@anon59592690
A lot is a shit load more than a fuck ton when working in metric… and in Canada that’s expressed as a “no way yeah”
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I believe in Scotch* a brace is is the number of pheasants that one would usually carry given the number and the weight of haggis** one would generally have on ones person!
- Just used “Scotch” to wind up any Scottish folk in the comments!
** Again winding up!
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Yup. Who probably managed the servants in the home?
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We know this specifically from the Antebellum period, that white women in plantations were often incredibly brutal to enslaved women while being generally pretty oppressed by the patriarchal structure. The structure gave them a little bit of power over the women working in the house, and that often led to brutality.
Also, see Aunt Lydia from the Handmaid’s tale.
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Now I’m wondering about the history and popularity of institutions created to “help” those unfortunate women…
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Mary Beard was discussing that (with references to classical history) this morning 26 minutes
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Hm. You mean in the ancient world? Maybe Mary Beard has something to say on that… See @anon33176345 comment below…
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Although there’s some cultures that had roads, but still didn’t use wheels, as they lacked the equivalent of a horse/oxen to draw vehicles (or the landscape was inhospitable to large carts because it was too mountainous, etc.). So the roads were purely for foot traffic.
Yeah, the webs of inter-dependencies for inventions to both exist and be adopted is really fascinating, even for the most fundamental of inventions. The Western notion of inventors, at least, is too much a fiction about solitary individual geniuses pulling ideas out of the ether and revealing them to a society that instantly snaps them up. But humans just ain’t that smart, and inventions don’t work that way. (I loved James Burke’s show “Connections” as a kid, as it revealed one level of inter-dependencies for discoveries that were never talked about in school.)
Also: that many more male Karens. Ain’t nothing like a male Karen in a patriarchal society, after all.
And now I’m thinking about the increased socio-economic power of women in post-Black Death Europe, which is seen by some as one of the main motivators for the witch accusations, and I’m envisioning an academic paper about “Witches and Karens”…
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I think “roads” (or more probably a better term would be “paths”) were around a long time. A steady stream of people constantly walking alongside a river would wear down the surrounding vegetation, making it easier for people who come along later to walk along it. Heck, if you go some some woods area where people rarely are, you still see paths, because animals also tend to make paths.
I suspect the real prerequisite for the wheel (as we know it) is having something to pull your stuff with. Once you have domesticated oxen or whatever, that you are harnessing up to drag heavy things with, the next step is to make those things drag easier. First by putting logs under it (which is still labor intensive to constantly move the logs) and then when someone gets the bright idea to create an axel, the wheel takes off. I suppose hand-drawn carts (for smaller loads) may have preceded beasts-of-burden, although from what I can find, the earliest archeological evidence for the wheel is from around 3500BC, and we had domesticated animals long before that, so using animals to pull things was probably already common.
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Which would probably been a travois (which might have come before pack animals).
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The beginning of the Woman’s Hour episode referenced above contained a scary example of how women are still imprisoned for rebelling against authority. In many countries, the state, religious authorities, and families have a lot of power. Being born into wealth and privilege there doesn’t prevent women from being detained - it just keeps them a better-appointed cell.
Turns out that women behaving outside the norm (Karens in the ancient world) might’ve been institutionalized since the mid-19th century. Before then, the outcome would depend on their status, location, and the motivations of people who wanted them under control or out of the way. Married women could be divorced (trigger warning below*), replaced in the household, forced from their homes, or disposed of in other ways.
I’m curious to learn what changed for them, and how the outcomes were different for single women and widows. The differences in power between those who had money, position, and/or authority vs. women who were have-nots must’ve been huge. Also, I’m wondering if age was a factor in an era when people were probably giving side-eye to survivors.
*Includes explicit accounts of sexual assault and violence. Also refers to witchcraft in a divorce case.
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I hear what you’re saying, and I think all of the above contributes. There is plenty of cart use without draught animals though. A road and a path are also quite different things. A road requires deliberate preparation and maintenance because wheels do a very specific kind of damage to the surface and need a lot more width. I think we’re both right, though- these are all factors.
People upthread who don’t think roads are an invention should spend more time walking around in the woods though, and imagine trying to get a cart through there. Remember that the world has been almost totally deforested since these things were invented.
It’s worth noting that the perception of the importance of draught animals to civilization is somewhat driven by the pop culture popularity of Jared Diamond’s books, but I don’t know how well supported a lot of his claims really are. There is a lot of “manifest destiny” and racists undertones to books like Guns, Germs, And Steel. The whole “poor people are poor because they didn’t have horses” story is a little thin to me.
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I think you would have to have drank a lot of scotch for that definition to make sense
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Probably deserve a ‘Glasgow Kiss’ to the forehead 
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I’ve seen them. A cart would not be an improvement over a backpack on them, but sometimes they are good enough for bicycles.
Something experimental archaeologists have found is that for moving heavy things, it works really well to make a sled and then pull it along wet wooden tracks. Very often better than log rollers and wheels, even.
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Well, the thing about the plague is that it killed men and women more or less equally in a society in which married women usually died young in childbirth. Suddenly there were a number of widows, now in ownership of wealth and lands (not just from their husbands but also other family members who didn’t survive), something that had been an incredible rarity, previously. That some women had some power enraged the patriarchy so much they had to invent a pretense to get rid of them - thus accusations of witchery, goes the theory.
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This whole thread is fascinating. With the plague you also get a shortage of labor so serfs can now go sell their labor and make money.
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That part.
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