Are the gender wars back? With viral TikToks of tearful millennials lamenting the “total nightmare” of modern dating, polls throughout the election season showing Gen Z men and women diverging politically, and reports of women embracing the abstinent 4B movement in response to Donald Trump’s presidential win, it sure seems so. Rather than being a source of happiness, many young people today seem to treat the opposite sex as an obstacle to it instead.
Part of this dispiriting story may have its roots in the astonishing (and necessary) advancements in women’s social and economic roles over the last 50 years. But although these developments might seem new, this era of remarkable transformation is not unprecedented.
The 19th-century English novelist Thomas Hardy published Far from the Madding Crowd at the beginning of a similar period of gendered tumult, when a nascent feminist movement cultivated a generation of educated and career-minded “new women” while industrialization eroded non-elite men’s economic and cultural privilege. First serialized in Cornhill Magazine in 1874, the novel follows a gentlewoman farmer and the three suitors vying for her hand in the fictional countryside of “Wessex.” Despite this veneer of pulp romance, Far from the Madding Crowd asks the kinds of questions that still seem to haunt young people 150 years since its publication—questions about virtue, tradition, and not just love but, perhaps more importantly, friendship between the sexes.
The novel’s heroine is the young, spirited, and beautiful Bathsheba Everdene. Her first proposal comes from Gabriel Oak, a hardworking and remarkably wise shepherd whom she turns down because she doubts his capacity to “tame” her. She accidentally ensnares the affections of her neighbor William Boldwood, a wealthy farmer whose moods swing wildly from placid reserve to impassioned fixation. And she’s ultimately seduced by Sgt. Frank Troy, whose dashing looks and charm hide a terrible secret.
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