Are Humans Hard Wired to Prefer Men as Leaders?

[Loren Pechtel]

Here's the thing.
I'm a guy. I don't care who comes in the men's room while I'm taking a leak. I wouldn't even care if a gal joined me in the shower at the city swimming pool. Odd, but not threatening. I simply have no reason to be concerned about women invading my privacy or worse. I'll open my pants, or get naked, I just don't care what chicks do.

Exactly. A couple of times I've seen women come into the men's room I'm using. They always apologize, but I've never seen a guy who seemed to give a hoot.

Women have far better reasons to want a man-free place to do personal business. Far better! Men are far more dangerous to women than women are to men, in that context.

Believing that women should behave like men, in public showers and such, is the height of "privilege". It's a profound male privilege to not care who else is in there with you.
Tom

Unless you're in the middle of nowhere it's still a trivial risk.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How about people who claim to be trans? I have no way of knowing if they actually believe themselves to be women or not... but they do identify themselves as transgender.

Restrooms, Locker Rooms, and Showers

Sexually Abusing 10-Year-Old Girl in the Bathroom
Restroom Sexual Attack, Voyeurism Against Adolescent Girls
Man “Dressed Like A Woman” Repeatedly Recorded Women in Mixed-Sex Restrooms
Accused of Sexually Assaulting Teen in Walmart Restroom
University of Toronto: Gender-Neutral Restrooms Partially Reversed After Female Students Recorded in Shower
Male Cross-Dresser Accused of Recording Women Using the Restroom

There have been plenty of women who record other women in the restroom. (Mostly to sell the video.) Showing individual instances doesn't prove much.

In Shelters and Refuges

Woman in Homeless Shelter Threatened by Transgender Resident
Transgender Pedophile and Rapist Sexual Terrorized Women at Homeless Shelter
Women’s Refuge Opens Doors to Man, Transgender, Who Threatened to Kill His Female Partner

Shelters are a different case, I can see good reason for them to be segregated.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I'm not arguing that children are the sole reason women were in the home, but rather that children are the reason they have that role and not men. I'd have to find statistics but IIRC up until the 20th century almost the entire world was still agrarian, which still necessitated women taking the homemaker role. Yes this is a generalization and there has been a transition period which is still underway.

As I already argued, none of that necessitated women taking the homemaker role since in a tribe, groups can function across family units, but moreover, even IF IT DID necessitate a homemaker role, that is not mutually exclusive to suffrage. Therefore, your argument was and still is illogical.

Actually, in such societies it made sense for women to not have the vote. In taking the homemaker role a woman's access to information was severely limited, she would not be nearly as capable of making good political decisions. Once newspapers became widespread that was no longer relevant.

 

[Metaphor]

For everybody talking about 'the vote', I think it should be kept in perspective how late in human history anybody got 'the vote'.

And the general time difference in societies between all males getting the vote and all females getting the vote is perhaps 50 years.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I'm not arguing that children are the sole reason women were in the home, but rather that children are the reason they have that role and not men. I'd have to find statistics but IIRC up until the 20th century almost the entire world was still agrarian, which still necessitated women taking the homemaker role. Yes this is a generalization and there has been a transition period which is still underway.

As I already argued, none of that necessitated women taking the homemaker role since in a tribe, groups can function across family units, but moreover, even IF IT DID necessitate a homemaker role, that is not mutually exclusive to suffrage. Therefore, your argument was and still is illogical.

Actually, in such societies it made sense for women to not have the vote. In taking the homemaker role a woman's access to information was severely limited, she would not be nearly as capable of making good political decisions. Once newspapers became widespread that was no longer relevant.

So the female teachers, teaching children about government now also didn't have access to newspapers.

Dude, stop making excuses! Men didn't want women in power and some still don't. Get your head out of the sand.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm not arguing that children are the sole reason women were in the home, but rather that children are the reason they have that role and not men. I'd have to find statistics but IIRC up until the 20th century almost the entire world was still agrarian, which still necessitated women taking the homemaker role. Yes this is a generalization and there has been a transition period which is still underway.

As I already argued, none of that necessitated women taking the homemaker role since in a tribe, groups can function across family units, but moreover, even IF IT DID necessitate a homemaker role, that is not mutually exclusive to suffrage. Therefore, your argument was and still is illogical.

Actually, in such societies it made sense for women to not have the vote. In taking the homemaker role a woman's access to information was severely limited, she would not be nearly as capable of making good political decisions. Once newspapers became widespread that was no longer relevant.

Yes, because the males were all literate and well schooled?

What made a farmer more capable of knowing how to vote verses the wife who isn’t Peggy Bundy?

 

[Rhea]

What is your view on the role of human instinct in how our cultures have developed?

Do you believe, for example, that sexual attraction is something we learn and not instinctive? And if you believe that sexual attraction is innate, where do you draw the line between inherent desire and learned behaviour?

This doesn't make sense. Sexuality is innate in all animals that reproduce sexually. That's how it works. What governs attractiveness is sexual selection - which is not innate. The external markers of sexual selection can become physical traits, such as peacocks having absurdly burdensome tails because that's what the females liked and selected for. But there's no innate, instinctual drive for peahens to find long tails attractive - it's the other way around.

So if there is no innate, instinctual drive for men to find certain characteristics attractive in women, and women in men, why do they mate at all? What is driving men toward particular types of women, and not others? Why are men almost exclusively attracted to women that are younger than them, and within their child-bearing years?

And you didn't answer my question:

What is your view on the role of human instinct in how our cultures have developed?

I think your premise that selection is "innate" is completely smashed by the human experience of so many not-alpha men having any opportunity to get laid at all, let alone married. If this were innate, and women were unable to stop themselves from preferring the "innately selected" male, most of the men on this board (including you) would be unchosen and celibate, and the females would all mate with Shemar Moore.

SINCE WE DON'T...

You have ample proof that women do not have any "innate" or "instinctive" preference that is strong enough to drive behavior to the degree that you claim we are "hard wired" to make choices about men as leaders. It's predominantly social, clearly.

 

[Rhea]

That's fair, but I think seize power isn't a generous enough explanation of what happened, or what is happening. First, it starts from the assumption that women don't hold any power via the caretaker role. Just because women traditionally care for children, doesn't mean they don't have power. Throughout history men have relied on women to raise their children, take care of their households, and a multitude of other equally important things. So this argument starts from the assumption that being a mother is less important than holding power in society, which just isn't true. Both positions are important for child-rearing. And throughout history women have been able to dictate that men go find some fucking food or we're not having children.

rousseau, I think you greatly underestimate the condition of people who were not permitted to own property, not permitted to vote or serve on juries (meaning not permitted to have peers on juries), who would lose their children if they left, who would be unable to acquire a means of living if they left, and then you allow yourself to call them "powerful" and assume that withholding sex was something they could do without violence directed at them.

You also completely disregard the position that "in the home" does not mean not working, as well as that many classes of people always had women work "outside."


There's just so much glossed over here that I need to comment. I can understand why you don't know this. You have never been this. But the women you are talking are people who have been this, personally. You are talking to people who were not permitted to wear pants in school. You are talking to people who were not allowed to have certain jobs (I was told - explicitly - that I could not have a job that I was qualified for because I was a woman. Several times.) You are talking to people who in their lifetimes were not allowed to hold credit in their name.

Please do not talk down to us about what we felt as women without full power.

Just because a woman might love her partner does NOT mean she is happy with her lack of power.
Just because a woman might need her spouse/provider to provide - because she is denied agency to do it herself! - does not mean that she has any power over him. A million homes with drunken dads should tell you that her "power" to make him "go find some fucking food" is not any real power at all.

Poor families have always had women "finding the fucking food" because caste systems in most cultures meant that poor men could not get enough. If you think women have "traditionally been homemakers" you need to read more history of non-white non-wealthy families.

I think you also have an incomplete view of what "women's work" actually is. If you think women celebrate the "power" of having an 18-hour workday while the men come home from getting the food and sit at the table while the woman still works to serve it to him, you might think they are all happy with that arrangement.

That's fair, but I think seize power isn't a generous enough explanation of what happened, or what is happening. First, it starts from the assumption that women don't hold any power via the caretaker role. .

Additionally, the "power" of being bound to household chores and childrearing came at the cost of women having no agency. Sure, we had "power" over the household... but we didn't get to make decisions about our life as a whole, we weren't free to pursue our own desires, to seek our own happiness. We were denied the highest peak of Maslow's Hierarchy. The value of a woman was defined by her service to her husband.

I'd start off by mentioning that you're making a pretty broad generalization about women's oppression. It's easy to paint a picture of women being universally oppressed, but I'm sure that's not actually the picture we're looking at. Women have never been happy, ever, in history?

Being happy and being powerless are not intertwined. Making the best of the situation and taking happiness where you can does NOT mean that you have not been powerless or oppressed. Is it you claim that we can't say we were powerless unless we pouted and complained the whole time? Were those who were enslaved in America "never happy, ever, in history"? Or does the fact of their ability to be happy even in the worst of conditions mean to you that the conditions weren't so bad?

A lot of the arguments we're seeing in this thread now display a short-sighted view of history. Up until the end of the 19th century women's role in the family unit was absolutely essential for survival in most of the world. It's only been in the twentieth century that women have been needed to work outside the home, and guess what?

Guess what? It was NOT only in the 20th century that women needed to work outside the home. It was, perhaps, that way in wealthy white families.

rousseau... think about this. It's just not true. Broaden your perspective and ask the question again.

Even far back in history women were not simply "homemakers" they were prehistoric handymen and gardeners and butchers. They were widows who hunted. In more modern societies they were seamstresses and cleaners and rock pickers and weavers.

This idea you have that women working and women working outside the home is all a 20th century thing is a terrible disregard of women's history.

. My point was that up until the twentieth century there literally was no avenue for woman's suffrage, human survival depended on a specific kind of family unit where women were in the home.

for wealthy white women.
All of the other women had been used for human survival outside the home (with their power stripped from them) and still had no power to make changes.

Women's Suffrage was made possible because industrialization and technology made our species, as a whole, emancipated from harsh realities of the world. Yes I'll grant you that culturally there were issues with ideas over the role of women, but you glazed over the point that as soon as women were needed outside the home gender roles changed within about 100 years.

Oh? Have the gender roles all changed?

Basically, those who have an odd hang-up over the idea that instincts exist are projecting their values from a 2020 world on our past, which really isn't an appropriate interpretation..

you need to know that this sounds terrible.

Like the little ladies didn't understand their own condition. Like women haven't said what they thought and felt all those centuries.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Actually, in such societies it made sense for women to not have the vote. In taking the homemaker role a woman's access to information was severely limited, she would not be nearly as capable of making good political decisions. Once newspapers became widespread that was no longer relevant.

So the female teachers, teaching children about government now also didn't have access to newspapers.

Dude, stop making excuses! Men didn't want women in power and some still don't. Get your head out of the sand.

Did you not read my whole post? I'm saying the reason became moot once those at home had similar access to information as those who went out.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Actually, in such societies it made sense for women to not have the vote. In taking the homemaker role a woman's access to information was severely limited, she would not be nearly as capable of making good political decisions. Once newspapers became widespread that was no longer relevant.

So the female teachers, teaching children about government now also didn't have access to newspapers.

Dude, stop making excuses! Men didn't want women in power and some still don't. Get your head out of the sand.

Did you not read my whole post? I'm saying the reason became moot once those at home had similar access to information as those who went out.

Your correction simply made no sense in context. Newspapers have been widespread for centuries, well before women's suffrage in the US. That was the context you inserted your "actually..." into.

But, moreover, women haven't purely been confined to the home and men have not been the super educated voter. One could also argue women's participation in their own destinies was and is a requirement because it tends more toward their equal access to education. Think: would you also argue against African Americans voting historically because many were kept from reading or did voting in their self-intetest improve the impact of governmental policy on their own educations?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Did you not read my whole post? I'm saying the reason became moot once those at home had similar access to information as those who went out.

Your correction simply made no sense in context. Newspapers have been widespread for centuries, well before women's suffrage in the US. That was the context you inserted your "actually..." into.

But, moreover, women haven't purely been confined to the home and men have not been the super educated voter. One could also argue women's participation in their own destinies was and is a requirement because it tends more toward their equal access to education. Think: would you also argue against African Americans voting historically because many were kept from reading or did voting in their self-intetest improve the impact of governmental policy on their own educations?

They haven't been widespread for centuries. You have the scale wrong.

I'm saying that in the time before newspapers someone who pretty much lived at home wouldn't have much information on which to vote.

 

[Emily Lake]

Unless you're in the middle of nowhere it's still a trivial risk.

A trivial risk to whom, exactly? Clearly, you aren't the one taking the risk, nor are you the one dealing with the ramifications if the risk is realized. You're very cavalier about handing off risk to other people as no big deal.

 

[Emily Lake]

There have been plenty of women who record other women in the restroom. (Mostly to sell the video.) Showing individual instances doesn't prove much.

I'd rather like a source for this claim.

 

[Emily Lake]

Even though I know it exists, sometimes I'm still taken aback by the sheer volume of sexism in the world... and the way in which is it so cavalierly supported by men. It's nothing more than the grace of chance that I have the privileges of being white to help counter the disadvantages of being black. I think if I were a black woman in this conversation, I might set some of you on fire with my mind.

 

[J842P]

There have been plenty of women who record other women in the restroom. (Mostly to sell the video.) Showing individual instances doesn't prove much.

I'd rather like a source for this claim.

I mean, I'm sure it's happened, You can find women who have sold their own children into sexual slavery, but I'm not sure what bearing it all ultimately has on this conversation.

 

[Rhea]

Did you not read my whole post? I'm saying the reason became moot once those at home had similar access to information as those who went out.

Your correction simply made no sense in context. Newspapers have been widespread for centuries, well before women's suffrage in the US. That was the context you inserted your "actually..." into.

But, moreover, women haven't purely been confined to the home and men have not been the super educated voter. One could also argue women's participation in their own destinies was and is a requirement because it tends more toward their equal access to education. Think: would you also argue against African Americans voting historically because many were kept from reading or did voting in their self-intetest improve the impact of governmental policy on their own educations?

They haven't been widespread for centuries. You have the scale wrong.

I'm saying that in the time before newspapers someone who pretty much lived at home wouldn't have much information on which to vote.

I think you’re the one with the scale wrong, Loren.

In the first two decades of the 17th century, more or less regular papers printed from movable type appeared in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. The Dutch “corantos” (“currents of news”), which strung together items extracted from foreign journals, became the sources for English and French translations published in Amsterdam as early as 1620. Rudimentary newspapers appeared in many European countries in the 17th century, and broadsheets with social news were published in Japan in the Tokugawa period (1603–1867).

https://www.britannica.com/topic/newspaper

 

[rousseau]

I'm not arguing that children are the sole reason women were in the home, but rather that children are the reason they have that role and not men. I'd have to find statistics but IIRC up until the 20th century almost the entire world was still agrarian, which still necessitated women taking the homemaker role. Yes this is a generalization and there has been a transition period which is still underway.

As I already argued, none of that necessitated women taking the homemaker role since in a tribe, groups can function across family units, but moreover, even IF IT DID necessitate a homemaker role, that is not mutually exclusive to suffrage. Therefore, your argument was and still is illogical.

Culturally I'm pretty much on board with you but again we forget that these cultural ideas existed for a reason. People believed women should be in the home because that is literally where they were needed.

Except that they were not needed to be sheltered inside a home, nor did the idea of women being less than men originate from agrarian societies--your unsubstantiated hypothesis. The idea was also present in nomadic and hunter gatherer cultures.

Similarly, Christian ideas of abstinence look pretty backward when you have birth control, but at the time these norms served a real function.

Except it is not about abstinence but instead using females as a way to ensure family status by selling them off. Abstinence is only a by-product, since men did not want a woman who already had sex/had diseases from other men/might be carrying another man's child.

Let's be real here and not make excuses. People would watch the bride and groom copulate to ensure the father was actually the father. Abstinence as an explanatory value is very lacking in explaining all these features of history.

Perhaps women could have voted once parliamentary democracy was a thing but these norms take time to change. We can't expect monarchy to be overthrown in one breath and have universal human rights overnight.

Monarchy has already been overthrown, but men are still demanding women be subservient. It's still happening. There are still groups in democracies trying to bring it backward. These are not people doing it for agrarian reasons.

Yes violence against women was and is still a problem. But like I mentioned to others this doesn't paint a full picture of the life of women throughout history. Many women were very likely in love with their partners, many women enjoyed child rearing, many women were fine with the situation as it existed.

My grandmother always spoke highly of working on the farm and of the cows. She was dropped off there on the farm when she was 3 to begin training as a worker. Her parents did not need to take care of her and probably couldn't. All of them were capable of voting upon adulthood. Just because my grandmother was happy at times doesn't mean there couldn't have been a better life for her or that there were not people who forced her into the life she endured. And those people had other choices they could have made.

It's fine to push for their rights but it's similarly easy to get the false notion that women were universally oppressed and universally didn't enjoy their lives. By not granting these women validity you take away their agency.

And this goes back to my original point: the interpretation that women were just helpless and powerless throughout history is an invalid interpretation of what history actually looked like. Yes to some degree men had more financial power but the reality is much more complicated.

You are exaggerating a position I did not take. Power is a continuum. No one claimed women were "powerless." They had power, just on average--less--on average. There historically have been many exceptions, such as female warrior leaders, political leaders, pirates, wealthy, educated, etc. You are the one in denial here of history--there was and is an actual physical, brutal, violent blocking of women's equality. Saying that truth is not some weird claim that women have no agency. It's just stating a fact.

rousseau, I think you greatly underestimate the condition of people who were not permitted to own property, not permitted to vote or serve on juries (meaning not permitted to have peers on juries), who would lose their children if they left, who would be unable to acquire a means of living if they left, and then you allow yourself to call them "powerful" and assume that withholding sex was something they could do without violence directed at them.

You also completely disregard the position that "in the home" does not mean not working, as well as that many classes of people always had women work "outside."


There's just so much glossed over here that I need to comment. I can understand why you don't know this. You have never been this. But the women you are talking are people who have been this, personally. You are talking to people who were not permitted to wear pants in school. You are talking to people who were not allowed to have certain jobs (I was told - explicitly - that I could not have a job that I was qualified for because I was a woman. Several times.) You are talking to people who in their lifetimes were not allowed to hold credit in their name.

Please do not talk down to us about what we felt as women without full power.

Just because a woman might love her partner does NOT mean she is happy with her lack of power.
Just because a woman might need her spouse/provider to provide - because she is denied agency to do it herself! - does not mean that she has any power over him. A million homes with drunken dads should tell you that her "power" to make him "go find some fucking food" is not any real power at all.

Poor families have always had women "finding the fucking food" because caste systems in most cultures meant that poor men could not get enough. If you think women have "traditionally been homemakers" you need to read more history of non-white non-wealthy families.

I think you also have an incomplete view of what "women's work" actually is. If you think women celebrate the "power" of having an 18-hour workday while the men come home from getting the food and sit at the table while the woman still works to serve it to him, you might think they are all happy with that arrangement.

That's fair, but I think seize power isn't a generous enough explanation of what happened, or what is happening. First, it starts from the assumption that women don't hold any power via the caretaker role. .

Additionally, the "power" of being bound to household chores and childrearing came at the cost of women having no agency. Sure, we had "power" over the household... but we didn't get to make decisions about our life as a whole, we weren't free to pursue our own desires, to seek our own happiness. We were denied the highest peak of Maslow's Hierarchy. The value of a woman was defined by her service to her husband.

I'd start off by mentioning that you're making a pretty broad generalization about women's oppression. It's easy to paint a picture of women being universally oppressed, but I'm sure that's not actually the picture we're looking at. Women have never been happy, ever, in history?

Being happy and being powerless are not intertwined. Making the best of the situation and taking happiness where you can does NOT mean that you have not been powerless or oppressed. Is it you claim that we can't say we were powerless unless we pouted and complained the whole time? Were those who were enslaved in America "never happy, ever, in history"? Or does the fact of their ability to be happy even in the worst of conditions mean to you that the conditions weren't so bad?

A lot of the arguments we're seeing in this thread now display a short-sighted view of history. Up until the end of the 19th century women's role in the family unit was absolutely essential for survival in most of the world. It's only been in the twentieth century that women have been needed to work outside the home, and guess what?

Guess what? It was NOT only in the 20th century that women needed to work outside the home. It was, perhaps, that way in wealthy white families.

rousseau... think about this. It's just not true. Broaden your perspective and ask the question again.

Even far back in history women were not simply "homemakers" they were prehistoric handymen and gardeners and butchers. They were widows who hunted. In more modern societies they were seamstresses and cleaners and rock pickers and weavers.

This idea you have that women working and women working outside the home is all a 20th century thing is a terrible disregard of women's history.

. My point was that up until the twentieth century there literally was no avenue for woman's suffrage, human survival depended on a specific kind of family unit where women were in the home.

for wealthy white women.
All of the other women had been used for human survival outside the home (with their power stripped from them) and still had no power to make changes.

Women's Suffrage was made possible because industrialization and technology made our species, as a whole, emancipated from harsh realities of the world. Yes I'll grant you that culturally there were issues with ideas over the role of women, but you glazed over the point that as soon as women were needed outside the home gender roles changed within about 100 years.

Oh? Have the gender roles all changed?

Basically, those who have an odd hang-up over the idea that instincts exist are projecting their values from a 2020 world on our past, which really isn't an appropriate interpretation..

you need to know that this sounds terrible.

Like the little ladies didn't understand their own condition. Like women haven't said what they thought and felt all those centuries.

I believe you've both not fully grasped the point I was making, and have inferred a number thoughts from my post that I don't actually have. Try reading it again and realize I'm not the enemy, and don't have time to expound in detail about every point.

I've been a staunch supporter of women's rights for over a decade now, and I understand that, culturally, women have had very serious, and very real issues throughout history. What I was challenging initially when I responded to Jimmy Higgins was the generalization that our entire history has been marked by women's oppression, that oppression was a universal, conscious choice by men, and that every woman felt they were struggling.

I don't challenge this to undermine the very real struggle women have faced, but to highlight that the picture we're actually looking at is far more complicated. It's easy to take a few data points from the past century and generalize about thousands of years of history, and perhaps billions of people across the globe.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

As I already argued, none of that necessitated women taking the homemaker role since in a tribe, groups can function across family units, but moreover, even IF IT DID necessitate a homemaker role, that is not mutually exclusive to suffrage. Therefore, your argument was and still is illogical.



Except that they were not needed to be sheltered inside a home, nor did the idea of women being less than men originate from agrarian societies--your unsubstantiated hypothesis. The idea was also present in nomadic and hunter gatherer cultures.

Similarly, Christian ideas of abstinence look pretty backward when you have birth control, but at the time these norms served a real function.

Except it is not about abstinence but instead using females as a way to ensure family status by selling them off. Abstinence is only a by-product, since men did not want a woman who already had sex/had diseases from other men/might be carrying another man's child.

Let's be real here and not make excuses. People would watch the bride and groom copulate to ensure the father was actually the father. Abstinence as an explanatory value is very lacking in explaining all these features of history.

Perhaps women could have voted once parliamentary democracy was a thing but these norms take time to change. We can't expect monarchy to be overthrown in one breath and have universal human rights overnight.

Monarchy has already been overthrown, but men are still demanding women be subservient. It's still happening. There are still groups in democracies trying to bring it backward. These are not people doing it for agrarian reasons.

Yes violence against women was and is still a problem. But like I mentioned to others this doesn't paint a full picture of the life of women throughout history. Many women were very likely in love with their partners, many women enjoyed child rearing, many women were fine with the situation as it existed.

My grandmother always spoke highly of working on the farm and of the cows. She was dropped off there on the farm when she was 3 to begin training as a worker. Her parents did not need to take care of her and probably couldn't. All of them were capable of voting upon adulthood. Just because my grandmother was happy at times doesn't mean there couldn't have been a better life for her or that there were not people who forced her into the life she endured. And those people had other choices they could have made.

It's fine to push for their rights but it's similarly easy to get the false notion that women were universally oppressed and universally didn't enjoy their lives. By not granting these women validity you take away their agency.

And this goes back to my original point: the interpretation that women were just helpless and powerless throughout history is an invalid interpretation of what history actually looked like. Yes to some degree men had more financial power but the reality is much more complicated.

You are exaggerating a position I did not take. Power is a continuum. No one claimed women were "powerless." They had power, just on average--less--on average. There historically have been many exceptions, such as female warrior leaders, political leaders, pirates, wealthy, educated, etc. You are the one in denial here of history--there was and is an actual physical, brutal, violent blocking of women's equality. Saying that truth is not some weird claim that women have no agency. It's just stating a fact.

rousseau, I think you greatly underestimate the condition of people who were not permitted to own property, not permitted to vote or serve on juries (meaning not permitted to have peers on juries), who would lose their children if they left, who would be unable to acquire a means of living if they left, and then you allow yourself to call them "powerful" and assume that withholding sex was something they could do without violence directed at them.

You also completely disregard the position that "in the home" does not mean not working, as well as that many classes of people always had women work "outside."


There's just so much glossed over here that I need to comment. I can understand why you don't know this. You have never been this. But the women you are talking are people who have been this, personally. You are talking to people who were not permitted to wear pants in school. You are talking to people who were not allowed to have certain jobs (I was told - explicitly - that I could not have a job that I was qualified for because I was a woman. Several times.) You are talking to people who in their lifetimes were not allowed to hold credit in their name.

Please do not talk down to us about what we felt as women without full power.

Just because a woman might love her partner does NOT mean she is happy with her lack of power.
Just because a woman might need her spouse/provider to provide - because she is denied agency to do it herself! - does not mean that she has any power over him. A million homes with drunken dads should tell you that her "power" to make him "go find some fucking food" is not any real power at all.

Poor families have always had women "finding the fucking food" because caste systems in most cultures meant that poor men could not get enough. If you think women have "traditionally been homemakers" you need to read more history of non-white non-wealthy families.

I think you also have an incomplete view of what "women's work" actually is. If you think women celebrate the "power" of having an 18-hour workday while the men come home from getting the food and sit at the table while the woman still works to serve it to him, you might think they are all happy with that arrangement.

That's fair, but I think seize power isn't a generous enough explanation of what happened, or what is happening. First, it starts from the assumption that women don't hold any power via the caretaker role. .

Additionally, the "power" of being bound to household chores and childrearing came at the cost of women having no agency. Sure, we had "power" over the household... but we didn't get to make decisions about our life as a whole, we weren't free to pursue our own desires, to seek our own happiness. We were denied the highest peak of Maslow's Hierarchy. The value of a woman was defined by her service to her husband.

I'd start off by mentioning that you're making a pretty broad generalization about women's oppression. It's easy to paint a picture of women being universally oppressed, but I'm sure that's not actually the picture we're looking at. Women have never been happy, ever, in history?

Being happy and being powerless are not intertwined. Making the best of the situation and taking happiness where you can does NOT mean that you have not been powerless or oppressed. Is it you claim that we can't say we were powerless unless we pouted and complained the whole time? Were those who were enslaved in America "never happy, ever, in history"? Or does the fact of their ability to be happy even in the worst of conditions mean to you that the conditions weren't so bad?

A lot of the arguments we're seeing in this thread now display a short-sighted view of history. Up until the end of the 19th century women's role in the family unit was absolutely essential for survival in most of the world. It's only been in the twentieth century that women have been needed to work outside the home, and guess what?

Guess what? It was NOT only in the 20th century that women needed to work outside the home. It was, perhaps, that way in wealthy white families.

rousseau... think about this. It's just not true. Broaden your perspective and ask the question again.

Even far back in history women were not simply "homemakers" they were prehistoric handymen and gardeners and butchers. They were widows who hunted. In more modern societies they were seamstresses and cleaners and rock pickers and weavers.

This idea you have that women working and women working outside the home is all a 20th century thing is a terrible disregard of women's history.

. My point was that up until the twentieth century there literally was no avenue for woman's suffrage, human survival depended on a specific kind of family unit where women were in the home.

for wealthy white women.
All of the other women had been used for human survival outside the home (with their power stripped from them) and still had no power to make changes.

Women's Suffrage was made possible because industrialization and technology made our species, as a whole, emancipated from harsh realities of the world. Yes I'll grant you that culturally there were issues with ideas over the role of women, but you glazed over the point that as soon as women were needed outside the home gender roles changed within about 100 years.

Oh? Have the gender roles all changed?

Basically, those who have an odd hang-up over the idea that instincts exist are projecting their values from a 2020 world on our past, which really isn't an appropriate interpretation..

you need to know that this sounds terrible.

Like the little ladies didn't understand their own condition. Like women haven't said what they thought and felt all those centuries.

I believe you've both not fully grasped the point I was making, and have inferred a number thoughts from my post that I don't actually have. Try reading it again and realize I'm not the enemy, and don't have time to expound in detail about every point.

I've been a staunch supporter of women's rights for over a decade now, and I understand that, culturally, women have had very serious, and very real issues throughout history. What I was challenging initially when I responded to Jimmy Higgins was the generalization that our entire history has been marked by women's oppression, that oppression was a universal, conscious choice by men, and that every woman felt they were struggling.

I don't challenge this to undermine the very real struggle women have faced, but to highlight that the picture we're actually looking at is far more complicated. It's easy to take a few data points from the past century and generalize about thousands of years of history, and perhaps billions of people across the globe.

I did not presume you are an enemy. I think your argument is ridiculous, in a thread that is ridiculous, and defended by a ridiculous point by Loren. History goes beyond a mere century of discussion. Let's review the ridiculousness.

In Western civilization in the Middle ages, it was men keeping women from being educated and literate. That is like how white America kept slaves illiterate. What we're looking at is patriarchy. The thread should be titled, Are Men Hardwired for Patriarchy? since women didn't control policy. In colonial British America, only 10% of men were literate. But less women at 1%. Newspapers were abundant in 1789 and by a century before women's suffrage very widespread. There were still a monement to keep women uneducated. The first woman wasn't admitted to Harvard Medical School until the 1940's. Education is not a requirement to vote. Why? Because classes of people have been kept uneducated to keep them out of power. Once they have suffrage, they can gain political equality of opportunity so they have equal access to education. Flipping this around is like how slave masters used to whip slaves for crying. It's backward. Now there are still people today who don't want women to vote or be leaders. It's not about an agrarian lifestyle. These are usually men already in a patriarchal institution, either already with relative benefit over women or disaffected populaces being made promises. Men are not hardwired to want patriarchy. However, men are hardwired to want to create offspring and this makes patriarchy a fairly stable system until it is overthrown by a superior system like a working democracy where everyone's standard of living is improving and opportunity to mate is likely. Once the patriarchy is overthrown, the liberals in power move toward equality and women having political power but there's always pressure from the backward people who want a counter revolution.

 

[Gun Nut]

Men start a thread with other men to discuss how much better at leadership men are than women...

No. No. No!

Your micro-aggressive attempted micro-rape is noted. The lemmings are calling for your self-ban.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Did you not read my whole post? I'm saying the reason became moot once those at home had similar access to information as those who went out.

Your correction simply made no sense in context. Newspapers have been widespread for centuries, well before women's suffrage in the US. That was the context you inserted your "actually..." into.

But, moreover, women haven't purely been confined to the home and men have not been the super educated voter. One could also argue women's participation in their own destinies was and is a requirement because it tends more toward their equal access to education. Think: would you also argue against African Americans voting historically because many were kept from reading or did voting in their self-intetest improve the impact of governmental policy on their own educations?

They haven't been widespread for centuries. You have the scale wrong.

I'm saying that in the time before newspapers someone who pretty much lived at home wouldn't have much information on which to vote.

That wouldn't seem to be a statement where gender would matter.