The True History Of Female Emancipation (Part 1)

An exhibition called Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights was due to open at the British Library April 24. With the current situation there are of course serious doubts about its opening at all, but it is scheduled to run until August, so presumably the entire event won’t be cancelled.

The British Library rightly styles itself “The World’s Knowledge”. Unfortunately, this exhibition appears to include quite a lot of feminist propaganda masquerading as knowledge, while excluding all the major champions of women’s rights and milestones along the way, and even those it acknowledges are distorted. For example, the prospective visitor is told she can meet those who fight for:

“ending period poverty and supporting refugee women to securing abortion rights and increasing the number of women and girls involved in science.”

“those behind the No More Page 3 campaign” and “human rights advocates Southall Black Sisters, and the Women’s Liberation Movement” while “Recognising that inequality is experienced differently depending on race, gender identity, class and sexuality, this exhibition celebrates those who have struggled to overcome the barriers to living a fully-realised life.”

Indeed.

Let’s take a look at the above then outline very briefly the real history of female emancipation.

Period poverty is a very recent addition to the lexicon of lunacy. This campaign sought to provide free sanitary products in all secondary schools and colleges. Whenever you hear the word “free”, ask yourself: who pays? because apart from sunshine, very few things in this world are totally free. Obviously the taxpayer will foot the bill in this case, and the provision of “free” sanitary towels, etc, will undoubtedly lead to some abuse for financial gain. Having said that, this one may actually be worthwhile because in the past, girls were often not properly informed about menstruation by their mothers, and this could lead to embarrassment or more serious problems.

The bleeding resulting from periods has of course troubled women down through the ages, and they have taken various measures to deal with it, but it was the great statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin who produced the first modern, disposable menstrual pad. The idea was slow to catch on, the 1880s saw Johnson & Johnson producing them commercially.

The rights of refugee women means what? The right of any woman, usually from Africa, to relocate to Europe or North America by dint of some sob story of being raped or worse in her own country!

The prime mover behind the No More Page 3 campaign is a deranged woman from Brighton named Lucy-Anne Holmes. Look at her eyes in thiis short video. The most frightening thing about it is that she isn’t high on drugs.

Page 3 alludes to page 3 of the Sun newspaper. On November 17, 1969, its first Page 3 Girl appeared. As you can see, this is a quite tasteful photograph of an attractive young woman. The paper followed this up on November 17, 1970, and this time the model was topless, topless and then some. From then on, page 3 of this tabloid newspaper became a national institution, but second wave feminism was already on the march, and now with the third wave, we are led to believe that photographs of naked or semi-naked young women are “objectification” and worse.  The reality is that there was never any shortage of attractive young women to queue up for having their photographs splashed across a national newspaper, even the Sun, and the money was good.

Alas, feminists, who would have us believe they fight for the right of women to choose their own careers and for bodily autonomy, would have none of it. Women can have as much freedom as third wave feminism wants.

Whatever the fate of Page 3, the reality is that there are now more women than ever posing naked and semi-naked, as well as acting in films of varying length and quality on all manner of websites that make Page 3 pale by comparison. Women like Kat Banyard and Jessica Valenti may howl and scream, but ordinary women – young and not so young, attractive and not so attractive – have voted with their feet.

Now let us look at the real female emancipation movement. When our barely human ancestors came down from the trees, they realised the survival of the tribe was dependent on protecting its most precious assets: women of child-bearing age, and the young. To this effect they instituted social mores and customs that protected women. The above cartoon illustrates this to a tee. Staying at home in a filthy hut barefoot and pregnant may not have been much of a life, but hunting dinner that might eat “you” for dinner if you slipped up, was even worse.

The Romans were great administrators, and although their quality of life was far superior to that of their primitive ancestors, it was still dangerous, especially at the top, so they too preferred to keep their women at home safe. Here are a few Roman leaders with their fates:

Pertinax, (193AD), a former Governor of Britain, was assassinated. He was succeeded as Emperor by Didius Julianus, who was assassinated the same year. Clodius Albinus (193-7AD), Governor of Britain, was executed or committed suicide in 197AD. Antoninus Caracalla was assassinated in 217AD. His successor Macrinus was assassinated/executed  the following year, and his successor Elagabalus was assassinated in 222AD. Severus Alexander was assassinated in 235AD.

Being top dog in any country can still be dangerous, because the prime minister, president, monarch…is a magnet for every discontent and lunatic in the land. In October 1984, Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi was assassinated; earlier the same month, Margaret Thatcher and her entire Cabinet came within a hair’s breadth of assassination, in Brighton by an IRA bomb. Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007. These were not acts of that feminist fantasy “gendered violence”, but of political terror. Incidentally, if India is so patriarchal and Moslem Pakistan so misogynistic, why did their people elect women leaders?

To Part 2.