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Roderick

Feminism

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It's because women's labor is inherently devalued and expected to be XYZ and be done with little fuss and for almost no money.

 

I'm genuinely curious to know exactly when and how that came to be the case. Has there ever been a time in human history that "women's labor" was held in equal regard to "men's labor"? I have to imagine there were some bright spots in human history where this was the case but I can't think of anything offhand.

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It is really hard to nail down because the entire planet isn't a monoculture and historical feminism could nail down a couple of points - the rise of imperialism/colonialism in the Global West cemented very binary gender identities and roles and spread this to many "eventually civilized" cultures that they effectively wiped out, especially when missionaries went to spread Christianity. Colonialism also established "races" as well - there was no way to be able to enslave people or steal resources if you didn't class them out of being human.

 

Many cultures that weren't Eurocentric had shared responsibilities, more than two genders, etc. But there's also anthropology data that states that some cultures did believe in masculine aggression and such, but given that much anthro studies are still through the lens of Western culture, it's not entirely accurate. You could also argue that the rise of Christianity annihilated many matriarchal spiritualities (I believe there was research done that states that pre-Abrahamic religion was largely goddess-focused, but I could be wrong) and cultural beliefs.

 

But the biggest destruction and devaluing of women's labor HAS to be the Industrial Revolution if I had to put a finger on just the aspect of Labor as we know it today. Granted, women were part of the workforce, but it was often menial, backbreaking labor, especially if you were the underclass. If anything, classism had a lot to do with putting the lower classes and non-white groups of women in drudgery that was underpaying and dangerous (same with children) and upper class white women were to be cosseted and kept to grow up, do education until they were old enough to marry and then bear children.

 

Again, I am not a historian, anthro student or anything, so take ALL of this with a grain of salt. It's literally me collecting bits and pieces of reading I've done. The thing is that history has always been written by the players in power and there's always this perception that progressivism is only a very recent thing as we've moved "Away" from worse times, despite that all over history, women have worked, bucked "trends" and also existed in cultures that were very different than Global Western ideas of culture and our own contemporary notions of how things are/were. 

 

Take things like ancient Roman society vs. Greek society (many parts of Greek society, you know, where democratic thought came from, was also incredibly misogynistic in a way that has carried into some conceptions of gender now, even) or Hun society (women were allowed positions of power, to get divorced), plus things like polygyny, tribal family raising, etc. 

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Thanks for providing your thoughts. I am a bit ignorant on that topic.

 

I think it is interesting to consider various cultures throughout human history and analyze how some of them got certain aspects of society "more right" than we do today. I think you bring up an excellent point that we tend to think that we have moved/are moving away from worse times. It seems like sometimes (most of the time?) we have a really bad tendency to not learn from the mistakes and successes of the past and just keep stumbling because we are too fucking proud and ignorant to admit we are wrong.

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It's because we've attempted to formalize culture or views when we're talking the whole of human history across thousands of years and it's really hard! But yeah, a lot of it has to do with the fact that people still don't acknowledge that most of what we think of as "culture" was developed maybe a 100 years ago, if not maybe a couple hundred more. Colonialism did a lot to basically wipe out a lot of global diversity. Think of things like pink - pink was not considered a feminine color until the turn of last century. Diamond rings for marriage? That was an advertising campaign from...the 40s I believe. Slavery was literally three generations ago. 

 

This is what happens when we accept that things are the way they are and don't interrogate that things are pushed into being "tradition" by people for very specific reasons and not to be questioned. I would even say that feminism as we call it today was probably codified with suffrage movement (which was incredibly racist, btw) but women have been radically dealing with societal oppression for a very long time, etc. 

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Take things like ancient Roman society vs. Greek society (many parts of Greek society, you know, where democratic thought came from, was also incredibly misogynistic in a way that has carried into some conceptions of gender now, even) or Hun society (women were allowed positions of power, to get divorced), plus things like polygyny, tribal family raising, etc. 

 

I'm actually just reading about the Khitan empire, which was this semi-nomadic polity that existed for two hundred years on the northern border of China, up until the Mongols wiped it out. The crazy thing was that it was literally two states, one nomadic and one sedentary, united under a single emperor. The emperor would usually rule the Chinese, Koreans, and so on from present-day Beijing, while his wife would rule the Turks, Khitans, Mongols, and Tatars in the traditional style of the khan. It was a remarkably equal arrangement, especially considering the Confucian and Neo-Confucian misogyny that the Khitan culture absorbed with its partial Sinicization, and actually led to a lot of political instability rather early on as the empresses, who controlled most of the empire's military resources in the nomadic clans, repeatedly challenged the supposed primacy of their husbands and sons.

 

I have no idea why we never learn about idioms of female power and authority in different cultures. They exist, sometimes in striking relief, but they disrupt the narrative of progress and separation that still describes the "modernization" of the world, so they're ignored.

 

Thanks for providing your thoughts. I am a bit ignorant on that topic.

 

I think it is interesting to consider various cultures throughout human history and analyze how some of them got certain aspects of society "more right" than we do today. I think you bring up an excellent point that we tend to think that we have moved/are moving away from worse times. It seems like sometimes (most of the time?) we have a really bad tendency to not learn from the mistakes and successes of the past and just keep stumbling because we are too fucking proud and ignorant to admit we are wrong.

 

Late in my semester of teaching, whichever semester it is, I am always reduced to describing history as people finding increasingly more efficient and effective ways to be terrible to each other. It's usually once we get to 1848 or so, when I start to explain the generational cycle of rebellion and retrenchment that goes back over two hundred years. Just about every forty years, people protest injustice and some small things get overturned, then it gets rolled back after all the original protesters are dead and it happens again. 1780s, 1848, 1890s, 1930s, 1968, and now the 2010s...

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My boyfriend wanted me to remind the thread that Ancient Greece was not a codified nation until after the Romans decreed it as such and were actually non-assembled city states that had vastly different cultural rules - see Athens (heavily misogynist) and Sparta (we're not sure how this place worked since most of the accounts were from Athenians and not very accurate).

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I've heard it suggested that institutional patriarchy had its seeds planted as far back as the rise of industrial agriculture about 10,000 years ago when it was customary to hand down your land/property to your children. Men wanted to be certain that their children were biologically their own, and in response became more possessive and controlling of their female partners' sexual access. I do not know how substantiated this is, I can't imagine all cultures would have followed this exact path. I suppose you could test this by comparing the gender politics of nomadic cultures who do not own land.

 

Something we take for granted regarding the role of women as caregivers is that for the entirety of human history up until 100 or so years ago child mortality rates were much higher and life expectancy was much lower, as such you see people having more children. A mother having 5-10 children under the expectation they may die before age 40 could not reasonably expect to hold down a career even in this day and age. However, as birthrates decline and childcare resources improve in developed countries this expectation of women being the primary caregiver should really be falling into irrelevance.

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 A mother having 5-10 children under the expectation they may die before age 40 could not reasonably expect to hold down a career even in this day and age. 

 

The problem with "life expectancy" is that it's usually taken as a mean. As you said, infant mortality was quite high, which massively distorts the picture. People lived older than is assumed by the statistic prior to 100 years ago and I believe 60s is a pretty good estimate for a person to live if they made it past their teen years. Even as far back as 100/200CE. 

 

I'm by no means an expert in this though, so don't ask any follow up questions, because I'm sure you can google the answer as easily as I can. Although it's probably not really relevant to your point.

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Well this kind of discussion brings up the idea why pregnancy is so terrifying - it literally anchors your physical capabilities to your value as a human being. It's why women spend most of their time being asked when they are having kids, why birth control in the hands of women was so fucking revolutionary and safe access to family planning is crucial. I know we can laugh at dystopias presented in Handmaid's Tale but as someone who read that as a young teen girl, something in my bones felt like it could very much be real. As we see more and more legislation regarding fetus personhood and less rights for pregnant people, I can see that sort of thing coming on the horizon. If we ever experience catastrophic infertility, people who can conceive, with no scientific alternative to gestation, will be little more than chattel. 

 

Pregnancy ties you so heavily to your body as it stands now. There's literally forms of abuse of men getting their partners pregnant surreptitiously (I know we hear so much about "spermjacking" but no one talks about this) so they can keep them in a relationship (poking holes in condoms, sabotaging or literally withholding a woman's hormonal BC pills, etc) or somewhat hamstring a person's ability to "get far" without them financially. Pregnancy can absolutely be a life liability to many people and seeing more and more repro rights being snatched up is really scary and makes me glad I neither want nor can have kids. 

 

It's not out of left field to imagine gross sci-fi where women are literally turned into fucking incubators. 

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It's not out of left field to imagine gross sci-fi where women are literally turned into fucking incubators. 

 

My current understanding is that the opposite is far more likely to be true. Fertilization is, I believe, possible without sperm, but by reconstituting DNA from practically any cell into an ovum and initiating the steps required to form a zygote. If anything the role of men in reproduction will become an antiquated notion, and in vivo reproduction will be left to the hippies along with their meat from animals and organic food.

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Fertilization is possible without cis men, yes, but who still remains in power and is still pushing tons of legislation regarding abortion? Does that not scare you a tiny bit? Someone still has to carry the babies. There's some work being done in making uterine replacements and that's what I'm interested in because outsourcing gestation is a really huge leap.

 

Edit: Sorry, I should note here that I have a lot of really strong feelings on recent repro rights legislation. 

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The problem with "life expectancy" is that it's usually taken as a mean. As you said, infant mortality was quite high, which massively distorts the picture. People lived older than is assumed by the statistic prior to 100 years ago and I believe 60s is a pretty good estimate for a person to live if they made it past their teen years. Even as far back as 100/200CE. 

 

I'm by no means an expert in this though, so don't ask any follow up questions, because I'm sure you can google the answer as easily as I can. Although it's probably not really relevant to your point.

 

You're right 40 might be an exaggeration, I did not look up the exact statistic because it is too vague to encompass all cultures. That said, just because it is the mean average doesn't mean that life expectancy didn't influence people's long term decisions. The other thing I forgot to bring up was the rate of women dying from childbirth is of less concern now. Nevertheless, the improved medical science afforded by developing countries has been crucial to the liberation of women's role as caregivers. Immutable biological traits are becoming less and less of a relevant excuse, which was the larger point I was trying to make.

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I remember reading about some societies around ancient Mesopotamia having equal representation of Women on their city councils as well as rights to land ownership and divorce. The same source did describe that sadly it didn't last.

As for Ancient Greece a classics teacher of mine once described the region as being home originally to matriarchal societies that were overthrown by more expansion focused aggressors. Who were then overthrown by more violent cultures. As he described it, when these cultures settled they took on some of the more peaceful traits.

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I've heard it suggested that institutional patriarchy had its seeds planted as far back as the rise of industrial agriculture about 10,000 years ago when it was customary to hand down your land/property to your children. Men wanted to be certain that their children were biologically their own, and in response became more possessive and controlling of their female partners' sexual access. I do not know how substantiated this is, I can't imagine all cultures would have followed this exact path. I suppose you could test this by comparing the gender politics of nomadic cultures who do not own land.

The really crazy thing is that, up until the last few decades, women could always be sure that the child they had was their own. It was literally impossible for it to be otherwise. If you're rejecting cognatic kinship and partible inheritance as a society, surely the matriline is the one to choose, but no, almost never, not even in reasonably-developed matriarchal and quasi-matriarchal societies like the Picts of Scotland. It makes you wonder how much of the patriarchy was built by the collective insecurity of men who were terrified of raising some other man's child and wanted the power to be sure they weren't.

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Channel 4 have a one-off thriller screening at 9pm tonight called "Cyberbully". It's a single-room thriller starring Maisie Williams (Game Of Thrones) about a girl who is threatened with the release of a nude photo of her. It will be interesting to see how a mainstream channel deals with these relatively new issues, in a timeslot that seems aimed equally at tweens, teens and parents.

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Essential read, in my mind, if not something that people think of as a "feminist" read per se. If you can get it, try to read "Why Does He Do That: Insides the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" by Lundy Bancroft. It's fairly cheap on Amazon but you can also find free PDFs online. It goes into detailing why abusive men act the way they do but it has a lot of applicability to anyone who's deal with abusive spouses, parents, friends. It helped me a lot through a lot of shit I didn't really get in past relationships. 

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I'd be interested in reading that but I am so broke and I didn't see a particularly obvious free source.

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Aren't they dangerous? They have assassins in them!

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