Prokofiev’s beautiful compositions should be banished, but if musical works are to be judged by the political connections of musicians, then we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work, not just with connections to Nazism, but with connections to Soviet Communism, which killed far more people and is still alive today. (We hear far less about Soviet atrocities. Is that because they were so often committed under Semitic leadership?)

The Vienna Philharmonic was also scolded, as it has been many times, for having once been an all-male ensemble. The New York Times, to its credit, admits in this year’s critical piece that women were not excluded from performing classical music in the last three centuries.

For the most part, however, women performed in private, not in public, except in all-female ensembles ….

Yes, that’s very true, and one could even say that through their informal role, women performed more than men and did more to promote classical music. However, Farah Nayeri, author of The Times piece, trivializes the reason for the exclusion from orchestras:

Entire sections of the orchestra remained male because their instruments were considered unladylike.

The cello was deemed indecorous because it had to be placed between a player’s legs. Flutes and horns were thought to make a woman’s face look funny; percussion instruments were viewed as exclusively male.

That’s ridiculous. Women do look undignified with a cello between their legs, but professional orchestras were entirely or primarily male because men had the duty to financially support their families, a burden which women did not have to the same degree. The main thing that distinguished the professional orchestras from the private groups in which women played was that the musicians were paid, often enough to support a family.

Women are now part of the Vienna Philharmonic. And we live in a world where the family struggles far more. The point never was that women were inferior musicians. Eventually, the arts decline, as does civilization in general, when the family does. If you read through the lives of famous musicians and composers, you will find that many of them were inspired by mothers who loved music. The burden of proof rests with the believers in equality. No society has produced great art without great sacrifices — and one of those sacrifices is female success in the world, rather than the home.

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SOME excellent analysis of the movie “The Stepford Wives.” (Immodesty warning.)

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ALAN writes:

It was twenty years ago that my mother spent the last Christmas in her apartment at Maryville Gardens, on the property that had once been the site of Maryville College.

It was twenty years ago that I sat there with her as we talked about Christmas memories, listened to Christmas carols and songs, and watched Christmas movies from the 1940s and 1950s.

It was twenty years ago that it became unbearably clear to me and to her that her memory was beginning to fail.  It was a preview of what has been called “death in slow motion.” What followed was a three-year nightmare of continued loss, worry, frustration, uncertainty, and regrets. If I felt all those things acutely, as I did, then it must have been so much worse for her. But she never talked much about it, and I never encouraged her to do so. The realization that it was happening was bad enough. She knew there was nothing we could do about it. I knew it too, and I hated it.

On that night, we sat there in the comfort and warmth of her apartment, admiring the beauty of the lights on her Christmas tree and the ornaments that she had made and placed upon it and the Christmas village that she had made and placed under it.

It was the penultimate chapter in her life. She still found pleasure in decorating her Christmas tree and the village beneath it, just as she did when I was a boy in the 1950s and when I must have absorbed some of the joy she felt in looking forward to what for us was the happiest time of year. (more…)

  HUMAN mutilation looks like mutilation in a backward tribe. For a technologically advanced society, mutilation can be made to look normal. Three months later, the couple says they are confident their baby will thrive growing up in their hometown of Brighton, with support from both sets of grandparents. “It’s about having the right kind of community around us so they are able to see different kinds of family set-ups,” Jay tells the outlet. “All we can do is try to be really open from the start with them and other people around us — give them the best chance.” (Source) Ideas, not technology, determine how advanced a society. We live in a primitive world. But it's dazzling, and because it's dazzling people are fooled into thinking that high technology means a healthy, advanced culture that can sustain itself. In related news: This month, the first person to obtain a legal "non-binary" sex designation has successfully petitioned the court originally responsible for his "non-binary" status to order that the sex on his birth certificate be restored to "male." In documents exclusively provided to PJ Media, James Shupe's petition described his "non-binary" designation as a "psychologically harmful legal fiction." He told PJ Media he hopes this decision will prevent a woman currently seeking "non-binary" recognition from following the same lies. "The charade of not being male, the legal fiction, it's over," James Shupe told PJ Media on Tuesday. "The lies behind…

A philosopher seated at his desk may be able to distinguish the natural and supernatural aims of men, but in actual life, this distinction does not exist, and all education is worthless unless it enables a man to attain the end proposed for him by his Creator. What would it benefit an army to equip it with first-rate weapons, if it were left without leaders and without an object, so that each soldier could go wherever he chose? Every good teacher rightly expects his pupils to be grateful to him if they succeed in life. Those, however, who give instruction quite apart from all mention of religion, must expect to hear the children of this world reproach them at the last day, saying: "All that you taught us was vain; you never spoke to us of God; you showed us pictures of all kinds of things, but allowed the image of God to be obliterated in our souls; you made us learn the names of earthly kings in remote ages, but not the name of the King of Heaven, whose reign is everlasting; we know all about minute germs and fungi, and nothing at all about God." My Brethren, all creation exists for the glory of God: the earth, sea, and stars extol Him, the spirits in Heaven sing His praise; our lives belong to Him, and therefore we must teach our children to pronounce His Name; all our systems of…

  NEW YEAR'S GREETINGS from The Thinking Housewife. May you have great hope and confidence in God during the year ahead. I will keep all the readers of this site in my daily prayers this year --- and every year. THANK YOU very much to those who have given to support this blog. This is a lovely carol based on the poem by Christina Rossetti -- and it's not bleak at all. IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER ----- By Christina Rossetti In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ. Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day, Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay; Enough for Him, whom angels fall before, The ox and ass and camel which adore. Angels and archangels may have gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air; But His mother only, in her maiden bliss, Worshipped the beloved with a kiss. What can I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part; Yet what I can I…

START your new year right by meditating upon the possibility that this will be your last year --- and that it won't end well. Unpleasant thought, for sure, but it could be just the thing you need. It is fearful to think upon the union of God's power, wisdom, and justice in producing this world of punishment, this wonderful, mysterious, and terrific part of creation, which is in its desolate mysteries as much beyond our conception as the joys of heaven are in their resplendency. Nevertheless we will leave the Great Evil, the loss of God, out of view, and all the horrible details of the cruelties of physical torture. Bating all these things, what sort of a life will the life in hell be, after the resurrection? It will be a life where every act is the most hateful and abominable wickedness. Read Frederick William Faber's essay "Heaven and Hell" in his book Spiritual Conferences.  

THERE'S lots of free content on the Internet. This site is essentially free too, but you can help keep it online by donating. Your support is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much to those who have given.

  IN THIS famous interview, Norman Dodd  explains the role of American tax-exempt foundations in preparing the United States to be merged with Communist Russia and create a world government.  

IS the Kremlin fomenting race war in the United States? Could the U.S. become as divided as the Middle East? With people like Rachel Maddow yelling "Russia, Russia, Russia," American patriots are misdirected and led to believe there is no substance to accusations of Russian subversion. Watch this interesting exposé of figures on the right and left.

CHRISTMAS II ---- George Herbert The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be? My God, no hymn for Thee? My soul's a shepherd too; a flock it feeds Of thoughts, and words, and deeds. The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace Enriching all the place. Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers Out-sing the daylight hours. Then will we chide the sun for letting night Take up his place and right: We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should Himself the candle hold. I will go searching, till I find a sun Shall stay, till we have done; A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly, As frost-nipped suns look sadly. Then will we sing, and shine all our own day, And one another pay: His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine, Till ev'n His beams sing, and my music shine.