I have always hated these articles that attribute great bravery to people, of either sex, who do things a little different to the norm.

I have always been scared of motorbikes. They look very dangerous to me.

One easter, a while ago, after I had won the Forumuls one race at Bathurst, I was talking to an acquaintance I met down the town. He was telling me he thought I was mad, racing an open wheeler at Bathurst. Too dangerous he reckoned.

When I started laughing, he wanted to know why. Well you see, he had won 2 of the motorbike races held on the same track, 2 days earlier, & he thought what I did was dangerous.

We are all products of our history. Also some years ago, I met another yacht at an atoll somewhere in the Pacific islands. It belonged to a New Zealand couple, with a couple of kids, about 2 & 5 years old. I asked the 5 year old, how he liked living on a boat.

He looked at me a little strangely, when he said, "good". His mother explained to me that they were on their second time around, [the world that is], had been gone 7 years, & both kids, born along the way, had known no other home.

I don't think those kids would have been particularly impressed with Kay Cottee. She would have been another competent saillor to them. After all, they had met many of those.

I have found that people who do things a littld differently, are not anything special, just a little, & I mean a little, different.

Some times they may be wired a little differently, but often it is as simple as a book they read, as a kid.

I would never want to climb mountains, too much hard work for me. I have plenty of respect for those who want to, but no more respect than I have for the blokes, or ladies, who work their lives long, to provide a home, & education for their kids.

Brian, don’t re-write human physiology and determination – the ultimate in being tough and durable is to be female. You have barely peeled back a veneer on the issue, which is far from a modern one.

For tens of thousands of years it was the stern old ladies of the tribe who fended off crocodiles from the rear, as groups of Aboriginals waded across infested watercourses up north.
The feisty Lysistrata led that women’s revolt against the fine upstand of Greek warriors returning from yet another war.
Boadicea, Joan of Arc, - warring, leading, in the thick of bloody action at their times.
Our contemporary, Tanya Streeter, mixing it with the men to ridiculous ocean depths of beyond 150 metres in the dangers of free diving.

In the general rough and tumble of life, while men generally have the gross muscle, it is the women who are at least as likely to receive the shocks, and more likely to survive them. For species survival, it would have to be so: man is more expendable.

<"Is all the misandrist (anti-male) bashing necessary to laud the feats of these two remarkable women. The author has no idea how they thought about their world - please desist in overlaying your own prejudices on their situations.
Posted by Stev">

Oh this is interesting. Brian; you norty "misandrist" you. haha

Amfortas: You put these two images together: "While the women were marching for the right to vote, 140,000 men died at the battle of the Somme, and most were unable to vote either." and then have the cheek to say to me, "No manipulations, mendacities or straw-women, please."

Please don't use the deaths of WW1 soldiers to prop up your woman-hating agenda.

As to white feathers, the idea was started by a bloke who recruited the first 30 women. The government issued badges to identify people staying at home working in the war effort to counter the feather effect. That strategy also identified those who were not at home on war effort biz because they didn't have a government badge. So it's quite a bit more complicated than your nasty, "...blamed men for dying in the war that the women sent them to fight."

As to women wanting to vote - which country are you talking about specifically and which men?

If you're talking about Britain, do you mean men who owned no property, or men who didn't have a household worth 10 pounds, or do you mean men who weren't working men or agricultural labourers ? - because all of those got the vote through the reform acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884. Or were the only men fighting at Somme from none of those categories as well as being aged under 30?

It was in 1918 that women over 30 got the vote and all men over 21.
It was 1928 when that last limitation to equal voting rights in law was removed.

Throughout that time, the drive to extend the vote to poor, non-propertied men and all women was as much a class war as a matter of female striving for political participation.

Oh this is interesting. Pynchme misspells naughty as "norty" and snickers instead of addressing the substance of my critique.

"an appeal to ridicule does not take the form of a valid or useful argument, because it brings no new information or concrete discussion into the debate"

Hiya Stev. It's ok; I understand that you don't quite see why your comment would amuse me.

However, while we're here, would you mind showing the bits of the article where Brian shows that he's a "misandrist" ?

ta

""As to white feathers, the idea was started by a bloke who recruited the first 30 women. The government issued badges to identify people staying at home working in the war effort to counter the feather effect.""

Ah well, what can I say in the face of such a well supported and referenced factoid that it was a bloke to blame.

It's amazing the effect that 30 women had - oppressed and enslaved to the will of 'the Bloke' - that the Government had to bring its weight to bear to counter them.