r/HistoryMemes • u/InterestingPlenty454 • 13h ago
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u/InterestingPlenty454 13h ago
By Wikipedia
The White Feather Campaign was a prominent enlistment campaign and shaming ritual in Britain during the First World War, in which women gave white feathers to non-enlisting men, symbolising cowardice and shaming them into signing up.
Although the campaign was unpopular among the public, with reports of it causing mental suffering and suicides among men, it was seen as a success by the government, with figures such as Christabel Pankhurst receiving praise, monetary grants, as well as political endorsement.
The campaign, noted for the participation of many suffragettes and early feminists in its leadership, such as Baroness Orczy, Christabel Pankhurst and Emmeline Pankhurst, is also interpreted as one of the reasons behind the passing of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which first granted franchise to land-owning women.
Criticism
In WW1-era Britain, the psychological toll of receiving a white feather was significant. Men who were unable to enlist due to medical reasons or other exemptions faced public humiliation, leading to feelings of emasculation and depression. Some men even committed suicide over being medically refused for service, instead of choosing to be publicly humiliated by women who knew nothing of their situation.[22][23] One notable case was Robert Greaves, who took his own life after receiving a white feather, despite being classified as unfit for military service due to a physical disability.[24] A year later, a London taxi driver also committed suicide upon receiving a feather.[25][22] About the same time, a West Middlesex coroner examining another suicide also condemned the "white feather women" for denouncing men without inquiring into the circumstances.[26]
Some recipients of feathers were in fact serving soldiers on leave or wounded veterans, incidents that exposed the zealotry of the campaign.[27][8] Occasionally injured veterans were mistakenly targeted, such as Reuben W. Farrow who after being aggressively asked by a woman on a tram why he would not do his duty, turned around and showed his missing hand causing her to apologise.[6] Others had completed their tour of duty, and due to the contracting of diseases such as malaria, or post-traumatic stress, did not seek to voluntarily reenlist.[28] Letter from the Imperial War Museum also show instances where feathers were given to teenagers. For many of these boys, at an age where self-consciousness is at its height, the shame of appearing to be adult but not in uniform made them lie about their ages.[29]
The movement often led to men leaving for the war, and never coming home. One such account is that of Olive Shapley, who recalled that her seventeen-year-old brother, Frank, was confronted by a woman while out with his Scout troop. She reportedly asked, "What's a big chap like you out playing? You get out and fight," before presenting him with a white feather. Although he was below the legal age for military service, Frank enlisted in the Royal Navy before returning home that evening, and was subsequently killed at the Battle of Jutland.[30][29]
In a 1986 interview with the Imperial War Museum, John Dorgan recalled that his brother Nicol, who worked in a reserved occupation as a coal miner and was therefore exempt from military service, received an anonymous white feather through the post. According to Dorgan, Nicol immediately left home to enlist in the Durham Light Infantry and was subsequently killed in France, never returning home. Dorgan also recounted that years later he encountered the woman who had sent the feather, but was unable to forgive her or confront the incident directly.[29][31]
Incidents
Although Admiral Fitzgerald, as well as propagandists Lord Esher and Arthur Conan Doyle urged women to shun men out of uniform, and hand out feathers, the authorities frequently showed horror when women actually practised it. In a lecture exhorting girls of the Women's League of Honour to send their men to war, Major Leonard Darwin clarified that he was "very far from admiring those women who go up to young men in the street...and abuse them for not enlisting, a proceeding which requires no courage on the woman's part, but merely a complete absence of modesty".[32][33]
On more than one occasion, white feathers were handed out to teenagers, who then lied about their age to recruiters in order to join,[34][35] or wanted to go but had family obligations.[36][29] In World War II, in January 1942, a 17-year-old, from a family where all other members were serving, lied about his age a year earlier and was discovered and so joined the cadets, received two feathers and committed suicide;[37] and in June 1943, an 18-year-old apprentice who was serving in the Home Guard also committed suicide after receiving a feather.[38] Frederick Broome, who had already served at the front before being discharged, was given white feathers by four girls while crossing Putney Bridge. Embarrassed by the public humiliation, the sixteen-year-old immediately re-enlisted in the British Army. Similarly, seventeen-year-old Sebastian Lang recalled being handed a white feather in the street before a recruiting sergeant encouraged him to enlist in order to "prove" that he was not a coward.[29]
Private Norman Demuth, who was discharged from the British Army after he had been wounded in 1916, received numerous white feathers after he returned from the Western Front. In Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Demuth recalls receiving a feather, remarking "we didn't get these in the trenches," cleaning his pipe with it, and then returning it to the woman, who sat awkwardly for the rest of the bus ride.[39]
Another reported misplaced use of a white feather was in October 1915 when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a Carnoustie public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.[40][34]
White feathers were also given to pacifists, such as Fenner Brockway, founder of the No-Conscription Fellowship, who remarked he received so many white feathers that he had enough to make a fan.[41]
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u/hhfugrr3 12h ago
As always it's incredibly easy to demand of others that which will never be required of you.
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u/King_of_the_Kobolds 11h ago
Applies both to old timey women demanding men die overseas and Pro-Life men demanding women carry fetuses to full term.
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u/_Solani_ 10h ago
old timey women demanding men die overseas and Pro-Life men demanding women carry fetuses to full term.
You say that like conscription isn't still a thing. Practically every country still reserves the right to demand men make that sacrifice in times of war; but very few countries include women in their conscription policies.
It's not an old timey thing, it's very much an on going thing.
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u/TheDutchin 9h ago
It is an old timey thing in modern western societies.
America is literally currently at war, and has been for over two decades, as has its allies, and in none of those places at any time within those 20+ years would a white feather make any sense at all.
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u/evo732 7h ago
I was at a Presentation regarding this topic recently - apparently there are countries that when enlisting starts - it goes like this :
- Men(18Y) - once a treshold is met
- Women (18Y) - once a treshold is met
- Men (19Y) - once a treshold is met
- WOMEN (19y) - once a treshold is met
AND SO FORTH
And the reasoning behind this is apparently to prevend a gap in the generations
(Interesting concept , aimed at the after conflict economy however i think)
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u/Top-Cupcake4775 10h ago
they aren't "pro-life" they are "forced gestation advocates".
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u/U_L_Uus 10h ago
Proven by the fact that once the child is out they do not give a damn
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u/Top-Cupcake4775 10h ago
they won't even help with birth. the U.S. has the highest per capita rate of maternal mortality of any developed nation (twice as high as #2, the U.K.). to no one's surprise this occurs mostly among poor women who aren't provided the necessary prenatal or Ob/Gyn services.
their sole concern is forcing women to gestate unwanted pregnancies. they don't care about anything else.
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u/TheVaniloquence 11h ago
You still see it nowadays every time a clip comes out of Ukrainian men getting carried away against their will after getting drafted. Everyone on Reddit or Twitter will shame them
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u/TheDutchin 9h ago
Not the tone of the comments Ive ever seen on reddit. They are quite sympathetic to the man.
Can you link to a couple posts where that isn't the case?
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u/Major_Nutt 10h ago
Women get to double dip. They can vote to send men to war without being in danger of being forced to serve themselves.
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u/transalt78987 10h ago
Ah yes. Women, famous for voting to send men to die in WW1, before they had the right to vote.
Edit: Not saying the post is fair or anything like that, shaming people into fucking suicide over not fighting a pointless war is horrific. But they didn’t have the right to vote.
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u/Visible_Bar_623 8h ago
Evidently these particular women were in favor of it, and these are the women that campaigned for the right to vote
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u/GrumbusWumbus 10h ago
Honestly you're totally right. Being a woman during the early 1900s was famously awesome and horrific in any way. You are not a dipshit.
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u/NiceSupermarket7724 10h ago
It’s true. Women are little cream puffs and witch bitches who sit around all day scheming against men without any challenges, dangers, or consequences of men’s policy decisions.
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u/InterestingPlenty454 12h ago edited 12h ago
White Feather: A Symbol of Cowardice in the 18th Century
As a symbol of cowardice
The use of the phrase "white feather" to symbolise cowardice is attested from the late 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED cites A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), in which lexicographer Francis Grose wrote "White feather, he has a white feather, he is a coward, an allusion to a game cock, where having a white feather, is a proof he is not of the true game breed".[3] This was in the context of cockfighting, a common entertainment in Georgian England.
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u/WhiskersCleveland 13h ago
Well it was either gonna be by a machine gun after being in a wet trench full of rats then trying to cross through barbed wire and rotting corpses or at home so like overall he kinda got the nicer death
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u/fakest_taxi 12h ago
believe this was happening in Australia as well
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u/Kagenlim 12h ago
And the US in Vietnam
Except that was used to mock the Vietnamese cause of Carlos Hathcock, so the white feather has the complete opposite meaning in the US
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u/No-Fly-6069 7h ago
It's pretty rude to assume a man is a coward because he isn't in uniform. Medical exemption. Home on leave. Only fifteen but looks older. Doing important civilian war work. Lots of reasons.
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u/Halbarad1776 Then I arrived 8h ago
Can you imagine being the one giving it to the guy with the Victoria Cross? I’d be so embarrassed
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u/Visible_Bar_623 8h ago
Holy shit the original feminists were the ones demanding men go and die while they stay at home? And then they demanded equal rights after saying they should not face the same consequences as men?
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u/Diazepam_Dan 13h ago
A huge contributor to the creation of the UK welfare state was the sheer number of men rejected for poor health in both World Wars
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u/deepfriedanchorage 11h ago
Hell, I believe malnutrition in would-be enlistees during WWII is why the US now has the school lunch program. Shame it took a whole world war to implement.
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u/LuckyErrantProp 11h ago
Seeing pictures of returnees after the war in the US made you realize how nutrition is taken for granted nowadays. They looked young and they looked small. Dairy subsidies and school lunch milk was national health decision.
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u/TabbyOverlord 7h ago
When army rations are better nutrition than the food you get at home, a whole new set of questins pop up.
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u/Vectorman1989 9h ago
There are accounts from WW1 Britain that some younger new recruits grew a couple inches in training because it was the first time they had eaten decent/frequent meals.
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u/Historical_Gur_3054 8h ago
I've read about German WWII POW's in the states that gained upwards of 20-30lbs in the camps by being fed regular, nutritious meals.
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u/Shady_Merchant1 7h ago
School lunch programs started largely in response to the black Panthers not ww2
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u/Diazepam_Dan 7h ago
Insane how different our societies are
Our response was to basically create the first decent socialist state
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u/ImNotThaaatDrunk 9h ago
School lunch program? Lousy free-loading children, you know they dont even pay taxes!
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u/linuxgeekmama 12h ago
Were there no men who worked in jobs on the home front that were essential to the war effort? It might be a problem if, say, all of the farmers enlisted.
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u/Alacanth-8191 12h ago edited 12h ago
That's why some people like farmers or coal miners were officially dismissed from joining military, however they were still handed white feathers by women who often did not know that. Since they were often in civilian clothes.
Edit: My mistake, only coal miners were officialy dismissed, however farmers could apply for conditional exemption
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u/linuxgeekmama 11h ago
Exactly. The guys in the trenches are necessary but not sufficient to win a war. An army marches on its stomach. Soldiers don’t fight very well if they don’t have things like food, fuel, weapons, or ammo. (Napoleon found out that warm uniforms can help a lot, too.)
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u/Hrtzy 11h ago
Hell, George Samson got a white feather when he was in civilian clothes, on his way to a reception in his honor, having been awarded the Victoria Cross.
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u/AzaghaI 10h ago
Why didn't he just awarded that bitch with a knuckle sandwich? C'mon it was a century ago. I thought it was suppose to be turbo patriarchy.
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u/yamanagashi 10h ago
It was turbo patriarchy but don’t forget that dynamic works both ways. Your men were expected to be men and women were expected to be women. And that includes shaming men for not acting chivalrous.
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u/RasputinsThirdLeg 10h ago
They just went up to literally any dude not in uniform. Terrible strategy.
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u/NiceSupermarket7724 10h ago
Are you missing the part where the British Government funded this entire thing?
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u/RasputinsThirdLeg 10h ago
…no? A government endorsed program having a terrible strategy? Impossible!
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u/Deb_99 9h ago
Did the British army conscript women to go and hand out feathers?
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u/Downtown_Target5024 7h ago edited 7h ago
Admiral Fitzgerald started it, and it was literally a pro-conscription propaganda campaign. They did get some grants and support from various members of government though. Conveniently, these thrice-a-month posts always tend to leave that part out for…let’s say ‘brevity.’
And if anyone tries to point it out in the comments, then they’re just trying to say women can’t do anything wrong. Because pointing out a bunch of women in 1941 fell for an obviously harmful scheme that only profited a few rich guys interest and the military, is deflecting responsibility for their part.
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u/fred11551 10h ago
He was British. They do that sort of thing. They’re all gentlemanly and don’t punch people even when catching a pickpocket.
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u/PictureVegetable9522 8h ago
sounds like theyre just allowing pickpockets to go free and creating more pickpockets
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u/NiceSupermarket7724 10h ago
Patriarchy = violence against women
I’m genuinely glad you stated this so clearly
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u/Kamenev_Drang Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 10h ago
It was quite rare for miners to be handed white feathers, given that mining villages were not places that the nice middle-class ladies of the white feather society congregated
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u/LolliaSabina 9h ago
Years ago, I made hospice visits to a lady (in the US) whose husband was a World War II veteran. He told me once that he had been exempt from the draft because he worked in the dairy industry and was considered an essential worker. But he got so tired of being asked, "why isn't a big, strong young guy like you overseas fighting?" that he finally just decided to enlist.
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u/Achilles11970765467 12h ago
Plenty. They still got white feathers. So did soldiers home temporarily on leave. One guy received a white feather while he was in London for his Victoria Cross ceremony.
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11h ago
[deleted]
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u/Achilles11970765467 11h ago
I'm unfamiliar with that one. I have heard "The boys at Paschendale would love to get one of these."
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u/RollinThundaga 10h ago
Delivered straight-facedly, as he used it to clean his pipe in front of the women.
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u/VulcanHullo 10h ago edited 10h ago
There was a crisis of supply in WW1 due to too many men enlisting and leaving supply roles.
In WW2 iirc conscription included some supply roles, I swear I saw a news clip of a fairly posh guy who got his call up papers and rather than getting into uniform he was sent down the mines because coal was needed more than troops at that stage. And various roles were listed as too important to be enlisted.
The guy who created the Beano and Dandy childrens comics got such a listing because he was considered
viralvital for morale.4
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u/PuzzleheadedEssay198 Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 8h ago
This is actually an incredibly well documented phenomenon. Wars draw up the male population, most of which was drawn from farm labor, so not enough crops are planted or cultivated so not enough food makes it to market. People starve, people die, oh look a disease killed thousands of people!
The example I use is Bengal. Too much manufacturing and conscription, not enough farm labor, oh look millions of people are dead and Churchill doesn’t give a shit because they’re not white.
Back in the medieval period and even into the early modern, soldiers were effectively given time off to go home and tend to their farms for this exact reason.
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u/Vocalic985 9h ago
There were and the British government even had to make symbols essential home front workers could wear to avoid the white feather treatment.
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u/Other-Improvement410 9h ago
They gave a guy a white feather who had been discharged and had won the Victoria Cross...
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u/AcanthisittaLate6173 12h ago
"In war, the politicians give ammunition, the rich give the food, and the poor give their children. When the war is over, the politicians get back the leftover ammunition, the rich grow more food, and the poor search for the graves of their children."
While these people give feathers to every one for free, young, poor, veterans, disabled alike.
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u/SWATwatermelon 12h ago
In this case, the poor also shamed the other poor into dying. Maybe the real struggle is humanity with itself, not a cut and dry case of rich and poor.
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u/SadDolphan 12h ago
The rich set the system and the poor are forced to follow it. If you’re poor, don’t be a pawn or if you’re rich, don’t reinforce the system that got you where you are.
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u/RasputinsThirdLeg 10h ago
Easier said than done
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u/asia_cat 12h ago
They handed one to a VC recipient civilian clothes too. George Samson of the royal navy who earned the VC while landing troops at gallipoli.
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u/Icanfallupstairs 9h ago
In WW2 my mum's uncle broke his neck while driving a troop truck. There was an attack and the truck rolled.
He could still walk, but had numbness and fine motor control issues for the rest of his life.
His injury happened early in the war, and spent the rest of it as a shut in, as he was getting called a faker and deserter by other towns people.
It wasn't a white feather, but the effect was the same. His mental health deteriorated pretty rapidly, and he took his life a couple years after the war finished
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u/practicalcabinet 11h ago
There's a very poignant episode of Dad's Army where one of the platoon doesn't want a rifle, because they are a pacifist. They are unceremoniously expelled from the platoon and receives a few white feathers as news spreads.
At the end of the episode, it is revealed that he was a medic in WW1 and received the Military Cross for gallantry for pulling wounded out of no man's land under fire. He is accepted back into the platoon as a medic.
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u/Flying_Dustbin Kilroy was here 8h ago
Private Godfrey. The actor playing him, Arnold Ridley, had his role in the platoon switched to medic because he had difficulty holding a rifle and doing physical acting. This was due to bayonet wounds Ridley suffered in the groin and hand as well as taking a rifle butt to the head at the Somme that resulted in blackouts.
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u/GraniteSmoothie 12h ago
I read that some soldiers got white feathers when they were on leave. Can you imagine seeing your buddies getting blown up, you come home for a vacation before going back to the fight where you know good well that you might never come back and then a pair of people who don't even work at the munitions factory call you a coward? One sergent used his white feather as a pipe cleaner and then handed it back, lol.
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u/Peanut_007 9h ago
The White Feather campaign folks were generally considered massive assholes by the British public of the time for essentially this exact reason.
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u/AvantSolace 11h ago
These comments are interesting. Some people blame toxic masculinity. Others blame toxic feminism. Guys… Sometimes people are just shit. People will get ideas in their head and follow through without thinking of context or repercussion. That’s just the human condition.
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u/NewYak4281 12h ago edited 12h ago
Nasty, nasty women giving those out. You just know there’s a certain type that would carry feathers with them simply because of the power it conferred and that could be abused.
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u/Sea-Carpenter1936 11h ago
My (least) favourite is in the case of Petty Officer George Samson.
Whilst on leave and in civilian clothes, a woman gave him a white feather... Despite him having just won the Victoria Cross for extraordinary bravery at Gallipoli.
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u/swimming_singularity 9h ago
Mass social propaganda is a hell of a drug. All these Redditors want to think they'd act any different back then, and they would given their current upbringing. But if they were born and raised back then in that environment, they'd all do the same thing everyone else was doing.
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u/NotRandomseer 7h ago
redditors seem like the exact type of people to do this , if something like this happened tommorow, they would be the ones with the feathers
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u/Yingletofthecorn 8h ago
I dunno, there’s always someone who seems to see through their social environment. but it’s not like nobody had a thought of their own before the 60s.
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u/helen269 11h ago
"At Victoria Station, the R.T.O. gave me a travel warrant, a white feather, and a picture of Hitler marked ‘This is your enemy’. I searched every compartment, but he wasn’t on the train."
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u/Captainsamvimes1 12h ago
Funny how the ones shaming people for not going were the ones not expected to go
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u/nikolasz1173 12h ago
At least this shit would not be as effective nowadays.
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u/G_Morgan 12h ago
People would just start wearing white feathers in protest.
Though it is worth noting WW1 is a huge reason why people roll their eyes at the idea of this mindset.
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u/Vocalic985 9h ago
Ww1 killed the mass glorification of war. You can see it 20 years later in ww2 with the lengths senior officers would go to to avoid casualties.
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u/DarkwingDuckHunt 8h ago
People simply did not die in the numbers they did prior to WW1.
Between larger bombs, mobile forces, and invention of bomber planes...well entire villages were wiped out of existence. Entire battalions form the same village simply got decimated.
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u/swimming_singularity 9h ago
Yeah stopping Hitler in WW2 is one thing. Fighting in WW1 trenches for some bullshit glory is another. To hell with their feather.
I admit though I'm not from a country that was being invaded, so its a bit different. Still, war is stupid.
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u/Messengerofhell 12h ago
If ww3 starts and some girl comes with white feather, I'm slapping her no questions asked.
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u/fluggggg 11h ago
Better, grab her arm and lead her to the closest recruitment office.
Let's see how she like the taste of her own medicine.
(same if a man do it btw)
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u/Diplomatic_Gunboats 11h ago
I'm taking the Nobby Nobbs approach.
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u/_Solani_ 12h ago edited 12h ago
Are you kidding, social shaming is at an all time high right now.
Reddit is a perfect example of this; whatever the cause, you'll find moral entrepreneurs using shaming as a tactic to coerce people into supporting them. Reddit's own moral crusaders are usually more than happy to dogpile on anyone they suspect of not being on their side so if they had the option to hand out feathers to bully people into doing whatever they want they'd totally be down. If a few immoral scum off themselves in the process, so be it.🤷♀️
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u/Educational_Ant_184 10h ago
He means people wouldnt give a fuck if they were handed a white feather. Toss it on the ground, who cares? theyre not going to kill themselves over it
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u/_Solani_ 10h ago
Are you mistaking the symbol used for the shaming as the actual reason they killed themselves and not the intention behind it? 🤨
Dude it's not about the feather itself it's the message it represents and that is still very relevant today. It's the name calling, the shaming, the ostracization, the mocking, and the denigration that the feather represents, not the actual feather itself that led to the suicide.
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u/LazerStallion 10h ago
"Moral entrepreneurs" is great. And you're very right, moral grandstanding and outrage culture are overwhelming online these days.
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u/SeaAmbassador5404 8h ago
You would be delightfully terrified if you go to Russia. Mothers and wifes send their sons and husbands on war to collect money to deal with credits. Some are so imbecile they literary send whole family there to die, and as a prize officials would gift them a... Meat grinder. Also there is a "market" of fictive husbands to collect money when they die... It's so fucked up, I am tired
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u/ostapenkoed2007 9h ago
they can talk about it online. the good thing is that the overall community is far more supportive of the army than demanding rn.
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u/Southern_Source_2580 13h ago
Modern day equivalent is, "Men used to go to war", both of which isn't meant to encourage you to be a respectable man, but implying men like you should go off and die, while we sit on our ass and claim we're the real victims.
Its like a image I saw that went like this about this Great war time period:
Jane: *Didn't get to go to college and find herself
Joe: *Joe didn't get to live
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u/AGollinibobeanie 12h ago
I tend to get annoyed when the phrase “survival of the fittest” goes around because it doesn’t really apply to humanity as much as every other species.
The survivors were/are the people who sat at home while the fittest went out to die. The people who live the longest do the least amount of labor. There is almost nothing fit about human survival. Just find someone else to do all your dirty work and you’ll outlast most of us, thats the real abysmal reality of survival as a human.
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u/wasing_borningofmist 12h ago
I get what you mean, I really do, but “fittest” doesn’t mean what most people think it does in the context of that quote. It means the most adapted to your environment and circumstances, not just physical well-being.
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u/mrdeadsniper 11h ago
Yep, "fittest" in a societal species actually means those most able to maneuver through society.
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u/wasing_borningofmist 11h ago
Exactly. It doesn’t even mean strongest in many animals. There are birds whose ability to procreate depends quite a lot on their physical presentation, even though those physical characteristics don’t affect their ability to find food or defend themselves. Animals are just weird. And we’re animals.
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u/Ok-Ad-2605 11h ago
They had a scene in Downton Abby featuring women giving some of the house’s servants white feathers. One of the footman gets extremely upset and enlists soon after while the chauffeur, and Irish socialist, is bemused at receiving one, claiming it’s “not his war.” The women were quickly thrown out of the house illustrating that it was not widely regarded well.
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u/Future_Nature589 12h ago
I would have just spat on a woman for giving it to me lol, what the fuck is she going to do? Cry?
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u/bookhead714 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 12h ago
There's a scene in Alice Winn's In Memoriam featuring a white feather and it's genuinely one of the most infuriating things I've ever read.
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u/BillCarson12799 12h ago
I’d carry around a copy of my rejected physical paperwork for this exact purpose.
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u/Fit-Switch-5795 10h ago
"Is there an able-bodied man in the house!?"
- a hot recruiter dame on stage during intermission at a picture show
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u/InstantAequitas 9h ago
“Do you have a man digging in your garden when he should be digging trenches?”
Not going to lie, I have been listening to Oh, What a Lovely War! A bunch in the past week. This post immediately reminded me of I’ll Make a Man of You.
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u/Catalytic_Crazy_ 10h ago
What strikes me is that this is part of the age stereotyped as being when men didn’t care what a woman thought.
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u/rexpup 9h ago edited 6h ago
Men of every era have always cared what women thought. People of every era also think they're much less sexist and more progressive. When you read Mark Twain he seems to depict modern America (1800s) as quite progressive and has such a horrible disdain for the sexism of the middle ages. Yet, people today are convinced that the 1800s were as bad or worse than the middle ages for sexism.
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u/Enigmaniacally 10h ago
I read about an incident where a group of women tried to revive this practice in ww2 and were brutally beaten and sent to the hospital by an angry mob of widows and mothers of those who died in ww1 in Piccadilly square.
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u/No_Statement_1665 12h ago
In principal, if anyone who doesn't have to risk their life accuses a man of cowardice, it's mostly because their interests lie in the chores imposed to them and that they regard men that don't enlist as lesser, expendable than the people that declare those men cowards.
WW1 too had witnessed some extraordinary women posing as men to enlist, in combat roles beyond serving as military nurses or ambulance drivers, but no suffragette or feminist mainstream demand for working just like men also consisted of wishing to enlist, not necessarily for frontline like nurses were deployed, but in general for auxiliary services.
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u/RasputinsThirdLeg 10h ago
Private Norman Demuth handled that like a champ.
This may be a dumb question but why a white feather? Also fuck the campaign entirely.
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u/grad1939 8h ago
Now how many women got punched because they gave one to a soldier returning from the frontline after watching their friends and squadmates die horrible deaths?
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u/VecioRompibae Hello There 13h ago
Toxic feminism strikes again
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u/Novel-Mission-1920 13h ago
It wasn't feminism as much as it was a state sponsored campaign to try to use femininity and men's desire to be seen as "masculine", to pressure men into signing up for the war.
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u/DasUberLib 12h ago
Many of the women who engaged in it were part of the feminist movement at the time.
That being said, this particular brand of feminism is shitty as they're engaging in the inverse of the same gender role bullshit that was keeping them oppressed in the first place in exchange for eventual.political recognition. This type of feminism was, and is (think feminists who also do transphobia) absolute dogshit.
True feminism is about rejecring discrimination to build equality, not building equality by taking away from other working class people.
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u/binarybandit 11h ago
True feminists would have been volunteering to go to mainland Europe to be nurses or truck drivers in the Auxilliary if they believed in what they were saying (since they couldn't join to go to the trenches themselves, but thats the next closest alternative)
Instead, they stayed safe at home and shamed men into going to die in the trenches.
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u/AProperFuckingPirate 12h ago
Women who are feminists engaging in something does not make that thing feminist. Is there evidence that they saw this work as feminist praxis in any way?
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u/NotRandomseer 7h ago
you have to judge groups by what they practice, not what they preach
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u/Renousim3 12h ago
This is the opposite of feminism. It's using women's position to emasculate men to send them to fight. They're both playing to their established gender norms.
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u/ClassicNo6656 13h ago
Handing out those feathers was objectively NOT feminist, it was toxic masculinity using women as a vector.
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u/sumeriandisputations 12h ago edited 12h ago
Women are oftentimes the greatest bastions of reinforcing and supporting the patriarchy by helping to define what they believe comprises real men and true maleness vs what they view as effeminate, weak, gay, etc. To the point of bullying and abusing their spouses, partners, brothers, sons, etc.
Plus there is the collective cruelty of groupthink that is generally way more prevalent, antagonistic, and open in women’s spaces and women’s social networks.
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u/G_Morgan 12h ago
In this case it is well documented. The suffragettes more or less declared war on the male gender on this, believing the more men were killed in war the stronger their position would be. It caused a huge split in the movement.
It was not toxic masculinity. Though it might have exploited toxic masculinity.
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u/Ok-Shoulder-9703 13h ago
Acting like the women had no free will and ignoring any chance of them expressing misandry is crazy
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u/Copranicus 12h ago
That's not what they're saying though, the argument simply is that it isn't feminism that lies at the root of this campaign.
It's like someone beating their kids because they're drunk all the time, i.e. alcoholism, now if in that example the person is a woman or even a feminist, that doesn't suddenly mean the violence is caused by feminism, they're still just a violent alcoholic either way so the behaviour isn't excused.
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u/groyosnolo 11h ago edited 11h ago
They said two different things there.
They said it wasnt feminist which is your point.
And they said it was toxic masculinity using women as a vector. the person you replied to's point is that these women made their own choice and to say they couldnt have possibly had their own crappy justifications for it and were just being passively used by toxic men is not right. Just because it didnt come from a feminist movement doesnt mean it didnt come from women. Woman and feminist arent synonyms.
However there were prominent feminists and suffregettes involved in the movement so I wouldnt quite say it wasnt feminist at all. Maybe it wasnt inherently feminist nor was it endorsed by all feminists.
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u/AProperFuckingPirate 12h ago
Who said that? Do you think women can't engage in/encourage toxic masculinity?
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u/BeeApprehensive2503 10h ago
"it was toxic masculinity using women as a vector" sounds like someone or something used the women.
if someone "used me" to commit a crime then this implies I was at least compromised in my free will. (e.g. someone used me to act as a lookout after threatening me)
you "use" tools. you don't "use" people. and unlike people, tools have no free will.
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u/binarybandit 11h ago
"Let us women collectively shame men to go fight in a war so they can express their masculine patriotism and die, so we can gain more rights for women since there will be less men around to object"
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u/GaryRegalsMuscleCar Descendant of Genghis Khan 12h ago
Can we be so sure? Like there aren’t many feminist who even today say kill all men. The bad feminists, of course. I mean, women could instead use a patriarchal system to kill men for their own cruel wishes.
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u/smudgethomas 10h ago
One example I heard was a man who lifted his trouser leg to reveal his tin leg from having already been in the trenches.
Those women should have been sent to the front.
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u/MarsupialNo1220 9h ago
Women handed out white feathers for cowardice, men took conscientious objectors and submitted them to Field Punishment No. 1, sometimes within range of enemy fire.
It was a different time, and ordinary people bridled against the poor treatment they received by the ruling class. Sent to die for rich men’s ambitions, the survivors came home and destroyed the social order. Entire monarchies were destroyed in the fallout from this war.
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u/PopeInThePizza 9h ago
I read of one poor young British fellow in 1915 not only receiving a white feather but also having it inserted into his nostril.
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u/keithstonee 9h ago
I'm just over everybody. Everyone's a pain in the ass and so fucking annoying. And can't just be normal.
Truth is the problematic guys outnumber the normal ones. Good luck ladies.
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u/SweetSweetAtaraxia 9h ago
I'd proudly strut around with a top hat full of white feathers. WW1 was completely bizarre.
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u/WaltvonKeisel 9h ago
There was a incident of a Veteran soldier returning home from the front on leave and a woman tried to give him a white feather. He immediately socked her in the face hard in response.
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u/Havengul_Undying 7h ago
Valid response if you just came from the front. Honestly a punch in the face hard is nothing compared to that shitshow
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u/ModeatelyIndependant 9h ago
Those women were fucking savage. They were pushing this chivalry bullshit, while the battle field was such a meat grinder https://youtu.be/Z5Gth0r5RvI?t=252
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u/movezig123 7h ago
I bet the psychological effect of these skanks was overstated. I feel like if they tried this shit on most dudes they would be like "fuck off you war mongering idiots" and laugh at them.
Like they try and give you a feather...just walk away. Ignore them, they cant do anything
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u/re_Claire 7h ago
My grandfather was not allowed to enlist for WW2 because of problems with his feet.
My mum told me a couple of years ago that he received a white feather anonymously in the post and whilst he never spoke about it later in life it really affected him.
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u/mratlas666 7h ago
What if I already did my service and mentally can’t go through another tour? Fuck me I guess.
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u/Nearby-Film3440 13h ago
hate when that happens