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We don’t know much of troglodyte culture; the cave drawings weren’t that descriptive. But once humans left hunter-gatherer life for settling down to farm, one thing became clear: We treated women like shit. Twelve millennia later, a group assembled to discuss changing such patriarchal fuckery.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 19, 1848--
The first agrarian revolution began around 10,000 BC. That meant tending fields over hunting mammoths and shit. Settling down meant holding property. Holding property created a need for hands to work and inherit it. The steadier food supply also meant women could squeeze large babies out of small orifices more often.
Here are some fun stats. Prior to the 20th century, fully a quarter of all babies died before their first year, and half of all children died before they reached 15. Across cultures and continents and millennia this was so; once born, you had only a 50-50 chance of living to mid-teens. Only in the last century has child, and maternal, mortality plummeted.
Due in no small part to these realities, men have basically enslaved women as the breeding class, because to grow the population the average woman had to give birth at least six times in the hope that half the kids would survive to adulthood. And this was before epidurals. While Homo sapiens have given rise to a wide variety of cultures holding myriad beliefs, almost all had this one thing in common: fucking patriarchy treating women like property.
On July 19, 1848, the first women’s rights convention began in Seneca Falls, New York to “discuss the social, civil, and religious rights condition and rights of woman.” Held in the Wesleyan Chapel, the convention was organized by Quakers, who are big on the whole equal rights thing, along with Elizabeth Stanton, who wasn’t a Quaker.
Hundreds attended, including several dozen men. There was a heated debate about including the right to vote in their declaration. Famed social reformer Frederick Douglass, the only Black person in attendance, argued eloquently for its inclusion, and so it was.
The convention attracted much attention, and other such events began to spring up o’er the land by those [sarcasm alert] high-and-mighty women and the pussy-whipped men who supported them. Oh, wait. I forgot. Feminists don’t like sex. The men weren’t whipped. They were henpecked, or something.
Anyway, Stanton would later co-author (along with Susan B. Anthony and others) the six-volume History of Women’s Suffrage which would describe the Seneca Falls Convention as the beginning of the Women’s Rights Movement in the U.S.
Three years later the first National Women’s Rights Convention was held, and by that time the right to vote had become a central tenet. It’s a right that was finally won at the national level, mostly just for white women, in 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
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