Feminism Disease

I mentioned before that I was poking through the New York Times archives; I’ve been looking for early mentions of feminist activity, because I thought it might be entertaining for people to read and fun to write about since it’s not all depressing and current and such. It didn’t really turn out that way, cuz I wasted a lot of time and got all sorts of distracted reading unrelated things, which just bummed me out anyway.

Anywho, I’ve been learning all sorts of stuff.

I found all sorts of quotes from people on suffrage, feminism so on so forth, and there was a whole lot of really off-the-wall anti-feminist stuff too. I love anti-feminist stuff, and the further off-the-wall the better.

“Mr. and Mrs. John Martin” and “Professor William T Sedgwick” were the first folks I came across, they were vocal opponants of “the woman’s movement” and were quite alarmed at what the ladies were up to.

Sedgwick was “the father of the modern public health movement in America” all sorts of famous and respected even today and he pops up here and there in all sorts of articles about feminism. Lots of folks wrote letters to the editor responding to his anti-feminist assertions, falling into two general categories of angry women or supportive men. Well, in 1921 Sedgwick suddenly died and the NYTimes headline announcing his passing was:

I think that’s hilarious; I don’t know if that was perhaps the standard terminology at the time, or if the person who wrote the headline just didn’t like the guy, or what – but I like it.

Mr. and Mrs. John Martin published several multi-page articles, which seems sort of infomercial-y, full of all sorts of wild stuff, and it’s been pretty interesting finding out about them. Of course, I turned to google, and once I focused in on searching for Mrs. Martin by her full name “Prestonia Mann Martin” results started turning up. Not only is her name easier to target than “John”, she is the more ‘connected’ of the couple, likely due to her relation to Horace Mann, another social hero from the 1800′s.

As you’ll probably see from the clippings below, they aren’t exactly what we’d consider “modern liberals”, but much of the information I can find sings their praises as champions of the downtrodden and minorities, and allegedly women too.

I don’t care who they are related to, or how much they say they care, I wouldn’t trust any of ‘em with my down-trodden ass, that’s for sure. I’d be scared they’d kill me, steal my organs and give them to “better stock” or something.

I snipped some choice bits to share from a particularly outrageous Mr. and Mrs. John Martin piece, and I made sure to make the distressing parts less distressing to a woman’s delicate distressibilities by highlighting the worst parts in calm, soothing, feminine pink:

Wretched women, killing us all. Wretched, appalling women, destroying the country. Also, science is bizarre, let’s ignore it until it supports our side.

They should have tried that “end the demand” thing…but they didn’t and see what happened? Tens of thousands of feminine corpses started hunting people down and feeding on brains corps started destroying America.

Mr. John Martin seems like a fine fellow to get facts from.

(clipping of facts nevermind, i’ll spare you)

Well, he had a lot of facts about a lot of stuff, with numbers and statistics and percentages of  good women compared with bad women compared with other women compared with other comparable people. I couldn’t follow most of it though, because it was sort of like math. Very dry boring stuff which took up far too much space. I prefer my reading material to be emotionally exaggerated intolerant hate-mongering, and I assume you prefer the same.

Ahhhh, that’s more like it.

That’s true you know, the woman’s movement, and education, makes women turn into spinsters.

Spinsters, if you didn’t already know, are women who are addicted to spinning – oh no, not that modern undignified “spinning” where women spread their legs and rest their precious birth canal openings on the seat of some sexually depraved contraption – no, not that – but old fashioned spinning around in circles until you get dizzy.

Spinsters are hooked on it, they spin around for a long time, whole minutes sometimes, and then they wobble around all dizzy and fall over.

That’s why they don’t have babies, because they might get too dizzy and accidentally fall on the baby and smoosh it.

Well, hopefully the husband is doing his part by impregnating some of those leftover un-hitched un-educated women, that way the spinster half is at least represented by the children of non-classmates….

My goodness Mr. Martin! You know how to spin a phrase; I’ve never felt more twiggly or fruitless or die-on-the-tree-of-life-ish than I do right now. If I had some sperms I would be sure to put them into my vagina right away!

And seriously, I’m all for trying to be healthy and running and even a little competition can be good, but I don’t think race-suicide is healthy, and it doesn’t sound very sporting at all.

Shit. I named my cat Fecundity, I didn’t realize it was a real word.

See! Educated women are like vortexes, they suck the blood out of everything around them. Actually, I might be thinking of tampexes, but it’s kinda the same general idea so whatever…

I figured that was the problem all along; that only the ugly girls that boys didn’t want went to college. It’s kind of sad that parents would argue about it though. I hope those girls didn’t hear them yelling.

It’s a good thing Mr. Martin explained how parents only let ugly, unlovable rejects whom no man can bear the sight of go off to college, and it’s really helpful that he explains how none of that even makes much of a difference anyway. That’s the sort of information you can really use.  

Hopefully no college bound girls whose parents encouraged them are reading this, or they will figure out that we all think they are ugly. There can’t be any other reason for it at all, most of all not homosexuality.

Ahhh, I get it… it’s not really even the book-learning that dries up ovaries, it’s the money-making…. And the “startling facts” were startling – well they were startling in the sense that it was startling to hear them called facts.

…I wonder if feminists have heard that their success means “racial extinction” and “national death” and that they are making “a soft bed on which to put mankind to eternal sleep”? They must not have learned about all that stuff. Or they might have heard it and then decided to take a nap like I did.

And too bad the spinsters couldn’t just cast their own votes. I guess it makes some sense though because it’s hard to think straight when you’re dizzy and they might have voted for their cats by mistake, and cats are far too aloof to be in government.

… I wonder if Mr. Martin lived long enough to find out that it ended up being 2.5 kids and not just 2 ? He’d probably have been very relieved by that.

Maybe I can start collecting social security on account of my feminism disease. Having feminism disease does make it hard to function in the everyday world without pitching fits.

If anything about book-learning effects “physiological capacity for child bearing” it’s got to be all the heavy books people have to carry around. I don’t think it’s fair to blame feminism for that though because college boys should be offering to carry the womens’ books for them, but I guess they don’t because all the girls in college are too ugly.

If boys were nicer to ugly girls, there probably wouldn’t even be any feminism at all, ever think about that Mr. and Mrs. John Martin? Hmmm?

But Mr. Martin is probably right about the reason for all those stillbirths, like how it’s because women only have so much brain storage capability, and if they fill up too much brain with useless book-facts, they forget how to grow babies and they can’t figure out how to squeeze the baby out without doing it all wrong.

I mean, that sort of stuff is totally practical for women who aren’t so selfish.

It’s probably good that there aren’t any kids in or near the “college cloisters” because it sounds like these ugly college girls go around fondling babies like perverts. Keeping them cloistered is a good start, but it’s probably not a good idea to start bringing babies aroud.

Oh.

Is that cow as in: ‘boobs have milk for kids, like cows have milk for calves’; or cow as in: ‘why buy the cow when the milk is for free’? Does it make a difference? Hmmm.

I must be a dullard because I honestly can’t figure that out. It’s probably the numbers that are throwing me off.

Oh Mr. Martin.

I’m starting to think you might be a bit of a bigot. Forgive me please if I’ve pegged you wrong, but I usually peg ‘em pretty good.

France musta got rid of their feminists because I met a french guy last year.

Oh well good. I’m relieved that you’re not a bigot like I thought, you’re just a eugenics buff. No harm in that; apparently it was all the rage at the time.

Yeah, but they are so ugly! Gross!

I bet Mr. Martin would have like me, because I let men support me and I’m opposed to racial extinctions.

At least if we breed the non-college girls, the babies will get the pretty genes.

How able and trained could they be if they fall for sterile enticements? That doesn’t sound like good breeding stock to me. … and honestly I’d have thought that half-educated women would be a good compromise; they’d be smart enough to figure out how much to tip the delivery boy and they wouldn’t forget how to get babies out of their vaginas.

__________________________________________

 If you’re like me, and anyone with any sense would want to be, you’ll be happy to know that Mr. and Mrs. Martin co-authored a book titled Feminism: Its Fallacies and Follies (now in the public domain) and you can click to download the whole thing where you’ll find gems like this one from pages 65-66 explaining how women who work are killing their own children and driving their husbands to drink:

This can cause no astonishment to the informed, for another investigator, Mr. George Cadbury, witnesses that ” inspection of the homes of women who have to be at factories all day clearly indicates that the removal of the mother gives rise to many conditions of dirtiness or irregular or bad nourishment of infants which must obviously be prejudicial.” This neglect is inevitably injurious, also, to the father, and Mr. Cadbury’s investigations in Birmingham showed that the proportion of sober and steady men was nearly twice as great in families where wives do not work as in homes where wives do work, and the evidence indicated not that the mothers went to work because the fathers drank, but that the fathers drank because of the comfortless homes when the mothers went to work.

Which, first, I just want to point out one of the best tools you can use to discourage anyone from daring to disagree with you: “This can cause no astonishment to the informed” – which in modern parlance might be expressed with: “Everyone already knows that… …” or “We all realize by now, of course, that….” or “Only a fool would disagree that….” — it’s one of those little tricks that asshole-fuckwad-douchbag-shitheads use all the time.

Anyway, yeah…. Anyone with any sense at all already knows that women who work all day let their houses become dirty and they forget to feed their kids all the time. And worse! it makes the men go drinking in town! Tsk Tsk, ladies!

Oy. These “Martin” people, whoever they are, sure do remind me of Glen Beck in the way they are fatalistic and dramatic and just totally unconvincing with their alarmist arm-flailing, well to anyone with any sense at all, anyway.

Yes CLEARLY it’s the selfish woman insisting on living the whirl-wind exciting life of a textile worker who makes her man feel so badly neglected that he turns to the bottle.Yes, CLEARLY it could NOT be that she has to work to feed her kids because her husband his spending all his money at the pub. Selfish bitches, every one of them!

Ugh, it’s really disgusting the way these two blamed women for everything, and how they encourage women to just stay home, hungry with hungry kids, to save children from death. Duh. What idiocy that they won’t admit the reason less children die is because it’s harder to beat its mother to death. When moms stay home they can put themselves in between the child and the fist.

Here are a few totally unrelated but completely fascinating that popped up as I looked through the search results for the Martins:

From Time Magazine 1933: “Mrs. Roosevelt is talking about is Prohibiting Poverty, a 131-pp. volume by a Mrs. Prestonia Mann Martin of Florida. Mrs. Martin, 71, is a onetime Fabian Socialist, wife of a lecturer at individualistic Rollins College”

There is a surprisingly huge amount of information about Mrs. Martin, and quite a bit about her husband too in a biography of Harriet Brooks: Pioneer Nuclear Scientist, Apparantly, Brooks was expected to quit teaching if she got married, and Martin might have been influential in Brooks’ decision or something, a very interesting read…

A journal of correspondence about Martin’s history of anti-slavery activism…

A quick mention in an enlightening chapter from the Mission for the Third Millenium – not enlightened, mind you, but enlightening

About these ads