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so this morning i'm working on my adr stuff and i come up on a research question and i go surfing along and find this interesting site (i needed a casualty count for the Titanic ~ what won't those japanese shoehorn into a half-hour animé? hahahaha) ~
i've always had an interest in the Titanic disaster. i once wrote a short play based on an eye witness account from a woman who was force-rescued as a child by a crewman who perished ~ she was too scared to get in the boat and he ripped her stuffed pig, out of her arms and threw it in the boat and told her she had to go after it). so many amazing and wonderful stories about the ship and its passengers ~ great grist, indeed.
but anyway, i've long doubted the gross sort of classist assumption that the people in steerage all sank to their deaths on account of hoggy first classers taking all the boats and locking the access gates and other such drivelly nonsense perpetuated by the like of the ridiculous Titanic film, among other popular misconceptions.
the website above gives a decent counter argument using percentages to show who really went down with the ship and what those numbers actually mean.
why indeed? because it's not pc to show poor steerage people acting like poor steerage people. rather than a class issue, the survival rate was a gender and age issue. it was women and children first in the lifeboats and there were fewer steerage patrons saved simply because there were fewer women and children in steerage and they were much farther away from the deck (which is economics if anything, not snobbery). also, according to eyewitness accounts, people in steerage were much more reluctant to get off the ship and/or leave their belongings.
i found this summary amusing:
on top of which: nothing so disheartening as unduly politicizing a disaster over which no one has any control ~ especially 80-some-odd years after the fact.
i hate revisionist history.
: o p
i've always had an interest in the Titanic disaster. i once wrote a short play based on an eye witness account from a woman who was force-rescued as a child by a crewman who perished ~ she was too scared to get in the boat and he ripped her stuffed pig, out of her arms and threw it in the boat and told her she had to go after it). so many amazing and wonderful stories about the ship and its passengers ~ great grist, indeed.
but anyway, i've long doubted the gross sort of classist assumption that the people in steerage all sank to their deaths on account of hoggy first classers taking all the boats and locking the access gates and other such drivelly nonsense perpetuated by the like of the ridiculous Titanic film, among other popular misconceptions.
the website above gives a decent counter argument using percentages to show who really went down with the ship and what those numbers actually mean.
[T]hird class women were 41% more likely to survive than first class men. And third class men were twice as likely to survive as second class men. [emphasis mine].
Yes, class is a far weaker variable in determining survival rate than sex or age. Indeed, most of the variance in first class vs. third class survival rates can be attributed to sex alone. The reason for this is simple: 44% of the first class passengers were women, while only 23% of the third class passengers were women. Because the survival rate for women was far greater than the survival rate for men, we would thus expect a much higher survival rate for first class passengers as a whole than for third class passengers as a whole.
Although this analysis is incandescently obvious, it never seems to show up in mass media treatments of the Titanic disaster. Why is that?
why indeed? because it's not pc to show poor steerage people acting like poor steerage people. rather than a class issue, the survival rate was a gender and age issue. it was women and children first in the lifeboats and there were fewer steerage patrons saved simply because there were fewer women and children in steerage and they were much farther away from the deck (which is economics if anything, not snobbery). also, according to eyewitness accounts, people in steerage were much more reluctant to get off the ship and/or leave their belongings.
i found this summary amusing:
those interested in further amusement can check out John Updike's article "It Was Sad," The New Yorker, 10/14/96, p. 94. Mr. Updike rambles on for several pages in an futile attempt to debug what he calls the "myth" of male heroism in the Titanic disaster. Since he has no factual basis for his beliefs, the effect is amazingly bad. Or check out the new movie Titanic, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as one of those heroic third class passengers who were, as we know from the casualty figures, less heroic than the bourgeois passengers in second class.
on top of which: nothing so disheartening as unduly politicizing a disaster over which no one has any control ~ especially 80-some-odd years after the fact.
i hate revisionist history.
: o p
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