In France at the time of the 1974 election— the one in which Giscard beat Mitterand, which was seven years before the one in which Mitterand beat Giscard—I remember seeing among all the election posters and handbills a discreet little yellow notice that said: Français! Assez des expériences inutiles Républicaines! Votez Monarchiste! (Frenchmen! Enough of failed Republican experiments! Vote Monarchist!) I often think of that brave little band of monarchists with a special kind of admiration. Not because I am a monarchist myself, but because they refused to be cowed by a majority that was not just large but overwhelming. Here, I thought, was one place in the world where it was possible to raise a dissenting voice against the chorus of what everybody knows.

I thought of them again amid the media’s unanimous self-congratulation over the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. How I longed for one brave soul somewhere to stand up and say: Enough of failed sexual egalitarianism! Repeal the Nineteenth Amendment! (Not that I think that way. Not at all. God forbid that it should be suspected even for a single moment that I am not in favor of women voting, smoking, running for office, wearing trousers, piloting jet fighters—anything they want to do, basically. Do you think I’m crazy?) We have come so far so quickly, however, that the lieutenant governor of New York, Elizabeth McCaughy, was quoted in The New York