My trawl of the internet for spanking references has turned up something quite quaint an weird: a cutting from “The Meriden Daily Journal” from Nov 26, 1940, headed “Mrs Catt would use spanking machine on dreamers of empires”.
Mrs. Catt was an 81-year-old veteran suffragist who was addressing the opening of Women’s Centennial Congress. The gist of her message was that war was bad.
Here’s what she said (this is during World War II, right?):
Perhaps what we most need is an international mothers’ Gestapo whose business it will be to hunt out the world empire dreamers in infancy and use a spanking machine on them.
Excuse me, she wants to organise what?
…I think language has changed since then, just a bit.
I think the last thing empire-dreamers need is early childhood exposure to International Gestapo of any kind…