>And who gave women the right to vote? The evil, patriarchal, oppressive, misogynistic... men.
Yes. Women were not able to get the vote until men assented to it. That is a textbook example of men oppressing women. You might as well argue that slaves weren't oppressed because they were eventually "given" their freedom by white men.
>For most of history, women were basically the property of their fathers, then traded for dowry to become the property of their husbands. They couldn't own property, they couldn't vote, they could be stoned to death for disobeying their husbands.
For most of history, both men and women in any society couldn't do any of the things you just described. The majority of people in any society, of both genders, have belonged to the lower classes. This is still true today, but you have far more rights as a lower class person today than you would have 200 years ago. You're viewing history solely from the perspective of the upper classes (which includes the middle class).
Ah, this old argument. Yes, and modern feminism would not disagree with you. What this argument does is try to shift the responsibility away from the oppressor (in this case, patriarchy), akin to the slave owner saying to the slave that he's also had a hard life.
> The idea that slavery is wrong or women should have the right to vote never got less accepted over time.
This cannot be the case, because those ideas have not existed since the beginning of time. They had an origin and therefore an upward trajectory towards their reification in law.
> Oh, it obviously isn't simple, otherwise it wouldn't have taken so long to abolish slavery and let women vote, I couldn't agree more.
Slavery didn't carry on so long because people “weren't sure whether it was okay”. It carried on because the powerful wanted slaves. The history of slavery discourse is the history of people inventing new reasons that it's actually a good thing – but the reasons it's a bad thing stay the same, and were even known and remarked upon in Ancient Greece.
Women had the vote in 1264, when the House of Commons was first formed in England, and they had the vote in 1295 when the then-King officially declared the House of Commons part of parliament. In fact, England had universal suffrage (albeit hampered by the lack of secret ballot) until 1430, when it was restricted to forty-shilling freeholders.
Are you really saying these are hard problems? These are problems that were introduced as a means of enabling the concentration of power. The ethics of abortion is a problem introduced by our biology; why would you even expect it to be so easy?
> The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are "arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely as we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and lazy.
Its not exactly arbitrary, its more dependent on the current state of the world. Take the trolley problem, if killing one person would save billions does murder become moral?
Similarly, (and more contentiously) we might look at pre industrial agrarian societies as barbaric for favouring male children but when your society/family is absolutely dependent on human labour and men are capable of providing far more for roughly the same amount of resources consumed you can see how that moral position could emerge.
>Men have been getting the good end of sexual discrimination for centuries. Owning property. Voting. Higher education. Being allowed to practice a profession. Being favored by marriage laws. Being favored by social biases.
Yes, so let's reverse it, and get a female-biased revenge ...on people that weren't even alive back at those times.
>Where could we be now if we hadn’t repressed half of our society throughout our entire history?
And where could we be now if we hand't repressed all of our society throughout our entire history? Men were repressed too, and in many cases more than women (hard labour, conscription etc). Men and women have gender roles which limit their lives.
"Do you know," suddenly continued Posdnicheff, "that this power of women from which the world suffers arises solely from what I have just spoken of?"
"What do you mean by the power of women?" I said. "Everybody, on the contrary, complains that women have not sufficient rights, that they are in subjection."
"That's it; that's it exactly," said he, vivaciously. "That is just what I mean, and that is the
explanation of this extraordinary phenomenon, that on the one hand woman is reduced to the lowest degree of humiliation and on the other hand she reigns over everything. See the Jews: with their power of money, they avenge their subjection, just as the women do. 'Ah! you wish us to be only merchants? All right; remaining merchants, we will get possession of you,' say the Jews. 'Ah! you wish us to be only objects of sensuality? All right; by the aid of sensuality we will bend you beneath our yoke,' say the women.
"The absence of the rights of woman does not consist in the fact that she has not the right to vote, or the right to sit on the bench, but in the fact that in her affectional relations she is not the equal of man, she has not the right to abstain, to choose instead of being chosen. You say that that would be abnormal. Very well! But then do not let man enjoy these rights, while his companion is deprived of them, and finds herself obliged to make use of the coquetry by which she governs, so that the result is that man chooses
'formally,' whereas really it is woman who chooses. As soon as she is in possession of her means, she abuses them, and acquires a terrible supremacy."
"But where do you see this exceptional power?"
"Where? Why, everywhere, in everything. Go see the stores in the large cities. There are
millions there, millions. It is impossible to estimate the enormous quantity of labor that is expended there. In nine-tenths of these stores is there anything whatever for the use of men? All the luxury of life is demanded and sustained by woman. Count the factories; the greater part of them are engaged in making feminine ornaments. Millions of men, generations of slaves, die toiling like convicts simply to satisfy the whims of our companions.
"Women, like queens, keep nine-tenths of the human race as prisoners of war, or as prisoners at hard labor. And all this because they have been humiliated, because they have been deprived of rights equal to those which men enjoy. They take revenge for our sensuality; they catch us in their nets.
"Yes, the whole thing is there. Women have made of themselves such a weapon to act upon the senses that a young man, and even an old man, cannot remain tranquil in their presence. Watch a popular festival, or our receptions or ball-rooms. Woman well knows her influence there. You will see it in her triumphant smiles.
"As soon as a young man advances toward a woman, directly he falls under the influence of this opium, and loses his head. Long ago I felt ill at ease when I saw a woman too well adorned,--whether a woman of the people with her red neckerchief and her looped skirt, or a woman of our own society in her ball-room dress. But now it simply terrifies me. I see in it a danger to men, something contrary to the laws; and I feel a desire to call a policeman, to appeal for defence from some quarter, to demand that this dangerous object
be removed.
"And this is not a joke, by any means. I am convinced, I am sure, that the time will come -- and perhaps it is not far distant -- when the world will understand this, and will be astonished that a society could exist in which actions as harmful as those which appeal to sensuality by adorning the body as our companions do were allowed. As well set traps along our public streets, or worse than that.
“During the last few years, and since the rights of women have been so much insisted upon, and practically carried out by the strongest-minded of the sex, numerous husbands have complained to me of the hardships under which they suffer by being married to women who regard themselves as martyrs when called upon to fulfill the duties of wives.”
As far as I can tell, you're saying that it's not true that men have historically oppressed women because it's not true that the bourgeoisie (note spelling) oppress the proletariat. That's clearly a non sequitur.
> I mean, yes there always were and always will be some abusive men, but men _as a group_ have been more associated with protecting and caring for women than being hostile to them.
As much a slaveowner has been "protecting and caring" for his slaves.
> bigots and intolerant people weren’t as much of a problem when there was less diversity.
Generations of abused minorities and women might beg to differ, from slavery to lynchings to internment camps to mass oppression, abused people from Germany (yes, you read that correctly), Italy, Ireland, China, Japan ... people who were Jewish, Catholic, Latino, African-American (of course), etc etc. etc. would all say otherwise. Assuming you are talking about the U.S., until 1920, women couldn't even vote. Until the approximately the generation who came of age in the 1980s, they didn't have access to most of the labor market - unless their husband gave permission (maybe that ended around the 1950s and 1960s) - and in most fields they still are excluded from the top positions and in many fields are still excluded from most positions except HR, receptionist, and organizing the office party.
> All of these things have been present in the most war-torn and unstable societies (ex: much of the Middle East, some of the areas around present-day China and Russia).
No, they have been condemned for females and tolerated for the more powerful.
> At one point there was no state in history in which women could vote. At one point there was no state in history in which slavery was abolished. Sometime you need to buck history to progress.
There however were places without central government or tax collectors. Like Somalia, or Afghanistan.
> Should we interpret it as a victory for self empowerment or as a result of lack of soldiers during the last year of the biggest war the world had seen?
Clearly as the first. Women would not have gotten the vote without the suffrage movement, just as they didn't get it after the Civil War. However, the war had an effect on the timing, as is often the case with social change movements. They can go on for decades, and finally succeed when an external event forces the dominating powers' hands. No one would say that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the cause of WWI. The alliance system was rigged to blow at the first spark, and that spark happened to be the assassination.
> Should we interpret it as men oppressing poor women or as a form plunder for profit by a religious institution that targeted those with something to take?
As medieval and early modern history was my focus in grad school, I must say that I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically by any professional historian that I've read, and they were relatively uncommon. Like most things in history, they were a result of a complex interaction of factors, but as is often the case, the powerful are rarely the victims of events of that sort, regardless of their complex causes.
> Personally I lean towards not trusting political movements when they write about history.
I wasn't talking about political writing but about scholarly or pseudo-scholarly works, and all writers have political leanings. Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.
Yes. Women were not able to get the vote until men assented to it. That is a textbook example of men oppressing women. You might as well argue that slaves weren't oppressed because they were eventually "given" their freedom by white men.
reply