Feminism

My dad teaches at a Classical Christian School and each year they have a night of recitation. I was helping him choose some poems for his class. I found "If" by Rudyard Kipling for the boys, and was looking for something for the girls. I got "Verses of Virtue" off my shelf and started looking through it. I found some wonderful things about feminism in there and wanted to share them.



The first is by Queen Victoria.

"Queen Victoria on 'Women's Rights"

I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of "Women's Rights," with all its attendent horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to "unsex" themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and digusting of begins and would surely perish without male protection.

I love peace and quiet, I hate politics and turmoil. We women are not made for governing, and if we are good women, we must dilike these masculine occupations.

Queen Victoria, 1870

And the second is a poem.

"Which Mission is Mother's?"

She's a woman with a mission;
'Tis her heaven-born ambition
To reform the world's condition
You will please to understand.

She's the model of propriety,
A leader of society,
And has a great variety
Of remedies at hand.

Each a sovereign specific
With a title scientific,
For the cure of things morbific
That vexes people sore.

For the swift alleviation
Of the evels of the antion
Is her fore-ordained vocation
On this sublunary shore.

And while thus she's up and coming,
Always hurrying and humming,
And occasionally slumming,
This reformer of renown:

Her neglected little Dicky,
Ragged, dirty, tough, and trickly,
With his fingers soiled and sticky,
Is the terror of the town.

Tid-bits

I read that last one and actually laughed out loud. I have seen that with my own eyes! It's amazing how the author was able to capture it all in that six verse poem.

I was so glad to be able to find those poems (I ended up giving Dad another poem by Doug Philips for the Night of Recitation.) that express so poignantly what would and what did happen when feminists had their way.



Tiffany