Gender Equality throughout History

[Kelenas]

Well, I've been going through a lot of my Fantasy-CRPGs again, where females usually have the same rights, freedoms and opportunities as males, even in medieval settings, and one of my usual stray thoughts hit me; what would our history have looked liked, if gender equality had been an established part throughout European history, with women free to chose whatever profession they wished and reach what heights they could?

- Kelenas

[LSCatilina]

Mmm...Maybe if the Etruscans had even more influenced Roman civilisation (Etruccan women have even a proper name), you can have a romance culture of equality between man and woman (against germanic one), as you can see; by exemple, between occitan and french medieval cultures (not equality tough OTL, but a more favorable situation).
So, the equality between gender, would be likely reached in Europa during Renaissance (helped by church, would use woman priests)

It's more plausible than have a perfect equality between gender from the beggining of humanity, due to a certain share of tasks during pre-history.

[SeptimusMagistos]

Even medieaval-setting CRPGs tend to have much higher living standards and education than the actual Middle Ages, which does correspond to greater gender equality. So maybe that's the way to go.

[Iori]

Perhaps if the Minoan civilization had managed to continue on and become a domiant influence.

Technically though that would't be true equality I suppose, since women seemed to have had a slightly more important position then men, but it would be close enough.

[yourworstnightmare]

Originally Posted by Iori

Perhaps if the Minoan civilization had managed to continue on and become a domiant influence.

Technically though that would't be true equality I suppose, since women seemed to have had a slightly more important position then men, but it would be close enough.

Acctually we know too little about the Minoan civilization to know if that's true.

[Grey Wolf]

The problem with gender equality is that with limited resources it becomes a meritocracy. Sounds great but if you can only afford 100 warriors, then you will test them and whilst in theory women are welcome to apply, how many women applicants will get through? You may have 1000 men wanting those 100 positions and of those 1000, perhaps 98 will be stronger than any of the women applicants. And its strength that counts throughout most of history - if you can't weild a broadsword you don't want to be going into battle up against someone with one...

And strength counts in a lot of other crafts and professions too - I'm not saying women can't do them, just that with a limited pool of jobs there are going to be proportionately more men who can do them than women, and thus the actual result in terms of those employed is going to be even more skewed as the top portion of the men not only outdo all the other men, but the vast majority of the females.

This is going to be the case with apprenticeships for example - you may even take in equal numbers of young men and women at the lowest level, but when it comes to graduating to journeymen and masters (or equivalent gender-neutral terms) in professions where strength and stamina matter there will be more men than women going through.

Especially if the numbers of women are reduced by childbirth - its a lot harder to come back to being a blacksmith after having a baby than it is to come back to being a clerk.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf

[Yorel]

An earlier gender equality would have huge butterflies : the world as we know it would be in no way the same.

For one, Salic Law would probably not exist : Sons would not be favored over daughters, meaning the eldest child would get the crown, no matter its gender. You would thus have a greater number of Regnant Queens around the world than OTL.
Of course, Male Primogeniture might still exist, but more in the Germanic sense, meaning women would be able to inherit the crown such as Mary I, Elisabeth I or Victoria did instead of being completely excluded.
Also, alliances would not be created only with political marriages because there would be a greater fear of creating personnal unions between two countries, or at least they would not be realised using high ranked people in the order of succession.
Another thing would be that succession crisis would be greatly reduced as their would be a greater number of possible heirs to a crown.

Secondly, with women having equal rights to men, they could enroll in their country's armies and not be just nurses tending the wounded. This would possibly increase the number of soldiers in each countries, which might mean longer (because of the soldiers' numbers) or bloodier wars.
They would also play a greater role in science, politics, litterature, etc... They could even have a greater role in Religion, meaning that women could become Priestess in Catholic Christianity or Female Imams in Islam. You could even get female popes or caliphs. That also may imply that the myth of the Original Sin is a different one or seen in a different way, which mean that Religions would have tottaly different opinion on women.

[MNP]

Originally Posted by Grey Wolf

And strength counts in a lot of other crafts and professions too - I'm not saying women can't do them, just that with a limited pool of jobs there are going to be proportionately more men who can do them than women, and thus the actual result in terms of those employed is going to be even more skewed as the top portion of the men not only outdo all the other men, but the vast majority of the females.

This is going to be the case with apprenticeships for example - you may even take in equal numbers of young men and women at the lowest level, but when it comes to graduating to journeymen and masters (or equivalent gender-neutral terms) in professions where strength and stamina matter there will be more men than women going through.

Especially if the numbers of women are reduced by childbirth - its a lot harder to come back to being a blacksmith after having a baby than it is to come back to being a clerk.

Indeed, but the key is in your last statements. A big problem is that women simply weren't educated for trades they COULD do nearly as often. Increase base education for women and you're could get a number of professions that don't depend on gender. There were women lawyers in Troyes in the 13th century for example. So things like medicine, accounting, law, clerks, business owners, and even some crafts like pottery. Certain military roles like say, reconnaissance might be filled by women etc. The thing is most of these professions weren't in widespread use in the early middle-ages so you never really got a critical mass of "beyond-wife women." I can't recall what the C in CRPG stands for, but generally in those worlds you have magic and magic is the Great Equalizer, being generally conceived as an academic or pseudo-scientific discipline and capable of beating someone with great physical strength. In any world with magic you are going to have a number of women who can monopolize force. This concept in fact (magic as gender equalizer) is the driving concept for my own urban-fantasy world.

As for female leaders, the some of the Khariji sects believed that it was acceptable to have women Imams and there are a number of early Christian leaders who were women. I've always wanted to look into how it became a male dominated thing. Certainly a lot of the early records were lost to us even by the 4th century.

[Daeres]

Originally Posted by yourworstnightmare

Acctually we know too little about the Minoan civilization to know if that's true.

Thank you, I do get tired of people assuming facts about Minoan culture when nearly all of what we think is supposition. For instance, rather than a matriarchal culture my archaeology tutor thought it likelier that it was a 'harem' society, for the elites, but I digress.

As for female leaders, the some of the Khariji sects believed that it was acceptable to have women Imams and there are a number of early Christian leaders who were women. I've always wanted to look into how it became a male dominated thing. Certainly a lot of the early records were lost to us even by the 4th century.

This is true, there are mentions of female deacons in early christian literature, so the idea that things have always been exactly the way they are now is definitely not true.
If you want my opinion, Christianity began as a kind of guerilla movement that was partially dictated by a kind of survival pragmatism, once it become officially recognised and acquired a clear hierarchy I think that that's when specific power interests began to take their toll, especially the fact that a lot of older Roman traditions merged with Christian theology, and I think that's the point where women lost their power.

I think an interesting POD would definitely be one where women kept a strong role in the formation of the early Roman Catholic church, as has been said earlier many pieces of important doctrine would likely be different. One thing I will say is that an ATL with equality would not necessarily be a better or worse one, that would probably still depend on pure chance.

[Kelenas]

CRPG = Computer Role Playing Game. As opposed to the ones you play with dice at a friends table, trying not to spill your drink on the character sheets.

Would it help if the changes started earlier than the middle ages? In antique Rome or Greece, perhaps?
Perhaps women of aristocrats, landowners, etc are given more responsibility overlooking their husbands' estates, businesses, etc. while the men are busy playing war elsewhere, and trickles slowly downward from there?

- Kelenas

[Sol Zagato]

The biggest problem with gender-equity societies is that a more militarily powerful patriarchial society usually comes along and consumes them whole. You need to think of a way to keep the birth rate up or compensate for the low birth rate.

At the low-tech, low organization end, gender-equity societies have less cannon fodder than the competition. At the high-tech end, the gender equity societies will be in the same boat as other decadent civilizations that are already debilitated before they're overrun by something more vigorous. Maybe the way out is to have 'something more vigorous' be the Samaritans.

[TxCoatl1970]

Ever since we developed agriculture and surpluses of food worth fighting over, men have been in charge. It's not inevitable, but what happened.
The main problem with that development is that while it allowed for surplus population, labor specialization, and all the goodies that allow technological progress but also, more means and reasons for conflict.
Sadly, CRPG's and paper RPG's assume modern health care and nutrition and mortality rates, so women aren't stuck birthing babies so they can be doing whatever besides stirring the pot at home. Roughly a third of babies died within six months and another third died before the age of twelve due to disease and malnutrition before say, 1920.
Gender equality implies that both sexes have the social sanction to pursue whatever they wish. In hunter-gatherer societies with a steady-state social model with a stable population and so forth, women were in a much better position of rights and respect that they wouldn't recover until the more urbanized middle ages and industrial eras where technical ingenuity reduced the need for brawn and having tons of kids as you did on the farm since the days of Ur.
Basically, it boils down to that gender equality can happen when either societies are very primitive or very advanced.
In between, patriarchy dominates due to celebration of masculine virtues, dissatisfaction with traditional boundaries, always wanting more territory, money, glory, need for progeny (gotta have a big army to whip up on your neighbors) all these depend on keeping 90% of women barefoot and pregnant while men do whatever. Is there a middle ground?
You'd have to completely change the emphasis of society from expansion to stability and making do with what you have. That was social suicide with a bunch of aggressive, expansionist empires always jostling for an advantage IOTL. Of course, rigorously enforced female disapproval might get the guys to play nicer, but dunno if that'd work.

[Mr Qwerty]

Originally Posted by Sol Zagato

The biggest problem with gender-equity societies is that a more militarily powerful patriarchial society usually comes along and consumes them whole. You need to think of a way to keep the birth rate up or compensate for the low birth rate.

At the low-tech, low organization end, gender-equity societies have less cannon fodder than the competition. At the high-tech end, the gender equity societies will be in the same boat as other decadent civilizations that are already debilitated before they're overrun by something more vigorous. Maybe the way out is to have 'something more vigorous' be the Samaritans.

The first paragraph is just what I was going to say: male-dominated societies will always outbreed female-dominated or gender-equal ones because 1. most women wouldn't choose to be pregnant pretty much constantly from 15 on and 2. women in such societies will be less sexually interested (yeah, yeah, not everyone believes in the sexy-alpha-male thing, but I do).

By Samaritans, do you mean "descendants of Israelites not deported by Assyria" and if so, what do they have to do with the subject?

[Kelenas]

I think he may have meant it more in the "good Samaritan" sense. Not sure, though.

- Kelenas

[Sol Zagato]

Originally Posted by Kelenas

I think he may have meant it more in the "good Samaritan" sense. Not sure, though.

- Kelenas

UGH, I meant Sarmatians! A wee bit of a difference.

[Yelnoc]

Well, society was rather egalitarian before the rise of civilization. So you have to find a way to preserve that. In prehistory, women had equal share of the work of survival as the gatherers and original farmers, but as society shifted from a hunter-gather to an agricultural won, men took over the work of providing for their family and women did lesser jobs. Thus establishing their lesser position in society.

Maybe you could have women retain their roles as the planters and reapers in agricultural societies. Not quite sure if this gets rid of the problem, but it might give them a better chance at getting to the top of the social pyramid.

[MNP]

Originally Posted by TxCoatl1970

You'd have to completely change the emphasis of society from expansion to stability and making do with what you have. That was social suicide with a bunch of aggressive, expansionist empires always jostling for an advantage IOTL.

Not necessarily. It depends on a lot of things like organization and technology as well as just having a somewhat different mindset on the role of women. I mean, how much would it have affected things if preachers didn't go around talking about women being weak the cause of sin for generations?

I'm not saying you are going to get an equal society, we don't have that now, but you can mitigate it more than it was.

[Teleology]

The Black Death created more opportunities for women for a long time in Europe, up until the Renaissance came along and as a blooming of Catholic thought brought along with it a return of religious misogyny to the fore (which is itself a cultural reflection/reaction to the fact that by that time the population had recovered enough where there were enough men to fill some of the roles women had stepped in to fill).

Even if women never get an equal place as laborers and soldiers, the wives of nobles and merchants/freeholders expanding into the realm of business (as did happen in those post-Blackdeath years) would be a great driving force for legal/cultural equality.

Well it would in the modern day.

I guess while females owning property and so on becoming common and traditional would be big, in general in a society dominated by titles and the church, wealthy women becoming equal in commerce would not really mean all that much politically.


Heh, mixing Black Death with a religious reformation for the female ascension to start with the middleclass ascension, maybe. After all, IOTL what freed the wealthy burgers to be more influential was the decline of the idea of divine rule of the nobility thanks to the Protestant Reformation; along with the practical implications of Protestant areas perhaps lacking the Church's massive institutions and place keeping the non-noble wealthy down and considered sinful.

I've heard that the beginnings of the middleclass in the West was when Protestantism gave the German burgher the confidence that his wealth was not sinful, because as a Protestant you had to be confident that you were going to heaven because you either were or you weren't, the belief that people were predestined.

[CaliBoy1990]

Originally Posted by Sol Zagato

The biggest problem with gender-equity societies is that a more militarily powerful patriarchial society usually comes along and consumes them whole. You need to think of a way to keep the birth rate up or compensate for the low birth rate.

At the low-tech, low organization end, gender-equity societies have less cannon fodder than the competition. At the high-tech end, the gender equity societies will be in the same boat as other decadent civilizations that are already debilitated before they're overrun by something more vigorous. Maybe the way out is to have 'something more vigorous' be the Samaritans.

And the problem with the overtly masculine societies is that they all end up imploding somehow. Whether it be Nazi Germany in the early modern era, or ancient Sparta...........Well, I think you can get the point from there.
They may be able to gobble up some at first, but they always fall hard on their asses sometime.

[AtriumCarceris]

What's all this talk about female priests being possible in the Catholic Church? I'm pretty sure it's not happening no matter how gender-equal society is.

Originally Posted by CaliBoy1990

And the problem with the overtly masculine societies is that they all end up imploding somehow. Whether it be Nazi Germany in the early modern era, or ancient Sparta...........Well, I think you can get the point from there.
They may be able to gobble up some at first, but they always fall hard on their asses sometime.

I would figure any masculinity was completely irrelevant to why they fell.