Lost Horizon

A note on the oppression of women before the advent of the feminist movement: how many of us still remember how it really was? I fear by now all that is lost down the memory hole.

I stumbled across this passage in James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon,” first published in 1933. I had found a copy at a second-hand bookstore in Sri Lanka while on vacation.

“There was Miss Brinklow, for instance. He foresaw that in certain circumstances he would have to act on the supposition that because she was a woman she mattered far more than the rest of them put together…”

That is how women were treated before feminism.

If this was oppression, can anyone point to examples of similar attitudes towards Jews in Nazi Germany, or to blacks in the “Jim Crow” US South? Or to Irish under British control?