I am reading a book about poisons throughout history, and it mentions that throughout the 1800’s women were stereotyped as devious people who would murder men using poisons for their own gain, while it was socially acceptable for men to beat their wives and be unfaithful.
This struck me as weird, both because the book has not commented on gender issues up until this point, and because it sounds completely wild that men could essentially treat their wives like property with zero repercussions.
Still, this book was written by a historian and it is a perspective that I have heard from feminists as well. I was wondering if I could get some nuance on it here.
Search the archives of the LeftWingMaleAdvocates subreddit. I know it’s been discussed there. But you’re right. It isn’t as straightforward as feminists present it.
This notion and many others in the feminist discourse is more a “history taken out of context” than an outright lie. We tend to imagine past societies as working essentially the same way ours do, just with different attributes (technology, culture, art).
The truth is, the whole structure of society was different. The state apparatus only became as developed as it is today in the course of the 20th century. Before that justice, police, civil servants played very little role in every day people’s lives. Nobody was going to arrest you for a brawl, beat up, or any other kind of petty violence among the lower classes (over 90% of the population).
This didn’t mean it was a free for all. Family structures took on a big part of the missions of today’s state. Beat up your wife and you will have to deal with her father and brothers. This is what a patriarchal society actually is: a system where the men of the family take on a role of making order and protecting rights through the use of private violence. Understand that and suddenly the notions that as a woman you could only marry with your parents’ approval, that you lived under your father (or if dead, brother’s) guardianship until mariage, that your patrimony was under the stewardship of your husband… make a lot more sense. They are the one who would have to put themselves on the line if things went wrong.
The feminist narrative is a form of revisionism: it only works by applying present day realities, where the protective role of the family has been taken over by the state, to the past. That’s why it’s entirely unattractive as an ideology outside of the world of economic privilege in first world nations or the elites of the rest of the world.
