Is OTL misogynous?

NikoZnate has already mentioned ancient Egypt as a possible candidate for the first category, and I have mentioned the Middle Assyrians as belonging to the second. Any other ideas?
The Spartan city-state for the first category and Athens for the second category.
By contrast, Spartan women enjoyed a status, power, and respect that was unknown in the rest of the classical world. Although Spartan women were formally excluded from military and political life they enjoyed considerable status as mothers of Spartan warriors. As men engaged in military activity, women took responsibility for running estates. Following protracted warfare in the 4 century BC Spartan women owned approximately between 35%[8] and 40% of all Spartan land and property.[9] By the Hellenistic Period, some of the wealthiest Spartans were women.[10] They controlled their own properties, as well as the properties of male relatives who were away with the army.[8] Spartan women rarely married before the age of 20, and unlike Athenian women who wore heavy, concealing clothes and were rarely seen outside the house, Spartan women wore short dresses[11] and went where they pleased. Girls as well as boys received an education, and young women as well as young men may have participated in the Gymnopaedia ("Festival of Nude Youths").[8][12]
Take that Athens.
 
Allow me to state this question: If you had to pick some cultures that, if given greater influence on and a more prominent place in history, would result in a world (both the modern world and the historical process leading up to it) with more or less rights for women, which would you pick? Simply put, which cultures have been pro-women's rights and which have been anti-women's rights, compared to OTL?

zraith is entirely right to pick out Sparta and Athens for being two civilizations that qualify. For Greek cities i'd also pick out Gortyn for being relatively egalitarian, their legal code is much more gender-free than Athens' was say.

I don't know how many people are going to agree with this, but for the period Rome was not all that bad with regards to treating women. Obviously there are a tonne of authors across Rome's history who wrote about women in an incredibly offensive tone, but since these authors represent a very small section of Rome's complicated society that doesn't mean all that much. Also, there are plenty of Roman authors who were not misogynistic at all, even by our standards. Obviously Rome was important for far longer than Sparta was, but it's interesting that there are many more famous historical female figures from Rome than Sparta.
 

Alkahest

Banned
Sparta and Athens are excellent examples, though Sparta of course brought their own little quirks to the gender table.

A problem I have with researching this subject is that for almost every culture in history, especially non-Western ones, someone has published an article about how that culture was totally far more egalitarian than we give it credit for. The way some historians present it, the Sassanid Empire was a liberal wonderland of tolerance while the Mongols were feminists on horsebacks. Is there any culture out there that has actually made historians go "Turns out these people were actually worse than we thought." or at least "They were pretty much the chauvinist pigs we figured from the beginning."? I know Western-dominated historical research hasn't been all that generous towards "foreign" cultures, but sometimes it feels like many historians are just overcompensating these days.
 
Sparta and Athens are excellent examples, though Sparta of course brought their own little quirks to the gender table.

A problem I have with researching this subject is that for almost every culture in history, especially non-Western ones, someone has published an article about how that culture was totally far more egalitarian than we give it credit for. The way some historians present it, the Sassanid Empire was a liberal wonderland of tolerance while the Mongols were feminists on horsebacks. Is there any culture out there that has actually made historians go "Turns out these people were actually worse than we thought." or at least "They were pretty much the chauvinist pigs we figured from the beginning."? I know Western-dominated historical research hasn't been all that generous towards "foreign" cultures, but sometimes it feels like many historians are just overcompensating these days.

The problem is that our own historians are STILL at times chauvinist in some cases. I means, we could easily name rightwing historians and scholars around....
 

Alkahest

Banned
All historians bring their own ideological and cultural baggage to the job, unfortunately. That's true no matter where they can be placed on a political scale. A conservative, a feminist and a socialist will interpret the same data in different ways, and nothing makes a conservative point of view more correct by default than a feminist one, or vice versa.

But that's just what I'm talking about, how can I as a complete amateur when it comes to history get a decently objective picture of such a complicated and politicized topic as women's rights in various historical cultures?
 
All historians bring their own ideological and cultural baggage to the job, unfortunately. That's true no matter where they can be placed on a political scale. A conservative, a feminist and a socialist will interpret the same data in different ways, and nothing makes a conservative point of view more correct by default than a feminist one, or vice versa.

But that's just what I'm talking about, how can I as a complete amateur when it comes to history get a decently objective picture of such a complicated and politicized topic as women's rights in various historical cultures?

You can't much so easily, I fear. We can't.
 
You can't much so easily, I fear. We can't.

This.

One of my specialities is historiography and source criticism. The first problem is that historical focus is rarely without political connotations or cultural ones. Historians and people working with historical information never choose objectively. I certainly don't, I might be a fan of all history everywhere but I tend to gravitate towards poorly represented areas of history. In the case of studying women throughout history, the entire subject of women's studies and gender studies in ancient society is as a result of Feminism. Before this point, women in history rarely merited a paragraph in a whole textbook unless it was some unavoidable figure like Cleopatra. As such, since the 1970s a tonne of work has been done on the subject of gender in ancient societies, particularly ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

As such, I have enormous respect for the good that feminist historians and classicists have done. However, they have a tendency to go too far in the opposite direction. Men frequently become faceless clones of feminine repression, whereas all women are individuals and fully rounded human beings. Also they end up going so far into their own world that they actually become offensive; there's an essay written about Plato, speculating about why he was egalitarian, that essentially ends up saying 'he was probably gay, because only a gay man would think this way'. Because sexuality determines personality :rolleyes:.

There are feminists who object to the existence of 'gender studies', thinking that it attempts to neutralise feminism by making it gender-neutral. There are feminists who object to ancient history attempting to be objective at all because they feel it reduces the ability of ancient historians to properly engage with moral issues arising from the ancient world. Essentialism is a big problem with some feminists, i.e the idea that a piece of work written by a woman is fundamentally imbued with a different character to one written by a man, which is utter nonsense. There are feminists who believe that being a man should disqualify you from studying gender studies or women studies, because women should study women's history and men should study men's history.

Those extremes do not apply to many feminists, and almost nobody believes more than one or two of the viewpoints I just listed at the same time. But you can see why attempting to engage in looking at women through history is a nightmare, when it's utterly impossible to do so without wading through debates that have lasted through decades and social issues that have lasted even longer.

I, and anyone else that has had the fortune of studying a well-taught Gender studies course at degree level, could try to help someone who is an amateur to understand this difficult and delicate area. But it really is very complicated >.<
 

Alkahest

Banned
Source criticism? But I want all my information from Wikipedia! I demand convenient truths, prepackaged and easily digestible! (Okay, fine, I will use my own brain once in a while.)

Anyway! In your at least semi-professional opinion, what cultures in history are without redeeming traits when it comes to gender, what cultures really were as misogynous as non-historians tend to think they were? (Bonus points if they were actually major civilizations, not just a bunch of poor schmucks hidden away in some godforsaken part of the world, like the Taliban.)
 

Alkahest

Banned
So! The following cultures have been mentioned:

Relatively "egalitarian":
Ancient Egypt
Sparta
Gortyn

Relatively "misogynous":
Middle Assyrian Empire
Athens

Any other ideas?
 
So! The following cultures have been mentioned:

Relatively "egalitarian":
Ancient Egypt
Sparta
Gortyn

Relatively "misogynous":
Middle Assyrian Empire
Athens

Any other ideas?

The Etruscan culture seemed to be fairly egalitarian:

Etruscan women enjoyed an elevated status and a degree of liberation unknown to their counterparts in Rome and, especially, in Greece. They were allowed to own and openly display objects and clothing of a luxurious nature; they participated freely in public life, attending parties and theatrical performances; and--shocking to Greeks and Romans--they danced, drank, and rested in close physical contact with their husbands on the banqueting couches. Etruscan ladies were often literate, as one may deduce from the inscriptions on their mirrors, and even learned, if Livy's portrayal of Tanaquil as skilled in augury may be trusted. Their prominence in the family was a consistent feature of Etruscan aristocratic society and seems to have played a role in its stability and durability.

http://history-world.org/etruscanorganization.htm
 

Alkahest

Banned
Heh. It seems that the story for every other culture that has been conquered or eclipsed by a victorious "Western" (as in, the cultures that created the foundations of modern Western society) culture is: "These people were far more egalitarian, more liberal and in general nicer than everyone else, but then the evil Patriarchy came and ruined everything!" Surely some cultures out there were worse than the cultures that proved triumphant IOTL?
 

Winnabago

Banned
I’d give that one to the Gauls. No one likes to talk about them much, but that might just be because my history teacher doesn’t like talking about white people.

But the reality is that there isn’t all that much information on this subject, and most of what we know comes from records of people with women’s names being allowed to do things. Women were simply generally lower, and that statistic varied somewhat. All there is to it.

It’s a bit like trying to figure out which ancient societies were racist, and going to ridiculous lengths to find some Roman black people.
 
So! The following cultures have been mentioned:

Relatively "egalitarian":
Ancient Egypt
Sparta
Gortyn

Relatively "misogynous":
Middle Assyrian Empire
Athens

Any other ideas?

I'll suggest Ancient China for relatively egalitarian. Women could lead armies and peasant revolts (see Fu Hao, Princess Pingyang, and Mother Lü). Women had immense power in the imperial court (Empress Lü and Wu Zetian). Women were also expected to be literate (if they weren't why would Ban Zhao write Lessons for Women). In Ancient China, footbinding and concubinage were not yet common, and women could still be heads of households. Women could remarry, and did so often.

Early Modern China is when things change, and should probably go into the second category.
 
To be honest, most cultures are neither one nor the other constantly. As with us, I'd say that most cultures we have evidence for seem to have a balance of people who disrespect women, and people who don't feel threatened by women. The difference is that a) the balance is not always even, b) sometimes the historical record is dominated by one over the other, c) the treatment of people on a day to day level is pretty much invisible from the historical record.

So it wouldn't surprise me that it's rare to find more than a few cultures that are consistently egalitarian or consistently repressive.
 

Alkahest

Banned
I’d give that one to the Gauls. No one likes to talk about them much, but that might just be because my history teacher doesn’t like talking about white people.
Gauls? Really? I've lived under the impression that Celts were more egalitarian than the Romans. Then again, "Celts" is a damn broad category.
I'll suggest Ancient China for relatively egalitarian. Women could lead armies and peasant revolts (see Fu Hao, Princess Pingyang, and Mother Lü). Women had immense power in the imperial court (Empress Lü and Wu Zetian). Women were also expected to be literate (if they weren't why would Ban Zhao write Lessons for Women). In Ancient China, footbinding and concubinage were not yet common, and women could still be heads of households. Women could remarry, and did so often.

Early Modern China is when things change, and should probably go into the second category.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
To be honest, most cultures are neither one nor the other constantly. As with us, I'd say that most cultures we have evidence for seem to have a balance of people who disrespect women, and people who don't feel threatened by women. The difference is that a) the balance is not always even, b) sometimes the historical record is dominated by one over the other, c) the treatment of people on a day to day level is pretty much invisible from the historical record.

So it wouldn't surprise me that it's rare to find more than a few cultures that are consistently egalitarian or consistently repressive.
Ugh, history is so messy. But yeah, I understand what you mean. I'm more and more leaning towards the idea that different cultures growing more or less prominent is far less important than women getting control over their own reproduction.

So here's a question to the learned members of this forum, based on that idea: How come the knowledge of different contraceptive methods was seemingly lost for such a large time, especially in Europe? The picture of evil Christian witch-hunters persecuting old wise women who gave women power over their own reproductive systems using herbs is so clichéd that I am almost embarrassed to bring it up, but could there be a grain of truth to it? (Note that this question is based on the assumptions that people had access to at least semi-reliable contraceptive methods in ancient times and that this knowledge was largely lost. Both those assumptions may be wrong.)
 
Well, as history has its ups and downs, so does the topic of women's rights and gender equality. I know one thing : You could find enlightened ideas about the role of women in society even in the most women-unfriendly eras and countries. Also, even some of the women-unfriendly regimes or nations often had surprisingly pro-woman laws and regulations (even if they were few and far between).

So, the problem, as with everything complex and societal, is really beyond a simple generalization or caricature of an era.


Speaking for myself, the longer of my two TLs has a far more devastating and disastrous series of global conflicts in the late 19th and 20th century. Due to extremely large casualties on the male population, many women are forced to not only work on the home front, but become frontline soldiers as well. Feminism gets a heavy boost with this and while the world of the TL at the end of the 20th century is somewhat more conservative and monarchic than OTL, everyday gender equality (especially in things such as wages, etc.) is generally better established than in OTL.
 

Winnabago

Banned
I give it to the Gauls, Alahest, because of their tendency to rape and plunder, which under the Romans was often more controlled.

However, the Romans are a bit of a default: we already knew they were sexists, they didn’t turn out to be more sexist than we expected.

The Gauls, who we know less about, I would say did.
 
b) What POD do you think would result in the least misogynous modern-day world?
I think the most plausible way to do this might be to change human biology. Maybe go for the "Matter of Seggri" solution and make women naturally outnumber men heavily. Alternately, make women as physically strong or stronger than men.

Note though under a lot of those scenarios you might end up making a misandrist world instead.

a) What POD do you think would result in the most misogynous modern-day world?
Well, it's pretty easy to imagine a more sexist world, just wipe out the last hundred years or so of feminism somehow. Absolutely most ... hmm, what about a culture that defines women as nonhumans (basically smart domestic animals, or soulless automatons that merely imitate human life) and manages to gain ascendancy over the world?

Maybe go with a variant of that Maaga religion that defines women as anattasatta (automatons). Or something along those lines.
 
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