What do you think of the notion of "women and children first" during a disaster?

[iverglas]

110. well here comes a feminist

and calls that bullshit bullshit.

Gender bias in action, or at least in policy - this is an inequality the feminists won't target.

These "people" who were "rationalizing it in their responses" -- they were feminists, were they?

Or are you suggesting that we feminists should devote an hour a day to finding and pondering arcane examples of some "privilege" granted to women, and next morning gird our loins and go out and do battle against it? Surely there should have been many volumes of feminist thought devoted to these four words by now.

I don't want to be herded through doorways or onto public conveyances by men, and I have no grounds to demand or expect that any man would treat me in any special way in a disaster because of my sex. Nor would I want it.

Sad now?


Oooh look! And from the Daily Mail! About the Titanic:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2087585/Cruise-ship-Costa-Concordia-sinking-Whatever-happened-women-children-first.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

The Daily Mail, in an editorial of April 17, 1912, claimed that it was The Law of the Sea that: ‘Those who are saved are not the strong and able-bodied but the weak and the dependent — not the grasping millionaire from the private suite on the promenade deck, clutching a roll of bank-notes . . . but the defenceless wives and sisters and children.’

Yet surprisingly, perhaps, such an attitude provoked sharp responses from early feminists, who believed that ‘women and children first’ infantilised women, and it gave rise to the slogan ‘Votes not Boats’ for the female sex.

The Mail published several feminist ripostes to its celebration of chivalrous behaviour on the Titanic.

Sadder?