Let’s subjugate women!!!

That is actually quite clever. I need a near-future world not changed utterly beyond recognition that essentially makes women the wards of men – rather like children in fact. Mistreatment and abuse viewed the same way as we’d view someone abusing a child in their care. The concept of making the family the defining social unit rather than the individual is the best idea I have seen so far.

Reestablishing elements of the legal concept of Coverture from the 19th century under which husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned. Women and girls subject to coverture have their legal identities subsumed under men’s, first by their fathers and then by their husbands. Under its strict terms, females submitting to it cannot own property, participate politics, serve on juries, write wills, sign contracts, make legal complaints, or exercise custody rights over their children if their husband or farther objects.

Still can’t find a post WWII POD. Think I’ll have to bite the bullet and go back further. Mormonism replaced by another religion putting enormous emphasis on keeping women in their proper place.

Coverture was never actually that strict, it mainly applied in the area of property law (and only in property law, if I recall). Some of the other stuff you mentioned happened (e.g., women didn't serve on juries) but it wasn't because of coverture. You're looking at something more like the early Roman legal arrangment, and even that was much less strict in practice than it was in theory.

But the main problem is that very, very few societies have been that strict, and Western and other developed societies in particular have almost always moved in the direction of more rights and privileges for women, not fewer. Replacing Mormonism isn't going to come close to coming close to getting the kind of society you want.

With a POD of less than five hundred years ago, I think the only way this is possible is some kind of sex-selective disease that drives women crazy or makes them sexually indiscriminate or just plain kills them (making the surviving women too precious to be free) or something equally within shouting distance of ASB.
 
1. Well, obviously.


2. Some very intelligent comments have convinced me that any doing so would mean betraying everything western civilization have aspired to since the enlightenment. I’ll need an much earlier POD unless the regime are total monsters.


3. True by the mid nineteen century married women’s property laws were beginning to be passed to some extend but yes, married women were De Jure effectively property. I realize Mill’s “On the Subjugation of women” is a bit of a polemic but I still consider it a reasonable good overview of just how extensive a husbands rights were. I fully understand that men rarely exercised their power nearly as despotic as the law allowed them to but then, as Mill points out, few absolute monarchs spend all day being despotic.

No, they weren't. They couldn't be sold or traded or killed or chained or to some extent maltreated (there were some legal protections, and stronger social ones), they could have and spend money, and the most extreme coverture laws weren't universal either. Cattle were property. Women were legally and in actuality second-class citizens, but they weren't property.

In 1840, would you have rather been a married white woman or a male negro slave?
 
No, they weren't. They couldn't be sold or traded or killed or chained or to some extent maltreated (there were some legal protections, and stronger social ones), they could have and spend money, and the most extreme coverture laws weren't universal either. Cattle were property. Women were legally and in actuality second-class citizens, but they weren't property.

In 1840, would you have rather been a married white woman or a male negro slave?

To some extent we are arguing semantics. You may be confusing chattel slavery and “just” Slavery. The police force in classical Athens was state-own slaves quite willing to go on strike if they were unhappy about something. There is the charming story of a slave girl in Alexandria in the nineteenth century who sued – and won – her freedom because her owner tried selling her after getting her pregnant. Apparently a big no no under Islamic law.

To my mind being property doesn’t require having no rights, just severely curtailed rights. I fully agree they weren’t property on paper but in practice?

For an overview see for instance:
http://www.hastingspress.co.uk/history/19/overview.htm

A few relavant quotes:

“everything they owned, inherited and earned automatically belonged to their husband. This meant that if an offence or felony was committed against her, only her husband could prosecute. Furthermore, rights to the woman personally - that is, access to her body - were his. Not only was this assured by law, but the woman herself agreed to it verbally: written into the marriage ceremony was a vow to obey her husband”

“Every man had the right to force his wife into sex and childbirth. He could take her children without reason and send them to be raised elsewhere. He could spend his wife's inheritance on a mistress or on prostitutes. Sometime, somewhere, all these things - and a great many more - happened. To give but one example, Susannah Palmer escaped from her adulterous husband in 1869 after suffering many years of brutal beatings, and made a new life. She worked, saved, and created a new home for her children. Her husband found her, stripped her of all her possessions and left her destitute, with the blessing of the law. In a fury she stabbed him, and was immediately prosecuted.”

“If a woman was unhappy with her situation there was, almost without exception, nothing she could do about it. Except in extremely rare cases, a woman could not obtain a divorce and, until 1891, if she ran away from an intolerable marriage the police could capture and return her, and her husband could imprison her. All this was sanctioned by church, law, custom, history, and approved of by society in general”

“Signs of rebellion were swiftly crushed by fathers, husbands, even brothers. Judge William Blackstone had announced that husbands could administer "moderate correction" to disobedient wives, and there were other means: as late as 1895, Edith Lanchester's father had her kidnapped and committed to a lunatic asylum for cohabiting with a man.”

Is any of this factually incorrect or even grossly misleading? OK, Edith Lanchester actually got released at her subsequent Habeas Corpus hearing so perhaps not the best example but that was 1894 – not sure she would have been released in 1850. Now, I’ll be happy to concede that many, perhaps most, men took their responsibility as heads of the family very seriously and treated their female dependents kindly but they held virtually unlimited power over them.
 
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First of all, I regret if anyone was offended. It certainly wasn’t my intention. It is simply the way I express myself. If I had needed a POD for breaking up the United States my title would likely have been: “Let’s Destroy the US!!!” While I haven’t been posting on the board, nor reading it that much to be honest, I did post extensively back in the Usenet days and my post would certainly not have raised an eyebrow then.
I should confess that I hadn’t read the forum rules before posting but I certainly have now and, honestly, I can’t for the life of me figure out how either the title of post contain is a flame bait.
This is not a rhetorical point – I genuinely would like to know what rule I broke so I can guard against it happening again
As exhibit A I would point out the notable lack of flames in the subsequent thread. I realize that could just mean I’m an incompetent flame starter but still…:)

As to the substance of my question I really did need a POD for a rollback of women’s rights post WWII for a story idea. The feedback has been extremely valuable. I always realized such a timeline would be dystrophic but some very well thought out replies here have demonstrated that it is much worse than I thought. I will either need to make the bad guys much more sinister then originally intended or push my POD back much further.

Thanks to all the extremely well-informed posters.
Ulver, didnt you read what I said? It's the technology that freed women. Oh sure laws helped but it wasnt near as important as technology.

I think the problem is you younger guys think dishes were always washed by a machine, and we could always pick up a frozen pizza to eat but years ago basic household chores took lots of our time and most of that fell on women.

Again, look at cars. Before automatic transmissions, self starters, and self sealing tires cars were very difficult to drive especially for women who tended to have less muscle mass. But make it easy to drive and opportunities increase.
 
This isn't the first time we've seen each other; yours has been eroded with me for quite some time too.

I am well aware not everyone who is anti-Communist, certainly not in the narrow sense of opposing the Third International, or Mao's CCP, and not even everyone who is against the whole Marxist program of hoping to eventually transcend private property is necessarily a "reactionary." However I will affirm that anyone who is onboard with "subjugating women" in the sense of taking away rights and dignities they've already been granted by their societies, however grudgingly and recently, is a reactionary. And that if all anti-Communists are not all reactionaries, certainly all reactionaries are anti-Communists.

Hell yes the bolded portion is reactionary. I can agree with you there.

There's the type of reactionary that doesn't depend on the Historical Dialectic (everything a progression toward Communism) being accurate.
 
To some extent we are arguing semantics. You may be confusing chattel slavery and “just” Slavery. The police force in classical Athens was state-own slaves quite willing to go on strike if they were unhappy about something. There is the charming story of a slave girl in Alexandria in the nineteenth century who sued – and won – her freedom because her owner tried selling her after getting her pregnant. Apparently a big no no under Islamic law.

To my mind being property doesn’t require having no rights, just severely curtailed rights.

"Being property" means being treated the way propery is treated. Chattel slavery is called chattel slavery because under that system the slaves were legally "chattels," i.e., movable property. There were other types of slavery, as you point out. 19th C. women weren't even slaves, let alone chattels.

Again, would you rather be a married woman in the 19th C. (remembering too that whom you married was legally voluntary and even marriage itself wasn't mandatory) or a negro slave, i.e., a chattel slave, i.e., actual property?
 
All over the world, with very few exceptions, the women are already subjugated. Even in places where they are equal in law, they are treated as second class citizens in practice. Women are treated as private property, to be exploited as sex objects and machines to produce babies. In short the brains are not important in women, only vaginas and wombs count! All religions have given their contribution in subjugating the women and denying them justice. Any further subjugation of women means turning the clock back and a return to the middle ages.
 

OS fan

Banned
Mr Kishan, I hope very much this was a joke. If I wanted to disparage feminism by acting as a crazed feminist, I couldn't do much worse.


I suspect that this editor is somewhat biased towards feminism, and their claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Also, the text affirms that there are connections between feminism and marxism. Which is actually old news.

Also, I remember a French author writing that in the late 20th century there are some Socialist circles in France where the men and women willingly share their partners with the other members, for sex. Whether people are beautiful or ugly, everyone gets a turn.
 
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