Showing posts with label Gender Essentialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gender Essentialism. Show all posts

Monday, April 15, 2013

101st Anniversary of Titanic Sinking and The Myth of "Women and Children First!"






















One hundred and one years ago, late on the evening of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic entered an icefield near the island of Newfoundland, off the northeastern coast of North America. That night, disaster struck and in the early hours of the morning of April 15, the Titanic sank, taking over 1500 people to a watery grave.

The "unsinkable" Titanic was built to withstand both head-on and side collisions, because of it's steel skin and the system of separate water-tight chambers which ringed the vessel's hull. Engineers imagined dangers from head on collisions, and even the possibility of the ship being rammed midship by another vessel, and they believed that their remarkable new design would allow the ship to withstand such accidents without sinking.

What no one seemed to have anticipated was that a ship running alongside an iceberg - or even the deceptively flat-looking fields of pack ice commonly found in the north Atlantic in spring - could possibly experience more than a single glancing blow or even a direct impact in just one section of the ship. The vastness of underwater ice from which the saying "that's just the tip of the iceberg" is derived, poses a much graver risk to vessels.

What we call an iceberg is merely
the tip of an iceberg.
What brought down the Titanic was not a single devastating point of collision with an iceberg. The ill-fated ship entered the icefield at speed, heedless of the danger lurking below the surface of the water. She may not have even been close enough to collide with the part of the iceberg which was visible above the surface of the sea - but the great spreading hulk of ice below the water was nearer than the berg itself.

The fantastic design of the Titanic's many-chambered hull failed to avert catastrophe because when the ship scraped along the underwater edge of the ice for about ten seconds, that was long enough for the ice to score a thin, deep tear along the hull exposing not just one water-tight compartment or even two (apparently the worst-case scenarios envisioned by the engineers who designed her) to a deadly inundation of frigid seawater, but five. The fact that there were five breached compartments overwhelmed the ship's ballast. When the water entered the first five compartments, the hydraulic doors - which were meant to be able to close automatically between compartments in the event of a breach of one or two of them - failed, allowing compartment after compartment to begin filling with water.  The ship began it's fatal list as the perfect storm of events that led to its horrific destiny was set in motion.

The disaster was further intensified by the outdated safety measures in place and the shortage of life boats on board. Those inadequate safety measures - and the gallant Captain's attempted response to that situation - helped establish a silly, false and pernicious (to women) myth about maritime history (often generalised to all historical disasters).  Some people (I'm looking at you, MRA's) point to the persistent myth that "women and children first!" has been the chivalrous cry during ocean disasters for centuries as evidence of an historical gender advantage resulting in preferential treatment for women at the expense of men.

I hate to puncture that particular heroic fantasy of resentful MRAs - wait, I don't hate to do it at all: I insist on setting the record straight! Although the Titanic story helped popularize that myth because an order to that effect was given by the chivalrous Captain E. J. Smith. When he realized the imminent disaster facing his passengers and crew, Captain Smith knew he was in the unenviable position of having to allot too few lifeboats to too many passengers. He made the choice to offer women and children places on lifeboats first and remaining places on boats would be given to men. This decision was then horribly misapplied by his crew who clearly did not understand what to do because it was not and never had been ocean-going protocol - the assertion that men have died for centuries for the sake of women on board sinking ships is a lie.

Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson of Uppsala University in Sweden published an exhaustive study of maritime records and studies of disaster survival to investigate whether women have, in fact, enjoyed a gender-based advantage during disasters due to the chivalry and sacrifice of men.

Women's lower status and oppressive social mores
dictating gender isolation and restrictive dress
ensured that women were (and still are) nearly always
grossly disadvantaged in emergencies.
Our results provide new insights about human behavior in life-and-death situations. 
By investigating a new and much larger sample of maritime disasters than has previously 
been done, we show that women have a substantially lower survival rate than men. That 
women fare worse than men has been documented also for natural disasters (Frankenberg et 
al., 2011; Ikeda, 1995; MacDonald, 2005; Neumayer and Plümper, 2007; Oxfam 
International, 2005). We also find that crew members have a higher survival rate than 
passengers and that only 7 out of 16 captains went down with their ship. Children appear to 
have the lowest survival rate. Moreover, we shed light on some common perceptions of how 
situational and cultural conditions affect the survival of women. Most notably, we find that it 
seems as if it is the policy of the captain, rather than the moral sentiments of men, that 
determines if women are given preferential treatment in shipwrecks. This suggests an 
important role for leaders in disasters. Preferences of leaders seem to have affected survival 
patterns also in the evacuations of civilians during the Balkan Wars (Carpenter, 2003).
Moreover, we find that the gender gap in survival rates has decreased since WWI. This 
supports previous findings that higher status of women in society improves their relative 
survival rates in disasters (Neumayer and Plümper, 2007). We also show that women fare 
worse, rather than better, in maritime disasters involving British ships. This contrasts with the 
notion of British men being more gallant than men of other nationalities. Finally, in contrast 
to previous studies, we find no association between duration of the disaster and the influence 
of social norms. Based on our analysis, it becomes evident that the sinking of the Titanic was 
exceptional in many ways and that what happened on the Titanic seems to have spurred 
misconceptions about human behavior in disasters. Every man for himself
Gender, Norms and Survival in Maritime Disasters, Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson, April 2012.

The terrible loss of men's lives in the Titanic disaster was an exception to the rule in the history of disaster survival. The numbers might not even have been as terrible as they were had there actually been any sort of coherent tradition of "women and children first" in place because then the crew would not have misunderstood Captain Smith's meaning, allowing empty life boats to be put into the sea. Because they had clearly never heard of such a thing, they thought he meant no men were permitted to get into the lifeboats at all. The Titanic story actually confirms that the legend of male chivalry that it spawned is patently false because the crew of that ship clearly had no idea how to execute it whatsoever. The myth that women and children have always come first is yet another of the twisted revisions of history which some men - notably, the  subset of "men's rights activists" whose intense hatred of women is frightening and whose delusions of male persecution are flabbergasting in their total departure from reality - use as an argument against any movement toward equal rights for women in society.

Some writers have argued that the entire concept of putting women first in an emergency may be merely a means of promoting an idea of essential gender differences which may then be used to justify other inequalities that disfavour women.[14] According to Lucy Delap of Cambridge University, the British ruling class used the myth of male chivalry at sea to justify denying women the right to vote, as there was no reason for women to vote since men would always put the interests of women ahead of their own interests. women and children first, wikipedia.

Further support for the argument that the Titanic experience was never, in fact, the law of the sea or even a maritime tradition comes from the testimony of James McGann, a ship's fireman who survived the Titanic sinking. As their inevitable doom rapidly approached, Captain Smith released his crew from his earlier orders:

“He gave one look all around, his face firm and his lips hard set. He looked as if he was trying to keep back the tears, as he thought of the doomed ship. I felt mightily like crying as I looked at him.
“Suddenly he shouted: 'Well boys, you've done your duty and done it well. I ask no more of you. I release you. You know the rule of the sea. It's every man for himself now, and God bless you'. Titanic Wiki.

Anyway, back to the anniversary. Did you know that before the collision with the iceberg, the wireless operators on board the Titanic were so swamped with work sending out newfangled transAtlantic telegrams on behalf of exultant passengers - everyone wanted to try out this new technology! - that they literally ignored warnings about ice? When other ships in the area sent messages warning the Titanic that it was entering an ice field, one overwhelmed operator, Jack Phillips, replied, "Shut up! I am busy! I am working Cape Race!". The poor fellow's reputation suffered terribly after the disaster thanks to that harried message. I did not know about that until I heard it on NPR!

To commemorate the date, let's look at a brief video from my favorite place on earth (in case NiftyReaders had not already gathered that!) which gives another little tidbit of information about Cape Race and the Titanic story which many people did not know.