Feminism -- 1800s Style

SCANALYZER Continuity
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I have been reading a fascinating book published in England in 1949 – “A Short History of Science & Scientific Thought”, by F. Sherwood Taylor. The author illustrates some of his observations with extracts from publications contemporary to each period. One of these is the “First Report of the Central Board of His Majesty’s Commissioners”, dated 28 June 1833.

Coal mining was essential to the Age of Steam, to mechanization, and to the growing wealth of England – the kind of wealth that is the backdrop to Jane Austen’s novels on the charming lives of the English Upper Classes, fretting over arranging appropriate marriages for their daughters. Coal mining in the early 1800s was also very hard work.

Pre-pubescent girls were sent down the mines, stripped to the waist in the heat & dirt, where they worked side by side with similarly attired young boys pulling carts of coal from the coal face to the base of the mine shaft. If the mine were shallow enough, women then took the coal in baskets on their backs and dragged it up ladders to the surface. All so that Their Betters could go to balls in Bath.

When I see one of today’s Daughters of Privilege driving to her government job in an imported car with a bumper sticker saying “A Woman’s Place is in the House … and the Senate”, I shake my head. Do they even know?

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They know little of the past. Yesterday is year zero for these naïfs. What, if anything, they do know is wrong.

Pity these ignorants. They have been deluded into thinking that spending their days in meaningless jobs in a cubicle farm is liberating and transformative. Later, looking back at those wasted years, they will drown their sorrows in box wine, surrounded by cats instead of a family.

In part 2 of his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl describes such a case of regret in one of his patients, contrasting her experience with that of another woman who had found meaning in her life through the care of her disabled son.

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What they don’t know (or rather, among the things they don’t know). is that originally, feminists argued FOR gender-based legislative protections. Listen to the wonderful song “Bread and Roses”.

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