When I was a student I was constantly doing battle with male students, both left and right wing, not to be trivialised by having doors opened for me as if I were a poor weak little thing. You have no idea of the tricks they would play to get one over on me.
Sadly, the male of the species has used women's fight for independence to excuse bad manners - and indeed, some women have used rudeness and ungraciousness to refuse simple courtesies. Now people with walking sticks find themselves having doors left to crash into them, and those for whom doors are opened waltz through without making an acknowledgment, let alone giving thanks.
So, in my more mature years, I regard the opening of doors for others (ANY others) as mere good manners. But I have not lost sight of the supposed inferiority of the female that led to the patronisation of women in the first place.
I am glad to see that the problem has been the subject of thoughtful consideration for some time, as this passage from the book named in the title shows.
"I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority... S0 ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude, to... shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two."
And the author of this wisdom? Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97). Two hundred years ago she wrote her lengthy and erudite thesis on how women (and slaves, and the poor) responded to their treatment, and society's views of them, by conforming rather than by challenging. We don't appear to have caught up with her yet.
Mary WollstonecraftIn case the name sounds familiar and you can't place it, she married William Godwin, and produced a daughter, Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley - wife of the poet and author of Frankenstein.
No shrinking violet there.
