Tag: feminism

Just to give half my friends, or at least people I sort of know the opportunity to jump up and down screaming indignantly, I’m owning up.

I mis-read things sometimes. I’d like to be able to say with hilarious consequences, but they aren’t always. Like this time, really.

It was an open tab about something I’d read but not very well and it just didn’t go in, fnarr fnarr. It was supposed to be about votes. It said timeline of womens‘ suffrage.  It’s important stuff, showing how women quite often had a vote hundreds of years ago, sometimes by accident when a law was sloppily drafted, sometimes because they just were, or some of them anyway. But generally they didn’t have a vote because the whole issue was about the same as how I read the open tab at the top of my laptop screen:

Timeline of Women’s Stuff

1589 – Invention of the handbag.

1627 – Widespread adoption of the idea that wearing underwear is slutty.

1846 – Women allowed on trains.

1847 – First performance of Two Ronnies joke with punchline ‘he’s only done it twice; the first time he was sick, the second time his hat blew off.’

1889 – Woman drives a car.

1890 – Two Ronnies perform first woman parking joke.

1918 – Women allowed to vote.

1979 – Women elect champion of womens’ rights, Margaret Thatcher.

Any date in twentieth century: blond jokes, Essex girl jokes, handbag jokes, ditziness jokes, et c., et c..

 

 

The not wearing underwear thing is true, by the way. Only girls who were thought no better than they ought to be used to wear knickers. The date is wrong, but the idea was widespread, at least in Europe. As for elsewhere, much like women’s things, nobody knows or seems to really care much, most of the time.