Matriarchy challenge

How could Western Europe and North America end up roughly as developed as in OTL and have, by 2004, men having roughly the same legal status as Victorian women.


My guess is a LONG WW1 type war with men being disporportionate casualties, women taking over more significant possitions at home and some kind of revolution on both sides - probably inspired by a prophetess
 
Derek Jackson said:
How could Western Europe and North America end up roughly as developed as in OTL and have, by 2004, men having roughly the same legal status as Victorian women.


My guess is a LONG WW1 type war with men being disporportionate casualties, women taking over more significant possitions at home and some kind of revolution on both sides - probably inspired by a prophetess

The POD would have to be a bout 100 million years ago, resulting in our species evolving such that women were larger and stronger than men, and able to bear children much faster than in OTL.

It is impossible to have a war that would result in enough men dying for a matriarchy to form; it would have ended through sheer exhaustion way before that. Besides, females as a group are incapable of managing large-scal organizations like a moden state due to their brains.
 
Point of Order:

Matriarchy means female dominance what you are looking for is a weaker Patriarchy.

I think it would need to happen in steps. A World War One that much longer results in Communist Europe. Women would be closer to equality--perhaps Rosa Luxembourg and even the Countess Markiewiscz are major figures--but the Communist regimes had a way of giving lip service to women's right but only partially delivering the goods--esp. power at the highest levels.

As far Prophetess perhaps some of the Theosophical crowd--Blavatsky, Besant or the lesser known Anna Kingsford could rise to the occasion witha greater emphasis on the social and less on orientalist theology. Actually Besant was an impressive poltical figure pre Theosophy,

But back to my thery of steps I think it's possible that a sort of protofeminism could arise in the Enlightenent. It might undergo some development in the French Revolution (maybe even a little in the American) and after some tortured interaction with Romanticism (Blavatsky claimed to have fought as one of Garibaldi's Redshirts) and the inevitable Christian backlash come to flower in the 1920's.
 
Tom_B said:
Point of Order:

Matriarchy means female dominance what you are looking for is a weaker Patriarchy.

I think you may have misread the POD - MEN have the same legal status today as Vicotorian women, an presumably WOMEN today have the relative stsatus that Victorian MEN had.
 
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
I think you may have misread the POD - MEN have the same legal status today as Vicotorian women, an presumably WOMEN today have the relative stsatus that Victorian MEN had.

Hmm if what Derek wants is a complete role reversal then there is one and only one possible POD:

American Right Wing extemists in 1920 hijack a B-52 and nuke Mecca.
 
The current situation with men in charge has been around ever since early hominids where the women stayed home and kept house and the men hunted. The reverse could not be possible, as men can't breast feed babies.
 
Abdul Hadi Pasha said:
Besides, females as a group are incapable of managing large-scal organizations like a moden state due to their brains.

Why? Can you prove that? I know some stuff about the differences between men and women and how the brain works, but why do you reason from that that they can't manage large-scale organizations? And what about the female politicians from Hillary Clinton to Maggy Thatcher?
 
Max Sinister said:
Why? Can you prove that? I know some stuff about the differences between men and women and how the brain works, but why do you reason from that that they can't manage large-scale organizations? And what about the female politicians from Hillary Clinton to Maggy Thatcher?

I said "as a group", not that there are no exceptions. There are also men that like to cook.

Women do well as leaders of small organizations and companies, where their suffocating control-freakishness isn't quite as fatal as in larger-scale organizations, and their constant emotional crises and need to cry and hug all the time won't cause all work to grind to a halt.

The simple fact of the matter is, the division of labor was the only possibility for our species - women get pregnant and breast feed, neither of which can be done while out hunting and foraging, so they took care of work close to home, and men took care of the work away from the home. That the disparity between private power (home) and public power (work & politics) became so great is an accident of history. Even so, women in what looks like the most patriarchal of societies often wield a very large amount of power in the ruling classes through their control over private life.

Examples include control over the marriage alliances of 19th c Britain that determined who held public power, and in the Ottoman Empire where the Sultan's mother was either the first, second, or third most powerful person in the empire depending on the period.

That there has never in all of human history been a matriarchy is in my opinion telling. I just don't think women's brains can handle it. Look at academic pursuits: there have been first-class female scholars in every field known to man except mathematics-based fields including math itself and physics. They can't do all the abstract stuff, and that's why they should stay at home an watch Oprah rather than making us report on why we needed to spend 15 minutes in the bathroom or tracking us down at the gym to ask why we aren't at our desks on lunch break, or wear blue so often just to bother them.
 
But politics is more of an art than a science, Abdulhadi.
IMO, it is possible of having a co-rulership of men and women in equal rights, similarly to most OTL's democratic systems, and with women having a slight edge on men.
 
Abdul, I don't know f you are joking or not (I hope you do). Your argument is about as valid as feminist's "if there were more women in politics there would be less wars" (and I had constant arguments with this line of thinking starting in high school and lasting through uni).

The fact is that woman's brain are different (difference in usage of brain halves which control certain functions). Not better or worse but different. E.g. they are better at multitasking. Much of "natural roles of sexes" is culture based and culture promoted. There are tribes where roles are reversed and men wear make up and such, while women don't.

Both sexes are given toys that fall in their "natural sex role", boys get soldiers, cars, girls get dolls, houses. Reember how odd it is if girl wants to play with soldiers and boy with dolls. All hell is breaking loose, they are forced to play with their "natural sex role".

And people wonder why there are no women here. ;)
 
aktarian said:
Abdul, I don't know f you are joking or not (I hope you do)

Largely, yes, or at least exaggerating; I was mostly referring to my boss. But I do think that differences in the way women's brains work (different, not better or worse) make women as a whole less capable at dealing with large abstract and/or hierarchical systems, so they are less suited to be senior executives and rule large polities.

They are clearly massively superior at multi-tasking (in an interesting test where people had 4 minutes to complete 8 tasks, ALL women succeeded and ALL men failed) and are more detail-oriented.

One theory about this is that men developed a better spacial sense due to the whole hunter-gatherer thing (in another test, men proved far better at nagivating in the wild - men can picture their location in a wider scheme, where women follow directions in a linear, linguistic way, and that there is a disparity in test scores in geometry but NOT in algebra is interesting).

So, I do not think women would ever be able to replace men as dominant in public life unless some plague killed off most men, in which case the survivors would have to devote all their time to replenishing the species, or your POD was so far in the past that wwe evolved differently.
 
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