Monstrous Regiment(s) of Women!

Apparently, there's a new anti-feminist documentary out, The Monstrous Regiment of Women, that -- according to their own website -- "goes all out to demolish the feminist worldview . . . from a consistently Christian perspective."

*giggle*

Maybe it's the fact that I'm still suffering from a head cold, which seems to leave me prone to the giggles, but I have to say I find this project really amusing.

You see, that particular quotation* has been used before . . . and to much better effect, at least in my humble opinion. In the interest of doing my part to maintain The Feminist Worldview (is that the same as having a Feminist Agenda?) I thought I would take this opportunity to highlight them here.

As it happens, just this past weekend Hanna bought me a copy of Terry Prachett's discworld novel, Monstrous Regiment, which follows the adventures of the intrepid Polly who, under and assumed masculine identity, has enlisted as a private in a ragtag company of soldiers in order to find her brother Paul who's gone missing at the front. I am only about seventy-five pages in, but so far I have enjoyed a great deal of satire, bawdy slapstick comedy, at least one vampire of ambiguous gender, and a very satisfying pub brawl.

A slightly more serious -- though, I would argue, no less lighthearted -- meditation on gender and politics can be found in Laurie R. King's second installment of the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, A Monstrous Regiment of Women (to which I owe the source of the quotation -- King is always scrupulous in her citations!). This chapter of the Russell-Holmes partnership sees Russell coming into her own in 1920s London as an academic and as a sleuth as she tracks down the person or persons responsible for a series of murders all related to the life of a charismatic feminist theologian.


*The quotation is taken from the title of a polemic by John Knox (1505-1572), The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, an attack on the regime of Mary Tudor and Mary Stuart in Britain, published in 1558.