Somebody thought Romulus was a real person?! And these people teach at universities?! (Says everything you need to know about Women's Studies.) She may as well have thought that Romulus was the home world of the Romulans until Mr Spock failed to save it from that super nova  Just bear this in mind the next time you hear some "fact" about rates of domestic violence etc repeated without any checking in a newspaper or on the TV. Very often the fact is nothing more than a myth, a factoid. No disrespect to women who are the victims of such violence, but there is a bit of a difference between claims that 20-35% of women admitted to hospital emergency rooms are the victims of domestic violence and the real figure, that is, one percent. Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship By Christina Hoff Sommers | Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, June 29, 2009 One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack. Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook--a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward: "The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. . . . The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe." Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology--the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors. A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, "The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study." The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years. Zorza also informs readers that "between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence." Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent. |
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