The declaration also wrongly stated that men could seize a wife's property and wages but a Married Women's Property Act had already been passed in the New York state where the declaration was first declared, a fact the feminists conveniently ignored.

"The Declaration of Sentiments was a declaration of war," pronounced Fiamengo, explaining this important document used the same strategies of vilification that is found in war propaganda. "In this case, the enemy consisted of women's fathers, brothers, sons and husbands," she added.

But what about Britain's brave suffragettes? Fiamengo reveals Emmeline Pankhurst and her woman's suffragette movement have a very dark history, having used militant tactics that included vandalism and violent protest such as firebombing the homes of members of parliament. As for their much-lauded achievements, Fiamengo points out that throughout the 19th Century, subjects on which women agitated for reform - like women's higher education, changes to divorce law and child custody, women's property rights, age of consent - saw an all-male parliament quick to act.

When it comes to the right to vote until the later nineteenth century the vast majority of British men lacked that right. But voting rights were steadily being extended throughout this century. In fact, it was WWI that decided the matter of suffrage, with women's service on the home front – their work in munitions factories and farms – which changed public attitudes towards women, and in 1917 a vote sailed through British Parliament to extend the franchise to servicemen who had previously been voteless and to women aged 30 and above. "Feminist activists like Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, now considered the great heroines of the noble suffrage struggle, contributed little or nothing to the victory," concludes Fiamengo. Pankhurst and her fellow suffragettes did play a crucial role in the outrageous White Feather campaign, where women humiliated men who were not in military uniform.

Another lasting contribution from these pre-war feminists was their anti-male sexual disgust. Vilification of all men as sexually depraved was a central plank of early feminism, encapsulated in the suffragettes' double demand: Votes for women and Chastity for men! Fiamengo provides ample evidence of the early feminists' hate-filled rhetoric and sneering attitudes to male sexuality – quoting, for instance, social purity activist Frances Swiney's comments on "a selfish, lustful, diseased manhood" which "sought in woman only a body".

This sowed the seeds for anti-male sexual revulsion, which for many men led to male sexual guilt, self-loathing, and deference to woman's moral superiority, one of the major feminist legacies of the past 150 years, according to Fiamengo.

Could men rape their wives in the 19th Century? Well, a man could not be criminally prosecuted for this act but it certainly wasn't true that marital rape was accepted or that its harms were ignored, says Fiamengo, detailing the legal history whereby a wife at that time was understood to give consent to sexual relations just as men had contractual obligations including being responsible for all his wife's debts, even if that landed him in prison. The moral harm of marital rape was in fact widely acknowledged and family members frequently intervened in cases where it became known a man was abusing his wife.

So, it goes on. Fiamengo's expose of these misrepresentations of our social history has important lessons for us all. It's a real step forward that this impressive scholar will have the opportunity to enlighten a larger audience about what she has discovered. She concludes a recent video with the forlorn words: "It remains to be seen how much longer we will be willing to allow public conversations to be dominated by a female supremacist ideology – while still justifying and whitewashing its origins."

Janice Fiamengo, through her videos and substack blogs, is doing her best to ensure those conversations change very quickly.