- Location
- Britain
I will note that the idea that misogyny must have active malice behind it is rather an absurd one.
Misogyny against women in the past; before 1500s. What are the factors?
- Thread starter Accelerator
- Start date
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
I mean, speaking of this specific general time period, you have the element of witchcraft going from something that the church insisted was a bunch of hooey that people shouldn't be persecuted over to gradually becoming more persecuted over time as more people started believing in it as an evil force. But that didn't actually reach it's height until the 1600s.
And the problem for women there is that leads to positions in society where women were often prominent, wise women and pre-scientific medicine and the like, ending up being suppressed.
And the problem for women there is that leads to positions in society where women were often prominent, wise women and pre-scientific medicine and the like, ending up being suppressed.
- Location
- The Old Dominion
Looking at it during the middle age es the guilds that most often had women were trade and craft guilds and there there were only a few guilds that specifically excluded women and there were a few guilds in Paris and Cologne that were apparently women only.
in general apparently the professions of surgeons, glass-blowers, chain-mail forgers were apparently open to women and there are apparently a number of records of women working with their husbands and even continuing their husbands smithies after the death of their husbands during the middle ages which is one profession I honestly didn't expect I also admit I didn't lets say expect customs officers, guards, masons and book illuminators among others to be among some of the jobs some women being down on record as doing in the middle ages .
There are also evidence of some women being involved in trade as well, with apparently 21% of the people involved in trade contracts were women and apparently women provided 14% of the capital in seafaring ventures in 12th century Genoa.
in general apparently the professions of surgeons, glass-blowers, chain-mail forgers were apparently open to women and there are apparently a number of records of women working with their husbands and even continuing their husbands smithies after the death of their husbands during the middle ages which is one profession I honestly didn't expect I also admit I didn't lets say expect customs officers, guards, masons and book illuminators among others to be among some of the jobs some women being down on record as doing in the middle ages .
There are also evidence of some women being involved in trade as well, with apparently 21% of the people involved in trade contracts were women and apparently women provided 14% of the capital in seafaring ventures in 12th century Genoa.
- Location
- Neither here nor there
Except that some of the most unequal rules were enforced upon the relatively more comfortable upper class. I mean, it's not the Korean peasant woman who's going to be walking around with veils on her head, or be sequestered into the anbang, it's not going to be the lower-class Florentine girl who's getting married off at the age of 12, and it's not going to be the 19th-century working girl who's going to get committed to an asylum for being "hysterical".
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- Location
- Singapore
*raises hand*
I would like to point out preemptively that they did not consummate the marriage yet.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
This. Still waiting on that citation, Avernus, because I'm not aware of any way that social status could affect the probability of the first sperm to reach an egg carrying an X or Y chromosome.
- Location
- Singapore
I'm fairly sure that it was always, like, 50% chance.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
As far as I know, it is, which is why Avernus' claim confuses me.
- Location
- Singapore
Hormones?
Treating half of the population poorly is a luxury subsistence levels of society don't have. Whether that's peasants in an agrarian or industrial society or "barbarian" / hunter-gatherer or just harsh climates (Inuit), women need to work as much as men. Maybe different work - there are good evolutionarily reasons not to get your women killed in melee hunting or warfare - but still hard work. And there obviously were cultures where women participated in warfare anyway. For that matter we don't strictly know that women didn't participate in hunting in prehistory.
This is one where the modern macho-to-overt misogynist fantasy of a post-apocalyptic era where women can go back to being passive chattle is completely ridiculous. We have firearms now. Not using half your apex predators as hunter-warriors when survival is on the line and they have completely fucking equal lethality and risk is fucking stupid. You could be the toughest badass in the state carrying two rifles, a machete and a baseball bat; Grandma over there can still kill you before you know it happened and there is fuck all you can do about it.
1632 is hilarious in that regard. West Virginia mining town ISOT'd to the Thirty Years War, if you don't know. World of vicious badasses. The person in that book with easily the highest personal kill count is a high school cheerleader. She's not particularly big or even mean but she is an Olympic-class rifle shot.
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The Great Depression in America and the Collapse of the USSR, on the other hand, were mid-level catastrophes that saw women being set back decades (in the later case, it was worse than Gilead, where women in 90s Russia could often end up being addicted to heroin and trafficked to pay off drug debts)
- Location
- Patriarchova
Dunno how universal this is, but there's another possible component to this that's been proposed as well.
Men are, due to the aforementioned physical strength and aggression, natural warriors. In a society of hunter gatherers where each band is an extended family give or take, you need to mate with someone from a different band in order to have healthy, genetically diverse offspring. However, you also don't want to let one of your warriors join another band that might one day fight you. Conversely, you also don't want to ACCEPT a warrior into your own group who might have mixed loyalties.
This means that women are the ones who have to join their husbands' families, and take on their husbands' familial identity.
Couple this with marriage-alliances being important for diplomacy as societies got bigger and more complex, and with men being able to overpower women physically on an individual basis AND likely having more experience with violence due to being raised in the warrior and big game hunter roles, and, well.
Like I said, it's just a hypothesis, and may not have been true universally even if it was true in some places. But it definitely makes sense.
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xa na xa
A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
- Location
- σ Octantis
Both male and female exogamy and endogamy have been observed in a wide range of human cultures and societies. This explanation is not valid for humanity in general. It is not even necessarily valid for female exogamy cultures.
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In general I find it problematic how people try to use foraging and prehistoric people, resulting in what can be called "caveman just-so stories".
For one thing, contemporary foragers are not a good model for prehistoric people, and one should be wary of conflating them.
There is the tendency of underestimating the material resources available to prehistoric people.
An example is the people that first settled west coast Sweden after the retreat of the ice.
They had an enormous access to different food sources. Waters just teeming with sealife, bountiful game inland.
Skeletons have been found to be very healthy and well-nourished. Eg the Österöd woman.
!kung people just need to work less than four hours a day on average to get food. In the Kalahari desert! Modern foragers have mostly to be found in marginal territories; imagine how different it must have been for mesolithic people coming to virgin land, and how different the influence on their cultures.
Further, think about deep time and its impact on cultural diversity.
In one place you might dig up stone tools that are works of art. Then a couple thousand years later, they might have been replaced by some mor utilitarian ones. That's about the same time as between now and the Roman empire; reflect how many different cultures there have been since and how much they changed. And prehistory is measured by the tens of thousands of years, that's more by a factor of ten or twenty.
There is far more possibilty of variation in gender relations (and cultural diversity in general) in the span of prehistory than in people's usual normal assumptions.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
People tend to assume that women didn't participate in combat before the 1980s, but that's not necessarily the case.
According to the Roman accounts of the Lusitanian Wars to conquer modern-day Spain, the Celtiberians had warrior women who fought alongside the men. Historical accounts from this era are notorious for exaggeration, but it's not an isolated incident. Romans claimed to encounter warrior women in "barbarian" tribes they conquered all over Europe. About 20% of the warrior graves from ancient Scythia are women, and possibly inspired the Greek myth of the Amazons.
Before medical exams for recruits became standard, it was really common for women to join the military by just pretending to be men. During a war, it was usually safer to be one of the people with a weapon, instead of one of the people getting pillaged. There's the ballad of "Sweet Polly Oliver" and a list of other specific examples, and there are hundreds of women known to have secretly served in the American Civil War, often only being discovered when the bodies of the dead and wounded were examined.
According to the Roman accounts of the Lusitanian Wars to conquer modern-day Spain, the Celtiberians had warrior women who fought alongside the men. Historical accounts from this era are notorious for exaggeration, but it's not an isolated incident. Romans claimed to encounter warrior women in "barbarian" tribes they conquered all over Europe. About 20% of the warrior graves from ancient Scythia are women, and possibly inspired the Greek myth of the Amazons.
Before medical exams for recruits became standard, it was really common for women to join the military by just pretending to be men. During a war, it was usually safer to be one of the people with a weapon, instead of one of the people getting pillaged. There's the ballad of "Sweet Polly Oliver" and a list of other specific examples, and there are hundreds of women known to have secretly served in the American Civil War, often only being discovered when the bodies of the dead and wounded were examined.
- Location
- Neither here nor there
I don't think anyone's saying that women didn't fight in battle, but that for the most part, this was the exception. Not to mention that frequent historical attestation doesn't necessarily translate it into being more reliable, since it's highly possible that Roman historians were drawing on the same well of tropes when speaking of "barbarian" peoples (of which female warriors would be seen as a classic example of barbaric "backwardness" to the misogynistic Romans).
The answer to all of this seems to be "many different factors, depending on local environmental conditions, pre-existing customs/cultures in both that society and societies around them and the state of the people living in that area." Same with the various romantic/sexual/marriage customs and taboos. Making the whole discussion kinda pointless, as it's way too broad.
One society might have developed it to ensure that the females are around to reproduce due to harsh local conditions. Another might have had the bad luck of an upswing of aggressive males unwilling to take "no" pushing them in that direction. Another might have adopted such a thing over time due to interactions with another group of people. Another might have seemed to developed it for no reason, due many small, individual causes building up.
One society might have developed it to ensure that the females are around to reproduce due to harsh local conditions. Another might have had the bad luck of an upswing of aggressive males unwilling to take "no" pushing them in that direction. Another might have adopted such a thing over time due to interactions with another group of people. Another might have seemed to developed it for no reason, due many small, individual causes building up.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Yeah. The odds seem to be stacked against women for a number of reasons.
One thing I wonder is if the patriarchal norm (which is almost universal among humans, even if the degree of it varies immensely from "seperate but equal-ish" to "women are literally property") is something we just kept stumbling into post-speciation, or if it's something we inherited from the ancestral hominids. Most large, social mammal species are patriarchal, but not all, and there's a lot of variation even within the primate order. So, we may be a naturally* patriarchal species, or we may have artificially turned ourselves into one somehow.
*Don't take this as an appeal to nature. "Natural" isn't a synonym for "good" or "right," and there's a lot of other stuff from our prehistory that we've chosen to rid ourselves of for better and for worse.
Doesn't even have to go back that far. There's been a lot of cultural inter-mixing and descendants cultures over the millennia. It's entirely possible that one group sufficiently far back developed it, and it just spread from them, "infecting" their peers and descendants with that particular cultural meme.
Honestly, that possibility worries me. As it implies the issue will just keep reoccuring, it can't be truly beaten.
Add in the fact that we've seen that various cultures be(come) more egalitarian, only for such cultural values to be destroyed or regress, and I've genuinely worried since I was young about the possibility we're just in a bubble period, which will even burst and reset. The last half-decade has not been helpful in that regard. :/
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Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
I think that this the result of a pretty common tendency in people to want to look for a comprehensible, "rational" solution to questions that seem to lack them. People want to point to some inherent, primal reason that explains why human civilization turned out how it did.
They want to be able to say "Well, women became subservient because they're weaker than men and needed to have children" to make sense of it and to tie this into some sort of vaguely scientific understanding of humanity. So they don't to face up to the unsatisfying and scary (and probably true) alternative that humanity just happened to spat out that way out of a chaotic mess of causality stemming from millions of little factors and millions of individual human decisions over the course of thousands and thousands of years.
And the problem you run into is that there are a lot of people who actively want there to be some essential "human nature" explanation to gender inequality, because that makes it very easy to follow it to it's conclusion of being unchangeable and natural. And a lot of people will just fall into it because it's easier than following the more nihilistic alternative to it's conclusion and thinking about how things could have turned out different.
TL;DR: Armchair evolutionary psychology is creationism for nerds.
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- Location
- Patriarchova
IDK about your first point. Patriarchy has been the overwhelming tendency in the vast majority of societies on both hemispheres for as far back as we can tell. If it "just happened" to turn out that way, it must have happened REALLY early on, and then STAYED that way for tens of thousands of years with only a handful of exceptions even as humanity spread out across the continents and diversified massively in culture.
It's possible, sure. But I find it much more likely that some sort of actual environmental pressure played a role. We can only guess and idly speculate about what those pressures might have been, but I'd be very surprised if there really weren't any at all.
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zhuull
SB still lying to protect Racists what else is new
Why do you feel your incredulity here is a valid reason to think otherwise? And didn't someone in thread just remind everyone to stop acting like "pre-history" was this big long chain of events that we actually have mapped out when in reality we know next to nothing about large swaths of history for many areas?
At most you could say that "patriarchal society" is the norm for the civilizations we currently think we have decent records for and that's about it. That really isn't enough to speculate on long term regional trends, much less global ones.
Every time I hear that "men were hunters" thing I just start giggling.
It's well known that how misogynistic the past was is an overblown fantasy by misogynists themselves. But it's not just a fantasy, it's a false nostalgic one. Similar to how there's a large contingent of mostly men in America who idealise a mythical fragment of the 50's.
It's well known that how misogynistic the past was is an overblown fantasy by misogynists themselves. But it's not just a fantasy, it's a false nostalgic one. Similar to how there's a large contingent of mostly men in America who idealise a mythical fragment of the 50's.
- Location
- Patriarchova
My understanding is that at least in most tribal societies that we have anthropological or archaeological evidence from, the big game hunters were predominantly men (at least, in the times and places where there was big game to be hunted). Women hunted plenty, but generally smaller stuff.
Well, they want to say that, because it's a nicer alternative than the other one.
I mean, if in a hypothetical fantasy land all the nations were mostly ruled by Orcs, the Orcs aren't gonna actually say "we're in charge because we consistently work together to murder and hinder anyone who dares challenge us, and after a long time others have learned that the only way to avoid being killed is to let us do what we want" because that doesn't make them look good, and the mindset of folks who do that is that they're the real victims.
Verywellmind said:
So they'd justify it instead with stuff like "Dwarves are naturally subservient because of their lesser strength" and "Elves are primitives who don't know how to build siege weaponry". Shifting the focus and lying about it. We saw it with colonialism.
Now, how does this apply? Well, a study showing countries led by women were in wars for 27% more time than ones led my male rulers may help. Especially the notes on how often unmarried queens were attacked, in contrast to the consistent gains that married queens tended to have, due to how co-rule and marriage alliances helped them.
Here's some analysis:
QZ said:
Note that I'm ignoring some stuff, mostly because it's irrelevant or kinda reinforces what I'm saying. Like, Consider this: do female rulers have that 27% more wars thing under their belt because the only way to survive is by having a specific mindset, which explains why even in modern times, long lasting female rulers tend to have similar personalities to Thatcher?
I mean, saying that the patriarchy is a filter is kind of derailing, but I think I'm safe to say that comparative acceptability of violence is the biggest factor.
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