Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xophmeister | Hacker News Reader

    A Game for Boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty
    and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books

Uhm...OK. Good luck with that title!

View on HN

Seems pretty progressive for something published more than a century ago. When it first came out, American women were still not allowed to vote.

The document is over 100 years old. I'd say the HN rule of not posting dumb comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html) extends to ahistorical internet dismissals.

This is worth a whole article:

https://lewislitjournal.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/bibliophili...

OTOH, he wrote Ann Veronica:

https://bookriot.com/2015/02/08/h-g-wells-feminist-author/

""Primitive attempts to realise [sic] the dream ... when Wells writes “We then began to humanise [sic]""

Somebody doesn't like British spelling.

I would say that the sort of girl who is drawn enough to something to pursue it, even though it wasn't labeled "for them" (and it being the early 20th century, gender lines were a lot more sharply drawn), is the more intelligent sort.

From the intro: "It can be played by boys of every age [...] by girls of the better sort, and by a few rare and gifted women."

Never gonna read beyond that intro.

So I suppose you have never/will never read Tom Sawyer, due to Injun Joe?

People in the past had (what we now consider) backward mentality, and we have to deal with it somehow. I did mutter "wtf, man?!" upon reaching that paragraph, nevertheless I kept reading.

So almost every piece of classical literature is worthless, because it came from a more patriarchal time?

This is a game that is of interest mostly as a historical artifact, anyway, rather than a a game that people should be playing for its own sake.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com