Tea at Trianon: The Wrongs of Woman

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, November 6, 2022

The Wrongs of Woman

From Matthew Schmitz at First Things:

Can feminist arguments help conservatives build the order they desire? About a decade ago, I attended a dinner at which a prominent journalist urged her fellow social conservatives to talk up the fact that one in five American women are sexually assaulted while in college. She believed there was no clearer demonstration of the need for a revival of chastity. There was only one problem—the statistic is false. As KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. have shown in an important book, The Campus Rape Frenzy, the most reliable data for the period, from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, suggests that the incidence of sexual assault on campus is around one woman in forty, not one in five. Yet on the basis of that discredited statistic, the Obama administration moved to solve what Hillary Clinton described as an “epidemic” of campus rape. Following guidance from the administration, colleges erected Title IX tribunals that stripped the accused of due process and the presumption of innocence. Gross miscarriages of justice ensued. Far from gaining a new dawn of chastity, social conservatives who repeated the false claims had become complicit in a cruel folly. They had done so not out of cynicism, but because their sentimental ideals blinded them to reality.

Feminism owes much of its success to the same habits of chivalry that it claims to oppose. Americans often accommodate feminist demands out of condescension rather than a principled commitment to equality. They agree that women deserve better treatment, higher praise, and more patient attention not because they share the politics of Wollstonecraft but because, mutatis mutandis, they are attached to those of Patmore. Like Patmore’s England, today’s America is invested in the social and moral prestige of middle-class women. But Americans today regard it as natural and right that middle-class women should have professional lives. They have also dropped the Victorian valorization of sexual modesty. Presenting middle-class women as above reproach (the Angel in the Office) even as they pursue sexual relationships and professional careers is easier if we affirm that they lack agency in their relations with men (“pawns”) and are incapable of lying (#BelieveWomen). These conceits have allowed the burden of proof to shift readily to the accused in the legal and pseudo-legal proceedings of the last few years. In #MeToo and the Title IX tribunals, we observe not the triumph of equal rights but a hewing to the dictum that the purity of women (of a certain class) must not be doubted. (Read more.)