AMERICAN university women have often displayed an intolerance of injustice, joining in activist organizations to oppose mistreatment of the marginal and oppressed. Given this history, when will university women rise up as one against the injustice of Title IX, the federal mandate that colleges and universities make athletic teams proportionally representative along sex lines?

The University of Delaware is the latest institution to announce cuts in men’s teams to comply with Title IX. It cannot afford to add the new women’s teams necessary to make the numbers work.  Delaware is ending its men’s varsity track team altogether. Some men at the school have filed suit, alleging discrimination. The problem with claims of reverse discrimination, which have not been successful in the past, is that they still uphold the idea of equal representation. In reality, men should receive more  athletic opportunities in college because men are different from women. Men are more athletic and more interested in athletics.

The solution to this problem is not more discrimination suits.

The solution is for American women to use their voice, to rise up as one and decry the injustice. America’s intelligent and educated women have often looked out for others, not for themselves. Let this noble tradition return.

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Sophia Dorothea and the Castle of Ahlden

Saraband for Dead Lovers is an excellent 1948 movie about the doomed royal marriage between King George I of England and Sophia Dorothea of Celle, who was imprisoned by her husband for 30 years in a castle in Germany on charges of infidelity, charges which have never been conclusively proven. Joan Greenwood stars as Sophia Dorothea and she is exquisitely beautiful and moving in the role, portraying the woman who would never sit on the throne of England with her husband as the innocent victim of schemers and cruelty by her husband.

There are three outstanding female perfomances in this movie. In addition to Greenwood, Francoise Rosay plays the imperious Duchess Sophia, the mother of George, originally George Louis of Hanover. Flora Robson is the plotting and vain Countess Platen, the former lover of  Philip Christoph von Konigsmarck, played by Stewart Granger. The costumes and the scenes of seventeenth century Hanover help to make this an exceptional product of London’s famous Ealing Studios. Directed by Michael Relph, it was the Ealing Studios’ first film in technicolor and for some inexplicable reason it was a box office flop.

In real life, Sophia Dorothea was forced to marry her cousin George Louis in 1682 after his mother, the Duchess Sophia, plotted to arrange the match for financial reasons.  The marriage was arranged on the very day Sophia’s engagement to another man was to be announced. Prince George Louis of Hanover (Peter Bull in the film) was disliked by even his own mother, who said he was “the most pigheaded, stubborn boy who ever lived.”  George Louis later inherited the throne of England through his mother, who was a granddaughter of King James I.

The marriage was never happy and resulted in the birth of two children, including the boy who would become George II. Sophia fell in love with the Swedish Count Konigsmarck, and he loved her. It is not known whether the affair was ever consummated. In the movie, Sophia Dorothea resists having an affair though she admits to loving Konigsmarck. In both real life and the film, the pair was caught trying to flee, and the count was murdered. Sophia spent the next 30 years confined to the Castle of Ahlden after being divorced by her husband. She died at the age of 61.

GRACE KELLY’S wedding dress and the dresses of her attendants were modest, elegant and feminine, as opposed to the dresses of Kate Middleton and her maid of honor, as is discussed in the previous entry.

In 1954, Pope Pius XII spoke to the International Congress of Master Tailors and Designers. He said:

Instead of elevating and ennobling the human person, the modern fashions are tending to degrade and debase it. Even if you are not responsible for these deplorable manifestations, you cannot remain indifferent to them. Far from going along with the already too strong inclination toward immodesty, always be careful to respect the norms of decency and good taste, of a sanely understood and perfectly upright elegance. [emphasis added]

In brief, instead of following the materialist current which is leading so many people astray today, deliberately put yourselves at the service of spiritual ends. It is not possible to partition human life, to fix certain spheres of it in which morality has no word to say. Clothes express in too evident a fashion the tendencies and tastes of a person to escape from certain very clear rules that surpass and must govern the simple aesthetic point of view.

Today, clothes designers sell bridal wear that does not “respect the norms of decency and good taste.” Almost all wedding dresses feature bare shoulders or low cut necklines, as if it is possible to look virginal if the dress is simply white.

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LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

Here are some thoughts on the Wedding. I’ve tried to put some sequence into my ideas, but for the most part this is a miscellany.

First, it is simply not realistic in our time to expect an heir to the throne of Great Britain to find a woman to marry who is suitable in all other ways and is a virgin to boot. There are very few virgins today in Britain, let alone young women of the appropriate background for a royal marriage who are virgins.  Read More »

SUZANNE writes:

Kate Middleton is just another nail in the downfall of the British monarchy and the death of Britain. She is not a virgin (for which she is praised), will not obey her husband, is not refined and ladylike as she seems plus she has cohabitated with Prince Williams seven to eight years before this marriage. Many journalists and tabloids are ecstatic at how “modern” they are and how the Royal house embraces progress and liberation. Read More »

WHEN they were wed yesterday, Kate Middleton rejected the traditional wedding vow and did not promise to obey her husband. At VFR last week, I wrote:

How can a man be king when he can’t even secure the obedience of his wife?

Wifely obedience comes directly from the New Testament, was an ideal in Western society for thousands of years, and is grounded in human nature. 

See the remainder of my comments in that entry and the discussion that follows.

WILL the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge be anything but glorified party-ers now that the wedding is over? Adam Lovejoy writes:

The problem with Prince William is that he thinks that because he has lost his mother, Princess Diana, he has some God given right to do whatever he pleases – as if the tragic death of his mothers [sic] is some excuse for him to make a fool of himself and ignore his duty as the second in line to the throne. He gets involved with an unsuitable woman, lives with her openly outside marriage for seven years and then falls for her cheap act of ‘Oh, William, they’ll never allow you to marry me’ act, while the horny brigade applauds him for being thoroughly modern.

IN THE the 1931 movie “Bad Girl,” a husband reacts to his wife’s suggestion that she get a job so they can have an apartment of their own. He explodes in anger (go to minute 09:09). “My idea of a husband is a guy that looks after a wife and takes care of her… If I can’t do that, I won’t be a husband.”

Also, here’s research that shows that a wife’s employment has negative effects on men, more so than on women. According to the abstract: “Husbands of working wives felt less adequate as family breadwinners than did husbands of housewives, and this appeared to account for their lower levels of job and life satisfaction. Findings suggest that the occupational domain is particularly important to understanding the negative relations between wives’ employment and husbands’ job and life satisfaction.”

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip on their wedding day

A ROYAL WEDDING is an entirely different affair in the age of the Internet, with even relatively intimate moments, such as when the bride is adjusting her gown in the car, brought to the entire world. If you are one of the small handful of people on the planet who has not watched snippets of the wedding, you can view them on the Royal Channel here. 

Kate Middleton was an elegant bride with beautiful warmth though the appearance of virginal purity is theater and nothing more. The Telegraph shows a selection of gowns of the past if you would like some perspective on her dress. The ceremony itself was reverent and restrained, with the traditional reminder that the first purpose of marriage is “the increase of mankind.” The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, made no appeals for social justice in his sermon. He focused on the Christian meaning of marriage, with a bit of twenty-first century psychologizing thrown in for good measure. He said:

As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life. This is to load our partner with too great a burden. We are all incomplete: we all need the love which is secure, rather than oppressive, we need mutual forgiveness, to thrive.

The bishop’s statement that “every wedding is a royal wedding with the bride and the groom as king and queen of creation” is precisely to the point. That’s why royal weddings are important. Virtually anyone can partake of this same ritual and participate in this same exalted institution. Contrary to being a purely aristocratic event, the royal wedding is a highly democratic event too.

THE TORNADOES that touched down in the Southeast on Wednesday and Thursday were among the deadliest in U.S. history. The winds are believed to have exceeded 300 miles an hour. Among those killed was Tom Lee, a father of 13 children in Alabama. A tornado hit a community of Christian homeschooling families. The home of Kelly Crawford, of Generation Cedar, was destroyed while 25 children and several adults huddled in the basement.

AT HER blog Home Living, Lydia Sherman argues that it is is wrong for a man to ask his wife to work. She writes:

There was a time when most people on the earth, even those not religious at all, would not argue about the women being allowed to stay home and be in charge of the inner workings of the household. Most people thought it was as natural as breathing the air. Read More »

HOW MANY WOMEN in the world are madly, passionately, overwhelmingly, heart-stoppingly in love with the deceased economist and social thinker Friedrich Hayek? Here is one.

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THERE are many trashy books that do not deserve to be read. Still there’s something profoundly unsettling about the use of books for interior decorating.

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A CONNECTICUT mother faces charges of fraud because she lied about where she was living in order to get her son into a better public school. The mother is black and the school she had enrolled her son in was largely white. So intense is the drive to prove the deliberate denial of education to blacks that the mother, Tanya McDowell, is hailed as a hero. Peter Applebome reports in The New York Times:

The tale outlined outside court by the defendant’s supporters had a heartbreaking story line — a child tossed out of school, a homeless mother charged with felony theft for the crime of sending him to a better school than the one available to her, the inequalities that define America’s schools.

The boy was not tossed out of school. He was asked to leave one school and attend another. His mother, as Applebome later notes, also faces serious drug charges, suggesting that the boy’s most pressing problem may have nothing to do with his education, and she was not homeless. And “the inequalities that define America’s schools” are not due to unequal funding, as Applebome later states. They are due to differences that are both innate and cultural.

A recent report by Jason Richwine for the Heritage Foundation on “The Myth of Racial Disparities in Public School Funding” rebuts this widespread assumption. Richwine writes: Read More »

A YOUNG MALE READER writes:

Men’s clothing has not fared any better. Any given article of traditional men’s clothing is marked by loyalty to custom and accrued wisdom. Yet an assembly of them betrays an incredible variety of textures and origins, the fruit of trade and empire. The offerings are more cosmopolitan than a U.N. convention: Norwegian sweaters, Hebrides tweeds, English tattersalls, Indian madras, Shetland sweaters, Cordoban leather, Peruvian Alpaca… Each bears the mark of its maker, who may come from any corner. And yet, such wares are branded as provincial and elitist. Read More »

TINA BROWN, who has made Newsweek even less interesting than it was before, applies the predictable amount of contempt to the subject of the pending royal marriage. Of Kate Middleton, she writes:

Now that she’s engaged to be married to the second in line to the throne, her life is about to get more boring still. The palace machine will take over. The portcullis will come down. William is a RAF search-and-rescue helicopter pilot at RAF Valley on the island of Anglesey, and the happy couple will live in a remote farmhouse in North Wales, where there is 33 inches of rain a year. There she can tend to the urgent priority of royal wife, the speedy manufacture of the heir and spare.

Ah, yes. It would be far less boring if Kate Middleton occupied some corporate position churning out propaganda or attending conventions for chief executive goddesses. Raising an heir to an ancient throne, how deadly dull.

MODESTY is not the same as prudery, as is discussed in this entry. A reader also suggests retailers that sell more modest women’s clothing than what is generally available and vintage clothes, including the dress above.