In 1857, a few years after the Birkenhead disaster, another ship went down while women and children were on board — and in that case, too, were they given priority in boarding the lifeboats. Per a paper on the subject available through Columbia University, William Herndon, the captain of the S.S. Central America, reportedly told his men to "save the women and children," after the ship became caught in a hurricane. The crew understood it meant that they (the men) would likely die; the majority of them did.
But here's the thing: "Women and children first" was never an actual maritime law, according to another 2006 academic paper published by The Journal of the Social History Society. Rather, the concept was simply a moral code that sailors and passengers lived by. That code was sacrosanct, too. In the case of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, many of the men who managed to sneak, bully, luck, or jump their way onto a lifeboat were later considered cowards. One tragic example, according to The A.V. Club, was the story of a male Japanese survivor named Masabumi Hosono, who was one of the last two people allowed to board lifeboat 10. Unfortunately, he was later considered a coward by the public at large and eventually died by suicide due to the fallout.
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