Sunday, August 4, 2013

The New Age, July 31 1913

Not a whole lot that caught my eye in this one.  S. Verdad predicts that America is about to annex Mexico.  The always deeply nasty Sevota has a piece about how sad it is that what-we-now-call Apartheid is probably going to get voted down in South Africa.  The house philologist explains that similarities in transatlantic vocabulary prove the existence of Atlantis.  Beatrice Hastings skewers all the also-rans after Robert Bridges wins the poet laureateship. 

The most interesting thing is a letter to Beatrice Hastings about her recent screeds against feminism, in which the reasonable author (one Bertha C. Morely) asks her "tu quoque?"  Props to Bertha Morely, who is brave enough to confront the sharpest pen in England so directly: "I do not seem to have made as clear as I could wish the point that Mrs. Hastings appears to have mistaken the false for the true, and so judges the true by the false." 

Hastings' long response to all her critics, though not specifically Morely, is that she isn't a puritan but is scared that the men will rise up and smash all of womankind by force if they continue agitating for freedom.  It sounds like more outlandish New Age nonsense, but I wonder if this sounded more plausible pre-WWI.  Reminds me of Matt Hofer's Paideuma article on Giovanni Papini's "The Massacre of the Women," in which Papini attempts in Swiftian Satire to suggest that men should just kill all women.  So it's on other people's minds, too--even if less seriously. 

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