I can't find a source now (of course), but I was at the Titanic Museum in Belfast this summer, and the information there indicated (through my hazy memory) that "women and children first" didn't come out of some noble sense of chivalry, but of a maritime disaster in the 1850s where every single woman and child on board died.
I can't remember the name of the ship, and maybe it's a mis-telling of the Birkenhead story, but the museum's version was that the loss of women and children in the earlier disaster led to such revulsion that it became practice to instead prioritize women and children.
EDIT: Aha, it was the Atlantic in 1873 that I'm thinking of. So both stories can be true, since the Atlantic sinking occurred between the Birkenhead and the Titanic.
https://www.phillyburbs.com/story/opinion/columns/2012/12/19...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1873/apr/03/mainsection.fro...
I would argue that "women and children first" has been practiced since the dawn of times in a smaller setting i.e. tribes of hunter gatherers
The motivation is to protect women and children from likely dangerous circumstance so that the tribe can be quickly repopulated.
The tribes that sent all the women and children off to war or adventure and had only a few women or girl survivors left would have to wait for decades to repopulate the tribe to previous numbers but the opposite could be achieved in years.
I can't find a link but this very scenario is playing out in Ukraine at the moment. There was a video released by the government outlining the policy perhaps to explain why men were barred from leaving the country.
If all your fighting age males died the women and children would just becomes slaves to whoever won. There are numerous examples of this being documented during Romes expansion into Western Europe.
A group of young men on the contrary can quite easily raid and kill the men in neighboring villages and take as many women as they can keep as slaves. Again, documented in Romes founding.
People seriously underestimate how bloody and amoral history is and that women were as complicit in all of the barbarity as the men.
Could you clarify what you said about women's complicity at the end? Every other part of your comment seemed to attribute very little agency to women (they are essentially prizes for whoever wins a fight, with seemingly no other choice).
To understand the ancient world you need to understand one saying:
Vae victis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis
Once you understand that you will understand that the gender of the losers didn't matter one bit once the fighting was done, they were killed, enslaved, conquered, raped or whatever else the victors felt like at the time.
This isn't about men and women, this is about winners and losers.
Or to quote Rosa Luxembourg about the same phenomenon a couple of millennia later:
>Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against “male prerogatives” would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat. They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their “right” to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation.
One of the many writings she was raped with a saber for, but for some reason isn't popular today.
Most of the polls I’ve seen show that Rosa Luxembourg got that guess completely backwards.
In the current election the female candidate supported slavery, false imprisonment and murdering innocent men.
She got it quite right.
"Athens rules all Greece. I control Athens. My wife controls me" - Themistocles
That was a joke in Plutarch. Women were absolutely despised in Ancient Athens. If you want to get a sense of Athenian attitudes towards women you should read Pericles' Funeral Oration.
I have little clue about ancient athens. Your statement however does mean contradict the poster. You can despise a party/group, while that group holds power over you. In fact that is a very common way why such a relationship occurs.
There is truth in comedy. And the real joke is that it continues about his infant son controls his wife & therefore his infant controls all of Greece via his wife.
And not sure how Thucydides' Pericles telling the future widows of Athens to basically have a 'stiff upper lip' is evidence of them being "absolutely despised". If anything I'd take it as evidence they had status and influence because otherwise the first man of Athens wouldn't be addressing them.
And also from Plutarch, women are the ones who stop Rome from being destroyed w/ Coriolanus.
I think complicit is a poor choice of words in this case. I think compliant is better.
The behavior of the captured woman would be:
- do everything possible to ensure her young previous children are not killed, but accompany her in captivity;
- don't try to escape, which would probably be impossible anyway;
- don't fight or assassinate her new captor 'husband', it would mean certain death;
- try to make the enslaved relationship work as well as possible; please the new master;
- seek to have successful children in the new context;
- marry-up in the new society, if at all possible, such as on death of the first 'husband'.
Many women would have already had arranged marriages out from their home village, to a new husband in another location, even within the same tribe or society. They may never have seen their original family again.
They would be dominated by their new mother-in-law, and treated like a slave in the new extended household. Being captured and enslaved again was probably not so different - unless it was by different and abhorrent barbarians.
For example, China had arranged out-marriage of daughters, and many of their lives were totally miserable (e.g. foot-binding so they couldn't run away). But being captured by the Mongols was probably extremely unpleasant (I mean, they never washed :)
Women didn't generally run away they just accepted their new husband.
or soethe story goes, I imangine cases of women fighting back would be surpressed in, such societies.
How is that complicity?
It’s not. That’s like saying someone who’s getting robbed at gunpoint is complicit because they’re handing over the money.
They are complicit though because in this case whatever value they hold (labor, baby factory, social connection) goes away when they refuse to do those things or get killed while refusing.
In your analogy imagine being held at gunpoint knowing that if you give up your riches you will ultimately survive but the behavior that caused you to give up your riches will be incentivized and perpetuated due to your compliance. Now contrast that with the situation where you refuse to hand over your riches and the would be robber walks away or kills you only to have the riches disappear the instant you do.
Granted it is not an easy situation for an individual to make but choosing to be complicit and acting accordingly is still an exercise of an individuals agency.
I get you’re trying to make some argument about the roles we take, ultimately, because of our personal decisions in life situations, but complying with a robbers demands does not make me complicit in the crime. Those are two different concepts.
This is a pretty twisted interpretation of the term complicit.
By your definition every girl who has been raped or abused and survived is.
No.
Some situations like a single instance of SA cannot be reasonably predicted and attempts at fight, flight or freeze will end up with SA occurring regardless.
So in these situations the person who is being assaulted is not complicit because no action whatsoever could have prevented the SA from happening.
> survive but the behavior that caused you to give up your riches will be incentivized and perpetuated due to your compliance
I'm really confused by this, it feels like a modern framing is being applied to a really long period of time a very very long time ago.
Why would a band of pillagers stop pillaging because the women in one village slit their throats rather than be taken captive? If anything, it seems more likely that a band would settle down and take over existing defenses and start a new life if there were people there to start new lives with, even as slaves.
Anyway it seems a little silly to suggest ancient peoples would be concerned with, or should be concerned with, the greater incentive structure of pillaging. Either way, pillagers gonna pillage.
> Anyway it seems a little silly to suggest ancient peoples would be concerned with, or should be concerned with, the greater incentive structure of pillaging. Either way, pillagers gonna pillage.
I am not asserting this. It's simply a matter of did the women help or hinder the violence? I argue that by virtue of being taken captive with hopes of integrating into the new tribe in some shape or form they helped perpetuated the violence.
> I argue that by virtue of being taken captive with hopes of integrating into the new tribe in some shape or form they helped perpetuated the violence.
If you share this opinion with some women you know irl, I would be really interested to hear how they respond.
Ill do it and get back to you.
That is not a correct use of the word complicit.
>Associated with or participating in a questionable act or a crime; having complicity.
>Associated with or participating in an activity, especially one of a questionable nature.
I find it sickening that someone would even try to describe a woman having to give up her agency due to not having the physical power to fight off a man as “complicit”.
> I find it sickening that someone would even try to describe a woman having to give up her agency due to not having the physical power to fight off a man as “complicit”.
It's a dark way of thinking about it but I guess it's why 'just following orders' is generally not considered a valid legal or moral excuse even in situations when insubordination likely results in death or imprisonment.
Prisoners of war are complicit in their captor's war crimes?
I am not talking about decision in a legal context.
I am talking about cause and effect.
My point is that actions (or lack of action) determine the outcome. The emotions that the actor feels towards the available actions does not determine the outcome of whatever action they choose. Just the actions count.
Let's do a simple calculation that seeks to explain why Arabian men might have up to 4 wives.
Assume: in ancient Arabia, life was very harsh; tribes survived by raiding each other; 100% of adult men would go on a raid; women do not fight; fighting was brutal and merciless; casualties were high; no male prisoners were taken; wounded were killed; then ...
The first raid is inconclusive and 20% of men die on both sides. Now there are 100:80 women to men.
The second raid is also inconclusive, with the same casualties. The ratio is now 100:64.
The third raid is a rout, a total victory. The victors again lose 20%, but all the losing tribe's men are killed, and all their women are taken.
The victors now have more territory, more camels, more date palms and more wells.
The female to male ratio is 100+100:51
Of course, you can reduce the casualty rate and increase the number of raids, but something like that could be quite close to historical reality.
I would think if the men were willing surrender and change loyalty, they would also have been more useful alive.
I think they would never be trusted. Clan loyalty was paramount. A man would never think of surrender or betrayal, and even if he did, he would not be trusted, because the victorious men could never imagine such a thing (like Japanese in WWII).
Secondly, there was literally no work for men to do, except fight. Another man is another mouth to feed and water. In the small scattered settled urban locations, in the few major oases, there was work (farming, building, digging irrigation channels, etc), but they had E. African slaves to do this, because they could be trusted (no hope of escape; all were castrated).
> I would argue that "women and children first" has been practiced since the dawn of times in a smaller setting i.e. tribes of hunter gatherers
> The motivation is to protect women and children from likely dangerous circumstance so that the tribe can be quickly repopulated.
This is the male expendability hypothesis:
Thanks for the link. I came up with this theory after researching why men seem to have been the primary hunters in hunter gatherer tribes.
Totally unscientific but I think that heterosexual men and women shape the behaviors of each other for better or worse. Similar stuff is observed in animals. Spiders are particularly interesting.
"Women and children first" only means something in mass transportation or dense urban evacuation in a society with a concept of queueing.
More generally, there are ancient virtues of preserving the precious, vulnerable and honored, but the situations where the men would have to uselessly line up in the back would not exist. They would be fighting, attacking back, carrying weaker people, creating diversions, etc.
I think you're close to the mark but not quite on it.
Women and children first is an artifact of modernity. It is a required value in a location where you can A) have a disaster and B) have people (men) who don't have strong bonds.
If we were all from the same family, or village, then yes your "preserving" line of thought works. But mix in a group of males who dont have women or children with them, they can push to the front as it were. Even if they don't have the numbers to be successful they are a "threat to order" that might not exist. One where men who could be helping are now fighting/keeping order.
We are extending familiarity to society.
Yes this. Even though it has been practiced for years prior at some point it was probably just instinctual and driven by emotion instead of logical thought.
The phrase and it's propagation is an artifact or modernity.
Well said.
Of course cannon fodder can’t leave the country.
That's a biased take.
A more accurate take would be "Of course cannon's and cannon fodder can't leave the country during a time of war."
Yup
I'm upvoting you to counter the downvotes because that is the brutal reality of war, particularly if the top brass (on both sides) don't actually have anything to lose.
In both Russia and Ukraine, conscription does not apply to those who chose their parents wisely
You, and many, have argued the point about the tribes and whatnot, but I've found that this frequently seems to be just applying one's current day culture to a speculation of what things might have been like.
One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. We have plenty of young kings and military commanders just from the last thousand years, stretching back 10 or 20 thousand, who knows?
As for women in war, just from written era of history (the last 4k years) there's ample evidence of women fighting in war and being honored for valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare
Since you mention tribes I assume you mean more the 5-20k years ago timeline, in which case I'd hesitate to plainly speculate that these societies all tucked their women away in caves like the Flintstones suggests, or that any one of these societies was much like another. It's a very, very long period of time after all.
David Graeber is a fun anthropologist to read if you want to challenge some of the "common sense" assumptions we often make about ancient societies. "Debt" and "The Dawn of Everything" in particular I recommend.
> You, and many, have argued the point about the tribes and whatnot, but I've found that this frequently seems to be just applying one's current day culture to a speculation of what things might have been like.
To be fair we can only speculate but I actually came to this conclusion thinking about the two scenarios mathematically. Women increase the rate at which a tribes population can grow so when women die in combat a tribes growth rate diminishes. When a competing tribe manages to capture a woman in combat the growth rate of her original tribe diminishes and the growth rate of her new tribe increases. So sure, bigger does not always mean better but in a small population faced with constant threats the bigger tribes had a statistical advantage.
> One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. We have plenty of young kings and military commanders just from the last thousand years, stretching back 10 or 20 thousand, who knows?
I don't understand why this is a counter point. The age of what is considered a child has changed over the years but generally and historically speaking it coincides with the age of puberty so if anything it proves my point instead of diminishing it.
> As for women in war, just from written era of history (the last 4k years) there's ample evidence of women fighting in war and being honored for valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare
No doubt there has been many brave female warriors. My position is that this has been the statistical exception not the norm and that over time the societies that failed to follow the idea of "save the women and children" have declined and been extinguished or absorbed by those that do.
> Since you mention tribes I assume you mean more the 5-20k years ago timeline, in which case I'd hesitate to plainly speculate that these societies all tucked their women away in caves like the Flintstones suggests, or that any one of these societies was much like another. It's a very, very long period of time after all.
Agreed. It is a very, very long period of time and what we are seeing is the results of experiments played out over that time. Notice the trend in the ratio of male to female combatants in modern and historical armies.
> David Graeber is a fun anthropologist to read if you want to challenge some of the "common sense" assumptions we often make about ancient societies. "Debt" and "The Dawn of Everything" in particular I recommend.
Thanks for the recommendations. Ill check them out.
> One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old.
...You're arguing that the age of manhood has grown lower over time?
You have your bar mitzvah at 13.
> As for women in war, just from written era of history (the last 4k years) there's ample evidence of women fighting in war and being honored for valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare
Here's what that link looks like:
> 16th century BCE – Ahhotep I is credited with a stela at Karnak for "having pulled Egypt together, having cared for its army, having guarded it, having brought back those who fled, gathering up its deserters, having quieted the South, subduing those who defy her".
> 1479–1458 BCE – Reign of Hatshepsut. It is possible that she led military campaigns against Nubia and Canaan.
> 13th century BCE – Estimated time of the Trojan War. According to ancient sources, several women participate in battle
> 13th century BCE – Lady Fu Hao, consort of the Chinese emperor Wu Ding, led 3,000 troops into battle during the Shang dynasty.
> Mid-12th century BCE – Deborah believed to have been appointed judge and defeated the army of King Jabin of Canaan, according to the Book of Judges.
> 11th century BCE – 4th century CE [sic] – Approximate time for the burial of a Kangju woman in modern Kazakhstan who was buried with a sword and a dagger.
> Late 9th century–8th century BCE – Shammuramat (Semiramis) ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire. She was the first woman to rule an empire without a man ruling with her.
You might notice that so far only one of these examples involves a woman fighting in war, and that example is taken from legendary "documentation" written 600+ years after the events.
To clarify, I was attempting to give a simple overview in counter to the idea that "all ancient peoples put women and children first because procreation etc." It's an assumption contradicted by what evidence we have.
You're right, much of what we have of ancient times is nothing more than legends, or the work of one or two historians. From 10k back we have basically nothing but archaeological evidence.
So first of all, there's not evidence to suggest this idea that women and children were universally tucked safely away from things like war. Second of all, we do have evidence of participation by women in war - the legends of the Amazonians didn't come from nowhere, and women did, apparently, fight in the Trojan war, and women did get buried with weapons, and there are tales of warrior women, etc.
As for children, my point was more like, "women and children first" in 2024 would result in some 15 year old boys on the life boat, whereas 20000 years ago a 15 year old boy could very well have a spear put in his hand before a battle.
> Second of all, we do have evidence of participation by women in war - the legends of the Amazonians didn't come from nowhere
That is, in the most literal sense, not evidence. It's also a completely unjustified claim.
Where did the legends of Ellen Ripley come from?
> and women did, apparently, fight in the Trojan war
There's no evidence for that either.
> and women did get buried with weapons
Yep. There's evidence for that. It appears to be a single-digit number of women per 1000 years, and there isn't evidence that they used the weapons.
We have mass graves from prehistoric battles. A female skeleton in one of those would have been big news.
> We have mass graves from prehistoric battles. A female skeleton in one of those would have been big news.
Doesn't seem to make the news, since in archaeological circles it's not really newsworthy. This really is just applying modern gender ideology to ancient peoples that had different ideas about gender roles.
Well I guess it does technically "make the news" since more niche news sites report on the findings. Maybe my own background makes me find it not really newsworthy.
https://www.history.com/news/dna-proves-viking-women-were-po...
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-grave-sword-mirr...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/tomb-containing-th...
Well, in the ancient world it was often old men first, to preserve knowledge and political power. Kings of men over mothers of children.
It's just common sense to order by likelihood of perishing, if you want to minimize casualties.
This only applies if you consider it reasonably possible for someone to survive a shipwreck in frigid waters, not, of course, that those queuing could always accurately evaluate that chance. I think the reality here though, if we’re being honest, is that it’s based on a valuation of some lives over others, and that men are considered more expendable in emergencies.
And more smaller people and children can fit on a boat.
> didn't come out of some noble sense of chivalry
There is obvious "value" of someone's life in all of the history and even now and children and women and higher on that ladder. In 1800s if 10 black man dies for the cost of saving 1 white man, it wouldn't have came to anyone's attention at all, but if 1 white woman dies, it was a news.
Even now, a school shooting in US killing dozen children gets more news than 1000s killed in middle East. Even in countries closer to middle East than US.
> "women and children first" didn't come out of some noble sense of chivalry
This is a natural instinct for any decent man, and you can verify it by looking at the attitudes and writings of men in the early 1800s (predating your maritime disaster) in America during times of war. Any race or society that doesn't prioritize women and children is going to quickly be eliminated.
> “My God! What shall I do with these women and children!” Hull exclaimed on receiving Brock’s message. Horrified at the thought of a bloodbath, he was bamboozled into surrendering Detroit on August 16, 1812 without firing a shot or even consulting his officers.
The logic is also circular. Prioritizing women and children only after they die in a disaster doesn't make sense unless you already consider that a particularly bad thing, with extra consideration to their safety.
Citing the writing of men in the 1800s is a very bad way to go about proving the existence of a natural chivalrous instinct. Anything you cite can easily be put down to cultural attitudes.
Why did you respond to my post without reading what I was responding to? Why? Why? I'm so sick of these low effort replies that don't even put the smallest amount of time into even looking at what they're responding to.
I literally did though. I understand that you were responding to a claim that disembarking procedures changed in response to a specific maritime accident, but you also made the claim directly in your comment that there is an innate chivalrous instinct in men, and your only substantiation (admittedly because you were responding to a claim about the time period) was to cite the writings of men in the 1800s. My point still stands and that’s why I responded to you.
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You’d promptly be shot or thrown overboard yourself.
Yes I'd die fighting and take a few with me. Just submitting is not an option.
So in an evacuation where women and children were going first, and the men are ordered to wait behind because there’s not enough life boats, you’d walk up to a line of innocent children waiting to get in a lifeboat and kill as many as you could. Then you’d kill as many men who tried to stop you as you could.
You would murder children because you don’t like being told what do do. I think that’s something you need to work on sir.
Do you think that's the most effective action you could take at such a moment?
An aversion to instructions sounds like oppositional defiance disorder but more importantly, this is concerning behavior for someone with access to children or women.
One of my teachers did a paper on maritime disasters and concluded that women were more likely to die in shipwrecks, despite “women and children first”. The Titanic and Birkenhead were the exceptions.
https://www.ifn.se/media/3eoh2e0u/wp913.pdf
> Since the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a widespread belief that the social norm of "women and children first" (WCF) gives women a survival advantage over men in maritime disasters, and that captains and crew members give priority to passengers. We analyze a database of 18 maritime disasters spanning three centuries, covering the fate of over 15,000 individuals of more than 30 nationalities. Our results provide a unique picture of maritime disasters. Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared with men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers. We also find that: the captain has the power to enforce normative behavior; there seems to be no association between duration of a disaster and the impact of social norms; women fare no better when they constitute a small share of the ship's complement; the length of the voyage before the disaster appears to have no impact on women's relative survival rate; the sex gap in survival rates has declined since World War I; and women have a larger disadvantage in British shipwrecks. Taken together, our findings show that human behavior in life-and-death situations is best captured by the expression "every man for himself."
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First thing that comes to mind is Radiohead’s “Idioteque”.
Me first then the children
It was less than a mile to shore, but still amazing that one man made the swim https://maps.app.goo.gl/tLhRhBLb1DFMpCY56
The article claims it was three miles to shore, not less than one:
> This course kept the Birkenhead within approximately three miles of the coast, maintaining a speed of approximately 8 knots.
> One young officer did manage the three mile swim to the shore where he emerged to find his own horse standing waiting for him.
The article is wrong. The coordinates of the wreck can be found in the diving guide https://wikitravel.org/en/Diving_in_South_Africa/HMS_Birkenh...
The Wreckage location can be different than where the ship went under, due to the currents.
> The large sandstone reef to the south east of the wreckage with a pinnacle at the blinder known as Birkenhead Rock slopes down to about 27 m at the edge of the sand, which runs roughly east–west magnetic. The slope of this reef is quite steep to the east, but flattens out a bit where the engines of the wreck lie stacked at the edge of the sand.
awesome story. equally awesome third delivery by the Van Halen musical ensemble
> The troops onboard included fresh drafts of
> Only then did Captain Salmond shout to the men that everyone who could swim must save themselves by jumping into the sea and make for the boats.
This article nicely illustrates male "privilege". First you are enslaved by government to serve in army.
Second you are not even allowed to save yourself. They first had to deal with women, children and HORSES!!! before men were allowed to swim away!!!