Lynn Bridge posts a comment.
I recently watched for the first time The Forsyte Saga. The end of the Victorian age.
Have been watching Upstairs Downstairs.
One of the things which discussions of sexual relations in America miss is the other social historical and legal dimensions which still vestigially existed for the Victorians. This criticism applies no less to Bridge's comment than to DK's post.
What do I mean? The Victorians lived in a class structure, The Old European Order.
The Democratic Revolution had gradually, or fitfully, relentlessly eaten away at that structure for over a 150 years. There was really not much to put in its place, given that the organized religions had come under attack, even the Protestant ones created since the Reformation, so that there was no longer a strong a religious sense associated with either hierarchical social and political order, or a credible morality, religious or secular, based on the Old Order.
It was against this background, when slavery no less than sexual equality and sexual license, racial equality, unfettered capitalist accumulation and its accompanying bad working conditions, liberal anti imperialism in the heart of imperialist Europe, etc., emerged as social and political issues and separate causes, that the sexual revolution and gender equality emerged along with all the others in tandem.
In my judgment, it would be an analytic error to even try to view something like sexual equality, either for or against, in isolation from this long sad unresolved and much much larger heritage of Western civilizational decline, and further complicated by the global cultural and military conflict now under way everywhere.
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