Nineteenth-Century Novelist Henry James Predicted Twentieth-Century Feminism 

Thank you! Much appreciated.

Thanks, Kevin. It's hard to do justice to a Henry James novel. There is something to enjoy and remark on every page, so much insight into human nature and recognition of social comedy and astute observation; but even reading his prose aloud is a challenge (I messed up some of the passages; they deserved better). I've started a Substack where I'm going to put up some of my literary essays and others; but my men's issues angle is predominant right now, so it isn't 'pure' literary criticism.

Oh wow, Janice. Thank you. 😍

@@LeeGordonSeebach just clicked on your paintings video. Absolutely fantastic. The one with the donkeys is super cool.

@@jiveturkey9993 Thank you so much. 😎

@@LeeGordonSeebach I just watched the step by step video, it was interesting to watch the creative process necessary to make your beautiful art!

@@LeeGordonSeebach I like all the blue-collar peasant class animals of the world. Skunks, seagulls, donkeys,raccoons etc etc. So That donkey painting really struck a chord.

Thank you very much. Your appreciation is inspiring.

Aw shucks, my friend!

@@janicefiamengo993 It's true! We don't seem to find that quality of scholarship too much anymore these days. I wish I could put together a university and make one or more courses consisting of your lectures...

@@janicefiamengo993 You are too modest.

And against the fashion of the day.

You'll enjoy this one, I promise. James's insights into victim psychology are truly extraordinary. It may be worth looking into his letters, also, to find out if he wrote more on the subject.

Thanks, my friend. I'm just getting started, and wish I had more time to do it!

Much appreciated, Peter.

Yes, excellent points! James's narrator is somewhat coy on the issue, often apologizing to the readers for Basil's retrograde views and saying things like 'No wonder he couldn't get published, with views that hadn't been possessed by any reasonable person since the sixteenth century" (not a direct quote, just a bad paraphrase). I thought this was fascinating, but I didn't have time to get into it in the video and wasn't sure anyone would care. It showed that already, by 1886, the rights of women were a mainstream subject about which most elites wouldn't disagree; and that anyone attempting to defend men and masculinity was ALREADY considered so retrograde as to be beyond social acceptability. So much for 19th century society being conservative! Also, I found it fascinating that James, who must have agreed at least to a large extent with Basil's views, felt the need to distance himself through comic irony from the character. Thanks for being interested.

Petre, I can't vouch for a thorough anti-feminism in all his work, though if you want to read a short James novel that demonstrates his humane social conservatism, you could start with *What Maisie Knew,* about a divorce from a child's point of view. It is stunning. The first time I read it was on an airplane, and I absolutely could not put the book down, and read the whole thing in one sitting. *The Bostonians* is one of my favorite novels. It is romantic, it is hilarious, it is caustic, it is unsparing of human foibles, and filled with interesting observations of humanity. I didn't do justice to it at all in this 'essay.' It is interesting to me that so few novelists (in English) have attempted any kind of novelistic treatment of feminism from a skeptical point of view.

@@janicefiamengo993 You made me curious about "What Maisie knew". I will read it. I imagine in the past children were visibly affected by a divorce, because they were socially conditioned to appreciate the father and the integrity of the family. Children today show a strange indifference toward the father and often they do not even consider him part of the family. One can find some antifeminism in many writers of the XIXth century, even the feminist ones. Dostoevsky, which I know best, though basically a radical feminist, often made fun of women and said very harsh things about them. Dostoevsky was very amused by those men, usually very conservative, who thought women were lofty creatures incapable of evil.

@@janicefiamengo993 He may be anti-feminist but he was not anti-woman. Read 'Washington Square' or 'The Aspern Papers' for moving and perceptive portraits of women suffering from unrequited love.

Literally no one is anti-woman in our day and age. But most people are rather anti man. The fact people feel the need to proclaim they are not "anti-woman" is amazing. ​Stop qualifying yourself to feminists. It's unnecessary and reeks of groveling. Women need less emotional validation and aggrandizement.@@hejla4524

I recommended it to a good friend, and he said he found it somewhat interesting, but he couldn't get past page 125 (too dense, too slow-moving). It is not for everybody. But I think it is a remarkable work of art as well as a profound anti-feminist treatise. The movie is also pretty good, an early Merchant-Ivory production, I think.

Thank you!

I used to read the Times Literary Supplement assiduously; and also the London Review of Books. My favorite bits were long long articles about James's letters. I've always meant to read the letters themselves, but so far have not done so. He was a character indeed. I felt trepidation about this little video essay because I don't know him as deeply as I would like, though I have read most of his novels thoroughly.

@@janicefiamengo993 The video was a triumph Janice, I so enjoy your clear style of delivery and cogent arguments. As for James, I need to read more of his work and more about him. Colm Toibin's fictionalised account of James's life, The Master, is well worth reading too.

Thanks for the suggestion, Richard, and for the kind words. I'm not sure why Steve decided not to number the video essays. I'll ask him about it.

Thank you, Michael. I don't know it. Have you read it recently? Can you provide a teaser?

@@janicefiamengo993 Indeed I can ! He gets you started in his early chapter (The Maternal Instinct) with this idea . . . and then he moves on to places you want to go. Absolutely delighted to know you have not come across him yet. A treasure is waiting for you and anyone else who reads this message . . . "A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank. . . "

@@janicefiamengo993 In Defense of Women is one of the books I recommend to everybody despite nobody ever reading it on my recommendation. When I tell parts of it to women, they generally agree that it's an accurate portrait of how men and women think and come up with their own examples. It can't be categorized as either pro or anti really so it's ignored - that's part of our Puritan heritage though, isn't it? Mencken has a bad reputation anyway for saying exactly what he thought. Sometimes he was so close to being exactly on the mark that he made everybody uncomfortable.

Well, I don't know if you'll agree that he predicted the damage, exactly, but I think you'll be astounded by his insights into the dangers of feminist psychology.

@@janicefiamengo993 Thank you for drawing attention to it. I'm going to read it. A lot of what went wrong seems fairly obvious (to have predicted) to us with the benefit of hindsight. But who could have seen that feminism was going to cause the ridiculous nature of being overrun with non-Westerners who are encouraged to hate us? Or the general rise of self-hatred so prevalent in the West today?

@@tarstarkusz That is part of the feminist victim mentality, in my opinion (which mentality *is* extensively analyzed by James, if not the social consequences you mention--though James is interested in the close relationship between Abolitionism and feminism). Under the victim mentality, the victim is by definition purely innocent and righteous in a binary scheme of oppressor and oppressed. The same scheme sees the non-western other as oppressed by the (colonizing/imperialist) west and is therefore to be welcomed, deferred to, conciliated, and empowered (including with grievance ideology) by adherents of the feminist victim ideology. Western feminists showed their righteous bona fides by allying against western men. The self-hatred that is so dominant today is the flipside of vacuous self-love; one can love oneself only by hating the white western male and the white western nation.

@@janicefiamengo993 But these same feminists were kvetching about African American men getting the vote before them. Both men and women of the 19th century were "based" and redpilled on race. My question, which hopefully will be answered this weekend when I start reading the book, is could they have foreseen their great granddaughters kissing the feet of AA men while their other granddaughters were chanting things like "White silence is violence" and "Black Lives MATTER!!!" Could they have foreseen a single dead baby on a beach would lead to over a million hostile invaders (almost all young unaccompanied men) just being invited into Europe by feminist leaders and the press? They knew it took hundreds of years to get rid of and deport the last of the Moors out of Spain. This all seems obvious to us NOW, after it happened. It's easy to see the consequences of an ideology after they already happen. It's like the difference between mastering a subject taught to you by an expert and you independently identifying all of the physical laws and figuring it all out on your own (IOW, you don't need to be Issac Newton to learn differential calculus, but you do need to be Issac Newton to invent differential calculus) Also, the rise of the normalization and extremely widespread attitudes about anonymous sex? The total breakdown of the family? The collapse of fertility? The drop in testosterone? Maybe they were a lot less naive' than I think. But it's hard to imagine, for me anyway, that they could see all of this coming.

Indeed! I mentioned *What Maisie Knew* in an earlier video (Early Feminists Hoped to Destroy the Family, at about 13:55). It is a truly fantastic novel and, again, extraordinarily prescient about the damage caused by divorce and selfishness. I'll never forget the experience of reading it: my head seemed to be exploding.

In James day, men always got the children, as they were the only ones permitted to be in a position to "support" them.

If you followed this channel you would know that not only were women permitted, but were encouraged and supported in their pursuits, including education and career. The myth that they were not permitted covers the truth that they were not interested.

@@MadameChristie watch the videos on this channel. You have been deceived by feminism, which is the only socially sanctioned hate movement in the west.

@@MadameChristie Not everybody is able to understand the material, especially when they are blinded by rage like you . Bye

Steve can speak for himself, but I think Steve has decided that others are essentially saying some or most of what he was saying, so he doesn't feel the need and is wary of RU-vid censorship. But I agree: they were outstanding.

That would require a very long book. The short answer is because men are willing to sell out other men in order to fulfill feminist women's demands, even to the detriment of themselves, women, and children.

Some things can't be fixed.

@@neilreynolds3858 True

I appreciate the sentiment!

I can find only digitized versions online. It seems to have been "disappeared" from bookstores.

@@janicefiamengo993 Thanks! That was the same issue I kept running into when I was looking for it. Great video, by the way!

@@janicefiamengo993 I just got a copy of the German version, Der dressierte Mann, from Blackwell's in England. It's very good so far!

Glad you found us. I have subscribed multiple times to this channel yet have never received a notification. Do I feel persecuted? ha ha. Just a bit.

@@janicefiamengo993 Janice, thank. I have met you and Steve at ICMI in London a couple of times. Steve, maybe once. Always memorable. Amazing the fear you guys put in the "them tube" cencors, with truth and well reasoned, well presented facts. Love what you both do. Again, thank you. 👍

@@oghamstone5964 Glad to meet you again!

I've been arguing for years that Puritanism permeates every aspect of intellectual life in the US but nobody will accept it: The Puritans were the intellectual fathers of America. Puritanism = sexual repression and nothing else to modern minds but they still think like Puritans no matter how much they screw around. It causes a lot of trouble in life since that kind of thinking leads to depression, anger, and fanaticism. We're ending up in a situation where we have a religious war on our hands that nobody can talk about and will never end.

I don't agree. He did believe in love, but he also believed that men should utterly refuse all feminist claims and demands. In the novel, Basil won't even allow Verena to give her last platform speech; and he won't concede a single feminist claim. Conservatives, in opposition, have accepted the vast majority of feminist claims, and even support feminists and feminist ideas when they think it may help the conservative cause (which it never does).

He did this during a time when, as Thornton Wilder put it, "women vote.....indirect".

@@janicefiamengo993 But if "male love" is the cure for feminism, that means the existence of feminists is proof of unloving men. Before you know it, they'll say Patriarchy caused feminism.

Sorry to be late replying to this interesting comment. We do not agree on James being on the wrong side of history; or rather, I agree that his views didn't prevail, but not that he was wrong to have them. We also do not agree that feminism was a movement of the people, rejected by conservative and wealthy elites. I'd say in general it has been the opposite, mainly promoted by elites. I believe feminism has been the most destructive and malign force in 20th century history, perhaps barring the totalitarian experiments of Nazism and Communism (but there are links between feminism and both these totalitarian movements), which also greatly profited elites and harmed the average person. Novelists in general do not tend to be anti-feminist, in my opinion, though this is a huge subject impossible to prove in a short answer. Most nineteenth century English-language novelists were generally supportive of feminism, producing novels that portrayed women as the victims of male brutality, and the laws as biased against them. See the writings of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)--especially her novel -*-Adam Bede-*--- as well as Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell (especially her novel *Ruth*) for examples of acclaimed and popular writers who wrote very sympathetically about the "wrongs" of woman perpetrated by an allegedly bigoted patriarchal society. And of course there is *Tess of the D'Urbervilles* by Thomas Hardy too, where the sympathy for the woman and the bigotry against male brutality reach almost hysterical proportions. Near the end of the 19th century, many novels explicitly promoted feminism: Grant Allen's *The Woman Who Did* and George Gissing's *The Odd Women* are two examples that spring immediately to mind, and there are many others. Novels promoting socialism are beyond my ken. Certainly Charles Dickens was harshly critical of the exploitation of working people in England.

@@janicefiamengo993 is

Do you mean suffragette terrorism in particular or something more widescale? There is Simon Webb's *The Suffragette Bombers: Britain's Forgotten Terrorists,* which I referenced in an earlier video. But that is restricted to the bombing campaign carried out by the Women's Social and Political Union between 1907 and 1914. Feminists have committed other acts of arson and bombing, but I don't know of a study of them. Or do you mean "terrorism" more generally, including all acts of violence and incitement to violence for a political cause?

@@janicefiamengo993 Yeah sorry I meant "terrorism" in a much broader sense, including politically motivated acts of vandalism like the one you cite in this video. About a month ago, a Russian girl named Polina Dvorkina (not her birth name) killed her father and then entered a kindergarten group with the intention of shooting the boys there, but she was stopped and arrested before she could commit the act. She has admitted to being a radical feminist who believes in the concept of male privilege. Barely anyone has reported this story, and it will probably fade even farther into obscurity soon, until nobody remembers it any more. And I wonder how often does this sort of thing happen. It'd be nice to have a book or a website that lists all such incidents. For now, I'll check Simon Webb's book out, thank you.

@@VirideSoryuLangley I don't know if there's anything like what you're looking for (there should be! what an important subject). There are books that cover some of the subject, for example Patricia Pearson's excellent *When She Was Bad,* Daphne Patai's *Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism,* and Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young's *Legalizing Misandry* (and probably many others that I'm not thinking of). And of course Warren Farrell's *The Myth of Male Privilege.* But nothing exactly about how many women are incited to violence, whether against male partners or against men in general, by ideas of female supremacism. Sorry not to be of more help.

@@janicefiamengo993 gratified to discover a link between you and Simon Webb, in the form of one of his books. I regularly attend his channel. Among his many worthwhile short chats are many on Europeans being enslaved by other Europeans and by slavers from northern Africa, the ubiquity of slavery among tribal leaders, and one eye opener asking the rhetorical question of how did more than 3/4th of historic Palestine region disappear from modern maps? Who took it?