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Edwird -> RE: Refutation of "Women's Historical Oppression" (2/4/2017 10:58:52 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: respectmen
It is often alleged: - that women have been historically oppressed for millennia - that (at various times) women could not leave the house, hold accounts, etc. - that any excesses by modern feminism are simply a backlash against historical oppression, etc.
Ample material exists in refutation:
1. History Professor Martin van Creveld has written a volume, "The Privileged Sex," in which he documents the female privileges (and male disadvantages) which historically have accompanied ostensible disadvantages to the female role. His volume is thorough and well-annotated.
2. Historian Joanne Bailey, Professor of History at Oxford Brookes (not Oxford University), has written a monograph here: http://www.academia.edu/746242/Favoured_or_oppressed_Married_women_property_and_coverturein_England_1660_1800 https://jbailey2013.wordpress.com/tag/coverture/ http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=151611 http://history.brookes.ac.uk/research/Social-and-Cultural-History/prof.asp?ID=592
The monograph shows that married women held more or less power of attorney to the marital property, only nominally recorded in the husband's name.
3. Further many jurisdictions required by law that the household expenses be borne entirely by the husband, with the husband forbidden access to the wife's assets, rendering the husband an "asset slave".
4. Many jurisdictions would jail the husband for failure to support (often at sole whim or complaint of the wife), thus rendering the husband an "income slave":
5. At least one front-page article detailed first-wave suffragettes deliberately contracting debts in order to cause their husbands to be jailed.
6. One immigrant newspaper circa 1910 contained a pitiful letter from husbands jailed for non-support, begging their wives to let them out just for the upcoming holiday: https://books.google.com/books?id=lfoJPscpt2QC&pg=PA110 (bottom of page, continued on next two pages) https://books.google.com/books?id=bNGpnN_AbWAC&pg=PA112 The Editor responds that they have committed a crime and deserve to be punished.
Excellent work, respectmen, quite excellent.
If not for this post, I'd almost have forgot about the well respected archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whom I came upon somewhat earlier in life. I don't know why everybody on the 'net screams "Give Me A link!" when > 85 percent of my knowledge came from print, but there it is. I read most of this stuff from age 16-24 in any case.
As she expounded, some societies in the long past were female-led. She'd dug up all kinds of pottery and other artifacts that seemed to heavily hint in that direction.
Of course, as we are directed to think from earliest age, if any side has advantage, the other side suffers. Nature doesn't actually work that way on every occasion, actually not that way at all on many occasions. Even with dimorphism having them smaller, female lions and elephants kick out the adolescent males. But humans hire economists and accountants and defense contractors and philosophers to maintain disadvantage where desirable. Sorry Africa and South America.
The unfairness just never ends. I wonder sometimes, as I'm sure you do, if the inherently disadvantaged females in nature cry as much as some human males do at whatever disadvantage, perceived or real.
But worry not. There comes occasion when both nature and pop music coincide to produce a statement regarding the natural, yet unnatural state of men having to suffer the insufferable burden of being ...
Men.
Here is Elvis, on the subject:
Hard Headed Woman
"Ever since the world began, a hard headed woman been the thorn in the side of man."
Truer words never spoken.
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