The panicky politics of giving up a seat
SIR – Your column “One Hundred Years Ago” (August 26) speaks approvingly of the behaviour of “The New Girl”: “How often, when travelling in ’buses and Tubes, a girl gets up and gives her seat to an older woman.”
The silent implication that no man would do otherwise is supported by an article in a 1922 Army Quarterly. It states that soldiers in the British Army of the Rhine rarely interfere in the lives of German civilians – but if they were to see a woman standing in a Cologne tram, they would make a man give up his seat for her.
Do men still commonly offer their seats to women? Or does this now risk being seen as “toxic masculinity”?
Anthony Greenstreet Camberley, Surrey