A brief history of feminism, part four.

So, further back through time. Before the CIA and before the Nazis and their western branches.

Back so far we wind up at first wave feminism, in fact in no way the first variant of feminism, but even so. That's the name it now goes by. It gained its power, ironically in view of its later eugenical pretentions, by trailing on the coat tails of the justified sympathy for blacks. It's been a common trope, feminists sit themselves on the crest of a rising wave and when the wave recedes under their weight, whether civil rights or pacifist radicalism or anti-slavery, they're left at their new height, with a little help from their friends in high places.

There's a lot of myths about suffragism, first wave feminism. The idea that it was heroic, sacrifical, stoical under government persecution, dedicated to democracy. Even that it earned women the right to own property and so on, manifestly untrue. Women have always been able to own property in England. For a true picture of the society women of the time supposedly found so oppressive see the works of E Belfort Bax.

These myths are the founding myths of a movement, but no more true for that. The woman who threw herself before the king's horse and was killed, had a return ticket that day. Just an accident. I've even heard it alleged that dastardly men, so fearful of female participation in democracy, tortured the suffragists of the time. Look closed and they mean force feeding. Those who went on hunger strike in prison were force fed because the government couldn't have the PR damage associated with women starving to death, rich white women at that, in British prisons.

Furthermore they were in prison for good reason, suffragists blew up Lloyd George's house. He later signed into law the act allowing women the vote. Terrorism works. As Pizzey says, feminists have been involved in terrorism more recently too.

Look at true government oppression in denial of the vote if you will: the protests of 1832, in which the King's Own Dragoons hacked down so many poor men - who wanted nothing more the democracy - all around Bristol.

Women were late to the party. It was a movement. It went up and took feminism with it. It came down again, without even achieving industrial democracy or the last points of the Charter. Feminism stayed on high, lifted up by the resilience of men.

There was a placard on the Simpsons: Draft men not beer. A good start for many lines of thought. The feminist blue ribbon movement against booze. Created modern organised crime, as well as allowing a holier-than-thou, sentimental feminist (in Bax's term) grab for the moral high-ground, whence to look down upon te atavistic menfolk.

Again, an actual placard from reality: "Votes for women, chastity for men."

Whatever happened to Angilion who used to post on the Usenet, I wonder? Again, it's ironical, given the later feminist turn to race-based biological warfare, that back then it was a common feminist belief that STDs were a conspiracy against women, a sort of male biological warfare plot to use VD they'd picked up from hookers to infect their wives. Why would they want to do that? Answer comes there none.

We're getting towards the pre-history of feminism now. That's for another time. Dingwall, Weishaupt, Wollstonecraft, the reemergence of Venus and Tertullian's statements about the doorway to the devil. Later.