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To: muawiyah

I’d be glad to debate the point, but seem to have trouble finding reliable statistics about historical sex ratios in different societies. Do you have references?

While I’m well aware American frontier societies were extremely lopsided to males, I’m not so sure this was true of the longer-settled areas.

Immigrants were always disproportionately male, and for obvious reasons not too many women were on the ever-moving frontier.

I disagree with your claim about women doing most of the work in the past. While true of most tribal societies, it is most definitely not true of most peasant societies, where everybody had to work all the time to stave off starvation and pay the landlord. The male serfs didn’t get to hang out on the corner. Male slaves through all history were always worked to the max. That’s the whole point of having slaves.

I also suggest your claim that all women were slaves is inaccurate. Sure, by our standards women had no rights and were little better than slaves. But the women of the time were well aware of the difference between honorable wife and mother and a female slave. Note the many, many examples of women killing their children and themselves rather than being taken captive to be enslaved. Jews, Gauls, Britons, Carthagnians, Germans, Rajputs, etc. Very long list.


22 posted on 06/18/2011 4:25:31 PM PDT by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan
There are few statistics ~ to a degree there simply weren't a whole lot of people around in a single area, and most of our data is found on grave stones, but not on grave boards ~ those having disintegrated centuries ago.

One source has been Byzantine tax records ~ but notice that about the 6th century the whole world fell into a triple dip Great Recession like nobody's business. Every standard of civilization was abandoned. The recovery took a long time and even as late as 1790 a full census of the population (see Constitution) was considered quite revolutionary.

One population did manage to get its makeup put under the microscope ~ they were called Huns. When they left China, expelled by the Emperor himself for intense banditry and rapine, they were pretty much Chinese. By the time they got to Europe a couple of centuries later they were White folks.

This happened simply because females do best in settled life but these guys were migratory and continued raiding all across the continent until they reached Europe. This required them to obtain new females on a regular basis.

26 posted on 06/18/2011 4:41:01 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: Sherman Logan
Supposedly my great great grandmother smothered her daughter to keep her from being taken by the Indians at the Pigeon Creek Massacre.

Still, my Great grandmother, who was smothered, finally passed on at about the age 95 giving us one of histories longest smotherings.

The mothers killing the kids (to show their fidelity to their own standards and to protect their chilluns) is an old one ~ I think it didn't happen often.

36 posted on 06/18/2011 5:26:03 PM PDT by muawiyah
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