I’ve been researching how the masculine virtues of chivalry came under particular attack from the upper-class Suffragettes (and they pretty much were all upper-class) in the early 20th century. Their campaign for gender quality took umbrage with the chivalrous social codes that had governed gentlemen’s behaviour. Suffragettes sought to remove any notion of women as ‘the weaker sex’ in need of saving, in order to level the political playing field. As a woman, I find it endlessly depressing that these codes, in place partly to protect women and hold men to account amongst their peer group, became outmoded with the decline of the European aristocracies and the catastrophe of World War I.
I’ve been researching how the masculine virtues of chivalry came under particular attack from the upper-class Suffragettes (and they pretty much were all upper-class) in the early 20th century. Their campaign for gender quality took umbrage with the chivalrous social codes that had governed gentlemen’s behaviour. Suffragettes sought to remove any notion of women as ‘the weaker sex’ in need of saving, in order to level the political playing field. As a woman, I find it endlessly depressing that these codes, in place partly to protect women and hold men to account amongst their peer group, became outmoded with the decline of the European aristocracies and the catastrophe of World War I.