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[misatheredpanda.livejournal.com]

CAMILLE DESMOULINS IS 250 TODAY!

I don't actually have anything to commemorate the event, sadly. However I would like to encourage you to spare a thought (and perhaps a few words, if you feel so inspired) for this man who slipped into history - and more than a few peoples' hearts in the past 250 years - against the odds. I could never express how grateful I am for it.

Comments

[maelipstick.livejournal.com]

Aside from all the other issues that have been pointed out with this selection...holy classism.

There's this godawful other piece she does about being a social work student in the 70s (which she assumes is somehow relevant to conditions thirty years on) which basically states she knows what she is saying and that it is horribly bourgeoisie to class poor people as anything other than drunks who beat each other. (Which is rather like being a chiropodist and assuming everyone must have a verruca because all the people you see at work do.)

And it ends with this sort of impotent wail at the folly of interventionism. She hits every one of my buttons this woman, EVERY ONE.

Because that's the pinnacle of equal rights for "uneducated girls" - getting drunk and fighting! Wahoo! Poor people spend all their time in a state of drunken disorder, don't you know?

Isn't this a cliche that pre-dates feminism by about two hundred years anyway? How about Hogarth's Gin Lane (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beer-street-and-Gin-lane.jpg). Plently of sozzled, slatternly, violent poor women and it's too early to even blame Mary Wollenscraft.