Tea at Trianon: Feminism and Identity in the Transhuman Age

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

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Feminism and Identity in the Transhuman Age

From Mary Harrington:

This revolution rewrote the economic map, forcing what Karl Polanyi called “the Great Transformation” into a “market society” where the basic economic unit was not households but individuals, and where increasingly work happened somewhere outside the home. This precipitated a huge range of consequences for women, depending on their class and situation, and triggered large-scale social reform campaigns as a consequence.
These included (to name a few) campaigns for sex-specific workplace protection for manual labourers, against sex-specific workplace protection for knowledge workers, numerous subtypes of campaign to update the legacy legal and political status of women to reflect the new socioeconomic environment, to elevate and value the role of motherhood in private bourgeois homes drained of economic activity, to control the availability of hard liquor, and much else besides. In all this, two themes intertwine and sometimes compete: a feminism that calls for recognition of women in our distinctive reproductive role, and a feminism that calls for women’s entry into the market on the same terms as men. At times these sets of interests could clash along social class lines, with feminists on both sides.
In other words: first-wave feminism was not evidence of some miraculous frenzy of moral progress, after the endless premodern “Dark Ages”. It was rather an effect of technological change, as it interacted with the reality of women’s embodied lives and interests, and also with existing sociocultural norms and legacy legal and religious frameworks.
With this in place I turned to face the progressives and argued further that the set of beliefs we inherited from this first wave of feminism no longer applies. Because since that era we’ve begun a new industrial revolution, or perhaps a new phase of our ongoing technological revolution. (Read more.)