by Christyl Rivers

Created on: December 01, 2010

Chivalry in the 21st century sounds great.  There is in fact more than one website you can Google or Bing, to learn what the rules of valor are for SCA,(society for creative anachronisms), medieval re-enactment enthusiasts, romantics, and others who long for the never actually existent yesteryear days of gallant knights. It's a great ideal, but it's meaning has morphed through the ages.

Chivalry dictated that bound by honor, noble knights roamed the kingdom, doing good deeds for oppressed peoples, exploited animals, Christian crusade causes, and most of all honoring beauty and virtue of women who were seen as represented by the Virgin Mary.  The ideals of courtly love were all about adoration from afar, and never about even imagining touching said Lady of beauty and grace.

Therefore, first we have to decide if what has happened to chivalry is good or bad.  If we are talking about horse bound knights who gallop about spreading Christian charity, there is not likely to be much of that.  Was it killed by feminism?  That too, is debatable, but for most intents and purposes, in recognizing chivalry as something akin to serving first Christ and church, and then Lord and Lady, one wonders why there is a hierarchy at all? Are we not ordered by Christ to treat all living things with appreciation, respect, reverence and most of all, love?  Therefore, it is highly unlikely that allowing the oppressed to have some of the same privilege as noblemen would have been dismissed by feminism. Quite the contrary, women like being considered mid-way between virgin and slut. That is where reality actually puts us in the category we prefer to be thought of, as “human.”

However, for the sake of argument let us think of that tiny narrow band of chivalry as most people think of it today.  Opening doors for women, helping them with their bags and burdens, and/or “serving” them as though they needed extra help for whatever kind hearted reason one may have.

Sojourner Truth proclaimed before a minister: . "That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody helps me any best place. And ain't I a woman?"  She continued, "I could work as much, and eat as much as man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne children and seen most of them sold into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief,

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