The recent item at The Thinking Housewife about the “heroic” movie house in East St. Louis provoked me into remembering the many heroic films that Hollywood produced in the decades before World War II that thrilled the audiences who attended those glorious cinemas.  The movies used to belong to a healthy popular culture, which began to erode after the heady victory of 1945 and which disappeared apace in the tumult of the late 1960s.  Contemporary popular culture tends to be sexually and violently gross, morally relativistic, and intellectually so degraded that its mindlessness beggars description.  Recently, when I had the opportunity to teach a course on the history of American popular culture, I asked my students to watch a number of pre-1950 movies of the type that drew people out of their homes by the millions in the 1930s and 40s.  One of them was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn. 

Ascriptions like “the greatest film ever” are dubious, but in the case of The Adventures of Robin Hood, what would usually be hyperbole seems justified.  (Sample the original theatrical trailer.)  If, as I argued to my students, the European directors employed by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s saw in film a continuation of grand opera on the Wagnerian model – a type of unified total artwork involving all the subordinate arts from costume- and scene-design through dramatic dialogue to musical accompaniment – then one would be hard pressed to find a more exemplary instance than the Flynn-Curtiz Robin Hood.  The critic René Girard has argued that all effective narrative turns on moral conversion and that reading is itself a type of conversion experience.  So it is also in film.  One of the strongest recommending features of Curtiz’ superbly directed medieval epic is that the story turns on a moment when two paths of moral conversion intersect one another and intertwine.  Robin must let love temper his passion for justice and Marian Fitzwalter (Olivia de Havilland) must give up her Norman superciliousness to become reconciled to the English virtues embodied by Robin. Read More »

IN ITS latest issue celebrating global pop feminism, Newsweek includes Rebecca Lolosoli, of Kenya, as one of the 150 “women who shake the world.” Lolosoli has established a “matriarchal utopia,” a womyn-only village called Umoja. To add to the perfection of this Arcadia, many of these women were raped by British soldiers. That’s what we are told by the investigatively hard-nosed Newsweek, and expected to believe without any proof. “Sons are welcome—as long as they are willing to follow the village’s rules and do not try to dominate the women.” The village supposedly offers women protection, as if any women can seriously protect themselves without the help of men.

The women of Umoja must be only too happy to indulge the fantasies of Western feminists and the bottomless credulity of American women. In a ludicrous example of fusion feminism, which is commercial to the core, the village manufactures artisan bead necklaces sold by fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg. Buy one, and you too can be part of global matriarchy and channel the strength of the Umoja women as you drop your children off at day care or are on your way to work as a low-level government functionary. Umoja! Primitive is cool. It sure beats the soulless, deadening, day-to-day reality of Western androgyny. 

Eliza Griswold reports:

Lolosoli, a mother of five, is now the first woman among her people, the Samburu of Kenya, to ask for—and receive—a divorce.

Two months ago, when the verdict was announced, her husband burst into tears in the courtroom.

“I will get hold of you again,” he threatened.

Lolosoli will be part of this weekend’s Women in the World Summit in New York City. The event is sponsored by Founding Partner HP, American Express, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Reuters, the Virtue Foundation, Vital Voices Global Partnership, Women for Women International and the United Nations.

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HERE’S THE latest from The Australian on efforts by the Australian government under Prime Minister Julia Gillard to force companies to hire and promote women: Read More »

WHEN I chose this Soviet poster honoring International Women’s Day yesterday, I was perplexed by the picture. What is happening to the woman on the left? What is all that stuff? Now, I realize, thanks to a reader, that she is buried under her kitchen. This is a symbol of household slavery. The woman is literally crushed by her samovar and mop.

Lucy Zubova writes:

I don’t know if you translated it but the Russian wording reads: “8th March Insurrection Day of the Female Workers against Kitchen Slavery.” All I can say is, Ha ha ha ha. I don’t care how many billboards or pictures of Dyadya Lenin were placed around the former USSR. My own Russian husband has told me something of the life those “equal” Soviet women enjoyed. Read More »

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice

                                                  From “Ash-Wednesday” by T. S. Eliot

The Majestic Theater, East St. Louis

ALAN writes:

East St. Louis, Illinois, was named an All-American city in the 1950s. It stands directly across from St. Louis, in the shadow of the St. Louis Gateway Arch. 

One morning in 1937 three hundred people attended a Cinema Breakfast in the lobby of the beautiful Majestic Theater in downtown East St. Louis. The breakfast was held by the Better Films Council of East St. Louis. A photograph in their bulletin The Motion Picture and The Family shows 18 white women standing in the lobby. All are attired in dresses and hats. The Better Films Council and groups like it around the nation were principled advocates for high moral standards in motion pictures. (Obviously no such groups are needed today.)  Read More »

JOSIAH writes:

Patriarchy is assumed by many to mean rule by men. Feminists make this assumption, and anti-feminists tend to make this mistaken assumption too. Patriarchy is not rule by men, but rule by patriarchs (from the Latin root pater) or family men. In the past, most men were patriarchs so patriarch and man were interchangeable. This is the reason we have made the mistaken assumption that patriachy is rule by men.  Read More »

TODAY is the centenary of that beautiful, soul-stirring Marxist holiday, International Women’s Day. To mark the occasion, this video was made by a British equality campaign. The actor Daniel Craig dresses up as a woman while playing James Bond, making it a day to celebrate not just feminism but homosexuality too.

The sheer hatefulness of the script will take your breath away. It is narrated by the actress Judi Dench in a voice dripping with contempt and rage over the worldwide maltreatment of women as she recites unverifiable figures such as 60 million for the number of girls sexually assaulted on their way to school every year. Women do two-thirds the amount of work around the world and earn ten percent of the income, she says. Her poisonous little speech is pure, unadulterated evil.

The video was made by EQUALS, “a partnership of leading charities brought together by Annie Lennox to celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day.” Interestingly, in its glowing description of International Women’s Day, the group fails to mention the day’s Soviet origins. The great thing about Soviet equality was that women were sent to Siberia too. Read More »

TINA BROWN has unveiled her first issue of a redesigned Newsweek with a breathless celebration of global feminism. Women, women, women.  The world over, women are doing amazing, earth-shattering, unprecedented things. And, with such humility: Read More »

Home 'Be It Ever So Humble, George Smith (1867)

I REALIZE this is just a painting and many Victorians did not live like this. I also realize you may consider this domestic coziness cloying, even obnoxious. But this is one more bit of evidence for the ideals to which the Victorians aspired. Try to imagine a modern painter portraying three generations together like this. He would be laughed out of every gallery in America. Read More »

THE latest big news regarding marriage is that premarital sex was always normal in America. That’s right. If you thought there was something called the sexual revolution, you were wrong.

In today’s New York Times, Ross Douthat, the “conservative” columnist, writes about the impossibility of a “traditionalist utopia” in which the only sex is married sex. He states:

No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married), and not even in Mormon Utah (where Brigham Young University recently suspended a star basketball player for sleeping with his girlfriend).

The study cited by Goldstein and others is, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954-2003,” by Lawrence B. Finer. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which funded the study, Finer proves “[C]ontrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, the study shows that even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage.”

Actually, public perception holds that the sexual revolution began in the 1960s. Those who were born in 1940 would turn 20 in 1960. Therefore, this study does not deflate the general impression that premarital sex was not widely accepted in the past and dramatically increased in the 60s.

The age of the first sexual encounter decreased over the course of the years included in the study from 20.4 to 17.6. The study did not examine whether the first sexual encounter was with a future marriage partner or how many partners on average respondents had.

The idea that trends in premarital sex in America have differed little over the years is not proved by this study.

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MELANIE writes:

I’ve been reading your website for about a year now. I came across it at a time in my life when I was struggling with a lot of confusion in my family, as well as with my own conscience. You have been an inspiration and comforting reassurance to the “traditionalist” feelings I’ve always had in my heart. My own mother is a wonderful woman and I have most nothing but fond memories of her throughout my childhood. Unfortunately she falls at the end of the Boomer generation and fell prey to far too much feminist ideology. She was a working mother. I am not. Needless to say I don’t think she always respects some of my choices and views. Read More »

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

I have been looking at the Paris fashion fiasco on your blog with interest. What could these designers be thinking? Perhaps they are preparing women to work in prison camps or plowing fields. Maybe they are trying to eliminate the task of sorting lights from darks when doing the laundry. Are they seeing the world from inside a munitions factory? 

I will tell the modern designers something: they need to get out more and see the real world. They are rich enough to afford sea cruises and tours of the best and most beautiful parts of the world. They can go to rose gardens and take in the beauty and let it translate to their designs. They can view ocean scenes and colorful sunsets in great places. They do not even have to have a prestigious education to find ideas for designs in clothing. The web now affords even the most ignorant person a glimpse into clothing designs of former days. Consider garments in the painting, “Lamentations Over a Dead Christ” by Andrea del Sarto, 1524, attached below. Even the poor who followed Christ were depicted as having more cloth on their bodies. more design and more color than today’s designers give to the world. One biography of this artist describes his subject matter as “lacking in embellishment,” but it looks more greatly embellished than the cold looking steel and mud colors of the new fashions.

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St. John the Baptist, Frederic Shields

THESE are days of darkness for white European civilization. The sky is darkened. The sun is in near total eclipse. Illumination comes not from great schemes of political reform. It comes, if it comes at all, from the lighted candle of the human soul. It comes from the burning heart.

 The author of Cambria Will Not Yield writes:  

Reason alone cannot restore the European’s sanity, because reason lacks vision. Faith transcends reason, because faith involves the heart, which is the spiritual organ of sight. From an empirical, rational standpoint it makes no difference if one European stands before the great liberal tribunal and declares his eternal defiance of the tribunal and his unyielding support of the ancient Europeans. The tribunal is the sea, and the drowning men still drown. But in the spiritual realm, which we see when we look through, not with, the eye, every human soul contains a world. And the world of one antique European can outweigh the principles of a legion of liberal Babylonians. Satan conquers by distorting and diverting man’s spiritual eye, his heart. So keep thy heart, thou man of Europe, and thou shalt ride triumphant over ruin and death.

MR. R. writes:

You know, I just realized for the first time in my adult life that I have grown quite accustomed to addressing women as “Ms” in letters and emails, even when I am reasonably sure they are married. I think that has become a convention resulting from feminism, where it MUST NOT be assumed that a woman is a “dependent” and that she should not be addressed in a way that would insult her independence. How ludicrous!?! Is it not? Read More »

BRITON RIVIÉRE painted this scene, Compulsory Education, in 1887. Here is an interesting description of the painter’s portraits of animals from the website, Victorian/Edwardian Painting.  Phillip Brown writes:

Regarded as the most able successor to the great painter of animals Sir Edwin Landseer, Briton Riviére’s art was highly popular in the later nineteenth century when he exhibited sensitive portrayals of animals and human figures in which the beasts emphasise the portrayals of human emotion. Perhaps his most famous work is Prisoners also known as Fidelity of 1869 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) in which a young poacher and his dog await trial in a bare prison cell. The sympathy of the faithful dog for his master caught the imagination of the Victorian public and it was a similar appeal to that of Landseer’s Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (Victoria and Albert Museum). Riviére’s biographer Walter Armstrong has described the artist’s ability to depict emotion in the expressions of his animals without overly anthropomorphising them; ‘Speaking of him broadly as an artist, Riviére’s strong points are his sympathy with animals, his pleasant sense of colour, his directness of conception, and his fine vein of poetry.”

The most successful of Riviére’s compositions are those in which a solitary human figure is shown with a dog.