“These days you have to be in the majority”
This true and weighty sentence comes from one of my favourite works by Leonard Bernstein “Candide”. Bernstein would have been 100 years old this year. He was a 1908 vintage, so in 1938 he was 30 years old. For someone like me, who has been studying Leonard Bernstein for many years now, this is a strange fact.
The ancient Roman comic playwright Plautus coined the expression
homo homini lupus est (“man is a wolf to his fellow man”).
I’d like to adapt it to fit what is known as the “gender debate” –
femina feminae lupa est
because I have noticed for some time that women can be the greatest opponents to gender equality, and I’ve been affected by this myself. The latest example I’ve come across is a lead article by Martina Salomon in the Austrian newspaper Kurier.
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